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  • he Abu Dhabi campus of New York University has closed 

    he Abu Dhabi campus of New York University has closed 

    President Trump on Monday renewed his threat to begin “completely obliterating” Iranian power plants and oil production facilities if the country’s leaders did not agree to reopen the Strait of Hormuz “immediately.”

    Mr. Trump has sought to pressure Iran to yield to his demands and end its chokehold over the strait, a vital shipping route for oil and natural gas, by alternating threats of destruction with unverified claims of diplomatic breakthroughs. Iran has denied holding substantive talks with the United States and has rejected the Trump administration’s conditions as unreasonable.

    The mixed messages led to another nervous day for energy and stock markets: The price of Brent crude, the global benchmark for oil, briefly rose to $116 a barrel on Monday before falling back to around $114 a barrel, and the S&P 500 closed down about 0.4 percent.

    Here’s what else happened in the war:

    Iran: The foreign ministry spokesman, Esmail Baghaei, said that Iran had received proposals for talks with the United States through intermediaries, including Pakistan, but maintained that Iran had held no negotiations — and would not do so while the military campaign continues. The war has fractured the Iranian government, complicating its ability to make decisions, according to officials familiar with U.S. and Western intelligence assessments. Still, a parliamentary committee backed a proposal to impose tolls on ships crossing the Strait of Hormuz, which is treated under maritime law as an international waterway where ships are guaranteed passage.

    Lebanon: The Israeli military said it had destroyed more than 100 high-rise buildings in the area of the capital, Beirut, used by the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. Two U.N. peacekeepers were killed when their convoy was “struck by an explosion of undetermined origin” in southern Lebanon. An Israeli strike on a Lebanese army checkpoint in the country’s south killed one soldier and injured several others, the Lebanese military said in a statement. More than 1,200 people in Lebanon have been killed in the nearly monthlong conflict, and more than a million others have been displaced, according to Lebanese authorities.

    Persian Gulf: The Abu Dhabi campus of New York University has closed until further notice after Iran warned on Saturday that American universities with outposts in the Gulf were “legitimate targets” in retaliation for strikes on Iranian universities during the war.

    Israel: An oil refinery in the northern city of Haifa was struck during an Iranian missile attack on Monday morning, according to Israel’s fire and rescue service, and falling shrapnel hit a large fuel container fuel, igniting a fire. There were no reports of casualties.

    Turkey: NATO air defenses shot down a ballistic missile fired from Iran that had entered Turkish airspace, Turkey’s defense ministry said in a social media post. It was the fourth time that the military alliance, of which Turkey is a member, has reported intercepting an Iranian missile in or near Turkey’s skies since the start of the war in Iran.

    United States: Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said the president “would be quite interested in calling” on Arab countries to help pay for the costs associated with the Iran war. “Certainly it’s an idea that I know that he has and something that I think you’ll hear more from him on,” she said.

  • The Dubai authorities responded to an episode involving

    The Dubai authorities responded to an episode involving

    A Kuwaiti crude carrier was “directly attacked” by Iranian forces while anchored at the Dubai port in the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait’s state news agency said Tuesday morning, citing the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation.

    The Dubai authorities responded to an episode involving a drone and a Kuwaiti oil tanker that caught fire in Emirati waters, the government’s media office said. No injuries were reported among the tanker’s 24 crew members, whose safety had been secured, the media office said. Maritime firefighting teams had been working to bring the fire under control and later said it had been extinguished.

    The Kuwaiti Petroleum Corporation said in a statement that the tanker, called Al-Salmi, was fully laden when struck in what it said had been an Iranian attack. The vessel’s hull sustained damage, the company said, adding that the fire and damage had the potential to cause an oil spill in surrounding waters. Measures were being taken to put out the fire and mitigate any potential environmental damage, it said.

    The maritime intelligence company Tanker Trackers said that, according to its tracking information, two million barrels of crude were on board the vessel — about 1.2 million from Saudi Arabia and about 800,000 from Kuwait. The tanker “was done loading a month ago,” the tanker tracking company said of the vessel on social media.

    The Al-Salmi is a massive vessel that is nearly 1,100 feet long and was built in 2011 by Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering in South Korea.

    Iran did not immediately respond to reports of the attack.

    The Kuwaiti military said it was dealing with hostile missile and drone attacks even as news of the tanker attack in Emirati waters was emerging.

    On Friday, an Iranian strike injured 12 U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, two of them seriously, in an attack on Prince ​Sultan Air Base in Saudi ​Arabia. And on Saturday, multiple drones struck the Kuwait International Airport, causing significant damage to its radar system, the country’s aviation authorities said. There were no reported casualties. Those strikes were part of a series of attacks recently against Israel and Gulf countries in the past several days that showed Iran retains enough missiles and drones to destabilize the region and inflict a punishing cost on its foes.

    The attack on the Kuwaiti tanker comes as traffic in and around the Strait of Hormuz has come to a practical standstill amid Iranian retaliatory attacks on commercial vessels in regional waters. In March so far, fewer than 150 tankers have traversed the strait amid the attacks, according to data from S&P Market Intelligence. Normally, about 140 ships travel through the vital waterway every day, according to the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations, which tracks security at sea.

    Before Tuesday’s attack, the U.K.M.T.O. said in a report on Monday that it had received 24 reports of suspicious incidents affecting vessels operating in and around the Persian Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz and the Gulf of Oman since Feb. 28 when the United States and Israel began attacking Iran.

  • Anthropic Is at War With Itself

    Anthropic Is at War With Itself

    These are not the words you want to hear when it comes to human extinction, but I was hearing them: “Things are moving uncomfortably fast.” I was sitting in a conference room with Sam Bowman, a safety researcher at Anthropic. Worth $183 billion at the latest estimate, the AI firm has every incentive to speed things up, ship more products, and develop more advanced chatbots to stay competitive with the likes of OpenAI, Google, and the industry’s other giants. But Anthropic is at odds with itself—thinking deeply, even anxiously, about seemingly every decision.

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