Trump shouldn’t ease Russia sanctions – they are choking its economy | Phillip Inman

Donald Trump handed Vladimir Putin a financial lifeline last week when he waived a ban on India buying Russian oil for 30 days.Trump found himself in a furious row last year with Narendra Modi over his country’s oil deals with Moscow, only for fences to be partly mended when India’s biggest importer later capitulated.Now we find the power of oil as an instrument of geopolitical power is again to the fore. It suits the US president to ease up on sanctions against Russian oil purchases to keep the global oil price down.Trump knows that high prices at the pump could send his popularity to fresh lows and believes that allowing more Russian oil into the global system will limit the extent of an Iran-induced petrol price spike

Airline groundings expose depth of world travel’s reliance on Gulf corridor

After nearly a week of uncertainty, airspace closures and very limited flights, news that hundreds of thousands of passengers around the world were hanging on for emerged: the Gulf-based carrier Emirates was restarting operations in earnest despite the US-Israel war on Iran.Those relieved by the restart will include the UK’s Foreign Office, after its travails in organising delayed rescue flights out of neighbouring Oman.Emirates plans to return to 11 daily flights to five British airports by Saturday, and will operate to 60% of its full network, 83 destinations in all, including seven US airports and a total of 22 daily flights to India.Yet the partial return will struggle to dispel the doubts raised by a week when many started to wonder, just where will the world fly now?Before the crisis, the three big Gulf hubs – Dubai, home of Emirates, Abu Dhabi for Etihad and Qatar Airways’ Doha base – had established themselves as the crossroads of global aviation, with networks that link Asia, Africa, Europe and reaching out to the Americas and Oceania.Nearly 300,000 people pass through one of the three hubs every day and about two-thirds are heading straight through on a connecting flight

Investors are expecting Donald Trump to back down in the war with Iran – but what if he doesn’t?

Investors over the past year have learned that Donald Trump has a boundless capacity to quickly reverse course in the face of acute political or market pressures.But a week since the United States and Israel launched missile strikes on Iran, there are fears the war could morph into a protracted conflict.In purely economic terms, the war has brought about what has long been considered a worst-case scenario from a conflict in the Middle East: the closure of the strait of Hormuz, through which travels a fifth of the world’s oil and gas supplies.Since the start of the hostilities, the global benchmark oil price has jumped by 17% to more than US$85 a barrel, triggering shock waves through financial markets.The Australian sharemarket has been relatively shielded from the worst of the fallout, but still suffered a steep 3

Ian Arnot obituary

My friend and former colleague Ian Arnot, who has died of cancer aged 45, was an LGBTQ+ activist, charity leader and fellow of the Chartered Institute of PR (CIPR). He was also a longstanding non-executive director in the charitable sector in Edinburgh, and served as BT’s head of corporate communications from 2020 to 2025.Ian became well known in media and political circles in Scotland and London during his 24-year career with BT Group. He was appointed a chartered fellow of CIPR in 2023, in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the institute and the profession, and was elected vice-chair of CIPR Scotland in 2025. He was about to start a new role with the IHG hotel group at the time of his terminal diagnosis, which he bore with typical resilience, courage and hope

Iran war pushes oil price above $90, threatening rise in global inflation

The Iran conflict has driven the oil price past $90 a barrel to its highest weekly gains since the Covid-19 pandemic six years ago, threatening a fresh rise in global inflation.Reports that Kuwait had begun cutting production of oil at some fields after running out of space to store it drove the cost of a barrel of Brent crude to as high as $91.89 at one point on Friday – its highest since April 2024 and up from about $72.50 just before war broke out.The price of the international benchmark has surged by more than 25% since the US-Israel attack on Iran last weekend, its biggest weekly jump since the week to 3 April 2020

North Korean agents using AI to trick western firms into hiring them, Microsoft says

Fake IT workers deployed by North Korea are using AI technology, including voice-changing tools, to trick western companies into hiring them, Microsoft has said.The US tech firm said a signature Pyongyang money-raising ruse is being enhanced by AI, which is helping create fake names and alter stolen IDs to increase the credibility of false applicants for IT and software development jobs.The scam typically involves state-backed fraudsters applying for remote IT work in the west, using fake identities and the help of “facilitators” in the country where the company targeted is based. Once hired, they send their wages back to Kim Jong-un’s state and have even been known to threaten to release sensitive company data after being fired.According to a blogpost from Microsoft’s threat intelligence unit, Pyongyang is using AI to bolster the effectiveness of its ploy