Mario Nawfal

🇨🇳🇮🇷 China took over Iraq's oil after the American surge, and Washington's war is now handing it Iran the same way without a shot fired Two decades ago, while American troops surged into Iraq, Chinese petroleum engineers followed behind them. Today Iraqi oil runs on Chinese contracts. Peter Alexander, watching from Shanghai, expects Iran to be that story at a scale nobody has priced, because a regime whose only goal is survival will take the one partner that offers survival as a package: "overwhelming influence throughout the region without a single shot fired" The strain shows in one number. Oil in Shanghai now trades about $30 above Brent since the Saudi pipeline burned, and Beijing pays it without complaint, because certainty is the thing it buys. His advice for Washington is the hardest pill in the building. Stop pretending, treat China as a peer, and negotiate the next thirty years while there's still something to trade. @WeTheBrandon

🇺🇸 RFK Jr. says cooking is what finally gave his youngest son a place in the family. He told it on his food show, with 7 kids in the house and 2 boys who like the kitchen. The youngest got good enough that his brothers started asking him to cook, and that turned into prestige at the table, then confidence. He called dinner an old ritual, families making something together, almost a spiritual thing. Writer: Lucas t.co/3ZYL6MOmWI

🇺🇲🇬🇱 U.S. Airmen touched down in GREENLAND for military exercises. The missions tested USNORTHCOM’s ability to operate in the Arctic’s harsh, high-latitude environment while maintaining military preparedness and operational effectiveness. TLDR: Troops went to Greenland to train in s*tty weather. Source: @USNorthernCmd / Writer: Marie

Worst-case scenario: boom, he’s mist. Best-case scenario: everyone watching already knows he’s mist in the brain department. 🤣 Writer: Daniyal t.co/BAvLfD0vA7

🇺🇲 SpaceX’s Falcon just had a SUCCESSFUL LIFTOFF! Look at that beautiful baddie launch. Writer: Marie t.co/UiQy7yisXb

🇺🇸 Ilhan Omar was confronted over the federal investigation into allegations of immigration and marriage fraud, and things got ugly fast. Asked directly whether she had married her brother, Omar flatly denied it and called the question “disgusting.” When the reporter brought up Tom Homan’s confirmation that DHS is investigating allegations involving her, Omar denied being under investigation and was asked whether Homan was lying. Her answer: “He’s been saying some dumb shit like you.” Writer: Sol t.co/WA8wd7C3cS

🇺🇸 Trump is floating a cutoff on trade with every country the US buys more from than it sells to. He put a number on it tonight: $1.5T a year, because a deficit is a loss with a nicer name. Canada, Mexico, Europe. Mexico gets a pass because a deal is close. The rest get the warning. That is how he reads the ledger: other countries get rich off access to America, and the arrangement has gone on long enough. Whether a cutoff collects $1.5T or simply shifts who pays is the fight underneath the line. Writer: Lucas t.co/8Kct6EiMkg

🇺🇲 Trump is still DANCING like nobody’s watching. Even though EVERYBODY is watching.🕺 Writer: Marie t.co/JV6jff7Ixc

🇮🇷 Iran's storage tank lids aren't lifting, which means production has effectively stopped. Twenty empty tankers sit anchored off Sri Lanka. More wait off Chabahar and Jask. Nothing new is arriving at the Malaysian anchorage where Iranian crude normally offloads, and nothing gets past Singapore unseen. Sal Mercogliano, maritime historian and shipping analyst, says trucks and the Caspian back door move a fraction of what one tanker carries. "I think the US is playing a very dangerous game in keeping that oil constrained, because you're backing them into a corner." A country with nothing left to export has nothing left to protect. @mercoglianos

🇺🇸🇵🇸 A Palestinian-American lawyer walked into a Florida budget hearing to fight a $1B Israel Bonds investment and left in handcuffs. Noura Erakat joined a crowd demanding Palm Beach County pull the money. Officials said the bonds weren’t on the agenda. Protesters kept talking. Deputies cleared the room. Erakat was arrested on a trespass charge. Palm Beach is the world’s biggest government buyer of Israel Bonds. So, more than a budget fight, it was politics colliding with a room that refused to stay quiet. Writer: Lucas t.co/68J8g6prFj

🇺🇸 🇮🇷 America sank two tankers as a message to anyone still doing business with Iran. Sal Mercogliano, maritime historian and shipping analyst, calls those strikes demonstrations, aimed at Iranian vessels and the commercial ships trading with them alike. A heavily damaged tanker was just towed out of the strait. Tehran says mine, Washington says missile, and the absence of any oil spill points at the missile. "We're going to have attrition in this tanker fleet. They're inflicting losses. They're killing mariners on board." Escort operations work until the losses outpace the crews willing to sail them. @mercoglianos

Elon’s new Starship film is a victory lap for the flight that finally brought a whole ship through reentry intact. Flight 13 launched in July, deployed 20 Starlink V3s, then survived reentry at roughly 25× the speed of sound and splashed down in the Indian Ocean still sending data. The documentary follows that recovery and the bigger bet: a reusable rocket could open the solar system. Next is Flight 14, and a shot at catching the ship. Source: @SpaceX / Writer: Lucas

