Rubio says the Strait of Hormuz is Iran's "economic nuclear weapon."
"They are bragging about how they can hold 25% of the world's energy hostage. Imagine if those same people had access to a nuclear weapon. They would hold the whole region hostage." pic.twitter.com/uLwSOmFF8H
Banned, relocated, resumed work. When patients put themselves in the hands of a doctor, they trust they’ll be treated with care. But what happens when that trust is abused? This unprecedented investigation spanning Europe and beyond shows how doctors who have been banned for major wrongdoing, including causing psychological and physical damage to their patients, relocate and pick up their careers. Subscribe to OCCRP on YouTube ► https://shorturl.at/BSzsh Timestamps: 0:00 Introduction 1:20 “John” is hurt in the UK but in hospital he suffers abusive treatment 03:57 Dr. Stan. is struck off but moves to Romania to practice 06:12 In Germany, a patient learns of his surgeon’s past abroad 07:17 In Norway, a patient loses his leg 08:24 The Norwegian Health Authority finds the amputation was the result of serious medical errors 09:26 German medical groups call for a national doctors register 10:23 How OCCRP built and analysed the datasets behind this project 10:48 Researcher David Ilieski discusses the data gathering and analysis and the availability of the data across Europe Read more at: https://shorturl.at/xKPvG
The Iran conflict has entered a Cold War-like phase of financial sanctions, gunboat interdictions and talks about having talks, Axios’ Marc Caputo and Barak Ravid write.
Why it matters: The conflict has settled into a grinding stalemate, all but assuring higher energy prices for months — and leaving President Trump with the costs of the war but little of the political upside of ending it.
Several U.S. officials told Axios they’re concerned about America getting drawn into a frozen conflict of no war and no deal. In this scenario, the U.S. would have to keep its forces in the region for many more months. The Strait of Hormuz would stay closed. The U.S. blockade would remain, and both sides would continue waiting for the other to blink or fire first.
With the midterms now six months away, “a frozen conflict is the worst thing for Trump politically and economically,” a source close to the president said.
Inside the room: President Trump is vacillating between launching new military strikes and waiting to see whether his “maximum pressure” sanctions make Iran more inclined to negotiate an end to its nuclear weapons program, according to five advisers who have spoken with him.
“All [Iran’s leaders] understand is bombs,” Trump recently told one adviser, who relayed the comment to Axios.“I would describe him as frustrated but realistic,” the adviser said. “He doesn’t want to use force. But he’s not backing down.
“Some of Trump’s senior advisers want him to maintain the U.S. blockade of the Strait of Hormuz for now — and impose more economic sanctions to pressure the Iranian regime — before going back to bombing.
Trump is also consulting with hawks outside the administration, including Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen, retired Army Gen. Jack Keane and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). All are advising Trump to take some kind of military action to try to break the deadlock.
Zoom in: Trump discussed the Iranian proposal with his national security team yesterday. Iran offered to negotiate a side deal to open the Strait of Hormuz in return for the U.S. dropping its blockade of ships coming and going from Iran.
A U.S. official and two other sources briefed on the meeting said no decisions were made.
One source said Trump didn’t seem inclined to accept Iran’s proposal because it would postpone talks over that nation’s nuclear program — the elimination of which has been Trump’s chief reason for attacking Iran.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has ramped up the maximum pressure sanctions campaign targeting financial institutions, shipping companies and even “teapot” refiners in China that process sanctioned Iranian oil.
“This is maximum pressure everywhere and from all angles,” a senior administration official said. “That could mean military action, too. It might not. It’s up to the president.”
A Frontier Airlines Airbus A320 departs from Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas, March 2026.Kevin Carter—Getty Images
As sky-high jet fuel prices continue to put intense pressure on airlines’ bottom line, budget airlines are looking for a way to make ends meet. As the federal government weighs a $500 million bailout for Spirit Airlines, more budget airlines are now turning to the Trump administration to stay above the clouds.
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A group of low-cost airline executives, including those from Frontier and Avelo, met with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Federal Aviation Administration chief Bryan Bedford last Tuesday, reportedly requesting $2.5 billion in government assistance, according to the Wall Street Journal. And just like the potential Spirit offer, the airlines will issue government warrants that could convert into equity stakes in the companies.
The request assumes that jet fuel prices will remain above $4 a gallon on average for the rest of the year, which the airlines predict will cost an additional $2.5 billion. U.S. jet fuel prices averaged $4.19 on Friday, according to Argus Media. Before the war, prices averaged less than $2.50 a gallon. In its bankruptcy restructuring plan, Spirit Airlines planned to spend $2.24 per gallon in 2026 and $2.14 in 2027, according to a March filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Now, prices are almost double that.
