On April 22, 2026, Merck & Co Inc MRK announced a significant partnership with Google Cloud, valued at up to $1 billion, aimed at transforming its operations into an AI-driven enterprise. This multi-year agreement will leverage Google Cloud's platforms, including Gemini Enterprise, to enhance productivity for Merck's workforce of over 75,000 employees.
https://www.gurufocus.com/news/8810093/merck-mrk-partners-with-google-cloud-for-1b-ai-initiative
By Tsvetana Paraskova of OilPrice.com
Iran continues to export its oil out of the Persian Gulf via the Strait of Hormuz using dark mode on tankers to move past the US blockade outside the world’s most vital oil chokepoint.
At least two Iran-flagged supertankers fully laden with an estimated about 4 million barrels of crude have exited the Gulf via the Strait of Hormuz and through the U.S. blockade, Bloomberg reports, citing satellite imagery analyzed by energy flows intelligence firm Vortexa.
The two Iranian very large crude carriers have been detected by satellite images as they had turned off their transponders and AIS positioning weeks ago. One of the supertankers, the Hero II, last transmitted a signal more than a month ago, with position in the Malacca Strait, data on MarineTraffic showed. The other VLCC, the Hedy, was last detected by AIS transponders around the same area near Malaysia and Singapore more than 70 days ago.
Various vessel-tracking and maritime intelligence firms say that Iran continues to export its oil and move tankers past the U.S. blockade, by increasingly using dark activity and signal spoofing tactics.
Earlier this week, an Iranian supertanker, which had delivered 2 million barrels of crude to a ship-to-ship transfer offshore Indonesia, was en route to return to Iran’s Kharg Island after entering the Strait of Hormuz through the U.S. blockade.
An Iran-owned VLCC departed Iran in late March 2026 and traveled to the Riau Archipelago in Indonesia, where she transferred 2 million barrels of crude oil to another VLCC, according to vessel monitoring data by TankerTrackers.com.
“Iranian flows continue via deception, including dark activity and ship-to-ship transfers,” maritime intelligence firm Windward said in a daily note on Tuesday.
“Iranian maritime trade remains active, but increasingly reliant on deceptive shipping practices and alternative routing strategies. New intelligence indicates potential shifts east of Hormuz, suggesting that pressure in the Gulf is driving adaptation rather than halting flows.”
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/irans-covert-oil-trade-persists-tankers-breach-us-blockade
by Aldgra Fredly via The Epoch Times,
U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said on April 21 the department requires $10 billion in additional funding from Congress to overhaul the nation’s air traffic control with a new software system.
Duffy told Reuters in an interview that the additional funding would go toward developing new software aimed at improving the efficiency of air travel and reducing flight delays.
“This tool lets us see and then spread flights in a way that allows for way less disruption,” he told the news outlet. “We could fix this.”
Congress allocated $12.5 billion last year under the One Big Beautiful Bill to upgrade air traffic control infrastructure and equipment to enhance aviation safety. At an April 21 event, Duffy provided an update on the project, saying it is expected to be completed in about two and a half years.
Duffy said the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has replaced nearly 50 percent of copper wires, converted 270 radio sites nationwide, installed new surface awareness systems at 54 airports, and transitioned 17 towers to electronic flight strips using the allocated budget from Congress.
“We are going to need more money for the software side of this build,” he said at the event.
“Congress is ... going to have to find a pathway to get us the rest of that money. It’s going to take us time to develop it, deploy it, debug it, train on it. And so getting that software started now, hopefully as our build completes with all of the infrastructure, we will have the technology of the software ready to meet up in two and a half years and have a brand new system for America to use.”
The Transportation Department said in January the overhaul would involve launching an airspace modernization office to oversee the installation of a new air traffic control system and creation of an advanced aviation technologies office to oversee the integration of drones and other air mobility vehicles into U.S. airspace.
The FAA will also move more key leadership posts to permanent roles and consolidate management of finance, information technology, and human resources under the administrator, according to the Transportation Department, adding that the restructuring will not lead to workforce reductions.
Multiple safety-related incidents happened at airports over the past year due to equipment issues. In May 2025, air traffic controllers in Denver were forced to switch to emergency backup frequencies after they lost contact with aircraft for about 90 seconds. The controllers had to use emergency backup because both primary and main backup frequencies went down.
