Historical novelist Robert Harris writes about the Roman Empire – and says the parallels of disillusionment with modern day politics are ‘impossible’ to ignore. [Subscribe to our Substack newsletter: https://channel4news.substack.com/sub…] In this episode of Ways to Change the World, he tells Krishnan Guru-Murthy that Donald Trump’s ‘vanity projects’ and strong man tactics remind him of Emperor Augustus, how the pressure to appease the masses is ‘crushing politicians into a form where it’s impossible for them to operate’ and why historians might look back and see the Brexit vote as ‘the first big crack’ in British democracy. Robert Harris’ latest book ‘Agrippa’ is out now.
Lindsay Clancy admits she killed her three young children. What the jury must decide is whether she was legally responsible for their deaths. Prosecutors say Clancy deliberately sent her husband out of the house before strangling 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson and 8-month-old Callan, arguing her actions show planning, awareness and an understanding that what she was doing was wrong.The defense tells a very different story, arguing that Clancy’s mental health deteriorated after childbirth and that bipolar disorder and postpartum psychosis left her unable to appreciate the wrongfulness of her actions. Her journals documented severe insomnia, anxiety, depression and feelings of “drowning,” while psychiatric experts sharply disagree over her mental state and her claim that a voice commanded her to kill. Dr. Phil analyzes the competing evidence, the psychology behind the defense and prosecution arguments, and the central question of the Lindsay Clancy trial: mental illness or legal insanity? Sponsored by Preserve Gold: Get up to $20,000 in FREE Gold & Silver with a qualified purchase. CALL: 844-718-2642 Text ASKPHIL to 50505 or visit https://DrPhilgold.com Sponsor: CarShield is how you move from chaos to control. Their protection plans are built to cover a deep bench of mechanical issues, thousands of parts across cars, trucks, and SUVs… without putting a cap on how far you drive. That’s not just coverage. That’s control. Call CarShield today: 1-800-588-8501 more info: https://carshield.com/ Experience a side of Dr. Phil McGraw you may have been missing as he provides critical information on some of the most important issues we face today. McGraw delves into the minds of the most exciting and accomplished people. From celebrities to ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, to the world’s leading experts, every guest and topic is provocative, informative, and relevant. http://drphilpodcast.com Dr. Phil McGraw, one of the most well-known and trusted mental health professionals in the world, is the host of daytime TV’s top-rated program, Dr. Phil. This trailblazing and award-winning platform continues to provide the most comprehensive forum on mental health issues in the history of television. Dr. McGraw’s unique ability to take complicated and technical information and make it accessible and understandable to the general public has distinguished him both among viewers and within his profession. Follow for more Dr. Phil & The Dr. Phil Podcast: Dr. Phil Show – / @drphil Podcast – https://www.drphilpodcast.com/
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Meta and its Facebook and Instagram platforms have agreed to a massive settlement over claims that social media harmed kids — including new restrictions aimed at limiting teens’ screen time. Michael Smerconish thinks the changes are a good step. But they raise a much bigger question: Could adults live by the same rules? Two hours a day. Apps dark after midnight. Notifications silenced during the day. And all of it against a backdrop in which Americans are spending less and less time face-to-face with one another. Maybe the problem isn’t only what social media is doing to kids. Maybe it’s what it has done to all of us. Could you live under the same restrictions being placed on teenagers?
Nvidia eyes Hugging Face in full-stack AI push Nvidia may be taking one step closer to dominating the open-source AI ecosystem.
The tech giant has agreed to buy Hugging Face, the dominant repository of open-source AI models, for $12.9 billion, according to a report by The Information, citing a source familiar with the agreement. This is a strategic move that allows Nvidia to diversify its portfolio from just chipsets and take ownership of more of the AI stack.This would give Nvidia ownership over the “front door for open AI innovation,” Ashish Nadkarni, Group VP of enterprise infrastructure at IDC, told The Deep View. “Owning that front door gives NVIDIA a major position in the mindshare of today’s AI development personas.
