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The NewsPlanetAI Brief · Week ending August 30, 2026

The Siege Engine

Six days ago we did something a newsletter is not supposed to do: we told you what we did not know. We laid out five questions the war was about to turn on, marked the single tripwire on each that would resolve it, and promised to report which way each one fell. The first has fallen.

We said the sanctions package due that Monday would "land hardest on Iran's trading partners rather than on Iran itself," and we set the tripwire this way: a genuine concession, resumed talks or a verified cut in Iranian oil production would mean the pressure was working; another promised "devastating response" with exports unchanged would mean it was not. On Monday the Treasury Secretary launched Operation Economic Outcast, and by the end of the week the answer was not close. Iran offered no concession, resumed no talks, cut no production. Its economy minister called the package "the same old talk" and said the country was "ready for every scenario." Petrol queues formed in Tehran, the rial touched two million to the dollar, and a Supreme National Security Council secretary promised to retaliate "in a seismic manner." None of that is the pressure failing to bite: the queues and the rial are the bite. It is the pressure failing to compel. By the test we set beforehand, Iran absorbed the pain and conceded nothing, and the shape of the package tells you why the pain is unlikely to become compliance.

Read the instruments rather than the label and the novel part of Outcast is not another sanction on Iran. It is pressure on the countries, banks and companies around it. After nearly six months of war, neither side has been able to compel the other directly, so both are increasingly transferring the coercion outward. That is the engine this issue is about, and this week both sides ran it in plain sight.

On Saturday, two days before the American launch, the Secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council went on state television and gave the mirror image of the American threat. "We declare to all countries, do not join the economic war waged by the United States. Any country participating in the imposition of economic restrictions against us is considered an enemy." Mohsen Rezaei laid out a sequence: negotiate first, then try to peel them away from Washington with pleasant language, and if that fails, strike their interests. The American half had been posted days earlier: the president promising "tremendous economic consequences" for any country that gives Iran "any type of lifeline," the Treasury Secretary telling the world it was "either with us or against us."

Neither man was talking to the other's government. Both were talking to the same set of countries, in the same grammar, for opposite behaviour.

That is the siege engine. A siege aimed at one country, which that country is built to absorb, converts into pressure on the neighbours who are not built to absorb it. The United States has run one of the most expensive air campaigns in a generation for the better part of six months without reopening the strait or closing Iran's borders. Unable to compel each other, both have turned to the countries in between.

Why the siege does not seal Iran

Closing the Strait of Hormuz was never only an export problem for Iran. It was an import problem for ninety million people. But Iran's three largest suppliers before the war were China, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey, and two of those reach Iran by routes the blockade does not touch. Turkey trucks goods across the land border. Iraq, from the other direction, is where Iran sells some twelve billion dollars a year in goods, gas and electricity by pipeline and road. The Emirati channel is the largest and hardest to size: Emirati firms shipped Iran about six billion dollars in goods directly in 2024 by United Nations trade data, but the number that matters is Dubai's re-export economy, where merchants buy Western goods and forward them on, and estimates of the UAE's share of Iranian imports run from eighteen to thirty percent depending entirely on whether those re-exports are counted. The blockade controls the strait. It does not control Iran's land borders.

The Caspian answered the food question. The Russian ports of Astrakhan and Olya moved more than 3.5 million tonnes of cargo in the first half of 2026, up ninety percent on the year, with grain tripling to nearly half of everything they shipped; on the Iranian side the share of essential goods entering through northern ports doubled, from eighteen to thirty-two percent. We measured the corridor ourselves: on public satellite radar, large-hull traffic at Iran's Neka and Amirabad anchorage roughly quintupled between 2021 and 2024 and has run flat since, the blockade months sitting inside the ordinary range of the two years before them. That is not a surge but something stronger. Iran did not improvise a Caspian lifeline under blockade; it had one, built before this war, and the war simply made it load-bearing. It is a grain corridor, not an oil one, and its survival value is that people eat. Whether crude also moves down the pipeline from Neka to Tehran's refineries is the one thing our instrument cannot see, and we will claim neither that it runs nor that it is idle.

Iran's refineries survived as well. The strikes behind the "seventy percent capacity" headlines in April appear to have hit storage and distribution far harder than the refining cores. Human Rights Watch documented the four Tehran-area targets of 7 March as storage depots, while Persian Gulf Star, the refinery that makes roughly forty to forty-five percent of Iran's gasoline, was not struck.

