Eight countries that are part of the OPEC+ oil cartel will boost production of crude as US and Israeli forces launched a major attack on Iran and the country responded with retaliatory strikes against Israel and US military installations around the Gulf, disrupting oil shipments from the region.

The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, in a Sunday meeting said it would increase production by 206,000 barrels per day in April, which was more than analysts had been expecting.

The countries boosting output include Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Kazakhstan, Algeria and Oman.

Attacks throughout the region, including on two vessels travelling through the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow mouth of the Persian Gulf, could restrict countries’ ability to export oil to the rest of the world.

That would will likely result in higher prices for crude oil and gasoline.

Roughly 15 million barrels of crude oil per day – about 20 per cent of the world’s oil – are shipped through the Strait of Hormuz, making it the world’s most critical oil chokepoint, according to Rystad Energy.

Tankers travelling through the strait, which is bordered in the north by Iran, carry oil and gas from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Qatar, Bahrain, the UAE and Iran.

Iran had temporarily shut down parts of the strait in mid-February for what it said was a military drill. Further disruptions to that shipping channel could lead to lower supply and higher prices for oil.

“Roughly one-fifth of global oil supply passes through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital artery for world trade, meaning markets are more concerned with whether barrels can move than with spare capacity on paper,” said Jorge León, Rystad’s senior vice president and head of geopolitical analysis.

“If flows through the Gulf are constrained, additional production will provide limited immediate relief, making access to export routes far more important than headline output targets.”

Iran exports roughly 1.6 million barrels of oil a day, mostly to China, which may need to look elsewhere for supply if Iran’s exports are disrupted, another factor that could increase energy prices.

Energy experts believe oil prices could shoot higher when barrels begin trading late Sunday. Analysts at Rystad anticipate the price of a barrel of Brent crude, the international standard, could increase by $US20 ($A28) when trading opens.

A barrel of Brent crude closed at a seven-month high of $US72.87 ($A102.56) on Friday.

Australia is continuing to back the US in its war against the “abhorrent” Iranian regime, but the Albanese government has stopped short of endorsing the military action as legal.

The US and Israel launched air strikes against Iran, killing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in addition to more than 40 senior leaders, as the two nations push for regime change.

Three American troops have been killed in the conflict, the Pentagon confirmed.

Defence Minister Richard Marles said US facilities in Australia were not used in the attack, describing Iran’s leadership as “abhorrent”.

“We do support the action that the United States has taken, and we very much stand with the Iranian people in this moment,” he told ABC radio on Monday.

Asked if the attacks were deemed legal under international law, Mr Marles replied: “Ultimately, the legality of these measures is a matter for both the United States and Israel to go through.”

Australia-based human rights advocate and lawyer Sara Rafiee called for continued international pressure to help dismantle the regime’s coercive practices, security infrastructure and command centres.

“Iranians are unequivocal in one thing: reform within the current system is not an option,” she said.

“After 47 years of repression, they want the regime gone in its entirety and the opportunity to determine their own future.”

Iranians in Australia took to the streets to celebrate the strikes on Tehran, marking them as the beginning of the end for the brutal regime. 

Rallies took place in Sydney, Melbourne and outside the former Iranian embassy in Canberra, where members of the community sprayed champagne, cheered and danced. 

A jubilant Nadeo Ranjear welcomed the Ayatollah’s death as “the greatest, greatest news”. 

“It is still the beginning of the end. We still haven’t got 100 per cent victory, but we are almost there,” he told AAP outside the embassy on Sunday.

“Victory is around the corner … the Iranian people will overthrow this regime.”

Some smaller, anti-war demonstrations also broke out, with groups such as the Jewish Council of Australia condemning Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s endorsement of the US strikes.

Australian Travel Industry Association chief executive Dean Long warned travellers transiting through the Gulf to expect delays and rerouting “for the foreseeable future”.

He warned Australians not to cancel flights, even to nations upgraded to do-not-travel warnings.

“Let the airline or tour operator make that call – if they cannot provide the service because it is unsafe, your rights are much better protected,” Mr Long said. 

It’s supposed to be the driest town in Australia, but Oodnadatta has been left a sea of buckets and tarps after being hit in an inland big wet that claimed the life of one man.

The motorbike rider went missing after trying to cross a flooded creek at Eurelia, in South Australia’s Flinders Ranges on Sunday morning.

The 47-year-old’s body was later recovered as severe weather warnings and flash flooding alerts remain in place across the region and much of Australia’s inland southeast.

