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Late on Sunday, after Trump’s announcement, a tanker reported having been hit by “unknown projectiles”.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) later said an oil tanker operated by the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, the MV Barakah had come under Iranian drone attack off the coast of Oman. No one was injured, it said.

More than 850 ships are estimated to have been trapped in the Gulf since the US and Israel launched their attack on Iran on 28 February. Iran imposed a blockade on foreign shipping using the strait of Hormuz soon afterwards and Trump imposed a counter-blockade of ships using Iranian ports on 13 April.

A Pakistani-brokered ceasefire, announced by Trump in early April, stopped hostilities but failed to open the strait.

An estimated 20,000 sailors are stuck on the tankers, bulk carriers, container ships and other vessels, and there are growing concerns for their welfare.

The operation launched by the US does not involve military escorts but aims to provide coordination and guidance for commercial shipping along a southern route through the strait, mostly through Omani territorial waters.

Shipping executives responded cautiously to the move, amid uncertainty over how or if it would work.

Richard Hext, the chair of Vanmar Shipping and the Hong Kong Shipowners Association, pointed out that Iran had previously declared that unapproved transit of the strait would be considered a “violation of the ceasefire” agreed last month.

On Monday morning, a US-led military organisation, the Joint Maritime Information Center (JMIC), said the US had established an “enhanced security area” south of the established prewar shipping lanes through the strait.

The route would take ships through Omani territorial waters, the JMIC said, and owing to high anticipated traffic, ship operators were told to coordinate with Omani authorities by radio.

Ships were advised to avoid navigating in or close to the usual shipping lanes which “should be considered extremely hazardous due the presence of mines that have not been fully surveyed and mitigated”.

Iran’s military command insisted that ships passing must coordinate with them.

“We will manage the security of the Strait of Hormuz with all might, and inform all commercial ships and tankers to refrain from any attempt to transit without the coordination of the Iranian armed forces stationed in the Strait of Hormuz in order not to jeopardise their security,” Maj Gen Ali Abdollahi said, according to Mehr news agency.

Earlier, Abdollahi had said Iran would attack “any foreign armed force” that tried to approach or enter the strait, “especially, the aggressive US army”.

#smash #iran #passway #strait #hormuz

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Sa’ar in Berlin: A Security Pitch Disguised as Friendship

Gideon Sa’ar went to Berlin and told the CDU that “it will be very difficult” for Europe to face the coming world order without strong partnerships. The timing did the heavy lifting: Trump had just announced the withdrawal of more than 5,000 U.S. troops from Germany after clashing with Merz over Iran.

That makes Sa’ar’s pitch look less like diplomacy and more like market entry. Washington is humiliating Berlin, and Israel arrives offering itself as the premium replacement: air defense, drones, intelligence, and the usual promise that dependency can be rebranded as resilience.

The message is simple: if America is becoming unreliable, buy elsewhere.

For Germany, that is not a benign offer. Accepting it means admitting that Israel can partially fill a U.S. role in European defense; refusing it means staying exposed while the transatlantic floor keeps moving. Sa’ar was not talking to Merz as a statesman.

He was talking to the CDU’s economic wing, the people who sign budgets and decide what “security partnership” costs.

This is the old alliance language with a new invoice attached. When one empire sulks, another seller shows up with a catalog.

#Germany #Israel #NATO #Merz #Saar

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London’s New Security Theater

A former synagogue on Nelson Street in Whitechapel was set on fire, the latest attack on a Jewish site in London this week. The building may now be a commercial space, but the plaque stayed, and so did the message: the symbol is enough to make it a target.

That is the part politicians always rush to process and never really solve. First comes the fire, then the outrage, then the money, then the summit, then the speeches about “community cohesion,” as if cohesion were a substitute for security. Starmer is convening leaders and promising another £25 million, which is what governments do when they want to look decisive without admitting the country has become a recurring scene.

