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Major oil producers led by Saudi Arabia and Russia are expected to stick to a previously decided output boost at their meeting on Thursday, despite pressure to further increase production.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has exacerbated concerns about oil supplies, sending prices to record highs this year.

Hard on the heels of an EU ban on Russian oil imports over the invasion, the OPEC+ cartel agreed at their last meeting in early June to open the taps wider than expected.

But prices continue to be high, and analysts say a respite is not in sight when the 23 members of OPEC+ meet via video conference from 1100 GMT.

“We should expect a rubber stamp,” said Jeffrey Halley, an analyst with Oanda. “Given that OPEC+ can’t even meet its present targets, and hasn’t for a long time, I expect no bearish surprises.”

The 13 members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, chaired by Saudi Arabia, and their 10 partners, led by Russia, drastically slashed output in 2020 as the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting lockdowns sent demand plummeting.

Since May last year, they have been gradually increasing output again. In recent months, the US and other top oil consumers have increased their pleas to open the tabs more widely.

But several OPEC+ members have been failing to meet the output quotas, while Iran and Venezuela — and now also Russia — are blocked by sanctions. 

– ‘Political theatre’ –

The United Arab Emirates said this week it was close to its oil output ceiling, ahead of a regional visit by US President Joe Biden, who is expected to lobby for increased production.

Biden will visit neighbouring Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil exporter, as part of his tour next month.

“President Biden’s July trip to Saudi Arabia is mostly for political theatre and won’t really lead to a meaningful increase beyond the planned OPEC+ boost of 648,000 barrels per day of supply in July and August,” said Edward Moya, another analyst from Oanda.

On Monday, at the meeting of the G7 club of industrialised nations in Germany, French President Emmanuel Macron was caught on camera telling Biden details of a conversation with UAE leader Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan.

According to Macron, Sheikh Mohamed said the UAE was at its “maximum” capacity and Saudi Arabia also faced a limit for raising production.

G7 leaders agreed to work on a price cap for Russian oil as part of efforts to cut the Kremlin’s revenues.

As prices soar, OPEC, which was set up to “ensure the stabilisation of oil markets”, has been sticking to its strategy.

“There is little chance OPEC does anything to give relief to the market,” said Ipek Ozkardeskaya, a senior analyst with Swissquote Bank.

Analysts have warned that only a recession may be able to bring down prices.

Indirect talks in Qatar’s capital between Iran and the US on reviving a 2015 nuclear deal have concluded with “no progress made”, a State Department spokesperson said late Wednesday.

The negotiations in Doha were an attempt to reboot long-running European Union-mediated talks on a return to the 2015 agreement between Tehran and world powers.

No time limit was previously announced on the most-recent negotiations, which had been taking place in a Doha hotel with special envoy Robert Malley heading the US delegation.

But by Wednesday night, a US State Department spokesperson said the “indirect discussions in Doha have concluded”. 

“While we are very grateful to the EU for its efforts, we are disappointed that Iran has, yet again, failed to respond positively to the EU’s initiative and therefore that no progress was made,” the spokesperson told AFP in an email. 

EU coordinator Enrique Mora had earlier said the parties engaged in “two intense days of proximity talks” in Doha that had “not yet” yielded the progress the EU team sought.

“We will keep working with even greater urgency to bring back on track a key deal for non-proliferation and regional stability,” he said on Twitter earlier in the day, posting a photo of himself meeting with Iran’s chief negotiator Ali Bagheri.

The comments came after Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman Nasser Kanani said that the talks would last only two days.

The parties have “exchanged views and proposals on the remaining issues”, he said.

An EU source told AFP that the discussions, which come two weeks before US President Joe Biden makes his first official visit to the region, were supposed to last several days.

– ‘Red lines’ –

Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian had said Iran was “serious” about finalising a deal in Doha, but that it wouldn’t cross its “red lines”.

“If the American side has serious intentions and is realistic, an agreement is available at this stage and in this round of negotiations,” he was quoted as saying by state news agency IRNA earlier Wednesday.

IRNA has previously described the “red lines” as lifting all sanctions related to the nuclear agreement, creating a mechanism to verify they have been lifted and making sure the US does not withdraw once again from the deal.

Washington has “made clear our readiness to quickly conclude and implement a deal on mutual return to full compliance”, the US State Department spokesperson said after indirect talks concluded. 

“Yet in Doha, as before, Iran raised issues wholly unrelated to the JCPOA (Iran nuclear deal) and apparently is not ready to make a fundamental decision on whether it wants to revive the deal or bury it,” the spokesperson said. 

Differences between Tehran and Washington have notably included Iran’s demand that its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps be removed from a US terror list.

– ‘Trump method’ –

The arch-rivals have been meeting indirectly — passing messages from different areas of the same hotel — to try to break an impasse in attempts to restart the 2015 agreement.

That deal, which lifted sanctions in return for Iran curbing its nuclear programme, was abandoned unilaterally in 2018 by former US president Donald Trump, who reimposed biting sanctions.

Iranian officials earlier said they were hoping for progress in Qatar — but warned the Americans to abandon the “Trump method” of negotiating.

“We hope that, God willing, we can reach a positive and acceptable agreement if the United States abandons the Trump method,” Iranian government spokesman Ali Bahadori-Jahromi said.

He described the method as “non-compliance with international law and past agreements and disregard for the legal rights of the Iranian people”.

The international talks on reviving the deal began in April 2021 in Vienna, before the process stalled in March.

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For all its tough talk against Russia, the UK’s government is failing to enforce its promises to clean up dirty foreign money, a hard-hitting report by MPs said Thursday.

