Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

An outbreak of serious pneumonia is growing in New York, officials said on July 5.

Eighteen cases of Legionnaires’ disease have been confirmed in several Manhattan neighborhoods, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene said late Sunday, up from 14 earlier in the day and 10 on Saturday.

The cases are clustered in three zip codes, 10028, 10128, and 10075, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the department said.

We’re investigating a cluster of Legionnaires’ disease on the Upper East Side (ZIP codes 10028 & 10128). If you live or work in this area or visited the area since late June and are experiencing flu-like symptoms, contact a healthcare provider immediately: https://t.co/0rXv78p1V1 pic.twitter.com/Z4i7iYnnaB

— nychealthy (@nycHealthy) July 3, 2026

Legionnaires’ disease is a form of pneumonia caused by Legionella bacteria, which grow in warm water. The disease shares symptoms with influenza, such as fever and chills, and can be fatal if left untreated.

No deaths have yet been reported with the current outbreak.

People who live in the zip codes, or who have recently visited the east side of Central Park, should monitor for symptoms, New York City Health Commissioner Dr. Alister Martin said in a statement.

People who experience symptoms should see a health care provider immediately.

Treatment for pneumonia typically includes antibiotics, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Certain individuals are more vulnerable to the disease, including individuals aged 50 and older and those who smoke or vape.

One way people can contract Legionnaires’ disease is by breathing in water vapor or mist containing Legionella bacteria. People cannot get the disease from other people.

The probable source of the bacteria is a water cooling tower in the area, according to health officials.

The systems, usually located on top of buildings, control the temperature of cooling systems, such as refrigeration and spray mist systems, which contain the bacteria.

The city’s health department is testing all the cooling towers in the area.

“This is not an issue with any building’s plumbing system. It is safe for you to drink water, bathe, shower, cook, and use your air conditioner,” health officials said in a notice to residents.

“Continuing to use your air conditioner is especially important when the city is experiencing extreme heat and temperatures reach dangerously high levels.”

There have been outbreaks of Legionnaires’ disease in the past from plumbing systems in buildings, but there are no signs that this is the case with the current situation, according to officials.

Officials first reported the cluster of cases on July 2. They said at the time that any owners of buildings where cooling towers tested positive for the Legionella bacteria would be directed to carry out full remediation.

A Legionnaires’ disease cluster in central Harlem, also in Manhattan, sickened 114 people in 2025 and left seven dead.

The writing is on the wall: defense-tech unicorns, particularly those focused on loitering munitions, autonomous drones, and counter-UAS systems, are positioned for years of growth as warfare changes forever. 

These “war unicorns,” as we call them, are increasingly ripe for M&A as larger players race to consolidate across drones and counter-drone systems. The latest example is Nasdaq-listed defense and industrial technology firm Ondas Holdings moving to acquire DZYNE Technologies, a maker of drones, loitering-munition-type systems, and counter-drone technology.  

Ondas Drone Box 

Bloomberg reports private equity firm Highlander Partners will receive $200 million in cash and about $675 million in Ondas stock. Those shares will be locked up for six months.

“The arms race has started,” Ondas CEO Eric Brock said in a Bloomberg TV interview. “Over the last 20 plus years we have de-industrialized in the United States. That means the supply chain has moved to China.”

The deal expands Ondas’ portfolio beyond the civilian drone market into systems developed for military surveillance and reconnaissance, as well as smaller kamikaze drones.

DZYNE BlitzBox Drone 

The American company Dzyne has introduced the BlitzBox system, a container for covertly launching a swarm of attack drones. On the outside, it looks like an ordinary cargo box, but inside, it can hold up to 100 Blitz drones, ready to launch in minutes.#DroneWars #UAS #UAV pic.twitter.com/w9aRaZYrCZ

— Drone Wars (@Drone_Wars_) May 27, 2026

Ondas said DZYNE is expected to generate $191 million in revenue this year and $300 million in 2027.

Recently, Needham analyst Austin Bohlig told clients of a potential drone procurement supercycle, as the US military prepares to spend billions of dollars on these low-cost systems.