“The deal comes as Nvidia faces mounting pressure from the very labs that rely on its chips. Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic are each moving toward custom or co-designed AI silicon, a shift that threatens Nvidia’s near-monopoly on AI hardware. Worse for Nvidia, these labs bring something it can’t easily replicate: deep, firsthand knowledge of the models the chips are meant to run, letting them tune hardware for performance in ways a general-purpose chipmaker can’t match.
Hugging Face could eventually become a non-chip source of revenue for Nvidia, which could spur more growth if chip revenue eventually stops skyrocketing. A small caveat, however, is that, according to the report, Hugging Face has only generated $150 million in annualized revenue thus far.That makes Nvidia’s payment about 80 times the startup’s forward revenue, the report notes.
Revenue aside, the advantage of being both a model and chip maker is a key reason Nvidia has invested heavily in open-source models. Nvidia’s commitment has been reflected not only in signing an open letter supporting the ecosystem, but also in internal investment in and development of open-source models, such as its Nemotron models. Of course, the Hugging Face acquisition moves that forward.
Additionally, there’s a significant robotics angle: Nvidia already has a strong position with its Jetson, Isaac, and Omniverse solutions, and Hugging Face’s own robotics efforts give Nvidia another point of leverage as physical AI becomes the next frontier. And just today, Hugging Face unveiled Microduck, a $399 open-source robot that learns new tricks via reinforcement learning.
Even its looks resemble the Nvidia “Blue” research robot, inspired by Star Wars’ BD-1, shown at demos, live events, and Disney. Still, as Nadkarni highlights, the acquisition would also mean there would be less choice in the industry. “To the extent that others like Intel, Apple, and AMD make similar plays, there will be fewer “ecosystem-neutral” platforms in the market,” said Nadkarni. “Note how Microsoft has gradually made GitHub more like an extension of its own strategy (and for its own benefit).”This is a landmark move for Nvidia, as it solidifies its efforts to be not just a chip company, but one that aims to own multiple layers of the AI stack at once.Hugging Face has become something like the GitHub of AI: serving as the industry’s central hub for sharing models, datasets, and applications. Owning that layer, on top of the hardware layer Nvidia already dominates, deepens the moat. Already, nearly every open model runs on Nvidia GPUs, and buying the platform where those models live removes any ambiguity. It’s also a defensive play: as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Amazon push to build their own custom chips, controlling the distribution layer keeps developers tied to Nvidia’s ecosystem regardless of who’s building the silicon.
Bipolar depression does not have a single face. Through one patient’s journey, this case-based reflection explores 5 distinct presentations and how each can shape clinical recognition and treatment.
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Bipolar depression is more than a state of sadness; in clinical practice, it often appears as a disorder of lived time. During hypomania, time accelerates and possibilities expand; during depression, time collapses into an immobile present; and in mixed states, time becomes unbearable, filled with agitation, and despair without rest.1Understanding this altered experience requires more than symptom recognition—it also requires a treatment approach that extends beyond pharmacotherapy.
*Effective management extends beyond medication to include psychoeducation, relapse prevention, monitoring of sleep and early warning signs, suicide-risk assessment, medication adherence, family involvement when possible, and the gradual restoration of routine, agency, and reciprocal relationships.2
Pharmacological management should therefore be embedded within these broader plans. US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved treatments for bipolar depression have expanded over the past 2 decades. Currently approved agents include the olanzapine–fluoxetine combination (approved 2003), quetiapine (2006), lurasidone (2013), cariprazine (2019), and lumateperone (2021). Lamotrigine remains approved for maintenance treatment and prevention of depressive relapses, whereas lithium continues to occupy a central role because of its efficacy in maintenance treatment and evidence suggesting a reduction in suicide risk, despite lacking FDA approval for acute bipolar depression.3,4
Between the recommendations of clinical practice and the reality of everyday life lies the patient’s story. Here, our patient Mustafa’s journey illustrates how bipolar depression may unfold long before it becomes diagnostically recognizable and evolves through a series of psychological phases that are not part of any diagnostic manual yet are deeply familiar to many clinicians who accompany patients through recovery.
