Global (Page 29)

Israel’s technology sector has been generating layoff headlines for months, but the workforce has barely moved. What is happening underneath is a reallocation of jobs from one half of the industry to the other.

A survey by the Israel Innovation Authority and consultancy Zviran, conducted in the second half of June among 210 tech companies employing roughly 130,000 workers — more than 80% of the sector’s employees — found the total number of tech employees virtually unchanged, with companies still recruiting in significant numbers.

During the first half of the year, the surveyed companies hired an average of 8% of their workforce while laying off 2.8% and seeing another 4.3% leave voluntarily. Hiring above 8% against departures near 7% produces churn, not contraction — a lot of people changing seats without the room emptying.

The wider labor market points the same way: about 18,000 vacancies were recorded in the tech sector against roughly 15,000 job seekers, and the number of people employed in high-tech rose about 7% in the first quarter, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics. Employment in technology positions passed 600,000 in that quarter, a jump that broke three consecutive years of slowing job growth, and Israeli tech companies raised $4 billion over the same three months.

The split beneath the aggregate is the actual story. Software companies are streamlining rapidly in response to the AI shift, while hardware companies keep expanding and recruiting — the most striking gap in the survey. Software firms are the ones finding that AI tools compress the headcount needed per unit of output. Hardware firms, including the defense-adjacent manufacturers now running at capacity, need physical labor that no model replaces.

The currency is doing its own damage. The strong shekel squeezes Israeli companies earning revenue in foreign currencies while paying salaries locally: 17.6% of companies that carried out broad layoffs and 28% of those that reduced hiring cited exchange rates as a direct factor. Israeli growth companies with international operations recorded higher layoff rates than the local development centers of multinationals — a distinction that separates firms carrying their own cost base from those funded out of a global parent’s budget.

The forward-looking numbers are notably weaker than the trailing ones. Almost 37% of tech companies expect hiring volume in the second half of 2026 to fall below the first half, up from 23% in the previous survey. Planned hiring dropped from 7.2% to 5.9%, while among companies planning company-wide layoffs the planned layoff rate climbed from 4.1% to 6.4%. The outlook for the rest of the year is considerably more subdued.

Innovation Authority CEO Dror Bin said the survey shows Israeli tech is not in decline but in the middle of a deep structural change, with overall employment holding despite the uncertainty the layoff wave has created.

Earlier readings support that framing. A December survey covering roughly 80% of the sector’s employees found only 5% of companies cited AI implementation as a reason for layoffs, and in most of those cases it was a contributing factor rather than the sole one. Efficiency measures were the main driver, cited by 26% of companies. The pattern the Authority described was a sector entering a more measured phase: fewer new jobs posted, lower voluntary turnover, and workforce adjustments increasingly made through layoffs rather than natural attrition.

Pay tells the same story about who is scarce. The average high-tech salary hit a record NIS 38,467 in March, up 4.3% year over year, with programming salaries reaching NIS 40,117 — even as headcount stayed flat. Companies hiring fewer people are still bidding hard for a narrower set of engineers.

Israel recorded $85 billion in tech exports, $84 billion in exits and nearly $15 billion raised during 2025. For anyone tracking the sector from abroad, the takeaway from Tuesday’s survey is that the headline layoff count has been a poor proxy for what the industry is doing. The jobs are moving, not disappearing — and the second half will test whether that stays true.

JBizNews Desk | Tel Aviv

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Fenway Sports Group is not selling Liverpool. It is selling a piece of it. The Boston-based company that has controlled the English soccer club since 2010 has been negotiating to sell roughly a third of the club to an outside investor group — one that includes Amazon founder Jeff Bezos — for cash, while keeping majority control and day-to-day command of the operation. The stake under discussion is more than 30%, worth about £1.35 billion, or close to $1.8 billion.

The price sets the club’s total value at £4.4 billion, roughly $6 billion, which would rank among the largest deals the sport has seen. Sky News reported on August 10 that Fenway is preparing to announce the transaction as soon as this week. Nothing has been formally announced yet, and both sides have declined to discuss timing publicly.

The buyers are led by Amit Bhatia, a British businessman who is the son-in-law of Indian steel billionaire Lakshmi Mittal and who was previously a shareholder and vice-chairman at Queens Park Rangers before stepping away from that club earlier this summer. Bezos is the largest name attached to the group. Also participating is Eduardo Saverin, the Facebook co-founder, whose fortune is estimated above $32 billion. Fenway acknowledged the approach in a statement last month, saying an investment consortium led, managed and represented by Bhatia had expressed interest in a strategic minority investment in the club.

For Bezos, this would be a first. He looked at buying the Seattle Seahawks and the Washington Commanders in the past and walked away from both. Soccer has never been on his list. His participation says less about the sport than about the asset: top-tier European clubs are now traded the way infrastructure and media properties are, priced on global broadcast revenue, sponsorship reach and scarcity of supply.

