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The average nationwide price of a gallon of diesel fuel stood at $6.23 Monday morning, the highest on record, according to AAA.

Despite operating in just three states, its breakfast has beaten out all other national chains. 

Trump Declares Ukraine, Russia Have Agreed To Halt All Attacks On Energy Targets

Update(11:19)ET: Amid soaring national diesel products and painfully high prices at the pump, President Trump on Monday announced the Zelensky government has acceded to the US president's prior call to abstain from attacking diesel infrastructure in Russia. He has unveiled what he's presenting as a new Russia-Ukraine energy ceasefire.

Trump says "Ukraine has agreed not to hit Russian Energy targets. Russia has agreed to do, likewise! The World’s Diesel price rise is mostly caused by the Russia/ Ukraine War, not Iran." Clearly high fuel prices are creating immense pressure within the GOP, and Trump is trying to essentially tweet his way out of this war-related mess...

DIESEL FUTURES PARE GAINS, TRADE NEAR $5.04/GAL

Diesel responded immediately...

And also crude...

*  *  *

The Kremlin has welcomed President Trump's weekend call for Ukraine to stop attacking Russian diesel supply and infrastructure sites. The somewhat surprise remarks which will only serve to further pressure the Zelensky government came when pressed by a reporter on Sunday. Trump responded by saying Zelensky "has to do one thing. He has to stop knocking out diesel fuel in Russia."

The US president said at the sidelines of the Irish Open on Sunday, "There are plenty of other targets. Don’t hit diesel fuel, because that’s hurting, that’s hurting the world" - adding that he indeed had spoken to the Ukrainian president about it.

"I've asked Zelensky not to hit the Russian refineries. Diesel is being driven up by the fact that it’s having a hard time coming out of Russia," Trump additionally stated. "That’s a case that hurts the world, and we’ve got to stop it."

On Monday, Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was asked about Trump's words. "Of course, one can only welcome any call on the Kiev regime to stop strikes on civilian economic infrastructure," Peskov told a press briefing.

via Associated Press

The Kremlin official had been questioned on whether Putin views the US call to refrain from strikes on Russia's diesel-producing infrastructure a positive step toward a settlement of the Ukrainian conflict.

"Any countries can contribute to a settlement in Ukraine by influencing Kiev and pushing it toward flexibility," Peskov said, leaving things somewhat vague. He said that disabling of Saudi Arabia's East-West oil pipeline, which has reportedly knocked more than 4% of global supplies off the market, is cause of serious concern.

"The deterioration of the situation in oil markets cannot but cause concern among global economies," he emphasized. On that front, the Associated Press newly reports Monday:

A crucial Saudi oil pipeline hit in strikes will be mostly out of service for several weeks for repairs, reports AP citing officials

Specifically concerning the status of the 'special military operation' in Ukraine, the Putin spokesman described, "It is becoming increasingly clear to professionals, based on the dynamics at the front lines, that Russia is consistently moving toward achieving its goals in the special military operation."

He vowed: "The dynamics of advances at the front lines of the special military operation will continue; no one should have any doubts about that."

And he explained of the weekend New Delhi-hosted major BRICS summit, "Putin reacted positively to the readiness of the leaders of China and India to contribute to the Ukrainian settlement."

.@POTUS: "I've asked President Zelensky not to hit the diesel plants — refineries... Diesel is being driven up by the fact that it's having a hard time coming out of Russia." pic.twitter.com/G9P3tbsNMQ

— Scott Adams (@scottadamsshow) September 14, 2026

As for Ukraine, President Zelensky over the weekend pointed out that the country's own energy infrastructure has also subject of frequent attack by Russia.

"The Russians are burning warehouses with food and gas stations, pharmaceutical facilities and ordinary passenger trains, residential buildings and civilian businesses," Zelensky stated in a Sept.12 X post.

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/14/2026 - 11:19

Deshaun Watson started a football game on Sunday for the first time in nearly two years, and it went as poorly as many expected.

Beijing Rejects Pause, Slams Dario's 'Fearmongering, Cold War Playbook'

China's Foreign Ministry and state press had rejected the China provisions of Dario Amodei's essay calling for a 'pause' in AI development, while state security minister and President Xi Jinping laid out what Beijing wants instead.

On Saturday morning, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published We Must Pace the Frontier, an essay arguing that the industry must slow the rate at which it improves frontier models and asking Washington to help it do so. By Monday afternoon in Beijing, China's Foreign Ministry responded. 

