تابع رؤية 2030
بذكاء سياقي

الرياض - مباشر: أنهى مؤشر السوق الموازية السعودية (نمو) تعاملات جلسة الأحد على انخفاض محدود بلغت نسبته -0.11%، ليفقد 26.71 نقطة ويغلق عند مستوى 23,202.13 نقطة. وشهدت الجلسة تداول نحو 2.52 مليون سهم، بقيمة إجمالية بلغت 14.47 مليون ريال. ومالت كفة الأداء نحو الشركات غير المتغيرة التي بلغ عددها 65 شركة، مقابل ارتفاع 33 شركة وانخفاض 27 أخرى. سجلت قيمة التداولات خلال الجلسة 14.47 مليون ريال موزعة على 2.51 مليون سهماً، وتصدر سهم تدوير قائمة الأسهم الأكثر نشاطاً من حيث القيمة والكمية، حيث بلغت قيمة تداولاته 5.54 مليون ريال بعد تداول 1.1 مليون سهم، ليغلق السهم مرتفعاً بنسبة +1.53% عند سعر 5.3 ريال. وجاء سهم إدارات في المرتبة الثانية من حيث السيولة بقيمة 1.11 مليون ريال، مسجلاً تراجعاً بنسبة -2.16% ليصل إلى 262.2 ريال. وفي قائمة الأسهم الأكثر ارتفاعاً، صعد سهم ملان بنسبة 9.52% ليغلق عند 1.15 ريال، تلاه سهم دي آر سي بارتفاع قدره 8.50% مغلقاً عند 43.4 ريال. كما حقق سهم جمجوم فاشن مكاسب بنسبة 6.47% ليصل إلى 118.4 ريال، وارتفع سهم قمة السعودية بنسبة 5.97% ليقفل عند مستوى 7.1 ريال، وسهم الدولية بنسبة 5.92% عند 5.19 ريال. وشملت الارتفاعات أيضاً أسهم معيار بنسبة 5.77%، وريشيو بنسبة 4.98%، وموبي للصناعة بنسبة 4.65%. في المقابل، تصدر سهم رماث قائمة التراجعات بنسبة 6.63% ليغلق عند 29 ريال، متبوعاً بسهم المداواة الذي انخفض بنسبة 6.49% ليصل إلى 4.9 ريال. وتراجع سهم الأشغال الميسرة بنسبة 4.52% ليغلق عند 13.3 ريال، وسهم مفيد بنسبة 4.35% عند 33 ريال، ومصاعد أطلس بنسبة 3.90% عند 9.6 ريال. كما ضمت قائمة الانخفاضات أسهم فيو بنسبة 3.70%، ونت وركرس بنسبة 3.68%، والراشد للصناعة بنسبة 3.11%. وعلى صعيد النشاط التشغيلي، سجل سهم حلوة تداولات بقيمة 0.93 مليون ريال مع تراجع سعره بنسبة 1.52% ليغلق عند 2.6 ريال. واستقر سهم دار المركبة دون تغيير عند سعر 1.35 ريال رغم تداول 0.35 مليون سهم بقيمة 0.47 مليون ريال. كما سهم الرازي تداولات نشطة نسبياً بقيمة 0.38 مليون ريال، مرتفعاً بنسبة 2.65% ليغلق عند 29.4 ريال. وتراجع سهم الرعاية المستقبلية بنسبة 1.12% بقيمة تداول بلغت 0.35 مليون ريال، وسهم ملكية بنسبة 2.26% عند سعر 39 ريال وبسيولة بلغت 0.35 مليون ريال.

