Hormuz Prices, Iran Threats, Gas at $4.23, April 29

Fears are not abstract: oil is near $116, refineries are sprinting, and a US president is threatening a nuclear state while a king flies to New York. Energy and war have fused into one feedback loop.

🇬🇧 Two Jewish men stabbed in Golders Green, north London, in a suspected antisemitic attack. Counter-terrorism police lead the investigation. Starmer calls it appalling. (The Guardian)
🇱🇧 Israeli double-tap strike kills three rescue workers in Lebanon, officials say, among five killed in successive attacks. Another strike kills five family members. (BBC News, Al Jazeera)
🇨🇴 Colombia holds elections as violence surges again and candidates divide on how to handle guerrilla attacks, four years after the total peace promise. (The Guardian)

The good news of a world recovering, a peace deal holding, a city feeling safe — none of it is holding.

Quiet.

A man is dead in his own country because he went to help. A man is stabbed on a London street because he wore a kippah. A candidate in Bogota says the peace deal failed while the paramilitaries take another village. And at 11am in Golders Green, the day was normal until a blade. At 11am south Lebanon, another extraction run, another double tap. At 11am the refineries in Grangemouth got the call: max out the jet fuel. The afternoon was lost to planning a war.

The connection nobody drew: the Golders Green stabbing and the rescue workers in Lebanon are the same story. In both, the attack is not just on bodies but on the idea that some places are not targets — a synagogue, an ambulance. When those become coordinates, there is no safe category left. The sharp end of an oil war and the sharp end of a knife are the same geometry: one group decides another group is no longer inside the circle of protection.

So here we are. Brent at $116.40. A president threatening a nation that may soon have to cut its own production because the Strait is too tight. A king at Ground Zero. A London street under barrier tape. A Colombian election where peace is a losing platform. And the only good news: rain fell on the Huwaizah Marshes in Iraq, bringing life back after years of drought. Water returned to a place that was dying. Which is to say — the planet does not do war. It does spring. It does not care who wins.