Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency reported the seizures and added its Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy had warned that any disruption to order and safety in the strait would be considered a “red line.”

International News via Reuters:

Iran said it had captured two container ships seeking to exit the Gulf via the Strait of Hormuz on Wednesday after firing on them and another vessel, in its first seizures since its war with the United States and Israel began in February. 

Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency reported the seizures and added its Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy had warned that any disruption to order and safety in the strait would be considered a “red line.”

The seizure of one of the ships, the Panama-flagged MSC Francesca, was confirmed by Montenegro’s minister of maritime affairs, who said four Montenegrin seafarers were on board and that they and the rest of the crew were safe. 

“Negotiations between the shipping company and the Iranian side are ongoing, and the relevant state authorities are in constant contact with the crew,” the minister, Filip Radulovic, said on X. 

SHIPS FIRED UPON

The IRGC accused the MSC Francesca and the Liberia-flagged Epaminondas of operating without required permits and tampering with their navigation systems. 

The Greek-operated Epaminondas had reported being fired upon about 20 nautical miles northwest of Oman. It said it had sustained damage to its bridge after being hit by gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades from an IRGC gunboat, according to the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations and maritime security sources. 

Greek operator Technomar Shipping Inc confirmed the attack in a statement and said that its crew were safe.

Epaminondas has a crew of 21 members made up of Ukrainians and Filipinos, according to the Greek coast guard, which could not confirm the vessel’s seizure. Technomar has not confirmed the seizure either. 

“Our priority remains the safety and well-being of our crew as we work with all relevant stakeholders to ensure their continued safety,” the operator said. 

Maritime security sources said that there were three people onboard the gunboat, adding the master of the ship said no radio contact was made prior to the attack and the vessel had received earlier permission to transit the strait.

MSC Francesca was hit by gunfire about eight nautical miles west of Iran, but it was not damaged and its crew were safe, according to the UKMTO and the sources.

Operator MSC, the world’s biggest container shipping group, did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

According to three sources, the Epaminondas is also on charter to MSC.A third, Liberia-flagged container ship, Euphoria, was fired upon in the same area but was not damaged and had resumed sailing, later reaching Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates, the sources said. 

The attacks occurred while the three ships, some switching their navigation systems off, attempted to exit the Strait of Hormuz in a row in the early morning hours, they added. The seizures were the first since 2024, when Iran had captured the container ship MSC Aries in Hormuz. 

There was no immediate information about what, if any, cargo the ships were carrying.

OIL BOUNCES HIGHER

Oil prices reversed course to head higher after the incidents.”The Iran war and strait closing are unprecedented and there is no line of sight on a final outcome and timing, creating the potential for more headline noise and volatility,” Jonathan Chappell, senior managing director at investment bank Evercore, wrote in a note. 

Tehran imposed restrictions on ships using the strait chokepoint at the southern end of the Gulf following U.S. and Israeli bombing attacks on Iran on February 28, bringing traffic to a virtual standstill.

Iranian shipping remained largely unfettered, however, empowered in part by a one-month U.S. sanctions waiver issued on March 20 allowing it to export crude oil and oil products.

Washington has since closed down that trade with a U.S. blockade of Iranian ships entering or exiting the Gulf.

The strait usually sees about 130 vessels a day enter and exit the Gulf and handles about 20% of the world’s daily oil and liquefied natural gas supply.

That fell to about nine vessels per day after the war began, rising to about 20 during a brief reopening announced and then revoked by Iran last week, according to data provider AXS Marine.

“The latest seizures make clear, even an ‘open’ Strait of Hormuz is not a safe Strait of Hormuz for seafarers, ships and cargo,” said Peter Sand, chief analyst at ocean and air freight intelligence platform Xeneta. 

Reporting by Jonathan Saul in London, Yannis Souliotis and Renee Maltezou in Athens, Nayera Abdallah and Jana Choukeir in Dubai, Aleksandar Vasovic in Belgrade; Editing by Toby Chopra, Jason Neely, William Maclean, Rod Nickel

Other top AI companies including OpenAI and Anthropic have aggressively shifted resources to business customers in recent months

International News via Reuters:

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai is deepening a push into enterprise software, signaling to investors at Google’s annual cloud conference that AI agents — human-like digital assistants — are a linchpin of its strategy to monetize artificial intelligence.

At the three-day conference in Las Vegas that starts Wednesday, Pichai and key Google executives will seek to position the company’s AI tools as production-ready infrastructure for enterprise customers who are emerging as the industry’s most reliable revenue stream.