Read the report:

• Congress Moves To Boost Drone Funding As “War Unicorns” See Possible Procurement Supercycle

Related:

• JPM Call With Axon Reveals Race To Fortify U.S. Data Centers Against Kamikaze Drone Swarms
• Goldman Sits Down With Anduril As ‘War Unicorns’ Reshape Defense Tech
• “Flying Beer Cooler”: Pentagon’s Next Kamikaze Drone Ushers In Era Of Cheap Mass-Produced Airpower

Separate, but more on war technology coverage:

• Ukraine Plans To Hyper-Innovate Humanoid Robot Soldiers

The Ondas-DZYNE deal further suggests that defense startups focusing on drones and counter-UAS are prime M&A targets for larger companies.

Authored by Mark Jeftovic via BombThrower.com,

“You just wait until the next bear market…”

Last month, I talked about how many of the legendary investors I’ve long followed as well as many of my contemporary financial commentators (speaking specifically of the contrarian ilk), are almost unanimous in the opinion that the AI trade is well into bubble territory and stocks in general are overvalued. Hell, even I think that and I’m personally “all in” on AI and have a fair bit of equities exposure to it (not a tonne, but it’s there, and the biggest winners in the TSC portfolio lately have all been AI stocks and HPC stocks).

Angela sent me this Diary of a CEO interview with Jeremy Grantham – another legend – and she said it was scary. At his peak he managed something like $165B AUM, but he’s down to $80B or $90B now (he also says the only reason he’s still counted as a billionaire today, personally, is because they include the money he’s given away. Grantham has donated over 90% of his net worth to the Grantham Foundation, which invests and incubates primarily green-tech innovation to combat climate change.

Although Thomas Braziel, whose name you might recognize as a notable distressed asset investor who specializes in crypto i.e. Mt Gox claims, FTX, put out an interesting analysis of Grantham’s green tech foundation’s filings – and surmised that what he’s saying on the talk-show circuit isn’t lining up with where he’s actually allocating the foundation’s …money  )

Via: GMO Q4 2025 Letter

Grantham occupies an exalted perch in the pantheon of institutional investors, so when he opines on something, it tends to get picked up on, which one may find somewhat quizzical, given his lifetime batting average isn’t really in the same league as the likes of Buffett, Munger, Klarman, et al.

His lifetime average returns? The closest analog could be the lifetime average of the GMO Global Asset Allocation Composite, which he co-founded.

Their number? 8.43%. And 0.8% of that was because of a one-time litigation settlement received in 2024

Warren Buffett’s lifetime batting average is pushing 20% (19.8%).

The S&P itself, 10%.

In case you’re wondering how somebody became a billionaire by lagging the major index by 200bp over their entire career, it’s because Grantham is proficient at one thing in particular: not losing money.

The TL;DR from the DOAC interview? A lot of people are about to lose a lot of money.

When Stephen Bartlett told him he was invested in SpaceX, Grantham dead-panned, “Good luck with that”.

Bitcoin? “It’s a zero”.

The interview went a bit viral and I saw a lot of “Billionaire says Bitcoin is worthless” headlines in the mainstream financial press. Grantham has since been on a punditry tour (perhaps in promotion of his latest book, “The Making of a Permabear” – yes, really); and the soundbites that are being repeatedly teased out from them are his “Bitcoin is a zero” sermons, in one case getting into a somewhat heated exchange with Joe Kernen on CNBC – where Kernen, incredibly, makes some of my points far less diplomatically than I have here.

At least it’s not just Bitcoiners getting into scraps! pic.twitter.com/pfJyXM3ZFc

— JOEY (@JoeyTweeets) June 26, 2026

After Grantham trotted out the usual “no use case”, “there’s no there there”, “it’s a bubble”, Kernen straight-armed Grantham in the face with his underperformance over the past two decades,

“You’ve done a great disservice to anybody who’s listened to you over the last twenty years”.

