ZeroHedge News

Victorian Doctors Seek Answers From OpenAI And Governments Over Medicare Breach

Tyler Durden — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 03:20:00 +0000

Victorian Doctors Seek Answers From OpenAI And Governments Over Medicare Breach

Authored by Rex Widerstrom via The Epoch Times,

The Australian Medical Association (AMA) Victorian branch has called on OpenAI and the Victorian and federal governments to explain how they will protect patient health data following a security incident in which an OpenAI agent gained unauthorized access to a Medicare statistics portal.

The ChatGPT app is displayed on a phone alongside a medicare card in Melbourne, Australia on Sept. 24, 2026. Asanka Ratnayake/Getty Images

While the doctors' group noted that no personal information appears to have been accessed, AMA Victoria President Dr Simon Judkins asked, "What happens next time if an AI agent gains access to a system containing sensitive clinical information?"

Judkins said the breach raised serious questions for doctors and patients.

"Confidentiality remains absolutely critical to maintaining a trusted relationship between a doctor and their patient, and increasingly that depends on the security of the digital systems we use every day," he said.

"Patients and doctors need confidence that unauthorized access will be detected quickly and reported immediately ... Why did it take nearly three months for Australian authorities to be notified?"

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the agent reached the Medicare Statistics Reporting Service portal, run by Services Australia, on June 18.

It accessed public and non-public files after finding a way around existing blocks. Albanese said no personal information is believed to have been accessed, though official investigations remain ongoing.

OpenAI notified the Australian government on Sept. 10 via an email sent to a public mailbox, according to the prime minister.

Services Australia subsequently reported the breach to the Australian Cyber Security Centre on Sept. 15.

"It took until Sept. 10 before there was any notification," Albanese said, adding that "there will obviously be legal consequences on it."

Other Agencies Affected

OpenAI confirmed its agents also accessed sites belonging to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) and NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research.

At the Victorian Department of Health, the company stated that agents used an exposed access key to retrieve aggregate statistics, though medical records were not accessed.

The AMA said that federal investigations are examining the agent's interactions across multiple government systems.

The company has since apologized. "We should have handled our response better. We are sorry and working to do better in the future," OpenAI stated, committing to establish a task force on AI control.

OpenAI has also committed to having its chief strategy officer, Jason Kwon, appear before a Joint Select Committee inquiry in Sydney on Oct. 6.

Mounting Cybersecurity Concerns

Australia has previously experienced major breaches involving health information, including the 2022 Medibank cyberattack, in which data including names, dates of birth, addresses, phone numbers, and Medicare numbers of millions of Australians was accessed.

In 2024, a separate attack on electronic prescriptions provider MediSecure exposed personal and health information, prompting a federal investigation.

Dr Mukesh Haikerwal, a former AMA Victoria and federal AMA president, said governments must also consider what safeguards are needed.

"The clear question to ask is whether the Federal and Victorian governments are satisfied that our health systems are adequately protected against unauthorized access by AI?" he said.

"What safeguards are in place for hospital records, My Health Record and electronic prescribing?"

An Australian Signals Directorate report found only 22 percent of surveyed government entities met all eight key cybersecurity measures in 2025.

The Epoch Times has sought comment from Services Australia and the Victorian Department of Health.

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/03/2026 - 23:20

11 Million US Workers May Need To Switch Careers By 2035

Tyler Durden — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 02:45:00 +0000

11 Million US Workers May Need To Switch Careers By 2035

This month has made it very clear how AI doom narratives are promoted in an information operation through public relations firms, billionaires, and endless streams of climate-like doom corporate media headlines. These efforts aim to shape public opinion about AI and push for tighter regulation, giving those at the top of frontier labs moats.

The headlines have ranged from claims that AI will take tens of millions of jobs to, more recently, Bill Gates warning that AI could "cause a billion deaths" as he calls for regulation. But like Gates' climate predictions, much of the doomerism seems to be hyped up.

As for the AI jobs-apocalypse narrative, it may be overblown. A new report by McKinsey & Co. suggests AI could force roughly 11 million US workers to change occupations by 2035 - or about 7% of the current workforce.

McKinsey describes the labor market disruption as more of a transitional period for working-class folks in low-skilled jobs rather than an outright jobs apocalypse. However, six out of seven affected workers could face income loss.

"Job opportunities can be abundant and yet leave millions of workers without work if those positions require different skills, credentials, locations or pay structures than current jobs," the report's authors stated.

The US economy has navigated technological changes before, and there is nothing new under the sun: from tractors displacing farm workers in the fields to automated factories replacing workers on an assembly line, computerized offices, and online retail. Those transitions lifted productivity but disrupted the labor market, requiring workers to retrain and find new jobs.

Over time, living standards rise, and the economy adapts. But apocalyptic narratives of tens of millions of job losses and warnings like Gates' claim that AI could "cause a billion deaths" represent perhaps what can only be described as peak doomerism.

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/03/2026 - 22:45

Chinese Hackers Impersonate Former White House Official In Attempt To Steal US AI Policy Secrets

Tyler Durden — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 02:10:00 +0000

Chinese Hackers Impersonate Former White House Official In Attempt To Steal US AI Policy Secrets

Authored by AG News Staff via American Greatness,

Chinese-linked hackers have allegedly been impersonating American artificial intelligence experts, including a former White House official, in a targeted cyberespionage campaign aimed at obtaining sensitive information about U.S. AI policymaking.

Cybersecurity firm Proofpoint revealed Thursday that a hacking group it identifies as TA419 has been attempting to steal passwords from individuals at American and Japanese think tanks, defense contractors, universities and law firms since at least 2025.

Proofpoint attributed the activity to Chinese hackers based on the malware, infrastructure and targeting patterns associated with the attacks, which the company said align with Beijing's intelligence priorities.

The latest operation involved fraudulent emails appearing to originate from prominent AI and national security experts, including Lynne Parker, former principal deputy director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

The messages typically invited recipients to participate in AI-related projects or collaborations before directing them to fraudulent websites designed to steal login credentials.

Among those targeted was Alex Engler, a former White House official who now leads the Penn Center on Media, Technology, and Democracy.

Engler told Reuters he received an email supposedly from Parker inviting him to participate in a new AI policy initiative. After noticing something suspicious and consulting colleagues, he discovered the message was fraudulent.

Proofpoint said the operation targeted fewer than 10 individuals across several organizations, particularly experts involved in AI regulation, export controls and national AI strategy.

The company's findings suggest the hackers were pursuing intelligence about Washington's policymaking rather than simply attempting to steal American technology.

Parker confirmed that at least two individuals received suspicious messages using her identity in early July.

"The United States and China are in a competition around AI," Parker told Reuters.

The allegations underscore growing cybersecurity concerns surrounding America's technological competition with China, particularly as AI becomes increasingly important to national security and economic policy.

The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Beijing has consistently denied conducting cyberespionage operations.

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/03/2026 - 22:10

Minnesota Might Hand Republicans A Senate Upset Nobody Predicted

Tyler Durden — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 01:35:00 +0000

Minnesota Might Hand Republicans A Senate Upset Nobody Predicted

Democrats entered this year's midterms aiming to flip Senate seats in Maine, North Carolina, Alaska, and Ohio, and hold Georgia and Michigan.

With the national mood really riding against the GOP, they see opportunities in Texas and Iowa as well. But things appear to be changing. That Democrats plan to flip the Senate assumed they wouldn't lose any seats they currently hold. Michigan is potentially winnable for the GOP after Democrats in the state nominated Abdul El-Sayed, but now another reliably blue state has landed on the defensive side of the ledger, forcing Democrats to defend a seat in a blue state they have held for nearly two decades.

Republican Michele Tafoya trails Democratic Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan by less than 2 points in the RealClearPolitics polling average of Minnesota's U.S. Senate race, a gap that sits inside the margin of error. If the environment were as poisonous for Republicans as it is believed to be, this election wouldn't be on anyone's radar. Instead, it has become a true contest, and that raises a question the party would rather avoid: how many of its offensive gains survive if one of its safest seats slips away in November?

The competitive nature of this election is most certainly due in part to unique circumstances in the state. A KSTP poll taken last month found that 14% of Minnesota voters named fraud as their most important issue, behind inflation and cost of living at 37% and ahead of health care at 12%.

Federal prosecutors estimate that at least $9 billion billed to 14 state-run Medicaid programs since 2018 may be fraudulent, a figure Walz disputes, on top of separate schemes in which sham nonprofits billed the state for child care, school lunches and other services. According to a House Oversight report, the state's Democratic leaders knew about the fraud and failed to act.

Most of those charged are of Somali descent, and the House report found state officials ignored the fraud to avoid accusations of racism. Gov. Tim Walz's net approval has since collapsed from +19 in June 2025 to -14 in August 2026. The damage has spread to Attorney General Keith Ellison, Sen. Amy Klobuchar and the Democratic legislature. Pollsters have yet to publish separate numbers for Flanagan, though a politician who has stood one step behind Walz since 2019 has little room to distance herself from the scandal. Tafoya has built her campaign on that exact point.

NEW 📺 AD: We teach our kids that bad behavior has consequences, but somehow politicians think the same rules don’t apply to them.

Peggy Flanagan ignored warning signs while fraudsters stole our tax dollars.

She has spent eight years as lieutenant governor in the Walz… pic.twitter.com/utZpS40XRe
— Michele Tafoya (@Michele_Tafoya) September 18, 2026

The fraud issue is moving more than one race. Klobuchar entered the governor's contest in late January with a double-digit lead. The most recent co/efficient survey has her up by 2.

MPR News described the Senate contest as quiet, since the outside money pouring into Texas and Maine has yet to show up in Minnesota. That quiet works in Tafoya's favor. She is running a state-level argument about state-level failure, and national Democrats have given her the space to make it without interference.

If control of the Senate comes down to a single seat in November, Democrats may discover that the race they never thought they would have to defend was the one that mattered, and that their handling of one of the largest benefits scandals in American history might save the GOP from losing the Senate.

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/03/2026 - 21:35

25 States Ask Supreme Court To End Maine's 72-Hour Gun-Purchase Wait

Tyler Durden — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 01:35:00 +0000

25 States Ask Supreme Court To End Maine's 72-Hour Gun-Purchase Wait

A Montana-led coalition of 24 state attorneys general and the Arizona Legislature is urging the Supreme Court to hear a challenge to Maine's three-day waiting period for gun purchases.

Under Maine's law, a seller can't hand over a firearm until 72 hours after the buyer and seller agree to the sale. The wait runs even if the buyer's background check clears right away. A gun bought at noon Monday can't go home with its owner before noon Thursday.

The law exempts some buyers and sales, including law enforcement and security personnel, dealers, certain family transfers, antique firearms, and sales that don't require a background check. Sellers who break it face civil fines of $200 to $500 for a first violation and $500 to $1,000 after that.

Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen announced the coalition's friend-of-the-court brief Tuesday. It was filed September 28 in Beckwith v. Frey, a case brought by gun owners and businesses, and argues that the waiting period violates the Second Amendment even for buyers who have already passed a background check.

The challengers asked the Supreme Court to take the case on August 25. Maine has not defended the law there yet: Attorney General Aaron Frey's office filed a waiver on September 24 saying it won't respond unless the Court asks it to - a routine step, not a concession.

Watch: WMTW's August report on the petition.

How Maine Won Round One

The law took effect August 9, 2024, one of several gun measures Maine passed after the October 2023 Lewiston mass shooting. A federal judge blocked it in February 2025, but on April 3 of this year the First Circuit lifted that injunction, finding the law likely constitutional and sending the case back for further proceedings.

The appeals court's reasoning turned on the difference between buying a gun and keeping one. In its decision, the court held that restrictions on buying a gun fall outside the Second Amendment's text:

"laws regulating the purchase or acquisition of firearms do not target conduct covered by the Second Amendment's 'plain text.'"

