Good morning from the Financial Times.

Today is Friday, March 20th, and this is your FT News briefing.

The global energy crisis is getting worse after a massive attack in Qatar.

Plus, amateur traders are turning to five-minute bets.

The people that the prediction markets are pulling in or that they're advertising to are looking

to make bets that sort of resemble, you know, a roulette game.

I'm Mark Filipino, and here's the news you need to start your day.

European gas prices surged after Iran struck an industrial facility in Qatar yesterday. It supplies a fifth of the world's liquefied natural gas.

To give you an idea of how important it is, stocks and bonds tumbled yesterday while Brent

crude at one point jumped above

$115 a barrel. This scenario was so bad that one analyst described it as Armageddon for the industry.

Central banks are worried, too. The European Central Bank said yesterday it might raise rates

at its next meeting over the threat of rising inflation.

Now, U.S. markets did stage a late rally. They got a boost after Israel's prime minister,

Benjamin Netanyahu, said a separate round of strikes on Iran eliminated its ability to enrich

uranium and to produce ballistic missiles. Netanyahu said he now sees, quote, this war

ending a lot faster than people think. But the attacks on Qatar could have lasting impacts

on global energy. Here to explain is Malcolm Moore. He's the FT's energy editor. Hi, Malcolm.

Hi, Mark. So Malcolm, tell me a little bit about this LNG site in Qatar and why it's so

vital to global supply. Okay, so imagine an industrial site that is three times a size of Paris,

and then imagine that on that site, there are 14 huge units, factories that basically spend all their time compressing gas into a liquid so it can

be exported from Qatar to the world. Also on the site, there are petrochemical facilities, refineries,

...