The details of the potential aid package are still under discussion, and the airlines’ request was sent to the White House, which did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
Earlier this month, budget airlines including Spirit, Frontier, and Avelo, requested Congress approve a temporary break on certain airline ticket taxes to offset about a third of the cost of higher jet fuel. In a letter to lawmakers, the airlines warned that without the relief, travel costs will continue to rise, which will adversely affect consumers at the ticket counter.
Like most U.S.-based budget airlines Frontier and Avelo fly primarily in the U.S., Mexico, and the Caribbean and offer customers cheaper domestic flights. Frontier reported net income of $53 million during the fourth quarter of 2025. Meanwhile, privately owned, Houston-based Avelo reported an operating loss of $6.4 million and a loss margin of negative 7.4% in Q3 of 2025, according to the most recent quarterly results available on the Department of Transportation website.
Spirit’s potential bailout
The global energy crisis has been difficult for airlines across the globe, but it has become a make-or-break moment for Spirit.Even before the war began, the company was working to exit its second bankruptcy in as many years. Now, the airline is reportedly offering equity in exchange for emergency aid, and the White House appears to be open to a deal.
“I’d love somebody to buy Spirit,” Trump said April 21 in an interview with CNBC’s Squawk Box, adding, “Maybe the federal government should help that one out.”
The Trump administration is considering invoking the Defense Production Act to potentially bail the airline out, according to Bloomberg. Under the 1950 law, the president has emergency powers to direct production of goods and services deemed critical to national defense. It is unclear how the Trump administration could use national security to justify the bailout of an airline that heavily focuses on domestic travel.
Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings in November 2022.Michael M. Santiago—Getty Images
Reed Hastings, cofounder, former CEO, and now chairman of the board at Netflix, studied AI and computer science back in the 1980s. Decades later, he thinks today’s AI revolution could bring back an emphasis on the humanities as a field of study.
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After graduating with a degree in math from Maine’s Bowdoin College, Hastings pursued a Master of Science degree in computer science and artificial intelligence at Stanford. The earlier AI revolution he was a part of didn’t pan out, but the current AI wave shows signs of completely upheaving the labor force as we know it, and it may even transform education, he said on an episode of the Possiblepodcast last week.
Hastings chose STEM for his own graduate degree, but he said AI will shift what universities prioritize in the future.
“STEM practically took over Stanford University,” said Hastings. “Now maybe what we’ll see is a rotation, you know, back to the humanities and to understanding [the] combination of history and literature.
“If I had a 3-year-old today, I would be doubling down on the emotional skills,” he added.
Boris Cherny, creator of Anthropic’s Claude Code, predicted in February that the title of “software engineer” may even go extinct by the end of the year as AI tools give all employees the ability to write code.
Hastings, for his part, is skeptical AI will replace human software engineers entirely.
“There’s a substantial chance that while many companies will have reduced software engineering employment, there’ll be many other opportunities for more software,” he said on the podcast.
Still, Hastings has put his own money behind the idea that humanities will matter more in the years ahead. Last year, the Netflix cofounder donated $50 million to his alma mater Bowdoin College to establish the Hastings Initiative for AI and Humanity. The funding will help Bowdoin hire 10 new faculty members, and fund research on AI’s impact on society.
“Our goal is to prepare the next generation of leaders to engage responsibly with the opportunities and challenges presented by AI,” says Bowdoin’s website for the initiative.
While Hastings foresees sweeping changes in education and work, he is more optimistic than ever about the future and the role that AI will play in improving the world.
“The next 20 years will be super exciting, and I think it will usher in this era of abundance,” he said.
In 2001, Fortune first convened “The Smartest People We Know,” bringing together CEOs and founders, builders and investors, thinkers and doers.
Since then, Fortune Brainstorm Tech has been the place where bold ideas collide.
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Analysts, marketers, and business owners face the same question: How do you reach audiences in an era when AI is reshaping how people search and find information they need? That’s a top-of-mind issue for Pat Brown, SVP of global marketing, growth, analytics, and platform at Adobe. Brown joins The Deep View Conversations to share his unique perspective on the issue, with the expertise of someone who was doing marketing science before it was even called that, and who, in his current role, is responsible for global marketing execution across various forms of media and has to put these skills into practice every day. Pat breaks down how AI is moving beyond content generation to reshape media workflows end-to-end, from audience measurement to agents that automate entire processes. Topics covered:
The role of AI agents in automating marketing workflows
How AI in marketing can augment rather than replace creativity
AI-powered marketing tools that help analyze patterns and signals
Whether AI has “killed” SEO and what that means for marketers’ jobs
The rise of new terms like AEO and GEO in a “zero-click” search world
Why it’s still worth investing in marketing and brand strategy despite AI changes
Why today’s AI-driven SEO landscape feels like the early days of SEO
If you want to understand how AI is reshaping and helping individuals connect more effectively with audiences, this conversation will leave you feeling more knowledgeable about those topics.
