Steve LeVine

Negotiators will gather later this week in Vienna to begin final talks in what has been a more than two-year marathon to settle an Iran nuclear deal. Almost no one thinks that the two sides will close a deal on time—instead, they are likely only to be getting truly serious by the advertised June 30 deadline, and will take up to another week to either shake hands or walk away.

The world has been clamoring for a super-battery.

Tesla, always on the hunt to drive up its share price, achieved a big bump yesterday and today by showcasing a significant personnel acquisition—a five-year contract with Canadian battery impresario Jeff Dahn.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, the sun famously never set on the British empire. A commanding navy enforced its will, yet all would have been lost if it were not for ports, roads, and railroads. The infrastructure that the British built everywhere they went embedded and enabled their power like bones and veins in a body.

Traders love a good oil war.

European sanctions on Russia are due to expire at the end of July. Russian president Vladimir Putin seems to have been betting that the EU, divided over Russia policy (paywall), would lift, ease, or fail to renew them, which—with the added help of higher oil prices—would allow Russia’s struggling economy to roar back.

One major carmaker after another—Tesla, BMW, Toyota, and now Ford—is making its cutting-edge electric car patents available for use by their rivals, some with licensing fees and others completely free.

OPEC is once again at odds with the market. This time, it’s not about the cartel’s strategy to dominate the oil trade. Instead, OPEC is in a debate with industry analysts and traders who are declaring the cartel the winner in a months-long war with US shale oil.

The resignation of an Israeli government official appears to clear the way for the development of a stalled giant offshore natural gas field—gas with the potential, even if remote, of triggering geopolitical reverberations in and outside the region.

Turkmenistan’s president wants to be sure that the country’s progeny remember him after he is gone. So the country has raised a gigantic bronze gilded with 24-carat gold leaf in the Central Asian capital in his honor.

Several major automobile makers are racing to create electric cars within an upper-mass-market sweet spot—traveling 200 miles or more on a charge, and costing $30,000 to $40,000. But a new report adds to doubts that they will make money, especially at first.

Oil prices rose today after five straight days of declines, but traders may finally be understanding that they have been inflating them for two months for no economic reason: the world is awash in oil, and the cost of drilling for more is lower than it has been in years.

After falling roughly 60% from July through March, oil prices are now up around 44% from their bottom. The chatter among many investors and industry players is that the worst is over. The only questions remaining, they say, are how high prices will go from here and how soon oil drillers can resume counting their profits.

Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, is suffering from an affliction of which Thomas Edison complained more than a century ago: inventors and promoters lining up at his door, each with lofty claims for a new battery.

His own solar company has cast doubt on the economics of his new home and business batteries, but Tesla CEO Elon Musk said he has sold out of the products in the six days they have been on offer.

Lithuania has jailed an alleged Russian spy for three months and formed a regional military brigade to counter Moscow, part of a new bout of brinksmanship between the two former Soviet nations.

With his unusual nighttime product launch, Elon Musk has again revealed himself as the best combined technology showman and designer in Silicon Valley since Steve Jobs. The question is whether Musk’s cool and conviction can incite a groundswell of buyers to snap up his sleek new home and business batteries—whether they will indeed “change the way the world uses energy,” as he has described his aim.

In the 1980s, Pope John Paul II became the scourge of dictators the world over, lending succor to people’s power movements that brought down governments in southeast Asia, Latin America, the Warsaw Bloc, and the Soviet Union.

In Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev got himself re-elected this week with 98% of the vote. In Sudan, leader Omar al-Bashir was re-elected with a 94% advantage. Both have led their countries for a quarter-century.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk—the showy electric-car, solar, and space billionaire—plans yet another shot at building a non-fossil fuel colossus with the launch later this week of a line of home and business-scale lithium-ion batteries.

The last 11 months have been an unlikely journey for oil, with its widely unanticipated price dive, Saudi Arabia’s uncharacteristic refusal to stem the bloodletting, and financial havoc for petro-powers and energy companies.

With its anti-trust case against Gazprom, the European Commission is striking at the heart of a powerful tool that Russian president Vladimir Putin has used to punish nations that he views as unfriendly or weak.

A blockbuster deal to sell Tesla Motors to Google fell through in 2013 when a shift in fortunes gave Elon Musk his confidence back, and he called off the agreement, according to a new book.

A personal conundrum has emerged among early candidates in the 2016 US presidential election—to rebel against your elders? For Republican Marco Rubio, the answer is yes. For Democrat Hillary Clinton, resoundingly the opposite.