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Judge orders DOJ to unredact more Epstein files, says Todd Blanche ‘conceded’ violating Transparency Law
Warships, Helicopters, Transport Planes: US Military Shifts Assets To Quake-Ravaged Venezuela
Venezuela's massive twin-earthquake disaster, which unfolded on Wednesday evening, has left dozens of apartment towers and other structures in ruins. The death toll has climbed to about 235, with at least 4,300 people injured. On one independent monitoring platform, the number of missing topped 50,000 overnight.
The sheer scale of the disaster across several districts of Caracas has prompted an international response, with the U.S. Southern Command deploying military assets to the quake-ravaged country. The disaster also marks a major test for acting President Delcy Rodríguez in a post-Maduro world.
SOUTHCOM is deploying the USS Fort Lauderdale, USS Billings, C-17 and C-130 transport aircraft, reconnaissance platforms, helicopters, and other mobility assets to assist U.S. personnel, search-and-rescue teams, and interagency partners as they assess damage, locate survivors, and deliver emergency aid.
📍#UnitedStates / #Venezuela (🇺🇸/🇻🇪)@Southcom Commander Gen. Francis L. Donovan has announced the following assets have been mobilized:
- USS Fort Lauderdale (LPD-28)
- USS Billings (LCS-15)
- C-17 Globemaster
- C-130 Hercules
- Reconnaissance Platforms
- Rotary-wing aircraft. https://t.co/TDnKgkncj9 pic.twitter.com/umxFmofs95
SOUTHCOM noted that it will "work closely with interim Venezuelan authorities to plan, coordinate, and direct the U.S. military's unparalleled logistical and operational capabilities in support of rapid relief operations across the affected areas."
Earthquake relief support from the sea:
The @USNavy has a proud legacy of providing disaster relief directly from the sea.#SOUTHCOM has directed USS Fort Lauderdale (LPD 28) and USS Billings (LCS 15) to Venezuela to support @DeptofState-led U.S. government relief operations in… pic.twitter.com/z1JJ0aLjSl
The open-source intelligence X account, TheIntelFrog, reports that US airlift operations have begun.
The US response to the earthquake disaster in Venezuela is well underway.
📍The first related C-17, #AE1449 as RCH234, arrived in Curacao overnight.
📍#AE2FA6 as RCH525 is en route with members of USA-02 urban search & rescue team.
📍#AE07F8 as RCH421 is en route with members of… pic.twitter.com/4mznPCySI7
Boots on the ground.
RELEASE: SOUTHCOM Leadership Arrives in Venezuela to Coordinate Earthquake Relief Support
U.S. Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Kevin J. Jarrard arrived in Caracas, Venezuela, today, to oversee Department of War support to Venezuela earthquake relief efforts.
Maj. Gen. Jarrard is serving… pic.twitter.com/sCIhyuI63L
Con velocidad, precisión y una capacidad logística incomparable, equipos de EE. UU. se están desplegando para apoyar las operaciones de respuesta tras los devastadores terremotos en Venezuela. Esta noche recibimos en Caracas al Mayor General Jarrard, quien coordinará estos… pic.twitter.com/u7b7poZZfj
— Embajada de los EE.UU. en Caracas (@usembassyve) June 26, 2026U.S. military rotary-wing aircraft have proven to be lifelines during multiple disaster relief missions. #SOUTHCOM is sending rotary-wing aircraft to support @StateDept-led U.S. government earthquake relief operations in Venezuela.
These aircraft will provide critical… pic.twitter.com/IqNgJmQTkk
In a post-socialist, post-Maduro world, Rodríguez faces a once-in-a-generation natural disaster crisis that will likely shape the future of her administration after January's Delta Force operation to remove Nicolás Maduro from power. An effective and powerful response will certaintly help and increase popularity.
For Rodríguez, "the emergency is simultaneously a risk and an opportunity," Venezuelan political analyst Benigno Alarcón said in a report quoted by Bloomberg. If the response is rapid and transparent, "the interim government can recover performance legitimacy. If it is opaque, militarized, exclusionary, or corrupt, the social cost, international pressure, and the probability of fractures will increase."
