The United States and Iran are closing in on a one-page memorandum of understanding that would declare an end to the war and begin thirty days of detailed negotiations, Axios reported. The fourteen-point document, negotiated through Pakistani mediators by Trump envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, would commit Iran to a moratorium on uranium enrichment, the removal of its highly enriched uranium from the country, and an enhanced inspections regime including snap inspections by United Nations monitors. In return, the United States would gradually lift sanctions and release billions in frozen Iranian funds. Both sides would ease their restrictions on shipping through the Strait of Hormuz during the thirty-day negotiation period.
The duration of the enrichment moratorium remains the central sticking point. Iran proposed five years. The United States demanded twenty. Three officials told Axios the number would land at no fewer than twelve years, with one source putting fifteen as the likely figure. Nothing has been signed. Iran’s foreign ministry said Wednesday it hadn’t yet delivered its response to mediators, Al Jazeera reported.
President Trump told the New York Post it was “too soon” to prepare for a signing, CBS News reported. He also posted on Truth Social that if Iran doesn’t agree, “the bombing starts, and it will be, sadly, at a much higher level and intensity than it was before,” CNBC reported.
If the framework holds, it will follow a pattern. In 2015, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action began as a similar short document: a political framework between Iran and six world powers that set the terms for a longer negotiation. That deal included a fifteen-year enrichment limit. The United States withdrew from it in 2018. Eight years later, negotiators are trying to rebuild what was dismantled, on a tighter timeline and with a war to end first.
Wall Street responded before any diplomats did. The S&P 500 closed above 7,300 for the first time in its history, finishing at 7,365.12, up 1.46 percent. The Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 612 points to close at 49,910.59. The Nasdaq Composite rose 2.02 percent to 25,838.94, CNBC reported. All three indexes set records.
U.S. crude oil fell 7 percent to $95.08 per barrel. Brent crude dropped 7.8 percent to $101.27, CNBC reported. Oil, like equity markets, is pricing in a future that hasn’t arrived yet. In April 2020, U.S. crude briefly traded below zero. In March 2022, after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Brent hit $139. The commodity moves on expectations and corrects on reality. Whether this drop holds depends on whether the memo becomes an agreement.
The national average price of gasoline reached $4.54 per gallon on Wednesday, the highest in nearly four years, NBC News reported. The price has risen 31 cents in the past week and has increased more than 50 percent since the war with Iran began in February, NPR reported.
The Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil passes, has been effectively closed for sixty-seven days. That number matters more than any diplomatic memo. The strait is the bottleneck. Until it reopens, the pressure on fuel prices will continue regardless of what happens at the negotiating table. Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear signed an executive order freezing his state’s gas tax to eliminate a scheduled summer increase. He isn’t the only governor looking at the pump numbers and deciding that gasoline politics have arrived at his desk.
The last time the national average was higher was June 2022, when it briefly topped five dollars during the early months of the Russia-Ukraine war. The cause was different. The mechanism was the same: a disruption in global oil supply that translated, within weeks, to higher prices at every gas station in the country.
Ukraine’s unilateral ceasefire, which took effect at midnight Tuesday, lasted minutes before Russia violated it. President Zelensky said Russian forces carried out 1,820 ceasefire violations by 10 a.m. Wednesday, including bombardments, attempted ground assaults, airstrikes, and drone attacks, the Kyiv Independent reported.
In the hours before the ceasefire began, Russian glide bombs struck Kramatorsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Chernihiv, killing at least 22 people and wounding more than 80, NPR reported. Ukraine then rejected Moscow’s separate proposal for a ceasefire on May 8 and 9, when Russia marks Victory Day. A senior Ukrainian official told the Kyiv Independent: “We just don’t see the point (to follow it) for the parade.”
Moscow’s Victory Day parade in Red Square will proceed Friday without tanks, missiles, or other military equipment for the first time in nearly two decades, Euronews reported. Zelensky said the absence of military hardware wasn’t a gesture of restraint but evidence of Moscow’s fear of Ukrainian drones. The pattern of this war’s ceasefires is now established: they are proposed, they are violated, they produce nothing except a record of who violated them. That record, whatever else happens, is accumulating.
Ted Turner, who founded CNN and changed the way the world receives its news, died Wednesday at the age of eighty-seven after a long battle with Lewy body dementia, CNN reported. His family said he died peacefully, surrounded by his family. He had announced the diagnosis in 2018, just before his eightieth birthday.
Turner launched the Cable News Network on June 1, 1980, from a converted country club in Atlanta. The idea, which most of the broadcast industry considered absurd, was to put news on television twenty-four hours a day. It was not absurd. When the Gulf War began in January 1991, CNN was the only network broadcasting live from Baghdad as the bombing started, and the world watched a war unfold in real time for the first time in history. Time named Turner its Man of the Year. By then, CNN had reshaped the economics and the pace of news permanently.
In September 1997, Turner pledged one billion dollars to the United Nations, at the time the largest individual philanthropic gift in history, the Chronicle of Philanthropy reported. The pledge created the United Nations Foundation. Turner didn’t invent philanthropy at that scale. He demonstrated that it was possible, and then he dared others to follow. Jane Fonda, his former wife, wrote on Wednesday: “He swept into my life, a gloriously handsome, deeply romantic, swashbuckling pirate, and I’ve never been the same,” NPR reported.
And one good thing.
On Wednesday morning in Rome, Pope Leo XIV made an unannounced video call to thirteen parish priests in southern Lebanon whose villages sit along the border with Israel and have been worn down by months of missiles and bombardments, Vatican News reported. The call lasted about a minute. Ten small screens showed the faces of the priests, with the Pope at the center. He spoke in French. He told them to stay in their hometowns. He told them he was praying. And then he said: “Pray with me so that peace prevails. God willing, peace is near,” the Washington Post reported.
A one-minute call to thirteen priests in villages that are being shelled. A man on a screen in Rome telling them to hold on. It isn’t a ceasefire. It isn’t a memo. It isn’t a deal. It is a person, with authority and a telephone, choosing to look at the people who are in the worst of it and say: I see you. Stay.
It is Thursday. The diplomats are talking. The markets are moving. The ceasefires are breaking. And in thirteen villages in southern Lebanon, the priests are still there. That’s the day.