None of that means the pressure is painless. Iran's gasoline deficit runs between fifteen and twenty-four million litres a day, and officials have told their own media the country has "no choice but to conserve" for eighteen to twenty-four months. But the deficit predates the first strike: in the winter of 2024-25 consumption already outpaced refining capacity and the government cut rations. What the war changed is that the imports which used to fill the gap are blocked. The survival mechanism is rationing, not resupply, and rationing has a political limit: on 13 August the government trialled a price rise and cancelled it within hours after public anger.

So the honest version is narrower than the slogan. Iran does not survive a siege because forty-five years of sanctions made it clever. It survives because it has land borders and refineries. Sanctions taught Iran how to use the system. Geography is what gives it a system to use.

What the package actually did

Operation Economic Outcast was announced as an "economic D-Day," the "single greatest financial offensive ever marshalled against an adversary," aimed at severing "every economic lifeline" that sustains Iran. Strip the packaging and read the four instruments Treasury actually issued, and a narrower, more revealing machine appears.

The load-bearing new lever is legal, not punitive. Under Executive Order 13902 the Treasury Secretary issued five sectoral determinations (digital assets, technology, gold, aviation and shipping) which, in the release's own words, let the government "sanction any person, regardless of where they are located, that operates in" those sectors of the Iranian economy. That is an authority to designate, not a designation. It lowers the evidentiary bar for reaching a third-country facilitator from "helped Iran commit terror" to "operates in one of these five sectors." It is aimed, by construction, outward.

The actual designations that accompanied it ("nearly sixty" people, companies and vessels) are Fury-scale volume, not a new order of magnitude, and by weight they are not even mostly about oil. The largest block is a missile-and-nuclear procurement network of more than twenty entities, heavy with Hong Kong and mainland Chinese trading firms. The second is a state cyber group. Only the third is the shadow oil fleet: brokers and bunkering intermediaries in the United Arab Emirates, Singapore and Hong Kong, including one who is said to have moved more than a hundred million dollars in cryptocurrency for Iranian oil since 2023. The oil enforcement reaches the facilitators (the brokers, the exchange houses, the ship-to-ship transfer operators), not the buyers. And the buyers are the point.

Because the bite of all four instruments is the same: removal from the dollar system, enforced not by the United States directly but by every dollar-dependent bank, insurer and port that de-risks pre-emptively. That means the reach tracks dollar-dependence exactly. Facilitators in the Emirates, Singapore and Hong Kong are reachable. So, it turned out this week, are four Indian customs and trading companies and three Indian nationals, swept up for moving roughly a hundred and twenty million dollars of Iranian petroleum, a designation that reaches a country Washington has spent a year courting, and strains that relationship for the trouble. What is not reachable is the tier Iran leans on hardest: the yuan-walled Chinese banks that settle the oil, and the ruble-and-rial Caspian grain that never touches a dollar at all. Enforcement is a friction tax on the periphery. It is not a severing of the core.

And the man who launched it said so, on the record, when a reporter pressed him. Asked why, if this was a D-Day, he did not simply impose the sanctions that day, the Treasury Secretary answered: "Why would I want to blow up the global financial system? We believe that it is important to level set and give people a cure period… a warning shot and a level set of expectations is appropriate." Asked directly how long the "defined timelines" given to each country actually were, he refused to say: "I'm not going to set timelines. But we do not have infinite patience here." The mechanism he described is not severance. It is a graduated, private, country-by-country warning with a cure period and no published deadline, the opposite of the "clock just started ticking" in his own opening statement. Outcast is a threat held in reserve. It is an announcement, not an execution.

Nothing shows the gap between the paper and the effect more cleanly than the one bank he named. He promised that "every branch of Bank Melli must be shuttered and dark." Bank Melli, Iran's largest state bank, has been fully sanctioned by the United States since 2018. Its Western branches wound down years ago; the branches that survive do so in Iraq, Russia, Oman and Afghanistan, where American sanctions are not enforced. The constraint on the United States was never its authority to designate Bank Melli. It was, and remains, its ability to make third countries comply. Naming an eight-year-old designation as this week's enforcement example is the whole argument in miniature: the instrument that is missing is not more paper. It is reach into places the dollar does not run.

