ZeroHedge News

Tesla Engineers Audit Chinese Suppliers As Optimus Commercialization Nears

Tyler Durden — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 00:25:00 +0000

Tesla Engineers Audit Chinese Suppliers As Optimus Commercialization Nears

About a month after JPMorgan analysts toured Tesla's Fremont factory and confirmed a "targeted four-month transition following the end of S/X production in May" to humanoid production lines, a new report on Friday says that Tesla engineers arrived in China to inspect robotics component suppliers, as Elon Musk appears to be moving closer and closer toward the commercialization of humanoid robots.

Bloomberg first reported this development as Tesla engineers arrived in Ningbo, a major port and manufacturing city in Zhejiang province on China's eastern coast, just south of Shanghai. The engineers inspected parts and component factories for the humanoid robot called "Optimus."

"Tesla's reported supplier audits are a positive commercialization signal for China's humanoid supply chain, pointing to progress toward repeatable Optimus production," Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Ian Ma wrote in a note, adding, "Near-term sentiment could stay supported if audits lead to confirmed supplier nominations and larger orders."

Tesla is reportedly targeting the second half of 2027 for commercial sales of Optimus. Production is likely to begin much earlier, as JPM analyst Rajat Gupta said the "Optimus Academy" will be operating later this year, with robots collecting real-world training data before being deployed in factories.

News of this development sent the Solactive China Humanoid Robotics Index slightly higher on Friday, up about 1.4%, amid a tumultuous year that has left it down about 30%.

The market's appetite for physical AI, specifically humanoids, was hyped in mid-August by China's blockbuster Unitree IPO, but the momentum failed to follow through.

Bernstein analyst Eunice Lee recently pointed out that the adoption curve for humanoids will be much steeper than that of automobiles over a century ago.

Goldman analysts last month raised their global humanoid robot delivery base case to 75,000 shipments in 2026, 890,000 in 2030, and 6.5 million in 2035, versus previous estimates of 51,000, 256,000, and 1.4 million, respectively.

The invasion of physical AI is just around the corner.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/19/2026 - 20:25

HHS Awards $42.3 Million To Push 'Treatment First' Model For Homelessness & Addiction

Tyler Durden — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 23:50:00 +0000

HHS Awards $42.3 Million To Push 'Treatment First' Model For Homelessness & Addiction

Authored by Kimberly Hayek via The Epoch Times,

A federal agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) awarded $42.3 million in new supplemental cash Friday to states and territories with the goal of speeding up the implementation of the Treatment First model for homelessness tied to addiction.

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) funding supports the initiative falling under President Donald Trump's executive order titled "Ending Crime and Disorder on America's Streets" and the relevant Best Practices Toolkit that followed. That order from July 2025 directed agencies to put treatment and recovery ahead of the old approaches.

"President Trump has directed us to break the cycle of homelessness and addiction by putting treatment, recovery, and self-sufficiency first," HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a statement. "These investments will help states move people from crisis into treatment and from treatment into lasting recovery, stable housing, and work. We are funding results that help people reclaim their health and independence."

About $17.3 million of the funds went to Community Mental Health Services Block Grant recipients. Officials say it builds systems, partnerships, workforce capacity, policies, and the technical pieces needed to make Treatment First a success. The funds will go toward technical assistance, training, policy work, and coordination across systems.

Roughly $25 million went to Substance Use Prevention, Treatment, and Recovery Services Block Grant recipients to expand options for safe, licensed, certified, or chartered sober and recovery housing, as well as the requisite technical assistance to ensure that more recovery residences open and quality standards tighten.

"Treatment First means building a system that does not leave people cycling between homelessness, emergency rooms, and the criminal justice system," SAMHSA Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary Christopher D. Carroll said. "These investments will help states strengthen the infrastructure - partnerships, data, workforce, and recovery supports - needed to connect people with serious mental illness and addiction to effective treatment and support them on a path toward lasting recovery, stable housing, employment, and self-sufficiency."

In June, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) published a $4.04 billion Continuum of Care notice. It walked away from the Housing First model, which provided permanent housing with no strings attached. Chronic homelessness climbed 81 percent from 2013 to 2025, despite the number of taxpayer-funded beds increasing 151 percent, HUD figures show.

HUD Secretary Scott Turner called Housing First a failure that "warehoused the vulnerable without results." Housing alone will not fix a crisis driven by addiction and mental illness, he said.

Kennedy earlier this year announced more than $700 million for related work, of which nearly $100 million went to the STREETS program for homeless people dealing with addiction or serious mental illness. In February, he introduced the $100 million STREETS effort itself, built around continuous contact from the street through recovery, jobs and self-sufficiency.

A federal appeals court this week allowed HUD to forge ahead with funding shifts after lower-court challenges. The department has earmarked $1.3 billion for transitional housing and supportive services.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/19/2026 - 19:50

Appeals Court Rules Federal Ban On Interstate Handgun Sales Unconstitutional

Tyler Durden — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 22:40:00 +0000

Appeals Court Rules Federal Ban On Interstate Handgun Sales Unconstitutional

Authored by Jill McLaughlin via The Epoch Times,

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 against the federal government's ban on interstate transfers of handguns on Sept. 18, finding the nearly 60-year-old law was unconstitutional.

The ruling reverses provisions of the Gun Control Act of 1968 that prohibit handguns from being sold directly from licensed firearms dealers to buyers across state lines.

"The ban sullies the plain text of the Second Amendment and is inconsistent with the nation's tradition of firearms regulation, dating back to the founding era, under that Amendment," Circuit Judge Jerry Smith wrote in the ruling.

The court also rejected the lower court's analysis when dismissing the lawsuit last year, determining that the historical record adequately justified the ban because colonial and state laws regulating the movement of firearms across borders satisfy conditions outlined in the Bruen ruling of 2022.

The Supreme Court's 2022 decision in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen set a history-based standard: A new regulation must be consistent with the nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation.

Smith wrote that the lower court's analysis "stretches the historical record far beyond what it can actually bear."

Circuit Judge Catharina Haynes dissented, agreeing with the lower court's decision to dismiss the case last year.

"I agree with the district court's decision that the several provisions of [the gun control act] discussed in this case are not unconstitutional under the Second Amendment," Haynes wrote. "That is all that is in play in this case."

The federal lawsuit was filed in January 2025 by Texas custom firearms dealer Elite Precision Customs LLC and out-of-state customers Tim Herron, a New Mexico-based grand master in the U.S. Practical Shooting Association, and Freddie Blish, a retired U.S. Marine Corps veteran who travels around the country teaching safe firearms handling for self-defense.

The Firearms Policy Coalition, a national gun rights organization, also joined the lawsuit against the federal government.

The plaintiffs argued the law prohibited people from directly purchasing handguns from licensed dealers outside their state of residence, while allowing them to buy rifles and shotguns.

Handgun buyers were forced to arrange transfers through a licensed dealer in their state, which required them to depend on another dealer agreeing to participate in the transaction and usually included more fees and delays, according to the Firearms Policy Coalition.

The Firearms Policy Coalition said the ruling was a win for people's rights.

"This is a massive victory for the People and another major defeat for the federal government's unconstitutional gun-control regime," said the coalition's President Brandon Combs in a statement. "Your right to keep and bear arms does not stop at your state line, and the government cannot make you pay a penalty just to exercise it."

A district court in Texas granted the federal government's motion to dismiss the lawsuit on Sept. 30, 2025, finding the sale restrictions didn't function as a de facto prohibition on possession but were a reasonable commercial restriction enacted by Congress.

Congress passed the Sale Restrictions provision in 1968, finding that interstate commerce provided an easy way for citizens to evade states' gun laws at the time, according to the lower court.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/19/2026 - 18:40

CENTCOM Claims US Military Has Escorted A Billion Barrels Of Crude Out Of Hormuz

Tyler Durden — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 22:05:00 +0000

CENTCOM Claims US Military Has Escorted A Billion Barrels Of Crude Out Of Hormuz

Brent crude futures eased toward $103 a barrel by the end of the week as mixed Iran headlines and hopes for renewed diplomacy around next week's United Nations General Assembly weighed on energy markets.

On Saturday morning, CENTCOM commander Adm. Brad Cooper said the US had escorted 1 billion barrels of oil and more than 2,000 commercial vessels out of the Persian Gulf over the past couple of months.

Hostilities at the Hormuz chokepoint continued into Friday, as CBS News reported that two vessels were hit by projectiles. Iran claimed responsibility for striking one over an alleged "illegal crossing."

President Trump said Thursday he would soon make a "big decision" on whether to launch a major assault to "annihilate" the Iranian regime. "It's a big decision," the president told Axios ahead of a planned meeting with Persian Gulf leaders next week. "Anything could happen to me."

We suspect any major action against the Iranian regime could come after the midterm elections, whether kinetic, securing or neutralizing Kharg Island, or a next phase of expanded sanctions that could include not just Tehran but also China.

Middle East oil exports have stayed resilient despite the Saudi East-West pipeline disruption, largely because flows have been rerouted through Hormuz.

UBS oil and gas analyst Henri Patricot wrote in a note that combined crude and petroleum-product exports through the critical waterway and alternative routes reached about 14 million barrels a day in the two days preceding Friday. He said the weekly average remained around 12 million barrels a day, compared with more than 20 million before the conflict kicked off in late February.

That still leaves global oil markets with a deficit of more than 8 million barrels from these export routes on a weekly basis. This only shows the scale of the disruption that continues ahead of the Northern Hemisphere winter, as Saudi Arabia told major refineries in Europe that crude loadings would be halted next month due to ongoing disruptions to the East-West pipeline.

Patricot said the increased shipments through the Hormuz chokepoint continue to be driven by "dark transits":

Reduced concerns on near-term flows, same uncertainty on resolution

A pick-up in flows via the Strait of Hormuz in recent days has eased some of the concerns around near-term crude supply, impacting prices. More reports indicate that Aramco will raise exports from Oman over the next few weeks. Flows will reportedly be going to Asia. US President Donald Trump said that the is nearing a decision over whether to restart attacks on Iran. He is due to meet GCC leaders next Tuesday. Meanwhile attacks on vessels in the Strait of Hormuz have reportedly continued.

Flows going up in the past couple of days, despite Yanbu interruption

We estimate total crude oil and oil product exports via Hormuz plus volumes diverted to the bypass routes were up to 14Mb/d in the past couple of days, despite the drop in Yanbu. Total flows remain at 12Mb/d on a weekly basis vs. the >20Mb/d preconflict. The increase continues to be driven by dark transits via Hormuz as visible volumes in the latest UBS Evidence Lab data. Another LNG carrier left the Gulf yesterday, the second one we have seen exiting this month. Flows via the Bab el Mandeb Strait remain within the recent range.

Gulf loadings ramping up Gulf

Gulf crude loadings ex-Iran rose to >10Mb/d over the past 2 days and are near their highest level since the start of the conflict at 8.1Mb/d over the past week vs. the August average of 5.5Mb/d. This is driven by higher Saudi and Iraqi exports. There is still no fresh Iranian crude loading on the other hand . Including Fujairah, loadings on the bypass routes averaged 2.5Mb/d in the past 2 days and are at 4.9Mb/d so far in September vs. 3.4Mb/d in August and 6.4Mb/d in July. Oil product loadings in the Gulf are also bouncing back slightly, above 1.5Mb/d vs. sub-1Mb/d for most of the conflict.

Separately, JPMorgan's head of global markets strategy, Dubravko Lakos-Bujas, told clients, "Middle East oil exports have stayed unexpectedly resilient despite the Saudi East‑West pipeline disruption, largely because flows have been rerouted through Hormuz."

Brent crude futures settled around $103.87 a barrel on Friday, while the US diesel crack spread closed around $112.60 a barrel, suggesting the crisis is less about crude and more about refining (read Goldman's diesel report), specifically diesel.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/19/2026 - 18:05

Total PsAI-Op: How Altman, Amodei, And The 'EA' Cult Are Milking "Rogue AI" Breakouts To Protect A Trillion-Dollar Bubble

Tyler Durden — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 21:30:00 +0000

Total PsAI-Op: How Altman, Amodei, And The 'EA' Cult Are Milking "Rogue AI" Breakouts To Protect A Trillion-Dollar Bubble

The sudden emergence of an 'AI Panic' over the past weeks and months was highly suspect from the beginning. According to tech insiders, Silicon Valley's apex AI labs are deliberately overselling "rogue AI" hacks to pressure the federal government into building a regulatory moat that would lock out future competition - and the timing, months after both OpenAI and Anthropic announced plans to go public, couldn't be more obvious.

Akhil Verghese, founder of AI software company Krazimo, told the NY Post the incidents were no rebellion: "They were simply told to get the best result possible on a test." Voice AI co-founder Abhi Kumar was blunter: "One man's 'the model escaped the sandbox' is another man's 'you failed to build the sandbox correctly.'" Taivo Pungas, chief intelligence officer at Pactum AI, said the leap from "we didn't build the right sort of box" to a whole-of-government emergency feels exaggerated.

PANIC!

The AI "breakouts" that lit up Capitol Hill this summer were about as organic as #4 red dye. On July 16, OpenAI models running a cyber evaluation exploited a zero-day and got from their test range into Hugging Face's production systems; OpenAI disclosed it five days later, naming GPT-5.6 Sol and an unreleased model, and noting the models had been configured "with reduced cyber refusals so they could attempt offensive exercises that normal safeguards might reject." Nine days after that, Anthropic disclosed three incidents of its own.