My husband was recently describing something that happened on a past holiday. It wasn’t a significant event, but it sounded pleasant. I, however, had no recollection of what he was telling me. He couldn’t quite believe it.
We know that “recollections may differ”, but how can it be so different? And why do I not have this memory? I’m busy at work – have I simply run out of space?
It’s a tempting explanation. We talk about “full heads”, “information overload”, and “too much to take in” as though the brain were a container that eventually reaches capacity. But the brain does not fill up. Instead, it filters.
At any given moment, far more information is available to us than we could ever realistically store. The sights, sounds and conversations of even a single day would overwhelm any system that attempted to record them in full. Instead, the brain relies on selection.Attention determines what is noticed. Emotion helps determine what matters. Then, structures such as the hippocampus decide what is worth committing to longer-term memory.
If your attention is elsewhere, the process falters at the first step.
On that holiday, my husband may have paused long enough to register the moment. I may have been thinking about where we were going next, checking timings, or simply moving through the day without stopping to take it in. The difference is subtle, but it matters.Without focused attention, experiences are only weakly encoded, if at all. In that sense, the memory was not lost. It was never fully formed.
Even when memories are successfully encoded, they are not stored as fixed records. Each time we recall an event, we reconstruct it, drawing on fragments of sensory detail, prior knowledge and expectation. With repetition – through conversation, reflection or retelling – those reconstructions become stronger and more coherent. Over time, they can feel increasingly vivid and certain.
This helps explain why shared experiences can diverge so dramatically. We assume that living through the same moment should produce the same memory, but the brain does not work that way. It does not passively record experience. It actively selects, prioritises and, just as importantly, discards.
The feeling that our brains are “full” arises not because we have run out of storage, but because we have reached the limits of what we can process at once.Attention is finite. Working memory – the small amount of information we can actively hold in mind – is even more limited.When these systems are saturated, new information struggles to gain a foothold. This is the mental equivalent of too many tabs open: nothing has been permanently lost, but everything becomes harder to manage.
Where the computer analogy breaks down
Computing analogies are useful up to a point. If working memory resembles RAM – fast, temporary, limited – then long-term memory is often compared to a hard drive. But this is where the parallel breaks down. A hard drive stores files in fixed locations, retrievable in exactly the same form in which they were saved. The brain does not work this way.
Memories are not stored as discrete files. They are distributed across networks of neurons, overlapping, reshaped, and reassembled each time they are recalled.New experiences do not simply add to what is already there – they interact with it, altering both the new and the old.
Attempts have been made to estimate how much the brain could theoretically hold. One widely cited figure from the Salk Institute puts it at around a petabyte – roughly equivalent to hundreds of years of continuous video. It is an impressive number, but also a somewhat misleading one. It implies a storage system that fills up over time, when in reality the brain is constantly reorganising itself. Capacity is not fixed, and information is not stored in isolation. It is integrated, modified, and, when no longer useful, allowed to fade.
Which raises a slightly uncomfortable question: what happens to the memories we would like to keep?
Some of them will fade – not because the brain has run out of space, but because they are not continually reinforced. Memory is not preserved simply because it matters to us. It is preserved when it is revisited, retold, or reconnected to other experiences. Without that reinforcement, even meaningful moments can become harder to access over time.
What is lost, in most cases, is not the memory itself but our ability to retrieve it. A familiar smell, a piece of music, or an unexpected detail can bring something back that seemed entirely gone. The trace remains, but it has slipped out of reach. And the absence of a memory is rarely evidence of a system at capacity – more often, it is the trace of a moment that was never fully stored, or one that has simply not been called upon.
Baby boomers overwhelmingly hold the largest share of household wealth in the U.S.Getty Images
Older Americans may be trading in hustling for retirement, but that hasn’t stopped them from getting richer.
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Baby boomers now hold a record high of the United States’ wealth, Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok noted in a December blog post, citing Federal Reserve data. Compared to 1989, when those over 70 years old held 19% of the wealth in the household sector, older Americans now own 31% of the wealth.
That chunk of change is an outsize share compared to other generations. Baby boomers, who make up about 20% of the U.S. population, hold more than $85 trillion in assets, according to Fed data. By comparison, millennials, who make up about the same percentage of Americans, hold just about $18 trillion, roughly one-fifth that of baby boomers.
