SYDNEY: A cyclone off Australia triggered outages at two of the world's largest LNG plants, energy giant Chevron said Friday (Mar 27) as Middle East turmoil stoked soaring demand for the fuel.

The Gorgon and Wheatstone gas plants in Australia collectively supply more than five per cent of the world's liquefied natural gas, according to Chevron figures.

Both suffered outages on Thursday afternoon as Tropical Cyclone Narelle lurked off the coast of Western Australia.

"Chevron Australia is working to restore production at the Gorgon and Wheatstone gas facilities following production outages," Chevron said in a statement.

CNA Games

Guess Word

Crack the word, one row at a time

Buzzword

Create words using the given letters

Mini Sudoku

Tiny puzzle, mighty brain teaser

Mini Crossword

Small grid, big challenge

Word Search

Spot as many words as you can

Show More

Show Less

"We will resume full production at both facilities once it is safe to do so."

The Gorgon gas plant - which is the larger of the two - was continuing to operate at a reduced capacity, Chevron said.

It was not immediately clear to what extent supply might be impacted.

Tropical Cyclone Narelle was inching towards the coast of Western Australia on Friday morning, according to the government Bureau of Meteorology.

The category four system was forecast to bring "destructive wind gusts and heavy rainfall" to some coastal areas, the bureau said.

A sprawling industrial complex sitting just off Australia's western coast, the Gorgon plant is capable of pumping out more than 15 million metric tonnes of gas each year.

At full capacity, the smaller Wheatstone project produces almost nine million metric tonnes.

MAJOR DISRUPTIONS

Australia is one of the world's largest LNG exporters - and is a particularly crucial supplier to import-reliant northern Asia.

Some 40 per cent of Japan's LNG comes from Australia, according to the Asia Natural Gas and Energy Association.

The US-Israel war on Iran has caused major disruptions to global supplies of both oil and LNG.

Qatar, the world's second-largest LNG producer, has seen LNG exports plunge as fuel tankers steer clear of the Strait of Hormuz.

LNG prices in some parts of Asia have more than doubled.

Chevron is one of two major natural gas producers in Western Australia, alongside Woodside Energy.

Between them, the two companies account for more than 15 per cent of international natural gas exports.

With LNG profits set to soar on the back of the Middle East crisis, Australia is reportedly mulling a new windfall tax on fuel exporters.

WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump said on Thursday (May 26) he will take executive action to pay 50,000 airport security workers as a deal stalled in Congress to address staff shortages that have snarled travel around the country.

Trump said he was instructing the Homeland Security Department "to immediately pay our TSA Agents in order to address this Emergency Situation, and to quickly stop the Democrat chaos at the airports. It is not an easy thing to do, but I am going to do it".

Nearly 500 airport security officers have quit since the start of a partial government shutdown in February, the Homeland Security Department said, as a congressional dispute over the department's funding forces Transportation Security Administration officers to work without pay.

It is unclear how long the funding will last or if Trump is tapping funding for the Homeland Security Department approved last year as part of a massive tax and spending bill.

CNA Games

Guess Word

Crack the word, one row at a time

Buzzword

Create words using the given letters

Mini Sudoku

Tiny puzzle, mighty brain teaser

Mini Crossword

Small grid, big challenge

Word Search

Spot as many words as you can

Show More

Show Less

Democrats in Congress have held up funding for DHS while demanding a change in rules governing its immigration operations, after agents in Minneapolis shot and killed US citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

Republicans have rejected repeated Democratic proposals to fund the TSA separately while negotiating reforms to how Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents operate.

The TSA reiterated on Wednesday that the agency could be forced to close smaller airports if staffing issues worsened.

More than 11 per cent of TSA officers, or 3,120 agents, did not show up for work on Wednesday, while much higher absentee rates of 30 per cent or more were seen at New York's JFK, Houston's two airports, and airports in Baltimore, New Orleans and Atlanta.

Chris Sununu, CEO of airline trade group Airlines for America, on Thursday reiterated his call for Congress to quickly resolve the issue. He warned that, even if the US Senate reaches a deal on DHS funding by Friday, "you're still probably looking at a very tough weekend, because it's not going to get finalised" immediately.

Trump has said he could deploy National Guard troops to airports to address security needs.

Senate Republicans and Democrats continue to debate a proposal that would allow funding to resume for TSA and other Department of Homeland Security agencies while keeping some immigration enforcement funding on hold.

