James' World 2

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For most of my adult life, I have noticed something odd. Some evenings, I can barely remember what I did that day. Ask me what I had for breakfast and you will be met with a blank look. On other days, I can tell you the details of interviews I did, the plans I made, which snacks I packed my daughter for school and how much of each she ate.

The difference between them doesn’t seem to correlate to how I slept. In fact, only one factor seemed to matter: how much I rested. I have long thought that, on days when I am rushing around, I am just more stressed, which may affect memory formation.

But there could be another reason: the role of rest itself.

We all know that a lack of restorative sleep impairs our cognitive abilities. When we are sleep-deprived, we can struggle to recall what we have learned, absorb new information and sustain focus. We may also be aware that resting while awake seems to partially restore our sleep-deprived minds.

Now, neuroscientist Giulio Tononi and his collaborators at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are revealing how certain housekeeping and cognitive tasks that happen during sleep can also occur, to some extent, while we are awake.

This is “the last piece of the puzzle” that may answer why wakeful rest helps to fulfil some of the functions of sleep, says neuroscientist Thomas Andrillon at the Paris Brain Institute.

Local sleep

For decades, sleep was understood to be a global state that affects the whole brain at once. In deep sleep, the brain reverberates with slow brainwaves – in which neurons slowly cycle in sync between firing and silence – and mostly disconnects from the surrounding environment.

But in recent years, research has complicated that perspective. In 2011, a team of sleep researchers, including Tononi and his long-time collaborator Chiara Cirelli, also at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, published a paper describing an odd phenomenon. When rats were sleep-deprived yet awake, their brains showed sudden bursts of sleep-like slow waves – but only in clusters of neurons at a time. The team called it local sleep and considered it to be part of a broader phenomenon that exists in various forms across the animal kingdom (see “Sleeping with part of the brain”, at the end of this story).

These bouts of local sleep were incredibly brief: a few hundred milliseconds, at most. But they had a noticeable impact. When rats were trained to reach for sugar pellets, they were more likely to fall short if their sleep-deprived minds had slipped into local sleep first. “If it happens at the wrong time, in the wrong area, you have impaired performance,” says Cirelli.

That isn’t just true of sweet-toothed rats. Humans also show local sleep states just before experiencing an attentional lapse. And we are more likely to experience both when we are tired, which is why doing something routine but with high stakes – like driving a car down a highway – can be dangerous when we are sleep-deprived.

But Tononi, Cirelli and their colleagues’ latest study, published in June, indicates there is an upside to local sleep.

In addition to describing local sleep, Tononi and Cirelli are known for coming up with one of the most compelling explanations for why we sleep: the synaptic homeostasis hypothesis. As we take in information all day long, our brains form and strengthen thousands of neural connections. These connections are energy-hungry, so we can’t keep them all. Sleep, they posit, is when our brains go to work decluttering what we don’t need, which helps with storing what we do.

Could local sleep offer the same sort of housekeeping, just on a micro-scale? To find out, they genetically modified brain cells in mice so that a laser light could switch those neurons “on” or “off”, mimicking the pattern of slow-wave sleep. In one experiment, they put a local neural network to sleep in awake mice that were sleep-deprived.

Afterwards, they found that the part of the mice’s brains that had “snoozed” for 30 minutes showed reduced markers of synaptic strength – a sign that decluttering had already started – unlike the part that had stayed fully awake. They also noticed that, during global sleep later on, there was less slow-wave activity in the bit of the brain that had napped, presumably because its housekeeping function had already partly been done – which also indicated that local sleep seemed to have reduced that brain region’s need for sleep.

These changes in brain activity were also reflected in behaviour. Normally, if a mouse learns a new task and then is sleep-deprived, its later recall is diminished. But when, in a different experiment, the sleep-deprived mice had local sleep induced across multiple networks for an hour after learning something new, they remembered the task just as well as the mice that took an actual nap. “This is the first piece of evidence that suggests that local sleep can do the job of sleep, and not badly,” says Tononi.

Both Tononi and Cirelli are quick to point out that local sleep is no replacement for sleep in general. While they pushed the phenomenon to its limits in the laboratory to see what it was capable of – and what its underlying purpose might be – the fleeting bursts of local sleep that we experience in the real world aren’t the same as a night’s rest. If your brain can get to wo

rk on decluttering connections all at once, as in global sleep, that is clearly better and more efficient, says Tononi.