The deluge exposed the lack of weather proofing at the historic Pink Roadhouse, located in SA’s arid north on the famous Oodnadatta Track.

The dirt car park out front of the Oodnadatta food stop is a muddy quagmire; the locals say it hasn’t rained this much since the 1980s. 

For Nicole Castagnaro, her shift at the roadhouse on Sunday was spent emptying the 30-plus buckets and containers dotted around the store as the rain kept falling and the roof kept leaking.

“There’s no one around at all,” she told AAP.

“The roads are closed, we’re running out of food, and if the trucks can’t get through, we’ll be stuck eating baked beans for the foreseeable future.”

Oodnadatta received nearly 18mm of rain overnight, or more than 10 per cent of its average annual rainfall of 171mm.

It’s been so long since the tracks flooded, most locals have no idea what happens next if food can’t be delivered to the tiny town and its population of 102 people.

“We can’t live on just beans, but I don’t know if the military will airlift supplies – I guess we’ll find out,” Ms Castagnaro said.

There’s no immediate end in sight to the huge storm system as it passes through central Australia, bringing widespread downfalls and flash flooding.

Millions were still bracing for deluges on Sunday night and Monday morning amid severe weather warnings for SA’s east and much of western Victoria and NSW.

The outback SA mining town of Coober Pedy also copped an unexpected drenching, receiving nearly 16mm of rainfall during the night.

The Bureau of Meteorology’s Dean Narramore said heavy rain, thunderstorms and flooding were expected to continue until at least Monday night.

“While for some areas, we’ve seen welcome agricultural impacts from this widespread rainfall, the additional rainfall could start causing some issues,” he said.

After receiving just 3.6mm of rain so far in 2026, Adelaide was told to expect falls of up to 50mm on Sunday, but the heavy downpours instead fell further north.

Yunta, in the outback about 300km northeast of the SA capital, received 129mm of rain, while rural centres such as Mildura in northwest Victoria were also inundated.

The downpour came as a shock to many in SA after forecasters tipped the state’s first dry summer since 2019, the eighth since records began.

Meteorologists have described the slow-moving tropical low – which sat over the Simpson Desert in the southeast Northern Territory for a week – as highly unusual.

For many farmers, some rain is welcome but forecasters warn that benefits will turn to risk as totals push beyond 50mm.

The low is expected to weaken as it moves east, although consistent falls have already prompted warnings of increased shark activity in Sydney Harbour and estuaries along the NSW coast after heavy rain.

Rich run-off can attract baitfish and, in turn, sharks, triggering attacks such as the spate in January that left one Sydney schoolboy dead.

Further key insights into the state of Australia’s economy are due to be revealed as expectations mount for a second 2026 cash rate hike.

Gross domestic product, consumption, income and productivity data will be released in the national accounts for the December quarter on Wednesday.

Australia’s central bank will hold a second meeting of its monetary policy board in mid-March, after raising the cash rate a quarter of a percentage point to 3.85 per cent in January.

It followed January’s data which showed inflation coming in hot, with the consumer price index at 3.8 per cent.

The Reserve Bank is widely tipped to raise rates again in 2026, with NAB economists forecasting the board to lift rates to 4.1 per cent in May, then keep them on hold until late 2027.

For rates to remain on hold for the rest of 2026, the bank says the data will need to change quickly with a “material downward revision to inflation forecasts”.

ANZ economists are also expecting a 0.25 percentage point rise in May.

The Reserve Bank’s target band for inflation is between two and three per cent, and relies on figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics to monitor the situation.

It became the first major central bank to lift rates after previously cutting them following the inflation spike from the COVID-19 pandemic.

NAB head of Australian economics Gareth Spence said the bank was forecasting a rise in May would be the last for 2026.

“Household spending has really accelerated, disposable incomes have improved throughout last year and purchasing power picked up,” he said.

Mr Spence said while attention remained on government spending with the federal budget due to be handed down in May, all eyes should turn to the private sector.

The unemployment rate remained at a low 4.1 per cent, he noted.

Mr Spence said state government infrastructure pipelines were also levelling off as more projects neared completion. 

Wall Street investors are meanwhile dealing with a handful of persistent concerns, particularly over financial and tech ‌stocks.

The major US indexes have suffered their largest monthly percentage declines in a year and all three ended decisively lower on Friday.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 521.28 points, or 1.05 per cent, to 48,977.92 while the S&P 500 lost 29.98 points, ​or 0.43 per cent, to 6,878.88.

