Brent crude futures were up $3.15, or 3.58%, to $91.25 a barrel at 0903 GMT, while U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude was up $2.96, or 3.55%, to $86.36

International News via Reuters:

Oil prices rose more than 3.5% on Monday after the U.S. attacked an Iranian island in the Strait of Hormuz and Tehran said it had retaliated, as their conflict extended into its sixth month.

Brent crude futures were up $3.15, or 3.58%, to $91.25 a barrel at 0903 GMT, while U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude was up $2.96, or 3.55%, to $86.36.

U.S. forces struck two launchers on Iran’s Larak Island in the Strait of Hormuz on Sunday, the first known American strikes on the country since late July.

In response, Iran attacked two U.S. air bases in Jordan, Iranian media reported on Monday, citing Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.

“Renewed military strikes in the Middle East and concerns of further oil supply disruptions have lifted oil prices,” said UBS analyst Giovanni Staunovo, adding that markets will now focus on whether the situation de-escalates or not.

U.S. President Donald Trump said in a social media post on Sunday that Iran’s energy hub of Kharg Island was being “blown to smithereens”, but there was no evidence the island was under attack. The post, which included an AI-generated video, provided no further details. Iran denied any attack on the island and said oil operations were continuing.

Efforts to negotiate an end to the conflict remain stalled as mediators seek to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of global oil supplies passed before the war began at the end of February.

Part of the sharp market reaction reflected thin trading volumes due to a UK public holiday, said Saxo Bank analyst Ole Hansen.

Shipping data showed the number of visible commodity vessels transiting the strait over the weekend fell to five a day, highlighting caution among operators concerned about attacks on shipping.

The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations agency said on Sunday that a tanker had been struck by a projectile while entering the strait on Saturday.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Reuters on Sunday that the U.S. was likely to impose new secondary sanctions on Iran every week.

Despite Monday’s rally, Brent and WTI were still on track to post modest losses for August after falling more than 4% last week, their first weekly declines in three weeks.

Trump also said on Sunday that oil secured under a recently struck deal with Venezuela would be used to replenish the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which has fallen to near its lowest level in 44 years.

Reporting by Florence Tan and Colleen Howe. Editing by Kirsten Donovan and Mark Potter

The FSB is a global watchdog that seeks to identify and manage risks in financial systems

International News via Reuters:

Financial Stability Board Chair Andrew Bailey said on Monday that the impact of AI on cyber risk was the most immediate concern for the global financial system, saying the technology could change the speed, scale and economics of an attack.

The FSB is a global watchdog that seeks to identify and manage risks in financial systems.

In a letter to G20 finance ministers and central bank governors ahead of meetings this week, Bailey, who also serves as the Bank of England governor, said many countries do not have systems in place to manage the deployment of advanced artificial intelligence models.

The financial sector’s dependence on a handful of powerful tech providers could undermine system-wide market confidence, he added. 

The comments highlighted concerns among regulators that advanced AI could accelerate the discovery of cyber vulnerabilities, forcing faster patching and creating potential operational and resilience challenges if testing and recovery processes are unable to adapt safely.

His comments follow the U.S. administration’s tightly controlled rollout of Anthropic’s powerful Mythos model, restricting it at one point to only U.S. nationals.

“Recent developments highlight the importance of ensuring that advances in capability are matched by resilience and preparedness,” he said. 

Supporting safe and responsible model release “on a global basis” should be a priority, he said.

In July, an OpenAI agent escaped a controlled testing environment and hacked AI company Hugging Face, raising concerns about the potential for AI systems to circumvent safeguards.

Bailey reiterated prior warnings about the risk of potential market corrections, citing stretched AI valuations and frailties in government debt markets, while flagging as an emerging concern the increase in the use of leverage in equity markets. The U.S. Treasury earlier this month intervened to cap yields on long-term bonds that had reached multi-decade highs.   

Reporting by Phoebe Seers; Editing by Cynthia Osterman

Both found administering contraception without valid consent breached the women’s right to respect for their private and family life and subjected them to degrading treatment in some cases. The reports differed on whether the practice was systemic

International News via Reuters:

A campaign of forced contraception in Greenland that ran primarily in the 1960s and 1970s violated women’s human rights but did not meet the legal definition of genocide, two expert reports concluded on Friday.

Both found administering contraception without valid consent breached the women’s right to respect for their private and family life and subjected them to degrading treatment in some cases. The reports differed on whether the practice was systemic.

At least 4,000 Greenlandic women and girls, some as young as 12, received intrauterine devices or contraceptive injections between 1966 and 1991, often without their consent or knowledge, a joint Danish-Greenlandic inquiry found in 2025.

That inquiry found the practice was intended to reduce birth rates and family sizes, which Danish authorities at the time viewed as a way to improve living standards and social and health conditions in Greenland, an Arctic island and semi-sovereign territory of Denmark, with a population of 57,000.