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Jason Ford

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We’ve all done the infinite scroll on the Netflix app, spending an hour looking for something to watch before giving up. Sometimes there are just too many shows to choose from. And the last thing anyone wants is to get a few hours into a series that’s not worth finishing.

To save your precious time, we’ve compiled a list of our favorite shows on Netflix. From some of the streamer’s most iconic flagship series, such as Stranger Things and The Crown, to reliable comfort watches including Younger and Scandal, the platform has something for everyone. We’ve also found underrated or critically acclaimed originals you can’t find anywhere else. We’ll let you know which series have just arrived or are about to leave, too, so you can prioritize your watch list.

Sometimes the best shows aren’t the ones that win all the awards; they’re just the ones that let you unwind and have fun. This week, we recommend Outer Banks, which is heading into its fifth and final season this week. The show is an action-adventure-mystery about a group of teens living is coastal North Carolina who are on a hunt for a long-lost treasure that might save their beloved home. The series introduced us to stars like Chase Stokes and Madelyn Cline and is a fun, breezy binge. And if you love entertainment industry inside jokes, check out all four seasons of the fun French series Call My Agent! The show is a wry look at the inner workings of a French talent agency, and a feature film version of the show will drop on Netflix in September.

If you’re looking for your next favorite series, here’s our roundup of some of the best shows you can stream on Netflix right now. And if you’d rather go with a movie instead, here are our picks for the best movies on Netflix.

Outer Banks (2020 to present)

Netflix’s original action-adventure series Outer Banks has been a massive hit for the streamer since it first premiered in 2020, and it’s coming to an end this summer. The show is set in a coastal town in North Carolina’s Outer Banks and pits the haves (the “Kooks”) against the have-nots (the “Pogues”). Naturally, the Pogues are the heroes of the story as the Kooks try to take what little land and assets the Pogues have left. And while all of that is happening, the Pogues, led by John B. (Chase Stokes) are constantly on a hunt for (literal) treasure, stemming from the disappearance of John B.’s father who was on a hunt for gold before he vanished. Check the show out now; the fifth and final season arrives on Aug. 20.

Call My Agent! (2015 to present)

The French series Call My Agent is about a group of talent agents at a fictional firm. Though the agents aren’t real, the show is filled with real celebrities playing often egotistical and difficult versions of themselves (almost all of them are French, you’ll see the likes of Isabelle Huppert, Jean Dujardin, Juliette Binoche and Jean Reno appear throughout the series). The show consists of four hilarious seasons, and a feature film, Call My Agent! The Movie is arriving in September. If you’re a fan of inside-Hollywood style shows, it’s a fun option.

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“It’s one of the surprising successes,” said Michelle Wiese Bockmann, a shipping analyst at Windward, a maritime analysis firm. “They have been extraordinarily effective in keeping that southern corridor operating, despite the attacks.”

But the U.S. effort, which Iran opposes, has come at a cost.

The U.S. military is deploying significant resources to get a limited amount of oil through the strait — something it did not have to do before the war, when tankers sailed freely through the waterway.

“It’s extremely labor intensive to provide for that kind of persistent defense,” said Joshua Tallis, an analyst at the Center for Naval Analyses.

To try to protect vessels on the southern corridor, Central Command uses a range of weapons that can intercept Iranian drones and missiles. Ship operators say they register any planned trips through the strait with the U.S. military, and then report possible threats or attacks as they occur. The United States uses ships, helicopters and planes to launch weapons to intercept attacks. It has helped over 1,000 ships transit the strait, according to Central Command.

The U.S. tanker protection operation has drawn attacks by Iran. At least 15 ships taking the southern routes have been hit since the start of June, injuring 16 mariners and killing two, according to a New York Times analysis of data collected by the International Maritime Organization, a part of the United Nations. Another ship was struck this week while it was sailing close to Oman, killing a crew member, the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations, an entity administered by Britain’s Royal Navy, said on Tuesday.

The Iranian military retains the ability to escalate its attacks on all shipping in the area, as well as on oil and gas facilities in Gulf countries. And Iran is demanding permanent control over ship traffic in the strait, something it did not have before the war.

“Iran’s threat over the strait will remain significant for the foreseeable future,” said Mona Yacoubian, a director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a research organization.

