MagazinAisle

Blog

  • Global oil demand to plunge amid disruptions caused by war on Iran: IEA

    Global oil demand to plunge amid disruptions caused by war on Iran: IEA

    The IEA’s oil ‘demand destruction’ report comes after its chief said unnamed countries are hoarding stocks.

    Published On 14 Apr 2026

    The International Energy Agency (IEA) has sharply cut its forecasts for global oil supply ⁠and demand growth, saying both are expected to fall from last year’s levels as ⁠the United States-Israel war on Iran disrupts oil flows and weighs on the global economy.

    According to its report published on Tuesday, the IEA sees global oil demand falling ‌by 80,000 barrels per day (bpd) this year, compared with a projected year-on-year rise of 640,000 bpd in its previous monthly report.

    Recommended Stories

    list of 3 itemsend of list

    The forecast was released after the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and IEA urged countries on Monday to avoid hoarding energy supplies and imposing export controls that could worsen the shock.

    IEA chief Fatih Birol on Monday told reporters that several countries were holding onto stocks and imposing export restrictions, and appealed to all countries to let energy stocks flow to the markets. He did not name the countries.

    “Demand destruction will spread as scarcity and higher prices persist,” the IEA report said on Tuesday, adding ⁠that the deepest cuts ⁠in oil consumption have come from the Middle East and Asia Pacific so far, for naphtha, ‌LPG and jet fuel in particular.

    The Paris-based watchdog said a projected 1.5 million bpd drop in demand in the second quarter of this year would mark the deepest contraction since the COVID-19 pandemic.

    On Monday, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) lowered its prediction for world oil demand in the second quarter, but kept its full-year outlook unchanged.

    Hormuz disruptions

    Attacks on energy infrastructure in the Middle East and Iran’s closure of the Strait ‌of Hormuz have led to the largest oil supply disruption in history, the ‌IEA ‌said, with 10.1 million bpd lost in March.

    Iran brought traffic through the strait – a key route for global energy shipments – to a near-total halt in response to US-Israel attacks on its territory since February 28.

    The Iranian de facto control over the chokepoint sent gas and petrol prices skyrocketing around the world.

    Now, Washington aims to take control of the strait from Tehran by making it impossible for Iranian tankers, which have continued to pass each day, to transit.

    For this, US President Donald Trump announced a blockade on Iranian ports on Sunday, after weekend peace talks ⁠in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, between the US and Iran failed to reach a deal.

    The IEA report said the US blockade has further clouded the outlook for global energy security and the supply of a vast array of goods that rely on petroleum.

    Oil demand could plunge even further if the strait remains closed, the IEA said.

    “In this case, energy markets and economies around the world need to brace for significant disruptions in the months to come,” it warned.

    “Resuming flows through the Strait of Hormuz remains the single most important variable in easing the pressure on energy supplies, prices and the global economy,” the IEA added.

    Russia’s gains

    It also noted that a chief beneficiary of the disruptions has been Russia. Thanks to the surge in prices, Moscow’s ‌revenues from crude oil and refined products ⁠rose in ⁠March, rebounding from February when they fell to their lowest level since the start of the all-out war on Ukraine in 2022.

    Russia’s commodity revenues are a vital part of the state budget and are needed to support rising military spending.

    The IEA said Russia’s crude oil ‌exports rose by 270,000 bpd last month from February to 4.6 million bpd, mostly driven by higher seaborne shipments as the Druzhba pipeline remained offline.

    Flows via the Druzhba pipeline to Hungary and Slovakia across Ukrainian territory have remained shut following ⁠the attacks on the pipeline infrastructure at ⁠the end of January.

  • New Pro-DeFi Policies Show the SEC Isn’t Waiting for Congress to Act on Crypto

    New Pro-DeFi Policies Show the SEC Isn’t Waiting for Congress to Act on Crypto

    In brief

    • The SEC issued a new policy letting certain DeFi interfaces avoid broker-dealer registration.
    • The move was praised by industry leaders as a major victory for decentralized finance.
    • It indicates the SEC is barreling forward on crypto even as the Senate’s Clarity Act remains in limbo.

