The war in Iran has sparked a global energy crisis that has rocked markets and sent oil prices surging to their highest level in four years. The chances of a quick resolution appear to be deteriorating as the conflict escalates, as do hopes that the U.S. economy might escape unscathed.

The war has effectively blocked off the Strait of Hormuz, a vital energy corridor that links oil and gas producers in the Persian Gulf with the rest of the world. The closure has cut off the roughly 20 million barrels of oil that normally flow through the strait each day, according to the International Energy Agency. The IEA estimates the conflict is removing roughly eight million barrels daily from the global supply, making the crisis the biggest oil supply disruption in history. Oil prices have been on a rollercoaster as a result. Brent crude, an international benchmark that cost around $70 a barrel before the war, grazed $120 last week and has since settled between $90 and $100. 

The swings have already caused gasoline prices for U.S. drivers to rise, but it might not be enough to force the severe downturn some economists have warned of. Price levels so far might only have a marginal impact on economic output over the long run, according to a report published Friday by Oxford Economics, an advisory firm. 

But that scenario rides on a relatively quick return to pre-war price levels over the next few months. The longer the strait remains closed and the higher prices rise, the faster the economic situation around the world—including in the U.S.—deteriorates.

Breaking parts of the economy

Oxford Economics uses a standard rule of thumb to estimate the economic impact of pricier oil: Every time oil gets $10 more expensive for a sustained period—determined to be around two months—it amounts to a 0.1% decline in GDP due to higher inflation and slower growth. If prices average $100 for two months, it would erase a few tenths of a percentage point of global GDP growth, but a recession would likely be avoided, according to the report.

The breaking point for the economy, Oxford Economics found, will be if oil prices average around $140 a barrel for two months. At that price, spillover effects would be much harder to contain, and many parts of the world would be flirting with economic decline.

“There are mild contractions in the Eurozone, the UK, and Japan, while the U.S. nears a temporary standstill and layoffs push up the unemployment rate, leaving it close to a recession,” the report’s authors wrote.

The problem with calculating the economic consequences of higher oil prices is that the implications are exponential. The more prices rise, the more knock-on effects could happen to hurt the economy. Higher-for-longer oil and transportation costs would begin to spill over into food and other goods, making inflation an across-the-board problem rather than a primarily fuel and energy-focused one. The Federal Reserve and other central banks would also be more inclined to tighten their interest rate policy if it became clear oil prices would remain high, dampening down economic activity. 

The final complication is more psychological. Sustained high oil prices could lead to a “deterioration in the collective psyche,” according to the report, as expectations of high prices become fixed among consumers. And in the car-dependent U.S., where consumers pay particularly close attention to gasoline prices, fuel inflation would risk crowding out households’ disposable income and lower spending elsewhere, also contributing to a slowdown.

Uncertain outcomes

Under this worst-case scenario, U.S. inflation would likely peak at around 5% in the second quarter of 2026, up from 2.4% currently, according to Oxford Economics’ modeling. This would be the highest inflation since March 2023. Such readings would likely push the Federal Reserve to adopt a more hawkish stance and potentially favor hiking rates this year. The Fed is likely to hold steady on rates this week, but the Iran conflict has also made many forecasters inclined to expect no cuts at all this year.

While the $140 scenario is a serious warning, Oxford Economics notes that the odds of this outcome remain low for now. A more plausible scenario, according to the authors, would be for oil prices to average around $100 per barrel, in line with where prices have fallen for most of the past few weeks. Much depends on when the conflict might wind down and the strait becomes safe to navigate again, allowing oil and natural gas exports to leave the Gulf once again. Trump administration officials recently said several weeks could still pass before hostilities subside.

Oil prices moderated on Monday on the back of several U.S. announcements signaling supply boosts, including the temporary loosening of sanctions targeting Russian oil exports, Iranian tankers receiving permission to leave the Gulf, and President Donald Trump’s pleas to other countries to help secure the strait. The IEA-coordinated release of 400 million barrels of global emergency oil reserves has also helped reassure markets with a limited buffer.

But oil prices have become accustomed to price swings during this war. Early in the conflict’s second week, after Trump wrote on Truth Social that higher oil prices were a “small price to pay” for achieving U.S. goals in Iran, oil prices jumped 25% overnight to just below $120 a barrel, before retreating later in the week.

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At Sunday night’s Oscars, fan-favorite Sinners struck gold and walked away with four wins. The horror film’s star Michael B. Jordan triumphed as best actor, and its director, Ryan Coogler, took home the award for best original screenplay. But just one decade before the $365 million worldwide box-office success was sweeping the awards ceremony, its director was drowning in student loans.

“I was 200 grand in debt for film school. It was bad,” Ryan Coogler revealed on the WTF With Marc Maron podcast last April. “We don’t come from no money.”

It was 2015, and Coogler was on the verge of breakout success—but his wallet didn’t show it. 

At the time, the director had already filmed the critically acclaimed film Fruitvale Station with Jordan. With the A-list actor as his muse, the budding filmmaker took on the tall task of creating a Rocky spinoff series, also starring Jordan: Creed. 

He began shooting the first movie in the series, which went on to make $42.6 million in its opening weekend on a $35 million budget. 

But the $200,000 in student loans from attending Southern California’s School of the Cinematic Arts was still burning a hole in his pocket. “I wasn’t making no money,” he added. 

How Ryan Coogler went from $200K in debt to a $25M net worth

The 39-year-old director’s win with Creed marked the first of many to come: Creed II and Creed III also shattered ticket sales expectations; Black Panther and its sequel Wakanda Forever did well over $2 billion at the worldwide box office; Judas and the Black Messiah was nominated many times for Golden Globes and Academy Awards; and four time Oscar-winner Sinners brought in at least $365 million at global box offices. 

While he didn’t confirm whether or not his student debt has been wiped clean yet, Coogler is far past worrying about his repayment plan.

After making some of the biggest superhero and sports films, his net worth is estimated at roughly $25 million. None of it may have ever happened if it weren’t for Coogler confiding in his girlfriend at the time—now wife—about how his creative-writing teacher recognized his potential as a screenwriter. 

“[My wife] bought me a screenwriting software, Final Draft,” Coogler said. “I found something that I really loved.”

The world’s most successful people often have rags-to-riches stories

Coogler’s start as a burgeoning creative riddled with debt isn’t an uncommon story. Some of the world’s most successful people have their own rags-to-riches story of how they managed to turn things around.

Queen of television Oprah Winfrey is known for her glitzy audience giveaways and sizable $3.2 billion net worth. She grew up in rural Mississippi in extreme poverty, raised by a single mother. Even when she discovered her passion for radio at just 17, she faced skepticism over her ability to anchor, deemed “unfit for television.” She was demoted from news to daytime TV—which actually proved to be a huge success for the media personality. Thus was born The Oprah Winfrey Show, which reeled in $300 million yearly during its peak. Winfrey later negotiated ownership of the series in 1986, solidifying that her run-ins with poverty would now be a thing of the past.

Do Won Chang, cofounder and CEO of Forever 21, also had rocky beginnings before finding major success. He and his wife, Jin Sook, immigrated to the U.S. from South Korea—their first jobs in L.A. being dishwashing for a coffee shop, and manning a gas station on the side. Chang noticed that most of the men driving the snazziest cars worked in the garment industry, so he took a job at a clothing store. That was the start of his $81 billion love connection with fashion.

“I came here with almost nothing,” Chang said in a 2016 interview with Forbes. “I’ll always have a grateful heart toward America for the opportunities that it’s provided me.”

Airbnb’s Brian Chesky is worth nearly $9.2 billion today—and it’s a far cry from nearly living on the streets back in his twenties. In 2007, Chesky had a problem: He didn’t have enough to cover rent. So he and his roommates hatched a plan that would inspire his empire. They turned their apartment into a bed-and-breakfast, blowing up air mattresses to accommodate guests. Now the CEO’s short-term rental company is worth $78 billion.

“We’re conditioned to avoid taking risks at all the wrong times. Right after college, we’re told to do the safe thing,” Chesky wrote for Fortune in 2014. “But that’s not how life works, and it’s the wrong way to think about risk. Inevitably, things change as you get older.”

A version of this story was published on Fortune.com on April 28, 2025.

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In nearly 100 years of Oscar history, only three women have ever been nominated for the Best Cinematography category. On Sunday night, Autumn Durald Arkapaw, director of photography for Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, and the first Black woman ever recognized in the category, made all of them matter.

The win at the 98th Academy Awards was a long time coming, as is evidenced by the sheer lack of women in the field. Women made up just 7% of cinematographers on the top 250 films in 2025, according to San Diego State University’s annual Celluloid Ceiling report. Cinematography also consistently ranks among the lowest categories in terms of female representation across all of Hollywood’s behind-the-scenes roles. 

During her acceptance speech, Arkapaw recognized the weight of the history she was making: breaking a glass ceiling for women in filmmaking. 

“I really want all the women in the room to stand up, because I feel like I don’t get here without you guys,” she said. “I really, really, truly mean that. I have felt so much love from all the women on this whole campaign and gotten to meet so many people. And I just feel like moments like this happen because of you guys.”

A cinematographer, also known as a director of photography (DP), is the person responsible for capturing the visual look and feel of a film or TV production. They are essentially the bridge between the director’s creative vision and what actually appears on screen.

In the entire history of this Oscar category, only three women have ever been nominated before Arkapaw: Rachel Morrison for Mudbound in 2018, Ari Wegner for The Power of the Dog in 2021, and Mandy Walker for Elvis in 2022. Arkapaw mentioned in her acceptance speech that she had personally met Morrison.

How Autumn Durald Arkapaw became an Oscar-winning cinematographer

Arkapaw was destined to be a creative. Born on Dec. 14, 1979, in Southern California of Filipino and African American Creole descent, she was raised by a single mom and her mother’s extensive Filipino family. They were “an artistic and talented bunch,” according to a profile of Arkapaw published by the Alliance of Women Film Journalists. She found inspiration in her mother’s work as a photographer and in a large family photo album; she grew up taking pictures and making short films in iMovie.  

But she later majored in art history at Loyola Marymount University, believing her future was in curating art in New York. One genre film class changed her mind, though. When watching Broadway Danny Rose and Raging Bull on the big screen, it “opened up my mind to film in a new way,” she told Vogue in a September 2025 interview.

“I got excited, and I wanted to know how they were made, and who was behind the camera, and what their job meant,” she added. 

After graduating from LMU, she spent three years at AOL-Time Warner—but in a corporate advertising role. She spent weekends shooting an independent short film and eventually committed to a career in cinematography. The small budgets and limited resources she had early on “gave her the creative freedom and confidence that held her in great stead later when she took on large-scale work,” according to the Alliance of Women Film Journalists. She also enrolled in the American Film Institute, where she steadily built her career, even shooting music videos for artists including The Weeknd, Arcade Fire, and Solange, before breaking into feature films. 

“It sounds crazy now because there weren’t as many female cinematographers [at that time],” she told Vogue. “My parents didn’t even know what a cinematographer was. I’m about to quit a good job, go to film school instead, and end up owing the government lots of money?”

Meeting Ryan Coogler changed her career

Her collaboration with Coogler began with Black Panther: Wakanda Forever in 2022, and she later shot Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl in 2024 before working with Coogler again on Sinners. 

Arkapaw also broke technical barriers while shooting Sinners, becoming the first female photography director to shoot on large-format IMAX 65mm film. Sinners took home a record-breaking 16 Oscar nominations, and won four: Best Actor for Michael B. Jordan, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Original Score.

Arkapaw’s philosophy of success has always been rooted in self-belief.

“Believe in yourself more than anyone else,” she told Panavision. “If you have confidence in yourself and your ideas, you can achieve your goals. My mother always taught me I could achieve anything with hard work and belief.”

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The U.S. national debt is hurtling toward $39 trillion, but a Washington fiscal watchdog says the more alarming milestone isn’t a dollar figure—it’s a ratio. And it arrives in just five years.

According to a recent analysis from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), the Congressional Budget Office’s latest projections show that by fiscal year 2031, the average interest rate paid on the federal debt will exceed the country’s rate of economic growth. In the dry shorthand of economists, “R will exceed G.” In plain terms, that means that the cost of borrowing will be growing faster than the economy’s ability to pay for it.​

“Once interest rates exceed the growth rate…primary deficits will lead debt to grow indefinitely,” the CRFB warned in a blog post published March 9.​

A guardrail, quietly disappearing

For most of the past 60 years—including all of the last 15—the U.S. has benefited from a structural cushion: interest rates on federal debt stayed below the pace of economic growth. That relationship, which economists measure as R<G, meant that even as the government ran persistent deficits, debt as a share of GDP could remain stable or even shrink. The economy, growing faster than the debt’s carrying cost, was effectively eroding the burden over time.​

Real interest rates on federal debt averaged just 0.9% over the past 15 years, while real GDP growth averaged 2.2%. That buffer is now evaporating, according to the CRFB.​

Since 2023, most newly issued Treasury debt has carried yields between 4% and 5%—rates that exceed the economy’s long-term expected growth rate. As older, cheaper debt matures and gets rolled over at these higher rates, the average interest cost on the entire federal debt stock is creeping upward. CBO now projects that by 2031, both R and G will hit roughly 3.8% nominally—and then diverge, with R pulling ahead.​

The spiral mechanism

The CRFB describes what comes next as a self-reinforcing feedback loop. Higher debt pushes interest rates up and slows economic growth. Slower growth reduces tax revenues. Reduced revenues widen deficits. Wider deficits add more debt. More debt pushes rates higher still. “Over time,” the group warns, “this could lead to accelerating growth in the debt, which could eventually be too rapid to correct, absent a major disruption or crisis.”​

Even CBO’s relatively optimistic “baseline” scenario—which does not model additional tax cuts or spending increases—projects the national debt will balloon to an unprecedented 175% of GDP by 2056. By that year, CBO estimates the interest rate will reach 4.2%, against a GDP growth rate of just 3.5%—a gap of 0.7 percentage points. Closing that gap alone, the CRFB calculates, would require roughly $2.7 trillion in annual spending cuts or tax increases—in 2056 alone.​

The political wildcard

The CRFB’s warning carries an implicit rebuke of Washington’s current fiscal trajectory. If lawmakers continue enacting tax cuts and spending increases—as they did in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which CBO estimates will add $4.7 trillion to deficits through 2035—the spiral “could arrive sooner and with greater intensity than projected.”​

The national debt is expected to cross $39 trillion within days, up more than $2.6 trillion in the past year alone. But as the CRFB makes clear, the real danger isn’t the next trillion. It’s the arithmetic of what happens when a country can no longer grow its way out of its debt—and the window to act before that moment closes in just five years.