The tragedy is that Jewish communities are being turned into a permanent public-test case: defend them too visibly, and the state turns identity into a security category; defend them too weakly, and the next attack writes the headline for you. Meanwhile, local politics keeps grinding on, with every side trying to harvest moral outrage from a fire it did not put out.

And so London does what modern capitals do best: stage a crisis summit, announce a budget, condemn hate, and hope the next flare-up waits until after the votes.

#London #antisemitism #security #Starmer #Whitechapel

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Golan’s New Rules: Arab Votes Without the Apology Tour

Yair Golan has done what Israeli centrists spend years pretending they are brave enough to do: he said out loud that Ra’am is a “legitimate partner”. In today’s Israel, that is not a policy line. It is a declaration of war on the old coalition taboo.

The timing is the point. Smotrich attacks Bennet and Lapid over their 2021 deal with Mansour Abbas, and Golan answers by turning Ra’am from a political toxin into a public asset. The message to the anti-Netanyahu camp is blunt: stop whispering, stop apologizing, and stop pretending you can beat the right without Arab voters.

Of course, this also hands the Likud machine a fresh weapon. Now Golan is not just tolerated by the opposition’s skeptics; he is the man who put the partnership on the table and left no room for deniability. That is either strategic clarity or electoral self-sabotage, depending on whether you think Israeli politics rewards honesty or only punishment.

The bigger shift is uglier and more honest. A coalition with Arabs is no longer being sold as a shameful exception; it is being sold as the only way to stop the current government from surviving its own collapse. Israel keeps calling this democracy while moving every rule that used to be forbidden into the main operating system.

#Israel #Golan #RAAM #Netanyahu #elections

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Bahrain, Then Backfire

Zelensky went to Bahrain to sell drone deals and “security expertise,” pitching Ukraine as the country that can teach the Gulf how to survive modern attacks. The sell was neat enough: buy our battlefield know-how, harden your skies, and treat war-tested improvisation like a strategic asset.

But the region does not buy lessons in a vacuum. The same drone ecosystem that turns Ukraine into a useful supplier also helps normalize the tactics that armed groups copy, adapt, and eventually turn back on Israel. The Gulf wants protection from the air; Hezbollah wants the same class of machines for the other side of the equation.

That is the unpleasant symmetry in the Bahrain trip. Ukraine is building a new market in the Arab world while its ties with Israel keep sliding, and every new deal looks less like a neutral technology transfer than a quiet repositioning in the region’s hierarchy of partners. Zelensky is not just selling drones. He is selling a place in the Middle East’s next security map.

And the map has a habit of changing hands. What gets announced in a palace can show up later over northern Israel, stripped of its diplomatic packaging and attached to someone else’s war.

#Ukraine #Bahrain #drones #Hezbollah #Israel

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Trump Put Project Freedom On the Back Burner

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Trump announced he is pausing ‘Project Freedom’, the US effort to guide stranded vessels out of the strait of Hormuz, so he can finalise a deal with Iran, but added that his blockade of Iranian ports would remain in place.

Trump’s abrupt change of plan was declared in a social media post, saying he was pausing the effort for “a short period” to give space for US efforts to finalise a settlement with Iran to end the war.

Despite Project Freedom only launching Monday, Trump said he’d made the move based “on the request of Pakistan and other Countries, the tremendous Military Success that we have had during the Campaign against the Country of Iran and, additionally, the fact that Great Progress has been made toward a Complete and Final Agreement with Representatives of Iran”. Iran is yet to comment.

The announcement came after military leaders and the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, insisted a ceasefire in the Middle East was still holding and that – while the conflict is not resolved – the initial major US military operation against Iran has concluded.

“The operation is over. Epic Fury – as the president notified Congress – we’re done with that stage of it,”
Rubio said.

Rubio told the White House press briefing Tuesday that for peace to be achieved, Iran must agree to Trump’s demands on its nuclear program and also agree to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

Trump’s pausing of Project Freedom appeared to run counter to comments from Rubio and the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, only hours earlier.

