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By ABC chief business correspondent Ian Verrender Should Israel attack Iranian oil export facilities, oil and petrol prices could surge. (file photo) Photo: RNZ / Dan Cook Analysis: What was he thinking? When US President Joe Biden last Thursday casually dropped that he had discussed military strikes against Iran's oil export facilities with Israel, all hell broke loose. Crude oil prices, which in recent months have been languishing, immediately took flight, surging 5 percent. By the end of the week, they had stacked on 8 percent. It didn't take long for the inevitable about face. By Friday, Biden had canned the idea, saying he had warned Israel against it and ordered it to find "other alternatives". There's no doubt an attack on Iran's oil export facilities would hurt. The country h...

This satellite image shows hurricane Milton churning over the Gulf of Mexico on October 7, 2024. Photo: NOAA / RAMMB / AFP By Daniel Trotta and David Alire Garcia, Reuters Hurricane Milton strengthened into a Category 5 storm on Monday (US time), posing an immediate threat to Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula on its way to Florida, where the state ordered mass evacuations while still recovering from the devastation of Hurricane Helene. With maximum sustained winds of 285km/h, Milton was categorised as the strongest level storm on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale. Milton was classified as a tropical storm on Sunday afternoon but in less than 24 hours it "explosively" morphed into a Category 5 storm - the third-fastest intensifying storm on record in the Atlantic Ocean, according to the US Nat...

By Niklas Pollard, Ludwig Burger, Jonathan Allen, Reuters Nobel prize for medicine winners Victor Ambros (left) and Gary Ruvkun (right). Photo: AFP/JOSEPH PREZIOSO US scientists Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun have won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Medicine for the discovery of microRNA and its crucial role in how multicellular organisms grow and live. Their work helped explain how cells specialise and develop into different types, such as muscle and nerve cells, even though all the cells in an individual contain the same set of genes and instructions for growing and staying alive. "The Nobel's, you know, there's a word we use for Major League Baseball, it's called 'The Show'. Which means it's not any show, it's THE show," Ruvkun told Reuters, describing what it was like being thrust into th...

By Brendan O'Brien, Reuters Residents board up a store in St. Petersburg ahead of Hurricane Milton's expected landfall in the middle of this week in Florida. Photo: BRYAN R. SMITH/AFP As Hurricane Milton strengthened to a Category 5 storm, Floridians scrambled to prepare for its arrival this week near Tampa, where it may bring blistering winds, life-threatening storm surge and torrential rains to the Gulf Coast for the second time in two weeks. Milton strengthened to the most powerful category of storms as it churned through the southwest Gulf of Mexico, about 1183km from Tampa. It was packing sustained winds of up to 257kph, the National Hurricane Center said. The storm was expected to turn northeast on Wednesday (NZT) and head toward the populous Tampa-St. Petersburg area, making l...