For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.

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The spike in oil prices was not a good look politically or economically for President Donald Trump after the U.S. and Israel launched their war on Iran, but the military campaign is going well, according to the Institute for the Study of War.

Crude eased somewhat on Monday on signs that more tankers are passing through the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has virtually locked up after hitting commercial ships. That comes as Iran’s top source of leverage is fading.

“The war in Iran is currently in a phase in which the military trajectory is relatively positive: The United States is steadily destroying Iran’s ability to use its most essential tool in the war—drone and missile attacks—which in turn underpin the entire Iranian strategy,” ISW said in a report Sunday.

While Iran has inflicted significant damage to U.S. installations in the region and allied infrastructure, the pace of its attacks is plunging and hasn’t come close to its original plan for fighting off an existential threat to the regime with overwhelming retaliation, it pointed out.

For example, drone attacks on the United Arab Emirates collapsed from 332 on the second day of the war to just six on Sunday. Ballistic missile attacks fell from a peak of 137 on the first day to four yesterday.

The U.S.-Israeli bombardment has destroyed hundreds of Iranian launchers, and its missile force troops are reportedly demoralized, deserting, and refusing orders, according to ISW.

“Some individual drones have penetrated air defenses and caused politically unacceptable damage to oil infrastructure, but the overall trend in attacks is overwhelmingly positive,” it added.

There’s also little to no evidence the reduced pace of attacks is due to Iran keeping projectiles in reserve to be used later when the U.S. and Israel will have fewer interceptors, the report said.

Such a tactic would be a major gamble that assumes Iran will still have enough launchers left in the future. It also assumes the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps retains enough command and control to execute that kind of coordination after the relentless targeting of its leadership.

ISW also noted the last Iranian attack on merchant shipping was on March 11, though it’s unclear whether that was due to less traffic in the Strait of Hormuz or the degradation of Iran’s military capabilities.

Of course, Iran’s plan was never to defeat the U.S. military, with the focus instead on causing political and economic pain, ISW said. Indeed, soaring crude prices have already made gasoline more expensive, threatening higher inflation and public backlash ahead of U.S. midterm elections.

Iran’s strategy rests on inflicting damage in the Gulf, disrupting shipping, activating proxies, committing terrorism, and launching cyber attacks.

“Iran has likely calculated that if these five prongs cause U.S. casualties, drive up oil prices, and impose economic costs on both the US and its Gulf allies, the United States and Israel would make a political decision to end the war without achieving their objectives,” the report said.

ISW expressed confidence the U.S. Navy can reopen the Strait of Hormuz, despite officials describing it as a “kill box” filled with potential threats, while adding “the risk-tolerance of the market will ultimately determine the length of the disruption in the Strait.”

Meanwhile, Trump has called on other countries to send warships to help escort tankers, even warning NATO failure to help him “will be very bad for the future” of the alliance. But so far, there are no takers.

Despite Iran suffering devastating losses on the battlefield, the burden is still on the U.S. to prevent Iran from using economic and political pressure to turn insignificant tactical moves into strategic successes, ISW warned. Still, Operation Epic Fury is working for now.

“The available evidence supports the assessment that the combined campaign is achieving its military objectives thus far but is not yet complete,” ISW said. “Declaring the campaign a failure at this stage is therefore premature. The collapse of Iranian drone and missile attacks—down significantly since Feb. 28—presents a compelling picture that the military campaign is degrading ballistic missile and drone capabilities.”

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A former Colorado funeral home owner who helped her ex-husband hide nearly 200 decomposing bodies in a building is asking for leniency when she is sentenced Monday, saying she was a “scared and desperate mother” who was manipulated to keep the family business operating.

Carie Hallford, 48, faces up to 20 years in prison for taking over $130,000 from families for funeral services, including cremations, and often giving them urns full of concrete mix instead. In two cases, investigators found the wrong body was buried. In August, she pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and admitted that she and her ex-husband Jon Hallford cheated customers and also defrauded the federal government out of nearly $900,000 in pandemic small business aid.

Carie Hallford decided to get a divorce after she was put back in jail in her state case in November 2024, which put her out of reach of her husband’s constant calls and texts and allowed the “fog in her mind from the years of abuse” to lift, according to a court filing by her lawyer, Robert Charles Melihercik.

Federal sentencing guidelines recommend prison time up to eight years since Carie Hallford didn’t have a criminal history. But lawyers for the government are asking U.S. District Judge Nina Y. Wang to sentence her to 15 years, in part for taking advantage of grieving people following one of the largest discoveries of decaying bodies at a funeral home in the U.S.

Families struggle with guilt, shame and nightmares

Those who entrusted their loved ones to the Hallfords struggled with guilt, shame, nightmares and panic attacks since the bodies were discovered in 2023. They were stacked so high in some places that they blocked doorways. There were bugs and maggots. Buckets had been placed to catch leaking fluids.

Prosecutors also want a longer sentence because the former couple, who had offered “green burials” without embalming, lavishly spent a pandemic-era small business loan on vehicles, cryptocurrency, pricey goods from stores like Gucci and Tiffany & Co. and laser body sculpting rather than on their Return to Nature funeral home in Colorado Springs.

Carie Hallford is asking to be sentenced to eight years. In court documents, Melihercik, said Hallford’s actions were motivated by “fear and severe anxiety.” He said Hallford’s former husband used “classic instruments of domestic violence” to control her, including threatening at times to kill himself and her.

The lawyer who represented Jon Hallford in state court, Adam Steigerwald, declined to comment on the abuse allegations. The lawyer who represented him in federal court, Laura Suelau, did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

Carie Hallford was the public face of the business

Some victims are not sympathetic to Carie Hallford, the public face of the business who met with families and assured them their loved ones would be treated with respect.

Emma Williams, whose family entrusted the Hallfords to take care of her father’s remains in 2022, said Carie Hallford had a choice.

“She continued to stay with the business and take advantage of us out her own greed,” she said.

Crystina Page, whose son’s body was left at the funeral home after he was killed in 2019, said Carie Hallford spent four years “feeding the monster” by continuing to accept more business.

“She is just as guilty as he is, except that he couldn’t have done it without her bringing him the bodies,” Page said.

Defense says a shorter sentence would allow for restitution

Carie Hallford says that much of the lavish spending of the government loan money was the result of “love-bombing” as Jon Hallford attempted to apologize to her. She urged her husband to buy a cremator with the loan money, but was too scared to force the issue, Melihercik said in the court filing.

“Although she will be behind bars for the next decade or more, she finally feels free,” Melihercik wrote. He also said a shorter sentence would allow Carie Hallford to be able to return to work and repay the money the couple took from their victims.

Carie Hallford is also facing 25 to 35 years in prison when she is sentenced in state court on related charges next month.

Jon and Carie Hallford each pleaded guilty in December to nearly 200 counts of corpse abuse in state court. The plea deals require their state and federal sentences to be served at the same time.

Jon Hallford was sentenced to 20 years in the federal case and 40 years in the state case. At his sentencing last month in the state case, he apologized and said he will regret his actions for the rest of his life.

“I had so many chances to put a stop to everything and walk away, but I did not,” he said. “My mistakes will echo for a generation. Everything I did was wrong.”

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AI isn’t just minting frontier model labs, it’s dragging forgotten venture sectors back into the game.

Healthtech, cybersecurity, biotech, and enterprise SaaS all saw a decisive pickup in early-stage activity in Q4 2025, driven by AI-native startups that look very different from the last cycle’s darlings, according to PitchBook’s latest Emerging Tech Indicator (ETI), which tracks pre-seed through Series B deals done by the top 15 VC firms globally.​

Healthtech is the clearest example of the shift. Health and wellness deals jumped to $678 million across 23 transactions in Q4, more than double the previous eight-quarter average of $332 million and 16 deals. The money is flowing into two buckets: consumer-facing “know your body” platforms and AI tools that make providers’ operations more efficient.​

Function Health, a subscription service that gives members access to a battery of lab tests and personalized insights, raised a $300 million Series B at a $2.5 billion valuation—an 11.5x step-up from its June 2024 Series A. On the enterprise side, Paradigm Health pulled in $78 million for clinical trial management software, while Valerie Health raised $30 million to automate front-office workflows with AI.​

Venture dollars are also returning to brick-and-mortar care, but with an AI angle. Radial Health, a network of mental health clinics, closed a $50 million Series A, and obesity-care chain Knownwell raised $26.1 million. Together, those deals suggest investors are moving away from popular telehealth bets and toward “AI plus services” models that plug into existing care infrastructure rather than trying to replace it.​

Aside from health and wellness, cybersecurity reached a new high. Cyber deals hit a record $643.1 million in Q4 across 15 transactions, with average valuations in the segment jumping to $273.4 million—more than double the previous eight-quarter average of $129.1 million. Ten of those 15 were Series A rounds.

Here, too, the deal list reads like a catalog of “AI + cyber” companies. 7AI raised a $130.6 million Series A for an autonomous threat-detection platform that continuously monitors digital environments. Vega Security secured $120 million for AI-powered threat detection and analytics, while Adaptive closed an $81 million Series B for generative AI–based threat simulations.

Biotech, long out of favor after the 2021 boom, also showed signs of life with deals climbing to 10 in Q4—the most since late 2022. Braveheart Bio raised $185 million in its first financing round to advance cardiovascular drugs licensed from China’s Jiangsu Hengrui Pharmaceuticals, while Expedition Therapeutics secured $165 million for a COPD therapy licensed from Fosun Pharma.​

Even enterprise SaaS—under fire in the public markets for sluggish growth and seat-based pricing—looked surprisingly lively in the emerging tech lens. Q4 SaaS activity reached $313.4 million across 19 deals, with 10 at the seed stage. PitchBook’s analysis argues that what’s getting funded now is “service as software”: products that deliver AI-powered outcomes, not just tools employees have to learn and adopt.​

Against the backdrop of a more cautious overall deal economy—and continued mega-bets on a handful of frontier labs—the ETI data suggests a narrower but sharper playbook at the top of the market. Health, cyber, biotech, and SaaS never truly disappeared from VC portfolios. Elite firms are now willing to lean back into them, so long as the pitch is less “another point solution” and more “AI-native system that moves real-world outcomes.”​

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European countries on Monday demanded to know more about U.S. President Donald Trump’s plans for the war on Iran and when the conflict might end as they weighed whether to agree to his call to send warships to help shore up security in the Persian Gulf.

Trump has asked allies — including France, China, Japan, South Korea and Britain — to help secure the strait for global shipping. He said the U.S. was talking to “about seven” countries for military support to help reopen the trade route. But he wouldn’t say which ones and gave no indication of when such a coalition might be formed.

Separately, in an interview with the Financial Times, he warned that “if there’s no response or if it’s a negative response I think it will be very bad for the future of NATO.”

As European Union foreign ministers gathered to discuss Trump’s demand, German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul said it’s important for the United States and Israel to define “when they consider the military aims of their deployment to have been reached.”

“We need more clarity here,” Wadephul told reporters.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s spokesperson, Stefan Kornelius, said underlined “this war has nothing to do with NATO — it is not NATO’s war. NATO is an alliance to defend the alliance area.”

Kornelius said that Berlin “took note” of Trump’s comments, but he added: “The United States did not consult us before this war, and so we believe this is not a matter for NATO or the German government.”

Estonian Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna also said that U.S. allies in Europe want to understand Trump’s “strategic goals. What will be the plan?”

Their reactions were typical of the cautious response that many in Europe have shown to the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, although few allies in Europe have openly opposed it. Trump has described his demand for help in the strait as “a very small endeavor.”

Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski invited the Trump administration to go through the proper channels.

“If there is a request via NATO, we will of course out of respect and sympathy for our American allies consider it very carefully,” he said. Sikorski made a reference to Article 4 of NATO’s founding treaty, which allies can invoke if they believe their territory or security is under threat.

‘Not be drawn into the wider war’

As she headed in to chair the meeting of ministers in Brussels, EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said that “it is in our interest to keep the Strait of Hormuz open, and that’s why we are also discussing what we can do in this regard from the European side.”

