DUBAI — The United States said it destroyed five Iranian oil tankers on Tuesday after ballistic missiles targeted a Navy warship, and Iran answered by firing on a U.S.-used air base in Jordan and claiming strikes on ships in the Strait of Hormuz, the sharpest burst of tanker warfare in a conflict now more than six months old.

U.S. Central Command said the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps twice tried to hit an American warship over two days. “The U.S. warship successfully evaded the attempted Iranian attacks and continued to patrol regional waters. No American personnel were harmed,” the command said. It identified the tankers as the Kaviz (also rendered Kivik), Charminar, Horizon 1 and Riesco in the Gulf of Oman, and the Derya near Kharg Island, Iran’s main oil export hub. Crews were told to leave before the ships were struck and “rendered inoperable,” CENTCOM said. It released video it said showed the Riesco burning and sinking. The vessels, it said, belonged to a “multi-billion-dollar shadow network that funds the IRGC and its regional proxies.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, traveling in Colombia, stated the new rule in one sentence. “Iran continues to try to hit U.S. naval ships, and for every time they do that or try to do that, they’re going to lose tankers,” he told reporters.

The Guards said they answered with a “heavy missile strike” on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base near Azraq, Jordan, a facility used by U.S. forces. Jordan’s armed forces said 20 ballistic missiles were fired from Iranian territory. Eighteen were intercepted. Two fell in unpopulated areas. There were no casualties, Jordan said. A U.S. official said the Jordan strikes were ineffective and that all American troops were accounted for. Iran claimed hangars and shelters were wrecked. That claim was not independently confirmed.

The IRGC also said it hit two U.S. vessels — in some statements naming destroyers — eight oil tankers and 10 ships it called “non-compliant” for entering a zone it has declared off-limits in the strait. It claimed “great damage.” CENTCOM did not immediately confirm those hits. The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations center said several merchant ships in the northern Arabian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman had taken “disabling fire,” and that one tanker reported a nearby vessel listing, possibly after a projectile strike.

The exchange follows a similar weekend round. On Saturday, CENTCOM said it struck three Iranian crude carriers after missiles were fired at two U.S. warships, including an aircraft carrier and a destroyer that “evaded” the attack. Iran said it then targeted commercial and U.S.-linked ships. Washington has now made tanker-for-tanker an announced policy: fire at a U.S. combatant, lose export hulls.

Oil moved with the smoke. Brent, the global benchmark, traded through $100 a barrel on Wednesday for the first time since late July before easing. About one-fifth of the world’s seaborne oil used to pass Hormuz. Since the war opened with U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran in late February, the waterway has been mined, restricted, escorted and fought over. The United States says it is enforcing a blockade of Iranian ports and escorting some commercial traffic. Tehran says it will widen an exclusion zone from near Chabahar into the approaches of the strait and put violators on its own sanctions list, according to officials including Mohsen Rezaei.

The White House is running a dual track: sink shadow-fleet tankers and cut what remains of Iran’s civilian aviation and trade. The administration announced sanctions on 36 targets, including dozens of Iranian airlines, as the ships burned. President Donald Trump has said repeatedly that Iran will not be allowed a nuclear weapon. He has also tried at times to describe the fighting as contained even as energy prices rise into a U.S. midterm year.

Other fronts moved the same week. Houthi forces in Yemen struck targets in southern Saudi Arabia, wounding scores and setting energy sites alight, according to regional reports, widening a war that already includes Israel and Hezbollah. Neighboring mediators have floated temporary shipping corridors and mine-clearance talks. Those ideas have not stopped missiles on Jordan or hulls in the Gulf of Oman.

What can be stated from official accounts is narrow and grim. The United States says it warned crews off five tankers and destroyed them after two failed shots at a warship. Jordan says it knocked down most of a 20-missile salvo and that no one died. Iran says it hit U.S. ships and a larger group of tankers and will keep closing water. Independent confirmation of how many commercial hulls were actually holed on Wednesday is incomplete. UKMTO’s “several vessels” and CENTCOM’s video of one Iranian tanker sinking are the firmest public images.

Hormuz is not a metaphor. It is a pinch point where insurance rates, tanker routing and election-year gasoline prices meet anti-ship missiles. A war that both capitals have at times called limited is now eating the ships that pay for it. Rubio’s formula — shoot at the Navy, lose a tanker — is simple. So is Iran’s: close the gate and fire at the bases that keep it open. Neither formula lowers the price of a barrel once the next hull is on fire.

