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The Yankees technically still are alive, but they’re starting to adorn the coffin and prepare the grave.

Steve Gleason was the star of the show on Monday as the Saints revisited one of the most celebrated moments in franchise history.

It took two pitches from Cam Schlittler for that decision to blow up on the Yankees.

Basically the Rays forced the Yankees to play baseball, and the Yankees were just awful at it. 

Jim Bakker rose to prominence after founding “The PTL Club,” a Christian television show he co-hosted with his first wife, Tammy Faye Bakker, from 1974 to 1989. 

The Trop could mostly pass for study hall for most of its existence. Even when the Rays have been good — and they’ve been good an awful lot since 2008 — the locals were indifferent at best and apathetic at worst.

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — There might not be a more confident pitcher than Cam Schlittler, who does not doubt himself and did not doubt himself before Game 2.  Sure, he knew that he was about to face a lineup that excels at placing bat on ball. But he also knew he was tied for the...

Both the Milwaukee Brewers and San Diego Padres continue to troll one another. While the Brewers were practicing on the field at Petco Park on Monday, the stadium had the cool, calm sound of elevator music blasting from the speakers. Back Milwaukee, when the Padres were taking batting practice on Saturday, American Family Field was...

Heroes, zeros and the inside pitch from the Yankees’ 5-2 loss to the Rays in Game 2 of the ALDS.

During the Raiders and Chiefs’ Sunday thriller, Raider Nation was letting Travis Kelce know what they think of him and Taylor Swift. A Raiders fan was seen walking up the stairs at Allegiant Stadium, holding a sign with Kelce and Swift’s faces on it, and was roasting the iconic pop star’s appearance. Raiders fans troll...

As Mayor Mamdani touts progress in expanding “free” childcare, the bills for his socialist ambitions keep growing.

We are breaking down tonight’s huge playoff matchup, the final score, and the biggest moments from the game. Did the pitching hold up? Who came through with the clutch hits? Join us for the ultimate postgame recap and reaction as we look at where this American League Division Series stands.

The Five-Year Fuel Crisis: Why The World Economy Is Paying For A War It Thinks Is Ending

Authored by Larry C. Johnson via SonarIntelligence (Sonar21),

Once again Karl W. Miller has put numbers to a problem that most of the commentariat still treats as a temporary price spike. His latest forward outlook, "The Five-Year Global Energy Crisis," dated October 3, makes an argument that should alarm every finance ministry from Berlin to Jakarta. The war's damage to Gulf energy infrastructure is not a disruption that ends when the shooting stops. It is a reconstruction problem measured in years and trillions of dollars, and while it is solved, the world will be short of the fuels that run its economy.

A ceasefire is not a repair crew

Miller's central insight is simple. A ceasefire can reopen a shipping lane overnight. It cannot manufacture a compressor, mobilize commissioning engineers, or pay a contractor. The next phase of this crisis, he writes, is a competition for cash, equipment, qualified contractors and finished fuel.

His cost model is sobering. In his aggressive case, rebuilding the damaged Gulf energy system requires $1.16 trillion in total program funding. Under prolonged stress, with scarce equipment, rising prices and delays, the bill reaches $2.53 trillion. Even his faster case runs to nearly half a trillion dollars. He is careful to say these are model outputs, not contractor quotes, and that the true extent of the damage is the largest unknown. An April assessment put energy-related repair costs at only $34-58 billion. But the direction of his argument doesn't depend on the exact figure. Every month of delay makes the same repair more expensive, because the global market for specialized equipment and crews is already stretched by LNG expansions, refinery maintenance and power projects elsewhere.

The timeline is just as stark. Weighted by cost, the rebuild averages almost five years from today. Only 60% of the work finishes by 2031, and the longest-lead packages run to seven years.

The money problem comes first

The most original part of Miller's analysis is about cash. A damaged refinery may be worth rebuilding and technically repairable, and still sit idle because the government that owns it has to pay for food imports, salaries, electricity and water first. Lost export revenue doesn't stop those bills. When a state borrows to keep paying them, that money can't also pay an engineering contractor.

Iraq shows the problem in practice. In July, it faced a monthly public salary obligation of about $5.96 billion with a funding shortfall of $2.52 billion. A government in that position rebuilds nothing. It pays its people, and the export capacity that would restore its revenue waits. Miller's warning is that this trap can stop reconstruction before it starts: without engineering funds and vendor deposits, factory slots go to other customers and delivery dates slip.