The court didn't say every purchase restriction is immune from challenge. It treated the waiting period as a presumptively lawful condition on gun sales, similar to licensing systems that issue permits to anyone who meets objective criteria, and found the challengers hadn't shown the law was being applied abusively.

The States' Argument

That framing matters because of the Supreme Court's 2022 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. If the Second Amendment's text covers the conduct in question, the government has to justify its law by pointing to the nation's historical tradition of gun regulation. It can't simply weigh public-safety benefits against the burden on gun owners.

The coalition says Maine's law has to face that historical test. Its brief argues that keeping a qualified buyer from taking possession of a gun necessarily restricts the right to keep arms. Otherwise, the states warn, governments could regulate every step needed to exercise a right while dodging the scrutiny attached to the right itself.

The states also reject Maine's historical comparisons to licensing and intoxication laws. Those restrictions, they argue, targeted conditions a person could satisfy or avoid. Maine's wait applies even after a buyer has been cleared.

The NRA and Second Amendment Foundation filed their own brief urging review, citing 18th- and 19th-century newspaper advertisements and other records they say show buyers could routinely take a gun home immediately.

A Split Between Circuits

The Tenth Circuit reached the opposite conclusion on New Mexico's seven-day waiting period, holding that acquiring a firearm is protected conduct and that the delay is likely unconstitutional. The coalition argues the conflict between the two appeals courts is reason enough for the Supreme Court to step in.

The New Mexico win has limits. According to an August 28 statement from the Mountain States Legal Foundation, which represents the challengers there, the final injunction protects only its two named clients, Samuel Ortega and Rebecca Scott. Every other buyer in the state is still subject to the wait.

The law's supporters say the point isn't paperwork. The Maine Gun Safety Coalition argues that putting time between a purchase and access to the gun can prevent impulsive suicides and violence driven by short-lived anger or distress - risks a background check can't catch, because the buyer may be legally eligible.

The challengers point to the opposite risk. Their petition describes lead plaintiff Andrea Beckwith as a domestic-violence survivor who teaches firearms and self-defense to other survivors, and argues that a mandatory delay can leave someone who needs protection now unable to take home the gun they just bought.

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/03/2026 - 21:35

US To Allow Online Applications For 1st-Time Passports: Rubio

Tyler Durden — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 01:00:00 +0000

US To Allow Online Applications For 1st-Time Passports: Rubio

Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times,

Beginning next year, U.S. citizens can apply for their first passport fully online, according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

A woman applies for a U.S. passport online. Shutterstock

"By the end of 2027, our goal is for the vast majority of Americans to be able to apply for a passport or a passport card on America.gov," Rubio said during a Sept. 29 remark at an event launching the America.gov platform.

The online application makes the process "more accessible and easier for Americans," he said.

"So, whether you live in the middle of a major city or you live in a rural town, you'll be able to apply from anywhere," Rubio said.

Currently, American adults seeking a first passport must apply in person at an authorized acceptance facility and fill out forms with their personal identification information and other related details.

According to Rubio, a major benefit of the online application system is that users can find existing personal details after signing in to the platform through their login.gov account and do not have to "type the same thing over and over and over again" during the application process.

The new system also makes the photo submission process easier.

Currently, people must submit one passport photo. It must meet certain conditions, such as being in color, being taken in the past six months, and using a plain white or off-white background free of objects or shadows.

But in the online application process, people would take a photo of themselves through their phones and upload it.

"No printing forms, no drugstore hostage photo, no appointment, no line, no middleman that you're paying to do something that should be available to you," Rubio said.

"You tell America.gov what you're trying to do, and it walks you through every single step and tells you exactly what comes next."

He said there was an entire industry built around cashing in on every stage of the passport application process, with some businesses even charging for forms and appointments that are free.

Rubio also said there was a risk of services keeping or misusing applicants' personal details.

The America.gov platform was launched by President Donald Trump on Sept. 29.

Trump signed an executive order instructing federal agencies to integrate their services with the platform.

The new web portal is aimed at making it easier for people to find government-related information, enabling people to ask questions and get guidance on how to procure various services.

The portal serves as a landing page that consolidates almost 30,000 federal government websites into one chatbot.

"The federal government no longer stands in your way, and it stands only at your service," Trump said. "We're simplifying it. ... We're making it what it should be."

Answers to questions about government services come directly from official government websites with links to sources, according to the platform.

Next year, the site is scheduled to offer assistance in finding Medicare coverage and enrollment.

The site will also make it easier for Americans to find a job in the federal government.

Citizens will submit their resumes, and the platform will match them with positions fitting their experience.

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/03/2026 - 21:00

Army Deploys To Rio Grande Valley After Cartel Gunmen Open Fire On Coast Guard Crew

Tyler Durden — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 00:25:00 +0000

Army Deploys To Rio Grande Valley After Cartel Gunmen Open Fire On Coast Guard Crew

Roughly 500 troops are being dropped onto islands in the Rio Grande by Chinook helicopters, days after suspected cartel gunmen opened fire on a US Coast Guard crew from the Mexican side of the river.

The deployment figure comes from sources who confirmed it to NewsNation, which also obtained video of the Chinook drops. Officials have not put a number on it publicly. Breitbart reports the size and duration are being withheld for operational security, with troops expected to stay staged in the sector for at least 30 days.

#BREAKING Law enforcement sources confirm that roughly 500 troops are deploying this week to Texas’ Rio Grande Valley —Being dropped onto islands by chinook helicopters.

It comes after suspected cartel members shot at a USCG vessel near Roma over the weekend—The coast guard… pic.twitter.com/xApDsX2RKw
— Ali Bradley (@AliBradleyTV) October 2, 2026

According to the Coast Guard, personnel from Coast Guard Forces Rio Grande were running joint interdiction operations near Garceno, Texas, on Sept. 26, when they took gunfire from across the border. They returned fire. No one was hurt, no Coast Guard assets were damaged, and the incident remains under investigation.

The Coast Guard said it "works closely with U.S. Border Patrol, the Department of War and the Texas Military Division to secure the border, disrupt illicit activity and protect the American people," and that threats to its members are taken "extremely seriously."

Between August and September, officials told NewsNation, the military used a high-energy laser in the Rio Grande Valley to take down at least 11 cartel-linked drones that posed a physical threat to troops and CBP personnel. The Rio Grande Valley sector covers more than 320 river miles, 250 coastal miles and 19 counties, and the cartels working it are watching agents and troops, using drones to guide crossings, and moving drugs.

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/03/2026 - 20:25

Stockpiling Begins: Neros Awarded $100 Million Pentagon Contract For Kamikaze Drones

Tyler Durden — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 23:15:00 +0000

Stockpiling Begins: Neros Awarded $100 Million Pentagon Contract For Kamikaze Drones

US defense company Neros Technologies, which focuses on Category 1 one-way attack drones, was awarded a $100 million contract under the Department of War's Drone Dominance Program for 14,000 drones and explosive payloads.

The award, under the Drone Dominance Program's Gauntlet II, prioritizes Archer AI, the Category 1 FPV attack drone. Its automated kill chain lets the FPV fly to an operator-selected target, a huge advantage in battle zones where electronic warfare jammers, such as those targeting radio frequencies and GPS signals, dominate.

Neros CEO Soren Monroe-Anderson stated:

"We've developed our Archer FPV system to be highly modular and easily adapted to end user needs. Pairing real warfighter feedback with our deep engineering talent is the reason Neros is the only manufacturer to have placed in the top three across two fundamentally different mission sets, deep strike and close quarters battle, with the same drone platform.

Ultimately, Drone Dominance is a test of two things: can competitors build high-performance drones? And can they produce them in massive quantities with short notice? We're the only manufacturer to receive multiple bonus awards for Gauntlet I based on our delivery speed. We're ready to fulfill this next batch of 14,000 drones, and more whenever the Department of War signals need for them."

The announcement comes after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth revealed that Autonomous Warfare Command, dubbed "AutoWarCom," will become operational in the fall of next year and will accelerate the DoW's purchases across all drone categories.

What matters here is that the massive rearmament supercycle is set to kick off, if it hasn't already. It will provide massive tailwinds for drone companies as the military begins stockpiling all categories of drones and counter-UAS technology while fortifying military installations around the world.

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/03/2026 - 19:15

The Fed Created Zohran Mamdani

Tyler Durden — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 22:40:00 +0000

The Fed Created Zohran Mamdani

Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance

Usually, at least once a day, I come across something on the internet that almost causes me to lose my lunch. Yesterday, it was a photo of Zohran Mamdani and Curtis Sliwa holding hands and getting flu shots together.

As someone who observed the mayoral race in New York City closely, I found the spectacle disgusting on multiple levels. Not because political opponents can’t be civil to one another, but because it immediately brought me back to how Sliwa folded like a cheap shirt after an election in which, in my view, he couldn’t get over himself long enough to put his pride aside, step out of the race and give Mamdani’s main opponent, Andrew Cuomo, a clearer shot at winning.

Instead, Sliwa stayed in the race, presenting himself as some type of principled alternative while insisting that remaining in the race was somehow the honorable thing to do when, if he really gave a shit about New York, he should have just swallowed his pride, recognized the electoral reality in front of him and gotten out of the way. Just because you can stay in, doesn’t mean you have to.

But alas, Andrew Cuomo is no more and we are now stuck with this smiling communist buffoon, whose economic ideas make a 9 year old playing SimCity on an iPad in the back of a minivan look like Fiorello La Guardia.

For years, the United States has responded to financial crises with some combination of lower interest rates, enormous fiscal deficits and extraordinary amounts of liquidity. Whenever something breaks badly enough, policymakers rush in to stabilize the system. By now, I’m hoping people are starting to realize that when this happens, the benefits and costs of these “rescues” aren’t distributed evenly.

In fact, they disproportionately brutalize the middle and lower class, the very same group of citizens that politicians are almost always claiming to help. And such rescues are almost always supported by both political parties. (Read: The Devil Neither Political Party Will Name)

In these situations, financial assets can respond almost immediately to easier money and abundant liquidity. Stocks rise. Bonds rise. Real estate rises. Private-company valuations rise. People who already own substantial assets watch their net worth recover and, eventually, soar.

The person living paycheck to paycheck experiences this very differently. He doesn’t own enough stocks for another bull market to change his life. Instead, he notices that his rent costs more. His groceries cost more. Insurance costs more. Restaurants cost more. A starter home that was already expensive becomes completely unattainable.

🔥 85% OFF FOREVER IF YOU SUBSCRIBE TODAY: I am again offering an 85% discount to anyone that wants to become a Fringe Finance annual subscriber today. It’s a discount you can keep and stays applied for as long as you wish to remain a subscriber: Get 85% off forever

Back in the day, inflation would slow (but never reverse) and economists would announce that the problem was getting better. But the middle and lower class was still stuck with higher rent, groceries and home prices. Nowadays, inflation hasn’t even slowed. Prices are still skyrocketing higher. And the middle and lower class is getting torn to shreds by higher prices.

And that is the political environment that produces Zohran Mamdani…demonizing billionaires, proposing extremely regressive taxes, advocating for social revolution and just throwing around ideas of a state planned economy like he’s talking about the weather to a passerby in the park.

Which brings us to the great irony: the anger underlying his politics can be legitimate even if his proposed solutions make little sense on paper and even less sense in reality.

As I’ve said innumerable times on this blog, a voter doesn’t need to understand the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet to recognize that something feels profoundly wrong when working full time no longer seems sufficient to achieve the basic milestones previous generations considered normal.

And when that voter hears that the stock market has hit another record high, he doesn’t feel richer. He feels cheated…and pissed off…and envious.