The arithmetic behind Fenway’s side of the table is the part worth studying. The group bought Liverpool for £300 million in 2010, when the club was in financial distress. If the current deal closes at the reported valuation, the franchise has multiplied roughly fourteen times in sixteen years, and Fenway monetizes part of that gain without giving up the asset. The last comparison point is recent: when Dynasty Equity bought a small interest in 2023, the club was valued at more than £3.3 billion, about $4.5 billion. The new number is a third higher in under three years.

That trajectory explains the buyers as much as the seller. American money has been moving into English soccer steadily, and half of the Premier League’s 20 clubs are now primarily controlled by U.S.-based investors. One driver is availability — NFL and Major League Baseball franchises are increasingly closed to new buyers or simply unaffordable, while a Premier League club remains within reach for technology and finance fortunes. Rising American viewership of the sport has done the rest.

Liverpool supporters should temper expectations about what the cash buys on the field. The Premier League’s profitability and sustainability rules cap what clubs can lose against revenue, so an injection of this size does not translate into an open transfer budget. In practice the money tends to go toward stadium capacity, training facilities, debt reduction and balance-sheet cushion — the items that let a club compete with state-backed rivals without depending entirely on matchday and broadcast income.

There is a legitimate caution attached, and it has been voiced by soccer finance analysts since the report surfaced: investors of this size put money in to earn a return, and the presence of a group with this much capital raises the question of whether a minority position stays a minority position. Fenway retains control under the structure as described. Whether the same is true in five years is a separate matter.

What happens next is procedural but not automatic. Fenway must issue the announcement, the parties must sign definitive documents, and the incoming owners must clear the Premier League’s owners’ and directors’ test before the shares change hands. Until that sequence completes, the deal is an agreement in principle carried by reporting rather than a closed transaction. For Fenway, the fix to a familiar problem — how to fund a club competing against sovereign-backed budgets without selling it — is a partial sale that brings in outside billions and leaves the boardroom intact.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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President Donald Trump is publicly defending FIFA President Gianni Infantino after a plan to raise roughly $4.2 billion from private investors by selling part of FIFA’s World Cup commercial business collapsed under pressure from major soccer federations.

Trump said removing Infantino would be a “terrible mistake,” praising him for overseeing what the president described as an extraordinarily successful and profitable World Cup.

The dispute is fundamentally about who should profit from one of the world’s most valuable sporting properties.

Infantino had proposed creating a new commercial entity called FIFA Forward Enterprise, which would control commercial and event operations tied to the World Cup and other FIFA competitions.

Outside investors would have been allowed to purchase a non-controlling stake of as much as 20%.

FIFA valued the new business at about $20 billion, meaning a 20% sale could have raised approximately $4.2 billion.

Private investment firm Thrive Eternal, connected to Joshua Kushner’s Thrive Capital, was expected to be among the leading investors.

The plan immediately triggered resistance from powerful soccer organizations, including UEFA, Concacaf and the Asian Football Confederation.

Their objection was larger than the price.

For generations, FIFA’s biggest tournaments have been controlled by soccer’s governing institutions. Selling part of the commercial operation to private investors would have introduced shareholders whose financial returns could become intertwined with decisions involving television rights, sponsorships, ticketing and future tournaments.

Critics argued that FIFA was effectively putting a piece of the World Cup’s future revenue stream up for sale without adequately consulting the national and regional federations that make up the organization.

The backlash became intense enough that FIFA withdrew the proposal.

FIFA leadership subsequently acknowledged that the process should have been handled differently and promised a review, but the retreat did not end the controversy surrounding Infantino.

Several major federations have questioned his judgment, while some officials have openly called for new leadership.

Trump is now stepping directly into that fight.

The president’s support matters because Infantino has developed an unusually close relationship with the Trump administration, particularly during preparations for the 2026 World Cup hosted across the United States, Canada and Mexico.

The tournament also demonstrated why private investors were interested in FIFA’s commercial rights in the first place.

The World Cup has become a massive global business built around broadcasting, corporate sponsorships, hospitality, ticketing and licensing. Expanding the tournament to 48 teams and 104 matches increased the amount of inventory FIFA could sell to broadcasters and sponsors.

That creates a valuable stream of future revenue.

Private-equity investors routinely seek businesses with predictable cash flows that can be packaged, expanded and eventually sold or refinanced. FIFA’s commercial operation has many of those characteristics — except that it sits inside a nonprofit global governing body whose members do not necessarily view maximizing investor returns as its primary purpose.

That tension ultimately helped kill the transaction.

The failed $4.2 billion raise therefore leaves FIFA with a much larger question than whether Infantino survives the political backlash.

