The Navy’s Supply Chain Struggle, and Trump’s Unusual Oil Deal in Venezuela

From The New York Times, it's The Headlines. I'm Will Jarvis, in for Tracy Mumford. Today's Monday, August 31st. Here's what we're covering. In the Middle East, the U.S. military has carried out its first attack against Iran in more than a month. According to U.S. Central Command, American forces opened fire on Iranian rocket launchers near the Strait of Hormuz yesterday. It said they were getting ready to disperse mines into the waterway. In response, Iran retaliated by firing a barrage of missiles towards Jordan, where several thousand U.S. troops are stationed. One source told The Times all of the missiles were intercepted. While the back-and-forth appeared to be limited, it underscores how the U.S. is still struggling to secure the Strait of Hormuz. The Trump administration has been urging commercial vessels to make the journey through, with guidance from the U.S. Navy, and military officials say they're prepared to launch new attacks on Iran if shipping traffic is threatened. As part of that effort to keep the waterway open, the Navy continues to have an array of ships stationed near the Strait, including aircraft carriers, destroyers, and other vessels. It's become a huge logistical challenge. Think of if you have 20,000 sailors at sea, each of them wants three meals a day. You spread that across, you know, 16 or more ships, you're talking about hundreds of thousands of meals every week. My colleague John Ismay is a former naval officer, and he's been covering the supply chain issues the Navy has been facing. Those issues burst into public view recently as reports spread of deteriorating conditions aboard the USS Lincoln aircraft carrier. But John says that even though that ship has been swapped out, the other Navy vessels in the Middle East are facing similar resupply challenges. That's because a key U.S. base in the region, in Bahrain, was largely destroyed by Iranian forces on the first day of the war. Instead, the U.S. Navy has been the Navy's head to rely on getting supplies from the tiny, British-controlled island of Diego Garcia, way out in the Indian Ocean. That includes food and other critical provisions, along with huge amounts of fuel. While the aircraft carriers use nuclear reactors for propulsion, all the other ships need liquid fuel. And the single greatest consumer of fuel goes to the aircraft on these aircraft carriers. So you think about all the fighters, the surveillance planes, the helicopters. You're talking about dozens of planes. So that just requires millions and millions of gallons of fuel. And all of that has to come from a tiny island 2,200 miles away. Meanwhile, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has downplayed issues with keeping the Navy's fleet running at full steam, telling reporters earlier this month that the U.S. could keep its naval blockade on Iran, quote, as long as we need to, indefinitely. In Venezuela, the Times is covering a new and highly unusual deal by the Trump administration that will give the U.S. significant control over Venezuela's vast oil reserves. President Trump announced the agreement on Friday, claiming it's the biggest oil deal in world history. And Venezuela's President, Delce Rodriguez, said it would generate hundreds of billions of dollars for her country by developing more than a dozen oil fields. Rodriguez came into power earlier this year with the blessing of the Trump administration, after U.S. special forces captured her predecessor, Nicolas Maduro. And since then, Venezuela has been effectively run from Washington. The Trump administration has said it wants to help revitalize the country's economy and transition it to democracy. But there are no elections in sight, and millions of Venezuelans are still in power. Which has many people wondering when it comes to this new oil deal, what's in it for us? Julie Turkowitz covers Venezuela for the Times. She says beyond people's doubts about the Trump administration's new plan for Venezuelan oil, many in the country see a kind of deep irony in the whole situation. For years, Venezuela's socialist government proudly thumbed its nose at Washington. Now, it seems to be handing over one of its most precious resources. Venezuela is the country with one of the largest oil reserves in the world. The oil, industry has been nationalized since the 1970s. And the concept of the oil being owned by the people is really sort of at the center of Venezuelan identity and really goes beyond politics. So the idea of the U.S. coming in and having majority control is really a bitter pill for many people to swallow, especially since they are extremely skeptical that they will personally get anything in return. Details of what exactly is in the agreement are thin, and it could take years for any significant oil production to get going, since Venezuela's energy industry has been decimated by decades of corruption, mismanagement, and U.S. sanctions. Still, one former head of Venezuela's national oil company, who now lives in exile, told the Times that the deal with the Trump administration opens the door to a, quote, new form of U.S. power. U.S. colonialism. In Nepal, workers have been using heavy machinery to dig mass graves as the death toll from last week's sudden flood climbs higher and higher. As of this morning, authorities say that more than 900 people were killed, and officials have continued to raise their estimate of how many are missing. They now say more than 4,500 people are still unaccounted for, as recovery teams struggle to pick through the devastated landscape. Miles of roads and more than 40 bridges were wiped out. The bulk of the ongoing rescue effort has focused on the several major hydropower projects that were under construction in the region. Hundreds of people working on those projects have been rescued from tunnels deep beneath the rock, with emergency responders digging through thick rubble and mud and using explosives to blast open doors and walls. But the work has been painstaking, and the window to find survivors is closing. Amid the scale of the devastation, some family members of the missing told the Times that they are starting to lose hope that they'll ever find their loved ones' remains. The flood was so powerful that some bodies were recovered in India after being swept hundreds of miles downstream. And finally, this weekend, NASA launched the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, its latest, greatest effort to chart the universe. With Nancy Grace Roman, billions of galaxies will be found, tens of billions of new stars, tens of thousands of new planets. The telescope is named after NASA's first chief astronomer. It's a. $4.3 billion device that was built with a carefully crafted mirror left over from a canceled spy satellite project. NASA scientists say part of what sets the Roman apart from other telescopes is its panoramic, ultra-high-definition field of view. To put it into perspective, it will be as if Hubble and James Webb kind of peered through a keyhole at the universe, while Nancy Grace Roman will kick the door down. NASA says the telescope is. now on a months-long journey way out into space, to its working location, about a million miles away from Earth. Once it gets there, it will start sending back a whopping one terabyte, or 1,000 gigabytes, of data each day. Over the course of a single month, it will be able to complete a survey of the sky that might take the Hubble telescope a century. Beyond searching for new galaxies, stars, and planets, Roman is also expected to help researchers study dark matter and dark energy, which could help them get answers to the question, why the universe is expanding at a faster and faster rate. But the team working on it says that part of the telescope's appeal is that it might end up showing things they didn't even know to look for, with one researcher saying that, quote, Roman's vast reach will allow us to find the weird, the rare, and the unusual. Those are the headlines. Today on The Daily. It's so interesting to think about how fast this company's grown when this is effectively just like a camera on a stick. Yes, it is just a camera on a stick, but now it's 120,000 cameras on sticks, and they're all connected. My colleague Kashmir Hill on how the company Flock, which sells license plate readers, expanded so quickly and why its technology has become so controversial. You can listen to that in the New York Times app or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you are not a Times subscriber yet, you can get a full month of free access to everything we publish when you download the Times app now. I'm Will Jarvis. We'll be back tomorrow.