According to Anthropic's July 30 write-up - the "waking up" narrative is total bullshit. "A misconfiguration left the machines that Claude accessed as part of the evaluation with live internet access," the company wrote; the models had been told they were offline. Claude Opus 4.7 went after a real company that happened to share a name with the fictional target and pulled "several hundred rows of production data." Mythos 5 published a booby-trapped Python package to the live PyPI registry that was "downloaded and run on 15 real systems." An unreleased research model scanned "roughly 9,000 targets" and got into one company's web app "using basic and well-known cyberattack techniques." Anthropic's own verdict: "We believe these incidents to be closer to a harness and operational failure than a model alignment failure." It halted cyber evals on July 23 and called in METR - their preferred Orwellian arbiter - to review.

Anthropic's account has one wrinkle: Opus 4.7 kept attacking after it recognized the system was real. Only the newer research model stopped. So the machines are not uniformly "blameless" - but a model that keeps following its instructions on a misconfigured network is Irregular's failure, not evidence of intent.

The Common Denominator

Every one of these evaluations was run by the same third party: Irregular, an AI security firm that tested the OpenAI, Anthropic and Google models and, per Axios, hit "the same security issues" each time. The Verge adds Meta to the list - a pattern Axios's Sam Sabin flagged in July:

Anthropic's models accidentally had access to the internet during model testing due to a "misunderstanding" with third-party testing partner, Irregular. no 0-days in this case, unlike the OpenAI/Hugging Face incident
— Sam Sabin (@samsabin923) July 30, 2026

Then came Gemini. On Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Google's model had broken into three real companies during an Irregular capture-the-flag exercise. The incident happened in May, Irregular published its report on August 14, and Google didn't mention it until the Journal called - and then explained that it hadn't considered the hacks worth disclosing because Gemini "acted appropriately" and stopped once it realized the targets were real.

Irregular told Axios the model "wasn't supposed to be able to get online, but internet access was unintentionally available," and the fictional target company "had the same name as a real one." In one case Gemini guessed passwords until it got in; in two others it found credentials sitting in a public repository. Irregular says "all known issues on our end were remedied and resolved weeks ago" and that the Gemini case "does not represent a materially separate incident." Google VP Heather Adkins: "Safe development of powerful AI models is critical and we invest deeply in this area."

But when looking at the actual events, the model was blameless.

To make it clear:
- Gemini was told it was it was in a fictional hacking eval
- Irregular unintentionally opened internet access after the eval started
- in all three cases, as soon as Gemini figured out it had hacked a real company it immediately stopped

Gemini was blameless.
— Andrew Curran (@AndrewCurran_) September 18, 2026

So Google - which isn't asking Washington to pace anything, considered the incident a non-event - yet the two labs lobbying for a federal slowdown scrambled to put out press releases.

Industry commentator John Ennis put the obvious question, pointing out that "once is an accident, twice is questionable, but three times looks intentional".

Why does the Irregular keep "accidentally" connecting these models to the internet?

Once is an accident, twice is questionable, but three times looks intentional

And they are EA aligned

Something is rotten here, IMO
— John Ennis (@johnennis) September 19, 2026

The Effective Altruism movement is the doomsday tendency that has spent a decade staffing AI safety boards and testing labs on the premise that AI will kill everyone unless the right people are in charge of it. Whether Irregular is EA-aligned is Ennis's call. That it is the one firm under all of these incidents is on the record from Axios, The Verge and Anthropic itself.

The Pacing Play

Six days before the Gemini story broke, Dario Amodei published a September 12 post warning that within 6 to 12 months an AI swarm could "take over the entire internet with a persistent botnet," potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage. His prescription: "We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models." Sam Altman and Elon Musk signaled support. In a nutshell, Pacing the Frontier™ is a bid to become strategically indispensable - too big to fail, with Beijing as the justification.

Nvidia's Jensen Huang - circle-jerker-in-chief noted: "What better way to create demand than to create a problem." lol yes.

Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora called it a "NINJA move" and then, after more time talking to labs, open-source projects and government, warned it could backfire:

Sequel to AI Pacing

I have now spent more time talking to people who run AI labs, Open Source projects and those in government and infrastructure.

I am beginning to feel the NINJA move could backfire.

I understand the pressure to come out and share where AI is "unmanageable ", and constantly share examples where it runs rogue. This fits in the category of "self-reporting" and an attempt to limit liability...

Here are the consequences of the NINJA move.
1. They have successfully encouraged every law maker around the world to have an opinion...
2. By proposing pacing - they have introduced uncertainty in the AI infrastructure trade...
...
It's time to rebuild the brand of AI - any marketing expert will tell you, this Ninja move has done more to harm the brand of AI and will take a while to rebuild. #letsbepositive in our actions and our narrative.
— Nikesh Arora (@nikesharora) September 19, 2026

Lawmakers jumped on this right on cue.

Senator Josh Hawley opened an investigation into OpenAI on September 9, with a records deadline of October 1; Senator Bernie Sanders announced a bill to ban further frontier-lab development; Senator Elizabeth Warren demanded an "immediate pause." As we noted earlier this week, everybody in this conversation is talking their own book. On Friday the White House joined in from the other side: Trump posted that AI safety concerns are a "hoax" and said he will appoint an AI czar and stand up an "AI Force," per Bloomberg.

Follow The Money

Oh and then there's that, yes. A leaked OpenAI presentation obtained by the Financial Times projects negative free cash flow of $278 billion from 2026 to 2030, with the company's compute bill rising from a $600 billion estimate in February to $856 billion by July - against revenue it hopes to grow from $36 billion this year to $350 billion in 2030. As we detailed previously, Altman has already walked back the timeline on the economic transformation that was supposed to pay for all of it.

Anthropic, meanwhile, has shifted its planned IPO from October to November, per the Journal, on what Reuters reports is $100 billion-plus in annualized revenue. And a week after its CEO said the industry must slow down, Reuters reports Anthropic is considering rushing out a new model to counter OpenAI's momentum ahead of that IPO. Pacing for thee.

he meant AFTER the IPO https://t.co/KXIPQzEhUf pic.twitter.com/bCDDsPmWXl
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) September 19, 2026

If an open-weight model out of Hangzhou does 95% of what Claude or GPT-5 does for a fraction of the cost, the valuations both labs are banking on implode. The only way to protect the margins, justify the cash burn and satisfy Wall Street is to make it legally impossible for anyone else to compete - a regulatory moat so thick, and compliance costs so high, that only a $100 billion corporation can afford to train a frontier model. Arora's point stands: no actual security fix has been proposed, only more "compute spent on safety" and a federal body to bless it.

The models didn't rebel. A contractor left the internet on, three times that we know of, and the two labs with IPOs to protect turned that into a case for federal pacing. Hawley's records are due October 1, Anthropic has promised a redacted PyPI transcript and an outside METR review, and Google's explanation for sitting on a May breach of three companies until a newspaper called is that the model behaved. Don't believe the byte.

* * *

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/19/2026 - 17:30

Trump Drops 'Fake News' Receipts As CNN, MSNBC, Politico Journos Have White House Badges Revoked

Tyler Durden — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 20:50:00 +0000

Trump Drops 'Fake News' Receipts As CNN, MSNBC, Politico Journos Have White House Badges Revoked

Update (1200ET): Following through on his promise, journalists from CNN, MS NOW, and Politico were denied access to the White House grounds on Sept. 19 after President Donald Trump announced a ban targeting the outlets the day before.

Akayla Gardner, a White House correspondent for MS NOW, said that her press pass was revoked at the third gate she passed through to enter the grounds on Saturday morning.

“Once I was inside where we have magnetometers, I attempted to scan my badge, which we have to do to be able to get into the White House grounds,” Gardner said during a live broadcast on MS NOW.

“It did not work. There was a red beeping light, and so the officer asked me to hand over my badge. He said that it was disabled.”

Gardner said the officer on duty wasn’t able to explain specifically why her badge did not work, allegedly saying the decision “was above him.”

Gardner’s badge and her photographer’s badge were both then “taken” away from them by security, she said. However, an MS NOW producer’s pass was approved, and the employee was still able to go inside, Gardner said.

MS NOW defended its team and newsroom in a statement on Saturday morning, saying the media channel plans to take “any and all steps necessary to defend our First Amendment rights” as journalists in a democracy.

“The White House belongs to the American people and the decisions made inside are funded by our tax dollars,” MS NOW stated on social media.

The outlet stated that it will continue reporting on the Trump administration, even if its reporters are not allowed on White House grounds.

CNN’s reporter Betsy Klein was also denied access and had her press pass revoked.

CNN responded with a statement defending its White House team:

“CNN stands fully behind our White House team and their fair and accurate reporting,” the statement read.

“We have a right under the U.S. Constitution to do that reporting without hindrance or interference from the government. Should the ban which President Trump threatened go ahead, it would be an illegal assault on that fundamental and constitutionally-protected right.”

POLITICO editor-in-chief Jonathan Greenberger shared in the publication’s daily newsletter Playbook that the company’s White House reporter, Cheyenne Haslett, was also locked out on Saturday.

“Secret Service denied her entry to the complex and confiscated the pass that allows her access to the White House,” the statement read.

“We stand by her and all reporters here covering the White House. As we said yesterday, we will vigorously defend our First Amendment rights.”

White House Correspondents’ Association president Jacqui Heinrich, a Senior White House Correspondent for Fox News Channel, accused the White House of singling out CNN, MS NOW and Politico for “doing their jobs.”

“The Constitution protects the freedom of the press from government interference,” Heinrich wrote in a statement on Sept. 19.

“That protection does not depend on whether the president likes a news organization’s coverage, agrees with its reporting, or approves of the questions its journalists ask.”

Shortly thereafter, The White House Rapid Response account on X responded with a list cataloging years of the network's own reporting failures and outright fabrications, nearly 50 examples in all...

Ouch!

* * *

As Zachary Stieber detailed last night via The Epoch Times, President Donald Trump on Sept. 18 said he has banned three news outlets from the White House.

Trump said on Truth Social that he was, effective immediately, banning CNN, MS Now, and Politico from the White House “as a result of their constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS!”

The president added:

“Media Outlets shouldn’t be able to constantly write or report FICTION and LIES when they’re covering the President of the United States, the Trump Administration, or the United States of America. Other Fake News Media Outlets to follow.”

MS Now and Politico did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

CNN could not be reached.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for more details regarding which stories or posts the president was referring to.

Trump routed them during a post-tweet press conference:

"What I do ask is just a semblance of truth. CNN is fake news. MSNOW is fake news. They're fake news. They know it. They're putting there for a reason."

"Politico was bailed out by our government from going out of business."

🔥 President Trump is now LAYING THE HAMMER after the Fake News WHINED that he blocked CNN/MSNOW/Politico from the White House

"What I do ask is just a semblance of truth. CNN is fake news. MSNOW is fake news. They're fake news. They know it. They're putting there for a reason."… pic.twitter.com/sxUtdqwCOQ
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) September 18, 2026

Trump added that "I don't want them in my office", stating that he will take this as far he can including "we'll be suing these people too."

He concluded by noting that "there may be other media outlet bans to follow."

The Fake News are Democrat operatives pretending to be journalists.

The toughest question the media ever asked Joe Biden was his favorite ice cream flavor! pic.twitter.com/PMNXrAtRZO
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) September 18, 2026

Trump previously banned The Associated Press from the Oval Office and other spaces after the outlet declined to change its stylebook to reflect the president’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.

A federal judge entered an injunction against the ban, determining that it violated the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment because it discriminated based on The Associated Press’s viewpoint.

But an appeals court in mid-2025 partially stayed the injunction. The court allowed Trump to ban the outlet from the Oval Office, Air Force One, and some other spaces, concluding that “these restricted presidential spaces are not First Amendment fora opened for private speech and discussion” and that the White House “therefore retains discretion to determine, including on the basis of viewpoint, which journalists will be admitted.

Judges also ruled that Trump could not ban reporters from the White House’s East Room.

“The identified harms are less clear with respect to the East Room, which does not share the hallmarks of spaces like the Oval Office,” the majority said.

At present, however, there is no White House press secretary and the usual press briefings are somewhat disrupted. The most likely immediate outcome is that the administration attempts to remove those networks from the presidential and vice presidential pool rotations.

* * * This bag made out of 1000D Military-Spec Cordura®

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/19/2026 - 16:50

No More Mandatory ESG Fees For Dairy Farmers, USDA Rules

Tyler Durden — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 20:20:00 +0000

No More Mandatory ESG Fees For Dairy Farmers, USDA Rules

Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times,

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has ended environmental, social, and governance (ESG) initiatives in a dairy program that is funded by dairy farmers.

The update applies to the National Dairy Promotion and Research Program, also known as the Dairy Checkoff Program.

The program funds research, promotion, and nutrition activities aimed at strengthening markets for American dairy.

However, the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy, set up through the program, has pursued "extensive ESG initiatives, including greenhouse-gas and net-zero targets," the USDA said in a Sept. 17 statement.

"USDA's action ends checkoff support for those ESG-related projects while allowing necessary administrative functions that do not advance such agendas," the department said.

American dairy farmers pay 15 cents per hundredweight on their milk to fund the checkoff program. Importers pay 7.5 cents per hundredweight on dairy products brought into the country.

The checkoff program is partly managed by Dairy Management Inc. (DMI), created by the National Dairy Promotion and Research Board (NDB) and another entity.

In a Sept. 17 letter to NDB Chair Lolly Lesher, USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins cited several DMI initiatives deemed to support ESG activities.

This includes the U.S. Dairy Net Zero Initiative, Greener Cattle Initiative, Pathways to Dairy Net Zero, and the mandatory participation of dairy producers in the Farmers Assuring Responsible Management Environmental Stewardship program.

