Iran: One Word Away From a Deal, One Strike Away From Collapse
The fragile US-Iran ceasefire agreed on April 9 wobbled dangerously on Monday when the US Navy launched what it called “self-defense strikes” against Iranian vessels in the Strait of Hormuz — even as Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters in India that a final memorandum of understanding was down to disagreements over “a word, a sentence.” Tehran immediately accused Washington of “a clear violation of the ceasefire” and threatened retaliation. (NBC News, NPR)
The proposed MOU would kick off a 60-day process covering Iran’s nuclear program, sanctions-relief timing, and the formal reopening of the Strait. Trump claimed on May 23 that the deal was “largely negotiated” and would be announced “soon” — but Iran’s state media insists the waterway will remain under Iranian supervision regardless of any agreement, undercutting the US account of what has actually been agreed. (CNBC, Al Jazeera)
CNN’s breakdown of the proposed deal frames the Hormuz question as the hardest knot: Washington wants a multilateral oversight mechanism; Tehran wants sovereignty reaffirmed. With roughly one-fifth of global LNG effectively offline since the blockade began and the ceasefire already having been tested before, the gap between “a word” and “a deal” is doing serious macroeconomic work. (CNN)
Anthropic Signals Mythos Public Launch — When Safeguards Catch Up
Anthropic confirmed on May 25 that it intends to eventually make Mythos-class models available to the general public, but declined to give any timeline — because, in Anthropic’s own words, “no company — including Anthropic — has developed safeguards strong enough to prevent such models from being misused.” The disclosure came via a The Register report noting that the claude-mythos-1-preview model string has begun appearing in Claude Code and Claude Security UI strings, with at least one user briefly seeing a toggle before it was pulled. (The Register, gHacks)
Since Mythos Preview launched in early April via Project Glasswing, roughly 50 partner organizations have used it to surface more than 10,000 high- or critical-severity vulnerabilities in widely deployed software. One concrete recent find: a certificate-forgery flaw in wolfSSL, now patched, with Anthropic promising a full technical writeup. (Cyber Security News, BleepingComputer)
The model string leak and the public statement together look less like an accidental reveal and more like expectation management: yes, this is coming; no, not yet. Independent analysts put limited enterprise access no earlier than late 2026, broader availability in 2027 or later. (TechTimes)
Xi and Putin: 40 Agreements and a Joint Dig at the “Golden Dome”
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s two-day state visit to Beijing on May 19–20 — his 25th trip to China — produced more than 40 cooperation agreements spanning trade, energy, technology, and media, plus an extension of the 2001 Sino-Russian Treaty of Friendship. The two leaders jointly declared that the world risks returning to “the law of the jungle,” a phrase leveled squarely at what they framed as US-led unilateralism. (NPR, CNBC, China MFA)
Their joint statement specifically called out Trump’s proposed $175 billion “Golden Dome” missile-defense architecture as a destabilizing development. On the energy side, Russia’s oil exports to China grew 35 percent in Q1 2026; ongoing Power of Siberia pipeline expansion talks remain one of the few unresolved bilaterals. (Al Jazeera, China-Global South Project)
Shenzhou-23 Docks at Tiangong: History in Hong Kong’s Name
China’s Shenzhou-23 spacecraft docked at the Tiangong space station at 2:45 a.m. Beijing Time on May 25, completing a six-hour journey from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center. The mission is historic on two counts: payload specialist Lai Ka-ying (Li Jiaying in Mandarin) — a 43-year-old former Hong Kong Police superintendent and computer-forensics specialist with a doctorate from the University of Hong Kong — became the first person from Hong Kong to reach orbit and China’s fourth female space traveler. (PBS News, NPR)
The mission also inaugurates China’s first attempt at a year-long continuous human spaceflight, with one crewmember scheduled for roughly 12 months aboard Tiangong — a duration milestone that moves China measurably closer to the endurance benchmarks required for its stated goal of landing astronauts on the Moon before 2030. (TechTimes, Orbital Today, Hong Kong Free Press)