Hailing his Iran deal this week amid the excess of Versailles, Donald Trump urged sceptics to take Wall Street’s word for its success. “There is nothing as smart as the market – and the market loves it,” he said, claiming credit for ending the economic chaos that had kicked off when he started bombing Iran in late February. Without the agreement, he said, “the alternative would be a worldwide depression”. By the weekend, the outlook was less optimistic after planned US-Iran peace talks in Switzerland were abruptly called off, then reinstated, and Iran said Israeli bombing in Jordan meant it was justified in closing the strait of Hormuz again. Still, hopes persist that the sea passage carrying about 20% of the world’s oil supplies will reopen fully in the coming days and weeks. If the oil does start to flow more freely again, it should forestall the shortages of key products, such as jet fuel, that some analysts had predicted would occur if the war persisted. Energy markets are already anticipating the hoped-for resurgence in supply: the cost of a barrel of crude oil dropped below $80 a barrel after the agreement was announced, for the first time since the early days of the war. Yet governments are still counting the economic costs of a war they did not want any part of. The severity of the impact varies by region. Gulf economies, which have seen exports of their main revenue-raiser choked off and found themselves the target of Iranian bombs, are expected to plunge into recession. Analysts at Oxford Economics are expecting GDP in the region to decline by 2.6% this year. Economic growth in the US, now a net energy exporter, has remained strong, with stock markets bolstered by the AI investment boom, and SpaceX just the first of a series of mega market launches expected this year. But American drivers are paying $1 a gallon more for petrol than a year ago, and economy-wide inflation in the US has surged to 4.2%, its highest rate in three years – news that Trump greeted by claiming: “I love the inflation.” View image in fullscreen American drivers are paying $1 a gallon more for petrol than a year ago. Photograph: Carolyn Kaster/AP Trump’s newly appointed pick as Federal Reserve chair, Kevin Warsh, was chosen in the hope he would deliver a string of interest rate cuts. In fact, Warsh is likely to face pressure to raise borrowing costs in the coming months. Dario Perkins, the head of global research at the consultancy TS Lombard, said that of the leading central banks, “as the economy has remained strong and inflation has increased, the Fed is probably going to increase rates the most, maybe as much as four times (to a range of 4.5% to 5%) by the end of next year”. He said the US economy had remained strong thanks to consumers running down their savings to continue spending, while shoppers in the UK and continental Europe had been more circumspect. “The euro consumer, while they have savings, are more worried about the war and its outcome,” he said. In the EU, which is heavily reliant on gas imports, the European Central Bank (ECB) has already raised interest rates for the first time since 2023, in the hope of choking off surging inflation. The impact on prices in the UK has been somewhat more muted, with inflation hitting 2.8% in April and interest rates on hold for the moment – but confidence has been hit hard and the jobs market remains weak. Sanjay Raja, the chief UK economist at Deutsche Bank, said inflation would rise further – perhaps by up to another percentage point – in the coming months. “All of the data suggests that there’s something coming – we are going to see some pressure.” However, he expects the downward effect on growth to be relatively modest – knocking up to a quarter of a percentage point off GDP growth. Many developing countries have been forced to ration fuel in the face of rocketing prices and are braced for the impact of surging fertiliser costs over the coming months. This “demand destruction” – cutting back on usage when prices become unaffordable – may be part of the reason why oil prices have not surged even higher since February. Raja argues it is also because countries including China have been able to rely on strategic oil supplies, some of which may not have been known about by analysts. View image in fullscreen Kevin Warsh is likely to face pressure to raise borrowing costs in the coming months. Photograph: Will Oliver/EPA Despite Trump’s bullishness, his tentative agreement with Iran leaves many questions unanswered and will not immediately draw a line under the economic damage caused by the war. Ryan Sweet, the chief global economist at the consultancy Oxford Economics, said: “The difficulty of quantifying the economic cost is that the economic timeline doesn’t equal the military timeline, so we’re still going to be feeling the economic impact of this through the rest of this year and potentially early next.” He pointed out that while Trump had stressed that the strait of Hormuz would reopen, the details remained hazy. “There’s still the risk that tolls are imposed on ships, or the number of ships that go through the strait is a lot less than before the conflict – there’s still a lot of uncertainty around that.” Fears remain that hostilities could yet be reignited – for example, if Trump comes to doubt that Tehran is serious about winding down its nuclear plans. Trump is also facing some pushback against the deal at home, even from Republicans. Neil Shearing, the chief global economist at the consultancy Capital Economics, said policymakers should view the agreement as fragile. “It’s a good start. But there are several ways the deal can fall apart. Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah and Lebanon, Iran exploiting its chokehold over the strait of Hormuz, and a dispute over how to limit Iran’s nuclear ambitions.” He added that the oil markets may be too sanguine about the next few months. “Our modelling of the oil price shows that prices of Brent crude should be about $90 a barrel in the third quarter and $80 a barrel in the fourth quarter. However, the market has raced ahead and is already pricing oil at $80. That’s a Goldilocks outcome to the war when there is plenty more negotiating to be done.” Matt Gertken, the chief geopolitical strategist at BCA Research, said in a recent research note that the US-Iran memorandum of understanding “should not be seen as a complete and durable peace deal that uncorks the global commodity bottleneck and concludes the war”. Instead, he said, “we would still assign a 60% chance of renewed fighting after the midterm [elections in the US] as President Trump gains a window, from 4 November 2026 until the end of 2027, to try to get better terms and better implementation”. Even if the deal holds, many economists are wary of assuming the energy markets will quickly snap back to normal. First, that is because it will take time for Gulf oil infrastructure to be restored and for the backlog of ships stuck in the region to transit through the strait and beyond. Second, and more worrying, there is a risk that by illustrating so starkly Iran’s ability to choke off Gulf oil supplies at will, the conflict may have permanently increased the cost of some commodities by prompting firms to build more slack into their supply chains. As Sweet put it: “I think there’s going to be a long shadow from this.”

The attack on a girl’s elementary school in the Iranian town of Minab was one of the US military’s deadliest civilian bombings in decades. But nearly four months on, the Pentagon has produced no answers about why the military fired a Tomahawk cruise missile into a school on the first day of the war, killing at least 175 people, mostly children. Some critics doubt that the Pentagon ever will, or will bury the results under classifications to keep the worst mistakes secret from the public. As the US signs a shaky memorandum of understanding on a ceasefire with Iran, the secretive investigation into the attack has also become a test case for the self-styled secretary of war Pete Hegseth’s new approach to what he calls “warfighting”. As he said in early March, nearly two weeks after the attack, “our rules of engagement are bold, precise and designed to unleash American power, not shackle it”. Shortly after the attack, Donald Trump suggested that it was carried out by Iran. When it became clear that the strike used a US-made Tomahawk missile, he suggested that Iran also had access to the cruise missiles. It does not. As he celebrated a ceasefire deal to open the strait of Hormuz last week, Trump signalled he was ready to write off the attack as a mistake. “It’s such a strange question to be asked at this date, because you’re talking about a long time ago,” Trump said when he was asked about the investigation during a press conference at the G7 meeting in Évian-les-Bains, France. “But nobody did that on purpose.” Debris lies spread across girls’ school in Iran in aftermath of deadly strike It was at the beginning of what Trump has taken to calling a “little excursion” into Iran that the back-to-back or “double tap” strikes on the school building took place, killing mainly children under the age of 12. Officials have told media anonymously that the site was believed to be an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) base. Mohammadreza Ahmadi Tifakani lost two children in the school bombing. His seven-year-old daughter, Hanieh, was killed, along with all of her classmates in the girl’s section of the school, when the first missile hit. According to witnesses, her 10-year-old brother, Sobhan, survived the initial explosion and ran back to look for his sister. He was killed in the second blast. “I personally went to the morgue and identified both of them,” Tifakani told the Guardian in an interview shortly after the attack. “Sobhan was missing an eye, and half of his face was gone. His legs were broken. Hanieh’s skull was fractured but her face was intact. I recognised Sobhan at first glance, even though he was severely injured.” Trump said last week: “Mistakes are made. The war is nasty.” Several former Pentagon and national security officials expressed doubt to the Guardian that the US government would take responsibility for the deaths of the schoolchildren in Minab or even release the full report into the attack. “It’s very rare that you would have a military operation and not have some incidents where there was a mistaken target and civilians are harmed or killed, but then there is a system for investigating, assessing accountability and taking responsibility” in those cases, said one former senior Pentagon official. “Even without the civilian harm mitigation office, there’s a very clear process for this, and I’m very doubtful that the Hegseth Pentagon will follow through,” the former official added. Footage released by Iran foreign press office shows destruction inside girls’ school As part of