It must decide whether the World Cup should remain entirely controlled by soccer’s governing institutions or whether private capital should eventually receive a seat at the table in exchange for billions of dollars.

For now, the investors are out.

Infantino remains in.

And the president of the United States has made clear which side he is on.

JBizNews Desk | Washington & Zurich

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Cuba has run short of the oil that powers its electric plants, and it is replacing that supply with Chinese solar panels — fast enough that China now sends the island roughly 40 times the volume of panels it sent three years ago.

Chinese exports of solar panels to Cuba ran about $3 million in 2023. That figure reached $117 million in 2025, according to the energy research group Ember. Cuba has built dozens of solar parks with Chinese investment, under an agreement to open 92 across the country by 2028. Imports of Chinese photovoltaic panels have risen more than 1,800% in five years.

The turn toward renewable energy has helped the island absorb increased pressure from the United States, though it has not stopped the grid from failing.

How the oil disappeared

The crisis stems from a U.S.-imposed oil blockade enacted after January 2026, when Washington ousted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Venezuela had long been Cuba’s primary oil supplier, and imports from Mexico were halted as well under U.S. pressure. Washington authorized a single Russian tanker carrying 100,000 tons of crude in March; those reserves are long exhausted. Domestic production covers a fraction of demand, and emergency diesel generators have become largely unusable for lack of fuel.

The grid was fragile before any of that. Cuba’s electricity system runs on fuel-oil, diesel and gas thermoelectric plants, and most of the seven main plants forming the backbone of the national grid have operated for more than 40 years. Peak-hour deficits routinely exceed 2,000 megawatts against demand near 3,100 megawatts.

The result has been repeated total failures. The island suffered its sixth nationwide blackout of the year on the night of August 2, the eleventh since late 2024. There were two islandwide collapses in March and three in July, along with several partial outages, and rolling blackouts now run more than 20 hours a day in places. The Cuban government attributes the crisis to the U.S. embargo and oil restrictions; independent analysts point to a lack of domestic investment and poor economic management as the main drivers, compounded by chronic maintenance shortfalls.

What solar can and cannot do

Solar accounts for only about 9% of Cuba’s electricity generation, because the aging grid cannot efficiently absorb new capacity and lacks battery storage. Panels without storage produce during daylight hours and nothing after sunset — which is precisely when household demand peaks.

That is the limit on the strategy, and it is a physical one. Cuba can keep installing capacity, but until it can store the output and stabilize the network that carries it, the panels reduce daytime fuel burn rather than end the blackouts.

China’s side of the trade

China controls close to 80% of the global solar supply chain and has positioned itself as Cuba’s leading renewable energy partner while working through its own industrial overcapacity. That last clause is the commercial logic. Chinese manufacturers built far more panel capacity than global demand absorbs, and placing that output — through financing, donations and state-backed projects — serves both an industrial and a diplomatic purpose.

Beijing has extended other support as well, including $80 million and 60,000 tons of rice approved by Xi Jinping.

A crack in the state’s grip

The most interesting development for business readers is what the fuel shortage has forced Havana to permit. The government recently authorized its first foreign-backed fuel import venture and allowed nearly 200 Cuban businesses to take part in wholesale fuel distribution — a cautious opening of an energy sector the state has controlled tightly for decades.

Scarcity did what ideology would not. A government that could supply fuel through state channels had no reason to license private distributors; one that cannot has every reason.

For American companies, direct opportunity remains foreclosed by sanctions. The relevant lesson runs the other way. An economy whose grid fails eleven times in twenty months is a live demonstration of what happens when generating capacity ages past its service life and no capital goes in behind it — a scenario that utilities in the United States are now arguing about in the context of data center demand. The difference is capital availability, not physics.

Cuba’s solar buildout is real, and it is among the fastest anywhere. It is also a country installing the future while the present keeps going dark.

JBizNews Desk | Havana

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President Donald Trump said the United States has three ways to force an end to the Iran war, and that the one he likes best requires no new military action at all: let Iran run out of money.

Trump laid out the options in a pre-taped interview with Real America’s Voice that aired early Tuesday. The first is to do nothing and wait, on the argument that Iran’s economy fails on its own. The second is to strike Iran hard. The third, in his framing, is to beat Tehran economically — and he described that as something Washington is already doing.

The line that carried the interview was his description of the American position over Iran’s blocked assets. Trump said the United States controls the regime’s money, that there is a lot of it, and that he is Iran’s banker. He also said Iran cannot borrow.

In plain terms, that refers to Iranian government funds and reserves frozen in overseas accounts under U.S. sanctions, plus the banking restrictions that keep Iran from moving oil revenue through the international financial system. Tehran can still sell oil to buyers willing to take the risk, but converting those sales into usable hard currency is the choke point. Releasing blocked assets is one of the conditions Iran has attached to reopening the Strait of Hormuz.

