China to inject 300 billion yuan into state banks, deepen reform of state financial firms The Business Times
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Johnson’s Latest Headache: Republicans Who Lost Their Primaries Skipping Votes NOTUS — News of the United States
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Oracle Layoffs 2026: Why Larry Ellison’s US tech giant is cutting thousands of jobs again after $300 billi The Economic Times
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China sets lowest economic growth target in 35 years The Times
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House Asks Bill Gates, Leon Black and Goldman Lawyer to Testify on Epstein WSJ
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REUTERS—A U.S. appeals court on Monday returned the lawsuits that led to most of President Donald Trump’s tariffs being struck down to the U.S. Court of International Trade, which could determine the process for refunding more than $130 billion to importers.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued a one-page order granting the motion by importers to send the case back to the trade court, where it originated in early 2025.
The motion was opposed by the Trump administration, which said it wanted the case delayed for up to four months to give it time to consider its options.
Recent developments in the Middle East, including U.S. military actions against Iranian targets and reported damage to key export infrastructure like Kharg Island, have once again drawn attention to the vulnerability of global energy supplies.
Iran’s threats to fire on tankers trying to transit the Strait of Hormuz have created an insurance crisis for shippers, forcing oil prices to rise. At the same time, Iranian attacks on Qatar’s LNG infrastructure led the world’s second largest exporter to suspend production.
A new analysis from Enverus Intelligence Research finds that these events introduce a significant risk premium to oil prices, with Brent crude potentially facing an additional $10 to $15 per barrel if disruptions escalate. The firm’s baseline forecast had Brent at around $63, but prolonged instability in the region could push prices higher as markets price in supply concerns. Given that the Brent price had already risen by more than $9/bbl as of Tuesday, this seems a conservative projection unless the situation is quickly resolved.
The U.S.-Israel war with Iran could disrupt supplies of key semiconductor manufacturing materials, a South Korean ruling party lawmaker said on Thursday, as the conflict in the Middle East entered its sixth day.
South Korea’s chip industry, which supplies around two-thirds of global memory chips, is also concerned that a prolonged conflict in Iran will lead to higher energy costs and prices, Kim Young-bae said after meeting with executives from companies such as Samsung Electronics 005930.KS and trade groups.
It’s not exactly a secret that war can have a debilitating, caustic effect on the economy.
So when Operation Epic Fury commenced over the weekend — which saw joint U.S. and Israeli forces successfully kill Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as well as much of Tehran’s leadership infrastructure — it was only logical for people to assume that the markets would have a volatile and negative weekend.
According to The Wall Street Journal, those wringing their hands were only half right.
The Middle East conflict lifted oil, and stocks rebounded from early declines Monday, with investors saying hostilities, if brief, are unlikely to severely hurt the economy. https://t.co/ZdDhCivC3c
— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) March 2, 2026
Because Iran has previously demonstrated its willingness to close the key trade route through the Strait of Hormuz, some media outlets are speculating that oil prices could soar to $100 a barrel or higher. They argue that this could cause a recession in the United States, which would spread across the global economy.
These fears are misplaced. Yes, the price of Brent Crude, the global benchmark, has climbed sharply to around $75 to $78 a barrel. But from the standpoint of economic activity, that is not a particularly troubling price. Several times in the past five years, Brent has traded above $90 a barrel without causing a recession in the U.S. or globally. World markets can weather oil prices in the $70s.
REUTERS—The United States will take action to mitigate rising energy prices due to a spike in the price of oil caused by the Iran conflict, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Monday.
Speaking to reporters on Capitol Hill, Rubio said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Energy Secretary Chris Wright would announce the plans on Tuesday.
“Starting tomorrow, you will see us rolling out those phases to try to mitigate against that … We anticipated this could be an issue,” Rubio said.
Like a good neighbor, The New York Times is there… to aid the Democrats in spreading anxiety about our war effort. The lefty newspaper is trying to whip out — get this — economics to lambast President Donald Trump and Israel’s historic military toppling of arguably the most murderous regime in the Middle East.
Instead of celebrating the long overdue elimination of the sadistic Ayatollah Khamenei and liberation of the Iranian people, Times energy reporter Rebecca Elliott whipped out this overly pedantic headline March 1: “Oil Prices Jump After Iran Attack, Pointing to Economic Risks.”
A Cheongung missile launcher is displayed during the Seoul International Aerospace and Defense Exhibition (ADEX 2025) at Seoul Air Base in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province, South Korea, on October 17, 2025.
