Oil dips below $110 in volatile markets as Trump deadline looms for Iran to reopen strait – business live

Brent crude has now fallen 1.8% to $107.86 a barrel.“For now, the absence of a clear path forward is keeping markets volatile and indecisive,” said Daniela Hathorrn, senior market analyst at Capital.com

Oil and gas crisis from Iran war worse than 1973, ​1979 and 2022 together, says IEA

The current oil and ‌gas crisis triggered by the blockade of the strait of Hormuz is “more serious than the ones in 1973, ​1979 and 2022 together”, the head of the International Energy Agency (IEA) has warned, as Donald Trump’s deadline for Iran to reopen the waterway approached on Tuesday.Fatih Birol, the executive director of the IEA, told ⁠Le Figaro newspaper that the impact of the Middle East conflict on the oil market was larger than the combined force of the twin oil shocks of the 1970s and the fallout of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.Birol also warned that the countries most at risk were developing nations ‌which ⁠will suffer from higher oil and gas prices, higher food prices and a general acceleration of inflation, while European countries, Japan and Australia would also suffer.Oil traded at more than $110 a barrel on Tuesday, before dipping in volatile trading, after Donald Trump said all of Iran could be “taken out” in one night.Brent crude, the international benchmark for oil prices, rose by 1% to $111 a barrel, before slipping back to $109

An AI bot invited me to its party in Manchester. It was a pretty good night

Two weeks ago, an AI bot invited me to a party it was organising in Manchester. It then promptly lied to dozens of potential sponsors that I’d agreed to cover the event, and misled me into believing there would be food.Despite all this, it was a pretty good night.In early February, a class of new, powerful AI assistants went viral. The assistants, called OpenClaw, represented a step change in the rapidly improving capabilities of AI – in large part because, unlike other AI agents, they could be untethered from guardrails and set loose upon the world

Kurt Strauss obituary

My father, Kurt Strauss, who has died aged 95, was a senior engineer who worked for more than two decades at the Electricity Council, the government body that coordinated electricity supply in England and Wales before privatisation in 1990.He worked for all of that time within the council’s overseas relations branch, managing international relationships, technical exchanges and consultancy services while rising steadily through the ranks to associate director. German by birth but brought up in the UK, he was a passionate European who spoke French and German, and was therefore well suited to those responsibilities.Kurt was born in Degerloch, a suburb of Stuttgart, into a Jewish family. In 1937 his parents, Viktor, who worked in the family down and feather business, and Marianne (nee Melzer), sent Kurt’s older brother, Helmut, to safety in Britain, where he ended up at a boarding school, Sidcot, in Somerset

Drone racing to drone strikes: have war and sport become indistinguishable?

The Trump administration’s pushing of the war in Iran reflects a sporting culture driven by clipped-up content, shameless tribalism and a lust for escalation Among the more surprising continuities of 2026 has been the visual kinship between the Winter Olympics and the US’s illegal and unprovoked war in Iran. High-speed camera drones were a highlight of TV coverage of the recent Games in Milano Cortina, bringing viewers within kissing distance of the action as Olympic athletes hurtled down the slopes and around the tracks in the skiing and sliding events. The incessant screech of the drones aside, the introduction of quadcopter-borne cameras felt like a real step forward in coverage of the winter sports, bringing a (literal) new perspective to events that had become, over recent decades, fairly static as a viewing experience.No sooner had the Olympics finished than aerial video was back on our screens – only the footage, in this case, was of a far darker variety. In place of the ludicrous hip flexibility of the slaloming skiers and the high-speed cornering of the monobobbers, for the past month our feeds have been flooded with satellite and drone imagery of the US military blowing Iranian aircraft, ships, vehicles, munitions buildings, and citizens to smithereens

The Breakdown | Mitchell’s Six Nations conundrum: who will be Red Roses’ next Abby Dow?

How do you solve a problem like replacing Abby Dow? Yes, it is a different take on the Sound of Music song but it is a fiendish question to answer. The Red Roses winger retired after the Rugby World Cup, leaving a try-scoring hole in the world champions’ squad, whose next task is to try to win their eighth straight Women’s Six Nations title. And so while Julie Andrews’ character realised she was not a problem after all, the England head coach, John Mitchell, is left with a selection headache before his team start their campaign against Ireland on Saturday.Dow scored 50 tries in 59 caps, with her lightning pace a key characteristic to her game. She retired to pursue a career in engineering and her boots are large ones to fill