Saudis, other oil giants announce surprise production cuts

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Saudi Arabia and other major oil producers on Sunday announced surprise cuts totaling up to 1.15 million barrels per day from May until the end of the year, a move that could raise prices worldwide.

Higher oil prices would help fill Russian President Vladimir Putin’s coffers as his country wages war on Ukraine and force Americans and others to pay even more at the pump amid worldwide inflation.

It was also likely to further strain ties with the United States, which has called on Saudi Arabia and other allies to increase production as it tries to bring prices down and squeeze Russia’s finances.

The production cuts alone could push U.S. gasoline prices up by roughly 26 cents per gallon, in addition to the usual increase that comes when refineries change the gasoline blend during the summer driving season, said Kevin Book, managing director of Clearview Energy Partners LLC. The Energy Department calculates the seasonal increase at an average of 32 cents per gallon, Book said.

So with an average U.S. price now at roughly $3.50 per gallon of regular, according to AAA, that could mean gasoline over $4 per gallon during the summer.

However, Book said there are a number of complex variables in oil and gas prices. The size of each country’s production cut depends on the baseline production number it is using, so the cut might not be 1.15 million. It also could take much of the year for the cuts to take effect. Demand could fall if the U.S. enters a recession caused by the banking crisis. But it also could increase during the summer as more people travel.

Even though the production cut is only about 1% of the roughly 100 million barrels of oil the world uses per day, the impact on prices could be big, Book said.

“It’s a big deal because of the way oil prices work,” he said. “You are in a market that is relatively balanced. You take a small amount away, depending on what demand does, you could have a very significant price response.”

Saudi Arabia announced the biggest cut among OPEC members at 500,000 barrels per day. The cuts are in addition to a reduction announced last October that infuriated the Biden administration.

The Saudi Energy Ministry described the move as a “precautionary measure” aimed at stabilizing the oil market. The cuts represent less than 5% of Saudi Arabia’s average production of 11.5 million barrels per day in 2022.

Iraq said it would reduce production by 211,000 barrels per day, the United Arab Emirates by 144,000, Kuwait by 128,000, Kazakhstan by 78,000, Algeria by 48,000 and Oman by 40,000. The announcements were carried by each country’s state media.

Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak meanwhile said Moscow would extend a voluntary cut of 500,000 until the end of the year, according to remarks carried by the state news agency Tass. Russia had announced the unilateral reduction in February after Western countries imposed price caps.

All are members of the so-called OPEC+ group of oil exporting countries, which includes the original Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries as well as Russia and other major producers. There was no immediate statement from OPEC itself.

The cuts announced in October — of some 2 million barrels a day — had come on the eve of U.S. midterm elections in which soaring prices were a major issue. President Joe Biden vowed at the time that there would be “consequences” and Democratic lawmakers called for freezing cooperation with the Saudis.

Both the U.S. and Saudi Arabia denied any political motives in the dispute.

Since those cuts, oil prices have trended down. Brent crude, a global benchmark, was trading around $80 a barrel at the end of last week, down from around $95 in early October, when the earlier cuts were agreed.

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From agitator to insider: The evolution of AOC

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez arrived in Washington as the ultimate Democratic disruptor. Four years into her House career, she’s embracing a new role: team player.

The co-founder of the progressive “squad” — who rocketed to prominence with her willingness to take on party leaders when others on the left would not — is acquiring power via more traditional means now. She snagged a senior position on a plum committee, putting her in closer proximity to top House Democrats. At a recent party retreat, she coached fellow Democrats on how to up their communications game.

And after years of on-and-off sparring with former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Ocasio-Cortez is forging ties with new Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries — a fellow New Yorker whose centrist instincts aren’t always aligned with her own.

Her evolution is driven partly by a new political reality for her party: Democrats lost the House last year, and progressives have found a lot to like in Joe Biden’s first two years in the White House. But Ocasio-Cortez’s shift also comes as the 33-year-old lawmaker is mulling her next steps.