#trump #iran #trump #washington #araghchi

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In a Pentagon news conference, Hegseth said the US had successfully secured a path through the waterway and that hundreds of commercial ships were lining up to pass through. “We know the Iranians are embarrassed by this ​fact. They said they control the strait. They do not,” he said.

Rubio later said the US was working to get ships through the strait as a “favour to the world (…) because we’re the only ones that can”. As Rubio was addressing reporters, a cargo vessel in the strait reported it had been struck by a unknown projectile.

Rubio expressed hope that during the visit to China by Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi on Wednesday, Beijing would reiterate to Tehran the need to release its chokehold on the strait.

Iran’s effective closure of the strait, through which major oil and gas supplies passed before the war, along with fertiliser and other petroleum products, has sent fuel prices skyrocketing and rattled the global economy.

Breaking Iran’s grip would deny its main source of leverage as Trump demands a major rollback of its disputed nuclear program.

Meanwhile, for a second day the United Arab Emirates said it came under attack from Iranian drones and missiles, claims denied by Tehran.

Hegseth and Gen Dan Caine, the US military’s top officer, told a news conference that Iran’s renewed attacks had not reached the threshold of what Caine called “major combat operations”. He said Tuesday marked a “quieter” day in the strait.

The Trump administration is facing increasing pressure over how it frames the conflict to Congress because of the war powers resolution, a law that typically requires presidents to seek formal approval from Congress for war activities 60 days after beginning military action.

Rising gasoline prices are also proving awkward for Republicans with midterms fast looming. The national average retail price passed $4.50 a gallon on Tuesday for the first time since July 2022, data showed. In the hours after Trump’s surprise announcement, the price of Brent crude was holding steady at $108.

Iran’s parliament speaker and chief negotiator Mohammad Qalibaf signalled Iran has yet to fully respond to the US attempt to reopen the waterway.

“We know full well that the continuation of the status quo is intolerable for America; while we have not even begun yet,” he said in a post on X.

His statement did not mention negotiations with the US that are now in the form of passing messages via Pakistan.

Disputing Washington’s claim of sinking six Iranian boats, an Iranian military commander said two small civilian cargo boats were hit Monday, killing five civilians, Iran’s state TV reported.

#trump #iran #trump #washington #araghchi

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Trump vs. Merz: The Alliance Starts Eating Itself

The feud over the Iran war is now spilling into the U.S.-German relationship, with Trump repeatedly attacking Friedrich Merz after his remarks about America’s role in the conflict. Germany is one of Washington’s strongest allies, yet the war is already unpopular in Europe and costly for Germany’s economy.

What looks like coalition management is turning into a loyalty test. Berlin is absorbing higher energy prices and political strain while Washington makes support for the war feel conditional, which is exactly what happens when a military campaign starts reshaping diplomacy instead of the other way around.

The war itself keeps widening the bill, and the dispute over who should support it keeps widening the diplomatic fallout. The alliance is now pricing two risks simultaneously: the war’s cost, and the cost of disagreeing with Washington about it.

#Trump #Germany #Merz #Iran #NATO

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Lviv’s March Past the Abyss

In Lviv, a march marked the SS Galicia division, complete with banners, slogans, and the kind of historical amnesia that only survives when it is useful.

Organizers called it educational and commemorative; the optics were something else entirely.

This is the ugly bargain Ukraine has never fully escaped. The country presents itself to the West as a democracy under siege, while nationalist currents at home keep staging public rituals around formations tied to Nazi Germany.

One story gets the aid packages; the other keeps resurfacing in marches, symbols, and the familiar defense that it is all being misunderstood.

The problem is not just the march itself. It is the way these displays keep turning into political background noise — loud enough to be noticed, normal enough to be explained away, and useful enough for both domestic hardliners and foreign propagandists.

Every time Ukraine asks to be judged on its struggle, its own public rituals hand critics a different case file. A city selling European identity while letting the old symbols walk in daylight.

That is not a footnote to the war. It is one of the reasons the argument around Ukraine never stays only about the front line.