🇺🇸🇻🇪 Exxon is nearing a deal to return to Venezuela, 19 years after Chávez seized its assets there The company could sign a memorandum with state-run PDVSA this month covering fields holding more than 50 billion barrels, though talks could still collapse. Chevron committed $7 billion over five years to double its output to 600,000 barrels a day, and Harold Hamm's Continental Resources signed its own preliminary deal Wednesday. Back in January, Exxon CEO Darren Woods sat in the White House and called Venezuela "uninvestable" without real changes to its laws. Caracas has since rewritten its oil rules and cut production taxes. Woods got exactly what he asked for, which is the part worth noticing. Washington pushed for $100 billion in the ground and the majors said no until the legal terms changed, then the terms changed. Every barrel that comes out of the Orinoco is a barrel that does not have to sail past Iranian guns or Houthi artillery, and with Hormuz at a trickle and the Red Sea gone, hemispheric oil stops being an ideological preference and becomes the supply chain. The company Chávez humiliated in 2007 may end up holding the fields that insulate American refineries from the next Gulf crisis. Source: The Wall Street Journal / Writer: Daniel

🇮🇷 🇨🇳 Chartering a tanker from the Gulf to China now runs $1 MILLION a day. It used to be $50,000. Twenty days at sea puts one voyage north of $20 million. Sal Mercogliano, maritime historian and shipping analyst, says the market got so desperate that a used tanker just sold for more than it cost new. Saudi, Kuwaiti and Emirati state ships handle the escorted runs because their governments can absorb war risk insurance no private owner would touch. At those rates the crude still moves. The question is who eats the cost once it reaches a pump. @mercoglianos

🇺🇲Rand Paul said HELL NO to Sen. Kennedy's push for a mandatory nationwide AI KILL SWITCH with his lone objection. "Ben Franklin said failing to plan is planning to fail. Approaching something as important as AI, we need as many facts as possible before we dictate rules for the whole economy!" Paul totally pulled the plug on the "kill switch" 😂 Writer: Marie t.co/aa7PaXlXI7

🇸🇦🇮🇷 Saudi Arabia's mercenaries drove off in American SUVs when the checks stopped clearing, and the kingdom they left behind is built on sand The Houthis sent a thank-you note to the American taxpayer for the trucks. That detail, to Robert Barnes, explains the whole Saudi position. A monarchy that never built an army of its own citizens rents one, and rented armies leave. His larger claim is that the House of Saud's power was never poured in concrete: "built on a house of desert sand" The Wahhabi base that lifted the family now isolates it. The cousins locked in the Ritz remember. The public watched the crown prince abandon the Palestinians, then float asking Israel for help against Yemen. Barnes reaches for 1918, when one war erased four empires inside a decade, and asks whether Iran and Ukraine are doing the same work. That's his forecast, and Riyadh calling Washington twice in a day without an answer is the first data point. @barnes_law @WeTheBrandon

🇺🇸🇮🇷 Trump says the pain at the pump is worth it because Iran's economy is finished... "It's going to end soon because they can't go on. Their nation is destroyed. You have a little higher gas. It's a very inexpensive price to pay for what we've done. That's going to come tumbling down. That's going to be like a rocket ship in reverse." Gas sits at $4.37 against $3.19 a year ago, diesel cleared $6, and the Fed just hiked rates for the first time since 2023. Voters price that as more than "a little higher." Writer: Daniel t.co/EYXVElDHTn

Travis Kelce was scammed by a $35 million Ponzi scheme run by an ILLEGAL immigrant The Chiefs star was named in court as one of many to be wronged by Siddharth Jawahar in the scheme Jawahar, who orchestrated the fraud, was sentenced to 11 years in prison this week after pleading guilty in January to wire fraud. Prosecutors say Jawahar took client money and dumped nearly all of it into a Pakistani tobacco stock. When it slumped, he didn't tell a soul. Kelce’s exact financial losses were not disclosed. Source: New York Post / Writer: Bri

🇺🇲🇮🇷 Trump keeps saying he can end the war in Iran. “That war? That war’s gonna end very soon. Watch, you just watch. Trump was right about everything, you watch. They’re getting decimated, and they want to make a deal so badly... We want to make it, and they’re not ready yet, I don’t think. But we can have a deal anytime we want.” $6/gallon diesel says otherwise, but okay. Writer: Marie t.co/6ksYVZlaWy

🇺🇸🇨🇳 Sam Altman is going to dinner with Trump and Xi. The White House is packing the table with American tech names for the Sept 24 state dinner, and the ChatGPT boss is on the list with Nvidia’s Jensen Huang. This lands while Altman has been warning that frontier AI needs a slower hand, and while Chinese models keep closing the gap. The man talking caution sits down at the deal table. Washington wants a show of U.S. AI muscle, while Beijing wants to see who actually runs the labs. Altman gets both rooms at once. Source: CNBC / Writer: Lucas

