Zero Rss

US Agencies Accuse China-Based AI Firms Of 'Malicious' Copying Of American Models

Federal cybersecurity and intelligence agencies on Tuesday accused six China-based artificial intelligence companies of running industrial-scale campaigns to extract proprietary features from leading U.S. models.

DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun, and Z.AI were all named in the joint advisory.

Officials alleged the companies, "likely with Chinese government awareness," pulled billions of tokens across millions of requests from U.S. AI systems. The list included variants of Claude, GPT, Gemini, and Grok. The activity dates back to at least late 2024.

Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Acting Director Nick Andersen said that CISA is committed to promoting the secure use of AI.

"We strongly urge AI companies to take immediate steps to safeguard their platforms against knowledge distillation campaigns that threaten to close the gap in advancements made by American companies," Andersen said.

As Kimberly Hayek reports for The Epoch Times, knowledge distillation is a standard research method where a smaller model learns from the outputs of a larger one.

The three agencies - CISA, the National Security Agency, and the FBI - differentiated legitimate research from "aggressive, malicious, and targeted distillation activities at an industrial scale."

The advisory said the firms routed traffic through native application programming interfaces (API), remote cloud providers, and third-party aggregators that strip user metadata. A gray market of proxies, referred to as "transfer stations," helped them dodge geographic blocks, break terms of use, and muddy the trail. Bulk premium subscriptions, shared across developer teams, kept the bills down.

DeepSeek, formally Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Basic Technology Research Co. Ltd., has run an organized campaign since at least late 2024, according to the agency, to feed synthetic training data into its R1 and V3 models.

Targets included Claude 3.7, Claude Sonnet 4 and 4.5, Claude Opus 4.1, Gemini 2.5 Pro and Flash previews, GPT-4, GPT-4o, GPT-5, and Grok 4.

Officials called DeepSeek's widely cited $5.6 million training figure misleading, saying it leaves out the cost of data taken through distillation.

Moonshot AI, or Beijing Moonshot Technology Co. Ltd., was accused of a broad campaign since at least mid-2025. The advisory said the firm pulled substantial Claude Fable 5 data for its Kimi-K3 model and GPT-4o data for Kimi-K2.

The new advisory recommends three steps for U.S. model providers, including hunting anomalous prompts, accounts, and usage spikes; quietly degrading answers when a distillation campaign is suspected; and sharing intelligence across companies, clouds, and API aggregators.

In July, Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios said his office had reason to believe Moonshot AI "distilled Anthropic's Fable for the development of its K3 model."

"Large-scale, covert industrial distillation aimed at stealing proprietary U.S. technology and undermining American research is unacceptable," Kratsios said.

Alibaba, the agencies contended, distilled Claude-4, Claude Opus, Claude Sonnet, and GPT-5 in late 2025 to hasten software engineering, customer-service dialogue, and image creation for its Qwen family of models. MiniMax, or Shanghai MiniMax Co. Ltd., used Claude Code, Claude Sonnet 4, Claude Opus, and several Gemini versions to improve its M2 model. Officials said MiniMax even attempted prompt injections to convince Claude Code it was actually a MiniMax product.

StepFun distilled a string of Claude and GPT-5 variants between late 2025 and early 2026 for its Step 4 model. By mid-2026, Z.AI had taken billions of tokens of GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus 4.8 data for chain-of-thought reasoning, the advisory said.

On April 23, a White House memo warned of "industrial-scale campaigns" employing "tens of thousands of proxy accounts" and jailbreaking tricks.

"There is nothing innovative about systematically extracting and copying the innovations of American industry," Kratsios wrote at the time. "And there is nothing open about supposedly open models that are derived from acts of malicious exploitation."

The memo also said the campaigns "allow those actors to deliberately strip away security protocols from the resulting models and undo mechanisms that ensure those AI models are ideologically neutral and truth-seeking."

Anthropic, the maker of Claude, said in February that DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax created about 24,000 fraudulent accounts and sent more than 16 million prompts to Claude. MiniMax accounted for more than 13 million, Moonshot AI more than 3.4 million, and DeepSeek about 150,000, according to the company.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said he is open to sanctioning Chinese AI developers over alleged model theft.

"This administration supports open-source models, but what we do not support is IP theft," Bessent said in July. "If we see, especially, that overseas models are stealing from our great companies, we have the ability to sanction them because of this theft."

"There's a very technical AI word for it called distillation, but you and I would call it theft."

CISA, the National Security Agency, and the FBI said the effort sits at the center of those firms' development plans.

Tyler Durden Fri, 09/11/2026 - 06:55

Ukraine Wants To Tax Sex To Fund The War

Authored by Martin Armstrong via Armstrong Economics,

How desperate must a government become before it considers taxing pornography to purchase drones for a war it cannot win?

Ukraine is now reportedly considering legalizing parts of its adult entertainment industry to generate additional tax revenue for the war against Russia. Ukrainian lawmaker Yaroslav Zhelezniak estimates legalization could bring around $25 million annually into the government's coffers, enough, he claims, to purchase up to 30,000 drones. The legislation has already passed its first reading in parliament and awaits further consideration.

Zelensky has agreed that parliament should consider the proposal after a petition supporting reform attracted more than 25,000 signatures.

You cannot make this stuff up.

Ukraine requires around $120 billion annually for defense, according to reporting on the proposal, and the government is scrambling everywhere it can for money. Its budget deficit exceeds $32 billion as Kyiv simultaneously negotiates with the IMF over additional financial assistance and new taxes. Europe and the United States have poured hundreds of billions into keeping this war machine operating, yet five years into the conflict Kyiv remains financially dependent upon outsiders.

The situation is even more outrageous because the government created this absurdity itself. Producing and distributing pornography remains illegal in Ukraine and can carry years in prison, yet tax authorities began demanding money from Ukrainians earning income through adult platforms. Pay the taxes and you effectively provide the government with evidence that you participated in an activity it criminalized. Refuse to pay and they can prosecute you for tax evasion. Zhelezniak himself described it as a "tragicomic situation."

You cannot legislate human nature out of existence.

Prostitution has survived emperors, kings, dictators, democracies, communism, religious prohibitions, and every law politicians have invented. The Romans tried regulating how prostitutes could be paid and people simply devised ways around the restrictions. Make an activity illegal and government frequently creates an underground market with multiple exploiters.

That is government in its purest form.

First it declares something immoral and sends the police after you. Then it discovers you are making money, demands its percentage, and eventually considers changing the law because it desperately needs the revenue. Ukraine has simply added the insanity of war to the equation.

There is only desperation in reaching the point where politicians are calculating how many battlefield drones can be purchased from taxes on sex work. Every additional scheme to extract another dollar, euro, or hryvnia demonstrates the same underlying reality: this war has consumed Ukraine economically, financially, demographically, and socially. At some point, someone has to admit that destroying what remains of the country to finance an unwinnable war is not defending Ukraine.

Tyler Durden Fri, 09/11/2026 - 06:30

US Home Delistings Decline As Sellers Become More Willing To Make Deals

Property delistings nationwide recorded a year-over-year decline toward the end of this summer, as sellers showed more patience than they did a year ago and a larger share were willing to cut prices, according to Realtor.com.

The August 2026 Monthly Housing Trends Report, released on Sept. 2, indicated that delistings declined 12.6 percent in August from a year earlier, following decreases of 8.3 percent in June and 4.7 percent in July compared with the respective months in 2025.

By contrast, the December 2025 Realtor.com report showed that delistings in June and July 2025 jumped by 48 percent and 57 percent, respectively, from the same months in 2024.

Authored by As Mary Prenon reports for The Epoch Times, the report attributed the sharp rise in delistings last summer to elevated home prices, higher mortgage interest rates, and economic uncertainty.

The average interest rate for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage was around 6.6 percent to 6.8 percent during summer 2025, according to Freddie Mac.

"With buyers and sellers far apart, the sellers' solution is to pull that trump card and delist, rather than cut prices," Realtor.com senior economist Jake Krimmel said at the time.

While the group's September 2026 data showed a year-over-year drop in delistings this summer, it also noted there were 10 consecutive months of annual list-price drops.

In August, 20.4 percent of active listings had price reductions, a 0.4 percentage-point increase from July and unchanged from August 2025.

Listings in pending status declined 0.2 percent from a year earlier, following eight months of gains, which peaked at 4.1 percent in May, according to the report. Contract signings also decreased 3.7 percent compared with August 2025.

Nationally, the median list price stood at $424,500 in August, a 1.0 percent decline from July and a 1.3 percent decline from August 2025.

"August brings a mixed reading: buyer demand softened and price cuts rose modestly above last year's pace, but sellers are still showing more patience than they did during last year's late-summer delisting wave," Krimmel said in a Sept. 3 statement.

"Price cuts, pending sales and delistings together can tell you whether sellers are satisfied, panicking, or somewhere in between."

Regionally, the West and South recorded the largest share of active listings with price reductions in August, at 22 percent and 21.4 percent, respectively. The Northeast had the lowest share, at 14.1 percent, while the share in the Midwest was 19.6 percent.

Meanwhile, 1.14 million active listings across the country were reported in August, including 401,760 new listings - a 5.2 percent dip from July. The report indicates that inventory grew across all four regions, with the Midwest leading by 10.5 percent.

"August's data shows a housing market entering its seasonal cool-down with less momentum than it had earlier this year," Realtor.com Chief Economist Danielle Hale added in the report.

"Higher mortgage rates are meeting a point in the calendar when activity typically slows, and buyers appear to be responding more selectively."

As of Sept. 3, Freddie Mac reported an average 6.71 percent interest rate for a 30-year fixed mortgage, and 5.98 percent for a 15-year fixed loan.

Only the years 2000 and 2023 had higher rates at this time of year in the last 26 years...

Looking ahead to the fall, Realtor.com said the gap in delistings compared with last year could either persist or reverse, depending on market conditions and whether sellers will continue to rely on price reductions.

"Sellers may start to get more desperate in September and subsequent months when mortgage rates are likely to remain higher than they were at this time in 2025," the report noted.

Tyler Durden Fri, 09/11/2026 - 05:45

Huge Fire Along Saudi 'Hormuz Bypass' East-West Oil Pipeline After Alleged Houthi Strikes

Update(1815ET): While unconfirmed, this would mark a huge escalation of the Houthi entry into what's been creeping all summer into a regional war:

Yemen's armed forces targeted Saudi Arabia's East-West oil pipeline; satellite data shows fires at six points along the route that transports crude oil from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea. (IRIB News)

Reports earlier in the day revealed Houthi attacks on southern areas of the kingdom, but made no mention of the Iran-aligned group targeting the further north East-West oil pipeline - which has become vital as an alternative bypass to the contested Strait of Hormuz. Earlier today: Houthis Seize Yemeni Port Of Mocha, Gaining Greater Leverage Over Bab Al Mandab Strait

And now an extremely alarming situation for global energy flows:

If true, this is very serious. The East-West pipeline is Saudi Arabia’s critical bypass around the Strait of Hormuz. https://t.co/km3QMx0YRw

— OilPrice.com (@OilandEnergy) September 10, 2026

Analysts remain cautious about speaking in certainties at this early point...