In a lengthy recent interview in her Capitol Hill office, Ocasio-Cortez wouldn’t rule out any number of options, from challenging Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) next year (“don’t ask me that question … print that,” she said with a laugh), to remaining in the House for the long haul or, perhaps, leaving Congress entirely.

“There's a world where I'm here for a long time in this seat, in this position. There's a world where I'm not an elected official anymore. There's a world where … I may be in higher office,” she said.

Ocasio-Cortez’s shift suggests a potential exchange of one type of power — her penchant for internal pot-stirring and the outsize media attention that comes with it — for a more conventional kind of influence. Whether AOC 2.0 is actually more powerful than the previous one isn’t clear yet; she and Jeffries have not yet locked arms the way Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) did ahead of his push to lock down the House’s top gavel.

Not that Ocasio-Cortez accepts any comparison between herself and the right flank of the GOP.

“There are people, including moderates, who sometimes try to draw this completely unfair, false equivalence between progressives and, frankly, the fascists that we see in the Republican Party,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

And Ocasio-Cortez’s new profile also isn’t without risk. The Democratic base doesn’t typically reward an ability to work the inside levers of Congress. But the influence she can accrue by playing Congress’ inside track may prove to be as potent as the saturation-level media exposure she would forgo in the process.

Then and now

Ocasio-Cortez’s growing ease and seniority within the Democratic caucus is a far cry from when she arrived in the House in 2019 and decided to skip most party meetings.

At the time, Ocasio-Cortez said, many veteran House Democrats treated her with a mix of admiration, disrespect and fear. They would avoid speaking to her when she was standing nearby, she said, even as they lapped up news coverage about her latest utterance.

Her early sense that colleagues were forming impressions of her without bothering to talk to her was reinforced by non-stop leaks of closed-door caucus meetings, which, she said, “might as well have been broadcast on C-SPAN.”

“One of those things that I really learned during that period was that there was nothing I could do that would dampen that fervor. Whether I participated in it or not, there was just going to be all these stories and all of these things,” she said of the early media attention she received. "And so I decided to have agency."

Ocasio-Cortez is operating in a much different place now, and nothing encapsulates that repositioning more than her ascension to a top role on the Oversight Committee. Her role as vice ranking member has helped Democratic leadership bring her closer inside their tent — and allowed her to assert herself as an institutional force, while still channeling the energy she brought as a 29-year-old newcomer in 2019.

At the same time, she made clear in the interview that she reserves the right to hold the Biden administration accountable — especially in policy areas where she sees the president’s team as occasionally “weak,” like immigration.

Bonding with Raskin

Ocasio-Cortez’s rise on the committee is in part thanks to a partnership with Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the panel who led the push to impeach former President Donald Trump after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. The former constitutional law professor and former bartender’s bond began during the last Congress when they worked together on the Oversight panel.

“People don't see the academic nerd side of her,” said Raskin, who at 60 is nearly twice Ocasio-Cortez’s age. “But I totally do, as a professor.”

As for her posture toward Democratic leadership, they’re still figuring each other out. She noted that her sometimes-prickly relationship with Pelosi caused consternation at times.

“I … own that I was very critical of our party’s leadership.” she said. Though Ocasio-Cortez said her relationship with the new batch of Democratic leaders is “still evolving," she acknowledged “a significant shift” in the dynamic with party leaders. She attributed at least in part it to an influx of new liberal, younger, more diverse members who are more natural allies.

All told, whether by design or not, Ocasio-Cortez has been making fewer headlines of late as Washington’s initial fascination with the “squad” passes. She’s as likely to speak directly to constituents and supporters through her own social media as she is to seek out a gaggle of reporters. Case in point: Her recent declaration — via a post on TikTok — that Congress shouldn’t rush to ban the popular China-linked app.

Republican respect

As for her work on the Oversight panel, Ocasio-Cortez has earned her begrudging respect from Republicans.

“She maximizes her five minutes as well as anyone in Congress,” Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) said of Ocasio-Cortez’s allotted time to question committee witnesses. “She’s always prepared.”

