🛢 🇸🇦 🔼 Saudi Aramco raised its May oil price for Asia to a record +$19.50/barrel, up from just +$2.50.

Higher fuel costs for Asia (China, India, etc.)

More pressure on global oil prices.

📎 Clash Report

🖥 🇮🇷 🔌 The internet blackout in Iran is entering its 38th day with the general public now cut off from international networks for over 888 hours.

📝: Iran's intranet, state controlled/supervised websites still function. Iranians just can't access foreign websites without VPNs.

📎 NetBlocks

⛽️ 🇺🇸 📈 Gas prices in the US have moved up to $4.12 per gallon, their highest level since August 2022. The 38% spike over the last 5 weeks ($2.98/gallon to $4.12/gallon) is the biggest we've seen in the past 30 years.

📎 Charlie Bilello

🐰 🇺🇸 🐣 President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump, and the Easter Bunny open the 2026 White House Easter Egg Roll with The Star-Spangled Banner

📎 Breaking911

🐰 🇺🇸 🐣 Trump Gives War Update to Children While Flanked by the Easter Bunny: ‘Our Warriors Are the Greatest Fighters on Earth’

"We’re the greatest military, the most powerful military any place in the world. You saw what happened with Venezuela, and it’s an honor. I built it in my first term and I didn’t know I was gonna be using it this much in my second term, but it’s my honor, and they’re the greatest people on Earth. Our warriors are the greatest fighters on Earth and they very much appreciate you and love you and that’s why they do it."

https://www.mediaite.com/media/tv/trump-gives-war-update-to-children-while-flanked-by-the-easter-bunny-our-warriors-are-the-greatest-fighters-on-earth/

🇺🇸📞🌞⁉️ — US President Donald Trump says some groups, implying an unknown Iranian Kurdish formation, stole the arms shipments destined for Iranian protesters:

We sent to some guns.
They were supposed to go to the people so they could fight back against these thugs.

The people we sent them to kept them. I am upset with a certain group of people and they will pay a big price.

@BellumActaNews

🇨🇳🇺🇸 Nations that bet on China's supply chains are faring far better than those who took a chance with the US

For at least a decade, developing countries across Asia and Africa have worried about growing dependent on China. They’re concerned about debt traps, coercive policies, and hidden costs that might push their economies toward crisis.

Crisis has come, and that logic has been turned on its head. After six weeks of the US and Israel’s war on Iran and its ensuing counterattacks, it is the countries that bet on Chinese supply chains that are faring better than the ones that trusted Pax Americana.

Consider Pakistan. By now it should have been in the middle of yet another economic and social implosion. It has always been vulnerable to energy price shocks, given that it imports almost all of its energy, much of it through the Strait of Hormuz. The country has $130 billion in external debt and a persistent current account deficit, and so the slightest nudge should have tipped it over into a familiar spiral: Emergency requests to the International Monetary Fund, 18-hour power blackouts, unrest on the streets.

None of that is visible. There are signs of stress, certainly: Islamabad has hiked fuel prices and is planning to shut of electricity for two to three hours each day. A sustained shortage of liquid natural gas will make it hard to keep power plants running. But, compared to the situation just a few years ago — when, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the economy had a full-scale meltdown — it’s showing remarkable resilience.

What’s the difference? Chinese-made solar panels. Pakistanis have gleefully transitioned to solar power, importing about 17 gigawatts a year of photovoltaics since 2024. A quarter of households have installed solar panels for their own use.

Nor are solar panels the only way in which cheap Chinese goods are turning out to be sources of resilience rather than disruption. Nepal has a higher proportion of electric vehicles than any other country in the world, barring Norway. Its huge imported fleet of cheap EVs mean that it is far less worried about gasoline prices than most of its Asian neighbors. And they run on clean electricity, emerging from a hydropower infrastructure that is financed in part by Beijing.

It’s not hard to imagine policymakers from across the developing world looking at examples like these and concluding that betting on Beijing isn’t actually the riskier option. Some may already have taken that chance; imports of Chinese solar panels have shot up in the past couple of years across sub-Saharan Africa in particular. If the only options are dependence on predictably mercantilist Beijing and on an erratic, self-centered and disruptive US, the choice is obvious.

That may turn out to be the wrong call. It isn’t wise to imagine that relying upon Beijing’s goodwill is any safer. In just the past year, China has shown the willingness to weaponize control over supply chains, such as the production of magnets and rare earths.

But right now, the contrast is glaring. Countries that believed that the open trading order, underpinned by American hegemony, would protect them from shocks are struggling; those who chose to run the risk of dependence upon Chinese imports and infrastructure are showing unexpected resilience.

🔗 https://archive.ph/l2jYw