Other top AI companies including OpenAI and Anthropic have aggressively shifted resources to business customers in recent months.

Mountain View, California-based Google announced on Wednesday that it was unifying a set of AI products under the name “Gemini Enterprise.” Most notably, this involves rebranding and bulking up Vertex AI, a tool that allows cloud customers to select from a variety of AI models to use for business purposes.

Google also announced a set of new governance and security features for AI agents. Agents are powerful digital assistants that can plan, decide, and act autonomously, a fast-growing field that has sparked worries over safety, reliability and oversight.

“There’s definitely a strategic shift as the models become much more sophisticated,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian told Reuters in an interview. The primary use case of Vertex AI recently shifted from “old-style machine learning” to a sudden explosion in users building their own custom AI agents, Kurian said.

Google is seeking to outflank both its traditional cloud rivals and AI upstarts as pressure mounts to prove returns on massive generative AI spending.

Google Cloud, once seen as a laggard to rivals such as Amazon and Microsoft, has gained traction with enterprise customers, powered by massive bets on AI and years of heavy investment in data centers, custom chips, and networking gear.

At GE Appliances, that shift is already tangible. Marcia Brey, a senior executive and Google customer, told Reuters that Google’s suite of tools and the enterprise data already stored in Google Cloud allowed her logistics and distribution team to deploy AI faster compared with other products the company had tested.

NEW GOOGLE CHIPS

The company unveiled two new custom tensor processing units (TPUs) on Wednesday, called the TPU 8t and 8i. 

“Both have been sort of architected and designed end to end for (what’s) called the age of agents, and sort of the unique requirements of agent-based solutions and applications,” Google’s Vice President and General Manager of Compute and AI Infrastructure Mark Lohmeyer said in an interview with Reuters.

Google designed the TPU 8t for training the large language models that underpin chatbots like Anthropic’s Claude. Google sets up the training chips in pods of 9,600 chips that are stitched together and can link together to scale to 134,000 chips, the company said. Combined with other Google technology the company said it can string together 1 million chips for large training needs.

Google’s TPU 8i is tuned for the type of computing necessary to generate instant responses from AI agents, a process known as inference. The company boosted memory on the chip itself to help achieve the improved performance. Google said it delivers 80% better performance for speedy inference tasks than the prior generation called Ironwood.

AGENTS OVER CODING

In addition to traditional enterprise providers and other hyperscalers, a new class of competitors is quickly emerging in enterprise AI: model providers.

So far, coding assistants and plug-ins that connect AI models to existing enterprise software have emerged as lucrative channels for AI revenue and payback on their heavy investments.

After early success powered by the raw strength of their models, OpenAI and Anthropic are now pushing downstream, marshalling resources into applications that utilize those models to perform specialized tasks, including agent-building tools.

But while rivals are pushing hard on their coding products, Google, by contrast, kept coding largely out of the spotlight at its cloud conference. Kurian instead cast the AI battleground as one defined by agents, governance and enterprise deployment, saying that some coding announcements were being held back for its I/O developer conference in May.

“Some people are using the models to write code. They can use Gemini and also other tools like Claude,” he said. “But in other cases, we have unique things. There’s capability in the platform that nobody else offers.”

The long-term bet to build out a vast suite of in-house offerings, from models to chips, rather than relying on third-party vendors has given Google an edge over other large cloud providers.

This has helped Google to grow its overall cloud market share to 14% at the end of 2025, though it still trails rivals Amazon and Microsoft, according to data from Synergy Research.

Reporting by Kenrick Cai; additional reporting by Max A. Cherney; Editing by Sayantani Ghosh, Shri Navaratnam and Hugh Lawson

Mexico’s Mayan Train, an approximately 1,500-km (1,000-mile) rail project, was meant to bring development to the country’s impoverished south through improved infrastructure and increased tourism

International News via Reuters:

Deep in Mexico’s Maya jungle, brilliant white lights blaze improbably in the wilderness: a maintenance depot for a flagship multi-billion-dollar train line.

But just beyond the perimeter fence an off-grid village lies in darkness.

Mexico’s Mayan Train, an approximately 1,500-km (1,000-mile) rail project, was meant to bring development to the country’s impoverished south through improved infrastructure and increased tourism.

But, two years after it was inaugurated, it is struggling. Ticket sales cover only a fraction of operating costs and hotels built along the route sit mostly empty.