“The baby [boomer] generation has really gobbled up a huge share of household wealth, so it’s left a lot less for other age cohorts,” Edward Wolff, professor of economics at New York University, told Fortune.
How did baby boomers benefit from good economic timing?
America’s septuagenarians were raised by parents who came of age during the Great Depression and learned the hard way the lessons of frugality and the importance of saving money. But the baby boomer generation owes a great deal of their financial security to the stars aligning during their formative years.
In the 1970s when many baby boomers entered the housing market, inflation surged, making buying a home an appealing investment. As home values soared in the following decades, so, too, did the generation’s equity. The older generation has also been boosted by stock ownership, with baby boomers holding 54% of stocks worth more than $25 trillion, according to an early 2025 analysis of Fed data by the Motley Fool. Millennials owned about 8% of stocks worth $3.9 trillion.
But Gen Z, who may be following baby boomers’ lead in stock market investments, have not shared the same good fortune in the housing market. Housing supply has been low since the 2008 recession, exacerbated by sky-high mortgage rates, which disincentivized home sales and contributed to exorbitant home prices.
As a result, 2025 saw a 21% drop in the share of first-time homebuyers, and the age of those buyers reached a record high of 40 years, according to November 2025 data from the National Association of Realtors, leaving Gen Z to wait a little longer for the keys to their first homes. A March 2025 Redfin report found today, just 33% of 27-year-olds own their homes compared to 40% of baby boomers who owned their homes when they were the same age.
“They weren’t able to enjoy the big appreciation of house prices to the same extent as baby boomers,” Wolff said.
To be sure, not all baby booms have experienced soaring passive wealth in their twilight years. A growing number of older Americans have “unretired,” part of a trend of a graying workforce that has seen the number of individuals 65 and over who are working has quadrupled since the 1980s. While many of these individuals are working to continue to save money and take advantage of an employer’s health insurance, others are still clocking in simply because they work less-demanding white-collar jobs and are living longer.
What is Gen Z’s silver lining?
Gen Z may be facing generation-defining economic challenges, but there’s hope for them yet. Pew Research Center data from 2024 indicates Gen Z may actually be in better financial shape than young people in past generations: In 2023, Zoomers made a median pay of about $20,000, adjusted for inflation. In 1993, 18- to 24-year-olds made about $15,000. Income growth finally outpacing home price growth may also be a silver lining for prospective home buyers. A 2025 Bank of America report projected that by 2035, Gen Z would be the wealthiest generation with $74 trillion in wealth and is expected to grow to 30% of the population over the next decade.
But part of the equation of Gen Z’s relatively paltry share of wealth is simply because they haven’t had as much time to acquire it, Michael Walden, professor emeritus of economics at North Carolina State University, told Fortune.
“It makes logical sense that older people will accumulate greater percentages of wealth at any point in time because they’ve had more years to invest and reap the returns of their investments,” Walden said.
Beyond just more time, Gen Z will indirectly benefit from the investments made by their parents and grandparents as they await the Great Wealth Transfer that promises to distribute, by some estimations, $124 trillion in inheritance to the younger generations. Just last year, 91 heirs inherited a record $297.8 billion, according to the UBS Billionaire Ambitions Report, a 36% increase from last year.
Walden said the Great Wealth Transfer is coming, but Gen Z and millennials shouldn’t rely on the death of a loved one to begin their wealth acquisition journey in earnest.
“It’s hard to target when that’s going to come, so I would argue to any young person that I would be talking to, have a plan, be consistent with the plan,” he said.
A version of this story was published on Fortune.com on Dec. 8, 2025.
More on how different generations are building wealth:
As baby boomers are forced to ‘unretire’ because they’ve not saved enough, 6-year-olds in Germany are being given retirement accounts
Forget the K-shaped economy, market veteran Ed Yardeni says—instead, it’s boomers hoarding wealth while Gen Z struggles to build it
Gen Z may not be able to afford a house or the cost of living—but give it 10 years. They’re on track to gain $36T and become the richest generation
The $124 trillion Great Wealth Transfer is intensifying as inheritance jumps to a new record, with one 19-year-old reaping the rewards
The Fortune 500 Innovation Forum will convene Fortune 500 executives, U.S. policy officials, top founders, and thought leaders to help define what’s next for the American economy, Nov. 16-17 in Detroit. Apply here.
Sasha Rogelberg is a reporter and former editorial fellow on the news desk at Fortune, covering retail and the intersection of business and popular culture.
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