South Korean defense stocks saw massive gains on Tuesday after the country’s markets returned from a public holiday, as the Iran war fuels interest in defense names globally.
Heavyweight Hanwha Aerospace, which is South Korea’s largest defense manufacturer, saw shares surge nearly 25%, before paring gains to about 13%, while Korea Aerospace Industries gained more than 12%, but cut those to 2.4%.
Shares in air defense systems maker LIG Nex1 soared 25%, while electronic warfare systems manufacturer Victek and anti-aircraft missile components’ maker Firstec saw shares rise more than 20% and 15%, respectively.
Trump allies warm to solar amid AI-driven power demands Finance & Commerce
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Paramount acquires Warner Bros Discovery in mega deal: the winners, losers and Trump’s man in the middle The New Indian Express
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Oil prices rose and stock markets came under pressure on Monday after intense US-Israeli strikes on Iran prompted fears of significant global economic disruption.
Brent crude jumped by as much as 13% during early trading – to hit $82 per barrel, a 14-month high – as the effective closure of the strait of Hormuz, one of the most important arteries for global trade, intensified concerns over oil supplies.
In Tokyo, the Nikkei 225 fell by nearly 2.4% as traders in Asia responded to the weekend’s developments. It later pulled back, to trade down 1.5%. Pre-market trading also put Wall Street on course to open lower on Monday.
When your average daily token usage is 8 billion a day, you have a massive scale problem.
This was the case at AT&T, and chief data officer Andy Markus and his team recognized that it simply wasn’t feasible (or economical) to push everything through large reasoning models.
So, when building out an internal Ask AT&T personal assistant, they reconstructed the orchestration layer. The result: A multi-agent stack built on LangChain where large language model “super agents” direct smaller, underlying “worker” agents performing more concise, purpose-driven work.
In the age of AI, the scarcest resource in headquarters is no longer time. It is, rather, the willingness to say no.
Artificial intelligence is moving rapidly into military planning staffs because it compresses routine cognitive labor. AI excels at absorbing guidance, reorganizing complex material, and producing clear strategic language at speed. This feels like a qualitative advance, creating the impression that planning itself has become easier. But this impression misleads. The risk of AI-enabled planning is that it will produce plausible constructs that obscure where judgment is required, creating the illusion that analytic completeness can substitute for prioritization.
AI is seen as “raising the floor” by making it easier to produce adequate products. That is true. Yet AI also “collapses the median” by increasing the relative cost of real insight. As AI-enabled planning begin to inform real-world operations, the temptation is to treat complete answers as sufficient, without interrogating whether they represent the right answers to the hard questions of what to resource, what to defer, and what risk to accept.
Elon Musk’s makeshift AI power plant generates sound and fury in Mississippi AOL.com
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Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent told “Sunday Morning Futures” host Maria Bartiromo on Sunday that revenue from tariffs would not drop, despite the Supreme Court’s ruling against the authority President Donald Trump’ invoked to levy his “Liberation Day” tariffs.
The high court decided Trump exceeded his powers under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) in a 6-3 ruling issued Friday. Bartiromo questioned Bessent about claims made Friday by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget that the deficit would increase due to the loss of revenue.
“Yes, so, Maria, let’s take a step back here. And Maya MacGuineas should be ashamed, and they should take the word ‘responsible’ out of her organization’s name,” Bessent responded. “Everything she told you was completely irresponsible and, look, where were they when the Biden administration blew out the deficit that we had a fiscal contraction last year? So she should be ashamed.”
“So let me tell you what’s going to happen first, this ruling was a very narrow ruling in terms of the president’s ability to use IEEPA to collect revenues. The Supreme Court said the president can put in a full embargo, but he cannot collect one dollar,” Bessent continued.
The technology giant Nvidia just reported a great fourth quarter. The company operates on a January fiscal year. It comfortably beat analyst expectations, primarily because of the explosion in artificial intelligence infrastructure spending. Importantly, the largest U.S. data center companies just announced dramatic increases in artificial intelligence capital spending. Spending by the so-called hyperscalers will rise well over 50% to almost $700 billion in 2026.
Nvidia’s revenue reached $68.1 billion, a growth rate of 73% year over year. That exceeded the consensus estimate of around $66 billion. Data center revenue was up 75%, a huge beat. Earnings per share were also higher than expected. The market was looking for earnings of around $1.53. The reported number was $1.62. Nvidia’s gross margin was also outstanding at 75%. That indicates the company continues to have pricing power and appears to be largely unaffected by the shortage of high-bandwidth memory semiconductors.