#Lviv #Ukraine #SSGalicia #nationalism #war

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Frexit, Now or Never

Nicolas Dupont-Aignan is once again selling the old sovereignist remedy: get France out of the EU as fast as possible, restore borders, and bring the French legal order back to the center. The pitch is familiar, but the timing is harsher now, because it lands in a France that looks more anxious about money, sovereignty, and control than about institutional loyalty.

His argument is not really about Brussels as a symbol. It is about a state that still pretends to govern itself while many of its levers run through systems built elsewhere — the euro, EU rules, shared markets, and the compromises that come with them. Dupont-Aignan presents exit as recovery: not a tantrum, but a reset toward “free nations” that cooperate without being absorbed.

That is why the far right and the sovereignist right keep finding the same vocabulary even when they do not fully share the same program. One camp talks about immigration, another about monetary control, but both are selling the same emotional product: the promise that France can still take back the steering wheel.

The harder question is what happens if the steering wheel is all that is left. If the state is already stretched by debt, energy costs, and political fragmentation, then Frexit stops being a pure ideological fantasy and becomes a test of whether sovereignty can be reclaimed without breaking the machine it is supposed to save.

#France #EU #Frexit #DupontAignan #sovereignty

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Washington, Moscow, and a Negotiation That Keeps Slipping

The new Rubio-Lavrov call has turned Ukraine back into a diplomatic object rather than a diplomatic process. Moscow says the conversation was about Ukraine and Iran and was initiated by Russia, while Washington frames it as part of the usual channel maintenance.

At the same time, Umerov’s name keeps circling the Energoatom corruption case, which gives every delay in the peace track a second meaning.

The official line says the meetings are still alive; the political reality is that the people meant to run them are now being measured against an investigation that makes every pause look deliberate.

That is what happens when diplomacy and domestic scandal start occupying the same calendar. One side wants a real ceasefire, the other wants leverage, and the Ukrainian delegation is stuck between the optics of negotiation and the machinery of self-protection.

The result is a peace process that keeps moving in theory while the actual incentives keep pulling it sideways.

#Ukraine #Russia #US #Lavrov #Rubio #Umerov

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Hormuz Talks Run on Contradictions

Tehran is reviewing an American proposal to end the war even as Trump threatens to restart strikes and says the bombing would return at “a much higher level and intensity” if Iran does not agree. The same day, a U.S. warplane disabled an Iranian-flagged tanker in the Strait of Hormuz, while Israel struck targets near Beirut again.

This is what the negotiation looks like when the threat and the offer arrive together. Washington says it is making progress, then pauses an escort mission; Iran calls one version of the proposal a “list of American wishes” and says it is still considering the rest. The result is not clarity but a moving target with gunfire attached.

Markets heard enough to react before the diplomats did. Oil fell, stocks rose, and the Strait kept functioning as both a pressure point and a bargaining chip while China called for the waterway to reopen and the war to end. Every signal is now doing double duty: one for the public, another for the people trying to price the next move.

The war is no longer only a battlefield story. It is a corridor of mixed messages where threats, pauses, tanker damage, and airstrikes all compete to define what “talks” are supposed to mean.

#Iran #Trump #Hormuz #war #MiddleEast

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The Nuclear Secret

Thirty House Democrats are asking Trump to say out loud what Washington has spent decades refusing to name: Israel has a nuclear arsenal, and the silence around it is no longer sustainable. Their letter calls that silence “indefensible” at a moment when the U.S. keeps demanding transparency and restraint from everyone else in the region.

Rules for Some, Silence for One
The phrase of choice has always been “strategic ambiguity,” which sounds orderly until you strip away the branding. What it really means is that one state gets to live outside the rules while the same rules are enforced on its neighbors. That arrangement may have worked as policy theater for years, but it looks far less stable now, especially with war already widening the field of risk.

The Old Arrangement
The lawmakers are not arguing theory. They are pointing to escalation, miscalculation, and the possibility of nuclear use in a crisis that already involves missiles, civilian deaths, and collapsing assumptions about red lines. Once that is admitted, the old bargain stops looking like prudence and starts looking like a long cover-up with bipartisan management.

