China's oil rebound just got smaller. Tehran says the Oman deal does not reopen Hormuz.

On Friday, Chinese customs delivered the headline: crude imports rebounded 22 percent in July from June's near-decade low. The measure our demand marker is written on tells a weaker story. Kpler's final seaborne count, published in an August 4 Reuters column, puts July at 6.94 million barrels a day. That replaces the roughly 7.8 million preliminary estimate we carried for nine issues, a figure that was about 0.86 million barrels a day too high. The recovery was real but smaller than we reported.

Kpler attributes most of the increase to previously stranded Persian Gulf cargoes finally arriving. If that attribution is right, July says more about timing than renewed appetite, and the rebound carries less weight than the headline suggests.

The war supplied the opposite kind of clarity. Iran's foreign minister said Sunday that the near-final shipping arrangement with Oman "does not mean the opening of the Strait of Hormuz", echoing the Revolutionary Guard's position a day earlier. A tanker was struck in the strait on Saturday. The route deal keeps advancing on paper. The strait itself is a separate negotiation.

And for the first time in three issues, markets are open to weigh all of it. Crude is bid, the dollar is firmer, and gold is softer in the early premarket. Those are morning readings; the settlements render the verdicts, and the full read with levels and markers is below the wall.

For paying subscribers below: the full regime dashboard, data, and mapped sources. Inside: the seaborne July number against our diagnostic threshold, and why a trigger that fired earns no promotion; the trigger's prospective rewrite, and why it tightens rather than moves the goalposts; the shape of this morning's crude move and which channel it points toward; a European defense guidance cut that tests a registered invalidation; and the Senate's lopsided sanctions vote.