03 World
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The war with Iran has once again raised questions about Washington’s ability to prioritize its interests in East Asia and particularly to manage intensifying competition with Beijing. Furthermore, the war and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz have presented American and Chinese leaders with new challenges and potential opportunities, as they respond to the war’s global impacts. We asked five experts to address how the war is shaping competition between Washington and Beijing.
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Rising stock markets along with growth in pension and provident fund savings have generated unprecedented wealth for the Israeli public in the past few years. According to Bank of Israel figures released last week, at the beginning of 2026 (February) the Israeli public’s portfolio of financial assets was worth a record NIS 7.4 trillion. This represents growth of NIS 1.1 trillion within a year, and an 80% rise within six years. At the beginning of 2020, the public’s portfolio was worth NIS 4.1 trillion.
The continual growth in the financial assets portfolio, which includes money held in bank accounts, savings programs (provident funds, pension funds, and mutual funds), and securities, provides a glimpse into the way in which Israelis have managed their money in recent years, the level of risk that they tend to take, and their impact on prices in the local stock market.
Appetite for risk
A glance at the make-up of the public’s financial assets shows that Israeli investors’ appetite for risk has grown considerably. At the end of 2022, the proportion of risk assets (stocks and bonds) in the portfolio was 39%. By the beginning of 2026 it had jumped to 48%.
Trump says he has paused effort to guide vessels from the Strait of Hormuz – National– globalnews.ca
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President Donald Trump said on Tuesday evening that he is pausing the U.S. effort to guide stranded vessels out of the Strait of Hormuz to allow time for a deal to end the Iran war, but that the American forces’ blockade of Iranian ports would remain in place.
Trump announced the decision in a social media post, saying the effort — which started on Monday in the vital waterway for global energy — would pause for a short period to see whether an agreement with Tehran on ending the war in the Middle East could be finalized.
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Just before midnight on Nov. 24, 2025, New Castle County police officers conducting a routine property check in Wilmington’s Canby Park spotted a white Toyota Tacoma parked after hours. What initially appeared to be a standard traffic stop uncovered a detailed terror plot. The suspect — a University of Delaware student — was found in possession of a converted machine gun, more than 100 rounds of ammunition, body armor, and a handwritten notebook mapping out a planned attack on the campus police department, including entry points, escape routes, and the name of a specific officer. When FBI agents interviewed him, he stated that achieving martyrdom was “one of the greatest things you can do.” The acting U.S. Attorney called it “a quintessential example” of law enforcement collaboration that stopped a catastrophe.
Public safety professionals have spent two decades training to detect threats like the one in Delaware, yet it was a chance traffic stop that ultimately exposed it. But the threats arriving now are far subtler. State-sponsored reconnaissance, espionage, and pre-operational surveillance do not announce themselves with machine guns and manifestos — picture a graduate student flying a drone over a shipyard, a photographer lingering near a port crane, or a series of probing visits to a water treatment facility. If our patrol officers are catching terrorism by accident, they are almost certainly missing foreign adversary surveillance entirely.
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U.S. President Donald Trump said that Iran will be bombed “at a much higher level” if it doesn’t agree to a peace deal.
The president said the war “will be at an end” if Iran agrees to the proposals, meaning the Strait of Hormuz “will be open to all.”
His post on Truth Social came after markets reacted to an Axios report that the U.S. and Iran were close to an agreement that would bring their two-month war to an end.
The outlet reported on Wednesday that Washington expects responses from Tehran on several key points to form the basis of a one-page memo within the next 48 hours.
Oil prices fell sharply in response, while U.S. stock futures, equities listed in Europe and global sovereign bonds rallied.
In his Truth Social post, the president warned that if Iran did not agree to a deal, “the bombing starts, and it will be, sadly, at a much higher level and intensity than it was before.”
Before the post, a Pakistan government official told MS Now: “The prospect of a proposal to end the war is very likely in the coming days.”
A spokesperson for Iran’s foreign ministry told CNBC earlier on Wednesday they were “evaluating” a 14-article peace proposal from the U.S.
President Donald Trump announced a 5,000 troop cut in Germany, adding more is to come. He said, “We’re going to cut way down. And we’re cutting a lot further than 5,000.”
