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Practical Magic 2 is a testament to the power of movie stars; it's basically made in Sandra Bullock's image.

Pitino has never said goodbye to Billy Minardi, either, not really.

These titles and so much more are dropping this week.

The Duke of Sussex and his wife, Meghan Markle, touched down across the pond with their two kids -- Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet -- in August.

The Duke of Sussex and his wife, Meghan Markle, touched down across the pond with their two kids -- Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet -- in August.

More Than 62,000 Arrested For Speech-Related Offenses In Britain, Report Finds

Via American Greatness,

More than 62,000 people were arrested in Britain for communications offenses over a five-year period, according to a new civil liberties report warning that the country's increasingly broad speech restrictions are having a chilling effect on free expression.

Big Brother Watch found that 62,199 people were arrested between 2021 and 2025, amounting to roughly 34 arrests per day. At least 18,500 people were charged and 12,292 were convicted, according to the organization.

The findings were based on Freedom of Information requests to police forces across the United Kingdom. Big Brother Watch said the actual number of arrests could be higher because some forces did not provide complete data.

The report examined enforcement of communications laws that can cover threatening or grossly offensive messages and other online content.

Big Brother Watch argues that broadly written statutes have resulted in people being investigated or arrested over controversial social media posts, jokes and other forms of expression.

The group also found stark geographical differences in enforcement. Cumbria Constabulary recorded about 25.7 arrests per 10,000 residents over five years, compared with just 1.9 in neighboring Northumbria.

Big Brother Watch described the disparity as a "postcode lottery" that raises concerns about whether speech laws are being enforced consistently.

The report follows growing scrutiny of Britain's Online Safety Act, which imposes extensive content and child-safety requirements on internet platforms. Big Brother Watch says the law has encouraged platforms to restrict lawful material and require age verification for some online content.

Silkie Carlo, director of Big Brother Watch, called for an independent review of Britain's speech laws and police practices.

"Thousands of people are being arrested for controversial speech, online jokes and non-violent protest," Carlo said. "Enough is enough."

The organization argues the figures demonstrate that Britain's approach to policing speech needs significant reform, particularly when arrests do not ultimately result in criminal charges.

Big Brother Watch is now calling on the government to conduct a national review of laws affecting freedom of expression and to reconsider police training on speech-related offenses.

Tyler Durden Fri, 09/11/2026 - 07:45

We came together and rallied around each other in the ensuing days, weeks and months, and sports absolutely aided in the healing efforts.

A civil war has erupted in the New York Democratic Party over the Israel-Gaza war after the Young Democrats of Albany County issued a statement accusing the Jewish state of committing genocide in Gaza, which was condemned by state party chairman Jay Jacobs.

The UK spy chief ominously warned that the next 9/11-scale terror plot “may ​already be taking shape somewhere we are not yet looking."

Brent Nears $110 Then Tumbles On IEA Demand Destruction Warning As Houthis Threaten Saudi Oil Escape Route, Diesel Shock Goes Global

Brent crude futures nearly topped $110 a barrel in the overnight hours but fell 3.5% to the $103 handle by 6 a.m. ET, after reports from the International Energy Agency that soaring fuel costs could spark global demand destruction.

The global benchmark remained on course for its biggest weekly advance since July. Prices have soared more than 70% this year as the Hormuz chokepoint remains disrupted, energy infrastructure attacks continue from the Gulf to the Russia-Ukraine theater, and renewed Chinese buying of crude in various global markets bids up local prices.

“A resumption of a full-blown Saudi-Houthi war would be a potential catalyst for our high oil price scenario coming to fruition,” RBC Capital Markets analyst Helima Croft wrote in a note. 

The big news overnight was a report that Iran-backed Houthis claimed to have hit Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline, which feeds an export terminal on the Red Sea and effectively bypasses the Hormuz chokepoint. There's also news that the Houthis advanced toward coastal areas bordering the strategic Bab al-Mandeb Strait, gaining ground in their push to seize Mokha near the southern end of the Red Sea.

🔥🌏Just to put the sheer SCALE of this attack into perspective...

The smoke stretched more than 100 km across the Saudi desert and was visible from space even when zoomed all the way out to a global view of Earth.

See for yourself: https://t.co/qLhyb7cH8v pic.twitter.com/z5kmQa2dTx

— Soar (@SoarAtlas) September 11, 2026

The Gulf crisis shows no signs of slowing as US forces took out several Iranian tankers this week and Tehran warns of further escalation.

More bad news for global energy markets: Saudi Arabia's oil production fell again last month to its lowest level since 1990.

CHART OF THE DAY: Saudi Arabia and Russia (the world's 2nd and 3rd top oil producers) suffered significant output drops in August due to the Iran and Ukraine wars, respectively. Combined, Riyadh and Moscow pumped last month ~5.5m b/d less than they did in January (@IEA data). pic.twitter.com/YJNn0A9kg3

— Javier Blas (@JavierBlas) September 11, 2026

Capital Economics commodities expert Hamad Hussain warned that depleted inventories and early signs of recovering Chinese demand leave prices vulnerable to another interruption in Middle East flows.

Former Goldman Sachs commodities chief and current Real Macro head Jeff Currie joined CNBC TV on Thursday and said that it's actually Chinese buyers who are bidding up crude: "Actually, I put a bigger weight on China coming back to the market," he said, citing strong buying interest after returning from Singapore and Hong Kong.

The more consequential crisis isn't necessarily about crude supply, because the global economy doesn't run on that. Instead, it's the diesel shortage rippling through the world. The US diesel crack spread currently trades around $110 a barrel. Prices at US pumps for the industrial fuel average $6 a gallon, a record high, while prices at some gas stations in California topped $9.99 per gallon.

"Brent holding above $105 with Houthi/Bab al-Mandab disruptions raising fears of a double chokepoint. 10y bunds yields highest since 2009, 10y US within reach of the 5% level," UBS analyst Justinus Steinhorst wrote in a note.

However, there is some good diplomatic news from the Gulf: Bloomberg reports that the six-member bloc of Gulf states is considering meeting with Iranian officials next week to discuss the Hormuz chokepoint.

Tyler Durden Fri, 09/11/2026 - 07:20

Clancy's case ended in a mistrial last week, leaving her in limbo until she's back in court.

Matthew Palazzo, an active-duty Coast Guard member, will join Vance as he serves as the top US official at the solemn 25th anniversary ceremony alongside all living former presidents.

One study shows that delaying a big life marker could actually have a big impact on how long you live.

Making sure that the AI buildout forges ahead has become somewhat of an obsession among Trump officials.

"People say never forget. Of course I never will, but I also say never forgive the terrorist who killed thousands of innocent people."

A juror in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial said the lone holdout whose reluctance to acquit forced an 11-1 hung jury was fixated on the amount of blood found in the bedroom at the couple’s home.

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

At the plate, this has been a difficult season for Chris Suero. The fascinating Mets catcher/utilityman prospect has been attempting to fight his way out of Double-A Binghamton while tweaking his swing — “Trying to get to where I want to be” in the box, he said recently. He has been clawing his way on...

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

Victims who suffered excruciating, life-changing burns during the 9/11 terrorist attacks say people have forgotten about the day’s catastrophic devastation — and are even treating them with disrespect.