Many large shipping companies have chosen to stay away from the strait until there is a lasting cease-fire, and traffic through the strait remains far below what it was before the war.

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The U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, in a handout photo, conducting operations related to the Strait of Hormuz in April. The Navy has said it has about 20 warships in the Gulf of Oman.  Credit…U.S. Navy, via Getty Images

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A warming climate and a dearth of summer sea ice have opened the Arctic to cargo shipping—a reality that seemed impossible just decades ago.

Some countries believe the Arctic route could provide an alternative for international traders seeking to avoid the conflict-stricken Red Sea and Strait of Hormuz.

Already, one Chinese company has started container ship voyages during the summer on the Northern Sea Route, which runs along the northern coast of Russia to Europe via the North Sea. China especially views the route as an “Ice Silk Road” that avoids Middle East trouble spots.

The decision to try the Northern Sea Route is also, at least in part, practical: The subpolar route is shorter than the standard one—so the trip takes about 20 days compared with around 40. And it may be cheaper for Asian exporters than the regular path. The latter goes through the Strait of Malacca, which connects the Indo-Pacific with the Indian Ocean, and the Bab al-Mandab Strait, which connects the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean via the Gulf of Aden.

“The Arctic shipping routes offer an alternative trade corridor with the potential to overcome the Malacca Dilemma—China’s lack of control over strategic shipping lanes,” says Arctic shipping analyst Malte Humpert, who founded the nonprofit Artic Institute in Washington, D.C.

The move is also seen as a sign of growing economic cooperation between Russia and China, he adds. China uses the Northern Sea Route to deliver cargo to Europe, and Russia uses it to deliver oil to Asia. The conflicts in the Middle East make it more attractive. “The situation around Hormuz and the Red Sea has encouraged some niche container operators to give the [Northern Sea Route] a try,” Humpert says.

None of this would be possible without climate change. According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration–funded research group, 17 summers with the lowest sea-ice cover on record have occurred in the past 20 years. NASA data, meanwhile, show the Arctic sea-ice extent is shrinking by about 12 percent every decade.

The shrinking ice cover will “absolutely” result in increased shipping along the Northern Sea Route during the summer months, says Anastasios Leonburg, a marine risk consultant for the insurer Allianz Commercial and a former merchant ship captain. “The implication for shipping is more accessible routes and more navigable seasons,” he says.

Expanding Arctic shipping is also triggering environmental concerns. Campaigners worry it will result in more black carbon emissions from shipping fuel that could cause the sea ice to melt more quickly. For this reason, the use of heavy fuel oil—a cheap, high-energy, tarlike material that is left over from refining crude oil—has been banned in the Arctic by the International Maritime Organization since 2024, but loopholes still exist.

The Oslo-based environmental watchdog Bellona Foundation analyzed a journey on the Northern Sea Route last year by a large Chinese cargo ship named Istanbul Bridge. The group’s analysis found the ship may not have been built to properly withstand ice along the route—exposing it to potential accidents—and that it may have used heavy fuel oil.

Given geopolitical tensions, new international agreements to govern Arctic shipping seem unlikely. Russia alone sets regulations for the Northern Sea Route—and environmentalists fear that, without enforcement, efforts to open the region to global shipping risk destroying the fragile ecosystem that made the shortcut available in the first place.

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Ask a retiree how much income they need, and they’ll give you a number. Ask how much cash flow their portfolio generates, and many will give you the same number. Ask what they actually spend, and you’ll often get a third answer — or a shrug.

That’s the problem. These are three different things, and mixing them up can quietly cost money. Here’s a breakdown.

Cash flow is the movement of money, regardless of tax implications.

Move money from savings to checking? Cash flow, but no tax.

Take a qualified withdrawal from your IRA? Cash flow with a tax implication.

Sell $50,000 of stock you bought for $40,000? That’s $50,000 of cash flow, but only the $10,000 gain is taxed.

Harvest a loss on a position that’s down? That’s cash flow, too, and it can actually lower your tax bill.

Much of what moves through your accounts is simply your own money changing seats.

Income is what gets taxed (and it comes with a decision). Income shows up on your tax return:

• Dividends paid
• Interest earned
• Rent collected
• Capital gains realized
• IRA withdrawals taken

Here’s the part many people miss: Income comes with a decision. You can spend the money or reinvest it.

