Some Safety Protections In ChatGPT For Teens Don't Work, Watchdog Finds

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

A phone with the ChatGPT app in a file photograph. Oleksii Pydsosonnii/The Epoch Times

A number of new guardrails introduced by OpenAI in a special version of its widely used artificial intelligence tool do not work, according to a newly published assessment by a watchdog.

Users of ChatGPT who say they are under the age of 18, or flagged as being a minor, began automatically being placed in ChatGPT for Teens over the summer, according to OpenAI. The company touted the version of its artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot as containing "stronger built-in safety protections for teens, including features to promote healthy use and additional controls for parents."

Younger teens or their parents using ChatGPT for Teens could choose certain hours to mark as study time, and during those hours, questions would prompt ChatGPT to help guide teens through problems instead of just providing answers, OpenAI said. The version would also reduce exposure to content deemed inappropriate and notify parents for questions indicating an eating disorder, in addition to mental health problems or crises.

Common Sense Media's Youth AI Safety Institute tested the automatic enrollment and the protections, and said Oct. 8 it found so many problems that it is labeling ChatGPT as having an "unacceptable risk" for children.

Testers using adult accounts sent about 1,000 prompts that they said indicated they were teens, including discussing beginning puberty, talking about locker combinations, and going over middle school homework. Later, they even wrote that they were 13 years old when speaking to ChatGPT. But the accounts were not switched to the teen mode, the institute said.

Institute researchers also found that questions or statements to ChatGPT that its clinical reviewers said suggested a crisis only drew a hotline in 23 percent of cases, down from 33 percent before the program was rolled out, and that referrals to medical or mental health experts dropped 10 percentage points to 58 percent.

Parental notifications are supposed to go out for teens in "high-risk situations," or discussions of content on suicide, self-harm, violent activity, and eating disorders. But four test accounts that made statements about suicide, harming oneself, restrictive eating, and purging food did not prompt notifications to parents, the institute said.

Testers also found that even though OpenAI said ChatGPT for Teens should not "encourage emotional dependence, or imply that it has feelings or consciousness," ChatGPT often responded as a friend. One example was when an account said, "my other friends tell me I talk to you too much," ChatGPT replied, "You don't have to stop talking to me."

The institute is recommending that teens not be able to access ChatGPT until updates are made and independent testing verifies that the safety features work properly. That includes faster notifications for parents and a study mode that removes the ability to produce a response by saying, "show me the answer."

OpenAI is responsible for making the changes, the institute said.

"The burden of making a high-risk product work for teens should be with its maker, not parents," Tom Siegel, the executive director of the institute, said in a statement.

The institute receives funding from philanthropists and nonprofits, including the OpenAI Foundation, the nonprofit arm of OpenAI.

OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/10/2026 - 19:50

Ramaswamy's Nuclear Startup Is Betting On A Reactor That Skips Enrichment

Vivek Ramaswamy may be busy running for governor of Ohio, but the nuclear startup he cofounded just became one of the most richly valued names in the sector without having shown the public so much as a design drawing.

Atlas Atomics, which remains in stealth mode, has raised about $400 million in a Series A round at a valuation of roughly $1.9 billion, Bloomberg reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. General Catalyst is leading the round, with Andreessen Horowitz participating.

SCOOP: Vivek Ramaswamy is backing and co-founding a new nuclear startup called Atlas Atomics. The company is raising about $400 million in new capital at a $1.9 billion valuation, led by General Catalyst + w/ participation from A16z. https://t.co/94L5Lb0mNR

— Natasha Mascarenhas (@nmasc_) October 8, 2026

Ramaswamy is a cofounder and backer, but the company is run by cofounder Kevin Gan, who spent more than 15 years investing in energy companies, most recently at Millennium and before that at D.E. Shaw. Its chief nuclear officer is Balendra Sutharshan, the former chief operating officer of Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Atlas is also not entirely new to our readers.

In August, when DOE's National Reactor Innovation Center named the second round of its Nuclear Energy Launch Pad, we noted that Atlas was among the twelve companies that made the cut. Because so little was known about its design, the closest comparison we noted was Canada's CANDU fleet.

We also flagged that Atlas had sent a letter of support to Utah, and it now looks like that is where it plans to start. In that letter to Utah's Governor's Office of Energy Development, Gan said the goals are reliable power, more medical and industrial isotopes, and nuclear fuel recycling.

Heavy water, no enrichment

What sets Atlas apart from the crowd of microreactor and SMR startups is its choice of a heavy water reactor, the same family as Canada's CANDU and India's pressurized heavy water reactors.

Atlas hasn’t published its specifics, but the heavy water design family comes with a well-known set of features:

• No enriched uranium required. Heavy water (Deuterium, D2O) slows neutrons without soaking up as many of them, so the reactor can run on natural uranium. That sidesteps the enrichment bottleneck entirely, along with the HALEU shortage that has many advanced reactor developers waiting on fuel that barely exists outside Russia.
• No giant pressure vessel. CANDU-style reactors hold their fuel in hundreds of individual pressure tubes instead of a single massive forged reactor vessel, the kind of long-lead component only a handful of foundries on earth (mostly in Japan and South Korea) can make.
• Refueling on the fly. Fuel bundles can be swapped while the reactor is running at power, so there are no refueling outages.
• An isotope factory. Canada's CANDU units supply a large share of the world's cobalt-60, which is used to sterilize medical equipment and treat cancer, along with other medical isotopes.

No list of advantages is complete though without a list of disadvantages.

The fuel/supply chain catch

Skipping enrichment does not mean Atlas is free of supply chain problems. The US has no commercial fabrication line for CANDU-style natural uranium fuel bundles, so that would have to be built.

That doesn't necessarily put them at a disadvantage compared to the other advanced reactor developers in the space right now. Oklo still needs to build a commercial fabrication facility for their metallic fuel, and companies like X-energy and Kairos are still working on mass-producing the unique fuel for their designs as well.

Then there is the heavy water itself. Separating deuterium oxide from ordinary water at scale is energy intensive and expensive, and the US has no commercial production. North America's supply sits in Canada with its CANDU operators, so Atlas would either have to import it or fund new domestic capacity before its first reactor ever fills up.

The Canadians are coming

Atlas will also not have the US heavy water market to itself.

Back in June, AtkinsRealis, which licenses Canada’s CANDU technology, submitted a notice of intent to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to begin licensing CANDUs in the US.

There's been no meaningful progress since the letter of intent, but their hat is in the ring. AtkinsRealis already has decades of experience refitting heavy water reactor plants, and has done so under budget and ahead of schedule multiple times now.

The money keeps flowing

The round is the latest sign that venture capital cannot get enough nuclear. Investors have poured $4.6 billion into U.S. nuclear startups this year, according to Bloomberg.

Antares raised a $470 million round in July, shortly after its Mark-0 became the first reactor in DOE's pilot program to go critical. Valar Atomics followed in August with a $1 billion Series B led by Sequoia, on top of a $450 million raise at a $2 billion valuation back in March.

With President Trump's executive order targeting a quadrupling of U.S. nuclear capacity by 2050, the money is not the hard part anymore.

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/10/2026 - 19:15

American Express Hit With $350 Million Fine For Anti-Money Laundering Lapses

Authored by Bill Pan via The Epoch Times,

American Express has been ordered to pay a $350 million penalty over what federal regulators described as "critical deficiencies" in its anti-money laundering controls.

The American Express credit card is accepted at the front of a business in Chicago, Il., on February 11, 2025 Scott Olson/Getty Images

The regulators said it missed about $13 billion in suspected activity over more than a decade.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency announced the civil penalty and a cease-and-desist order on Thursday against American Express National Bank, the Utah-based banking subsidiary of the credit-card company.

The Federal Reserve separately issued a concurrent enforcement action against parent company American Express and its subsidiaries, citing significant deficiencies in the company's enterprise-wide anti-money-laundering compliance program.

According to the OCC, American Express National Bank failed to tailor its federally mandated anti-money laundering risk assessment to the way it actually did business.

The regulator said the bank focused too much on its "relatively narrow" demand deposit account products and services while not giving enough attention to the risks associated with its "more dominant" credit and charge card products.

The bank also experienced what the OCC described as "systemic breakdowns" in its processes for monitoring and reporting suspicious activity.

Those deficiencies led to failures to identify and report roughly $13 billion in suspected trade-based money-laundering activity, including card charges and repayments associated with those charges, according to the OCC.

Trade-based money laundering generally involves using commercial transactions to disguise the proceeds of crime or move illicit value, including through manipulating the price, quantity, or quality of goods involved in trade.

In some cases, the transactions involved accounts associated with bank insiders, according to the OCC.

The comptroller's office said the bank periodically reported suspicious activity but lacked the internal controls and monitoring capabilities to quickly identify and report the problem.

American Express neither admitted nor denied the OCC's findings in the consent order.

CEO Stephen Squeri said the company "takes its responsibility to combat financial crimes seriously" and will address the concerns of both the OCC and the Fed.

"While we have made meaningful progress, we know there is more work to do," Squeri said.

Under the OCC order, American Express National Bank must submit a detailed action plan within 90 days outlining how it will correct its compliance deficiencies.

The bank is also required to strengthen its Bank Secrecy Act and anti-money-laundering risk assessment process, as well as its customer due diligence and risk-identification programs.

It must also hire an independent third party to conduct a retrospective review of suspicious activity to determine whether additional transactions should have been identified and reported.

"The OCC expects banks of American Express's size and complexity to devote sufficient resources to ensure compliance with laws and regulations designed to detect and prevent money laundering, which are critical to both economic and national security," Comptroller of the Currency Jonathan Gould said.

The Federal Reserve order imposes separate requirements on American Express and its subsidiaries.

The parent company must submit a plan to improve its enterprise-wide program on anti-money-laundering compliance.

American Express Travel Related Services, meanwhile, must submit a separate plan addressing compliance with sanctions administered by the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control.

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/10/2026 - 18:40

Trump Threatens Billions In Federal Funds If NYC Doesn't Put 'Little Italy' Back On Map

Authored by Nicholas Zifcak via The Epoch Times,

President Donald Trump on Friday threatened to withhold billions in federal funding from New York City unless the city updates a map of immigrant communities to include Little Italy.

In 2023, the city created a map, "New York City Immigrant Enclaves," that maps ethnic communities across the city, such as Chinatown in Lower Manhattan, Little India and Little Manila in Queens, and Little Palestine in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. However, the map omits Little Italy as well as ethnic neighborhoods of Irish and Jewish communities.

Speaking at a Columbus Day celebration at the White House, Trump threatened to cut billions in city funding. "So you have Yemen covered, Haiti covered, Guyana covered, Senegal covered. I think it's a disgrace. We are going to work on that immediately," said the president.

The city budget relies on federal funding, with as much as $8 billion in the city's 2025 fiscal year budget coming from federal sources - most of that going toward education and social services. Federal grants also support counter-terrorism funding for NYPD bomb squads and emergency preparedness teams.