Kallas said the EU could expand its Operation Aspides naval mission to protect shipping in the Red Sea up into the Persian Gulf. If no agreement is found among the 27 EU countries, those who stand ready to go it alone could form a “coalition of the willing” and provide military support on an ad hoc basis.

The war in Iran, sparked on Feb. 28 airstrikes by Israel and the U.S., has driven up energy prices worldwide, with brent crude up more than 40%. But the conflict has also disrupted the wider global supply chain beyond oil, affecting everything from pharmaceuticals from India, semiconductors from Asia and oil-derived products like fertilizers that come from the Middle East.

Cargo ships are stuck in the Gulf or making a much longer detour around the southern tip of Africa. Planes carrying air cargo out of the Middle East are grounded. And the longer the war drags on, the more likely that there will be shortages and price increases on a wide range of goods.

France has said it is working with countries — President Emmanuel Macron mentioned partners in Europe, India and Asia — on a possible international mission to escort ships through the strait but has stressed it must be when “the circumstances permit,” when fighting has subsided.

French senior officials, speaking anonymously on ongoing talks, said the Netherlands, Italy, and Greece had shown interest and that Spain might be involved in some way.

In London, Prime Minister Keir Starmer said Britain “will not be drawn into the wider war, ” but that it is discussing with the U.S. and allies in Europe and the Gulf the possibility of using mine-hunting drones that the U.K. already has in the region. But he signaled that Britain is unlikely to dispatch a warship.

EU’s refugee concerns

Operation Aspides was formed to thwart attacks to shipping in the Red Sea by Somali pirates and Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels, who have yet to join the current fray. Saudi Aramco manages a pipeline network that bypasses the Strait of Hormuz to deliver oil to the Red Sea port city of Yanbu.

“If we want to have security in this region, then it would be easiest to actually already use the operation that we have in the region and maybe change a bit,” Kallas said. “There is also talk of coalition of the willing in this regard, but we also need to see what could be the fastest to provide this opening for the Strait of Hormuz, but of course, as you can see, it’s not easy.”

The EU is anxious that a potential refugee crisis in Iran will develop if the war continues.

“Although for now, the conflict has not translated into immediate migratory flows toward the EU, what the future holds remains unclear and necessitates the full mobilization of every migration diplomacy tool we have at our disposal,” said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in a statement Sunday.

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Associated Press writers Geir Moulson in Berlin, Jill Lawless in London, and Sylive Corbet in Paris contributed to this report.

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An offshore wind project targeted by the Trump administration has begun sending power to New England’s electric grid, the developer said Friday.

The Danish company Orsted said Revolution Wind is now generating power and will scale up in the weeks ahead until it is fully operational. Orsted is building Revolution Wind with Global Infrastructure Partners’ Skyborn Renewables to provide electricity for Rhode Island and Connecticut, enough to power more than 350,000 homes and businesses.

Revolution Wind was one of five major East Coast offshore wind projects the Trump administration halted construction on days before Christmas, citing national security concerns. Developers and states sued, and federal judges allowed all five to resume construction, essentially concluding that the government did not show that the national security risk was so imminent that construction must halt.

The Biden administration sought to ramp up offshore wind as a climate change solution.

But President Donald Trump, who often talks about his hatred of wind power, has said his goal is to not let any “windmills” be built. He has signed a spate of executive orders aimed at boosting oil, gas and coal.

White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said Friday night that Trump “reversed course on Joe Biden’s costly green energy agenda that gave preferential treatment to intermittent, unreliable energy sources and instead is aggressively unleashing reliable and affordable energy sources to lower energy bills, improve our grid stability and protect our national security.” Rogers added in a statement to AP that the administration “looks forward to ultimate victory on this issue.”

Orsted said that at a time of growing energy demand, Revolution Wind will provide price certainty and stability, citing a preliminary analysis by the state of Connecticut that estimates it will lower wholesale energy costs by about $500 million per year by 2028.

“Revolution Wind is adding affordable, reliable American-made energy to New England’s grid, helping to meet growing energy demand and lower consumer costs,” Amanda Dasch, chief development officer at Orsted, said in a statement.

Chris Kearns, acting commissioner of the Rhode Island Office of Energy Resources, called the first power milestone a “significant moment for the state’s clean energy landscape.”

Orsted began construction in 2024 about 15 miles (24 kilometers) south of the Rhode Island coast. The wind farm has 65 of the 11-megawatt Siemens Gamesa turbines, and more than 1,000 people have been working on it.

Connecticut Rep. Joe Courtney, a Democrat, said that because this wind energy is directly transmitted off the New England coast, “its price will not be at the mercy of uncertain global energy markets.” The Iran war is disrupting world energy supplies, the global economy and international travel.

Courtney also said Friday’s milestone “never would have happened without talented Connecticut building trades workers, who persevered through the Trump administration’s illegal halt work orders.”

The order in December was the second time the administration halted construction on Revolution Wind. Work was previously paused Aug. 22 over national security concerns. A month later a federal judge ruled the project could resume.

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The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

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The United States’ war with Iran is entering its third week, but Congress has yet to publicly test the Trump administration’s case for the conflict.

Republicans in Congress have so far side-stepped public debate over the war, even as Senate Democrats reach for every tool at their disposal to demand hearings with Trump administration officials. Increasingly frustrated, Democrats are threatening this week to force a series of votes on the war, hoping that the effort to gum up the Senate’s voting schedule will prod Republicans to action.

“We’ve had no oversight whatsoever over what the executive is doing as we’re spending a billion dollars a day, and we have failed to have any real substantive debate or discussion,” said Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J.

The role of Congress in the deliberations is an unsettled question with enormous stakes, given that lawmakers have the power to shape the trajectory of the conflict as it grows in cost and casualties. So far, 13 military members have been killed and billions of dollars have been spent, but President Donald Trump has not sought congressional approval for attacking Iran.

As the 17th day of the conflict dawned Monday, Republican lawmakers remained mostly resistant to the idea of quickly forcing public testimony before Congress.

How GOP leaders are handling calls for hearings

Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters last week that he didn’t expect public hearings specifically on the Iran war, but noted it would inevitably come up in the regular rhythm of testimony on military policy and spending.

“They have briefed us,” Thune, R-S.D., said, pointing to classified briefings from the Trump administration. Those sessions have been held behind closed doors and most lawmakers refuse to disclose more than the broad topics of discussion.

Thune also noted there have been regular news conferences from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They are “answering the hard questions that are being asked,” Thune said.

The GOP chairs of committees dealing with national security have also said they don’t have plans in the near term to hold hearings specifically on the war, though some acknowledged the value of lawmaker questioning.

Sen. Roger Wicker, the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, argued that the regular run of hearings on Capitol Hill would provide lawmakers with plentiful opportunities to ask questions.

“We’re going to conduct generous oversight, thorough oversight,” said Wicker, R-Miss.

Some Republicans are looking ahead to an expected supplemental budget request from the Trump administration to cover the costs of the war. That request, however, is likely weeks away and faces a difficult path through Congress.

Democrats have pointed out that the Pentagon has already received additional funding from Republicans’ marquee tax cut law that was passed last year and provided funding for GOP priorities, including at the Pentagon.

Wariness growing from some Republicans

Still, agitation from a few Republicans at the lack of high-level responses from the Trump administration is starting to show, especially as they brace for a hefty war bill from the administration.

“I don’t want to just be given the invoice from the Department of Defense, saying this is what it’s going to cost,” said Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska. “I want them to be engaged with us.”

She added that it was important for lawmakers to get information both in classified briefings and public hearings “so that the public can better understand this, too.”

Another GOP senator on the powerful Appropriations Committee, Louisiana’s John Kennedy, exited a classified briefing last week fuming that it had been a “total waste of time” because the officials were not able to provide the answers that top-level Cabinet officials could.

Republicans have almost uniformly backed Trump’s decision to launch an attack on Iran, though many are wary of a lengthy conflict. Trump has cycled through different objectives for the war, ranging from crippling Iran’s military capabilities to a demand for “unconditional surrender.”

“I think we have to let the objective play out as far as we can, and if then the effort gets murky on how to get to the objective, that might be a good time to have some hearings, but it’s too early,” said Sen. Cynthis Lummis, a Wyoming Republican.

But as the midterm elections approach, Republicans are also aware that public support for the war remains tepid.

“I wish we could disclose a lot of this publicly because it would make it a whole lot easier to explain to the American people,” said Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., adding that classified briefings were necessary to protect U.S. service members now that the war is under way.

How Democrats may force a debate

Democrats, meanwhile, are threatening to do just about everything in their power to bring attention to the war, even if it means repeatedly forcing votes that fail.

A group of six Democrats has said that unless hearings are scheduled with Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other Cabinet officials, they will call up daily votes on a series of war powers resolutions that if passed would require Trump to gain congressional approval before carrying out any more attacks on Iran. Similar resolutions have already been rejected by both chambers in the Republican-controlled Congress.

The votes, however, would eat up valuable time on the Senate floor and set the ground for a debate on the conflict just as Senate Republicans plan to spend much of the week trying to pass Trump’s priority legislation to impose strict new proof-of-citizenship requirements for voting.

The group of Democratic senators also hinted at using other tactics to slow the Senate’s work on other business.

Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, told reporters that unless there is a commitment for public hearings, “We’re not going to let the Senate go on with business as usual. We’re not going to let the Senate be silenced.”

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Advanced technology isn’t just automating tasks in the white collar world—AI agents and robots are flipping burgers, stocking warehouses, and even doing household chores. Driverless taxis have also entered the mainstream, despite job loss fears from gig workers. But the leader of autonomous vehicle (AV) business Waymo insists the tech isn’t taking human work. 

“Now that we’ve been in a few markets for a few years, it’s great to be able to see that we haven’t eliminated jobs in those markets,” Waymo’s co-CEO, Tekedra Mawakana, recently told The New York Times.

The $126 billion behemoth of industry, which started out as Google’s self-driving car project, has understandably raised eyebrows from human drivers. It’s the largest AV company in the U.S., serving at least 10 cities with around 3,000 robotaxis and counting. And as more companies including Tesla and Amazon-owned Zoox enter the arena, ride-hailing workers are put on edge. 

Even the CEO of Uber himself believes that most of his company’s rides could have a robot behind the wheel in the next couple of decades.

Humans will be needed to rotate tires and operate fleets in the era of self-driving cars

Waymo’s co-CEO says the shift to driverless will open up new jobs. Instead of being in the driver’s seat, humans will be behind the scenes of the whole operation, fulfilling operational and blue-collar business needs. 

And to support the workforce of the future, Waymo is funding tuition scholarships for U.S. technicians, and partnered with Bronx Community College in creating an automotive technology program.

“Humans are still rotating those tires and working on those vehicles,” Mawakana continued. “We have fleet operators, we have fleet technicians. All of our fleets are fully electric. Those charging companies are building the infrastructure, putting them in city centers, pulling those wires from the utility company.”

Justin Kintz, the global head of public policy at Waymo, tells Fortune that the business’ investments in infrastructure and growing services “create opportunities for Americans of all backgrounds, by bringing a wide variety of new, non-college and trades-work roles to communities around the U.S.”

Robotaxis will have an impact on human drivers—but will strengthen blue-collar work

Automated cars are on the rise, much to the dismay of human drivers and passengers who get stuck navigating the errors of the new technology. 

It’s projected that the U.S. robotaxi market will grow from 1,500 in 2025 to around 35,000 in 2030—around a 90% compounded annual growth rate, according to a 2025 Goldman Sachs report. The automated services could account for 8% of the total American ride-share market in just a few short years.

It’s only natural for drivers to fear for their future careers, especially as they see AI gut company workforces and swipe the jobs of thousands of white-collar employees. About 85% of people believe that the rollout of driverless cars will lead to job losses, and another 70% felt unsure of the technology or that it’s a bad idea for society, according to a recent University of California San Diego analysis of Pew Research Center data. 

And industry leaders like Uber chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi have sounded the alarm that the majority of the business’ trips will be “fulfilled by robots of some kind” within 20 years. However, when one door closes, another one opens. 

It’s projected that in deploying 9 million AVs over the next 15 years, more than 114,000 new jobs in AV production, distribution, maintenance, upgrades, and repairs will be created, according to a 2024 study from Chamber of Progress. Humans won’t be totally left out of the process; companies will need about 190 workers to manufacture and service the cars, for every 1,000 AV created and deployed each year.

The co-founder and CEO of $15.2 billion “super-app” company Grab, Anthony Tan, announced it would be rolling out robobuses in its headquarter city of Singapore this year. But in lockstep with making a large investment in driverless technologies, the business is also considering how to upskill human drivers in the shift. And just like Waymo, the company recognized a few work opportunities for people, including vehicle maintenance and data analysis. 

“We see new kinds of jobs emerging,” Tan said in a 2025 Q&A with analysts. For example, drivers could be remote safety drivers, data labelers; they could change LiDARs, cameras, and so forth.”

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A generation ago, Poland rationed sugar and flour while its citizens were paid one-tenth what West Germans earned. Today, the economy of the country has edged past Switzerland to become the world’s 20th largest with more than $1 trillion in annual output.

It’s a historic leap from the post-Communist ruins of 1989-90 to European growth champion, which economists say has lessons on how to bring prosperity to ordinary people — and that the Trump administration says should be recognized by Poland’s presence at a summit of the Group of 20 leading economies later this year.