Tyler Durden Fri, 06/26/2026 - 08:20IAEA Chief Confirms Nuclear Inspectors Returning To Iran, No Timeline Given
For the first time since the US-Iran MoU was signed earlier this month, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) announced it will have access to Iran for official inspections of the country's nuclear facilities.
However, a precise timeline for when the inspections are expected to commence was not given. "There is an agreement and to comply with that agreement, the IAEA will have to have access and inspect,” UN nuclear watchdog chief Rafael Grossi said at a news conference in Japan. "We hope to be there soon."
"The inspections will indeed take place," he emphasized to reporters. "We will be working on the modalities - dates, procedures, places - very soon."
via AFPThe agreement signed last week said "explicitly" that the dilution of Iran's highly enriched uranium would be carried out under IAEA supervision, he added.
But importantly, Tehran has in the last days made its position clear that it will keep key sites off-limits until a final deal with Washington is reached and sanctions are lifted.
US chief negotiator in Switzerland, JD Vance, came away insisting that the IAEA will soon return - which Iranian officials have contradicted.
Grossi had further stated in his Friday remarks that the Iranians' pledge to not pursue a nuclear weapon would need "very strong" verification.
But he also conceded that thus far the UN agency itself had "barely initiated" talks with Iran on the heels of the formalized MoU agreement with the United States.
"I think the objective of this agreement is to ensure that there is no development of nuclear weapons in Iran. The government of Iran has declared quite clearly that this is not their intention," Grossi continued.
"But of course intentions are not enough. We have to have a very strong verification system in place... as soon as is practicable," he added.
The US administration has so far said that it is not prepared to budge on this issue of thorough inspections. Ironically the 2015 JCPOA under Obama, which Trump has frequently lambasted, included just such an inspection regimen.
“It's not over yet, but so far, so good.”
Vice President JD Vance praised President Trump's handling of Iran at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, arguing the administration has stayed focused on its original mission despite outside pressure.
Vance said Trump's objective… pic.twitter.com/Ab56zctHzo
It remains to be seen whether the US can get a better inspection deal in place, or whether any new scenario will fall short of the prior JCPOA. Tehran sees itself in a strong position, and won't so easily accept demands which it deems as giving too much to the US and Israel.
Tyler Durden Fri, 06/26/2026 - 08:05‘Infuriated’ Jenni ‘JWoww’ Farley addresses wedding guest list drama after snubbing ‘Jersey Shore’ co-stars
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Russia Says It Downed Almost 700 Ukrainian Drones In Massive Overnight Barrage As Fuel Shortages Worsen
Russia's Defense Ministry claimed Friday morning that the military intercepted at least 660 Ukrainian drones across the country and Crimea, in what shaped up to be one of the most massive overnight aerial assaults since the 2022 invasion began. Drones being sent across the border in the hundreds has become a nightly, highly escalatory affair of late.
Anti-air defenses in the capital region were busy, with Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin confirming that at least 47 inbound drones on a were downed starting around 2:30am local time. Sobyanin reported no casualties or structural damage, stating only that emergency services were working at the sites of fallen debris. This month has already witnessed several instances of major airport closures among the capital's four commercial hubs.
If Russia did indeed down around 660 drones, this means there there was possibly over a thousand initially launched, given the intercept rate is typically less than the amount of UAV's which make it through. This has been the pattern from both sides of the border.
Illustrative: Low-flying suicide drones have defined much of this war, wreaking havoc on both sides.Drone injures and strikes were reported outside the capital region though. For example in the Tula region, over 110 miles to the south of Moscow, Governor Dmitry Milyayev announced that a woman was wounded during the strike.
He also described that an "industrial facility" was struck in the town of Novomoskovsk. Some unverified reports quickly identified the target as the massive Azot chemical plant. Social media videos point to a drone strike.