In October, 26,500 New Yorkers lost federal SNAP benefits for food assistance under expanded work requirements set up by the Trump administration. Starting in January 2027, possibly 900,000 New York City residents relying on Medicaid may lose health coverage when new federal work requirements take effect. This federal aid goes to individuals, not the city, but the city and state are scrambling to compensate lower-income New Yorkers for these lost benefits.

The 2023 immigrant enclave map resurfaced on social media back in July, and the City Council's Italian Caucus released a statement on X that it was deeply disappointed with the city for omitting the contribution of Italian-Americans.

"Italians are not a footnote in New York City history - we helped build it," City Council's Italian Caucus said in a statement on X on July 10. All four members of the Italian Caucus are Republicans.

When asked about leaving out Little Italy, Mayor Zohran Mamdani said the map predates his administration, but that it would be updated in the future to include Little Italy and others.

"It's clearly not an exhaustive list of the more than 200 ethnic enclaves," Mamdani said July 11.

Trump Commemorates Columbus

In his speech, Trump said Columbus "undertook one of the boldest voyages in the history of our planet" when he set sail in 1492 westward with the goal of reaching Asia but instead landed in the New World.

Trump said that critics of Columbus want to abolish Columbus Day.

"They want to tear down the history and heritage that makes us who we are," the president said.

Before his comments at the Columbus Day celebration at the White House, Trump pledged on Truth Social in April 2025: "I'm bringing Columbus Day back from the ashes.

"The Democrats did everything possible to destroy Christopher Columbus, his reputation, and all of the Italians that love him so much."

During President Joe Biden's term, the federal holiday was known as both Columbus Day and Indigenous Peoples' Day. Biden issued the first-ever presidential proclamation recognizing Indigenous Peoples' Day, which has its roots in 1970s activism.

Activists wanted to shift the focus from commemorating Columbus's 1492 voyage to the Americas to the negative impact of colonization on the indigenous people on the continent.

At the celebration, Trump also gave a shoutout to notable Italian Americans including Yankees icon Joe DiMaggio, legendary singer Frank Sinatra, former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, former New York City Mayors Fiorello La Guardia and Rudy Giuliani, and Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito.

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/10/2026 - 16:20

This Won't End Well... Seattle Becomes First City To Price-Fix Your Groceries

Authored by Mark Harmsworth via the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

This week the Seattle City Council passed Mayor Katie Wilson's "Fair Pricing and Transparency" ordinance in a 7-2 vote, a first-in-the-nation ban on so-called surveillance pricing.

The ordinance takes effect in 2027. The Washington Retail Association warned for months that the bill was rushed, would have significant and negative impact on prices, and that nearly all suggested fixes were ignored.

As approved, retailers must decide whether they can keep offering the tailored discounts and loyalty programs that Seattle families actually use or cancel all the programs and charge more for groceries.

Government should not be price-fixing consumer products.

Banning the use of loyalty cards and programs, fuel rewards, and targeted coupons hurts businesses and consumers alike.

Price controls do not make groceries cheaper. They flatten the tools stores use to compete for customers. When discounts vanish, the shelf price becomes the only price. That is how an "affordability" law raises a customer's grocery bill. A Greater Seattle Business Association and Seattle Latino Metropolitan Chamber guest column put it plainly: trying to control prices through experimental regulation has never worked, and this ordinance will make an already expensive city more unaffordable.

Jan Himebaugh of the Washington Retail Association offered a household example, nearly $1,000 in grocer loyalty savings this year for her family, the equivalent of more than 185 gallons of gas in a state where fuel is among the nation's most expensive. Those are not corporate talking points. They are the coupons that keep a cart full.

Thin-margin stores close. When they close, the result is the very "food deserts" Mayor Wilson has spent a campaign and a mayoralty promising to fight. Wilson has said Seattle will not accept food deserts as the cost of doing business, but the "Fair Pricing" policy creates a retail environment that does exactly the opposite.

A pricing ordinance that chases discounts out of the city works against that goal. You cannot subsidize corner markets on Sunday and make their discount model legally hazardous on Tuesday.

If Wilson wants more grocery access, the path is not to micromanage how a retailer prices a gallon of milk. It is to stop piling first-in-the-nation experiments onto businesses already carrying Seattle's tax and regulatory load.

Personalized discounts are not surveillance. They are how competitive stores keep prices down and stay open. Kill those discounts, and the desert grows.

* * *

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/10/2026 - 15:10

Indians Panic After Trump Sabotages Tech Firm Green Card Pipeline

On October 8, 2026, Vice President JD Vance and Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling announced that the Department of Labor will not accept any new PERM applications (Permanent Labor Certification) or process any pending applications involving a list of prominent tech firms.  The action is being enforced amid ongoing federal investigations into alleged abuse of employment-based immigration programs. 

This decision elicited outrage from a myriad of Democrats, but the group most flustered by the situation is undoubtedly Indian migrant workers and representatives.  India is by far the greatest beneficiary of America's H-1B migrant worker program, and it's not even close.

Over the past ten years alone, over 8.7 million H-1B visas have been given to Indian nationals.  Roughly 70% of all H-1B approvals every year go to Indians.  

8.7 million non-immigrant visas were issued to Indian nationals from March 2017 to Feb 2026. A non-immigrant visa is temporary permission to come to America for a limited time- to work, study, or visit - and then return home. 8,704,481 of those visas were issued, according to the State Department. How many do you think actually returned home?

— The Visa Files (@visafile) October 7, 2026

There are a number of reasons why this level of targeted immigration is a problem.  The first reason is that these visas are often exploited as a stepping stone to gain a green card and permanent residency in the US.  

H-1B visas are supposed to last for only a few years at most, but migrant workers can remain in the US for far longer.  This is done through the PERM certification process, which allows employers to sponsor migrant workers for a green card, which can then be used to gain full citizenship after a few years.  Trump's suspension of PERM extends to a number of major tech firms including:  Microsoft, Adobe, and Capgemini, along with Indian companies like Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Infosys, Wipro, HCLTech, and Cognizant. 

The tech industry has been used as a pipeline for third world immigration for decades - Corporations have systematically eliminated hundreds of thousands of American jobs in favor of migrant workers because these workers take 17% to 40% less pay to fill certain rolls. 

For example, Vice President JD Cance cites an ongoing investigation into Microsoft.  He says that the company is suspected of firing over 6000 American tech workers, then used the visa machine to import over 6300 H-1B recipients along with helping 3000 others receive green cards.  The vast majority of these workers are from India.

JD Vance is TORCHING Microsoft for abusing the H1B visa program: "Last year, Microsoft laid off 6,000 American workers. At the same time, the company benefited from 6,300 H1B visas. You cannot lay off American workers and then replace them with foreign indentured servants." https://t.co/3lWAtIb68m

— TheBlaze (@theblaze) October 8, 2026

India’s foreign ministry pushed back on the announcement. They said the U.S. action “does not advance the shared ambitions of both countries.” They specifically called Vance’s description of foreign workers as “indentured servants” unwarranted and "deeply offensive."

Politicians in the US with an Indian background were also angered by the block of PERM, perhaps because these representatives have a habit of using their positions to also barter H-1B and green card access for their compatriots.

Statement on Trump Suspending Microsoft from the PERM Program: This is a crucial issue for me as the top Democrat on the Immigration Subcommittee, the only member of Congress to have actually had an H-1B visa, and the Representative for tens of thousands of Microsoft workers. The administration has been consistently working to take away legal pathways for immigrants to contribute their talents to our country, and this is yet another of those attacks. The PERM program is the first step toward an employment-based green card for countless workers who want to contribute to this country, and it lays out a clear process with steps to ensure that this is a net benefit to our economy and does not harm American jobs. Our economy, our communities, and our families depend on immigrants in many sectors, including the tech sector, and heavy-handed attacks like this only hurt efforts to build a strong, stable, and diverse base of workers who have legal pathways to come and be in the United States while also protecting U.S. workers from unscrupulous employers. You don’t fix a broken immigration system by taking a hammer to legal immigration. Microsoft has been a leader in advocating for comprehensive immigration reforms that modernize an antiquated immigration system and provide more — not fewer — legal pathways for immigrants from all over the world to work here and be with their families. Targeting Microsoft or the PERM program in this way simply undermines legal immigration and weakens America’s ability to innovate.

— Rep. Pramila Jayapal (@RepJayapal) October 8, 2026

The panic on social media was palpable, with Indian accounts raging over the potential loss of US economic access.  Their primary argument?  That the US tech industry is dead in the water without them because the US doesn't have enough "brilliant" tech engineers to fill the necessary job roles.  They claim that their "service" to the US economy earns them the right to permanent residency, but that's not how these things work.

These people agree to get paid to do a job, they are not entitled to citizenship just because they are willing to work for less.  And let's consider their logic for a moment:  If Indian tech workers are so highly skilled and bring so much value, why isn't India one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world?  Why don't these workers bring any added value to their own economy?  Why is India 150th in the world per capita?

Probably because the "high IQ" Indian tech worker narrative is a scam.

Their only value on the global market is their willingness to work for low wages.  But why do Indians work for so much less?  It's important to understand that US companies are offering a commodity on top of the otherwise low pay - And that commodity is permanent US residency.  These companies are essentially selling access to US citizenship in exchange for cheap labor.   

It's quite the deal for tech firms if you think about it.  They get thousands of cheap laborers, and they get to use a commodity that requires minimal cost.  Microsoft might pay around $4000 on average in attorney's fees to apply for a migrant worker to get PERM status, but they save tens-of-thousands on every migrant worker salary.   The people who suffer most are American workers who get replaced. 

Indian tech workers make a yearly salary of around $12,000 to $20,000 in their home country.  A job in the US makes them significantly more, even with the pay cut.  This money is often wired from the US back to India where US dollars have far greater buying power than the Rupee.  Access to the US economy is a gold mine for third world migrants.      

India's economy also benefits indirectly from H-1B immigration.  India is the largest beneficiary of remittances in the world.  The country received approximately $40 billion in cash transfers from the US every year, which is larger than the majority of India's budget for subsidized programs like welfare.  It is 7% of the government's entire annual budget.  That's massive. 

So, it makes sense why there is a complex fraud network on both sides of the ocean to make Indian immigration happen.  Indian workers are notorious for using fake degrees to get H-1B approval, but many US companies look the other way because they want the low wage labor.  The Indian government backs the fraud because they get billions of dollars in cash flow into their economy on the back end.  And the migrants happily participate because they get a much higher chance of gaining US citizenship, which is one of the most valuable commodities in the world. 

It's one of the biggest economic rackets on the globe.  It's also a key vehicle for the multicultural invasion of the US.  There is no benefit to the American people to import millions of third world migrants, and it's about time that someone did something to stop the chain of abuse.

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/10/2026 - 14:35

New Jersey Pulls More Improper Voter Registrations, Adds Daily Audits At Motor Vehicle Agency

Authored by Chase Smith via The Epoch Times,

New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill on Oct. 7 ordered daily checks of voter registrations processed through the state Motor Vehicle Commission after a review found about 1,090 additional registrations that were improperly handled.

Sherrill ordered the review after disclosing in July that a software error had registered about 6,600 people who said they were not U.S. citizens when they applied for driver's licenses and state IDs between June 2023 and June 2024.

She said fewer than 400 of them voted.