    The SEC unveiled a new policy Monday exempting certain decentralized finance interfaces from key registration requirements—a proactive move that indicates the regulator is moving full-steam ahead on its crypto agenda, with or without Congress.

    The new policy, laid out today in an SEC staff statement, allows user interfaces for DeFi tools to forego registration as broker-dealers, so long as they meet certain requirements. User interfaces, as defined by the SEC, are services, created by crypto companies, that make it easier for self-custodial wallet holders to complete on-chain transactions.

    Prior to President Donald Trump’s return to power, the SEC viewed such interfaces as squarely under the agency’s purview, given they technically involved a crypto company playing some role in connecting independent DeFi users to a marketplace. Crypto industry leaders have long argued such interfaces should not be considered akin to hands-on, traditional Wall Street brokers like Charles Schwab.

    Now, crypto leaders have appeared to have gotten their wish. Should a user interface adhere to a list of requirements, the SEC has said it will not obligate the companies behind those interfaces to register with the agency—even when the interfaces engage with securities.

    To qualify, an interface must not handle or hold user funds; arrange financing; solicit users to engage in any specific crypto transactions; or pressure users to choose one transaction path over another. It must also give users multiple options for executing transactions and list the options by objective criteria such as price, and charge users only flat rates or fixed rates for assisting with transactions, among other requirements.

    “Crypto is forcing the Commission to confront its inner demons that have driven it toward ever more expansive readings of the securities laws,” SEC commissioner Hester Peirce, a noted crypto advocate, said Monday of the staff statement. “Recent history is littered with a patchwork of no-action letters and enforcement actions that have contorted the term ‘broker’ beyond recognition.”

    Decentralized finance leaders hailed the announcement as a major step forward for the sector.

    “Tough day for the gatekeepers and the moat protectors,” Amanda Tuminelli, executive director of the DeFi Education Fund, said Monday. “Good day for builders.”

    “This is an incredible moment,” Matt Corva, general counsel at Ethereum software giant Consensys, proclaimed. (Disclaimer: Consensys is one of many investors in an editorially independent Decrypt.)

    “If decentralized applications meet their promise,” he continued, “you can pencil this down as the day centralized intermediaries were dealt a critical blow by allowing fair competition against them.”

    Miles Jennings, the head of Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto arm, dubbed the SEC statement a “huge win for DeFi.”

    Other industry leaders noted the SEC’s statement shows the agency is moving ahead with the key pillars of its crypto agenda despite having not yet received specific guidance from Congress on the subject.

    Though SEC Chair Paul Atkins has repeatedly voiced his support for the Senate’s pending crypto market structure bill, he has also said he does not need the legislation to pass in order to realize his aggressively pro-crypto agenda. 

    The Senate bill, dubbed the Clarity Act, has remained in limbo for months, hung up on several thorny issues. Backers of the bill have warned in recent days that, with November’s midterms fast approaching, the legislation may not become law if it doesn’t pass imminently.

    Daily Debrief Newsletter

    Start every day with the top news stories right now, plus original features, a podcast, videos and more.

  • MiniMax Drops State-of-the-Art AI Agent Model—Then Quietly Changes the License

    MiniMax Drops State-of-the-Art AI Agent Model—Then Quietly Changes the License

    In brief

    • The new MiniMax M2.7 matches top closed models in benchmarks.
    • The model underwent a quite license shift to restrict commercial use post-release.
    • The move was justified as a way to prevent service providers from “nerfing” the model when offering it to developers.

    MiniMax M2.7 is here, the weights are on Hugging Face, and it’s legitimately competing with the best closed models out right now.

    The numbers: 56.22% on SWE-Pro (a benchmark for software engineering tasks), nearly matching Claude Opus 4.6; 57.0% on Terminal Bench 2. An ELO of 1495 on GDPval-AA (a benchmark for real-world knowledge work tasks across jobs). For context: This is the highest among open-weight models, only slightly below Opus 4.6, Sonnet 4.6, and GPT-5.4.