Hegseth’s “anti-woke” crusade at the Pentagon, the military has shuttered or reduced units meant to review civilian casualty incidents and has more broadly indicated that decisions made in combat by “warfighters” would not be subject to such close scrutiny. The reduction in civilian oversight at the Pentagon under Hegseth may make it easier to skirt blame for the incident. The incident is comparable to some of the worst mass-casualty incidents of past US wars, including the 2017 Mosul airstrike that killed at least 105 and perhaps more than 200 civilians, the 2015 Kunduz hospital airstrike that killed 42 people, and the 1991 Amiriyah air raid shelter bombing that killed more than 400 Iraqi civilians who were sheltering during Desert Storm. Trump said last week that the investigation was continuing. US Central Command, when asked about the investigation, gave no new information. “We have no updates at this time,” a defence official wrote. But media reports indicate that the investigation has concluded. Preliminary results said the attack came because of the US using seven-year-old targeting data that failed to indicate that the building next to an IRGC base was in fact a girls’ school. The New York Times reported last week that at least one analyst had alerted a colleague several years ago that the US appeared to be targeting what was now a school in Minab. But the targeting data was not updated, and military officials continued to revalidate the site as a legitimate target for bombing. Tifakani said at the time he had little hope of accountability from US investigations or the world. Asked what message he had for legal institutions or investigators looking into the bombing, he said: “They are witnessing everything themselves. We saw what happened in Gaza and Palestine. Now the same tragedy has befallen our own children. No matter what we say to them, that will not change anything.” Congressional inquiries into the incident have also been stymied. “The US strike in Minab is one of the most horrific episodes of the entire illegal Trump war in Iran,” said Yassamin Ansari, an Iranian-American congresswoman who represents Arizona’s third district. She said she had written to the Trump administration to demand answers about the strike and “gotten little to no response”. “Donald Trump is hiding the truth from the American people and Congress, and deflecting blame to Secretary Hegseth, because he does not want the public to know the true horrors of what he unleashed on the Iranian people with absolutely nothing to show for it,” Ansari said. “I will continue to do everything in my power to get answers for the families of these girls.” Footage from Minab, Iran, shows the aftermath of a US-Israeli strike on a girls’ school – video Wes Bryant, a former US air force special operations targeting expert and former chief of civilian harm assessments at the Pentagon, said his few remaining colleagues overseeing civilian harm reduction at the Pentagon had been prevented from seeing the preliminary results of the investigation. “I believe Hegseth and Trump are both going to do everything they can to suppress this investigation,” he said. “So, even if there is one really sitting there, it’s not getting out any more, unless we have, you know, a brave whistleblower.” He added: “The amount of people with eyes on that report are going to be very small.” He said strikes in Iran that had killed thousands of civilians were a sign of the rising “aggregate harm” that the US was willing to accept as part of a culture of that pointed to “pure negligence and recklessness, but also to a degradation of culture at senior leadership levels in the military”. Early in his tenure as secretary of defence, Hegseth moved to close down or severely reduce civilian oversight of the Pentagon’s civilian harm mitigation and response, and a report released in May by the department’s inspector general concluded that the US military no longer had the people, tools or infrastructure needed to comply with two federal statutes requiring it to maintain a functioning civilian casualty policy and operate a civilian protection centre of excellence. In September, Hegseth said publicly that he had done away with “stupid rules of engagement” for the US military as part of an anti-woke revamping of the Pentagon. In March, weeks after the strike on the school, as the US campaign against Iran continued at a fever pitch, he boasted: “Warfighters have maximum authorities granted personally by the president and yours truly.” Observers have said the remarks and shuttering of key offices have limited civilian oversight at the Pentagon, with one former official saying the US “threw in the trash the whole mitigating civilian harm strategy”. Niku Jafarnia, the acting deputy Washington director for Human Rights Watch, said: “Hegseth himself has publicly expressed a lot of his scepticism around the amount of measures that we had in the military previously to mitigate these types of reckless errors and massive civilian harm incidents. “He has publicly expressed scepticism about the value of constraints on fighters, and he has taken actions that have systematically weakened some of these protection measures that are supposed to ensure compliance with the law.” Pointing to Hegseth’s earlier public remarks about “untying the hands of our warfighters” and ignoring “stupid rules of engagement”, she added: “I think we saw the effects of that on day one of the war.”