TSA is grappling with a school spring-break travel surge that is about 5 per cent higher in volume than last year's. Absences have spiked above 10 per cent in recent days, leading to hours-long delays to get through security checkpoints at some airports.

Hundreds of US immigration agents and Homeland Security Investigations officers began deploying at 14 US airports on Monday to aid security screening.

Some of those agents are now checking IDs with TSA equipment, guarding entrances and exits, assisting with logistics, and engaging in crowd control.

ICE and other law enforcement personnel at DHS are getting paid during the shutdown.

STOCKHOLM/DALLAS/SEOUL: A Korean children’s song plays — a little girl’s voice, recorded decades ago.

Anna Samuelsson does not recognise it. “It’s like another child,” she says. “It’s not me.”

But it is her voice, when she was five years old and newly arrived in Sweden from South Korea. Today, that child feels distant, her language gone, her memories out of reach.

Catherine Harned knows that feeling too. When she arrived in Texas at age seven, she spoke only Korean. “When I came to America, it was stressed to me — speak English,” she recalls.

CNA Games

Guess Word

Crack the word, one row at a time

Buzzword

Create words using the given letters

Mini Sudoku

Tiny puzzle, mighty brain teaser

Mini Crossword

Small grid, big challenge

Word Search

Spot as many words as you can

Show More

Show Less

Within years, she lost not only the Korean language but much of her early life.

Harned and Samuelsson are sisters by birth, adopted weeks apart in 1974 from different orphanages in Seoul. They grew up continents apart, unaware of each other’s existence.

They are among more than 200,000 South Korean children who, through the decades after the Korean War, were placed with families overseas. Many of them were conveniently labelled as “orphans”.

“The production of ‘orphans’ had everything to do (with) facilitating the movement of children and had very little to do with the actual circumstances of the child,” says Eleana Kim, a professor of anthropology and Asian American studies at the University of California, Irvine.

International adoption became a solution to social pressures, from stigma around mixed-race babies and unmarried mothers, to poverty and rapid modernisation. It was also driven by demand from the West, where fewer children were becoming available for adoption.

By the 1970s, transnational adoptees — most commonly from South Korea — made up the equivalent of 1 to 2 per cent of newborns in Sweden.

In the United States, evangelical Christians saw adoption as a way to “hasten the kingdom of God”, cites author and scholar Soojin Chung at the Princeton Theological Seminary.

Often, the children’s stories were simplified or rewritten as something more palatable: abandoned, rescued, given a better life.

But many adoptees have since uncovered records that did not add up, documents with missing details, repeated narratives and even the names of parents where none were supposed to exist.

Last year, South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission found that the decades-long adoption programme had been rife with fraud including falsified records and cases of children being mislabelled as orphans.

Months later, President Lee Jae Myung issued a public apology to adoptees and their families, acknowledging the country’s role in what he described as “unjust human rights violations”.

He said in a Facebook post that he felt “heavy-hearted” thinking about the “anxiety, pain and confusion” many had experienced and pledged support for adoptees attempting to trace their origins.

For many, that search is long overdue. Across continents, adoptees are trying to reclaim what was lost, seek their biological families and make sense of identities shaped by absence.

From Sweden to the US and back to South Korea, CNA’s One “Orphan” Every Hour follows their journeys as they piece together their past and confront the forces that took them from it.

WATCH: South Korea’s fake orphans — How adoptions to USA and Sweden tore families apart (1:32:04)

THE LIES OF THE PAST

Mary Bowers had always believed she was an orphan. Her birth certificate says so, with no recorded birth parents. “When I left for college, I asked for my adoption papers,” she recalls.

The deeper she looked, the more uncertain her background story became. According to the records, Bowers’ mother realised she was pregnant only after her relationship had broken down, and she was too poor to raise a child.

But when Bowers compared her documents with those for other adoptees from the same agency, she found that account repeated “a dozen times over”.

“It was word (for) word the same,” she says. “So I don’t really know what the true story is.”

Then in 2024, she discovered she had a full-sibling: Chase Malmgren, adopted in Utah as an infant, 23 years after her. But her brother’s adoption record raised more questions.

His adoptive parents had been told his mother was married, that her husband had lost his trucking business and the family had fallen into financial hardship.

After a one-night stand with a businessman, she got pregnant and gave up the child to preserve her family’s reputation. It was a complete account. But it did not match Bowers’.

For others, the truth is more painful.