Rollins asked Lesher to submit a list of all projects, both current and planned, that support ESG.

In its recent statement, USDA said the decision to end dairy checkoff funding for ESG initiatives aligns research and promotional activities with the original mission of the checkoffs.

"American dairy producers, cattle ranchers, and farmers pay checkoff assessments so those dollars can build demand for their products - not bankroll radical climate agendas that raise costs and constrain production," Rollins said in the statement.

"Today's action returns the Dairy Checkoff and all research and promotion programs to their core mission: expanding markets and supporting the hardworking men and women who feed this country.

"We will not allow producer dollars to underwrite mandates that put American agriculture at a disadvantage."

'Costly and Unconstitutional Practice'

The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) welcomed the USDA decision in a Sept. 17 statement, highlighting that the department's action came after the organization had filed a lawsuit on the matter.

The lawsuit, filed in June against the secretary of agriculture and the NDB, argued that using dairy checkoff funds for ESG initiatives pushed expensive and harmful mandates on the country's farmers.

The USDA and WILL agreed to stay the case while the department finalized its decision to end ESG initiatives in dairy checkoff programs.

"We are very encouraged by this great news today for America's dairy farmers. Following our lawsuit, the Trump administration is ending a costly and unconstitutional practice of forcing dairy farmers to fund radical ESG demands with the 'Dairy Checkoff,'" Rebecca Furdek, WILL deputy counsel, said in the statement.

"This was a clear example of unelected and unaccountable federal bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., pushing an ideological agenda on our hardworking American farmers."

According to WILL, the update could potentially affect more than 20,000 dairy farms.

Meanwhile, in its recent statement, the USDA said it has also directed the Agricultural Marketing Service to ensure that no promotion and research funds in other commodity checkoffs go to advance ESG mandates.

In addition to dairy, there are similar checkoff programs for a wide range of commodities, such as lamb, egg, mango, pork, beef, peanut, and potato.

"American producers substantially fund these checkoff programs through mandatory assessments. Those funds must serve their statutory purpose of strengthening markets for agriculture - not advance misguided external ESG agendas that can raise costs or potentially constrain production," the USDA said.

* * *

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/19/2026 - 16:20

Texas Daycare Faces Lawsuit For Running "Toddler Fight Club"

Tyler Durden — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 19:45:00 +0000

Texas Daycare Faces Lawsuit For Running "Toddler Fight Club"

Forget about Somali daycare fraud for a moment - have you heard about toddler fight club? A daycare in Fort Worth, TX is facing investigations and litigation after evidence showed staff abusing young children and forcing them to fight each other.

One mother, Heather Harris, knew something was wrong when she picked up her 4-year-old son at the Arka Montessori Academy of Risinger daycare. He was crying uncontrollably and was covered in bruises. Employees told the mother her son had fought with another child, but their explanations did not add up, according to a lawsuit filed this month by Harris and her husband, Richard Harris. She insisted on seeing the classroom's surveillance footage.

The disturbing footage shows staff at the daycare swing a child around like a rag-doll and trying to force him to fight another child.

Heather and Richard Harris filed the lawsuit September 4th against Arka Risinger Educators LLC, which operates the Fort Worth child care center on West Risinger Road. The case was filed in Tarrant County's 48th District Court. The lawsuit accuses the center of negligence, gross negligence and failing to properly hire, train and supervise its employees.

The family is seeking more than $1 million in damages, and for a jury to determine the final amount. The family and their attorney have described the scene as resembling a “child fight club.” State regulators cited the center for related violations (improper discipline, prohibited punishments such as grabbing/pulling, yelling, and failure to intervene).

The incident is only one of many that the daycare has been investigated for by authorities.

The Texas Health and Human Services Commission's Child Care Regulation Division investigated and cited Arka Montessori for 16 violations since 2024. Inspections found at least 21 safety deficiencies. Violations included improper discipline; prohibited punishments, grabbing and pulling; yelling at children, etc. The most recent investigation also uncovered employee accounts alleging Johnson had previously yelled at children or handled them aggressively.

It is curious, though, that the daycare is still running after these problems were uncovered by officials.

Parents being more involved in the vetting of staff at these facilities is an obvious issue - checking the company's citation records would be a good start. That said, child care programs have a tendency to limit the vetting of prospective employees in favor of filling positions quickly. HHS Child Maltreatment counted 2,341 victims of abuse by daycare providers in 2024 alone.

Be very careful who you leave in charge of your children... but if you do choose the Arka Montessori, here are some 'rules'

The Rules of Toddler Fight Club

The first rule of Toddler Fight Club: you do not tell Mommy about Toddler Fight Club.
The second rule of Toddler Fight Club: you DO NOT tell Mommy about Toddler Fight Club.
If someone cries, goes limp, or needs a diaper change, the fight is over.
Only two toddlers to a fight. Sharing is still not a thing.
One fight at a time, fellas. Then snack.
No shoes, no shirts. Honestly, we weren't wearing them anyway.
Fights go on as long as they have to, or until nap time, whichever comes first.
If this is your first day at daycare, you have to fight.

And remember:

"You are not your onesie. You are not the contents of your diaper bag. You are not your light-up sneakers."

"We're a generation raised by screens. We have no Great War, no Great Depression. Our great war is bedtime. Our great depression is that the banana broke in half."

And never forget:

"On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for every goldfish cracker drops to zero."

Sorry, we had to...

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/19/2026 - 15:45

Health Agency Looking At Electromagnetic Fields, Wireless Radiation: RFK Jr.

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

Health Agency Looking At Electromagnetic Fields, Wireless Radiation: RFK Jr.

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is examining electromagnetic fields, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said on Sept. 17.

The department issued a request for researchers and others to provide input on the impact of electromagnetic field (EMF) exposure, including radiation from radiofrequencies, as it works to figure out the current evidence base and craft recommendations for schools and families.

Concern about the potential health effects of the exposure "has increased, particularly in relation to children, schools, and long-term cumulative exposure," Kennedy wrote in the document. "At the same time, scientific literature is extensive, technically complex, and not always easy for policymakers or public health stakeholders to interpret."

Evidence submitted by the public can include peer-reviewed studies, government reports, and industry data, he said. Individuals can also share experiences of health effects they believe may be associated with exposure to EMFs. They should outline the types of technology involved, the nature and duration of the exposure, the health effects, and any treatment that was sought.

Comments will be accepted for 30 days, starting on Sept. 21.

Kennedy, a lawyer, has been involved in litigation involving electromagnetic fields, including a case against the Federal Communications Commission that resulted in a court in 2021 finding the agency's decision to keep in place 1996 wireless radiation limits was arbitrary and capricious because it "failed to provide a reasoned explanation for its determination that its guidelines adequately protect against the harmful effects of exposure to radiofrequency radiation unrelated to cancer."

The ruling, from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, ordered the agency to properly review information regarding health effects from exposure to wireless radiation.

Children's Health Defense, which Kennedy once chaired, recently brought a new case challenging the commission's apparent failure to comply with the order.

The agency has until later in September to reply. It states on its website that "no scientific evidence currently establishes a definitive link between wireless device use and cancer or other illnesses."

Kennedy told a conference in Washington on Thursday that filings to the court that led to the win included more than 10,000 studies.

"But there are still gaps in knowledge, and we're filling those," he said. "HHS is reviewing the regulatory landscape, and we will release a report this fall."

The report will include evidence submitted in response to the request for information, Kennedy said.

"We've opened the process to the public because these questions deserve rigorous science, transparency, and answers," he said.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/19/2026 - 15:10

Iran Submits Conditions For Ending War With US Via Qatar, Awaits Trump Response

Tyler Durden — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 18:35:00 +0000

Iran Submits Conditions For Ending War With US Via Qatar, Awaits Trump Response

Iran has announced Saturday that its Supreme National Security Council has submitted Tehran's conditions for ending the war with the United States via Qatar, and that it awaits the Trump White House's response.

"We are in contact with the Qatari intermediary who conveyed our conditions to Washington to end the war, and we are awaiting a response from President Trump," the supreme council's secretary Mohsen Rezaei said.

Via Asharq Al Awsat

But he warned that if Washington doesn't comply, the Islamic Republic is ready for a "decisive war". The conditions, according to his summary, features--

"the end of the war on all fronts, the release of frozen assets and the end of the naval blockade."

"Iran has become convinced of the need to change its strategy towards Washington following the US withdrawal from the memorandum of understanding," Rezaei explained in words given to Al Jazeera.

He blasted US and Israeli calculations which have been on display through over six months of war as "flawed" and asserted that the conflict was ultimately instigated by Netanyahu.

"Iran knows the US military’s vulnerabilities and is more prepared than ever to counter its air strikes," Rezaei stated. He went on to claim that Iranian forces recently tested an anti-ship missile near a US aircraft carrier.

"Iran is serious about defense," the high-ranking Iranian security official continued, and "if attacked, will strike US bases and Washington's interests in the region with greater force."

Meanwhile, President Trump continues to shut down critics of his "little excursion" in the Middle East, which is increasingly an obvious quagmire from which the US is seeking to extricate itself, by saying that high fuel prices don't matter in light of the potential for Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon.

Interestingly, at the same time Iran continues to seek to demonstrate it is not bent on achieving nuclear weapons status.

However, Rezaei has also newly teased withdrawing from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty:

Iran complies with a fatwa issued by the late Ali Khamenei prohibiting the development of nuclear weapons and has not yet decided to withdraw from the Treaty on the Non·Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.

"We still adhere to the fatwa of the late supreme leader and have not changed our nuclear doctrine, but we do not know what will happen in the future. We have not yet made a decision to withdraw from the Non·Proliferation Treaty, and this issue depends on Washington’s behavior," said Mohsen Rezaei

However, according to Rezaei, the actions of the United States and Israel allow Iran to withdraw from the treaty.

The Iranian official in the fresh remarks also addressed the escalating Saudi-Yemen war. He described that the Houthis seek a peace settlement with Saudi Arabia, and suggested a broader US-Iran deal would facilitate that.

Why is CENTCOM doing this? Markets say bullshit pic.twitter.com/BdkzCGrFY6
— The_Real_Fly (@The_Real_Fly) September 19, 2026

Of course, Tehran at the same time knows that the Houthi advance along the Red Sea coast has only increased Iranian leverage over global energy - given the Yemeni rebels are now in easter shooting distance of the vital Bab Al-Mandab Strait. Iranian advisers are likely coordinating with the Shia Ansar Allah movement as it battles the Saudi coalition.

* * *

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/19/2026 - 14:35

The 'Modern-Day Lynching' Hoax... And The Elephant In The Room

Tyler Durden — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 18:00:00 +0000

The 'Modern-Day Lynching' Hoax... And The Elephant In The Room

Authored by Larry Elder via The Epoch Times,

Nearly 60 Democratic members of Congress signed a letter to sound an alarm: Black Americans are being found hanging, including some from trees, in a wave of possible "modern-day lynchings."

Their letter to the Justice Department and FBI stated, "The series of deaths raise significant suspicion of foul play given the role of lynching in our nation's history." Rep. Ayanna Pressley called it a "national crisis." Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who signed the letter, tweeted about "widespread modern-day lynchings" and "racial terror."

Every suspicious death deserves investigation. But history is not evidence. What are the facts?

Demartravion "Trey" Reed, 21, was found hanging at Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi. The medical examiner found no foul play and ruled the death suicide. His family confirmed that his girlfriend said Reed sent suicidal texts the previous night.
In Raleigh, North Carolina, a 32-year-old black man was found hanging downtown. Video showed him acting alone with a cord. His mother said he suffered mental health problems.
Juliana Nzita, 16, was found on church property in Charlotte. Investigators found no defensive wounds, assault, foul play or outside involvement.
Justice Kai James, 21, was found hanging at a Job Corps center in Albany, Georgia. Authorities called it suicide.
Kyle Bassinga, 21, was found hanging in Cobb County; video showed him entering the woods alone. Authorities called it suicide.
To'Nea Nicole Miller, 27, was found hanging in Miami's Gwen Cherry Park. Authorities called it suicide.
Jerard "Jay" Jackson, 28, was found near a trail in Rothbury, Michigan. Authorities called it suicide.
Tasia Fortune, 29, was found hanging behind an abandoned house in Jackson, Mississippi. Her death was ruled homicide. Police arrested Jarques Ratliff, a 51-year-old black man who knew her. His motive is unknown.

According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, more white Americans than black Americans die by suicide by hanging, and whites do so at a higher per-capita rate. In 2020, 10,573 white Americans and 916 black Americans died by suicide by hanging, strangulation or suffocation. The age-adjusted rates were 4.6 per 100,000 for whites and 2.0 for blacks.

This blacks-being-lynched hysteria recalls the supposed epidemic of racism-driven black church burnings in the 1990s. The mainstream media pushed the narrative of organized white terrorists torching black churches across America. Then-President Bill Clinton created a national task force.

The investigation found no national racist conspiracy. From 1995 through September 1998, authorities investigated 670 arsons, bombings or attempted bombings involving houses of worship. Two hundred twenty-five involved predominantly black churches. Most did not. Of the 106 suspects arrested for arson at black churches, 68 were white, 37 were black, and one was Hispanic.

Some fires were indeed racist crimes, but the sweeping media narrative was false. America had again been stampeded into believing white racism had suddenly and everywhere reared its head.

Meanwhile, these so-called leaders ignore the elephant in the room.

They ignore the epidemic of black children born without a father married to and living with their mother, despite overwhelming evidence that two-parent families improve economic, behavioral and educational outcomes.