Grantham’s response and attempt at a defence, combined with something else he said in the DOAC interview, are all leading up to my point here, while being 100% oblivious to it:

To Joe Kernen: he said “We’ve been in a bull market since 2009, let’s see how all this stuff holds up when the next bear market hits”

To Steven Bartlett: he cautioned how Amazon sold off a staggering 92% during the Dotcom bust.

During the drive to Hamilton for a board meeting, I listened to this short Alex Hormozi clip and his analogy (which he cribbed from Brian Johnson) hit me full force and I finally had a working metaphor that explained what I’ve been trying to articulate about these living legends of finance.

That they’re underestimating the significance of fiat debasement is true, but it doesn’t really explode in your brain as much as make your eyes glaze over.

The analogy is fish are swimming around in water.

Some of them become experts at swimming. They train their entire lives, they practice every day, they study the expert swimmers of yore, and they analyze nearly every aspect of the water they inhabit: it’s PH levels, alkaline, currents, flow – everything.

They know how a slight variance in one factor impacts the others – they know “which way the current is going”.

But over time, the water heats up; they may pick up on this, but they’re never quite prepared for what it means beyond a certain point.

When that point arrives, the water evaporates – and now it’s gas. Steam.

Setting aside for our purposes how this would fry the fish, imagine they’re still alive, but now they’re trying to apply everything they know about swimming in water to this new environment, which is gaseous, not liquid.

They would be flailing and flapping around like the proverbial “fish out of water”.

What happened?

They were never wrong about their fluid dynamics.

The physics changed and they had no model for the new reality.

Hormozi’s short clip was applying this metaphor to AI – which is certainly among the key drivers of the “monetary physics change” that we are now undergoing.

But the point of no return, when the phase shift started, was – I believe, and as Raoul Pal has always said – the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2009.

That was when the water started turning to gas.

Grantham’s own yardstick measures the current bull market from then – when the central banks stepped in, when The Big Print started and when interest rate suppression and credit expansion became permanent features of the global monetary system (I would argue that the process started in 1980-82, and the GFC was a major tipping point).

Yes, Amazon came off 92% when the dotCom bubble burst. But anybody who had bought, even at the high right before that, is now up about 4,642.7 %

On the new Sovereign Capitalist site, we can model all this out interactively (see below).

Run the interactive widget here

On its surface, Grantham’s fixation on loss avoidance serves a purpose (recall Buffett’s top rules of investing: number one is “Don’t lose money”, number two is “See Rule number one”).

If I ever experienced a staggeringly huge life-changing windfall in one moment, I would carve out a “retire your bloodline”-type allocation and hand it to a guy like Grantham (more likely it would be Vito Maida  over at Patient Capital, here in Canada).

But being good at preserving capital has its own opportunity cost, which is far more pronounced now that we’ve traversed the inflection point into the Exponential Age.

The world has transitioned from flat to hyper-cubed – the architecture is completely different now, and the linear measuring stick known as fiat money is ill equipped for the task of describing it.

To Grantham’s point “you just wait until the next bear market”, there won’t be a next bear market, not until we change that measuring stick.

Until the monetary regime change happens – that “change in physics” – any drawdown, no matter how deep, will be papered over with incessant Big Prints until the system itself completes its metamorphosis.

Today’s post was an excerpt from The Sovereign Capitalist my recently relaunched premium service. This goes beyond a dashboard, it’s more of an operating system for high agency net-producers.  All members get access to the full pre-release version of my new book: The Blueprint – Survive & Thrive in an Overclocked Timeline.

By Stuart Chirls of AmericanShipper

The container shipping market is being driven by geopolitics, rates, and network reshuffling, but freight-rate volatility and adjustments by carriers to protect schedules and pricing has supplanted Middle East disruptions as top-level concerns.

Asia-U.S. West Coast prices increased 8% to $6,175 per forty foot equivalent unit (FEU), according to Freightos, a data contributor to SONAR ocean market data.

Prices for Asia-U.S. East Coast transportation also rose 8%, to $7,998 per FEU.

Iran has escalated steps to assert sole authority over vessel traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, writes Freightos Research Head Judah Levine, in a note to clients, even as it negotiates with the United States over terms of a final peace deal.