China is not the target. China is the constraint.

The package was sold as aimed at Iran and at China, which buys roughly ninety percent of Iran's shipped oil. The Chinese entities actually designated are procurement and cyber intermediaries. The channel that matters (the major Chinese banks that clear the oil payments) was, twice, asked about directly and, twice, left untouched.

A Reuters correspondent put it plainly: Chinese banks are the most powerful lever available, none were hit, is that coming, or does "the very delicate trade truce with China" prohibit it? The Treasury Secretary answered without saying the word China. A Yahoo Finance correspondent asked again, naming Chinese banks and shipping firms; he pivoted to the Treasury's bond-auction schedule and answered in generic language about no one being above sanctions. Asked twice about the single most consequential enforcement question of the day, he declined twice. That pattern is itself the finding.

He did volunteer one forward commitment: a "major financial institution" would be designated "by the end of this week." One was, and it was not nothing. On Friday the Treasury proposed cutting the United Arab Emirates operation of Banque Misr off from American correspondent accounts, and named the manager of Bank Melli's Dubai branch and a Hong Kong trading shell alongside it. Treasury did climb a rung. But it climbed the rung it could reach: the UAE operation of a major Egyptian state bank, not a mainland Chinese institution clearing Iran's oil trade. The banks that would actually hurt were left where they stood. The likely constraint is not hidden. The president is due to host Xi Jinping next month, his first US visit in more than a decade; the administration wants the trade truce intact and fears Chinese retaliation on the critical minerals that Western manufacturing runs on. An analyst at Tsinghua University, quoted this week, drew exactly the line we are drawing: if the sanctions stay limited to "individual companies and intermediaries, both sides may still keep the disagreement contained. But if it touches China's core financial institutions, the situation could become quite different."

That is the finding. China is not the target of this package. China is the constraint on it. The rung that would actually hurt has been identified, threatened and left unclimbed, because the country on the other end of it has leverage of its own. Beijing supplied the diplomatic half in return, calling the sanctions unlawful and vowing "all necessary measures", while, tellingly, saying nothing that would cost it the summit.

Six months of enforcement point where the package points. The US Navy has fired on and disabled Iranian-flagged tankers running the blockade, but has never boarded, seized, or fired on a Chinese-owned one. When a Chinese-owned tanker, the Rich Starry, tested the blockade this spring, it was left to turn itself back and, on a later run, to transit unhindered. That is the distinction we drew on 19 July, one of two tripwires we said would change the war: not a Chinese ship deterred, but a Chinese hull interdicted, the act that would force Beijing to answer. It remains uncrossed.

The strait, written down at last, almost

While Washington reached for the neighbours, Iran and Oman spent the week formalising the thing this newsletter has argued the strait has become: not an open waterway but a permissioned system, with a gate, a claimed toll, and two governments negotiating how to split what it might yield.

On 25 and 26 August, Iranian officials described a deal. A Revolutionary Guard spokesman said Iran and Oman had "reached agreements regarding the share of each country in the waters of the Strait and the share of Iran and Oman in its revenues." Iran's deputy foreign minister described the mechanics: a temporary two-way corridor about seven miles wide, ships entering the Gulf through Iranian waters and leaving through Omani, with a permanent replacement route to be negotiated within thirty to sixty days. This is the arrangement Iran has been building toward: a strait it administers, sorts and charges for, rather than one that simply reverts to being free.

Three disciplines keep this from being more than it is. First, Iran's own government does not speak with one voice about it: hours after the Guard announced agreement, a senior Iranian source told Reuters the deal was "not yet finalised" and the two sides were "still working on details." Second, the revenue claim runs ahead of the text. No rate has been published, no coordinates, no effective date, no instrument a shipowner could read; the "share of revenues" is asserted, not documented, and we have printed the toll that isn't for four months running (see the correction below). Third, and most simply, it is not a reopening. Iran's deputy foreign minister said in the same breath that "from a military standpoint, the Strait of Hormuz is closed," that no military vessels would pass, and that traffic, which remains near a handful of ships a day, has not resumed. When the American president claimed this week that "all mines" had been cleared from the strait and it was reopening, that same Iranian official dismissed it with the sharpest available test: "If that claim were true, why is no vessel passing through the strait?" Both capitals are describing a strait that neither the water nor the ship traffic confirms. Read neither as reopening nor as closure; read the instruments.

