Nine months into the second Babiš government, Czech politics has settled into a pattern that neither its supporters nor its opponents predicted in October 2025. The coalition has not collapsed. It has also not delivered the rupture with Brussels and Kyiv that its campaign promised. What has emerged instead is a government that concedes on substance while holding the rhetorical line, and a presidency that has turned a largely ceremonial office into the main institutional check on the cabinet.

Disney’s investment in OpenAI, reported at around a billion dollars, has been discussed mostly as a content deal. Legal scholars looking at it have raised a different concern, and it deserves more attention than the headline number. The worry is enclosure. When the largest content owners sign exclusive or near-exclusive arrangements with the largest AI companies, the effect isn’t just a transfer of money. It removes material from the pool available to everyone else and raises the entry price for anyone trying to build a competing system.

The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December 2023, alleging that millions of its articles were used without permission to train generative models. The case survived motions to dismiss and moved into discovery, and in January a judge affirmed an order compelling OpenAI to produce a sample of twenty million ChatGPT user conversations. The copyright question is what everyone is watching. The discovery order is what will matter longest.

The market spent most of this week pricing in a reopening. Then Fars published the draft, and the trade unwound in about an hour. Brent settled Thursday at $82.49, up 3.8%. WTI closed at $77.29, up 2.8%. Friday morning added another 1.25% on Brent and 1.10% on WTI, putting the international benchmark near $83.50. That still leaves the week down roughly 8%, because Monday and Tuesday were spent on the assumption that a deal was imminent.

The United States spent four months building a legal and moral case against tolls in the Strait of Hormuz. On June 24, Trump called any fee on transiting shipping unacceptable. Marco Rubio, asked about the distinction between a fee and a toll, said there wasn’t one — it was an international waterway, and no nation on Earth supported paying to cross it. Washington told the Gulf states, told Singapore, told the European Commission, and told Beijing that the principle was not negotiable.

Strip away the flattery and the F-35 headlines from this week’s Ankara summit, and a narrower, more concrete objective sits underneath everything Trump is offering Erdogan: unblocking the Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline. The jet talk is the part that makes headlines. The pipeline is the part that actually protects Trump from a repeat of the Hormuz shock that nearly cost him the midterms. The blockade Trump cannot afford to relive Iran’s closure of the Strait at the outset of the February war sent oil prices spiking more than 70 percent, and the fear of that blockade dragging into November is what pushed Trump toward a ceasefire in the first place.

Here is the number that ought to frame every story written about Tuesday night, and won’t. Claire Valdez is now the Democratic nominee for New York’s 7th Congressional District, which means — in a district this blue, where the November election is a coronation — she is effectively the next member of Congress for some 770,000 people. She earned that with roughly 37,000 votes. Across the whole city, turnout limped in around 420,000, against more than a million in last year’s mayoral primary.

The British constitution is about to do the thing it does best and explain least. A prime minister who won a landslide twenty-three months ago is preparing to leave office, and not one voter will be asked to ratify his replacement. Labour’s 2024 majority was never Keir Starmer’s personal property. It belongs to the party, and the party can hand it to whomever it likes. This is not a loophole. It is the system working as designed, and it is the reason the Conservatives are spectators to a drama that decides who governs them.

The US-Iran deal is not a market mover in the usual sense. It is a rotation. Two premiums that had been pricing the same war collapsed at once — the energy premium embedded in crude and the geopolitical risk premium embedded in equities — and they unwound in the same session. For everything except one sector, the two forces pulled in the same direction, and the result was one of the sharpest risk-on moves of the year.

The TACO trade has gone kinetic. Trump Always Chickens Out began as a Wall Street acronym for tariff threats that evaporated on contact with the bond market. It now describes American Gulf policy. On Tuesday, President Trump struck Iran to “restore leverage.” On Thursday, he canceled the follow-on strikes, announced that Iran’s leadership had “approved” a draft agreement, and began planning a signing ceremony for the weekend. Iran’s foreign ministry responded that Tehran had “not yet reached a final decision.