The essay's three steps, are third-party evaluators with permanent, employee-level access inside the labs, which Anthropic committed to unilaterally; coordination among labs in democratic countries on safety standards and the pace of progress, which Amodei concedes needs a narrow antitrust waiver from the U.S. government; and, eventually, agreements with various governments, including China. It also asks Washington to keep the ban on advanced chips and chipmaking equipment, enforce it against smuggling and remote access to overseas data centers, crack down on distillation, prevent model-weight theft, and use the resulting three-to-five-year window to widen America's lead before any bargain is struck. Sam Altman said OpenAI would match the evaluator commitment. Elon Musk's reaction was three words: "Dario is right."

Amodei himself acknowledged the problem. On CBS on Sunday he called the possibility that China and other adversaries would not slow down the "toughest dilemma" in his proposal.

According to Xinhua, Beijing's Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun said on Monday that the development of AI bears on the well-being of all humanity and that all parties should jointly promote its open and inclusive development for good and for all. He added: "Fearmongering, confrontation and vicious competition will only disrupt the process of global AI governance which serves no one's interest."

On Sunday evening Beijing time, a Global Times editorial admitted that sure - on the surface the essay appears to be a "rational statement" about global AI security. A closer reading, the paper said, showed it "packed with containment provisions targeting China" and, in essence, a "Cold War playbook" for the AI sector - and that excluding China from the global innovation system would increase, rather than reduce, the "trial-and-error costs and risks of loss of control" in global AI development. China's AI capabilities "have long ceased to be a variable that can be excluded," reads the editorial. 

Other Chinese notables chimed in as well. Xiang Ligang, a telecom and technology policy commentator, called Amodei's rhetoric inappropriate, groundless and hostile. After all, the 'pacing' would ultimately require China's cooperation while advocating restrictions on chips, computing power and models to slow China down. Xiao Qian, vice dean of Tsinghua's Institute for AI International Governance, attributed the China provisions to commercial pressure: Anthropic's closed-model approach is competing with Chinese open-source models on cost, performance and the developer ecosystem, and restrictions would protect its position. Liu Shaoshan of the Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics for Society, who the paper says previously worked with Amodei, added that framing AI as decisive for national security turns an AI company into "strategic infrastructure," which raises barriers to entry and valuations at the same time.

On Wednesday, Beijing's commerce ministry rejected a joint FBI, NSA and CISA advisory that accused Chinese developers of "aggressive, malicious" efforts to distill capabilities from Claude and GPT, calling the accusation "groundless in fact and without basis in law," distillation a normal technical and commercial practice, and the advisory further proof that Washington is "seeking to monopolize computing power."

Amodei's essay, published three days later, asks the U.S. government to crack down on the same practice in the same document that asks the industry to slow down for the sake of humanity. 

Trump Responds

Asked on Thursday in Dallas whether he had any concern about existential risk from AI, Trump said, "No, I don't have any." On Sunday, speaking to reporters at his Doonbeg resort during the Irish Open, he said the United States is "leading China in AI" and intends to stay there because "whoever wins AI, wins." Guardrails were possible, he said; the dire warnings came from "negative forces" raising things he insists will not happen. And on Monday, Trump slammed "perfect little angel" Dario over his screed.

House Speaker Mike Johnson made the same argument in institutional form: an emergency session to regulate AI would cost the United States the race with China.

The American Split

The domestic disagreement was already on the record. Barack Obama, at a Manhattan fundraiser on Thursday whose transcript his office released to the New York Times on Sunday, told House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to make AI a governing issue if Democrats take the House. The technology, he said, is "moving very fast in private hands," and he positioned himself as neither an accelerationist nor a doomer.

David Sacks, the former White House AI czar, told Amodei and Altman in a Saturday-night post to go ahead and slow down if their unreleased models warrant it, but without the antitrust waiver, the regulatory approval process or METR, which he called intertwined with Anthropic's investors and staff. Demanding a preferred framework as the price of restraint, he wrote, "will look like blackmail of the public and the political system." China, he added, was "very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know." Beijing confirmed the point two days later.

Beijing's Own Concerns

The most revealing document out of China this weekend wasn't the response to Dario. State Security Minister Chen Yixin's article, published Sunday in China Cyberspace, the Cyberspace Administration's journal, lists six categories of AI risk and, per Bloomberg, makes no mention of the Anthropic and OpenAI calls to slow down.

The first risk is regime security: "hostile forces" using deepfakes and bot networks to wage "cognitive warfare." The second is cyber offense, and here Chen named Anthropic's Claude Mythos and OpenAI's GPT-5.5-Cyber as systems that sharply raise the efficiency of vulnerability discovery and malware development and threaten China's critical information infrastructure.