Ukraine is intent on making life inside Russia as painful as possible, in order to put pressure on the Kremlin to end the war. According to fresh reporting:
A fast-growing number of regional officials and gas station chains across Russia are restricting gasoline and diesel sales as Ukrainian drone attacks on oil refineries and supply networks take a mounting toll on supplies.
Fuel rationing measures were in place in at least 56 Russian regions as of Thursday, according to open-source data analyzed by The Moscow Times.
In dozens more regions, residents are complaining about fast-rising gasoline prices, closed filling stations and miles-long lines, while some local authorities and major retailers remain hesitant to enact rationing.
“In some districts of our republic, there is no fuel at gas stations right now, so people go to [the capital] Kyzyl to refuel,” said a resident of Tyva, a southern Siberian republic roughly the size of Tunisia.
Ukraine's asymmetric warfare against Russia's much-larger and better armed military machine is in a significantly better position than the status of a year or so ago. Russian forces still have the upper-hand on the front line in the east, but the pain clearly being inflicted on Russia's economy can't be ignored at this point.
Smoke was rising from the Azot chemical plant in Novomoskovsk, Tula region, after a massive drone attack overnight and in the morning. Regional authorities confirmed damage to an industrial facility, power lines and a residential building. #Russia pic.twitter.com/ANkCXXyj7T
— NOELREPORTS 🇪🇺 🇺🇦 (@NOELreports) June 26, 2026In the meantime, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had announced Thursday a 40-day "influence operation" engineered by Ukraine's SBU security service designed to "compel" Russia to end the war.
The sheer volume of Friday's overnight attack underscores that Zelensky and Ukraine's military feel they have some rare momentum going and so must capitalize on it. Many regions of Russia seem powerless to stop the inbound drone waves, given conventional air defenses are set up to defend primarily against larger, faster-moving projectiles like missiles or jets.
Tyler Durden Fri, 06/26/2026 - 07:45Hundreds of rabbis demand Mamdani apology for calling pro-Israel AIPAC ‘monsters’
Kim Jong Un demands ‘destructive’ military posture as South Korea vows to boost drone warfare
Neighbors dig through Venezuela rubble to search for loved ones after earthquakes kill at least 235
OpenAI Plans Delaying IPO Until 2027, Blames SpaceX
One month ago, during the height of the tokenmaxxing craze - when companies were spending ridiculous amounts of money, in many cases without knowing they were even doing so, just to test out the latest agentic craze - first OpenAI and then Anthropic rushed to announce they will follow in the footsteps of the SpaceX IPO, and were planning (or rather hoping) to go public in the next quarter or two. To validate its euphoric IPO dreams, Anthropic even trotted out a lafughable ARR of $47 billion, a number which besides being laughably incoherent and a non-GAAP mish-mash of adjustments and double counting, also took advantage of said tokenmaxxing frenzy.
Then following a furious blowback against said tokenmaxxing which has seen a collapse in agentic spending and an aggressive shift to much cheaper Chinese models, we said two weeks ago that we are eagerly awaiting Anthropic's new ARR, one which reflects the revulsion to Claude's stratospheric token costs.
Meanwhile, Anthropic quietly annualized the one-time bumper revenue from Feb-May on the agentic splurge when nobody had any idea what they were paying, to come up with the ludicrous $47BN ARR.
Let's see what ARR is next month after clients finally checked their token bills.
And while we wait, Anthropic's biggest competitor, OpenAI - which unlike its peer has been far less vocal about its latest annualized revenue numbers - appears to have realized that going public at a time when agentic spending is suddenly in freefall (Goldman's best "efforts" to predict 120 quadrillion monthly tokens by 2030 notwithstanding) may not be the best idea, and according to the NYT is now leaning toward punting its IPO until next year in hopes that the AI bubble will be even bigger next year.
OpenIA's odds of a 2026 IPO promptly tumbled on Polymarket, and were last below 30% from over 50% before the report.
So what is going on, and how did OpenAI - which earlier this month said it had filed confidential paperwork with securities regulators to kick off the process for going public, but it did not commit publicly to any time window - frame the delay so it doesn't sounds like it rushed out its plans to IPO on a one-time bumper revenue burst, only to reverse them as the overpaid agentic euphoria has fizzled?