    Minimax benchmarks
    Image: Minimax

    It’s a 230B-parameter Mixture of Experts model with only 10B active per inference pass, so you get frontier-level output without paying frontier-level compute. MiniMax said it was the first model to participate in its own development—an internal version ran 100+ autonomous rounds of self-optimization, rewrote its own scaffold, and came out 30% better. No human in the loop.

    Then the license changed, and the community lost it

    But shortly after the weights dropped, the Chinese AI lab MiniMax quietly updated the terms: commercial use now requires written authorization from MiniMax.

    Non-commercial use stays free and unrestricted. Research, personal projects, fine-tuning for your own setup—none of that changed. But if you’re running a hosted service or building a commercial product, you’re in “needs authorization” territory now.

    Hacker News and a Hugging Face discussion thread filled up fast with developers calling it out. The specific friction point is this: MiniMax is labeling the license “MIT-style,” but MIT permits commercial use by definition. Calling it “Modified-MIT” while restricting commercial use is, to put it charitably, confusing.

    Ryan Lee, MiniMax’s Head of Developer Relations, posted a detailed response rather than the usual corporate non-answer. His explanation: bad-faith hosting providers had been deploying degraded versions of previous MiniMax models—wrong templates, aggressive quantization, sometimes not even MiniMax’s actual model—then letting users walk away thinking MiniMax ships mediocre work.

    “They walk away thinking MiniMax is mid,” Lee wrote. “We get the reputational bill, the user gets a bad experience, and the serious hosting providers who do the work properly get drowned out in the noise.”

    “A fully permissive license meant we had no way to push back on any of that,” he added. “If the license has edge cases that hurt legitimate community use, tell us. We’d rather fix the text than defend it.”

    This fits a wider pattern. MiniMax built its developer reputation on fully open releases—M2 under MIT in October 2025, M2.5 under the same terms in February 2026. M2.7 is the first break from that streak, and it came just months after the company listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in January 2026, raising around $620M with Alibaba and Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund among its backers.

    Other Chinese companies, which dominate the open-source space, are also testing the waters of close-sourcing AI. Alibaba’s Qwen team reportedly shifted toward proprietary development after senior leadership departures, according to the Financial Times, Xiaomi also released its new MiMo v2 models under a close source license. The shorthand that Chinese labs are open and U.S. labs are closed no longer holds.

    For those interested in using it commercially, Lee says the authorization process will be fast and reasonable.

    Daily Debrief Newsletter

    Start every day with the top news stories right now, plus original features, a podcast, videos and more.

  • ‘Mother Mary’ Review: Anne Hathaway Plays a Gaga Pop Star, and Michaela Coel Is Her Designer, in David Lowery’s Thuddingly Pretentious Fantasia

    ‘Mother Mary’ Review: Anne Hathaway Plays a Gaga Pop Star, and Michaela Coel Is Her Designer, in David Lowery’s Thuddingly Pretentious Fantasia

    In “Mother Mary,” the title character (Anne Hathaway), a global pop superstar who you could say is based on a lot of people but is most directly and obviously a riff on Lady Gaga (maximalist dance pop; extravagant postmodern wardrobe; air of transgressive Catholic rapture), has a close encounter with Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel), the British fashion designer who created Mary’s visionary costumes. She was her hand-in-distressed-glove collaborator — and the two were closer than that. But they’re estranged now, and haven’t seen each other for 10 years. So cataclysmic was their breakup that in all that time, Sam has never once listened to Mother Mary’s music.

    But now, out of the blue, Mary shows up at the English country manor that’s the headquarters of Sam’s fashion empire. She’s there because, in her words, “I need a dress.” A visionary dress. A dress for the big summing-up-of-her-career concert that she’s about to give. The two go into the large stone barn out back where Sam does her designing, and there, by themselves, they talk: about their partnership and their past, about their wounding breakup, about the complicated brew of love and bitterness that still holds their dual spirits together.

