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Oil prices fell Thursday as investors weighed waning global demand against the ongoing supply disruption in the Middle East.

U.S. West Texas Intermediate futures were down 1.5% to $82.04 per barrel at 1:45 p.m. ET. Brent crude, the international benchmark, was trading 1.4% lower at $87.77 per barrel.

Brent

The International Energy Agency said Wednesday that global oil demand was set to fall further than previously expected this year, amid a deepening impact from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

"Renewed hostilities and maritime disruptions" are undermining efforts to boost global oil supply, the IEA said. Supply remained 6.3 million barrels a day lower year-on-year in July.

The security situation in the Middle East remains precarious for shippers, with attacks on vessels in the Gulf of Oman and the Red Sea this week. Iran's Houthi allies in Yemen, meanwhile, claimed Thursday that they targeted a refinery in Saudi Arabia's Jizan region with drones.

Meanwhile, Oman's coastline has reportedly started to be affected by a massive oil spill caused by a leaking tanker that ran aground June 30 carrying an estimated 800,000 barrels of Russian oil and is under international sanctions, according to Reuters. It's leaking near a nature reserve that's home to wildlife including Arabian Sea humpback whales and ​Socotra cormorants, Reuters reported.

Further, deadly attacks on vessels in the Gulf of Oman and the Red Sea have pushed worries over supply disruptions up another notch. While there are signs that diplomatic efforts toward reopening the Strait of Hormuz are ongoing, the over five-month-old war continues to disrupt energy flows.

"The lack of clarity over the possibility of a full reopening of the waterway could leave oil prices exposed to the upside at a time when the market remains tight," said Christopher Tahir, a senior market strategist at Exness, adding that any additional setbacks could drive oil prices further up. %!s()

That said, there's growing evidence that organizations need to take action to scale their AI programs. Among the issues is whether the enterprise can supply the data and context that models need.

• McKinsey researchers recently reported that fewer than 10% of companies have fully scaled AI and that more than two-thirds of high-performing companies identify data as the primary obstacle to enabling it.

• KPMG researchers reached a similar conclusion: 58% of executives cited data readiness and access as the biggest challenge to deploying AI agents.

But does that context gap mean the organization is missing technology?

Many vendors would argue the answer is yes. If AI needs more context, then the solution is to buy a new layer that’s “built for the agentic era.” Admittedly, some of these technologies may be useful or even necessary. But for many enterprises, the fastest path to more context might start with an easier question: How much of the context can be delivered by technology my organization already owns?​

In practice, context consists of three things:

1. Semantics Or Business Meaning: business glossaries, data governance tools, master data models, semantic models, policy repositories and data dictionaries.

2. Operational State: master data management platforms, hierarchy management, relationship management, reference data workflows, stewardship workflows, data quality rules and exception management.

3. Traceability: data catalogs, metadata management, lineage tools, stewardship histories, governance workflows, approval records and audit trails.

But context can't be kept accurate, consistent and trustworthy through definitions and metadata alone. It requires an operating model with the people, processes and decision rights that govern how context is created, maintained and changed over time.

Definitions change. Source systems disagree. Policies evolve. Business rules collide. Someone has to decide which definition applies, which source is authoritative, which relationship matters and how exceptions are handled. Those decisions are what allow context to support AI models reliably.

​This is where many organizations get the starting point wrong.

​They already own many of the capabilities required to provide AI with context. Master data platforms contain trusted business entities and relationships. Data governance tools capture ownership, policies and business definitions. Catalogs document metadata and lineage. Workflow engines record approvals, stewardship activities and operational decisions.

Individually, these capabilities work well. They support data governance programs, regulatory initiatives or transformation programs. The problem is that they're rarely designed and later operated as a single enterprise context capability.

As a result, context becomes fragmented. Business definitions live in one platform, stewardship processes in another, lineage somewhere else and operational rules inside applications. Each capability creates value on its own, but AI needs them to work together. Doing the work to understand alignment and gaps might, very well, be the best and most cost-effective place to start.

