Israel’s defense minister announced Thursday that Alireza Tangsiri, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy, was killed in an Israeli airstrike. Tangsiri was the officer most directly responsible for Iran’s de facto blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, the passage through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil supply moves on any given day. Israel didn’t provide details about the timing or location of the strike. Iran, as of Thursday afternoon, hadn’t confirmed or denied his death, according to the New York Times.

The strike came on a day when both sides intensified military operations. Israel launched a wave of strikes targeting Iranian infrastructure, and Iran fired missiles at central Israel, NPR reported. President Trump told reporters Thursday that Iran wants to make a deal. Iranian officials have publicly rejected the American peace proposal while signaling they remain open to negotiations, a distinction that matters more than it might appear. The United States sent Iran a 15-point peace plan through Pakistani intermediaries earlier this week, the New York Times reported, even as the Pentagon prepared to deploy 2,000 paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division to the region.

The pattern isn’t new. In 1987, during the Iran-Iraq War, Iran began attacking commercial shipping in the Persian Gulf to pressure countries supporting Iraq. The United States responded with Operation Earnest Will, a fourteen-month naval escort operation to protect reflagged Kuwaiti oil tankers moving through the Strait of Hormuz. That operation, which began as a limited commitment, expanded into direct confrontation: in April 1988, the U.S. Navy sank or damaged six Iranian vessels in a single day during Operation Praying Mantis. The Strait was at the center of it then. It is at the center of it now.

Meanwhile, the economic effects of the blockade are spreading. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development downgraded growth forecasts for major economies on Thursday, with the United Kingdom facing the largest projected hit among major economies, the BBC reported. European leaders find themselves caught between voters who don’t want to join America’s war and an economic crisis that worsens the longer shipping through the Strait remains disrupted, according to the New York Times. In Congress, Republican lawmakers who have given the administration wide latitude to wage war without formal authorization are growing frustrated with the lack of detail about ground troops, costs, and a timeline for ending the conflict, the Times also reported.

A jury in Los Angeles found Meta and Google negligent in a landmark trial over social media addiction and its effects on young users, NPR reported. The verdict held both companies liable for harms to children, a finding that the BBC’s technology editor called a potential “game-changing moment for social media,” according to the BBC. A separate verdict in the same week reached similar conclusions, the New York Times reported, marking two major courtroom losses for the industry in quick succession.

The verdicts arrive where Congress hasn’t. Federal legislators have struggled for years to pass child online safety legislation, and juries are now doing what lawmakers couldn’t. The last time American courtrooms reshaped an entire industry this way was the tobacco litigation of the 1990s. The first state attorney general to sue a tobacco company was Mississippi’s Mike Moore, in 1994. It took four more years before the Master Settlement Agreement of 1998 changed how cigarettes were marketed and sold in the United States. The social media cases are earlier in that arc, but the direction is similar: when legislatures don’t act, juries eventually do.

Here is a story that isn’t leading many front pages but should be. The war in the Middle East has disrupted fertilizer exports from Gulf states, triggering a 25 percent price increase just as American farmers are preparing for spring planting, NPR reported. Gulf nations are among the world’s largest fertilizer producers, and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has choked the supply chain at the worst possible time. Corn planting season is weeks away across the Midwest, and farmers who were already operating on thin margins are now absorbing costs they didn’t budget for.

The effects are global. In Australia, the fuel crisis is hitting farmers during harvest season, the New York Times reported, and because Australia exports a majority of its agricultural products, the disruption could cascade across Asia. Wars have economic consequences that extend far beyond the countries firing the weapons. This one is reaching into fields in Iowa and Queensland at the same time, for the same reason.

New census estimates released Thursday show that the immigration slowdown has reached every metropolitan area in the United States, the New York Times reported. Large urban counties and border communities absorbed the biggest changes, but the data is clear in every direction: in three-quarters of American counties, population growth either slowed or turned negative between mid-2024 and mid-2025.

New York City’s numbers tell the story in miniature. The city’s population held roughly flat after international immigration dropped 70 percent compared to the previous year, the Times reported separately. For a city that has depended on immigration for population growth and labor supply for more than a century, that number is worth sitting with.

Thursday is Equal Pay Day, the date that marks how far into 2026 women had to work to earn what men earned in 2025. This year it falls on March 26, one day later than it did last year, NPR reported. Women have now lost ground for the second consecutive year, a reversal of progress that had been measured in small, steady increments for decades.

The gap persists across industries and education levels. Equal Pay Day was first observed in 1996 by the National Committee on Pay Equity. Thirty years later, the calendar keeps moving in the wrong direction.

And in New Haven, Connecticut, a woman named Shay Taylor-Allen has started her medical residency at Yale New Haven Hospital.

She was born there. She spent a decade working there as a member of the cleaning staff. She mopped the floors in the same hallways where she now sees patients.

“I still can’t believe it,” she told the Washington Post. Taylor-Allen went back to school while working full time, completed her prerequisites, got into medical school, and matched into a residency at the hospital that has been part of her life since the day she arrived in it. The Post reported she landed the residency at the same institution where she’d spent most of her adult life on the cleaning staff.

That is a real thing that happened today. The ground is still under your feet.