    The talk stretches on for a while, and since the two actors are vivid and on point, we’re fine with settling into one of those movies that’s essentially a two-hander — in this case, broken up by flashbacks to Mother Mary onstage, where she performs before her adoring throng. I’ve always been partial to movies about conversation, because I think it’s one of the most pleasurable activities there is, and the fact that “Mother Mary” strikes such a familiar chord — Mary and Sam unpeeling their history like an onion, circling around it until they reach its inner core — is not, in my book, a strike against the movie.

    That will come later. 

    At no point do Mary and Sam say they were lovers. The film’s press material coyly describes them as “friends.” And maybe they were just friends — friends intimate enough to be spiritual lovers. In a sense, it doesn’t really matter. “Mother Mary” is not a roman à clef. The character of Mother Mary may be a fictional gloss on Lady Gaga, but it’s not as if she’s supposed to be Gaga. And at this point, there wouldn’t be anything revolutionary in portraying a famous pop star with a private life that’s bisexual. That’s not the point of the movie.

    What is the point? For a while, we think “Mother Mary” is going to be a talky, angsty, back-and-forth relationship drama, mixed in with heady footnotes on fame and creativity. Mary, named for a Beatles lyric, has composed a new song, which she says “might be the best song ever written in the history of songs.” It’s called “Spooky Action,” which is a reference to Einstein’s principle of “spooky action at a distance” — the idea that separated particles, even when they’re light-years apart, can have an effect upon each other. That’s a rather ponderous metaphor for what in another movie might come down to, “I still think about you.”

    But never mind. Hathaway, in disheveled straight blonde hair parted down the middle to its thick dark roots, does a convincing job of showing us that Mary, while devoted to her art (and her fame — the two can’t be separated), is a mere mortal who wears her onstage persona like a cosmic costume. Her trademark is to sport some version of her signature halo, a circular head piece attached to the neck, and this connects to the religious nature of her stardom — that she’s no mere celebrity, and not just an artist either, but a kind of pop demigod channeling our collective fantasies of saintliness and sin.

    The film shows us that Sam, the offstage muse, is an awesome creator as well. Her visionary designs forged Mother Mary as an image (Mary once paraded down a red carpet wearing honey), so she shares in her identity. Coel, as she proves in the marvelous new Steven Soderbergh movie “The Christophers,” is a great debater — she knows how to use those penetrating large eyes, and her profile that’s like a Picasso come to life, to project an insinuating perception, the sense that she’s reading her antagonist like a psychic. In this case, Sam views Mary with ultimate wariness and knowledge, still smarting from the scars of abandonment and what they revealed.

    But all of that — spoiler alert! — winds up being very much beside the point. David Lowery, the writer-director of “Mother Mary,” is a hard filmmaker to pin down, but he is, among other things, a reliably highfalutin trickster-showman who likes to tease the audience with a nearly avant-garde sense of play. I’ve liked some of his films, like “The Old Man & the Gun” and “The Green Knight,” even if the latter fused its intoxicating roots-of-King-Arthur mythology with too much head-scratching magical realism for my taste. In “Mother Mary,” the director gives in to that side of himself completely. This is the David Lowery-est David Lowery movie ever made. Which is to say that by the end of it, you may be scratching your head to the point of wanting your money back.

    Mother Mary dances on the barn floorboards, and Sam says things like “You give people the gift of giving a shit about you.” But what the movie really comes down to is a séance. And the stabbing of flesh. And a ghost. Yes, a ghost. In the form of a floating piece of red material that looks like a blanket made of organza. Is this the ghost of their relationship? Or a real ghost? That’s a question that will be debated by moviegoers for maybe four seconds. Because “Mother Mary,” as it takes the leap into Gothic metaphysical fantasy, becomes almost completely incoherent, and stays that way. It’s like an exorcist movie where the devil is a piece of bolt fabric. 

    The movie does have a few additional in-concert scenes, but the songs, written and produced by Jack Antonoff and Charli xcx, just sound like a bland version of what they’re supposed to be. To my ears, the music conjured Taylor Swift trying to be Enya. If this were a sustained two-hander, it might have been the story of a beloved pop superstar and her genius designer, and how they forged a connection that was creative and spiritual and romantic. It might have been about how they broke up (because the pop star became too big and thought she could do it on her own), and about how that breakup was a betrayal (because it was based on the pop star’s narcissism). Instead, “Mother Mary” turns into the most befuddlingly pretentious movie about a pop star since Brady Corbet’s “Vox Lux.” It heads down a blind alley of cosmic meaning that, in the end, means nothing.