Trump’s claims about how bad things are inside Iran should be read with care. He said the country is running 300 percent inflation, that its currency has almost no value, and that soldiers are not being paid and are leaving. Iranian inflation is severe, but his figures run higher than what his own administration officials have been giving reporters. That gap matters for anyone trying to judge how close the pressure campaign is to producing a result.

The timing of the interview also matters. It follows Trump’s Truth Social post on Monday saying he would demand Iran pay compensation for people the regime killed, as part of any future talks. That demand came after Tehran refused to reopen Hormuz unless Washington agreed to a list of conditions: lifting the naval blockade of Iranian ports, lifting sanctions, releasing blocked assets, withdrawing U.S. troops, and paying war damages. Trump’s compensation demand answers that with a mirror-image claim of his own.

Wire coverage read the week as a shift rather than a new plan. The pivot back to financial pressure comes as U.S. stockpiles of key weapons have thinned and as stop-start talks appear to have stalled again — and sanctions are a slow instrument, built to grind over years rather than end a shooting war on a schedule.

The enforcement side of the economic strategy is running in the meantime. Central Command said on Aug. 9 that U.S. forces had redirected 55 commercial vessels, disabled two ships and boarded two others under the naval blockade of Iranian ports, which was reinstated on July 14 after the ceasefire collapsed in early July. Those numbers are the practical expression of what Trump described in the interview: not strikes, but a cordon around Iran’s ability to move cargo and get paid for it.

The military option he named second is not hypothetical either. Central Command struck Iranian military targets for 13 straight days beginning July 11 and ending July 23, and Trump said on July 24 the military was ready for a far larger attack.

For businesses, the significance is what all this says about how long the disruption lasts. A negotiated reopening of Hormuz would restore the shipping route that normally carries about a fifth of the world’s traded oil. An economic-attrition strategy, by design, does not have an end date — it works by outlasting the other side. Companies with exposure to Gulf shipping, energy costs or Asia-Europe freight are pricing the difference between those two paths every day.

Trump gave no timetable for choosing among the three, and his description of Iranian negotiators as dishonest — he said they agree to terms and then deny it publicly — suggests he does not expect a fast diplomatic close. The two sides signed a memorandum of understanding on June 17, nearly four months after U.S. strikes began on Feb. 28, and it broke down in July.

What Trump is betting is that Iran’s finances give out before the world’s patience with closed shipping lanes does. Nothing in Tuesday’s interview indicated which way that race is running.

JBizNews Desk | Washington

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The U.S. military is about to start ordering missile interceptors by the thousands instead of by the dozens, because five months of war with Iran burned through a stockpile that took years to build and would take far longer to replace.

Army budget documents for fiscal 2027 reviewed by Fox News Digital call for a sharp increase in purchases of Patriot Advanced Capability-3 Missile Segment Enhancement interceptors, known as PAC-3 MSE, and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense interceptors, or THAAD — the two systems that shoot down incoming ballistic missiles. Patriot batteries cover troops, air bases and other high-value sites at shorter range; THAAD reaches higher and farther.

The scale of the change is easiest to see in the old numbers. Army records show PAC-3 MSE buys falling from 328 missiles in fiscal 2022 to 252 in fiscal 2023, 230 in fiscal 2024 and 214 in fiscal 2025, before the fiscal 2026 request funded 320. Meanwhile, the Army Requirements Oversight Council had quietly raised its acquisition objective for the same missile from 3,376 to 13,773 back in April 2025 — more than quadrupling what the service says it needs.

THAAD was thinner still. The Missile Defense Agency bought 11 interceptors in fiscal 2024 and 12 in fiscal 2025; the fiscal 2026 base request called for 25, with $317 million in additional mandatory funding adding 12 more for a total of 37. By fiscal 2027, with THAAD procurement shifted to the Army, the request supports 857 interceptors — 27 through regular funding and 830 through the Munitions Acceleration Council.

“The problem is 25 years of not buying enough munitions,” retired Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies told Fox News Digital.

What drained the shelves was a war that leaned on air defense harder than anything since the Gulf. American interceptors have been fired repeatedly to protect Israel, U.S. forces across the Middle East and Navy ships in the Red Sea. Reuters reported the Army has used virtually all of its Army Tactical Missile System and Precision Strike Missile inventories during five months of fighting with Iran, with Patriot and THAAD stocks also drawn down and slightly under half the global Tomahawk supply expended, according to one source. President Trump has pushed back on those accounts, saying the United States has more munitions than it needs and that American defense firms are producing at record levels while expanding plants and equipment.

