Aggregator

After winning a championship, Karl-Anthony Towns wrongly believed his contract extension negotiations would go smoothly — especially since he’s willing to take a discount.

Cambridge University Declares Free Speech Should Be 'Restricted'

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

Gonville and Caius College, one of Cambridge's oldest foundations, is compelling its undergraduates to attend mandatory "inclusivity training" from the start of term.

The 90-minute sessions are being delivered by Stop Hate UK, a 'charity' activist organisation whose own materials tell students their free speech rights may be restricted, that "Islamophobia is a crime", and that a facial expression can count as harm.

The order lands in the same university that spent the better part of two years investigating a philosopher for lawful speech, and in the same education system that has spent 2026 drilling children in white privilege, "racism requires power", and compulsory hijabs.

Students in at least one college of Cambridge University will be forced to take mandatory 'inclusivity training' from the start of the new term next week, The Spectator has learned.

The 90-minute sessions are being delivered by Stop Hate UK. This group has published a video... pic.twitter.com/0zBC85IMFX

— The Spectator (@spectator) September 30, 2026

According to an email from the college's education and tutorial office, seen by The Spectator, "attendance by undergraduate students is mandatory. It is important for the community as a whole to ensure a collective and unified response." The course, due to run from the week commencing 5 October, will cover "demonstrating inclusive behaviours" and "recognition of a hate incident and its impact."

A Caius spokesman told The Spectator the college had, "in consultation with student representatives," committed to "hosting facilitated discussions around inclusivity to support the whole community at Caius."

That is a softer description than the email students actually received. Mandatory attendance and a demand for a "collective and unified response" is not a discussion. It is an instruction.

BREAKING: Gonville & Caius, Cambridge has sent all undergraduates a notice, making 90-minute inclusivity sessions by 'Stop Hate UK' mandatory. The charity's materials are woke, defective and misstate the law on protected characteristics and Islamophobia. https://t.co/3ihJt4HxOG https://t.co/brE8VGChs4 pic.twitter.com/FruP9TpvBm

— Joe Rich (@Joe_Rich) September 30, 2026

Stop Hate UK has published a video telling university students they must always display "positive attitudes" and "use respectful and kind language that will not cause harm or offence."

Its syllabus for educational settings tells students that free speech should be "restricted by other duties, responsibilities, and legislative and contractual obligations," and teaches them how "opinions, attitudes and prejudice are influenced and shaped by unconscious bias, media bias, fake news, etc."

Andrew Gilligan, writing in The Spectator, put the obvious question: "How will students be required to 'demonstrate' that their behaviour is 'inclusive?'" The charity's own glossary supplies an answer of sorts. It speaks of "microaggressions" and "micro-inequities," including "unintentional comments" and "unconscious messages" that "devalue and discourage people... conveyed through facial expressions, gestures, tone of voice, choice of words."

Hate incidents, it says, can include "abusive gestures" or "malicious complaints about parking."

The Free Speech Union called the scheme another mark of Cambridge's intellectual decline, and of the way activist groups have been emboldened by the government's non-statutory "anti-Muslim hostility" definition.

Cambridge students are being forced to undergo "inclusivity training".

At least one Cambridge college is requiring students to attend training delivered by Stop Hate UK. The group has posted a video on social media saying students should always display "positive attitudes" and... pic.twitter.com/Mq6ZVgwrMm

— The Free Speech Union (@SpeechUnion) October 1, 2026

The use of "hate incident" rather than "hate crime" is the tell. Behaviour well below the legal threshold is being placed inside a disciplinary frame. That sits awkwardly beside the Home Office's own retreat. In March, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced that non-crime hate incidents would be scrapped, saying: "Under these reforms, forces will no longer be policing perfectly legal tweets."

Caius is importing the logic the Home Secretary has just disowned, and making attendance compulsory.

If the syllabus is followed, one of the first things Cambridge students will be taught is "unconscious bias," a concept a UK government report has already found wanting. That review concluded that "evidence that [unconscious bias] training content and techniques 'works' is lacking," that such sessions "do not seem to be effective at improving diversity outcomes within workplaces," and that there was "potential for back-firing effects."

Most of the studies used to justify the training "did not use valid measures of behaviour change."

The Committee for Academic Freedom has gone further, and found legal errors in the provider's published materials. Age, a protected characteristic under section 4 of the Equality Act 2010, disappears from Stop Hate UK's list. The statutory category of "gender reassignment" is replaced with "gender identity," which, as CAF noted, "is not one of the nine protected characteristics named in the Act."

The Supreme Court held in 2025, in For Women Scotland, that "man," "woman" and "sex" in the Act carry biological meanings. Gender-critical belief is capable of protection under the Act, as Forstater established. Presenting a contested theory as settled law, then requiring students to attend, is not neutral instruction.

The Office for Students' Regulatory Advice 24 allows universities to require training that advances positions a person may disagree with. It does not allow them to "require training or induction that imposes a requirement on the person completing the training actively to endorse any viewpoint or value-judgement."