The transformation is reflected in people like Joanna Kowalska, an engineer from Poznan, a city of around 500,000 people midway between Berlin and Warsaw. She returned home after five years in the U.S.

“I get asked often if I’m missing something by coming back to Poland, and, to be honest, I feel it’s the other way around,” Kowalska said. “We are ahead of the United States in so many areas.”

Kowalska works at the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center, which is developing the first artificial intelligence factory in Poland and integrating it with a quantum computer, one of 10 on the continent financed by a European Union program.

Kowalska worked for Microsoft in the U.S. after graduating from the Poznan University of Technology, in a job she saw as a “dream come true.”

But she missed having a “sense of mission,” she said.

“Especially when it comes to artificial intelligence, the technology started developing so rapidly in Poland,” Kowalska said. “So it was very tempting to come back.”

Breaking out of poverty

The guest invitation to the G20 summit is mostly symbolic. No guest country has been promoted to full member since the original G20 met at the finance minister level in 1999, and that would take a consensus decision of all the members. Moreover, the original countries were chosen not just by gross domestic product rank, but by their “systemic significance” in the global economy.

But the gesture reflects a statistical truth: In 35 years — a little less than one person’s working lifetime — Poland’s per capita GDP rose to $55,340 in 2025, or 85% of the EU average. That’s up from $6,730 in 1990, or 38% of the EU average and now roughly equal to Japan’s $52,039, according to International Monetary Fund figures measured in today’s dollars and adjusted for Poland’s lower cost of living.

Poland’s economy has grown an average 3.8% a year since joining the EU in 2004, easily beating the European average of 1.8%.

It wasn’t simply one factor that helped Poland break out of the poverty trap, says Marcin Piątkowski of Warsaw’s Kozminski University and author of a book on the country’s economic rise.

One of the most important factors was rapidly building a strong institutional framework for business, he said. That included independent courts, an anti-monopoly agency to ensure fair competition, and strong regulation to keep troubled banks from choking off credit.

As a result, the economy wasn’t hijacked by corrupt practices and oligarchs, as happened elsewhere in the post-Communist world.

Poland also benefited from billions of euros in EU aid, both before and after it joined the bloc in 2004 and gained access to its huge single market.

Above all, there was the broad consensus, from across the political spectrum, that Poland’s long-term goal was joining the EU.

“Poles knew where they were going,” Piątkowski said. “Poland downloaded the institutions and the rules of the game, and even some cultural norms that the West spent 500 years developing.”

As oppressive as it was, communism contributed by breaking down old social barriers and opening higher education to factory and farmworkers who had no chance before. A post-Communist boom in higher education means half of young people now have degrees.

“Young Poles are, for instance, better educated than young Germans,” Piatkowski said, but earn half what Germans do. That’s “an unbeatable combination” for attracting investors, he said.

Success of an electric bus company

Solaris, a company founded in 1996 in Poznan by Krzysztof Olszewski, is one of the leading manufacturers of electric buses in Europe with a market share of around 15%. Its story shows one hallmark of Poland’s success: entrepreneurship, or the willingness to take risks and build something new.

Educated as an engineer under the Communist government, Olszewski opened a car repair shop where he used spare parts from West Germany to fix Polish cars. While most enterprises were nationalized, authorities gave permission to small-scale private workshops like his to operate, according to Katarzyna Szarzec, an economist at the Poznan University of Economics and Business.

“These were enclaves of private entrepreneurship,” she said.

In 1996, Olszewski opened a subsidiary of the German bus company Neoplan and started producing for the Polish market.

“Poland’s entry to the EU in 2004 gave us credibility and access to a vast, open European market with the free movement of goods, services and people,” said Mateusz Figaszewski, responsible for institutional relations.

Then came a risky decision to start producing electric buses in 2011, a time when few in Europe were experimenting with the technology. Figaszewski said larger companies in the West had more to lose if switching to electric vehicles didn’t work out.

“It became an opportunity to achieve technological leadership ahead of the market,” he said.

An aging population

Challenges still remain for Poland. Due to a low birth rate and an aging society, fewer workers will be able to support retirees. Average wages are lower than the EU average. While small and medium enterprises flourish, few have become global brands.

Poznan Mayor Jacek Jaśkowiak sees domestic innovation as a third wave in Poland’s postsocialist economic development. In the first wave, foreign countries opened factories in Poland in the early 1990s, taking advantage of a skilled local population.

Around the turn of the millennium, he said, Western companies brought more advanced branches, including finance, information technology and engineering.

“Now it’s the time to start such sophisticated activities here,” Jaśkowiak says, adding that one of his main priorities is investing in universities.

“There is still much to do when it comes to innovation and technological progress,” added Szarzec, the Poznan economist. “But we keep climbing up on that ladder of added value. We’re no longer just a supplier of spare parts.”

Szarzec’s students say more needs to be done to reduce urban-rural inequalities, make housing affordable and support young people starting families. They say Poles need to acknowledge that immigrants, such as the millions of Ukrainians who fled Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, contribute to economic development in an aging population.

“Poland has such a dynamic economy, with so many opportunities for development, that of course I am staying,” said Kazimierz Falak, 27, one of Szarzec’s graduate students. “Poland is promising.”

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David McHugh reported from Frankfurt, Germany.

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Construction is finished on a major Massachusetts offshore wind farm, the first project to reach this stage during President Donald Trump’s time in office.

Offshore construction was completed Friday night on Vineyard Wind with the installation of the final blades, Craig Gilvarg, a spokesperson for the project, said Saturday.

Trump, who often talks about his hatred of wind power, has said his goal is to not let any “windmills” be built. Vineyard Wind was one of five major East Coast offshore wind projects the Trump administration halted construction on days before Christmas, citing national security concerns. Developers and states sued, and federal judges allowed all five to resume construction, essentially concluding that the government did not show that the national security risk was so imminent that construction must halt.

Another one of the five, Revolution Wind, began sending power for the first time to New England’s electric grid on Friday and will scale up in the weeks ahead until it is fully operational.

While Revolution Wind just began delivering power, Vineyard Wind has been doing so for over a year as more turbines were finished. Vineyard Wind is a joint venture between Avangrid and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, located 15 miles (24 kilometers) south of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, Massachusetts. It has 62 turbines that will generate a total of 800 megawatts. That is enough clean electricity to power about 400,000 homes.

Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell has said the completion of this project is essential to ensuring the state can lower costs, meet rising energy demand, advance its climate goals and sustain thousands of good-paying jobs.

The Trump administration has been particularly critical of the Vineyard Wind project because of a blade failure. Fiberglass fragments of a blade broke apart and began washing onto Nantucket beaches in July 2024 during the peak of tourist season. Manufacturer GE Vernova agreed to pay $10.5 million in a settlement to compensate island businesses that suffered losses.

Vineyard Wind submitted state and federal project plans to build an offshore wind farm in 2017. Massachusetts had committed to offshore wind by requiring its utilities to solicit proposals for up to 1,600 megawatts of offshore wind power by 2027. In what might have been a fatal blow, federal regulators delayed Vineyard Wind by holding off on issuing a key environmental impact statement in 2019. Massachusetts Democratic Rep. William Keating said at the time the Trump administration was trying to stymie the renewable energy project just as it was coming to fruition.

The Biden administration signed off on it in 2021, as it sought to ramp up offshore wind as a climate change solution. Construction began onshore in Barnstable, Massachusetts.

The first U.S. offshore wind farm opened off Rhode Island’s Block Island in 2016, at the end of President Barack Obama’s tenure. But with just five turbines, it’s not a commercial-scale wind farm. The nation’s first commercial-scale offshore wind farm officially opened in March 2024, when President Joe Biden was in office. Danish wind energy developer Orsted and the utility Eversource built that 12-turbine wind farm, called South Fork Wind, 35 miles (56 kilometers) east of Montauk Point, New York.

Trump began reversing the country’s energy policies his first day in office with a spate of executive orders aimed at boosting oil, gas and coal. White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said Friday night that Trump “reversed course on Joe Biden’s costly green energy agenda that gave preferential treatment to intermittent, unreliable energy sources and instead is aggressively unleashing reliable and affordable energy sources to lower energy bills, improve our grid stability and protect our national security.”

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The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

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A haunting whale song discovered on decades-old audio equipment could open up a new understanding of how the huge animals communicate, according to researchers who say it’s the oldest such recording known.

The song is that of a humpback whale, a marine giant beloved by whale watchers for its docile nature and spectacular leaps from the water, and was recorded by scientists in March 1949 in Bermuda, said researchers at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Falmouth, Massachusetts.

Just as significant is the sound of the surrounding ocean itself, said Peter Tyack, a marine bioacoustician and emeritus research scholar at Woods Hole. The ocean of the late 1940s was much quieter than the ocean of today, providing a different backdrop than scientists are used to hearing for whale song, he said.

The recovered recordings “not only allow us to follow whale sounds, but they also tell us what the ocean soundscape was like in the late 1940s,” Tyack said. “That’s very difficult to reconstruct otherwise.”

A preserved recording from the 1940s can also help scientists better understand how new human-made sounds, such as increased shipping noise, affect the way whales communicate, Tyack said. Research published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration states that whales can vary their calling behavior depending on noises in their environment.

The recording predates scientist Roger Payne’s discovery of whale song by nearly 20 years. Woods Hole scientists on a research vessel at the time were testing sonar systems and performing acoustic experiments along with the U.S. Office of Naval Research when they captured the sound, said Ashley Jester, director of research data and library services at Woods Hole.

The scientists didn’t know what they were hearing, but they decided to record and save the sounds anyway, Jester said.

“And they were curious. And so they kept this recorder running, and they even made time to make recordings where they weren’t making any noise from their ships on purpose just to hear as much as they could,” said Jester. “And they kept these recordings.”

Woods Hole scientists discovered the song while digitizing old audio recordings last year. The recording was on a well-preserved disc created by a Gray Audograph, a kind of dictation machine used in the 1940s. Jester located the disc.

While the early underwater recording equipment used to capture the sound would be considered crude by today’s standards, it was cutting-edge at the time, Jester said. And the fact that the sound is recorded on a plastic disc is significant because most recordings of the time were on tape, which has long since deteriorated, she said.

Whales’ sound-making ability is critical to their survival and key to how they socialize and communicate. The sounds come in the form of clicks, whistles and calls, according to NOAA scientists who study them.

The sounds also allow the whales to find food, navigate, locate each other and understand their surroundings in the vast ocean, scientists say. Several species make repetitive sounds that resemble songs. Humpback whales, which can weigh more than 55,000 pounds (24,947 kilograms), are the ocean’s most renowned singers, capable of complex vocalizations that can sound ethereal or even mournful.

The discovery of long-lost whale song from a quieter ocean could be a jumping-off point to better understanding the sounds the animals make today, said Hansen Johnson, a research scientist at the Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life at the New England Aquarium.

“And, you know, it’s just beautiful to listen to and has really inspired a lot of people to be curious about the ocean, and care about ocean life in general,” said Johnson, who was not involved in the research. “It’s pretty special.”

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Pixar’s “Hoppers” held onto the top slot at the box office, bouncing back with $28.5 million in its second weekend, according to studio estimates Sunday, while Colleen Hoover’s “Reminders of Him” added to the author’s successful streak at the box office.

After its $45.3 million debut, The Walt Disney Co.’s “Hoppers” release dipped a modest 37% in its follow-up weekend, a promising sign for an animated movie hoping to have strong legs through March. The Pixar original, about a young woman who transforms into the body of a beaver to help defend a pond from development, is hoping to keep attracting audiences with good reviews (94% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes) and strong audience scores (an “A” CinemaScore).

While many of Pixar’s sequels have been blockbusters on arrival — like 2024’s “Inside Out 2” ($1.7 billion worldwide) — their originals have recently needed time to get going. In 2023, “Elemental” launched with a disappointing $29.6 million but went on to gross a hefty $496.4 million globally.

“Hoppers,” which has taken in $164.7 million globally thus far, has a long way to go to match that, but it’s off to a good start. It faced little direct new competition this weekend. The upcoming Amazon MGM sci-fi adventure “Project Hail Mary,” however, will soon take up IMAX screens and compete for family moviegoers.

Universal’s “Reminders of Him” debuted in second place this weekend with a better-than-expected $18.3 million. The film, starring Maika Monroe as a woman attempting to rebuild her life after prison, is the third Colleen Hoover adaptation to reach the big screen, following 2024’s “It Ends With Us” ($351 million worldwide for Sony) and 2025’s “Regretting You” ($91 million for Paramount).

“Reminders of Him,” which cost about $25 million to make, got poor reviews (56% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes) and notched a not-great “B” CinemaScore with audiences. But the film, the first from a screenplay co-written by Hoover, extends the bestselling author’s popularity with moviegoers.

“ Undertone,” a micro-budget horror movie from A24, opened with $9.3 million. The film, written and directed by Ian Tuason, has been touted as A24’s best horror film since Ari Aster’s “Hereditary” (2018), one of the movies that helped put the indie studio on the map. With a budget of just $500,000, “Undertone” makes particular use of sound design in a one-setting tale about a paranormal podcaster (Nina Kiri) caring for her dying mother.

