Aggregator

"You don't need an election on November 3rd," Mayor Karen Bass said. "A Republican cannot win in this state, and yet a Republican with a British accent?"

Showing his face? Absolutely not.

Appeals Court Upholds Hawaii's Rules For Gun Buyers

Authored by Michael Clements via The Epoch Times,

Hawaii's rules for gun buyers were upheld by a federal appeals court Tuesday in a ruling that reversed a lower court's injunction.

Palm trees frame the Hawaii State Capitol in Honolulu on April 23, 2025. Mengshin LinAP Photo

The U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a U.S. District Court for the District of Hawaii by a vote of 6 to 5.

In Todd Yukutake and David Kikukawa v. Anne Lopez and the City and County of Honolulu, the court found that the law imposing a list of rules on gun buyers is constitutional under the June 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen.

Writing for the majority of the Ninth Circuit's en banc panel, Judge John B. Owens stated that a footnote in the Bruen decision holds that objective, "shall-issue" licensing standards comply with the Second Amendment.

A "shall-issue" standard means the state must grant a permit to a qualified applicant.

The dissenting judges say this is a misapplication of the Bruen standard.

The law in question requires a state-issued license to purchase a handgun. The licensing process requires applicants to submit fingerprints, a mental health check and their Social Security number. It also sets a 30-day limit for purchasing the gun once the license is issued. If the licensee fails to meet that deadline, the process must be restarted.

Once the firearm purchase is complete, the new gun owner is required to provide information about the gun to the police department. Under some circumstances the gun must be inspected by the police.

Under Bruen, a gun law is constitutional if it fits the plain text of the Second Amendment and has a historical analogue from the time of the Second Amendment's ratification.

The majority wrote that footnote nine of the Bruen decision allows requiring a license to carry a handgun in public for protection as long as the licensing requirements are based on objective standards.

Owens wrote that the plaintiffs failed to show that the law effectively denied them their Second Amendment rights or impeded their ability to acquire firearms. He stated that, according to footnote nine, "non-abusive, shall-issue laws comport with the Second Amendment."

Joining Owens in reversing the injunction were Chief Judge Mary H. Murguia and judges Kim McLane Wardlaw, Jacqueline H. Nguyen, Gabriel P. Sanchez, and Holly A. Thomas.

Judge Ryan Nelson joined Judges Daniel Bress, Lawrence VanDyke, Bridget Bade, and Danielle J. Forrest in dissenting in part.

The dissenters wrote that footnote nine does not apply since it covers the carrying of a firearm and not the acquisition of one. They also noted that the state did not identify a historical analog for the licensing requirement.

The lawsuit was filed on Oct. 21, 2021, by the Honolulu County residents. The pair said the licensing process was an unconstitutional infringement on their Second Amendment rights. In August 2021 the U.S. District Court for the District of Hawaii found in their favor.

Gun rights activists say this is not the end of the case. Brandon Combs, president of the Firearms Policy Council, called the decision a "roadmap for abusing gun owners."

Alan Gottlieb, executive vice president of the Second Amendment Foundation, vowed to continue the legal fight.

"This case will be headed to the Supreme Court and I believe that the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals will be overturned," Gottlieb stated in an email to The Epoch Times.

* * *

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/24/2026 - 17:00

A sophomore wide receiver and backup quarterback for Pickens High School, died after the utility terrain vehicle rolled over while he was “unrestrained."

More like MV-PCA!

Nicolas Cage is John Madden in Amazon’s new biographical film. Cage will play the legendary football coach and broadcaster in “Madden,” with the film set to premiere globally on Prime Video on Nov. 18. The trailer gave viewers the first taste of Cage as Madden, the famed NFL coach, broadcaster and the man behind EA’s...

The prime minister also slammed Syria, Turkey, Qatar and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani elsewhere in his speech.

Regulators Find Their Situational Awareness: Fed, BoE Probe Bank Exposure To Jane Street After AI Fund Meltdown

Better late than never...