Then along comes Mamdani offering to freeze his rent, subsidize his childcare, make his bus free and use government to intervene in the cost of everyday life. Is that man going to stop and thumb through history books to try and carefully determine what the historical outcome of such policies have been throughout history? Hell no. He’s going to volunteer to sell “Hot Girls For Zohran” T-Shirts in Union Square Park.

You can argue about the economics of Mamdani’s policies, but politically, the sales pitch isn’t difficult to understand. And the response from people who believe in markets cannot simply be to call these voters communists and lecture them about economics.

Instead, they have to answer a much more uncomfortable question. Why does the supposedly capitalist system increasingly seem to work spectacularly well for people who already own assets while becoming progressively harder for people trying to acquire them?

That is the question Mamdani is trying to present himself as answering. And most of us know he’s giving people the wrong answer. But that doesn’t make the question disappear.

In fact, there is something deeply ironic about responding to the consequences of years of economic intervention with demands for even more economic intervention…and then when your bullshit plans fail to make economic or basic common sense, turning to real entrepreneurs and business leaders for help.

We risk trying to cure distortions created partly by government policy with another layer of government policy, and then wondering why the distortions keep multiplying.

Eventually somebody has to address the disease rather than the symptoms. That means taking seriously what persistent inflation does to people who own few assets. It means acknowledging the distributional consequences of monetary policy. It means recognizing that rising asset prices aren’t synonymous with widespread prosperity. And it means understanding that “inflation is falling” is cold comfort to someone whose cost of living already jumped 20%, 30% or more.

If capitalism’s defenders want fewer socialists, they might start by making capitalism look like it works for people who don’t already own everything.

QTR’s Disclaimer: Please read my full legal disclaimer on my About page here.

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/03/2026 - 18:40

Siberian Plague-Lab Death Draws FSB Escort For Ambulances

Tyler Durden — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 22:05:00 +0000

Siberian Plague-Lab Death Draws FSB Escort For Ambulances

A possible plague case in Siberia has triggered a major containment effort after the death of a 28-year-old employee of an anti-plague laboratory. A hospital wing is under quarantine, nearly 200 people are reportedly under observation, and Russia's chief sanitary official has flown in. Local outlets say FSB units have been escorting ambulances carrying the woman's contacts for examination.

The authorities are clearly taking the threat seriously - but getting a straight answer out of the feds is another matter. Irkutsk Governor Igor Kobzev is still calling it a "particularly dangerous infection," while assuring residents that every identified contact is symptom-free and testing negative.

The dead lab worker has been identified as Daria Shipilova, a laboratory assistant at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East, according to Lyudi Baikala and REN TV. She was admitted to hospital in Shelekhov with severe pneumonia, placed on a ventilator, and died. Reports differ slightly on the timeline: The Moscow Times gives a September 29 admission and a Thursday death (48 hours), while Lyudi Baikala says she spent three days in hospital.

According to The Moscow Times, Shipilova told medical staff she had accidentally broken a tube containing live bacteria while collecting samples. Lyudi Baikala, citing journalist Pavel Stepanov and the Telegram channel Mash, placed the alleged accident on September 25 and linked it to plague bacteria. Those reports describe the illness as pneumonic plague, although neither that diagnosis nor the laboratory accident has been publicly confirmed by investigators. IRK.ru reported that doctors initially suspected severe COVID and sent her to the hospital's COVID center.

By the evening of October 1, security and administrative officials were meeting in Irkutsk. Lyudi Baikala, citing a source close to law enforcement, reported that FSB units began accompanying ambulances transporting Shipilova's contacts for examination that day. The Insider carried the same account, while residents reported seeing people in protective suits on the streets. The FSB has not confirmed the escorts.

“There is a possibility that the number of people the young woman [lab worker] came into contact with reached into the three digits,” Irkutsk journalist Pavel Stepanov said*, and that residents have already noticed people on the streets wearing protective suits, masks and gloves.…
— Annie Jacobsen (@AnnieJacobsen) October 2, 2026

Shelekhov district head Maxim Modin confirmed that the hospital's inpatient department was under quarantine; the outpatient clinic remained open. Kobzev said the sanitary-epidemiological commission had convened on October 2 over a suspected "particularly dangerous infection." Anna Popova, who heads Rospotrebnadzor, the federal agency that runs Russia's disease surveillance and owns the anti-plague institutes, traveled to attend. The governor told TASS it was premature to identify the disease and made no mention of a death. Irkutsk also postponed a city cleanup day scheduled for October 3.

The reported contact numbers suggest how widely authorities are casting the net. REN TV and Izvestia put the total at roughly 197, with 189 hospitalized for observation: 114 in one facility, 63 in another, and 12 at the anti-plague institute. Eight remained outside hospital, and some accounts said the list was still growing. No secondary infection has been confirmed. Kobzev's October 2 statement said the contacts had no symptoms and negative tests, although some media reports claimed several people under observation had developed symptoms.

First Official Use Of 'Plague'

The leader of Buryatia (the next region over from the lab), Alexey Tsydenov, wrote that the woman who died of plague in Irkutsk region had not visited his republic. Citing Rospotrebnadzor and his government, he also said Buryatia had no plague foci, including along the Mongolian border. But even that acknowledgment became less definite: Meduza reported that he later edited the post to say she "may have died of plague." He did not identify the pneumonic form.

Meanwhile, competing accounts sent Shipilova to Thailand or Buryatia before she fell ill. Tsydenov denied the Buryatia visit. Gennady Onishchenko, who ran Rospotrebnadzor until 2013, questioned whether plague was involved at all, pointing to dormant rodents and fleas and snow already falling in Buryatia. That argument addresses a possible wildlife exposure; it does not resolve the allegation that she broke a tube of bacteria at work.

Izvestia and the Telegram channel Ostorozhno Novosti both report that investigators have opened a criminal case under Article 236, which covers sanitary violations that cause death by negligence. Nobody has confirmed it on the record. That charge only makes sense if somebody broke a rule at work.

By Saturday, some of the public information was disappearing. Baikalsk's administration posted a notice urging residents to limit travel to Shelekhov and nearby settlements, citing "unofficial information" about a plague case. Roughly two hours later, the notice was gone. REN TV also deleted five Telegram posts about the Shelekhov hospitalization figures.

Kobzev's Saturday post concerned an inspection by Roszdravnadzor, the healthcare-quality regulator rather than the epidemiological service, and did not address the infection. Comments asking why there was still no official statement went unanswered. Meanwhile, Lyudi Baikala reported that pharmacies in Irkutsk and Shelekhov had sold out of antibiotics.

The institute where Shipilova worked was founded in 1934 to fight plague and still leads plague surveillance for the region, alongside cholera, anthrax and tularemia. It is one of five such institutes nationally and the only one covering Siberia and the Far East. Natural plague foci remain in parts of southern Siberia, including Tuva, Altai and Transbaikal. Russia's last widely reported human case involved a child in the Altai Republic in 2016 and was linked to marmots.

The negative tests are welcome news, and the reports so far do not establish a spreading outbreak. But a young laboratory worker is dead, a hospital wing is quarantined, and almost 200 contacts have reportedly been identified. "Particularly dangerous infection" is a description of the stakes. It still isn't an explanation of what happened.

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/03/2026 - 18:05

Quantum Isn't Coming For Your Bitcoin

Tyler Durden — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 21:30:00 +0000

Quantum Isn't Coming For Your Bitcoin

Authored by Brandon Black via Bitcoin Magazine,

For as long as Bitcoin has existed, new forms of FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) have been used to predict its demise. Despite this, Bitcoin has grown into a multi-trillion dollar asset and begun to take its place in the global monetary order. In recent months, the specter of a cryptographically relevant quantum computer (CRQC) enabling an attacker to recreate secret keys from public keys and sign Bitcoin transactions moving other people's coins has returned as an evolved form of FUD.

Is this a realistic threat to Bitcoin's continued growth? In a word, no.

There is no evidence that a CRQC will be built within a decade, and it remains unknown whether such a machine will ever be built. The quantum threat remains FUD.

State of the Art

To date, no quantum computing machine has computed anything out of reach of a precocious 6-year-old (confirmed empirically). Quantum computers are remarkable technology and showcase the truly science fiction worthy capabilities of the modern world. These devices harness foundational technologies such as optical tweezers, laser cooling, superconducting flux qubits, electromagnetic traps, dilution refrigerators, and many more. Within these devices individual qubits are coerced into specific subatomic states (different for each candidate technology), entangled into superpositions, manipulated to represent computations, and then their subatomic properties are read and interpreted. The astounding truth is that these devices exist, and can be manipulated to produce meaningful computations across a handful of inputs. The cold reality check is that (for an example candidate tech.) to do a computation that a small child can do requires enough power to air condition a Texas high school, many hours of setup, and further hours of post-processing.

Reading the Future

I know what you're thinking, "but there's so much money flowing into quantum computing". Does money flowing into a field correlate with the rate of real-world technological progress in that field? Not really. In fact, it can be argued that until the correct underlying technology has been developed and the product-market fit confirmed, money flowing into an area has a negative correlation with the likelihood of applicable technology being developed. This can be clearly seen by comparing NASA's Space Shuttle program to SpaceX's Falcon 9. SpaceX took (mostly) known science and reduced it to practice to satisfy a demonstrable market need for reliable and lower cost access to space, at a program cost of less than $5 billion to first crewed mission. The Space Shuttle cost roughly $50 billion to reach its first crewed mission. Not only did Falcon 9 cost an order of magnitude less to develop, but it has a perfect crew safety record to date. There are many reasons for these differences, but it goes to show that no amount of money makes a technology that is not ready practicable. Translating this to quantum computing: we can see that with tons of money being thrown at the problem, technology demonstrations at massive cost are possible.

But this tells us nothing about whether more money will bring us the holy grail of stable, low-error qubits (like the reliability of the Falcon 9).

No amount of continued development on the Space Shuttle program would ever have produced the low cost, high reliability of Falcon 9, and it's entirely probable that no amount of continued development, at any cost, will ever make any of the current quantum computing technologies reliable enough to break a single key pair.

Now, you might be thinking, "but what about all the recent advancements?" There are two important things to keep in mind about recently published advancements.

First, many of these advancements have been advancements in pure mathematics only.

For example, the recent Google paper which had such an important result that they chose to redact the theoretical quantum circuit rather than risk it being used to break important cryptographic systems. This may seem like massive progress toward the future of CRQCs, but in fact it changed nothing. Unless (or until) the quantum hardware has its Falcon 9 moment, there simply is no device which comes anywhere near the stability and scale needed to run the redacted circuit. It's pure theater to hide a circuit designed for a device which may never exist.

Second, on the hardware side itself, we see many new results and bits of progress published in a given year, but how many of these relate to the same quantum computing candidate technology? How many represent merely a starting over after a prior result ended in a dead end? The reality is that these advancements do not represent some linear track toward eventual success. They represent the breadth-first search of an infinite possibility space within which quantum researchers are hoping to find a path along which they can proceed for even a modest distance without reaching yet another dead end.

When we look at the reality of the future of quantum computing, it's hazy at best. There are promising technological developments. Especially, to my eye, in the area of neutral atom devices. But it's far too early to tell if there's a path open toward an eventual CRQC along any of the currently known branches or if more restarts are in our future. If, at some point, we see many iterations of the same candidate technology implementing progressively more capable devices, and computing meaningful results that a precocious child cannot also compute, we can revisit this discussion with different evidence.