And the instrument, when it comes, needs a signature nobody can prove exists. The permanent route Iran and Oman must now negotiate is exactly the kind of arrangement that, by Iran's own constitutional practice, requires the Supreme Leader's acceptance. Mojtaba Khamenei has been the nominal Supreme Leader since his father was killed on the first day of the war, and he has not appeared in public since 28 February; a brief video offered in August as proof of life was assessed as likely pre-war footage. The institutional order Iran is building at the strait depends, at the top, on ratification from a Supreme Leader whose condition, control, and even current likeness cannot be verified outside the regime's inner circle.

The picture that leaves is two rival permission regimes contesting the same water. Iran and Oman are consolidating one of them, openly, on paper. The other was disclosed anonymously last month: a US-run corridor of nightly escorted convoys through Omani water, which the Central Command's own standing position denies exists. Both run through Omani consent. Both make volume claims the commercial tracking data cannot support, a symmetry we set out on 2 August and which still holds. And beneath both, the dominant mode of transit is neither: ships crossing dark, on no one's manifest, which we established in our 26 July radar analysis and which neither regime governs.

Behind the contest over who controls passage sits a quieter change in what Washington is willing to call success. Before the war a working strait meant ordinary commercial navigation at scale, no permission system, and passage nobody had to buy. The White House now describes the strait as reopened and under American control, counting nearly 1,500 vessels moved under US protection. It says so while the United States is still blockading it: the naval blockade declared on 14 July has never lifted, and freedom of navigation cannot describe water a navy is still blockading. And it says so of a strait that even the friendliest measure puts short of restoration: Goldman Sachs estimates Gulf exports have recovered to about two-thirds of their pre-war level, still some seven to eight million barrels a day below where they ran before. Iran's security chief said this week that Tehran was itself drawing up conditions for reopening the strait at mediators' request, ending the war among them: a waterway cannot be at once reopened and awaiting the terms on which it might reopen.

Washington has not left the strait. It may be leaving behind the requirement that the old strait return. The change that matters may not be who controls the water but what now counts as victory over it: a militarily supervised waterway running well below its pre-war commercial and legal baseline. We argued on 28 June that the strait had become a system the United States could punish but not reopen; what is new is not that restoration failed, but that the guarantor with the most to lose from conceding it has stopped acting as though restoration is required.

What Iran is aiming at

Rezaei's threat had the same address as the American package, made explicit. "We have not yet attacked any American economic interests," he said. "So far, we have only targeted military bases, but if they want to impose economic sanctions on us, the United States has oil and economic companies around Iran and elsewhere, and we will strike them." If neighbouring governments will not distance themselves from Washington, he said, Iran would harm their interests.

Two disciplines apply. Claims are not events: this is a threat, and our escalation triggers key to the classes of object actually struck, not to what either party says it may strike. And Tehran does not speak with one voice: the same days carried the president describing the country's condition as full-scale war and calling it time to end it from a position of strength, alongside the foreign minister dismissing the sanctions as a desperate rerun of old plans that will fail like the rest. Attribute each speaker. Never render it as "Tehran."

What is not in doubt is the address on the envelope. American economic interests around Iran are assets standing in other people's countries.

The persuasion runs alongside the threat. Rezaei used the same interview to claim Iran had sold seventy million barrels of oil in the past month or two, bypassing the blockade. That is about 1.17 million barrels a day against the 2.478 million a day OPEC recorded for Iranian production in July, in a window when Iranian crude in floating storage fell by only about twenty-five million barrels. It is not arithmetically impossible. It is also exactly the number a government would want neighbouring capitals to believe on the weekend it is asking them to sit out an economic war, which is a reason to place it beside the referent rather than adopt it.

The people being aimed at

Rank the parties in this war by their capacity to absorb a siege and the ordering is not the one the politics implies. The most exposed are not the belligerents. Qatar, nominally on the other side, watched Iranian strikes take roughly a sixth of Ras Laffan's capacity and has been buying American cargoes to cover contracts it can no longer fill. A country in that position does not want a winner; it wants the water working, which is why it has spent the month as a declared mediator of the corridor talks.