A Patient’s Narrative
Before Mustafa’s illness acquired a name, his life had already begun to change.He was a 22-year-old student preparing for his sixth-grade examinations in Baghdad when philosophy slowly replaced ordinary study, and sleeplessness began to feel like clarity rather than exhaustion.He spoke intensely about reality and consciousness, walked unusually long distances across the city, and became increasingly irritable when others failed to understand his ideas. What first appeared as ambition or intellectual awakening gradually became acceleration, disinhibition, and estrangement. By the time despair appeared, it was not a simple depressive collapse, but the aftermath of a mind that had promised him exceptional meaning and then left him unable to live with its consequences.
The following phases are not formal diagnostic stages but a clinical framework that emerged from one patient’s journey and may resonate with experiences commonly encountered in practice.
1. Despair Phase
I first met Mustafa at a medical ward at Baghdad Teaching Hospital after a serious suicide attempt by overdose. At our first encounter, his central complaint was not merely sadness, but a collapse of meaning. He felt that his life had become unworthy of continuation. What had first appeared to him as discovery had become, to others, acceleration and chaos. His irritability had grown, his judgment had weakened, and he was increasingly unable to recognize the social consequences of his behavior.
Alongside this psychic acceleration, he became more disinhibited, engaging in risky acts and long, purposeless walks across Baghdad, from Karrada to Taji, as though his body had been recruited by the restlessness of his mind.
This was the first paradox: his suicidal despair had not emerged from simple depression alone, but from the exhaustion that follows acceleration.The exhilaration had burned itself out before he confronted the emptiness that followed.
2. Denial Phase
Mustafa initially could not accept the diagnosis of bipolar disorder. He compared himself with friends, with internet descriptions, and with the popular caricature of bipolarity as a simple alternation between happiness and sadness.Because his suffering did not resemble these stereotypes, he concluded that the diagnosis must be wrong.
He told me: “My episodes do not stop. I do not have several months of normal life. Most of my episodes are mixed. There is no daily life for me at all, so it was difficult to find myself in the typical bipolar disorder I searched for on Google or ChatGPT.”
His denial was not mere resistance. It was also an attempt to preserve identity. To accept the diagnosis meant accepting that some of his most intimate experiences, his thoughts, energies, ambitions, and convictions, might also be symptoms. The diagnosis threatened not only his health narrative, but his authorship of himself. Because of this, he resisted lithium and other mood stabilizers. He preferred to think of his condition as a personality problem that could be treated through behavioral therapy alone. Medication, to him, felt like an admission that the self could not be trusted.
In one message, he wrote: “What am I going to do now? I understand that I need to take my medication, but what am I going to do with this diagnosis? I need help understanding how I should handle it.” This was the beginning of diagnostic grief: not grief over what he had lost, but grief over the person he was no longer sure he had ever been.
3. Dependency (Childlike) Phase
Eventually, Mustafa accepted the diagnosis, but acceptance did not immediately bring agency. Depression left him depleted, indecisive, and unable to organize ordinary life. He began to depend on his clinician for small decisions: how to eat, when to sleep, whether to go out, what to read, what to say to family and friends.
These questions seemed childish on the surface, but they reflected a deeper regression produced by depression.When the internal world loses structure, the external world becomes impossible to navigate. The patient does not only ask for advice; he asks to borrow another person’s mind, until he gradually learns to trust his own again. The therapeutic relationship became one of the few spaces where experience could be translated into meaning. For the duration of the session, life seemed manageable. Every symptom had a name, every behavior a context, every fear a possible explanation.
This phase carries its own danger.The clinician may become, in the patient’s imagination, not merely a doctor, but a temporary organizer of reality. The task, therefore, is not to enjoy being needed, but to return the patient gradually to himself.
