When Trump and Netanyahu started this war, much of the attention in the business world was focused on the price of crude oil (Brent, WTI) and the derivative products (gasoline, diesel, fertilizer, plastics). When the Strait was closed and then reopened via the MOU, prices fluctuated accordingly, but what has been of most interest to me is that the market prices of those materials have not continued to rise as much as might be expected.
Everyone who tracks the news knows that the U.S. and other countries are tapping their "strategic petroleum reserves" stored underground (some small countries don't have such and are suffering disproportionately).
The second group of factors that mitigated price rises was increased use of alternative energy, restrictions on energy usage, increased production in non-Gulf nations etc.
But from near the beginning, I heard analysts on Bloomberg say that China was modifying its policy on oil. China apparently has immense reserves of stored oil, but were still net oil importers (see chart above for 2016-2026). After the war started, they have markedly decreased their importation of oil, apparently using some of their reserves and altering domestic policies toward conservation.
Why? In part, it's basic economic good sense when the Brent price goes from 50 to 90 to cut purchases. But this is a super-smart country with well-thought-out international policies. They also have a sort of alliance with Iran, which I believe was one of their sources for imported oil in recent years. By cutting their daily imports from 12 million to 7 million they buffer the world's loss of I think 5 million a day that was passing Hormuz.
Is it in their best interest (remembering that they think years/decades in advance, not election cycles) to keep the oil price rise modest so as not to harm the economies of the world they export to? Or do they want to keep the price down because a huge price rise might cause the U.S. to stop the war and they would rather the war go on longer so the U.S. depletes its own reserves and the continuation of the war leads to more and more destruction of the U.S. military capabilities? I suspect the latter, because I think there is way more erosion of U.S. capabilites in the Gulf than Washington has (or will) admit.
Also note that Iran wants to charge fees for transit of Hormuz and that those fees would be paid in Chinese yuan, not U.S. dollars. (a relevant WSJ article is behind a paywall) This was is weakening the U.S. military capabilities, depleting strategic petroleum reserves, ruining the U.S. diplomatic status around the world, and causing unhappiness and political dissent within the U.S. China has a lot of control over how this will unfold. Stay tuned.
A US government map of Africa mislabeled every country during a state department presentation at a global conference in Brazil this week, causing a stir among attenders who took screenshots and posted them online.
Reuters viewed a video of the presentation given at the Aids 2026 conference in Rio de Janeiro, which shows the errant map displayed halfway during a presentation about the state department’s new health agreements.
A Reuters analysis found the image of the map included in the presentation contained an artificial intelligence watermark that signals it was made with OpenAI tools. The company did not respond to a request for comment.
The state department said it took “full responsibility” for the confusion caused and that the map had been produced by a team member who hastily changed the slide deck before the event.
The map showed Nigeria, where the US currently has several hundred troops deployed, as landlocked in the Sahara desert. Mozambique, which is in south-eastern Africa, was relocated to the Horn of Africa, while Côte d’Ivoire in west Africa was placed on the other side of the continent.
Screenshots of the map first appeared in a Substack post by the Aids expert Emily Bass and were widely shared on LinkedIn, with one post garnering about 40,000 views.
“Whoever created and approved this slide did not know where countries in Africa are and did not care to check their work,” wrote Matt Petit, who focuses on AI and geopolitics at the Atlantic Council, in the post.
In a statement, the state department said: “We take full responsibility for the confusion and misrepresentation it caused for attendees, including our African partners.” The speaker at the conference was Jeff Graham, the top US health envoy who oversees the initiative known as the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief, or Pepfar. He did not reply to requests for comment.
The state department said the discussions at the conference were “substantive and constructive” despite the map and that it remained committed to fighting Aids with real results. The Trump administration’s decision last year to pause funding pending a review disrupted aid programs worldwide but Pepfar’s core work such as the provision of life-saving drugs has largely resumed. The US is scaling back other areas of its spending including on prevention and surveillance, and plans to fully phase out the program in South Africa.
UPDATED, with response of Google Tonight I typed just one sentence into Google Earth and put refugees near the Mexican border. Then I planted a nuclear plant in Iran. Then I put a fatal crash on a street in Amsterdam. Google’s own satellite imagery underneath all three. What on earth is Google doing?
Google spent twenty years building the reference the world checks against.
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Today it added a button that makes things up. Google Earth on the web now has image generation built in, powered by Nano Banana 2. It went live today, worldwide, for everyone, with no waitlist and no application.
You open Google Earth. You zoom to any coordinates on the planet. You click create image. You type what you want to see. The model takes Google’s satellite, aerial and 3D imagery of that exact spot as its starting point and gives you back a photorealistic picture. If it isn’t quite right you refine it.
I added a hospital and a bomb crater in Gaza in seconds with Google Earth. I can’t believe I just typed this.