Some conservatives have even opened the door to collaborating with her on issues where progressives might align with their party, like data privacy and surveillance.

It's no accident that Ocasio-Cortez made an institutional home on the Oversight panel: Perhaps more than any other House committee, it offers members who clearly communicate a chance to go viral and force answers from the powerful.

And while Ocasio-Cortez has demonstrated her ability to go viral since her first days on the committee, she’s also now focusing on mentoring younger colleagues. She credited the committee as “one of the few refuges” when she first arrived on the Hill to “demonstrate my capacities and earned respect based on my work” — a place where senior Democrats were “willing to give me the benefit of the doubt,” she said.

“It's understandable when I first arrived, if someone would try to question my substance and my commitment to work, but that commitment has always been there,” she added.

Mentoring new Democrats

One of the new members Ocasio-Cortez is mentoring is Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.), who at 26 is the youngest elected member of Congress — a designation she held back in 2019.

She’s “helping on the best ways to craft questions, the best ways to deal with combative people on the committee,” Frost said in an interview.

Ocasio-Cortez is now helping shape the party’s investigative strategy. She took part in a panel at Democrats’ retreat last month where she taught lawmakers how to get better at asking questions in hearings. She also helped strategize for a GOP-led trip last month to the D.C. jail, where detainees are being held in connection with the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.

If Ocasio-Cortez's growing involvement in internal party strategy is chipping away at younger liberals' affection for her, it didn't show in the reverence with which Frost described her mentorship. Among the lessons he's learned from her, he said, was "being a badass motherfucker."

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Broad swaths of U.S. reel from tornadoes that killed 29

WYNNE, Ark. — Residents across a wide swath of the U.S. raced Sunday to assess the destruction from fierce storms that spawned possibly dozens of tornadoes from the South and the Midwest into the Northeast, killing at least 29 people.

The storms tore a path through the Arkansas capital and also collapsed the roof of a packed concert venue in Illinois, stunning people throughout the region with the scope of the damage.

“While we are still assessing the full extent of the damage, we know families across America are mourning the loss of loved ones, desperately waiting for news of others fighting for their lives, and sorting through the rubble of their homes and businesses,” President Joe Biden said in a statement.

Biden earlier declared broad areas of the country major disaster areas, making federal resources and financial aid available to support recovery.

Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders in Arkansas, where at least five people were killed, already had declared a state of emergency and activated the National Guard.

Confirmed or suspected tornadoes in 11 states destroyed homes and businesses, splintered trees and laid waste to neighborhoods.

The National Weather Service confirmed Sunday that a tornado was responsible for damage to several homes near Bridgeville, Delaware. One person was found dead inside a house heavily damaged by the storm Saturday night, Delaware State Police reported.

It may take days to confirm all the recent tornadoes and where they touched down. The dead also included at least nine in one Tennessee county, five in Indiana and four in Illinois.

Other deaths from the storms that hit Friday night into Saturday were reported in Alabama and Mississippi.

Residents of Wynne, Arkansas, a community of about 8,000 people 50 miles west of Memphis, Tennessee, woke Saturday to find the high school’s roof shredded and its windows blown out. At least four people died.

Ashley Macmillan said she, her husband and their children huddled with their dogs in a small bathroom as a tornado passed, “praying and saying goodbye to each other, because we thought we were dead.” A falling tree seriously damaged their home, but they got out unhurt.

Chainsaws buzzed, as bulldozers plowed into debris. Utility crews restored power as some neighborhoods began recovery.

Nine people died in Tennessee’s McNairy County, east of Memphis, according to Patrick Sheehan, director the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency.

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee drove to the county Saturday to tour the destruction and comfort residents. He said the storm capped the “worst” week of his time as governor, coming days after a school shooting in Nashville that killed six people including a family friend whose funeral he and his wife attended earlier in the day.