  • Trump’s Attack on the Pope Leaves Colbert, Kimmel in Disbelief: ‘Not Even Hitler or Mussolini Attacked the Pope So Directly and Publicly, According to One Historian’

    Trump’s Attack on the Pope Leaves Colbert, Kimmel in Disbelief: ‘Not Even Hitler or Mussolini Attacked the Pope So Directly and Publicly, According to One Historian’

    Donald Trump‘s social media post attacking Pope Leo XIV as “weak” left late-night hosts Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel in disbelief during their respective April 13 episodes. Both men regularly bash Trump during their monologues, but the president’s tirade against the Pope left them puzzled to the point of near-speechlessness.

    “According to one Italian religious historian, not even Hitler or Mussolini attacked the Pope so directly and publicly,” Colbert told his viewers before quipping: “It’s never great when someone says, ‘You should really be more discreet and respectful. You know, like Hitler.’”

    Pope Leo has publicly opposed the war in Iran as well as Trump’s immigration policy, which prompted Trump’s meltdown. The president posted on Truth Social: “Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy … I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon. I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s terrible that America attacked Venezuela, a Country that was sending massive amounts of Drugs into the United States and, even worse, emptying their prisons, including murderers, drug dealers, and killers, into our Country. And I don’t want a Pope who criticizes the President of the United States because I’m doing exactly what I was elected, IN A LANDSLIDE, to do, setting Record Low Numbers in Crime, and creating the Greatest Stock Market in History.”

    The post prompted Kimmel to ask: “What does the pope have to do with crime? He’s not Batman, he’s the pope. This is what happens when you sell Bibles instead of reading them… We have a fight between the president and the Pope. The world has become a real life episode of ‘South Park.’”

    Trump courted even more backlash when he followed up his tirade by posting an AI-generated image of that many interpreted to depict Trump as Jesus Christ. The backlash was widespread and instant, with Trump later removing the post from his Truth Social account and claiming that he thought he was depicted as a doctor.

    “So, Donald Trump wants us to believe that he thought this was a doctor,” Colbert fired back, calling it “quite the excuse” from the president and adding: “If I’m in a doctor’s office and that man walks in, I’m thinking I died.”

    Trump’s excuse also caused disbelief from Jon Stewart, who asked during his April 13 episode “The Daily Show”: “Do you even care about lying to us anymore? Is this over? Has this relationship gone stale? Your lies used to have a real spark… And now the best you’ve got is, ‘Eh, no, I wasn’t Jesus. I’m a doctor!’ You need to go back and find your happy place and fast.”

  • Bitcoin (BTC) is Rising, But It Will Be Temporary! Analyst Reveals the Level He Expects for the Real Bottom!

    Bitcoin (BTC) is Rising, But It Will Be Temporary! Analyst Reveals the Level He Expects for the Real Bottom!

    As tensions between the US and Iran in the Middle East continue unabated, Bitcoin ($BTC) remains strong.

    Bitcoin, although it fell to the $70,000 level after the first talks between the US and Iran over the weekend ended without a result, has risen again to the $74,000 level.

    This rise was influenced by news that a second round of talks between the two countries would begin and by growing expectations that the Bank of Japan would not raise interest rates this month.

    While Bitcoin is trying to remain strong amidst recent developments, some analysts predict that $BTC could fall to $50,000 before experiencing a sustainable recovery.

    At this point, LVRG Research Director Nick Ruck predicts that the $50,000 level could be the last major buying opportunity before a real recovery begins.

    Ruck stated that Bitcoin’s price falling to these levels would represent a healthy cycle reset, given the broader economic pressures and weak capital flows into cryptocurrencies.