From Stand-alone Technologies To An AI Context Capability

A key part of this approach isn't just to inventory tools but to determine where business meaning, operational state and traceability live today. Organizations need to understand whether those capabilities are concentrated in a few trusted systems or distributed across multiple platforms, which sources are authoritative, where conflicts exist and how these capabilities can be connected into a common context layer.

Organizations also need to develop a cross-cutting or unified operating model that allows context to be produced, made accessible to AI systems and governed, maintained and improved over time across the distributed tool set. Existing semantic, operational and traceability capabilities need to be connected through common ownership, decision rights, change processes and accountability models. Without that alignment, context remains fragmented across teams, systems and workflows, even if the underlying tools are technically connected.​

​For many enterprises, this could be the fastest and most practical path to AI context. It allows the organization to reuse existing investments, identify the gaps that genuinely require new technology and create a pragmatic approach to expose trusted data and business meaning to AI systems.

The Bottom Line

Enterprises are under growing pressure to demonstrate measurable value from AI. Strengthening the organization’s enterprise data foundation, especially the context layer, is critical to making that value measurable, repeatable and trusted.

That may sound daunting. But the good news is that many enterprises aren't starting from zero. In the organizations furthest along, much of the machinery needed to supply AI with context is already in place: MDM, data governance tools, catalogs, lineage, policies, workflows and operational systems.​

Before investing in another context platform, ask yourself: Have we fully connected the context we already have?

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But now, for the first time in 20 years, he is not involved as an English football season gets under way.

From the outside, the turnaround from officiating at the highest level to retirement seems sudden.

So why did Taylor quit?

Here, for the first time, the 47-year-old explains his decision in detail - opening up on the impact of the often toxic debate surrounding officiating, and the intense scrutiny faced by referees.

Taylor also says he thinks his fellow officials should think twice before criticising their former colleagues in the media and talks of his hopes of helping Turkish football emerge from a sprawling referee betting scandal.

And he reveals what he really thinks of the video assistant referee (VAR) system.

'Any referee will be lying if they said pressure or scrutiny does not bother them'

Taylor retired last month, announcing in a short statement the end of a career during which he officiated 668 matches in the English professional game, every major domestic cup final, and 163 international fixtures.

He wrote it had been "an immense privilege, but the pressure is intense and the scrutiny is constant".

So was that why he quit?

"It was part of it," Taylor says when we meet at his lawyer's offices in Leeds.

"Any referee will be lying to you if they said that pressure or that scrutiny did not bother them, because that's a natural human reaction.

"One of the challenges that referees face at every level is actually understanding the challenges that we face.

"Fear of making mistakes, external opinion, spectators, managers, parents, media, colleagues. All these things feed into creating self-doubt, lacking confidence, and then things can spiral out of control and you lose the ability to actually have any confidence in what you're doing on the field."

For years, Taylor said he had developed "resilience" to handle the pressures he faced, but can that only last so long?

"Everybody will experience times where dealing with that environment for a long period of time, your energy levels would dip," he says.

"That then starts to impact on motivation and your actual confidence. It goes back to the confidence again of, 'I've got to go again, make sure I don't make a mistake, still want to get to this tournament or have this match'. It's a very real feeling that everybody would go through.

"I was very confident in my own coping mechanisms on how I dealt with that.

"The decision to retire is purely based on my body and my mind coming to its natural course in that current role - and it's ready to go on a new journey."

Needing a break from pressure

Having taken charge of three matches in his second World Cup, Taylor says he only decided to retire once his tournament ended, which seemed like "the perfect time".

He says he has not missed gruelling pre-season training drills, but admits to "a hint of sadness" because "that's a big part of my life that I'm going to miss being involved in".

"I wanted to decide when I finished on my own terms," he says. "And I don't think you can say there's any better place to finish than at the World Cup."

So are his family relieved? Last year, Taylor told BBC Sport they no longer went to his matches because of the abuse he received, and spoke about how they were targeted by Roma fans in Budapest Airport after the 2023 Europa League final.

"Undoubtedly one of the things that you are considering are the serious sacrifices that both your family and your friends have made over the years for you to do what you do," he says.