Meanwhile, despite government promises, the local communities near the line say they have seen little benefit. A Reuters review of census data and interviews with dozens of residents in towns along the track found that poverty remains entrenched and well-paying jobs hard to find.

In Vida y Esperanza – “Life and Hope” in English – just steps from a railway maintenance depot, residents had hoped the train would bring change. 

“It’s not like we’re asking for much,” said Mary Sandra Peraza, a 30-year-old mother of four.

Power lines installed for the train run almost directly above her house. But she depends on a rented solar panel and generator for her family’s energy needs.

“There’s no real benefit for us,” she said.

Before dawn, Peraza cooks breakfast on a propane hot plate in a small outdoor kitchen. The village’s lone primary school sits a stone’s throw from the depot but has no grid electricity for fans, computers or even stable lighting.

Its teacher, Lidia Patricia Chan Us – known by her 35 students as “Maestra Pati” – has spent years trying to get power connected.

Authorities have told her electricity cannot be installed until the land beneath the school has formal titles. The red tape issue is a common one for rural communal plots like this, but she had hoped that might change with the arrival of a mega project that the government had vowed would spur development and progress.

“At the beginning, when the project came along, we were happy about it,” Chan Us said. Some residents sold food to construction workers, which she said was a benefit to the community. “But when the construction ended, just as quickly as it arrived, it was gone.”

In the state of Quintana Roo, where Vida y Esperanza is located, the share of homes recorded as having electricity actually fell slightly during the period the railway line was being constructed, according to official data, even as new substations were built to power the line.

Mexico’s public education ministry and its defense ministry, which oversees the operation of the train via a state company, did not respond to requests for comment.

In response to a question about this story after it was published, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum defended the line as a success. At her regular morning press conference on Wednesday, she said the project had helped regional development, but added “it’s not something that happens overnight.”

MAYA HAVE LONG LIVED IN POVERTY

Former President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador promoted the Mayan Train, a loop route connecting cities and archaeological sites through the Yucatan Peninsula, as a way to bring development to Indigenous Maya communities and spread tourism beyond beach resorts like Cancun.

But that development is yet to materialize, government data shows.  

While federal spending on the Mayan Train triggered a historic 13.2% spike in economic growth in Quintana Roo in 2023, that proved to be a temporary construction-related boost. The state plummeted into a 9.7% contraction in the first nine months of 2025, according to the latest data from statistics agency INEGI. 

Quintana Roo did cut unemployment and expanded formal hiring, but about 60% of workers in the Yucatan remain in informal jobs without legal or social security protections.

Historically marginalized, Maya populations in Mexico’s southeast have long faced high poverty rates and limited access to services.

While governments over decades have promised that development would bring opportunity, many community activists say instead that their forests have been fragmented, communal lands eroded and traditions strained.

Legal challenges to the train from environmental groups and Indigenous communities ultimately failed as the government pushed the project forward under national security exemptions.

For many Maya, the land over which it runs is their sacred inheritance, central to their identity and linking them to their ancestors.

“I feel outraged by the way they behaved, because they didn’t take us into account,” said Eliseo Ek, 45, an Indigenous activist from the Quintana Roo community of Nicolas Bravo.

EMPTY WORDS, EMPTY TAPS

In Xpujil, a town close to the train line and near the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve in Campeche state, Nicolas Moreno Jimenez, a 50-year-old beekeeper and farmer, turns a tap inside his modest concrete home. Nothing comes out.

Lopez Obrador promised that the town’s chronic water shortages would be addressed when he inaugurated the Adolfo Lopez Mateos-Xpujil aqueduct in January 2024.

“How do we build a major project like the Mayan Train and not bring in water?” Lopez Obrador said at the event.

But, Moreno said, the taps are still dry.

“They were empty words,” Moreno said about the former president’s promise.

Each week, he brings in water by car from another community so his son, a university student, can bathe, wash dishes and flush the toilet.

Around 70% of the population of Campeche have access to running water, data shows.

EMPTY SEATS, EMPTY ROOMS

Meanwhile, the train itself has struggled to attract the hoped-for interest.

Imagined as a seamless rail link between Cancun and other top tourist locations, legal challenges, environmental rerouting and land constraints pushed key segments inland and left many stations far from city centers and airports, making it a less practical option for visitors.

Reuters visited three stations in November 2025, each largely empty. Fewer than 40 of 230 seats were occupied on a weekday afternoon trip between Bacalar and Chetumal.