The precise ideological lessons that Iran’s new leadership draws from the 110-day war may prove to be the overriding factor in determining whether negotiations with the US culminate in an agreement that verifiably prevents the country from developing a nuclear weapon – an outcome that could usher in a new era for the Iranian economy while also reshaping the Middle East. Does this rapidly assembled leadership team, forged in the fire of war, still represent an Islamic ideological crusade – a description coined by Henry Kissinger – or does the acceptance of the memorandum of understanding, in the words of JD Vance, denote a desire for pragmatism? The vacuum created by the invisibility of Iran’s injured supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, makes this moment something of an interregnum. On Thursday, Khamenei published a letter saying he opposed the deal in principle but had deferred to the president, Masoud Pezeshkian, after being given undertakings that if the US demanded too much, he would not accept. The rights of the country and the axis of resistance had to be protected, Khamenei said. Like his father and predecessor, Ali Khamenei, he has put himself in the enviable position of ensuring absolution from blame if the elected politicians get burnt dealing with the west. View image in fullscreen An Iranian man walks past a banner depicting Mojtaba Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader, at Valiasr Square in Tehran. Photograph: Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty Images His public intervention, on the eve of now-cancelled talks in Switzerland, may yet influence the balance of a charged debate inside the US administration as to the nature of Iran’s new, younger leadership. On Friday last week, Donald Trump seemed to land on one side when he accused the Iranian leadership of being “very dishonourable people who don’t deal in good faith”. That assessment appeared to chime with the views of John Ratcliffe, the CIA director, who warned his president that a significant gap separated the positions publicly expressed by Iranian officials from what they were saying privately. “Intelligence indicates that Iranian intentions do not align with the commitments made in the agreement,” Ratcliffe concluded, a source close to the discussions told Axios. The hint was that Iran’s leadership team would either stall on a nuclear agreement or, worse, conclude they must secretly assemble a weapon since the strait of Hormuz would eventually become a wasting asset. Few Iranians deny that the strait was decisive in proving the US could no longer impose global order unilaterally. View image in fullscreen Donald Trump talking with the CIA director, John Ratcliffe, left; the secretary of state, Marco Rubio; and the White House chief of staff. Susie Wiles. Photograph: Daniel Torok/AP Payam Fazlinejad, a hardline editor of the magazine Naqd Andisheh, said: “History has also shown America that geography sometimes takes revenge on technology; part of the source of power lies in geographical straits, not in heavy military equipment. Iran has come to understand that it possesses a greater deterrent power than a nuclear weapon.” But, like many others, Fazlinejad urged the leadership to break the never-ending cycle of war, negotiations and protests. “The country cannot afford a new miscalculation and must restore stability to the country,” he told Pezeshkian at a meeting of media editors this week. Politicians may have different prescriptions but it is clear the public crave a return to normality. Trump, judging by his remarks at the G7 summit in Évian-les-Bains, has gone all in on a version of this analysis and, as a result, decided to embrace Iran’s leadership. On Tuesday, he described the country’s leaders – the third set with whom he has had to negotiate – as “the most rational group we have ever dealt with … They are not radicalised. They are looking to help their country.” Trump’s team like to think they have been given in the last few weeks privileged access to the most senior figures in Tehran in a way that is unprecedented for US politicians since the 1979 revolution. View image in fullscreen Donald Trump and France’s Emmanuel Macron during the signing of a deal with Iran to end the Middle East war. Photograph: @EmmanuelMacron/X/AFP/Getty Images Vance, for instance, said the US had never got so close to the Iranian leadership. “The coolest thing about the progress we’ve made over the last few weeks is that you’re seeing people within the Iranian system – senior leadership, even IRGC officials – say: ‘You know what? We recognise the way that we’ve done business with the US for 47 years is a mistake.’” He said it was the hardliners in Tehran who were playing up the benefits of the deal for Iran and playing down its drawbacks – an assessment that in fact is probably the opposite of what has been happening in the capital over the past two weeks. In reality, it has been the most hardline faction, known as the Paydari