    Ruck also stated that Bitcoin has fallen by approximately 40% from its recent all-time high, with significant participation from institutional investors, a smaller drop than in previous bear markets. In this context, Ruck noted that the current bear market has its own unique macro-structural characteristics, arguing that for these reasons, a drop of more than 60% might not occur in this cycle.

    Aside from Nick Ruck, Bitcoin investor and analyst Ivan Liljeqvist also stated that Bitcoin has not yet reached its bottom.

    “I don’t think we’ve hit the bottom yet, and I don’t think $60,000 is the bottom. The trend is still downward. There’s no bullish momentum right now.”

    *This is not investment advice.

  • Visa throws its weight behind Stripe’s Tempo blockchain

    Visa throws its weight behind Stripe’s Tempo blockchain

    Visa (V) has made its first foray into running blockchain infrastructure, the company said on Tuesday, operating as an “anchor validator” node on the Stripe-backed Tempo blockchain.

    Visa, a long-time collaborator of the payments services provider, configured and managed the validator node entirely in-house, following six months of joint work with Tempo’s engineering team to integrate the card giant’s infrastructure directly into the blockchain, according to a press release.

    Visa plans to run nodes on some other blockchains following the Tempo integration. The card network had previously said it will join the Canton Network, where there are plans to serve as a “Super Validator.”

    For the past seven years or so, Visa’s blockchain engineers have been “living and breathing stablecoins,” said the head of Visa’s crypto team, Cuy Sheffield. Now the focus is on supporting the evolution of new payment flows such as machine-to-machine commerce using AI agents, he added.

    “We’ve been an early design partner, working very closely with the Tempo team, looking at designing infrastructure that can support many types of new payment flows, and particularly agentic payment flows,” Sheffield said in an interview with CoinDesk.

    Tempo, which is also backed by crypto investment firm Paradigm, went live last month with Machine Payments Protocol (MPP), a protocol that lets software and AI agents pay for services autonomously.

    “Visa is a big part of MPP,” Sheffield said. “We added the MPP card spec. We announced Visa CLI, which is a wallet that is built on top of MPP where agents can use a Visa card to be able to spend. So we’ve been deeply involved in the Tempo and the MPP ecosystem, and now we’re running the underlying infrastructure on Tempo.”

    There’s no doubting Stripe’s conviction when it comes to assembling an end-to-end blockchain-based system for stablecoin payments. But, taking a step back, some people might question how open and decentralized such a system is.

    Sheffield, in response, said Visa is simply being pragmatic, looking for products that can drive payment volume.

    “Our view has always been that decentralization is a spectrum,” Sheffield said. “There are many use cases where decentralization for the sake of decentralization doesn’t solve a problem. I think we’re now entering a phase in the crypto industry where decentralization is not the primary value prop. It’s whether a new payment infrastructure is fast, efficient, programmable and can outperform some existing payment infrastructure for certain use cases.”

    Stripe moved into the stablecoin industry when it acquired stablecoin specialist Bridge for $1.1 billion in 2024. Earlier this year, Mastercard made a similar move, buying stablecoin firm BVNK for $1.8 billion.

    Asked if Visa had any plans to offer its own stablecoin, Sheffield said:

    “It’s so early and the rules haven’t even been fully written yet. We spent a bunch of time with the OCC (Office of the Comptroller of the Currency) and others,” he said. “I think there are many different roles that Visa can play, but everything we do, we want to make sure that we’re doing it in partnership with our clients and our network.”

  • Indonesia, US sign ‘major’ defence cooperation agreement

    Indonesia, US sign ‘major’ defence cooperation agreement

    Signing of defence partnership follows reports that Washington is seeking overflight access in Indonesia for US military planes.

    ⁠US ⁠Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ⁠has hailed the establishment of a “major defence cooperation partnership” with Indonesia, saying it underscores the “strength and potential” of ties with Jakarta to maintain stability in the Asia Pacific region.

    Hegseth hosted Indonesian Minister of Defence Sjafrie Sjamsoeddin at the Pentagon on Monday, where the deal was signed.