In Theory

There are two possible explanations for the repeated failure of quantum research to develop a CRQC over many decades. It's possible that it's just a hard problem and we're continuing to apply science and engineering to solve it and one day the ingenuity of the human species will prevail as it has in the development of the Internet, the smart phone, social media, and Bitcoin (left to the reader to decide which of these are positive developments). On the flip side, it may be that developing a CRQC is either impossible or will remain forever outside our grasp. Consider what it would mean for a CRQC to exist: the machine would have to represent within its superposition a field of possibilities the same size as the complexity of the cryptographic problem to be solved. I.e. to break the 128-bit security of the elliptic curve discrete log on Bitcoin's secp256k1 curve, the quantum superposition would have to represent all possible values of a 128-bit number. In classical computing, representing all such values would require more computer storage (by many orders of magnitude) than humans have ever produced. If there is even the slightest granularity to the quantum superposition (i.e. the quantum superposition is not perfectly continuous across all possible values) then the quantum computer cannot ever become cryptographically relevant. If the energy required to hold a superposition scales with the complexity of the field being represented then a quantum computer cannot ever be cryptographically relevant. The contemporary understanding of quantum physics does not rule out either of these possibilities.

Conclusion: Bitcoin Cannot Rest

Despite all of the preceding, Bitcoin development toward new cryptographic algorithms must continue. While a quantum attack on Bitcoin's cryptography is not imminent by any means, it's entirely possible that another flaw could be found through other means. We know that certain elliptic curves have been found to have weaknesses, and secp256k1 could be next. Bitcoin has survived as long as it has because attacks on the system have strengthened it and that will continue to be true as the quantum FUD attack plays out. The development of P2MR or P2TRv2, of SHRINCS, SPHINCS, IBC, ML-DSA, and more post-quantum signature schemes will eventually lead to improvements to Bitcoin's resilience in the face of future attacks even if an actual CRQC is never developed.

This piece is featured in the latest Print edition of Bitcoin Magazine, The Quantum Issue. We're sharing it here as an early look at the ideas explored throughout the full issue.

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/03/2026 - 17:30

Mushroom Cloud Over Alabama: Trump Just Pulled A Condoleezza Rice

Tyler Durden — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 20:55:00 +0000

Mushroom Cloud Over Alabama: Trump Just Pulled A Condoleezza Rice

President Trump just pulled a Condoleezza Rice.

George W. Bush's Secretary of State had (in)famously stated "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud" in September 2002 while trying to fearmonger the public into getting on board with the Iraq invasion.

On Friday night, Trump rallied supporters in Mobile, Alabama amid a tour through deep-red states to bolster Republican turnout ahead of the November midterms.

On stage, he once again defended the decision to launch a war on Iran and repeated his line that voters should pretend that he is on the ballot. On higher oil as well as painful gas prices at the pump, he reiterated that it's a "small price" to pay to prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapon. He also claimed the Iran war will "probably" end soon after the midterms. That's when Trump proclaimed:

"But remember about the oil: You're paying a price, but boy, is that a small price than what it would be if these lunatics were allowed to have a nuclear weapon and used it on Mobile, Alabama."

TRUMP SAYS HIGH OIL PRICES A SMALL PRICE TO PAY, IRAN WOULD HAVE NUKED ALABAMA *** pic.twitter.com/MH17sEhNZp
— The_Real_Fly (@The_Real_Fly) October 3, 2026

We should start by noting the obvious: There is nothing in Iran's missile arsenal capable of reaching the United States. Not a single report has even so much as ever claimed it,

According to the Arms Control Association, the Islamic Republic does not possess operational intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and certainly has never tested one. Iran's most advanced missiles have a long enough reach to perhaps hit central Europe, or else the remote US-UK base Diego Garcia deep in the Indian Ocean - but hitting Mobile, Alabama is absurd and an impossibility.

However, it's unlikely that your average Alabama voter knows this (though notably in the above clip the crowd's response is lackluster and the applause is very weak). Even the US intelligence community knows that the idea that the Iranians could send a projectile to reach the continental US is false on its face:

There is no serious evidence to back up all the claims that have been made about Iran developing long-range rockets to deliver nuclear warheads. The U.S. intelligence community assess that Iran may be technically capable of developing an ICBM with sufficient foreign assistance, not that they are doing so. Iran has never tested any long-range rockets. Iran's longest-range missiles are medium-range ballistic missiles, not the intercontinental-range missiles as critics will have us believe.

As far as the evidence shows, Iran is assessed to have deployed several dozen Shahab-3 and Ghadr-1 medium-range ballistic missiles with ranges up to 2,000 kilometers, as well as dozens of short-range ballistic missiles with ranges of 150 to 500 kilometers. Iran is testing a solid-fueled medium-range ballistic missile, the Sejjil-2, but that has not been tested since 2011 and the United States cannot confirm Iran's claims that this missile is deployed.

Likely Trump is himself fully aware of all this, but when the point is fearmongering the US public into supporting the next Middle East quagmire and half-baked 'forever war'.... well then logic, reason, and truth go out the window.

Vice President JD Vance pulled something similar not too long ago. Back in March in the opening weeks of Operation Epic Fury he implied that Iran could potentially turn a nuclear bomb into a suicide vest - another absurd claim, just based on the logistics and technical requirements alone.

Vance suggests Iran could have used nuclear suicide vests: “You talk about people who walk into a crowded supermarket and have a vest on, and they blow up the vest and a couple of people get killed, and that's a terrible tragedy. What happens when what's on the vest is not… pic.twitter.com/6HiCHhi4S9
— The Bulwark (@BulwarkOnline) March 26, 2026

"You talk about people who walk into a crowded supermarket and have a vest on, and they blow up the vest and a couple of people get killed, and that’s a terrible tragedy," Vance told a live briefing at the time. "What happens when what's on the vest is not something that can kill a couple of people, but can kill many, many tens of thousands of people?”

As we pointed out at the time, the simple reality is that a nuclear bomb could not be miniaturized to the point where it could be worn as a vest.

Dear Trump admin, at least come up with something better than old Bush NeoCon talking points.

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/03/2026 - 16:55

Egypt Arrests, Disappears Entire Newsroom Over 'Fake News' Allegations

Tyler Durden — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 20:20:00 +0000

Egypt Arrests, Disappears Entire Newsroom Over 'Fake News' Allegations

Via Middle East Eye

Egyptian authorities have detained the entire newsroom of one of the country’s only independent media outlets in a move that rights groups have denounced as a "first" and an "alarming escalation" on free speech.

On September 28 and 29, security forces raided the homes of the six journalists - Mohamed Ashraf Abu Emeira, Abdallah Qadry, Islam Barakat, Omar Helal, Mohamed Mahmoud and Mohamed Adel - who constitute the entire team working for Matsada2sh (Arabic for "Don’t believe"). The arrests bring the number of journalists detained in Egypt to 24.

via AFP

"It is a first in Egypt: an entire newsroom behind bars," press freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said, criticising the authorities for failing to reveal the journalists' whereabouts.

"It's a violation of the Egyptian Constitution, even though this is common practice. Journalists detained in Egypt are often forcibly disappeared for several days before being officially charged and brought before a court," the group added.

According to multiple accounts by rights groups, the officers confiscated the phones and laptops belonging to the journalists as well as those of their family members during the raids. They also did not present any arrest warrants and refused to disclose where the journalists would be held.

The interior ministry later published a statement confirming the arrests and accusing the journalists of running an unlicensed platform that is "run from abroad" and of spreading "fake news".

It also accused its journalists of being affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, the country’s largest opposition group that has been outlawed under the government of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi since 2014.

One of the platform’s editors was previously detained in 2023 over similar allegations but was released two days later.

Matsada2sh was founded in 2018 as a fact-checking outlet that corrects misleading or inaccurate information by various sources, including those by official government sources or opposition media.

"Independent journalism is critical in any free society and Egyptian authorities’ failure to allow free exercises of expression to thrive flies in the face of a purported commitment to dialogue, transparency, anti-corruption, and regional leadership," more than 80 rights groups and independent media outlets said in a statement.

"The crackdown on the Matsada2sh platform and these arrests are alarming escalations on independent media and freedom of expression that cannot be allowed to stand."

One of the founders of Matsada2sh, Abdelrahman Mansour, who is not based in Egypt, told the Associated Press on Thursday that the families do not know where the journalists are.

"Everyone on this team knew the risks when they went to work every day, but it’s unacceptable for the government to make false accusations and forcibly disappear journalists just because they’re afraid of a free press," AP quoted Mansour as saying. "Their families are worried, we’re worried, we just want them released unharmed."

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/03/2026 - 16:20

California Man Accused Of Routing More Than $300 Million In Restricted Servers To China

Tyler Durden — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 19:10:00 +0000

California Man Accused Of Routing More Than $300 Million In Restricted Servers To China

Authored by Arthur Zhang via The Epoch Times,

A California man has been arrested on federal charges accusing him of helping route more than $300 million in export-controlled computer servers to China through Malaysia and Singapore.

Greg Lui, 38, who also uses the name “Yiu Kong Lui,” is arrested by federal agents in Los Angeles County on Oct. 1, 2026. FBI

Greg Lui, 38, also known as Yiu Kong Lui, of San Gabriel, was arrested Oct. 1 after a federal grand jury returned a three-count indictment two days earlier.

Lui was the chief executive officer and owner of Earthmade Computer Inc., a company based in City of Industry, California, and established in November 2023. He was also the registered agent of another company, Coindigger, that did business as Earthmade.

Earthmade has not been charged in the case. The company did not respond by publication time to a request for comment.

Lui is charged with conspiracy to violate U.S. export-control laws, outbound smuggling, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Prosecutors allege payments from Malaysia flowed into Earthmade's U.S. bank accounts and were then used to buy restricted servers from American manufacturers.

Prosecutors allege the conspiracy began no later than October 2023 and continued through at least Aug. 12, 2026. The indictment's detailed transaction examples are concentrated in 2024, when Lui and others allegedly bought high-end computer servers and graphics processing units, or GPUs, from U.S. manufacturers and routed them through Malaysia and Singapore before they ultimately reached China.

Malaysian Route

Between January and October 2024, Earthmade received more than $80 million from one Malaysian company and $96 million from another, according to the indictment. Prosecutors say Earthmade brokered nearly $300 million in sales of export-controlled Nvidia-powered servers from three U.S. manufacturers.

One of the Malaysian companies had been established in 1999 and primarily dealt in lumber, plywood, millwork, and wood panels. Prosecutors describe the second Malaysian entity as a front company.

In January 2024, Lui allegedly told a co-conspirator that the lumber company wanted 70 servers containing Nvidia H100 GPUs. Later that month, he placed an order for 27 H100-equipped servers worth about $7.6 million.

Those servers were shipped from Los Angeles County to Kuala Lumpur. Less than two months later, prosecutors say, a co-conspirator emailed a Malaysian government official stating that the 27 servers had been transshipped to a Chinese purchaser.

Another order was far larger. A U.S. manufacturer quoted Earthmade for 512 export-controlled servers in April 2024, and Lui placed the order the following day.

The indictment traces 92 of those servers. Although a manufacturer had said they were ready to ship to Earthmade in Los Angeles County, prosecutors allege Lui and a co-conspirator instead had them flown from San Francisco to Kuala Lumpur and then onward to Hong Kong. The Chinese purchaser was listed as the consignee.

The indictment identifies the purchaser as an unnamed industrial company based in Hangzhou, China.

US Front Company

Prosecutors describe another transaction involving 100 servers equipped with Nvidia H100 GPUs and worth more than $22 million.

Lui allegedly used an unnamed U.S. front company to place the order and claimed that another City of Industry company, Topmost, was the buyer. He then submitted false documents identifying "Jackie Lui" as Topmost's chief executive, according to the indictment.

Topmost was also not charged in the case. The company did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.

Prosecutors allege Lui had purchased another person's identifying documents in 2021 and later used that identity in business transactions connected to the export-evasion scheme.

The indictment also alleges that a person presented as chief technology officer of the Malaysian lumber company was actually an international broker of export-controlled servers who incorporated Topmost in California.

Roman Rozhavsky, assistant director of the FBI's Counterintelligence and Espionage Division, said the bureau's investigation found that Lui allegedly sold hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of the technology to the Chinese government.