Another incident took place in late April 2025, when controllers overseeing Newark Liberty International Airport lost contact with planes for about 30 seconds, leading to flight delays.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Wednesday that many Persian Gulf allies along with a number of Asian nations have requested foreign exchange swap lines with the US, and pointed to the potential for such arrangements to support dollar-denominated lending overseas.
“Many of our Gulf allies have requested swap lines,” Bessent said in answering questions at a Senate Appropriations subcommittee, a day after President Donald Trump confirmed that a currency swap with the oil-rich United Arab Emirates was under consideration. “Numerous other countries, including some of our Asian allies, have also requested them.”
President Trump signed five presidential determinations under Section 303 of the Defense Production Act on Monday. All five declare critical energy capacities essential to national defense and authorize federal purchases, commitments, and financing to cut through financing shortages, permitting delays, and supply chain choke points.
Any mention of renewables are noticeably absent, as the administration has been pounding the table on the reliability of coal and natural gas, especially through the recent winter storm...
"Sleep Tight, America. We Got This": NatGas And Coal Power Plants Prevented Grid Collapse During Historic Winter Blast https://t.co/CvAfdeiwts
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) January 27, 2026
They sit under the national energy emergency we flagged back in January 2025. The moves target fossil fuel production and the infrastructure that actually moves power, while nuclear and geothermal get their own lanes.
Section 303 of the DPA allows the government to act as the financial support for these industries due to the administration’s interpretation that the private sector can't do it on their own.
Domestic Petroleum Production, Refining, And Logistics Capacity
This determination covers exploration, production, refining, gathering and transmission pipelines, storage, and marine terminals. DPA authorities now back projects to secure jet fuel, diesel, and gasoline for the military and industrial base, cutting reliance on foreign suppliers that have weaponized energy in the past.
Coal Supply Chains And Baseload Power Generation Capacity
Coal mining, rail and barge transport, terminals, on site stockpiles, and plant life extensions all get the treatment. The memo stresses that baseload coal power remains irreplaceable for defense installations and the exploding electricity demand from AI and manufacturing. Federal support will speed maintenance and logistics that markets alone have left stalled.
Natural Gas Transmission, Processing, Storage, And LNG Capacity
Pipelines, compression, processing plants, underground storage, LNG liquefaction, and export facilities fall under this one. The goal is steady domestic supply plus stronger exports to allies. Long lead times for equipment and construction are the stated problem.
Development, Manufacturing, And Deployment Of Large Scale Energy And Energy Related Infrastructure
This broader determination is for engineering, site acquisition, permitting, early stage financing, and domestic manufacturing capacity for large energy projects. It removes the capital and regulatory friction that has slowed big builds across the sector, creating a practical foundation for faster scaling wherever the need is greatest.
Grid Infrastructure, Equipment, And Supply Chain Capacity
Transformers, transmission lines, substations, high voltage breakers, power electronics, and the full upstream supply chain are targeted here. Aging equipment, foreign dependence, and slow domestic output threaten reliability. The action backs US manufacturing to harden the grid that must carry power from every source.
Nuclear and Geothermal
As we have tracked since the May 2025 executive orders, the nuclear fuel supply chain is already moving under its own DPA Consortium and related authorities, with the explicit target of quadrupling US nuclear output by 2050.
Geothermal development was also left out of today's batch. It too appears to be advancing on its own parallel track through existing federal programs and private sector momentum that do not require another layer of Section 303 intervention right now.
These efforts could benefit from the expanded DPA authorities granted to Energy Secretary Chris Wright on March 13, 2026. In an amendment to the National Defense Resources Preparedness executive order, President Trump delegated additional powers directly to the Energy Department, enabling Wright to invoke Section 303 authorities swiftly to restart critical domestic oil infrastructure and counter supply disruptions caused by the war. That same streamlined authority now positions Wright to accelerate implementation of yesterday's five determinations.
https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/trump-deploys-five-defense-production-act-memos-american-energy
The shares had plunged more than 60% following the April 10 Complete Response Letter—the second denial for the melanoma immunotherapy despite an initial advisory committee vote in favor—and subsequent announcements of substantial layoffs (escalating to over 200 positions in Massachusetts). Yesterday’s close near $1.86 reflected sustained pressure near all-time lows. Publication of the high-profile Wall Street Journal opinion piece, which detailed clinician frustration, highlighted inconsistencies in agency and political statements, and framed the decision as overly rigid, generated widespread media pickup and debate. This renewed visibility, combined with elevated call option activity and trading volume exceeding 10 million shares, triggered speculative buying and short covering in the heavily sold name. No new clinical data or company announcement occurred.