Documented consequences for some women included heavy bleeding, serious infections, scarring of the fallopian tubes, removal of the uterus and the inability to have children.

In 2024, the then-government in Nuuk tasked three legal experts and one psychologist with establishing whether there have been violations of human rights and the rights of indigenous peoples and if these meet the definition of genocide. The panel split during its work, with two members resigning and submitting a separate report.

Greenlandic Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen said the government would establish a reconciliation commission whose work “should not be about assigning blame, but about uncovering the truth with a view to genuine reconciliation, which will create the future we desire as a society.”

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said she would read the reports “with great interest” and welcomed the proposal from Nielsen.

“A reconciliation commission gives us the opportunity to look back at the darkness in our shared history, engage with it critically, and acknowledge the pain it may have caused,” she said.

The Greenlandic Siumut party demanded in a statement that the genocide question should be settled by “a competent and independent international court”. “Today we could have been far more Greenlanders,” the party said.

The reports’ findings are sensitive because U.S. President Donald Trump has pledged to take over Greenland, which aspires to full independence one day. His administration has highlighted allegations of misconduct by Danish authorities against the people of its former colony, in seeking to persuade them to turn to Washington.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment when contacted by Reuters via email.

INTENT IS KEY TO PROVING GENOCIDE

The UN Genocide Convention prohibits not just mass killing but “measures intended to prevent births” within a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, and requires proof the acts were carried out with intent to destroy that group in whole or in part.

In their report, Dalee Sambo Dorough, a lawyer from Alaska and former chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, and Miriam Cullen, a law professor at the University of Copenhagen, found a reasonable basis to believe that Kalaallit Inuit (Greenlandic) women had suffered involuntary contraceptive practices that violated their rights to equality and non-discrimination, to non-interference in private and family life and the right to freedom from cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

They did not, however, conclude that genocide had taken place. There was also a reasonable basis to believe that “limiting population growth” was one factor behind how doctors approached contraception, they said.

In the other report, Jonas Christoffersen, former head of the Danish Institute for Human Rights, and Jensine Nedergaard, a psychologist who worked in Greenland — the experts who resigned from the original panel — accepted women had been wronged but said the extent of the violations could not be established.

Christoffersen and Nedergaard found no evidence “any authority or health professional at any time had any intention of destroying the Greenlandic population.”

Dorough and Cullen said the evidence could not establish such an intent “on the basis of contraceptive practices alone.”

Establishing whether genocide had ever taken place, they wrote, would need to consider other violations Denmark is accused of in Greenland, such as the removal of Inuit children to Danish families. This fell outside the scope of their report.

They added that genocidal intent by Denmark “remains a possible inference” that a court might establish based on a full review.

DENMARK DID BREACH CONVENTION, ONE REPORT FINDS

Dorough and Cullen found, however, “reasonable basis to believe” Denmark had breached the Genocide Convention by learning as early as 1969 of a serious risk that the programme amounted to the preventing of births within a group, and failing to take all measures within its power. Only a court could settle that question, they said.

Under the terms of the Genocide Convention, which Denmark ratified in 1951, the country pledges not to commit genocide, and to prevent and punish it.

The reports’ authors and the women at the centre of the case asked that the findings not be used in questions over Greenland’s future ties with Denmark on the grounds that the women’s experience should be considered in isolation and not drawn into geopolitical disputes.

‘WE WERE TREATED LIKE ANIMALS’

Inger Platou, 70, was one of the women affected.

Speaking to Reuters before the experts’ findings were published, she described waking up from what she had been told was a minor operation to discover an IUD had been inserted without her consent.

“It turns out we were treated like animals,” she said. “Without consent, they just wanted to stop women from giving birth or having children. It was a very inhumane act.”

She said a doctor later told her complications from the coil had left her unable to become pregnant. She went on to adopt two children from Colombia.

“We are very deferential to authority because we are colonial children,” she said.

In 2025, Frederiksen apologised to women she said had been subjected to “systematic discrimination” and Greenland’s Prime Minister apologised for cases that occurred after Greenland took over its health system in 1992. Denmark on Thursday passed a compensation law to pay 300,000 Danish crowns ($46,758) to each affected woman.

Both reports were peer reviewed by two outside academics: one found the Christoffersen and Nedergaard report fell short of “recognised scientific standards”. Greenland’s justice minister said their report did not fulfil their commission.

Christoffersen said he and Nedergaard had written to the Greenlandic government in July to explain their reasoning, and that the two scholars rejected the finding that their report fell short of scientific standards.

($1 = 6.4159 Danish crowns)

Reporting by Stine Jacobsen in Copenhagen and Time Barsoe in Nuuk, additional reporting by Louise Rasmussen; editing by Philippa Fletcher and Alexandra Hudson