CAF has asked the obvious follow-up: whether Caius students will be expected to produce the promised "collective and unified response" by accepting the premises, for instance by labelling prescribed scenarios as microaggressions. The committee has invited students who are required to assent to anything to get in touch.

Stop Hate UK has claimed that "Islamophobia is a crime." It is not. Britain has no blasphemy law. The same organisation has treated truthful reporting on the Muslim grooming gangs scandal as a source of hatred, writing that "this leads to the formation of Anti-Muslim attitudes, subconscious biases and hate."

Its work on the subject cites the Centre for Media Monitoring, then part of the Muslim Council of Britain, an organisation successive governments have refused to engage with since 2009.

That is the same territory covered by Labour's non-statutory definition of "anti-Muslim hostility," which Communities Secretary Steve Reed sold as a tool "so we can take action to stop it," and which the Free Speech Union's Richard Holmes warned "risks hindering free speech under the law and legitimate criticism of Islamism." Schools were urged to monitor and report it.

Cambridge has form on this. Philosopher Nathan Cofnas was hired under Cambridge's 2020 free speech statement, then investigated for the better part of two years after publishing on hereditarianism and affirmative action.

The university eventually concluded that his views, "while seen by many as offensive, did not breach the law and did not contravene University regulations designed to uphold free speech." By then the contract had run out.

Cofnas's account of it was blunt: "I was betrayed the moment the administration determined that free speech was inconvenient for it."

Caius has form of its own. In 2022 the master and a senior tutor wrote to students about a Helen Joyce event on gender-identity ideology, saying they did not "condone or endorse" views they considered "offensive, insulting and hateful," and that the college would "continue to strive to make Caius an inclusive, diverse and welcoming home." The new sessions are that email turned into a timetable.

The pattern below the university line is the same. In Sheffield, school materials have told children that "black people can be racially prejudiced towards a white person which is wrong and totally unacceptable. However, this is not racism. Racism is racial prejudice plus power. In the UK, white people hold the cultural power."

In Barnet, a Labour council approved taxpayer funding for an Islamic primary that requires girls as young as seven to wear a hijab from Year 3. Stephen Evans of the National Secular Society called it "appalling that taxpayers are being asked to fund a school that forces girls as young as seven to wear the hijab."

Back at the University level, in Northampton, freshers were pointed at an Advance HE module on "Whiteness, Privilege and Belonging." The university said "inclusivity is one of our core values, and we make no apologies for that." Philip Kiszely, on TalkTV, answered that "there is NO WHITE PRIVILEGE in higher education. The anti-racism system is the problem, which is overtly racist."

A university that cannot tell the difference between a crime and a parking complaint, or between the Equality Act and a leftist activist group's preferred version of it, is not protecting its students. It is training them to treat argument as harm and dissent as a hate incident.

The Office for Students now has a complaints scheme under the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act. Caius has just given its undergraduates a reason to use it.

Tyler Durden Mon, 10/05/2026 - 12:00

Another primetime matchup for Michael Penix Jr. and the Atlanta Falcons is on tap for “Monday Night Football.”

And, they say it makes the "smoothest smoothies ever."

The worst is ahead for Pete Calvin.

A high school student and the driver of a Jeep involved in the early morning crash were killed, cops said.

From walking down the aisle to asking for a divorce and having to file, the highs and lows of Big Apple love aren’t cheap.  New York, where a dream wedding costs over $53,000, is the second-most expensive state for divorce, running soured sweethearts more than $27,000 to officially part ways, according to nightmarish new data.  “The cost...

These Amazon best-selling items are a must-grab!

Aramco Cuts Asia Oil Prices To Six-Year Low, Warns Global Oil Supply Buffer "Scarily Thin"

Saudi Aramco has raised oil prices for European-bound cargoes in November but has cut prices for Asian buyers to the lowest in six years as Persian Gulf producers race for market share with flows through the Strait of Hormuz increasing. 

The state-owned firm will offer Arab Light crude to buyers in Asia to $5 a barrel less than the Dubai/Oman benchmark for November, according to Bloomberg citing a list from the producer. That compared with a discount of $2 a barrel for this month. Traders and refiners had expected a $5 increase from October, a Bloomberg survey shows. 

The unexpected cut amounted to $3 per barrel - which is the lowest since June 2020, not long after crude hit negative prices for the first and only time in history - is a signal the world’s largest oil exporter may be trying to boost sales to Asia, along with other Persian Gulf producers. Aramco raised November prices to Europe by $3 a barrel, and left those to the US unchanged from this month.

For European buyers, on the other hand, the November oil price will be $3 per barrel higher than it was for this month, across all grades. The prices for Saudi oil grades sold to the United States remained unchanged from  October. 

The discount for Asian buyers is likely a response to a surge in shipping costs for the Hormuz route, where Saudi Arabia is using ship-to-ship transfers in the Gulf of Oman to reduce the risk of Iranian attacks on vessels carrying its crude. The STS involves sending smaller vessels to pick up crude from the Persian Gulf, pass through Hormuz, and offload the crude onto VLCCs waiting off Oman. This oil-shuttling has boosted the cost of transporting crude from the Persian Gulf to other parts of the world, mostly Asia.