4. Self-Defeating Phase
As the depressive phase deepened, Mustafa became increasingly vulnerable to guilt, inadequacy, and shame. Pleasure felt undeserved. Rest felt like laziness. Hope felt naïve. He described his mind as his worst enemy. This metaphor was clinically revealing. Where there is an enemy, there is aggression—and in Mustafa, aggression had turned inward. It appeared as self-criticism, self-deprivation, and repeated self-sabotage.
He was agreeable, sometimes excessively so. He placed the needs of others before his own, including mine. Beneath this compliance was a fear of abandonment. He seemed to believe that to have needs was to risk rejection, and that to disappoint others was to disappear from their care.
In this phase, depression was not only biological suffering.Depression became an internal courtroom in which Mustafa served simultaneously as the prosecutor, the judge, and the accused. The therapeutic work required helping him distinguish responsibility from guilt, remorse from self-hatred, and discipline from punishment.
5. Coping Phase
Gradually, Mustafa began to name his states rather than be possessed by them. Naming did not cure him, but it created distance. What could be named could be observed; what could be observed could sometimes be survived.
Our relationship shifted from dependence toward interdependence. He began to recognize warning signs, challenge negative beliefs, maintain routines, and seek reciprocal relationships rather than relationships built only on rescue. One of his later messages read:
“It still felt like a battle to get out of bed, or even to breathe every day, but somehow that was okay, because I knew it would end.”
This sentence marked a quiet transformation. Recovery was not the arrival of permanent happiness. It was the restoration of temporal faith: the belief that a state is not a destiny, that an episode is not the whole self, and that despair, however persuasive, is not always prophetic.
In this sense, recovery did not mean the absence of bipolar disorder. It meant recovering authorship over a life that had once seemed entirely dictated by the illness.
Clinical Relevance
Looking back, Mustafa did not move through these phases in a straight line.He revisited some, lingered in others, and occasionally returned to places he thought he had left behind. Recovery was not a destination but a changing relationship with his illness.4 Bipolar depression remained part of his story, but it no longer wrote the story for him.
Although the 5 phases described here are not intended as a formal diagnostic model, they provide a practical clinical framework that can help psychiatrists recognize subtle shifts in a patient’s psychological state, strengthen the therapeutic alliance, anticipate barriers to engagement, and tailor interventions to the patient’s needs at a given moment.
The same individual may move between despair, denial, dependency, self-defeating patterns, and adaptive coping over time, often requiring clinicians to adjust not only pharmacologic strategies but also communication, psychoeducation, and psychotherapeutic support. Rather than viewing bipolar depression solely through the lens of symptom checklists, attending to these evolving psychological states encourages a more individualized and recovery-oriented approach to care.
In daily practice, the value of this framework is not in placing patients into a specific phase, but in recognizing that their experience of bipolar depression changes over time. As these changes occur, the same treatment approach may no longer fit the patient’s needs, even when symptom severity appears similar. Paying attention to these shifts can help clinicians better understand changes in behavior, reconsider treatment priorities, and adapt both pharmacologic and psychosocial interventions. Seen this way, bipolar depression is not a fixed condition assessed at each visit, but an evolving clinical process that requires ongoing clinical judgment.
Dr Younisis a senior psychiatrist in the department of psychiatry at Baghdad Teaching Hospital, Iraq.
References
1. Taylor DM, Barnes TRE, Young AH. The Maudsley Prescribing Guidelines in Psychiatry. 15th ed. Wiley-Blackwell; 2025.
3. Ghaemi SN. Feeling and time: the phenomenology of mood disorders, depressive realism, and existential psychotherapy. Schizophr Bull. 2007;33(1):122-130.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has previously criticized the Pentagon bureaucracy for resembling the Soviet Union.Leon Neal—Getty Images
Shortly after he became Trump’s Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth warned that the American military risked a late Soviet-style decline. Speaking before a group of defense executives in November 2025, he teased comparisons with the USSR and even the Chinese Communist Party as he described an “adversary” that poses a serious threat to the United States of America. “The adversary I’m talking about is much closer to home,” he said. “It’s the Pentagon bureaucracy — not the people, but the process.”
