Greetings! Happy St. Patrick’s Day to those celebrating.

Let’s get into today’s top stories.

🇮🇷 Larijani’s reported death tears another hole in Iran’s command. Israeli strikes appear to have severed another layer of Iran’s war leadership. Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said Ali Larijani was killed overnight. Katz also said Gen. Gholam Reza Soleimani was killed. Iranian state media did not immediately confirm either death. Larijani was widely believed to be running Iran since the war began. That made him more than a minister and less than replaceable. His reported death suggests Israel is still targeting continuity, not just hardware. Each such strike scrambles decision-making, succession, and deterrence at once. Tehran is fighting, but also constantly reorganizing itself under fire. In modern war, the chain of command is now a target list.

🌎 Trump went around diplomacy, and now wants backup. After side-stepping diplomacy on the way to war, Donald Trump is asking others for help. He said he asked about seven countries to help protect tankers. He also said China may delay his trip by “a month or so.” Britain discussed mine-hunting drones, not a warship, Keir Starmer said. Australia said it will not send a ship. France sounded tentative, and Beijing stayed noncommittal. Karoline Leavitt said others benefit from Washington’s effort to disarm Iran. Trump meanwhile mocked alliance logic even while asking allies to help. The appeal has exposed how lonely unilateralism looks once shipping lanes are threatened. The war has turned swagger into a sudden group project.

✈ Airline chiefs say shutdown politics is clogging the nation’s checkpoints. Airline chiefs are warning that airport security cannot run on patriotic overtime. The chief executives of American, Delta, Southwest, and JetBlue urged Congress to act. United Parcel Service (UPS), FedEx, and Atlas Air signed too. They want Homeland Security funded and aviation workers paid. That includes Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officers screening passengers. They say the partial shutdown is already producing longer airport lines. More than 300 TSA agents have quit since the shutdown began. Airlines expect 171M passengers this spring season alone. They also pointed to the 2026 FIFA World Cup and America’s 250th birthday. When long lines become routine, political stalemate starts looking like a travel hazard.

🗳 Illinois Democrats hand the baton to a post-Durbin generation. Illinois Democrats just handed the baton to a younger bench. Lieutenant Governor Juliana Stratton won the Democratic Senate primary on Tuesday. She beat two sitting House members in a bruising contest. The retirement of Senator Dick Durbin created the opening. Governor JB Pritzker backed Stratton and saw his influence validated. She now advances to face Republican Don Tracy in November. The race also reflected a broader season of Democratic turnover. That made succession feel less theoretical and more immediate. Illinois voters did not merely pick nominees, they picked a post-Durbin era. In party politics, renewal rarely arrives politely, but it arrived anyway.

🧠 Jensen Huang says AI has left training and entered monetization. Jensen Huang says artificial intelligence is entering its next commercial phase. The Nvidia Corporation ($NVDA) chief executive called it an “inference inflection.” He delivered that line in San Jose on Monday. The company says the shift is backed by $1T in orders. That is a staggering number, even by semiconductor standards. The pitch is that training built the boom, but inference will cash it out. Nvidia wants demand to look structural, not cyclical. Huang is selling the future in language that sounds half engineering, half prophecy. Markets have heard that sermon before, but still keep buying seats. In the AI economy, scale sounds most persuasive when Huang says it.

🥩 Workers walk out, and meatpacking’s buried strain goes public. About 3,800 workers walked out at JBS-owned Swift Beef in Greeley, Colorado. The plant is one of the largest meatpacking operations in the country. Union leaders said workers want better pay and better health care. They also said the company pressured workers in one-on-one meetings. JBS is a top local employer, which raises the stakes. Union representatives called it the first American beef slaughterhouse strike since the 1980s. That alone tells you how high frustration had to climb. Meatpacking is brutal labor even when the line is calm. When workers stop, the industry’s hidden strain suddenly becomes visible. America’s food system likes invisibility until labor decides otherwise.

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That’s all for today!

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