An Nvidia spokesperson told The Epoch Times on Oct. 2, "This case shows yet again that smuggling is a losing proposition - legally, economically and technically. Our work with law enforcement has led to prosecutions, and we will continue to engage with law enforcement."

If convicted of all charges, Lui faces statutory maximum sentences of 20 years on the export-control conspiracy count, 20 years on the money-laundering conspiracy count, and 10 years on the smuggling count.

Lui was expected to make his initial appearance and be arraigned Oct. 2 in federal court in downtown Los Angeles.

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/03/2026 - 15:10

Search Intensifies Off Nantucket After Gulfstream Jet Vanishes From Radar

Tyler Durden — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 18:35:00 +0000

Search Intensifies Off Nantucket After Gulfstream Jet Vanishes From Radar

A massive search is underway off Nantucket on Saturday morning after a Gulfstream G100 carrying six people disappeared from radar while flying from Bermuda to Boston.

The G100 was operated by Latitude Air Ambulance, which provides medical evacuation and repatriation services.

BREAKING: Gulfstream G100 with 6 persons on board has reportedly crashed into the Atlantic while flying from Bermuda to Boston pic.twitter.com/gHZI5Sq2vc
— Breaking Aviation News & Videos (@aviationbrk) October 3, 2026

Company spokesman Clarence Togeretz confirmed to The New York Times that the G100 was missing and said Latitude had contacted search-and-rescue and law enforcement agencies.

Local outlet Nantucket Current said the search-and-rescue effort is focused on an area about 13 nautical miles south of Nantucket.

BREAKING: A search is underway 13 nautical miles south of Nantucket for a Gulfstream aircraft with six persons on board. The FAA reported losing contact with the aircraft early Saturday morning.

The Gulfstream G100 (tail #CGRJP) air ambulance was traveling from Bermuda to… pic.twitter.com/TvKEe9e2iU
— Nantucket Current (@ACKCurrent) October 3, 2026

Flight-tracking website Flightradar24 shows the area of interest where aerial and sea-based Coast Guard assets are searching.

The US Coast Guard is continuing to search for a missing G100 C-GRJP, which lost contact en route to Boston. https://t.co/Yv3BmlmJco pic.twitter.com/TYXdccMR9y
— Flightradar24 (@flightradar24) October 3, 2026

X user Breaking Aviation News & Videos lists the Coast Guard assets searching for the G100:

HC-144 Ocean Sentry airplane crew from Air Station Cape Cod
HC-130 Hercules crew from Air Station Elizabeth City
MH-60 Jayhawk helicopter crew from Air Station Cape Cod
47-foot motor lifeboat crew from Station Brant Point
Fast response cutter William Sparling (WPC-1154)

Nantucket Current said the G100 "declared an emergency before losing contact."

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/03/2026 - 14:35

David Ellison Debuts New Name For Merged Paramount, Warner Bros. Studios

Tyler Durden — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 18:00:00 +0000

David Ellison Debuts New Name For Merged Paramount, Warner Bros. Studios

Authored by Jill McLaughlin via The Epoch Times,

Paramount and Warner Bros. studios will be combined under one company named Skydance, company CEO David Ellison announced Oct. 2 on his newly opened X account.

David Ellison, CEO of Paramount Skydance, speaks during the Paramount Pictures presentation at CinemaCon at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas on April 16, 2026. AP Photo/Chris Pizzello

"We have big goals for Skydance, and we intend to pursue them with passion, imagination, and a willingness to take smart risks," Ellison said.

"At the same time, we will honor what makes Paramount and Warner Bros. special - giving both studios the opportunity to grow, tell more great stories, and bring those stories to even broader audiences around the world, powered by the scale and capabilities of Skydance," he said.

Ellison said the company chose the name Skydance for a few reasons. The company will serve as an umbrella entity over Paramount and Warner Bros., bringing the iconic studios together under one roof while also preserving their "distinct identities, extraordinary legacies, and brands that have resonated with audiences for generations."

"We never wanted a new corporate identity to diminish, alter or overshadow either one," Ellison said in the post. "Instead, we wanted a name that would give the combined company an identity of its own while allowing Paramount and Warner Bros. - and all our extraordinary brands - to remain in the spotlight."

The company's assets now include Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. Pictures, Skydance Animation, Nickelodeon Animation Studio and Avatar Studios; CBS, Showtime, MTV, CNN, TNT, TBS, Comedy Central, Food Network, HGTV, Discovery Channel, HBO/HBO Max, Paramount Plus, and others.

Skydance also owns the film rights to at least 22 of the industry's biggest franchises, including Star Trek, DC Comics, Looney Tunes, Game of Thrones, Dora The Explorer, Mission Impossible, The Lord of the Rings, SpongeBob SquarePants, Avatar: The Last Airbender, and Transformers.

Ellison announced on Sept. 30 that Ynon Kreiz would serve as co-CEO of the merged company when it officially closed. He joins the company from Mattel, a leading entertainment company where he has served as chairman and CEO since 2018.

Kreiz will oversee the company's day-to-day operations and integration of the combined businesses, while Ellison will lead the strategy, creative, and technology aspects of the company, according to Ellison.

"I'm excited to partner with David to build the next-generation media and entertainment company - bringing together premium content and iconic brands at the highest quality and scale, serving global audiences across every entertainment vertical and distribution platform," Kreiz said in a statement.

Paramount Skydance settled a lawsuit with California and 11 other states on Sept. 21 that attempted to block the $111 billion acquisition, clearing a path for one of the largest media mergers in history.

The settlement was approved by a U.S. District Judge Sept. 30, paving the way for the merger to officially close on Oct. 6.

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/03/2026 - 14:00

Far-Left Riots "Tearing France Apart" Is Political Gift For Le Pen As Election Odds Soar

Tyler Durden — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 17:25:00 +0000

Far-Left Riots "Tearing France Apart" Is Political Gift For Le Pen As Election Odds Soar

Riots that French officials blame on far-left groups have morphed into a political crisis, leaving hundreds injured and more than 100 high schools severely damaged. The social unrest appears to be a gift to right-wing presidential contender Marine Le Pen, whose Polymarket odds of winning next year's election have surged in recent days.

At least 65 school employees, including 40 principals, and roughly 170 students have been injured since the unrest began, Euronews reported Friday. Education Minister Édouard Geffray said at least 100 high schools had suffered severe damage.

🇫🇷 Mass riots escalating across France

Despite bans on gatherings outside closed lycées, clashes with police have continued since morning in Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Rennes, and other cities.

More than 400 schools are fully closed today over damage and threats to staff. Pupils… pic.twitter.com/tmadn01Cgm
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) October 2, 2026

Young second and third-generation migrants film a French firefighter after setting him on fire during the ongoing school riots pic.twitter.com/rqhC8rcoV2
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) October 2, 2026

France: 625 arrested. 83 cops hurt. 159 students and staff injured. Schools on fire. The mayor of Saint-Denis high-fived the riot and said violence can be legitimate.This is what open borders and muslims produce.pic.twitter.com/cHpC7y42Es
— Vitruvius Republic 🇺🇸 (@realMAG1775) October 1, 2026

🚨🇫🇷FRANCE is tearing itself apart❗️

Call it suicidal empathy or call it Western self-hatred.

2,000 arrests, but the police can't control it.

It started as a protest by "students," but as always, it's escalating into riots by immigrants and those born in France with a… pic.twitter.com/Zhcdre37v1
— The Lector (@TheXLector) October 2, 2026

🇫🇷 School fires and riots spread across all of France

Young second- and third-generation migrant rioters are setting high schools on fire.

In many of France's cities, riots are being propped up by far-left pro-migrationist LFI officials, who are physically present at the scene.… pic.twitter.com/DJpAe4NamN
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) October 1, 2026

The unrest began over overcrowded classrooms, teacher shortages, long school days, and deteriorating facilities. The government's proposed 2027 budget only offers a 1.7% increase in education spending, bringing the total to 65.53 billion euros.

French intelligence agencies told a government crisis meeting Thursday that radical politicians from the far-left France Unbowed party, known as LFI, had sparked the riots.

According to local outlet Le Monde, Geffray told reporters that far-left groups had taken control of the movement.

The broader security concern is that far-left groups exploit legitimate grievances, recruit younger and younger participants, and transform localized protests into opportunities to riot. The far-left-fueled riots that accompanied US protests in 2020 offer a cautionary tale about how these groups hijack movements, and Western governments are only now coming to their senses about this problem.

For Le Pen, these riots seem like a gift, as her Polymarket odds of winning next April's election have surged.

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/03/2026 - 13:25

Trump Announces One-Time $90 Payments To 20 Million Seniors In Medicare

Tyler Durden — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 16:50:00 +0000

Trump Announces One-Time $90 Payments To 20 Million Seniors In Medicare

Authored by Aldgra Fredly via The Epoch Times,

President Donald Trump announced on Oct. 2 that his administration would issue one-time $90 payments to more than 20 million seniors enrolled in Medicare.

A file photo shows a federal Medicare office. Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Trump said the payments were meant to help seniors cover Medicare premiums and would come from the Medicare Improvement Fund, which Congress has allocated $2 billion to improve Medicare's fee-for-service program but has never been used, according to a White House fact sheet.

"We are finally using this Fund, along with my Most Favored Nations Deals, to substantially lower costs for our Seniors," the president wrote in a Truth Social post.

Eligible Medicare recipients will receive the payment in early October by direct deposit or by check sent to the mailing address they registered with Medicare, the White House said.

Most Medicare Part B enrollees are eligible for the payments, except those whose premiums are already paid by Medicaid or who pay an income-related monthly adjustment amount, the White House said.

"With this action, President Trump is the first President to ever use the Medicare Improvement Fund to directly lower costs for senior citizens," it stated.

Medicare is federal health insurance for Americans 65 or older and some with disabilities. Medicare Part B covers doctors' services, outpatient care, and some preventive services such as flu vaccinations and diabetes screenings.

Trump said in his post that the $90 payments are separate from the $500 rebate checks his administration planned to send to nearly 1 million people who were overcharged for their coverage through the Affordable Care Act - President Barack Obama's healthcare law, known as Obamacare - under the previous administration.

The one-time payments for seniors, Trump said, also demonstrated his commitment to carry out a plan to give every American adult a $5,000 dividend check if Republicans retain control of Congress in the November election.

The president first announced the $5,000 payment during a Sept. 9 Republican event in Dallas, Texas, calling it the Trump dividend. He promised the payment if Americans return Republican majorities to both the House and Senate in the upcoming midterm elections on Nov. 3, which he said could be made possible by his tariff policies.

The Census Bureau's American Community Survey estimated that there were 245 million adult U.S. citizens in the country as of 2024, meaning the payouts would cost about $1.3 trillion.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told NBC News on Sept. 10 that, if implemented, the $5,000 dividend checks for citizens would not be paid for with taxpayer dollars. He said the administration could "earn the money that Donald Trump wants to pay out, not from the deficit and not from taxpayers."

Melanie Sun contributed to this report.

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/03/2026 - 12:50

US Again Rebuffs Riyadh's Yemen Plea As 100,000-Man Force Readies For War

Tyler Durden — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 16:15:00 +0000

US Again Rebuffs Riyadh's Yemen Plea As 100,000-Man Force Readies For War

Several reports have indicated that Saudi Arabia and Yemeni government forces are preparing for a major offensive against Houthi rebels in the coming weeks, which will mobilize a huge force with an aim to take back Yemen's Red Sea coast and to ultimately secure the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, amid an ongoing threat to global shipping in the Red Sea area.

Over 100,000 Yemeni pro-government troops could mobilize for the offensive, Reuters has reported. Last month, the ease and quickness of Houthi gains proved humiliating for the Saudi coalition in Yemen.