Front and long opposed to engagement with the west, that has denigrated the deal. This group, linked to the former nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili and prominent in the parliament, described the deal as a catastrophe and said ending the blockade now was premature. Many of its members appeared at street rallies and on TV to denounce the negotiating team as a betrayal of the revolution and of the martyred supreme leader. Jalili’s brother Vahid, who runs much of the state broadcaster Irib, has provided a platform for critics of the deal, to the open frustration of Pezeshkian. Critics claim Irib is an inverted version of Fox News, suppressing diverse opinion. The internal battle over the deal was, in some ways, a re-run of the arguments Iran went through when it signed the nuclear deal in 2015. The chief negotiator, the then foreign minister Javad Zarif, became a target of vitriol for years, accused of naively striking a deal with the “Great Satan”. When Trump unilaterally withdrew from the deal in 2018, he severely undermined the faction that saw Iran’s opening to the west’s markets as essential. Ever since, the advocates of negotiation have had to overcome the reasonable argument that the US cannot be trusted. Currently it is Trump’s inability to control Israel in Lebanon that weakens the negotiations in Tehran. Nevertheless, it still feels as if, despite Khamenei’s intervention, the hardliners are the ones who had to retreat. The advocates of a deal won not only an argument but also a power struggle. Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the conservative-inclined consensus builder recently re-elected as speaker of Iran’s parliament, is probably – along with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) from where he came – the most high-profile beneficiary of the war. Ghalibaf was so confident of his position, he suggested a vote was taken at the supreme national security council on whether to accept the deal. Unusually, army members were allowed to vote as well. Only one person present opposed, reportedly most likely Jalili. Key figures in the parliament, a possible roadblock, concede the memorandum is not a document that requires parliament’s approval. In a long interview on Wednesday, punctuated by many personal pronouns as well as praise for national unity, Ghalibaf justified the act of negotiation and, implicitly, the concessions inherent in bargaining. “My job is not diplomacy,” he said. “I am a fighter. But with the spirit and culture of a fighter I pursue diplomatic work. Our goal was to relieve the pressure and fire on the people. If this negotiation had not taken place, would such an event have just happened just by firing a missile? No. “Our armed forces, compared to an enemy armed to the teeth, can wipe the floor with them, but could this have been possible without the support of the people? Never.” View image in fullscreen Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, who was recently re-elected as speaker of Iran’s parliament, is probably the most high-profile beneficiary of the war. Photograph: NurPhoto/Getty Images But if survival in war was the primary objective, the big question now is how the government will behave. The early clues, experts say, are that the new leadership is operating a new grand strategy, that it will be more authoritarian, more pro-China and more willing to listen pragmatically to the advice of the IRGC. Preparations for Ali Khamenei’s funeral hardly suggest Iran is morphing into a secular regime. On the nuclear front, a deal is available, since the US has abandoned previous red lines. However, Kelsey Davenport, an Iran expert at the Arms Control Association, warned that discussions about the critical on-the-ground verification role of the UN nuclear inspectorate, and the regime’s willingness to accept a necessarily intrusive UN inspection regime, were still to be tested. Strict timelines were needed for Iran to report to the International Atomic Energy Agency, she said. Ghalibaf also seems aware that the focus inside government needs to shift to address inflation and the currency markets. “We must take over the frontline from the launcher kids and relieve the people from economic pressure,” he said. “The criterion of success is shifting from repelling external threats to improving the economy.” One way to do that is to not put all Iran’s eggs in the western basket. Ghalibaf, appointed as special envoy to China last month, emphasised a balanced approach between west and east. Sina Toossi, a senior fellow at the Centre for International Policy, said: “For years, Iran treated China transactionally. They were ultimately seeking some kind of accommodation with the west, and were using China as a form of leverage. But they did not really deliver to China everything that China wanted. “Xi Jinping visited Tehran in January 2016, the same month the JCPoA [joint comprehensive plan of action] was signed. During his visit, China and Iran signed a comprehensive strategic partnership agreement, but Iran gave all the contrac