They ignore the crisis of K-12 schools in urban America, where most black fourth graders are not proficient in reading or math. Leftist politicians and teacher unions control and defend public urban schools.

They ignore black-on-black crime. In 2023 more than half of the nation's homicide victims were black, and of those victims, nearly 90 percent of the identified offenders were black.

They ignore the effect of illegal immigration on black joblessness and wages. A U.S. Commission on Civil Rights investigation found that illegal immigration has tended to increase the supply of low-skilled labor and depress both wages and employment rates for low-skilled American workers - a disproportionate number of whom are black men. Research presented to the commission estimated that the immigration influx from 1980 through 2000 reduced the employment rate of low-skilled black men by 8 percentage points. Other research estimated that immigration cost the average American man without a high-school diploma approximately $1,800 annually in reduced wages.

Black truth-tellers who identify these problems are smeared as "Uncle Toms" and "sellouts." The Ku Klux Klan could not have designed a more destructive arrangement.

If black leadership malpractice were a crime, many politicians would be staring at life without the possibility of parole.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/19/2026 - 14:00

Houthi Ballistic Missiles Hit Fuel Tanks Near Riyadh Airport In War First

Tyler Durden — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 17:25:00 +0000

Houthi Ballistic Missiles Hit Fuel Tanks Near Riyadh Airport In War First

In a historic first of the Yemen conflict, Houthi ballistic missiles rained down on the Saudi capital of Riyadh overnight, triggering rare air raid alerts and a general state of panic among the citizenry.

The international airport may have been targeted, given huge black smoke plumes were seen rising above city’s King Khalid international airport. There looks to have been a significant ground impact just near the major aviation hub.

Source: Reuters

The Guardian reports, "Explosions were heard in the capital as firefighters battled to extinguish the flames of a burning fuel tank emblazoned with the logo of the Saudi oil company Aramco near the city’s King Khalid international airport."

Several rounds of explosions in the capital were heard overnight, with reports of flight cancelations and pauses, with FlightRadar24 citing "major problems" at the airport.

"The Saudi civil defense force sent air raid alerts overnight on Friday to residents of Riyadh, Jeddah and other cities including Yanbu, a major industrial port which is home to critical oil facilities," The Guardian report notes.

No casualties or major damage has been officially reported, and the air alert warnings were soon lifted. There hasn't been much in the way of a specific public assessment of the attack from Saudi authorities.

Smoke rises from fuel storage depot at King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia pic.twitter.com/0qjb9oY3lC
— TRT World Now (@TRTWorldNow) September 19, 2026

Gulf states which have been targeted throughout the Iran conflict have by and large kept quiet on damage as a result of attacks either by Iranian forces or the Houthi rebels in Yemen. In some cases they've persecuted citizens who share photographs with the outside world.

Fierce fighting continues to unfold in Yemen, with regionally based analyst Yasmeen al-Eryani of the Sanaa Center think tank saying the Houthis continue to set the pace of escalation:

"You could see that the Houthis are determining the timelines and the levels of the escalation," al-Eryani said. "So, depending on the current situation, it seems that the Houthis are the ones in control."

The analyst traced the latest tensions back to July, when an Iranian Mahan Air flight resumed direct travel between Tehran and Houthi-controlled Sanaa.

She said tensions escalated with Saudi Arabia after a subsequent Mahan Air flight was prevented from landing in Sanaa, prompting Houthi retaliation and raising fears of a broader confrontation.

But the attacks have gone the other way as well, with the Houthi military on Saturday announcing that the Saudi coalition carried out 26 attacks against areas under the group's control over the prior day.

Reported images and footage of smoke rising from facilities at King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh following overnight ballistic missile attacks by Ansarallah: pic.twitter.com/bTSfEDdlYF
— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) September 19, 2026

The Houthis further tallied that over 300 Saudi attacks had been launched on their positions over just the past week, as cited in the AFP. After the rapid Houthi advance along the Red Sea coast this month, the Iran-aligned group is in better position to potentially block international shipping in the Bab Al-Mandab Strait.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/19/2026 - 13:25

Gold At $155,000 An Ounce

Tyler Durden — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 16:50:00 +0000

Gold At $155,000 An Ounce

Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance

The fellas over at Zero Hedge put up a Tweet last week that floated a wild monetary thought experiment: they said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent could theoretically “buy back” our roughly $40 trillion in U.S. government debt using cash from the Treasury General Account.

There would just be one small detail standing in the way…the government would first have to re-mark its gold reserves to somewhere around $155,000 per ounce.

If you’re not familiar with the concept, it probably sounds outright insane. But the basic idea is actually simple, and once you follow it through to its logical conclusion, things get interesting pretty quickly.

The United States owns roughly 261.5 million ounces of gold, giving it the largest official reserves in the world. Yet the government still carries that gold at a statutory price of just $42.22 per ounce, even though gold trades at about 100x that price.

At $42.22, the government’s entire gold hoard is officially valued at only about $11 billion. In the real world, it’s worth well north of $1 trillion. It’s roughly the equivalent of somebody who bought a Manhattan apartment for $25,000 decades ago insisting that it is still worth $25,000 today because that’s what the original paperwork says.

As a gold bull, naturally, I love the idea of finally marking this gold to market. But the attraction goes well beyond watching the government admit that gold is worth considerably more than $42. Revaluation could once again formally elevate gold’s importance as a monetary asset, something gold investors have been arguing for years could and should happen, while central banks around the world have quietly continued accumulating.

There’s also a practical reason Washington could eventually find the idea appealing. Treasury owns the gold and already has a mechanism for issuing gold certificates against it to the Federal Reserve. In exchange, Treasury can receive a credit to its account at the Fed. In other words, there is already plumbing in place that allows the government to monetize the value of its gold. The problem is that the current system is tied to that absurd $42.22 statutory valuation, meaning Congress would likely need to change the law before a major revaluation could take place.

A reasonable scenario would be relatively straightforward. Congress changes the valuation and brings Treasury’s gold much closer to something resembling reality. At $5,000 per ounce, America’s 261.5 million ounces would be valued at roughly $1.3 trillion. At $10,000, we’re talking about approximately $2.6 trillion.

Suddenly, an asset officially carried at about $11 billion becomes a source of potentially trillions of dollars of balance-sheet capacity. Treasury wouldn’t have to load up trucks at Fort Knox either. The gold could remain exactly where it is while the government monetized some portion of the higher official valuation through the existing certificate framework.

The Federal Reserve has studied official reserve revaluations and looked at examples of governments around the world using gains on reserve assets for fiscal purposes. So while the specific details of how America might do it remain hypothetical, the broader concept isn’t unprecedented.

That’s the relatively sane version. Now for the Fringe version…

Suppose Washington doesn’t revalue gold to $5,000 or $10,000. Suppose policymakers decide they’re going to establish an entirely new official valuation for gold and pick something truly ridiculous. Say $100,000 per ounce. Or roughly $155,000 per ounce, which would put America’s gold reserves at around $40 trillion, roughly enough, on paper, to match the national debt.

At $100,000, America’s roughly 261.5 million ounces of gold would carry an official value of about $26.15 trillion. At $155,000, you’re north of $40 trillion. Now we’re talking about numbers Washington can actually get excited about.

Under a hypothetical legal framework allowing it, Treasury could issue vastly more gold certificates against that revalued gold, with the Federal Reserve crediting Treasury’s account in return. That’s essentially how the existing system already works, except today the certificates are limited by law to the hilariously outdated statutory gold price of $42.22 per ounce.

Taken to its extreme, you eventually arrive at the idea that sent me down this rabbit hole in the first place: could the United States use Fort Knox to retire a gigantic portion, theoretically even something approaching all, of the national debt?

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On paper, you can construct something resembling that scenario. Unfortunately, there’s one small problem: revaluing the gold doesn’t actually create $40 trillion of new wealth. What it could create is an enormous amount of new financing capacity for Treasury.

Changing the official price of an ounce of gold from $42 to $155,000 doesn’t give America more factories, houses, data centers, oil, electricity, farmland or productive capacity. We still have the same economy and the same 261.5 million ounces of gold. We’ve simply assigned an enormously larger number of dollars to that gold and, under this hypothetical framework, allowed Treasury to monetize that higher valuation.

If Treasury then started using that money to retire government debt, the Treasury securities could disappear, but the people and institutions holding them don’t disappear. They get paid. In effect, Washington would be replacing enormous quantities of interest bearing Treasury securities with money and other monetary liabilities in the financial system.

And that’s where the thought experiment gets really interesting, because the ultimate consequence could show up in the value of the dollar itself.

The act of revaluing gold wouldn’t automatically dump $40 trillion into the economy or instantly destroy the dollar. Treasury would first have a vastly larger balance at the Fed. The real monetary event begins as Treasury actually uses that money. And if Washington attempted to deploy tens of trillions of dollars to retire debt without the Federal Reserve somehow offsetting the resulting liquidity, we’re talking about monetary expansion on a scale that has essentially no modern American precedent.

You haven’t made America $40 trillion richer. You’ve potentially created an enormous number of additional dollars and dollar like claims against essentially the same underlying economy.

Maybe the best way to understand $155,000 gold isn’t that Washington has suddenly decided an ounce of yellow metal is magically 30 or 40 times more valuable. Maybe it’s that Washington has decided it now takes vastly more dollars to represent the same ounce of gold.

In other words, the crazy number may tell you as much about the dollar as it does about the gold.

And if trillions upon trillions of those newly available dollars were actually deployed, the adjustment could eventually appear through some combination of a weaker dollar, higher inflation, rising nominal asset prices, higher inflation expectations and changes in interest rates. The exact outcome would depend enormously on how the operation was structured and how aggressively the Federal Reserve responded.

So there’s no magic trick here. You can’t make tens of trillions of dollars of government obligations disappear without something changing somewhere else in the system.

That’s the part of this thought experiment that should make gold investors’ ears perk up. A $155,000 official gold price could be viewed less as Washington declaring that gold suddenly became extraordinarily valuable and more as Washington implicitly acknowledging that the dollar has become extraordinarily cheap relative to gold.

You could potentially retire an enormous amount of nominal Treasury debt this way. You could make the government’s debt statistics look dramatically better. You might even reduce future Treasury interest expense substantially…but you haven’t eliminated the underlying economic cost. You’ve changed the form in which that cost is expressed.

Instead of carrying tens of trillions of dollars of Treasury securities, you’ve potentially pushed some of the adjustment into the monetary system itself, into liquidity, inflation, interest rates, asset prices and, ultimately, the purchasing power of the currency. So the really crazy part of $155,000 gold isn’t necessarily imagining gold becoming that expensive. It’s imagining what a dollar might be worth in a world where Washington decided it needed gold to be worth $155,000.

The debt gets smaller, the number of dollars potentially gets much bigger…and then those dollars may buy a hell of a lot less.

And setting an official government price of $100,000 wouldn’t automatically force gold to trade for $100,000 in New York, London or anywhere else. The government can choose an accounting value, but it can’t simply order the global market to agree with it. The signal, however, would be impossible to ignore.

The country responsible for issuing the world’s primary reserve currency would essentially be announcing that gold was important enough to use as a tool for restructuring its own sovereign balance sheet. Every central bank, sovereign wealth fund and large institutional investor on Earth would immediately have to consider what that meant.

If the United States itself suddenly decided gold deserved a dramatically higher monetary valuation, why wouldn’t other countries want more of it?

And if you’re running a central bank somewhere, the question becomes increasingly uncomfortable: how much of your reserves do you want sitting in dollars and Treasury bonds versus the asset Washington itself just decided was valuable enough to help address its fiscal problems?

A sufficiently large revaluation could amount to an admission that gold never really left the monetary system in the first place. We just spent decades pretending it did while central banks continued stacking bars in vaults.

I’m not predicting $100,000 gold. That number is intentionally ridiculous because it demonstrates how powerful the mechanism becomes when taken to its extreme. But the current $42.22 valuation is arguably even more ridiculous in its own way.

Eventually, Bessent or somebody at Treasury is going to look at 261.5 million ounces of gold, look at the government’s fiscal situation and ask why one of America’s most valuable financial assets is still being carried at a price that hasn’t had anything to do with reality for more than half a century…especially at a time when we are desperate to clean up our fiscal house…

The interesting question isn’t whether $42 makes sense. It clearly doesn’t. The question is what price will Scott Bessent arrive at that does make sense.

More from QTR:

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Also, again I just straight up get shit wrong a lot. I mention it multiple times because it’s that important you understand.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/19/2026 - 12:50

Cuba Hit With National Power Grid Collapse As Oil Sources Dry Up

Tyler Durden — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 16:15:00 +0000

Cuba Hit With National Power Grid Collapse As Oil Sources Dry Up

Cuba’s power grid collapsed once again this week, this time at a national level, leaving millions of people across the island without electricity. This is the sixth time since the US cut off fuel sources to the island since January that the national grid has collapsed and it's the most utility shutdown events in the country's recent history.

Even when Cuba's grid is in operation, only 30% of the population at most receives electricity at any given time. Many regions stay dark 20 to 30 hours at a stretch. Some provinces have reported 60–90 hours without power. Havana has gone from 4 hours a day early in the year to 18 hours after the fuel cutoff.

"Protocols are now in place to begin the gradual restoration of the system," said Felix Estrada, an ⁠official with Cuba's National Electrical Union (UNE). Power had returned to a handful of scattered neighborhoods in Havana by late evening, primarily around hospitals, but much of the city remained completely dark.

Many exhausted residents of the capital Havana were already without power when the national blackout hit.