Depending on the account, your decisions are taxed differently. For example, in a brokerage account, the dividend (income) is taxed whether you spend it or not. If the dividend comes into your qualified account (IRA or Roth), it’s not taxed.

It’s important to pay attention to these little differences.

Spending is what’s gone. This is the money that leaves your accounts to support you and your lifestyle (groceries, travel, property taxes). Once it’s spent, it’s gone. It isn’t coming back as shares, basis or anything else.

Spending is the number your plan actually has to cover. Not your cash flow. Not your income. Your spending.

The drag many miss

Once the terms are straight and the plan is in place, the leaks start to become visible. Many retirees generate more taxable income than they spend.

A $1 million portfolio in your brokerage account, yielding 3% in dividends, puts about $30,000 of income on your tax return each year, whether you spend it or reinvest it.

Let’s say you spend only $10,000 of it — you still pay tax on all $30,000. You wrote the IRS a check for the privilege of reinvesting money you’d already had invested. Do that for a decade, and the drag compounds quietly, every April.

Even withdrawal coordination can make a big difference. A retiree younger than 65 who funds an entire year from long-term capital gains might pay mostly 0% in capital gains tax. That’s because only the realized gains count as income.

If they keep their gains/income low enough, they may also be able to lower their ACA health insurance premiums. That’s a very different situation than taking a little from an IRA, a little from a brokerage account, collecting dividends along the way and layering on Roth conversions.

Same spending, very different tax bill.

Total return still wins

This is why I push retirees toward “total return” thinking. There’s little difference between a stock that grows by 7% and a stock that grows by 4% while paying a 3% dividend.

The grower lets you decide when to realize income. The dividend payer decides for you, every quarter, whether you need the money or not.

Sometimes growth may be better than dividends, and vice versa.

The same is true in real estate: Rent plus appreciation is the whole picture, and the rent is taxed as it arrives.

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(Image credit: Getty Images)

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Lakes Powell and Mead, the nation’s largest reservoirs, are drying up, sending a Colorado River system that provides water and electricity for millions of people into a state of crisis with no end in sight.

Water levels in Lake Powell, along the Utah-Arizona border, fell to a record low on Saturday. Lake Mead, the larger of the two and farthest downstream on the Colorado River, dropped to its lowest recorded point a week earlier.

The combined reservoir system, an essential water source for cities and farms across Arizona, Nevada and Southern California, has not held so little water since 1957, before Lake Powell was filled. That was long before climate change brought three decades of drought, the worst dry spell for the Southwest in at least 1,200 years, scientists said.

Federal and state officials and communities across the region have taken emergency steps to try to head off catastrophe. They shifted water from a smaller reservoir to try to save Powell and have called for water conservation, though those requests are mostly voluntary so far.

The water shortage could have dire implications for growing Sun Belt cities such as Phoenix, for key industries including agriculture and data centers, and for hydroelectric dams that power millions of homes across the Southwest.

The shrinking reservoirs are the immediate result of record-low snowpack this winter, which was erased by record heat in the spring. Melted snowpack creates most of the Colorado’s flow during the dry summer months. But as the Southwestern climate has grown hotter and drier, the river’s flow has become smaller and less reliable.

“We expected to be in a very unpleasant place, and that’s where we find ourselves,” said Kathryn Sorensen, the director of research at the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University. “Mother Nature is in charge of this system.”

At the same time, a booming population in the Southwest and intensive agriculture mean that the region is consuming far more water than the river can now provide.

Here is what to know about the crisis.

Who uses the reservoirs?

The Colorado River supplies water to 40 million people and 5.5 million acres of farmland across parts of seven states. About two dozen native tribes and two Mexican states also hold rights to the river’s water.

Lakes Powell and Mead are central to maintaining that water supply in the lower half of the Colorado basin. While the river’s upper basin — which stretches across Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico — relies more heavily on seasonal stream and river flows for water, the two man-made lakes have served as a predictable supply for the more populous lower basin, which includes parts of Nevada, Arizona and California.

Agriculture is the biggest user of the Colorado River, with alfalfa and other sources of livestock feed accounting for nearly half of the water consumed. Municipal water systems use about a quarter.

And a growing share — about 10 percent of the river’s flow — is not consumed at all, but evaporates as temperatures climb across the Southwest.

How much has the water supply declined?