    Recommended Stories

    list of 4 itemsend of list

    “This [partnership] signifies the strength and potential of our security relationship… bolsters regional deterrence, and advances our shared commitment to peace through strength,” Hegeseth said, according to a Defense Department statement.

    The US defence secretary also said Washington and Jakarta’s security relationship was “active and growing”, noting that both countries’ armed forces participate in more than 170 military exercises together each year.

    A joint statement on the new partnership said the two sides had agreed to work on co-developing “sophisticated asymmetric capabilities, pioneering next-generation defence technologies in the maritime, subsurface and autonomous systems domains”, and improving operational readiness.

    “We are here as Indonesian delegates… with very great enthusiasm to continue to develop our defence relationship, [which] should be enduring for our next generation in Indonesia and the United States of America,” Sjafrie was quoted as saying.

    “We’re working on behalf of mutual respect and mutual benefit to enhance [the] value of our national interests,” he added.

    The signing of the partnership comes a day after reports in Indonesia that both countries are discussing a proposal to ⁠give US military aircraft access to Indonesian airspace.

     

    The US is seeking “blanket” overflight access for military aircraft through Indonesian airspace, several ‌media outlets reported on Sunday, adding that Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto had approved the proposal.

    Responding to the reports, the Ministry of Defence in Jakarta said in a statement that the two countries are still discussing a “Letter of ⁠Intent”, and only a preliminary draft on overflight was being discussed internally. The draft is neither final nor binding, the ⁠ministry added.

    Control over Indonesian airspace belongs to Indonesia, the Defence Ministry added, saying that deals ⁠with other countries would protect Indonesia’s sovereignty and adhere to Indonesian law.

    “The deal is not final. It is not legally binding. It cannot be used as a basis for official government policy,” Defence Minister Sjafrie’s spokesman, Rico Ricardo Sirait, told the Jakarta Globe.

    “Authority, control, and oversight over Indonesian airspace rest entirely in our country. Any potential regulation shall guarantee Indonesia’s full authority to approve or reject any activity in national airspace,” he told the news outlet.

    Prabowo is due to meet his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, in Paris on Tuesday, just a day after he held talks with Russia’s Vladimir Putin about oil, the government in Jakarta said, according to the AFP news agency.

    Last month, Prabowo’s government announced fuel rationing and mandated a day-per-week work-from-home policy for civil servants to conserve energy stocks as prices surge amid the US-Israel war on Iran.

  • ‘We Will Not Pay These Criminals’: Crypto Exchange Kraken Is Being Extorted Over Stolen Data

    ‘We Will Not Pay These Criminals’: Crypto Exchange Kraken Is Being Extorted Over Stolen Data

    In brief

    • Kraken is being extorted for an undisclosed sum by criminals that have access to customer data.
    • The firm’s security executive said it will not negotiate or pay the criminals.
    • The exchange is working with law enforcement, and believes it has sufficient evidence to identify and arrest those responsible.

    A criminal group is threatening to release stolen customer data from crypto exchange Kraken, the firm reported Monday, publicly disclosing the conflict via social media.

    “We will not pay these criminals; we will not ever negotiate with bad actors,” Kraken Chief Security Officer Nick Percoco posted on X.

    “We are currently being extorted by a criminal group threatening to release videos of our internal systems with client data shown if we do not comply with their demands,” Percoco added. “We are actively working with federal law enforcement across multiple jurisdictions to pursue all individuals involved and bring them to justice.”

    According to Percoco, the firm recently received a tip that a video was made showcasing sensitive customer information from its internal systems. That tip follows a February 2025 security incident in which a similar video, containing customer information, was shared on a “criminal forum.” 

    In each instance, the individual involved from within the company was identified. No customer funds were at risk, Percoco said, and internal systems were not breached. 

    “Since then, we have been collaborating with industry partners and law enforcement to investigate and disrupt insider recruitment efforts targeting not only crypto companies, but also gaming and telecommunications organizations,” said Percoco. 

    The firm’s security executive approximated that around 2,000 individuals potentially had their information viewed, and anyone at risk has already been contacted. The criminals are allegedly threatening to share that information with local media and across social media networks if Kraken does not comply with their demands. 