Chen describes AI as "a new arena for strategic rivalry among major powers," warns that countries with an AI advantage may invoke national security to impose technology controls and build closed ecosystems, and calls for powers to "resolutely resist hegemonism, technological barriers, and exclusive blocs." None of this means Beijing dismisses loss-of-control risk: its cyberspace regulator has carried an explicit loss-of-control scenario in its safety framework since 2024, and Xi said at the World AI Conference in July that AI should "always remain under human control."

Chen's focus is on who controls the systems, who can weaponize them, and who is denied the hardware to build them, not about whether the frontier should move more slowly.

Then There's Xi

Xi's own contribution came at the BRICS summit in New Delhi on Sunday. China will take the lead in establishing a BRICS AI Open Source Zone to promote cooperation on large language models, AI training and an open AI ecosystem, he said. The logic is to build with the Global South and resist a ruleset written in San Francisco and enforced through American export licenses.

Trump and Xi are due to meet in Washington on September 24, with AI governance expected on the agenda.

Reuters reported that officials were preparing a separate mid-September AI-safety dialogue led by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, covering AI-directed cyberattacks, distillation and the prospect of a Chinese model with Mythos-level cyber capabilities; a White House official said "there is currently no planned AI-related meeting in mid-September." Lizzi Lee of the Asia Society Policy Institute framed Beijing's question: if Washington wants cooperation on frontier safety while restricting China's access to frontier compute, "what exactly does that cooperation look like?"

As we laid out Saturday: Chinese open-weight models from DeepSeek, Alibaba's Qwen, Moonshot's Kimi, MiniMax and Zhipu are downloadable, forkable and far cheaper to run, with cumulative downloads the Global Times puts above 10 billion. Export controls and evaluator regimes govern American labs and American hardware. They do not retrieve weights that have already been distributed. Amodei's essay does not pretend otherwise; it is why the proposal climbs to a negotiation with Beijing, and why he ranks a treaty-style limit on recursive self-improvement as "difficult but just on the edge of being possible." That third step requires a partner. As of Monday, the partner has said what it thinks of the first two.

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/14/2026 - 11:15

We’re smelling (and scrubbing, and slathering) what The Rock is cooking.

We’re smelling (and scrubbing, and slathering) what The Rock is cooking.

A British sprinter has lashed out at Sydney Sweeney over her risqué commercial.

Sean McVay’s summer vacation doubled as an involuntary conditioning drill for the Rams. A shirtless photo of McVay posing on a boat with his wife, Veronika Khomyn McVay, went viral in June because the 40-year-old coach looked more like someone competing for a roster spot than constructing one. Los Angeles Rams head coach Sean McVay...

The former Bravo star was ordered to eight months of home confinement after getting out of prison last December.

The former Bravo star was ordered to eight months of home confinement after getting out of prison last December.

Another Judge Blocks USPS From Implementing New Mail-In Ballot Rule

Authored by Aldgra Fredly via The Epoch Times,

A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction on Sept. 13 that blocks the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) from enforcing its requirements to tighten mail-in voting rules.

Under the rule, states must supply the agency with lists of mail ballot recipients, and all outbound and return ballot envelopes must bear unique barcodes. It also allows the Postal Service to refuse to deliver ballots that do not comply with the new standards.

In a 24-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said the Postal Service had likely exceeded the authority granted by Congress when issuing the rule. He said that the government had failed to provide any evidence that halting the USPS mail-in voting rule would result in significant fraud in the upcoming elections.

"The key portions of the rule exceed any conception of the outer bounds of these authorities," Nichols said in the ruling.

"Nothing in the Postal Reorganization Act authorizes the Postal Service to impose new election procedures on state election officials, to create a data collection system for mail-in and absentee voters, or to refuse the transmission of lawful mail because it fails to meet these data collection requirements."

The Postal Service issued the final rule on Aug. 21 to implement an executive order President Donald Trump signed in March. In the order, Trump wrote that the federal government had a duty to maintain public confidence in election outcomes and that additional measures were needed to enhance election integrity through U.S. mail.

The Trump administration previously said the executive order would help to keep federal elections honest.

The Department of Justice argued on Aug. 31 that the USPS rule is "a regulation of the U.S. mail, and a modest one at that - not a federal takeover of election administration by the Postal Service."

The judge on Sunday also found that the rule would increase the risk that a significant number of otherwise appropriate absentee or mail-in ballots would not be counted in the upcoming elections.