Dry and hot conditions across the Colorado River basin have cut the river’s flow by about 20 percent over the past two decades.

The current water use levels are unsustainable, too. While about 12 million acre-feet of water now flows down the Colorado in an average year, the century-old rules that govern the use of the river have allocated the rights to more than 16 million acre-feet. One acre-foot, or enough water to cover an acre a foot deep, is about 326,000 gallons, enough to supply two or three households for a year.

Diminishing supply, combined with decades of overuse, has caused water levels in Lakes Powell and Mead to decline steadily over the past 30 years. In both reservoirs, water storage has not been close to capacity since the late 1990s. Lake Mead is now about 27 percent full, while Lake Powell is about 23 percent full.

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The Glen Canyon Dam near Lake Powell in Arizona last month. Lakes Powell and Mead, the country’s largest reservoirs, have been recording new lows this summer. Credit…John Locher/Associated Press

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Take a flashlight – the one on your phone will do – turn it on and place the pad of your index finger over the bulb. See that red glow? You might think it’s something to do with blood, but you’d be wrong. It’s photons of red light bouncing around inside your finger, looking for somewhere to land.

This simple experiment is a doorway to one of the most profound and surprising biological discoveries of recent years. “Light is a nutrient,” says Bob Fosbury, who was an astrophysicist at the European Southern Observatory before he turned his attention to the biology of light. That’s obviously true for plants, which use light to make carbohydrates. But it turns out it’s also true for animals and fungi, all of which exploit light in a hitherto unappreciated way. All living organisms – including us – are solar-powered.

Sunlight has long been understood to be critical to life on Earth. But the fact that light is also used to oil the wheels of metabolism is only just, er, coming to light. Long wavelengths, which come from red and infrared (IR) light, are particularly beneficial for creating energy, and are readily available from sources including sunlight and incandescent bulbs.

But changes in lighting intended to help save energy have inadvertently deprived us from this crucial supply. The irony is that just as we have discovered the benefit of red light, we are unintentionally starving ourselves of it.

How modern bulbs starved us of red light

The story begins in the early 2000s with the widespread adoption of two now-ubiquitous energy efficiency technologies. The first was the light-emitting diode (LED), which largely replaced energy-guzzling incandescent bulbs. Although this change helped conserve energy, it had other unforeseen consequences. The second was window glass that filters out IR, designed to prevent heat leaking into or out of buildings. Together, these dramatically narrowed the spectrum of light we are exposed to indoors, an environment where most humans spend up to 90 per cent of their time. “We lost about 95 per cent of the spectrum,” says neuroscientist Glen Jeffery at University College London. “Suddenly, without warning, boom, the long wavelengths go. And that’s a problem.”

For the vast majority of human existence, those long wavelengths of light were unavoidable. Daylight is rich in visible red light, which has wavelengths of about 650 to 750 nanometres. It also emits vast and invisible (to us, at least) quantities of IR, which extends out to about 2500 nanometres.

People who spend much of the day outside are naturally exposed to these long wavelengths, even when fully clothed. When long-wavelength light hits a human body, it sails through clothing and penetrates deep into tissues (short-wavelength light such as UV, in contrast, is absorbed by clothing, which is why covering up helps prevent sunburn). Red and IR are also abundant in moonlight and in the glow of a campfire. Indoor light, too, used to be full of these wavelengths, either from sunlight streaming through windows or light sources such as open fires, candles, and oil and gas lamps. The invention of the electric light didn’t change that, as the spectrum of an incandescent light bulb closely matches that of the sun.

But the adoption of energy-efficient lighting and windows robbed us of longer parts of the spectrum. Glass that filters out IR obviously blocks that portion of sunlight, and while LEDs throw out a lot of visible light, they produce nothing beyond about 750 nm. “LEDs are completely dark in the infrared,” says Fosbury. Scott Zimmerman, founder of the lighting company Silas Inc. in New Jersey who collaborates with Fosbury and Jeffery, calls LED light “ultra-processed”, an analogy with ultra-processed food. The combined effect of ultra-processed light and modern glass means that the average human today receives much less long-wavelength light than their ancestors did.