For American manufacturers, this is the largest demand signal in a generation. Lockheed Martin builds both the PAC-3 MSE and the THAAD interceptor. The Pentagon has struck framework agreements with Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman to boost THAAD and PAC-3 output, including a Lockheed contract valued at nearly $59 billion to triple PAC-3 production by 2030 — though experts caution that congressional appropriations are what turn those frameworks into actual missiles. Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg went further this month, sending arms makers a memo giving them 21 days to submit plans for faster delivery and expanded capacity on critical systems, telling industry that multi-year development cycles no longer match what the military needs.

Ordering is the easy part. Interceptors depend on specialized production lines and a supplier web turning out rocket motors, seekers, guidance sets and energetics, none of which scales in a quarter. That makes the fiscal 2027 jump less an immediate refill than an attempt to build industrial capacity that can sustain higher output for years.

The reason for the urgency sits in the Pacific. A Heritage Foundation analysis estimates current annual production capacity at 620 PAC-3 MSE missiles and 96 THAAD interceptors, and puts the minimum viable inventory for a conflict with China at 7,082 PAC-3 MSE and 1,394 THAAD — several times what it estimates the U.S. holds today, with actual stockpile levels classified. At current production rates, the report calculates it would take between roughly nine and more than 80 years to reach those numbers depending on the system, and argues the window to close the gap is narrowing.

Report author Jim Fein, a defense industrial base researcher at Heritage, told Fox News Digital the shortage was foreseeable and traces to decades of budget tradeoffs in which other programs won out — decisions made both in Pentagon requests and in what Congress ultimately appropriated.

The mismatch also shows up in cost. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker noted in March that the U.S. has been firing $4 million Patriot interceptors at Iranian drones costing a fraction of that.

JBizNews Desk | Washington

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An American defense technology company will build the next batch of small attack drones that Israeli combat units carry into the field. Ondas Inc., the Nasdaq-listed autonomous systems firm headquartered in West Palm Beach, Florida, said Tuesday it won a multi-million-dollar strategic tender from the Israeli Ministry of Defense to develop and produce next-generation tactical attack drone capabilities under a program named “Digital Bat.”

The idea behind the program is straightforward: build a strike drone cheap enough that the army can hand them out to ordinary infantry units in large numbers, rather than treating each one as an expensive asset to be conserved. Ondas will lead development of a new generation of low-cost tactical attack drones designed for scalable deployment across frontline combat units.

What Ondas is contracted to deliver is not just an aircraft. The development work covers the full operational package — the aerial platform itself, the autonomous flight software, mission integration, systems engineering, production readiness, and compatibility with the military’s wider command-and-control environment. In practice, that means a soldier should be able to pull the drone out, send it toward a target, and have it work with the same digital systems the unit already uses.

Eric Brock, Ondas chairman and chief executive, framed the award as proof the company can now run large programs itself rather than supplying parts to someone else. He called it “an important validation of the defense technology platform we are building at Ondas.”

Israel’s defense establishment has been rebuilding its drone procurement from the ground up since the Swords of Iron war, and the shift is toward volume. An earlier tender for assault drones went to Israeli startup Xtend, and senior figures in the country’s defense industry have described the technology as still in its infancy — many expect assault drones to become the infantry equivalent of a grenade or a rocket launcher, a tool a soldier throws a few meters toward an enemy without needing line of sight.

Ondas has not won everything it bid on in Israel. Last month, two young Israeli startups, Kela and eyesAtop, beat Ondas for the separate Ministry of Defense tender covering the autonomous command-and-control platform for the Digital Bat program — effectively the national software layer that will manage future attack drone swarms. The Tuesday award gives Ondas the aircraft side of the same effort.

The company’s Israeli footprint is substantial and was assembled by acquisition. Ondas has bought Israeli firms including Airobotics, Iron Drone and Roboteam, giving it a combined aerial and ground robotics operation inside the country. It also holds contracted work tied to Israel’s Eastern Border Security Barrier through its 4M Defense demining unit. Across the group, Ondas now organizes its defense business into four areas: air defense and counter-drone systems, aerial intelligence, aerial attack, and unmanned ground systems, with AI-based command and mission software tying them together.

Brock tied the Israeli program directly to what is happening in Washington. He pointed to the U.S. Drone Dominance Program, a $1.1 billion initiative aimed at rapidly fielding low-cost unmanned systems including one-way attack drones, and said defense priorities are shifting fundamentally toward affordable autonomous systems that can be produced at scale. The same engineering and manufacturing base, in other words, is meant to serve both markets.

