The US-Israeli war on Iran is hitting Gulf Arab nations hard – but with a wider impact in today’s interlinked world.

As well as global oil and gas supplies, Gulf states play a critical role in many economies.

So how are they connected – and what could be at risk?

Presenter: James Bays

Guests:

Nikolay Kozjharnov – Research associate professor in energy security at the Gulf Studies Center at Qatar University

Cornelia Meyer – Macroeconomist and oil and gas specialist

Torbjorn Soltvedt – Associate director at global risk intelligence company Verisk Maplecroft

“I want to lick your stink … I want to taste your foulness … I want to shower in your rot … I want to feast in your fetid funk.”

Have more romantic sweet nothings ever graced the screen? Scripted by Grace Glowicki and Ben Petrie (partners in life and in filmmaking), these words of seduction are music to the ears of a lonely Gravedigger (Glowicki), who has been formulating a perfume to cover up her corpse-like stench. What she discovers is that the right one will love her exactly the way she smells, learning that she’s not so pheromonally challenged after all.

Glowicki’s sophomore feature “Dead Lover,” sometimes presented in “Stink-O-Vision,” is one of those entirely singular freakouts that we can thank Telefilm Canada for subsidizing (see also: the Cronenberg family oeuvre, Matt Johnson’s current “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie” and many more).

She co-writes, directs and stars in this highly stylized, wonderfully DIY handmade project, beautifully designed with gruesomely gothic sets by production designer Becca Morrin and art director Ashley Devereux. The blend of intentional artifice paired with deep emotion calls to mind other Canadian auteurs like Guy Maddin and Matthew Rankin (“The Twentieth Century”), but Glowicki’s film also exists within another lineage: the feminist Frankenstein film.

The film opens with a quote from Mary Shelley: “There is something at work in my soul which I do not understand.” Her 1818 novel “Frankenstein: or, the Modern Prometheus” has always been a feminist text (despite Guillermo del Toro’s more bro-ey adaptation), grappling with the terrifying power of creating life — and how close that is to death. Feminist filmmakers have drawn out these inherent themes from the book, the most recent and loudest example being Maggie Gyllenhaal’s “The Bride!” But “Dead Lover” hews closer to Laura Moss’ modern medical take, “birth/rebirth,” and even more closely to Zelda Williams’ cute, poppy “Lisa Frankenstein,” in which a young seamstress stitches up a reanimated boyfriend.

Our Gravedigger speaks to us, and to the moon, about her heart’s desire in charming cockney rhyming slang. Her hopes are rather simple and conventional: one true lifelong love and a family. After much rejection, she finally finds her Lover (Petrie) in the cemetery, saving him from a ferocious beast while he mourns his late opera-singer sister (Leah Doz). After the pair consummate their fragrant lust, the Gravedigger is ready to settle down right away.

In order to make her dreams come true, Lover travels to Europe for fertility treatments, where he drowns on a ship, the only thing left of him a finger, delivered to her by fishermen. Our enterprising Gravedigger, a true woman of science, engineers a lizard elixir and regenerates the finger into a long tentacle that eventually demands a body. What better choice than his own sister? But when her wild new Creature (Doz) comes to life, all hell breaks loose, summoning the sister’s jealous, grief-stricken Widower (Lowen Morrow) into an unfortunate love triangle (or square?).

Glowicki is a terrific filmmaker, marshaling her tiny troupe to execute this unique project. Petrie, Doz and Morrow play multiple roles, including a gossipy Greek chorus and the band of merry fisherman (truly an astonishing array of Canadian accent work on display). Her commitment to her singular vision never wavers, but as an actor, Glowicki is truly astonishing. Caked in Halloween makeup and lit with an array of colored gels, Glowicki summons something primal, pure and deeply moving about the lengths one will go to for love, a screech from the depths of her gut.

With a dream-pop soundtrack by U.S. Girls that would be at home in an episode of “Twin Peaks,” “Dead Lover,” in all its stinky, sexy, queer and grotesque glory, is one of the grossest and loveliest films about love I’ve ever seen. This one’s for the horny, hopeless goth inside all of us.

STOWE, Vt. — Looking back, gubernatorial candidate Dean Roy says his political ambitions started in the eighth grade. And by that he means last year.

After working as a legislative page at the Vermont Statehouse, the 14-year-old freshman at Stowe High School now has his sights set on the corner office. In November, he’ll be the first candidate for governor under age 18 to appear on the state’s general election ballot.

“I don’t expect necessarily to win,” he said. “What I do expect is to start the movement, and get more young people to come in behind me and say, ‘Yeah, we also want to make change.’”

Another eighth-grader, Ethan Sonneborn, sought the Democratic nomination for governor in 2018 but finished last in a four-way primary. Roy secured his spot in the general election by creating his own third party, the Freedom and Unity party. Both were able to run because the state constitution sets no minimum age for gubernatorial candidates, requiring only that candidates have resided in the state for four years.

“I know it sounds crazy, a 14-year-old running for governor, but honestly, look at the people in charge right now,” Roy said in a post on his campaign’s Instagram page. “They’ve been doing this forever and things still aren’t working.”

Nearly all other states set minimum age requirements for governor, often 30 years old. In Kansas, lawmakers added a requirement that gubernatorial candidates be at least 25 years old in 2018 after six teenagers ran for office.