At the same time, conditions such as obesity, type 2 diabetes, dementia and early-onset cancers are on the march. The usual suspects for this are poor diet and lack of exercise. But according to Fosbury, Jeffery and others, these are only a piece of the puzzle; another reason, perhaps the principal one, is red-light deprivation. “There’s not a single cause, but I do increasingly think that light is the most fundamental and dominant one,” says Fosbury. “And it’s probably the easiest one to solve.”

To understand why light is so vital, we have to go back in time again, to the Soviet Union of the late 1980s, where, at the USSR Academy of Sciences in Moscow, a biophysicist called Tiina Karu was experimenting with red and near-infrared light as a therapy. She discovered that they were useful in wound healing and pain management and wondered what the mechanism was. Eventually she hit on energy metabolism, specifically the pace at which mitochondria inside the body’s cells produce a molecule called ATP. Red light, she found, accelerated this process.

Karu’s work never found a wide audience, mainly because she came from the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, according to Jeffery. But she was right, and today red-light therapy is everywhere, used to promote wound healing and treat skin conditions, hair loss, cognitive impairment, chronic pain, osteoarthritis and much more. The evidence of its efficacy is patchy, but growing, according to John Mitrofanis, a neurologist at the University of Grenoble Alpes in France. There is much debate over the correct doses and wavelengths, but researchers are in agreement that its effects are mediated by mitochondria.

The key to this is the electron transport chain, a complex and highly orchestrated metabolic process that takes in energetic electrons and passes them down a chain of proteins, creating ATP in the process. ATP is biology’s principal energy currency, analogous to cash in an economy. When a cell needs energy to perform a task – say, building new proteins – it uses ATP.

When mitochondria are bathed in red or IR light, the electron transport chain runs a little faster and more ATP is produced – a process Fosbury calls “photometabolism”. The exact mechanism by which ATP production is accelerated remains a point of contention, but what’s certain is that diseased cells are often short of ATP, so a boost can make up the deficit. That, says Jeffery, explains why red-light therapy is beneficial.

It also explains why taking away red light can be harmful. Jeffery points out that all life on Earth evolved in an environment rich in red light and IR, but humans now mostly live in one stripped of those wavelengths. The result is more sluggish ATP production. To add insult to injury, we have also flooded our indoor environment with shorter wavelengths in the form of blue light from screens and LEDs. Blue light inhibits ATP production by slowing down the electron transport chain. Lose, lose.

The effects are insidious. Fosbury likens long-wavelength light to a vitamin and calls the effects of deprivation “21st-century scurvy”, a nod to the disease of vitamin C deficiency that killed and sickened tens of thousands of sailors in the 18th century. Like scurvy, it creeps up on you. “It’s something that accumulates over a period of time,” says Jeffery.

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A debate is brewing in the oil market: Is the Strait of Hormuz way more “open” than we thought?

Common wisdom held that the crucial waterway is effectively closed to oil tanker traffic. Iran has fired on dozens of tankers attempting to transit the strait. Maritime tracking services using a combination of transponder data and satellite imagery have reported a significant decline in the number of vessels trying to navigate the waters. Global oil inventories continue to be depleted.

But US Energy Secretary Chris Wright told a very different story last week: The strait is open, and oil is flowing significantly faster than the market appreciates.

He would know: The US military is right there, patrolling the water, escorting ships in and out of the strait, protecting them from enemy fire. The Navy provides the Department of Energy with detailed information about which vessels are moving through and when.

“In coordination with the US military, the US Department of Energy maintains the best available data related to oil and oil products leaving the Arabian gulf,” a DOE spokesperson said.

It’s not unlike the Trump administration to jawbone oil prices lower. President Donald Trump has repeatedly said the United States controls the Strait of Hormuz and frequently claims that a deal with Iran is imminent. Secretary Wright has said the United States is ensuring plenty of oil is getting where it needs to go.

Ignoring the bluster, Wall Street analysts have largely relied instead on the third-party tracking data they’ve been receiving, along with industry-reported inventory measurements and other data.

But that might be changing. Or, at least, for the first time since the start of the war, some analysts on Wall Street might at least be willing to consider that the administration may be telling the truth about the state of the oil market.

Confusion reigns

Wright asserted that the seven-day average of oil flowing out of the Strait of Hormuz had increased to 9 million barrels per day. Hussain noted that stood in direct opposition to Iran’s claim that the strait was closed – and ship-tracking data that showed it was about half Wright’s number.