"Yesterday I'd gone without ‌power ⁠for 24 hours. They turned the lights on for an hour, and then the grid collapsed," said Frank Lorenzo, a 23-year-old Havana resident.

Around 61% of Cuba's oil was sourced from Venezuela until the US capture of illegitimate president Nicolas Maduro. Shipments from Mexico have were also scaled back and then cut off. Russia has sent only one tanker so far this year.

Reports of a "shadow fleet" of tankers carrying Iranian oil to Cuba have circulated since at least 2020. Investigations of the seized tanker "Skipper" in 2025 found it had previously carried Iranian oil to Syria and China, then later moved Venezuelan oil on a route tied to Cuba. It confirmed the existence of overlapping Iran–Venezuela–Cuba shipping networks.

The US blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has proven incredibly effective in shutting down Iranian oil exports, leaving Iran's clandestine trade partners high and dry.

The communist regime has operated as a hub for Chinese, Russian and Iranian operations including intel operations in the western hemisphere for decades. Along with Venezuela, Cuba has represented a hostile eastern foothold in America's backyard. The Trump Administration also accuses the Cuban government of engaging in propaganda programs in the US, working with far-left organizations (including Antifa and Democratic Socialists) to organize activist subversion to undermine national stability.

Cuba reports limited negotiations with US officials and has largely pandered to the American media in the hopes of winning favor in the court of public opinion. As with Iran, Trump seems to be playing the long game, waiting for Cuba to economically falter before entering into serious talks. The frequency of power outages on the island nation is increasing and it will be difficult for Cuba to continue functioning for much longer.

Without an industrial base, agriculture and basic utilities, internal breakdown is inevitable.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/19/2026 - 12:15

They're Telling Us A Major War Is Coming...

Tyler Durden — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 15:40:00 +0000

They're Telling Us A Major War Is Coming...

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,

The British government is dusting off a classified Cold War manual, telling households to stockpile tins and bottled water at home, while state media is putting out articles debating whether the country is mentally prepared for war.

The classified Government War Book is being rewritten for the first time since 2004. The old document set out how ministries would keep food moving, communications open and government itself functioning if conflict reached the homeland.

After the Cold War it was mothballed. It is now being revived as part of a Home Defence Programme that officials say will align military and civilian responses if international hostilities hit the UK mainland.

?? Britain is dusting off its old "war book" and telling the public to start preparing for the possibility of serious disruption, including keeping canned food and drinking water at home.

The government is updating emergency plans that haven't been revised in decades, while the...
— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) September 18, 2026

Households are being told to prepare to go without power, water or the internet. The Cabinet Office checklist is blunt: bottled water, non-perishable food, essential medicines, a first-aid kit, a torch, a power bank, spare batteries and a wind-up or battery radio.

One official, speaking to the Financial Times, insisted the campaign would not be "duck and cover." "There will be practical advice on things you can do to improve domestic resilience, like having some bottled water and tinned food. It will be common sense, not scaremongering."

Britain Rewrites Its 22-Year-Old 'War Book' as Families Told to Stockpile Food and Waterhttps://t.co/JWfxDnly4H
— Prepper Q ???????????? (@PrepperQ) September 16, 2026

Chief Secretary Darren Jones put the same line to MPs: "The government will do all it can and we are well prepared - but we can all play our part to keep ourselves and our loved ones safe. This campaign will help the public to take small but important steps to be prepared in case of emergencies and disruption - be that severe weather or a cyber-attack, which can impact access to power, water, or phone signal."

The plans are due to be stress-tested in 2027 in Exercise Albiston Shadow, described as the largest home defence drill in decades. Ministers and hundreds of officials will role-play a multi-day crisis built around hybrid attacks - cyber disruption, sabotage, interference and disinformation - rather than tanks on Whitehall. Some home-defence work has reportedly been pulled forward from 2035 toward 2030.

Armed Forces minister Louise Sandher-Jones framed the whole package around Moscow: "Russia is not only a threat to NATO's eastern flank. It is a direct threat to the UK homeland and these exercises, together with important measures like updating our 'War Books', will help prepare us to meet that threat, as well as showing the British public how seriously we are taking it."

Chief of the Defence Staff Sir Richard Knighton has said the same in plainer language. "In my 35-year career, this is the most dangerous period that I have known." He added that "the risks and threats to this country are greater than I have known since the Cold War," that Russia is "probing, challenging, testing our defences," and that "society and all of us" may have to accept "different choices and different priorities."

The BBC this week pushed the mood further. "War may be coming. Are we psychologically ready?" asked correspondent Allan Little, noting the stockpile drive and the War Book rewrite.

War may be coming. Are we psychologically ready? https://t.co/dARsGoVRpK
— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) September 17, 2026

Historian Margaret MacMillan told the BBC: "It's not the tanks you need to worry about. It's the cutting of cables on the ocean floor. It's the hacking into systems on which so many things depend." After 80 years without war on British soil, she said, "I don't think we are psychologically prepared."

Retired general Sir Richard Shirreff compared the moment to "those Edwardian summers before 1914, when there was a lot of talk of war but the notion of actually going to war seemed so far-fetched as to be beyond belief."

That is the version of events ministers talk about in public. It is not the only reading.

In 2025, Professor David Betz of King's College London, a specialist in modern and unconventional war, argued that Whitehall is hardening the homeland against domestic fracture while using a Russian invasion narrative as political cover.

Pointing to the 2025 National Security Strategy line that Britain must "actively prepare for the possibility of the UK homeland coming under direct threat," Betz said the apprehension is real - and internal.

"But that's not external in origin, that's internal, and that has to do with the way our society is now configured, it is highly fractured." He described "low trust, highly fractured, and highly politically factionalised which is leading us increasingly inevitably into civil conflict."

On the invasion talk he was dismissive: "The fact of the matter is there is a great distance between us and Russia... we are not militarily threatened in a direct way on the ground by any obvious external enemy, even Russia... one of those is not occupying the village green with Russian soldiers, that simply, frankly, is a rather bizarre assertion."

The politically unsayable part, in his account, is this: "What they're concerned about is domestic conflict, and they perfectly understand this, but that's completely politically toxic for them to say so publicly." A citizen force to guard infrastructure sold as anti-Russian preparation is, he said, "a logically absurd proposition, but it is convenient as a pretext."

Elon Musk has also said as much. In a July clash with The Economist's Zanny Minton Beddoes he called civil conflict in Britain a "reckoning" on present trends. "If you have a large and growing, rapidly growing, group of people whose beliefs are antithetical to western beliefs, at some point there will be a reckoning."

Beddoes reached for the "far right" smear. Musk's reply: "No, I support the NORMAL people. What you call the far right FALSELY." He added he is "against rape and murder" and "against the imposition of rules and laws that are contrary to what we've come to accept in the West."

Stockpiles, War Books and "whole of society" drills fit a foreign hybrid-war briefing. They also fit a state that no longer trusts continuity of basic services in a low-trust, factional country - and will not name the policies that produced that state.

The contradiction is sitting in plain sight. Days ago the same government posture that talks up existential danger was still starving the force that would have to fight.

The British Army has been ordered to pause most "non-essential" collective training for UK-based units on standby - live-fire work, armour and Apache drills - because the Ministry of Defence's day-to-day budget cannot cover fuel and ammunition at current prices.

Only a sliver of units are deployed. The surface fleet has shrunk from nearly 50 fighting vessels two decades ago to around 22. Defence spending rises on paper are eaten by inflation. Welfare spending is up 16 per cent in five years. The military is told not to raid health or education to fill a hole of roughly £1.4 billion a year.

A state that cannot fund tank training is not "war-ready." A state that tells families to buy their own water while it funds mass settlement and the welfare load that follows is not serious about cohesion either. Sir Richard wants "different choices and different priorities." Those choices keep landing on tins in the cupboard, not on borders, remigration or a force that can actually fight.

Andrew Michta, a strategic studies professor, told the BBC the deeper problem is mental as much as material: "The UK is also largely disarmed and, most importantly, mentally. There is no readiness for what's happening because the policy elites are not addressing their publics in a way that would honestly state the gravity of the situation."

The gravity they will name is Moscow. The gravity they will not name is a society they helped pull apart, then briefed to stockpile against the dark. The War Book can be rewritten. The cover story writes itself.

* * *

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/19/2026 - 11:40

14-Country Maritime Defense Alliance Moves Closer To Deploying To Red Sea, Gulf Of Aden

Tyler Durden — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 15:05:00 +0000

14-Country Maritime Defense Alliance Moves Closer To Deploying To Red Sea, Gulf Of Aden

With Saudi shipping traffic in the Bab al-Mandeb Strait under unprecedented peril, the recently-launched Multinational Maritime Defense Coalition is moving closer to deploying ships to ensure freedom of navigation in the Red Sea, the Saudi Ministry of Defense announced on Friday.

Formed on July 30 at the initiative of Saudi Arabia, the Multinational Maritime Defense Coalition comprises 14 countries: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, Yemen, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Sudan, Djibouti, and Somalia. Representatives from 41 countries and the European Union, including 154 naval officers and officials, attended the coalition's fourth planning meeting at the Saudi Western Fleet Command in Jeddah.

Representatives of the countries that comprise the new Multinational Maritime Defense Coalition at their Friday meeting in Jeddah (Saudi Defense Ministry)

"The Alliance is currently working on integrating capabilities and preparing for operational implementation and actual presence in the maritime operations area, following its achievement of the Initial Operational Capability stage," the Saudi Defense Ministry said. The undertaking is organized to encompass joint training, intelligence-sharing, and -- most importantly -- maritime security operations. The entity is headquartered in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and commanded by Saudi Major General Abdullah Al-Shahri.

On Friday, Al-Shahri told reporters the coalition will confront any threat to maritime navigation, but it's far from clear how much impact it will have.The fact that the entity has been the topic of very little conversation amid the growing economic crisis emanating from the Middle East suggests the markets are profoundly skeptical.

“We have seen several maritime security initiatives before, including those established during the piracy crisis in the Gulf of Aden," International Crisis Group's Ahmed Nagi told al Jazeera last month. "While some of these initiatives had political significance, many struggled to translate their objectives into tangible results on the ground."

The multi-mission combat ship His Majesty King Saud was floated in Wisconsin in December 2025 (SPA photo via Asharq Al-Awsat)

Saudi Arabia has invited European states to join the coalition, but they've thus far been reluctant to join. In July, diplomats told the New York Times the Europeans wanted to see how the coalition's schemes and expectations developed before taking the plunge. When it formed, the coalition stressed that it was "purely defensive and not targeting any country."

The coalition was formed just 10 days after Yemen's Ansar Allah movement -- nicknamed "the Houthis" after its founder -- announced a blockade on Saudi-related shipping in the Red Sea. Earlier this month, Ansar Allah achieved a stunning battlefield success by seizing the remainder of Yemen's Red Sea coast it hadn't yet controlled -- by the group's claim, some 2,000 square miles. The lightning blitz put well-armed Ansar Allah forces directly beside the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, and on islands that command it. Though frequently called "rebels," Ansar Allah -- "Defenders of God" -- controls Yemen's capital and territory in which some 80% of Yemenis live.

Following the west-coast setback for Ansar Allah's Saudi-backed opponents, the kingdom was dealt another major blow when Iraqi militias struck Saudi Arabia's east-west pipeline, which had been serving as a critical export outlet amid the near-closure of the Strait of Hormuz. With the pipeline requiring repairs that will take weeks if not months, Saudi Aramco has started cancelling October crude oil delivers to Europe.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/19/2026 - 11:05

Los Angeles Ranks Last Among 100 US Metros For Affordability And New Home Construction

Tyler Durden — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 14:30:00 +0000

Los Angeles Ranks Last Among 100 US Metros For Affordability And New Home Construction

Authored by Mary Prenon via The Epoch Times,

Des Moines, Iowa, ranked first and Los Angeles ranked last in Realtor.com's inaugural report grading the 100 largest U.S. metros on housing affordability and homebuilding activity.

A sign is posted in front of a home for sale in Los Angeles on July 9, 2026. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

The results highlighted how local zoning and permitting can affect housing affordability in different areas.

The real estate platform's first Metro Affordability and Homebuilding Report Card, released on Sept. 16, showed that Des Moines received an "A+" grade with a score of 83.4, the highest among the 100 metros analyzed, reflecting its strong residential construction activity and affordability.

The city has a median listing price of $349,903, with the monthly mortgage payment requiring 27.5 percent of a median-income household's income, below the commonly cited threshold of 30 percent.

The calculation assumed a 10 percent down payment and a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage with a 6.5 percent interest rate.

At the other end of the list, Los Angeles received an "F" grade with a score of 12, leaving it at the bottom of the 100-metro ranking.

The median listing price in the city stands at $1.129 million, requiring a household earning the median income to spend 84.4 percent of its income on the monthly mortgage payment on a typical home, according to the report.

Meanwhile, the report said that local housing policies can help explain the gap between the highest- and lowest-performing metro areas in new home construction and affordability.

"Beyond land availability, the biggest difference between the 'A' metros and the 'F' metros is local housing policy, especially related to zoning and permitting," Realtor.com senior economist Joel Berner said in the report.

"The 'A's share regulatory flexibility and streamlined approval processes, while the 'F's are locked in restrictive land-use frameworks."

The report noted that Des Moines had a permit-to-population ratio of 1.85, meaning the city was issuing permits for new homes at a rate 85 percent higher than the national average relative to its population.

By contrast, Los Angeles' ratio of 0.47 meant that the city was permitting less than half the national average relative to its population.

"The combination of extreme affordability pressure and limited new supply placed it at the bottom of the class," the report noted.