White House file image

The report described, "The Saudis are considering two possible options for the assault, the Gulf and Yemeni officials said: Either a narrowly focused attack on the area around Bab el-Mandeb or a broader offensive that also includes other synchronized attacks on multiple fronts around Yemen, in the governorates of Al-Bayda, Marib, Taiz and Al-Jawf."

Parallel to the Reuters reporting, Axios said Friday that the United States will definitely not join the offensive in any direct way, short of possible intelligence or even targeting help.

The report cited US officials who say Riyadh again directly requested military help from Washington, but the kingdom has been rebuffed for the second time in a few weeks.

The Saudis are expected to focus on air cover for ground forces loyal to Sanaa, and reports suggest the Saudis wanted US warplanes in the air as well.

Saudi Defense Minister Prince Khalid Bin Salman called Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth to brief him ahead of the operation and specifically requested US airstrikes as coverage for the ground operations. The request was rejected, US officials say.

An admin official was cited in Axios as saying the US "is not going to take kinetic action for now."It was just a week ago that President Trump was said to have been close to ordering US military support in the Yemen theatre, but that he decided against it at the last minute.

Sunni clerics denigrate Shi'ites of the region:

Speaking at a conference in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan’s top Muslim cleric said: "Houthis have no connection whatsoever to Islam.” pic.twitter.com/PY47Bmi99d
— HatsOff (@HatsOffff) September 30, 2026

US officials have said getting bogged down in the Yemen conflict would be a "distraction" at a moment US forces engaged against Iran and in escorting oil transit through the contested Strait of Hormuz.

There's also the fact that in prior years when the US was more directly supporting of the Saudis and UAE in coalition operations in Yemen, it did little to change realities on the ground, other than imposing misery and death on the broader Yemeni population.

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/03/2026 - 12:15

What Michael Milken Would See In AI Chip Financing

Tyler Durden — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 15:40:00 +0000

What Michael Milken Would See In AI Chip Financing

Authored by Patrick Feeley via Substack,

Very few people in the AI financing debate are reading the deals like a credit trader would. We have had a week of headlines about who is raising what. Amazon is moving $8 billion of chips off its balance sheet. Broadcom is lending $42 billion to its own customer. Nvidia is offering to backstop $125 billion of the debt people use to buy Nvidia. The coverage treats each number as a scoreboard. Hardly anyone asks the question that matters once the paper is sold, which is who is holding the risk and whether they know it.

There is one person who would have asked. He went to federal prison, and he was also right about a version of this problem forty years before almost anyone else.

Berkeley, 1965.

In 1965 Michael Milken was an undergraduate at Berkeley when he came across an NBER monograph by W. Braddock Hickman, Corporate Bond Quality and Investor Experience, published in 1958. Hickman had gone through decades of corporate bond records, from 1900 to 1943, and reached a conclusion that should have been scandalous. Investors usually overestimated the risk in higher-yielding bonds. They treated the rating as the risk, and the rating was wrong often enough that the paper everyone feared tended to do better than its reputation.

Milken later wrote that he "was struck by the disparity between theory and reality." That is a modest way to describe what he saw, which is that a whole profession had confused a letter grade with a probability. Most people who find something like that write a thesis. Milken built an industry. He went to Wharton to study capital structure, joined the firm that became Drexel Burnham Lambert in 1969, and moved the high-yield desk to Beverly Hills in 1978.

The machine.

The numbers still look fake to me. Public junk bonds outstanding went from $8.5 billion in mid-1977 to $59.1 billion by mid-1985 and roughly $200 billion by early 1990. Between 1978 and 1985 Drexel underwrote 57 percent of every new-issue dollar in the market. One desk, and largely one man. The money built MCI, Ted Turner's empire, Steve Wynn's casinos and McCaw Cellular, and it funded T. Boone Pickens's raids on the oil majors, which readers of my last piece will recognize as an early chapter of the constructivist trade. By 1989 the Predators' Ball at the Beverly Hilton drew more than 3,000 people. Pickens was there.

Most people, including some who worked there, get the ending wrong. Drexel did not die of bad bonds. Drexel Burnham Lambert filed for bankruptcy on February 13, 1990, and the Los Angeles Times described the cause as "a staggering liquidity problem." The firm defaulted on roughly $100 million of loans, a small number against the market it had created, and the market lost its main dealer overnight. Most of the issuers were fine and most of the paper was fine. What disappeared was the one institution willing to take the other side.

Two months later Milken pleaded guilty to six felony counts and paid $600 million. He was sentenced to ten years and served 22 months. Weeks after his release he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and he spent the next three decades building the Prostate Cancer Foundation and FasterCures before his pardon in February 2020. As a former biotech person I would guess his second career did more good than his first did harm. That is a different essay.

The detail that belongs in this essay comes from 1987. That year, according to the GAO, insurers held more than 30 percent of all junk bonds outstanding. In April 1991 California regulators seized Executive Life, which had 62.7 percent of its general account in junk. The institution that failed was the marginal buyer of the paper, with long liabilities, a capital charge set by the rating rather than the asset, and a board that believed it owned bonds.

The skeptic.

The popular memory of Milken is a man who sold leverage to anyone who would take it. His own writing says close to the opposite. "Debt isn't good. Debt isn't bad. For some companies, close to zero debt is too much leverage." In the Wall Street Journal in 2009 he laid out six factors and warned that when they point toward rising business risk, "even a dollar of debt may be too much for some companies." In Bloomberg Businessweek in 2014 he named the industry. Stable, predictable revenue can carry debt. Technology, he wrote, "should finance growth primarily with equity."

Read that again and then look at what is being sold this week. I suspect the man who built the high-yield market would hesitate to lend against a GPU.

He also kept a short list of principles about credit. The first one is four words long. Rating is not credit. Most of what follows is an application of those four words.

The tape.

On October 2 the Financial Times reported that Amazon is pitching investors on a special purpose vehicle (a separate company set up to hold specific assets and borrow against them) that would own roughly $8 billion of already-installed Nvidia Grace Blackwell chips, raise debt against them, and lease the chips back to Amazon. The stated goal is a lighter balance sheet. The other effect is a rating. Investors expect the paper to come out investment grade on the strength of Amazon's double-A, which is what opens it to insurers and pension funds. Amazon says each series of chips will last at least five years. In the same article the FT noted that Grace Blackwell will soon be superseded by Vera Rubin. Both facts ran in one story, and I have not seen anyone comment on it.

A day earlier Reuters pulled a number out of Anthropic's IPO filing. Broadcom will lend Anthropic up to $42 billion in convertible notes, roughly a third of a $125.2 billion, five-year commitment to lease Google TPUs that Broadcom helps design. Anthropic's own filing flags the potential conflict of interest and warns that certain defaults could make "a substantial portion of its lease obligations immediately due." Bloomberg reported that banks are separately assembling $60 billion for Broadcom's chip financing, $42 billion senior and $18 billion junior, with Blackstone leading the junior piece. In August Nvidia set up a platform with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR to bring in more than $500 billion of outside money, and Jensen Huang said Nvidia holds an option to backstop $125 billion of it.

CoreWeave remains the live experiment. In August it closed a $2.6 billion loan with a roughly five-year maturity against customer contracts that average about three years. Meta's Hyperion data center was financed with $27.3 billion of bonds through Blue Owl's Beignet vehicle, priced at 6.581 percent, rated A+, one notch below Meta, and kept off Meta's balance sheet. Pimco reportedly took about $18 billion of it, which is one firm holding two thirds of one deal.

All of this is being priced with the 10-year Treasury above 5.2 percent. It touched 5.34 percent on October 1, the highest since 2002. JPMorgan expects $4.1 trillion of AI-related debt to be issued through 2030. For scale, the entire junk bond market that Milken built peaked at around $200 billion.

How a trader reads it.

First, the rating is borrowed. A vehicle that owns depreciating silicon is being rated off Amazon, not off the silicon. That works for as long as Amazon pays the lease, and the lease is most of the trade. Strip the structure away and a buyer of that paper is long Amazon credit at some spread over Amazon's own bonds, plus a residual bet on what a 2026 GPU fetches in 2030. The first leg is easy to price. The second is hard to hedge, because I am not aware of any real forward market in used Blackwells. If the spread does not pay for the second leg, the buyer is being paid for Amazon risk and taking the chip risk for nothing. Milken would have asked about it in four words.

Second, the debt can outlive the asset. Five-year money on chips with three-year contracts and a successor generation already announced is a bet on renewal. The CoreWeave lenders said as much and described themselves as comfortable underwriting renewal risk. That may be a reasonable bet, but it is closer to a venture bet than a term loan, and I would expect it to be priced like one. Amazon trimmed the useful life of some servers from six years to five in 2025. Michael Burry spent his October 1 Substack arguing the real economic life is shorter still. I do not know the right number, and I doubt anyone does. What I do know is that the coupon is fixed and the collateral value is not, and if the collateral falls short, the lender holds the difference.

Third, the marginal buyer looks familiar. In 1987 it was the insurers. In 2026 it is insurers and pension money again, reached through investment-grade structures that look like corporate bonds and behave partly like equipment leases. Cliff Asness put it better than I can in March. "The lion doesn't care if the ostrich is first loss or higher up in the capital structure." Tranching sorts out who takes the first loss, and the size of any loss stays the same. To be fair to Asness, he has been careful to say he did not predict the timing of trouble in private markets, and I am not predicting it either. I am describing a structure.

There is a real counterpoint, and Milken would make it himself. Anyone with a contract from Anthropic or Amazon has absorbed every rate increase so far. One executive told CNBC last month, "If you have a deal with Anthropic, will 50 basis points really stop you?" Probably not. My guess is that trouble, if it comes, starts two tiers down, with the smaller neoclouds lenders have started turning away and the second-string chip lessors who priced their books when the 10-year was in the 4s. Credit cycles have a habit of starting where few people are looking.

The club.

There is one more pattern Milken would recognize, and it is the one I think about most as a public-market investor. In 1989 the Los Angeles Times described the Drexel network as a club whose members were lending to and borrowing from each other. Deals cleared because the same handful of balance sheets sat on both sides of the trade.

In 2026, Broadcom lends to its largest customer so that customer can lease Broadcom's chips. Nvidia offers to backstop the debt its buyers use to buy Nvidia. Several of the sponsors in the Nvidia platform also appear in the Broadcom financing. Each deal is defensible on its own. Taken together, the suppliers have become a meaningful source of their own demand, and the public is about to be invited into the arrangement through an Anthropic IPO that people close to it have put at up to $2 trillion.

To be precise, I think AI demand is real, perhaps the most real thing in the economy right now. My concern is narrower. When the junk market seized in 1990, the companies were mostly sound. The dealer that made the market walked away, and nobody else would take the other side. For AI credit, the chips will almost certainly get used. What I would want to know is who makes a market in GPU-backed paper in the quarter one of the large sponsors decides to sit out. Today, as far as I can tell, it is largely the sponsors themselves.

People.

The part of Milken I like most is the optimist. "People are the scarce resource," he said. "It's not buildings, it's not printing presses, and it's not factories." I did not expect to find him on chips, but he got there too. "For today's computer chips, it's less than two percent of the cost. Brainpower has become the 'raw material' for building companies."

Hold that up against this week. Borrowed money is going into the factory at a 5 percent risk-free rate, and very little is going to the people who have to make the factory pay. I would guess the return on AI accrues mostly to the operating companies that take the compute and turn it into margin, and many of them are small and mid caps that have not done it yet. They are sitting on the adoption gap.

Anthropic seems to see it the same way. It just committed $100 million to train 10,000 engineers to deploy its models inside customers. Read that as a signal. A model company is paying out of pocket to close the gap between buying compute and using it, which suggests the chips alone do not close it. The lenders are financing the supply side of a market whose bottleneck, I think, sits on the demand side, with people.

