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Wall Street dives, ships collide and measles keeps spreading

 
Today's National story

Markets slide amid recession fears, Trump tariffs

What happened
U.S. stock markets had their worst day of 2025 yesterday, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average closing down 890 points, or 2.1%. The S&P 500 shed 2.7% — 8.6% and more than $4 trillion in market value lower than a month ago — while the Nasdaq tumbled 4%, notching its worst day since 2022. 

Who said what
Yesterday's stock plunge extended a "miserable month for markets" that saw all three major market indexes "wipe out" any gains made since November's election, said CNN. Wall Street is starting to question "how much pain President Donald Trump will let the economy endure through tariffs and other policies in order to get what he wants," The Associated Press said. In an interview broadcast Sunday, Trump declined to rule out a coming recession.

Investors and economists are digesting Trump's apparent "indifference to rising risks" from his "double-barreled blitz" of slashing the federal workforce and threatening "huge tariffs" on America's "largest trading partners," The Wall Street Journal said. After years of policymakers being "singularly focused on achieving a so-called soft landing," Trump's teams is "considering a course correction that, by their own acknowledgment, might tip the economy toward a hard landing."

In one measure of the fallout, the five tech executives who stood behind Trump during his inauguration have since collectively lost $209 billion in wealth, Bloomberg said, with Tesla's Elon Musk alone losing $145 billion. Tesla's stock plummeted 15.4% yesterday to its lowest level since October. Analysts attributed the losses to declining sales, "protests of Musk's political activity, including his mass firings of U.S. government workers" as head of Trump's DOGE team, and concerns that "politics are distracting the world's richest man from tending to his cash cow," Reuters said.

White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett told CNBC yesterday there were "a lot of reasons to be extremely bullish about the economy," despite "some blips in the data" this quarter. Hassett's comments did not "immediately convince" investors, who are "increasingly skittish" about Trump's unpredictable tariff decisions, The Washington Post said. The Cboe Volatility Index, or "Wall Street's 'fear gauge,'" surged 19.5% by market close.

What next?
Trump's 25% tariffs on steel and aluminum imports are set to take effect Wednesday, the same day the government releases its monthly inflation report.

 
 
Today's INTERNATIONAL story

US jet fuel tanker, cargo ship collide off UK coast

What happened
A container ship hauling toxic chemicals collided with a tanker carrying jet fuel for the U.S. military off the northeast coast of England yesterday, causing multiple explosions. The crews of both vessels abandoned ship, and Britain's coast guard said 36 sailors were safely taken ashore. The owner of the cargo ship, the Solang, said one crew member was missing.

Who said what
The U.S.-flagged tanker Stena Immaculate was carrying Jet-A1 fuel for the U.S. Navy's Military Sealift Command, a military spokesperson and the ship's U.S. operator, Crowley Logistics, told Reuters. One crew member told the BBC that the Solong, registered in Portugal and owned by German firm Ernst Russ, came out of nowhere and collided with the 600-foot Stena Immaculate at 16 knots.

"Both vessels have sustained significant damage in the impact of the collision and the subsequent fire," Ernst Russ said in a statement. Some residents reported seeing a "massive fireball" after the crash, said Martyn Boyers, CEO of the Port of Grimsby East. The Solang was carrying 15 containers of sodium cyanide, a toxic chemical used in gold mining and other commercial applications, and alcohol.

What next?
The collision released at least jet fuel into the Humber Estuary, and "efforts to assess any environmental damage are still ongoing," the BBC said. The impact on seabirds, gray seals and fish from the jet fuel was likelier to be more immediate and of shorter duration than with a crude oil spill, Mark Hartl, a scientist at Edinburgh's Heriot-Watt University, said to The Washington Post. But the fuel can still be hazardous for wildlife, especially since "a lot of it is burning."

 
 
Today's PUBLIC HEALTH Story

RFK Jr. offers alternative fixes as measles spreads

What happened
As a measles outbreak in West Texas and New Mexico continues to spread, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. publicly "outlined a strategy for containing" the outbreak that "strayed far from mainstream science, relying heavily on fringe theories about prevention and treatments," The New York Times said yesterday.

Who said what
The Texas outbreak, centered in an under-vaccinated Mennonite community in Gaines County, has infected at least 230 people in the state and a bordering county in New Mexico, and killed two unvaccinated patients. But "even a measles outbreak and death isn't enough to drive many residents into free vaccine clinics," The Wall Street Journal said. Local doctors are "fighting an uphill battle to convince some parents that vitamin A — touted by vaccine critics as effective against the highly contagious virus — will not protect their children," Reuters said.