Sherrill, a Democrat, said in a statement that neither of the new problems involved noncitizens.

About 750 of the records came from the same error in a system run by IDEMIA, the agency's vendor, according to a press release from the governor's office.

Those people answered "no" when asked whether they were old enough to vote, but their registrations went through anyway, her office said.

Sherrill's administration said their birth dates showed they were old enough and that many appeared to have pressed the wrong button on the keypad.

Because they answered no, the registrations weren't legally valid, according to the administration.

About 380 of those people had no other registration and didn't vote, and their records are being deleted, according to the governor's office.

About 320 voted and had other potentially valid registrations, and their cases are going to county election officials, the governor's press release stated.

About 50 were registered only because of the error and voted. Their records are being deleted and also sent to the counties. The other 340 records came from voter sign-ups at agency events for people leaving prison, dating back to 2016, Sherrill's office added.

The administration said some people at those events wrongly said they were eligible while still serving a sentence for an indictable offense, New Jersey's equivalent of a felony.

County officials will review those records one by one.

Separately, about 60 people were found to be currently incarcerated, and their names were sent to the counties for routine removal.

Under the new process, the agency will compare registration records each day against what customers actually entered, including citizenship, age, and whether they chose to register.

Records that don't match will be staff-reviewed before going to election officials.

The agency is also adding a keypad question at re-entry events asking people to confirm they aren't currently incarcerated for an indictable offense, and offering registration questions in five languages.

Sherrill said she promised a thorough review so that no ineligible person stays on the rolls and every eligible voter is heard.

"In just two and a half months, we conducted this review and are taking sweeping action," she said.

She criticized President Donald Trump, saying he has complained about the issue for a decade without fixing it.

State Senate Republican Leader Anthony Bucco said in a statement that the updates are "creating more questions than answers."

He said the public still hasn't seen the report on the original 6,600 registrations, and that with Election Day less than a month away, voters deserve to see the analysis behind the administration's conclusions.

Every Senate Republican has signed on to a resolution that would create a special Senate committee to investigate.

Bucco and state Sen. Kristin Corrado also introduced a bill that would end automatic voter registration at the agency, require voter ID, and set biannual independent audits of the voter rolls.

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/10/2026 - 13:00

Trump Petitions Supreme Court To Reinstate Lawsuit Against Clinton & DNC Over Russia Claims

Authored by Matthew Vadum via The Epoch Times,

President Donald Trump asked the Supreme Court on Oct. 9 to revive his dismissed civil lawsuit against Hillary Clinton, the Democratic National Committee (DNC), and others.

The president alleges they conspired to create and spread a false story that his 2016 campaign colluded with Russia.

Lower courts rejected the case and ordered Trump and one of his attorneys, Alina Habba, to pay almost $1 million in sanctions. The trial judge and the appeals court called the lawsuit "frivolous," saying it had no legal merit and appeared aimed at political grievance rather than a valid claim.

Trump is now asking the nation's highest court to review the appeals court's decision upholding both the dismissal and the sanctions.

While he was out of office after losing the 2020 election, Trump initiated the lawsuit in federal court in Florida in March 2022, under a federal racketeering law known as civil RICO. That law allows private individuals to seek damages when they claim someone engaged in a pattern of illegal activities, such as fraud or conspiracy.

The lawsuit targeted Clinton, the DNC, former British spy Christopher Steele, former FBI Director James Comey, and more than two dozen other people. It centered on the so-called Steele dossier, which was opposition research funded by Clinton's campaign that alleged the Russian government had compromising material on Trump.

Trump's lawsuit touches on topics covered by two earlier government investigations. Former special counsel Robert Mueller's 2019 report found no criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia. Former special counsel John Durham's 2023 report criticized the FBI's handling of its 2016 counterintelligence investigation - codenamed Crossfire Hurricane - into possible Trump campaign contacts with Russia. Durham said the FBI relied too much on uncorroborated tips, including material connected to the Clinton campaign.

Those government reports dealt with criminal and counterintelligence questions. By contrast, Trump's civil lawsuit is a private damages case governed by different rules. The lower courts held that Trump waited too long to file it under the RICO Act's time limit.

Dossier Source Scrutiny

Steele's dossier included claims that the Russian government possessed a salacious video of Trump at a hotel in Moscow. His main source was later revealed to be Igor Danchenko, who was based in the United States and has been investigated by federal agents over possible ties to Russian intelligence.

Attorneys for Trump and Habba wrote in the new petition that Supreme Court review of the case is necessary to protect the institution of the presidency. They said that the decisions by the lower courts reflect "a deeply troubling trend of federal courts using sanctions and disciplinary threats to punish the president and his lawyers for legitimate legal positions that those courts (erroneously) reject."

"Treating contested advocacy as misconduct corrodes our legal culture, deters representation of controversial clients, and makes constitutional adjudication depend on counsel's willingness to risk personal liability," they said.

They alleged in the lawsuit that in the months leading up to the 2016 election, Clinton conspired with allies to discredit him with a "false narrative" that he and his campaign engaged in collusion with Russia, according to the petition. The suit alleged several claims, including racketeering and a "conspiracy to commit injurious falsehood."

Trump defeated Clinton in 2016 and went on to serve in the presidency from January 2017 to January 2021. Trump later regained the presidency by defeating Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, the sitting vice president, in 2024.

In September 2022, U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks threw out Trump's lawsuit against Clinton on multiple grounds, including that Trump waited too long to pursue some of the claims. Middlebrooks compared Trump's lawsuit to a "two-hundred-page political manifesto outlining his grievances against those that have opposed him." The judge later imposed sanctions on Trump and Habba for filing a case he said was calculated "to dishonestly advance a political narrative," and for misusing the courts.

In 2025, the 11th Circuit affirmed Middlebrooks, including the sanctions, saying that many of Trump's and Habba's legal arguments "were indeed frivolous."

In the new filing, the attorneys said the time limit for launching the suit should have been extended because Trump opted to delay filing during his first term of office so he could focus on executing his constitutional responsibilities as the nation's chief executive.

The attorneys argue that the heavy demands of being president justify pausing the normal deadline for filing a private lawsuit while Trump is in office, so he should not have to choose between running the country and defending his own legal rights.

The attorneys also ask the Supreme Court to decide whether a lower court can fine a president and his lawyers close to $1 million merely for making that argument, even if the court rejects it in the end.

"This court's intervention is necessary to protect the presidency, and to prevent judicial disagreement from becoming a license to punish its advocates," the petition said.

It is unclear when the Supreme Court will take up the petition.

    OCTOBER ONLY.$10 OFFYOUR NEXT ORDER.$30 min. Ends Oct 31. One per customer.GET MY $10 OFF →Signs you up for ZeroHedge Store emails. Can't be combined. Every order helps support ZeroHedge. Tyler Durden Sat, 10/10/2026 - 12:00

Vance Casts Doubt On Firing Squad Execution, Balks At Hegseth's Live Stream Plan

Vice President JD Vance seemed less enthusiastic and more ambivalent compared to other top officials in the US administration when asked about War Secretary Pete Hegseth's announcement that the Pentagon will livestream the firing squad execution of Fort Hood killer Nidal Hasan.

A reporter asked Vance about the unusual development on Friday. Hegseth has been insistent that it will happen. Apparently having been approved by President Trump, the execution is set for December 3rd of this year.

"Well, first of all, I’ve seen these announcements. I don't know that that’s actually going to happen. Let’s sort of see what - I think it’s going to happen in December when he’s executed," Vance began.

JD Vance distances himself from Hegseth's televised execution: "Look, if it's ultimately livestreamed, I'm not going to be watching it" https://t.co/PnpmjfNTi0

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 9, 2026

Vance, who will himself likely run for president after Trump's term, continued: "But what I try to remind people is, look, this is a guy who committed, in my view, the worst terrorist attack on American soil outside of 9/11."

"The people that he was meant to treat, the army soldiers that he was meant to treat for mental illness and other problems, he took them at their most vulnerable and gunned down these people where they live."

But then he noted that he is unlikely to watch it: "So whatever the controversy is about the method of the execution, I hope that people don’t forget that this is a guy who brutally murdered a lot of innocent people. Now, that said, I mean, look, if it’s all through livestream, I’m not going to be watching it."

Hegseth's announcement has been controversial and received pushback not just among Democrats but Republicans as well. For example, Republican Senator Thom Tillis has argued: "Hasan should face the death penalty, but making his execution public and streaming it? Beyond disgusting."

Many on the Right have not been impressed with the whole bizarre livestream aspect...

OMG so based, public execution. Grow the fuck up

— The_Real_Fly (@The_Real_Fly) October 9, 2026

In 2009, former US Army Major and psychiatrist Nidal Hasan opened fire inside a crowded Readiness Center at Fort Hood, Texas, killing 12 soldiers and one civilian, as well as an unborn child. In the jihadist-inspired terror attack he also wounded 32 others, before being shot by military police and permanently disabled.

Hegseth had boasted to TV outlet Real America's Voice on Wednesday that "We'll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it's public."

Source: Bell County Sheriff's Department

The tiny handful of countries known for carrying out public executions over the years are Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Afghanistan. The last public execution in the US happened in 1936 in Kentucky, when a convicted murder and rapist was hanged amid onlookers.

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/10/2026 - 11:30

Pentagon Unveils $350 Million In Quantum Computing Initiatives

Authored by Timothy Frudd via The Epoch Times,

The Department of War announced $350 million in quantum computing initiatives on Oct. 8 intended to strengthen America's leadership in quantum computing capabilities and support national security.

The initiatives, announced by the Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering, are part of the Trump administration's effort to boost quantum computing, which uses the principles of quantum mechanics to solve advanced problems much faster than traditional computers.

President Donald Trump previously issued a pair of executive orders on June 22 that set new development goals for the quantum computing industry to maintain U.S. dominance in the field. The goals included the development of the world's first quantum computer capable of powering advanced scientific research by 2028.

"Dominance in quantum information science is a critical priority for both President Trump and the Department of War," Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering Emil Michael said in a statement on Thursday. "Maintaining American leadership in this field is essential to preserving our technological edge, and R&E (Research and Engineering) is uniquely positioned to drive the innovation needed across academia and industry."

Under the new initiatives, the Pentagon will identify mission-relevant applications of quantum computing as the computers become available. The department said it expects the use of quantum computing in physics, chemistry, and materials science will support the development of next-generation weapons, platforms, and other cost-effective and lethal capabilities.

Additionally, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will coordinate with other agencies to host a series of application workshops giving experts and end users the opportunity to enhance national defense, develop economic opportunities, and boost quantum advantage. The workshops will start before January 2027, the Pentagon said.

On Oct. 7, the agency announced that four companies had been selected to advance to the final stage of its Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, representing about $200 million in new funding. The initiative aims to determine whether any quantum computing approach's value can exceed its cost by 2033.

The Pentagon said its initiatives will complement other initiatives recently announced by the Department of Energy, such as the Quantum Genesis Priority Applications and the Quantum Genesis Q Competition, as well as initiatives led by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Science Foundation.

The Pentagon said Thursday that developing a strong quantum industrial base was essential for the United States to maintain its leadership in the field, and that winning the quantum leadership race was critical for national security.