Overnight, Asian tech stocks slumped after a report that Nvidia’s next-generation AI server rack system has been delayed by more than a year due to manufacturing difficulties (we profiled it back in May in “Nvidia’s Vera Rubin Rack Will Cost $7.8MM: Here’s What’s In It“.)

Research firm SemiAnalysis said in an X post that Nvidia’s Kyber NVL144 hit setbacks in the construction of printed circuit boards for the platform. 

MASSIVE DELAY: Just 3 months after Jensen demoed Kyber NVL144 at GTC, it has faced major setbacks and has been delayed by more than 12 months, pushing it back to 2028. Below, we explain why Kyber has faced massive delays and why NVIDIA’s NVL72x2 back-to-back rack architecture was… pic.twitter.com/VYduxnu01B

— SemiAnalysis (@SemiAnalysis_) July 5, 2026

According to the tweet, the PCB midplane at the center of the Kyber design remains too difficult to produce reliably. As we noted two months ago, the Kyber design consolidates 144 of Nvidia’s most powerful chips into a single cabinet, enabling them to operate as one unified system, and was originally expected to arrive alongside Vera Rubin Ultra in 2027. 

Meanwhile, cloud providers pushed back against the design over operational complexity, SemiAnalysis said, leaving Nvidia without a tested path to expand the scale-up architecture for Rubin Ultra.

In response, Japan’s Ibiden, a PCB maker that counts Nvidia as its largest client, dropped as much as 10%. Among related suppliers, Kingboard Laminates Holdings tumbled 18% in Hong Kong, Elite Material fell 10% in Taiwan and Samsung Electro-Mechanics slid 11% in South Korea.

The selloff came after a significant run-up in those stocks. Before Monday’s reversal, both stocks had posted extraordinary gains for the year – Kingboard Laminates by over 470% and Samsung Electro-Mechanics by more than 600%, according to Bloomberg.

The report by SemiAnalysis, which has been known to play “loosely” with market-moving information and trade ahead and/or after its calls (see here and here), many of which have been big flops, landed as AI stock investors have been growing increasingly anxious, with even the smallest setback sparking outsized reactions after a yearslong rally. Last week, global tech stocks whipsawed on headlines hinting at potential overcapacity in the AI buildup and growing competition; earlier today ZH was the first to point out that token expenditure are once again rolling over.

Token spending index rolling over again, down to 2.5 month low pic.twitter.com/0cJhmULDTj

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) July 6, 2026

The SemiAnalysis report spurred “weakness across regional tech” Monday, said Shawn Oh, head of Korea cash equities at NH Investment & Securities Co. in Seoul. The prospect of a Kyber NVL144 delay together with other points in the post are “raising uncertainty around Nvidia’s next-generation scale-out road map and creating a wider competitive window for alternative AI platforms,” he added. It’s also the reason why AMD stock surged today, as any delays in the Nvidia ecosystem allow competitors to grab market share. 

SemiAnalysis also warned that NVL576, which would connect eight of the Kyber racks over optical links to form an even larger system, faces its own delays or constraints on production volume.

However, hours after the unconfirmed SemiAnalysis report sent the Nvidia supplier ecosystem tumbling – giving an opportunity to the research firm to buy the stocks cheap for itself or its partners – an Nvidia spokesman told Bloomberg that “Our road map is intact.”

Additionally, CNBC also reported that its existing Rubin systems have entered full production and deliveries to eight major cloud customers – among them Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud – are scheduled to begin this fall.

An MSCI Inc. gauge of sector shares is down 8.5% in the past two weeks, extending its loss Monday with PCB makers among the leading decliners.

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma issued a dire warning to staff on Monday: “Our business today is not healthy. We must reset Xbox.”

Sharma’s memo, first published on the Xbox website, announced cuts of 3,200 jobs tied to Microsoft’s Xbox division, or equal to about 20% of staff, as deteriorating margins and disappointing Game Pass subscriptions have forced the unit into a major restructuring effort.

