Brent crude benchmark rose to more than $80 a barrel, its steepest increase since ceasefire began

Oil markets have recorded their sharpest price rise in nearly two months after a series of attacks on fossil fuel tankers near the strait of Hormuz led Donald Trump to declare that the ceasefire deal with Iran was over.

At the same time, UK short-dated bonds suffered their worst day since the end of March as the prospect grew of a Bank of England rate rise to cope with the renewed inflationary pressures.

The yield or interest rate on two-year gilts rose 15 basis points to 4.35% with a rate rise in November fully priced in and a 50% chance of another in December. The market gave a 75% chance to one rate increase by the end of the year earlier this week.

Attacks on three locations across Iran came after three tankers in the strait of Hormuz were targeted on Tuesday

The US military carried out strikes on Iran for a second day, hours after Donald Trump said that an interim agreement to end the war was “over”.

Late on Wednesday Iranian state media reported explosions in the port city of Bandar Abbas in the strait of Hormuz; in Sirik, another southern coastal city; and the south-western Bushehr province, home to Iran’s nuclear-power-plant complex.

Trump wrote on Truth Social: “This is in retribution for yesterday’s bombing of ships by Iran. If it happens again, it will get much worse!”

Reported cases of cyclosporiasis, an intestinal illness caused by a parasite, are nearing 1,000 in Michigan, local health officials said Wednesday.

Since June 22, at least 992 cases have been confirmed, a spokesperson from the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) told ABC News. At least 36 people have been hospitalized.

Typically, the state sees about 50 cases per year, meaning cases are nearly 20 times higher than on average.

Donald Trump’s declaration at the NATO summit that the U.S. had returned to war with Iran didn’t lead to the usual gasping allies or perplexed officials.

If anything, it cemented Europe’s increasing reliance on itself.

As motorcades sped out of Ankara’s presidential place and down the barricaded streets ringing the Turkish capital on Wednesday, a half-dozen European officials said the ceasefire’s end only stiffened their resolve to be less dependent on the American militarily and stand alone.

“After seeing what’s happening in Iran and Ukraine, we first of all, have to build our own military might, and then everybody will respect us: Americans, Russians, Iranians or Chinese,” said a European official. “The more muscles you have, the less political anger you show.”

Donald Trump denied disaster aid to four Democratic-led states in a move that is raising new questions about whether he’s injecting political motivations into emergency management decisions.

Trump on Friday rejected $227 million in aid requests from New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Rhode Island for help recovering from a major snowstorm in February. Two days earlier, Trump approved Federal Emergency Management Agency disaster aid for six Republican-led states, while extolling the political virtues of GOP politicians and candidates in the states.

By now, it’s clear that the only way the tech industry can justify the cost of AI is if it replaces vast swaths of the human workforce with machines that run 24/7.

The bad news is that this situation has created a world-historic financial market that, by some metrics, is looking worse than the run-up to the Great Depression. The good news is that this future of an AI takeover is looking increasingly unlikely, at least at the industry’s current pace, a fact which is now dawning on some of the biggest rubes and dupes in the corporate world.

According to a new survey from “Big Four” accounting firm KPMG, a significant number of corporate executives are reeling from sticker shock over new usage-based AI pricing schemes. Though enterprises could once count on AI companies to subsidize the price of large language models via flat-rate contracts, that’s no longer a given, as the rising cost of computational power forces the entire tech sector into a defensive posture.

A Manhattan federal court judge on Wednesday ordered the release of the more than $5m Donald Trump owes E Jean Carroll following her successful 2023 sexual abuse and defamation trial against him. Less than an hour after the judge issued his order, Trump filed paperwork indicating he was appealing the decision.

Trump had deposited this $5m jury award, as well as 11% interest, into a court-held account some six weeks after Carroll’s courtroom victory. Judge Lewis Kaplan’s order directs the disbursement of these court controlled funds, which now total some $5.8m due to interest accrual.

Kaplan’s decision comes more than three years after Carroll bested Trump in her bombshell civil case; jurors determined that he sexually abused the former Elle writer and unlawfully impugned her reputation with false, vitriolic denials. Trump denied all wrongdoing.

The order followed the US supreme court’s 29 June decision not to review Trump’s appeal. Trump wanted the supreme court to weigh his appeal after lower courts repeatedly snubbed his fight against this verdict.

Donald Trump unexpectedly left Turkey on Wednesday aboard an older Air Force One rather than ‌the newly renovated Qatari-donated jet that brought him there, but later boarded the new plane in Britain for the flight to Washington.

The trip to Turkey for the NATO summit, the first international travel for the new plane, took place as hostilities escalated with Iran, a country that borders Turkey.

The unexpected plane switch followed months of scrutiny over the luxury gift intended to serve as a temporary replacement while Boeing struggled to deliver long-delayed next-generation Air Force One planes.

Crossword puzzles and brain teasers have long been touted as ways to keep the mind sharp. But a new study points to another strategy that may matter just as much: staying fast on your feet.

Researchers have found that people in their 80s who maintain an exceptionally quick walking pace, dubbed "super movers," are also far more likely to stay mentally sharp compared to their slower-moving peers of the same age.

Ukraine struck Russia's largest oil refinery, located in the city of Omsk, on Monday, marking what its forces say was its furthest-ever drone attack in the war.

The Omsk facility, which processes about 21 million tons of oil a year, is in Western Siberia and about 1,700 miles from Ukrainian territory — roughly the distance between Los Angeles and Houston.

The Federal Communications Commission will vote to eliminate a rule that requires Internet service providers to list all of their so-called “passthrough” fees on an easily accessible broadband price label. The FCC vote could also make the price labels themselves a bit harder for consumers to find.

ISPs routinely advertise prices much lower than those actually charged to consumers on their monthly bills. One method of raising monthly bill prices above advertised rates is to tack on fees that, ISPs claim, are used to offset charges imposed by local governments.