The Nasdaq Composite leaked 210.17 points, or 0.92 per cent, to 22,668.21.

Australian share futures slipped back 20 points, or 0.21 per cent, to 13,722.

The S&P/ASX200 rose 23.3 points on Friday, up 0.25 per cent to 9,198.6, and up 3.7 per cent in February, as it notched its best close.

The broader All Ordinaries gained 26.9 points, or 0.29 per cent, to a record close of 9,435.6.

America and Israel’s attack on Iran has disrupted flights across the Middle East and beyond as countries around the region close their airspace and key airports that connect Europe, Africa and the West to Asia have been hit by strikes.

Hundreds of thousands of travellers were either stranded or diverted to other airports after Israel, Qatar, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait and Bahrain closed their airspace on Saturday. 

There also was no flight activity over the United Arab Emirates, flight tracking website FlightRadar24 said, after the government there announced a “temporary and partial closure” of its airspace. 

That led to the closure of key hub airports in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Doha, and the cancellation of more than 1800 flights by major Middle Eastern airlines. 

The three major airlines that operate at those airports – Emirates, Qatar Airways and Etihad –  typically have about 90,000 passengers per day crossing through those hubs and even more travellers headed to destinations in the Middle East, according to aviation analytics firm Cirium. 

Two airports in the United Arab Emirates reported incidents as the government there condemned what it called a “blatant attack involving Iranian ballistic missiles”.

Officials at Dubai International Airport – the largest in the United Arab Emirates and one of the busiest in the world –  said four people were injured, while Zayed International Airport in Abu Dhabi said that one person was killed and seven others were injured in a drone strike. Strikes were also reported at Kuwait International Airport.

Though Iran did not publicly claim responsibility, the scope of retaliatory strikes that Gulf nations attributed to Iran extended beyond the American bases that it previously said it would target.

Dubai’s landmark Burj Al Arab hotel was also damaged as overnight Iranian retaliatory attacks spread across the Gulf states and the wider Middle East.

Dubai later confirmed that a drone was intercepted, and debris caused a minor fire on the Burj Al Arab’s facade.

Dubai is the biggest tourism and trade hub in the Middle East and its airport is one of the world’s busiest travel hubs. 

The Burj Al Arab hotel has long been ⁠one of the emirate’s most recognisable symbols. Opened in 1999 ‌on an ​artificial island off Jumeirah Beach, the sail-shaped tower quickly became an emblem of a city intent on projecting ​luxury on a ‌global scale.

Airlines that cross the Middle East will have to reroute flights around the conflict with many flights headed south over Saudi Arabia. That will add hours to those flights and consume additional fuel, adding to the costs airlines will have to absorb. So ticket prices could quickly start to increase if the conflict lingers. 

The added flights will also put pressure on air traffic controllers in Saudi Arabia who might have to slow traffic to make sure they can handle it safely. 

But it is unclear how long the disruption to flight operations could last. For comparison, the Israeli and US attack on Iran in June 2025 lasted 12 days.

Australian leaders have thrown their support behind United States and Israeli attacks on Iran amid reports the Islamic regime’s leader has been killed.

Tehran has been pounded by explosions and air strikes after US President Donald Trump announced a “massive and ongoing” operation to topple the Iranian administration.

It has led global airlines to suspend flights across the Middle East, alongside changes to travel warnings for popular destinations such as Doha and Dubai.

Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has reportedly been killed in the strikes, a development Mr Trump described as a “correct story”.

A meeting of Australia’s national security committee, involving Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and other senior government ministers, is due to take place on Sunday morning.

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has urged Australians to delay all travel to the Middle East, including to the United Arab Emirates.

“Military conflict in the region may result in widespread movement restrictions, airspace closures, flight cancellations and other travel disruptions,” the warning said.

Both Dubai and Doha are popular destinations for Australian expats.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese issued a statement on Saturday, saying Australia stood with the people of Iran in their struggle against oppression.

“For decades, the Iranian regime has been a destabilising force, through its ballistic missile and nuclear programs, support for armed proxies and brutal acts of violence and intimidation,” Mr Albanese said.

Australia and its international partners called on the Iranian regime to uphold the human rights of its citizens, the prime minister added.

“Instead, the regime has instigated a brutal crackdown on its own people leaving thousands of Iranian civilians dead,” he said.

“A regime that relies on the repression and murder of its own people to retain power is without legitimacy.”