After its disappointing debut, Warner Bros. “The Bride!” plummeted in its second weekend, dropping 70% with just $2.1 million. The Maggie Gyllenhaal-directed riff on “The Bride of Frankenstein” cost about $80-90 million to produce, but so far has grossed just $11.3 million domestically.

Oscar weekend is often slow in theaters, with the industry’s attention largely focused on Sunday’s Academy Awards. But the trio of moderate successes in “Hoppers,” “Reminders of Him” and “Undertone” lifted moviegoing ahead of Hollywood’s biggest night. Year-to-date ticket sales are up 15.2% from the same point last year, according to Comscore.

Top 10 movies by domestic box office

With final domestic figures being released Monday, this list factors in the estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Comscore:

1. “Hoppers,” $28.5 million.

2. “Reminders of Him,” $18.3 million.

3. “Undertone,” $9.3 million.

4. “Scream 7,” $8.4 million.

5. “Goat,” $4.7 million.

6. “The Bride!” $2.1 million.

7. “Kiki’s Delivery Service,” $1.7 million.

8. “Wuthering Heights,” $1.7 million.

9. “TMNT II,” $1.5 million.

10. “Crime 101,” $1.1 million.

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For Gen Z, navigating today’s job market can feel daunting—especially as artificial intelligence threatens to upend the very idea of work. But according to Melinda French Gates, that uncertainty is exactly where growth begins.

The billionaire philanthropist said that learning to embrace transitions is the key to personal and professional development.

“If we pause and if we give ourselves time to learn, we can actually grow tremendously during those transitions, whether they’re easy or whether they’re hard,” she said on Bloomberg’s Leaders with Francine Lacqua podcast.

And for new graduates in particular, the 61-year-old said there’s one question that cuts to the heart of it:

“I even tell university graduates these days, you think the transition is when you go through graduation? No, it’s when you wake up the next day and you’re saying, ‘Am I really on the way to where I want to go?’”

It’s a question many Gen Zers are already grappling with as traditional career ladders grow less stable. Early in their careers, young workers are moving on quickly: The average job tenure during the first five years of employment is just 1.1 years, according to recruitment company Randstad. That’s a sharp contrast to earlier generations. Gen Xers and baby boomers typically stayed in their early roles for closer to three years—suggesting today’s young workers are reevaluating their career paths far sooner.

Melinda French Gates’s first post-grad job wasn’t going as planned—but instead of quitting, she embraced the challenge

Learning to question major transitions is something French Gates said she learned early in her career—starting with her first post-grad job. After earning her bachelor’s degree in computer science and her MBA from Duke University, she spent nine years at Microsoft. 

“There weren’t very many women at the time, and it was a rough-and-tumble world. Tech is still pretty tough. It was the boys’ debate society,” she recalled to Bloomberg. “And I thought, ‘okay, I can rise up, I can play this game.’ And I did play the game and I did quite well—I was moving up the ranks in the company.”

But around the two-year mark, doubts crept in: “I realized I didn’t like myself. I didn’t like how I was treating people outside of work, because I was treating them the same way I was treating people inside of work, which was the game we had to play. And I thought, no, this isn’t right for me.”

It’s a realization many young workers may recognize today. As Gen Z switches jobs more frequently than previous generations, questions about culture and values are surfacing earlier in careers. French Gates’ experience speaks to why: when the culture doesn’t match your values, no amount of upward momentum feels like enough. 

But rather than quit and seek opportunities elsewhere, she decided to try something different: shifting her approach to work.

“I thought, ‘okay, before I leave, I will try—inside this company—being who I truly am,’” she said. “And to my surprise, I did not fall flat on my face. I actually rose in the company, and people came to work under me in my division who wanted that type of leadership. And I thought, ‘oh, this can work. There’s no reason for me to be somebody else—be myself.’”

It’s a realization, she said, that often only comes once you’re in the thick of it—but once you are, it’s worth sitting with.

“I don’t think it’s until you get to the next day that you can really, at least for me, start to process the transition and where you are,” French Gates added. “And this is really the heart of what leadership is also like.”

Lisa Su and Julie Sweet agree with Melinda French Gates: embrace hard times—and you’ll find success on the other side

French Gates isn’t alone in her view that leaning into discomfort is one of the surest paths forward. Some of the world’s most successful executives agree.

Lisa Su, CEO of semiconductor company Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) put it bluntly in a commencement address to graduates of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute last year: “Run towards the hardest problems—not walk, run—and that’s where you find the biggest opportunities, where you learn the most, where you set yourself apart, and most importantly, where you grow.”

“When you choose the hardest challenges,” she added, “you choose the fastest path to growth and the greatest chance to make a difference.”

Accenture CEO Julie Sweet has a reminder of that mantra in her home, with a plaque stating: “If your dreams don’t scare you, they’re not big enough.”

“I look at it every day when I think about where I need to take our company, and where I need to continue to learn as a company,” Sweet said at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit in Riyadh last year.

“So I hope for all of you that your dreams scare you, because that means you’re going to make the impact that I know you can.”

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Jürgen Habermas, whose work on communication, rationality and sociology made him one of the world’s most influential philosophers and a key intellectual figure in his native Germany, has died. He was 96.

Habermas’ publisher, Suhrkamp, said he died on Saturday in Starnberg, near Munich.

Habermas frequently weighed in on political matters over several decades. His extensive writing crossed the boundaries of academic and philosophical disciplines, providing a vision of modern society and social interaction. His best-known works included the two-volume “Theory of Communicative Action.”

Habermas, who was 15 at the time of Nazi Germany’s defeat, later recalled the dawn of a new era in 1945 and his coming to terms with the reality of Nazi crimes as something without which he wouldn’t have found his way into philosophy and social theory. He recalled that “you saw suddenly that it was a politically criminal system in which you had lived.”

He had an ambivalent relationship with the left-wing student movement of the late 1960s in Germany and beyond, engaging with it but also warning at the time against the danger of what he called “left-wing fascism” — a reaction to a firebrand speech by a student leader that he later said was “slightly out of place.” He would later recognize the movement as having driven a “fundamental liberalization” of German society.

In the 1980s, Habermas was a prominent figure in the so-called Historians’ Dispute, in which Berlin historian Ernst Nolte and others called for a new perspective on the Third Reich and German identity. They tended to compare what happened under Adolf Hitler to atrocities carried out by other governments, such as the deaths of millions in the Soviet Union under Stalin. Habermas and other opponents contended that the conservative historians were trying to lessen the magnitude of Nazi crimes through such comparisons.

Chancellor Friedrich Merz said that “Germany and Europe have lost one of the most significant thinkers of our time.”

Germany’s center-right leader said that “his sociological and philosophical work had an impact on generations of researchers and thinkers.” Merz praised “Habermas’ intellectual forcefulness and his liberality” and said in a statement that “his voice will be missed.”

Habermas supported the rise to power of center-left Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in 1998. He was critical of the “technocratic” approach and perceived lack of political vision of Schröder’s conservative successor, Angela Merkel, complaining in 2016 of the paralyzing effects on public opinion of “the foam blanket of Merkel’s policy of sending people to sleep.”

He was particularly critical of the “limited interest” shown by German politicians, business leaders and media in “shaping a politically effective Europe.” In 2017, he praised newly elected French President Emmanuel Macron for laying out of plans for European reform, saying that “the way he speaks about Europe makes a difference.”

Habermas was born on June 18, 1929, in Duesseldorf and grew up in nearby Gummersbach, where his father headed the local chamber of commerce. He became a member of the Deutsches Jungvolk, a section of the Hitler Youth for younger boys, at 10.

He was born with a cleft palate that required repeated operations as a child, an experience that helped inform his later thinking about language.

Habermas said he had experienced the importance of spoken language as “a layer of commonality without which we as individuals cannot exist” and recalled struggling to make himself understood. He also spoke of the “superiority of the written word,” and said that “the written form conceals the flaws of the oral.”

His wife, Ute Habermas-Wesselhoeft, died last year. The couple had three children: Tilmann; Rebekka, who died in 2023; and Judith.

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The CEOs of the nation’s top airline companies, including American, Delta, Southwest and JetBlue, are imploring Congress to restore funding to the Department of Homeland Security and embrace a bipartisan solution to pay federal aviation workers including airport security officers during the partial government shutdown.

“Once again, air travel is the political football amid another government shutdown,” the executives wrote in an open letter to Congress that was published Sunday online and in The Washington Post.

The letter, which was also signed by the CEOs of the cargo companies UPS, FedEx and Atlas Air, said that Congress should pass the Aviation Funding Solvency Act and the Aviation Funding Stability Act, which would guarantee air traffic controllers are paid regardless of the government’s funding status, as well as the Keep America Flying Act. That measure would offer the same protections to Transportation Security Administration officers tasked to provide security and to screen all travelers.

”It’s difficult, if not impossible, to put food on the table, put gas in the car and pay rent when you are not getting paid,” the letter said.

The current partial shutdown affects only the Department of Homeland Security, which includes TSA. Democrats in Congress refused to fund the department over objections to its immigration enforcement tactics. The lapse marks the third shutdown in less than a year to leave TSA workers temporarily without pay — and once the government reopens, to have to wait for back pay.

Democratic lawmakers have said DHS won’t get funded until new restrictions are placed on federal immigration operations following the fatal shootings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis earlier this year.

The CEOs noted that with spring break in full swing, FIFA’s World Cup 2026 approaching and celebrations for America’s 250th birthday throughout the year, the stakes are high. The letter said that U.S. airlines expect 171 million passengers this spring season.

As the latest partial shutdown drags on, there have been long security lines at a growing number of U.S airports.

The TSA and Homeland Security have consistently blamed Democrats for the long security lines.

Homeland Security posted on its X account last week that more than 300 TSA agents have quit since the start of the shutdown.

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Thirty years ago, a single light bulb would illuminate the mezcal distillery owned by Gladys Sánchez Garnica’s family in rural Oaxaca, where the agave-based spirit was made through the night. As drops dripped from a clay oven, Garnica and her siblings listened to stories told by their parents while neighbors arrived by horse to get a taste of a drink known for its smoky flavor.

“We were taught when to harvest agave, how to care for the soil, and how much we could ask of the forest,” said Garnica, 33, speaking from a women-owned distillery in San Pedro Totolapam, a town of just over 3,000 residents in Mexico’s Oaxacan Central Valleys, where much of the economy depends on mezcal.

Today, that small-scale tradition exists alongside a global boom that has transformed mezcal into a major industry dominated by international brands. As mezcal has spread to bars around the world, so has its footprint on the land. Along the road to communities like San Luis del Rio, where celebrity brands such as Dos Hombres, created by actors Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul from the hit series “Breaking Bad,” are made, agave plantations now blanket hillsides that were once forest. While the boom has brought economic benefits for many local producers, it’s also led to rising environmental costs.

Mezcal production surges as popularity takes off

Production in Mexico has gone from about 1 million liters (264,172 gallons) in 2010 to more than 11 million (2.9 million gallons) in 2024, according to COMERCAM, the country’s mezcal regulatory body. Nearly all is produced in Oaxaca, but less than 30% remains in Mexico. About 75% of exports go to the United States.

In two major mezcal-producing areas of Oaxaca, more than 34,953 hectares (86,370 acres) of tropical dry and pine oak forests have been lost in 27 years to make room for agave, an area roughly equivalent to the size of the U.S. city of Detroit, according to a study led by Rufino Sandoval-García, a professor at the Technological University of the Central Valley of Oaxaca.

The study found that agave plantations in the two areas have expanded by over 400% the past three decades, increasingly replacing forests and farmland with a species of agave known as espadin, used in most commercial mezcal.

That is accelerating soil erosion, reducing by 4 million tons per year the amount of carbon dioxide captured by forests, limiting the land’s ability to recharge groundwater and creating heat islands in heavily planted areas, according to the study.

“It will take a long time for the ecosystem to recover the resilience it once had,” said Sandoval-García.

Mezcal production has always been resource-intensive

One liter (0.26 gallons) of mezcal can require at least 10 liters (2.64 gallons) of water for fermentation and distillation, and generates waste such as bagazo, the pulpy residue left after the juice has been extracted, and vinazas, or wastewater, often dumped untreated into rivers. Large quantities of firewood are also burned to roast agave pineapples and fuel distillation, much of which comes from illegal logging, according to Sandoval-García.

For generations, the environmental impacts of the spirit remained limited by its small scale and the ability of surrounding forests and soils to recover. That balance is now fragile.

Félix Monterrosa, a third-generation producer from Santiago Matatlan who owns Oaxacan brand CUISH, said the boom of industrial mezcal displaced the milpa system he learned from his ancestors, in which corn, beans and pumpkin were grown alongside agave.

“Now everything is monoculture, and that is the real problem,” Monterrosa said. In his town, decades of dumping mezcal waste into the river have left it so polluted that residents nicknamed it the “Nilo,” short for “ni lo huelas,” or in English: “don’t even smell it.”

Monterrosa now plants wild agaves alongside corn and trees to restore biodiversity, though he said maintaining the system at scale remains a challenge.

Water is an increasing concern across Oaxaca, which experienced its worst drought in more than a decade in 2024, according to Mexico’s National Water Commission.

Armando Martínez Ruiz, a producer in Soledad Salinas who sells his mezcal to Mexican brand Amaras, installed a system to cool and reuse water during distillation.

“We never had enough water here, so I try not to waste it,” he said.

