jtrent238 test blog: Your Wednesday Briefing

July 13, 2022

By Natasha Frost

Writer, Briefings

Good morning. We're covering Russia's oil sales and images from the James Webb Space Telescope.

An oil tanker anchored at docks in Venezuela in 2021. Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York Times

Putin's oil war with the West

As Russia pushes to find new buyers for its oil amid tough Western sanctions, it is cutting into the market shares of two of its allies — Iran and Venezuela — and setting off a price war that could hurt them all. Experts expect that if the oil battle intensifies, it will raise tensions with the Kremlin even as Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, works to shore up his alliances.

The oil competition set off by Russia's invasion of Ukraine already appears to be pushing Venezuela a bit closer to the West after years of a deep freeze in relations. Any possible deal to bring more Venezuelan crude oil onto world markets would help the U.S., which is increasingly desperate to reduce oil prices to limit the damage to Western economies from the war.

The resurgence of oil and gas prices — and the fact that so much of the global supply comes from Russia — has been Putin's strongest weapon against the West, giving him outsize geopolitical clout. Oil prices in recent months hit levels not seen since 2008, increasing Russia's oil revenue and helping feed the country's war machine.

Background: The increase in energy prices has given fossil fuels a prominence they last enjoyed in the 1970s, amplifying the effect of the Kremlin's policies far beyond the battlefields at a time when many world leaders had hoped to begin phasing out oil to tame climate change.

Other news:

Russian and Ukrainian negotiators will meet today in Istanbul, in the increasingly desperate effort to release huge amounts of grain from Ukraine's ports and ship them to a world facing rising hunger.
The debate over comments made by Ukraine's ambassador in Germany has stirred questions about a dark chapter of their shared history.

The Carina Nebula, captured by the James Webb Space Telescope.NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI

A new vision of an ancient universe

The James Webb Space Telescope, the most powerful space observatory yet built, has offered a spectacular slide show of the earliest days of our cosmos: ancient galaxies carpeting the sky like jewels on black velvet; fledgling stars shining out from deep within cumulus clouds of interstellar dust; hints of water vapor in the atmosphere of a remote exoplanet.

The Webb telescope, 30 years and nearly $10 billion in the making, is equipped to gain access to this realm of cosmic history, study the first stars and galaxies and look for nearer, potentially habitable worlds. It is a collaboration among NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.

To look outward into space is to peer into the past — to observe a star 10 light-years away is to see it as it existed 10 years ago, when the light left its surface. The farther away a star or galaxy lies, the older it is, making every telescope a kind of time machine. Astronomers theorize that the most distant, earliest stars may be unlike the stars we see today.

Quotable: "That was always out there," said Jane Rigby, a NASA astrophysicist and the telescope's operations manager. "We just had to build a telescope to go see what was there."

Shockwaves from Mo Farah's trafficking story

Mo Farah celebrating winning the men's 10,000-meter final at the 2016 Summer Olympics.Kirsty Wigglesworth/Associated Press

The revelation by the British Olympian Mo Farah that he was trafficked to Britain as a child has reverberated widely in his adopted country, where immigration remains a contentious issue and candidates vying to be the next prime minister have defended the government's policy of putting some asylum seekers on planes to Rwanda.

Experts said they hoped Farah's stark personal story would humanize the complex challenges faced by migrants, refugees and asylum seekers, pulling the debate away from what has been the government's single-minded focus on cutting the numbers of people crossing the English Channel into Britain.

Britain's Home Office said it didn't plan to take action against Farah, who was awarded a knighthood in 2017 and is perhaps the most successful long-distance runner in history. Children are not complicit in fraud or false representation committed by parents or guardians.

Details: In a forthcoming BBC documentary, Farah recounts vivid memories of being transported to Britain under a false name as a 9-year-old Somali, of being forced into domestic servitude for a family and of being rescued by a school gym teacher who helped get him into the care of a friend's mother.

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ARTS AND IDEAS

The power of the casual check-in

Reaching out just to say "hello" might seem like an insignificant gesture — a chore, even. Or maybe you worry an unexpected check-in wouldn't be welcome, as busy as we all tend to be. But a new study suggests that casually reaching out to people in our social circles means more than we realize.

The study found people tend to underestimate how much friends like hearing from them. Researchers ran 13 experiments, involving more than 5,900 participants, to gauge how good people are at guessing how much friends value being reached out to, and what kinds of interactions are the most powerful.

Across all the experiments, those who initiated contact significantly underestimated how much it would be appreciated. The more surprising check-ins (from those who hadn't been in contact recently) tended to be especially powerful.

Friendship experts stress the need to connect with others on a daily basis, and they encourage people to see friendship as an important component of personal health. "To be functioning at our best, we need to be in a connected state," said Marisa Franco, a psychologist and assistant clinical professor at the University of Maryland. "Just like you need to eat, like you need to drink, you need to be connected to be functioning well."