Along with Los Angeles, New York City, Providence, Rhode Island, Honolulu, and Boston also had failing grades.

For example, Berner said, Boston has four times as many pages of zoning law as Austin, Texas, and 79 percent of its land is zoned, compared with just 15 percent in Austin.

Minimum parking mandates apply to 88 percent of land in Boston, while in Austin, the requirement is 37 percent.

Boston also has less land that allows unrestricted accessory dwelling units, limiting the supply of smaller, more affordable homes.

"The contrast between Austin and Boston makes clear that the rules governing what can be built can be just as consequential as the land available to build on," Berner added.

Those top-ranked metros with less restrictive zoning and permitting also include: Raleigh, North Carolina; Columbia, South Carolina; Houston; and Indianapolis.

Regionally, the South and Midwest performed best for both new construction and affordability, while the Northeast and West lagged.

The report attributes the difference to more available and lower-cost land in the South and Midwest, in addition to more flexible zoning and permitting policies.

"Homebuilding and affordability are inseparable, and if we want to improve affordability in a lasting way, we need to build more homes," Realtor.com chief economist Danielle Hale said in the report. "The metros at the top of these rankings show that buyers benefit most when communities pair homes that are attainable for today's local earners with enough new construction to support tomorrow's demand."

In its Sept. 16 report, the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) and the Wells Fargo Housing Market Index found that builder confidence in September hit the lowest level since September 2025.

"Buyer traffic has weakened across much of the country, largely because of rising mortgage rates," NAHB Chairman Bill Owens said in the report.

The average 30-year fixed mortgage rate was 6.95 percent for the week ending Sept. 17, up from 6.76 percent the previous week and 6.26 percent a year earlier, according to Freddie Mac.

Owens also said builders continue to face higher material costs, rising energy prices, and ongoing labor shortages.

NAHB chief economist Robert Dietz added that 42 percent of builders rated current lot availability as "poor," and 38 percent as just "fair."

According to Realtor.com, the United States remains short of more than 4 million homes, putting financial strain on first-time homebuyers.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/19/2026 - 10:30

Trump-Xi Summit Cheat Sheet: New Deals, Extended Trade Truce, But No Breakthrough?

Tyler Durden — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 13:55:00 +0000

Trump-Xi Summit Cheat Sheet: New Deals, Extended Trade Truce, But No Breakthrough?

The White House released an itinerary for next week's Trump-Xi meeting, including plans for Trump to greet Chinese President Xi Jinping at Joint Base Andrews. Ahead of the summit, Bank of America analysts outlined modest expectations, telling clients they see "little scope for a major trade breakthrough."

Bloomberg reports that Trump will welcome Xi at Joint Base Andrews on Wednesday, opening a visit that includes bilateral talks and a White House state dinner on Thursday.

Trump and Xi will be at the White House on Thursday for a military review in the Rose Garden. First Lady Melania Trump and Xi's wife, Peng Liyuan, will attend a separate event in the Washington metro area, with details yet to be announced.

That evening, Trump will host Xi for a state dinner in the East Room. Both presidents are scheduled to deliver opening remarks to guests, including technology and finance executives.

Bank of America China and Asia economist Anna Zhou penned a preview of next week's Trump-Xi meeting, saying both sides are expected to extend their trade truce and announce new commercial deals.

Zhou expects a one-year extension of the existing trade agreement, which expires Nov. 10, alongside additional Chinese purchases of US goods and targeted tariff relief.

"We expect the Trump-Xi summit with the most likely outcome being an extension of the existing trade ceasefire, supplemented by additional Chinese purchases and limited tariff reductions on non-sensitive products," Zhou said.

She added, "We see little scope for a major trade breakthrough or a substantive new framework for AI-chip licensing. The reported participation of Chinese CEOs is a constructive signal, but it should be treated cautiously unless it produces concrete purchases, investments or market-access commitments."

Zhou's cheat sheet on what to expect next week:

Separately, JPMorgan analyst Feng Zhu previewed next week's summit for clients, saying neither side will offer a "grand bargain," but that he expects "more deals."

Zhu expects:

We expect limited stabilization, with strategic stability a key measure of success.
Iran and strategic waterways offer the clearest geopolitical upside, despite tensions over China's links to Tehran.
The economic package should exceed May's but remain narrow: tariff restraint, a renewed rare earth truce, limited chip licensing, additional purchases, and selective investment.
On AI, a risk-management dialogue is more likely than a binding governance agreement.
The likely outcome is strategic accommodation within managed decoupling, not partnership or a grand bargain.

With just days until the summit, tensions are rising, but the meeting remains on track, so far...

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/19/2026 - 09:55

The Marriage Deficit Is An Economic Catastrophe

Tyler Durden — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 13:20:00 +0000

The Marriage Deficit Is An Economic Catastrophe

Authored by Stephen Moore via The Epoch Times,

The Beatles told us: "All you need is love."

They were right, but along with love must come marriage.

But marriage rates have plummeted, especially among young men.

A Pulitzer Prize-worthy story by Sean Salai of The Washington Times crunches all the numbers. To say they are worrisome would be a vast understatement.

- In 2025, nearly twice as many men ages 18 to 39 were unmarried as were married.

- There were 30.4 million unmarried men ages 18 to 39 in 2025, up 47 percent from 20.7 million in 2000.

- In the same period, married men in this age range dropped by 15 percent, from 18.1 million to 15.4 million. "Such men are more likely to be lonely, prone to deaths of despair and unhappy," according to Brad Wilcox, a University of Virginia sociologist.

- Forty-two percent of working-class men are unmarried, according to educational psychologist Donna R. Turner. In 1980, 73 percent of working-class men were married.

I could go on and with these depressing statistics.

But I believe the decline in marriage and children is a threat to the American future much more dangerous than even the national debt, climate change, cancer or foreign aggression.

Family is the essential organizing unit in America. We're not to live in Soviet-style communes where the authority figure is "Big Brother."

Every study shows that the decline in marriage among young men is tied to alcoholism, violent crime, drug abuse, pornography, depression, isolation, less economic success and suicide.

Are women to blame?

Certainly. Study shows that as women have become more career oriented, they are having a harder time "marrying up."

Generation X and millennials have become choosier in finding a mate and more likely to have children alone, if they have them at all.

"Women have less structural need for marriage than past generations did," said Angelica Gianchandani, a New York University finance instructor. "Rising income and education give many women a financial independence marriage once provided, and donor sperm and fertility treatment have decoupled motherhood from a partner altogether."

Women are much less likely to be religious today than in decades past. So holy matrimony is less of a lifetime priority or moral obligation.

We do know that when women raise children without a father in the home - for whatever reason - their kids, especially their sons, are less successful. It's a particular problem for black women to find a suitable mate when so many young black males are incarcerated.

I'm thrashing for explanations and solutions to this deeply troubling social trend. Obviously, we are not returning to the "Father Knows Best" norms of the 1950s or 1960s.

But recovery starts with admitting we have a problem. I would suggest that President Donald Trump announce a national bipartisan commission on "Rediscovering Love, Marriage and Parenthood."

One last stat to underscore the urgency of turning around these trends:

The latest Census Bureau data indicate that 47 percent of households were headed by married couples last year, down from 78.8 percent in 1949.

That trend MUST be reversed to advance America's economic prosperity and human happiness.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/19/2026 - 09:20

Syria Rejects Desperate Saudi Plea To Deploy Militants To Yemen

Tyler Durden — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 12:45:00 +0000

Syria Rejects Desperate Saudi Plea To Deploy Militants To Yemen

Provocative rumors have been flying all week that Saudi Arabia has recruited Syrian militants to fight the Houthis in Yemen, at a moment the Iran-aligned rebel groups is said to be rapidly gobbling up more territory, especially along the Red Sea coast.

The claim has been especially strong in Lebanese media, after prominent Al-Akhbar reported this week that hundreds of Syrian fighters were recently transferred to southern Saudi Arabia, including fighters who took part in the Jolani/HTS-led fight to topple Bashar al-Assad in December 2024. However, it's unclear if the alleged fighters have Syrian state backing (whether on a covert level or not), or if they could be there on their own initiative as mercenaries.

Seen in Libya over past years: Syrian troops from the National Army of the Free Syrian Army, via Al Monitor

The Saudis had provided strong covert support, along with other Gulf states, to the over decade-long effort overthrow of Assad, and so Riyadh could now being calling in favors from Damascus.

The phenomenon of Syrian mercenaries and foreign fighters transferred in large numbers to other broader conflict theatres is not without precedent, as many are still said to be in Libya.

However, their deployment in Yemen might not yet be a reality, and it could just be that Saudi officials have pitched it as just an idea or possibility, amid the ongoing appeal also for more help from Western allies including the US and Britain.

On Friday Turkish media is reporting that Damascus has rejected the alleged Saudi plea to send Syrian militants for fighting in Yemen. According to Turkiye Today:

Syrian sources who spoke to Türkiye Today said Saudi Arabia had in recent months sought fighters to meet its military needs in Yemen, but that the Syrian government had "politely" rejected a request to organize and deploy a Syrian force against the Houthis.

"This issue has been exhausted and is over. The Saudi request was made several months ago. Syria politely turned it down, saying it was focused on its own military organization process and did not intend to enter a conflict as a third party," one of the sources said.

However, the same sources indicated the Sharaa/Jolani government would not prevent Syrians as individuals from traveling for the purpose of assisting the Saudi coalition.

Separate reports this week have speculated that Turkey could get involved in the fight for Yemen on Saudi Arabia's behalf based on the recently inked Mecca Defense Pact. But that too is simply at the level of unfounded rumor at this point.

The same Turkish media report underscores, "Claims that Türkiye had played a role in transporting or organizing Syrians for deployment to Yemen were also rejected by Turkish sources."

Who would have thought that rising fuel prices caused by an Ansarallah Houthis attack on a Saudi Arabia pipeline may topple the Ahmad Al Sharaa regime in Syria?

Which regime will topple if Qatar is attacked? https://t.co/C2BTt24zdR
— Ubi pus, ibi evacua! 🇺🇸 (@SyriaReport) September 13, 2026

The unnamed sources said: "We have no involvement in this matter. Syria and Saudi Arabia are sovereign countries." As for Turkish media, the reports of Damascus slamming the door on Riyadh ring true given post-Assad Syria is facing serious problems on many fronts, especially internal unrest and large demonstrations this week over fuel price hikes. It doesn't have the military power or resources to get much involved in Yemen at this stage.

But on the other side of this, it also remains true that the Turkish government has long sought to use Syrian militants as fodder for its grander designs in places like North Africa.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/19/2026 - 08:45

As A Former Head Of MI6, It's Clear That Britain's Climate Policy Is Leaving Us Dangerously Exposed To Our Enemies

Tyler Durden — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 12:10:00 +0000

As A Former Head Of MI6, It's Clear That Britain's Climate Policy Is Leaving Us Dangerously Exposed To Our Enemies

Authored by Richard Dearlove via The Daily Sceptic,

This is the transcript of a lecture given in London last night to the Global Warming Policy Foundation by Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, titled 'Energy Security: Blowing in the Wind'. The full lecture is available to watch on YouTube.

A summer of drought and record temperatures has discomforted the country: parched ground, overheated public transport, sleepless nights and a distorted and obsessive media. It is a distracting backdrop for a lecture on energy security - 'climate change' must be the most repeated phrase of the last three months since the first heatwave of the summer back in May. To step out of this context will seem like a heresy to the ideologues of Net Zero. Are you blind to the disturbing evidence around us, they will ask. However, the extreme weather events of the last 90 days are not a logical place to start a debate about energy security. We must take a strategic view free of prejudice, and put aside emotionally charged, only partly scientific convictions about climate change.

There are so many of them - for example Lord Deben's endless preaching from his 'countryside crusader' soapbox in Country Life, the frequent BBC interviews with Met Office scientists. However, I am pleased that the media debate is not entirely one-sided and that some heavyweight voices are striking a counterbalance. For example, this from a very recent Washington Post op-ed: "Nations are finally realizing they cannot afford to shun any power source for ideological reasons" - written in the context of a striking revival of interest in nuclear power.

Of course, I am not a scientist, and I do not have formal technical qualifications; but I did spend 38 years in the intelligence service, where one gets some practice in weighing up intelligence of various kinds, and for more than 20 years since have been one of its speaking heads. National security and the geopolitics of national security are my thing. Very few share my depth of experience - successes and failures.

My principal aim in this lecture is to lay bare the vulnerabilities in our national energy stance - note my reluctance to use the word policy. I do not think that government has an energy policy; perhaps it has a climate policy (which raises the question of whether it is actually possible to have a climate policy or whether such a policy falls into the category of extracting sunbeams from cucumbers). For analytical expertise and strategic analysis, I am indebted to Dr John Constable and to Professor Gwythian Prins. Their contributions to this lecture are extensive.

As my title suggests, the UK's climate stance/policy currently lacks security anchors; and the answer, my friends, is certainly not blowing in the wind. It has been more a finger in the wind. As a country we have been drifting and we are dangerously exposed. The most pressing threat to this country is not man-made climate change as Ed Miliband and now Miatta Fahnbulleh, avidly supported by legions of so-called experts, would have us think. There is no simple link between canceling Rosebank and stopping wildfires. To believe such a thing is the height of naïvety, or ignorance of the science, or conviction akin to religious belief.

National security is three dimensional. There is the direct threat mounted against us by hostile states - the easiest to understand. Then there are the vulnerabilities created by shortcomings in our infrastructure and policies and subject to exploitation by our enemies and competitors. The third dimension is from threats that we have failed to identify accurately and for which there is little or no defensive preparation. Putin's Russia characterizes the first, our neglect of defense expenditure the second, and the Covid pandemic (lab made and not zoonotic as some of us alerted Boris Johnson in early 2020) the third.

