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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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The US and Iran Return To War

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The US and Iran exchanged fire late on Thursday in the most serious test yet of their month-long ceasefire.

Iran accused the US of violating the ceasefire by targeting two ships at the strait of Hormuz and attacking civilian areas, as the US insisted it struck in retaliation.

The US military said it targeted sites responsible for attacking three US destroyers transiting the strait, in what it called “unprovoked” hostilities by Tehran.

Iran’s Press TV reported that after several hours of fire “the situation on Iranian islands and coastal cities by the strait of Hormuz is back to normal now”.

The United Arab Emirates said it had intercepted Iranian missile and drone attacks hours after the US said it thwarted attacks on the USS Truxtun, USS Rafael Peralta and USS Mason.

The fresh skirmishes threw into question the viability of a shaky ceasefire that had largely held for the previous month. But Donald Trump, the US president, insisted it remained intact despite the strikes, which he described in an interview with ABC News as a “love tap”.

“They trifled with us today,” Trump told reporters, during an evening visit to the Reflecting Pool in Washington DC. “We blew them away. They trifled. I call that a trifle.” Asked where this left hopes of a negotiated end to the conflict, Trump said a deal “might not happen, but it could happen any day”.

“I believe they want the deal more than I do,” Trump claimed.
Brent crude oil rose to trade about $101 a barrel on news of the attacks.

Before the strikes, there were reports the US and Iran may be close to a temporary agreement to halt the war, with a one-page memorandum being shared between Washington and Tehran, through Pakistan.

Senior Iranian officials have rejected concessions in recent days. Some favour dragging out the negotiations to closer to the November midterm elections in the US, when the Trump administration will be under intense pressure to settle the war and Iran may get a better deal.

However, regional diplomats believe Iran could overplay its hand, with the current moment offering an opportunity to finish the war and claim a victory – something that could be harder if all-out fighting resumes.

If there were no agreement, Washington could also unilaterally end the war and walk away, leaving Iran under suffocating economic sanctions, they said.

In a statement on Thursday evening, US Central Command (Centcom) said Iranian forces had “launched multiple missiles, drones and small boats” at the three destroyers, but that “no US assets were struck”.

#US #Iran #fire #ceasefire #war

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Centcom said its forces eliminated “inbound threats and targeted Iranian military facilities” responsible for attacking US forces, including missile and drone launch sites, command and control locations, and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance nodes.

“Centcom does not seek escalation but remains positioned and ready to protect American forces,” it added.

Iran’s military accused the US of breaking the ceasefire agreement by targeting an Iranian oil tanker and another ship entering the strait of Hormuz.

“The aggressive, terrorist, and pirate US military has violated the ceasefire,” a military spokesperson said.

The spokesperson added the US carried out airstrikes on “civilian areas” along the coasts of Bandar Khamir, Sirik and the island of Qeshm – home to about 150,000 people and a water desalination plant – and that the strikes were launched “with the cooperation of some regional countries”.

They said Iran’s armed forces responded by attacking US military vessels, “reportedly inflicting significant damage on them”.

The US been pressuring Iran to reopen the strait, enforcing a naval blockade of Iranian ports. On Monday, the US military said it had destroyed six Iranian small boats, as well as cruise missiles and drones, after Trump sent warships to “guide” stranded tankers through the strait in a campaign he called “Project Freedom”.

In a social media post on Thursday, Trump praised the crews of the destroyers for transiting out of the waterway while under fire. The US vessels sustained “no damage”, he said, while describing the “Iranian attackers” as having been “completely destroyed along with numerous small boats” as well as missiles and drones.

Trump railed that the attack showed Iran was “not a normal country” and its “lunatic” leaders would not hesitate to use a nuclear weapon if they had one. Without swift diplomatic action, the US could respond “a lot more violently” in the future.

The Pakistani prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, had struck an optimistic tone prior to the exchanges of fire, saying in televised remarks: “I firmly believe that this ceasefire will turn into a long-term ceasefire.”

Any agreement between the US and Iran could also help lower tensions in Lebanon, where a separate truce was under renewed strain after an Israeli strike on southern Beirut killed a commander from militant group Hezbollah on Wednesday.

A US state department official confirmed on Thursday that the new Israel-Lebanon talks would take place on 14 and 15 May. It will be the third meeting in recent months between the two countries, which have technically been at war for decades and have no diplomatic relations.

