Oil surges past $100 as U.S. and Iran escalate strikes in Gulf

Seven months into a grinding military confrontation, the United States and Iran have carried their conflict from the Persian Gulf to the skies over Jordan, and its tremors are now felt in every fuel gauge and heating bill across the world. Brent crude crossed $100 a barrel on Wednesday — a threshold that functions less as a number than as a signal — as strikes on tankers and ballistic missiles on an American air base marked a new threshold of escalation. The Strait of Hormuz, that narrow passage through which a fifth of the world's oil once flowed freely, has become a contested corridor, and t