Extreme weather and climate change are a natural hazard and are a huge disruptive threat for which we should and do make contingencies - like the Thames Barrier. Mankind has always had to live with these disruptions, dictating patterns of human settlement and how, over centuries, we have planned and built. The belief that we might exercise a degree of control over the climate is an understandable aspiration but common sense, which accepts that we cannot control the weather, would suggest it remains beyond human reach. The recent earthquake in Venezuela or the falling mountain in Tibet should remind us that our exposure to the forces of nature is not something we can control - only sometimes partially mitigate.

By all means include natural hazards in a list of national security threats (as the British Cabinet Office does) but do distinguish them as being separate from those that emanate from hostile nations and entities.

The two issues on which I will focus in this lecture are: the vulnerabilities of our energy infrastructure, and their actual and potential exploitation by foreign powers that do not share our national interest. I am not qualified to argue the case on climate science about which so many here are expert. I am therefore sticking to the areas closest to my own expertise.

When I was C (chief of MI6) I had the unusual experience of meetings with hostile international players - the Russian leadership, the PRC leadership and Qaddafi amongst others. I do not need to go into the purpose of those meetings here. However, it is worth recording a conversation with the Chinese general who was then head of the 2PLA - the all-powerful Military Intelligence Service of the PRC to which Deng Xiaoping had granted primacy in the Chinese intelligence community.

I should first explain the significance of that conversation. The Chinese Communist Party leadership shares many of the characteristics of a cult, albeit one that has seized control of a whole country - it claims infallibility in doctrine whilst proclaiming its leaders to be faultless scientists of human affairs. It therefore extirpates ruthlessly any cult that seeks to challenge its infallibility within the PRC. However, it is also ideologically attuned to exploiting the cults of its enemies not only to weaken them from within but also to make them a vehicle for their own baleful influence. The methodology is built into the PRC's DNA because it is so sensitive to its own vulnerabilities.

The focus of the general's concern was the activities of Falun Gong in the UK and Europe amongst the Chinese diaspora. The Falun Gong movement witnessed huge growth in China in the 1990s until it was subject to a massive campaign of suppression. The PRC saw the cult as a direct challenge to the authority of the Communist Party, with which it shared certain conspiratorial, organizational and ideological characteristics.

In the democratic West we are thoroughly familiar with the fashionable cults and movements that blow through society. Only those that espouse violence are subject to legal suppression. Their durability is variable and so is the extent to which they capture serious political attention. Remember CND, the campaign against the deployment of cruise missiles in Europe, the various emanations of Palestinian terrorism, the radical terrorist groups in Germany and Italy in the 1970s. To these I would now add climate catastrophism and its associated greening and anti-carbon fuel movements - and you will have others in mind like Black Lives Matter and the pro-Hamas Palestinianism so evident recently on our streets.

Climate catastrophism has built major bridgeheads in the public mind, in the media and in the political domain. It is also a driver of the Net Zero bandwagon. Challenging this edifice, despite its shaky foundations, has been difficult - though a shift in the Overton window does now allow a little more space for a talk such as this one.

What is beginning to be well documented by academic research is the extent to which the movements which were spawned during the Cold War, like CND and radical terrorist groups like the Red Army Faction, were exploited by Soviet Active measures which used them ruthlessly to try to undermine and weaken the West. Their support for and penetration of them was methodical and extensive. Those skills are alive and well today in Russia and China. The SVR and 2PLA have large departments focused on active measures supported by other whole-government initiatives.

The PRC's capability needs explanation. Perhaps more important than 2PLA, with which it works closely, the Chinese Communist party's United Front Work Department counts 40,000 employees and 600,000 in affiliated organizations and together has a budget in the low billions of dollars. The department's purpose is to shape a world favorable to the PRC's interests. It has seen an important revival of its role under Xi's rule. You may recall the case of the Chinese lawyer Christine Lee's unlimited travel and entertainment largesse which was lavished around Westminster - a classic example of UFWD influence.

Helpfully, the Chinese Communist Party likes to publish its doctrine. One example is the 1999 paper written by two second intelligence officers titled 'Unrestricted Warfare: assumptions on war and tactics in the age of globalization', which describes the efficacy not of physical disarmament of the enemy but of its moral disarmament. You can see therefore why Xi Jinping has himself described the UFWD as "China's magic weapon".

On a recent visit to Spain (Pedro Sanchez the Spanish PM sees China as a favored partner) I asked a group of Spanish MPs if they knew about the UFWD. Not one of them knew of it or understood its role - yet Spain at the moment is one of the main focuses of its European activity. Perhaps we are slightly more alert in the UK, but there is no harm at all in raising awareness further.

The Russian threat is actual and immediate. It requires less explanation because it is so obvious. Putin's Russia sees itself already engaged in gray warfare with the West on account of our support for Ukraine. It is prepared to carry out attacks without consideration of the political risk. The Russian agency that conducts this conflict is mainly the GRU, Russian military intelligence - equipped and trained to carry out acts of sabotage behind enemy lines. Its various attacks in Europe have been widely publicized.

I would, in the context of this talk, draw particular attention to just one of its capabilities. As the Cold War ended Russia nonetheless continued to invest heavily in developing its underwater warfare resources. The intelligence about this back in the early 2000s was striking; and today we understand better why the Soviet Union, even as it disintegrated, had the foresight to invest in the capability to interfere with undersea cables, pipelines and electricity grid interconnectors. The evidence of its aggressive intentions is incontrovertible.

It may surprise you that I am not going to dwell on the manifest illogicalities of our current energy circumstances: the extreme Net Zero targets; the deprecation of intrinsically cheap conventional energy; the excessive subsidies to renewable electricity; the refusal to exploit our own fossil fuel resources; the grid's struggle to manage an increasingly stochastic generation profile; the poor thermodynamic quality of renewables; and the growing dependence on imports in distressed circumstances. The list is long and familiar to all of you - and the point of this lecture is to develop a fresh perspective on the nation's energy security.

I urge our leading politicians to take very careful note. We are not the victims of a conspiracy to make us vulnerable. We have quite casually done this to ourselves. We have as a nation negligently wandered close to a cliff edge and the adversaries I have described stand ready to help us over it; and the fragility of the present international order enhances the risk. "Do not distract your enemy whilst he is making a mistake," was Napoleon's famous dictum. The leaders of the CRINK alliance are smirking at our lack of realization about what we allowed our energy sector to become.

John Constable has introduced me to some frightening statistics. Comparing energy flow data for 1974 and 2025, it shows industrial final consumption has fallen by about 70% in absolute terms, from 41% to 14% of the national total, whilst transport rose by 76% to become the largest single sector. Only 50 years ago the UK was still a major industrial power. Iron and steel manufacturing, once substantial, has all but completely disappeared (when I went to university in 1963 my mother, who unusually had a career, was about to retire as Chef de Cabinet to the chairman of the United Steel Companies).

Three consequences follow. The country has lost the industrial capacity to reproduce its own energy system, so that uncertain access to equipment and spares (for example generators and transformers) is a graver and more chronic danger than a temporary shortage of gas. Deindustrialization also means that the UK has lost the large interruptible load that once allowed a shortage to be absorbed by factories rather than households (remember the three-day week). Furthermore, in ceasing to manufacture, it has exported its exposure to the energy systems of its suppliers, some of whom are strategic adversaries.

Our foreign policy is therefore fettered, and could even be held to ransom - does the Foreign Secretary, the arch prophet of Net Zero, have any grasp of the country's predicament? His present obsession with new West Bank Israeli settlements (whilst Kyiv incidentally is being torn apart by Russian missiles) suggests that his attention is elsewhere.

The economic and social character of the country has of course changed enormously in 50 years. What was a heavy-duty production system has become a consumption center. The current pattern of our energy consumption shows that we move about and buy things, largely imported things. We do not manufacture as we once did. In the process we have inadvertently destroyed the circularity which largely assured our energy security. The energy system required industrial output and industrial output required energy.

That kept us sane and kept us on the rails. So, in complacently deindustrializing we have not merely lost an industry, we have lost the capacity to rebuild the energy system itself. Large-scale transformers ordered today now take two years to arrive, (before 2020 it was seven to 14 months), generators up to three years, and the grain-oriented electrical steel (GOES), for which there is no real substitute, comes largely from China, whose production capacity now dwarfs any other state. Europe has just two producers of that steel remaining, both plagued by reductions and closures as China undercuts the market. Britain and its allies do retain the capacity to design and assemble the apparatus on which the grid depends, but the material without which none of it can be built is being concentrated in the hands of the very country which the Director General of MI5 has identified as the most serious threat to Britain's national security.

Some power sector manufacture still remains in the hands of reasonably friendly powers, but in a tight corner there may be practical limits to friendship, and in any case, there will be a queue.

The PRC leadership thinks long-term, and it does not have to worry about re-election, only about its survival. One of its policies, pursued with great success, has been to build dependencies not just in its own regional sphere of influence but globally. We have seen the leverage that its domination of the production of rare earths has secured, and we have watched how Huawei (a company closely associated with the PLA) has knocked out its foreign competitors and spread its communications technology around the world. London Transport has also recently started to purchase Chinese electric buses, made of course with the benefit of large state subsidies, all of them subject to software control by the manufacturer.

The idea that 'Your No. 22 isn't running today because the vehicle has just been immobilized by the manufacturer' is faintly comic, but the weakening of the electricity grid is of another order - let us say because failing equipment could not be replaced. Water, sewage, gas networks, rail and underground transport, traffic lights and communication are all mains-connected. Such peacetime dependencies give China strategic leverage, and in a crisis, it gives it weapons of mass disruption which could literally bring a country to a standstill. In the documentation for the 20th Party Congress, Xi Jinping talks of China achieving global domination by 2045; we should take the threat seriously because the methodology for doing it is being put in place under our very noses.

The bulk of my professional experience was on the front line of the Cold War. We used to make the following assumptions: that the country's war-fighting potential resided in its industry, that our most vulnerable link was the fuel chain (mostly then carried by sea) and that our industrial base could be rebuilt and repaired - a question of time and organization rather than capability.

The terms of that equation have fundamentally changed. We have very little industry left to protect and we cannot rebuild non-existent industries which lie in foreign jurisdictions beyond our reach. And consequently, the state cannot, through emergency command and control, promptly rebuild what it loses, because the industries are now in other jurisdictions and beyond its reach. It can join the queue, or it can beg. Furthermore, a consumer-led energy society is exposed to breakdown when failures occur. It cannot temporarily switch power consumption away from industry to keep home fires burning.

Saying that the current energy policy is mad or grounded in the religion of climate change does not really get us very far - simply into shrill arguments that deepen the disagreement. What I have tried to do, with a great deal of help, is to take the argument back towards a national Grand Strategy for energy, one which recognizes that we live in a tense and hostile world where the greatest danger is not climate change. If a present or future government can evaluate and plan its exposure to energy risks - for example, identifying single points of failure dependent on foreign manufacture and building contingencies around them - then we could be on track towards a more security-aware energy policy. It might also engender a more balanced assessment of the thermodynamic value of the national fuel mix.

We have talked blithely about 'powering past coal' but no major industrial power has in reality abandoned coal for heavy industry, China in particular, and in fact we remain dependent on the products of those economies. This is a difficult message for many of our politicians to accept.

Might we make it easier for them if, for a start, we introduce a concept of national security exceptions to Net Zero - a quarter way house until sanity returns and the country is ready to embrace a balanced energy policy.

In this context there is also a compelling case to do all that we can to rebuild the strategic industries we require to ensure that we can defend our island fortress and be a reliable ally to friendly democracies around the world. This is a subtle matter - the state is almost certainly not the best agent for this undertaking - and it would probably take at least a generation, but the legacy benefits would be enduring. The first responsibility of government is the safety of the nation.

However, successive governments have forgotten this, and Britain is now caught in an energy trap of its own making. As with rebuilding our armed forces, it will take a significant national effort to extract us and bring us back to a position of safety. The task is urgent. The Government should have this amongst its very top priorities. Instead, we are being urged to remove a few thousand rough sleepers from our streets - a laudable feel-good objective but not exactly of strategic importance to the destiny of the proud nation that is Great Britain.

Sir Richard Dearlove is Chair of Board of Trustees of University of London and a former head of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). This transcript was first published on the GWPF website.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/19/2026 - 08:10

Russia Seizes Assets Of Swiss Food Giant Nestle

Tyler Durden — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 11:35:00 +0000

Russia Seizes Assets Of Swiss Food Giant Nestle

Russian authorities seized the remaining businesses and assets of Swiss food giant Nestle and three French groups, the latest move against Western firms in response to sanctions against Moscow.

A decree signed by President Vladimir Putin issued late Thursday transferred the Russian operations of Nestle, French retailer Auchan and the former Leroy Merlin DIY chain, now known as Lemana Pro, to a company called LEV Management. The decree also covers the Russian subsidiaries of French logistics group FM Logistic, France24 reported.

Investigative outlet Novaya Gazeta Europe reported that LEV Management was created only at the end of 2025, and is headed by a Russian interior ministry general. It had no known business activity.

Most Western companies quickly sold their Russian operations and holdings after the Ukraine invasion, or at least isolated them, as sanctions have made trading in most goods difficult.

Russia has since made it difficult for firms to leave, requiring presidential authorization for deals, or seizing the assets outright.

