The Trump administration will pay Duke Energy $129 million to abandon an early-stage offshore wind project planned off North Carolina, with construction not yet started. The company will relinquish its federal waters lease and reinvest the reimbursement in energy sources favored by the administration, including potential new nuclear and natural gas projects. The move marks the administration’s fourth intervention to curb offshore wind development and prioritize what it describes as more reliable traditional energy.

Iran attacked a container ship in the Strait of Hormuz on Thursday, raising concerns about the security of a key energy-shipping route. Data the next day showed traffic through the strait had rebounded markedly, and the United States and Iran agreed to a 60day period of talks while pledging to cease hostilities. Brent crude fell 4.3% to $71.99 a barrel and WTI dropped to $69.23, while the U.S. national average gasoline price slipped to $3.90 a gallon. The latest flare-up did not result in a material supply disruption.

A preliminary ceasefire deal in the U.S.-Iran war has helped push oil prices sharply lower, easing gasoline costs and potentially taking pressure off airfares and shipping. But underlying inflation has shown limited improvement, and forecasters expect May core PCE inflation to rise to a 3.4% annual pace, the highest since 2023, with overall PCE at 4.1% year over year. The outlook suggests the Federal Reserve may need to keep interest rates higher for longer, delaying any policy pivot.

The U.S. National Security Agency has been forced to stop using Anthropic’s latest AI models, Mythos 5 and Fable 5, after the Trump administration imposed export controls on the startup. The models had shown unusually strong capability in internal NSA testing to uncover software vulnerabilities. In a congressional hearing this month, Sen. Mark Warner said NSA Director Gen. Joshua Rudd told him Mythos broke into “almost all of our classified systems” within hours, comments later cited by The Economist.

Iran’s foreign minister said the first session of high-level talks with the United States in Switzerland made “major progress” toward a ceasefire in Lebanon. Pakistan and Qatar, acting as mediators, said in a joint statement that “encouraging progress” had been achieved after the session ended. Oil prices had risen earlier on uncertainty over the Strait of Hormuz, but optimism from the opening round pushed prices lower.

The article says China, the world’s largest oil importer, cut crude imports by about a third during the war, leaving state energy firms’ stockpiles and refiners’ fuel inventories close to full. If the Strait of Hormuz reopens, oil tankers previously stranded in the Persian Gulf and bound for China could arrive in a cluster, temporarily boosting deliveries. The resulting supply-demand setup reduces upside momentum for global oil prices and adds direct downside pressure to crude and fuels such as gasoline.

The prolonged U.S.-Iran conflict has lifted fuel and material costs, contributing to faster inflation and weakening expectations for additional interest-rate cuts before year-end. That shift has intensified pressure on small businesses, pushing sentiment down to its lowest level since Donald Trump was elected to his second term. Although U.S. and Iranian officials announced a preliminary ceasefire deal on Sunday, the economic fallout is expected to persist.

Ukraine has recently used attack drones to systematically strike key highways, rail lines and bridges leading to Crimea, destroying large numbers of fuel tankers and freight trains. Videos circulating widely on social media show fuel trucks burning and long lines at gas stations, with one witness saying an overnight wait for gasoline lasted eight hours. The disruptions have caused acute gasoline shortages on the peninsula and hampered the summer tourism season. The campaign targets the physical energy logistics chain between Russia and Crimea, materially unsettling regional supply-and-demand for refined products, especially gasoline.

Mosaic, one of the world’s largest phosphate fertilizer makers, said disrupted sulfur shipments through the Strait of Hormuz have driven up a key input that now accounts for about half of its roughly $800-per-ton selling price. The company reported a net loss of $258 million for the quarter ending March 30 and said it will slow production at some plants. Even after the United States and Iran reached a preliminary ceasefire agreement on Sunday, shipping and supply chains could take months to normalize, with damaged infrastructure potentially not rebuilt until 2028, according to an agricultural economist at North Dakota State University.