Author: Shekari Philemon

Wall Street opened Monday on shaky ground as oil prices surged past $110 a barrel and investors scrambled to assess the damage from a widening Middle East war. Futures across all three major indexes fell sharply, with markets still recovering from one of the roughest weeks in months. Dow futures dropped 1.7% after plunging the equivalent of 1,000 points overnight. Contracts tied to the S&P 500 fell roughly 1.6% while Nasdaq 100 futures sank about 1.7%. All three had briefly fallen more than 2% in the early hours before clawing back some ground. The moves underscored just how quickly investor…

Oil prices crossed $110 per barrel for the first time since early 2022, when the Russian invasion of Ukraine sent energy markets into a tailspin. What is unfolding now may be even more alarming. Since late February, crude prices have surged more than 50% on international markets, making this the fastest oil rally recorded in roughly four decades. Both Brent crude and West Texas Intermediate jumped more than 25% in a single overnight session, breaching the $110 threshold by Sunday night. WTI has climbed more than 60% since the conflict began. Markets opened Monday morning with futures already in retreat.…

The February jobs report landed like a cold splash of water on anyone still holding out hope that the American labor market was finding its footing. The economy shed 92,000 jobs last month, a result almost nobody saw coming, and the unemployment rate nudged upward to 4.4 percent from 4.3 percent in January. But despite the disappointing numbers, the Federal Reserve is not expected to cut interest rates at its upcoming meeting, and the reason comes down to one word: oil. The Iran war has sent oil prices sharply higher, injecting new inflationary pressure into an economy that was already…

American aluminum buyers are in full scramble mode. The ongoing war on Iran has thrown a wrench into a supply chain that was already straining under the weight of import tariffs, and the ripple effects are being felt across industries that rely on the lightweight metal, from automakers to appliance manufacturers to beverage producers. The near-total shutdown of commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz has forced two of the region’s biggest aluminum producers, Qatar and Bahrain, to suspend deliveries entirely. That is a significant blow for the United States, which sourced nearly a fifth of its aluminum imports from…

Gut health has been a wellness buzzword for long enough that most people have tuned out the conversation. You have heard about probiotics. You have been told to eat more fiber. Someone has definitely recommended kombucha to you at a party with a level of enthusiasm that felt slightly evangelical. And through all of it, the idea that your digestive system has an intimate relationship with your brain has felt like a soft wellness claim rather than a hard scientific one. The 2026 research is here to make the case considerably harder. A landmark study published in early 2026 examining…

Few comebacks carry as much emotional weight as one built on a decade of quiet. Jill Scott, the Philadelphia soul singer who helped define neo-soul in the early 2000s, has released her first album in ten years, and by her own account, it is among the most personal work she has ever made. The record arrives not as a reinvention but as a deepening, a fuller expression of the woman she has been building herself into across a lifetime. Releasing music after that long a silence comes with its own kind of vulnerability. She has described the experience of putting…

Four days into a military campaign against Iran, the United States is staring down an estimated $200 billion price tag and a question even the president cannot answer: what happens next? Since strikes began targeting Iran’s leadership on a Saturday, the administration has offered shifting justifications for the campaign. Officials stopped short of explicitly framing it as a regime-change operation, yet the outcome has effectively functioned as one. Reports suggest the initial strikes alone killed dozens of senior Iranian officials, gutting the country’s top leadership structure in a matter of hours. The defense secretary reinforced that framing publicly early in…

Weeks before an Iranian frigate was torpedoed and sunk near Sri Lanka, it had been sailing proudly through Indian waters as an honored participant in one of the region’s most prominent naval gatherings. India’s navy and defense ministry confirmed that the vessel had taken part in the International Fleet Review and a multilateral naval exercise organized by the Indian navy at the port of Visakhapatnam in mid to late February, an event that drew participation from 74 countries. Images from the exercise showed the ship at sea and its crew posing on deck beneath the Iranian flag. From those celebratory…

Brent crude futures climbed to $90 a barrel this week for the first time in nearly two years, as a widening Middle East conflict brought shipping through the Strait of Hormuz to a near-complete halt. The global benchmark surged as much as 7.6% in a single session, while West Texas Intermediate topped $85 for the first time since April 2024. Taken together, futures have gained more than 20% in just one week. The scale of the disruption is staggering. Estimates suggest the global crude market is losing between 7 million and 11 million barrels of supply each day because of…

A global poll has dropped a number that no one who came of age in the era of shoulder pads and consciousness-raising is quite ready to process. Nearly one in five Gen Z women say they believe their future husbands should have the final word on important household decisions. That is 19 percent of a generation that was supposed to have inherited a leveled playing field, up sharply from around 6 percent of the generation that preceded them. The reaction among older women who lived through the feminist movements that made those gains possible has ranged from disbelief to a…