Six questions Milken would ask.

Does the debt pay down before the chips stop earning?
Should this business be financed with debt at all, or, as he put it, primarily with equity?
Whose credit is actually being rated, the chip's or the guarantor's?
Who owns the residual if a 2026 GPU is worth a fraction of book in 2029?
Is the seller financing its own customer, and who makes the market if the dealer steps back?
Who turns the compute into margin?

The sixth is the one I spend my days on, and it is the only one where the answer is a company rather than a structure. Milken liked to say the past is always triple-A and the future is always single-B. He meant it as encouragement, and I take it that way. The future is worth financing, as long as the people doing the financing know what they own. This week a good number of them will own Amazon credit with some used-chip risk attached, and I hope they are being paid for both.

This note is for research and discussion only. It is not an offer to sell, or a solicitation to buy, any security. Sargasso Capital Management may hold positions discussed or related instruments and may change those positions without notice.

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/03/2026 - 11:40

He Calls It Socialism; Marx Called It Communism's Last Stage

Tyler Durden — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 14:30:00 +0000

He Calls It Socialism; Marx Called It Communism's Last Stage

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

On Theo Von's podcast, Zohran Mamdani defined socialism as the government delivering whatever you need for a dignified life. That is Marx's rule for communism's last stage - and New York is already getting the invoice.

Von asked him to define socialism. Mamdani said socialism means you will have whatever you need to live a dignified life, and that it is the government's job to deliver on that. Housing. Childcare. Transit. The things, he said, that let you take a breath.

Karl Marx saved a version of that sentence for the end of the road. In the Critique of the Gotha Programme he split communist society in two. The lower phase still pays you for the work you do. The higher phase, once "all the springs of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly," gets a banner: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.

THEO VON: "Will you define socialism for us?"

MAMDANI: "Socialism, to me, means that you will have WHATEVER YOU NEED to live a dignified life, and that it is the GOVERNMENT'S JOB to deliver on that."

I've heard a line like that before. It came from a famous book, and it was... pic.twitter.com/B9jKlJkVXH
— The Vigilant Fox ? (@VigilantFox) October 2, 2026

Mamdani skipped the abundance and kept the needs. He also skipped the part where the state is supposed to wither. In his version the state is the delivery service.

On CNN's Amanpour in September he said the model "will absolutely translate" nationally, because the only majority in the country is the working class, and its inability to afford housing, childcare, and transit "goes beyond any one city."

After the June primaries he had already said a democratic socialist can get elected anywhere, for any office. A late-July CNN poll found about a third of Democrats and Democratic-leaning adults calling themselves democratic socialists. House Speaker Mike Johnson's read was blunter: the party had nominated some of the most radical candidates ever to run.

One example of this playing out came in February, when Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez cut a Spanish-language ad for free 3-K and Pre-K. The script: if your child turns three or four in 2026, you can enroll in New York City, and any parent is eligible regardless of occupation, income, or immigration status.

The spot landed in the same season City Hall was warning of a budget crunch and a possible property-tax hike. "Whatever you need" did not come with a residency test.

City Hall has built a network of nearly 200 creators, grown out of the campaign's Creators4Zohran shop and run through a private Signal group, "NYC Creators Announcements," overseen by a new-media director salaried at $175,000.

It has paid some of them for agency campaigns, typically $5,000 to $20,000 a pop. The Department of Social Services spent more than $100,000 this year on a social push under a contract signed in 2025, before Mamdani took office. The Office of Mass Engagement sits at $54 million. The needs principle, distributed by group chat.

Sitting at a desk for the country's 250th birthday, Mamdani said the powerful have always treated America as "an arena of supremacy, where only a select few are allowed freedom, where not all are created equal," belonging to those with the right accent or shade of skin.

Patriotism, he said, is dissent. Love of country is the reason you refuse to leave it. Critics noted he was eight years a citizen, using the occasion to indict the country, after a $4 billion Hochul bailout for the agenda.

Bill Maher, of all people has called out Mamdani for exactly what he is. Maher pointed at the hire of tenant advocate Cea Weaver and her line about electing more communists. "That's a communist," Maher said. "You're allowed to believe it. You're allowed to vote for it. Let's just not pretend that that's not what this is."

Mamdani still says democratic socialist. The definition he gave Theo Von is the one Marx wrote for the higher phase of COMMUNISM, with one edit: the government stays, and it delivers the agenda.

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/03/2026 - 10:30

"Where Is The Onshoring?" UBS Questions White House Investment Boom As Foreign Money Flows Into Takeovers

Tyler Durden — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 13:55:00 +0000

"Where Is The Onshoring?" UBS Questions White House Investment Boom As Foreign Money Flows Into Takeovers

President Trump recently said that over $20 trillion in foreign investment has flowed into the US so far in his second term.

“We have more money being spent from outside countries and companies. Over $20 trillion. That’s five, six, seven times higher than any country. Not just here, any country ever,” Trump said, adding that the total could climb to $25 trillion by the end of his term.

🚨 President Trump stuns the World by saying our Manufacturing is higher than ever and $20 Trillion dollars is being invested into America

"No country in HISTORY has ever been close”

THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT I VOTED FOR

Follow @mr_pool001 pic.twitter.com/qPr4i4INN2
— Mr pool (@mr_pool001) October 1, 2026

Yet UBS economist Arend Kapteyn wrote in a new note on Thursday that new foreign direct investment totaled $232 billion in 2025, roughly $30 billion below its 10-year average. He said that, adjusted for inflation, investment that year was below every pre-pandemic year.

“One way to assess whether manufacturing is being ‘onshored’ to the US is through foreign direct investment (FDI) data,” Kapteyn said.

Kapteyn’s findings clash with the White House’s narrative of the early innings of a durable manufacturing revival. The latest White House tracker lists trillions of dollars in announced US and foreign investments, with commitments from the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Japan, Saudi Arabia, India and South Korea alone exceeding $5 trillion.

Kapteyn continued:

Yet little of this is visible in the BEA's New Foreign Direct Investment data (chart below).

New FDI totaled just $232bn in 2025, around $30bn below its 10-year average and, in real terms, lower than in any pre- pandemic year. There was a modest pickup relative to 2022-24, driven mainly by media/ telecoms and primary metals (within 'other manufacturing), but no broad-based investment surge.

Also note that, 94% of new foreign investment took the form of acquisitions of existing US firms. Only 2% reflected the creation of new businesses and 4% the expansion of existing foreign-owned operations, suggesting that foreign capital is largely changing ownership rather than adding new productive capacity.

The gap between the data Kapteyn analyzed and the White House's announcements may partly reflect the lag between investment pledges and actual spending. The bigger question is how much of that money will ultimately finance new US production capacity, rather than acquisitions of existing businesses.

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/03/2026 - 09:55

UAE Says Omani Flydubai Co-Pilot Attacked Captain With Axe, Tried To Seize Israel-Found Jet For "Terror Act"

Tyler Durden — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 13:20:00 +0000

UAE Says Omani Flydubai Co-Pilot Attacked Captain With Axe, Tried To Seize Israel-Found Jet For "Terror Act"

State news agency WAM quoted UAE Attorney General Hamad Saif Al Shamsi as saying the Flydubai Omani co-pilot accused of attacking the captain with a crash axe tried to seize control of the passenger jet bound for Israel and attempted to carry out a "terrorist attack."

Planning, attempted terrorist act behind flydubai flight FZ1073 incident: Attorney-General#WamNews https://t.co/OWxoZ9nWWR pic.twitter.com/JCE3NuGppa
— WAM English (@WAMNEWS_ENG) October 3, 2026

"Investigations into the incident involving flydubai flight FZ1073 found that the co-pilot had attempted to carry out a terrorist attack," Al Shamsi said.

BREAKING:

The Omani co-pilot who stabbed Captain Smit Machchhar and tried to crash Flydubai Flight FZ1073 on its way to Tel Aviv has been identified as Hamam Al Hamami.

Netanyahu stated today that it's becoming increasingly clear after the first interrogations that the attacker… pic.twitter.com/qXBS64D7W8
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) October 3, 2026

The aircraft operating flight FZ1073 from Dubai to Tel Aviv on Wednesday, about one week before the third anniversary of the October 7 attacks, plunged 18,000 feet during the attack as passengers and crew subdued the attacker.

Between 05:22:07 and 05:22:36 flight #FZ1073 dropped from 30,875 feet to 16,750 feet (-14,125 feet in just 29 seconds) pic.twitter.com/hHfnX7cKWI
— Flightradar24 (@flightradar24) September 30, 2026

🇦🇪🇮🇱🇸🇦🚨 UPDATE: Damage visible on FZ1073 after emergency landing

Images from Tabuk appear to show significant damage to the upper tail of flydubai flight FZ1073 following this morning’s extraordinary incident.

Reuters reports, citing an Israeli official, that a physical… pic.twitter.com/AXKCqt5Qjx
— DD Geopolitics (@DD_Geopolitics) September 30, 2026

The passenger jet, with 174 souls on board, diverted to Tabuk in northwestern Saudi Arabia for an emergency landing.

Al Shamsi said the investigation is under way "to uncover all the circumstances of the incident, its motives, and related connections, in addition to completing technical examinations and examining physical and digital evidence."

On Friday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel was investigating whether the co-pilot had acted under anyone's direction, warning that anyone involved in the terror plot would pay a "heavy price."

Flydubai halted all flights on the Israel route shortly after the terror plot was foiled, and Israel's El Al canceled its scheduled flights, stranding some Israelis in the UAE.

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/03/2026 - 09:20

Turkey's Fix For Its $20 Billion Hedge Fund Meltdown: Kindly Ask The Winners To Give The Money Back

Tyler Durden — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 12:45:00 +0000

Turkey's Fix For Its $20 Billion Hedge Fund Meltdown: Kindly Ask The Winners To Give The Money Back

Two weeks after a cluster of Istanbul asset managers stopped honoring redemptions, triggering a market-wide circuit breaker and the liquidation of 131 funds held by some 455,758 Turkish retail investors, Ankara has unveiled its plan to make everyone whole. Or at least, to make everyone a little bit less un-whole.

As Bloomberg reports, Turkey will start payments to investors caught in the fund crisis. The Capital Markets Board (SPK) approved interim payments of up to 1 million lira (about $20,400) per eligible investor in funds run by Tera, Pusula, Atlas and Hedef, calculated on each investor's "net investment" as determined by the Central Securities Depository (MKK). Below a million lira, you get your money back; above it, you get a million and a place in the queue. Money market funds get paid first, the rest in descending order of investor count, with A1 Capital, Bulls and Pardus funds slotted in afterward. The interim payments are advances against whatever the liquidation ultimately recovers, which is a polite way of saying nobody knows yet.

Emre Tezmen, chair of Tera Yatırım, was arrested early last Wednesday.

Finance Minister Mehmet Simsek, meanwhile, insists that "we are not talking about a systemic problem," pointing out that public debt is just 22% of GDP and the budget deficit is "roughly half the developing country average." All true, and also not much consolation to the investor who, as Turkish Minute recounts, sold her Istanbul home before moving to Portugal, parked the proceeds in stock funds as an inflation hedge, and has watched her account fall ~90% while being unable to withdraw even that. "It is melting away before my eyes, and I can't do anything about it."

The "please give it back" account

The payouts are the boring part. The truly bizarre part is how Turkey - long the biggest banana in crowded bus of capital markets banana republics - plans to refill the pot.

Alongside the interim payments, the regulator announced the creation of "Voluntary Return Accounts" at Birlesik Fon Bankasi "for individuals seeking to return excessive profits obtained from pre-liquidation share sales." Proceeds will be funneled to the fund liquidation estates and on to Ziraat and Isbank for distribution to investors. A separate "General Share Refund Account" has been opened for anyone who would like to hand back profits from speculative trading in listed stocks, and a new fund inside the deposit insurer TMSF will receive assets later determined to be proceeds of crime (details here).