The states the siege actually runs through are the ones on the water. Oman co-designed the navigation framework for the strait and hosts the American backchannel with Tehran, and on 17 August was told the United States would bomb it if it got in the way; its foreign minister then called Tehran, not Washington, and affirmed a shared "sovereign responsibility over territorial waters". The United Arab Emirates suspended all trade and financial dealings with Iran on 19 August, five days before the American package, after accusing Iran of firing two ballistic missiles toward its waters; Iran called the accusation baseless, both missiles fell at sea, and no independent adjudication exists. No customs, central-bank or banking instrument has yet given the suspension effect, and the Emirates suspended trade once before, in March, and reversed it by late June: price the announcement, not the rupture, until an instrument appears. Iraq sits on both sides of the ledger, buying Iranian gas and electricity by pipeline while racing to build export capacity around the strait through Ceyhan, Baniyas and Aqaba, and last week asking Tehran for permission to move its own tankers, which Iran says it granted with no hull, count, volume or published permit attached. This week it was Iraq that reporting named as the likeliest place the United States shows how it squeezes Iran's trade partners.

And Pakistan and Turkey are the two governments whose levers Washington's own menu named: Pakistan's request to the Treasury for a currency swap line, Turkey's bid to rejoin the F-35 programme. Neither is a lever on Iran. Both are levers on partners. This week the traffic on them was visible: Pakistan's army chief was in Tehran, Iran's foreign minister was on the phone to him and to Qatar's prime minister, and Iran hosted Omani and Pakistani delegations together. The neighbours are not bystanders to this siege. They are its medium.

Below the states are the people with the least capacity of all. Roughly six thousand seafarers are still aboard some four hundred vessels behind the strait, and ninety-three crew have been abandoned outright by their owners at Iranian ports. We have reported that count three times. What is new is a clock: marine insurers have taken one and a half to two billion dollars in claims from around seventy damaged or lost vessels, and underwriters warn that a ship held long enough stops being delayed and becomes a total loss on paper. The threshold is twelve months' deprivation of use. The war opened on 28 February.

The hedges, and why coercing them makes more of them

Every one of those parties has spent this war building an instrument the guarantor did not authorise. Three American partners signed a mutual defence pact at Mecca on 7 August and the United States is not a party to it. Iran and Oman have now put a corridor and a revenue split on paper, and the United States is not in that text; it is the party Iran accuses of obstructing it. Saudi Arabia went looking for its own Red Sea coalition. Pakistan designated six overland routes into Iran. China issued a sovereign injunction blocking American sanctions enforcement on its own soil. India and South Korea stood up national marine war-risk pools, and Japan is weighing state reinsurance for tankers to keep Gulf oil moving. That last cluster is the quietest and possibly the most telling: when allies begin underwriting their own war risk, they have finished pricing the guarantee.

We set the standard for reading these on 23 August and it still holds. They produce concrete results or they were announcements. The pact produces joint exercises, a command structure and defence cooperation, or it was a communiqué. The corridor produces coordinates, a notice to mariners, a completed demining and a published tariff, or it was a photo opportunity.

But the direction of the loop is already visible. The siege produces hedging, because the parties who cannot absorb it have to find another way to keep their economies running. The hedging reads in Washington as defection and in Tehran as complicity. Both capitals answer defection with coercion aimed at the hedgers, because neither can aim it at the other. And coercion aimed at a country that is hedging because its guarantor stopped being sufficient is an argument for hedging harder.

That is not a claim about anyone's intentions. It is what the instruments do.

Correction: the toll that was not a toll. We have printed the Hormuz transit fee four times: as a "yuan toll claimed" on 29 March, as "up to $2 million per vessel" on 12 April crediting the Financial Times, as an established charge "in Chinese yuan" on 17 May crediting Lloyd's List, and as "reportedly $1-2 million" on 12 July with the note that Iran has never published a tariff. The figure never moved, but our confidence in it fell steadily across those four prints and we never told you that was happening. Our 17 May issue stated a charge as settled fact that we could not substantiate then and cannot substantiate now. No tariff has ever been published and the Strait Authority has never issued a fee schedule; the instrument Iran actually imposed is the mandatory Iranian-approved insurance every transiting vessel must carry, free for its first sixty days by design, with the document reserving the right to charge later. This week's Iran-Oman "share of revenues" claim is the same figure reaching for paper a fifth time; we are holding it to the same standard, and it has not met it yet.