Why blame Elon of course.
The NYT reports that when the ChatGPT maker hired bankers and lawyers with an eye toward IPOing as soon as the third or fourth quarter of this year, Sam Altman pushed those advisers to find a way for the start-up to be valued at $1 trillion, up from the company’s last private valuation of $730 billion.
OpenAI’s advisers presented company executives with the option of waiting until 2027 to go public with a $1 trillion valuation, or lower the targeted valuation for a quicker IPO, which would be a disaster as the IPO would effectively admit that OpenAI can't keep up with the growth rate of Anthropic which a month ago raised $65 billion in a $965 billion private funding round. Altman responded that any change to the trillion-dollar valuation was a nonstarter.
But, the report goes on, "a cascade of recent developments has caused OpenAI’s executives to shift away from their most aggressive aspirations" and the primary scapegoat is Elon Musk’s, and specifically the performance of SpaceX after its I.P.O. this month. "It was the largest ever, raising more than $85 billion and reaching a valuation of $1.77 trillion on its debut. Since then, SpaceX’s stock has been on a downward slide, as shares slumped to $153 at the end of the trading day on Thursday after reaching a high of $202 last week."
Realizing it would look very stupid if it just blamed the very same company that prompted it to rush its IPO in the first place, the NYT also blamed global markets which "have also been choppy in recent weeks, with tech stocks dragging down indexes as investors question whether AI companies will live up to their sky-high promises."
Nowhere in this above is there a mention of the only thing that actually does matter to investors: the financials, and one can only imagine what is going on there after the early Q2 "tokenmaxxing" agentic burst which has now fizzled. OpenAI said this year that it was generating $2 billion in revenue each month but we are patiently waiting for an update now that the latest series of open Chinese models offer 95% of the US frontier performance for 10% of the price (as discussed in "Answering The "Trillion Dollar Question": Are China's AI Models A Better Value Than US Models").
It's not just China: OpenAI faces acute pressures at home too. Anthropic, which offers a Claude Code tool for creating sophisticated software code, has been far more successful in selling its service to enterprises (at least until the tokenmaxxing fiasco). At the same time, Google’s Gemini, the tech giant’s flagship consumer AI product, has become popular with users.
The NYT however is correct that OpenAI’s postponing its IPO plans - for whatever reason - will disappoint Wall Street and Silicon Valley, especially not if but when its main rival Anthropic, which has been in very hot water with the Trump admin for months, does the same.
There's more.
Besides creating SpaceX strawmen, OpenAI is also grappling with other issues. Late last year, CFO Sarah Friar said it was not pursuing an I.P.O. at the time and was focusing on shoring up its finances. However, since then the company has done just the opposite as it has continued to pour money into data centers and computing power, with no indications of slowing down.
Some OpenAI executives appeared to have changed their minds about an IPO just a few months after Friar said the company was not looking to go public. The Wall Street Journal reported that the company planned to go public by the end of 2026. That surprised some employees because they thought the company was not on a strong enough financial footing.
The company has also been spending like a drunken sailor on marketing and recruiting high-profile engineering talent from companies like Meta and Google. Realizing that it is losing market share to both Anthropic and Chinese open-sourced models, ChatGPT is also searching for other lines of revenue, including dabbling with placing ads inside ChatGPT and striking e-commerce deals with companies like Shopify and Stripe that would allow people to buy things from online stores directly inside ChatGPT.
The biggest problem facing OpenAI, however, is that growth has plateaued: after years of surging downloads of ChatGPT’s consumer app, those numbers have slowed and continue to hover around 900 million users, surprising investors who believed the company would easily hit one billion.
And the wildcard is now that the US government is actively throttling the latest frontier models over concerns they may hack sensitive government agencies, today the Information reported that OpenAI is releasing its latest GPT-5.6 model only as a limited preview to a small group of partners. The reason, according to Sam Altman: the U.S. government asked it to. Altman reportedly told staff that the government will be "approving access customer by customer" during the preview period, with a broader release potentially following a couple of weeks later. This comes after Anthropic took a similar path with Mythos, and after the White House forced Anthropic to withdraw Fable and Mythos over national security concerns.