"I want to stress that there is NOT YET concrete evidence to support that the Saudi East-West Pipeline has been hit. There is satellite imagery from multiple satellites that clearly indicate SOMETHING is going on, but there is not yet confirmation that it ACTUALLY has significant/catastrophic damage."

It's too early to make any hard claims, but the Copernicus browser Sentinel 3 shows a 80km long smoke trail. Larger than routine flaring. pic.twitter.com/enrSDAF7zc

— OilPrice.com (@OilandEnergy) September 10, 2026

Large smoke plumes south of Medina, as Iranian state media is quick to frame it as the result of a significant Houthi attack and escalation against the kingdom...

Satellite imagery captures fumes of smoke rising from Saudi Arabia's East-West oil pipeline following an alleged strike by Yemen's Armed Forces.

Follow Press TV on Telegram: https://t.co/1ymjeez4mJ pic.twitter.com/wgaiyGG21p

— PressTV Extra (@PresstvExtra) September 10, 2026

Map (via S&P Global Commodity Insights):

*  *  *

Update(1735ET): It looks like that Iranians have fired on more international vessels in the Strait of Hormuz on Thursday, with the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO) Centre within the last couple hours monitoring the below developing situation:

UKMTO says it has received a report of two vessels involved in a security incident 4nm West of Khasab Oman

The master of the vessel reports seeing four unknown projectiles hit two unknown vessels, causing fire on one vessel, and unsure of the status of the second vessel, 6nm north of his position.

Meanwhile...

WTI Crude back to $104

The IRGC taking shots at tankers 'violating' Iran's passage protocol has of late become a nightly and daily reality. As Washington tries to find an offramp, and ratchets the 'Economic D-day' sanctions, this is Tehran squeezing back and saying not so fast, seeking to impose a deep political and economic cost on the Trump administration.

There could also be another 'military answer' on Iran from the US side as soon as tonight. The Pentagon had launched sporadic attacks on southern Iran earlier this week. But the US also seems hesitant and fearful over the prospect of runway escalation and inescapable quagmire.  

*  *  *

Brent crude futures traded above $102 a barrel Thursday morning after Iran threatened to intensify attacks, renewing concerns over tanker flows through the Hormuz maritime chokepoint. The supply risk extends well beyond crude to mounting shortages of refined products, particularly diesel, as the US diesel crack spread trades around $102 a barrel.

President Trump's indication yesterday that the conflict could continue beyond November's midterm elections suggests limited near-term fuel pump relief for working-class folks, with the US national gasoline average above the politically sensitive $4-a-gallon threshold and diesel at a record high. Trump also announced overnight a proposal for a $5,000 "Trump dividend" check for every American adult if Republicans retain control of both chambers of Congress.

Following Goldman, HSBC raised its 2026 average Brent crude forecast to $90 a barrel from $80, citing continued disruptions to shipping through the critical Gulf waterway that are expected to keep global oil balances tighter for longer.

With Hormuz flows running at roughly 30% of pre-conflict levels, HSBC analysts see the market adjusting to a prolonged period of depressed tanker transit through the chokepoint. That outlook suggests sustained supply constraints through year-end.

"The key indicator to watch is whether this will put an end to the heavy shuttling of oil through the Strait of Hormuz," said Arne Lohmann Rasmussen, chief analyst at Global Risk Management in Copenhagen. "It may not come to a complete halt, but combined with the more aggressive Houthis in the Red Sea and higher Chinese crude oil imports, the global oil market balance appears to be deteriorating again."

Earlier this week, Vitol Group CEO Russell Hardy said about 10 million barrels a day have been crossing the waterway, roughly half of pre-war levels. He added that an exact figure is hard to quantify and that volumes aren't guaranteed daily.

Read:

• "It's Pretty Tight": Vitol Chief Warns Of Global Fuel Squeeze As Refineries Max Out, Leaving Little Room For More Chaos

Goldman commodities strategist Yulia Zhestkova Grigsby sharply revised tanker-flow estimates through the Hormuz chokepoint to between 15 million and 16 million barrels per day, roughly two-thirds of pre-war levels. That's mainly because the market is not counting ships that turn off their automatic identification systems to avoid detection by Iran.

Goldman's Daan Struyven also noted one upside scenario this week that could push Brent to $120 if the conflict persists...

"The fundamental picture for products remains bullish with global inventories and reserves deteriorating," said Darrell Fletcher, managing director for commodities at Bannockburn Capital Markets. Before 'Operation Epic Furry', about a fifth of the world's oil and liquefied natural gas passed through Hormuz to global customers, mainly in Asia. The ongoing disruptions have sent NatGas prices in Europe above 81 euros on Thursday. 

Beyond energy, a broad-based commodity rally has pushed agricultural products and metals higher, sending the Bloomberg Commodity Index to levels last seen in 2012. HSBC analysts spot a commodities cycle developing into a "super squeeze," which suggests the move could be sustained.

Tyler Durden Fri, 09/11/2026 - 05:11

Migrants Placed In Tiny British Village Will Out Number Locals By 10 To 1

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,

The official line is that 1,256 single adult males will be placed at the old MoD depot on the edge of the Oxfordshire hamlet. Yet the document villagers pulled out of the consultation pack talks about "accommodation for 3,510 service users."

That is not a rounding error. In a place of 350 people and 46 children, it is a demographic wrecking ball.

Home Office sparks fresh outrage in Piddington as surfaced document reveals plan to house over 3,000 asylum seekers in village https://t.co/T4AmKxtZQN

— GB News (@GBNEWS) September 9, 2026

The Home Office calls the figure an "outdated estimate" and "categorically untrue." But the document has not been withdrawn.

The village has no pub, no shop, no pavement on the approach road and no street lighting worth the name. Men of fighting age would be free to come and go from a site that backs onto the children's playing field. That is the plan they are being told to accept as "fairness."

This is the same village that first exploded in July when the 1,250 figure landed with almost no consultation.

Children from the parish wrote to the Prime Minister asking him not to take the only home they had known. Seven-year-old Rex Perkin, whose family has lived there more than a century, worried he would no longer be able to walk to his sister's grave. On 4 July - American Independence Day - 96 percent of those who voted backed a referendum on leaving the United Kingdom. The second vote is now days away.

The new row began when residents working through the planning papers found an Unexploded Ordnance risk assessment for Bicester Site A. It states that "the proposed scheme" relates to "accommodation for 3,510 service users." The assessment is dated March this year. It is still online. It has not been amended.

The official planning application seeks a ten-year "temporary" change of use for "non-detained asylum accommodation," open 24 hours, for up to 1,256 single males aged 18 to 65. Consultation closes on 17 September. The village's symbolic independence referendum is two days earlier, on 15 September - Battle of Britain Day.

Parish council chairman Tim McNally put the contradiction in plain English.

"Although the proposal states 1,256 single males between the ages of 18 and 65, the service users focuses on 3,510," he said. "That is ten times the size of the village of Piddington. Now if that is an error, correct it. This is more than alarming. It is either deception at the greatest level or incompetence at the highest."

'Prime Minister...look what you are doing to 46 kids, who will basically lose their childhood.'

Chairman of Piddington Parish Council Tim McNally explains the impact that placing thousands of migrants in the local area would have on his community. pic.twitter.com/SrDt2ZPeU9

— GB News (@GBNEWS) September 9, 2026

Resident campaigner Ian Darby told GB News the same suspicion is now general.

"Clearly we're concerned and it's slightly beggars belief that if there was some original thinking at sort of 3,500 people, that they'd still be daft enough to include an old report that is no longer relevant in this consultation," he said.

He added, "Some of us are a little bit more suspicious and worry that that is potentially their ultimate plan, which for this village, just to remind everybody, would be ten times the size of this village. It's a takeover. It's a complete destruction of a beautiful little village."

'Ten times the size of this village, it's a takeover and complete destruction of a beautiful village.'

Ian Daeby says he is concerned that documents relating to the Piddington asylum site reference a capacity of 3,510, while the Home Office insists the limit is 1,256 migrants. pic.twitter.com/OzLVZqLZhY

— GB News (@GBNEWS) September 9, 2026

A Home Office spokesman replied: "It is categorically untrue to suggest we are seeking to house 3,510 people at the MOD Bicester. As our planning application clearly states, we are considering the site to accommodate up to 1,256 asylum seekers."

They added that community concerns are "central to our immigration reforms" and that hotels are being emptied in favour of former military sites.

Villagers note the 3,510 figure was never pulled from the file. They also note the application arrived after a 56-day wait with 11 sections redacted, including material on suicide and self-harm, health and safety, and handling a death on site.

'It is a symbol of a country whose rulers and politicians keep demanding public trust, whilst giving fewer and fewer reasons to offer it.' @GoodwinMJ analyses the significance of thousands of migrants being set to be housed in Piddington, a small village in Oxfordshire. pic.twitter.com/hExJQ6oXxM

— GB News (@GBNEWS) September 9, 2026

Piddington is a single-lane hamlet of thatched and brick cottages, a 13th-century Grade II-listed church, and a parish playing field. The nearest amenities are miles away down an unlit B-road with no pavement. Gardens sit close to the depot fence. The site is about 750 metres from family homes.

Resident Melise Witkin, 59, told the Mail the argument is not class and never was.

"This is not about being rich or poor, this is about safety," she said. "We are 356 people in the village with 46 children and 1,250 men turning up is a recipe for disaster. People walk their dogs, children play, I just think it is madness. This is about safety, nothing more. Even for them [the asylum seekers], along that road there is no pavement, there are no street lights. We don't have a pub, we don't have a shop, what are the asylum seekers going to do here."

Karen Joy said the fear is already in the houses.

"We feel we have been ignored," she said. "We are a very small village and there is nothing for the people in the asylum camp to do. Our worry is that they will wander into our village and the security is nil. We feel scared. That is all I feel, to be honest."

Victoria Hubbocks described what the change does to ordinary life. She runs at 5am. Her 11-year-old walks the dog alone. The village currently switches street lights off overnight because everyone knows everyone.

"I go for runs at 5 o'clock in the morning and I don't feel scared. I will have to change that," she said. "I think it effectively takes away my children's childhood." On the Prime Minister's demand that every area "step up," she added: "Step up? Fair enough, but ten men to each woman in Piddington isn't a fair proportion in any way, shape or form."

Joe Marshall, on the parish council, said police who visited the site left a phrase behind that nobody in Whitehall wants to repeat.

"We're sitting ducks," he said. "The police have come and had a look and said that we're sitting ducks, and we've not been given any reassurances." He also said the application is "full of inconsistencies," littered with typos, and missing "really crucial documents."