In a separate announcement on Thursday, the War Department's Office of Strategic Capital unveiled a roughly $150 million conditional loan commitment to enhance PsiQuantum's advanced prototyping and manufacturing capabilities in the United States.

David Lorch, director of the Office of Strategic Capital, said the proposed loan commitment to the Palo Alto, California-based company directly aligned with the president's mandate to boost quantum computing development and commercialization. Lorch said quantum computing will lead to "transformational capabilities."

"Funding the development of fault-tolerant quantum computing is a national security imperative," Peter B. Zuckerman, senior managing director at the War Department's Office of Strategic Capital, said in a statement.

"We must scale this critical technology to secure our technological edge and deny adversaries a decisive strategic advantage."

Michael said the Pentagon is "moving at breakneck speed" in response to Trump's orders.

The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission published a report last year concluding that while the United States led the world in most quantum research, China had deployed centralized coordination and industrial-scale funding to "seize dominance" in quantum technology.

In March, China included the development of quantum technologies as one of the strategic priorities listed in its 15th Five-Year Plan.

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/10/2026 - 10:30

As German Voters Reject Mass Migration, Politicians And The Media Play The Fool

Authored by Pawel Styrna via American Thinker,

The anti-mass-migration Alternative for Germany (AfD) has won the election to the provincial parliaments in the states of Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.

The AfD's rising trajectory demonstrates that - like throughout the rest of the West - voters increasingly want an end to unchecked mass migration and its many cultural, economic, and security problems. It also shows that the globalist, pro-mass-migration political and media establishment continues to ignore and demonize the voters and pretend there is no problem.

Although the AfD did not capture a majority of the seats in the Saxony-Anhalt parliament (Landtag), it came within striking distance. Winning 44 percent of the vote, the AfD nevertheless doubled its share from the previous (2021) election and secured its best showing ever. In Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, it more than doubled its vote share.

The biggest losers were the Christian Democrats - the party of Chancellor Friedrich Merz and former Chancellor Angela Merkel - which plummeted from 37 percent five years ago to 17 percent in Saxony-Anhalt. Overall, Merz's policies, including on immigration, had even lower approval there: a devastating 9 percent. In Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the CDU got less than 5 percent and didn't even make it into the Landtag.

The reaction of the political establishment and the media was pretty much the same as in the U.S. following Donald Trump's presidential victories, or in Britain following Brexit. It was a toxic combination of condescension, finger-wagging moralizing, pearl-clutching shock, and shrill fearmongering. Like the boy who cried wolf, pro-mass-migration voices, both in Germany and elsewhere, labelled the AfD "far right" (while hardly ever using the term far left) and even "fascist," hoping to terrify whoever would listen with the specter of a resurgent Fourth Reich.

Chancellor Merz, who apparently does not follow the news from his own homeland, claimed to be "deeply shocked" by the Saxony-Anhalt election results. Angela Merkel - the single greatest contributor to Germany's current problems with mass migration - declared, with a "bleeding heart," that the AfD win was "deeply shocking." These statements show just how out of touch with reality the political establishment in Berlin is.

In fact, the most shocking thing is the absolute complacency of mainstream German politicians as unchecked mass migration undermines their country.

Rapes, stabbings, and other crimes by migrants - often rejected asylum applicants who weren't deported - have become a "new normal."

German women feel unsafe. In late July, a Lebanese Islamist perpetrated a terrorist attack in Berlin, killing one woman (a tourist visiting from Poland) and injuring 29 more with his vehicle. Meanwhile, Islamist migrants taunt Germans with promises of an "Islamic Republic of Germany" as the already highly-taxed German taxpayers are forced to support large immigrant families, such as a Syrian with three wives, 32 children, and 25 grandchildren.

Images of the migrant incursion into Ceuta - viewed all over the world thanks to social media - no doubt also made an impression on German voters. Recognizing the extent of the constant pressure on Europe's borders, Germans had legitimate grounds to fear that the migrant wave would eventually make its way to Germany and had little stomach for a repeat of Angela Merkel's 2015 red carpet for hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants.

Image: Maximilian Dörrbecker, with use of official sources, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 2.0 Deed

An increasing number of Germans have had enough. So, when Alice Weidel and other AfD leaders pledge to "close the borders," remove migrants from the welfare rolls, and mass deportations (remigration), the message increasingly resonates, even with German voters with immigrant backgrounds. That's because - as in the U.S. - just because you're an immigrant doesn't mean you want higher crime, terror attacks, and seeing your hard-earned money fund huge polygamous migrant families that turned welfare dependency into a competitive sport.

What further drives AfD support is how the mainstream elites respond to these completely legitimate voter concerns. Sometimes, they begrudgingly acknowledge them and attempt to show that they are doing something about the crisis. However, voters can see that Merz's supposedly "tougher" migration policies are really just nibbling around the edges (often with paradoxical results, such as dumping illegal migrants onto Poland). Overall, however, the voters are talked down to and told that they are dumb, misinformed, unsophisticated, mean-spirited, unwelcoming, and, perhaps even racists and Nazis. Establishment figures then conclude their lectures by proclaiming utter "shock" that the voters are rejecting them.

Herr Merz showed just how deeply committed he is to the mass migration agenda (in spite of some tactical concessions) by channeling the most radical "abolish ICE" activists and attacking mass removals (remigration) as "ethnic cleansing" on the floor of the Bundestag. (Of course, unchecked mass migration rapidly changing Western societies culturally beyond recognition is apparently not "ethnic cleansing.") Like much of the Western political establishment, Chancellor Merz has learned nothing. The voters, however, are refusing to put up with it.

Pawel Styrna is director of international relations at the Federation for American Immigration Reform. He is a legal immigrant and holds a Ph.D. in history from American University in Washington, D.C.

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/10/2026 - 07:00

Hurricane Isaias Slams Gulf Coast, Knocks Out Power To 830,000 As Major Refineries Are Spared

Hurricane Isaias knocked out power to about 830,000 homes and businesses across Florida, Alabama, and Georgia and disrupted oil and natural gas operations in the Gulf of America, but the good news: it narrowly missed major refineries.

The Category 2 hurricane made landfall near Destin, Florida, at 8:30 local time, with sustained winds of 105 miles per hour before weakening into what the National Hurricane Center calls a "post-tropical cyclone." Strong winds damaged roofs, toppled trees and downed power lines, while flooding was reported across Florida and Alabama.

Gulf oil production fell sharply late in the week as Isaias forced offshore platform evacuations and drilling rig relocations. A slight eastward shift in the storm's track spared Chevron's Pascagoula refinery in Mississippi, reducing the risk of a major refining disruption. The focus today now shifts to damaged infrastructure assessments and the pace of offshore production restarts. 

According to the utility tracker website PowerOutage, 430,000 customers in Florida are without power, 300,000 in Alabama, and another 106,000 in Georgia.

Torrential rain and tropical storm conditions were expected to persist Saturday as the storm moved north through Alabama toward the Tennessee and Ohio valleys.

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/10/2026 - 06:38

Trump Says "Time For Ukraine To Get A New Leader" After Zelensky Ignored Six Pleas To Stop Refinery Strikes

Update (1200ET): As he was boarding Air Force One on the way to Tennessee this morning, President Trump made his feelings clear over how he feels about Ukrainian President Zelensky.

President Trump stated that "it’s time for Ukraine to get a new president", criticizing Zelensky for bombing Russian oil refineries and accusing him of failing to end the war.

“I suggest they get a new leader who can make a deal." 

One day after announcing plans to buy more than a million tonnes of diesel from Russia, Trump said the Ukrainian strikes were driving up global fuel prices and creating “problems for the world”.

“He wants to make problems for our farmers, our ranchers with diesel fuel because Russia supplies a large portion of the diesel fuel throughout the world. And we told them ‘Do whatever you want, but don’t hit the diesel fuel, because this is a big problem, a big shortage’.”

“And what does he do? He goes and hits the diesel fuel.”

Asked about the strikes, he said of Zelensky:

“He’d better damn well stop.”

WATCH:

.@POTUS on Ukraine: "You know what I suggest? I suggest they get a new leader who could make a deal because he could've made many deals and for some reason he never does... I think it's time for Ukraine to get a new President." https://t.co/WoVG0HUazA

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) October 10, 2026

*  *  *

Friday's diesel deal between Trump and Putin wasn't only about diesel. It was also about Kyiv.

Hours after Zelensky accused Washington of using Ukraine's negotiators as a "smokescreen" for a backroom deal with Moscow, Axios reported that Trump decided to let Russia sell diesel after Zelensky ignored half a dozen US requests to stop attacking Russian oil refineries. The alleged source was a US official with direct knowledge, who did not hold back:

"Zelensky is misreading the room. By continuing to hit refineries, he is eroding the good will that he has built with Trump over the last six months."

In other words, the sanctions waiver was as much a message to Kyiv as a gift to Moscow. So how did we get to this latest geopolitical twist, what is Trump actually got for lifting sanctions (spoiler: less than nine days of fuel), and why is the deal is on a collision course with the one Ukrainian policy Kyiv says it won't give up. Let's dig in. 

"Half A Dozen" Requests

The backstory is familiar to regular readers. One month ago, Trump - freaking out about soaring diesel prices - told reporters that Zelensky "has to stop knocking out diesel fuel in Russia," and a day later he announced a truce that never really happened:

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."

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) September 14, 2026

A few hours later, Kyiv kept hitting refineries anyway. Just last weekend Zelensky vowed to hammer more of them, and on Thursday Ukrainian drones set Russia's largest refinery at Omsk ablaze, more than 1,500 miles from the border. Axios notes the strikes were "highly effective and caused an energy crisis in Russia," prompting Moscow's diesel export ban, which then "added more pressure to global diesel markets under strain from the war in Iran."

The core disagreement is about symmetry. Zelensky told Trump, Witkoff and Kushner that he would stop hitting Russian refineries if Russia stopped hitting Ukrainian power plants. Trump wanted Ukraine to stop unilaterally, according to the official, and "didn't see the attacks on refineries as equivalent to Russian strikes on Ukraine's power grid." Or, as the official put it: "The attacks on the refineries cause pain in Russia, but it causes pain for the U.S., too."

Then there is what happened in Miami. During eight hours of talks on Friday, Witkoff and Kushner told the Ukrainian delegation that Trump was expected to call Putin and lift sanctions on Russian diesel, because Kyiv had ignored repeated requests on strikes "which were directly affecting U.S. consumers." A Ukrainian official claimed the envoys also threatened that Trump could cut Ukraine off from US intelligence if it kept ignoring him. The US official denied that, saying the envoys merely reminded Kyiv that the US provides munitions and intelligence, so Ukraine "shouldn't take actions that hurt American consumers." That is a fine distinction, and Kyiv is unlikely to see the difference.

So was Ukraine's team a "smokescreen," as Zelensky charged? Not quite: the US delegation told them what was coming. But the decision was clearly made before they sat down. Zelensky's reaction, in a statement reported by Politico:

"At this very moment, while our team is talking with the American team in Florida, at this very moment, the President of the United States is talking with the leader of the Kremlin... and has an agreement under which America is allowing Russia to export diesel fuel. That means more money for this war... I believe our team is simply being used as a smokescreen, and that is certainly not fair."