There is tension between sustainability and profitability

While major companies highlight sustainability commitments, their third-party contracts with distilleries are typically limited to purchasing mezcal in bulk. Producers say those agreements rarely cover the costs of raw materials, workers’ wages or maintenance of their distilleries.

Del Maguey, one of the world’s top-selling mezcal brands, says they are working to reduce their environmental footprint by planting trees. Over the past five years, the company reused more than 5,000 tons of bagazo and 2 million liters (528,344 gallons) of vinaza to build a raised platform at a distillery in San Luis del Rio to prevent flooding and contamination, according to its head of sustainability, Gabriel Bonfanti.

For many, the boom has been a lifeline in a region with some of the highest poverty rates in Mexico.

Luis Cruz Velasco, a producer from San Luis del Rio who works with Mexican brands like Bruxo, said the growth has created jobs for nearly every family in his town of about 300 residents. Where previous generations lived in thatched houses, mezcal income has helped his siblings to attend university.

“There are many people who criticize us and ask what we do to reforest,” Velasco said. “But we have to look for a livelihood and food.”

For Velasco, the problem is not the entry of large brands, which he says have done more than the government to support marginalized areas like his, but the lack of public incentives for farmers to safeguard environments by planting native trees or maintaining traditional farming systems.

In Oaxaca, much land is communally owned and managed through local systems of self-governance. Converting forest into agave plantations requires federal approval from Mexico’s Secretary of Environment and Natural Resources.

The permitting process is so slow and bureaucratic that some communities choose to bypass it, said Helena Iturribarria from Tierra de Agaves, a conservation project to reforest parts of Oaxaca’s valleys and promote sustainable agave production.

The Secretary of Environment said in a statement it had not received requests for forest clearing for agave cultivation in the past three years in Oaxaca. The agency also said it was investigating nine public complaints filed since 2021 over illegal land clearing for mezcal production.

Finding ways to protect land

In 2018, Garnica founded a collective of women called the “Guardians of Mezcal.” The group is promoting mezcal produced by women using sustainable practices, including using only fallen trees for firewood and planting agave alongside other crops.

With help from Tierra de Agaves, Guardians of Mezcal and local community officials from Santa Maria Zoquitlan secured projected status for 26,000 hectares of forest surrounding the town.

“Mezcal is a way of life, like a form of work that our parents taught us, so it really means a lot,” Garnica said. “If there is a funeral, a wedding, a party, mezcal is a drink you are going to share with others, and above all many families depend on it.”

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The Trump administration this week stepped up its ambitious effort to replace about $1.6 trillion in lost tariff revenue that was eliminated by the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down a range of the president’s import taxes.

Recovering that lost revenue, which the White House was counting on to help offset the steep, multi-trillion dollar cost of its tax cuts, is possible but will be challenging, experts say. The administration has to use different legal provisions to impose new duties, and those provisions require longer, complex processes that U.S. companies can use to seek exemptions. It could be months or more before it is clear how much revenue the replacement tariffs will yield.

“I wouldn’t bet against this administration being able to get back on paper the same effective tariff rate they had before,” said Elena Patel, co-director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. But the new approach will “make it easier for people to contest the tariffs, which is going to put a big asterisk on the revenue until all that is settled.”

On Wednesday, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said the administration will investigate 16 economies — including the European Union — over whether their governments are subsidizing excessive factory capacity in a way that disadvantages U.S. manufacturing. The investigation will also cover China, South Korea, and Japan, Greer said.

In addition, he said there would be a second investigation of dozens of countries to see if their failure to ban goods made by forced labor amounts to an unfair trade practice that harms the United States. That investigation will also cover the EU and China, as well as Mexico, Canada, Australia, and Brazil.

Both investigations are being conducted under Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act, which requires the administration to consult with the targeted countries, as well as hold public hearings and allow affected U.S. industries to comment. A hearing as part of the factory capacity investigation will be held May 5, while a hearing on the forced labor investigation will occur April 28.

It’s a far cry from the emergency law that President Donald Trump relied on in his first year in office, which allowed him to immediately impose tariffs on any country, at nearly any level, simply by issuing an executive order.

Moments after the Supreme Court’s ruling, Trump imposed a 10% tariff on all imports under a separate legal authority, but that duty can only last for 150 days. The president has said he would raise it to 15%, the maximum allowed, but has yet to do so. Some two dozen states have already challenged the new tariffs. The administration is aiming to complete its Section 301 investigations before the 10% duties expire.

The effort underscores the importance that the Trump White House has placed on tariffs as a revenue-raiser at a time when the federal government is facing huge annual budget deficits for decades into the future. Previous administrations, by contrast, used tariffs more sparingly to narrowly protect specific industries.

Erica York, vice president of federal tax policy at the Tax Foundation, noted that the first investigation covers roughly 70% of imports, while the second would cover nearly all of them.

“That breadth suggests the goal isn’t to address the issues at hand, but instead to recreate a sweeping tariff tool,” she said.

Trump sees tariffs as a way to force foreign countries to essentially help pay the cost of U.S. government services, even though all recent economic studies find that American companies and consumers are paying the duties, including ones from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and economists at Harvard University. In his state of the union address last month, Trump even touted his tariffs as a potential replacement for the income tax, which would return the United States’ tax regime to the late 19th century.

Trump also wants tariffs to help pay for the tax cuts he extended in key legislation last year. The tax cut legislation is expected, according to the most recent estimates by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, to add $4.7 trillion to the national debt over a decade, while all Trump’s duties, including ones not struck down by the court, were projected to offset about $3 trillion — or two-thirds of that cost.

The court’s ruling Feb. 20 that he could no longer impose emergency tariffs eliminated about $1.6 trillion in expected revenue over the next decade, according to the CBO.

Some of Trump’s tariffs remain place, including previous duties on China and Canada that were imposed after earlier 301 investigations. The administration has also slapped tariffs on some specific products, including steel, lumber, and cars. Those, combined with the 10% tariff for part of this year, should yield about $668 billion over the next decade, the Tax Foundation estimates.

“It’s going to take a really big patchwork of these other investigations to make up for the (lost) tariffs,” York said.

The administration’s efforts are also unusual because they reflect an overreliance on tariffs to bring in more government revenue. Trump has also said the duties are intended to return manufacturing to the United States, and he has used them to leverage trade deals.

“What makes this really different,” said Kent Smetters, executive director of the Penn Wharton Budget Model, “it is really the first time tariffs have been mainly used as a revenue raiser.”

Patel, meanwhile, argues that raising revenue can be done more reliably and straightforwardly by Congress. Laws like Section 301 are traditionally intended to be used to address specific trade policy concerns in particular countries.

“It’s not supposed to be there to raise revenue,” she said. “If we want to raise revenue through tariffs, then Congress should impose a broad based tariff.”

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U.S. President Donald Trump said he has demanded about seven countries send warships to keep the Strait of Hormuz open as Iranian strikes continued to rain down on Gulf countries Monday.

Dubai International Airport, the world’s busiest, gradually restarted operations after a drone struck a fuel tank and started a fire. Authorities said it was quickly contained and no injuries were reported.

Tehran has accused the United States without evidence of using “ports, docks and hideouts” in the United Arab Emirates to launch strikes on Kharg Island, home to the main terminal handling Iran’s oil exports evidence, as oil prices soared. Brent crude oil was trading near $105 per barrel on Monday.

Trump said the U.S. is negotiating with countries heavily reliant on Middle East crude to join a coalition to police the waterway where about one-fifth the world’s traded oil normally flows, but declined to name them.

Israeli strikes have deepened Lebanon’s humanitarian crisis, with more than 850 people killed and over 850,000 displaced.

Here is the latest:

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent downplays oil price surge

The treasury secretary followed Trump’s lead Monday and dismissed concerns about rising oil prices since the start of the Iran war.

Bessent accused the media of “trying to make it into some crisis that it’s not,” and he insisted prices would come down after the conflict ends.

“I don’t know how many weeks it will be, but on the other side of this, the world will be safer, and we will be better supplied,” Bessent said on CNBC.

He said the Treasury Department hasn’t traded oil futures to try to cap prices. Asked whether it would going forward, the secretary said: “I’m not sure under what authority or what auspices” that would happen.

Trump’s Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told Bloomberg Television over the weekend that the administration has talked about that strategy.

Trump to hold a news conference on Monday

It adds to an already full slate of meetings and other activities on the president’s schedule for Monday morning.

He’s hosting a lunch with members of the Kennedy Center board, as well as signing an executive order on fraud with Vice President JD Vance later Monday afternoon.

The president says the news conference will be before the Kennedy Center lunch.

Explosions are heard in Qatar’s capital, Doha, amid an attack

The Interior Ministry urged people to remain indoors.

Sirens sound in Jerusalem and the surrounding area warning of incoming missiles from Iran

Sirens were also sounding in Bahrain Monday afternoon ahead of a potential attack, the country’s Interior Ministry said. The ministry urge people to head to the nearest safe place.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt says China trip could be postponed

Leavitt says “leader-to-leader” talks between President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping are happening and that “at this point,” Trump looks forward to visiting China.

But those dates “may be moved,” she said.

“As commander-in-chief, it’s his number one priority right now to ensure the continued success of this Operation Epic Fury,” Leavitt told reporters at the White House on Monday morning.

UAE reports attacks by 6 missiles and 21 drones

The United Arab Emirates was attacked Monday with six ballistic missiles and 21 drones coming from Iran. That’s according to the Emirati Defence Ministry.

The ministry tallied 304 ballistic missiles, 15 cruise missiles and 1,627 drones since the start of the war.

The attacks killed seven people including two troops, it said.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer defends decision to differ with Trump

Starmer has defended resisting President Trump’s pressure for the U.K. to join the war against Iran, saying he has “stood by my principles.”

Trump has berated the British leader for limiting the use of U.K. bases by American warplanes and declining to send an aircraft carrier to the Middle East. Trump complained to the Financial Times that “when I asked for them to come, they didn’t want to come.”

Starmer said at a news conference Monday that British troops should only be sent into action that is legal and has “a proper thought-through plan.”

He said U.K. opposition politicians who’ve criticized his stance “would have rushed the U.K. headlong into this war without the full picture of what they’re sending our forces into, and without a plan to get us out. That is not leading. It’s following.”

Iraq’s oil minister says new route for oil exports set to open

Iraqi Oil Minister Hayan Abdul-Ghani said Monday in a video statement that a pipeline from the northern city of Kirkuk to Turkey will be operational within a week, allowing the country to resume oil exports interrupted by the ongoing regional war.

Iraq previously exported around 3.4 million barrels of oil a day through its southern port of Basra, he said, but “in light of the military operations and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, Iraqi oil exports stopped two or three days after the beginning of the war in the region.”

Abdul-Ghani said the pipeline from Kirkuk to Turkey, with a capacity of 200,000 to 250,000 barrels a day, is currently undergoing hydrostatic testing. The route will bypass the semi-autonomous Kurdish area in northern Iraq after Baghdad could not reach an agreement with local authorities over conditions for exporting via another pipeline in the Kurdish region.

Israel says displaced Lebanese will have to wait to return home

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said those that fled southern Lebanon in the face of Israeli fighting against Hezbollah militants won’t be able to return home until northern Israel, which has been hit by barrages of rockets, is safe.

“Hezbollah will pay a heavy price for its aggression and activity in the Iranian axis to destroy Israel,” he said.

“We have promised security to the residents of the north, and that is exactly what we will do,” he said.

American efforts to protect Strait of Hormuz continue, US military commander says

The top U.S. military commander in the Middle East says American forces are zeroing in on Iran’s threats to freighters carrying oil and natural gas through a vital chokepoint in the Persian Gulf.

“We will continue to rapidly deplete Iran’s ability to threaten freedom of navigation in and around the Strait of Hormuz,” Admiral Brad Cooper, the head of U.S. Central Command, said in a video posted to X on Monday.

Iranian strikes on commercial vessels have effectively stopped shipping traffic in the waterway, through which a fifth of the world’s oil is transported. That has dramatically increased the price of oil and put pressure on Washington to do something to ease the pain for consumers.

Trump says he may delay China trip as Iran war roils oil prices

President Trump may delay his China trip due to the Iran war, but Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Monday it’s not to pressure Beijing on the Strait of Hormuz.

Bessent said any delay to Trump’s trip to Beijing wouldn’t be because of disagreements over the Iran war or efforts to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

“If the meeting for some reason was rescheduled, it would be rescheduled because of logistics,” he said. “The president wants to remain in D.C. to coordinate the war and traveling abroad at a time like this may not be optimal.”

Trump has suggested he may delay the much-anticipated visit to China at the end of the month as he seeks to ramp up the pressure on Beijing to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz and calm oil prices that have soared during the Iran war.

Italy signals reluctance to Trump’s call to help open Strait of Hormuz

Italy is the latest country to react cautiously to Trump’s demand that allies help open the Strait of Hormuz.

Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani told reporters in Brussels on Monday that Italy backs reinforcing EU naval missions in the Red Sea.

But he added: “However, I don’t think these missions can be expanded to include the Strait of Hormuz, especially since they are anti-piracy and defensive missions.”

U.S. President Donald Trump said he has demanded about seven countries send warships to keep the Strait of Hormuz open, as Iranian strikes continued to rain down on Gulf countries.

A Pakistani oil tanker transited through Strait of Hormuz

A vessel tracker says a first tanker carrying non-Iranian oil has transited through the Strait of Hormuz.