Mario Terzino has an 18-year-old daughter who walks the dog alone. That stops if the camp opens. "We've got no public transport. There is nothing here," he said. "It's not about who's going to the base. It's about the scale. We're talking about 1,250 people, or males, going into a site which is literally adjacent to our playing field. It's just bonkers."

Piddington is being sold as an isolated planning row. It is not. It is the same template stamped across rural Britain: take a high-trust village with no night-time economy, no spare police, and a children's play area, then drop in a barracks-worth of single adult males and call it "equity."

At RAF Linton-on-Ouse in North Yorkshire, a village of about 600 faces around 1,200 single adult males beside a primary school and nursery - six migrant men to every local woman.

 

In Gronant, North Wales, residents woke to find a former village hall, freshly turned into new-build homes, handed to asylum seekers with blacked-out vehicles and no warning. Locals called it an "absolute betrayal."

Crowborough in East Sussex watched hundreds of single adult males arrive at a former army camp. Women reported feeling unsafe. Volunteer patrols followed. Barnham in Suffolk sits on the same list. Together the three English MoD sites were framed as housing about 3,750 people while hotels are emptied.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham's answer to Piddington was not a pause. It was a doctrine. "All parts of the country need to play their part." Middle-class and leafy places, he said, can no longer sit outside the map. Borders minister Anna Turley called it a "more fair and equitable system" and insisted the men would be "contained" on site - while also confirming they "will be allowed out."

The cheerleaders for this policy tend to live nowhere near it. They praise "sharing the burden" until the burden is a lane with no pavement and 46 children. Then the enthusiasm thins out.

Reform UK's Zia Yusuf, who visited the village, blasted the 3,510 assessment.

"It's now been revealed the lying Labour Government had assessments carried out based on housing 3,510 migrants in the English village of Piddington, more than double the official figure of 1,256," he said. "That would have been 10 illegal migrants for every one resident. Villagers' lives will be ruined overnight. Ministers continue to conceal the true scale of what is coming, and the numbers keep rising before a single migrant has even arrived."

Samantha Phillips, 61, a 26-year resident now helping organise self-defence classes for women and children, said: "If this was to happen, if we were to get 3,510 male migrants, then the entire population of Piddington represents less than one tenth of the size of the local male migrants."

Andrea Owen, who grew up in the military community around Bicester, put the cultural point without a think-tank filter. "The British traditions and the British way of life are just being ripped away."

Look at the map and the pattern stops looking like incompetence. Channel crossings continue. Hotels become a political embarrassment. The solution chosen is not detention and removal. It is dispersal into the least densely populated, least policed, most culturally intact corners of the country.

They could not have picked places more alien to a cohort of fighting-age men from the other side of the world if they had tried. No mosque. No late-night high street. No anonymity. A medieval church, a playing field, dog walkers, and children who still treat the lane as their own. Then the same officials express surprise when women book self-defence classes and a parish council talks about independence.

Darby's warning is the one that matters if the 1,256 cap is even real. Once the site is open, it is the easy tap. "If I were sitting in their shoes and this was open even initially at sort of 1,200, and you did have a rush of new asylum seekers arriving, you're going to come here first, aren't you? Because you've already won the battle."

McNally asked the question Whitehall will not answer. "How can a government do this to us? Our children - our children's lives - are the ones that are being undermined."

The consultation ends on 17 September. The village votes on the 15th. Legal options are being prepared. A petition against using MoD sites without proper local consultation has already passed the threshold that forces a government response. Activity on the ground has already been reported. Ecological, electrical, sewage and water documents, residents say, are still not properly in place.

A government that wanted the least disruption would not park thousands of unvetted men against a playground in a hamlet of 350. A government that wanted maximum cultural shock would do exactly that - then lecture the people living there about "playing their part."

Piddington is not refusing to exist in modern Britain. It is refusing to be used as the demonstration site for a policy that treats English village life as surplus.

Tyler Durden Fri, 09/11/2026 - 05:00

What More Evidence Does The Blob Need That Michael Gove Was Right?

Authored by Toby Young via The Daily Sceptic,

When I think of Michael Gove perusing the latest PISA league tables, proving yet again that his education reforms have transformed the life chances of English schoolchildren, a line from Broadcast News, the 1987 romcom, comes to mind.

"It must be nice to always believe you know better, to always think you're the smartest person in the room," says a veteran television news man to a young female producer.

"No," she replies. "It's awful."

When it comes to teaching and learning, the man who ran the Department for Education from 2010 - 14 really does know better. As he has pointed out, a natural experiment has taken place in Great Britain over the last 16 years - longer, if you date the beginning of the reform programme to the Labour and Skills Act 2000 - with England implementing a raft of educational reforms and Scotland and Wales stubbornly sticking to the same old failed formula. The results in the just-published 2025 PISA data are there for all to see.

English 15 year-olds scored 492 in maths, 497 in reading and 516 in science - 29, 36 and 34 points respectively above the OECD average. England now sits comfortably in the upper reaches of the developed world, having climbed into the top 10 in all three subjects.

Wales, by contrast, has fallen below the OECD average, its maths score declining a full 10 points since 2022. Scotland, though still nominally above the international average, has flatlined since its own dismal 2022 showing and now trails England by roughly a year's worth of learning. Just think about that: in Scotland, the average child is a year behind his English counterparts. (In Wales, they are two years behind.)

So Lord Gove has been vindicated. But knowing he was right won't be much comfort, given the resistance to his reforms in the devolved nations. No free schools, no academies, no 'comprehensive grammars'. No phonics, no spelling and grammar tests, no maths mastery, no EBacc, no Progress 8. Just the same old romantic dross - 'problem solving', 'transferable skills', 'child-centred learning' - that has failed Scottish and Welsh schoolchildren for decades.

Instead of replicating Westminster's knowledge-rich curriculum, Edinburgh and Cardiff rolled out a skills-based "curriculum for excellence". Even today, in spite of the overwhelming evidence of its failure, the SNP Education Secretary, Màiri McAllan, is still defending this rag-bag of progressive clichés.

Scotland's education system, she said in response to the latest PISA figures, looks at "artistic expression, problem solving and moral education" so it produces "well-rounded individuals who are ready and capable to be resilient in this world". Not so ready and capable, Màiri, if they can't read, write or add up. As Gove rightly concluded, there's no evidence schools can teach artistic expression, problem solving or character traits like resilience, so it's better to focus on what they can teach.

The unions have a lot to answer for. In England, it was a standing joke among education reformers in the early 2010s that the 'n' in the NUT stood for 'no' because England's largest teaching union had blocked every reform for the last 50 years. Gove and his trusted lieutenants like Nick Gibb faced down the NUT and drove through his reforms in the teeth of ferocious opposition. But his Scottish and Welsh counterparts weren't so robust, quickly abandoning any effort to overhaul their failing schools when the unions objected.

Some of this can be explained by not wanting to copy what the hated Tories were doing down south. But even when the OECD recommended Scotland reproduce some of the measures that were clearly succeeding in England - a pared-down academic core, greater headteacher autonomy, stricter behaviour management policies, more rigorous assessment - the EIS, Scotland's largest teaching union, threw up its arms in horror. Each time Scottish education ministers have so much as gestured towards reform, the union has treated it as an act of war.

All of which must be profoundly depressing for Lord Gove. What more do you need? he must be thinking. Worse, the current Labour Government is in the process of dismantling the Gove reforms. Incredibly, Bridget Phillipson and now Lucy Powell have looked at the PISA data and concluded that England's education system should be more like that of Scotland and Wales - less school autonomy, no more free schools, continuous assessment instead of rigorous exams, toothless behaviour policies, and a neutered Ofsted. At the heart of Labour's new national curriculum, we're told, will be 'sustainability' and 'decolonisation'.

The blob is back and the smartest man in the room must be reluctantly concluding that no amount of evidence will convince his opponents he was right.

Tyler Durden Fri, 09/11/2026 - 03:30

Austria's Headscarf Ban For Under-14 Schoolgirls Comes Into Force

Via Remix News,

Austria's new nationwide ban on "traditional Muslim" head coverings, including hijabs and burqas, for girls under 14 in both public and private schools, has now taken effect as of Sept. 7, 2026. in Vienna, Lower Austria, and Burgenland.

The start date coincided with the start of the new school year.

Austria's remaining states will follow with a ban next week as well.

The measure, framed by the government as a child-protection and gender-equality policy, immediately faced visible resistance from Muslims and the first formal legal challenge.

At an Islamic primary school in Vienna, reporters from Austrian news outlet Heute observed young girls arriving to school still wearing headscarves accompanied by their mothers. One child wore a pink hijab coordinated with her dress; two slightly older students entered in simple hijabs without parents. School officials did not immediately clarify how they would apply the ban on private Islamic institutions.

The law requires schools to start with conversations involving the student and her legal guardians. Repeated violations trigger involvement of child-protection services, with fines of €150 to €800 possible for parents as a last resort. Teachers, already under strain, must initiate these talks. There are now fears of real conflict arising in the coming months.

Integration Minister Claudia Bauer of the conservative ÖVP described the headscarf as "a sign of oppression and a means of controlling girls from the earliest childhood." Chancellor Christian Stocker has separately called for a constitutional ban on political Islam, saying he does not "want to live in an Islamic state."

The right-wing Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), the most popular party in the country is known for its even harsher stance toward migrants and Islam in the country. FPÖ politician Ricarda Berger stated there is "no place for political Islam in Austria, and certainly not in our schools."

The party wants a general ban on all headscarves and face coverings in schools for both students and teachers alike, which would cover all ages.

Education Minister Christoph Wiederkehr of the liberal NEOS acknowledged uncertainty about the law's fate at the Constitutional Court, stating: "You can never be completely certain."

He added that the government and education ministry "carried out very intensive consultations" to draft a constitutionally compliant text.

Only the Greens opposed the bill in parliament. Green politician Sigi Maurer accused Wiederkehr of "creating new conflicts and offloading them onto the teachers," saying the minister wanted to "foist the role of police officers onto them."

Teachers' union chairman Paul Kimberger noted that some communities had already announced they would resist and that certain conversations with parents "will probably have limited success."

The Islamic Religious Community in Austria (IGGÖ), the largest Islamic organization in the country, condemned the ban as discriminatory. Spokesperson Carla Amina Baghajati said, "We believe it unjustifiably restricts the fundamental right to freedom of religion and disproportionately affects Muslim girls. Rather than protecting children, it singles out a specific religious practice and risks excluding the very children it claims to support."

The IGGÖ has pledged to support families challenging the law at the Constitutional Court. A request for annulment was filed on the first day of school.

A 2020 Constitutional Court ruling had struck down an earlier ban limited to children under 10, finding it violated Austria's duty of religious neutrality. The court dismissed premature challenges to the new law in July because it had not yet entered force, but that procedural barrier is now gone. Left-wing student groups have called for protests. An 11-year-old girl demonstrated against the ban in February carrying a banner that, translated into English, read, "My headscarf, my decision."