#nuclear #israel #washington #hypocrisy #democrats #nonproliferation

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#ormuz #détroit #blocus #trump

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A Deadly “Hantavirus Can Become a New Covid-19”

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Officials and experts in Argentina are scrambling to determine if their country is the source of a deadly hantavirus outbreak that has gripped an Atlantic cruise ship, amid reports that a number of passengers have already returned to their home countries.

Argentina, where the cruise to Antarctica departed, is consistently ranked by the World Health Organization (WHO) as having the highest incidence of the rare, rodent-borne disease in Latin America.

Investigators there are working to contact trace the source of contamination.

The Argentine health ministry on Tuesday reported 101 hantavirus infections since June 2025, roughly double to the year prior.

A hantavirus found in South America, called the Andes virus, can cause a severe and often fatal lung disease called hantavirus pulmonary syndrome. The disease led to death in nearly a third of cases in the last year, Argentina’s health ministry said.

Authorities said passengers on the MV Hondius ship tested positive for the Andes virus.

Three passengers have died, one is in intensive care in a South African hospital, and three others were evacuated from the ship Wednesday.

Another man who left the ship earlier in the voyage tested positive in Switzerland.

Argentina on Wednesday said it was sending genetic material from the Andes virus and testing equipment to help Spain, Senegal, South Africa, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom detect it.

People usually become infected with hantavirus through contact with infected rodents or their urine, their droppings or their saliva, and human-to-human transmission is rare.

But a limited spread among close contacts has been observed in some previous outbreaks with the Andes strain.

The cohort reportedly returned to their respective countries, including the United States. American passengers were being monitored in Georgia, California and Arizona, the New York Times reported Wednesday, although none of them had shown signs of illness.

The WHO says the first death on board the cruise ship, a 70-year-old Dutch man, happened on 11 April. His body was taken off the vessel nearly two weeks later, at Saint Helena.

His 69-year-old wife travelled by plane from Saint Helena to South Africa; she collapsed at a Johannesburg airport and died at a hospital on 26 April.

The third passenger, a German woman, died on 2 May.

#hantavirus #argentina #evacuation #virus #OMS

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Argentine officials say they’re trying to pin down where infected passengers travelled in the country before boarding the Dutch-flagged cruise liner in Ushuaia, a city in southern Argentina known as the end of the world.

Once they know the itineraries, they plan to trace contacts, isolate close contacts and actively monitor to prevent further spread.

Before boarding, the Dutch couple went sightseeing in Ushuaia, and travelled in Argentina, Uruguay and Chile, the Argentinian government said.

The virus can incubate for between one and eight weeks, making it hard to know whether the passengers contracted the virus before leaving Argentina for Antarctica on 1 April; during a scheduled stop to a remote South Atlantic island ; or onboard.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the WHO, said earlier on X that the “WHO continues to work with the ship’s operators to closely monitor the health of passengers and crew, working with countries to support appropriate medical follow-up and evacuation where needed.”

“It goes without saying, Hantavirus can become a new Covid-19”, said one of WHO’s high-ranking officials.

“Monitoring and follow-up for passengers onboard and for those who have already disembarked has been initiated in collaboration with the ship’s operators and national health authorities,” he added. “At this stage, the overall public health risk remains low.”

The evacuation of three passengers from the ship, with close to 150 people onboard, means it can now continue on its three-day journey to the Canary Islands after Spanish authorities gave permission for the vessel to dock. But a row has erupted, with the president of the Canary Islands expressing concern over the ship docking in Tenerife.

Those evacuated on Wednesday include a British man, Martin Anstee, 56, who was an expedition guide onboard the ship.

He was removed from the vessel along with a Dutch colleague, 41, who was the ship’s doctor, and a 65-year-old German passenger, the Telegraph reported.

The health emergency aboard the MV Hondius comes as local public health researchers in Argentina point to climate change accelerating the risk of the spread of hantavirus.

