Trump Postpones U.S. Strikes on Iranian Energy Infrastructure

4.638 - 19.932 Pierre Bien-Aimé

Here's your midday brief for Monday, March 23rd. I'm Pierre Bien-Aimé for The Wall Street Journal. President Donald Trump says the United States military is postponing strikes on Iranian energy infrastructure for five days following, quote, productive conversations with Tehran.

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Trump had said on Saturday that the U.S. would obliterate Iranian power plants. U.S. stock indexes jumped after markets opened and Brent crude futures dropped nearly 10%. Iran denied that it was in talks with the U.S., We exclusively report that two U.S. senators are introducing the first bipartisan Senate bill to ban sports betting on prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket.

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Kalshi and Polymarket offer yes or no bets on everything from politics to the weather to pop culture, but a lot of trading activity is focused on sports. That puts the platforms in competition with betting sites like FanDuel and DraftKings.

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A CalChief spokeswoman said the proposed ban would, quote, just push this behavior offshore, while PolyMarket didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. PolyMarket has a data partnership with Dow Jones, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal. And David Simon, the man who turned his family's real estate business into the biggest mall owner in the U.S., died yesterday.

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He was 64 and had received a pancreatic cancer diagnosis in 2024. Simon defied critics who said that malls were dinosaurs, and over a decades-long buying spree cobbled together an empire that spanned 250 properties and 206 million square feet. That gave his company, Simon Property Group, control of more retail space than any company in the world.