Lopez Obrador projected the train would transport 3 million people a year once finished, a figure since slashed to 1.2 million. At the same time, the project’s budget has ballooned from $7 billion to more than $25 billion, with revenue last year covering less than 13% of operating costs.

The train route has also spawned a line of six Tren Maya hotels. One in the Calakmul reserve, surrounded by jungle, features two pools and modern amenities. It was only about 20% full one night in November, according to a reception worker.

Government data reviewed by Reuters shows those properties averaged monthly occupancy rates between 5% and 24% most of last year.

The defense ministry agency that runs the hotels did not reply to a request for comment.

Sheinbaum has pushed back against assertions of problems with the train. She has regularly showcased tourist package offerings in her press conferences and suggested that the railway line could also be used for freight.

For Moreno, the hotels are a particularly painful blow.

His family was displaced decades ago when the government created the Calakmul reserve, a UNESCO World Heritage site intended to protect biodiversity and ruins of the once mighty Mayan empire.

“We had been there since 1980,” said Moreno. “They removed us in 1993. And now they build hotels where we could not even stay.”

“In the press conferences they say the poor come first,” Moreno added. “But they take away our rights.”

Reporting by Cassandra Garrison; Additonal reporting by Daniel Becerril and Paola Chiomante; Editing by Rosalba O’Brien and Daniel Wallis

Brent crude futures were up $3.32, or 3.37%, at $101.80 a barrel at 12:50 p.m. EDT (1650 GMT)

International News via Reuters:

Oil prices jumped by more than $3 on Wednesday after a surprise gasoline and distillate stock draw in the U.S., and prices got a further boost from reports of gunfire attacks on at least three container ships in the Strait of Hormuz and a lack of progress in peace talks between the U.S. and Iran. 

Brent crude futures were up $3.32, or 3.37%, at $101.80 a barrel at 12:50 p.m. EDT (1650 GMT). West Texas Intermediate futures were up $3.61, or 4.03%, to $93.28. Both benchmarks climbed about 3% on Tuesday.

At the session high, U.S. crude futures were up by more than $4 a barrel. 

U.S. crude stocks rose while gasoline and distillate inventories posted surprise draws in the week ended April 17, the Energy Information Administration said. [EIA/S]

Crude inventories rose by 1.9 million barrels to 465.7 million barrels, while U.S. gasoline stocks fell by 4.6 million barrels to 228.4 million barrels compared with analysts’ expectations in a Reuters poll for a 1.5-million-barrel draw.​

Distillate stockpiles dropped by 3.4 million barrels in the week to 108.1 million barrels, versus expectations for a 2.5-million-barrel drop, the EIA data showed.

Elsewhere, at least three container ships were hit by gunfire in the Strait of Hormuz on Wednesday. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Navy seized two vessels for what it described as maritime violations and transferred them to Iranian shores, the semi-official Tasnim news agency reported.

Iran and the U.S. have imposed restrictions on ships using the strait, which until the war began at the end of February had carried about 20% of global oil and liquefied natural gas supplies. 

Earlier, U.S. President Donald Trump said he would indefinitely extend the ceasefire with Iran, hours before it was due to expire. Neither side showed up for peace talks in Pakistan.

The ceasefire announcement appeared to be unilateral. It was not immediately clear whether Iran, or U.S. ally Israel, would agree to extend the truce, which began two weeks ago.

Iran’s ​parliament speaker and ​top negotiator Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf said on Wednesday that a complete ceasefire only made sense if it was not violated by the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports.

Qalibaf said in a post on X that the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz was impossible with such a “flagrant breach of the ceasefire”.

RUSSIA TO DIVERT SOME SUPPLIES

Elsewhere, Russia will divert oil supplies from Kazakhstan previously intended for Germany via the Druzhba pipeline to other routes starting from May 1, Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak said on Wednesday.

Novak said the logistical change was due to “technical possibilities” and had been agreed with Kazakhstan.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Wednesday that he extended sanctions relief on Russian seaborne oil for 30 days because of requests from countries that are the most vulnerable to oil shortages from the closed Strait of Hormuz.

The European Union is considering requiring countries to hold stockpiles of jet fuel, and potentially redistribute it based on regional needs and shortages, Europe’s energy policy chief told Reuters on Wednesday, as concerns mount over possible shortages.

Additional reporting by Shadia Nasralla, Stephanie Kelly and Yuka Obayashi. Editing by Barbara Lewis, Mark Potter, Nick Zieminski and David Gregorio