Madeleine Bjork grew up believing she had been given up owing to post-war hardship, even though she was born 30 years after the Korean War.

When she met her birth family, a different picture emerged. Her parents were unmarried, her abusive father left when she was two months old, and her mother struggled to raise her.

It was her grandmother who placed her in an orphanage without her mother’s consent. When her mother tried to get her back, it was “too late” as her adoption papers had been signed.

“I thought a lot about that, especially because I had my kids when I found out about this,” Bjork says, choking back a sob.

In more extreme cases, there was no consent at all. Han Tae-soon — the first biological mother to sue South Korea’s largest adoption agency, Holt Children’s Services, and the government — lost her daughter when the latter was four years old.

“They took her away while she was playing in front of the house. They kidnapped her,” Han says. “After seven months in the orphanage, she was adopted in the US.

“She used to live with the thought that I’d sold her.”

For all Philip Pellouchoud knows, his story may not be so different. Adopted in Colorado in 1971 through Holt, he has spent years trying to trace his origins.

The only record of his early life was a name in a ledger from the Centre for Lost Children, with no explanation for how he came to be there. “Was it an unwed mother? Was it a divorce?” he wonders.

Kim Do-hyun, the president of non-profit organisation KoRoot, which supports adoptees returning to South Korea to trace their origins, thinks it is unlikely that Pellouchoud will find clear answers as there is “no record, no clue”.

“We don’t believe that parents usually brought their child to (the Centre for Lost Children). Police could’ve taken … foundlings on the street (to the centre),” Kim says.

“The first action should’ve been (to look) for … the parents. But (at) that time, (it was) not done seriously.”

Instead, children could be declared adoptable with minimal investigation. Financial incentives may have played a role. “It wasn’t simply cynical (but) criminal,” Kim says. “The adoption agents could make money — one person’s yearly salary (from) one child.”

The result was a system where records were often incomplete, incorrect or missing altogether.

THE FAIRY TALE THAT WASN’T THEIRS

Whatever the system was trying to solve, there was often no fairy-tale ending after these children were sent to the West. “Almost every day you’d be reminded that you’re different,” Samuelsson says.

Being different “didn’t make a difference”, Bjork was told. But for her, it did. “Until I was maybe 13, I just wanted to be like everyone else,” she says. “My biggest wish was to be blonde and have blue eyes.”

Others faced overt racial stereotypes. Malmgren recalls being called “snake eyes” as a child, while Harned remembers her adoptive mother calling her long, jet-black hair “a rat’s nest”.

Joel Peterson, who is mixed, faced stigma on both sides. In his early childhood in South Korea, people would “pull their children away” and call his mother a prostitute, he remembers. He was also bullied and beaten by other children.

The prejudice did not end after he was adopted in Minnesota at age seven in 1970.

“I was ostracised and made fun of and picked on and bullied for being Korean, for being Asian, so I worked consciously at not having an accent,” he recounts.

Many adoptees internalised harmful narratives about why they had been given up. “Your mother was probably a prostitute” was something Bowers also heard — a stigma that Korean adoptees carried well into the 1980s.

Then there was the loss of a shared childhood that can never be recovered.

Bowers once flew all the way to South Korea to find her brother. Their eventual reunion in 2024 came with a quiet awareness of what had been missed.

“Even in this great scenario that Chase and I are in, … we don’t have that connection any more.

“There’s a sense of guilt because with the lost time,” she says through her tears, “I won’t get to teach him to ride a bike or see him in the school play.”

As they rebuild their relationship, Bowers describes a need — shaped by a lingering fear — to prove her worth to her brother.

“There’s almost like a trauma response in all (my) talking and outgoingness,” she says. “Some of it comes from (hoping that) if I prove that I’m good enough, then I won’t be abandoned. Like you can’t leave me.”

In 2022, she filed a case with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, ticking seven out of more than 50 categories of human rights violations, including the right to identity, family, country and access to information.

Whereas adoption is often framed as a happy ever after, many Korean adoptees may have had a different lived experience. “You’re like the fairy tale for everybody,” Samuelsson says, “except for yourself.”

WATCH: Labelled an “orphan”, she discovers a biological brother 23 years younger — Is it too late? (20:29)

RETRACING THEIR ROOTS

In the search for answers, Pellouchoud recently travelled to South Korea to visit adoption agencies, community centres and even police stations.

“I’ve taken every DNA test that you can,” he says. “Now I want to do this one last thing, and then I’m going to be done. And whatever happens happens.”