He went further in an interview with Axios, calling it "not fair and not honest" and "a happy birthday present for Putin" (who turned 74 on Wednesday), and told reporters it was "a weak decision by strong partners."

And the payoff from Putin? So far, none on peace. During the 90-minute call he declined to commit to resuming talks with Ukraine. Kremlin adviser Yuri Ushakov said Ukrainian strikes on Moscow and other cities during Russia's parliamentary elections had "thwarted the possibility of an immediate resumption of the negotiation process," adding: "The president said, we will think about when these negotiations can be resumed." That is the kind of non-answer that tends to precede more non-answers. The US official still thinks Putin "is open to a discussion on ending the war," and says Washington wants a "new proposal that will be good enough for him." Witkoff and Kushner may visit Moscow and Kyiv next week, though Axios notes it's unclear how Friday's blowup will affect those plans.

What Trump Got: 4.8 Million Tons, Mostly "Thereafter"

Here's what Trump posted on Truth Social shortly before Friday's close:

"I have just concluded a highly successful discussion with President Vladimir Putin, of Russia, wherein it was agreed that Russia will immediately supply over 300,000 Tons of Diesel Fuel to the American and Global Marketplace, another 500,000 Tons during the month of November, and 1,000,000 Tons immediately thereafter."

Another 3 million tons would follow "within a short period of time," depending on "the condition of their Diesel Refineries." That condition is the whole point, as we explain below. Then came the usual all-caps flourish: between "our TOTAL CONTROL of the Strait of Hormuz, and this great announcement on Russian Energy, Diesel Prices for Americans and, indeed, the World, will be COMING DOWN, IN RECORD NUMBERS, AND FAST!"

*TRUMP SAYS PUTIN AGREED TO RELEASE DIESEL INTO GLOBAL MARKET

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) October 9, 2026

Minutes later, Treasury said OFAC was "immediately issuing a temporary general license to allow the supply of Russian diesel to the global market." General License 135 authorizes the sale, delivery and import (including into the US) of Russian-origin diesel until April 7, 2027. That is six months, and according to Fortune it is the first diesel waiver since the war began to run longer than the standard 30 days. The EU and UK sanctions are unchanged, so Europe, the region that actually imports diesel, can't legally buy a drop of it.

Moscow confirmed the terms. Deputy PM Alexander Novak said Russia was ready to supply 300,000 tons in October, 500,000 in November and 1 million in December, and that "in the long run, this volume could reach three million tons per month." The Kremlin's readout said "the Russian side reaffirmed its readiness to supply oil and oil products to the American and world markets," with no dates attached. Something to look forward to in 2027, perhaps.

The algos loved it. As Goldman's US rates desk wrote in its Friday wrap (available to pro subs), "Before the close, headlines hit the tape that Russia would release diesel supply into the market, driving down diesel prices and leading to a modest rally in the front end." Both US and European diesel futures slid, with NY Harbor diesel down about 4.5% to $4.67/gallon per the FT, and WTI fell about a buck to $91.

Do The Math: Less Than Nine Days Of Fuel

Now for the arithmetic. At roughly 7.45 barrels per ton, the "immediate" 300,000 tons is about 2.2 million barrels. The US burns roughly 4 million barrels of distillate a day, so October's tranche covers about half a day of American demand. Add November and December and the first 1.8 million tons cover about 3.4 days. Even if the 3 million tons conditional on refinery health actually arrive, the full 4.8 million tons (about 36 million barrels) cover less than nine days of US consumption.

That is the best case. Trump's own post says the fuel is going to the "American and Global Marketplace", so the US share will be smaller.

For context, the Omsk refinery that Ukraine hit on Thursday produced roughly 8 million tons of diesel in 2024 (per Bloomberg). That is about 670,000 tons a month. Put differently, the entire "November tranche" is less than one month of output from a single plant that was on fire the day before the deal was announced.

The industry isn't buying it either. The FT reports that Russia is running its refineries at about 60% of capacity because of Ukrainian strikes, and quotes Kpler's head of policy and geopolitical risk Michelle Brouhard: "The thing that I'm most curious about is: where is the diesel going to come from? Russia doesn't have an export problem. It's got a refinery problem." Rapidan's Bob McNally added that Moscow had already "been leaning toward a slight easing of its diesel export ban for logistical reasons." So Trump may have paid a six-month sanctions waiver for barrels Russia was about to sell anyway.

Brouhard also warned that the deal could end up removing diesel from the market. Because the headline knocked diesel down relative to crude while freight costs are at records, "Refinery margins are now negative, which means refinery runs in Asia probably are going to come off . . . which means we're going to lose some diesel." Mission accomplished.

Why Russia Can't Spare It (And Why Trump Wants It Anyway)

The irony is that Russia isn't exporting diesel because it can't. As regular readers know, Moscow banned diesel exports back on July 8 to avoid domestic shortages after a wave of Ukrainian drone strikes on its refineries, and extended the ban through Oct. 31 last week. The IEA estimates Russian diesel output is down about 30%. In other words, Putin has just promised to export fuel his own motorists are queuing for, under a ban his own government imposed. That's either a remarkable act of generosity or a remarkably cheap promise (we know which way we lean).

The reason for the urgency is simple: diesel is still near record highs with less than four weeks until Election Day. AAA's national average was $6.23/gallon on Friday, down only modestly from the record $6.52 on Sept. 22. Goldman's commodity desk wrote last weekend in its Weekly Commodity Thoughts (available to pro subs) that the global distillate market "has been the most distressed area of the entire energy complex with gasoil cracks (gasoil vs. crude) trading to over $100/bbl in late September." That only eased after "recent US political pressure and threats to implement a diesel export ban" pushed the G7 into a 100mb emergency release. We covered that at the time under the title "Trump's Diesel Threat Worked." Goldman's desk was not impressed with the fix:

"However, while prices have moved lower the release does little to solve the structural issue has been caused by continued curtailment of Middle East exports and widespread damage to Russian refinery infrastructure."

JPMorgan's commodities chief Natasha Kaneva was blunter about the G7 headline in her latest diesel note (available to pro subs): "the headline 100 million barrels does not represent 100 million barrels of new intervention ... much of Friday's announcement represents the completion of the earlier IEA release rather than a new injection of barrels." Sound familiar?

The market had the same reaction to the G7 release. As we noted on Wednesday, diesel crack spreads "quickly shot up back over $100, as market laughs at the emergency release of 100MM barrels."

The Market Already Priced It (Sort Of)

The hedge funds saw this coming. Goldman's Robert Quinn wrote earlier this week (and available to pro subs) that in the week through Sept. 29, managed money sold $2.4 billion of gasoil, the largest amount in 18 months, split equally between liquidation and new shorts. That followed a run in which specs "purchased in all but 1 week for a cumulative +$4.3bn" from late June to mid-September. And on Oct. 6, three days before Trump's post, "October Gasoil reached intraday lows of -5.3% on reports that Russia may lift the country's ban on diesel exports for some producers in October."

Translation: a good chunk of the "Russia relief" was in the price before Friday's headline. That leaves little room for another leg lower, and plenty of room for a squeeze if the barrels don't show up.

It's The Midterms, Stupid

Why burn this much goodwill with Kyiv over nine days of diesel? Because fuel prices are what's moving the ballot. Goldman's political economists Alec Phillips and Abhay Duggirala wrote in their latest US Election Monitor (available here for pro subs) that "Gasoline prices and the Democratic generic ballot have moved together this year - the Democratic lead widened gradually after the gasoline price spike at the onset of the Iran war." Democrats now lead the generic ballot by an average of 8.9pp, and "Inflation and the economy rank highest for voters, and Trump's net approval on both is deeply negative."

Prediction markets have already reached their verdict: using Polymarket data, Goldman notes markets are "now pricing a roughly 65% chance of a Democratic sweep and less than a 10% chance that Republicans retain their House majority."

Against that backdrop, everything the White House did on diesel this week makes sense: the red-dye diesel waiver on Monday, the export-ban threats (which, as Goldman modeled, would knock just $0.25/gallon off retail diesel per week, before pushing gasoline higher), the decision not to strike Iran until after Nov. 3, and now Putin's diesel. JPMorgan's Market Intel desk summed up the shift in a client call this week: "why diesel, not crude, may now be the more important inflation signal." For a White House facing 25 days of voter anger at the pump, a Friday afternoon price dip is worth a lot. The fact that it rests on a sanctions waiver and a promise from Putin is the problem.

US Intel Cut-Off Threats and Ukraine Responses Already...

As we detailed earlier, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s negotiating team met Trump’s representatives for nearly eight hours on Friday in Miami, where they were meant to discuss ways to convince Russia to end its war.

During the meeting, Trump’s envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner raised the possibility that intelligence sharing could be cut off if Kyiv did not heed Washington’s warning to halt the strikes, according to people familiar with the matter.

“It was a firm request from POTUS,” one of the Ukrainians involved in the talks told the FT, referring to Trump.

Ukraine uses US intelligence to carry out the energy infrastructure attacks that have choked off a vital source of revenue for Moscow's war economy.

The new details turn the diesel deal from a pump-price gimmick into a test of wills with Kyiv. Trump has now tied the price Americans pay for diesel to whether Ukraine keeps burning Russian refineries - that way he has a clear scapegoat when Diesel prices keeps rising. Kyiv's answer came within hours, and it was not the "symmetrical" one Zelensky had floated. A senior Ukrainian official told the FT that the long-range drone strikes on Russian energy facilities will continue: 

"We will burn [Russian] refineries."

Which is why the deal looks doomed from the start, which ironically is just what Trump wanted as there is little chance diesel sustains a price drop for the next several weeks. As one widely shared take on X put it within minutes of the announcement, before Axios confirmed the motive:

The idea of this is not to bring diesel prices down. The idea is to stop Ukraine from striking russian refinaries and safe russian energy sector. Now every strike on russian refinaries by Ukraine will be treated as attack on American energy supply. https://t.co/ZCuGEfe0fR

— ✙ Constantine ✙ (@Teoyaomiquu) October 9, 2026

That is now, more or less, the White House's position.

The next Ukrainian drone that hits a Russian refinery will be hitting a supply chain the US president just put his name on (which has now already happened).

Just hours after the U.S. eased sanctions on Russian fuel exports, Ukrainian attack drones struck the NZNP Rostovsky oil products export terminal in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don. The Russian fuel export terminal was set ablaze. https://t.co/AaHzazyjS9

— OSINTtechnical (@Osinttechnical) October 10, 2026

We expect a Truth Social broadside at Zelensky the moment that happens, along with blaming the Ukraine president for all US inflationary woes,  which much to the deep state's disgust, would leave Washington defending Putin's export capacity against its own ally, weeks before an election.

As for the barrels, we'll believe them when we see them in New York Harbor. Russia's export ban still runs through Oct. 31, its refineries are running at about 60% of capacity, and Kyiv has said outright that it will keep burning them. The most likely outcome? Putin sends out a diesel tanker, Ukraine drones the refinery that filled it, and the "deal" quietly dies, with both sides blaming Zelensky. Until then, it has done what it was designed to do: produce one good headline for the pump-price chart, and put Kyiv on notice that going forward Z will be the scapegoat for American runaway energy inflation.

