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”.
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