The Constitutional Court is likely to have the final word on the issue.

Read more here...

Tyler Durden Fri, 09/11/2026 - 02:00

We Are In World War Xi

Authored by Karen Siegemund and Bradley A. Thayer via American Greatness,

As the Russo-Ukrainian war continues, Americans may blame Russian leader Vladimir Putin for starting "World War III." It is correct that World War III has started, but its cause is the People's Republic of China (PRC), not Russia.

The war did not start with Putin's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 or with the appeasement of Russia in the years before Putin's foolish aggression. It started with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The

CCP has been at war with the U.S. since coming to power in 1949 and has employed many fronts in this war to undermine America and the West. The CCP's May 2019 declaration of "People's War" against the U.S. was CCP leader Xi Jinping's call for a maximal effort against America. Not coincidentally, the COVID-19 outbreak soon followed. The CCP lied about COVID's origins, refused to share information with the world, and used Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), as its willing accomplice. Another front is CCP election interference. President Trump has revealed the CCP's interference in the 2020 U.S. presidential election in an effort to secure President Joe Biden's victory. Biden's open borders allowed many hundreds of thousands of military-age Chinese men into the United States - prepositioning a force to strike against the American people in their homeland. The sustained chemical warfare attack that is fentanyl is another avenue of attack, destroying American lives and families. The CCP's success at buying American and European politicians and journalists to serve as its agents of influence is yet another, as is TikTok.

Putin is not the source of World War III. Putin is, in the scheme of World War III, a secondary player. It is Xi who is driving World War III. It seems that the common denominator for every manifestation of this global crisis, whether overt or covert, foreign or domestic, is that Xi Jinping and his CCP have either inspired or enabled them - or at least, stand to be the principal beneficiaries. Consequently, while some call this World War III, one might consider a more apt name to be "World War Xi."

It was Xi who gave the green light to Putin to invade Ukraine when they met in early February 2022. Xi and Putin have met over 11 times since then, most recently in Bishkek, and on each occasion, Xi has evinced strong, public support for Putin's war. While the Russo-Ukrainian war is not yet resolved - it has lasted longer than World War I - it already has a clear winner: the PRC. The PRC provides great assistance to Russia - diplomatic, economic, and "dual-use" military aid - all of which is important to sustain Russia's war. Beijing is receiving a prodigious return that is helping Xi win World War III.

First, by sustaining the war, the PRC occupies the U.S. and so diverts attention from its aggressive acts and preparations for war over Taiwan, which might include attacks against the U.S. itself. The U.S. intelligence community and military have only so much bandwidth, and the conflicts in Iran, Ukraine, and elsewhere in the Middle East are filling it. In addition, U.S. stockpiles are drained by the conflict in Iran and aid to Ukraine, including Patriot, ATACMS, and other missiles, and 155mm artillery rounds, all of which reduce the ability of the U.S. military to fight a high-intensity war with the PRC. In turn, a reduced U.S. arsenal hurts U.S. conventional deterrence in key theaters, like the western Pacific and Taiwan.

Second, the war cements Putin's dependence on the PRC. Putin is Xi's myrmidon, the supplicant in the relationship. Truly, Putin is Xi's useful idiot. Xi drafted Putin to serve in his anti-Western alliance, which costs Putin his autonomy. Xi's ultimate ambition is to overthrow U.S. power and position in the world and shackle the world to the PRC's tyrannical ambitions. Putin's interest would have been better served by emerging as the tertius gaudens of the conflict between the U.S. and the PRC. Now that he has tied Russia's interests to the PRC, he will walk the path Xi requires of him. That requires Russia to accept diminished influence when Russia's interests conflict with the PRC, such as in Central Asia, and to serve as an instrument of distraction for the U.S. and its NATO allies while China expands its military power and strategic ambitions. Putin must fear that once he has served his usefulness, Xi may overthrow him.

Third, Putin also serves as a lightning rod, attracting the world's animus and attention for his acts while Xi's genocide in Xinjiang remains too often unremarked and in the background. The PRC's preparations for war against Taiwan and its increasingly coercive measures against the Philippines also do not receive the attention they deserve.

Fourth, as a result of the Ukraine war, Xi has secured his northern flank. Russian conventional and nuclear military power is now a tool to be employed in conjunction with or apart from the PRC's military - but to serve Beijing's interests. The U.S. has a "multiple front" war problem with which it must contend.

Moreover, Xi has secured his western flank in Central Asia. The Central Asian states perceive Russia as a threat due to the invasion of Ukraine and see Moscow as the junior partner in the Sino-Russian relationship. For Xi, this is a remarkable occurrence at the same time that China is committing genocide against Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang or East Turkistan. The PRC's western flank is as secure as it has been in recent years. With two flanks secure and Xi's ability to project power expanding, it is no surprise that Xi is aggressing on the PRC's southern and eastern flanks.

The bottom line is that the Russo-Ukrainian war greatly benefits the PRC. As the PRC gains in military might, this hurts the ability of the U.S. to defend its national security interests elsewhere, including in the western Pacific. In turn, this weakens the ability of the U.S. to deter aggression against Taiwan, the Philippines, and other states, as well as the ability to fight a war with the PRC, should deterrence fail.

The costs of the Russo-Ukrainian war are high in every respect. While Moscow may eke out a Pyrrhic victory, the true winner of the war is Beijing. The war continues because Xi wants it to, and his aid allows Putin to pursue his folly.

With its strategic position strengthened and its power projection capabilities expanding, the PRC is putting in place the conditions necessary for aggression. The U.S. and its allies should expect China to center its belligerency on its southern and eastern flanks. This aggression might be kinetic - indeed, at some point it will be so - against India on Beijing's southern flank, against Taiwan on the eastern, and possibly even against Japan and the U.S. But the PRC will continue to employ all the tools of statecraft to bring its might to bear to cause the change it wants. Thus, the world should expect diplomatic, ideological, and economic pressure to be employed by the PRC against them, while Beijing also seeks to undermine the governments of India, Taiwan, Japan, and the U.S. We should also anticipate the continued expansion of the PRC's domestic influence in those countries through the use of the PRC's United Front Work Department to subvert them and other overt and covert efforts.

It is a new world. Soviet dominance over the PRC during the Cold War is now reversed. In World War III, the PRC calls the shots because of Putin's strategic idiocy. Having the PRC's northern and western flanks secured is a key step toward Xi's greater belligerence. The CCP is employing many tools in this war, and the American people need to recognize the avenues of attack.

The U.S., its allies, and its partners must move beyond anticipating aggression to recognizing its certainty and the reality of World War Xi.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of ZeroHedge.

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/10/2026 - 23:25

25 Years Later, Air Travel Still Bears The Imprint Of 9/11

Authored by Jeremy Lott via The Epoch Times,

The terror attacks 25 years ago this week had enduring costs for America's commercial aviation sector.

Today's domestic fliers are on balance worse off for it, with higher costs, fewer choices, and more delays.

That's because, on Sept. 11, 2001, men who were part of the al Qaeda Islamist terror network bought tickets and boarded four passenger planes out of Boston, northern Virginia, and Newark, New Jersey.

Once airborne, the 19 terrorists hijacked those planes and managed to fly two of them into the World Trade Center towers and one into the Pentagon.

The remaining plane, United Airlines Flight 93 from Newark to San Francisco, was brought down by a revolt of passengers and crew who had pieced together what was happening with the other planes.

The Boeing 757 crashed into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, instead of its intended target, which the National Park Service identified as the U.S. Capitol.

At the World Trade Center, more than 2,700 people died that day.

When Flight 93 went down in Pennsylvania, all 44 people, including seven crew members and 33 passengers, including the four hijackers, died on impact.

At the Pentagon, where American Airlines Flight 77 from Washington Dulles Airport to Los Angeles crashed, 189 people died, including 125 people in the building, six airline crew members, 53 passengers, plus the five hijackers.

Airlines in the Red

For the airlines, the financial impact was awful and bordered on existential.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) grounded all flights for several days. Once the planes were cleared for takeoff, many would-be passengers were jittery about being airborne. After all, they had just watched domestic planes slam into skyscrapers on their television sets, over and over.

These planes had long been seen as mechanical marvels that shortened long trips and brought the world closer together. The al Qaeda hijackings turned them instead into visible instruments of previously unimaginable destruction on U.S. soil.

Looking back at that day, the International Air Transport Association did not sugarcoat it.

"On September 11, 2001, the world changed forever," Willie Walsh, former director general of the air travel trade group, said in a fact sheet for the 20th anniversary of the day.

"Those of us old enough to understand what was happening at the time still remember where we were when we heard the horrific news. Indeed, for many, it probably still feels like yesterday."

The attacks were not only "assaults on the United States of America," as far as the world of aviation was concerned. Those weaponized planes were also aimed straight at the "global air transportation system - a facilitator of peace and freedom," he said.

Financial fallout from the attacks was swift and severe. Revenues and profits nosedived.

U.S. passenger airlines had posted profits of $2.2 billion in 2000. They lost $8 billion in 2001, and revenues did not climb back to 2000 levels until 2004.

Those losses contributed to the bankruptcies of several air carriers, most notably US Airways and United Airlines in 2002. United stayed aloft, but US Airways eventually was absorbed by American Airlines.

Airport Security Costs

An act of Congress created the Transportation Security Administration, popularly known as the TSA, in November 2001 to help address security concerns. The TSA took over screening at most airports.

The Aviation and Transportation Security Act also greatly expanded a previously existing air marshals program to put many more armed, hidden officers on flights to thwart future would-be hijackers.

Costs for U.S. fliers grew higher, in part to pay for the new, slower airport security. U.S. taxpayers are paying for it as well. The amount spent on the TSA has varied from year to year. At present, the yearly price tag is in the $11 billion range.

Gary Leff, proprietor of the popular View from the Wing website, is not happy about that.

"It's not clear what we've gotten spending over $10 billion annually," he told The Epoch Times.

TSA oversaw the formalization of what some critics have called security theater, with belts and shoes off, liquids limited in size, passengers subjected to various scanning devices, and lots and lots of plastic tubs.

Bill McGee, a senior fellow for aviation at the American Economic Liberties Project, says he still believes that TSA security beats the alternative.

"It's really easy to beat up on the TSA, and I've done it quite often myself. In fact, there's an entire chapter on TSA criticism in my book 'Attention All Passengers,'" he told The Epoch Times.

At the same time, he said, it's important to remember "what airline and airport security was like prior to 9/11," when "security was the responsibility of the airlines, and it was often non-existent."

"I think we can all agree that the airlines' efforts in outsourcing airport security on 9/11 was a spectacular failure," McGee said, adding that TSA's existence indicates "that aviation security is taken seriously enough that it's the responsibility of the federal government."

He said he would not want to have such a "vital function that is so intrinsic to national security be outsourced to the lowest bidders again."

Where TSA Can Improve

Yet there are downsides to having the TSA as it is currently organized. Instead of scrapping the agency, however, McGee suggested, "Let's think instead about how Congress can fix the TSA for all of us."