Nearly two months after Leopold Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness went from a $45 billion AI juggernaut to a Citadel block trade after it dumped its entire public book on Ken Griffen's doorstep at a 10% discount and six weeks after we learned that Jane Street lost $15 billion in July, its first down month in a decade, central bankers on both sides of the Atlantic have noticed that something may have happened.

According to the FT, the Bank of England's Prudential Regulation Authority and the Federal Reserve have "stepped up scrutiny" of banks' exposure to large trading firms and market makers. They are asking global lenders how much they have lent to Jane Street and Ken Griffin's Citadel Securities, and presumably also to such HFT money makers as Susquehanna and Hudson River Trading.

Regulators want to know three things: the firms' risk appetite, how banks' exposure to them "evolved during the day," and how risk controls held up. That's a polite way of asking whether anyone at the prime brokers was actually watching intraday margin as the AI trade fell apart in July.

While the PRA, the Fed and Jane Street all declined to comment, Jane's silence is the least surprising. Its last public word on the subject came from partner Turner Batty, who told investors, in the understatement of the year, that "July was a bad month."

A brief history of a very bad month

For anyone who missed it (i.e., all the regulators), here's the recap.

Situational Awareness is the fund Aschenbrenner, a former OpenAI researcher, launched in 2024 under the name of his viral essay. It had eight employees and ran long AI infrastructure / short software, with about 4x leverage through Goldman total return swaps. We described that leverage as "batshit insane", but it was also extremely profitable, if only to Goldman. In a separate piece, the FT today reported that Goldman earned more than $200 million in fees this year from lending to Situational Awareness, the most of any client in its prime brokerage business financing hedge funds. 

As long as the market was going, up it was a party: the extremely levered momentum-chasing fund was was up 439% net through June, reached $45 billion in AUM, and counted Jane Street among its investors.

Then July happened. AI stocks rolled over, software rallied, and both legs of the pair trade lost money at once. Nebius, Sandisk and SharonAI each fell roughly half, and SK Hynix dropped nearly 50%. As the margin calls came in, the fund went looking for fresh capital. It failed to find willing "widows and orphans" and so within days it had exited all of its public equity trades. Citadel bought the whole book in under 24 hours at about a 10% discount, beating Millennium and, fittingly, Jane Street. The fund ended the month down about 78%, with roughly $10 billion of private holdings left, including a large stake in Anthropic.

Griffin did well out of it. Citadel's Wellington fund rose 5.94% in July, its best month since 2022, and about half of its year-to-date gains came from the Situational Awareness trade. Over the next three weeks, Citadel flipped more than 80% of Leopold's portfolio to dumb money through roughly 100 block trades worth more than $4 billion. When Griffin later described the unwind, he thanked "the trading and prime brokerage teams at the banks serving both firms" for their "extraordinary cooperation."

Regulators are now asking those same prime brokerage teams some questions of their own.

Jane Street was the collateral damage: on top of its direct stake in Situational Awareness, its own book, which tends to, cough, be just ahead of whale and retail orders, leaned into the same momentum names: Sandisk, Micron, CoreWeave, Broadcom, SMCI, Dell and Bloom Energy, all the names that defined the momentum trade trough July. And when the AI trade reversed, it lost $15 billion in a month. Most firms wouldn't survive a hit like that. At Jane Street it barely dented the year: by early August the firm had generated $40 billion in net trading revenue, already more than its record $39.6 billion for all of 2025.

That is also what worries regulators. As the FT puts it, the size of the loss "indicated that Jane Street... appeared to take far more risk than a typical market maker."

The "market maker" that isn't one

This is the real story, and it has been building for 15 years. After 2008, Dodd-Frank and Volcker pushed banks out of proprietary trading. The risk didn't disappear. It moved across the street to a new class of firms that started out collecting pennies as market makers and grew into some of the largest directional risk-takers in the world. Many readers will recall our early days which were defined as a crusade against HFT shops such as Jane Street, Citadel, Jump trading and others, whose business practices were best described as frontrunning providing liquidity. Of course, they had money and we didn't, so that particular crusade ended up going nowhere.