The Western alliance continues to disintegrate. Defense Secretary Hegseth used this week’s NATO meetings to publicly blast several European allies for refusing U.S. requests to use certain bases and airspace during the Iran conflict, calling their behavior “shameful” and announcing a six-month review of the American military footprint in Europe. The argument is essentially that… Everyone is hoping the U.S.-Iran deal holds, but Hormuz is still operating on political trust instead of commercial confidence. The U.S. has lifted its naval blockade; Iran and the U.S. have signed the 14-point memorandum; and tankers have started moving again through the strait (including Saudi supertankers carrying millions of barrels of crude). Still, shipping companies and insurers have to decide whether the route is safe enough to normalize operations. The mines can be cleared, but without any guarantees that are hoped for from the 60-day negotiation process that now starts, it may be premature. Shipowners need more confidence than they have right now. Lebanon is still the real stress test. The memorandum commits both sides and their allies to end military operations on all fronts, including Lebanon, but Israel has already said its troops will remain in a security zone in southern Lebanon. Iran is warning that continued Israeli occupation could amount to an annulment of the agreement, and Israeli strikes in southern Lebanon have not fully stopped. Politics, Geopolitics & Conflict Everyone is hoping the U.S.-Iran deal holds, but Hormuz is still operating on political trust instead of commercial confidence. The U.S. has lifted its naval blockade; Iran and the U.S. have signed the 14-point memorandum; and tankers have started moving again through the strait (including Saudi supertankers carrying millions of barrels of crude). Still, shipping companies and insurers have to decide whether the route is safe enough to normalize operations. The mines can be cleared, but without any guarantees that are hoped for from the 60-day negotiation process that now starts, it may be premature. Shipowners need more confidence than they have right now. Lebanon is still the real stress test. The memorandum commits both sides and their allies to end military operations on all fronts, including Lebanon, but Israel has already said its troops will remain in a security zone in southern Lebanon. Iran is warning that continued Israeli occupation could amount to an annulment of the agreement, and Israeli strikes in southern Lebanon have not fully stopped. The Western alliance continues to disintegrate. Defense Secretary Hegseth used this week’s NATO meetings to publicly blast several European allies for refusing U.S. requests to use certain bases and airspace during the Iran conflict, calling their behavior “shameful” and announcing a six-month review of the American military footprint in Europe. The argument is essentially that if allies want fewer U.S. military operations launched from their territory, Washington will have fewer troops and assets stationed there. Trump is arguing that Europe contributed little during the Iran crisis, including discussions over a possible Hormuz security mission that ultimately became unnecessary after Washington opened a direct channel with Tehran. More than four years into the war, the Russia-Ukraine battlefield is mostly defined by attrition (not forward movement). New data compiled by Harvard Kennedy School’s Russia Matters project shows Russian forces gained just 10 square miles of Ukrainian territory over the past month (DeepState estimates), while Institute for the Study of War data suggests Russia may have actually lost ground. Nothing much has changed. Russia now controls roughly 19-20% of Ukraine, for which it paid with some 1 million military casualties, massive destruction of armored vehicles, and endless attacks on energy infrastructure. On Thursday, in a massive new campaign, Ukraine launched nearly 200 drones toward Moscow, with several striking the city’s main oil refinery for the second time this week and forcing the temporary closure of all four airports. Discovery & Development China has completed construction of a 400 MW solar-hydrogen-storage project in Jiangsu that combines utility-scale solar generation, battery storage, and green hydrogen production in a single system. The facility includes a 60 MW/120 MWh battery installation and hydrogen production capacity of 482 tonnes per year. China appears to be treating the buildout of new projects as industrial energy hubs, not standalone power plants, using surplus solar generation to produce hydrogen that can be stored, transported and consumed by industry. This strategy is designed to resolve two key challenges at the same time: renewable power intermittency and hydrogen production costs. Shell has drilled a sidetrack appraisal well on its Merlin discovery offshore Namibia as the company gathers additional