Peter Teachout, a professor at Vermont Law and Graduate School, has a different take than Roy on Vermont’s constitution. He points to a section in the document referring to what qualifies someone to be “entitled to the privileges of a voter,” and that is that they must be 18 years of age. Even under Roy’s interpretation, Teachout doesn’t predict a win for the teenager.

“In theory, a 4-year-old could run for governor. Should we be worried about it? No,” he said. “Vermonters can be a little cantankerous and provocative just for the fun of it, but it is not something they are likely to support in this context.”

But Roy’s former history teacher, James Carpenter, said he thinks it’s great that Roy is giving it his all. Though most 14-year-olds aren’t concerned with property taxes or healthcare, Carpenter describes Roy as an “old soul” with endless curiosity.

“It just really shows what type of kid Dean is. He’s very earnest in what he’s doing. There’s no gimmick behind this,” he said. “I think he blends that youthful optimism with some pragmatism that few kids have.”

Roy, who said he doesn’t identify with either major party, said housing is the most important issue facing the state. He’s also thought about how he’d juggle school with a full-time job as governor, saying he’d consider online classes and would do his homework at night after work.

The current governor, Republican Phil Scott, applauds Roy’s interest in politics and public service but questions whether someone so young is ready for the responsibilities that come with running a state.

“He believes it’s important for our youth to get involved,” said Press Secretary Amanda Wheeler. “But the governor also believes that a teenager may not be best suited to serve in that role given the lack of experience and lived perspectives youth have at that point in their lives.”

Roy disagrees that age has anything to do with whether a candidate is fit to run for office.

“What I’m aiming for is that these career politicians look at me and they say, ‘Oh my God, he actually has a chance to disrupt things,’” he said. “If I can get people to think that I am a threat to them, then I know that’s been a success. Because what I want is to show them that the youth have a voice. We’re gonna make change. The future is now.”

Swinhart writes for the Associated Press. AP reporter Holly Ramer contributed to this report from Concord, N.H.

Mary Rand, the first British woman to win an Olympic gold medal in athletics, has died at the age of 86.

Rand secured the long jump title at the Tokyo Games in 1964, also winning silver in the inaugural women’s pentathlon and bronze in the 4x100m relay.

That meant she also became the first British woman to win gold, silver and bronze at a single Olympic Games.

In the long jump, Rand broke the British and Olympic records with her first leap of 6.59m and then smashed the world record on her fifth attempt with an effort of 6.76m.

“Mary was the most gifted athlete I ever saw,” said Ann Packer, who won 800m gold at the 1964 Olympics days after Rand’s triumph and was her room-mate in Tokyo.

“She was as good as athletes get. There has never been anything like her since – and I don’t believe there ever will.”

Rand, whose first husband was British rower Sydney Rand, also won long jump gold at the 1966 Commonwealth Games in Jamaica.

However, injury denied her the chance to defend her Olympic title in 1968 and she retired at the age of 28 the same year.

Born in Wells, Somerset, she was only 17 when she set her first British record in the pentathlon, and she won 12 national titles across long jump, high jump, sprint hurdles and pentathlon during her illustrious career.

Rand was voted the BBC Sports Personality of the Year in 1964 and was awarded an MBE in the 1965 New Year Honours List.

March 27 (UPI) — U.S. Vice President JD Vance took aim at Minnesota and Somali immigrants on Friday ahead of the first meeting of the Trump administration’s anti-fraud task force.

While the meeting itself was behind closed doors, Vance gave brief remarks to reporters, touting the aims of the task force. He specifically took to task a scam in Minnesota involving a Medicaid program meant to aid children on the autism spectrum.

In September, the Trump administration announced charges against one person in a $14 million fraud scheme involving the autism program, and six additional defendants were charged in December.

“I think that the autism scam that we’ve seen in the Somalian parts of Minnesota really illustrates well what’s been going on across whole layers of our government,” Vance said.

“Now, what we’ve seen is Somali fraudsters at an industrial scale taking advantage of that program to the tune of millions and millions of dollars.”

In February, the Trump administration announced it was pausing more than $250 million in Medicaid payments to Minnesota over the alleged fraud.

President Donald Trump announced the formation of the panel during his State of the Union address earlier this year. He, too, took aim at at Minnesota and immigration in his announcement of the task force, which he said will help balance the federal judge “overnight.”

“The Somali pirates who ransacked Minnesota remind us that there are large parts of the world where bribery, corruption and lawlessness are the norm, not the exception,” Trump said.

“Importing these cultures through unrestricted immigration and open borders brings us problems right here to the USA. And it is the American people who pay the price in higher medical bills, car insurance rates, rent, taxes and, perhaps most importantly, crime.”

Gov. Tim Walz has lashed out at the Trump administration for targeting Minnesota, saying the withholding of funds “has nothing to do with fraud.”

“This is a campaign of retribution. Trump is weaponizing the entirety of the federal government to punish blue states like Minnesota,” he said in a statement.

Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and other officials from the executive branch joined Vance for the inaugural meeting of the White House Task Force on Eliminating Fraud.

An off-duty Metropolitan Police officer was among a group filmed confronting Al Jazeera journalists reporting on a suspected arson attack in north London, the force has confirmed. The incident is raising questions about press freedom.