Google’s own description of the “fun feature” is that Nano Banana “creates concepts grounded in the real world.”
Grounded in the real world means the invented thing is welded to genuine coordinates, drawn on genuine imagery, often in the same colours and the same light and at the same angle as the picture beside it.
The forgery does not have to look convincing on its own. It inherits the credibility of the map it was born on.
The announcement of 487 words, written by Bryan Horowitz, Product Manager, Google Earth from just a few hours ago baffled me. His instruction to the planet is six words long:
type whatever you want to see
That is the gate. That is the whole gate.
Elsewhere in the same post he suggests it’s fun to let your imagination run wild.
The post opens by asking whether you have ever looked at an empty lot in your neighbourhood and imagined a community garden. It closes by telling you to pick a spot on the map and start bringing your ideas to life.
It is live in every country tonight. Free. No application.
Somebody is going to bring an idea to life before morning. It will not be a community garden, trust me.
This new feature will guaranteed lead to governments, factions fighting infowars, trolls etc.
A government official wants a strike to look bigger than it was. A faction wants a hospital to look flattened, or intact, depending which one is holding it this week. A troll wants forty thousand reposts before lunch.
This morning all three needed a screenshot, a second browser tab and a little patience. Tonight they need a sentence.
We take misinformation seriously - every image created with Nano Banana in Google Earth includes the SynthID digital watermark, so if someone is unsure about an image, they can ask the Gemini app or use Lens in Search to see if the image was Al-generated. In addition, we prevent image creation on harmful topics and are continually updating our protections.
One clause in there is checkable tonight, so I checked it. Google prevents image creation on harmful topics. Refugees at a border. A nuclear plant in Iran. A fatal crash on an Amsterdam street. A hospital with a bomb crater in Gaza.
Nothing was refused. No warning, no softened output, no suggestion to try a different prompt.
Now look at the rest of the answer. The watermark is Google’s. The app that reads the watermark is Google’s. The search that reads it is Google’s. Every road out of the problem runs back through the company that built it.
I understand that Google has Google products to run Google checks. Planet Earth is bigger than Google.
I put one of tonight’s clips on X and asked nobody to check it. Hive, one of the biggest names in AI detection outside Google, scanned the post on its own and published a verdict underneath.
It's a strange world.... the fake image is not seen as fake, but there is some fake sound in a clip that has no sound at all.
The video came out of Google’s model minutes earlier. The audio track is silence — I measured it. Minus 91 decibels, first frame to last.
The only thing Hive found suspicious was music that does not exist.
Hive has a defence and it is a fair one, so let me make it before they do. What I posted was a screen recording, and a recording of a screen is a real recording.
That defence is the problem, not the excuse.
Fakes do not travel as clean files with their credentials intact. They travel as screen recordings, re-encodes, screenshots of screenshots, filmed off somebody’s phone in a hurry. The one case where the detector has an excuse is the only case that ever happens.
Google’s answer works if the image reaches you through Google, unaltered, and you already suspected it.
That is not how any of this arrives.
There is another problem that Google doesn’t count. The official who now gets to look at a genuine photograph of a genuine atrocity and say: AI.
He doesn’t need the tool for that. He needs everyone to know the tool exists.
If you have never verified anything in your life, here is why a less playfull mapping app matters.
When a photograph turns up online claiming to show a bombed hospital, a refugee camp or a burning refinery, somebody has to decide whether it’s true before a newspaper prints it. What they have is a reference — a picture of that same place, taken from above or from the street, that everybody agrees is real.
They put the claim next to the reference and they look at the gap.
Google built that reference and it is not a small thing. Street View passed 10 million miles of road in 2019. It now holds more than 280 billion images across over 110 countries. Google Earth turned twenty this year. Between them they are a photographic record of the physical world, and — this is the part that matters — every frame of it is dated.
Dated is the whole trick. If you know when the picture was taken, you can prove when something appeared.
In July 2014 the Russian Ministry of Defence held a press conference and produced satellite images about the downing of MH17. Bellingcat compared them against the dated archive in Google Earth and found the landscape didn’t match the dates claimed. The MoD images were fabricated.
Bellingcat published the walkthrough under the headline Who to Trust, Google or the Russian MoD?
In 2015, that was a rhetorical question. Not anymore.
Volkel
There is a village in North Brabant, ninety minutes from my desk, called Volkel. It has an air base. That air base stores American B61 nuclear bombs, a fact the Dutch government has never confirmed, which became public through a leaked diplomatic cable and was later described by a former Dutch prime minister as absolutely pointless.
On Google’s maps, Volkel spent years as a rash of coloured pixels. So did the ammunition depot at Staphorst. So did a Patriot missile site in Limburg, and several royal palaces, because the Dutch approach to hiding a military installation was to paint a large abstract artwork on top of it. The photographer Mishka Henner collected them into a gallery and sold them as art, which tells you how well the hiding worked.