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This March, the world’s largest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, pulled into port at Souda Bay, Greece, scheduled for more than a week of repairs. More than 200 of its sailors were receiving treatment for smoke inhalation, a result of a laundry room fire that spread through the ventilation system into the carrier’s sleeping quarters.
The USS Gerald R. Ford was at sea for 10 months, long past its deployment length, and was reportedly dealing with electrical problems and delayed maintenance that led to overworked equipment. That was on top of sewage problems on the ship that left its crew unable to use its toilets.
According to Linda Bilmes, a Harvard Kennedy School public policy lecturer and author of The Ghost Budget: U.S. War Spending and Fiscal Transparency, the USS Gerald R. Ford represents a larger problem for the U.S. military: a massive tract of infrastructure and facilities without the proper structures to maintain them.
“Here you have $13 billion spent on the highest tech carrier in the entire navy, and somehow there wasn’t a sufficient amount of money spent on maintaining the laundry conditions and the toilets,” Bilmes told Fortune. “That’s just one example, but you have to question whether the resources are being allocated in a way that provides maximum benefits.”
A report published last week from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the federal government’s audit institution, found that across the Department of Defense’s real estate portfolio of more than 700,000 facilities around the world—some of which are at least 50 years old or date back to the Cold War—the department is dealing with a $285 billion maintenance backlog in fiscal 2025 as a result of insufficient funding and personnel.
The findings included “chronically neglected” maintenance of some barracks that adversely affected the quality of life of enlisted service members, posing safety risks due to mold and broken fire systems.The report also noted crumbling parking lots at the Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, which have been in disrepair since at least 2018, as well as narrow quarters at the Twentynine Palms Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in California, which could not accommodate the maintenance of Marine Corps vehicles.
“This poses a risk to its missions and the quality of life of its personnel,” the report said.
The Pentagon did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
The U.S. diverging from the Soviet military downfall
This isn’t a matter of just one administration mismanaging money. The Pentagon is the only major federal agency that has never passed an audit. While the department attributes the opacity around its procurement and distribution of its massive, $1 trillion budget to the sheer size of the agency and its responsibilities, the GAO has found evidence instead of pervasive money mismanagement. For example, the Navy lost track of $3 billion in equipment over the last three years, and at one Naval distribution center, there was a backlog of 122,000 items that had not been processed, and as a result, the Navy bought equipment and supplies it didn’t need.
Hegseth’s implied Soviet comparison recalls the rigid structures that prioritized quantity over quality, leading the former superpower to spend up to 15% to 30% of its GDP on military industry, starving its economy and leading to its downfall. He called for defense acquisition reform, as well as systems streamlining contracting.
But the U.S.’s defense spending has key differences from the USSR, chiefly that it spends just about 3% of its GDP on defense. While the Soviet Union saw its military collapse because it became a poor country that ran out of resources, the U.S. military’s exorbitant maintenance is instead a result of a wealthy country continuing to misallocate funds as its budget swells.
Policy experts like Bilmes suggest this trend is not just a perennial problem, but one unlikely to reverse anytime soon.
How about those benefits we don’t really need?Getty Images
The United States is entering the most expensive phase of retirement. Some of America’s oldest are eligible for more than $100,000 a year in combined Social Security benefits, while remaining as one of the wealthiest generations in the country. The national debt is rising—just passing $40 trillion this month—and Social Security is set to enter insolvency by 2032, meaning it may already be too late for the generations left behind.