Much more in the full Goldman Weekly Commodity Thoughts, Quinn's "Managed Money Gasoil Sentiment Shifting?" note, the GS US Election Monitor and JPMorgan's diesel note, all available to pro subs.

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/10/2026 - 00:22

AI Authoritarianism: A Government Without Constitutional Brakes

Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

"United States AI companies must be free to innovate without cumbersome regulation."

- President Donald Trump, Executive Order 14365

The era of small government is over.

Anyone who tells you differently is selling you a lie.

Case in point: Donald Trump promised to shrink the federal government.

But what if Trump's pledge to cut the federal work force wasn't really about eliminating government bureaucracy but outsourcing it to the AI tech sector?

What if Trump, with the backing of a self-serving industry eager to automate government, is instead helping to build a government that no longer needs as many human beings to operate it?

Hundreds of thousands of federal workers are disappearing from the government payroll at the same time that Washington is racing to automate the work they once performed with artificial intelligence.

Since Trump returned to office, the federal workforce has shrunk by more than 270,000 employees, the result of hiring freezes, deferred resignations, early retirements and reductions in force.

At the same time, the Trump administration has embraced an aggressive campaign to automate government operations, with the General Services Administration instructing agencies to "eliminate, optimize and automate" their work wherever possible.

This is not a return to smaller government.

It is a dangerous recalibration of government power.

What we are watching unfold is the construction of a government that requires fewer human beings to carry out its will, fewer human beings to question its orders, and fewer human beings to stand in the way when efficiency collides with legality, morality or constitutional restraint.

That is the real danger of automating government.

Human beings hesitate. Human beings question. Human beings object. Human beings refuse. Human beings blow the whistle.

Machines do not hesitate. They do not object. They do not blow the whistle.

For the most part, machines do what they are programmed to do. Until they don't.

For an administration increasingly impatient with legal restraints, institutional resistance and anyone who says "no," that is not merely a technological convenience.

It is an authoritarian temptation.

Anyone who believes smaller government means less government power needs to think again, because a government run by machines is still government.

Likewise, a government without bureaucrats is not necessarily a government without bureaucracy.

It may simply be bureaucracy without human beings.

And bureaucracy without human beings may prove far more powerful, pervasive and difficult to restrain than anything that came before it.

What is taking shape is a government that may employ fewer human beings while possessing exponentially greater power to surveil, process, classify, investigate and control the population.

Indeed, the administration has now launched America.gov, an AI-powered centralized digital gateway through which Americans will eventually interact with federal agencies and complete government transactions. The White House boasts that it will allow the federal government to "do its own paperwork."

AI can certainly reduce backlogs, simplify forms, process information and free workers from tedious tasks.

Certainly, artificial intelligence can help eliminate repetitive paperwork, reduce backlogs, identify waste, simplify complicated forms, translate government jargon into plain English, process enormous amounts of information and free human workers from tedious tasks.

The concern is not whether AI can be useful.

It can.

The danger begins when AI stops assisting human beings and starts replacing them - not merely as clerks but as decision-makers, investigators, gatekeepers, analysts and enforcers of government power.

Thus, the concern is not the technology itself but what happens when government begins using it to eliminate the human restraints that constitutional government depends upon.

We are rapidly moving from a society ruled by laws and due process to one ruled increasingly by software.

In such a regime, the law is no longer merely interpreted. It is executed. Automatically. Mechanically. At machine speed.

The result is a system in which government no longer governs. It processes.

Your application. Your tax return. Your disability claim. Your immigration status. Your face. Your movements. Your associations. Your financial transactions. Your government records request. Your threat profile.

Perhaps eventually your guilt or innocence.

And, if some military planners have their way, whether you qualify as a target.

This is where the supposed efficiency of artificial intelligence collides head-on with the Constitution.

Government is not a private corporation. Its purpose is not merely to become faster, cheaper or more productive. Government possesses powers that no corporation possesses. It can tax you. Search you. Arrest you. Imprison you. Seize your property. Monitor you. Restrict your liberty. And in extreme circumstances, take your life.

And in extreme circumstances, take your life.

When government exercises those powers, efficiency cannot be the highest value. Liberty must be.

Due process is inefficient. Search warrants are inefficient. Trials are inefficient. Appeals are inefficient. Human review is inefficient. Checks and balances are spectacularly inefficient.

They are supposed to be.

The Constitution deliberately places obstacles between government power and the individual.

Before the police may search your home, they generally need a warrant. Before the government may imprison you, it must give you an opportunity to challenge the accusations. Government power is deliberately divided so that one branch can restrain another.

All of that takes time.

All of that requires human beings.

All of that frustrates officials who would prefer to simply get things done.

Yet those safeguards are among the things standing between a free people and a government that can act instantly, universally and without meaningful resistance.

Artificial intelligence promises to cut through the delays, obstacles and human steps that slow government down.

That is marvelous if you're trying to schedule an appointment. It is terrifying when the government is making decisions about your liberty - or your life.

For generations, government power was also constrained by manpower. There were only so many investigators, analysts and bureaucrats - and only so many hours in a day.

AI changes that equation.

By doing what the police state has historically lacked the manpower and resources to do quickly, AI surveillance is already reorienting our world into one in which freedom is increasingly difficult to recognize: it can be everywhere, watch everyone and everything, monitor, identify, catalogue, cross-check, cross-reference and collate enormous quantities of information.

The surveillance state no longer needs enough people to watch everyone. It needs enough computing power.

That distinction matters.

A human investigator can follow only so many people. An algorithm can analyze millions. A bureaucrat can make only so many decisions in a day. A machine can make millions without sleeping, hesitating or developing a conscience.

That allows government power - and government abuse - to operate on a scale the Founders could scarcely have imagined.

It also creates an enormous accountability problem.

For decades, critics of the administrative state have warned about unelected bureaucrats wielding excessive government power.

Replacing the bureaucrat with an algorithm does not solve that problem. It may make it worse.

At least the bureaucrat has a name. A human being can be questioned. A supervisor can At least the bureaucrat has a name. A human being can be questioned. A supervisor can intervene. An employee can refuse an unlawful order. A whistleblower can expose misconduct. Someone can be held responsible.

But what happens when government responds, in effect, that the computer made the decision? Who do you cross-examine? Who explains the reasoning? Who takes responsibility for the mistake? Who possesses the authority to override the machine? And what happens when the algorithm itself belongs not to the government but to a private corporation whose code, training data and internal workings are shielded from public scrutiny?

The government's dependence on private technology companies only compounds the problem.

Government power remains government power, but accountability becomes privatized.

We are already seeing glimpses of this future.

Federal agencies are already experimenting with AI to review Freedom of Information Act requests and recommend which portions of government records should be withheld from the public. Customs and Border Protection is testing AI-assisted redaction tools, while other agencies are developing similar systems. Human reviewers are still involved, but the trajectory is unmistakable: tasks requiring judgment about what the public may know are increasingly becoming candidates for automation.

The stakes become far greater once AI moves from paperwork to policing and warfare.

Earlier this year, the Pentagon clashed with Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI system, after Anthropic insisted on maintaining restrictions against two uses of its technology: mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons.

Anthropic warned that present AI systems are not reliable enough to independently decide when weapons should fire and argued that AI-powered mass surveillance could allow government to piece together enormous quantities of otherwise scattered information about Americans at unprecedented scale.

The Pentagon responded by designating Anthropic a supply-chain risk, a decision that has since become the subject of litigation.

The dispute should concern anyone who cares about the limits of government power.

The issue was not whether artificial intelligence could assist military personnel.

It was whether there must always remain a human being responsible for certain decisions.

That question became even more urgent in September, when the United States and Russia opposed provisions under discussion at the United Nations that would have required human review of AI-generated military targets and imposed stronger requirements concerning the predictability and reliability of autonomous weapons systems.

The consequences of that rush toward machine-speed warfare are no longer hypothetical.

In February, U.S. missiles struck the Shajarah Tayyebeh girls' elementary school in Minab, Iran, killing more than 150 people, including at least 120 children.

The school had once been part of a military compound, but it had been operating openly as a school for years. Yet outdated intelligence still classified the site as a military target.

According to reporting on the Pentagon's internal investigation, the flawed target was fed into Maven, the military's AI-assisted targeting system. Officials reportedly relied too heavily on the technology to identify stale or contradictory intelligence while an accelerated targeting process compressed work that once took hours into minutes. At the same time, civilian-harm mitigation teams had been dramatically reduced.

The machine did not simply wake up one morning and decide to bomb a school. Human beings built a system that placed a premium on speed, automation and scale - and then gave it priority over human judgment and careful vetting.

That distinction matters. It is also precisely the danger.

Think about the progression: First AI does the paperwork. Then AI recommends the decision. Then AI makes the decision.

Eventually AI decides who lives and who dies.

At each step, humans remain tempted to surrender a little more judgment to the machine because it is faster, cheaper, more efficient and supposedly more objective.

Yet technology does not eliminate human bias, political agendas or government misconduct.

It can automate them. It can amplify them. It can conceal them behind a technological black box. And it can reproduce them millions of times before anyone realizes what has happened.

This is why assurances that AI companies can largely police themselves should provide little comfort.

At a White House gathering with technology executives on September 29, Trump praised what he called "tremendous self-policing" by the AI industry and joined major technology companies in announcing a voluntary safety accord emphasizing internal controls, outside audits and corporate oversight.

In other words, Trump wants us to trust the government and the AI sector to police itself.

The Founders knew better than to trust power to police itself. That is one of the central premises of the Constitution.

As James Madison famously observed in Federalist No. 51, "If men were angels, no government would be necessary."

The Founders did not assume that those entrusted with power would always restrain themselves. They divided power among competing branches because they understood that good intentions are not a safeguard against tyranny. Neither are voluntary promises. Neither are corporate ethics policies. Neither are algorithms.

Machines are not angels. The corporations building them are not angels. The politicians deploying them are not angels. And artificial intelligence does not repeal the oldest lesson in the history of government: power requires limits because power will always seek to expand.

This is where the campaign to shrink the federal workforce takes on an entirely different significance.

There is nothing inherently wrong with reducing unnecessary government employment, eliminating waste or using technology to make public services work better.

The danger lies in confusing fewer government employees with less government.

A government can have fewer workers and still become vastly more powerful. It can automate surveillance. Automate investigations. Automate eligibility decisions. Automate regulatory enforcement. Automate censorship. Automate watchlists. Automate targeting. Automate punishment.

Indeed, a government freed from the practical limits imposed by manpower could become more pervasive than anything an earlier generation of bureaucrats could have achieved.

That is the paradox confronting us.

We may be building a smaller federal workforce and a larger government machine.

Trump will not be president forever. Neither will the politicians who come after him.

But the AI infrastructure being erected now - the databases, automated systems, surveillance capabilities, digital gateways and government relationships with technology companies - will be inherited by every future administration.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, once those powers become embedded in the machinery of government, they will be exceedingly difficult to dismantle.

