US Pauses Iran Strikes as Houthis Open a Second Front on Saudi Tankers

Trump ordered no strikes on Iran Friday night, the first pause since this column started counting nights. Bloomberg's four front oil read, Brent through $100, Ukraine hitting Russian infrastructure, the Gulf, and now the Red Sea, shows the pause did not calm anything. Houthis hit Saudi tankers again overnight, and Bahrain and Kuwait flew their own retaliatory strikes into Iran. Gulf states are no longer just hosting the war, they are fighting it. This column called the blockade claim unverified three weeks ago. Two Gulf air forces joining the fight confirms it. Rachel Lam's column on BlackRock, Temasek and CPPIB cornerstoning a Pentagon blacklisted chipmaker's HK listing is today's lead: a US military designation failed to keep sovereign capital out of a sanctioned firm, in public. A compliance head at a HK private bank now has to explain why a blacklist entry did not stop three of the world's biggest allocators. Separately, OpenAI disclosed a breach, and Bloomberg's malvertising story describes malware built in browser memory, no file dropped, nothing for endpoint tools to catch. Watch whether Riyadh treats last night's tanker hit as the trigger for its own retaliation, given two Gulf states already crossed that line this week.