The fuel gap is the global transmission belt

For the rest of the world, the damage arrives through diesel and jet fuel. The figures Miller cites are already severe. Gulf diesel net exports in August were just over a quarter of prewar levels. Combined Gulf and Russian diesel exports were 1.6 million barrels a day below February. Global oil stocks had fallen 507 million barrels since February, and global refinery throughput in August was 4.2 million barrels a day below a year earlier.

Looking forward, Miller's severe case assumes a shortfall of at least 3 million barrels a day of diesel and jet fuel, every year for five years. That's about 1.1 billion barrels a year and 5.5 billion barrels over the period. He is explicit that this is a deliberate stress test, not a forecast, and that a faster-recovery path closes the gap by the fourth year. But the stress case is a plausible one. Restored capacity can be absorbed by refinery outages, deferred maintenance, recovering demand and delivery bottlenecks. Damaged refineries don't come back at full capacity on the first day.

Inventories cannot fill a gap of that size for that long. Five and a half billion barrels is far beyond any country's emergency stocks, which is why drawing down Europe's reserves now, under pressure from Washington, only buys weeks. Without enough new supply, the balance can close in only one way: by using less fuel.

How the shortage reprices everything

The economic damage extends well beyond the missing barrels. When supply falls short, buyers bid for the marginal cargo, and that bid sets the price for all the fuel still being bought. Miller's illustration: a $40-a-barrel premium across 10 million barrels a day of purchases adds $146 billion a year to fuel bills. Applied only to the 3 million missing barrels, it would add $43.8 billion and badly understate the real cost.

Scarcity also reprices credit. At $150 a barrel, a buyer purchasing 1 million barrels a day needs $2.25 billion to hold 15 extra days of inventory, and $3 billion at $200. Longer voyages tie up more fuel and more money in transit. A supplier can have the barrels while its customer can't get a letter of credit. And a cargo that wins a bidding war for one country leaves another short. Competition redistributes the shortage before it eliminates it.

Who absorbs the shock

Diesel carries the crisis into the real economy. It runs road freight, farm machinery, mines, construction fleets and backup generators, none of which can switch fuels quickly. Higher diesel costs pass straight into freight rates and food prices, and when diesel isn't available at any price, activity simply stops. Jet fuel carries the shock into aviation: higher fares, fewer routes and higher air cargo surcharges. Kerosene hits the households with the least room to adjust, in countries where it is still used for heating, cooking and lighting.

Miller's regional assessment follows the money:

• Europe competes for replacement diesel and jet cargoes while running its refineries close to their limits.
• South and Southeast Asia face higher import bills, currency pressure and greater need for trade credit.
• Africa and smaller importers are the most vulnerable. Tenders fail, credit lines run out, and small cargoes become uneconomic long before global stocks are exhausted.
• The United States and other Atlantic suppliers face export demand competing with their own diesel needs, with refineries running so hard they have little tolerance for outages.

The ultimate balancing mechanism is demand destruction: freight deferred, low-margin factories idled, flights cancelled, and poorer importers losing every bidding contest. Miller warns against mistaking that for recovery. Lower consumption caused by rationing through price or credit is not a repaired energy system.

Case study: Europe

Europe shows what Miller's framework looks like in practice. The continent burns about 5 million barrels of diesel a day, fuel for the trucks that move its goods, the tractors that plant its crops and, as winter approaches, the boilers that heat millions of homes.

How much does Europe produce, and how much does it import? Running flat out, EU refineries can produce roughly 4.5 to 5 million barrels a day of diesel and gasoil, and they are already operating close to their maximum. That leaves Europe roughly 85-90% self-sufficient at best. The remaining 10-15% comes from imports, and that margin sets the price for the entire market. Kepler puts the EU's diesel imports from outside the bloc at about 580,000 barrels a day this year. Britain, which lost much of its refining capacity over the past two decades, is far more exposed: it imports more than half the diesel it uses.

The origin of those imports has changed dramatically. Russia was long Europe's largest outside supplier until the EU embargoed Russian diesel in 2023. The Gulf filled much of the gap, until the war cut it off. Since March, the United States has supplied more than half of Europe's diesel imports, and more than two-thirds in August and September. Europe has traded dependence on Moscow for dependence on Washington, and Washington has just shown it is willing to use that leverage, threatening an export ban unless Europe released its emergency stocks.