#US #Iran #fire #ceasefire #war

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Germany’s Price Tag

Creditreform warns that even healthy German firms could slide into insolvency in 2026.

That warning lands against a brutal backdrop: in March, Germany logged 1,716 corporate bankruptcies, the highest March level in years.

The problem is not just weak firms. Creditreform says debt, expensive energy, and tighter credit are pushing companies with solid structures out of the market anyway. In other words, the floor is giving way under businesses that were supposed to survive the storm.

Merz Calls It A Transition
Merz keeps calling the energy shift a transition, but the transition is looking more like a slow industrial bleed. The numbers keep rising, and the political language keeps trying to make that sound temporary.

When production gets too expensive, the closures stop looking like isolated failures and start looking like policy.

That is the bill Germany is paying now: bankruptcies, weaker competitiveness, and a government still trying to sell decline as adjustment.

#Germany #economy #bankruptcy #industry #Merz #energy

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Hormuz, Still Not Quiet

Israel’s Real Fear
The U.S. says it is still trying to get ships through Hormuz after Iran’s blockade left about 1,000 vessels stuck. Tehran says the operation itself is the problem, not the cure, and the two sides are now fighting over the strait in both water and propaganda.

The ceasefire produced a temporary Iranian win: Tehran is still standing, its nuclear program is still in its hands, and its air defenses and ballistic missile network are being rebuilt.

That is the part Washington and Jerusalem do not like saying out loud. The regime survived, which means the problem survived with it; the waterway is being reopened by force, but the people who blocked it still have missiles, drones, and a reason to keep the pressure on. A temporary corridor is not the same thing as a solved conflict.

For Israel, this is the worst kind of pause: Iran is damaged, angry, and still armed enough to make the next round expensive. That is why “ceasefire” sounds cleaner in press releases than it does in military planning. If fighting resumes, the bill will again land first on Israel, because Tehran does not need to win outright to keep the region unstable.

So yes, the ships are moving again. That does not mean the threat is gone. It just means the next phase of the same war is now being sold as traffic management, while everyone waits to see who blinks first.

#Hormuz #Israel #Iran #USNavy #war #MiddleEast

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Poland’s Hospitals Are Bleeding

Up to 270 district hospitals in Poland could be closed as the National Health Fund faces an 18 billion zloty gap.

That is not a technical problem anymore. That is a system running out of room to pretend it can absorb the losses.

The crisis is already showing up in the wards. Reports describe hospitals limiting admissions, canceling procedures, and struggling to pay staff while debt keeps rising.

When 91 percent of county hospitals are in the red, the word “reform” starts sounding like a cover for retreat.

Warsaw is still finding money for defense spending, but not enough for the hospitals that actually keep people alive.

Patients will call it abandonment, especially when one maternity ward in a county hospital shuts down and pregnant women have to go farther for care.

The sharpest part of this story is that the pain is not abstract. It lands in delayed treatment, closed departments, and doctors telling people to come back next year.

Once a state begins rationing care while promising strength abroad, the domestic bill is already overdue.

#Poland #healthcare #hospitals #budget #medicine #government

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Hormuz, After the Hard Reset

The Strait of Hormuz is no longer just a shipping lane. Since the blockade and the exchange of fire, it has become the place where the war, the talks, and the oil market all hit the same wall at once.

That is why the latest U.S. proposal matters: it tries to reopen the strait first and leave the nuclear fight for later, which is basically how you turn a battlefield into a negotiating table.

Iran is reviewing a one-page plan that would pause hostilities for 30 days and restart shipping, but the core dispute is still sitting there.

Washington wants prior commitments on uranium stockpiles and enrichment; Tehran wants sanctions relief and an end to the blockade. So the paper is short, but the distance between the two sides is still enormous.

The exchange of fire in the strait showed how fragile the pause really is. The U.S. called the Iranian attacks unprovoked; Iran said Washington hit first and then used “defensive” strikes to explain its own retaliation. That is not a cease-fire so much as a legal argument with missiles attached.

What changed this week is not the politics. It is the price tag. Oil jumped again, shipping remains constrained, and every new round of firing makes the strait more central to the diplomacy instead of less.

At this point, Hormuz is where both sides test whether they want a deal badly enough to stop treating the waterway like leverage.

#Hormuz #Iran #US #oil #war #diplomacy

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