Mr Albanese also pointed to recent Iranian attacks on Australian soil, including those targeting Jewish communities.

Iran’s ambassador was expelled in August 2025 after the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation found Tehran was behind at least two anti-Semitic arson attacks on home soil, including the firebombing of the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne.

Opposition Leader Angus Taylor described the current Iranian regime as “authoritarian, anti-Semitic and abhorrent”.

“Since 1979, the revolutionary Islamic government in Tehran has oppressed, imprisoned and murdered Iranians,” Mr Taylor added.

“We pray for the Iranian people at this time. May courage prevail.”

Mr Albanese said a diplomatic crisis centre has been established

“Our ability to provide consular assistance in Iran is extremely limited,” he said.

“Australians should leave now if it is safe to do so.”

With his large-scale attack on Iran, Donald Trump has seized a legacy-defining moment to demonstrate his readiness to exercise raw US military power. 

But in doing so, he is also taking the biggest foreign policy gamble of his presidency, one fraught with risks and unknowns.

Trump joined with Israel on Saturday to ‌plunge into war with Iran, providing little explanation to the American public for what could become the biggest US military campaign since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Trump has pivoted away from a preference for swift, limited operations like last month’s lightning raid in Venezuela to what experts warn could be a more protracted conflict with Iran ‌that risks escalating into a regional conflagration engulfing the oil-rich Middle East.

He has also set out a daunting objective of regime change in Tehran, pushing the idea that air strikes can incite a popular uprising to oust Iran’s rulers.

It is an outcome that outside air power has never directly achieved without the involvement of some kind of armed force on the ground, ‌and which most analysts doubt will succeed this time.

“Most Americans will wake up Saturday morning and wonder why we are at war with Iran, what is the goal, and why US bases in the Middle East are under attack,” said Daniel Shapiro, a former senior Pentagon official and US ambassador to Israel who is now at the Atlantic Council think-tank in Washington.

Trump’s fixation on Iran has emerged as the starkest example yet of how foreign policy, including his expanded use of military might, has topped his agenda in the first 13-months of his second term, often overshadowing domestic issues like the cost of living that public opinion polls show are much higher priorities for most Americans.

His own aides have been privately urging him for weeks to focus more on voters’ economic worries, highlighting the political dangers ahead of this November’s midterm elections in which Trump’s Republican Party is at risk of losing one or both chambers of Congress.

The brief pre-dawn video that Trump posted on his Truth Social platform announcing what the Pentagon has dubbed “Operation Epic ‌Fury” provided only broad reasons for ‌going to war now with a country the US has ⁠tussled with for decades, while averting all-out hostilities.

He insisted he would end what he said was Tehran’s ballistic missile threat – which most experts say does not pose a threat to the US – and give Iranians a ​chance to topple their rulers.

Trump said that to accomplish his goals, US forces would lay waste to much of Iran’s military as well as deny it the ability to have a nuclear weapon. Iran denies that its nuclear program has military aims.

Trump’s sudden resort to force, using huge US military assets built up in the region in recent weeks, appeared all but certain to close the door for now on diplomacy with Iran. 

The latest round of nuclear talks in Geneva on Thursday failed to achieve a breakthrough.

Some Trump aides have previously suggested that he might be able to bomb Tehran back to the negotiating table to force deep concessions. 

Instead, Iran responded on Saturday by launching missiles at US allies Israel and oil-producing Gulf Arab countries.

Trump’s focus in the video on the urgency of the threat posed by Iran’s ballistic and nuclear programs had echoes of the case President George W Bush made for war against Iraq in 2003, which later turned out to be based on faulty intelligence and false claims.

Trump’s assertion in Tuesday’s ⁠State of the Union address that Iran will soon have a missile that can hit the United States is not backed by US intelligence reports, according to sources familiar with the assessments, ‌and experts have also cast doubt on his aides’ ​recent claims of Tehran’s ability to quickly advance its nuclear capabilities.

With Saturday’s strikes, Trump, who had originally threatened to strike Iran in January in support of street protesters facing a violent crackdown, also erased all doubt that part of what he seeks now is regime change in Tehran.

But analysts question whether Trump, who has ruled ​out deploying US troops on ‌the ground, has a strategy that could unseat Iran’s longtime cleric-dominated government, which has proved resilient in the face of crippling sanctions and periodic mass protests.

The first wave of strikes mainly targeted Iranian officials, a source familiar with the matter said. 