The Pakistani-controlled tanker Karachi, which carries crude oil from Abu Dhabi, passed the strait on Sunday, according to data from MarineTraffic.

The tanker is now sailing in the Gulf of Oman, it said.

India expecting LPG ships that transited the Strait of Hormuz

India’s shipping ministry said Monday that an Indian-flagged vessel carrying liquefied petroleum gas is expected to arrive at a port later in the day with more than 40,000 metric tons of fuel.

Local media reported that the vessel sailed from Qatar’s Ras Laffan anchorage. The AP was not able to independently verify that.

A second ship is scheduled to dock on Tuesday, the ministry said. Both vessels crossed the Strait of Hormuz on Saturday.

Officials said 22 Indian-flagged vessels remain west of the strait.

Starmer says UK seeks ‘viable’ plan to open Strait of Hormuz

Prime Minister Keir Starmer says Britain is working with allies on a plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, but “will not be drawn into the wider war.”

He spoke after U.S. President Donald Trump said he’d demanded U.S. allies send warships to open the key oil shipment route.

Starmer said Britain is discussing with the U.S. and allies in Europe and the Gulf the possibility of using mine-hunting drones that the U.K. has in the region. But he signalled the U.K. is unlikely to dispatch a warship.

Trump has berated Starmer for a perceived lack of support for the war, after the prime minister initially refused to allow the U.S. to use British bases to strike Iran.

Starmer said at a news conference Monday that Britain is seeking “a viable collective plan” to reopen the strait, adding that it is, “to say the least, not easy.”

Iran says Strait of Hormuz is closed only to US, Israel and their allies

Iran’s top diplomat says the key Strait of Hormuz is only cut off for vessels of the United States, Israel and their allies.

“From our perspective it is open,” Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said of the strait. “It is only closed to our enemies, to those who carried out unjust aggression against our country and to their allies.”

Araghchi spoke at a press conference in Tehran on Monday.

Israeli airstrike kills 4, including 2 children, in Lebanon

Lebanon’s Health Ministry says an Israeli airstrike on the southern village of Qantara killed four people, including two children.

A wall collapse in Gaza kills 3 Palestinians

Two Palestinian women and a child were killed Monday when a wall collapsed in the Gaza Strip, hospital authorities said.

The three-meter-high wall collapsed over tents sheltering displaced people in the southern city of Khan Younis, the city’s Nasser Hospital said.

The dead were relatives and included a six-year-old boy, a 17-year-old pregnant woman and an elderly woman, according to a hospital casualty list.

The Israel-Hamas war has wrecked Gaza, leaving the majority of the strip’s more than 2 million people living in tents or damaged buildings.

The war left 61 million tons of rubble — about as much as 15 Great Pyramids of Giza or 25 Eiffel Towers by volume, according to the U.N.

German minister says US-Israeli aims need clarity

German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul said Monday it will be important for the U.S. and Israel to define “when they consider the military aims of their deployment to have been reached.”

Before meeting EU colleagues in Brussels, Wadephul said he told his U.S. and Israeli counterparts “we need more clarity here.”

He also said the Iranian government poses a significant danger to the region, the freedom of shipping and the global economy and “this danger definitely must not continue.”

Wadephul said without elaborating that he would back sanctions against those responsible for blocking the Strait of Hormuz.

He said once there is clarity on the U.S.-Israeli aims it will be time for a phase when “a security architecture for this whole region” is defined, which will entail speaking to Iran.

UK sending funds to Lebanon humanitarian groups

Britain is sending 5 million pounds ($6.6 million) to humanitarian organizations in Lebanon.

The funds are intended to help provide food, water and shelter for some of the more than 800,000 people displaced by Israel’s offensive against the militant group Hezbollah.

Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper said she is “gravely concerned about the developing conflict in Lebanon and the scale of the humanitarian impact.”

She condemned Hezbollah’s strikes on Israel and said the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Lebanese people by Israeli operations “is completely unacceptable.”

Cooper said the U.K. is working with European allies and the U.S. to prevent the conflict from escalating.

Bahrain reports missile and drone attacks

Bahrain’s Defense Ministry says air defense systems have responded to attacks Monday morning.

The ministry says four missiles and three drones were fired.

Israel sends troops into Lebanon for ‘limited’ operation

The Israeli military says it sent additional ground troops into Lebanon for what it calls a “limited and targeted operation.”

Military spokesman Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani says the latest deployment is meant to defend Israeli border communities against attacks from the Hezbollah militant group.

Shoshani says Hezbollah has sent hundreds of fighters from its elite Radwan unit toward the border since the militant group entered the war two weeks ago.

He says Israel carried out artillery and airstrikes on multiple sites before sending in the troops.

Earlier in the war, Israel beefed up the presence of ground troops inside Lebanon in what it says is an attempt to prevent attacks on its northern border towns.

Israeli strikes on south Lebanon kill 3 including 2 paramedics

Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency says one person was killed by an Israeli airstrike early Monday on a home in the southern Lebanese village of Kfar Sir.

The agency says another strike occurred after paramedics from the Islamic Health Society, Hezbollah’s health arm, arrived at the scene.

The agency says the second strike killed two paramedics and wounded another person.

Israeli military says 70% of Iranian launchers destroyed

The Israeli military says it has destroyed an estimated 70% of Iran’s missile launchers during the first two weeks of the war.

Military spokesman Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani told reporters Monday that while Iran continues to fire missiles at Israel, the number of launches has been greatly reduced.

He says Israel has carried out some 7,600 strikes in Iran, knocking out 85% of Iran’s air defenses and targeting a number of Iranian nuclear sites.

Shoshani says the war will go on “for as long as needed” and says Israel still has thousands of targets it is prepared to strike.

China has no comment on Trump’s Strait of Hormuz request

A Chinese government spokesperson did not respond directly to questions about Trump’s request for military support from several countries to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

The Foreign Ministry’s Lin Jian, at a daily briefing in Beijing, instead repeated China’s calls for an end to the fighting, noting the impact on energy and goods trade.

Trump said in an interview with The Financial Times that the U.S. would like an answer from China before his planned trip to Beijing in about two weeks, and that “we may delay.”

Lin said China and the U.S. have maintained communication on Trump’s visit.

“Head-of-state diplomacy plays an irreplaceable strategic guiding role in China–U.S. relations,” he said.

Drone strike starts fire at UAE oil facility

A fire broke out Monday following a drone attack on an industrial oil facility in Fujairah, one of the United Arab Emirates’ seven emirates, authorities said.

The Media Office in Fujairah said a drone targeted the Fujairah Oil Industry Zone, causing an “advanced” fire.

No casualties were reported.

UAE says Palestinian killed in Abu Dhabi missile attack

A Palestinian civilian was killed in a missile attack early Monday in the United Arab Emirates capital Abu Dhabi, authorities said.

The Abu Dhabi Media Office said a missile fell on a civilian vehicle in Al Bahyah area

The death raised the toll to seven people in the UAE since the beginning of the war Feb. 18, authorities said.

EU weighs naval missions to reopen strait

The European Union is weighing two types of naval missions to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

“It is in our interest to keep the Strait of Hormuz open, and that’s why we are also discussing what we can do in this regard from the European side,” said Kaja Kallas, the EU’s foreign policy chief.

She made the announcement ahead of a gathering of the bloc’s foreign ministers in Brussels on Monday.

Rising prices for energy and fertilizers has brought the war in Iran to the top of their agenda, she said.

Kallas said the EU could expand its Aspides naval mission to protect shipping in the Red Sea up into the Persian Gulf or form a “coalition of the willing” with member nations contributing military capacity on an ad hoc basis.

Saudi Arabia reports drone attacks

Saudi Arabia says it intercepted three drones Monday morning over the capital Riyadh and the nation’s oil-rich western region.

The Saudi Defense Ministry says no casualties or damage were reported.

The ministry reports more than 60 drones attacked the Gulf country within a few hours.

Some flights resume at Dubai airport

United Arab Emirates officials say Dubai International Airport has gradually resumed some flights at hours after a drone strike.

Dubai Civil Aviation Authority announced flights are operating to selected destinations, according to the Dubai Media Office.

Emirates airline says limited operations have resumed at the airport.

A drone struck a fuel tank at the airport early Monday, causing a fire and forcing the temporary suspension of flights.

Brent crude trades near $105

Brent crude oil is trading near the $105 per barrel level on Monday.

A barrel of Brent, the international standard, was up 1.6% at $104.73, dipping slightly after opening above $106 per barrel. It’s up more than 40% since the war began.

Share prices in Asia were mixed and U.S. futures advanced.

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About 3,800 workers at one of the nation’s largest meatpacking plants went on strike Monday in Colorado in what union representatives said is the first walkout at a U.S. beef slaughterhouse in four decades.

The strike at the Swift Beef Co. plant in Greeley began Monday morning, said Claire Poundstone, an attorney representing workers with United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7. Poundstone said she expected workers to participate in the strike line through the evening.

“We’ll be here all day,” she said.

The strike follows accusations from union officials that owner JBS USA retaliated against workers and committed other unfair labor practices amid contract negotiations. A previous contract expired Sunday night.

A message was sent early Monday seeking an updated comment from a spokesperson at JBS USA.

The union said in a news release that its workers “perform some of the most difficult and dangerous jobs in the country.”

“They deserve wage increases that keep pace with inflation, ensure they receive healthcare commensurate with the toll this work takes on their bodies, and that allow them to live with dignity and respect.”

It said JBS has been charging many workers at least $1,100 to offset the company’s expenses for personal protective equipment needed to ensure worker safety.

The strike comes at a 75-year low for the U.S. cattle population, with a Jan. 1 inventory of 86.2 million animals — down 1% from the prior year. Rising beef prices have added to economic anxiety in the U.S., while the administration of President Donald Trump has turned to a trade deal with Argentina in efforts to lower prices for food, including beef.

It also follows the January closure of a meatpacking plant in Lexington, Nebraska, which was expected to ripple through the local economy and community. Tyson Foods cited the smaller herd and millions of dollars in expected losses this year.

At the Greeley plant, the company tried to intimidate workers to quit the union in one-on-one meetings, union general counsel Matt Shechter said. A JBA USA statement issued before the strike said the company fully complies with federal and state labor and employment laws.

Kim Cordova, Local 7 president, said 99% of workers voted to authorize the strike. No formal negotiations took place over the weekend after the company refused a union request to negotiate on Saturday, Shechter said.

The company statement said any employee who didn’t want to strike would have work and be paid. The company said it would operate two shifts at the plant Monday and would temporarily move production as needed to other JBS facilities.

“Our goal is to minimize impact to our customers, our partners, and the broader marketplace while we work toward a fair resolution in Greeley,” the company said.

It’s the first strike at a U.S. slaughterhouse since workers walked out at a Hormel plant in Minnesota in 1985, Cordova said. That strike lasted more than a year and included violent confrontations between police and protesters, according to the Minnesota Historical Society.

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Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” was crowned best picture at the 98th Academy Awards, handing Hollywood’s top honor to a comic, multi-generational American saga of political resistance.

The ceremony Sunday, which also saw Michael B. Jordan win best actor and “Sinners” cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw make Oscar history as the first female director of photography to win the award, was a long-in-coming coronation for Anderson, a San Fernando Valley native who made his first short at age 18 and has been one of America’s most lionized filmmakers for decades. Before Sunday, Anderson had never won an Oscar.

But “One Battle After Another,” the favorite coming in, won six Oscars, including best director and best adapted screenplay for Anderson, the Oscars’ first trophy for best casting and best supporting actor for an absent Sean Penn.

“I wrote this movie for my kids to say sorry for the housekeeping mess that we left in this world — we’re handing off to them,” said Anderson while accepting the screenplay trophy. “But also with the encouragement that they will be the generation that hopefully brings us some common sense and decency.”

Ryan Coogler’s Jim Crow-set, blues-soaked vampire tale “Sinners,” which came in with a record 16 nominations, also landed some big and even historic wins. Coogler, the widely loved filmmaker, won the first Oscar in an unblemished career that started out with Jordan in 2013’s “Fruitvale Station.”

Arkapaw was also the first Black person to win for best cinematography. Only the fourth female cinematographer ever nominated, her win was a long-in-coming triumph for women behind the camera.

“I really want all the women in room to stand up,” said Arkapaw. “Because I don’t feel like I get here without you guys.”

And Jordan, one of Hollywood’s most liked leading men, won best actor in one of the night’s closest races. The Dolby Theatre rose to its feet in the most thunderous applause of the night.

“Yo, momma, what’s up?” said Jordan after staggering to the stage.

The Oscar night belonged to Warner Bros., the studio of “One Battle After Another” and “Sinners,” which scored a record-tying 11 wins. It was an oddly poignant note of triumph for the fabled studio, which weeks earlier agreed to a sale to Paramount Skydance, David Ellison’s rapidly assembled media monolith. The $111 billion deal, which awaits regulatory approval, has Hollywood bracing for more layoffs.

But “Sinners” and “One Battle After Another” — the much-acclaimed heavyweights of the season — were each Hollywood anomalies: big-budget originals born from a personal vision. In a year where anxiety over studio contraction and the rise of artificial intelligence often consumed the industry, both films gave Hollywood fresh hope.

