Brent futures fell $4.30, or 4.6%, to $89.95 a barrel at 12:38 p.m. EDT (1638 GMT)

International News via Reuters:

Oil prices fell about 5% on Tuesday after Iran and Israel said they had halted attacks on each other following an appeal from U.S. President Donald Trump.

Brent futures fell $4.30, or 4.6%, to $89.95 a barrel at 12:38 p.m. EDT (1638 GMT). U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude slid $4.95, or 5.4%, to $86.35.

That put Brent on track for its lowest close since April 17 and WTI on track for its lowest close since May 29.

Crude prices briefly pared losses around midday, down by just $2 a barrel, after Trump said Iran shot down a U.S. Apache helicopter that was patrolling the Strait of Hormuz overnight.

Trump added that the U.S., “must, of necessity, respond to this attack.”

On Monday, Israel and Iran halted direct attacks on each other after Trump urged them to stop. Tehran said it would resume hostilities if Israel continued to attack the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon.

On Tuesday, Israel struck the historic port city of Tyre in southern Lebanon, killing at least eight people. Iran has so far held back from attacking.

“The oil market is drafting lower … as the latest shooting match between Israel and Iran was diffused in favor of a ceasefire and as Trump continues to talk the market lower by suggesting that an end of the war with Iran could be reached in 2-3 days with negotiations in their final stages,” analysts at energy advisory firm Ritterbusch and Associates said in a note.

Iran has continued to block most shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, which before the war carried a fifth of the world’s crude oil and liquefied natural gas. Washington has imposed its own blockade of Iranian ports.

U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said on Tuesday that ship traffic in the Gulf and oil exports through the Strait of Hormuz are rising even as Washington and Tehran struggle to reach a deal on ending their more than three-month-old war.

Elsewhere around the world, China’s May crude imports slumped 29% to their lowest levels in eight years, extending a sharp decline in the world’s largest oil importer that is helping keep a lid on global oil prices.

WORLD SUPPLY, DEMAND AND INVENTORIES

The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) projected the Iran war would slash world petroleum production to an average of 99.0 million barrels per day (bpd) in 2026, down from a record 106.1 million bpd in 2025.

At the same time, EIA forecast world oil demand would slide to 102.9 million bpd in 2026, down from a record 104.0 million bpd in 2025. The agency said countries would pull the extra needed barrels from storage, cutting inventories in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to their lowest level since 2003.

Looking ahead, the oil market awaited weekly storage reports from the American Petroleum Institute (API) trade group later on Tuesday and the EIA on Wednesday.

Analysts estimated energy firms pulled 3.4 million barrels of crude from U.S. storage during the week ended June 5.

If correct, that would be the first time energy firms pulled crude out of storage for seven weeks in a row since January 2025. It compares with a decrease of 3.6 million barrels in the same week last year and an average decline of 0.7 million barrels over the past five years (2021 to 2025). [EIA/S] [API/S]

Reporting by Scott DiSavino in New York, Seher Dareen and Robert Harvey in London, Pooja Menon in Bengaluru and Emily Chow in Singapore; Editing by Sonali Paul, Tomasz Janowski and David Gregorio

The European Commission’s decision to issue an interim measure against Meta followed complaints from The Interaction Company of California, developer of the Poke.com AI assistant, French AI startup Agentik and a Spanish rival

International News via Reuters:

Meta Platforms has been ordered by EU antitrust regulators to give rival AI chatbots such as OpenAI free access to WhatsApp while they continue to investigate whether the company abused its market power by blocking competitors from the messaging app.

The European Commission’s decision to issue an interim measure against Meta followed complaints from The Interaction Company of California, developer of the Poke.com AI assistant, French AI startup Agentik and a Spanish rival.

Those complaints prompted the Commission, the EU’s competition enforcer, to open an investigation in December. It issued charges against Meta two months later, alleging breaches of EU antitrust rules, and additional charges in April after Meta levied access fees.

EU antitrust chief Teresa Ribera said Meta’s fees were so high that it was not economically sustainable for competitors and the company’s justification failed to convince.

“It seems that Meta expects to leverage the vast reach and likely dominance of WhatsApp to benefit its own AI assistant and to foreclose rivals,” she told a press conference.

“It is now a critical time. AI markets are developing exceptionally fast and AI systems are expected to become an important way for consumers all across Europe to access and use AI,” Ribera said.

She said the interim order would last as long as the investigation continues or at the latest until June 2029.

Meta, which has previously pointed to AI options available via app stores, operating systems, devices, websites, and industry partnerships, criticised the Commission order.

“The European Commission has decided that OpenAI and some of the largest companies in the world can use the paid-for WhatsApp Business product for free,” a Meta spokesperson said in an email.

“This is regulatory overreach subsidised by the many European companies that pay. We will appeal.”

Meta barred rival AI services from accessing its WhatsApp for Business application programming interface, which allows companies to connect their systems to WhatsApp, in October, while exempting its own assistant Meta AI. In March it allowed the competitors back onto the platform for a fee, a move that drew the Commission’s objection.

Under the interim measure, Meta must restore rivals’ access to the WhatsApp for Business API on the same terms and conditions that applied before October, within five working days.

Meta faces a fine of up to 10% of its global annual turnover if found to have breached EU antitrust rules.

Reporting by Foo Yun Chee; Editing by Mark Potter, Sudip Kar-Gupta and Chris Reese

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman at a ceremony in Houston named U.S. astronauts Andre Douglas, Frank Rubio and Randy Bresnik and Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano as the Artemis III crew, which is due to launch late next year

International News via Reuters:

NASA on Tuesday named three U.S. astronauts and an Italian astronaut to serve as the crew for its next Artemis mission, a spacecraft docking demonstration in Earth’s orbit next year that will test landers from Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin for the first time in space.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman at a ceremony in Houston named U.S. astronauts Andre Douglas, Frank Rubio and Randy Bresnik and Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano as the Artemis III crew, which is due to launch late next year.

“Artemis III is an incredibly exciting, complicated, and highly coordinated multi-launch campaign,” Jeremy Parsons, NASA’s Artemis program manager, said at the Houston event. “It’s going to happen in a short period of time with three of the world’s most powerful rockets.”

The mission will be a delicate dance in low-Earth orbit of multiple spacecraft involved in NASA’s complex Artemis program, the flagship U.S. effort to return humans to the moon for a long-term presence. The program faces competitive pressure from China, which is targeting its own 2030 crewed moon landing.

Though the two-week Artemis III mission will not approach the moon, it is seen as a key debut test of the two primary moon landers NASA will use on subsequent Artemis missions to put astronauts on the lunar surface.

SpaceX’s Starship and Blue Origin’s Blue Moon will take turns docking with NASA’s Orion, the astronaut capsule that launches off Earth atop NASA’s Space Launch System. The three spacecraft will test docking mechanisms and hover around each other.

Four U.S. astronauts flew around the moon and back earlier this year in NASA’s Artemis II mission, following Artemis I in 2022, a similar flight but without crew. The second crewed voyage in NASA’s Artemis program, Artemis III is the final mission planned before the space agency attempts to land astronauts on the lunar surface.

Reporting by Joey Roulette; Editing by Franklin Paul and Andrea Ricci