🇮🇱🇱🇧 Israel agrees to pull back in southern Lebanon
The framework deal gets signed in Washington tonight, and it has Israel committing to withdraw its forces from parts of southern Lebanon.
It runs as a "pilot." Israel steps back, the Lebanese army moves in and takes responsibility for those areas.
The other piece is the bigger one. Both sides are expected to formally recognise each other's sovereignty over their own land.
A pilot is a small start, but after everything these two have been through, troops pulling back and sovereignty on paper is a real step in the right direction.
Iran fired at least 4 One Way Attack Drones at ships in the Strait of Hormuz, one of them solidly hitting the upper deck of a large cargo carrier before the ship was able to proceed, the U.S. knocking down the other 3.
"Obviously, this is a foolish violation of our Ceasefire Agreement."
🇮🇷🇺🇸 The U.S. Iran ceasefire deal is already cracking
They signed it days ago, and both sides are already stepping on the parts they swore to keep.
Iran's clause 5 was the easy one. Let ships pass safely through the Strait of Hormuz. Yesterday its forces struck a commercial ship using the Omani side of the strait, the exact lane the U.N. had marked as safe. So much for safe passage.
The U.S. side has clause 1, which says all military operations stop, Lebanon included, and neither party so much as threatens force. Yet Israel, America's partner in this war, kept pounding southern Lebanon, and Trump went online swinging.
Trump: "we'll hit Iran very hard again, just like we did last week, only harder!!!"
That is the exact threat of force the clause rules out, in his own words, days after he put his name to it.
🇮🇷 Al Jazeera just mapped out who actually made money from the Iran war
The list is exactly who you'd expect and somehow still shocking when you see the numbers laid out
Saudi Aramco profits up 25% to $32.5bn in Q1. BP more than doubled its profits. TotalEnergies, Shell, all up significantly despite taking hits in Qatar.
Brent briefly hit $126 a barrel. The 6 biggest US banks collectively made $48bn in Q1 alone: JPMorgan up 13%, everyone else printing money off the volatility in oil, currencies and bonds.
Tanker companies were charging $100,000 a day per vessel and war-risk insurance quintupled overnight. Defense contractors are sitting on record backlogs: Northrop Grumman at $95.6bn, while Congress approved $700bn in new defense funding during the conflict.
And then there's the prediction markets. $580m in oil futures flooding in 9 times normal volume exactly 16 minutes before Trump announced a pause in strikes. 50 newly created accounts making hundreds of thousands betting on the ceasefire in the moments before Trump posted it.
A Yale analysis finding those flagged accounts winning nearly 70% of bets across 200,000 cases... statistically impossible without prior knowledge.
Estimated profits of $143m.
Somewhere between the people paying more for gas and the people dying in the strikes, an extraordinary amount of money changed hands very quickly and flowed in very predictable directions.
MSTR down -24% in this week and broke a support level it held for 830 days.
The $100 level that held through every correction since the Bitcoin ETF launched in January 2024 just broke
MSTR is trading at $85 after hours and now down -84% from its peak.
Let’s compare Bitcoin chart alongside it.
Bitcoin is down -54% from its $126k peak. Currently trading below 5% of the weekly MA 200. The same moving average that has marked the bottom of every major Bitcoin bear market in history.
Here is the scenario nobody wants to say out loud.
MSTR and Bitcoin have moved together since the ETF launched on January 11 2024. MSTR jumped 1,129% and Bitcoin jumped 225% to ATH.
If MSTR retests $40 the Bitcoin chart suggests a parallel retest of the post ETF launch support near $42,000. The same level Bitcoin was trading when the ETF changed everything in January 2024.
$100 on MSTR and $62,500 on Bitcoin are now the most important levels in the entire crypto.
If they do not reclaim these levels fast the next stop is a long way down.
Since the October 10th crash, the biggest liquidation event in crypto history which wiped out $19 billion in 24 hours, Bitcoin has not been the same.
After that, Bitcoin crashed -54% from $126K to $58K with no real bounce like we saw in 2018 and 2022 bear markets.
We saw a nonstop dump in Bitcoin and this cycle ended with no altseason at all.
The weird thing is, since the Oct 10th NASDAQ is up 28%, reaching a new ATH of 30,764, with many stocks hitting new all-time highs.
Historically Bitcoin correlates with the US stock market, but this time almost every pump gets sold off.
Bitcoin followed and recovered with stocks even during the 2025 tariff crash, but recently it has massively diverged since the October 2025 crash, and we continue to see hundreds of millions in liquidations every other day.
I think the 4-year cycle is still intact and the crash to the bottom feels aggressive due to leverage manipulation and algo trading by big firms like Jane, which makes money from arbitrage volatility rather than price going up.
Do you think there is manipulation involved or market is following 4 year cycle ?
🇮🇷 After Trump posted that the Strait of Hormuz is "completely open" the IRGC shot a Singapore-flagged cargo ship on it.
The Ever Lovely. The bridge damaged, but no casualties.
Iran just put a hole in a commercial vessel days into a deal that was supposed to guarantee safe passage, while Trump is publicly declaring everything was fine, and US officials are now describing it as an "early test of the deal's durability."