Vessels transit the Bab el-Mandeb Strait off the coast of southern Yemen on July 25, 2026. <\/p>\n
Khaled Ziad | Afp | Getty Images<\/p>\n
Hello, this is Justina Lee writing to you from Singapore, filling in for Leonie.<\/p>\n
U.S. President\u00a0Donald Trump<\/a> has\u00a0called on Congress to\u00a0add tariffs<\/a> on Iran to a\u00a0sanctions bill<\/a>\u00a0against Russia and Tehran that has bipartisan support, but those duties are likely to have little effect to Iran’s economy. <\/p>\n Signs of a recovery in crude flows through the Strait of Hormuz are easing<\/a> supply concerns, with oil prices extending declines on Friday. <\/p>\n In Asia, China’s factory activity contracted unexpectedly<\/a> in July for the first time since February, the Bank of Japan kept<\/a> its policy rate steady, while shares South Korea’s chip heavyweights SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics come roaring back to life. <\/p>\n What you need to know today<\/p>\n Hostilities between the U.S. and Iran continue to intensify, after U.S. President\u00a0Donald Trump<\/a>\u00a0called on Congress to\u00a0add tariffs<\/a> on Iran to a\u00a0sanctions bill<\/a>\u00a0against Russia and Tehran that has bipartisan support.<\/p>\n “I’d like to see tariffs on Iran. It would make it much stronger,” Trump said of the bill. <\/p>\n However, those duties would have little effect, given that the U.S. imports nearly nothing from Iran. Data from the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative showed the U.S. imported just\u00a0$1.4 million in goods from Iran in 2025<\/a>. Works of art, collectors’ pieces and antiques were the largest category of those imports, making up 55% of the value, according to the firm\u00a0Trading Economics<\/a>.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, signs of a recovery in crude flows through the Strait of Hormuz are easing<\/a> supply concerns. Oil prices extended declines on Friday, with West Texas Intermediate<\/a>\u00a0futures for September delivery dropping 1.6%.\u00a0Brent crude<\/a>\u00a0futures, the international benchmark, fell by nearly 1%. <\/p>\n Moving over to mergers and acquisitions, Canadian convenience and mobility retailer Alimentation Couche-Tard<\/a> announced<\/a> plans on Friday to acquire Poland’s largest convenience store operator Zabka Group.<\/p>\n The deal, which values Zabka at approximately 32.62 billion zloty ($8.6 billion), would expand Couche-Tard’s presence in central and eastern Europe. <\/p>\n Over in Asia, a slew of economic and market news dominated the headlines on Friday. <\/p>\n China’s factory activity contracted unexpectedly<\/a> in July for the first time since February, weighed by a slump in domestic orders and production disrupted by typhoons. <\/p>\n The latest survey of businesses by China Beige Book also found<\/a> that one of the Chinese economy’s few growth drivers lost steam in July, with “U.S.-bound shipments fell outright for the first time in several months.” <\/p>\n Meanwhile, the Bank of Japan kept<\/a> its policy rate steady on Friday, while warning that the country’s core inflation could exceed its 2% target. <\/p>\n In Asian markets, the AI rally comes roaring back<\/a> with South Korea’s chip heavyweights SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics surging over 20% on Friday, tracking huge gains in U.S. technology stocks. Blockbuster earnings from Amazon and Microsoft helped renew optimism around AI spending.<\/p>\n \u2014Justina Lee<\/p>\n And finally…Anthropic says its Claude models \u2018gained unauthorized access\u2019 to other organizations\u2019 systems<\/p>\n Anthropic<\/a>\u00a0on Thursday said it discovered three instances where its Claude\u00a0artificial intelligence<\/a>\u00a0models accessed the internet during an evaluation and “gained unauthorized access to the real systems of three different organizations.”<\/p>\n The company said it found these incidents after carrying out a “a large-scale retrospective review” of its cybersecurity evaluations. Anthropic said the review was prompted by a separate but similar security incident that\u00a0OpenAI disclosed<\/a>\u00a0last week.<\/p>\n OpenAI said a combination of its models escaped an isolated testing environment that had very limited internet access. The models chained together a series of vulnerabilities to reach the open web and eventually gain\u00a0access to Hugging Face<\/a>, which operates an open-source developer platform.<\/p>\n \u2014Ashley Capoot<\/p>\n