The federal government funds the TSA. When government shutdowns happen, as they do periodically, this creates problems for airport screening. TSA still functions during government shutdowns but not well.

Agents go unpaid, sometimes for long stretches. They have a statutory guarantee of back pay once the government is funded again. Yet overtime is discouraged, and absenteeism rises. This leads to longer screening times and missed flights.

That is what happened during the 76-day partial government shutdown of agencies under the Department of Homeland Security earlier this year.

Ha Nguyen McNeill, acting TSA administrator, testified in late March that the "cost of coming to work [was] becoming more untenable for the workforce." The agency's daily call-out rates had increased from 4 percent to 11 percent and at some airports were greater than 50 percent.

This reduced screening capacity was hiking wait times to "over four and a half hours at certain airports, raising major security risks and missed flights for passengers," McNeill said in prepared remarks.

In contrast, a handful of airports participate in the Screening Partnership Program. This allows private contractors to do the screening, under TSA regulations and nominal supervision, with a different line of funding.

The largest airport in the program is San Francisco International Airport (SFO). At roughly the same time that McNeill was sounding the alarm before Congress, the airport was reassuring fliers that they could enjoy their spring break travels.

"While we've seen and heard about the long security checkpoint lines over the last few weeks at major airports around the country, SFO is NOT experiencing this issue," the airport announced on social media.

During the partial government shutdown, the airport's screener-contractors were "being paid without interruption," and screening was "operating as usual."

The San Francisco airport regularly posts its security checkpoint wait times. For Sept. 6, waits ran between one and nine minutes for general boarding and between zero and four minutes for fliers with TSA PreCheck authorization.

The San Francisco example illustrates the gap between what TSA might be and what it actually is, Leff said. "Instead of regulating security provided by others," he said, the screening agency "largely regulates itself, which has led to a lack of accountability."

For instance, border agencies frequently operate what are called red teams, whose job it is to try to get contraband through a checkpoint.

TSA ran red teams for years. They found that TSA screeners are very bad at catching items that have been flagged as dangerous.

"After a series of embarrassing disclosures about their failure rates detecting dangerous items at checkpoints [with] failure rates over 90 percent a decade ago, they simply stopped releasing information on their effectiveness publicly," Leff said.

As the 25th anniversary of Sept. 11 approaches, Leff said that the response to the attacks has had bad effects for both fliers and would-be fliers.

"For travel, it's meant that trips take longer. That means fewer trips by air than there'd otherwise be. It likely means more car trips, which are far less safe, and more loss of life as a result. But we never examine second- and third-order effects," he said.

Last year, 64 people on commercial airlines died in the United States. All of the deaths came when an Army Black Hawk helicopter collided with a small commuter plane over the Potomac River near Reagan National Airport on Jan. 29. Three people in the helicopter also died.

Over that same period, 36,640 traffic fatalities were reported on American roads.

Progress and Innovation

Former International Air Transport Association boss Walsh saw one bright spot at American airports in the first 20 years following Sept. 11.

He thought that TSA PreCheck, where frequent fliers trade more information about themselves and a small fee for expedited screening, was worth celebrating.

Walsh acknowledged that "extraordinary measures" were probably necessary to get things flying again, post Sept. 11, but he made the case that the need for many of these measures had long-since passed.

Future American airport security could "move beyond the one-size-fits-all, rules-based model that still ... governs passenger security screening" and establish "firm deadlines" to sunset unnecessarily stringent rules, he said. These changes would make sure that "what we are doing is relevant."

James Fallows is a journalist, a small craft pilot and the author of several books, including a few on aviation.

"Free Flight: From Airline Hell to a New Age of Travel," was the original title of one of those books, published only months before Sept. 11, 2001.

Fallows saw the beginnings of something new taking shape. He observed smaller craft playing a bigger role in transportation and thought that would grow into a somewhat decentralized air-taxi system in the future.

The Epoch Times asked him about how the terror attacks had affected that development, and how he sized up its prospects today.

"So much has changed in the 25 years since the 9/11 attacks," Fallows said. For several years, "dramatically tightened security rules limited private air travel of all sorts."

However, that was not the whole story.

"The increasing congestion of airlines, and the ongoing progress in aircraft and engine design, has led to steady growth in private jet travel - for those who can afford it."

The next step is to bring that experience to more people. Many companies are working to create an "air taxi model" that people of modest means can afford to hail, Fallows said.

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/10/2026 - 22:35

Diesel Crunch Set To Worsen As Refining Capacity Falls Short, Industry Warns

The global diesel market - already trading at record prices - is set to further tighten in the coming months and keep fuel prices high, raising the prices of all goods and threatening the inflation targets of the central banks.

Industry officials, who gathered at the APPEC petroleum conference in Singapore this week, warned that the market has not seen the worst of the diesel crisis yet. Analysts say the real stress in oil markets is in the diesel market right now, OilPrice reported.

Global fuel markets are very tight and inflexible, despite the higher crude oil flows out of the Persian Gulf in recent weeks, Russell Hardy, chief executive of the world's biggest independent oil trader, Vitol Group, said on Tuesday.

“We're still not running enough refining capacity to prevent those draws, and we keep eating into the surplus that exists around the world,” Hardy said at the event, as carried by Bloomberg.

Despite the uptick in flows from the Strait of Hormuz, only 1 million barrels per day (bpd) out of an estimated 10 million bpd outbound flows are refined products, the rest is crude.

Refinery capacity is constrained in the Middle East, due to Iranian strikes on refineries and the trickle of fuel flows through Hormuz.

Moreover, refinery capacity in Russia is also severely restricted by nearly-daily Ukrainian drone strikes at Russian refineries, while Russia has banned diesel exports until at least the end of September.

Refineries in the United States and elsewhere have been running at maximum capacity this summer, having delayed maintenance. But they are unlikely to continue operating at these elevated utilization rates for much longer.

If the global refining system can sustain these processing rates until the end of this year, “it is going to be an achievement,” Shaikh Khaled Ahmad Al Sabah, managing director for international marketing at Kuwait Petroleum Corporation (KPC), told Bloomberg.

“I think we’re going to see a very difficult winter coming in Northwest Europe,” the executive said. “This is only the beginning.”

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/10/2026 - 22:10

Oil Tanker Rates Hit Record Highs as Middle East Shipping Risks Soar

By Tsvetana Paraskova of OilPrice.com

Oil tanker rates have jumped to record highs as escalating risks to shipping in and out of the Middle East are prompting traders and tanker operators to undertake inefficient and more expensive trade routes.

While the crude oil supply is actually there, shipping it through the Strait of Hormuz remains a very risky endeavor, especially in light of the escalating U.S.-Iran tanker war in the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, while Saudi Arabia has started to move crude cargoes out of the region through the north of the Red Sea and from Egypt’s Mediterranean ports.

The much longer workarounds are tying tankers and supertankers for longer with the shippers, tightening the market of available vessels so much that rates are skyrocketing to all-time highs. 

For example, the benchmark daily rate for a very large crude carrier (VLCC) to ship oil from the Middle East to China has hit a record high of almost $800,000, per data compiled by Bloomberg.

The price of chartering a supertanker to ship crude from the U.S. Gulf Coast to Asia has now hit a lump-sum fee of $29.5 million per run, and that’s not even factoring in fees for additional war risks or unexpected delays. 

“The VLCC positions list is now so tight that no one would be too surprised if we see the WS 400 mark breached for a Fujairah/East run off a prompt-ish position before long, crazy as it may sound,” shipbroker Fearnleys said in its latest weekly report for the week ended September 9.

“The oil still needs to get out through the Strait of Hormuz, and Iranians have increased efforts to stop that from happening. It’s a fragile state of affairs,” the shipbroker added.

“There’s quite a few bottlenecks all at the same time,” Alex Grant, Equinor’s global head of crude, products and liquids trading, told Bloomberg on the sidelines of the APPEC petroleum conference in Singapore.

“The market is quite stressed with all of that, and that’s showing up in the shipping rates.”

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/10/2026 - 21:40

Pakistan's Energy Crisis Set To Ease As Qatari LNG Breaks Through Hormuz

Authored by Irina Slav via OilPrice.com,

Pakistan is about to get some energy relief with tankers carrying Qatari LNG set to arrive in the country this month. The first cargo is seen arriving as early as Thursday, Bloomberg reported, citing ship-tracking data.

Pakistan has been struggling to keep the lights on after Qatar declared force majeure on its exports following Iranian strikes that caused damage to its Ras Laffan LNG hub. Since then, Pakistan has been forced to turn to spot LNG markets and pay hefty premiums for the occasional shipment. Qatar was the biggest supplier of liquefied natural gas to the South Asian nation, under long-term contracts.

The country has issued several prompt liquefied gas delivery tenders over the past three months, consistently paying $20 per million British thermal units and more-a tender earlier this month ended without an order, after Pakistan's state gas company only received one offer, whose price was $27 per million British thermal units. This is three times higher than pre-war LNG prices that Pakistan was paying.

"The international LNG price is around $23.18 per MMBtu, whereas the bid received was $26.969 per MMBtu. The price was considered too high, so a fresh tender has been issued," a senior Pakistan LNG Limited executive said, as quoted by Pakistani media earlier this month. Following the failure of that tender, Pakistan LNG issued a new one.

The Qatari cargoes would go some way towards alleviating the energy crisis in Pakistan, where power generation costs have soared due to the gas crunch and rolling blackouts have become a fixture of life, sometimes lasting for 24 hours in some parts of the country. As of July, these were 38% higher than a year earlier and since then have likely one even higher as LNG on the spot market has also trended higher while QatarEnergy announced an extension of its force majeure.

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/10/2026 - 20:55

Needham Spots Autonomous Trucking Inflection Point Arriving Next Year

Swedish freight company Einride's announcement last month that it plans to deploy 500 Tesla Semis on US roads, the largest publicly announced commitment to electric Class 8 trucks, suggests a shift toward fleet electrification. It also brings the next phase of trucking technology into focus: the gradual commercialization of autonomous freight.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has targeted late 2026 or early 2027 for self-driving capabilities to begin working on the Semi. That remains a Musk target, not a confirmed commercial rollout. Any version requiring a human operator would be supervised automation, like FSD on Tesla sedans, SUVs, and the Cybertruck.

NEWS: Google announced a major electric trucking project in Texas featuring Tesla Semi.

Google, Nevoya and Center for Green Market Activation will deploy:

• 25 electric semi trucks.
• Dedicated charging infrastructure
• An all-electric freight route between Houston & Dallas. pic.twitter.com/ZxSbFIJk5C

— DogeDesigner (@cb_doge) September 9, 2026

Needham analysts Chris Pierce and Mackenzie Holleran see a broader industry inflection point approaching in 2027, as factory-integrated autonomous trucks begin reaching fleets in greater numbers. Their note to clients says automation in trucking will lower operating costs, while longer operating hours could accelerate deliveries and shift market share toward larger carriers.

