The UAE said Friday its air defense systems were actively intercepting Iranian ballistic missiles and drones, one day after the U.S. and Iranian forces traded fire in the Strait of Hormuz. 

Global oil prices have risen again amid the ongoing naval clashes in the strait, as the tenuous U.S.-Iran ceasefire teetered on collapse. The American blockade of Iranian ports remains in place. The Pentagon’s Central Command said Friday there are “currently more than 70 tankers that U.S. forces are preventing from entering or leaving Iranian ports. These commercial ships have the capacity to transport over 166 million barrels of Iranian oil worth an estimated $13 billion-plus.”

The Trump administration, meanwhile, continues to wait for Iran’s response to a U.S. proposal to end the war and restart negotiations. Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei told state media that authorities were still considering the proposal.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) launched a new program this week called “CI Fortify,” which aims to help civilian utilities and other infrastructure stakeholders “prepare to operate through a crisis or conflict, continuing vital service delivery even as their systems are under attack.”

A new CI Fortify web page published by CISA states that Chinese hackers have successfully pre-positioned malware and access points across critical infrastructure that can be used to “disrupt and destroy the operational technology (OT) running the United States.”

Most critical infrastructure computer networks are not government-owned, making securing them more difficult from sophisticated cyber penetrations. CISA acting Director Nick Anderson said in a statement that “in a geopolitical crisis, the critical infrastructure organizations Americans rely on must be able to continue delivering — at a minimum — crucial services.” 

North Korea’s recent changes to its constitution, including language that indicates reunification with the democratic South is no longer a priority for Pyongyang, are fueling a mixture of optimism and skepticism in South Korea.

Asia Editor Andrew Salmon reports from Seoul that the constitutional changes, quietly adopted earlier this year by the regime of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, have attracted attention following the release of an analysis by South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS), which concluded that Pyongyang has cooled its hostility toward the South, but also become more adamant about its own sovereignty.

Even as North Korea has emerged as a nuclear-armed nation, the constitutional changes appear to reflect a belated acceptance in Pyongyang that the North has failed to match the prosperity enjoyed in the South and that a North-led unification process is impossible. The changes can also be interpreted as an attempt to further consolidate the ruling Kim regime’s iron-fisted hold on power in the North.

Joseph R. DeTrani homes in on how the Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons — which is in session at the United Nations — recently elected Iran as one of its 34 vice presidents, despite Tehran’s “noncompliance with International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards.”

“The unfortunate decision undermines trust in a conference that should focus on the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the emerging nuclear arms race,” writes Mr. DeTrani, a former associate director of national intelligence and an opinion contributor to Threat Status.

“Iran’s status as a threshold nuclear weapons state has been an issue that countries such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey follow closely,” he writes in an op-ed for The Washington Times. “Indeed, if Iran acquired its own nuclear weapons, then each of these countries, and others in the Middle East, would pursue their own nuclear weapons capability.”

The Uyghur region is the Chinese Communist Party’s “testing ground for its most extreme tools of control, including surveillance and state-imposed labor transfers,” writes Rushan Abbas, an activist and author who asserts that the tools of control are “later exported across China, Central Asia, Africa and the rest of the Global South.”

“More than 1 million children have been torn from their families and sent to state-run orphanages. Women have been forcibly sterilized or forced into marriage with Chinese men,” writes Mr. Abbas, who asserts that “China’s recent ‘ethnic unity law’ erases Uyghur identity by mandating Mandarin instruction and incentivizing forced marriages and Chinese migration while requiring CCP political indoctrination for all children.

“The CCP,” he writes in a Times op-ed, “has engineered a system of erasure and genocide that turns Uyghur suffering into profit, feeding global supply chains for apparel, agriculture, critical minerals, automobiles and more.”

• May 8-9 — The AI+ Expo, Special Competitive Studies Project 

• May 11 — The Australian Model: Navigating the U.S.–China Divide with Malcolm Turnbull, Chatham House

• May 11 — Defending Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War with China, Hudson Institute

• May 13 — The 2026 Iraq Dialogue, Atlantic Council

• May 13 — Forging the Next Era for the U.S.-Republic of Korea Alliance in Economic and National Security at America’s 250th, Stimson Center

• May 13 — The Strategic Value of China to Korea, Center for Strategic & International Studies

• May 14 — Offset Symposium 2026: Scaling Software Advantage Across the Mission, Second Front