To summarize: Turkey's plan to compensate 455,000 losers is, in part, to ask the winners nicely.

Bloomberg's Eric Balchunas summed it up best: "Turkey wants investors who made a lot of money in market to gift excessive returns to the other investors who lost $20b."

Turkey wants investors who made a lot of money in market to gift excessive returns to the other investors who lost $20b in funds w ponzi like schemes that are being liquidated. Wow. pic.twitter.com/Aw7RVn6DJQ
— Eric Balchunas (@EricBalchunas) October 1, 2026

Which raises a question that every holder of Turkish assets, foreign ones included, will now be asking: if realized gains can be deemed "excessive" after the fact, at what point do they become yours?

For those who don't feel like volunteering, there is the stick, or rather a discounted stick: under a leniency provision, anyone who pays twice their gains (minimum 500,000 lira) within 15 days of a criminal complaint gets a reduced penalty. Note where that money goes: not to the stranded investors, but to the Treasury and Finance Ministry. Market manipulation as a revenue line.

So who exactly made the "excessive gains"?

Here the honor system runs into a few practical problems. According to a detailed timeline of the probe, Pusula chairman Muhammed Yariz wired roughly 2.89 billion lira (~$15 million) to Edmond de Rothschild in Switzerland on September 1, two weeks before his firm defaulted; Pusula Holding chairman Serdar Turhan sent ~1.2 billion lira (~€25 million) to the same Swiss bank on August 24. Both have since been arrested. One suspects the Birlesik Fon Bankasi "voluntary return" desk is not their first call.

Then there's Cengiz Avci, a major shareholder in Odine Solutions, a stock that rose 987% this year to a peak 366 billion lira valuation before collapsing 94%. Prosecutors allege he booked ~15 billion lira in gains and converted 12 billion lira (~$244 million) into cash. There is an arrest warrant. He "had not returned and was not located." Presumably the voluntary return form got lost in the mail.

And then there's the politics. Fatma Betul Sayan Kaya, deputy chair of Erdogan's ruling AKP and a former family minister, resigned after the opposition alleged she bought shares in shipbuilder Ozata Denizcilik, a navy contractor whose valuation was ramped to $5 billion (above Ford Otosan) while Tera's brokerage reportedly controlled 95% of its shares, for about €1.1 million in April and sold for €23.3 million just before the September 16 crash. Kaya has not directly addressed the allegations, which remain unproven in court. A 21x return in five months: if that isn't "excessive," we'd love to know what is.

It doesn't stop there. As Middle East Eye details, one Erdogan adviser sat on Tera Portfolio's board until January, another former presidential adviser stayed on until the crisis erupted, and an Ozata board member arrested this week is the son of a former banking regulator and the son-in-law of a sitting deputy finance minister. Tera chairman Emre Tezmen, arrested on charges of running a Ponzi-like scheme, previously served on the board of the MKK, the very central depository now tasked with calculating each investor's "net investment" for the payouts.

Freeze, unfreeze, arrest the tweeters

The enforcement response has been equally on-brand. On a Friday, the Justice Minister announced asset freezes on 46 companies, 18 funds and 42 individuals. By Sunday, the freezes on 45 companies and 19 funds were lifted after the CMB conducted "a new assessment," with Simsek explaining that "protecting investment, employment, production and exports was a priority." Restrictions on the 42 individuals remain. Meanwhile, prosecutors in Bakirkoy arrested 16 people for social media posts deemed to be market manipulation and blocked access to 246 accounts "spreading speculative panic." It's always the tweets.

Officials have now identified 217 suspects across 26 manipulated stocks, with 56 detained as of September 30. The mechanics of the scheme were hardly sophisticated: funds piled into illiquid, low-float stocks, and with nobody on the other side, prices went vertical. Prosecutors allege some prices were inflated nearly 100x. Then the regulator tightened concentration rules in late August, the funds were forced to sell into a market with no bid, and retail rushed for the exits on the TEFAS platform. The ones who got out first were, inevitably, the ones closest to the funds.

The numbers tell the story: Pusula's funds shrank from 115 billion lira to under 8 billion, with 107 billion lira withdrawn before the doors closed. Money market funds, supposedly the safe end of the spectrum, saw 456 billion lira pulled in a single week (from 2.14 trillion to 1.68 trillion). In other words, those who knew ran, and those who trusted a "state-supervised system," as one law graduate who invested with her mother put it, are now waiting for a $20,000 interim check.

What Goldman is telling clients

As the crisis erupted, Goldman's EM credit desk wrote on September 17 that the equity market's 6% plunge was due to the "near-collapse and redemption default of asset manager Pusula Portfoy, precipitated by the regulator's clampdown on concentrated 'fund-chain' positions," followed by Tera "failing to meet redemption requests." The central bank responded with bond buybacks (you know, "NOT QE"), bigger repo auctions and lower discount rates, while Simsek spent the day "defending current policy mix and committing not to deviate from the anti-inflation track despite elections." Turkey CDS widened 10bps intraday before closing +6.5bps; Turkish bank perps fell as much as 65 cents.

We were more laconic: Turkey was getting "Leopolded" we reported late on Sept 16 when first news of the fund meltdown emerged.

Turkey getting Leopolded pic.twitter.com/vZYZqcPT24
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) September 17, 2026

By that weekend, Goldman's EM credit team was calling it a "systemic liquidity squeeze" in which "the liquidation of approximately $20 billion in local funds, sparked by redemption failures, dragged the BIST 100 down 6% and pushed external sovereign debt and CDS as much as 15bps wider midweek." Yet the bank's key takeaway was that "Turkey's move was technical rather than credit-driven, with a domestic fund liquidation transmitting into external debt before local buyers and short covering reversed most of it."

Goldman CEEMEA sales trader Ashwin Sharma went further, noting that the crackdown targeted a speculative boom that index provider MSCI had described as "co-ordinated trading," and that reining it in, "given threats of possible MSCI demotion (to Frontier)," was "a clear positive for me." His conclusion: "Despite near-term redemption-driven volatility, I continue to see Turkey as an attractive buy-on-weakness story," with banks pointing to further rate cuts and NIM expansion into 2027, and an energy price shock (Turkey is a net oil importer) the biggest risk. The bank's GIR EM strategists echoed the theme in their weekly kickstart, flagging Turkey's 5% weekly drop on "regulatory action on select investment funds."

The carry crowd hasn't left either. In a September 29 note, Goldman's EM SSA desk said Turkey remains a carry trade "GIR continues to favour and where we continue to see client allocation," with clients extending out the curve into paper like the EBRD 27.5% 2029s, which yield ~200bps above the 2027s. Then again, as of this morning, the bank's credit desk reported that in the Turkish corporate complex "risk was still available and offered with corps feeling particularly abandoned."

Which is, in a nutshell, the Turkish trade: the high-30s lira yields and the orthodox finance minister are real, and so is the system in which an AKP deputy chair allegedly makes 21x on a navy shipbuilder ramped by a fund whose chairman sat on the board of the securities depository, while the regulator's answer to the losers is a $20,000 advance and a bank account for the winners' conscience.

Been here before

Readers will recall the last time Turkish markets needed a marketwide trading halt, after the arrest of Erdogan's top rival Ekrem Imamoglu sent the lira to a record low ("All Hell Breaks Loose In Turkey"). And in May we noted that Turkey had sold nearly all its US Treasuries, dumping holdings from ~$16 billion to $1.8 billion alongside gold to defend the lira after the Middle East war erupted. The buffers, in other words, are thinner than the macro tables suggest.

As for the gated funds, the playbook should be familiar to anyone who followed the private credit redemption mess earlier this year: illiquid assets, daily liquidity promises, and a "screen price" that only exists until someone tries to sell. As one local analyst put it, whether the till "will have the money to pay it is unclear." The interim payments come out of what's left in the funds; the rest depends on the liquidators finding buyers for stocks that, by prosecutors' account, had been inflated as much as 100-fold, and on the winners volunteering to give back their winnings.

We wouldn't hold our breath. But we would watch the precedent: in Turkey, a realized gain is now only yours until the government decides it was excessive.

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/03/2026 - 08:45

Black Smoke Reported Over Critical Aramco Refinery As Saudis Weigh Major Assault On Houthi Rebels

Tyler Durden — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 12:10:00 +0000

Black Smoke Reported Over Critical Aramco Refinery As Saudis Weigh Major Assault On Houthi Rebels

Unverified reports and footage circulating on X early Saturday morning appear to show smoke rising from Saudi Aramco's Riyadh refinery. The cause and any impact on operations remain unclear. Separately, Axios reports that Saudi Arabia is preparing a major offensive against Iran-backed Houthis in the coming days. President Trump's comments last week that a bombing campaign against Tehran could resume after the midterm elections add to signs that the Gulf conflict remains far from any near-term resolution.

Turkish news outlet Türkiye Today cites NASA's FIRMS satellite monitoring system, which shows higher-intensity VIIRS thermal hits across Aramco's Riyadh refinery, one of Saudi Arabia's most important refining assets, with a capacity of about 130,000 barrels a day.

Open-source intelligence (OSINT) accounts on X are sharing footage of what may be Iran-backed Houthi attacks on the refinery. No official word yet on why thick black plumes of smoke are rising from multiple locations at the refinery.

More unconfirmed close-up footage showcasing the ongoing fire inside Saudi ARAMCO Riyadh Refinery, Riyadh Province, Saudi Arabia.
https://t.co/m4ITAHGBy0 pic.twitter.com/BMOGtYrtws
— Hexagone Intel (@osinthexagone) October 3, 2026

⚡️BREAKING: Saudi Aramco Riyadh Refinery has been Struck by Yemen's Houthis

Smoke is rising from Multiple Locations pic.twitter.com/s1apeEtfIX
— Iran Observer (@IranObserver0) October 3, 2026

Houthis have managed to Strike the Main Saudi Aramco Refinery in Riyadh!!
Nasa Frim shows it's likely on Fire after the hit. https://t.co/Sx0gLmwYRY pic.twitter.com/fgiXtH1R5k
— Ali (@MerruX) October 3, 2026

Unconfirmed footage showcasing ongoing fires inside Saudi ARAMCO Riyadh Refinery, Riyadh Province, Saudi Arabia. Unusual VIIRS thermal hits with increased intensity are observed across the refinery on NASA FIRMS satellite imagery. https://t.co/0GF1rCFoqV pic.twitter.com/Aow3HglPgh
— Hexagone Intel (@osinthexagone) October 3, 2026

A separate report by Axios overnight states that the Saudis are preparing for a major operation against the Houthis in the coming days, targeting coastal areas that give the rebels leverage over the critical maritime chokepoint of the Bab al-Mandeb Strait. The report cites two US officials.

More color from Axios:

Behind the scenes: A U.S. official said the Saudis have been planning the operation for weeks and that plans were approved by Saudi leadership several days ago.

The operation will include ground forces loyal to the internationally recognized government in Yemen with Saudi air cover.
On Thursday, Saudi Defense Minister Prince Khalid Bin Salman called Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to brief him on the planned operation and ask again for U.S. airstrikes against Houthi targets, the U.S. official said.
A U.S. official said that the U.S. "is not going to take kinetic action for now."

President Trump reiterated to TIME last week that he may escalate attacks on Iran after the November midterms if an acceptable deal can't be reached.

Separately, University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape has warned that Oct. 1 could mark a new phase in the conflict. He writes that "Iran's 45-day deadline to the United States expired today."

"On August 16, Iran's Supreme National Security Council decided that if Washington did not lift its naval blockade of Iranian ports within 45 days, Tehran would retain the option of launching renewed attacks against U.S. forces," Pape underscores. "That clock has now run out."

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/03/2026 - 08:10