Leaders of the separatist movement of Canada’s western province Alberta claim to have enough signatures to trigger a vote on separation from Canada.
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Gunshots rang out not far from the White House Monday as a gunman fired on Secret Service agents.
The shooting took place around 3 p.m. at 15th Street and Independence Avenue, near the Washington Monument and about a half-mile from the White House.
The shooting involved agents with the Uniformed Division, Fox News reported.
Secret Service Deputy Director Matt Quinn said that a bystander he called a juvenile was hit by the suspect’s gunfire.
U.S. Secret Service personnel are on the scene of an officer-involved shooting at 15th Street and Independence Avenue in Washington, D.C. One individual was shot by law enforcement; their condition is currently unknown. Please avoid the area as emergency crews are responding. pic.twitter.com/LNUTL2F3gM
— U.S. Secret Service Office of Communications (@SecretSvcSpox) May 4, 2026
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President Donald Trump revived talk of the United States smuggling arms to the Iranian people for the purpose of fighting the regime, suggesting that weapons were already on their way.
Talk of arming the Iranian people died down after speculation in the first weeks of hostilities, with Trump claiming weapons were sent, but that the Kurds took them all. In a Monday interview on the Hugh Hewitt Show, Trump openly labored over the question of whether to arm the Iranian people when asked if he was encouraging the public to protest, bringing up the January crackdown that saw the massacre of tens of thousands of protesters by the government.
“Well, look, the problem is you can’t — if you have five people with a gun, and 250,000 [without], the five people with a gun, assuming it’s used fast enough, which they do… they’re going to win. They have to, they don’t have weapons,” Trump said.
He then brought up the thousands of unarmed protesters who were killed in December and January.
“They lost 42,000, to be exact. 42,000 people in about a two-week period. Protesters, innocent, unarmed protesters,” Trump said. “So we’re not dealing with, you know, your typical people.”
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Russia on Monday declared a unilateral ceasefire with Ukraine between May 8-9, when Moscow holds its annual World War II Victory Day commemorations, and threatened a “massive missile strike” on Kyiv if Ukraine violated it.
Ukraine responded by declaring a truce of its own between May 5-6, saying it was “not serious” to expect it to observe a ceasefire during a Russian military holiday.
The quarrelling between the two sides comes with a lull in U.S.-led diplomatic efforts to end the war, as Washington shifts its focus to conflict in the Middle East.
Russian strikes killed nine people across Ukraine on Monday, according to Ukrainian officials, while a Ukrainian drone crashed into a high-rise building in an upscale Moscow neighborhood overnight.
“In accordance with a decision of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Armed Forces, Vladimir Putin, a ceasefire has been declared from May 8–9, 2026… We hope that the Ukrainian side will follow suit,” the Russian Defense Ministry said in a post on state-backed messaging service MAX.
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Russia lost more territory than it gained in Ukraine in April for the first time since a Ukrainian counteroffensive in the summer of 2023, an AFP analysis of data from the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) showed.
Moscow ceded control of about 120 square kilometers (46 square miles) between March and April, the ISW data revealed.
Despite the fighting at the front reaching a near stalemate, intense and deadly drone-dominated attacks have continued unabated in recent months, while U.S.-led talks on the conflict have stalled as the Middle East war grinds on.
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The leader of the Iranian-backed Hezbollah has reiterated the group’s rejection of an ongoing ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon that was brokered by the U.S.
“There is no ceasefire in Lebanon, but rather continuous Israeli-American aggression,” declared Secretary General Sheikh Naim Qassem in a written statement Monday, vowing that Hezbollah would “remain patient and continue to resist.”
The Hezbollah chief argued that Israel “has not implemented a single step of the agreement, violating it more than 10,000 times, killing 500 civilians, wounding hundreds, destroying thousands of homes and livelihoods, and displacing people from their villages.”
Israel’s on-and-off war with Hezbollah escalated dramatically two days after Israel and the U.S. launched their joint strikes on Iran, on Feb. 28. A barrage of Israeli airstrikes on southern Lebanon and around the capital Beirut was followed by an ongoing ground invasion.
