The U.S. military said Monday that two American-flagged merchant ships had successfully transited the Strait of Hormuz after it launched a new initiative to restore traffic. Iran has effectively controlled the critical waterway since the U.S. and Israel launched the war in late February.

Breaking Iran's chokehold over the strait would ease global economic concerns and deny Tehran a major source of leverage in talks aimed at ending the war. But U.S. President Donald Trump's latest effort also risks reigniting full-scale fighting as the U.S. and Iran steadily ramp up pressure.

The U.S. stock market is holding tentatively around its record heights Monday, while oil prices climb with uncertainty about when oil tankers can resume crossing the Strait of Hormuz and restore the world's flow of crude. Dueling claims about a possible Iranian strike on a U.S. Navy vessel in the strait heightened the tensions.

The S&P 500 rose 0.1%, coming off its latest all-time high. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 76 points, or 0.2%, as of 10:30 a.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 0.1% higher.

More than 300 families have been evacuated after massive amounts of ash billowed from the Mayon volcano over the weekend due to the collapse of lava deposits from its slopes, officials said Monday.

There was no explosive eruption from Mayon, which has been erupting mildly on and off since January, but huge deposits of lava on its southwestern slope suddenly cascaded down in a pyroclastic flow — an avalanche of hot rocks, ash and gas — before nightfall on Saturday, said Teresito Bacolcol, director of the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology.

European leaders on Monday said that U.S. President Donald Trump's snap decision to pull thousands of U.S. troops out of Germany came as a surprise but is a fresh sign that Europe must take care of its own security.

The Pentagon announced last week that it would pull some 5,000 troops out of Germany, but Trump told reporters on Saturday that "we're going to cut way down. And we're cutting a lot further than 5,000."

One Palestinian man was killed and four others seriously wounded during an Israeli military raid in the Israeli-occupied West Bank city of Nablus on Sunday, the Palestinian Red Crescent said.

The Palestinian Health Ministry said the man's wife was in labor at a local hospital when she was informed of his death.

Israeli army chief Eyal Zamir has instructed the Northern Command and the Israel Air Force to strike the production and supply chain of Hezbollah's FPV drones, including deep inside Lebanon, Israel's Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper reported on Friday.

The ongoing war between Israel and Hezbollah is far from the first conflict between them. The two have an enmity that goes back more than four decades, with outbursts of fighting or outright war punctuated by periods of tense calm.

Here is a timeline of some significant events in the hostilities between the two:

The leaders of major media companies around the world, including The Associated Press, are calling on Israel's government to lift a ban keeping foreign journalists from being able to independently enter and report from Gaza, a barrier that's been in place since the war's start in 2023 and continues even as a ceasefire has been in place for more than six months.

"Being on the ground is essential. It allows journalists to question official accounts on all sides, to speak directly with civilians and report back what they witness firsthand," said the statement from the executives, released Thursday. "That is why news organizations send their reporters into the field, often at great personal risk."

The first direct commercial flight between the United States and Venezuela is scheduled to land on Thursday in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, seven years after the U.S. Department of Homeland Security ordered an indefinite suspension, citing security concerns.

The resumption of a commercial flight between the two countries comes in the wake of the U.S. capture of Nicolás Maduro in a stunning nighttime raid on his residence in Caracas, Venezuela's capital, in early January.

Soaring oil prices from the Iran war pushed inflation higher in Europe in April as growth continued to underperform in a worrying combination both for consumers and policymakers at the European Central Bank.

Annual inflation in the 21 countries that use the shared euro currency rose to 3.0% from 2.6% in March, fueled by a 10.9% increase in energy prices, the European Union statistical agency Eurostat reported Thursday. Crude oil is trading above $120 per barrel, up from around $73 before the outbreak of the war on Feb. 28.