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THE PRICE HE CAN’T EXPLAIN
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told reporters at a White House address Thursday that he could not explain why oil prices were spiking. “We’ve got a spike in oil prices today that I don’t really understand,” he said, as Brent crude traded around $93.78 a barrel, up 2.4 percent from the prior close and already near that level by mid-morning. Earlier the same day, in a separate interview with CNBC, Bessent had announced the US would impose its toughest-ever sanctions against Iran, comparing the strategy to the blockade the US used against Venezuela. He said the administration likely would not restart large-scale combat operations as it ramped up economic pressure instead.
Bessent’s confusion arrived at the end of a three-day escalation he was personally part of. Iran pledged Tuesday that the Strait of Hormuz would remain closed. Trump posted to Truth Social Wednesday threatening what he called the most crushing economic operation ever taken against any country, and a White House source told Politico the administration had decided to pivot from military escalation toward economic pressure. Bessent’s own CNBC appearance Thursday morning, promising the toughest sanctions in history, was the next step in that same pivot. Asked to square that with the price spike, Bessent said his own economic actions would bring prices down soon, attributing to his own policy the eventual fix for a problem he’d just said he didn’t understand the cause of.
Thursday’s remark fits a longer pattern of Bessent publicly predicting oil relief that hasn’t arrived. At a May 28 Cabinet meeting, he called oil costs temporary and pledged that prices would fall below pre-conflict levels once the war ended. A Reuters photographer captured his notepad from that meeting with the words “Resilience” and “Operation Economic Fury” written on it. On August 4, Bessent told CNBC a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz might arrive within a day, and Brent fell 5.3 percent to $79.36 on the expectation. No deal materialized. Brent has since climbed roughly $14 a barrel from that low, to Thursday’s $93.78.
Bessent has also drawn direct criticism for how he’s used sanctions policy itself as a price lever. In March, he told Fox Business the US might unsanction Iranian oil already at sea, roughly 140 million barrels, explicitly to hold prices down for one to two weeks while the broader pressure campaign continued. When NBC’s Kristen Welker pressed him on air about Iran collecting billions in revenue from that unsanctioned oil, Bessent dismissed her framing as inaccurate. Brent spiked 10 percent in 24 hours around the same period, reaching roughly $111 a barrel, nearly 60 percent above pre-war levels.
🇺🇸 What American readers need to know: The Treasury Secretary responsible for the sanctions and economic-pressure strategy driving oil prices told the country today he doesn’t understand why oil prices are high, then in the same breath credited his own policy with the eventual fix. This is at least the third time since March he has publicly predicted oil relief that didn’t arrive on schedule. Every one of those predictions has been wrong in the same direction: prices stayed higher, longer, than he said they would.
Sources: Raw Story (US — Bessent’s “don’t really understand” quote, CNBC price figure, Trump’s economic-operation post, Politico source detail); HuffPost (US — Bessent’s follow-up remark on economic action, war-to-Hormuz-closure context); CNBC (US — toughest-sanctions announcement, Venezuela blockade comparison, no-large-scale-combat statement); TheStreet (US — May 28 Cabinet meeting detail, “transitory” pledge, “Operation Economic Fury” notepad detail, Reuters photographer credit); CNBC via August 4 report (US — August 4 Hormuz deal prediction, $79.36 close detail); Axios (US — March unsanctioning detail, 140 million barrel figure, $111 price peak); Fox News (US — Welker exchange detail)
THE DEADLIEST DAY IN ZAMBOYE
More than 100 people were killed when an artisanal gold mine collapsed Tuesday in the village of Zamboye, in the Central African Republic’s Nana-Mambere prefecture near the border with Cameroon. A local prosecutor confirmed the collapse and opened a judicial inquiry; officials and Red Cross volunteers said the death toll would likely climb further, since several people remained missing under the rubble as of Thursday.
The mine’s underground tunnels, dug by hand with no engineering support, gave way Tuesday afternoon. Miner Cedric Mbango, who was at the site, called the collapse “catastrophic,” describing the ground giving way beneath workers with no warning. Miner Jérémie Ngbiri, who lost his brother and a friend in the collapse, said he watched some of the trapped miners suffocate as rescuers tried and failed to reach them in time. “The rescue effort is being organized, but it is not up to the task,” Ngbiri said. Red Cross volunteer Gervais Ganagoro said his team recovered more than 10 additional bodies Thursday morning alone but could not say how many people remained buried. At least four of the dead were Cameroonian nationals, according to Cameroon’s own press.