The 3,200-job reduction will be split into two waves: the first 1,600 layoffs will begin this week, with another 1,600 occurring over the rest of the fiscal year, according to the memo.

Last month, Sharma told employees in another memo that Xbox’s “accountability margin,” the metric Microsoft uses to reflect profit margin, had slipped to 3% and that annual revenue had tumbled to alarmingly low levels. “Going forward, this cannot continue,” she wrote then.

The CEO said:

After careful consideration, I’ve made the difficult decision to reduce our team by approximately 3,200 throughout FY27. This will include approximately 1,600 role eliminations today, and in addition, four studios will leave XBOX to new management. I recognize that a year-long restructuring creates additional challenges. Unfortunately, it is not possible to make all the necessary changes in a single day, and I wanted to be direct about the scale.

. . .

Our business today is not healthy. We are operating on margins that are 3-10x lower than those of comparable platform and publishing businesses. We entered Gen 9 with a smaller install base and a higher cost structure. To grow, we bet on Game Pass, multi-platform, and a broader portfolio of content. While those businesses have created meaningful value, they did not grow at the pace we expected. As that happened, our core business weakened, and we added more teams, more investment, and more time, hoping for a better outcome. And now the industry is facing the most severe hardware crisis in its history. We must reset XBOX.

She provided color on restructuring across Xbox’s content portfolio:

Since 2018, we have aggressively expanded our studio portfolio while the number of games created each month across the industry now outpaces the last ten years combined. We now find ourselves competing not only with the largest publishers, but also with smaller independent studios. It is neither possible nor desirable to own every great independent studio. We have also learned that we are not the best home for every type of studio; in a typical year, we lost 64 cents for every dollar we invested. As we reset XBOX, we will help independent creators succeed by providing open development tools and audiences to realize their vision.

Compulsion Games and Double Fine Productions will return to management and transition to independent studios with their IP, catalog, and runway for their next games. Ninja Theory and Undead Labs have entered terms to join new ownership with funding to complete and grow Senua and State of Decay 3. In France, Arkane’s management is beginning required consultation with its Works Council to review potential strategic options.

We are also making reductions across other units, and in some cases, shifting investment to focus on higher priority projects. These changes vary in size across Activision, Bethesda/ZeniMax, Blizzard, King, Mojang, and XBOX Game Studios. None of our first party publicly announced games or projects are being cancelled as part of these reductions.

In addition, Mojang and King will now report directly to me. These two studios have increasingly become platforms and are our largest by monthly active players. They bring critical geographic, demographic, and differentiation to XBOX.

The changes at Xbox come as the broader video game industry remains stuck in a post-pandemic slump. Compounding the pressure is the memory-chip squeeze, fueled by AI data-center demand, which has pushed console production costs higher and forced both Xbox and PlayStation prices to climb.

The release of GTA VI, now about 135 days away, cannot come soon enough. WallStreet analysts expect the blockbuster launch to drive a new wave of console demand and potentially produce some tailwinds for the struggling gaming industry.

By Zachary Skidmore of DataCenterDynamics

New Jersey lawmakers have passed a bill that will direct the state’s Board of Public Utilities (PUC) to establish a dedicated data center tariff for facilities with a capacity of 50MW or more, in an attempt to shield other ratepayers from cost increases tied to new builds.

A similar bill was originally proposed in June of last year by Democratic assemblymen Dave Bailey and Joe Danielsen. However, that initial bill was pocket-vetoed by then-governor Phil Murphy, who did not sign it before his term ended.

Following the veto, the bill was replaced with S731, which proposed broader protections than the previous bill. It will now head to Democratic governor Mikie Sherrill for final approval. Assemblyman David Bailey Jr. said Sherrill’s office was involved in drafting the latest version and expressed optimism she would sign it.

The new bill is broader than the previously vetoed bill, applying to both existing and new facilities, and lowering the threshold from 100MW. It also aggregates facilities that are under common ownership or on contiguous sites, treating them as a single large data center for purposes of the threshold.

