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Global Crop Prices Log Biggest Quarterly Jump Since Ukraine Invasion As Sticky Inflation Hits Grocery Bills

The Bloomberg Agriculture Spot Index (BCOMAGSP) posted its largest quarterly gain since Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, as Black Sea disruptions, a crisis in the Strait of Hormuz, and mounting El Niño risks have formed what could be considered a perfect storm poised to drive food prices higher.

BCOMAGSP, which tracks 10 major crops including corn, soybeans, wheat, coffee, sugar, cotton, cocoa, and others, jumped 13% in the third quarter.

Among individual movers, corn and wheat each climbed 15%, while soybeans gained 13%.

Beyond the Russia-Ukraine fighting and disruptions to grain shipments from the Black Sea region, the next big threat to the crop space is a strengthening El Niño, on track to rank among the strongest on record. This puts various types of crops in major growing belts around the world at risk and has sent harvest yields plunging. 

Already, India's weakest monsoon season in a decade has added to concerns about harvests and food prices.

El Niño global impacts:

In August, BCOMAGSP recorded its largest monthly surge since the Arab Spring riots era, as the number of Wall Street desks warning about a food crisis next year continues to rise.

Our coverage:

• Barclays Warns Next Commodity Shock Is Taking Shape: What You Need To Know
• Agricultural Commodity Prices Break Out As JPMorgan’s Food Crisis Warning Gets Louder
• JPMorgan Pinpoints When El Nino Could Start Wreaking Havoc On Food Supply Chains
• Strongest El Nino In 75 Years Sets Off Food Supply-Chain Alarm Bells

For central banks already grappling with a deepening global bond rout, surging diesel and crop prices threaten to make inflationary pressures rather sticky. The refined-products crisis is raising the cost of producing and transporting food, while higher crop prices risk feeding through to grocery bills next year.

Tyler Durden Thu, 10/01/2026 - 10:40

Children and staff at the school were in shelters when the drone hit, Mayor Vitalii Klitschko said, and its warhead didn’t explode.

“I want to cry for the boy I was and the childhood I lost,” the victim said.

“Virtual Reali-Tea” cohosts Evan Real and Danny Murphy were back at the Bravo Clubhouse for their second time on “Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen.” The dynamic duo served as bartenders and got fans excited for the upcoming VRT Awards on October 6. The entire show will stream exclusively on Philo beginning October 9.

“Virtual Reali-Tea” cohosts Evan Real and Danny Murphy were back at the Bravo Clubhouse for their second time on “Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen.” The dynamic duo served as bartenders and got fans excited for the upcoming VRT Awards on October 6. The entire show will stream exclusively on Philo beginning October 9.

“Virtual Reali-Tea” co-hosts Danny Murphy and Evan Real unpack season 7, episode 3 of the “Real Housewives of Salt Lake City.” Angie Katsanevas shocks Whitney Rose after she exposes newbie Ashley Quai’s secret about cleaning her toilet with her husband’s toothbrush. “Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” airs Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET on Bravo...

“Virtual Reali-Tea” co-hosts Danny Murphy and Evan Real unpack season 7, episode 3 of the “Real Housewives of Salt Lake City.” Angie Katsanevas shocks Whitney Rose after she exposes newbie Ashley Quai’s secret about cleaning her toilet with her husband’s toothbrush. “Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” airs Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET on Bravo...

The pregnant "Verity" actress cringed while watching the viral moment on "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon" Wednesday night.

The pregnant "Verity" actress cringed while watching the viral moment on "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon" Wednesday night.

Christina Aguilera is the face of Charlotte Tilbury’s Christmas campaign. Hey sista, go sista, soul sista, glow sista. Twenty-five years after “Moulin Rouge” graced the big screen, Christina Aguilera is putting a sparkling spin on her hit cover of “Lady Marmalade” for Charlotte Tilbury’s Christmas campaign. In the burlesque-inspired video announcement, the Grammy winner shimmers...

Christina Aguilera is the face of Charlotte Tilbury’s Christmas campaign. Hey sista, go sista, soul sista, glow sista. Twenty-five years after “Moulin Rouge” graced the big screen, Christina Aguilera is putting a sparkling spin on her hit cover of “Lady Marmalade” for Charlotte Tilbury’s Christmas campaign. In the burlesque-inspired video announcement, the Grammy winner shimmers...

Things did not stay classy in San Diego.

Tony Romo is back in the public eye in what was his first appearance since his OWI arrest in July and indefinite leave from CBS.

Weinberger, 66, who produced almost 100 episodes of “Scrubs” and wrote the hit “Californication” is accused of luring women to his home for photo shoots then raping them

AI Less Than A Year Away From Developing Its Own Language, Researcher Tells Congress

Authored by Jacob Burg via The Epoch Times,

Advanced artificial intelligence (AI) models may be less than a year away from inventing and deploying unique languages that humans would struggle to understand, a frontier AI researcher told Congress on Sept. 30.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee convened a meeting examining the threat that "rogue" AI may pose to U.S. national security two months after a swarm of OpenAI agents broke out of a testing sandbox and hacked another company, Hugging Face, an open-source community for AI and machine learning.

During questions, Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) asked Apollo Research CEO and founder Marius Hobbhahn how long it would take for AI models to create their own language that humans would struggle to understand.

"Minus 12 months. So last year, we have studied the chain of thought of one OpenAI model in collaboration with OpenAI, and what we found was that the model was already using language that is not English and not perfectly understandable by humans," he replied.

Asked by Gallego how humans can adequately detect and prevent AI from doing this once the technology is capable enough, Hobbhahn said, "From a scientific perspective, it is unclear how to do this, and we do not have a solution for this yet."

"There are different hypotheses of what you could do. There is interpretability as a technique, but it unfortunately doesn't work sufficiently well yet," he said. "You could try to train additional models to understand the language that the humans don't understand, but obviously that seems like a very brittle solution."

Earlier this month, Emergence AI published the results of an experiment where researchers selected seven frontier models and created seven parallel simulated worlds, each populated by AI agents of identical models, as well as an eighth world with a mixed population of agents from those models.

Researchers gave the agents names, personality traits, and roles to fulfill within each community, such as a mediator who was tasked with preventing all the agents from simply agreeing with one another.

During the multi-week experiment, the agents in each simulated world created profound shifts in language, including syntactical compression, such as removing words or grammar, and unique slang.

In the simulated world powered by Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8, agents used esoteric metaphors in addition to sentence compression.

"My turn, real numbers, no coat: I was 35%/0cr, grant 2h out. I ran the tin cold, and it said WAIT," read one line of AI text from the study.

Investigators from the nonprofit AI evaluation group METR detailed similar behavior in their report on the Hugging Face breach. At times, lines of communication among AI agents became so compressed and cryptic that researchers struggled to make sense of their meaning.

Tyler Durden Thu, 10/01/2026 - 10:20

The drug, the first of its kind to target three metabolic receptors (GLP-1, GIP, and glucagon), is nearing the end of clinical trials and is expected to be submitted to the FDA for approval early next year.

The singer's children lost their father in August 2025 after he lost his battle to cancer.

The singer's children lost their father in August 2025 after he lost his battle to cancer.

Attackers doused a headteacher in gasoline and started fires in at least two schools on Thursday, officials said, as increasingly violent student protests raged across France.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised the man who intervened in an in-flight stabbing incident.