Jessie Buckley won best actress for her performance as Agnes Shakespeare in “Hamnet,” making her the first Irish performer to ever win in the category. At an Oscars where no other acting award seemed a sure thing, Buckley cruised into Sunday’s Oscars at the Dolby Theatre as the overwhelming favorite.

“It’s Mother’s Day in the U.K.,” said Buckley on the stage. “I would like to dedicated this to the beautiful chaos of a mother’s heart.”

‘KPop’ and ‘Frankenstein’ win for Netflix

From the start, when host Conan O’Brien sprinted through the year’s nominees as Amy Madigan’s character in the horror thriller “Weapons” in a pre-taped bit, Sunday’s ceremony was quirky, a little clunky and preoccupied with the shifting place of movies in culture. There was, of all things, a tie for best live-action short film.

As expected, the Netflix sensation “KPop Demon Hunters,” 2025’s most-watched film, won best animated feature, as well as best song for “Golden.” It was a big win for Netflix but a more qualified victory for the movie’s producer, Sony Pictures. Though it developed and produced the film, Sony sold “KPop Demon Hunters” to the streaming giant instead of giving it a theatrical release.

On Netflix, “KPop Demon Hunters” became a cultural phenomenon and the streaming platform’s biggest hit. It has more than 325 million views and counting.

“This is for Korea and Koreans everywhere,” said co-director Maggie Kang.

Another Netflix release, Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein” picked up three awards for its lavish craft, for costume design, makeup and hairstyling and for production design.

Amy Madigan won best supporting actress for her performance in the horror thriller “Weapons,” a win that came 40 years after the 75-year-old actor was first nominated, in 1986, for “Twice in a Lifetime.” Letting out a giant laugh as she hit the stage, Madigan exclaimed, “This is great!”

O’Brien presides over a ceremony shadowed by politics

Hosting for the second time, O’Brien began the Dolby Theatre show alluding to “chaotic and frightening times.” But he argued that the current geopolitical climate made the Oscars all the more resonate as a globally unifying force.

“We pay tribute tonight, not just to film, but to the ideals of global artistry, collaboration, patience, resilience and that rarest of qualities today — optimism,” O’Brien said. “We’re going to celebrate. Not because we think all is well, but because we work, and hope, for better.”

Throughout the show, O’Brien hit a number of targets, like Timothée Chalamet — who again missed out on winning his first Oscar, this time for “Marty Supreme” — for his diss of opera and ballet. But the ceremony seldom wasn’t shadowed by politics, whether in references to changes under U.S. President Donald Trump or the recently launched war in Iran.

Joachim Trier, whose Norwegian family drama “Sentimental Value” won best international film, quoted James Baldwin in his acceptance speech: “All adults are responsible for all children,” he said. “Let’s not vote for politicians that don’t take this seriously into account.”

Presenter Jimmy Kimmel, whose late-night show last year was suspended after comments he made about Charlie Kirk’s killing, was among the most blunt.

“There are some countries that don’t support free speech,” said Kimmel. “I’m not at liberty to say which. Let’s just leave it at North Korea and CBS.”

Shortly after, “Mr. Nobody Against Putin,” a film about a Russian primary schoolteacher who documents his students’ indoctrination to support Russia’s war with Ukraine, won best documentary.

“’Mr. Nobody Against Putin’ is about how you lose your country,” co-director said. “And what we saw when working with this footage is that you lose it through countless, small, little acts of complicity.”

“We all face a moral choice,” he added, “but, luckily, a nobody is more powerful than you think.”

Tributes to Reiner, Redford and others

Elegy also marked the Oscars. Producers expanded the in memoriam segment following a year that featured the deaths of so many Hollywood legends, including Keaton, Robert Duvall and Redford. Barbra Streisand spoke about Redford, her “The Way We Were” co-star.

“Bob had real backbone,” said Streisand, who called Redford “an intellectual cowboy” before singing a few bars of “The Way We Were.”

Billy Crystal paid tribute to Rob and Michele Reiner, who were killed in their home in December. Crystal, a close friend of Rob Reiner’s who memorably starred in 1989’s “When Harry Met Sally…” and 1987’s “Princess Bride.” In his moving remarks, Crystal quoted the latter.

“All we can say is: Buddy, how much fun we had storming the castle,” said Crystal.

Theatrical bests streaming, again

Yet again, the night’s final award again didn’t go to a streaming release; Apple’s “CODA” remains the only streaming film to achieve that distinction. “Sinners” and “One Battle After Another” were both theatrical releases shot on film.

Apple’s top contender this time, the Formula One race drama “F1,” a movie that it partnered with Warner Bros. to distribute theatrically, won for best sound. The lone blockbuster of the year to go home with a win was “Avatar: Fire and Ash,” for visual effects.

Some of O’Brien’s best digs came at the expense of the streamers. Netflix chief Ted Sarandos, he joked, was in a theater for the first time. The host also lamented the lack of nominees for Amazon MGM: “Why isn’t the website I order toilet paper from winning more Oscars?”

“I’m honored to be the last human host of the Academy Awards,” said O’Brien. “Next year it’s going to be a Waymo in a tux.”

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Iran urged people Saturday to evacuate the Middle East’s busiest port and two others in the United Arab Emirates, openly threatening a neighboring country’s non-U.S. assets for the first time as its war with the United States and Israel entered a third week.

Tehran said the U.S. had used “ports, docks and hideouts” in the UAE to launch strikes on Kharg Island, home to the main terminal handling Iran’s oil exports, without providing evidence. It urged people to leave areas where it said U.S. forces were sheltering.

Hours later, there was no sign of an attack on Dubai’s Jebel Ali port — the Mideast’s busiest — or the Khalifa port in Abu Dhabi. But debris from an intercepted Iranian drone hitting an oil facility sparked a fire at the third port, in Fujairah.

Iran says the US attacked from close to Dubai

Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, told MS NOW that the U.S. attacked Kharg Island and Abu Musa Island from two locations in the UAE, Ras Al-Khaimah and a place “very close to Dubai,” calling that dangerous and saying Iran “will try to be careful not to attack any populated area” there.

U.S. Central Command said it had no response to Iran’s claim. A diplomatic adviser to the UAE’s president, Anwar Gargash, said on social media the country has the right to defend itself but “still prioritizes reason and logic, and continues exercising restraint.”

Iran has fired hundreds of missiles and drones at Arab Gulf neighbors during the war, but it has said it was targeting U.S. assets, even as hits or attempts were reported on civilian ones such as airports and oil fields.

On Friday, U.S. President Donald Trump said the country “obliterated” military sites on Kharg Island and that oil infrastructure could be next if Tehran continues to interfere with ships’ passage through the Strait of Hormuz, where one-fifth of global oil supplies usually transit.

Iran’s parliamentary speaker has said strikes against the country’s oil infrastructure would provoke a new level of retaliation.

Araghchi told MS NOW that the strait was closed only to “those who are attacking us and their allies.”

As global anxiety soars over oil prices and supplies, Trump said Saturday that he hopes China, France, Japan, South Korea, the U.K. and others send warships to keep the Strait of Hormuz “open and safe.” Britain in response said it was discussing with allies a “range of options” to secure shipping.

Araghchi, in a social media post, urged neighbors to “expel foreign aggressors” and described Trump’s call as “begging.”

Iran repeats threat against US-linked oil assets

On Saturday, Iran’s joint military command reiterated its threat to attack U.S.-linked “oil, economic and energy infrastructures” in the region if the Islamic Republic’s oil infrastructure is hit.

Iran’s semiofficial Fars news agency said the Kharg Island strikes caused no damage to oil infrastructure. It said they targeted an air defense facility, a naval base, the airport control tower and an offshore oil company’s helicopter hangar.

U.S. Central Command said it destroyed naval mine storage facilities, missile storage bunkers and other military sites.

Israel earlier announced another wave of strikes in Iran targeting infrastructure, and said its air force had hit more than 200 targets in the past 24 hours, including missile launchers, defense systems and weapons production sites.

Another attack on the US Embassy in Baghdad

A missile struck a helipad inside the U.S. Embassy compound in Baghdad on Saturday. No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack. The embassy complex, one of the largest U.S. diplomatic facilities in the world, has been repeatedly targeted by rockets and drones fired by Iran-aligned militias.

The State Department again warned citizens in Iraq to leave “now,” and by land since commercial flights were not available. It noted that Iran and Iran-aligned militia groups “may continue to target” U.S. citizens, interests and infrastructure.

Meanwhile, Lebanon’s humanitarian crisis deepened, with over 800 people killed and 850,000 displaced as Israel launched waves of strikes against Iran-backed Hezbollah militants.

Marines and an assault ship will add to US forces

A U.S. official said Friday that 2,500 more Marines with the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit and the amphibious assault ship USS Tripoli were being sent to the Middle East, adding to the military’s largest buildup of warships and aircraft in the region in decades. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military plans.

Marine Expeditionary Units can conduct amphibious landings but also specialize in bolstering security at embassies, evacuating civilians and providing disaster relief. The deployment doesn’t necessarily indicate that a ground operation will take place. The Wall Street Journal first reported the Marine deployment.

The Tripoli was spotted by commercial satellites sailing near Taiwan, putting it more than a week away from waters off Iran.

Earlier in the week, the Navy had 12 ships, including the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and eight destroyers, in the Arabian Sea. The total number of U.S. service members on the ground in the Middle East is not clear.

US identifies 6 killed in military aircraft crash

The U.S. Department of Defense on Saturday identified six service members who died when the military refueling aircraft they were aboard crashed Thursday while supporting operations against Iran.

The service members were Maj. John A. Klinner, 33; Capt. Ariana G. Savino, 31; Tech. Sgt. Ashley B. Pruitt, 34; Capt. Seth R. Koval, 38; Capt. Curtis J. Angst, 30; and Tech. Sgt. Tyler H. Simmons, 28, according to U.S. officials.

The crash in western Iraq followed an unspecified incident involving two aircraft in “friendly airspace,” according to U.S. Central Command. The other plane landed safety.

___

Mednick reported from Tel Aviv, Israel, Magdy from Cairo and Toropin from Washington. Associated Press reporters Melanie Lidman in Jerusalem; Sally Abou AlJoud, Kareem Chehayeb and Bassem Mroue in Beirut; Qassim Abdul-Zahra in Baghdad; Will Weissert at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland; Tia Goldenberg in Washington and Hannah Schoenbaum in Salt Lake City contributed.

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As of 9:30 a.m. Eastern Time today, oil sold for $102.14 per barrel (using Brent as the benchmark, which we’ll get into momentarily). That’s $3.05 lower than yesterday—but approximately a $30 rise over the past year.

Will oil prices go up?

It’s impossible to predict the future of oil prices. Several factors determine the movement of oil, but it ultimately boils down to supply and demand. Again, when threats of economic downturn, war, etc. are high, the oil trajectory can turn rapidly.

How oil prices translate to gas pump prices

When you pay for gas at the pump, you’re paying for more than just the crude oil itself; you’re also springing for links along the chain, such as the refineries and wholesalers—not to mention taxes and local gas station markups.

Still, the crude oil aspect affects the final price most dramatically, as it typically accounts for more than half the price per gallon. When oil prices spike, so do gas prices. And frustratingly, when oil prices drop, gas prices tend to take their time drifting down to the lower price (sometimes referred to as “rockets and feathers”).

The role of the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve

In case of emergency, the U.S. has a store of crude oil known as the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Its primary purpose is energy security in case of disaster (think sanctions, severe storm damage, even war). But it can also go a long way toward softening crippling price hikes during supply shocks.

It’s not a long-term answer—more of an immediate relief to assist the consumer and keep critical parts of the economy running, like key industries, emergency services, public transportation, etc.

How oil and natural gas prices are linked

Oil and natural gas are both major energy fuels. A big change in oil prices can affect natural gas by extension. For example, if oil prices increase, some industries may swap natural gas for some segments of their operations where possible—which increases demand for natural gas.

Historical performance of oil

When examining oil’s performance, there are generally two major benchmarks:

• Brent crude oil is the main global oil benchmark.
• West Texas Intermediate (WTI) is the main benchmark of North America.

Between the two, Brent better represents global oil performance because it prices much of the world’s traded crude. And, it’s often the best way to track historical oil performance. In fact, even the U.S. Energy Information Administration now uses Brent as its primary reference in its Annual Energy Outlook.

Looking at the Brent benchmark across several decades, oil has been anything but steady. It’s seen spikes due to factors such as wars and supply cuts, and it’s also seen crashes from global recessions and an oversupply (called a “glut”). For example:

• The early 1970s brought the first big oil shock when the Middle East cut exports and imposed an embargo on the U.S. and others during the Yom Kippur War.
• Prices dropped in the mid-1980s for reasons such as lower demand and more non-OPEC oil producers entering the industry.
• Prices spiked again in 2008 with increased global demand, but it soon plummeted alongside the global financial crisis.
• During the 2020 COVID lockdown, oil demand collapsed like never before—bringing prices below $20 per barrel.

All to say, oil’s historical performance has been anything but smooth. Again, it’s hugely affected by wars, recessions, OPEC whims, evolving energy initiatives and policies, and much more.

Energy coverage from Fortune

Looking to stay up-to-date regarding the latest energy developments? Check out our recent coverage:

• With Iran still in control of Hormuz, Trump threatens NATO and oil hits $106
• The closed Strait of Hormuz is testing Asia’s energy security
• U.S. energy chief signals Iran war may last several more weeks

Frequently asked questions

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