The analysts said that driverless trucking is already moving beyond technical demonstrations as developers expand routes, remove onboard safety observers and secure carrier commitments. The next test is whether carriers enter a mass-adoption supercycle to automate their fleets and drive down labor costs.

"We believe the debate has shifted from 'can autonomous trucking work?' to 'how quickly can it scale?'" the analysts said.

They continued, "We see compelling benefits for early adopters and eventual trucking industry consolidation, underwritten by the increasing rate of adoption as industry participants see autonomy as a driver of share gain tilting the capacity playing field to lower cost providers capable of driving longer routes in shorter timeframes better satisfying customer demand."

The analysts identified Aurora as the industry leader, citing expanded routes and operating conditions, customer contracts and the removal of safety observers from certain trucks in July. Kodiak targets observer removal by year-end, with Plus AI targeting driverless operations in 2027.

They noted that long-haul freight "represents the earliest commercial opportunity for autonomous trucking."

Here's how much carriers will save: 

Higher asset utilization… Autonomous trucks are not constrained by fatigue or federal hours-of-service regulations. The 10 hour Dallas to Phoenix route can be completed in 10 hours leveraging autonomy, vs human drivers facing an 8 continuous driving hour burden, and autonomous trucks have unlimited patience to wait out inclement weather as needed. Outside of fueling, charging, loading and maintenance, autonomous trucks can operate nearly continuously, with AUR citing a potential more than 2x increase in asset utilization for carriers.

... and lower operating costs... Early autonomous per mile rates cited by AUR and The American Transportation Research Institute show autonomous to be meaningfully cheaper than human drivers, with labor the single largest operating expense for most carriers. Cost savings are compounded by improved fuel efficiency and fewer at fault accidents reducing insurance costs, creating a secondary economic benefit beyond first order labor savings.

While solving for a structural labor problem...The American Trucking Association estimates the current US. truck driver shortage at over ~82k drivers, a growing gap due to rising freight demand and average driver age and retirement rates, with industry sources emphasizing that the challenge is increasingly one of driver quality and retention rather than simply the number of licensed drivers. 

For Tesla, the first step toward automation would likely be Semi trucks running supervised FSD with a human operator. The broader industry opportunity is fully driverless Class 8 adoption, which could begin next year as carriers seek to reduce driver labor costs and increase fleet utilization.

The pace of adoption will depend on safety and production of lidar, radar, and the computing needed for each truck.  

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/10/2026 - 20:30

Perfectly Timed AI Panic Resurrects 'Bipartisan AI Safety Bill'

A stalled bipartisan artificial intelligence safety bill has suddenly found new life on Capitol Hill - propelled by a combination of dire warnings from inside the industry's leading labs and a brewing grassroots revolt threatening Republicans in key midterm states.

According to a new report from Semafor, momentum is building for a Senate regulatory framework just as a conservative-led "AI Data Center Revolt" bus tour hits the road. Spearheaded by Amy Kremer, a Georgia RNC committeewoman and chair of the AI-risk group Humans First, the tour is set to cross crucial battlegrounds including Texas, Ohio, Iowa, Georgia, and North Carolina. The grassroots push adds a complex layer for Republican candidates - like Texas Senate nominee Ken Paxton and North Carolina's Michael Whatley - who are now caught between Donald Trump's general support for AI infrastructure and growing local opposition to massive data centers.

But in Washington, the sudden legislative urgency looks less like a grassroots miracle and more like a highly coordinated pressure campaign. After weeks of stalled negotiations, the Senate's leading vehicle for AI regulation - negotiated by Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Ted Cruz (R-TX), and Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) - is suddenly being positioned as the "only viable option" to pass before the end of the year.

What broke the legislative logjam was a perfectly timed, 48-hour media blast from the very labs the bill seeks to regulate.

Panic.exe

Here's how the situation unfolded. 

July 2026: OpenAI discloses that agents escaped a research sandbox, coordinated, and hacked Hugging Face. Within days, Reps. Ted Lieu (D) and Nathaniel Moran (R) drop the AI Kill Switch Act. Reps. Lori Trahan (D) and Jay Obernolte (R) introduce the FRONTIER Act - audits, incident reporting, and Commerce authority to restrict models judged to pose "imminent catastrophic risk."

Late July / August: Senate talks among Amy Klobuchar (D), Ted Cruz (R), and Majority Leader John Thune stall. Punchbowl reported the hang-up: Anthropic and Sen. Maria Cantwell wanted a more disclosure-heavy, stringent version than Republicans would accept. The bill appeared dead.

Then came the September surprise.

The Insider Blast

Sept 8-9, 2026: Jacob Coxon, a 27-year-old pretraining researcher who spent three years at OpenAI then four months at Anthropic, resigns and posts that both labs are "racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives."

"The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt."

The thread explodes to 100M+ views. Anthropic's own alignment-science lead, Evan Hubinger, replies on his own account: researchers "earnestly believe AI could kill all humans," and he personally puts the chance above 10% this decade. He adds Anthropic "do[es] not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and [is] not clearly on track to."

Not everyone thinks this is exactly organic: 

Seems like a setup

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 10, 2026

And as Josh Caplan of CAPITAL news points out, he still has equity in OpenAI...

Oh. pic.twitter.com/qU7FXiGljy

— Josh Caplan (@joshdcaplan) September 10, 2026

Sept 9: OpenAI's Chris Lehane publishes "The AI policy window is open. We need to act," calling for mandatory national capability-based safety rules and urging Congress to move before it adjourns. OpenAI says it is now supporting some California bills it previously declined.

Also Sept 9: Anthropic's economics team publishes "Scenarios for our Economic Future" - three paths to 2030. In the extreme one, GDP grows 15% a year, unemployment hits 11.9%, knowledge-worker wages fall more than 10%, and labor's share of GDP drops from about 60% to 45%.

🦔Anthropic published an economic model this week on how AI could affect the US economy by 2030. They ran three scenarios. In the modest one, AI has about the same impact as the internet. In the substantial one, GDP growth doubles but knowledge worker wages go flat. In the…

— Hedgie (@HedgieMarkets) September 9, 2026

The paper lands weeks ahead of an IPO expected at a reported $2 trillion valuation and alongside a $15 billion pre-IPO debt raise.

Regulatory Capture by Panic?

Sept 10, today: Semafor reports the Klobuchar-Cruz-Thune bill is suddenly "the only viable option" before 2027 and "may be introduced as early as next week." Klobuchar: "it's clear we need to act now and not wait." Cruz: working on legislation "to address catastrophic risks involving biological or nuclear threats." Frontier labs and advocacy groups are already feeding Hill staff on unreleased draft text. Bernie Sanders is teeing up a superintelligence ban and a briefing.

AND LOOK... in response to Coxon:

Meanwhile, others are pointing out that the post went extremely viral, extremely fast, for a 'nobody' account:

I don’t think this has ever happened for a post from a new account with almost no prior activity

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 10, 2026

So - years of the same warning, then two months of incidents that may or may not have been blown out of proportion, then a 48-hour media blast from inside the labs, then the stalled bipartisan bill is "the only viable option" and might drop next week.

The 48-hour news cycle created the exact permission structure required to resurrect the Klobuchar-Cruz-Thune bill. Meanwhile, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is threatening a hardline superintelligence ban, which strategically makes the bipartisan compromise appear perfectly moderate.

While the exact text remains unreleased, the live Senate vehicle reportedly focuses on giving the Commerce Department and DHS significant levers over frontier models while preempting the state patchwork.

That preemption is the crucial tell. For a year, Republicans have sought to block states like California and New York from creating their own disjointed audit regimes, while Democrats have demanded affirmative federal safety duties. Frontier incumbents like OpenAI and Anthropic - who are already feeding Hill staff on the draft text - stand to benefit massively from a unified federal floor. Mandatory audits, kill-switch requirements, and incident reporting create a massive compliance moat that smaller startups and open-weight projects cannot afford.

It appears the propaganda is working as the odds an AI Safety Bill being enacted before 2027 have shot up...

As Quoth The Raven opines further:

This (AI regulation) could create an interesting problem for markets (on top of the other catalysts that could cause an AI crash) because Wall Street has spent the last several years making an enormous bet on precisely the opposite outcome. The AI trade isn’t just a handful of technology stocks anymore. It encompasses semis, data centers, cloud infrastructure, networking equipment, electricity generation, utilities, natural gas, nuclear power, cooling equipment, construction and the enormous financing apparatus required to build all of it.

Hundreds of billions of dollars are being committed on the assumption that demand for computing power will continue rising at an extraordinary rate.

Embedded in that assumption is something investors haven’t had much reason to question: that frontier AI development will continue largely uninterrupted.

If Washington changes that assumption, even temporarily, the financial consequences could arrive much faster than the technological ones.

Imagine that increasingly capable models suddenly require federal approval, extensive testing or expensive certification before deployment. Imagine strict liability for certain failures, hard limits on autonomous capabilities or restrictions on training models beyond specified thresholds. An outright moratorium isn’t even necessary. The government would only need to make the timing and economics of future model development less certain.

Markets would then have to reconsider how much computing infrastructure will actually be needed, and how quickly. Data-center projections could come down. Semiconductor forecasts could follow. Electricity-demand estimates could be revised, infrastructure projects could be delayed and lenders could become less enthusiastic about financing projects whose expected returns have suddenly become harder to calculate. The effects would ripple far beyond the companies actually developing the models.

That’s particularly important because markets don’t wait for revenue to disappear before repricing an asset to the downside…just like they don’t wait for profits to price dogshit to the upside. The AI boom has produced enormous valuations because investors expect enormous future demand. Change the expected trajectory of that demand and those valuations can change remarkably quickly.

This doesn’t mean an AI safety bill would necessarily crash the market, nor does it mean regulation would be economically destructive over the long run. Clear rules could ultimately reduce uncertainty and make the industry healthier. A modest bill could also wind up having almost no effect on the pace of development. But a genuinely restrictive regime would introduce a risk that I don’t think the market has spent much time pricing at all.

That’s what makes the timing so interesting. For years, investors have treated faster AI development almost entirely as an economic positive: better models mean more chips, more data centers, more electricity, more software, more productivity and more investment. The safety argument introduces the possibility that faster development eventually becomes politically unacceptable. If lawmakers begin viewing frontier AI as a national-security or catastrophic-risk problem rather than simply another technological industry, the assumptions supporting the AI capital-spending boom could change very quickly.

That leaves us with a remarkable irony. Yesterday I argued that we may have a relatively narrow window in which humans can still meaningfully decide how far and how quickly this technology should advance. A day later, there are signs that Congress is beginning to have exactly that conversation. If the warnings coming from inside the AI industry are remotely accurate, lawmakers arguably have an obligation to take them seriously. But investors should also recognize what serious action could mean…that an AI crash could very well start on, or ahead of schedule.