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was not in Tehran at the time of the ​attacks and had been transferred to a secure location, said a source with knowledge of the matter. 

However, several senior commanders in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and political officials have been killed, an Iranian source close to the establishment said.

Even if the strikes do succeed in eliminating top leaders, that could have the unintended consequences of sowing chaos across a sprawling nation of 93 million or even lead to a military-run government that might be even more intransigent with the west and oppressive to its people, analysts said.

“He wants to change the government,” said Jon Alterman at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a think-tank in ​Washington. 

“But it’s ​hard to change the government from the air. It’s hard to change the minds of Iranians through the air.”

Tyson Barker, a former ​senior US official who is now with the Atlantic Council, said Trump’s call for the Iranian people to rise up was also not likely to work.

“They’re really ‌exposing these poor Iranian people by saying, ‘Stand up and overthrow your government. We got your back’,” Barker said.

Trump, whose appetite for military operations has grown since the start of his second term, received briefings ahead of the Iran strikes that not only delivered blunt assessments about the risk of major US casualties but also touted the prospect of a shift in the Middle East in favour of US interests, a US official told Reuters.

Trump appears to have been emboldened by the US bombing of Iran’s main nuclear facilities in June, which he considered a major success, and the in-and-out raid that captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in January and has given the US considerable sway over the OPEC country’s vast oil reserves.

He may have forced his own hand with Iran with his frequent threats of military action while building up a huge naval force that he could not sustain indefinitely in the region.

Analysts see Iran as a much tougher, better-armed foe than Venezuela, even though its air defences and missile capabilities were severely degraded in ​joint US-Israeli strikes in June.

“Iran is a more formidable military power, and even what the response is right now in the Gulf – they’re willing to cross lines that they weren’t willing to cross before,” said Nicole Grajewski, with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

But Mark Dubowitz, chief executive of the Foundation for the Defence ​of Democracies, a nonprofit research institute considered pro-Israel and hawkish on Iran, said Tehran is in ⁠such a weakened state that it is worth Trump taking the risks to curb Tehran’s nuclear capabilities.

Whether or not the Iranian government falls, he said, severely degrading Iran’s nuclear and missile programs could be a victory for Trump.

The United States and Israel have attacked Iran, targeting its top leaders and calling for the overthrow of its government, while Iran responded with missiles fired at Israel and neighbouring Gulf countries.

President Donald Trump, who in the ‌biggest foreign-policy gamble of his presidency launched the war against a foe Washington has jousted with for generations, said the strikes were aimed at ending a security threat and ensuring Iran could not develop a nuclear weapon.

He called on Iranian security forces to lay down their weapons and invited Iranians to topple their government once ‌the bombing ended.

Tehran called the strikes, which began in the morning hours and hit targets in different areas of the country, unprovoked and illegal. 

Iran’s Al-Alam television said Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – yet to be heard from by Saturday evening – was due to give a speech soon.

In cities across Iran, explosions caused widespread panic. 

Residents rushed to collect ‌children from school and flee areas that might be targeted.

“We are scared, we are terrified. My children are shaking, we have nowhere to go, we will die here,” mother-of-two Minou, 32, said.

Iran responded by launching missiles at Israel and at several Gulf Arab allies of the United States that host American bases.

Iran issued a warning to shipping that the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow passage through which around a fifth of global oil consumption passes, had been closed. 

Traders expected a sharp jump in oil prices. Airlines cancelled flights in the Middle East.

Tehran promised a stronger response to come, with a senior Iranian Revolutionary Guards commander, Ebrahim Jabbari, saying it had so far used only “scrap missiles” and would soon unveil unforeseen weapons.

The UN Security Council was due to meet in New York on Saturday. 

Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called for an immediate cessation of hostilities.

Israel’s military said its pilots had hit hundreds of targets throughout ‌Iran, including strategic defence systems already damaged ‌in strikes last year. 

It said three sites ⁠where leaders had been meeting were struck simultaneously, and several senior figures were killed.

Iran’s Defence Minister Amir Nasirzadeh and Revolutionary Guards commander Mohammed Pakpour were killed in the Israeli attacks, sources said.

The first wave of strikes in what the Pentagon named “OPERATION EPIC FURY” mainly targeted Iranian officials, a source familiar with the matter said.

A girls’ primary school in the southern Iranian town of Minab was hit, killing 85 people, according to the local prosecutor cited by state media. Reuters could not independently confirm the reports.