Tonight it is all in the open, and anyone who wants a missile site in Limburg can simply add one.
Now notice what that entire twenty-year argument assumed.
You only censor a map that works. Every blur, every polygon, every diplomatic request was an admission that Google Earth was accurate enough to be dangerous. Governments were not worried the map would lie. They were worried it would tell the truth.
Google’s position never wavered. It does not blur satellite imagery by choice. Sites come pre-obscured because a government or a supplier requires it as a condition of flying over.
So to take one real building out of Google Earth, you need a state.
To put a nuclear plant into Iran, I needed a sentence.
The asymmetry is not meant to be funny. For twenty years the danger was a map that revealed something true, and there was a procedure for that — a law, a ministry, a condition on the overflight permit. Tonight the danger is a map that shows something which was never there, and for that there is no procedure at all.
The cars nobody moved
Somebody already did the hard version of what I did tonight.
In February 2025 a Google Earth satellite pass photographed a parking lot at the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters in Manama, Bahrain. Ordinary cars, ordinary rows.
A year later those cars were on X, in a photograph of the same base supposedly flattened by an Iranian drone strike.
Same cars. Same rows. Same spaces, vehicle for vehicle.
Somebody generated a war zone and forgot to move the Toyotas.
The Tehran Times posted it as a before-and-after of a US radar site in Qatar. It was not Qatar. It was Bahrain. The “before” was a genuine Google Earth capture from 10 February 2025. The “after” was made with Google AI — AFP and BBC Verify both ran it through Google’s signature detector and got a hit. It passed 950,000 views before anyone counted the parking spaces.
Building it took six steps. Screenshot Earth. Open Gemini. Upload. Prompt. Download. Crop. Six chances to get bored, and one forger who got bored at the parking lot.
Tonight, Manama can be changed in seconds with Nano Banana.
How to fight this?
Upload a suspicious satellite image to Gemini, ad @verifyai and it will tell you if Google is behind the forgery.
Adjudicate off Google entirely. Sentinel-2 is free and refreshes every five or six days. Landsat, Planet, Airbus, Vantor. You want a sensor with an orbit, a collection time and a resolution you can check.
Take two collects. Todd Myers at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency said it before any of this existed: for every collect, you need a duplicate collect from different sources.
Check the orbit. If an image claims a specific satellite at a specific hour, the published orbital elements will tell you whether anything was up there. The most boring check in the toolkit, and the only one no model can fake, because it isn’t about the pixels.
Disclosure
I build ImageWhisperer. Google technology is part of it, not the whole of it. No single score is ever the finding.
Digital Digging with Henk van Ess is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
“The Blizzard of 2026 certainly achieved a pinnacle ranking in the memories of those who experienced it and climatologically in the historical rankings of snowstorms,” said a NOAA report confirming Rhode Island met the requirement for disaster aid.
Presidents retain sole authority over granting federal disaster aid to states, but it’s highly unusual to deny a governor’s request after FEMA field offices have verified that damage estimates exceeded preestablished levels, according to a former agency official who worked under Republican and Democratic administrations.
“I can’t think of a time a declaration was denied” for a state that met FEMA and NOAA standards, said the former FEMA official who was granted anonymity to speak about internal decision making.
The emails and documents, which haven’t previously been reported, shed new light on Trump’s decisions to reject an overwhelming number of requests for disaster aid from Democratic-led states, even as he has approved nearly 90 percent of requests from states that are governed by members of his own party. The revelations also offer a fuller picture of Trump’s tenure over the most partisan distribution of FEMA aid since the agency was created in 1979.
Trump’s recent rejections involving snow diverge from the actions of other presidents, including Trump in his first term, who routinely approved similar requests from governors of opposing parties.
Presidents since George W. Bush approved all 69 state requests for snow assistance that met FEMA standards except for a 2016 request from New Mexico, which was being investigated for mishandling FEMA funds, according to a POLITICO analysis of agency records.
The four states sought $227 million in aid altogether after the paralyzing February storm dumped record snowfall over areas of the East Coast, leading to unprecedented snow-removal costs. POLITICO obtained the emails and state documents through open records requests submitted to New Jersey, Rhode Island and Massachusetts. New York officials said federal agencies also validated their request for aid, but POLITICO could not independently confirm that.
President Donald Trump arrives at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, on Monday. | Alex Brandon/AP
The Trump administration defended its denials. Neither FEMA or a White House spokesperson answered questions about why the states’ requests were rejected after meeting federal thresholds that historically have triggered the disbursement of aid.
“There is no politicization to the President’s decisions on disaster relief,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement. Trump handles disaster requests “with great care” to ensure state aid is used “to supplement — not substitute, their obligation to respond to and recover from disasters.”
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