“It’s terrible what has happened in this community, this county, this state,” Lee said. “But it looks like your community has done what Tennessean communities do, and that is rally and respond.”

Jeffrey Day said he called his daughter after seeing on the news that their community of Adamsville was being hit. Huddled in a closet with her 2-year-old son as the storm passed over, she answered the phone screaming.

“She kept asking me, ‘What do I do, daddy?’” Day said, tearing up. “I didn’t know what to say.”

After the storm passed, his daughter crawled out of her destroyed home and drove to nearby family.

In Memphis, police spokesperson Christopher Williams said via email late Saturday that there were three apparent weather-related deaths there: two children and an adult who died when a tree fell on a house.

Tennessee officials warned that a repeat of similar weather conditions is expected Tuesday.

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker traveled Sunday to Belvidere to visit the Apollo Theatre, which partially collapsed as about 260 people were attending a heavy metal concert. A 50-year-old man who was pulled from the rubble later died.

The governor said 48 others were treated in hospitals, with five in critical condition.

Pritzker also planned to visit Crawford County, about 230 miles south of Chicago, where three people were killed and eight injured when a tornado hit around New Hebron.

“We’ve had emergency crews digging people out of their basements because the house is collapsed on top of them, but luckily they had that safe space to go to,” Sheriff Bill Rutan said at a news conference.

That tornado was not far from where three people died in Indiana’s Sullivan County, about 95 miles southwest of Indianapolis. Several people were rescued overnight, with reports of as many as 12 people injured.

In the Little Rock area, at least one person was killed and more than 50 were hurt, some critically. The National Weather Service said that tornado was a high-end EF3 twister with up to 165 mph winds and a path as long as 25 miles.

Masoud Shahed-Ghaznavi was having lunch at home when the tornado roared through his neighborhood. He hid in the laundry room as sheetrock fell and windows shattered. When he emerged, the house was mostly rubble.

“Everything around me is sky,” he recalled Saturday.

Another suspected tornado killed a woman in northern Alabama’s Madison County, officials said, and in northern Mississippi’s Pontotoc County, authorities confirmed one death and four injuries.

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Schiff criticizes DeSantis over indictment comments

Rep. Adam Schiff slammed Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida on Sunday for comments the likely GOP primary candidate made about former President Donald Trump’s indictment.

DeSantis is willing to “say anything, do anything in hopes of becoming president,” Schiff, a California Democrat, told MSNBC’s Jen Psaki during an interview on the former Biden press secretary’s new show, “Inside with Jen Psaki.”

DeSantis, who is expected to enter the 2024 presidential race, criticized the indictment delivered by a New York grand jury on Thursday, calling it “un-American.”

“Florida will not assist in an extradition request given the questionable circumstances at issue with this Soros-backed Manhattan prosecutor and his political agenda,” DeSantis said, a reference to George Soros, a prominent Democratic donor who helped fund the Color of Change PAC, which supported Bragg’s campaign for district attorney. The former president is a Florida resident.

On Sunday, Schiff, who led Trump’s first impeachment in the House and sat on the high-profile committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection, called DeSantis’ comments “cowardly.”

“He certainly knows better about the law. He knows what his obligation is to extradite someone who is accused of crime in another state,” Schiff said. “This is kind of a cowardly action by Ron DeSantis to try to compete with Donald Trump on Trump’s own turf.”

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Asa Hutchinson announces presidential bid, says Trump should withdraw from race

Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson is running for president in 2024, he said Sunday.

“I am going to be running. And the reason, as I've traveled the country for six months, I hear people talk about the leadership of our country, and I'm convinced that people want leaders that appeal to the best of America, and not simply appeal to our worst instincts,” Hutchinson said during an interview with Jonathan Karl on ABC’s “This Week.” “I believe I can be that kind of leader for the people of America.”

Hutchinson will make a formal announcement later this month in Bentonville, Arkansas, he said.

