Sanctions Become the Weapon as Sarawak Shuts Down on Haze

The USS Abraham Lincoln left the Gulf for San Diego overnight after nine months on station, and within hours Washington announced what it called the toughest sanctions regime in Iran's history, aimed at the regime's trade partners rather than its territory. This column called the pivot from ships to paper on Thursday; the carrier's departure confirms it, the pressure now runs through banks and shippers, not the strait. Iran's president called Friday for ending the war from a position of strength, a claim easier to make with the fleet gone. Evergrande's Hui Ka Yan drew his life sentence as national debt cleared $40 trillion, and Bessent's bond market intervention sent bitcoin and gold up together overnight, a pairing that usually signals investors hedging against the dollar itself, not against each other. Microsoft patched a maximum severity Entra ID flaw already under active exploitation, the identity layer under half of enterprise cloud logins, worth an immediate patch cycle check for any bank running hybrid Azure AD. Malaysia's Sarawak shut nearly 600 schools as Indonesian peatland haze hit "very unhealthy" levels. Beijing revised the Typhoon Maysak death toll from 39 to 159 overnight, the first update in six weeks.