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The University of Arizona suspended the Sigma Tau Gamma fraternity after pledges were forced to eat goldfish and drink excessive amounts of alcohol.

Racism plagues American health care — reverse racism.

The Commercial Real Estate Crash Is Moving From Paper Losses To Realized Losses

The great commercial real estate waiting game may finally be running out of time, according to Bloomberg.

For years after Covid fundamentally changed how Americans use office space, lenders and property owners managed to postpone much of the financial damage. Loans were modified, maturities were pushed out and buildings were given more time to recover. The basic assumption was that eventually interest rates would come down, employees would spend more time downtown and refinancing markets would reopen.

Instead, many owners are reaching the end of the runway with rates still elevated and buildings worth dramatically less than the debt sitting against them.

Chicago’s Aon Center offers an almost absurd illustration. The 83-story skyscraper changed hands for $712 million in 2015 and was subsequently refinanced, with $536 million of debt eventually packaged into commercial mortgage-backed securities. Today, after losing important tenants, the building is worth nowhere near that amount. Its latest appraisal came in at just $195 million — a decline of roughly 73% from its 2015 purchase price.

Bloomberg writes that when the debt matured in July, the owner couldn’t repay it and sought another three years to sort things out. This time the lender wasn’t interested. The request was “unequivocally denied.”

Situations like this are beginning to pile up across the country. Office loans packaged into CMBS are now delinquent at a 12% rate, according to Trepp. That puts distress near an all-time high and, remarkably, beyond the levels seen in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Meanwhile, approximately $64 billion of office CMBS loans come due this year and next. Nearly $40 billion of that pile is already delinquent, in default or flagged as potentially troubled.

But this isn’t one uniform nationwide office collapse.

New York has been surprisingly resilient, with finance, law and technology companies still competing for desirable space. San Francisco, despite enormous problems left over from the pandemic, has received a new source of demand from the AI boom.

Other cities have considerably less working in their favor. Chicago’s downtown office vacancy rate is roughly 27%. Denver’s has reached an astonishing 39%. Los Angeles and several other downtown markets are also struggling, especially in areas dominated by older office stock.

There’s also increasingly a tale of two office markets within individual cities. Companies willing to spend money on office space generally want newer buildings, good locations and modern amenities. That leaves yesterday’s Class B towers fighting over a shrinking pool of tenants while their economics deteriorate.

And some of the repricing has been brutal.

Denver’s Republic Plaza has lost roughly 80% of its value compared with when Brookfield financed the property in 2012. Chicago’s Citadel Center recently changed hands for $137 million, approximately 76% below what the building sold for in 2006. The situation is bad enough that CoStar expects roughly 11.5 million square feet of Chicago-area office space to simply disappear through demolition by 2031.

Even those enormous valuation declines may understate what lenders ultimately recover.

Distressed office properties sold this year have fetched prices roughly 20% below their latest appraisals, according to Deutsche Bank research cited in the report. In other words, marking a building down dramatically on paper doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve marked it down enough.

There is, however, another side to the collapse. Once prices fall far enough, someone eventually decides the risk is worth taking. That process is now beginning. Investors are stepping into buildings at fractions of their former valuations, effectively resetting the cost basis of properties that made little economic sense at yesterday’s prices.

The same 601W connected to the troubled Aon Center recently bought Chicago’s 175 West Jackson Boulevard for only $41 million, nearly 90% below its pre-Covid sale price. Elsewhere in Chicago, investors acquired the debt behind another major tower for around $100 million, roughly 76% below the building’s previous purchase price.

That’s probably the most important part of what is happening now. An office recovery doesn’t necessarily require these buildings to regain anything close to their old valuations. It requires the old valuations to finally die.

For years, the industry could avoid discovering what many of these buildings were actually worth because lenders kept extending loans and owners kept waiting. As maturities arrive and extensions become harder to obtain, those theoretical losses increasingly have to become actual ones.

And only after that happens can buildings move into new hands at prices that make sense in the post-Covid world. As Polpo Capital’s Dan McNamara put it: “One of the scariest headlines is that office CMBS delinquencies are higher than after 2008.”

“And it’s going to go higher as we face more maturities.”

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/26/2026 - 11:05

Barbara Esposito-Mattera allegedly ingested the unwanted topping after she ordered a sub from Yella’s at SUNY Delhi, located in the Catskills, in September 2025.

Axel, a deaf 3-year-old Dogo Argentino who knows over 50 commands, is deploying with the Michigan National Guard as a ministry dog.

LA Councilwoman Katy Yaroslavsky is pushing to create a city agency that would turn more than 9,000 underused properties into housing and jobs.

The NTSB said the accident happened during the initial climb and identified the key event as a loss of control in flight.

Quantum Computing Flees Europe

Authored by Thomas Kolbe via American Thinker,

Caught between climate regulation and catastrophic energy-policy decisions, a growing number of high-tech companies in the EU are packing up and leaving. Through stock-market deals, two top quantum-computing companies, IQM and Pasqal, are gradually moving toward the United States. The bleeding of the European economy is now being accepted with remarkable resignation.

Not a week goes by without another disaster report from the economy. In the first half of the year, the German economy recorded a record number of insolvencies -- the highest insolvency figures since 2013. Thousands of industrial jobs are being eliminated as a result, and the economy continues to bleed. A political course correction toward strengthening the economic foundation still appears impossible. And this is only the beginning: the stranglehold of expensive climate policy, the restriction of fossil-fuel energy supplies, and rising regulatory costs are acting like an accelerant on the businesses of the euro economy. Those who can leave, do.

