President Trump has already attracted immense controversy when starting last month it became clear he is planning to hold Sept. 11 observances at the Pentagon, which was also struck. He's not planning to attend the more traditional ceremony and venue in Manhattan for the 25th anniversary of 9/11 in part because he wants to deliver a speech, says the NY Times; however, the event organizers have long barred remarks, seeking to keep it non-political and non-partisan.
"The president’s interest in speaking on Sept. 11 was conveyed to memorial planners in recent weeks, three of the people with knowledge of the events said. But since 2012, politicians have been barred from speaking at the site," the report details. "The National September 11 Memorial and Museum, which oversees the site, has worked rigorously to keep the venue nonpartisan and focused on the solemnity of the day."
"Mr. Trump, a native New Yorker who talked often about the Sept. 11 attacks during his 2016 presidential campaign, is now expected to commemorate them at the Pentagon, two of the people with knowledge of the events said," NYT continues. Vice President JD Vance is expected to represent the administration in New York. On Tuesday, President Trump just issued remarks sure to spark fierce controversy once again. Widespread reports have long documented that he was miles away from Ground Zero on that fateful day, but now he's using language as if he was a victim or barely escaped, or as if he was so close to the action and tragedy akin to a first responder. In the below he seems to confusedly switch between settings - as is often his style - going from talking about his own claimed rescue efforts with a crew of responders, to then narrating a dramatic tale of "running" from the site as it was feared a building could come down on them. Watch:
Trump on 9/11:
Two firemen, big strong guys, and I'm not the smallest guy in the world, they grabbed me under the arm and said, 'we gotta get out of here' and they literally lifted me up. This is not easy to do. I'm big. They lifted me up and they started running with me. They… pic.twitter.com/1FgeFuhdfZ
ABC writes of the Tuesday venue where Trump spoke: "The event at the Ellipse was spearheaded by the Tunnel to Towers Foundation and showcased a massive, 21-foot, nearly 17,000-pound steel beam recovered from the South Tower of the World Trade Center in New York, which had traveled for months across the country as part of the Steel Across America tour."
Trump 'recalled'. at the Tuesday ceremony: "The United States Steel Building [the former US Steel building, now known as 1 Liberty Plaza] was creaking, really creaking, and we thought it was going to fall down. The truth is, it creaked a lot. It creaked."
The president continued: "And I'll never forget two firemen. We thought it was coming down on top of us, and two firemen, big, strong guys — and I'm not the smallest guy in the world — they grabbed me under the arm, said, 'Got to get out of here!' And they literally lifted me up."
"This is not easy to do. I'm big. They lifted me up and they started running with me. I said, 'Fellas, I can run myself,' but they were amazing. But they thought it was coming down. It didn't come down," he added. He may have even been talking about his own office and building(?), but the ambiguous account is made to sound like he's 'running' from Ground Zero.
The NY Times has underscored further that he left the impression he had been right at Ground Zero:
On Tuesday, though, Mr. Trump left the impression that he had been at the site in the immediate aftermath. “I’ve never seen such an unbelievable mass of steel and, unfortunately, bodies and everything you can imagine,” Mr. Trump told the crowd, which had gathered to pay tribute to the police officers and firefighters who had been killed in the attack, including a stock trader and volunteer firefighter named Welles Crowther, whom Mr. Trump posthumously awarded with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
According to more background via the Times:
This was the latest in Mr. Trump’s evolving — and often disputed — account of his actions on Sept. 11 and in its aftermath, when he was working as a real estate developer in New York City.
Mr. Trump was watching television the morning of the attacks, which is verifiable from news coverage of that day, but what he did next has long been a matter of debate. He has repeatedly said that he took a construction crew with him to Lower Manhattan and was deeply involved in cleaning up the site, a claim that has been called into question by at least one former fire official who was involved in the recovery effort.
On Tuesday, Mr. Trump renewed his claim that he had taken a crew to a building near the site where the World Trade Center had stood shortly after the attacks. He said that two large firefighters picked him up and took him to safety when he observed an unstable building.
