TRUMP SAYS US IS "LOW-KEYING" NEGOTIATIONS WITH IRAN. WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?
By CNN - Harmeet Kaur - 13 August 2026
After Iran intensified its demands over the weekend before it would reopen the Strait of Hormuz, President Donald Trump didn’t threaten new strikes but instead indicated that he planned to choke Iran economically. “We are low-keying it,” he told Axios over the weekend. “We are only semi-negotiating with them. We are just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money.”
This broke with Trump’s usual rhetorical pattern in talking about Iran, in which the president generally declares that a conclusive deal with Iran is imminent, threatens to annihilate Iran if it doesn’t comply, then calls the attacks off at the last minute — only to do it all over again.
What, precisely, does it mean to “low-key” the events of a war? It’s not the first time the president has employed this peculiar turn of phrase, transforming a word typically used as an adjective or adverb into a verb. In early April, as Israel’s continued bombing of southern Lebanon threatened negotiations with Iran, Trump used it to describe a phone call with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “I spoke with Bibi and he’s going to low-key it,” he told NBC News at the time. “I just think we have to be sort of a little more low-key.”
By CNN - Harmeet Kaur
World rapidly burns through oil stockpiles with no end in sight to Hormuz deadlock
Meanwhile, oil prices are falling even as traffic through the crucial waterway remains severely constrained.
Updated 10:19 AM EDT, Thu August 13, 2026
Here's what we're covering
• Strait of Hormuz: Efforts to reopen the Strait of Hormuz are becoming more urgent as the International Energy Agency warns of global oil stockpiles are rapidly dwindling. Traffic through the crucial waterway remains minuscule, despite President Donald Trump’s insistence that the strait is open and the US still controls it.
• War talks: Iran could prolong the war with the US until Trump is out of office, a top adviser to the commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said. “The longer this war lasts, the more experience we gain,” Mohammad Reza Naqdi said in an interview with PBS.
• US carrier concerns: Lawmakers are demanding answers after families of USS Abraham Lincoln sailors raised concerns about deteriorating living conditions and worsening mental health during the ship’s record-breaking deployment amid the war with Iran.
Iranian media shares memes mocking Trump’s secret flight from Turkey
By CNN-Aida Karimi and Sana Noor Haq
A Lego figurine of US President Donald Trump inside a shawarma truck.
An AI photo of the president surrounded by McDonald’s fries.
A photoshopped image of Trump hunkered down inside an EasyJet trolley.
These are some of the memes reposted by Iranian news agencies this past week, mocking reports of an intricate plan led by US officials to get Trump out of Turkey and thwart the growing threat of assassination by Tehran. Last month, the US president clandestinely left the NATO summit in Ankara on an alternate military plane, which he boarded while hidden inside a catering truck, a US official previously told CNN.
On Wednesday, Iran’s official state-run Mizan news agency described the plot as a “cowardly escape” that had become “a topic of discussion for foreign cyberspace users.”
That same day, Iranian website Rajanews declared that, “Reports about Trump’s secret withdrawal from Turkey and his displacement with a food truck have launched a wave of user jokes on cyberspace.”
In another instance, Tehran’s embassy in South Africa posted screengrabs from a scene in the superhero film ‘Spider-Man’, showing the character Peter Parker putting on glasses so as to see clearly – beside two images of the president. The first photo showed Trump punching his fist in the air after an assassination attempt on the campaign trail in Pennsylvania in July, 2024. In the second altered image, Trump can be seen squeezed inside an airplane food cart.
The caption on the X post reads, “Brave American hero, or a coward hiding in a catering truck?”
Huge oil spill off the coast of Oman now covers hundreds of square miles
By CNN - Sarah El Sirgany
An oil spill off the coast of Oman now covers an estimated 500 square miles (1,300 square kilometers), the environmental organization Greenpeace told CNN.
The spill has spread to mainland Oman, roughly 200 kilometers from the stranded tanker in the Arabian Sea, according to Omani authorities.
Greenpeace campaigner Hanen Keskes said their analysis of satellite images showed fragmented spots, meaning the spill is in multiple areas rather than one continuous mass.
The Omani government is yet to confirm the size of the impacted areas. Its environment authority did not respond to CNN questions.
Ambrey, a UK security company, says its team will soon be on at the scene of the spill as part of an international response comprising vessels and aircrafts “with over 100 tons of equipment” but rescue efforts are being hampered by monsoon season.
The tanker, Caroline Bezengi, was carrying around 800,000 barrels of oil when it reportedly came under attack. The sanctioned vessel is believed to be part of the shadow fleet of oil tankers used by Russia.
Following an unidentified “incident” on June 6 outside Oman’s territorial waters the tanker ran aground off the Qibliyyah Island on June 21, Omani authorities said.
While some security observers reported an explosion onboard the ship, the nature of the incident hasn’t been determined. The ship had left one conflict zone - Novorossiysk on the Black Sea, where Ukraine has targeted Russian shipping - before traveling near Yemen, where the Houthis have attacked shipping as part of the Iran-US conflict.
Oil prices fall despite Hormuz stalemate. Here's what to know.
Oil prices are falling, despite few signs of a breakthrough in ending the war, and as traffic through the Strait of Hormuz remains severely constrained.
Brent crude, the global oil benchmark, is around 2% lower at $87.20 a barrel. WTI, the US benchmark, fell by a similar margin to $81.45 a barrel.
The declines, which tracked a broader pullback in commodity prices, come even as Iran and the United States appeared to harden their positions, with both countries claiming control of Hormuz. Traffic in the waterway is still well below pre-war levels of around 130-140 transits a day, but flows may be higher than official numbers suggest.
“Unofficial numbers suggest that the traffic may be higher given ship to ship transfer and ships going dark while passing through the strait,” Mohit Kumar, chief economist at investment bank Jefferies wrote in a note Thursday.
Several other factors are also helping soften the blow from a historic oil supply shock, he noted. China has reduced its oil imports, with other countries also relying on stockpiles, while the United States has increased oil production and Gulf producers have found alternative export routes via pipelines. “The supply demand picture doesn’t look that bad, despite the strait closure,” Kumar said.
Still, risks remain skewed to the upside. The International Energy Agency warned yesterday that the world faces a shortfall of 1.8 million barrels a day this quarter, more than double projections from a month ago, with global oil stocks falling rapidly.
“The market can’t keep pulling down inventories forever. Sooner or later, the cupboard runs bare,” Dan Pickering, chief investment officer at Pickering Energy Partners, wrote in a note. “It will be a challenging fall if the Strait of Hormuz remains contested.”