What is happening in Germany is being repeated elsewhere: in Finland, for example, where the company IQM is taking the leap onto the U.S. stock market. IQM specializes in superconducting quantum computers and develops the quantum processors required for them. The systems are being developed for research, high-performance computing, and industrial applications. The company merged with Real Asset Acquisition Corp., a kind of American shell company, and in early July moved to the Nasdaq under the ticker IQMX with a valuation of around $1.8 billion. This is not a classic sale of the company to the Americans -- the existing owners received no cash payment but remained invested in the company. However, this changes little about the outcome: capital, market power, and an increasing share of control over the company’s strategy will, in the future, be rooted in the United States -- American patents, American knowledge of future technologies, made in Europe.

A look at France shows a similar development. This is where Pasqal is based, a spin-off of the Institut d'Optique, founded in 2019. While global players such as IBM and Google rely on superconducting circuits, Pasqal found a different approach: the highly specialized team traps individual rubidium atoms with focused laser beams -- so-called optical tweezers -- inside vacuum chambers and arranges them in precise 2D and 3D lattices. With this principle, the company’s researchers appear to have succeeded in avoiding the production errors that have plagued other qubit technologies so far. The discovered method makes it considerably easier to scale the technology to ever larger numbers of qubits. Knowledge is power, especially in high technology. Given its complexity, the company’s innovation is probably only fully understandable to a few specialists.

Pasqal’s systems are going to data centers such as the Jülich Research Centre and to the Saudi energy giant Aramco. The applications extend across industries -- from energy company EDF to major bank Crédit Agricole, for which the race for cryptography and security technology has long since begun. From logistics optimization and materials simulation to risk analysis -- Pasqal is competing right at the forefront across the board.

One of the company’s co-founders was Alain Aspect, the French physicist who received the Nobel Prize in 2022 together with John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger for verifying the quantum entangelment of photons, thereby laying the scientific foundation for modern quantum technology. It is a good example of how university research and technological development can become intertwined at the corporate level. Yet as capital increasingly flows from the EU to America, these pillars of European academic and corporate culture are gradually disappearing.

In the case of Pasqal, the acquisition of the company by the shell company Bleichroeder Acquisition Corp. II on August 28 paved the way for its know-how to cross the Atlantic. The company is currently valued at around $2 billion -- but this is likely to be only a snapshot; its potential is enormous. With its patents, research results, and academic substance, Europe is losing its intellectual foundation -- all the more serious because the continent is energy-poor, politically cornered, and steering aimlessly through uncertain waters. Europe is simply no longer attractive enough for cutting-edge research, top-tier capital, and top talent.

Why, then, is quantum computing currently on everyone’s lips?

Quantum computing -- as demonstrated by the determination with which the American economy has gone hunting for patents -- is far more than merely the next step in conventional computer technology. Conventional computers think in switches: on or off, zero or one. Every bit is like a tiny lamp that is either lit or dark. Quantum machines, by contrast, work with qubits. These can not only be on or off, but both at the same time -- as well as infinitely many states in between, until the system is measured and the final result is determined. Through entanglement, qubits can be connected in such a way that the state of one immediately determines the state of the other -- regardless of how far apart they are. Where a classical computer checks one path after another, a quantum computer explores dozens, thousands, theoretically millions of paths simultaneously.

That does not make them better everyday computers. For texts, spreadsheets, or videos, the classical computer remains superior. But for tasks where the challenge is to find the right combination among astronomically many possibilities -- simulating new molecules, optimizing logistics networks, or breaking encryption -- a fundamental advantage emerges. In strategy papers from the United States, China, and the EU, quantum computing is explicitly identified as a key technology that will significantly advance fields such as materials research, pharmaceuticals, and cryptography.

Whoever controls the key technologies of the future controls global markets and gains geopolitical influence.

It is all the more tragic to see that in the EU, there has so far been little resistance, politically but also from within the business community, to ideologically driven, technology-hostile policies. The EU area now lacks almost all the conditions required to attract brilliant minds to high technology, encourage new companies to be founded, and enable investment and settlement in future-oriented clusters such as robotics, quantum computing, or artificial intelligence. Europe has specialized in saving the climate, and many on the continent seem indifferent to deindustrialization and the slowly emerging impoverishment of society. But Europe is facing Ayn Rand’s final bombshell: You can ignore reality, but you cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/26/2026 - 10:30

If you can attain that state where you see it all anew, let me ask you this: Would you vote for Ohtani as National League MVP?

With ESPN's "College GameDay" also on campus, Trump's presence typically is expected to cause heightened security in Knoxville.

Starbucks plans to close 64 locations across California, shuttering coffee shops from the Bay Area and Sacramento down to Los Angeles and San Diego.

A Good Samaritan exterminator stepped up this week where the NYC Parks Department refused -- by killing off a massive hornet’s nest terrifying a Queens neighborhood.

Russia has hammered Ukraine with cruise and ballistic missiles, powerful glide bombs and jet-powered drones while front-line progress has slowed, some 4½-years after Moscow launched a full-scale invasion of its neighbor.

“Shawn ‘Jay-Z’ Carter never raped me. I have never met or spoken to Mr. Carter,” the woman, who has remained anonymous and is identified as Jane Doe, said in a declaration filed Thursday in Manhattan federal court.

“Shawn ‘Jay-Z’ Carter never raped me. I have never met or spoken to Mr. Carter,” the woman, who has remained anonymous and is identified as Jane Doe, said in a declaration filed Thursday in Manhattan federal court.

Bill Belichick had a plus-one for a recent scouting trip.

Earlier this year, Akerman was equally effusive while dishing on Margo to Page Six.

Earlier this year, Akerman was equally effusive while dishing on Margo to Page Six.

Watch out for the men in black.

China got more than a lump of coal out of President Xi Jinping's White House meeting with President Trump, with plans to purchase $10 billion metric tons of the resource.