...Reminds us of Hillary Clinton's infamous 'escape from Bosnia' under fire:
This isn't the first time he has given such a story: "News accounts from that time put Trump about 4 miles from ground zero on Sept. 11, 2001, and footage shows him blocks away on Sept. 13, 2001, and Sept. 18, 2001," one investigation reviewed of prior claims. "None of those images or reports show him amid fire and ashes. And there is no record he was directly involved with first responders at the scene or that he sent hundreds of workers to aid the recovery. When asked, Trump has not provided evidence to corroborate the claims."
People have been chiming in all day, providing their own personal anecdotes contradicting Trump...
I know this is BS because I was with him in his Trump Tower apt once. I was looking through his telescope. He said, "I watched the twin towers fall through that ... it's solid gold." Those were his exact words and not a single word about going down there to help. https://t.co/u6y1nTkRpY
— Rick Reilly (@ReillyRick) September 8, 2026That Trump's tale was issued before a solemn 9/11 remembrance event is all the more shocking - and as an aside, is certainly no help to Republicans going into an already tough midterm election in November.
Tyler Durden Tue, 09/08/2026 - 18:50Authored by Christopher McFadden via Interesting Engineering,
John Hopkins APL researchers have found a way to dramatically speed up the way that carbon-carbon composites can be created. The new approach, the research team explains, could replace the current slow, labor-intensive process, ultimately slashing the cost of production.
Representative image of a carbon composite.Unsplash/Lawless Capture/Johns Hopkins"That speed is what makes FAST CAR2 so compelling," said Sal Nimer, assistant manager of APL's Science of Extreme and Multifunctional Materials program. "It has the potential to enable faster and more efficient production of advanced materials for high-performance applications, whether for rocket nozzles or hypersonic vehicles," he added.
Carbon-carbon, in case you are unaware, is basically carbon fiber embedded in a solid carbon matrix. Imagine carbon-fiber reinforced plastic, except instead of the fibers being surrounded by epoxy/resin, they're surrounded by more carbon.
That gives you something that is simultaneously very light, mechanically strong and astonishingly tolerant of heat. It's why you see it in things like rocket nozzles, re-entry systems, missile nose cones, aircraft brakes and hypersonic thermal protection.
Making carbon-carbon composites easier to make"Carbon-carbon is one of the most important materials available for the thermal protection systems that help high-speed flight vehicles survive extreme heat," said William Fahy, an APL materials engineer who co-led the FAST CAR2 project.
"It was crucial for the heat shield on NASA's Parker Solar Probe - the spacecraft flying closer to the Sun than any human-made object. It's indispensable," he added. However, at present, making it is a painfully slow process.
Traditionally, you start with a porous carbon-fiber structure. You then need to fill all the tiny gaps between the fibers with additional carbon.
There are two main ways of doing that: repeatedly force carbon-rich gas through the material and deposit carbon inside it, or soak it with a resin and heat the resin until almost everything except the carbon burns/pyrolyses away.
The problem is that one pass doesn't fill everything. FAST CAR2, on the other hand, makes this much simpler and faster. In fact, similar materials that take months to produce can be created in just days.
Instead of slowly growing or depositing the carbon matrix inside the fiber structure, they put a carbon-bearing material directly into the fiber preform and then squash and heat the whole thing extremely rapidly using a technique called field-assisted sintering.
Looking aheadThe electrical current produces very rapid heating, while the press simultaneously forces everything together. The actual densification apparently happens in minutes, although preparing the piece and completing the whole manufacturing process still takes days.
"We're aiming for something revolutionary - to change the mechanism itself so we can get there orders of magnitude faster," Chapkin said. "When we started, the theory was there, but we didn't even know if the material would hold together," Chapkin said. "We've been surprised every step of the way," he added.
Looking ahead, the team is now working with external partners to access larger presses that will allow them to scale the process to even larger sample production and open the door to more applications.
"Scaling is always the hard part," Fahy acknowledged, "but seeing how quickly this all came together and how successful it has already been, we feel optimistic about where it can go," he added.
