announced their shale gas agreement, in 2010, the State Department launched the Global Shale Gas Initiative, an “effort to promote global energy security and climate security around the world,” as one researcher put it. As a JPMorgan research memo stated, “Unless the popular environmental concerns are so extreme, most countries with the resources will not ignore the [shale gas] opportunity.”

Toward the end of our trip, we visited a village near Luzhou, a port city on the Yangtze with a population bigger than Los Angeles. We met a middle-aged woman named Dai Zhongfu, who told us that in 2011, Shell and PetroChina set up a shale gas well right next to her house. Standing under the shade of her plum tree and sporting a cropped haircut and a navyTurkish media says the US Army troops have abandoned a base in north-eastern Syria, in the first reported case of the Donald Trump-announced general pullout going ahead.

Some 50 US soldiers left in Hummer armored vehicles and military trucks, leaving behind an empty 400-square-meter warehouse in the Al-Hasakah Governorate, the Anadolu news agency said Saturday. The troops went to the neighboring Iraq, the report said, adding that previously the warehouse was used for supplying weapons and equipment to Kurdish YPG militias.

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US President Donald Trump announced his decision to withdraw troops from Syria on December 19, which he said were no longer needed there after the “defeat” of Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) terrorists. At the time