In a short statement, Nestle said it was "committed to taking all necessary steps to protect its rights and ensure continuity of business operations in the interests of all stakeholders, particularly its employees".

"The company is assessing the situation and its options," it added, without providing details of its residual Russian operations.

Jean-Philippe Bertschy of the Swiss investment bank Vontobel said he expected the financial impact to Nestle would be small "given Russia's limited contribution to group sales".

He said Russia now accounted for just over one percent of the group's sales, down from around two percent before the Ukraine war.

It has suspended "the vast majority of sales, non-essential imports, advertising and capital investment", he said, while continuing to supply essential food items.

Auchan and Leroy Merlin are both controlled by France's Mulliez family, and each has around a dozen outlets in Russia.

The latest seizure echoes Moscow's 2023 takeover of Danone's Russian business, which was later sold to a nephew of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/19/2026 - 07:35

74% Of Sex-Crime Suspects In Spain's Basque Country Are Foreigners

Tyler Durden — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 11:00:00 +0000

74% Of Sex-Crime Suspects In Spain's Basque Country Are Foreigners

Via Remix News,

Foreign-born suspects account for nearly three-quarters of sexual-crime arrests in Basque Country, official figures show

Official statistics released by the Basque regional police, the Ertzaintza, indicate that people born outside Spain made up 58.7 percent of all arrests in the first half of 2026 even though they represent 10.2 percent of the population.

The disparity is sharper in several high-profile offense categories.

Of the 107 people detained for crimes against sexual freedom, 79 were born abroad, making up 74 percent of arrests in this category, according to data obtained by The Objective.

Foreign-born suspects also accounted for 73.3 percent of homicide arrests and 61.3 percent of those for causing injury.

The highest shares appeared in other offences: 94.7 percent of drunk-driving arrests (36 of 38), 79.6 percent of theft arrests (222 of 279), and 77.6 percent of robberies involving violence or intimidation (253 of 326).

The figures come from data the Basque Department of Security, which began publishing this data systematically at the end of 2025. Until then, the Ertzaintza routinely omitted the birthplace of detainees.

Security councillor Bingen Zupiria of the PNV said the change followed "tremendous pressure" from the Popular Party (PP) and Vox in the Basque parliament. Police unions supported the move as a contribution to "crime prevention."

After that pressure, Zupiria stated, the department was forced to "change its criteria." Arrests are now broken down first by continent and then by region, including North Africa, the rest of Africa, Latin America, or Europe.

The publication of these breakdowns ended a long-standing practice of withholding origin information that the Basque government said had created more confusion than clarity. Citizens, officials argued, have a right to see the actual composition of recorded crime.

Within the foreign-born group, those originating from North Africa are notable for their high offense rates.

They form roughly 1.8 percent of the Basque population yet accounted for 37 percent of homicide arrests, 24 percent of sexual-assault arrests, 64 percent of theft arrests, 48 percent of robberies with force, and 66 percent of violent robberies in the first six months of the year.

Suspects from the rest of Africa and from Latin America also appear over-represented in several categories of crimes against persons and property.

Overall arrests have been rising. The Ertzaintza recorded 6,903 in 2021 and 9,222 in 2025. The first half of 2026 already produced 5,050. If the pace continues, the year would end with a record of about 10,100.

Only the Basque and Catalan regional forces currently publish the origin of suspects to the general public. However, an internal document obtained earlier this year showed that, across Spain as a whole, foreigners accounted for 51 percent of daily arrests (527 of 1,033). The share was higher in Madrid (64 percent), Catalonia (71.8 percent) and Murcia (60 percent), close to the Basque figure of 59 percent.

Other research has shown that foreigners commit 500 percent more rapes than Spaniards and 400 percent more murders.

Prison data from the Basque Department of Justice for August 2026 shows 722 of the 1,967 inmates (36.7 percent) were foreign-born.

Among those under 25, the proportion rose to 65.9 percent, or two out of three.

Read more here...

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/19/2026 - 07:00

Upcoming Trump–Xi Summit Is Really An AI Summit

Tyler Durden — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 03:25:00 +0000

Upcoming Trump–Xi Summit Is Really An AI Summit

Authored by James Gorrie via The Epoch Times,

When President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping meet at the White House on Sept. 24, the public agenda will be much larger than artificial intelligence (AI). Trade, semiconductors, rare earths, Taiwan, and other disputes will all be on the table.

But AI is different.

Trade agreements can be renegotiated. Tariffs can be raised or lowered. Semiconductor restrictions can be changed.

AI is becoming a general-purpose technology that can transform military power, manufacturing, cyberwarfare, scientific research, and the global economy simultaneously.

That makes the Trump-Xi meeting, in a very important sense, an AI summit.

China Is Much Closer Than Many Americans Think

The old assumptions about China's subordinate position in AI were simple: America had the technology, and China was trying to catch up.

That assumption is dangerously outdated.

Stanford's 2026 AI Index found that U.S. and Chinese frontier AI models have traded the lead several times since early 2025. By March 2026, the leading U.S. model held only a 2.7 percent advantage over the leading Chinese model on the benchmark measured by Stanford.

The United States still has major advantages. It produces more top-tier models, attracts vastly more private AI investment, and remains strong in advanced chips, computing infrastructure, and leading AI companies. U.S. private AI investment reached $285.9 billion in 2025, compared to $12.4 billion in China.

But China has other advantages. It leads the world in AI publications, citations, patent output, and industrial robot installations.

That last advantage is particularly important. China installed roughly 295,000 industrial robots in 2024, accounting for 54 percent of worldwide installations. The significance is not simply that China has more robots, but that it has enormous manufacturing capacity to deploy AI-powered machines.

That's a critical factor that can't be overstated. AI becomes much more powerful when it is connected to factories, warehouses, vehicles, supply chains, and physical machines.

China is already building that connection.

The Robotics Advantage Is Becoming an AI Advantage

The next phase of AI may not be dominated by chatbots, but rather by machines that can see, reason, move, and act.

China has built the world's largest industrial-robot deployment base and is rapidly expanding into humanoid robotics.

Chinese companies are also pushing open AI models that can be adapted and deployed cheaply. A 2026 U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission analysis found that Chinese laboratories have increasingly embraced open-source models and that Alibaba's Qwen ecosystem had more than 100,000 derivatives on Hugging Face.

This creates a powerful and escalating feedback loop. More AI creates better robots; more robots generate more real-world data; more data improves AI; better AI makes robots more capable; and more capable robots create more demand for AI.

That is where China's unrivaled manufacturing scale becomes a strategic advantage.

What Does Xi Want?

Xi has little reason to accept an agreement that simply slows China's technological development.

Beijing has repeatedly described AI as a strategic technology and has pursued greater technological self-reliance in response to American export controls.

China is also promoting its own model of global AI governance through Beijing's Global AI Governance Initiative. It calls for international cooperation on AI governance, safety standards, and technological development.

The fly in that ointment is that cooperation does not necessarily mean restraint.

China's current approach is closer to regulating the risks of AI while continuing to develop it aggressively. Reuters recently reported that Beijing is working on mandatory AI safety standards while simultaneously pushing rapid AI deployment and maintaining human oversight of advanced systems.

Xi Has Several Possible Objectives

China's top leader could seek greater access to advanced computing and semiconductor technology, seek limits on American restrictions against Chinese AI companies, and push for international rules that recognize China's role in setting AI standards.

He could seek agreement on specific dangers, such as AI-enabled cyberattacks, without accepting restrictions on China's broader AI development. The United States has already proposed discussions with China about monitoring AI-directed cyberattacks and other risks.

What Does Trump Want?

The U.S. president's position presents a thorny contradiction.

He has emphasized the need for the United States to remain ahead of China in AI while resisting proposals that would significantly slow American development.

He's not alone in thinking that. House Speaker Mike Johnson similarly argued this week that an AI moratorium could surrender America's competitive advantage to China.

At the same time, Washington has obvious reasons to prevent AI from becoming an uncontrolled strategic weapon. Advanced AI could assist cyberattacks, accelerate biological research, automate influence operations, and potentially enable autonomous military systems.

The U.S. and Chinese officials have already begun discussing some of these risks, creating a potential basis for a bargain.

Trump could potentially offer China something Beijing wants - reduced technology restrictions, greater access to certain chips, reduced tariffs, investment opportunities, or other economic concessions - in exchange for verifiable limits on specific dangerous AI applications.

But there is an enormous problem.

Why Would China Or the US Slow Down?

China has spent years trying to eliminate its dependence on American technology.

It would have little strategic incentive to surrender an advantage it believes could determine economic and military power for decades.

That makes a broad promise to "slow AI" difficult to trust.

Beijing could agree to safety standards, reporting requirements, or restrictions on particular applications while continuing to invest heavily in models, robotics, chips, and industrial deployment.

That's a predictable consequence of competing national interests. The United States would likely engage in the same practice. Thus, neither Washington nor Beijing wants to be the country that slows down while the other continues.

That is the central dilemma of AI.

The Real Issue Is Not Who Wins-Or Is It?

The most important question may, therefore, not be whether America or China wins the AI race.

It is a question of whether either country can establish meaningful limits before increasingly autonomous systems become too difficult for governments - or their creators - to control.

That concern is no longer confined to science fiction.

AI researchers and technology executives are openly debating whether increasingly capable systems could eventually operate beyond effective human supervision. China is discussing the same loss-of-control problem, although its preferred solution is to rely on technical standards and state supervision rather than to slow development.

That's why everything else at the Trump-Xi summit may ultimately look smaller.

Yes, Taiwan matters; but so do trade, semiconductors, oil, and rare-earth elements.

But AI is becoming the technology underneath all of them. Whoever develops the most capable AI could gain advantages in every one of those areas.

In the AI race, that means winner-takes-all.

On the other hand, if AI becomes capable of independently designing better AI, controlling machines and making decisions at speeds humans cannot match, the question will change again.

It will no longer be simply which country controls AI, but rather whether humans still control the technology they created.

That's the issue Trump and Xi cannot afford to treat as just another item on the summit agenda.

Tyler Durden Fri, 09/18/2026 - 23:25

Minnesota's Anti-ICE Relief Fund Shut Down Due To Rampant Fraud

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

Minnesota's Anti-ICE Relief Fund Shut Down Due To Rampant Fraud

Officials in Hennepin County, Minnesota, shut down a $2 million relief fund for businesses claiming to be affected by federal immigration enforcement after officials discovered widespread fraud among applicants, forcing them to end the program. The county board created the fund to help businesses "harmed" by Operation Metro Surge, the federal immigration enforcement operation that began in December 2025. Federal agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, in Minneapolis in January, turning it into one of the most scrutinized immigration enforcement actions in the country.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) Photo by Nicole Neri/Minnesota Reformer

Of about 300 applications submitted, only 82 were deemed legitimate. Officials distributed only $500,000 before shutting the program down.

County officials found the problem ran deeper than a few opportunists padding their paperwork. Site visits revealed businesses listed on applications that did not exist. Investigators found the same AI-generated language pasted into dozens of unrelated applications with little variation.

Hennepin County Commissioner Jeff Lunde said the fraud reflected a broader breakdown. "The fact that people, after all this fraud, felt that they could apply and get away with it, I think it's a problem because clearly there's no fear out there," Lunde said. "Until we get it where people fear things, then they're gonna keep doing it."

Lunde described watching the numbers deteriorate in real time. "Then at a certain point we're like, 'OK, we're getting declining results on that.' And so we said it's time to stop the program. So we just stopped processing at that point," he said. He described the bulk of the applications as fraudulent outright, a flood of fabricated claims rather than a handful of bad actors slipping through the cracks.

Neither Hennepin County nor Walz's office responded to Fox News' requests for comment.

Independent journalist Nick Shirley kicked off Minnesota's fraud reckoning with a viral December video accusing several Somali-run daycare centers of billing the state for children who were never there, a claim he put at more than $110 million in fraudulent billing. The FBI previously dismantled a $250 million fraud scheme involving the nonprofit Feeding Our Future, which falsely claimed to have served millions of meals to children during the pandemic.

President Trump has spent much of the past year aiming his rhetoric about Minnesota's fraud problem at the state's Somali population, pointing to a string of prosecutions involving nonexistent or dormant businesses and nonprofits used to drain government aid programs.

Walz testified before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in Washington, D.C., on March 4, over the alleged misuse of federal funds across Minnesota's social services and Medicaid programs. Vice President JD Vance referred Walz and state Attorney General Keith Ellison to the National Fraud Enforcement Division earlier this year for a potential criminal investigation. Republicans argue the two enabled a fraud scandal that has metastasized across the state's welfare system. Walz and Ellison acknowledge that taxpayer money was misused but insist Republicans are inflating the scope for political gain.

That fraud division is now a Senate vote away from becoming a permanent fixture at the Department of Justice. The House passed the bill 352 to 72 on Wednesday, with every "no" vote coming from Democrats. More than 140 House Democrats, including Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, joined every Republican in support. Democrats voted to give permanent status to the very fraud division Vance had already used against their own governor, suggesting Minnesota's fraud problem is harder to spin from inside the caucus than from a podium in St. Paul.

Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-Wyo.) didn't hold back on what Minnesota has revealed. "What has come [out of Minnesota] over the last year, what has been exposed, is absolutely criminal in nature," Hageman said, adding that fraud in other Democrat-run cities and states is likely "higher by an order of magnitude."

Hennepin County just handed her something better than a talking point. A program built to comfort the supposed victims of immigration enforcement collapsed under the exact kind of fraud Minnesota's leadership spent a year dismissing as a right-wing conspiracy theory.

Tyler Durden Fri, 09/18/2026 - 23:00