Iran's War Cabinet Speaks While Its Supreme Leader Does Not

Trump's ceasefire is dead twice now, first Tuesday and again overnight, and the exchange itself has stopped being the news. What matters this morning is absence: Mojtaba Khamenei, the successor whose command structure this column credited Thursday for keeping Iran's retaliation coordinated rather than scattered, did not appear at his own father's funeral. The New York Times frames it as health speculation. Read from here, it is the first hard data point against Thursday's chain of command call, and this column will hold that call until Tehran produces him in public. Bloomberg has crude steadying even as fighting flared, meaning tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz still treats the war as contained rather than regional. Washington's own strategy is thinner than the strikes suggest, the Times' Plan C piece notes the administration has no answer for why bombing plus sanctions produces a different result than the first round did. Away from the Gulf, Apple's suit accusing OpenAI of trade secret theft by a former employee is the one to read twice, it is the first litigation to test how enforceable AI talent lockups actually are. Watch for Mojtaba's next public appearance, or its absence, by Monday.