“It is becoming increasingly difficult to know how much oil is leaving the Gulf,” said Hamad Hussain, senior climate and commodities economist at Capital Economics. “Contrasting claims by US and Iranian officials are muddying the waters.”

Wall Street analysts – who use ship tracking services like Kpler and Windward Intelligence, among many other data points, to provide estimates about oil flows – have said oil tankers have been getting roughly 4 million barrels of oil out of the Persian Gulf each day.

In addition to the roughly 7 million barrels per day that Middle Eastern countries have rerouted around the strait through pipelines and other methods, about 11 or 12 million barrels have been flowing out, according to the tracking services. That’s significantly lower than the 20 million barrels per day that the region had exported before the Iran war started.

Wright said that on August 8, total oil coming out of the Gulf exceeded that 20-million-barrel mark.

Kpler defended its data, which is powered by its network of 13,000 owned-and-operated receivers across 190 countries that track 350,000 vessels, updating their location every 5 minutes. It also owns a fleet of low-earth-orbit satellites.

“It is not possible to reconcile the disparity between what we see and what he is quoting,” said Matt Smith, director of commodity research at Kpler.

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On the morning of Aug. 5, an anonymous account on X in India posted seemingly sensational news. The commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps had vowed that his country would never give up its nuclear weapon ambitions as long as Israel and the United States possessed those weapons, the account said.

It was not true, and there’s no evidence that the commander made the remark or that Iran has developed nuclear weapons. The claim soon caromed around the internet anyway.

The quotation appeared on Israeli accounts, and then a television channel there posted it, calling it the first public declaration that Iran was working to build a nuclear bomb. That evening, it made its way into remarks that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered at Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, the country’s national cemetery.

In the United States, Mike Waltz, the Trump administration’s ambassador to the United Nations, reposted the quotation, as did Senator Rick Scott of Florida, a Republican. Fox News also reported the claim, as anchors and guests cited it as evidence of Iran’s duplicity.

The quotation, attributed to Brig. Gen. Ahmad Vahidi, was part of a campaign that succeeded in misleading politicians and news organizations around the world, according to a review by The New York Times. The claim’s spread showed how easily viral disinformation can twist the public debate over matters as serious as war and peace.

It is unclear who fabricated the quotation. However, it appeared intended to bolster Mr. Netanyahu’s longstanding claim that Iran is determined to build a nuclear weapon and that war against Iran was necessary.

President Trump, who had tried to justify the war by citing Iran’s nuclear ambitions, has been searching for a way out of it, and the quotation went viral three days after he said he was halting all attacks on Iran to give peace negotiations a chance.

“This quote was clearly crafted to drive a wedge into peace negotiations,” said Darren L. Linvill of the Media Forensics Hub at Clemson University, who tracks how disinformation and propaganda spread on social media.

Iran’s nuclear program has been a source of international concern and diplomacy for three decades, but the country’s officials have maintained that it has a civilian, not a military, focus. The status of Iran’s nuclear development remains unclear.

The spokesman for Iran’s foreign ministry, Esmail Baghaei, criticized the fake post, calling it “an example of the flood of lies against the Islamic republic.” He blamed Israel, but did not cite evidence.

“The allegations of a link to a nuclear bomb are based on the same thing, a lie they have been feeding the international community for 20 years to justify military aggression,” he told reporters on Sunday.

General Vahidi, who took over command of the Revolutionary Guards in March, has issued numerous statements about the war since it started but not about Iran’s nuclear program. Last year, he addressed the topic in an interview with state media after a 12-day conflict with Israel that culminated in American airstrikes. While Iran would “do things it has not done previously” to defend itself, he said, the country’s position on nuclear weapons “has been stated with complete clarity in the past.”

Questions about the origins of the claim were first reported by Ynet, an Israeli news outlet. Since then, new details about how it spread so widely have emerged.

The first known appearance of the quotation — on the Indian account on X — had numerous red flags. The account, which has 175,000 followers, has been criticized by fact-checkers and the government of Pakistan for sharing false and Islamophobic content.

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Funeral ceremonies for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, in Tehran in July. Credit…Arash Khamooshi/Polaris for The New York Times

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Click the link below for the complete article:

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“When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king, the palace instead becomes a circus. — Turkish proverb,”

 

Hmmmmm…History is repeating itself yet again!

 

Isaiah 59:14

New Living Translation

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