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This blog is closed. You can read our latest full report hereResurgent oil and fuel prices could cement a fourth interest rate rise in Australia this year if Donald Trump’s renewed conflict with Iran is not resolved within a week, economists warn.US missile strikes on Iran and Trump’s announcement of a new maritime blockade has lifted oil prices to their highest point in the month since the two countries agreed to a peace deal. Continue reading...

Bloomberg’s editor-in-chief, John Micklethwait, stands by reporting, saying ministers who sued ‘imposed an extremely strained meaning on what was a solid ​story’Bloomberg News and one of its reporters have been ordered to pay S$460,000 (US$355,734) in damages after an article it published was found to have defamed two Singapore government ministers, the city-state’s high court said in a judgment released on Tuesday.Bloomberg and the reporter, Low De Wei, are liable to jointly pay S$230,000 to each minister, comprising S$170,000 in general damages and S$60,000 in aggravated damages, ⁠the judgment said. Continue reading...

A former Republican strategist blasted President Donald Trump and his "vandals" for betraying Sen. Lindsey Graham's (R-SC) last crusade with "nonsense."During an episode of The Warning, Steve Schmidt talked about how Trump is "putting a great deal of money" into Russian President Vladimir Putin's pockets with the Iran war. Late senior Sen. Lindsey Graham had just come back from Ukraine and, as Schmidt noted, was ready to propose sanctions against Russia when he died."Lindsey Graham, a few hours before his death, was talking about his Russia sanctions bill," Schmidt said. "When Donald Trump launched his war with Iran, global oil prices spiked, putting a great deal of money into whose pocket? That's right, Vladimir Putin's pocket."Graham was a loyal Trump ally, Schmidt noted as he blasted "the shallowness, the abject stupidity of MAGA policy and the MAGA senators who are celebrated in too many quarters as statesmen as opposed to imbeciles."Schmidt didn't just go after Trump but also "Jared Kushner and his Abraham Accords, which are a disaster," and Kushner and "Steve Witkoff meddling around the world," calling it all "nonsense" that's leading to another war."They squeeze on the balloon, moving air around it in disruptive ways that are often, in the end, catastrophic," Schmidt said. "America losing a war to Iran means that there will be a bigger, more deadly war sometime in the next decade."Speaking about the bigger war, Schmidt continued, "All of the seeds are being laid for it right now, today, as we speak, by the foolish men and women who have followed Trump to the edge of the abyss and over it."

Political heavyweight Pete Buttigieg predicted that Marco Rubio is never going to recover from "selling his soul" for one lie.During an interview on The Bulwark Podcast with former GOP operative Tim Miller, Buttigieg talked about how much Rubio has fallen in his eyes since becoming Trump's secretary of state.When Miller asked how Rubio has been doing, Buttigieg said, "If he hadn't asked for it, I would feel sorry for him," but criticized Rubio for testimony he gave before Congress in May 2025. Rubio claimed that no children had died as a result of the Trump administration's foreign aid cuts, Buttigieg said."When Marco Rubio lied to Congress about whether the aid cuts had killed children, when he stood there with a straight face and said no children died over this, when we already knew the names of some of the children who had been killed by this," Buttigieg said."Right then, you could just tell that this guy's just morally — and I hope politically — never going to recover from selling his soul," Buttigieg continued.Miller mentioned that the new book Regime Change revealed that Rubio was "supposed to be the normal, responsible adult in the administration." However, Rubio was "the point man" for cutting a deal with El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele to receive immigrants deported from the U.S., Miller said."You're going to have a gulag essentially in El Salvador," Miller said, summing up what Rubio negotiated. "We're going to send these people. We were sending innocent people there, and it was absolutely, I think, the most outrageous thing the administration has done."

