USA - One of North America’s largest refining hubs just went up in flames. Port Arthur fuels huge parts of the eastern US. Gas prices aren’t staying calm after this. Massive explosion sends thick black smoke pouring into the sky. Visible for miles.

IRAN - Hardliners in Iran smell weakness. They now know where the West is most vulnerable... and have no reason to hold back. I fear something has started that cannot be stopped. Yesterday's post on Truth Social declaring in bold capital letters that Donald Trump had engaged in 'very good and productive talks' with Iran was not so much a surprise as a shock to friend and foe alike. It meant the US President was suspending his dire threat to destroy Iran's energy infrastructure at least until Friday, even though the vital Strait of Hormuz remains blocked by Tehran's Revolutionary Guard.

IRAN - "Trump, fearing Iran's response, backed down from his 48-hour ultimatum," Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting said in a post on X. Shortly after US President Donald Trump announced that he is deferring "any and all" strikes on Iranian power plants and energy infrastructure on productive resolution talks, Iranian media reports denied any 'direct' or 'intermediary' communication with him. Further, the official rejected Trump's claim about ongoing talks, and said that Islamic Republic of Iran will not accept any negotiations until "its objectives in the war are achieved."

EUROPE - Europe has long imagined itself as a global strategic power with the agency to shape its own destiny. Yet the geopolitical landscape of recent years has revealed a far more uncomfortable reality. Whether Europeans like it or not, the European Union’s (EU) economic stability is increasingly determined by forces outside its borders. In the east, the war in Ukraine has bound Europe’s energy and security outlook to Russia. To the south, a widening conflict between Israel and Iran is beginning to tie the Union’s economic future to decisions made in Jerusalem.

EUROPE - The boss of the International Energy Agency said the crisis caused by the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz is worse than the two oil shocks of the 1970s and the gas shortage connected to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine put together. Fatih Birol, executive director of the agency, said the crisis prompted by the US and Israel’s war on Iran was “very severe” and could get worse through prolonged disruption to “vital arteries of the global economy”, including petrochemicals, fertilisers, sulphur and helium. Birol warned that the depth of the problem, which he described as “a major, major threat" to the world’s economy, had not been properly understood by political leaders.

IRAN - Iran has threatened to destroy the Middle East’s biggest oil factories in a move that could cripple the Gulf and trigger a global energy crisis. As well as striking oil fields in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait, Iran could target desalination plants that supply millions in the Middle East with drinking water. Such an attack could also trigger a cost of living emergency in Britain that could push fuel prices to record highs. Sir Keir Starmer is expected to hold a meeting of the COBRA crisis committee on Monday to discuss the UK response. The threat of tit-for-tat military responses from Iran and the US has also placed a “ticking time bomb” under the global market, analysts have warned. Although the US and Israel have targeted Iran’s missile capabilities heavily, Tehran is still believed to have the weapons in its arsenal to cause a crisis in the Middle East and beyond.

USA - The boom in private credit, along with soaring oil prices and disruption by AI, are setting off alarm bells but is another global financial crisis coming? Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, warned last month that some lenders are doing “dumb things” and he was starting to see parallels to the era before the 2008 financial crisis. Lloyd Blankfein, the former chief executive of Goldman Sachs, who steered the investment bank through the global financial crisis, said this month that he saw signs the economy could be heading for a 2008-style crash and we were “due for a reckoning”. Alarm bells started ringing on Wall Street about the private credit industry around September last year, when First Brands, an American manufacturer of car parts which had borrowed billions of dollars in private markets, filed for bankruptcy and disclosed about $9.3 billion of debt obligations. Yet the company had received strong credit ratings.

USA - Almost 20 years after the last crisis, another toxic debt bubble threatens to collide with Middle East turmoil and cause a global meltdown. Market Financial Solutions (MFS) collapsed last month amid allegations of widespread fraud, prompting searching questions about how mainstream banks such as Barclays and Santander – with an exposure of nearly £1 billion between them – could have become involved in such a high-risk operation. The wider issue is whether its collapse is a harbinger of much worse to come – whether the largely unregulated world of so-called “shadow banking” is now colliding with the economic ruin of renewed conflict in the Middle East to provoke, not quite 20 years after the last one, another Great Financial Crash? The whole affair has shone a bright – and, as far as the industry is concerned, unwelcome – light on the murky but fast-growing world of “private credit”, also referred to as the “shadow banking sector”. It is vast. Largely unnoticed, global “private credit” assets have soared from around $4 trillion in 2008 to some $16 trillion today.