Other provisions in the bill include requiring data centers to demonstrate their project is not proposed elsewhere to avoid speculative applications, providing financial guarantees to take or pay for at least 85 percent of the requested service for ten years, and committing to demand response and flexibility programs. In addition, the bill mandates that large data center customers be curtailed before residential customers during grid emergencies.

It will also require the PUC to prioritize interconnection for data centers that make binding commitments to bring their own clean generation or storage.

The bill is the latest to be passed within a state legislature, with several already enshrined in law, and many others currently making their way through the approval process.

Last month, regulators in Oregon approved a new rate class for data centers and other large loads, which is now in effect.

Before this, Oklahoma’s governor, Kevin Stitt, signed into law a new bill aimed at protecting ratepayers in the state from rising utility and infrastructure costs associated with data centers. This closely followed Florida, whose governor signed into law a similar bill that prohibited utilities from passing data center infrastructure costs on to residential and small-business ratepayers and required large-scale users to bear their full cost of service.

Other states to see similar rules proposed and passed include Ohio, North Carolina, and Virginia, to name a few.

By Phil Bring of FreightWaves

Police in Greenfield, Indiana, arrested a California truck driver after officers recovered nearly $2.9 million worth of tungsten oxide powder that police said thieves stole during a cargo theft in Pennsylvania.

According to a June 28 news release from the Greenfield Police Department, officers received an alert around 6 a.m. Saturday regarding a wanted semi tractor-trailer traveling eastbound on Interstate 70 into Hancock County. Police said the truck was connected to a cargo theft that occurred in Pennsylvania on June 25. Officers located the truck and trailer just west of the Greenfield exit at mile marker 104, confirmed the information and conducted a traffic stop.

Police identified the driver as 31-year-old Deepak Kumar of Fresno, California. Authorities said Kumar used fraudulent documents to obtain a load of nearly 40,000 pounds of tungsten oxide powder. Police valued the shipment at $2,857,500 and said it was headed to Mitsubishi Materials Corporation in Japan.

Greenfield police arrested Kumar at the scene on an active arrest warrant issued by the state of Pennsylvania. According to police, the warrant charges Kumar with theft by unlawful taking of movable property and criminal use of a communication facility.

Officers transported Kumar to the Hancock County Jail following the arrest. Police said the Hancock County Prosecutor’s Office will determine whether Kumar will face criminal charges in Indiana related to the traffic stop and evidence recovered during the subsequent search warrant.

Police said officers impounded the truck and trailer through Inman’s Towing of Greenfield following the traffic stop. Investigators held both as evidence while they requested a search warrant. After a judge issued the warrant, officers searched the trailer and confirmed it contained the reported stolen cargo.

According to police, a representative of Mitsubishi Materials Corporation traveled to Greenfield on Sunday and took possession of the recovered shipment.

The Greenfield Police Department has not identified the Pennsylvania business where investigators allege the cargo theft occurred. Authorities also have not released additional information describing the fraudulent documents investigators said Kumar used to obtain the cargo.

Police have not identified additional suspects or released court documents describing the alleged cargo theft. The department said the Hancock County Prosecutor’s Office will determine whether Kumar will face additional criminal charges in Indiana related to the traffic stop and the evidence recovered during the search warrant.

We previously discussed the unprecedented collapse observed in recent months in Chinese oil demand and imports, which led to the bizarre scenario where even Iran can’t find buyers (read China) for its temporarily unsanctioned oil armada (see “Iran Runs Into Big Problem: No Buyers For Its Oil, As Full Tankers Pile Up Off China“) and which prompted even JPM to point out that something bigger is going on behind the scenes.

“The scale of China’s oil demand collapse has been so dramatic that Chinese policymakers are reportedly examining whether this historic slump reflects a temporary response to elevated global prices or a more structural shift in consumption patterns.” – JPM

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) July 4, 2026

Understandably, with such a huge source of demand sidelined, today Bloomberg reported that Saudi Arabia has made big reductions to its main crude oil prices for buyers in Asia, selling barrels at a discount for the first time since it embarked on a price war in 2020, as a surge of global supply heightens competition to find buyers.