Many have disagreed with the rationale for the Trump tariffs, lamented their content and consequences, and been alarmed about the president’s expansive use of emergency powers to impose them. But the Supreme Court’s ruling challenging them ought to be alarming because it allows Congress’s dereliction of duty to continue while tipping the balance of power even further toward the judiciary.
The Supreme Court’s decision, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, is also alarming for a number of other reasons. To begin, it was dubious, seeing as how a splintered majority dismissed all “[s]tatutory text, history, and precedent” to the contrary in holding that tariffs are not a means to “regulate … importation” under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), as Justice Brett Kavanaugh, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, persuasively argued in his dissent. The court’s decision was also nonsensical, given that under its ruling, per the dissent, a president could “shut off all or most imports from China, but not … impose even a $1 tariff on imports from China.”
Most observers predicted the recent Supreme Court (SCOTUS) ruling striking down President Trump’s International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) tariffs; however, the decision raises new doubts and questions about trade with the United States for exporters from countries like South Korea. This explainer discusses what the recent ruling means for trade between South Korea and the United States and how South Korea may respond to relations with the U.S. in the coming days.
NORTHERN VIRGINIA: Rising energy costs are fuelling frustration among American voters ahead of this year’s midterm elections.
In Northern Virginia, data centres – notorious for guzzling massive amounts of electricity and water – are emerging as a flashpoint over power demand and infrastructure strain.
The region on the eastern coast of the United States is widely regarded as the data centre capital of the world, with a large concentration of server farms clustered in counties just outside Washington, DC.
The last time I covered the topic of the week-killing compound called glyphosate, it was in the context of concern over chemical supply shortages in 2022.
In that report, I shared concerns about the lack of phosphorus, used in compounds that support agriculture. I also noted that farmers were struggling because weeds had developed resistance to the exposure levels of this chemical, usually linked to the product Roundup.
This week, President Donald Trump signed an executive order using the Defense Production Act (DPA) to prioritize and expand U.S. production of elemental phosphorus and ensure adequate production of glyphosate‑based herbicides, designating them as “critical” to national defense and food security and extending liability protections to producers that comply with the order.
“I find that ensuring robust domestic elemental phosphorus mining and United States-based production of glyphosate-based herbicides is central to American economic and national security,” Trump said in the order. “Without immediate Federal action, the United States remains inadequately equipped and vulnerable.”
…Phosphorus, which is also covered in the order, is a precursor to the production of glyphosate and is also used in the manufacturing of certain military equipment.
The order will require Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins to issue orders and regulations to implement the increased supply of phosphorus and glyphosate.
A White House Fact sheet on the executive order said Trump signed it to “ensure domestic production of elemental phosphorus and glyphosate-based herbicides, the loss of which would cripple critical supply chains.”
FOOD SECURITY IS NATIONAL SECURITY: Thank you, President Trump, for acknowledging the importance of glyphosate-based herbicides in American agriculture. This is a vital step forward in ensuring a domestic supply of this critical crop input remains available for our producers. pic.twitter.com/SE9ebKUgoW
— House Committee on Agriculture (@HouseAgGOP) February 19, 2026
Musk’s denials are loud, but Epstein’s emails are louder Cybernews
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President Donald Trump’s new tariffs have come into effect today at a rate of 10%, after the US supreme court blocked many of his import taxes on Friday.
The president signed an executive order last Friday authorising the 10% tariffs just hours after the supreme court ruling. He later threatened to raise the rate to 15%, but did not officially do so by Tuesday 12.01am time in Washington, when the 10% levy came into effect.
However, Bloomberg is reporting that officials in the White House are working on a formal order that will increase the rate to 15%.
It comes after Trump declared this week that he can use tariffs in a “much more powerful and obnoxious way”.
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—The White House is engaging against a Florida bill that would establish limits on artificial intelligence, including protections for minors, sources familiar with the matter tell The Daily Signal.
The White House has contacted Florida Speaker of the House Daniel Perez and his staff members about opposing Gov. Ron DeSantis’ Artificial Intelligence Bill of Rights, sources said.
So far, Perez has sent the bill through four committees in the House since its introduction early this year. Perez told reporters on Tuesday that he is skeptical that states should pass legislation on an issue where the federal government has “first dibs.”