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The Congressional Budget Office projected in 2023 federal spending on Social Security and medicare will account for 81% of the increase in mandatory spending between 2023 and 2033. In 2026 alone, increases in Social Security and Medicare spending account for nearly half the projected $362 billion increase in mandatory outlays. Interest on the debt is adding even another layer on the stack of debt pancakes. CBO projects net federal interest costs will exceed $1 trillion in 2026 and rise to $2.1 trillion by 2036. That means the government is spending money to simply service the debt accumulated from previous deficits, even as entitlement programs continue growing.
The state of Social Security appears to have contributed to drastically different generational outlooks on the benefit. A December 2025 survey by the Cato Institute found that only 34% of Gen Z respondents expected Social Security to exist when they reached retirement. Cato’s June 2026 analysis also found that 79% of younger respondents expected some type of cut to their own future benefits.
“The survey revealed that young Americans are the least likely to expect Social Security will exist for them,” the study noted, “the most open to reforms, and the least likely to understand how the program works.”
Social Security is a pay-as-you-go program, meaning most payroll taxes collected from today’s workers are used to pay benefits to today’s beneficiaries. In simpler terms, a part of your paycheck subsidizes a boomer’s benefits—and according to the Cato Institute’s 2025 polling, only 45% of Americans correctly understand how the program works. Under current law, employees and employers each pay 6.2% of wages into Social Security up to an annual taxable maximum, which is $184,500 in 2026. Self-employed workers pay the combined 12.4% rate.
That structure worked far smoother when there were many workers for every retiree. But the demographic math changed—baby boomers are now moving through retirement while younger generations deal with record job market difficulty.
And it doesn’t help that Social Security beneficiaries are getting over double their investment into the program back. A median-wage worker retiring in 2027 is expected to receive roughly $730,000 in lifetime Social Security benefits compared with less than $200,000 in combined contributions from the worker and employer. When the employer contribution is excluded, the lifetime benefits amount to roughly 265% of what the worker personally paid into Social Security. The current system is effectively relying on the workers of today—which include millennials and the younger end of Gen X—to finance retirees.
The federal government has reached a point where arithmetic becomes unavoidable. The 2026 Social Security trustees report projects that the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance trust fund will be depleted in the fourth quarter of 2032. At that point, continuing program income would cover only 78% of scheduled retirement benefits. The theoretically combined Social Security trust funds are projected to be depleted in 2034, when incoming revenue would cover 83% of scheduled benefits. Without congressional action, that would mean an automatic reduction in benefits.
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates the retirement program would face an approximately 22% across-the-board reduction when the retirement trust fund is exhausted. The committee has proposed one way to address the issue—putting a ceiling on the benefits paid to its wealthiest retirees.Dubbed the “Six Figure Limit,” the proposal would cap Social Security benefits at $100,000 annually for a married couple retiring at the normal retirement age, with the limit adjusted for marital status and claiming age. A single retiree’s comparable limit would be $50,000.
The proposal is aimed at an extremely small group. CRFB estimates the cap would only really affect the top 0.05% of couples in its early years, households with average annual retirement income above $2.5 million and average net worth above $65 million. The organization says the cap would become more consequential over time as Social Security’s maximum benefits continue to rise.
CBS Newsreported in March that roughly one million individual Social Security beneficiaries receive at least $50,000 a year, meaning a married couple with two such beneficiaries could receive more than six-figures.
The Social Security Administration did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fortune.
Boomers are rich—but no one else will get their wealth
Baby boomers collectively hold roughly $93 trillion in wealth, according to Visa Business and Economic Insights, but only about $36 trillion is expected to pass to millennials and Gen X over the next two decades. The difference is reflected in taxes, debt, spending during retirement and the concentration of wealth among the richest boomers. After the dedication in liabilities, about $88 trillion remain—and the top 1% holds about one-third of that wealth. Boomers are also expected to spend approximately $16 trillion during retirement on housing, food, healthcare, prescriptions and other expenses.