For investors, the timing matters. The award lands two days before Ondas reports quarterly results, and the stock has been on a run. Shares traded around $9.35 in premarket Tuesday, up roughly 8% over the week. The company closed Friday at $9.11 after climbing 21.6% the prior week, and faces a demanding second half: early revenue projections of about $68 million to $69 million for the reported quarter leave more than $405 million to be booked against its $406 million second-half target. Ondas has been stacking orders to get there, including a $50 million U.S. Army task order last week that lifted its Mistral subsidiary’s awards past $240 million under a multi-year lethal unmanned systems contract worth $982 million.

Neither Ondas nor the ministry disclosed a delivery timeline or unit quantities for Digital Bat.

JBizNews Desk | West Palm Beach

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Iran has handed control of its top security body to a man who has been the subject of an Interpol Red Notice for nearly two decades over the deadliest terrorist attack in Argentina’s history. Presidency spokesman Mehdi Tabatabaei announced Sunday that President Masoud Pezeshkian had appointed Mohsen Rezaei secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, following the resignation of Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr. Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei separately named Rezaei his own representative on the council, giving him two seats of authority in the same body.

Rezaei has been under an Interpol Red Notice since 2007 over the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, which killed 85 people. Argentine court records attribute the attack to Hezbollah operatives acting on Iranian orders, and the late prosecutor Alberto Nisman alleged in a 2006 indictment that the decision was taken at a meeting in Mashhad in August 1993. Argentine authorities have long alleged a planning role for Rezaei, who was IRGC commander at the time; he denies wrongdoing. Interpol’s General Assembly upheld the notices for Rezaei and five others at its 76th session after Argentina’s request.

Israel responded immediately. Its Foreign Ministry said Monday that the Iranian regime <cite index=”115-1″>“worships terror, rewards its architects” and elevates them to the highest levels of power.</cite>

Who he is

Rezaei, 71, commanded the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps from 1981 to 1997, through most of the Iran-Iraq war. He later spent more than two decades as secretary of Iran’s Expediency Discernment Council and served as vice president for economic affairs from 2021 to 2023 under Ebrahim Raisi. He holds a doctorate in economics from the University of Tehran. Since March he has served as military adviser to Mojtaba Khamenei, who succeeded his father as supreme leader after Ali Khamenei was killed at the outset of this year’s war. Rezaei has taken a hard line on the confrontation with Washington and voiced skepticism about negotiations.

A revolving door at the top

Rezaei is the second man to hold the post since Ali Larijani was assassinated by Israel in mid-March, during the early weeks of the war between the United States, Israel and Iran. Zolghadr had been in the job only since late March. The president formally chairs the council, but the secretary carries the greater operational influence, and no decision becomes binding until the supreme leader signs off.

Why it matters commercially

The timing is what businesses should note. Rezaei takes the post amid ongoing talks over the Strait of Hormuz, which Tehran has used as leverage through the months-long conflict with the United States and Israel. The secretary of the security council is the official who coordinates Iran’s negotiating posture across the presidency, the foreign ministry, the armed forces and the intelligence services. Installing a figure who has publicly doubted the value of talks changes the read on how quickly a Hormuz arrangement gets settled.

That question sits directly on top of global shipping economics. Roughly a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil moves through Hormuz, and war-risk insurance premiums for tankers in the Gulf have been the single largest swing factor in freight costs for the region this year. Every week of uncertainty over the strait is priced into charter rates, insurance and the delivered cost of crude and LNG reaching Asian and European buyers.

There is also a compliance dimension for anyone with international exposure. The IRGC, which Rezaei led for 16 years, is designated a terrorist organization by the United States. A sanctioned-entity veteran now sitting at the center of Iranian decision-making narrows the space for any commercial re-engagement with Tehran that European or Asian firms may have been contemplating as part of a settlement.

The legal reality

The Red Notice has never produced an arrest. Argentina asked Qatar to detain Rezaei during a visit in 2022 and made the same request of Nicaragua the year before, when he traveled there for President Daniel Ortega’s inauguration. Both requests failed, and more than three decades after the bombing no one has stood trial.

An Interpol notice does not compel any government to act. It is a request circulated among member states, and in Rezaei’s case it has functioned mainly as a diplomatic marker — one that now attaches to the office coordinating Iran’s negotiations with Washington.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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Hungary’s parliament elected András Baka as president on Tuesday, handing the office to a judge whose removal from the Supreme Court became one of the defining rule-of-law disputes of the Viktor Orbán era. Lawmakers approved his election by 140 votes to 6, using the more than two-thirds majority controlled by Prime Minister Péter Magyar, and Baka replaces Orbán-appointed Tamás Sulyok, who was removed from the presidency last month.

The presidency is largely ceremonial. The signal is not.

Who Baka is

Baka served as a judge at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg from 1991 to 2008. He was nominated to head Hungary’s Supreme Court in 2009 and ousted in 2012 after condemning an Orbán-era move to cut the mandatory retirement age for judges from 70 to 62, which he called a judicial purge. The European Union and the United States both called the age-limit reduction illegal, and in 2016 the European Court of Human Rights ruled that his dismissal violated his freedom of expression.

