GoKawiil
Tech News
Mercy Corps, the 40-year-old humanitarian organization, has renamed itself Prosper Global. CEO Tjada McKenna discussed the decision alongside warnings about overlapping global crises, including conflicts in Syria, Sudan, Ukraine and Gaza, and how tensions in the Strait of Hormuz are contributing to looming food shortages in vulnerable countries.
Saudi Arabia closed its East-West pipeline, which can carry 7 million barrels of oil per day and bypasses the Strait of Hormuz, after saying it was damaged by drones launched from Iraq. The closure pushed both U.S. West Texas Intermediate and Brent crude futures up more than 3%, and prompted the postponement of a planned diplomatic meeting between Iran and Gulf Arab states on Hormuz security. The disruption comes as U.S. crude prices had already topped $100 a barrel last week amid escalating Middle East fighting.
Since the Strait of Hormuz closure sent Brent crude up 58% year-on-year, the European Commission has only trimmed its 2026 growth forecast from 1.5% to 1.1%, with unemployment steady near 6%. That resilience stems from a structural shift: Russian gas has dropped from 45% to 12% of EU imports while US LNG now supplies two-thirds of Europe's gas, backed by $750 billion in commitments through 2028, and EU output uses 44% less energy per euro than in 1995.
Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps recovered a 19-foot Dive-LD autonomous underwater vehicle made by Anduril after it malfunctioned during a surveillance mission near the Strait of Hormuz. The U.S. Navy has characterized the lost drone as an older, defective, unclassified unit carrying no sensitive sonar or radar equipment, while Iranian embassies have publicly mocked the loss online.
The United States has managed to loosen Iran's hold on the Strait of Hormuz and has nearly halted Iran's oil exports through a naval blockade, deepening Tehran's economic crisis. Despite this, the conflict launched by the US and Israel in February continues with no diplomatic breakthrough since a June truce collapsed, and low-level fighting persists without a clear American exit strategy.
Rising natural gas prices tied to the Iran conflict have driven up urea prices, which briefly exceeded $850 per metric ton in April—80% above pre-conflict levels and the highest since the Russia-Ukraine war disrupted markets in 2022. The Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a third of global seaborne fertilizer trade passes, has been effectively shut to commercial shipping, threatening supply to some of the world's poorest nations.
A developer built a tool that scrapes Costco's undisclosed gas-price data from an internal API called AjaxGetGasPricesService, pulling prices from roughly 600 warehouses nationwide. The project began as a personal effort to compare two nearby Costco locations in Tampa during a spring fuel price spike tied to Strait of Hormuz tensions, then expanded into a broader dataset showing how Costco's gas pricing moved relative to competitors.