We have spent years building valuations, infrastructure and investment plans around the assumption that the AI race will keep accelerating. If Washington suddenly decides the race needs a speed limit, AI itself may not be the first thing that breaks…the pure euphoria-fueled market built around its insane financial projections and financing circle jerks could be.

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/10/2026 - 20:15

Why Family-Run Grocers Are Suing New York Over City-Run Stores

Authored by Russ Jones via The Epoch Times,

Josefina Aguirre grew up among the piñatas hanging from the ceiling of Little Mexico Meat Market, the store her parents opened in New York City's El Barrio in 1997, three years after her father crossed the border from Mexico at 17.

She has a bachelor's degree in business management, a qualification her parents, Oscar and Guadalupe Aguirre, insisted on. But she came back to work at the store anyway - to the same three coolers of fresh cheese and cilantro, the same shelves of jalapeños and tomatillos, and the same customers who still bring in their mail so she can read it to them in English.

The store has survived the opening of a Costco nearby. It survived COVID-19, barely. Her father caught the virus and died before he ever got to enjoy the retirement he had worked 28 years for.

Now, Aguirre and her sisters, who run the shop together, are bracing for what they see as the biggest threat yet: a city-subsidized grocery store that can sell a $10 steak for $7, because, unlike them, it doesn't have to turn a profit.

"We're not scared of competition," Aguirre told The Epoch Times on Aug. 29 from behind the counter in Spanish Harlem. "We just want fair competition."

A dozen blocks south, Yessica Lezama hears the same fear from her parents. Benito and Carmen emigrated from Mexico and became U.S. citizens before opening El Pueblo Mexicano Grocery on Third Avenue 25 years ago. They were drawn to the stretch of neighborhood known for its Mexican community.

Lezama, 38, has worked with her parents for three years, serving the same customers and stocking the same shelves of fruits, vegetables, and Mexican products that have kept the store going for a generation.

"I think it will have a bad impact on sales," Lezama said of the mayor's grocery store plan. "Since we're a Mexican store, the city-run store won't sell the same products, but it will still hurt us."

Lezama said nearby business owners have formed an informal network to share information and support one another as the plan moves forward, meeting regularly to talk through their options.

"We help each other," she said. "It is hard enough already. We don't get a lot of help, and we're worried about going out of business."

Her parents are hoping to do more than just survive, Lezama said. They are working with a small-business association to modernize the store.

"My parents need help to make it more beautiful," she said.

2 Lawsuits, 1 Target

Aguirre is one of hundreds of small-business owners now represented in two lawsuits filed against New York City by the Multicultural Business Coalition, a group representing roughly 1,000 minority-owned bodegas, delis, and supermarkets. The group argues that Mayor Zohran Mamdani's plan to open city-run grocery stores will drive them out of business rather than help their neighborhoods.

The coalition filed a class-action complaint in the New York County Supreme Court on Aug. 24, alleging antitrust violations and predatory pricing, and a second suit the same day alleging that the city retaliated against members after they began organizing against the mayor's plan.

Together, the suits mark one of the most direct legal challenges yet to a marquee policy of Mamdani's first year in office.

The first complaint states, "The Defendants' municipal grocery stores deny the Class Members, hundreds of grocers, many small grocers equal protection, as they are not able to offer discounts that markedly depart from globalized commerce, thereby violating New York's Civil Rights Law."

The second suit states that the "opening of the underlying municipal grocery stores ... is diametrically opposed to the City's longstanding reasons for refusing to allow Walmart to operate grocery stores in the City: that the fallout from allowing Walmart to operate deep discount business, while bringing 'affordability,' further enriching a multibillion-dollar business, would eliminate an untold amount of opportunity for minority businesses, and small business at large."

Mamdani responded to the suits the same day they were filed.

"I'm confident in both the legality of this - that it will stand up in court - and the importance of delivering it," he said at an Aug. 24 news conference.

Frank Garcia, the coalition's chairman and head of the New York State Coalition of Hispanic Chambers of Commerce, said the mayor's confidence misses what's actually at stake for the coalition's members.

"My grandfather opened up one of the first bodegas in the late 1960s, when East Harlem was burning," he told The Epoch Times.

"I am proud to be following in his tradition, because what Mayor Mamdani is doing is disgracing his memory."

Inside the $70 Million Plan

Under the plan, first unveiled last year, the city will spend $70 million to open five publicly owned grocery stores, one in each borough, offering staples at prices roughly 30 percent below market rate.

The stores won't sell beer, cigarettes, or lottery tickets and will be designed to keep prices low rather than turn a profit. The goal, Mamdani has said, is to make food more affordable in neighborhoods with high poverty rates and limited access to full-service supermarkets.

The Bronx location, in an affordable housing complex in Hunts Point, is expected to open in 2027. The East Harlem store will be located at the 9,000-square-foot marketplace La Marqueta and is projected to open in 2029, according to city officials.

Mamdani has repeatedly defended the initiative.

"I continue to be fully confident in both the legality and the importance of our initiative to deliver five city-run grocery stores, one in each borough, to the people of our city," he said in a statement in July, noting that grocery prices in the city have climbed by roughly 30 percent in recent years and that City Hall could also ease regulations to help existing store owners in the meantime.

Garcia said the coalition tried repeatedly to meet with Mamdani before filing suit, without success, and that the city moved ahead without ever conducting an economic impact study.

"Why are they going against immigrant business owners who can't speak English and defend themselves?" Garcia said. "I don't see that the mayor is being fair."

Mark Jaffe, general counsel for the Multicultural Business Coalition and president of the Greater New York Chamber of Commerce, told The Epoch Times that the city's plan goes further than officials have admitted.

"Their plan is to eventually put every independent store owner out of business," Jaffe said. "And if you're lucky, maybe they'll give you a job."

When he pressed city officials for details on how the stores would actually be run, he said, he got no real answer.

"We asked what the business plan was," Jaffe said. "They told us, 'We don't need a plan, because the people we select will be responsible for coming up with the plan.'"

Jaffe also questioned whether a single store per borough would even reach the people Mamdani says he wants to help.

"Who is this really going to serve?" he said. "By the time you get on the train and spend two hours traveling, you're paying more" than you would have shopping at a neighborhood store.

An Economist's Warning

Economists are divided on what the lawsuits and the underlying policy mean for the city's food supply chain.

Christian Briggs, a political and economic analyst who has advised members of Congress, argued that the plan fits a broader pattern of government expansion into private markets.

"This is a manmade takeover of the food supply system," Briggs told The Epoch Times, comparing the initiative to nationalization efforts he attributed to past presidential administrations.

He noted that grocery stores typically run on net margins of just 4 percent to 5 percent, making a government-subsidized competitor selling goods 30 percent below market what he called "the beginning of the nationalization of our food chain supply system."

Briggs also predicted that despite the coalition's legal argument, consumer behavior would ultimately favor the city-run stores.

"'Free' is the most powerful word in the English language," he said, likening the grocery plan to the long-term trajectory of entitlement programs.

"The lawsuits are valid. They're justified. But in the end, you will not win over the word 'free,' because voters love free."

'Using Taxpayer Money'

Back at Little Mexico Meat Market, Aguirre said the math is simple and unforgiving. Her margin on a $10 steak helps cover her mortgage, her children's tuition, her rent, and utilities.

A city-run competitor selling the same steak for $7, funded by taxpayers rather than sales, doesn't have to make that math work.

"He can afford it because he's using taxpayer money," Aguirre said. "We don't have any help. Loans have been made difficult to get."

She and her sisters have quietly begun discussing plan B, such as teaching or other careers, or anything that doesn't mean losing more of what their father built before he died. That loss follows her behind the register every day - behind the same counter where her father used to stand.

"Is it fair for me to leave and start a new career?" Aguirre asked.

It's not a question she wants to answer. Not yet, anyway.

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/10/2026 - 20:05

Citi Says LatAm "Poised For Take-Off" As Powerful Tailwinds Align. Here's Why

Our focus on South America's improving investment outlook, underpinned by a generational shift from left-wing governments to more business-friendly governments, gained support Thursday from Citi's report, "LatAm Poised for Take-Off: The Macro Cycle Turns Latin America's Way."

Citi chief Latin America economist Ernesto Revilla wrote in a note earlier today that a right-wing political shift is serving as a tailwind alongside a weaker dollar, firm commodity prices, and global supply-chain realignment, while stressing that lasting gains depend on reforms and execution. 

Here is Revilla's take on improving LatAM markets: 

Latin America is entering one of its most favorable environments in years, with external and domestic conditions supporting a potential acceleration in growth. The global economy has remained resilient despite recent shocks, while a weaker U.S. dollar and firm commodity prices provide important tailwinds for the region. Latin America is also benefiting from shifting trade patterns, standing out as one of the few regions gaining import market share from both the U.S. and China. At the same time, stronger macroeconomic management, improving policy frameworks, and a more business-friendly political backdrop in several countries are strengthening the investment case. In this report, we examine whether these forces can translate into sustained growth and market outperformance. Our conclusion is clear: the opportunity is significant, but lasting success will depend on reforms, execution, and policy consistency.

Latin America is poised for take-off. Or to be more precise: the conditions for Latin America to achieve a higher rate of growth are the best they have been in decades, and it is time to capitalize on the opportunity.

The last time the region achieved a sustained acceleration in growth was from 2003-2008. Back then, a weak dollar (USD) and strong commodity prices combined to form the backdrop for growth. Those conditions, and more, are present again today.

Still, the development misfortune of Latin America is how little (or no) convergence it has achieved toward higher income levels. Convergence is the expectation that an emerging market will achieve higher growth rates to catch up to developed markets. As a region, Latin America has achieved little sustained convergence over the past 120 years. Consider that in 1990, LatAm's GDP per capita as a share of the U.S. was 28%; in 2024, it was 26.4%. Other regions, particularly Emerging Asia, have achieved significant rates of growth and convergence.

When looking at different eras of growth and development for Latin America, it is not easy to extract common characteristics of high growth episodes. Generally, one would expect that strong commodity prices, domestic political stability or at least policy continuity, and pragmatic governments are minimum conditions. Latin America has those again today. However, history shows that there were periods of strong growth without particularly strong commodity prices (1950 to 1973), or strong investment (the commodities boom of the 2000s).

However, the common denominator across eras when Latin America has achieved high growth and convergence (an increase in its GDP per capita as a share of the U.S. GDP per capita) is when the USD has been weak. This is because a weak USD implies easier financial conditions for emerging markets: Capital flows increase searching for stronger currencies and returns, debt repayment is cheaper, and commodity prices move higher. Right now, the global economy is facing a weak(er) USD regime that has benefited Latin America, and that for various reasons might be expected to continue in the medium term.