Europe's diesel depends on imported crude as well. Its refineries run almost entirely on foreign oil: the EU imports about 97% of the crude it consumes. But the Gulf was never Europe's main crude supplier. In 2025, Gulf Cooperation Council states supplied only about 7% of EU crude imports, Iraq another 5.8%. Europe's crude now comes chiefly from the United States, Norway and Kazakhstan, which together supplied nearly half of EU petroleum imports in the second quarter of 2026. The volume has held steady; the bill rose 56%. But the crude isn't the crude Europe's refineries were built for. Much of Europe's refining capacity was designed around medium sour crudes such as Russia's Urals, with conversion units that turn the heavier part of the barrel into diesel. American shale crude is light and sweet. It refines readily into gasoline and naphtha, but it yields proportionally less diesel and jet fuel, the very products Europe is short of. As Miller notes, sour crude isn't uniquely required to make diesel; the replacement barrels work, but not at the same yield or cost. The Gulf supply Europe really lost was finished diesel from Gulf refineries, and that is what the United States has replaced. The result is a double dependence: Washington is now Europe's largest supplier of both the crude its refineries run and the diesel they can't make. Even the non-American barrels carry risk. Most Kazakh crude reaches Europe through a Black Sea terminal at Novorossiysk, on Russian soil, a route that has already been hit by Ukrainian drones.

How long can Europe store diesel? This is where Europe's apparent cushion turns out to be thinner than it looks. Unlike crude oil, which can sit in salt caverns for decades, diesel degrades. Under ideal conditions, conventional ultra-low-sulfur diesel can typically be stored for six to twelve months. With stabilizers, biocides and well-managed tanks, that can be extended to 18 to 24 months. Oxidation forms gums and sediment, water collects, and microbes grow in the fuel.

European diesel has an added problem. The EU standard, EN 590, allows up to 7% biodiesel in road diesel, and biodiesel oxidizes faster than petroleum diesel. Concawe, the European refiners' research association, recommends a maximum storage time of six months for biodiesel and current blends containing it. Strategic stockholders can extend that by holding biodiesel-free product, but even then the reserve has to be rotated, sold into the market and replaced with fresh fuel on a cycle of a year or two.

That changes what Europe's reserve really is. EU countries and Britain held about 52 million tonnes of gasoil and diesel in June, including nearly 38 million tonnes of emergency reserves, roughly two months of consumption. But a diesel reserve is not a stockpile Europe can fill once and forget. It is a stock that must be continually turned over, which means continually bought, and bought in the same tight market Miller describes. Every barrel released now to satisfy Washington has to be replaced later, at a higher price, from suppliers who are already short. And because diesel degrades, Europe can't solve the problem by buying extra while it's cheap and holding it for years. A reserve with a shelf life of a year or two cannot cover a structural deficit that Miller's severe case puts at five years.

The conclusion for Europe is stark. It produces most of its own diesel but has no spare refining capacity. It depends on imports for the margin that sets prices, and those imports now come mostly from a single supplier that has shown it will use them as leverage. And its emergency reserve is both perishable and finite. In Miller's terms, Europe is one of the buyers most exposed to the marginal cargo, and the least able to wait out a five-year shortage.

The implications for the global economy

Put together, Miller's analysis describes a world economy facing a prolonged supply shock, not a temporary one. Fuel costs feed into nearly everything, so central banks fighting the inflation this crisis has already produced will face pressure for longer than they expect. Emerging-market importers face a combination of high fuel bills, weak currencies and tighter credit that has historically produced debt crises and unrest. And the reconstruction itself will absorb capital, equipment and specialist labor that would otherwise build new energy supply elsewhere, so the shortage may delay the investment needed to end it.

Miller's strategic conclusion is the one policymakers least want to hear. Ending the conflict removes one source of disruption. It does not repair the energy system, which requires a separate sequence of financing, engineering, manufacturing, construction and commissioning that will take years. Until that is done, reliable fuel and the cash to buy it will determine which economies absorb the burden. Neither will be distributed evenly.

Tyler Durden Mon, 10/05/2026 - 23:25

Zhang faced the judge in downtown Los Angeles wearing a high-collared designer jacket, black pants, highlighted hair and shackles.