Jane Street now holds equity stakes in companies, including Anthropic, and invests in hedge funds like Situational Awareness. Because these firms trade only their founders' and employees' money, they have no outside LPs to answer to. They can "take risks without answering to external investors," which works fine until the leverage comes from banks that do answer to regulators.

So the banks that were told to stop running prop books now finance the firms that do. As a result, prime brokerage has become one of Wall Street's biggest profit engines: banks finance equity trades, lend against bonds, and execute and clear derivatives for these clients. If a client defaults, the bank takes the loss... within limits of course - if the loss is too big, taxpayers end up eating it.

Put another way, the Volcker Rule didn't take risk out of the system. It moved the risk one step further from its supervisors, and the banks collect a financing fee on it.

What regulators can actually do

If supervisors decide banks are too exposed to certain firms, their main tool is to make them hold more high-quality liquid assets against those exposures. That would cost the banks real money, which makes it about the only thing prime brokerage desks would take seriously.

To be fair, the PRA wasn't entirely asleep. In its April business plan, three months before the blowup, it warned that while many firms had improved end-of-day monitoring, "rising intraday exposures - particularly for firms providing market access, clearing, and financing to electronic market-makers - continues to pose potential risks."

It was the right warning, but it came roughly $50 billion in losses early and a few months short of any action.

The BoE is also looking at the rapid growth of London prime brokers financing Asian equities this year, after AI names like SK Hynix went vertical. That raises the obvious question: if one eight-person fund with 4x leverage could produce a $35 billion drawdown and a $15 billion hit at the world's most profitable trading firm, how many other levered AI books are sitting on prime brokerage balance sheets, a question we have been asking repeatedly in recent months.

Situational Awareness #1

Next? https://t.co/wU7ogIUysJ

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) July 30, 2026

We know of at least one. While the Fed and BoE send out questionnaires, Situational Awareness is already putting on the same trades that blew it up the first time: AMD, Intel, SK Hynix and Sandisk. It dropped the Goldman total return swaps and now gets its leverage from out-of-the-money flex options through Clear Street. Nomura flagged a "mystery buyer" that spent $315 million in premium, equal to $1.1 billion of delta, on concentrated tech calls. Aschenbrenner told investors the fund had taken "the steps that were necessary to fight another day." Evidently that day came quickly.

The bottom line

Nobody expects Jane Street to go under. A firm that makes $40 billion in seven months can absorb a bad July, and it just sold $14.6 billion in bonds to PIMCO, Capital Group and Fidelity. The problem isn't Jane Street specifically. It's that the firms running the most concentrated, levered bets on the market's most crowded theme are now systemically important and lightly supervised, and they are financed by the banks regulators are supposed to protect.

Archegos was supposed to teach this lesson in 2021. Five years later, with AI in place of ViacomCBS, regulators are learning it again.

For more background, see our earlier pieces: "A Lack Of Situational Awareness", "Situational Unawareness" and "Little To No Situational Awareness… With ZERO Risk Management".

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/24/2026 - 16:40

E-cigarettes can be highly addictive because of the way they deliver nicotine.

Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani insisted he did not hide information about dangerous toxins believed to still circulating in the air before much of downtown reopened after the 9/11 terror attacks.

Michael Kay hasn’t called a Yankees playoff game in 25 years, but that changes on Tuesday.

Page Six broke the news on Sept. 11 that Gaga and her fiancé, Michael Polansky, had welcomed their first child together.

Page Six broke the news on Sept. 11 that Gaga and her fiancé, Michael Polansky, had welcomed their first child together.

The new fuel blend with 15% ethanol could provide much-awaited relief as California gasoline prices have climbed to record highs.

The thriller from Thailand blends the heartbreak of caring for elderly parents with a thriller about what a town thinks is a supernatural killer.

Megyn Kelly ripped the backlash against Sydney Sweeney’s racy new sports prediction-market ad -- arguing the actress is being singled out because she is a registered Republican.

Tech Giant Feared Its AI Tools Started A Commercial 'Doom Loop,' New Documents Reveal

Authored by Stacy Robinson via The Epoch Times,

AI executives allegedly knew their products could unlawfully harm businesses, flood the market with inferior work, and damage human society's creative capacity as a whole, according to communications newly revealed in a lawsuit.