Hutchinson is entering the GOP primary at a tumultuous time in the race, as its current frontrunner, former President Donald Trump, faces an indictment stemming from a case related to hush money paid to porn star Stormy Daniels during Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

On Sunday, Hutchinson, a former federal prosecutor, reiterated the call he first made Friday for Trump to withdraw from the race.

“Well he should,” Hutchinson said, when asked whether Trump should pull out of the race. “But at the same time, we know he's not [going to]. And there's not any constitutional requirement.”

The indictment will become too big of a “sideshow,” Hutchinson said, adding that the former president should focus on his defense instead of another bid for the White House.

“I mean, first of all, the office is more important than any individual person. And so for the sake of the office of the presidency, I do think that’s too much of a sideshow and distraction, and he needs to be able to concentrate on his due process,” Hutchinson said, acknowledging that the former president should be presumed innocent of the charges, which the Manhattan District Attorney’s office have yet to publicly unveil.

Hutchinson joins what’s expected to be a competitive Republican primary. In addition to Trump, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and conservative entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy have launched campaigns, and several others have said they’re considering joining the fray.

So far, Hutchinson is the only candidate or speculative candidate to call on Trump to remove himself from the race. Others have condemned the investigation as a partisan attack by Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan District Attorney who brought the case to the grand jury. Haley described the case as more about “revenge” than justice; Former Vice President Mike Pence called the indictment “an outrage”; Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said the move was “un-American.”

Hutchinson has also been critical of the case. “I don't like the idea of the charges from what I've seen coming out of New York,” he said Sunday. “But the process has got to work, and we've got to have respect for our criminal justice system, but also for the office of presidency.”

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At least 26 dead after tornadoes rake Midwest, South

WYNNE, Ark. — Storms that dropped possibly dozens of tornadoes killed at least 26 people in small towns and big cities across the South and Midwest, tearing a path through the Arkansas capital, collapsing the roof of a packed concert venue in Illinois and stunning people throughout the region Saturday with the damage’s scope.

Confirmed or suspected tornadoes in at least eight states destroyed homes and businesses, splintered trees and laid waste to neighborhoods across a broad swath of the country. The dead included at least nine in one Tennessee county, four in the small town of Wynne, Arkansas, three in Sullivan, Indiana, and four in Illinois.

Other deaths from the storms that hit Friday night into Saturday were reported in Alabama and Mississippi, along with one near Little Rock, Arkansas, where city officials said more than 2,600 buildings were in a tornado’s path.

Residents of Wynne, a community of about 8,000 people 50 miles west of Memphis, Tennessee, woke Saturday to find the high school’s roof shredded and its windows blown out. Huge trees lay on the ground, their stumps reduced to nubs. Broken walls, windows and roofs pocked homes and businesses.

Debris lay scattered inside the shells of homes and on lawns: clothing, insulation, toys, splintered furniture, a pickup truck with its windows shattered.

Ashley Macmillan said she, her husband and their children huddled with their dogs in a small bathroom as a tornado passed, “praying and saying goodbye to each other, because we thought we were dead.” A falling tree seriously damaged their home, but they were unhurt.

“We could feel the house shaking, we could hear loud noises, dishes rattling. And then it just got calm,” she said.

Recovery was already underway, with workers using chainsaws and bulldozers to clear the area and utility crews restoring power.

Nine people died in Tennessee’s McNairy County, east of Memphis, according to Patrick Sheehan, director the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency.

“The majority of the damage has been done to homes and residential areas,” said David Leckner, the mayor of Adamsville.

Gov. Bill Lee drove to the county Saturday to tour the destruction and comfort residents. He said the storm capped the “worst” week of his time as governor, coming days after a school shooting in Nashville that killed six people including a family friend whose funeral he and his wife, Maria, attended earlier in the day.

“It’s terrible what has happened in this community, this county, this state,” Lee said. “But it looks like your community has done what Tennessean communities do, and that is rally and respond.”

Jeffrey Day said he called his daughter after seeing on the news that their community of Adamsville was being hit. Huddled in a closet with her 2-year-old son as the storm passed over, she answered the phone screaming.