America First hardliners are viewing Sen. Lindsey Graham's death as a dark opportunity to purge the Republican Party of its remaining interventionist wing and consolidate control over Donald Trump's foreign policy agenda, Politico is reporting.Graham's sudden passing left a gaping hole in the GOP's hawkish establishment — a void that anti-interventionist Trump allies are openly celebrating as a chance to eliminate their final formidable obstacle within the party.Unlike most Republicans, Graham possessed a durable relationship with Trump, which he leveraged consistently to push aggressive foreign policy positions: unwavering support for Israel, robust aid to Ukraine, and advocacy for military strikes against Iran. With him out of the way, Politico is reporting his right-wing critics see it as a "macabre opening" they need to quickly take advantage of."The McCain wing of the 'America Last' party has taken a mortal blow with the death of Graham and the demise of [Sen. Mitch] McConnell," said Steve Bannon, Trump's former White House strategist. "[GOP Sen. Tom] Cotton and the rest of the cabal have neither the gravitas nor the cunning of those two. The Oligarchs in Ukraine and Imperial Israel Proponents are curled up in the fetal position."According to Politico, a former Trump adviser is also excited about gaining more influence with Graham out of the way. Steve Cortes framed Graham's death in nakedly transactional terms."Broadly, whatever the reason, if there are fewer voices in President Trump's ear advocating for intervention that's a great thing. It's a great thing for our country, it's a great thing for our movement, it's a great thing for our party," he said."Still, not all of the president’s America First allies see Graham’s death as a boon to their cause. Some instead frame him as a bridge between a still-hawkish Senate GOP conference and a more anti-interventionist White House — someone who was able to move between both camps in a way that actually helped the America First cause," the report notes with Alex Gray, a former NSC official in Trump’s first term warning, "It actually hurts the America First movement if we don’t have establishment senators who are willing to give America First views a fair hearing, the way Graham did. He inserted kind of an interpretive bridge between the two sides. He did a lot for America First foreign policy.”

Energy traders and Wall Street analysts are resorting to dark humor to cope with Donald Trump's foreign policy catastrophe in the Persian Gulf, where his aggressive posturing toward Iran has backfired spectacularly and destabilized one of the world's most critical shipping routes.The situation has become so dire that financial markets have developed a bitter joke about it. Traders have coined a new term for what they now expect: the "NACHO trade" — shorthand for "Not a Chance Hormuz Opens," according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.That acronym joins other Trump-themed market jargon, including "TACO," which stands for "Trump Always Chickens Out," revealing the contempt Trump critics have for his erratic decision-making.The Strait of Hormuz, through which approximately 20 percent of the world's oil passes, has become the focal point of Trump's unraveling Middle East strategy. After renewed fighting over the weekend and Trump's announcement that he was reimposing a U.S. blockade on Iranian shipping, oil prices surged more than 10 percent, erasing an entire month of price declines."The chance of the region and Hormuz going back to the old normal is effectively zero," said Rachel Ziemba, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, told the Journal. "If anything this reinforces the impetus to invest in other pathways as quickly as possible."The core problem, according to Wall Street Journal reporting, is that Iran and neighboring countries have discovered they can easily manipulate U.S. politics by threatening to choke off shipping through the strait. That realization has fundamentally altered market calculations."Oil markets and Middle East producers appear to be aligning around a new reality: The Strait of Hormuz is no longer expected to return to a prewar norm," the Journal reported.According to the Journal, "The idea behind the NACHO trade is that the shipping route through which roughly 20% of the world’s oil had passed will remain virtually shut, with only a trickle of traffic slipping through clandestine routes, until the economic costs of its closure, such as high oil prices and accelerating inflation, become untenable."

Bar owner offers ‘deepest apologies’ as police investigate whether exits were either blocked or hard to accessThe Bangkok pub that became the scene of the city’s deadliest blaze in 17 years has said it will cooperate with an investigation into alleged negligence, as the death toll rose to 30.The local district office said on Tuesday that three more people had died after the devastating fire that broke out in the early hours of Monday. An initial assessment by disaster officials found an electrical short ‌circuit in an air conditioner located in the ‌ceiling had caused the fire. Continue reading...

Counterterror police say former politician and reality TV contestant Ann Widdecombe was the victim of a "targeted attack."