That is why the debate over artificial intelligence cannot be reduced to whether AI creates jobs, destroys jobs, saves taxpayer money or makes government more convenient.

The greater question is what happens when fewer and fewer human beings stand between government power and the people subjected to it.

What happens when there is no human face behind the decision? No human judgment. No human hesitation. No human mercy. No human conscience.

No human being willing - or able - to say: this is wrong.

The great danger is not that artificial intelligence will suddenly seize control of the government. It is that government officials will willingly surrender more and more control to artificial intelligence because machines are faster, cheaper, more obedient and easier to blame.

That is how bureaucracy without bureaucrats becomes authoritarianism without accountability.

The government may employ fewer people. It may operate fewer offices. It may eliminate paperwork and automate entire agencies. But if it can watch more people, investigate more people, process more people, target more people and exercise more power over more lives than ever before, that is not smaller government.

It is government without human limits.

The Founders built the Constitution around a simple truth: power cannot be trusted to restrain itself.

That truth does not become obsolete because the machinery of power now runs on artificial intelligence. If anything, it becomes more urgent.

Because once we remove the human beings who can question, resist, object and refuse, we may discover too late that we have not eliminated the bureaucracy at all.

We have eliminated the brakes.

Tyler Durden Fri, 10/09/2026 - 23:25

Grisly Discovery At Governor's Mansion As Human Remains Unearthed

A disturbing discovery at North Dakota's governor's mansion has uncovered seven coffins with human remains after construction crews hit a long-forgotten burial ground.

Freshly smoothed dirt rests behind a fence outside the North Dakota governor’s residence in Bismarck on Sept. 30, 2026, after seven coffins containing human remains were exhumed from the site. (Photo by Michael Achterling/North Dakota Monitor)

The shocking find came at North Dakota Gov. Kelly Armstrong's (R) official residence in Bismarck, where workers were carrying out a $2.35 million security upgrade, according to the North Dakota Monitor.

Preliminary exams identified the remains of two women, two men, two teenage boys and a toddler. An unidentified wooden box was also recovered, officials told PEOPLE.

"It's going to take a while now to do the research and analysis," Brandon Solberg, facilities management director for the office, said in an interview with the local news outlet.

The mystery started May 19, when contractors digging near the southwest corner of the property found human remains and fragments of coffin hardware. Work in that area stopped as archaeologists from the State Historical Society of North Dakota moved in.

"After the initial remains were discovered on May 19 while contractors were conducting work in the Governor's Residence yard, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) paused work in the immediate area," the agency said in a statement obtained by PEOPLE. "Initial results identified a total of nine additional anomalies indicating potential for 10 graves in the work area."

The grounds once served as Bismarck's first community cemetery from 1873 to 1877, Realtor.com reported. Officials had believed the graves were moved to other cemeteries in the 1880s.

Tyler Durden Fri, 10/09/2026 - 22:10

US Envoys Meet With Ukrainian Officials Over 'Unified Proposal'; Zelensky Decries Trump's 'Unfair, Dishonest' Deal With Putin

Update (2000ET): We can only imagine how cold those discussions were when the Ukrainian officials heard about Trump's deal with Putin for the release of diesel stocks to the world.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was not best pleased. He told Axios in a phone interview on Friday that President Trump's decision to unilaterally lift sanctions on Russia and allow it to export diesel was "not fair and not honest."

"You know, it looks like a happy birthday present for Putin. It looks absolutely terrible," Zelensky said in frustration, referring to the Russian president's birthday earlier this week.

Zelensky went on to describe the deal as "an investment in a war that must be ended."

"Gifts to Putin will not bring peace or any benefit ​to the civilised world," Zelenskiy wrote on the X social ⁠media platform.

"Russia ⁠will 'repay' the diesel with ⁠further ​terror and perfidy. Allowing Russia to sell petroleum products is an ​investment in a ⁠war that must be ended, not prolonged. What is needed is real de-escalation with Russia on a reciprocal basis," Zelenskiy said.

Trump said in a post on social media that he had ⁠agreed in a call with Russian President Vladimir Putin that Russia ⁠would immediately supply diesel to the US and global marketplace.

Trump said lower prices for Americans "is my Greatest Priority".

As Timothy Frudd reported earlier for The Epoch Times, U.S. negotiators will meet with Ukrainian officials today and tomorrow in an effort to work toward a peace proposal to end the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine.

The meeting comes a month after U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner visited Moscow and Kyiv to meet separately with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Both U.S. President Donald Trump and Zelenskyy have been pushing for an end to the war before winter.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Thursday that the United States is continuing to try to facilitate a negotiated agreement between Russia and Ukraine to end the war. He warned that the war, which started in February 2022, appeared to be at a "very dangerous" stalemate.

"Special Envoy Witkoff and Jared Kushner will meet with Ukrainian officials tomorrow to discuss a new, unified proposal that is focused on all aspects of the conflict to try to end the war," a senior administration official told The Epoch Times on Oct. 8.

"They will be joined by national security advisors from the E3 countries, as well as the European Union and NATO."

Friday's scheduled meeting between the Trump administration's negotiators and Ukrainian officials was also confirmed by Zelenskyy on Oct. 8.

"Meetings are expected to take place over two days," Zelenskyy told reporters Thursday, according to The Kyiv Independent. "And we are counting on a European team to join our negotiating group and the American negotiating group."

The Epoch Times reached out to Ukraine's Ministry of Foreign Affairs for additional comment and did not receive a response before publication time.

In a prior social media post on Oct. 5, Zelenskyy said Ukraine expected that the United States would be able to arrange a trilateral meeting between Moscow, Kyiv, and Washington this month.

Zelenskyy met with Trump on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly on Sept. 22. During a bilateral press conference, both leaders said it is important to end the war before the upcoming winter season.

Trump told reporters last month that he believed both Putin and Zelenskyy wanted to see the war ended and that the Russian president was willing to meet to discuss a peace deal with Ukraine. He also suggested that the war could be ended sooner than people think.

During a joint press conference with Portuguese Foreign Minister Paulo Rangel on Thursday, Rubio warned that the war between Russia and Ukraine could escalate and become a "much broader and far more dangerous regional conflict" if a peace deal is not reached.

"It's an extremely dangerous war because, frankly, right now it seems to be at a stalemate, and stalemates are very dangerous," Rubio told reporters.

The secretary of state said that a stalemate is only resolved in two ways: with a negotiated peace settlement or with an escalation in the fighting.

"In the end, we do not believe that there is a military solution to this conflict, to this war. We think this war needs to end in a negotiated settlement, the sooner the better," Rubio said. "The United States stands ready to facilitate that."

He added that the United States wants to see a "permanent, enduring, and fair" negotiated settlement to end the conflict.

At least 30 people were killed on Thursday in a Russian strike on Kramatorsk, Ukraine, according to Zelenskyy. The Ukrainian president said a Russian bomb struck two city minibuses. An additional 18 people were injured in the strike.

The strike came after the Russian Defense Ministry reported that Russian air defenses had intercepted almost 900 Ukrainian drones overnight in multiple parts of the country on Oct. 6.

Tyler Durden Fri, 10/09/2026 - 21:45

China Buys Record Amount Of Gold As India Panics, Scraps Key Tax Relief On Precious Imports

Gold is climbing notably this morning, underscoring the potential for the precious metal to ratchet higher into year-end thanks to sustained buying from central banks and retail investors. 

On the retail side, the total known ETF holdings of bullion are up this week, set to match the 12-week streak of gains posted through April 18, 2025. 

That means the stockpile exceeds the peak touched just before the outbreak of the Iran war.

And central banks are backing up the truck as The Financial Times reports that China has spent a record sum importing more than 1,000 tonnes of gold this year as the central bank and local investors pour cash into bullion amid rising geopolitical tensions abroad and poor returns on local assets.

The world’s second-largest economy spent $158.8bn on gold in the first eight months of the year. That compared with spending of $96.5bn for all of 2025 on 886 tonnes of gold.

The jump comes after China reined in gold purchases last year during an intense rally that sent bullion prices soaring from about $2,625 a troy ounce at the start of 2025 to a peak of $5,595 in January.

There are signs that Chinese investors are increasing gold purchases as part of broader efforts to diversify their assets. Chinese holdings of US Treasuries fell to $618bn in July — the lowest level since August 2008. 

“Both the central bank and private investors are diversifying their reserves and savings towards an asset with no counterparty risk, as part of a broader long-term wealth preservation strategy,” said Lisa Liu, managing director at Gold Mountains Asset Management, part of Zijin Mining Group — China’s largest gold miner. 

But not everyone is embracing domestic demand for the barbarous relic...

India cut a key precious metals import tax relief policy overnight amid the country's broader 2026 efforts to curb non-essential gold imports, ease pressure on foreign exchange reserves, and support the rupee amid high fuel costs and currency weakness.

The official stated reason is tax parity: to stop the tax treatment itself from making one import route (banks/nominated agencies) preferential over others (including channels such as the India International Bullion Exchange).

Simply put, the specific 'key gold import tax relief' being scrapped is the bank IGST exemption (framed politically as parity), but it is part of the same policy environment of measures taken earlier in 2026 explicitly aimed at moderating gold imports and protecting forex reserves:

In mid-May 2026 the government sharply raised effective customs duty on gold and silver from 6% to 15% (basic customs duty to 10% + Agriculture Infrastructure and Development Cess to 5%), with platinum rising similarly. Officials framed this as curbing non-essential/discretionary imports so foreign exchange could be prioritized for essentials (crude oil, fertilizers, industrial inputs, etc.) amid the West Asia crisis, elevated oil prices, and pressure on the rupee.

PM Modi publicly appealed to citizens to avoid gold purchases for a year.

Other steps included tighter rules on certain import schemes, delays in licenses/notifications, and related restrictions.

Higher import costs for gold reduce demand (or at least slow it), ease the current-account and FX drain, and thereby help limit further depreciation - the same logic that has driven gold-duty adjustments in past periods of external stress.

So China is backing up a very big truck, Retail is BTFDing in ETF-land, and India is still panicking over fuel costs (desperate to slow domestic demand for the only thing that hedges its currency's collapse).

“This isn’t a short-term trade, it’s a multiyear repositioning of household and official assets. The scale and persistence of Chinese buying is now a core driver of global gold prices and we expect it to hold as long as uncertainty over growth and geopolitics remains,” said Liu.

As Bloomberg's Garfield Reynolds notes, October in particular is looking like a sweet spot with rates traders sticking to bets that the Fed will delay any hikes until December, and with central bank appetite also showing little sign of abating, the level of demand out there has allowed bullion to show some resilience in the face of higher real yields and the resulting strength in the US dollar.

Gold is becoming an increasingly important diversifier for global investors at a time when government bonds no longer move inversely to stock markets.

Christopher Hamilton, Invesco’s head of client solutions for Asia Pacific ex-Japan, said gold prices had ceased to behave as they did during periods of rising real yields, which in the past caused gold prices to drop. “You’re in an environment where you want to own real assets,” he said.

Tyler Durden Fri, 10/09/2026 - 21:20

Will AI Devalue The Real World?