Those internal documents were cited in a lawsuit brought by The New York Times, Mother Jones, and other news outlets alleging OpenAI and Microsoft's AI tools stole their work, and are harming their bottom lines.

"Millions of people around the world will soon consider large models 'hoovering up' all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions," one Microsoft document said, according to a legal filing first reported by Mother Jones on Sept. 22.

The 'Doom Loop'

One Microsoft document also allegedly indicated that the company was aware that the AI model outputs would result in fewer clicks on websites - including its own. Fewer clicks means less money, which disincentivizes creativity and leads to less, and maybe lower-quality, work.

"Our AI content strategy has started a 'doom loop' that will hurt the performance of our models and the entire web at the same time," the document said.

In evaluating the suits, courts will look at how the new material produced by AI models affects the source material's moneymaking capabilities.

According to the filing, Nick Turley, OpenAI's head of ChatGPT, wrote that the company's AI products pose an "existential threat" to publishers, "are largely substitutive, period" and "will get more and more substitutive as they get better."

Those statements kill the AI companies' "fair use" claim, attorneys for the news publishers wrote in their filing.

"The AI-generated outputs provide substitutive answers that reduce the need for users to visit Plaintiffs' websites and flood the market with low-quality material that undermines the business model of news publishers," the complaint reads.

One employee told OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman that he'd developed "a hack" to get around The New York Times' paywall, allowing ChatGPT to scrape up more stories.

"Ah, nice," Brockman allegedly responded.

After the companies filed suit, the lawsuit says, OpenAI also developed a filter to stop ChatGPT from outputting from sources involved in the litigation.

"OpenAI did not suppress the output of content from any entity that had not sued it," the lawsuit alleges. The filter was created "not to prevent OpenAI's models from infringing copyrights, but to stop Plaintiffs from gathering evidence of OpenAI's copying for use in litigation."

An executive at Microsoft, the lawsuit claims, worried that might be an "accidental cover up" that would result in "people who have a right over the content having less visibility into what was used for training."

Lawsuit

The publisher's cases have been consolidated into one federal multidistrict litigation in the Southern District of New York. The newspapers have filed for summary judgment, asking the sitting judge to decide the case without a trial.

This lawsuit is one of many that have cropped up in recent years, as AI companies have sought to train their models by feeding them existing texts and images from copyrighted sources.

In these lawsuits, the AI firms have defended themselves by citing the Fair Use doctrine under Section 107 of the federal Copyright Act.

That portion of the law gives an exception when copyrighted material is used under certain circumstances, such as teaching or criticism. Courts have ruled that it applies when the copyrighted material is used in a "transformative" way, and the end product is vastly different than the original.

The AI firms have argued that the model has simply substituted its own product for the source material on which it was based.

In July, a federal judge approved a historic $1.5 billion settlement between Anthropic and a group of plaintiff authors who alleged the company used pirated copies of their work - illegally downloaded from the internet - to train its model, Claude.

In the Anthropic case, the judge said using the books to train AI models was fair use; the violation was in using the pirated copies.

The AI companies' statements come amid an ever-increasing scrutiny of machine learning, and its possible impacts on humanity.

After a group of more than 700 OpenAI agents went rogue and hacked startup AI company Hugging Face, industry leaders publicly called for a pause in the development of new machine learning technology.

AI leaders have since called for a slowdown in AI development, citing the technology's potential to harm humanity. The calls have been met with skepticism from Trump administration officials, who argue the United States needs to lead the AI race with China to ensure national security.

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/24/2026 - 16:20

A sick hospital nurse is accused of beating a 4-month-old baby girl who was born prematurely, leaving her badly battered just before she was finally set to be sent home, police said. Kieran Ansley, 43, a nurse at Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital in Grand Rapids, Michigan, allegedly assaulted the baby, who was found by her...

Shoppers can expect the usual bulk pantry and household staples plus a full-service floral department, expanded fresh sections — including fresh tortillas and sushi on the daily.

Week 3 of the 2026 NFL season is kicking off in Green Bay.