With help from CNA, he met Bu Chung-ha, who led Holt Children’s Services in the 1970s and may have personally processed his case, along with thousands more.

Pellouchoud was told, however, that these adoption decisions were not made in South Korea but in offices in the US or France, where the children were matched with families there.

KoRoot also helped him obtain a document showing his birth name, Park Won-il, and that he was only three days old when a shop clerk brought him to the Centre for Lost Children.

When he took the document to a government agency, however, he was told it belonged to someone else with the same name, with no further explanation given. There is no other record of his first two years and a half.

For now, he is not continuing his search, unless a future DNA match offers new leads.

As for Samuelsson, she is looking for her birth family, but her search has stalled. Her sister, having built a life in the US, has not lent a hand yet and sees no reason to look back.

“I have no desire to pursue it, I really don’t,” Harned says contentedly. “This is my home.”

Malmgren is hesitant too, but for a different reason. He worries about “what happens if we do find our parents”. Asked if he fears finding that they might have truly abandoned him, he replies: “Yeah, that’s one fear.”

Last year, a Swedish commission recommended ending international adoptions after its investigation uncovered decades of fraud, abuse and illegal practices.

In the same year, South Korea finally banned private agency adoptions. The country now plans to end overseas adoptions by 2029.

Watch the documentary One “Orphan” Every Hour here.

QUEENSLAND, Australia: Gold has long enjoyed a reputation as a financial “safe haven” during stormy times. But over the past few months of geopolitical chaos and market panic, the precious metal has moved more like a roller coaster than a steady ship at anchor.

In late January, the gold price surged to an all-time high near US$5,600 per ounce – effectively double what it was a year earlier. It’s lost about 20 per cent since then, sliding sharply while major conflict broke out in the Middle East.

To be clear, gold is still at lofty heights by historical standards, up almost 300 per cent over the past decade. Much of this surge has been driven by “financialisation”. Put simply, more ways of investing in gold on paper – with complex financial products called derivatives and funds that track its price – have seen a boom in speculation by institutional and retail investors.

But this year’s wild swings in price should shatter any remaining illusion that gold is always a safe haven. To understand why, we need to look at how modern financial markets work – and in particular, why an oil shock is different to other crises.

UMBRELLAS AND STORM SHELTERS

To protect their wealth, investors often seek assets that are either “hedges” or “safe havens”.

A hedge is an investment that generally moves in the opposite direction to the rest of the market on average over a normal, long-term period. Think of a hedge like holding an umbrella above your head every single day. You’ll stay drier than everyone else when it rains, but you’ll also block out on some of the sunshine (potential gains) when it doesn’t.

A safe haven, on the other hand, is an investment that generally moves in the opposite direction to the rest of the market only during sudden periods of extreme stress or crashes. It’s like a storm shelter you only run to during a hurricane.
 

WHERE DOES GOLD FIT?

In a 2016 research study, colleagues and I found gold had some of the qualities of a safe haven, particularly for share markets in Australia, the United States, Germany and France.

During the 2008 global financial crisis, gold was the most stable commodity among the precious metals we studied. Its price did drop, but it avoided the catastrophic losses seen in other precious metals.

It had similar safe haven qualities in 2011, when ratings agency Standard & Poor’s (S&P) downgraded the US’ AAA credit rating to AA+ for the first time in history and many global stock markets fell.

Importantly, those market shocks came out of the financial system itself (a banking system failure and a credit downgrade).

Today, the world faces something fundamentally different: a massive energy shock due to interrupted oil supplies and major damage to oil and gas facilities in the Middle East.

WHY AN OIL SHOCK IS DIFFERENT 

Traditional finance textbooks will tell you that when a war breaks out, inflation spikes or stock markets crash, investors typically engage in what’s called a “flight to quality” – fleeing riskier assets and moving their money somewhere seen to be safer (such as gold).

In a 2025 research paper, colleagues and I offer a more nuanced view. Crucially, we incorporated data from more recent periods of stock market turbulence, including the COVID-19 pandemic, where gold’s safe haven properties were more muted.

We found gold is still a go-to choice for investors moving out of riskier investments. But it is not an untouchable storm shelter.

Instead of standing completely separate from the panic during a crisis, gold absorbs some of the volatility from both the stock market and energy markets, which can cause its price to fall.

