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President Donald Trump says U.S. allies should reimburse the United States for military operations protecting West Asia as the conflict with Iran continues.
“I want to be reimbursed because we’re protecting a very rich portion of the world,” Trump said, arguing that countries benefiting from U.S. security efforts should help share the cost.
Trump has also proposed a 20% protection fee on eligible commercial cargo passing through the Strait of Hormuz, a key waterway that carries about 20% of the world’s petroleum supplies.
In addition, he said the United States would serve as the “Guardian of the Hormuz Strait” while implementing a selective blockade on Iranian commercial shipping.
The proposal has drawn criticism from several Gulf nations and prompted legal concerns regarding freedom of navigation, while Iran has rejected the plan outright.

Mervin Raudabaugh had a choice. Take $15 million from AI developers, or take $1.9 million from a conservation trust. He took the smaller check.

He has farmed those 261 acres in Pennsylvania for 60 years. Tech companies wanted the land to build a massive data center. They offered over $60,000 an acre to secure the space they need for servers and electrical infrastructure.

Raudabaugh sold his development rights to a land preservation program instead. His fields, wetlands, and woodlands will never be built on. The financial temptation for struggling rural communities is staggering right now. This time, the farmer kept the land.

Deep beneath the forests of Kentucky, a prehistoric secret has surfaced after more than 325 million years. In the shadowy depths of Mammoth Cave—the world’s longest known cave system—scientists have uncovered the fossilised remains of two ancient sharks that once patrolled tropical seas long before the first dinosaur ever walked the Earth.

These long-lost giants, named Troglocladodus trimblei and Glikmanius careforum, each measured around 12 feet in length and represent a window into an era when much of North America lay submerged beneath a shallow inland sea. This incredible discovery was made inside a fossil-rich stretch of Mammoth Cave, a site now known to contain more than 70 species of ancient fish.

The preservation of these shark fossils is remarkable, offering clear glimpses of cartilage structures that rarely fossilise. These animals lived during the Carboniferous period, a time of lush swamp forests, rising mountain chains, and the slow merging of Earth’s landmasses into the supercontinent Pangaea.

What sets this find apart is not just the age of the fossils, but the unique environment in which they were preserved. Unlike open rock beds or seabeds, these sharks were entombed in limestone deep inside a cave system, sheltered from erosion and modern interference for over three hundred million years. Researchers believe the remains will help shed new light on how early sharks evolved in a world that was teeming with marine life, but vastly different from today’s oceans.

Fun Fact: Mammoth Cave is not just the longest cave system on Earth—it has now also become one of the richest prehistoric shark fossil sites ever found in North America.

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#AncientOceans #Troglocladodus #Glikmanius #PrehistoricSharks #Paleontology #CarboniferousPeriod #FossilDiscovery