State producer Saudi Aramco will lower Arab Light oil for next month by $11 a barrel to a $1.50 discount over the regional benchmark, according to a price list seen by Bloomberg. The last two times it sold the grade at a discount were during price wars in 2020 and 2015.

The large drop in prices, the biggest in at least 26 years, follows a surge at the height of the Iran war when the disruption to the Strait of Hormuz restricted the kingdom’s flows; it is also bigger than the $8 decline expected in a Bloomberg survey.

The surprise price cut underscores the surging volumes of oil that are now available on global markets, as the interim US-Iran peace deal enables Gulf producers to ramp up exports at the same time as a flood of trapped barrels escape through the Strait of Hormuz. The size of the cutback also raises questions whether other Middle East producers might be forced into steeper cuts to their prices as they compete for customers (mostly China, as India is quite happy importing cheap Russian oil) that are inundated with supply.

Aramco’s August prices are for buyers who purchase crude on long-term contracts, the main way in which the kingdom markets its barrels. Some traders who spoke to Bloomberg said even with such a large reduction, the barrels are more expensive than spot supplies from other regional producers that are available for immediate purchase on an adhoc basis.

According to Bloomberg, official prices from other producers in the region are expected to be released in the coming days.

Oil has plunged since the agreement between US and Iran came into effect in the middle of June, allowing traffic to resume through the Strait of Hormuz, the key chokepoint that had been largely blocked since the start of hostilities. Brent crude has given up all its wartime gains, and was trading below $72 a barrel on Tuesday.

Before the war, Saudi Arabia loaded most of its crude from within the Persian Gulf. However, Aramco diverted a chunk of those flows to its Red Sea facility at Yanbu as the war effectively blocked Hormuz. The kingdom made the rare move of selling some cargoes on a so-called spot basis in recent days, as it got resumed flows of shipments that had been trapped inside the Persian Gulf.

There’s no time like the eve of the major annual NATO summit for Trump to reignite his longstanding feud with Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, apparently. The American President blasted out the below Truth Social just before heading to Ankara, Turkey for the gathering of NATO heads…

With just a few days to go before the next NATO summit, POTUS Donald Trump has once again attacked the Italian Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni.

He portrays her as worshipful and calls for a “restraining order” to be imposed on her.

A few weeks ago, Trump had said that Meloni… pic.twitter.com/hHJTn8yCra

— Crazy Ass Moments in Italian Politics (@CrazyItalianPol) July 5, 2026

The doctored image featuring the caption “Restraining order needed” marks but the latest escalation between to the two leaders. Meloni has not responded or commented directly regarding the Truth Social Post, and is unlikely to given that Italy likely wants to avoid escalation.

“People come and go but relations must endure,” Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto remarked on the prime minister still being in Trump’s crosshairs to news channel Sky TG24. And Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani tried to brush it off while presenting an optimistic picture of future relations, saying he was “sure that transatlantic relations go well beyond individual comments.”

This new post follows on another Truth Social post from June, in which Trump accused the Italian PM of asking for a picture with him “over and over” at the G7 Summit in France.

At heart of the feud is Italy’s breaking with Trump over his Iran operation. This has included denying shared base usage for American military flights connected with Operation Epic Fury.

Trump had claimed earlier in the summer of Meloni, “She is doing poorly in Italy with her level of popularity, possibly because she turned down the United States of America, a Country that truly loves and protects Italy, when it came to denying Iran from obtaining or developing a Nuclear Weapon.”

He then suggested that Meloni wanted to be “friends again” to get her “numbers up” – but has appeared to stipulate that she must fully open up Italian bases for US aircraft usage once again.

Meloni in response to the prior June post slammed the US president for his “senseless” and “constant, unprovoked attacks”.

“As for my popularity, being your friend has certainly not helped it, nor does it depend on my relationship with you,” she shot back. “My popularity is none of your concern. I suggest you focus on yours.”

All of this could serve to make any close-quarter contact at the NATO summit in Ankara very awkward – also as the two will certainly be in the same general vicinity for events like the group photo.