    Additional details about the incident are not being shared by the firm at the time, due to the ongoing investigation. A representative for the firm did not immediately respond to Decrypt’s requests for comment.

    In his statement, Percoco said he believes there is sufficient evidence to identify and arrest the malicious actors. 

    The extortion attempt comes at a time when wrench attacks, or physical attacks in order to gain access to a victim’s crypto holdings, have jumped more than 75% year-over-year. Last year alone, more than $40 million in confirmed losses were attributed to wrench attacks, according to a report from CertiK, following headlines detailing grisly attacks on industry workers and investors.

    Kraken confidentially filed for IPO in November of last year, but quietly delayed those plans this year due to difficult crypto market conditions, according to a March report from CoinDesk.

    Last year, its publicly traded competitor Coinbase indicated that it had suffered a major data breach that impacted more than 69,000 customers at the end of 2024. The exploit was the result of criminals bribing Coinbase’s customer support agents for access to names, addresses, and more.

    Daily Debrief Newsletter

    Start every day with the top news stories right now, plus original features, a podcast, videos and more.

  • World faces food ‘catastrophe’ if Strait of Hormuz disruption persists: FAO

    World faces food ‘catastrophe’ if Strait of Hormuz disruption persists: FAO

    Global agriculture is highly exposed to the waterway blockage, risking higher commodity prices and food inflation.

    Published On 14 Apr 2026

    A prolonged disruption in the Strait of Hormuz could result in a global food “catastrophe”, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has warned, as shipments of critical agricultural inputs remain blocked in the key waterway due to the US-Israel war on Iran.

    Food prices have not risen yet because existing stocks are absorbing the shock, the United Nations body’s chief economist, Maximo Torero, said in an interview on Monday, alongside David Laborde, director of FAO’s agrifood economics division.

    Recommended Stories

    list of 3 itemsend of list

    But if traffic through the strait does not resume, the shocks to energy and fertiliser markets will translate into higher commodity and retail prices later this year and into 2027, Laborde added.

    Exports of 20 to 45 percent of key agrifood inputs rely on sea passage through the Strait of Hormuz, according to the FAO.

    “We are in an input crisis; we don’t want to make it a catastrophe,” said Laborde. “The difference depends on the actions we take.”

    “Right now, we don’t have a food crisis because we have food availability,” Torero added, noting that the increase in gas and oil prices has not translated yet into higher costs for bread and wheat, for example, thanks to ample supplies coming out of a good harvest season. “But this is now,” the economist said.

    Fertilisers

    Nearly half of the world’s traded urea – the most widely used fertiliser – and large volumes of other fertilisers are exported from Gulf countries via the Strait of Hormuz, making global agriculture highly exposed to any disruption there.

    Recent disruptions to gas supplies and shipping have already forced fertiliser plants, which use natural gas to manufacture fertiliser, in the Gulf and beyond to shut or cut their output.

    Should traffic continue to stall in the chokepoint, farmers will be forced to produce with less fertiliser or increase the cost of their product, Torero said.

    “This is why it’s so essential that the ceasefire continue and is so essential that it is not just a ceasefire, but also that vessels start moving,” he said. “The clock is ticking.”

    Torero added that poorer countries were most exposed because planting calendars meant delays in access to key inputs could quickly translate into lower output, higher inflation and slower global growth.

    Iran has brought traffic through the strait to a near-total halt in response to attacks from the United States and Israel, which launched a war on Tehran on February 28, killing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

    The move has triggered a global energy crisis, doubling at times the prices of oil and gas compared with pre-war levels.

    Over the weekend, Iranian and US representatives held a 21-hour marathon negotiation to reach an agreement for a permanent ceasefire, but failed to achieve a breakthrough.

    US President Donald Trump then decided to impose a naval blockade on the strait. He said the navy would hunt down and interdict ships in international waters that had paid Iran a toll to traverse the strait.

    Later, the US military said it would block all maritime traffic entering and exiting Iranian ports, including those in the Gulf and the Gulf of Oman.