Business and finance news from the Asia-Pacific.

Oil's advance showed concerns over an escalating Iran war outweighed relief offered by an emergency release of crude reserves by wealthy nations. The US plans to release 172 million barrels from its emergency oil reserve as nations around the world work to ease surging crude and fuel prices. That's part of the plan by member countries of the International Energy Agency to discharge 400 million barrels from reserves globally, its largest-ever release. For more analysis, we spoke to Mark Cranfield, Bloomberg's MLIV Strategist.

And for markets perspective on the oil story, we heard from Dilin Wu, Research Strategist at Pepperstone. She spoke to Bloomberg's Haidi Stroud-Watts and Avril Hong.