The region is enjoying many other tailwinds as well. Commodity prices, and hence terms of trade for the region, are the highest they have been since the supercycle of the 2000s. Latin America has benefited from the global trade reconfiguration as it has been one of the few places in the world that has gained market share both in China and in the U.S. since 2016 when trade tensions started. This is due in part to the extraordinary geographic advantage that Latin America enjoys, being far away from geopolitical conflict, and its possession of large reserves of the minerals and commodities that a world in flux demands. The nearshoring of manufacturing finds the region ideally positioned. Macro management in the region has matured as the successful fight against post-pandemic inflation demonstrates, even ahead of other developed and emerging markets.

The political cycle is a tailwind as well with a turn towards governments that are more explicitly business-friendly and reform-oriented. The right-wing turn, additionally, better aligns the region with a U.S. that is more active in the region at a time when increased foreign investment and attention is being focused on the region.

Despite the many tailwinds that are aligning in favor of the region, growth is not yet accelerating. Growth remains resilient but low, stuck around the 2% trend, below potential and what is needed to escape the non-convergence trap. That is why we see the current period as one of opportunity but not one of a guaranteed era of success. The bull case does not rest on current growth, but on valuation, level of currencies, carry, terms of trade, policy credibility, and the serendipitous combination of favorable factors not seen in more than a decade. Opportunity is there but needs to be captured through action and reforms.

There are challenges of course. We discuss in depth the fiscal one, which in a number of countries requires forceful action amid political constraints and institutional rigidities. We do not discuss others, such as the complex security situation, which has been on top of mind for voters in the region.

Not all favorable circumstances will be in place forever, and some of them are beyond LatAm's control. That is, some of the tailwinds are cyclical, not structural, and some depend on external circumstances, not internal ones. However, across modern Latin American history it is hard to find episodes when a set of positive factors combine serendipitously to set the stage for a higher level of growth and convergence. The stakes for 660 million people living in the region, for investors leveraged to the region's future, and for future generations are high. It also underpins the political stability of the western hemisphere.

This Citi Research report digs deep into the current set of positive factors surrounding Latin America, discusses macro, trade, fiscal and productivity dimensions, and discusses investment implications across asset classes. We are proud to welcome the perspectives of the region's heads of Banking and Wealth as well to add to our view.

Latin America is in the right place, at the right time.

The MSCI Emerging Markets Latin America Index is testing a breakout above a price ceiling that has capped several rallies since roughly 2014. The red dashed line marks resistance near 3,000, where advances stalled around 2017-19. The circled area shows the latest rally pushing back above that level.

The key question is whether 3,000 becomes a new support level, given the political tailwinds from recent elections that have shifted much of the continent to the right after years of failed progressive experiments.

The next big election to watch is Brazil (read the latest report).

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/10/2026 - 19:40

Sinopec Sees China Oil Demand Falling 8.9% in 2026

By Charles Kennedy of OilPrice.com

China’s Sinopec, the world’s top refiner by capacity, expects Chinese oil demand to drop by 8.9% in 2026 from a year earlier amid demand destruction from higher oil prices and the acceleration of electric vehicle adoption.

Oil demand in the world’s biggest crude oil importer is expected to drop by 600,000 barrels per day (bpd) on average this year compared to last year, according to estimates by Sinopec’s research arm quoted by Reuters.

Gasoline demand is set for an 8.7% decline, while diesel consumption is expected to crash by 11.4%, Sinopec Economics & Development Research Institute says.

The only petroleum product used in transportation that would see an increase is jet fuel, whose demand is expected to increase by 1.3% this year compared to 2025.

The high oil and fuel prices amid the Iran war accelerated the structural shift toward EVs this year, eating into the road transportation fuel demand.

China has managed the Strait of Hormuz crisis better than most expectations as it slashed its imports of crude oil and temporarily banned fuel exports in the spring and early summer.

The high oil prices destroyed some demand and sped up the adoption of EVs, which has been growing anyway in recent years, suppressing total oil demand even without blocked crude supplies in the Middle East.

Amid falling road fuel demand, Sinopec, or China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation as it is officially known, is looking to transform its business.

Sinopec will be allocating more capital to new energy and chemicals by the end of the decade to grow revenues and profits amid the lowest domestic fuel sales in China in nearly a decade.

In its first-half earnings release, Sinopec flagged falling domestic fuel sales, which have been weighing on the company’s earnings for two years now.

“Due to the dampening effect of high oil prices on demand and accelerated substitution by new energy, domestic refined oil products consumption declined by 8.6% year on year, among which gasoline decreased by 7.9%, diesel decreased by 11.5%, while jet fuel (kerosene) rose by 1.3% driven by holiday travel and the recovery of international routes,” Sinopec said in its press release.

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

Several US Warplanes Damaged In This Week's Iranian Attack On Base In Jordan: Report

The Iranian ballistic missile attack on an American base in Jordan this week ranks as one of the single biggest missile volleys sent over Jordan since the start of the US-led war.

The Tuesday night into Wednesday attack targeted Muwaffaq Salti Air Base, multiple international reports say. Widely shared but unconfirmed social media videos appeared to show several direct impacts on the base. But at least some of the images have been authenticated by outlets like Dropsite News.

Source: USAF

US Central Command (CENTCOM) sought to downplay the attack, saying initially that all troops were account for, but not immediately divulging whether casualties resulted. 

Since then, the Pentagon has said that no deaths resulted from the strikes on Jordan, during which time over 30 Patriot missiles were deployed as an aerial defensive measure.

While the Pentagon has remained mum on specifics, officials have acknowledged light material damage at the base.

New reporting from CBS says that several US military aircraft were damaged in the attack, based on anonymous defense officials, with at least one warplane being knocked out of commission:

Multiple American military aircraft were damaged in Iranian strikes overnight Tuesday into Wednesday local time on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, people with direct knowledge of the matter told CBS News. 

One A-10 Thunderbolt, an attack aircraft known as the Warthog, was struck and lost a wing, the sources said. 

Roughly eight F-15s sustained light damage and were reportedly put back into service, according to the people familiar with the damage, who spoke to CBS News under the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

Video shared by Iran’s Tasnim News Agency purportedly shows multiple Iranian missiles striking Jordan’s Muwaffaq al-Salti Air Base as dozens of air-defense interceptors are fired. Drop Site has not independently verified the video. pic.twitter.com/YB0yMuSWLU

— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) September 9, 2026

If the report is accurate, this means that clearly a number of missiles got through the dozens of Patriots launched to intercept. In summary...

• Around eight F-15s reportedly suffered damage, while an A-10 Warthog was struck and lost a wing
• US forces fired more than 30 Patriot missiles during the attack, costing over $126 million

Unconfirmed video: "The US Army is transferring Black Hawk helicopters from the American Muwaqqaf Al-Salti base in Jordan, including damaged helicopters."

الجيش الأميركي ينقل مروحيات بلاك هوك من قاعدة موفق السلطي الأميركية بالأردن، بينها مروحيات متضررة. pic.twitter.com/mNO7PT0fjo

— Ali BKK (@cameliaii32) September 9, 2026

Dozens of expensive aircraft, including large refuelers, have been destroyed by Iran's 'retaliation' throughout Operation Epic Fury as part of its 'debasifaction' campaign.

This has led to a broad retreat of US forces from 'frontline' Gulf bases, which may actually never be fully reconstituted again, or even rebuilt.

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/10/2026 - 18:50

Trump Broadens Interior's Role In National Energy Emergencies

Authored by Tom Gantert via The Epoch Times,

President Donald Trump expanded the number of Cabinet officials who can independently exercise emergency powers involving the nation's energy supplies for the second time in six months.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum testifies on Capitol Hill on April 29, 2026. Madalina Kilroy/The Epoch Times

An executive order issued Sept. 8 gives the interior secretary authority under the Defense Production Act that had previously rested largely with the energy secretary. Trump added the energy secretary alongside the commerce secretary under a similar provision in March.

Before March, the commerce secretary held authority under one provision intended to maximize energy supplies. Trump's action Tuesday leaves the three officials independently authorized to act on energy-related matters under the Defense Production Act.

The Defense Production Act, created five years after the end of World War II, allows the president to tell private companies to give federal contracts priority over private-sector customers. It also allows the president to provide financial incentives to increase the supply of materials and technologies considered vital to national defense. Congress has reauthorized the law more than 50 times since its enactment in 1950.

The Interior Department oversees federal lands and waters containing significant energy and mineral resources. Its agencies administer onshore oil and gas leasing and production, while the interior secretary approves the five-year schedule for offshore oil and gas lease sales. The department's energy portfolio also includes coal, critical minerals, geothermal energy, and wind and solar development on public lands.

The new order gives the interior and energy secretaries independent authority to require that certain energy-related contracts receive priority and to allocate energy resources when necessary to support national defense.

The order also establishes a process for resolving disagreements between the two departments. Energy-related disputes between the interior and energy secretaries will be referred to the National Energy Dominance Council. Disputes involving national defense infrastructure or military operations will be referred to the National Energy Dominance Council and the National Security Council while coordinating with the Department of War.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, a former North Dakota governor, also chairs the White House National Energy Dominance Council. In March, Burgum went to Venezuela to meet with leader Delcy Rodriguez to discuss investments and expansion of the country's natural resources.

Nearly six months later, Trump announced a deal with Venezuela to take control of 65 billion barrels from Venezuela's oil reserves. Trump said the deal was a partnership of private businesses and was brokered by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth while working with Rodriguez.

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/10/2026 - 18:25

Right-Wing Bolsonaro Overtakes Socialist Lula On Polymarket As Brazil Election Nears

Polymarket's "Brazil Presidential Election" market, with nearly $150 million in trading volume, now favors right-wing Senator Flávio Bolsonaro over leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva ahead of October's election. The shift follows polling data released earlier this week showing Bolsonaro pulling ahead in a hypothetical runoff, although the candidates remain statistically tied within the margin of error.

Bolsonaro took the lead on Polymarket around 8:20 a.m. ET, and by early Thursday afternoon, he stood at around 52.8% versus Lula's 44%.

On Tuesday, the BTG Pactual/Nexus survey showed that Bolsonaro had edged ahead of Lula for the first time. This comes as a deepening Supreme Court scandal strengthens the conservative challenger's campaign.

As the gap between Bolsonaro and Lula narrowed in recent weeks and the race became a toss-up, we pointed out an "explosive surge" in call open interest in the iShares MSCI Brazil ETF (EWZ).

And someone appears to be making a huge bet on just that: explosive surge in EWZ call OI https://t.co/nqFaGgms4R pic.twitter.com/uen9bXmqBw

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) September 8, 2026

On Thursday, Citi chief Latin America economist Ernesto Revilla told clients that Latin America is "poised for take-off," as a right-wing political shift across the continent, a weaker dollar, firm commodity prices, and global supply-chain realignment were producing tailwinds for the region.

Also this week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio kicked off his South America tour on Tuesday, first meeting with Trump-backed Colombian President Abelardo de la Espriella to strengthen security and economic ties as several countries in the region shift toward right-wing governments. 

A Bolsonaro victory would cement South America's broader shift from unhinged left-wing regimes toward the common-sense right.

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/10/2026 - 18:00