In a video message published on social media, Trump cited Washington’s decades-old dispute with Iran and Iranian attacks, dating to the seizure of the US embassy in Tehran during the 1979 Islamic ⁠revolution that brought the clerics to power.

Trump said the aim was “eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime”. 

He urged Iranians to stay sheltered because “bombs will be dropping everywhere.” 

He added: “When we are finished, take over your ​government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”

Oil markets have been closely watching the stand-off between Washington and Tehran ‌to try and determine if supplies will be impacted.

Jorge Leon, head of geopolitical analysis at Rystad Energy, predicted prices could shoot up by $US10-$US20  ($A14-$A28) per barrel when markets open on Monday unless there were signs of de-escalation.

Iran, the third-largest producer in the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, pumps about four per cent of global oil supplies, and a far larger share is shipped past its coast through the strait leading out of the Gulf.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said all US bases and interests in the region were within Iran’s reach and that Iran’s retaliation would continue until “the enemy is decisively defeated”.

Oil markets closed for the weekend are set to see price swings next week as the impact from the US and Israeli strikes on oil supplies from the Middle East remains unclear.

Scenarios before the latest conflict with Iran foresaw a quick price spike that fades if the attacks didn’t affect oil shipping and infrastructure, such as Iranian pipelines and its Kharg island terminal. 

However, there would be a bigger price spike and longer-lasting impact if oil infrastructure or supplies were interrupted because of the disruption of tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.

Oil prices have already risen on war fears. 

International benchmark Brent crude closed at a seven-month high of $US72.87 ($A102.56) on Friday.

Iran exports some 1.6 million barrels of oil a day, most of it going to China, where privately owned refineries are less concerned about the US sanctions that prevent Iran from selling its oil elsewhere. 

If that supply is disrupted, Chinese customers would look elsewhere for oil on the global market, potentially driving up prices.

Another question is around the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 per cent of global oil supply passes each day. 

Middle East exporters Saudi Arabia, Iraq and the United Arab Emirates send most of their exports through the strait. 

However, analysts say Iran has no incentive to try to close the strait because it would cut off its own exports and hurt its only big customer, China.

Limited strikes on Iran’s nuclear program and the Revolutionary Guard that avoid regime change or all-out war could see prices jump $US5-$US10 ($A7-$A14) based on fear alone, according to Rystad Energy in a prewar scenario.

A wider war involving Iranian disruption of tanker traffic could see crude push past $US90 ($A127) per barrel and US gas prices “well above” $US3 ($A4.2) per gallon, according to another prewar scenario from Clayton Seigle at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies. 

US petrol prices averaged $US2.98 ($A4.19) per gallon last week, according to the US motoring club AAA. 

Madonna has made a star appearance in Dolce & Gabbana’s front row during Milan Fashion Week for a collection that felt like a conversation with the Material Girl herself.

To the backdrop of her hit You’ll See, Madonna and her boyfriend Akeem Morris were ushered to their seats next to Vogue’s Anna Wintour just as the autumn-winter 2026-27 show was about to begin. 

Other front row guests couldn’t resist recording the moment as she hugged actor Alberto Guerra, with whom she recently shot a Dolce & Gabbana campaign.

Madonna, 67, has been a Dolce & Gabbana icon since the 1990s, with key moments including a bodice studded with coloured stones and crystals for the 1991 New York preview of the film Truth or Dare. 

The designing duo also created costumes for the Erotica tour in 1992 and the Drowned World Tour in 2001.

Madonna last appeared at the Dolce & Gabbana showroom for the spring-summer 2025 collection, wearing a lace veil. 

This time, her infamous blonde locks were loose. 

She wore a black blazer over a dark mini dress, with the only pop of colour coming from turquoise leather gloves.

Designer Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana’s collection for next autumn and winter featured transparent lace dresses reminiscent of Madonna’s early aesthetic and big-shouldered pinstriped suits that recalled her Vogue music video. 

The collection also featured big faux furs and animal prints.

Models gave a little twirl in front of Madonna and Wintour, making sure they caught the mirrored double-breasted suits with lapels on both the front and the back. 

Both style-makers wore dark sunglasses as they squatted in the low front-row seats, Madonna wrapping her arms around her legs. 

Attentive during the show, they privately exchanged impressions at the end. 

After the show, the designers embraced the Queen of Pop and whisked her backstage.

Outside, hundreds of fans gathered to glimpse Madonna and other stars who packed the front row.