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The Trump administration has launched an investigation into New York City Public Schools over allegations that pro-Hamas activism by educators may have crossed the line into anti-Semitic instruction targeting Jewish students.
The probe was launched over allegations that teachers sought to sow “hatred toward Jewish students” during classroom instruction.
The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights confirmed it opened the probe after receiving complaints that teachers were promoting political messaging in classrooms and portraying Israel supporters as “genocidal white supremacists.”
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- The US fights to reopen the Strait of Hormuz as the UAE comes under attack in a test of Iran truce AP News
- U.S. Warns China Over Iranian Oil as Sanctions Fight Intensifies The New York Times
- Iran issues threat after Trump plans to guide ships through Strait of Hormuz Fox News
- Attacks in Strait of Hormuz, Gulf region imperil fragile U.S.-Iran ceasefire The Washington Post
- Trump news at a glance: Middle East tensions back to the brink with president’s new threats against Iran The Guardian
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The debate over regulating artificial intelligence usually focuses on two competing visions. In Europe, lawmakers are writing detailed rules that govern how AI can be developed and used. In the United States, policymakers are taking a lighter touch, allowing companies, investors and consumers to shape the technology’s future.
But a new analysis from students at the University of Florida identifies a third force quietly shaping the future of AI in America: the courts.
As AI spreads faster than any previous technology, judges and juries are being asked to resolve disputes. In doing so, they are not simply applying existing laws—they are, case by case, defining what responsible AI use looks like. The result is a distinctly American form of AI governance: one built through the give and take of negotiations and legal processes rather than legislation.
So far, courts have mostly resisted treating AI as something fundamentally new. Instead, they have folded AI into existing legal doctrines, focusing on the humans and institutions behind the technology.
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The Trump administration just slammed the door on an effort by Cuba’s communist government to secure an economic lifeline while appearing to embrace reform. A May 1 executive order expands and sharpens longstanding American sanctions on Cuba, and appears to deliberately target a recent gesture at partially opening the Cuban economy. “All property and interests in property that are in the United States,” the order says, are barred from operating “in the energy, defense and related materiel, metals and mining, financial services, or security sector of the Cuban economy, or any other sector of the Cuban economy,” under the penalty of economic sanctions.
On March 16, in a bid for survival, the communist government of Cuba had announced a series of intended though vaguely executed reforms that would allow foreign investment in the island from Cubans living overseas. The reforms were to include a supposed expansion of private property rights. Deputy Prime Minister Oscar Pérez-Oliva Fraga said that the country was “open to maintaining a fluid commercial relationship with U.S. companies.”
Asked by email if the May 1 order was a deliberate response to the March 16 Cuban announcement, a State Department spokesman referred The Federalist to comments made on April 27 by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants. In a long discussion with Fox News Chief Foreign Correspondent Trey Yingst, Rubio rejected the possibility of reform under the current Cuban government, describing Cuba as “a failed state.”
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British maritime risk management group Vanguard said authorities would investigate whether the damage might have been caused by an attack, a drifting sea mine or another external object.
In response to the incident, South Korea’s Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries said on Tuesday it had asked Korean vessels in the area to move to safer locations and said authorities were in close communications with shipping companies and stranded vessels.
The South Korean government has said 26 South Korean-flagged vessels were stranded around the Strait of Hormuz.
In a post on the Truth Social platform, Trump said Iran had fired shots at the ship and other targets as the US launched an operation seeking to open the Strait of Hormuz to shipping.
He suggested it could be time for South Korea to join his new effort to help guide stranded ships through the waterway typically used to carry about a fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas supplies.
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Authorities are still investigating the reasons of the explosion, with negligence being suspected as a likely cause. Officials warned that the death toll is likely to climb as search and rescue operations continue.
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Bengaluru, India – In the sultry August heat of 2007, India’s government under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was sweating over the future of negotiations with the United States over a landmark nuclear deal. The proposed agreement aimed to ease access to nuclear fuel and technology in exchange for greater international scrutiny of India’s facilities.
The problem? India’s communists – suspicious of the US – were opposed to the deal. And they were India’s kingmakers.