Souleymane Bi, deputy mayor of Nana-Mambere prefecture, called the disaster “horrible” and appealed for international assistance. Local workers told reporters the rescue effort lacks the heavy equipment and technical expertise a disaster of this scale requires, meaning recovery has depended largely on hand tools and manual labor, the same conditions that caused the collapse in the first place.
Zamboye is the deadliest in a pattern of mine disasters that has become almost routine in the Central African Republic this year. A collapse in June killed dozens at the Be-Mbari gold mining site, also near the Cameroon border. In March, a landslide killed seven people at a mine in Ngourroum, in the country’s west. Artisanal, small-scale mining employs thousands of people across CAR and much of sub-Saharan Africa, operating almost entirely outside government safety oversight, in a country where gold mining offers some of the only available income in a fragile, conflict-affected economy.
🌍 TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: France 24 and Al Jazeera’s coverage treated Zamboye not as an isolated tragedy but as the latest, deadliest data point in a structural problem. Regional and international outlets have documented for years that artisanal mining across CAR functions almost entirely without formal safety regulation, because the alternative for most workers is no income at all. That framing, disaster as the predictable output of a system rather than a freak accident, is largely how the story has been covered by outlets close to the region. American wire coverage has generally treated each CAR mine collapse as a standalone incident rather than connecting them, even though this is at least the third such collapse in CAR since March.
🇺🇸 What American readers need to know: More than 100 people are dead in one of the deadliest mining disasters anywhere in the world this year. It happened in a country most Americans could not find on a map, doing work most Americans will never see, for gold that may well end up in a product an American eventually buys. This is the third such collapse in the Central African Republic since March.
Sources: France 24 via AFP (France, public broadcaster — initial death toll, prosecutor confirmation, judicial inquiry); NBC News via AP (US wire — Ganagoroh Red Cross detail, updated toll); ABC News via AP (US wire — Ngbiri quote, ongoing recovery detail, equipment shortage); RTE via AFP (Ireland — Mbango quote, Cameroonian victim count, Ngon Baba statement); Al Jazeera (Qatar, state-funded/editorially independent — Bi quote, June and March prior-collapse detail, structural mining-sector context)
NOBODY ASKED TO BE FLATTERED
North Korea’s response to Trump’s decision to scale back military exercises with South Korea, delivered Wednesday by Kim Jong Un’s sister and senior official Kim Yo Jong, was not gratitude. It was closer to a shrug. “We think it’s not worth making comments on that,” she said in a statement carried by state media, dismissing the reduced drills as irrelevant to North Korea’s position. She also denied Trump’s own recent claims that he and her brother have been in direct contact.
Trump ordered the Pentagon to “substantially reduce” the joint Ulchi Freedom Shield exercises in a Sunday social media post, saying the drills sent an inappropriate and hostile signal toward North Korea, which he described as having treated him well throughout his presidency. He cited South Korea’s refusal to join the US-Israeli war against Iran, saying he’d asked South Korean President Lee Jae Myung directly whether Seoul would help with “denuclearization” of Iran and been turned down. South Korean officials said the announcement came without advance notice, catching Seoul off guard and raising concerns inside the government about joint defense readiness. The drills, originally scheduled to run through August 27, will now end Friday.
The domestic reaction inside South Korea split sharply along political lines. President Lee’s office initially struck a conciliatory tone, saying it “sympathised” with Trump’s stated goals and expressing hope that warmer Trump-Kim relations might eventually produce genuine dialogue between Washington and Pyongyang. That drew immediate criticism from conservative opposition figures, who accused the government of prioritizing diplomacy with Kim over its own security. Park Chung-kwon, a spokesperson for the opposition People Power Party, said South Korea’s “security bulwark is being shaken to its very foundations.” Retired Lt. Gen. Chun In-bum, former commander of South Korea’s Special Warfare Command, was blunter about who benefits. “North Korea and China would be the ones most pleased by this,” he said.
North Korea’s own state media outlet KCNA had called the exercises “the most immediate and open threat” to Pyongyang and regional security just before the scale-back was announced, an escalation in rhetoric that made Kim Yo Jong’s dismissive follow-up statement notable by contrast. North Korea is widely believed to be supplying weapons to Iran and troops to Russia’s war in Ukraine, the same pattern of dual military entanglement this space reported on Tuesday night.
🌍 TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: Euronews’s coverage of Kim Yo Jong’s statement highlighted a detail that shaped European framing of the story more than American coverage. Her denial that any direct Trump-Kim contact has occurred at all contradicts Trump’s own repeated public claims of a personal relationship and recent communication with Kim. Euronews treated that contradiction, about the two men’s relationship itself, not just policy, as the more significant story than the drill reduction. US wire coverage largely led with the drills and treated the denial as a secondary detail.