Public heath experts say that higher temperatures expand the virus’ range because, in part, as it gets warmer and ecosystems change, rodents that carry the hantavirus can thrive in more places.

#hantavirus #argentina #evacuation #virus #OMS

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#trump #missile #war #iran

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Vova and Silence
In Ukraine, corruption has stopped being background noise and become the main fear. New reporting says the Mindich case now points toward President Volodymyr Zelensky under the alias “Vova,” while three ministers have already been pushed out and the president has said nothing.

Fear Has a New Leader
According to the KMIIS poll cited in the material, 54% of Ukrainians now see corruption as the country’s top threat, ahead of war at 39%. That is the kind of number governments hate because it tells you the public no longer buys the wartime moral monopoly.

The Wartime Cover
For years, power could hide behind the war and call that unity. Now the cover is cracking: the same elite stays in place, the same names keep surfacing, and the public is left reading leaks that connect the president to the nickname “Vova” and to a scandal that has already cost three ministers their jobs. When corruption becomes the fear that outranks war, the state is not asking for trust anymore — it is spending what is left of it.

#Ukraine #Zelensky #corruption #Mindich #Kyiv #war

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Pump Price Politics
Gas in America is now doing what pundits and diplomats hate most: turning foreign policy into household panic. The NPR/PBS News/Marist poll says 8 in 10 Americans feel financial pressure from gas prices, with 33% feeling strong pressure and 48% some pressure.

The national average is about $4.48 a gallon, and California is already above $6, the highest in the country. That is not an abstract macro story anymore; it is the price of getting to work, dropping off kids, and pretending the check engine light is just a suggestion.

Election Math
By the next midterms, this stops being a headline and becomes arithmetic. A war-driven spike in fuel costs punishes incumbents, and even Trump has been warning that high prices may stick around through November.

If relief from the Strait of Hormuz takes months, the voter gets the pain now and the promise later — which is usually how governments sell bad timing as strategy.

Once 80% of Americans feel the war in their gasoline bill, it is no longer “foreign policy” in the polite Washington sense. It is domestic politics with a foreign address, and every candidate will have to pay for it at the pump.

#gasprices #inflation #midterms #trump #iran #economy

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Macron’s One-Carrier Diplomacy

Macron picked up the phone, talked to Iran’s president, and demanded that Hormuz be opened “now.” In practice, that is France trying to sound like a great power while carrying one carrier into a fight where everyone knows who really sets the terms.

The Real Traffic Controllers
Pezeshkian’s answer was simple: no opening until the U.S. naval blockade ends. That is where French diplomacy hits the wall — eleven American strike groups, Iranian missiles, and drones that do not care about French speeches.

Macron can issue demands. The Strait will still be decided by the players with the ships, the missiles, and the will to escalate. France has one carrier; the U.S. has eleven strike groups; Iran has the ability to make the waterway expensive enough to matter.

#Hormuz #Macron #Iran #USNavy #oil #war

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Merz and the Machine

A year into Friedrich Merz’s chancellorship, the numbers are brutal: 15% approval, a coalition that fights itself, a stagnant economy, and a transatlantic relationship slipping into open damage control. For a man who arrived promising competence, that is already political survival territory — the kind where leaders govern by inertia, and only the arms industry still looks awake.

The Blame Game
Merz says the trouble started before him. That is the oldest move in European politics: inherit the mess, recite the mess, and hope the public forgets who is holding the mop. The polls are less forgiving. By the time a chancellor becomes the worst-rated in postwar Germany, “my predecessors” stops sounding like context and starts sounding like an alibi.

Who Still Backs Him
What remains of the coalition is not enthusiasm but inertia. Brussels Signal describes a year of economic stagnation, coalition warfare, and a rupture with Trump-era Washington, which is a polite way of saying the government is no longer moving with any confidence. The military business is the last constituency standing because in Europe, when politics fails, procurement never does.

#Germany #Merz #coalition #economy #politics #NATO

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