These days, we're overwhelmed with data.
Every chart on every patient is packed full of data -- some of it incredibly useful and important, some of it just a lot of noise, some of it just copy-and-pasted and brought forward from the last note, and the one before that, and the one before that. Figuring out how to tame all this data is going to be critical as we move forward, and certainly smart systems that can see the forest for the trees will prove to be helpful in the not-too-distant future.
Our patients are doing a lot more self-monitoring. They're showing up for appointments with data from their smart watches, rings, scales, home blood pressure monitors, continuous glucose monitors, and more. They're going online and asking health-related questions of different AI systems, to find out what may be causing their symptoms, and what evaluations they should undergo.
Now, as you can see from the image below, patients are even able to get lab testing done without a doctor's prescription, with no one to explain what the results mean to them, or even if these were the right tests to get in the first place.
(Note the recent handwritten increase in the cost of a rapid COVID-19 PCR test to $249!)
Our patients are going to urgent care centers and emergency rooms and specialists' offices, getting reams and reams of testing done. Their insurance companies are sending homecare agencies to visit them to test them, to screen them, to generate more and more data to help inform them about their health (and help the companies maximize their health risk categorization). This often creates more work for us with all this data.
As I wrote recently, when patients arrive in our office, they update their demographic information and are then presented with a series of questionnaires that they're expected to answer, all of which generates data. And they've been interacting with the world out there, leading to claims on their insurance, which leads to still more data.
And then they come to see us for their very brief -- all too brief -- office visits, where we're expected to address their acute and chronic medical conditions, the list of symptoms and complaints they been saving up for us, and we're supposed to hunt down the answers to all of these other things, and hopefully make good use of all this data out there.
It feels like we all need a bigger peripheral brain, a better medical assistant helping us out, someone (something?) to corral all this stuff and put it in the right place, put it in the right order, and help us make sense of it all. Someday soon I hope that we will get to do more listening to our patients, more time for holding their hands, focus more on examining them, more on letting them turn to us for support and more doctoring. And that smarter systems will be in place to help grab all this data, line it up just right, and help us make sense of it all, to make sure nothing bad slips through the cracks.
If the electronic medical record says they're overdue for a mammogram, but there's a claim against their insurance for this year's mammogram that was done at an outside radiology facility, someone, or something, needs to reconcile those two things. If the trend in the data on their home blood pressure monitor or continuous glucose monitor or smart scale or sleep ring is suggestive of a particular medical condition, something should help us sift through all this stuff and bring it directly to everybody's attention in a timely manner.
And if that huge ream of paper they brought in to their visit, records from their prior physicians or a hospitalization that they had printed out for us, contains a hidden pearl, gem, or nugget, something we need to make sure doesn't get missed or ignored, that's when we need systems smart enough to read through all that and separate the useful data from the noise.
Maybe buried deep within those xeroxed pages is a report from the radiologist with a finding that warrants followup -- the thing that points us in the right direction. Maybe the combination of one of their answers to one of the questionnaires, coupled with a lab report from the last visit, cross-referenced to something they said during our history of present illness today, will point us to the answer.
We all wish we had all the time in the world to spend on every patient. We've all seen the studies that show how many hours we need in a day to take care of all the patients we see already.
In this new world of patient-centered care, with improved remote monitoring, with new sources of data that we're going to collect on our patients, maybe even in ways we haven't even dreamed of yet, the amount of stuff we will need to pay attention to is only going to rise exponentially. In some not-too-distant future, perhaps all our patients, maybe even everyone in society for that matter, will be continuously monitored for everything, and there won't be a single thing that won't get caught, won't get found early, won't get nipped in the bud. But that's a lot of data, that's a lot of watching, that's a lot of synthesizing that even the best of the best doesn't have the bandwidth for.
For now, it often feels like we're treading water, trying to keep from sinking, trying to keep ourselves and our patients from being inundated with all the questions we ask and all the answers we get.
It's likely right there in the data, we just need to get it all in, and then get it all out.
Fred Pelzman is an associate professor of medicine at Weill Cornell, and has been a practicing internist for nearly 30 years. He is medical director of Weill Cornell Internal Medicine Associates.
https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/patientcenteredmedicalhome/120906
