Oil is coming down as ISIS is taking oil fields and ducts and flooding the market. At any price that is still more money for them than the alternative.

The Western world has been painfully myopic on energy. We have mastered nuclear power for 50 years now, yet still use oil for most things. True that the record of nuclear isn't perfect, but compared to oil? Neither the pollution nor the global security issues of oil are present with nuclear even counting its proven accidents. And the US is probably worse than Europe on this: Europe has comparatively low oil resources, but the US has enough oil than buying Saudi is close to treason: funding enemies by buying something you can make at home (or with your trusted neighbor Canadia).





News sources?

What Dante said is very important. Any news is dominated by what sells, and that creates biases of its own even short of direct agendas. The new chains appearing as an explicit contrast to American news are good starts but all will have their own biases. But at least they are in English: Russia Today, Al Jazeera, France 24, Press TV... Press TV is the least biased because Iran has few friends anyway.

Which is, imho, the worst problem. For large regions of the world, there is little English coverage. The coverage is in local languages or regional linguas francas. Because, to me, the ideal should be that: read local news. Reading local news is not the same as reading unbiased news; local papers and TV channels do have their own agendas too. But at least their agendas are local. And as such they still reflect better what the local audience is thinking (at least a part of it) than what US media will (to a point this also happens with the non-US international chains). But then of course what are you to do when local Latin American media is very scarce in English? Same for Africa outside Nigeria and South Africa.

To that extent, Pakistan is lucky. Because of the British colonial past, English media remains active and healthy. The main problem there is that English Pakistani media have a predominantly urban, highly educated, upper class audience who are more Westernized than the rest of the people. That creates a liberal (Pakistani usage of the word) bias. The Urdu press is in that sense a lot more connected with middle and lower classes (and again, can you read Urdu?) But, overall, even the English language press is better at being truthfully Pakistani than a foreigner's reading. So yes, read Pakistani papers.

(Language in Pakistan is a topic of its own. Pakistan uses English entirely to communicate with the rest of the world, and it is usually the medium in private schools. But inside, the "national" language, used by most media and by all public schools, is Urdu. However, Urdu itself is a minority language. As a native tongue, it is almost entirely limited to the Muhajir, descendants of Indian Muslims who fled to Pakistan at Partition, whose concentration is greatest in and around Karachi. Most Pakistanis instead have a local language as native tongue, and Urdu is only used formally or to communicate with a Pakistani from a different region. All of this, naturally, has consequences for media)

Generally, try to read local media. And yes, this is a good reason to not be monolingual.

Occasionallly too you will be reminded of how far the Anglosphere is removed from reality, like when you read reader's comments in African and Asian media grieving, rather than good-riddance-ing, Neil Wilkes.