What people don’t understand about October 7 is that for most Jews, what happened “over there” in Israel deeply affected us here. Even in school. Not just because of close family and religious ties to Israel, but because of the wave of antisemitism we’ve had to face. Ever since Oct. 7, 2023, my mornings seem...

In a performance that Aaron Boone will want to forget, the Yankees finished Game 2 with as many hits as they had errors.

Biologists are sounding the alarm after a stressed humpback whale trapped in a heavy commercial fishing net was seen off the coast of Southern California.

An Uncomfortable Reality: China's Rare Earth Chokehold May Outlast This Decade

An inconvenient reality for the Trump administration's race to rebuild Western conflict-free critical materials supply chains outside China, whether domestically or through friendshoring, is that it won't break China's chokehold this decade.

The main problem for the US lies well beyond the mine, ING analysts Ewa Manthey and Coco Zhang wrote in a note on Monday titled "The US rare earth push: what comes next?" Extracting more ore does very little for US companies that depend on Chinese processing plants to turn ore into usable metals, alloys, and finished magnets.

"The US has significant rare earth resources, but its supply chain remains heavily reliant on China. The biggest gaps do not sit in the mine, but rather in processing, heavy rare earth separation and magnet manufacturing," Manthey said.

China accounts for about 60% of mined magnet rare earths, 91% of refined output and 94% of permanent magnet production, Manthey said, citing the International Energy Agency.

Manthey added, "The US rare earth challenge is industrial rather than geological. Its vulnerability lies in the difficult stages between the mine and the finished component."

MP Materials represents both America's progress in rebuilding domestic rare earth supply chains and its continuing constraints. The miner produced a record 50,692 tons of rare-earth oxide in concentrate in 2025 and began manufacturing neodymium-iron-boron magnets in Texas that December.

The biggest gap is heavy rare earths, particularly dysprosium and terbium, which help magnets retain performance at high temperatures. These materials are critical across automotive, aerospace, and defense applications.

MP Materials is developing a separation line designed to produce about 200 tons of dysprosium and terbium annually. Even with that capacity, securing feedstock remains a challenge because production is concentrated in conflict areas such as China and Myanmar.

Manthey cited a June agreement with USA Rare Earth involving $277 million in grants, a $1.3 billion senior secured loan and a 16% government equity stake. She also highlighted the federal government's investment in MP Materials, alongside decade-long magnet purchase commitments and an NdPr oxide price floor.

The number of announced projects is growing: MP Materials, Vulcan Elements and USA Rare Earth have each outlined plans for facilities capable of producing 10,000 tons of magnets annually. Those targets, however, represent planned capacity rather than current output - and that is a major problem. 

The US is also pursuing supplies from Australia and Brazil while funding recycling technologies. Yet alternative supplies are unlikely to eliminate the China dependency this decade: The IEA estimates that announced magnet projects outside China would meet well below 20% of demand outside China in 2035. 

Last week, Bloomberg Intelligence analysts questioned whether more than $40 billion in announced federal support to rebuild conflict-free critical materials supply chains outside China would translate into reliable near-term supplies and improve defense readiness.

Christian Keller, Barclays' global head of economics research, recently warned that "China's quasi-monopolistic position" in the critical materials space would persist through at least the end of the decade.

Not just in mining...

...but also refining.

Stifel aerospace and defense analyst Jonathan Siegmann wrote last month that "owning the bottlenecks," or investing in producers within conflict-free supply chains, was the best way to gain exposure as China chokes off the West's access to critical materials such as tungsten, magnets, rare earths, and other materials.

News last Friday of the US Commerce Department's move to squeeze jet parts supplies to China in response to Beijing's weaponization of critical material exports indicates that an uncomfortable reality is setting in across the West: Mining and processing supply chains might not be rebuilt in time to meet demand from the massive rearmament supercycle.

Professional subscribers can read the full note here at our Marketdesk.ai portal. 

Tyler Durden Mon, 10/05/2026 - 23:00

After it was all said and done, following the San Diego Padres’ questionable decision to have Mason Miller come out and pitch in the eighth and ninth innings, speculation arose that he was tipping his pitches. For the Padres, who find themselves in a 2-0 hole against the Milwaukee Brewers, manager Craig Stammen begs to...

The president said the average trucker “will save over $100 every time they fill up,” with the order in place.