Brent crude futures edged up 1.1% to $97.31 a barrel by 03:02 ET on Monday, following a near‑10% surge in the contract the week before. The price gain came as the United States struck and disabled three Iranian oil tankers in retaliation for an IRGC ballistic‑missile attack on two U.S. Navy warships.
Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a key chokepoint for global oil shipments, has fallen sharply. Before the conflict escalated in late February, about 125 large commodity vessels – roughly one‑fifth of worldwide tanker traffic – passed daily. Over the weekend, only two vessels transited on Saturday and six on Sunday, pushing the 10‑day moving average down to ten vessels.
The U.S.–Iran confrontation, now six months old, remains in a “tense stalemate,” according to analysts. The latest U.S. strikes mark the first direct retaliation for the IRGC’s missile launch, heightening concerns about supply‑chain disruptions in the region.
In technology news, Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang declared that artificial general intelligence (AGI) has arrived, citing OpenAI’s GPT‑6 Astra model. OpenAI described Astra as its most capable and aligned system, excelling across computer use, software engineering, cybersecurity, science and professional tasks. Huang noted that Astra was trained on more than 100,000 Nvidia Grace Blackwell NVLink72 systems and that an additional 400,000 Nvidia GPUs are slated to come online.
Separately, an Amazon Prime Air cargo aircraft operated by 21 Air (flight 7598) overran a diagonal runway and crashed at Miami International Airport on Sunday around 2 p.m. local time. The accident killed at least five people and injured five others. The crash follows a 2019 incident in which an Amazon‑branded Boeing 767 operated by Atlas Air crashed near Houston, killing three crew members.