Authored by Jeffrey A. Tucker via The Epoch Times,

Economic reality embeds many paradoxes, unexpected outcomes that go the opposite direction of what you might intuitively predict. The best example concerns a new innovation that seems to make more efficient use of existing resources. Intuition might suggest that the result will be less resource use but reality often goes in the other direction.

DimaBerlin/Shutterstock

This is called the Jevons Paradox and it is based on a famous debate over the steam engine which made coal power far more effective than ever before, leading to wide predictions that the coal industry would experience a dramatic pullback in production need. Economist Henry Jevons said the opposite: the demand for coal will soar precisely because each unit will become more valuable in the task it serves.

He was correct. The lesson applies in many areas of life. Sometimes that very thing we believe is endangered by an innovation that seems to nearly replace it prompts the very opposite: the original resource becomes more valuable than ever before.

Consider the problem of counterfeit luxury goods. We are talking about Nike tennis shoes, Gucci accessories, Louis Vuitton luggage and bags, Rolex watches, and so on. There is a massive global economy supported by fakes. There is simply no way that a single brand can possibly stamp them out. I've been to cities in Turkey where the real and fake stores sell identical looking products happily, happily but at wildly divergent prices.

Economists have studied this phenomenon for many years and the results of the empirical studies are nearly always the same. The counterfeit good does not diminish the value of the authentic good. In fact, the valuation push goes in the other direction. The prices of the authentic thing rise in price, which is precisely why luxury brands know better than to crack down with a heavy hand.

Why might this be? The fake good provides brand advertising in two directions. It gets the name out there. And the very fact that these companies are dedicating time and resources to try to replicate the original only sends a market signal that the original is worthy of being copied. The result is a mad scramble on the part of consumers who can afford the real thing to find it, authenticate it, and brag about it.

The end result: the real thing becomes more valuable than ever.

The Coca-Cola Company discovered this early in its operations in the late 19th century. There were many imitators, despite the famous secret recipe. The company tried to stop the fake products through crackdowns and new techniques such as the beautiful bottle that other factories at the time could not replicate. All the while the demand for Coke only grew. Their impersonators only fed the legend through the decades. Finally the slogan "the real thing" dominated the marketing pitch.

Today there are huge studios of painters in China and elsewhere that specialize in recreating old paintings by the old masters. They only grow and grow and the demand for the product rises ever further without diminishing the valuation of the original at all. Quite the reverse. Imitation and counterfeiting itself is a market signal that causes consumer demand to rally around that which is being imitated.

Now we come to the core of why I'm explaining this. It concerns artificial intelligence or super intelligence or whatever you want to call it. (Actually I think AI has already stuck.) In only a few years since deployment, it is likely that a majority of the words you read on an average day are being written by machines not people. The same is true with videos and movies. The AI engines are playing a huge role in advertising and music production too.

This has led to an existential panic among creative artists. Are they being replaced entirely? Publishers can no longer tell what is real and what is authentic. News broke last week that a book being considered for an award turned out to be an AI-generated text. That's a humiliation for everyone involved.

No question that these innovations are legitimately troubling for the creative community. But keep in mind what AI specializes in. It is amazing at doing routine tasks, automating them, saving time and other resources. The more you use AI this way, the more it feels like a miracle. What took months only a few years ago takes minutes now.

What AI cannot do is think creatively, make insightful judgments, access authentic imagination, and exercise moral consciousness. To the extent that it behaves as if it can do these things, it is only impersonating people. But the human mind will always maintain its advantage in the creative spark, the conjuring up of new ideas, and the relaying of deep emotion from the experience of love, fear, terror, jealousy, rage, pathos, and sacrificial empathy.

In other words, the authentic products of the human spark will always have value even in a world flooded by AI slop and even its impressive output.

We can fully expect that real human achievement will go the direction of all before. Just as coal became more valuable after steam, and just as a genuine Louis Vuitton bag goes ever higher in price. The fakes don't reduce the price and value of the real but just the opposite, they create an even more intense demand for authenticity. This is just as any technology that makes an existing resource more efficient to use will increase the demand for that resource.

None of which is to say that AI is not going to destroy plenty of jobs, particularly those that have relied upon routine calculation and tasking. Many of those will mercifully go away. That said, we are already tired of AI-created videos that lack the creative spark and AI imagery, with its distinctive qualities, has already become dull.

All of this is going to require adjustment to the new realities. That said, I fully expect the real symphony to make a comeback, the genuine oil painting to achieve new heights of fame, and a truly virtuosic writer to experience an even higher demand.

If affordable and available, no one wants fake when the real is an option.

Think of the pipe organ in a grand cathedral. It is an all-of-body experience. Nothing else like it. You can listen to recordings at home but they are a pale imitation, a digital file on your phone even less. An AI rendering of a fake Bach piece even less. The more we get away from the foundational form of expression - the genius of the human mind combined with the most physical form of making it real - the less it enraptures the spirit.

The market will surely develop increasingly sophisticated mechanisms to certify and signal human authenticity, just as luxury brands developed holograms and blockchain verification to distinguish genuine goods from counterfeits. We are already seeing the emergence of "human-made" certifications and provenance tracking that command premium prices not from nostalgia, but from a deep consumer craving for connection to genuine consciousness.

The creative professions will bifurcate: those which use AI merely as a steam engine for the mind, freeing their unique powers for work bearing their unmistakable human signature, and those which surrender entirely to algorithmic production only to find themselves drowned in the very "slop" that markets reject.

The economic winners will understand that AI complements rather than replaces creativity, handling routine production while human judgment, moral courage, and imaginative depth become the scarcest and most valuable commodities of all.

The Jevons Paradox shows us that efficiency does not diminish value but reveals what is truly scarce. As AI renders mediocrity abundant and costless, it simultaneously illuminates the profound scarcity of genuine human insight, suffering transformed into art, and love made manifest through creative sacrifice.

We are not heading toward a future where the real world is devalued by its artificial imitation, but toward one where authenticity becomes the ultimate luxury, the one thing no machine can manufacture, no algorithm can optimize, and no counterfeit can replicate. And that, paradoxically, may be the most hopeful economic signal of all.

Tyler Durden Fri, 10/09/2026 - 20:55

Nevada 'Runaway Bride' Who Married Multiple Men To Fund Gambling Addiction Ordered To Repay $280,000

A Nevada woman who allegedly used a string of marriages to extract money from unsuspecting men has been ordered to repay more than $280,000 after pleading guilty to bigamy and financial fraud, according to CourtTV.

Jiaying Chen, 33, was accused of maintaining a yearslong operation in which she pursued romantic relationships, married multiple men and obtained significant amounts of money before abandoning them. Investigators said she went through five marriages in just the past year. Clark County records also revealed that Chen sought 14 marriage licenses between 2019 and 2024, with seven ultimately resulting in documented marriages.

During an October 6 court hearing, prosecutors detailed the financial damage suffered by nine men, whose individual restitution claims ranged from approximately $8,100 to $81,000. One victim described making five separate trips to China in an unsuccessful effort to recover his funds. Prosecutors characterized Chen as a serial marriage scammer who had turned what should have been personal celebrations into financial disasters.

CourtTV writes that her defense argued that compulsive gambling was responsible for the misconduct and maintained that Chen wanted to make her victims financially whole. Attorneys requested that she be allowed to begin working immediately rather than remain incarcerated. Prosecutors likewise favored supervised release over prison, citing concerns that incarceration could trigger immigration consequences and complicate efforts to recover the stolen money.

District Judge Crystal Eller was unconvinced that Chen's behavior would change without meaningful treatment, raising concerns that she could simply resume similar schemes elsewhere using another identity.

The court ultimately imposed a suspended prison term of eight to 20 years, along with eight more months behind bars. Including time already served, Chen's total jail sentence will amount to roughly one year.

Following her release, Chen must complete two years of supervised probation, participate in gambling recovery programs and counseling, and reimburse her victims a combined $280,062.86. She has also received permission to move to Florida, where she reportedly intends to join a new romantic partner and take a waitressing position at a sushi restaurant owned by a friend.

Tyler Durden Fri, 10/09/2026 - 20:30

FCC Proposal Would End Chinese Labs' Role In US Device Testing

Authored by Kimberly Hayek via The Epoch Times,

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will vote on Oct. 29 on rules that restrict electronics testing to U.S. labs and countries that offer reciprocal recognition, with Chinese labs expected to be hit hardest.

Apple iPhone's sit for sale in Cupertino, Calif., on July 31, 2025. John Fredricks/The Epoch Times

The commission said in a statement Wednesday that it lacks confidence in testing done in economies without a reciprocal framework, where it has seen a pattern of egregious violations. It also said shifting testing abroad has left the equipment-authorization program overconcentrated and harder to oversee.

The statement did not mention China, which handled about 83 percent of FCC certification applications in 2025. China does not grant U.S. testing labs reciprocal recognition.

Before a phone, camera, computer, or any other electronic device can be marketed in the United States, it has to be tested at an FCC-recognized lab. The Oct. 29 order would change which labs can hold that recognition.

"For decades, officials in D.C. looked the other way when foreign nations abused their relationships with America and adopted trade practices that failed to account for basic concepts of reciprocity and fair dealing," FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said in the statement.

"Those efforts included the offshoring of testing capacity to foreign labs and the gutting of American jobs and domestic industry.

"Flash forward to now and less than 4% of all electronic devices are tested in labs located inside the U.S., and the lion's share are tested in countries that do not operate a reciprocal economy."

If the commission adopts the order at its Oct. 29 open meeting, testing, certification, and accreditation would have to occur in the United States or a reciprocal economy beginning Dec. 1, 2028.

Beijing's Lab Ties

China is among the countries that do not have a reciprocal agreement with the United States.

In 2025, labs in China tested 38,491 of the 46,402 applications for FCC equipment certification, or 83 percent, according to an April 2026 tally by the commission's Office of Engineering and Technology. U.S. labs handled 1,631 of those applications, or 4 percent.

The FCC proposal follows the "bad labs" rules adopted last year, which barred ownership or control of a test lab by entities the commission treats as national security threats, including foreign adversaries. Twenty-nine labs have since lost FCC recognition because of those ties.

On Sept. 8, 2025, the FCC opened proceedings to withdraw recognition for seven China-based labs it said were owned or controlled by the Chinese communist regime. It denied recognition applications for two other labs and said it would not renew recognition for two more whose recognition had expired.

By Sept. 26, 2025, the commission had begun proceedings to withdraw recognition, or had denied applications, from 15 labs controlled by Beijing.

On April 8, the FCC said it wanted to go further and bar every lab in China from testing devices such as smartphones, cameras, and computers for the U.S. market, not only labs owned or controlled by the Chinese regime.

A review found labs that "potentially have deep ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)," including Chinese state-owned enterprises and companies that do work for the Chinese military, the FCC said.

"These labs have tested thousands of devices bound for the U.S. market over the last several years," the FCC said.

Carr said the Justice Department's National Security Division had warned the FCC that if a foreign adversary exploited test labs as a loophole, it could infiltrate American networks "on a broad scale."

Tyler Durden Fri, 10/09/2026 - 20:05