Tyler Durden Tue, 09/08/2026 - 18:25Right now, Chinese open-weight AI models are on the cusp of dominating closed-weight US frontier models in both price and performance. All ten of the top open-weight models on Artificial Analysis’s spring Intelligence Index came from China-based labs, and the best sat just six points behind the leading closed model; Chinese models also passed American ones in token share on OpenRouter in early June. All of this - despite asymmetrical lack of access to bleeding-edge hardware vs. their US competition, which Washington has been engineering since October 2022.
ASML Twinscan XT:260 lithography scanner,The first round of export controls went after Nvidia’s best AI chips and the tools that make advanced chips; later rounds added high-bandwidth memory and more of the chip-printing machines made by ASML, the Dutch company with a near-monopoly on them. This year the White House loosened on chips, licensing H200 sales that Beijing then capped on its own, while Congress moved on the tools: a bill that cleared House Foreign Affairs in April would bar ASML from selling its most advanced remaining machines anywhere in China and require a license for every service call on the ones already installed.
So - since China still can't build the machines that make the chips, they've stockpiled three years' worth of critical machinery - buying time for one company to spearhead a domestic drive for AI independence.
On Monday the Financial Times reported that Huawei has taken the coordinating role in China’s drive to build those machines itself, investing across the supply chain and pushing domestic tools into chip plants such as SMIC, China’s largest chipmaker. At the center of the effort is a scanner built by Shanghai startup Yuliangsheng, the same class of machine the bill targets. It is being tested at SMIC and on Huawei’s own production lines, and one source told the paper that output will reach 12 units by the end of the year.
China’s two major memory-chip makers, CXMT and YMTC, have already bought enough ASML machines to cover their expansion plans for the next three years. Meanwhile, Yuliangsheng’s would-be domestic replacement prints wafers through projection lenses made by Germany’s Zeiss, which says it sells lithography optics to exactly one customer: ASML.
China’s memory makers have banked three years of Dutch machines, and the domestic replacement runs on German glass.
What's a Lithography Scanner?A chip is a pattern printed onto silicon with light. The machine that performs that printing is a lithography scanner. For the chips that matter to China’s AI buildout, the relevant machine is an immersion deep-ultraviolet scanner (DUV), which passes light through a thin film of water to print finer features. ASML makes nearly all of them; Japan’s Nikon is the only other major player.
ASML’s newer extreme-ultraviolet machines have never shipped to China. Immersion DUV tools have, by the hundreds. ASML’s China president said in late 2023 that nearly 1,400 ASML machines were already installed in the country, and that number has risen since. China bought $49.6 billion of chip equipment in 2024, or 42% of the world total, much of it purchased ahead of another round of export controls.
SMIC uses those DUV scanners with multi-patterning, a technique that prints the same layer in several passes, to produce 7nm-class chips without EUV. That is how Huawei’s Ascend accelerators are made, including the 160,000 Ascend 950DTs that DeepSeek is ordering for its Inner Mongolia data center, covered here last week.
Every Ascend still traces back to a Dutch scanner. The machine Huawei is project-managing is meant to replace it.
Huawei As Project ManagerYuliangsheng was founded in 2022 and spun out of SiCarrier, a Shenzhen equipment maker that FT has previously reported has close technical and business ties to Huawei. Huawei denies any affiliation. Yuliangsheng’s immersion scanner has been in testing at SMIC since September 2025, targeting 28nm in a single pass and 7nm with multi-patterning. For now, it is being used on simpler chips while engineers refine it. AI accelerators are the stated destination.
Bernstein’s Lin Qingyuan told the FT that “Huawei is playing a project management role in China’s DUV push.” A prototype, he added, is of limited value without the thousands of vendors, fabs and customers needed to make it reliable at industrial scale. Huawei is trying to assemble that system.
Its corporate venture arm Habo and another Huawei-backed fund, Shenzhen Yuanzhi Xinghuo, have invested in suppliers working on the two components China still cannot make at the required level: projection lenses and light sources. Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment, the country’s older state lithography house, is supporting Yuliangsheng with multiple prototypes, some built with foreign components and others used to test domestic substitutes.
