Oil majors cash in on the chokepoint.

1. ExxonMobil's profits more than doubled to $14.5bn this quarter, its highest since 2022. Chevron posted its highest quarterly earnings on record, $12.1bn, nearly five times a year earlier. Both companies benefited from the prolonged closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which pushed US crude as high as $112.95 a barrel and gasoline to four-year highs. "While we didn't anticipate the current situation, we were prepared for it. In our markets, disruption is inevitable," said Exxon chief executive Darren Woods, noting the company absorbed a roughly 10% loss of upstream production and still delivered what he called exceptional results. (Sources: wsj.com, cnbc.com) · catalyst · Relevant · Not relevant

2. The 30-year US Treasury yield hit 5.24% Wednesday, its highest since 2007. The jump came after the Fed held rates at 3.5-3.75% for a fifth straight meeting, with three regional bank presidents dissenting in favor of a hike — the first three-way dissent in one direction in a decade. "There is no soft implicit target: not on this committee's watch," said Fed chair Kevin Warsh. "There's only a target and it's 2%. This Fed will not waver." Traders now price a 57% chance of a September hike, up from 30% before the meeting, even as Thursday's GDP print showed the economy slowing to 1.5% growth. (Sources: theguardian.com, washingtonpost.com) · catalyst · Relevant · Not relevant

3. US petrol prices in Britain hit their highest level since the Iran war began, at 160p a litre. The RAC's data shows diesel remains below its April peak of 191.54p, but the broader pattern is now familiar: the war's costs are landing unevenly, hitting drivers and mortgage holders while flowing as record profit to integrated oil majors. Mortgage rates in the US hit a one-year high this week, driven by the same inflation and war fears now showing up at the pump. (Sources: bbc.com, npr.org) · analysis · Relevant · Not relevant

4. The Senate's Russia sanctions bill advanced 86-12 this week, but its tariff provisions could hit US allies harder than Russia. Section 113 lets the president impose tariffs up to 100% on the five largest importers of Russian oil or gas — a list that includes China, India, Turkey, the EU, and Myanmar for crude, and adds Japan and South Korea for gas. Within the EU, the biggest buyers of Russian fossil fuels are Hungary, France, Spain, Belgium and Slovakia. Trump already holds broad sanctions authority and can waive anything in the bill by notifying Congress, which leaves its bite largely discretionary. (Sources: washingtonpost.com, aljazeera.com) · catalyst · Relevant · Not relevant

5. Most Americans now say the Iran war has not been worth fighting. Trump's approval rating on the war has slipped slightly since last month, according to new polling, even as the administration frames its outcome as a strategic success. The war entered its fourth month this week, with the US and Iran pausing attacks for a second straight day Sunday while ceasefire talks continued in the background. (Sources: pbs.org, scrippsnews.com) · spectacle · Relevant · Not relevant

6. Palestinian sources have detailed the roadmap Israel and Hamas are negotiating for the ceasefire's second phase. The draft requires complete cessation of military operations and full implementation of the humanitarian protocol before either side moves to the next stage — the same disarmament-for-withdrawal sequencing Trump announced Thursday, now with sourced procedural detail attached. An Israeli official told Al-Monitor that Israel "demands the complete disarmament of Hamas, including the removal of weapons from Gaza and the complete demilitarization of the Strip as a precondition for any process." Hamas has still not specified a disarmament timeline. (Sources: aa.com.tr, al-monitor.com) · catalyst · Relevant · Not relevant

7. Chinese brands now hold 15% of the UK new-car market, the industry's trade body confirmed this week. Traditional automakers are responding with deep discounts to compete against lower-cost imports, according to the SMMT's chief executive, a pattern that mirrors the export strength Beijing is leaning on domestically as consumer spending stays weak. China's commerce ministry separately demanded Monday that Washington scrap new forced-labor tariffs, calling them protectionism, after the US imposed blanket 10% and 12.5% duties on 60 trading partners including China and the EU on Friday. (Sources: autonews.com, aol.com) · analysis · Relevant · Not relevant

8. Russia's strike on a Delaware-registered drone factory in Kyiv marks the war's first hit on an American-owned manufacturer. Terminal Autonomy made AI-guided AQ-400 Scythe and AQ-100 Bayonet deep-strike drones designed to resist Russian jamming. "The Russians don't care who owns the manufacturing facility. It's still a target. They don't care if it's American or someone else's," said Anthony Vinci, a former senior US intelligence officer. Nobody was killed. Vinci added that if Patriot missiles were manufactured in Ukraine under Trump's July licensing pledge, "I do think... the Russians would target that manufacturing facility." (Source: theguardian.com) · juncture · Relevant · Not relevant