RIPPLE EFFECTS

Why? For one, market chaos means some large investors may be forced to sell gold to cover other losses or meet financial obligations, such as margin calls (where a lender demands funds to cover the falling value of an asset).

For other large investors, the recent price rally may have created an opportunity to sell high and take profits, or rebalance their investment portfolios.

But there is also the fact gold does not have as much essential intrinsic value as something like oil. There is not much industrial demand for it compared to other commodities.

In a severe crisis, forced to chose between a commodity like oil and gold, what does global industry really need? Oil.

ROCK, PAPER, GOLD

The different ways people are investing in gold is another important factor. Over several decades, gold has become increasingly “financialised”.

Now, it can be bought and sold with ease on “paper” via speculative, complex financial instruments called derivatives, or in increasingly popular exchange traded funds which track the price of gold.

With these funds, you aren’t buying gold itself. You’re buying an asset whose price is designed to track the price of gold in some way.

Today, a massive rise in speculative investment means that commodity prices depend on far more than real-world supply and demand.

Because global investors now hold gold derivatives and conventional stocks at the same time, the risk of exposure to common market shocks has drastically increased.

Rand Low is Associate Professor of Quantitative Finance at Bond University. This commentary first appeared on The Conversation.

RIVAL PLAN

REMOVES POTENTIAL TRUMP CLASH

KATHMANDU: Nepal's rapper-turned-politician Balendra Shah, set to be sworn in as the new prime minister, issued his first post-election message via a rap song on Thursday (Mar 26), urging unity.

"The strength of unity is my national power," Shah, better known as Balen, sang in the track, which racked up tens of thousands of views within minutes of being released on social media and streaming sites.

"Undivided Nepali, this time, history is being made," the 35-year-old added, singing in Nepali.

The sharply dressed Shah, who usually sports trademark dark sunglasses, has emerged as a symbol of youth-driven political change and will formally become premier on Friday.

His Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) won March 5 polls in a landslide, the first elections since a deadly youth-led uprising in September 2025.

At least 77 people were killed in the anti-corruption protests, which began over a brief social media ban but tapped into longstanding fury over economic hardship.

Shah, who had maintained a public silence since his election victory, delivered a message of solidarity in his track "Jay Mahakaali", named after a powerful Hindu goddess.

"My heart is full of courage, my red blood is boiling; my brothers stand with me, this time we will rise," he sang, over a video of him campaigning for election.

"This time, joy and happiness will burst in every home. Like wood from a green forest, I will break whatever comes. May my breath not run out, I will run like a leopard."

He took the oath of office as a lawmaker earlier on Thursday, but will be sworn in as prime minister on Friday.

It caps a bold gamble by the reformist, who resigned as Kathmandu mayor to challenge KP Sharma Oli, the 74-year-old four-time premier, in his own seat.

Shah not only unseated Oli, but the RSP also secured a powerful parliamentary majority, securing 182 of 275 seats in the lower house.

KYIV: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy arrived in Saudi Arabia Thursday (Mar 26) for an unannounced visit, as the war in Iran spurs interest among Gulf countries in Ukrainian arms technology.

The two countries are set to sign an agreement on "security cooperation - in particular, the protection of the skies", later on Thursday, a senior official told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity.

They did not provide further details of what was set to be in the accord.

Kyiv has sought to leverage its expertise in downing Russian drones to help Gulf nations, which are being attacked with the same Iranian-designed Shahed drones that Russia fires on Ukraine.

Zelenskyy has said that more than 200 Ukrainian anti-drone experts have been deployed to several countries in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, since the US-Israel strikes on Iran spurred retaliatory drone and missile attacks from Tehran.

"Arrived in Saudi Arabia. Important meetings are scheduled," Zelenskyy wrote on social media, publishing a video of him meeting a regional official in Jeddah.

"We appreciate the support and support those who are ready to work with us to ensure security," Zelenskyy added.

Saudi Arabia, which has close security ties with the United States, has been targeted by Iranian drones.

Kyiv is touting its mix of cheap drone interceptors, electronic jamming tools and anti-aircraft guns to down Russian drones as an effective air defence tool.

Ukraine has proposed swapping its interceptors for the vastly more expensive air-defence missiles that Gulf countries are currently using to down Iranian drones. Kyiv argues it needs more of them to fend off Russian missile attacks.

Last year, Saudi Arabia also hosted US officials for separate talks with Ukrainian and Russian delegations in a bid to find an end to the four-year war triggered by Moscow's Feb 2022 invasion.