Your Friday Briefing: Biden releases oil reserves

By Amelia Nierenberg

Writer, Briefings

Good morning. We’re covering global energy challenges, missile deception in North Korea and the wild world of Wikipedia.

War roils global energy access

On Thursday, the White House announced a plan to release up to 180 million barrels of oil from U.S. strategic reserves, the largest release since it was created, hoping to push gas prices down. Oil prices, which had been surging since the fighting in Ukraine began, fell modestly on expectations of the announcement. But diesel prices are still soaring.

At the same time, OPEC and its allies, including Russia, decided to stick with their previously agreed-upon plan of modest monthly production increases. Still, European leaders again rejected Russia’s demand that gas deliveries be paid in rubles.

Food: The U.N. is forecasting the worst global hunger crisis in decades as the conflict constrains grain exports. Ukraine said on Thursday that it had lost $1.5 billion in such exports since the war began.

Saboteurs: Ukrainian fears of Russian spies have led to a rise in checkpoints, hotlines and apps for reporting suspicious activities.

Schools: Europe’s teachers are struggling to explain the war to their students.

Fighters: Hundreds of Syrian mercenaries will join Russian forces, effectively returning a favor: Moscow helped President Bashar al-Assad crush rebels in the country’s 11-year civil war.

State of the war:

• NATO said that there was little evidence that Russia was fulfilling its pledge to withdraw from the area around Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, and that troops appeared to be regrouping instead.

• The Red Cross said that a humanitarian corridor could open on Friday to allow residents to escape Mariupol, a coastal Ukrainian city.
• Russian forces are withdrawing from Chernobyl, Ukraine’s energy company reported.

Other updates:

• Many Russians have rallied around Vladimir Putin, bolstering his approval ratings.
• European leaders are considering giving Ukraine security guarantees to enable an agreement with Moscow.
• President Volodymyr Zelensky urged Australian lawmakers to take a harsher stance against Russia.
• The U.N. appointed a commission to investigate allegations of Russian war crimes.
• A European bank forecasted that Ukraine’s economic output would contract by 20 percent this year and Russia’s would contract 10 percent.

Did North Korea fake a launch?

North Korea conducted its most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile test to date​ last week​, saying it had launched the Hwasong-17, its newest and biggest ICBM.

South Korea​ now says this may have been a ruse. Officials say Kim Jong-un used video editing to disguise an older, though possibly improved, Hwasong-15 missile, exaggerating the North’s weapons achievements. Kim badly needs diplomatic leverage with the U.S. and the South, and also needs to shore up his image at home.

The launch may not have been a deception. But if it was, it gives insight into Kim’s domestic strategy: He used it as propaganda, relying on a crude presentation of photos and a Hollywood-style video ​to demonstrate his seemingly infallible leadership.

Recent: North Korea ​began testing the Hwasong-17 ​this year, and had two successful launches, on Feb. 27 and March 5​. ​In its third test, on March 16, the rocket exploded shortly after liftoff. Some analysts say this deception may have been damage control.

Hong Kong’s pandemic tensions

Soon after the Omicron variant overwhelmed Hong Kong’s health care system, Beijing stepped in to help. China sent contractors to build isolation facilities, more than 1,000 medical workers to staff treatment centers and even butchers to help stabilize the local meat supply.

The city’s Beijing-backed establishment welcomed the help. But some residents see the outreach as an overreach.

Critics are frustrated by the centralized isolation of patients and widespread building lockdowns — common features of China’s strategy to have zero Covid cases, but jarringly misaligned with the city’s longstanding protections for individual liberties.

Analysis: Some wonder whether China’s authoritarian rule — and its commitment to zero-Covid policies — may jeopardize its prosperity and global standing, our columnist writes. Shanghai acknowledged on Thursday that it was not “sufficiently prepared” for the recent Omicron surge.

Here are the latest updates and maps of the pandemic.

• Taiwan will pay about $209,000 to the relatives of a patient who died after taking the AstraZeneca vaccine — the island’s first confirmed vaccine-related fatality.
• The Biden administration is expected to lift a public health order that had restricted immigration.

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THE LATEST NEWS

• There are now 10,000 political prisoners in Myanmar, a rights group said Thursday.
• Imran Khan defiantly refused to resign as Pakistan’s prime minister, despite the looming prospect that Parliament could remove him from office in a matter of days.
• An Australian who worked for China’s global television network stood trial in Beijing on Thursday after 20 months of detention.

• Tunisia’s increasingly authoritarian president dissolved Parliament on Wednesday, after lawmakers voted to block emergency powers he gave himself last year.
• Viktor Orban, Hungary’s populist prime minister, changed voting and registration rules ahead Sunday’s election. He faces an unexpectedly organized opposition.
• Kenya’s Supreme Court rejected an initiative by the president to amend the Constitution. Critics said it would have empowered the presidency and elites.

• Kentucky passed legislation that would ban abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, without exceptions.
• Inflation climbed 6.4 percent in February, the fastest pace in 40 years.
• The Justice Department is widening its Jan. 6 investigation to include a range of people involved in Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
• Americans can now mark their gender as “X” on their passports, a win for transgender, nonbinary or gender-nonconforming people.

• Bruce Willis, the blockbuster action star, will step away from acting after a diagnosis of aphasia. Here’s information about the condition.
• Will Smith was asked to leave the Oscars after he slapped Chris Rock. He refused.
• Ireland will turn its last surviving “Magdalene laundry” — where unmarried mothers and unwanted women were forced to work without pay — into a memorial to victims of institutional incarceration and abuse.
• A flamingo that fled a Kansas zoo in 2005 is still on the run, a fisherman’s sighting in Texas confirmed.

Did you grow up in a grid city, like parts of New York, Osaka or Melbourne? A recent study suggests that may have hampered your lifelong navigational skills, a finding that could eventually lead to navigation-based tests to help diagnose Alzheimer’s disease.

ARTS AND IDEAS

The weird world of Wikipedia

We often take Wikipedia for granted. An alphabetical list of U.S. states. The year that actor died. What does Nepal’s flag look like again?

But Annie Rauwerda, the 22-year-old who created the @depthsofwikipedia Instagram account to mine some of the site’s oddest pages, thinks it’s the best thing on the web. “It’s what the internet was supposed to be,” she said. “It has this hacker ethos of working together and making something.”

She engages in some deep web archaeology, unearthing pages from amusing (a chicken literally crossing a road in China’s Yunnan Province) to wholesome (Hatsuyume, the Japanese word for the first dream of the new year).

Followers often pitch her pages, but it’s hard to impress Rauwerda these days. If something has already created social media ripples, she won’t bother: “For example, there are only 25 blimps in the world,” she said. “It went around Twitter a couple days ago. I was shocked. I was like, ‘Everyone knows this.’”

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PLAY, WATCH, EAT

For Ramadan, make qatayef asafiri, a crowd-pleasing pastry that can be stuffed with creamy filling and dipped in pistachio.

Our week’s worth of five minute meditations can help you cope with daily challenges.

In a classical mood? Here are five albums to listen to right now, from a veteran’s take on Bach to contemporary electronic-heavy improvisations.

Play today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: Good news for an employee (five letters).

Here’s today’s Wordle and today’s Spelling Bee.

You can find all our puzzles here.

That’s it for today’s briefing. See you next time. — Amelia

P.S. A hidden haiku from The Times: “But in the midst of / it all, Will Smith’s victory / became a defeat.”

The latest episode of “The Daily” is about partisan gerrymandering in the U.S.

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You can reach Amelia and the team at briefing@nytimes.com.

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