Happy Monday and welcome to your wrap of the latest political and business headlines from around the world.
First up, Iran has said it is ready to respond to any US ground attack, as it accused Washington of preparing a land assault amid peace talks, Reuters reported.
It comes as Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt met in Pakistan overnight to try and bring the two sides together, with the initial discussions focusing on proposals to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
Iran’s parliament speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf accused the United States of planning to send in troops, adding that Tehran was ready to respond if foreign soldiers were deployed.
"As long as the Americans seek Iran's surrender, our response is that we will never accept humiliation," he said in a message to the nation.
Washington has dispatched thousands of Marines to the Middle East, with the first of the two contingents arriving on Friday aboard a ship, the US military said.
The Washington Post quoted US officials saying the Pentagon was preparing for weeks of ground operations in Iran.
Meanwhile, Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthis joined the conflict over the weekend, launching air attacks on Israel and raising the prospect they could target another key shipping route, the Bab el-Mandeb Strait.
The Strait of Hormuz is a narrow channel through which about 20% of global oil flows.
Elsewhere in the region, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has announced an expansion of his invasion of southern Lebanon, saying he has instructed the military to further expand the so-called “buffer zone”, The Guardian reported.
“We are determined to fundamentally change the situation in the north,” he said in a video statement. He said his decision is aimed at strengthening Israel’s security along the northern frontier.
Israel also said an industrial site in the south of the country was hit following an Iranian attack on a global crop protection company, the BBC reported. The site is on fire and the local fire service has declared the wider industrial zone it sits within a “hazardous materials incident”, urging workers to evacuate “exposed areas”.
In business news, a number of legal experts spoken to by Reuters have called for greater scrutiny after a handful of well-timed trades ahead of US President Donald Trump’s major policy surprises during his second term have potentially led to millions of dollars in profits for unknown traders.
In a Reuters review of trading ahead of Trump’s major policy decisions on tariffs, Venezuela and Iran showed at least four instances where legal experts said it appeared that investors knew what would happen shortly before it did.
“It looks deeply suspicious,” UCLA School of Law expert in insider trading Andrew Verstein said, adding that the examples showed patterns you “would expect to see if there were informed trading by government officials and their friends”.
Verstein was one of a handful of experts Reuters spoke to who believed the trades warranted greater scrutiny to determine if they were based on inside government information.
White House spokesman Kush Desai said government ethics guidelines prevent federal employees from profiting off nonpublic information. "Any implication that administration officials are engaged in such activity without evidence is baseless and irresponsible," he said.
Staying with business, drug giant Eli Lilly has signed a US$2.75 billion deal to bring drugs developed using artificial intelligence by Hong Kong-based Insilico Medicine to market, CNBC reported.
The agreement will give Insilico a relatively small cash payment upfront, with the remainder of the deal subject to regulatory and commercial milestones, along with royalties on future sales.
“This collaboration allows us to explore novel mechanisms and accelerate the identification of promising therapeutic candidates across multiple disease areas,” Eli Lilly vice-president of molecule discovery Andrew Adams said.
Insilico chief executive Alex Zhavoronkov said the company has developed 28 drugs using generative AI, nearly all of which were at the clinical stage of development.
“In many ways, Lilly is better than us in some areas of AI,” he said, noting the US pharma giant has “one person” who has brought biology, chemistry, and automation under one roof.
Insilico went public in Hong Kong in December. Its shares are up more than 50% year to date.