"Family life takes a back seat… so, for sure, that was a big part of why I decided to step back.

"It was in combination with... the scrutiny and the demands placed on referees at the very top level. And that doesn't necessarily mean that you're struggling to cope with those demands, but it comes to a point where it feels that your body and your mind needs to take a break from those kind of pressures."

Taylor has stayed off social media in recent years, but admits there is a limit to avoiding the scrutiny.

"Even away from social media, the general coverage of football these days is 24/7," he says. "So there's a lot more mediums for you to discover what people think about what happened last weekend.

"It's not always negative feedback when you come across fans and people when you're travelling around the country. But it is like you are living in a goldfish bowl for 10 months of the year."

How ex-officials add to 'culture of fear'

Taylor says the scrutiny on officials is "off the scale", and much of that is from "people in the media looking for things to scrutinise, whether that be fairly or unfairly". He describes it as a "big snowball effect".

Does it disappoint him that includes former match officials?

"Yes, it does personally, because it doesn't have any balance to it a lot of the time," he says.

"It's just part of the focus that comes with football. When we're dealing with supposedly objective analysis of matches, whether that be an expert ex-player in a studio or an ex-referee, that should be balanced and fair.

"If it's all one-sided criticism, that creates a culture of fear, disrespect, shame.

"There's a thirst for people to be told: 'Is the decision right or wrong?' And the reality in football is there's a lot of subjectivity and opinion in the middle of right and wrong. But that's not acceptable a lot of the time now."

Asked if that means he will not go into the media, he adds: "I would never feel like I would be wanting to be in a place where I want to criticise somebody, because I'd like to think I've got a very good understanding of why somebody's made a decision that they've made.

"Of course, a wrong decision can be made. Nobody really chooses to understand the reasoning why.

"I feel my skills and my passion are better suited to trying to pass on that knowledge and experience I've been lucky enough to accumulate over the years."

Asked about allegations of favouritism during the World Cup involving other teams and referees, Taylor said: "It always saddens me when someone's integrity is questioned and they receive threats.

"[The] result of a football match is multifaceted. Of course, referee decisions are part of that, but we have players who have a low passing accuracy. We have players who miss penalties. We have coaches who maybe make the wrong tactical changes or the wrong team selection.

"So there's a huge range of factors that play into a result of the game. So I think it's probably important that people just need to remember that."

Helping Turkish referees after betting scandal

Taylor will be trying to pass on his knowledge and experience in Turkey, where he has been appointed director of elite refereeing for the country's football federation.

He will take up that role in the wake of a major refereeing scandal in the country, with a five-year investigation finding 371 of 571 match officials had betting accounts.

Asked how he can help the federation move on, Taylor says: "The main focus, working together with the president and chairman, is on helping the officials - particularly the younger officials in the group - develop, build that resilience, build a better skillset to cope with those demanding matches, and really to drive improvement of standards in that respect and that's the central aim of my role there.

"The role, in a nutshell, is about improving standards for the top-level group of officials in Turkey, along with helping them develop their talent ID programme and also helping their international referees improve, get better, more high-profile appointments. Which is something that excites me.

"I'm very privileged that people hold my experience and knowledge in such high regard that they think I can make such a positive impact.

'VAR not for microscopic checks'

While Taylor says his biggest regret is never having the chance to take charge of a Champions League final, he relished officiating at his second World Cup, though he found officiating in the extreme heat of Dallas "brutal".

Once again, VAR proved controversial at the tournament, with four new areas covered by the system.

"Anything to do with VAR is good when we're talking about increasing the overall accuracy of decision-making," says Taylor.

"But we also need to remember that VAR is there to create a sense of justice, so [for] the big clear errors, and it's not there for microscopic, long-detail checks. And that's probably where everybody's trying to work even harder to get to, particularly this coming season.

"I think if we continue to focus on not being microscopic and not being too long in checking situations, where we're only using really clear evidence of an error being made, then... yeah, I think people will start to accept and trust the process more."

Asked if it was being used too often, Taylor says: "I think most people agree that does happen on occasions, so it's very sensible for us to say that and acknowledge that sometimes things are taking too long, and we're being too microscopic.

