Rattled Nerves.
Active shooter insurance.
“It’s the first thing I read every morning.” — Rob Manfred, Commissioner, Major League Baseball.
1. The Wall Street Journal:
President Trump said Sunday that the U.S. would start guiding commercial ships out of the Strait of Hormuz where they have been trapped by the war between the U.S. and Iran, in an arm’s-length effort to unblock the vital supply route.
“Countries from all over the World…have asked the United States if we could help free up their Ships, which are locked up in the Strait of Hormuz,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Sunday. “For the good of Iran, the Middle East, and the United States, we have told these Countries that we will guide their Ships safely out of these restricted Waterways, so that they can freely and ably get on with their business.”
The new mechanism, which Trump dubbed “Project Freedom,” is effectively a coordination cell to move traffic through the Strait, involving countries, insurance companies and shipping organizations, according to two senior U.S. officials. It doesn’t currently involve U.S. Navy warships escorting vessels through the strait, the officials said. (Source: wsj.com)
2. Iran’s military warned U.S. forces on Monday not to enter the Strait of Hormuz after President Donald Trump said the United States would start helping to free ships stranded in the Gulf by the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. Trump gave few details of the plan to aid ships and their crews that have been “locked up” in the vital waterway and are running low on food and other supplies more than two months since the conflict began. The unified command of Iran’s armed forces responded by warning U.S. forces to stay out of the strait. (Source: reuters.com)
3. A Ukrainian drone struck a residential building in Moscow less than five miles from Red Square, in an attack that will rattle nerves in the Kremlin before the Victory Day military parade on May 9. Although no injuries were reported, it was one of the deepest Ukrainian strikes inside Moscow since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. (Source: thetimes.com)
4. China has ordered its companies to ignore US sanctions, an unprecedented act of defiance that threatens to trap a vast banking sector in the crossfire as tension rises between the world’s largest economies. Beijing has often railed against unilateral sanctions and pronounced them illegitimate, but it has also quietly allowed its largest companies to comply with them, in order to avoid blowback on its own economy and to preserve access to the US financial system. Saturday’s announcement — coming before a long-awaited meeting later this month between President Donald Trump and his counterpart Xi Jinping — signals a far more aggressive stance. Beijing has now directed companies not to abide by US sanctions on private refiners linked to the Iranian oil trade, including heavyweight Hengli Petrochemical (Dalian) Refinery Co. which was sanctioned last month. (Source: bloomberg.com. Italics mine.)
5. Asian economies fear more pain from rising prices as they confront the rising threat that prolonged conflict in the Middle East could trigger a region-wide growth shock. The region is at the heart of fears over the economic fallout from the war because of its heavy reliance on energy supplied from the Middle East. Officials from Australia to Bangladesh are warning that soaring import costs are likely to push inflation considerably higher than projections made just weeks earlier. (Source: ft.com)
6. Asia Nikkei:
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party looks set to form the government in the politically crucial eastern state of West Bengal, bordering Bangladesh, for the first time, early vote-counting trends for elections held in April showed on Monday.