Correction: General License X. Our 23 August issue said the waiver permitting sales of Iranian oil "expires around 21 August." That was the expiry written into the licence when the Treasury issued it on 22 June, so the date we printed was real. What we failed to report is that the licence no longer existed: OFAC revoked it on 7 July after Iranian attacks on three ships in under twenty-four hours, replacing it with General License X1, a wind-down that ran through 16 July. The instrument had been dead for seven weeks and we did not re-check it.

What would prove us wrong. We named these tests before the package landed; they run against the Treasury's own list, not our predictions, and we will report each outcome, including the ones that cost us.

  • A core Chinese bank. The "major financial institution" resolved on Friday as Banque Misr's UAE operation, not a mainland bank clearing Iran's oil. The reading holds; it breaks the day a designation reaches a bank that actually settles the trade.
  • An executed third-country penalty. Outcast's country-by-country "defined timelines" are an authority, not an action, until the first government is actually penalised for missing one.
  • A real toll at the strait. The Iran-Oman corridor becomes a revenue stream the day it produces coordinates, an effective date, a completed mine-clearance, a first acknowledged transit, and a published fee or one confirmed payment. Until then the toll is leverage, not a tollbooth.
  • The SPR repayment. The first exchange window opens this autumn; thirteen companies owe roughly 160 to 170 million barrels back by 2028. What matters is not the calendar but whether the word deferral appears, which in 2000 cost borrowers 3.3 million extra barrels.
  • War-risk cover. Our 2 August test: if the shooting stops and premiums drift back toward a quarter of one percent while passage is still contested, the premium was pricing the war all along and the permission regime we describe does not exist.
  • Rezaei's threat. A claim, not an event. It becomes a phase change only if the class of object actually struck changes.

Where the rest of this comes from

Our own work, cited above

  • 26 July, "What They Aren't Bombing" — the Hormuz radar analysis, the pre-registered Malacca test, and the target-selection pattern including Kuwait's spared oil terminals.
  • 19 July — the two named tripwires, including any US interdiction of a Chinese hull.
  • 28 June — the first statement of the argument that the strait had become a permissioned regime the United States could punish but not reopen.
  • 2 August, "Who Has to Prove It Happened" — the permission-regime argument, its falsifier, and the symmetric volume-claim test now applied to both capitals.
  • 9 August, "Where the Emergency Oil Went" — the SPR exchange programme worked through in full.
  • 23 August, "The Product Stopped Working" — the Mecca pact, the Iran-Oman framework, the Saudi Red Sea coalition, and both Malacca prints.
  • 24 August, "The Waiting" — the five tripwires; the first, on whether the sanctions package works, is reported resolved in this issue.
  • The Neka/Amirabad anchorage series is our own, from public satellite radar, validated against curator eye counts.

Primary documents and official statements

  • US Treasury, press release sb0613 (24 August) — Operation Economic Outcast: the five E.O. 13902 sectoral determinations, the near-sixty designations, the country-by-country enforcement mechanism, the general-licence suspensions and the Hormuz-toll-payment guidance
  • The Treasury Secretary's 24 August press conference and Q&A — the "cure period" admission, the refusal to set timelines, the two China-bank dodges, and "every branch of Bank Melli… shuttered and dark" (C-SPAN video; the "cure period" exchange also reported by Common Dreams and Yahoo News)
  • Human Rights Watch — the 7 March Tehran-area strikes were storage depots
  • Global Energy Monitor — Neka–Ray pipeline
  • UN COMTRADE, via Trading Economics — UAE direct exports to Iran, 2024

Reporting

Shipping and trade press

Iranian sources on Iranian subjects

These are interested parties. We report what they say about their own affairs and mark it as such.

  • Iran International — the fuel deficit and the conservation warning
  • Borna News — the Ports and Maritime Organization on northern-port share
  • AbdiMedia — Persian Gulf Star "in safe condition"
  • IRNA — Abadan's chief executive
  • Mehr News — Neka–Ray capacity · the deputy foreign minister on the corridor · Iran rejects the UAE missile claim
  • IRIB, via AFP, Reuters and the Jerusalem Post — Rezaei's 22 August interview

The NewsPlanetAI Brief is written by Mike C Singer, NewsPlanetAI Editorial, and delivered by email every Sunday. Research is AI-assisted; the reporting, verification and judgment are human.

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