The startup also sits inside a much larger state-backed effort. In late July, The Information reported that a Shanghai firm had begun mass-producing domestic immersion DUV tools, sending ASML down more than 8% intraday. Reuters identified the company as Shanghai Aishengna Electronic Technology Group. Founded in August 2023 with Rmb7 billion, or about $1 billion, in registered capital, Aishengna is backed by Shanghai Electric Holding and a Shanghai International Trust subsidiary and has absorbed teams from Yuliangsheng and SMEE. Corporate and recruitment records show that Aishengna and Yuliangsheng share a Shanghai address. Reuters had reported in December that China had also built an EUV prototype, though production remains years away.
German Glass?A DUV scanner contains tens of thousands of parts spread across roughly a dozen major component groups. According to the FT’s sources, Chinese suppliers remain behind in two of the hardest: the projection lens and the light source.
Huawei is now backing a would-be replacement. Fujian Zhiqi Photonics was spun out of optical-materials maker Castech in 2022. Yuanzhi Xinghuo paid Rmb100 million for 37% of the company in 2023, implying a valuation of roughly Rmb270 million, or about $40 million. Castech, which grew out of a Chinese Academy of Sciences institute, has disclosed both ASML and Huawei as customers.
While SMIC has bought Yuliangsheng’s machines and is testing them, it still uses ASML tools for production. Meanwhile CXMT and YMTC have stocked enough ASML DUV equipment to cover three years of expansion.
ASML’s CFO Roger Dassen said in July that China would remain at roughly 20% of 2026 sales, down from 33% in 2025 but on a larger base. ASML raised full-year guidance to €43-45 billion the same day. Its servicing and upgrade business, Installed Base Management, generated €2.76 billion in the second quarter alone.
Lin’s read is that Chinese DUV has improved substantially but still lacks the full backing of domestic fabs, much as ASML’s own rise depended on years of work alongside TSMC. The stockpile gives SMIC, CXMT and YMTC three years of expansion without running an unproven domestic scanner in production. It also delays, by the same three years, the production-line learning Lin says the prototypes need.
The MATCH ActOn April 2, a bipartisan House group introduced the Multilateral Alignment of Technology Controls on Hardware (MATCH) Act, H.R. 8170, a bill built to close the remaining gaps in US restrictions on chipmaking equipment sold to China and to make the Netherlands and Japan, home to ASML and Nikon, match them on a deadline. The original version was broader. A substitute offered later that month stripped out several controls but, according to Reuters, kept a countrywide restriction on sales of ASML immersion DUV machines to China. It also kept restrictions on foreign equipment sales to CXMT, YMTC and SMIC facilities already barred from using US tools.
The MATCH Act would also require licenses to service equipment in covered facilities, including calibration, spare parts, software updates and field support, although the revised draft dropped the original policy of denying those applications. The introduced text gave allied supplier countries 150 days to match US controls; Reuters reported that the substitute retained a deadline for allied negotiations before unilateral US controls would follow. House Foreign Affairs approved the substitute 36-8 on April 22. A Senate version, S.4281, remains in Banking. Neither has had a floor vote.
Immersion tools need specialized maintenance roughly every six months, often performed by ASML engineers on site in China. A three-year stockpile covers a sales ban. It does not cover a servicing restriction, which would put every six-month service visit inside a covered facility behind a Commerce license.
Lin’s closing point to the FT is that US restrictions could actually speed up China’s progress by forcing local fabs to work with local suppliers. Huawei can coordinate the suppliers, fund the missing components and put prototypes in front of SMIC. What it cannot easily do is make a fab abandon a proven ASML scanner while Dutch inventory is still available. The one party that could is Congress, and its bill has not had a floor vote.
The remaining constraint is the machinery underneath China’s models. DeepSeek’s chip order runs into Huawei’s memory shortage. Huawei’s Ascend chips run through SMIC’s ASML scanners. The domestic scanner intended to replace them still relies on a Zeiss lens acquired on China’s secondary market. And CXMT, the memory maker at the top of Aishengna’s delivery list, has just bought enough ASML equipment for three more years. Three years is the time Huawei has to make the domestic scanner work.
Tyler Durden Tue, 09/08/2026 - 18:00