Apart from a brief stint as a lawmaker elected on the Hungarian Democratic Forum list in 1990, Baka has held no political positions. He is 73.

The political arithmetic

Magyar’s Tisza party won a landslide in April, ending Orbán’s 16-year run, and has since moved to unwind his influence over state institutions — including using a constitutional amendment to remove Sulyok from office weeks before nominating Baka. Tisza holds 141 of 199 seats in the National Assembly. Fidesz, now in opposition, boycotted the vote, accusing Tisza of authoritarian tactics, which the party denies.

The constitutional amendment that ended Sulyok’s term provides that the new president serves until a new constitution takes effect, or for a maximum of five years. Tisza has said it intends to adopt a new constitution within this parliamentary term and will consider allowing the president to be elected directly.

Why business is watching

Hungary spent the Orbán years in an extended standoff with Brussels over judicial independence and public procurement, and that dispute cost real money — billions of euros in EU cohesion and recovery funds held back pending rule-of-law changes. Elevating the judge whose dismissal Strasbourg ruled unlawful is the clearest possible statement that the new government intends to settle that argument on Brussels’ terms.

For companies operating in Hungary, the practical questions are narrower and more immediate. Predictable courts change how contracts are enforced, how procurement disputes get resolved, and how much legal risk a foreign investor prices into a Hungarian project. Hungary hosts substantial German automotive manufacturing and a growing battery sector, industries that commit capital on ten- and twenty-year horizons and that have spent years working around a legal environment Brussels flagged as unreliable.

Currency and borrowing costs sit downstream of the same question. The forint and Hungarian government debt have long traded partly on the state of the EU funding dispute, because those transfers are large relative to the size of the economy. A government that resolves the standoff removes a discount that has been priced into Hungarian assets for years.

What comes next

The presidency does not set economic policy, and Baka will not be negotiating with Brussels. What he provides is a signature and a symbol: a head of state who spent his career on the judicial-independence side of the argument, at the moment a government is preparing to rewrite the constitution.

The counterargument is already being made in Budapest. Critics note that removing Sulyok by constitutional amendment and installing Baka in his place uses the same procedural muscle Tisza condemned when Fidesz held the majority, complicating the party’s account of itself as a break from the previous era. A two-thirds majority rewriting the constitution is a two-thirds majority rewriting the constitution, whichever party holds it — and businesses that committed capital under one set of rules have reason to watch how quickly the next set arrives.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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President Trump has decided to stop bombing Iran and start starving it of money instead. He said Sunday that Washington will let its naval blockade and sanctions do the work of forcing Tehran to a deal, rather than launching another round of airstrikes. Traders read that as a signal the war is not ending soon — and on Monday oil jumped roughly 5%.

“We are just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money,” Trump said in an interview with Axios, adding that the blockade is deepening Tehran’s financial problems. “We are low keying it.” He also said the United States is “only semi-negotiating” with Iran over the Strait of Hormuz — a step back from his statement last week that the two sides were in talks.

The market reaction was immediate. West Texas Intermediate settled at $82.13 a barrel, up about 5%, and Brent crude finished around 5% higher at $87.72. That erases most of last week’s slide, when both benchmarks fell more than 7% after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNBC that an agreement to reopen Hormuz to free ship movement could come soon. No agreement has been announced, and both capitals have hardened their positions since.

The strategy Trump is returning to is the one he ran in his first term and revived in February 2025: cut off Iran’s oil sales, lock it out of the international banking system, and wait. What is different now is the blockade. A US naval cordon in place since April has stopped all crude exports from Kharg Island, Iran’s main oil terminal, with no tanker departures recorded for 11 straight days. Central Command said it has turned away 55 commercial vessels, disabled two and boarded two others.

The pressure is landing. Iran’s exchange rate has weakened nearly 50-fold since 2018, food prices are up more than 34-fold, and roughly 16 million people have dropped below the poverty line. The country also shed about 630,000 industrial jobs between the spring of 2025 and the spring of 2026, erasing eight years of employment gains. Inflation ran above 48% last October and above 42% in December.

Whether that pain translates into Iranian concessions is the open question, and so far the answer has been no. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Tehran is not holding direct talks with Washington and repeated that reopening Hormuz requires the US to lift the blockade and pay compensation for war damage. A senior Iranian security official said the waterway stays closed until those conditions are met, and Tehran also wants sanctions relief. In a further sign Tehran intends to hold out, Mohsen Rezaee — a former Revolutionary Guard commander who has argued for full Iranian control of the strait — was elevated to the country’s top security post.