9. US Latinos generated $4.4 trillion in GDP last year, a figure that would rank as the world's fourth-largest economy on its own. The number reflects the continued weight of Latino consumer spending and business formation inside an economy that grew just 1.5% overall last quarter. It is the kind of statistic that gets recycled across news cycles precisely because nothing about the underlying trend has changed week to week. (Source: newsweek.com) · spectacle · Relevant · Not relevant

10. Foreign Affairs: On why Moscow keeps fighting despite battlefield losses that outpace its stated gains: · analysis · Relevant · Not relevant

The Russian army, he said, was advancing along the roughly 800-mile frontline and occupying more Ukrainian land every day.

Moscow's ability to decisively breach the Ukrainian frontline is increasingly in doubt. (Source: foreignaffairs.com)

11. Global oil inventories have thinned enough that the next supply shock could hit harder than the last one. Strategic reserve releases and drawdowns have kept prices from spiking further during four months of intermittent US-Iran conflict, but that buffer is smaller than it was in April. Oil slipped Friday while still on track for a roughly 20% monthly gain, as more supply moved through contested maritime chokepoints. (Sources: energynow.com, shafaq.com) · analysis · Relevant · Not relevant

12. A widening web of regional conflicts is now straining shipping routes far beyond the Middle East. Maritime analysts describe conflicts from the Black Sea to the Red Sea as increasingly interconnected, each disruption compounding the next for an industry already absorbing the Hormuz closure and Houthi threats to Saudi exports. The result is a crisis measured less in any single chokepoint than in cumulative insurance and routing costs across the whole network. (Source: lloydslist.com) · analysis · Relevant · Not relevant

13. A 7.1-magnitude earthquake struck Japan's Kyushu island this week, killing at least three people and triggering tsunami warnings across the south. Emergency crews continued search operations through the weekend as authorities assessed structural damage across the affected region. The quake adds a fresh strain to a country already managing multiple overlapping disaster responses this year. (Source: apnews.com) · catalyst · Relevant · Not relevant

14. Media & IP: Reuters is licensing its archive to AI developers rather than suing them, editor-in-chief Alessandra Galloni said in a Sydney lecture this week. The wire's strategy treats training-data access as a negotiable commercial asset, a stance that puts it at odds with publishers still pursuing litigation over unlicensed scraping. Galloni's framing has now run unchallenged across three separate news cycles without a concrete deal, lawsuit ruling, or rival response emerging to test it. (Source: reuters.com) · analysis · Relevant · Not relevant

15. Markets & Startups: Fed funds futures now price a 57% chance of a September hike, up from roughly 30% before Wednesday's decision. The shift followed three regional Fed presidents' dissent in favor of raising rates now, the first three-way same-direction dissent in a decade. Bond markets have effectively sided with the hawks even as Thursday's GDP report showed growth slowing to 1.5%, the clearest split yet between what the Fed committee believes and what the data show. (Source: theguardian.com) · catalyst · Relevant · Not relevant

16. Spain: Spain remains among the EU's largest buyers of Russian fossil fuels, alongside Hungary, France, Belgium and Slovakia. That exposure puts Madrid in the path of the Senate sanctions bill's tariff provisions, which could hit natural-gas importers with duties up to 100% unless they show "significant steps" toward reducing Russian purchases — a standard the US administration would define unilaterally. Spain's wildfire crisis, which drove cross-border evacuations with France through late July, saw no fresh escalation reported today. (Source: washingtonpost.com) · analysis · Relevant · Not relevant

17. Canada: Canadian commentators are studying the shaky US-EU trade deal for lessons ahead of Canada's own negotiations. The agreement caps most US tariffs on EU goods at 15%, a ceiling Ottawa now treats as a benchmark for its own talks with Washington. Canada's three August byelections remain the country's nearest domestic test of how much tariff pain voters are willing to absorb. (Source: theglobeandmail.com) · analysis · Relevant · Not relevant

18. Puerto Rico: Puerto Rico's news cycle stayed quiet again today, with no dated developments in the corpus beyond stories already covered in prior editions. The island's energy and fiscal storylines remain in the same holding pattern noted across recent weeks. · analysis · Relevant · Not relevant

19. Surprise: No qualifying surprise-bucket story appeared in today's corpus, so this slot is being held rather than filled with a substitute from the general feed. · spectacle · Interesting · Not interesting