🇺🇸 What American readers need to know: The president scaled back a major military exercise with a treaty ally, citing a friendly relationship with North Korea’s dictator, and North Korea’s own government just publicly denied that relationship exists in the terms Trump has described. South Korea, the ally actually affected, is now politically split over whether to trust the reasoning behind a decision it wasn’t consulted on.
Sources: Euronews via AP (European, broadly centrist — Kim Yo Jong statement, contact denial, KCNA “immediate and open threat” quote); PBS NewsHour via AP (US wire — Kim Yo Jong full statement, drill timeline); NBC News (US — Chun In-bum quote, regional vulnerability framing); NPR (US — Lee’s office statement, Park Chung-kwon quote, conservative backlash); CNN (US — Lee’s “No thanks” account, Trump’s denuclearization request detail); NPR (Sunday order coverage) (US — Trump’s “substantially reduce” order, Truth Social post language)
THE LOOPHOLE NOBODY CLOSED
A New York Times investigation published Thursday found the Bureau of Land Management is quietly selling thousands of federally protected wild horses to buyers, including one in Ohio, who then quickly resell the animals to be exported alive, slaughtered abroad, and sold as meat. Slaughtering wild horses inside the US remains illegal. The Times’ examination of government records found the bureau’s own sale practices create a loophole that lets buyers acquire mustangs cheaply and route them out of the country almost immediately.
The finding lands months after Congress rejected a more direct version of the same threat. The Trump administration’s fiscal year 2026 budget proposal had sought to eliminate the longstanding congressional rider that bars the BLM from selling or killing healthy wild horses in a way that results in slaughter. Watchdog groups warned the move could have endangered up to 64,000 animals currently held in government facilities. The House Appropriations Committee restored that protective language after bipartisan pushback, including from Nevada Democratic Rep. Dina Titus. The formal policy fight was won by the horses. The Times’ reporting suggests the practical one was not.
Clare Staples, founder of Skydog Sanctuary, sent a formal letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum Thursday morning demanding an immediate suspension of the BLM’s sale program. She told the Times the bureau says publicly that slaughter is off the table while, in her view, doing the opposite in plain sight. “The only ones getting punished for what is going on are the horses,” Staples said. The BLM said in a statement that it “remains dedicated to placing animals into good homes” and upholding its legal responsibilities.
This is not the first time BLM’s own sale and adoption practices have been documented funneling protected horses toward slaughter. A 2015 Interior Department inspector general investigation found the bureau had sold nearly 1,800 wild horses to a single known kill buyer in Colorado between 2008 and 2012; federal and state prosecutors both declined to bring charges. A separate scandal involving BLM’s Adoption Incentive Program surfaced in 2021, when the Times reported “truckloads” of adopted horses were turning up at slaughter-linked auctions.
🇺🇸 What American readers need to know: Congress already said no to letting the government kill or sell wild horses for slaughter. A New York Times investigation found the government doing it anyway, through a sale process advocates say functions as a workaround Congress never approved. This has happened before, under both parties, without consequence for the agency involved.
Sources: Joe.My.God summarizing New York Times investigation (US — Ohio buyer detail, loophole mechanism, BLM statement); PR Newswire via Skydog Sanctuary (US, advocacy press release — Staples quote and letter to Burgum, confirmed independently via Times reporting cited); Nevada Current via Yahoo (US — House Appropriations Committee reversal, Titus statement, budget proposal detail); American Wild Horse Conservation (US, advocacy organization, primary account — 2015 OIG investigation detail, Colorado kill-buyer case)
NUMBERS AT PUBLICATION
🇮🇷 Iran: 3,636 killed
🇱🇧 Lebanon: 4,333 killed
🇮🇱 Israel: 1,200+ killed, ~5,400 wounded (includes 472 killed, 3,004 wounded in Gaza)
🇺🇸 US military: 18 killed, 687 wounded
🇵🇸 Gaza: 73,399+ Palestinians killed, 174,310 wounded
🛢️ Brent crude: $93.22/barrel
⛽ US gas: $4.10/gallon
Sources: HRANA (Iran), Lebanon MOPH, INSS (Israel), DCAS (US, disputed — see Aug 4 story), OCHA/Haaretz (Gaza), OilPrice.com, AAA.
“Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government.” — Thomas Jefferson, 1789
