First Thing: Oil prices surge as attacks on Saudi Arabia stoke supply fears

Good morning. Oil prices have climbed above $108 a barrel after a series of drone attacks from Iraq’s territory forced Saudi Arabia to close its east-west crude pipeline. Saudi traders said the kingdom would run out of oil stocks for export if it did not reopen within days. Gas prices also climbed higher. Energy prices have surged this year, as the US-Israel war with Iran has disrupted oil and gas supply across the Middle East.

The spike came as the Iran-aligned Houthi forces in Yemen launched several attacks against Saudi Arabia and captured the strategic island of Perim in the Bab al-Mandab strait on Sunday, expanding their control of the waterway.

AI-linked stocks have tumbled after the bosses of Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX called for a slowdown in “reckless” development, citing fears the technology could soon run out of control. The market swings come after the chief executive of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, appealed for the AI industry to “slow down”. Last week, a former Anthropic employee had warned that AI could precipitate human extinction by 2030.

The CEOs of OpenAI and SpaceX, Sam Altman and Elon Musk, have backed Amodei’s call. The US president, Donald Trump, on a visit to his golf course in Ireland, played down the warnings and said “very negative forces” were “bringing up things that won’t happen”.

Israel is working towards the systematic “elimination” of the conditions that sustain Palestinian collective life in the occupied West Bank, according to a report published by the human rights group B’Tselem. The Israeli organisation says Israel is “dramatically intensifying its attacks on every aspect of Palestinian life in the West Bank”.

A Republican congressman said he had to swim to safety after a plane he was traveling in made an emergency landing in a lake late Saturday. Tom Tiffany is running for governor on the Republican ticket in Wisconsin and has been endorsed by Donald Trump.

Representative Tiffany says he was returning from the La Crosse county Lincoln Day Dinner when the light aircraft lost power as it approached Wausau downtown airport. He said the pilot made an emergency landing in Lake Wausau and they ended up in the water and swam to safety. Emergency responders got Tiffany and the pilot to a nearby hospital, where they were treated for minor injuries.

Jon Henley reports from France where experts believe one-third of wildfires are set deliberately, with arson the biggest single cause of forest fires last year.

Coral Murphy Marcos speaks to members of the Coalición Exigimos Agua (We Demand Water Coalition), residents of the San Juan neighborhood of Santurce, who are campaigning over the island’s water issues.

A major investigation reveals how generations of British monarchs were central to the slave trade. This interactive goes on to illustrate the register laying bare Britain’s slave-trading past, littered with the names of monarchs, MPs and merchants.

The United States’s modern “king” is reshaping Washington DC in his own image. The architecture and design critic Oliver Wainwright deplores the decorator-in-chief’s mutilation of the seat of the nation.

More bad news thanks to the growth of AI. Pfas companies are launching a “tidal wave” of forever-chemical production to meet demand from the industry, a campaign organisation has warned.

A 70-year-old hiker who had been missing for a week on a Michigan island was rescued at the weekend, according to the US Coast Guard. Even though Craig Berg was found injured and hypothermic on Isle Royale, he was “alive and alert”, according to a statement

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