In an interview with Fox News last week, the Times said, Kennedy "cheered on questionable treatments like cod liver oil," which he called "the safest application of vitamin A," while issuing a "muffled call for vaccinations in the affected community," if people choose. There's "no way" the outbreak will convince vaccine skeptics to get their kids vaccinated, Gaines County physician Dr. Wendell Parkey told the Journal. "Before Covid I could convince some. Now it's like, forget it."

What next?
The National Institutes of Health, part of Kennedy's HHS, yesterday canceled "dozens of grants for research on why some people are reluctant to be vaccinated and how to increase acceptance of vaccines," the Post said.

 
 

It's not all bad

Between 2008 and 2022, rates of pre-cancerous cervical lesions in women between the ages of 20 and 24 plummeted by around 80%, according to a new CDC report. This "adds to evidence" that the HPV vaccine Gardasil, first recommended in the U.S. in 2006, is "preventing cervical cancer in young women," said The Associated Press. HPV is the most common sexually transmitted infection in the U.S. and causes about 10,800 cervical cancers annually.

 
 
Under the radar

Almost half of the women in Africa will be obese or overweight by 2030, according to a new study from the World Obesity Foundation. This "alarming rise" has been "compared with the HIV epidemic," said The Guardian. Unlike in most regions, where the obesity gender gap is "much smaller, or reversed," women in Africa are almost twice as likely to be overweight or obese as men. 

Africa's rising obesity rates are linked to the "proliferation of unhealthy diets" and increasingly sedentary lifestyles, regional experts said at The Conversation. This has a gendered element: women often stay at home caring for children while men "typically work outside the home." 

Urbanization also plays "a major role," said Nomathemba Chandiwana, chief scientific officer at South Africa's Desmond Tutu Health Foundation. "Many African cities lack safe spaces for physical activity," she told The Guardian, and that makes exercise harder for women. HIV treatments "add another layer" to the problem, since weight gain related to antiretroviral drugs is "disproportionately affecting women". 

In general, obesity "feels like HIV but more compressed," said Chandiwana. "We've got a disease we don't quite understand, it's there, we're not doing much about it." 

But the parallels could also spark positive action. In South Africa, where more than half the adult population (and more than two-thirds of women) are overweight or obese, society is "drawing on the lessons from tackling the HIV epidemic" to reduce stigma and improve access to treatment, according to the World Health Organization.

 
 
On this day

March 11, 2011

A 9.0-magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of Honshu, Japan. The earthquake, the fourth most powerful ever recorded, created a tsunami that caused a meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Parts of Japan are still recovering from the disaster, which killed more than 19,000 people.

 
 
TODAY'S newspaperS

"Stock sell-off worsens amid tariff turbulence," the Chicago Sun-Times says on Tuesday's front page. "Dow falls 890 points" as "fears of recession, stagflation" hit Wall Street, the Detroit Free Press says. "White House counters recession talk," The Oklahoman says, but there may be a "dark cloud on horizon" as President Donald Trump prepares to cut hundreds of workers at the National Weather Service. "New Canada leader pins hopes on being antithesis of Trump," The Wall Street Journal says. Trump is "keeping GOP in line with threat of ruin," The New York Times says, but "Trump run-in wins Zelenskyy points at home."

► See the newspaper front pages

 
 
Tall tale

Filthy hive-mind

British grandmother Louise Littlejohn was "astonished" when Apple's AI voicemail-to-text transcription bungled a message from a local business, telling her the caller asked if she was "able to have sex" before calling her a "piece of s--t," the BBC said. It appears the "sex" reference came from the caller inviting Littlejohn to an event on March "sixth," but it is unclear where "piece of s--t" came from. Once Littlejohn realized the "obviously quite inappropriate" error, she thought it was "so funny."

 
 

Morning Report was written and edited by Theara Coleman, Nadia Croes, Catherine Garcia, Scott Hocker, Anya Jaremko-Greenwold, Justin Klawans, Harriet Marsden, Devika Rao, Rafi Schwartz and Peter Weber, with illustrations by Stephen Kelly and Julia Wytrazek.

Image credits, from top: Spencer Platt / Getty Images; Lee Whitaker / Getty Images; Jan Sonnenmair / Getty Images; Illustration by Julia Wytrazek / Getty Images