The Cafe' [Think Tank]

Paul Sankey, analyst at Mizuho, examines what production cuts from OPEC+ can mean to the global oil market. America turned into a net oil exporter last week, breaking almost 75 years of continued dependence on foreign oil and marking a pivotal -- even if likely brief -- moment toward what U.S. President Donald Trump has branded as "energy independence." The shift to net exports is the dramatic result of an unprecedented boom in American oil production, with thousands of wells pumping from the Permian region of Texas and New Mexico to the Bakken in North Dakota to the Marcellus in Pennsylvania. While the country has been heading in that direction for years, this week’s dramatic shift came as data showed a sharp drop in imports and a jump in exports to a record high. Given the volatility in weekly data, the U.S. will likely remain a small net importer most of the time. “We are becoming the dominant energy power in the world,” said Michael Lynch, president of Stra...

Attorney General William Barr, pictured at an event on Wednesday in Anchorage, Alaska, sat down with CBS to discuss the Russia investigation. Mark Thiessen/AP Enlarge this image Former special counsel Robert Mueller could have declared whether President Trump broke the law if Mueller had wanted — albeit still without the ability to bring any indictment, Attorney General William Barr says in a new TV interview. Barr  told CBS News in an interview scheduled  to air on Thursday evening and Friday morning that he believed Mueller had more latitude to state his views than the special counsel may have permitted himself. "I personally felt he could've reached a decision. He could've reached a conclusion," Barr said. The discrepancy between the Justice Department's leaders is over its long-standing legal opinion that forbids the indictment of a sitting president. Mueller said on Wednesday that in his view, that policy meant he could never h...

Remote-Access Software on Systems Sold to States Remote-access software and modems on election equipment 'is the worst decision for security short of leaving ballot boxes on a Moscow street corner.' The nation's top voting machine maker has admitted in a letter to a federal lawmaker that the company installed remote-access software on election-management systems it sold over a period of six years, raising questions about the security of those systems and the integrity of elections that were conducted with them. In a letter sent to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) in April and obtained recently by Motherboard, Election Systems and Software acknowledged that it had "provided pcAnywhere remote connection software … to a small number of customers between 2000 and 2006," which was installed on the election-management system ES&S sold them. The statement contradicts what the company  told me and fact checkers for a story I wrote for the  New York Times  in February....

An electronic voting machines that produces a paper receipt from Election Services & Software. The company is among those bidding to replace all of Georgia's voting machines but close relationships between state officials and ES&S have raised questions about the fairness of the bidding process. David Goldman/AP It is likely to be a banner year for the voting equipment industry with state and local election offices planning to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on new machines ahead of the 2020 election. This year's purchases will probably amount to the biggest buying wave since right after the 2000 presidential election, when officials rushed to replace discredited punch card machines with touchscreen voting equipment. Those machines are rapidly aging and are being replaced with machines that leave a paper backup as a result of security concerns about purely electronic voting. The voting equipment purchases come at a time of increased scrutiny over th...