It was “shameful” that after years of warnings, the government only began to clamp down on the illicit flows when Russia invaded Ukraine in February, the report by the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee said.

The government has brought in new legislation to prevent corrupt funds being laundered through Britain’s property market.

But it has failed to back this up with enough resources or powers for anti-corruption bodies such as the National Crime Agency and Serious Fraud Office, the report said.

“Without the necessary means and resources, enforcement agencies are toothless,” it said.

“The threat illicit finance poses to our national security demands a response that is seen to be serious.”

Rich Russians have long found it easy to acquire expensive properties in London, or a world-class education for their children in Britain’s private schools, or control of Premier League football clubs.

According to multiple studies into the “Londongrad” phenomenon, they were enabled by a service industry encompassing blue-chip bankers, accountants, lawyers, property agents and public relations advisors.

And since Prime Minister Boris Johnson entered Downing Street in 2019, his Conservative party has stepped up a drive to entice cash-rich donors, including from wealthy backers originally from Russia.

Following the invasion of Ukraine, Johnson’s government has sanctioned dozens of wealthy, Kremlin-connected Russians and says their money is no longer welcome in Britain.

However, according to the MPs, “corrupt money has continued to flow into the UK”.

The committee called for the government to publish a review into a “golden visa” programme that enabled thousands of Russians to establish residency, or even citizenship, in Britain from the 1990s.

The scheme only ended in the week before Russia invaded Ukraine, and the report demanded to know what the government intends to do about Russians who obtained visas “without due diligence”.

One beneficiary of the scheme was the sanctioned oligarch Roman Abramovich, who has been forced to sell Chelsea football club.

Johnson meanwhile is refusing to release intelligence advice he received about his controversial appointment of Evgeny Lebedev, a Russian-born newspaper baron, to the House of Lords.

“The UK’s status as a safe haven for dirty money is a stain on our reputation,” the Foreign Affairs Committee’s Conservative chairman, Tom Tugendhat, said.

“The government must bring legislation in line with the morals of the British people and close the loopholes that allow for such rife exploitation,” he said.

The United States on Wednesday announced an agreement with Pfizer and BioNTech for 105 million doses of Covid vaccine for Americans this fall.

The $3.2 billion contract, signed between the companies and the US health and defense departments, includes vaccines for babies, young children, teens and adults, and may include Omicron-specific vaccines, which a panel of government experts recommended on Tuesday.

Delivery will begin in late summer and continue into the fourth quarter, the companies said. The contract gives the US the option to procure up to 300 million doses.

“The Biden-Harris Administration is committed to doing everything we can to continue to make vaccines free and widely available to Americans – and this is an important first step to preparing us for the fall,” Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a statement.

President Joe Biden’s administration has asked Congress for $23.5 billion in additional Covid funding, but a bill has not yet been passed.

As a result, the federal government “was forced to reallocate $10 billion in existing funding, pulling billions of dollars from Covid-19 response efforts” the statement said, with the new vaccines procured through this reallocation.

White House officials have previously said that without new funding, future vaccines might only be given for free to those at highest risk.

NASA administrator Bill Nelson said Wednesday the agency will reveal the “deepest image of our Universe that has ever been taken” on July 12, thanks to the newly operational James Webb Space Telescope.

“If you think about that, this is farther than humanity has ever looked before,” Nelson said during a press briefing at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, the operations center for the $10 billion observatory that was launched in December last year and is now orbiting the Sun a million miles (1.5 million kilometers) away from Earth. 

A wonder of engineering, Webb is able to gaze further into the cosmos than any telescope before it, thanks to its enormous primary mirror and its instruments that focus on infrared, allowing it to peer through dust and gas.

“It’s going to explore objects in the solar system and atmospheres of exoplanets orbiting other stars, giving us clues as to whether potentially their atmospheres are similar to our own,” added Nelson, speaking via phone while isolating with Covid.

“It may answer some questions that we have: Where do we come from? What more is out there? Who are we? And of course, it’s going to answer some questions that we don’t even know what the questions are.” 

Webb’s infrared capabilities allow it to see deeper back in time to the Big Bang, which happened 13.8 billion years ago. 

Because the Universe is expanding, light from the earliest stars shifts from the ultraviolet and visible wavelengths it was emitted in, to longer infrared wavelengths — which Webb is equipped to detect at an unprecedented resolution.

At present, the earliest cosmological observations date to within 330 million years of the Big Bang, but with Webb’s capacities, astronomers believe they will easily break the record.

– 20 year life –

In more good news, NASA deputy administrator Pam Melroy revealed that, thanks to an efficient launch by NASA’s partner Arianespace, the telescope could stay operational for 20 years, double the lifespan that was originally envisaged.

“Not only will those 20 years allow us to go deeper into history, and time, but we will go deeper into science because we have the opportunity to learn and grow and make new observations,” she said.

NASA also intends to share Webb’s first spectroscopy of a faraway planet, known as an exoplanet, on July 12, said NASA’s top scientist Thomas Zurbuchen. 

Spectroscopy is a tool to analyze the chemical and molecular composition of distant objects and a planetary spectrum can help characterize its atmosphere and other properties such as whether it has water and what its ground is like.

“Right from the beginning, we’ll look at these worlds out there that keep us awake at night as we look into the starry sky and wonder as we’re looking out there, is there life elsewhere?” said Zurbuchen.

Nestor Espinoza, as STSI astronomer, told AFP that previous exoplanet spectroscopies carried out using existing instruments were very limited compared to what Webb could do.

“It’s like being in a room that is very dark and you only have a little pinhole you can look through,” he said, of current technology. Now, with Webb, “You’ve opened a huge window, you can see all the little details.”