data on what it has described as the most promising subsurface result to date within its vast PEL 0039 license in the Orange Basin. The Merlin-1X well, drilled in the Coniacian play, encountered light oil, limited associated gas, and what Shell called good reservoir quality, marking the tenth well drilled across the 12,000-square-kilometer block. The discovery adds to a string of earlier finds, including Graff, Jonker, and La Rona, but Shell continues to emphasize a data-driven approach as it evaluates commercial viability. The results strengthen confidence in Namibia’s emergence as a major new hydrocarbon province, while highlighting the industry’s growing focus on the Coniacian interval as operators search for discoveries capable of supporting large-scale development projects. ReconAfrica is approaching the moment that will determine whether Namibia’s Kavango Basin becomes one of the most significant onshore oil discoveries of the decade. The company has begun production testing at its Kavango West 1X discovery, the first cased production test ever conducted in Namibia, targeting six separate intervals across more than 1,300 feet of hydrocarbon-bearing reservoir. Investors have been waiting years for this stage. Exploration wells can identify oil, but production tests determine whether it can flow at commercial rates. The well has already encountered 75 meters of net hydrocarbon pay, more than 560 meters of hydrocarbon-saturated reservoir, oil fluorescence, surface oil shows, and highly fractured carbonate formations that could provide the permeability needed for strong production. Results are expected by late July. If the test confirms commercial flow rates, attention will quickly shift to the planned Kavango West 2A appraisal well and the broader Damara Fold Belt, where ReconAfrica and its partners control a vast acreage position across one of the world’s last major frontier basins. Deals, Mergers & Acquisitions Venezuela has signed 5 agreements with Shell that formalize the company’s participation in the 7 Tcf Loran offshore gas field, one of the largest undeveloped gas discoveries in the Caribbean. This adds to Shell’s existing gas assets in Venezuela, including the 4.2 Tcf Dragon field and potentially additional offshore developments tied to Trinidad & Tobago’s LNG industry. We are now seeing Venezuela move from separate project approvals toward the creation of a regional gas export corridor. Rather than building costly new LNG infrastructure from scratch, Caracas is planning to use Trinidad’s existing liquefaction capacity and Shell’s position on both sides of the maritime border. Loran, Dragon, and other cross-border gas fields collectively contain more than 11 Tcf of resources and could eventually provide a significant new source of gas for Atlantic LNG exports. Saudi Aramco is reportedly exploring the acquisition of a 49% stake in GüzelEnerji, the Turkish fuel distributor owned by the military pension fund OYAK. The deal would give Aramco a significant downstream position in one of the region’s largest energy markets. GüzelEnerji controls more than 1,000 fuel stations across Turkey under the TotalEnergies, M Oil, and Türk Petrol brands and operates storage and LPG facilities with a combined capacity of 550,000 cubic meters. Ankara and Riyadh are deepening ties after years of souring, including through a recent $2B renewable energy deal. The Trump administration has secured another major offshore wind buyout, with Invenergy agreeing to surrender four offshore wind leases worth roughly $765 million and redirect the capital into natural gas-fired power plants and geothermal projects across the United States. The agreement covers leases in the New York Bight, California, and the Gulf of Maine and brings the total value of offshore wind investments redirected under the administration’s buyout strategy to more than $2.5 billion. Rather than attempting to halt projects through regulatory battles, Washington is increasingly offering developers a path to recover lease investments in exchange for shifting capital into energy sources aligned with the administration’s “Energy Dominance” agenda. The policy is rapidly reshaping the U.S. offshore wind sector, redirecting billions of dollars away from planned wind developments and into natural gas, LNG, oil, and other conventional energy infrastructure while triggering legal challenges from states that argue the federal government lacks authority to unwind offshore leases through negotiated settlements. Repsol is moving deeper into Venezuela as foreign oil companies race back into the country under newly eased U.S. licensing rules. The Spanish major is seeking to add the Horcón field in northwestern Venezuela to its portfolio, expanding around its existing Barua and Motatan assets while also advancing agreements with PDVSA and Eni tied to the Perla gas project and the Petroquiriquire joint venture. Repsol currently produces around 45,000 bpd in Venezuela, but is targeting a 50% increase over t