USA - Is it just a coincidence that the United States is being hit by a remarkable series of natural disasters at the exact same time that a catastrophic war has erupted in the Middle East? When I started digging into what has been happening over the past week, I was absolutely stunned.

USA - The US president orders a five-day pause to attacks on energy infrastructure as Sir Keir Starmer prepares to hold a COBRA meeting today. Was it an escalation too far even for President Trump? Or a masterstroke that finally forced Iran to back down? When Trump gave Iran just 48 hours to open up the Strait of Hormuz or face the consequences, even he could not have imagined that Iran would just surrender. Instead, it immediately threatened retaliation in kind against its Gulf neighbours and, via the effect on oil prices, the wider world beyond. The prospect of power stations blacking out on both sides of the Gulf, taps running dry as desalination plants were hit, and rocketing inflation and collapsing stock markets in the West, caused an audible gulp at the weekend. A delay of five days gives both sides some breathing space to consider if this abyss is one into which either wants to leap.

UK - Freedom of religion is a fundamental right in the United Kingdom. People should be at liberty to worship whom they choose. The freedom and right to prayer must be protected at all costs. But let’s be frank about the mass gathering of Islamic prayer which took place in Trafalgar Square last week. The Open Iftar, where 3000-odd Muslims gathered beneath Nelson’s Column to mark the end of the Ramadan fast, was not intended as some heart-warming expression of togetherness as organisers Ramadan Tent Project claim. So let’s call it what it was. It was a calculated display of religious and cultural assertion.

USA - The United States will destroy Iran's power plants if the Strait of Hormuz is not fully opened within 48 hours, US President Donald Trump threatened in a Truth Social post on Saturday night. "If Iran doesn’t FULLY OPEN, WITHOUT THREAT, the Strait of Hormuz, within 48 HOURS from this exact point in time, the United States of America will hit and obliterate their various POWER PLANTS," Trump wrote. In a response to Trump's statements, the Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters, which is the central headquarters of the Iranian armed forces, said that it will fully close the Strait of Hormuz if "America's threats regarding Iran's power plants are implemented." Iran also warned that it would start targeting "all power plants, energy infrastructure, and information technology," while any company in the region with American shareholders would also become a target. "Everything is ready for a great jihad with the aim of completely destroying all economic interests of America in the Middle East," the statement said.

USA - The list of countries Donald Trump takes issue with since he launched strikes on Iran grows by the week. The UK has gone from being his “most solid relationship of all” to “very, very uncooperative”. Other NATO governments do not fare much better, described as freeloaders making a “very foolish mistake” by staying out of his war. But amid all the fury, there’s one country many of his supporters fear Trump has gone too soft on: Israel. The two countries went into this conflict together. Trump has praised Israel for doing what other allies failed to: showing up to fight. But many of his base blame Israel for luring America into the war in the first place. As the war moves towards talk of the endgame, Trump’s supporters are concerned that the president could be led into a political quagmire that may absorb the remainder of his term.

USA - The shocking news that Iran has missiles that may be able to reach London should make even critics of Trump’s war – among whom I number myself – ponder deeply. We don’t know how many such weapons Iran possesses, nor how accurate they are. But the regime has just fired two missiles at the British-American military base on the Chagos Islands, a distance of about 2,400 miles. Before the Iraq War, no one – not even Tony Blair in his most deluded state – thought Saddam Hussein could strike London. Nor was there any evidence that Iraq was trying to develop nuclear warheads. Iran, on the other hand, has almost certainly been doing precisely that.

IRAN - Iran has today vowed to lay mines throughout the entire Persian Gulf if the US and Israel attack the country's coast and islands including Kharg Island where Donald Trump is said to be considering an invasion. The US is drawing up plans to occupy or blockade Iran's Kharg Island, the country's main oil export hub, to pressure Tehran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz to all shipping. 'Any attempt to attack Iran's coasts or islands will cause all access routes in the Gulf to be mined with various types of sea mines, including floating mines that can be released from the coast,' a statement from Iran's Defence Council said today. 'In this case, the entire Gulf will practically be in a situation similar to the Strait of Hormuz for a long time.' Oil prices rose today after Iran dismissed Donald Trump's 48-hour ultimatum to fully reopen Hormuz or face having Iranian power plants blown up.