🇲🇽 Mexico City woke up to a sky full of military aircraft for Independence Day. A local caught the flyover during the 216th parade: Air Force and National Guard planes and helicopters crossing the capital in one tight formation. Officials put the number near 100. That was the opening act before the troops moved from the Zócalo down Reforma. Writer: Lucas t.co/aiYTVSAkGx

🇺🇸 Trump is tying one of North Carolina’s most notorious murder cases directly to Roy Cooper. Speaking about Iryna Zarutska, Trump said the man accused of killing her was one of thousands of inmates released under Cooper’s watch and used the case to hammer the former governor on crime. Writer: Sol t.co/kO26vOJqCO

🇺🇸 Trump thanked Elon for getting Starlink into the North Carolina mountains when the phones went dead. He told a Gastonia Senate crowd that he called and said: They all want it; send it. Hundreds of terminals showed up after Helene wiped the signal out of the western counties. The storm is almost 2 years old, and he is still using that night as proof Elon moves faster than the government. When those towns got cut off, a private network got there first. Trump is hanging that memory on a Senate race because competence is the argument he wants attached to the name. Writer: Lucas t.co/fYiUOCgjEY

🇺🇲Trump wants the GOP base to cast their midterm ballots like his approval ratings depend on it. “I just want you to go out and pretend I’m on the ticket because essentially, I am.” Well, a little main character syndrome may be what Republicans need to turn out the vote. Writer: Marie t.co/ShyMqJfoa0

🚨🇺🇸🇮🇷 BREAKING: Trump will meet Gulf leaders next Tuesday in New York to plan what comes after the Iran war Three sources tell Axios the sit-down with Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and Oman happens on the UN General Assembly sidelines, with State Department invitations going out Wednesday. The agenda is a day-after strategy the administration expects to finalize once the midterms are over. Trump said the same day that hopefully we are toward the end of the war, and claimed Iran has told Washington directly it wants a deal. Netanyahu wants his own meeting in New York and hasn't been given one. The precedent is last year's UN sidelines meeting with eight Arab and Muslim leaders, where a draft Gaza plan went in and a deal came out weeks later. Every leader in that room has been on the receiving end of this war: bases hit, refineries burning, exports strangled. They will arrive wanting a postwar order that puts their own security first, and Washington needs their money and their airspace to build one. Whatever gets sketched next Tuesday is the framework Trump takes into the escalation or the exit he chooses after November 3. Source: Axios / Writer: Daniel

🇺🇸🇮🇷 A Space Force specialist kept jamming Iranian targets while missiles were incoming on her own position... until her commander PHYSICALLY DRAGGED her off the console Gen. Douglas Schiess told an Air Force conference about Specialist Gray, two years into the service, deployed to the Middle East and handed a top priority target package within hours of Epic Fury kicking off. His words on what happened next: "Even as 'Alarm Red' sirens were blaring, and incoming missiles targeted her site, she courageously held the line... until her commander had to literally pull her from the console to safety." Her console sat in the blast radius because, as Schiess put it, sometimes you have to be inside the satellite's footprint, which is why Guardians go into harm's way. The service is now studying what belongs underground and what can be run from remote sites or from orbit. Seven months in and Americans like her are still holding the line. Source: The War Zone / Writer: Daniel

🇺🇲 Trump wants his name on the Kennedy Center, or it's getting RIPPED DOWN. “The Kennedy Center, for many years, has lost tens of millions of dollars, even hundreds of millions. For me to go and fix it and then have to subsidize it… I think the Trump administration should certainly have recognition. ‘Cause frankly, if we don’t do that, it’s going to close and end up being ripped down…” Trump doesn’t just want the credit... He wants the building. Writer: Marie t.co/gXnpNiK7rZ

🇦🇷🇺🇸 Milei pointed out the Malvinas push was sitting in a drawer for 3 years, not cooked up for votes. He says an outside shock let him pull it. That shock was Trump treating the U.S. position on the islands as something he could reopen. The timing still looks like a gift. A patron in Washington looking south again, and the one Argentine cause that never needs explaining. Writer: Lucas t.co/jXukbUcoKS

🇬🇧 Britain’s navy chief says the next fight starts in the Atlantic, but the fleet is too thin to win it. Gwyn Jenkins says Russia is the main threat: hidden subs, long-range missiles, and ships probing vital cables. Two Royal Navy ships are already out every week tracking them. The problem? 5 working frigates, 6 destroyers on paper, and 2 carriers back in the shop. Jenkins wants more ships and drones. Britain is an island, and the government knows it. The money still isn’t there, so the warning is clear. The rebuild is not. Source: The Telegraph / Writer: Lucas

🇦🇷🇺🇸 Milei says his Malvinas/Falklands push started because Trump opened the file. Washington started talking like the old map in the South Atlantic might be up for review, and Buenos Aires moved. Sanctions on the oil project. More money for a base at the bottom of the continent. A claim Argentina never dropped, now sold as proof that lining up with the U.S. pays. Britain is the old special friend, while Argentina is the nearby partner. Milei is betting that geography beats history if Trump keeps looking south. Writer: Lucas t.co/EXr2qTja2t