Long reads shortened
A ship-to-ship oil transfer in the Eastern Outer Port Limits. WSJ
The secret “shadow fleet” saving Iran
If you want to know how Iran has held firm against American economic pressure, say Jon Emont and Rebecca Feng in The Wall Street Journal, you need to visit the Eastern Outer Port Limits, a “nautical no-man’s land” 45 miles off the coast of Malaysia. Here you’ll find dozens of tankers sitting low in the water, laden with sanctioned Iranian oil ready to be clandestinely offloaded on to non-sanctioned vessels bound for Chinese refineries. To execute these illicit ship-to-ship transfers, the crews turn off their transponders, lower tarps over the name of the vessel and use black paint to conceal identity numbers. Giant fenders are dropped between the ships to avoid collisions, before an enormous hose is hoisted across and the oil is pumped from one to another, sometimes more than a million barrels’ worth at a time.
It’s impossible to overstate the importance of this “shadow fleet”. It helped Tehran pull in around $31bn in oil revenue from China last year. And it is currently carrying an estimated 90 million barrels of Iranian oil, “effectively in offshore storage”, meaning Tehran will probably still be getting paid for its exports until October with or without a blockade. In the Eastern Outer Port Limits – a usually calm spot roughly midway between Chinese and Iranian waters – an “entire offshore ecosystem” has sprung up. Bunker ships provide refuelling services. Traders speed in on small sampan boats to sell sailors cigarettes and Indonesian Bintang beer. Some tankers act as “floating oil platforms”, filling up with Iranian and Russian oil from sanctioned ships and then redistributing it to other vessels. It is, in the words of intelligence analyst Michelle Bockmann, a “little epicentre of maritime lawlessness”.
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Heroes and villains
@RobertKennedyJr/X
Hero
Robert F Kennedy Jr, who dealt with two snakes that had unwisely slithered on to the patio of a friend’s house by grabbing them by their tails and holding them up for a weirdly long time as they repeatedly bit his hands and arms. The US health secretary has a long history of bizarre animal encounters, including, but not limited to, cutting the head off a dead beached whale, dumping a bear carcass in New York’s Central Park, and pulling over on a family road trip to slice off the genitals of a dead raccoon.
Villain
Donald Trump, for using the Iran war as an excuse to get out of his eldest son’s second wedding. When asked whether he’d attend the happy occasion in the Bahamas last weekend, the US president said he’d “try and make it”, but that he’d warned Don Jr it wasn’t good timing because of “a thing called Iran”. He pulled out the day before, citing “circumstances pertaining to government”.
Calendario Romano 2027
Villains
The makers of Rome’s so-called “sexy priest calendar”, after it emerged that one of its biggest stars is a flight attendant, not a man of the cloth. Giovanni Galizia, 39, was 17 when he posed for Calendario Romano, and has graced the front cover of the tourist favourite several times since. The photographer who puts the calendar together, Piero Pazzi, defended his product, claiming at least a third of the models in the already released 2027 calendar are genuine priests.
Villain
Charles Dickens, according to the Guildhall Museum in Rochester, which has denounced the 19th-century novelist in an internal memo for being racist. What tosh, says Philip Hensher in UnHerd. In Bleak House, Mrs Jellyby is “so taken up with an African colony that she totally neglects her own children”. When his characters go to the colonies – China in Little Dorrit, Egypt and Australia in Great Expectations – the novels don’t follow them. “Dickens just wasn’t interested.”
Villain
A former top-level executive at the CIA, who has been accused of stealing 303 gold bars worth more than £40m from the spy agency. Investigators say David Rush requested the 1kg ingots and millions of dollars in foreign currency for “work-related expenses” over several months. They found the loot at his home along with 35 luxury watches, many of them Rolexes.
Villain
A dog in Scottsbluff, Nebraska that inadvertently shot a woman at a petrol station. The hapless pet, breed unknown, jumped on to a loaded shotgun inside a truck, setting it off and hitting a passerby, whose injuries are not thought to be life-threatening.
Comment
Paul Morigi/Getty
Should Labour be listening to Blair?
What a “pointless and dispiriting” intervention we saw from Tony Blair this week, says Ian Dunt in The i Paper. To anyone listening closely, the former prime minister’s long moan about the coming Labour leadership tussle made him sound like Jeremy Corbyn: a “relic of the old world with no relevance to the new”. He’s right about Labour chaos but his solutions are “vacuous, commercially suspect or irrelevant”. And most of his concrete policy prescriptions just happen to align with his commercial interests – Blair’s views on AI, for example, are identical to those of his biggest donor, Oracle’s Larry Ellison. Net Zero? The Tony Blair Institute does millions of dollars of work for oil firms and petrostates. Politics, especially transatlantic geopolitics, has changed. Blair hasn’t. It’s a “sad, ignoble end to a great political mind”.
Maybe, says Samuel Rubinstein in UnHerd. But when the state is on the edge of crisis, when it is “crying out for a radical reimagining”, it’s best to entrust power to someone who has already proved his mettle. “Tony Blair has proved his mettle.” Hearing him back on the radio, deftly batting away stupid questions and presenting the first “considered plan for government” in more than 15 years, “cannot but make the heart flutter”. He has aged gracefully, and his Big Tech connections mean he is plugged into the real, future-facing world. Crucially, his “centrism” is not the soggy Rest is Politics kind where basically “we should all be nice” – he admires Donald Trump, never struggled to identify a woman, argues we must stop small boats “whatever it takes”, and so on. It’s time: “The argument for his return has become impossible to ignore.”
The Knowledge Crossword
Life
Humphrys with Julia Somerville on the Nine O’Clock News in 1985. Chris Ridley/Radio Times/Getty
The day I read the news blind drunk
When John Humphrys left the Today programme in 2019 after 33 years as a presenter, says Andrew Billen in The Times, there were “extravagant” on-air tributes and an evening party in the wood-panelled upper floors of Broadcasting House. But at 10pm everyone suddenly took to their smartphones. The Daily Mail had bought extracts from Humphrys’s grumpy memoirs, A Day Like Today, in which he slammed the corporation for sins including “institutional liberal bias” and misreading public opinion on Brexit. The mood turned, and after that the BBC honchos who had “begged” him to consider post-Today projects never called. He wound up on Classic FM’s Sunday night slot, putting in a “rather formal performance in which he recited Victorian poetry”.
It wasn’t his first scrape with BBC executives. In 1974, when he was a correspondent in Washington, Humphrys was among the first journalists to break the news that Richard Nixon was resigning. And he did so blind drunk. “I’d done my usual, gone for a very, very, very lavish lunch,” he says. “A couple of glasses of red wine in the office beforehand… then go to the restaurant, have a martini or two, then a glass of wine with lunch and brandy afterwards.” After “staggering” back to the office his assistant told him he needed to do a live piece. “I got through it. I didn’t fall off the chair, but it was painfully obvious I was pissed.” The next day his assistant told him executives back in London wouldn’t say anything directly to him, but they had made it clear to her: “You can’t do that again.”
🎙️😬 Humphrys is as spiky as ever about the Today programme’s current roster. He says he has “mixed views” about departing presenter Amol Rajan, calling him “very bright” but criticising his presenting style (too much emphasis on the definite and indefinite article, apparently). Were he in charge, he says, he’d have three lead presenters: his old friend Justin Webb, the “absolutely first class” Nick Robinson, and Anna Foster. Not Emma Barnett? “I was not going to name her immediately.”
Weather
Quoted
“Weekends don’t count unless you spend them doing something completely pointless.”
American cartoonist Bill Watterson
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