USA - Data centers, drought, and decay. Across the United States, a silent crisis flows beneath our feet. While drought and industrial demand capture headlines, the most profound threat to America’s water security may be its own decaying infrastructure. Every day, an estimated 6.75 billion gallons of treated, drinkable water — enough to supply millions of homes — seeps from ageing pipes before it ever reaches a tap. This systemic failure, born from decades of underinvestment, now collides with climate change and new contaminants, pushing the nation’s water systems toward a breaking point and forcing a reckoning with a trillion-dollar problem. The backbone of America’s public water supply is old and tired. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, many of the nation’s drinking water pipes are between 45 and 100 years old, with some systems still containing lead and copper. The United Nations has warned that water stress in many regions appears to be a long-term structural shift, not a temporary crisis.

USA - Donald Trump launched more broadsides at Keir Starmer today as he continued to express his fury at European leaders for refusing to help with the Iran war. The US President branded the Prime Minister 'disappointing' in his latest free-form press conference in the Oval Office. He renewed his attack that Sir Keir is 'no Churchill' - pointing to a sculpture of Britain's wartime premier on the table behind him. Mr Trump on Tuesday also swiped at Emmanuel Macron - saying the French President would be 'out of office very soon' - after Paris flatly rejected the US demand for help reopening the vital Strait of Hormuz. Mr Trump's frustration has become increasingly evident as European powers bat away his calls to send warships to reopen the crucial sea passage. In a post on his Truth Social site earlier on Tuesday, the President was left to insist: 'WE DO NOT NEED THE HELP OF ANYONE!' France and Germany have also dismissed the idea of taking an active role while the Iran conflict is raging.

UK - Keir Starmer is struggling to hold the Special Relationship together today amid open clashes with Donald Trump over the Iran war. The US President vented his frustration with the PM again last night, describing the UK's reluctance to get involved in the Middle East as 'terrible'. He also claimed that Sir Keir had offered to send two aircraft carriers to the region - something that Downing Street denied. Only one of the UK's carriers is currently operational, and that is due to be deployed to the Arctic. The barbs came as European powers batted away Mr Trump's call to send warships to reopen the crucial Strait of Hormuz. Sir Keir insisted yesterday that the UK would not get dragged into a 'wider war' after the US and Israel launched attacks. France and Germany have also dismissed the idea of taking an active role while conflict is raging.

IRAN - Thick smoke coils across Iran’s horizon; the acrid stink of burning oil hangs over its cities. In the Strait of Hormuz, tankers burn and drones strike. Violence spreads like infection. Operation Epic Fury is now into its third week, and its effects are global. According to US Central Command, by March 12 combined US and Israeli forces had struck around 6,000 targets in Iran since operations began – working out at around 460 strikes per day. Iran’s leadership is decapitated; its control centres in disarray, its nuclear programme in ruins. And yet, the Iranians fight on. How? Because they have spent twenty years preparing for this moment.

IRAN - They finally got Ali Larijani. Yesterday morning, Israel's defence minister said its military had killed Iran's security chief in a strike. Last week, Larijani appeared in public at Iran's Quds Day march. It was a calculated provocation. Surrounded by civilians, including many children, he gambled – correctly, it turned out – that neither Washington nor Tel Aviv would strike him there. He had, though, less than a week to live. This is without doubt the most significant assassination since the hit on former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei on February 28, the war's opening day. He was central to military strategy, intelligence coordination and contingency planning for the regime's survival. Larijani, 67, was one of the most intelligent, competent and powerful men in the Islamic Republic's leadership, After Khamenei's death, figures like Larijani became indispensable to keeping the system intact. His loss is seismic.

USA - Donald Trump has given another timing update on the US-Iran war, as oil tanker traffic in the Strait of Hormuz has come to a standstill, though some are warning the war could last most of the year. The average price for a gallon of regular gas has risen to $3.72, according to AAA, up from $2.93 a month ago. Speaking to PBS News on Monday, the President said he called the inflated gas prices 'a very small price to pay' and that 'the oil prices will drop like a rock as soon as it's over.' 'I don't believe it will be long,' he said when asked about how much longer the war will drag on. But three sources familiar with the matter told Axios that the Middle East could bleed into September, a much longer timeline than Trump has ever discussed publicly.

GERMANY - Saying no to Donald Trump can be a dangerous game, as Sir Keir Starmer is finding out. But Germany is no longer mincing its words, with the US president’s demand for help from NATO allies in Iran given short shrift by Berlin. “This war has nothing to do with NATO,” Friedrich Merz’s spokesman declared emphatically to Mr Trump’s request for allies to secure the Strait of Hormuz. “It is not NATO’s war.” “It is not our war; we did not start it,” added Boris Pistorius, the German defence minister, later. “What does Donald Trump expect from a handful or two handfuls of European frigates to achieve there in the Strait of Hormuz, which the powerful American navy cannot manage alone?” he asked. In rare German criticism of Israel, Mr Merz accused it and the US of not having a plan to end the war. “With each day of war, more questions arise,” he said. “Let me make this very clear once again: Germany ⁠is ⁠not part of this war, and we do not wish to become one.”