"We don't need to take too long looking at stuff, and we need to act on really clear visual evidence to intervene and change the decision." %!s()

Take wage gains for the typical worker in the 25th percentile. Some will call them “Main Street” workers, but whatever the description we should just report it as is: their year-over-year earnings are up 5.5%.

On its own this is good news, but it becomes even better news once compounding is factored in. Assuming a marginal propensity to save even a portion of the increases, there’s the potential for much bigger dividends over the long-term given the meaning of a dollar or thousands of dollars put to work today relative to what they’ll be decades from now.

Which is ideally the point that media analysis would focus on: there’s no frontier to American ingenuity. The latter is a wage story. Think about it.

Amazing as the present is, including AI prompts that will do more for the typical American than wildly expensive Bloomberg terminals once did for the richest of rich Americans, it’s a pale imitation of what it will be.

Said another way, the supercomputer you hold in your hand as you read this will soon enough have museum-like qualities. That’s the pace of innovation today. Everything we enjoy, no matter how powerful our enjoyment, is in a very real sense a look backwards.

Take Google searches. For the longest time Google has been a noun, verb and adjective, which is a rare but coveted business distinction. Yet a visit to Google in 2026 is profoundly different from the same visit in 2022, let alone 2002. Readers know why.

MORE FOR YOU

Just as Google had seemingly reached the frontier of costless data gathering for the typical person, OpenAI released ChatGPT. In doing so, it thoroughly altered the meaning of search and its potential. Rest assured that a transformed search process that renders 2022 another century relative to 2026 will soon enough have highly dated qualities too.

Please keep this in mind with wage increases in mind. The ability to save for a better tomorrow has been turbocharged by the innovation that touches all income strata in the United States.

Thanks to the democratization of access to the stock market (Vanguard’s index funds have over $12 trillion in investor savings), every American can expose increases in savings to the world’s most intrepid minds. Which means that 5.5% increases in wages can’t simply be viewed through the prism of great near-term news. Instead, they once again must be viewed through a long-term lens of dollars gradually compounding.

What’s important here is that investment begets more of it. And with it an increasingly universal notion for Americans and the world (Vanguard has $1 trillion worth of foreign savings) to place their savings in the most innovative nation in the world, the range of ways that Americans can earn and work are poised to grow. Translated, a 5.5% leap is just the beginning.

This truth can be found in the stock market itself. An information machine, it’s also a look ahead. And it’s non-partisan.

While media analysis of the economy is as mentioned an increasingly political concept, stock markets are a non-partisan look at the present and future. Love or hate Donald Trump, the S&P 500 is up 35% since the vote in 2024, and 28% since his inauguration.

About the buoyant markets, it’s worth remembering that there are no corporations, no innovations, and no jobs without investment first. Healthy stock markets signal even more investment begetting even higher wages.

Will typical analysis pounce on the above truth? Don’t bet on it, but do bet that 5.5% increases will soon enough have dated qualities too thanks to progress. Would it that media analysis would capture what stock markets keep communicating over the noise of politics. %!s()

The Israeli military’s systematic reshaping of the urban landscape comes against a backdrop of a staggering human toll, with at least 73,387 Palestinians – mostly children and women – killed since Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza began in October 2023.

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This removal of rubble could be an attempt at demographic engineering and erasing evidence of the genocide, the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor has said, in a report entitled Gaza Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment.

Obliterating the truth

The report estimates that there are approximately 68 million tonnes of rubble across the Gaza Strip, much of the result of Israel’s ongoing genocidal war on the enclave.

At least 10 million tonnes of rubble have already been removed, crushed or moved from their original sites within areas under Israel’s unlawful military control, which encompass about two-thirds of the enclave.

About 400 heavy pieces of excavation, crushing and transport machinery are also working to demolish the remaining structures in Gaza.

Debris is being loaded onto nearly 100 Israeli trucks daily, which are leaving the Gaza Strip for undisclosed sites within Israel and the occupied West Bank.

Budour Hassan, a researcher at Amnesty International, told Al Jazeera that this could be a calculated attempt to destroy evidence of crimes committed by Israel during the war.

