Hey y'all, it's Kyra Blackwell from Wirecutter.
New York Times and I test mattresses. Today I am testing 7 mattresses. This mattress is very
“supportive. It's just a very easy to shift position. You've considered nearly 4 dozen foam”
in their spraying and hybrid mattresses. We're looking out for an edge support motion isolation and firmness levels. At Wirecutter, we do the work so you don't have to. For independent product reviews and recommendations for the real world, come visit us at nytimes.com/ Wirecutter. 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 US military has carried out its first attack against Iran in more than a month, according to US Central Command, American forces opened fire on Iranian rocket launchers near the street 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 US troops are stationed. Those missiles were intercepted.”
While the back and forth appeared to be limited, it underscores how the US is still struggling to secure the street of Hormuz as the war passes the six month mark. The Trump administration has
been urging commercial vessels to make the journey through with guidance from the US Navy,
and military officials say they're prepared to launch new attacks on Iran if shipping traffic is threatened. As part of that, the Navy continues to have an array of ships stationed in and around the Persian Gulf, including aircraft carriers, destroyers, and other vessels. Keeping a force this large out at sea requires the transfer of an enormous amount of material. 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 US S 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 the Navy's main base in the region in Bahrain was largely destroyed by Iranian forces early in the war. Instead, the Navy's had 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, they 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 airborne surveillance planes, the helicopters, you're talking about dozens of planes that are flying six days a week. So that just requires millions and millions of gallons of fuel to keep all these ships going. And all of that has to come from a tiny island
2200 miles away. Meanwhile, Secretary of Defense Pete Heggseth has downplayed issues with keeping the Navy's fleet running at full steam, telling reporters earlier this month that the US could keep its naval blockade on Iran, quote, "as long as we need to indefinitely." In Venezuela, the Times is covering a new, highly unusual deal by the Trump administration that will give the US 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. In Venezuela's president Delcy Rodriguez said it would generate hundreds of billions of dollars for her country by developing more than a dozen new oil fields. Rodriguez was put into power by the Trump administration earlier this year. After US special forces captured her predecessor, Nicholas 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 poverty,
“which has many people wondering when it comes to this new oil deal, what's in it for us?”
My colleagues and I have been speaking to Venezuelans across Venezuela across the political spectrum, and there is a lot of apprehension and skepticism about this deal. Of course, the US has promised to bring major investment to the country, but what many people really want is an overall economic
Change and an overall political change.
She says many Venezuelans also see an irony in the deal with a socialist government that once
“proudly thumbed its nose at Washington, now 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 nationalist since the 1970s and the concept of the oil being owned by the people is really sort of at the center of Venezuela and identity and really goes beyond politics. So the idea of the US 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.
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 doors to quote a new form of US colonialism. Still, details of what exactly is in the agreement are thin and it could take years
“for any meaningful oil production to get going since Venezuela's energy industry has been”
decimated by decades of corruption, mismanagement, and US sanctions. 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 after a massive chunk of glacier broke off and plunged into a river valley. The bulk of the ongoing rescue effort has focused on the several major hydro power projects
“that were under construction in the region. Hundreds of workers 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. A mid-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, three, two, one ignition and left off. This weekend, NASA launched the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. It's 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-dollar device that was built with a carefully crafted mirror left over from a canceled spy satellite project. NASA scientists say what sets the Roman apart from other telescopes is its wide 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. Well, Nancy Grace Roman will kick the door down. NASA says the telescope is now on a month-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 about 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...
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 time 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.