For American businesses and drivers, the cost of the standoff is measured at the pump and in freight bills. Gasoline nationally is close to $4 a gallon and has risen more than 30% since the war began, which started with US and Israeli strikes on February 28. One estimate puts the additional fuel cost to the average American household at about $527 as of August 4, projected to reach roughly $650 by the end of summer.

The cushion the country has been leaning on is thinning. Crude held in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve has fallen below 300 million barrels, the lowest level since January 1983. Before the war, roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and natural gas moved through Hormuz, and the market has avoided a worse squeeze mainly because Chinese demand has been soft and emergency reserves have been released — buffers that are now close to exhausted.

Regional violence is keeping a floor under prices regardless of what happens in negotiations. A tanker operated by Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. was attacked near the strait over the weekend, and European diesel prices spiked after a strike on a Saudi refinery near the Red Sea. Houthi forces claimed responsibility for the attack on the Jizan facility. One forecast has Brent staying volatile in an $80-to-$90 range unless something breaks the current standoff.

That is the practical meaning of “low keying it” for American companies: fuel, freight and insurance costs stay where they are, and the calendar for relief is set in Tehran, not Washington.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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A new VIP lounge opened Monday morning at Ben Gurion Airport’s Terminal 3, in the duty-free area beside the synagogue — arriving roughly a month before the heaviest inbound travel weeks of the Jewish year.

The lounge runs about 250 square meters and is the first of two that Jetex, the Emirati aviation services group, will operate at Ben Gurion in partnership with LAYAM, part of Teddy Sagi’s group. The second, at roughly 370 square meters, is expected to open in the coming months, giving the two facilities a combined 620 square meters. It operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The menu is led by chef Eitan Mizrahi, formerly of the Royal Beach hotel in Tel Aviv, built around an interpretation of Israeli cooking, with desserts from pastry chef Dudu Otmezgine, Nespresso coffee and a bar stocked with international brands. The facility includes a cold buffet of cheeses and salads, a hot buffet with pizzas and burekas, and dedicated work and rest areas.

Who gets in

Premium-cabin passengers and eligible club members enter at no charge. Holders of American Express premium cards also enter free — but the physical card must be presented at the desk, and a card stored in a digital wallet will not be accepted. Guest entry follows the terms published by American Express. The arrangement falls under an exclusive credit-card agreement between American Express and Jetex.

Business-class passengers on foreign carriers operating at Ben Gurion, including Etihad, British Airways and Air France, also enter free, as do members of the Israeli Medical Association and other institutional partners of the group. Travelers without an entitlement can buy a single entry for $100 per person.

The question American travelers need to ask first

This is where readers flying in from New York should slow down. The American Express relationship in Israel runs through the local licensee, and Israeli reporting on Monday’s opening describes eligibility by card tier without specifying the country of issue.

When Jetex opened its earlier Ben Gurion lounge in partnership with American Express Israel, access was limited to Israeli-issued Platinum and Centurion cards. A U.S.-issued Platinum or Centurion card did not qualify, and neither did Priority Pass membership attached to it — a repeat of the situation at the former Dan Lounge, where American cardholders were routinely turned away at the desk. Priority Pass has not been accepted at Ben Gurion since January 2026.

Anyone counting on a U.S. Platinum card to cover a family’s pre-flight stop should confirm eligibility with American Express before arriving, rather than at the entrance with luggage and a boarding time. At $100 a head for walk-in entry, a family of four discovering the answer at the door is looking at $400.

The timing is the business story

Rosh Hashana begins at sundown on Friday, September 11, Yom Kippur falls on September 21, and Sukkot begins the evening of September 25 and runs through October 2. That sequence produces the densest concentration of inbound and outbound traffic Ben Gurion sees all year — three separate travel peaks inside three weeks, against a fixed number of seats on a route network that has still not fully recovered its pre-war carrier mix.

The consequence for travelers is familiar: fares to Tel Aviv climb steeply into that window, and the flights that remain available fill early. The consequence for the airport is congestion — long queues, packed terminals, and a premium on any space where a family can sit down. Opening a lounge in August rather than October is a commercial decision aimed squarely at that.

It also tells you something about who Jetex thinks the customer is. A Dubai-based operator of private terminals across more than 40 destinations does not enter Ben Gurion for the off-season. It enters for the weeks when demand outruns capacity and a $100 walk-in fee looks reasonable to a traveler facing a four-hour wait.

One practical note for the holiday itself: Ben Gurion effectively shuts down for Yom Kippur, and lounge service goes with it. Anyone booking around September 20 and 21 should plan on that.

The second lounge lands sometime in the coming months. Whether either one solves anything for the American traveler depends entirely on a detail that Monday’s announcements did not spell out — and that is worth a phone call before you rely on it.

JBizNews Desk | Tel Aviv

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