"The harm of untransmitted ballots - both to voters and candidates - is irreversible, because 'once the election occurs, there can be no do-over and no redress,'" Nichols said.

The Epoch Times reached out to USPS for comment but did not receive a response by publication time.

A federal appeals court on Sept. 10 declined to pause an injunction issued Sept. 4 by Judge Indira Talwani of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, which extended a temporary restraining order issued on Aug. 27 that halted key parts of the Postal Service's final rule.

The Supreme Court is currently considering the government's appeal of the order.

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/14/2026 - 11:00

Leeds United and Newcastle will put their unbeaten records on the line on Monday afternoon.

$6 Diesel Flashes 2008 Warning As Energy Shock, AI Slowdown Fears Fuel Perfect Storm

As of Monday morning, AAA's national average retail diesel price topped $6.23 a gallon as a global refining crisis sparked by the Russia-Ukraine war and compounded by the Gulf conflict sent the price of the most critical fuel powering the industrial world skyrocketing.

Bloomberg Intelligence senior commodity strategist Mike McGlone warned Monday that "$6 diesel echoes 2008 gasoline shock."

"Commodity spikes tend to sow the seeds of their own reversal, and diesel's first-ever surge above $6 a gallon may echo gasoline's 2008 experience. The US daily average gasoline price, at roughly $4.30 on Sept. 11, is only about 4% above its 2008 peak, which helped fuel the Great Recession," McGlone wrote in a note.

He added, "Elevated stock market valuations could add to the vulnerability."

On top of a fuel price shock, tech is sliding Monday morning amid fears of an AI slowdown (read the morning note). 

McGlone's warning comes as Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, pointed out at the end of last week that some gas pumps across California hit a record $9.99 per gallon for the industrial fuel.

MAXXED OUT at $9.999!! GasBuddy data showing 5 stations in California that have hit the limit and are selling diesel at the dispensers highest possible price: $9.999/gal

— Patrick De Haan (@GasBuddyGuy) September 10, 2026

Any sustained diesel price shock can push inflation higher while slowing economic growth, creating a stagflationary squeeze. Higher energy costs raise production expenses and reduce households' purchasing power, also denting consumer sentiment. 

The global refining crisis has drawn the White House's attention. President Trump on Sunday called on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to halt strikes on Russian diesel infrastructure.

"Zelenskyy has to do one thing. He has to stop knocking out diesel fuel in Russia," Trump told reporters at the Irish Open yesterday.

"We spoke to Mr. Zelenskyy about it. There are plenty of other targets. Don't hit diesel fuel, because that's hurting, that's hurting the world," the president said.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is considering how to use the Defense Production Act to expand US oil refining capacity as the Iran conflict drives up fuel prices.

Brent crude traded around $109 a barrel this morning. Last week, the IEA published a report warning of potential demand destruction for industrial fuels. US diesel crack spread remains above $110 a barrel. 

S&P Global Energy warned Thursday that it does not forecast Middle East crude production to return to prewar levels by the end of 2027.

Citi analysts warned Friday that soaring commodity costs and diesel prices will weigh on many of the companies in their coverage universe through the first half of next year:

In 2025, commodity costs were mildly inflationary except for select inputs such as coffee, gas, and tallow which up meaningful +DD%. However, in 2026, commodity inflation has reaccelerated with acute pressure on direct and indirect energy-based products driven by the geopolitical conflict in the Middle East including oil, resins, and diesel/freight costs. Additionally, prices for commodities impacted by tariffs and the global trade dynamics have also increased in 2026 including in aluminum and steel. Many of our companies have highlighted these input cost headwinds, which are pressuring margins this year and which we suspect will remain headwinds into at least 1H'27.

In March, JPMorgan's head of commodity research, Natasha Kaneva, outlined six policy levers the Trump administration could pull to contain oil prices. Some, including Jones Act waivers and Strategic Petroleum Reserve releases, have already been used. Other options include export restrictions and waiving federal fuel taxes.  

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/14/2026 - 10:40

Many runners questioned why the race had still gone ahead, despite local flash flood warnings.

By the end, it was clear to the Giants that they were putting the Cowboys on the ropes.

If you're in line to see a Marshals and Dutton Ranch crossover event, stay in line!

Before you drop $25, here's when we expect to see The End of Oak Street on HBO Max.

Timothée Chalamet goes for a hike, Rebel Wilson has a date night and more snaps..

Timothée Chalamet goes for a hike, Rebel Wilson has a date night and more snaps..