And now that the "uncorruptible" Trump admin is actively involved in picking winners and losers in the frontier model race, both OpenAI and Anthropic will watch their ARR collapse as most enterprise clients realize they will have better productivity gains by going with the latest Chinese models which, paradoxcially, are now easier to access in the US than domestic made versions.
Tyler Durden Fri, 06/26/2026 - 07:25Boiling Frog Nation
Authored by Kevin Finn via AmericanThinker.com,
I almost feel sorry for leftists. Almost. But I don’t. The reason is simple: so much of what they say and do runs counter to the core principles on which this country was founded.
Over the years, I’ve challenged dozens of left-leaning friends and acquaintances to name the top ten things the political left has done in the last quarter-century to make America safer, stronger, more prosperous, or more united. I have yet to receive a substantive answer. One person offered a list that included ObamaCare and the 2015 Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA). A quick review shows that, like many Democrat initiatives, these created more problems than they solved.
What makes me almost pity the left is that most leftists I know personally are decent, pleasant people -- so long as the conversation stays light: weather, movies, or sports. Venture into politics or culture, however, and the discussion turns surreal, like chatting with the Mad Hatter.
These individuals consider themselves well-informed.
They read the daily papers, watch network news, and never miss 60 Minutes. They speak of Rachel Maddow as if she were a close friend and dismiss Fox News out of hand. Yet they’ve never heard of journalists like John Solomon nor outlets like the Epoch Times. It rarely occurs to them to seek out differing perspectives. “Garbage in, garbage out,” as the old saying goes.
Søren Kierkegaard observed that there are two ways to err: to believe what is not true, and to refuse to believe what is true. Leftists frequently demonstrate both. They linger on stories long after those stories have been debunked, while major developments that threaten our country and culture receive little or no attention.
Consider a recent example. Legacy media devoted intense coverage to algae growing in the reflecting pool on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
One might think it was a national emergency. The reporting largely blamed the new blue liner and warm, shallow water. What it downplayed were the reports of vandalism that damaged the recently restored pool in the first place.
Meanwhile, far more consequential stories are ignored.
Tulsi Gabbard’s declassification of documents credibly alleging that Anthony Fauci’s agency helped fund the Wuhan lab, misled Congress about COVID-19’s origins, and overstated the effectiveness of vaccines, masks, lockdowns, and social distancing drew almost no mainstream coverage.
Conservatives have repeatedly labeled certain events “the scandal of our time,” only to watch legacy media minimize, distort, or bury them. The list is long: Benghazi, the Skolkovo technology transfer, Hillary Clinton’s emails, ObamaCare’s structural failures, the Russia collusion narrative, the surge of illegal immigration under Biden-Harris-Mayorkas policies, the murders of American citizens by illegal immigrants, the trafficking of hundreds of thousands of children, the rise of Islamism and socialism in American institutions, routine urban violence, questionable election irregularities, politically motivated prosecutions, and repeated calls for violence that have contributed to an emerging assassination culture.
These stories surface in conservative outlets, receive brief attention, then fade as the next crisis erupts. The public’s attention is constantly reset.
The kettle is simmering. The frog is growing restless.
In much of Western Europe and the United Kingdom, citizens have watched their cultural foundations erode with little effective resistance. America still has time to choose a different path.
True justice demands accountability. When the guilty face no consequences and the innocent continue to suffer, trust in institutions collapses. A nation cannot endure indefinitely if a large portion of its citizens -- perhaps a third to half -- work actively against its founding ideals.
The solution is not despair, but renewed commitment: to demand transparency, support independent journalism, engage in civil debate, and vote for leaders who uphold the Constitution and the rule of law.
Only by insisting on truth over narrative can we repair what has been damaged and secure a stronger future for the next generation.
Tyler Durden Fri, 06/26/2026 - 07:20