“She kept asking me, ‘What do I do, daddy?’” Day said, tearing up. “I didn’t know what to say.”

After the storm passed, his daughter crawled out of her destroyed home and over barbed wire and drove to nearby family. On Saturday evening, baby clothes were still strewn about the site.

In Memphis, police spokesman Christopher Williams said via email late Saturday that there were three deaths believed to be weather-related: two children and an adult who died when a tree fell on a house.

Tennessee officials warned that the same weather conditions from Friday night are expected to return Tuesday.

In Belvidere, Illinois, part of the roof of the Apollo Theatre collapsed as about 260 people were attending a heavy metal concert. A 50-year-old man was pulled from the rubble.

“I sat with him and I held his hand and I was (telling him), ‘It’s going to be OK.’ I didn’t really know much else what to do,” concertgoer Gabrielle Lewellyn told WTVO-TV.

The man was dead by the time emergency workers arrived. Officials said 40 others were hurt, including two with life-threatening injuries.

Crews cleaned up around the Apollo on Saturday, with forklifts pulling away loose bricks. Business owners picked up glass shards and covered shattered windows.

In Crawford County, Illinois, three people were killed and eight injured when a tornado hit around New Hebron, said Bill Burke, the county board chair.

Sheriff Bill Rutan said 60 to 100 families were displaced.

“We’ve had emergency crews digging people out of their basements because the house is collapsed on top of them, but luckily they had that safe space to go to,” Rutan said at a news conference.

That tornado was not far from where three people died in Indiana’s Sullivan County, about 95 miles southwest of Indianapolis.

Sullivan Mayor Clint Lamb said at a news conference that an area south of the county seat of about 4,000 “is essentially unrecognizable right now” and several people were rescued overnight. There were reports of as many as 12 people injured, he said.

“I’m really, really shocked there isn’t more as far as human issues,” he said, adding that recovery “is going to be a very long process.”

In the Little Rock area, at least one person was killed and more than 50 were hurt, some critically.

The National Weather Service said that tornado was a high-end EF3 twister with wind speeds up to 165 mph and a path as long as 25 miles.

Masoud Shahed-Ghaznavi was lunching at home when it roared through his neighborhood, causing him to hide in the laundry room as sheetrock fell and windows shattered. When he emerged, the house was mostly rubble.

“Everything around me is sky,” Shahed-Ghaznavi recalled Saturday. He barely slept Friday night.

“When I closed my eyes, I couldn’t sleep, imagined I was here,” he said Saturday outside his home.

Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders declared a state of emergency and activated the National Guard. On Saturday, Sanders requested a major disaster declaration from President Joe Biden to support recovery efforts with federal resources.

Another suspected tornado killed a woman in northern Alabama’s Madison County, officials said, and in northern Mississippi’s Pontotoc County, authorities confirmed one death and four injuries.

Tornadoes also caused damage in eastern Iowa and broke windows northeast of Peoria, Illinois.

The storms struck just hours after Biden visited Rolling Fork, Mississippi, where tornadoes last week destroyed parts of town.

It could take days to determine the exact number of tornadoes from the latest event, said Bill Bunting, chief of forecast operations at the Storm Prediction Center. There were also hundreds of reports of large hail and damaging winds, he said.

“That’s a quite active day,” he said. “But that’s not unprecedented.”

More than 530,000 homes and businesses were without power as of midday Saturday, over 200,000 of them in Ohio, according to PowerOutage.us.

The sprawling storm system also brought wildfires to the southern Plains, with authorities in Oklahoma reporting nearly 100 of them Friday. At least 32 people were said to be injured, and more than 40 homes destroyed.

The storms also caused blizzard conditions in the Upper Midwest.

A threat of tornadoes and hail remained for the Northeast including in parts of Pennsylvania and New York.

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‘Absurd and destructive’: Zelenskyy slams Russia’s U.N. Security Council presidency

Moscow will hold the largely symbolic United Nations post for the month of April.

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