Andy Burnham told MPs today that VAT will come off electricity bills next month, in response to a question at Prime Minister’s Questions about what the government would do to help households through the winter. The 5 per cent rate is removed from domestic electricity supplies from 1 October.

“I will, Mr Speaker, and I will remove VAT from electricity bills next month,” the prime minister told the Commons. “It’s not going to solve everything for people, Mr Speaker, but it will take a little bit of pressure off.”

Dave Doogan, leader of the SNP in the House of Commons, had set out three pressures on household budgets in putting the question. Energy bills would rise again across the United Kingdom in the coming weeks, he said. Five major mortgage lenders had pushed up mortgage prices within the last few days. The cost of a barrel of oil had gone over $100 within the last few hours, he said, pushing up prices at the pumps.

“Despite this, Mr Speaker, the prime minister still seems fairly well liked,” Doogan said. “I’ll let you into a wee secret: I quite like the new prime minister, but that popularity will not pay the bills during this winter’s looming cost-of-living emergency. Will he stand up now and tell people what he is going to do to help?”

What the cut covers

The measure was announced on 21 July, in the first week of Burnham’s premiership. According to the Downing Street announcement, the 5 per cent rate comes off domestic electricity bills on 1 October at a cost to the Treasury of about £850m in 2026-27, funded by cancelling the digital ID programme, which had been due to cost £1.8bn over three years.

Downing Street put the saving at about £45 a year on a typical bill and said the Treasury expected the change to take around 0.10 percentage points off CPI inflation.

The relief applies to domestic supplies only. As Business Matters reported in July, most firms miss out on the cut: VAT-registered companies already reclaim the tax on their energy, and commercial supplies sit outside both the announcement and the price cap. Small businesses that qualify for the domestic rate and are not registered for VAT, along with charities and residential care homes, do benefit.

Bills still rising

The cut lands as household costs go up. Ofgem raised the price cap by 4 per cent from 1 October, taking the annual bill for a typical direct debit household to £1,723, up £60. The regulator said gas bills would rise by 8 per cent while electricity costs stayed broadly stable because of the VAT removal, and that about 11 million households on fixed tariffs, roughly 35 per cent of the total, were unaffected.

Neil Kenward, Ofgem’s director general for markets, said: “High international gas prices are continuing to drive energy costs in the UK. We welcome the government’s intervention to remove VAT from electricity bills, without which customers would have faced even higher costs this winter.”

Burnham signalled further help with bills at the Budget when the cap decision was published, saying the government would look at how to get energy prices down in the long term.

On borrowing costs, the Bank of England’s most recent Credit Conditions Survey put defaults on secured loans at 6.2 per cent in the first three months of 2026, the highest reading since the final quarter of 2024. Lenders have repriced since the escalation in the Middle East, pushing the average two-year fixed rate from about 4.8 per cent to beyond 5.5 per cent.

In Northern Ireland, where EU VAT rules still apply, the Executive receives comparable funding to support households instead, the announcement said.

Paul Jones

Harvard alumni and former New York Times journalist. Editor of Business Matters for over 15 years, the UKs largest business magazine. I am also head of Capital Business Media’s automotive division working for clients such as Red Bull Racing, Honda, Aston Martin and Infiniti.

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Weak equity markets and FII outflows also pressurised the rupee, forex traders said.

Brent crude futures surpassed USD 100 a barrel for the first time in almost six weeks after attacks on oil facilities and ships in West Asia threatened to weaken the already strained supply chain amid the US-Iran tensions. Brent crude was trading higher by 2.94 per cent at USD 100.73 per barrel.

At the interbank foreign exchange market, the rupee opened at 94.80, also its intra-day high, against the US dollar. The local unit fell to an intraday low of 95.22 as crude oil prices surged. The rupee settled at 95.08 (provisional), down 34 paise from its previous close of 94.74.

Meanwhile, the dollar index, which gauges the greenback’s strength against a basket of six currencies, was trading at 98.84, higher by 0.05 per cent.

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“The rupee declined today on rising crude oil prices and risk aversion in global markets. Brent has breached the USD 100 mark on further escalation of tensions between the US and Iran. FII outflows too pressurised the rupee. However, rupee recovered initial losses on a weak dollar,” said Anuj Choudhary, Research Analyst, Mirae Asset Sharekhan.
The local currency is expected to trade with a negative bias on risk aversion in global markets and worries over rising crude oil prices. Escalation of geopolitical tensions between the US and Iran may also pressurise the rupee, he added.The US military destroyed five Iranian oil tankers on Tuesday in response to the latest attacks on its warships, and Iran hit back at American targets in Jordan.