That means the “Great Wealth Transfer” will not move a $93 trillion pile of assets from retirees to younger Americans. A substantial portion of it will never be inherited, and much of what is transferred will be concentrated among the affluent households.But the Social Security program was created as social insurance, not as a means-tested welfare program.So someone who earned more during their career generally receives a larger benefit, subject to the program’s formula and taxable maximum. An affluent retiree can qualify for a fat Social Security check even when that benefit represents only a small portion of their overall income.
According to the Cato Institute, Social Security should focus more heavily on protecting seniors from poverty while giving younger workers greater opportunity to build private retirement savings. Their analysis points to systems in other developed countries across the world that use combinations of basic pensions, targeted benefits, automatic adjustments and private savings mechanisms.
The United States’ earnings-related benefit structure can produce increasingly generous payments for higher earners, based on the Cato Institute’s report. The organization notes that a maximum-earning worker claiming Social Security at age 70 can receive more than $61,000 a year, while arguing policymakers could reduce benefits for higher-income retirees in a restructuring.
“Policymakers should consider fundamentally rethinking the program’s structure and transform it into a system that ensures seniors are protected from poverty when they can no longer work,” the institute wrote, “while also freeing up resources for younger workers to save more on their own.”
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Photo illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios. Photo: Samuel Corum/Getty ImagesToday marks six months of the Iran War, which began Feb. 28. Axios’ Barak Ravid reports the U.S. is improving its position in the waterway at the center of the quagmire:
The Strait of Hormuz has been Iran’s most powerful card since the start of the war in late February. U.S. officials say that over the past six months, the American military has steadily eroded Iran’s leverage over the crucial waterway.
Why it matters: What began six months ago with the goal of degrading Iran’s missile capabilities and destroying what remained of its nuclear program has evolved into an open-ended fight over the world’s most important energy chokepoint.
U.S. officials say they’ve turned the tide in the strait and believe it could be a watershed moment in the war, bringing gradual relief to the world economy and a better deal with Iran.
“The Iranian response is very mild,” President Trump told Axios in a phone interview yesterday. “They don’t want us to go back at them. That’s the whole ball game. The rest doesn’t matter.”
Zoom out: The number of ships crossing the strait — and the amount of oil exported through it — remain far belowprewar levels. But Iran has lost much of its control over the strait, U.S. officials said.
Iran is still firing at ships. But its ability to target them accurately is limited.
More than 200 mine-like objects have been swept from the main lane of the strait. U.S. officials say only 11 of them were actual mines and just a fewwere properly deployed.
In recent weeks, traffic through the southern channel has grown to 20 to 30 tankers every night, carrying an average of 9 million to 10 million barrels, per U.S. officials. That’s roughly half the prewar volume.
Yes, but: Oil experts and tanker trackers are skeptical that the actual figures are that high. U.S. officials say they’re undercounting.
Periodic reports of oil tankers being struck by projectiles also raise questions about the safety of commercial shipping through the strait, despite U.S. assurances.T
/ @drphil 
This is a landmark move for Nvidia, as it solidifies its efforts to be not just a chip company, but one that aims to own multiple layers of the AI stack at once. Hugging Face has become something like the GitHub of AI: serving as the industry’s central hub for sharing models, datasets, and applications. Owning that layer, on top of the hardware layer Nvidia already dominates, deepens the moat. Already, nearly every open model runs on Nvidia GPUs, and buying the platform where those models live removes any ambiguity. It’s also a defensive play: as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Amazon push to build their own custom chips, controlling the distribution layer keeps developers tied to Nvidia’s ecosystem regardless of who’s building the silicon.
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U.S. strengthens Hormuz hand
Photo illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios. Photo: Samuel Corum/Getty ImagesToday marks six months of the Iran War, which began Feb. 28. Axios’ Barak Ravid reports the U.S. is improving its position in the waterway at the center of the quagmire:
Zoom out: The number of ships crossing the strait — and the amount of oil exported through it — remain far below prewar levels. But Iran has lost much of its control over the strait, U.S. officials said.
Yes, but: Oil experts and tanker trackers are 
canisgallicus 