MIDDLE EAST - When Mojtaba Khamenei released his first statement after succeeding his slain father, the Iranian supreme leader praised the “brave and faithful” Houthis of Yemen, one of two militias in Iran’s axis of resistance that have yet to intervene in the Middle East war. With the Strait of Hormuz blocked, the Strait of Mandeb on the Red Sea remains the only option for oil transit in the region. Iran’s chokehold on the region’s oil supplies has restricted traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, one of two maritime arteries through which a third of the world’s seaborne oil passes. The other one, the Strait of Mandeb on the Red Sea, remains open, with dozens of tankers amassing off Saudi Arabia’s coast to load oil diverted from the east. The Houthis only have to launch a few missiles and drones to complete Tehran’s grip on the region’s oil. “They are waiting for a sign from Iran,” Ahmed Nagi, the senior Yemen analyst with the International Crisis Group, said. “I think it’s a calculated choice. At the end of the day the Houthis view this as an escalation against not Iran alone but the entire axis. If Iran is weakened, they will be the next target.”

USA - President Trump has suggested that the US could intervene in Cuba “very soon” after American negotiators demanded the resignation of the communist island’s president, according to reports, and protests broke out. In Moron, a city about 250 miles from Havana, anti-government demonstrators set fire to a Communist Party office and chanted: “Libertad! Libertad!” Many Cubans have taken to banging pots at sundown. At the White House on Monday night, Trump said: “I do believe I will be having the honour of taking Cuba.” He added: “Taking Cuba. I mean, whether I free it, take it. I think I can do anything I want with it. They’re a very weakened nation right now.”

USA - The war in Iran has emphatically demonstrated American military might on the world stage. There is only one superpower in the world today, and it isn’t headquartered in Moscow, Beijing or London. Alongside Israel, the United States has decimated much of Iran’s defences, air force, navy, ballistic missile sites, nuclear infrastructure, and its political leadership. All in the space of just three weeks. The Iran war has also sharply exposed simmering deep-seated tensions in the transatlantic alliance, as well as the open cowardice, petulance and weakness of European leaders, including among its increasingly diminished major powers – principally the UK, France and Germany, as well as the European Union, representing 27 member states.

UK - The Iran conflict will trigger the biggest spike in food prices since the invasion of Ukraine, the president of the National Farmers’ Union has claimed. His warning comes as ministers will promise for the first time to hold food production at present levels, as part of a government blueprint for land use this week. Tom Bradshaw told The Times that while food inflation was unlikely to surpass the 19.1 per cent rise in the year to March 2023, the conflict had triggered an “inflationary wave” that would probably peak in the autumn. He also said that profiteering by fuel and fertiliser suppliers may also be worsening inflation. By targeting tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, Iranian forces have disrupted trade in two of the biggest agricultural necessities: oil and fertiliser. Before the US and Israel bombed the Islamic Republic, a fifth of the world’s seaborne trade in oil and gas flowed through the strait, along with a third of that in fertiliser, which is made from gas.

ISRAEL - The IAF has carried out over 400 waves of airstrikes across Iran since the war began. Israel will continue its campaign against Iran for at least three more weeks, IDF Spokesperson Brigadier General Effie Defrin told CNN on Sunday. “We have thousands of targets ahead,” Defrin said. “We are ready, in coordination with our US allies, with plans through at least the Jewish holiday of Passover, about three weeks from now." "We have deeper plans for even three weeks beyond that,” Defrin added. The IDF Spokesperson's statement came as US Energy Secretary Chris Wright said he expects US operations against Iran to end within "the next few weeks."

MIDDLE EAST - The central question now confronting Washington and Jerusalem is no longer whether Iran can be weakened militarily. It is whether the United States and Israel are prepared for what may come next: a prolonged war of attrition with the Iranian revolutionary regime. How this war unfolds and how long it lasts will depend on the war aims of the United States and Israel. Is the ultimate objective regime collapse and the possibility of positive political change in Tehran? Is the goal to weaken the regime enough to create conditions for a future uprising by the Iranian people? Or is the aim more limited, degrading Iran’s nuclear and missile programs sufficiently for the president to declare victory and end the war? Where those objectives land will determine whether this conflict lasts weeks, months, or far longer.

MIDDLE EAST - Strengthening regional stability in the Middle East is based on moderate Sunni-majority states and Israel's national interests. One of the most notable phenomena of the war against Iran is the renewed rivalry and struggle between Shi’ites and Sunnis in the Middle East. What is unfolding before our eyes is not only a blow to the Shi’ite regime in Iran, but something much broader, which likely constitutes a turning point regarding the place of Shi’ites in the Arab world, and perhaps in the Muslim world more generally.

SAUDI ARABIA - Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, has been advising US President Donald Trump to “keep hitting the Iranians hard,” White House officials told the New York Times in a report published on Sunday. This follows the same advice of the late Saudi King Abdullah, who had reportedly told Washington repeatedly to “cut off the head of the snake.”