On the domestic equities market front, Sensex tanked 813.35 points to settle at 74,764.23 while Nifty was down 203.60 points to 23,431.50.

Foreign institutional investors (FIIs) sold equities worth Rs 123.19 crore on a net basis on Tuesday, according to exchange data.

A senior Anthropic safety researcher said on Tuesday that artificial intelligence (AI) has a greater than 10% chance to “kill all humans” within “the next decade,” responding to a former employee who resigned after accusing the company of acting irresponsibly. 

Former Anthropic and OpenAI researcher Jacob Coxon wrote in a lengthy resignation thread posted to X on Sunday that “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

“I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,” he wrote.

Former Anthropic and OpenAI researcher Jacob Coxon wrote in a lengthy resignation thread posted to X on Sunday. (Thomas Fuller/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Responding to Coxon’s thread in a quoted post, the company’s alignment science lead, Evan Hubinger, conceded that Coxon’s assessment was correct, though he added some caveats.

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“Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!” Hubinger wrote. 

“I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to,” he continued. 

Hubinger added that the potentially deadly risk did not come from present models.

“To be clear, as we say in our latest Risk Report, I think the risk from present models is low. What I am worried about is superintelligence arising from recursive self-improvement, as we have said is happening faster than we thought,” he wrote. 

CEO of Anthropic Dario Amodei attends a working lunch with G7 leaders, G7 outreach partners, and global tech CEOs on innovation and AI, during the G7 Summit on June 17, 2026, in Evian-les-Bains, France.  (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

Research on self-improvement – an AI model’s ability to continuously enhance its own source code or training methodologies – is an avenue of development Coxon specifically cited in his resignation thread as a main reason he quit.

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“These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources. We have all witnessed the progress in each of these domains, and progress is not slowing,” Coxon’s thread continued. 

Coxon also said that, unlike researchers at other companies, Anthropic’s scientists understand the risks of their work, but press forward because they fear a less responsible company might unlock the potentially disastrous capabilities first.

“At Anthropic, the stakes are well-understood, but they are locked in a race to get there first – they believe no one else will act responsibly, so they must do it themselves, despite the risk,” Coxon added. 

Coxon suggested that, to prevent utter catastrophe, the world may require a temporary ban on model improvement. 

Coxon suggested that, to prevent utter catastrophe, the world may require a temporary ban on model improvement. (Davide Bonaldo/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

“I don’t feel like we’re on track to prevent a global race, which may require costly actions such as a temporary ban on improving model capabilities,” he wrote. 

He ultimately called on global AI researchers and developers to think and act more responsibly. 

“If you are a lab researcher, I urge you to consider what the next few years will actually feel like. Do you want to kick off a superintelligent RL run without a rigorous understanding of its mind? Should you put your head down because ‘it’s happening anyway’ – or take this moment to call for different conditions?” his X thread concluded. 

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FOX Business reached out to Coxon, Hubinger, Anthropic and OpenAI for further comment.

LONG BEACH, CALIF. — Daring Foods, a plant-based foods manufacturer, is debuting a line of frozen skillet meals. The line features six meals formulated with Daring Plant Chicken.

Each skillet meal contains 21 grams to 25 grams of protein and 9 grams to 13 grams of fiber.

The Mediterranean-spiced chickpeas and vegetable variety contains chickpeas, peppers, red onion, garlic and shawarma-inspired spices.

The smoky vegetable chili is made with beans and vegetables in a tomato sauce.

The power grains and greens product is made with quinoa, kale, edamame, red pepper, chili and onion.

The lemon and garlic rotini is formulated with pasta and vegetables in a lemon and garlic sauce.

The teriyaki vegetable stir fry contains broccoli, peppers, mushrooms, water chestnuts and edamame in a teriyaki sauce.

The penne pomodoro features pasta, red peppers, mushrooms and tomatoes in a tomato sauce.

“We believe the foods people love can be better, and Daring Skillet Meals are an important next step,” said Chris Coburn, chief executive officer of Daring. “They bring that idea to life — familiar, flavorful meals made with Daring protein, vegetables, grains and simple ingredients. It’s another step in expanding what Daring can bring to the table, giving people more convenient ways to eat well without compromising on taste.”

The skillet meals may be purchased at Sprouts Farmers Market stores nationwide.