“The bulldozing is an integral part of all attempts to destroy the lands in Gaza City and in the Gaza Strip in general,” Hassan said.

“The real fears are that these operations are taking place with the aim of obliterating and hiding evidence.”

Preventing access to evidence of crimes is a direct challenge to the International Court of Justice, Hassan said. The ICJ is currently overseeing a genocide case against Israel brought by South Africa and supported by numerous other nations.

“The occupation systematically works to obliterate evidence and destroy the features of the crime,” she added.

Mohammed Salha, director of the NGO Network in the Gaza Strip, believes the debris being moved out of the enclave contains missile fragments, ammunition, and personal belongings – crucial for future accountability.

“The occupation is moving the rubble, fragmenting it, and moving it into the Green Line to obliterate the evidence and facts,” Salha told Al Jazeera.

“Naturally, there are thousands of martyrs under this rubble, and moving this rubble with their remains means a deliberate destruction of the crime scene that contains the basic evidence that exposes the occupation’s commission of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.”

Urban engineering

The mass removal of rubble could serve a distinct military and colonial purpose. Euro-Med Monitor reported that the large-scale crushing and removal of rubble destroys land boundaries, house foundations and street networks, stripping Palestinians of the physical markers of ownership and deepening ethnic cleansing in Gaza. This sets the stage for efforts to re-establish Israeli settlements in Gaza.

Retired Brigadier General Elias Hanna, a military and strategic expert, explained to Al Jazeera how geography is being used against the population as an extreme form of collective punishment.

“The building and the geographical area have become part of the battle and part of the weapon itself,” Hanna said.

“When the Israeli enemy destroys and bulldozes, this bulldozing falls within the policy of collective punishment; that is, you create a new urban engineering and a new phase and a different shape for the social and security environment to punish those who resist and punish the civilian incubator at the same time,” Hanna said.

This strategy of urban engineering aims to permanently alter the ecosystem of the enclave by preventing the return of Palestinians to their homes and making the destroyed areas in Gaza unliveable or unbuildable, Hanna added.

The daily tragedy

The removal of ruins also means that the bodies of missing people, estimated by Gaza’s civil defence in July 2026 to number about 8,500, could be gone forever.

Using heavy machinery without prior forensic surveys risks crushing or scattering these remains, severely infringing on the rights of families to know the fate of their relatives.

Abu Asim, a Palestinian citizen whose family members remain buried in the eastern areas of the Gaza Strip, now designated as behind a military “Yellow Line“, shared his agony with Al Jazeera.

“My family’s story is that their body parts were scattered in the streets, and some of them are still to this day under the rubble of the house, and their remains have not been brought out,” he said.

“We lost them, and the first tragedy was their martyrdom, and the second and daily tragedy is the absence of these graves and the absence of the evidence with which we will try this occupation for these crimes and atrocities.”

Rescue efforts have been entirely paralysed in areas seized by the Israeli military.

Samir al-Mana’ama, a lawyer with the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, told Al Jazeera that during the war, Israeli authorities seized an area of approximately 70 percent of the eastern Gaza Strip.

“[The Israeli military is] preventing the access of rescue crews to recover the bodies of the martyrs, and it is also tampering with the rubble areas and moving them from one place to another, which leads to a clear and explicit violation of the provisions of international humanitarian law and international human rights law,” al-Mana’ama told Al Jazeera.

Raed al-Dahshan, the director of civil defence in Gaza, highlighted the impossibility of their mission.

“In the available areas where we move now, things are very difficult and complex,” he told Al Jazeera. “So how about the situation if the matter requires coordination to enter the areas located inside the Yellow Line, which requires special equipment, coordination, and securing … the nature of our work there.”

Even known resting places of the dead have not been spared, Salha said, with historical burial sites included in this campaign of erasure.

“Reports and human rights documentation state that the occupation completely or partially destroyed more than 93 percent of the cemeteries in the Gaza Strip,” Salha said. “Neither stone, nor human beings, nor even the dead in their graves have been spared from the occupation.” %!s()