Saudi Arabia in Struggle for the Chinese Oil Market: the Price War as Necessity

The new agreement between the OPEC members and a group of non-OPEC countries (so called OPEC+ group) that was reached on 12 April 2020 does not necessarily mean the end of the price war. Starting from May, the participants of the renewed Vienna agreement are expected to cut their production by 9.7 million barrels a day in order to raise and maintain the stability of the oil prices. The deal is also supposed to end the oil price war which started after the failure of the previous attempt by the OPEC+1 to coordinate the production cuts for April and beyond. However, this will not happen, at least for now. In mid-April, Saudi Arabia surprised market observers by the declaration of official selling prices (OSP) on its oil for May. Initial expectations were that, in May, Riyadh would increase them to support the common OPEC+ struggle for higher oil prices. However, while raising the OSPs for the US market and keeping them close to the April's low level for Europe, Riyadh further downed prices for Asia.2 Moreover, as reported by Reuters, Saudi Aramco tried to provide its oil consumers with options to delay payments for supplies for up to 90 days. These moves clearly showed that Saudi authorities continue their struggle for dominance at the oil markets and consider Asia (first of all, China) as their top priority in this fight. However, this decision by Riyadh should have been expected

The features of finite-element modeling of a structural element of flexible woven composites

AbstractThe features of finite-element modeling of both an element itself and its behavior under uniaxial tension have been demonstrated with a structural element of flexible woven composites. The main components of the material, such as reinforcing fabric and material's matrix were examined in modeling. The reinforcing fabric is a plain weave. These yarns were taken as an elastic material. The matrix of the material was considered to be a soft polymer with the possible occurrence of irreversible elastic-plastic deformations. Moreover, the possible occurrence of damages in the structure of the material under high loads was taken into account in modeling. The fields of stresses and strains were built; the zones of the material's internal damages under uniaxial tension were demonstrated. The risk zones of weave were revealed

Verbal modifiers in areal perspective : The case of Latvian Romani

Publisher Copyright: © 2022, Vilnius University. All rights reserved.Based on the analysis of the texts collected in the 1930s in Latvia and Estonia, this paper provides a description of the semantics of the verbal modifiers, i.e., prefixes (preverbs) and particles, in Latvian Romani. The system of verbal modifiers in Latvian Romani is an innovation evolved under Slavic and Baltic influence. Most preverbs are instances of MAT-borrowing from Slavic and Baltic, whereas verb particles are a PAT-borrowing, modelled after the Latvian system. The paper argues that even preverbs of Slavic origin often copy the semantics and derivational patterns of Latvian prefixed verbs. It is also shown that, differently from Latvian, in Romani both preverbs and verb particles can affect the verb’s argument structure (e.g., by making it transitive) and change its aspectual value (e.g., by making it perfective). Finally, the distribution of verbal modifiers in Latvian Romani (the development of verb particles as opposed to other closely related Northeastern Romani dialects which only have prefixes, and higher frequency of verb particles in Estonia than in Latvia) confirms the areal cline in the spread of verb particles.Peer reviewe

A token-based investigation of verbal plurality in Lithuanian dialects

This paper examines the use of the verbal suffixes -(d)inė- and ‑dav‑ in Lithuanian dialects. Both suffixes express pluractionality, although of different types, and their distribution in Lithuanian dialects differs as well. Using corpus data, we find that in South Aukštaitian ‑dav‑ is rarer and -(d)inė‑ is more frequent than in East Aukštaitian; in Lithuanian dialects of Belarus -dav- is almost absent. We argue against the assumption that -(d)inėforms have extended into the domain of the past habitual at the expense of ‑dav‑ forms; a slightly higher token frequency of -(d)inė‑ in South Aukštaitian seems to apply irrespective of any particular tense. We also argue that only token-based analyses can substantiate claims concerning areal distribution of certain grammatical forms and constructions

Navigating Troubled Waters: Experts' Views on GCC Challenges for Socio-Economic Recovery in the Post-Covid-19 Period

The GCC economies are being seriously hit by the negative impact of low oil prices and spread of Covid-19 pandemic. The restrained inflow of oil incomes deepens the budget deficit of the countries and makes government spending cuts inevitable in 2020 and, most probably, 2021. As in the past, the first areas to suffer from these cuts are likely to be social programs, the private sector and jobs for expats. Subsequently, the fall in remittances from the Gulf region will cause an additional stress for the social security of the Middle Eastern countries that traditionally provide the GCC states with the bulk of its work force. At the same time, the non-oil sectors suffering from the Coronavirus pandemic are looking for additional support. Subsequently, the budgets of the GCC countries are overloaded with emergency spending allocated to fight the negative economic consequences of the Covid-19 outbreak to support their economies. The steps taken by the states are ranging from acute budget cuts, partial curfew and freezing of spending on ambitious projects to the provision of additional financial support to the banking sector and business

Towards the Corpus of Latvian Romani Texts : Deciphering the Manuscripts in Jānis Leimanis' Archive

Publisher Copyright: © 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)Latvian Romani is a Northeastern Romani dialect with a limited number of publicly available sources. Two large archival collections of texts in Latvian Romani, compiled primarily in the 1930s in Latvia and Estonia, have been recently digitized as images and made available online for a wider public. In our study, we focus on one of these collections, the Latvian Romani folklore texts collected by Jānis Leimanis in interwar Latvia. In this paper, we describe how initial manual transcriptions, most of which have been created with the help of a special crowdsourcing platform, were integrated in the handwritten text recognition (HTR) workflow in Transkribus. We present two HTR models trained on the basis of Leimanis' collection and discuss various issues related to the work on these texts.Peer reviewe

Diffusion and wave behaviour in linear Voigt model

A boundary value problem related to a third- order parabolic equation with a small parameter is analized. This equation models the one-dimensional evolution of many dissipative media as viscoelastic fluids or solids, viscous gases, superconducting materials, incompressible and electrically conducting fluids. Moreover, the third-order parabolic operator regularizes various non linear second order wave equations. In this paper, the hyperbolic and parabolic behaviour of the solution is estimated by means of slow time and fast time. As consequence, a rigorous asymptotic approximation for the solution is established

Micro-Structured Ferromagnetic Tubes for Spin Wave Excitation

Micron scale ferromagnetic tubes placed on the ends of ferromagnetic CoTaZr spin waveguides are explored in order to enhance the excitation of Backward Volume Magnetostatic Spin Waves. The tubes produce a closed magnetic circuit about the signal line of the coplanar waveguide and are, at the same time, magnetically contiguous with the spin waveguide. This results in a 10 fold increase in spin wave amplitude. However, the tube geometry distorts the magnetic field near the spin waveguide and relatively high biasing magnetic fields are required to establish well defined spin waves. Only the lowest (uniform) spin wave mode is excited.Comment: 3 pages, 3 figure

Russland und das Königreich Saudi-Arabien: Zwischen Syrien und der OPEC

Im letzten Jahrzehnt haben die Beziehungen zwischen Russland und dem Königreich Saudi-Arabien einige Stresstests erfahren. Die aktive Hilfe, die Moskau dem Regime von Baschar al- Assad in Syrien erweist, ließe erwarten, dass Russland zu einem der wichtigsten geostrategischen Opponenten von Riad wird. Überraschenderweise wurde jedoch der Dialog zwischen den beiden Ländern 2015 wieder aufgenommen und zeigt zudem eine Tendenz zur Normalisierung. Eine nicht unerhebliche Rolle bei diesem Prozess spielte die Tatsache, dass Saudi-Arabien Russland nach dessen »Erfolg« in Syrien als einen wichtigen Akteur in der Region anerkannt hat