The freight cost for a very large crude carrier has soared to an all-time high of $1.3 million per day because of the Hormuz situation. This is up 43 times from January this year, when the rate for a VLCC stood at some $30,000 per day, according to Bloomberg.

Because of these price developments, freight costs now add some $33 to the price of a barrel of oil getting shipped out of the Persian Gulf. This compares to $1.73 per barrel in January. In percentage terms, freight costs now represent 27% of the delivered cost for a VLCC cargo, versus 3% in January, the Poten & Partners data also showed.

Meanwhile, at roughly the same time as it was slashing prices to capture some of the UAE's market share, the head of Saudi Arabia’s state producer said that oil stockpiles that cushion the world from supply shocks have become “scarily thin,” putting markets at risk of worsening unless the Strait of Hormuz reopens.

The head of the world’s single biggest crude exporting company was speaking just days after governments in the world’s biggest economies announced plans to release as much as 100 million barrels of emergency oil and diesel stocks to ease rising fuel costs.

“Until Hormuz fully re-opens and confidence returns, the crude reality is that pressure at both ends of the barrel will intensify,” Amin Nasser, chief executive of Saudi Aramco, said at the Energy Intelligence Forum in London on Monday. “While the squeeze on crude is serious, refined fuel prices have risen even more sharply.”

Consumption of crude is still rising and countries will require even more supply for at least the next two years while rebuilding their inventories, Nasser said. That could mean additional demand of at least 2 million barrels a day, or even more if governments decide to increase the amount of oil they hold in stockpiles, he said. 

Commenting on the latest emergency release, Rabobank's Michael Every writes that the 50 million barrels of oil that Europe agreed to release (following US demands) are not from a government-owned facility but private stocks and were reportedly already available for sale, "but Europe is instead opting to buy cheaper US flows. So, the EU move was serious, showing who still asks, ‘How many barrels?’ when the White House asks for a jump in output, yet performative in that truly cheap diesel will remain in short supply."

When the US-Iran war began, the world had about 10 billion barrels of oil stocks, Nasser said. That has fallen to less than 6 billion, of which only 10% of which is practically available due to various technical restrictions, he said, echoing what JPM's Natasha Kaneva warned about back in May.

Source: JPMorgan

Releasing part of what’s left in global stockpiles will buy economies some time but won’t fix the imbalances between supply and demand, Nasser said. Gulf producers are working to ramp up production and exports and have succeeded in boosting crude flows to near prewar levels.

Saudi Arabia and neighbors like the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait have been using their own tankers to ship crude through Hormuz, which has been at least partly obstructed since the US and Israel attacked Iran at the end of February, kicking off a regional war.

The higher flows have provided scant relief for oil markets, which are still pricing in security risks to supply in the Persian Gulf and Red Sea. Brent crude, the international benchmark, has traded around $100 a barrel over the past month, even as more tankers transited Hormuz. Those vessels have had to run the risk of heightened attacks, while Saudi Arabia has been repeatedly targeted over the last month.

Still, all of Aramco’s upstream capacity remains intact, Nasser said. That has allowed the company to continue covering its supply contracts with buyers in Europe and Asia. The company has used various export routes, shifted supply between its different crude grades and pressed its own tankers into operation to supply customers, he said.

Over the past month, Aramco boosted crude shipments from its main export terminal at Ras Tanura in the Persian Gulf. The company reacted quickly to a temporary halt to its main cross-country pipeline after an attack last month, and has since brought flows back to about 80% of capacity, although earlier today we got reports of another massive explosion on the East-West pipeline which likely halted shipments again. 

"Massive fires" on the Saudi oil export pipeline: Sabereenhttps://t.co/WliqWfrUQY pic.twitter.com/WKpjzRWpL7

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) October 5, 2026

Aramco is looking for alternative crude export routes to avoid relying too much on any single method of reaching global buyers, Nasser said, without providing specifics. The company is studying plans that would double or triple the capacity of its storage facilities, he said.

Tyler Durden Mon, 10/05/2026 - 11:40

What else would you expect in the City of Love?

What else would you expect in the City of Love?

Dakota Johnson and Anne Hathaway's erotic thriller dominated the weekend box office.

I would wear one to the grocery store.

The former Bears linebacker allegedly scuffled with a female security worker at Soldier Field after Chicago's 23-12 win against the Jets on Sunday.

The 71-year-old cyclist was riding north on the East Drive near East 84th Street around 8:20 a.m. when he struck the unleashed pooch who darted into the roadway, police said.

A Southwest Airlines passenger suddenly stripped and began behaving erratically as the plane taxied for takeoff from Houston’s Hobby Airport. The crew aborted takeoff and returned to the gate, where police removed the woman and took her to a hospital for evaluation.

He needs to press the right buttons this week to wake up a team that looked like it was sleepwalking in Chicago.

The US Coast Guard has discovered a debris field off the coast of Nantucket from a missing air ambulance carrying six people that vanished over the Atlantic while flying from Bermuda to Boston. Air traffic control audio and tracking data indicate the pilot reported electrical problems and declared an emergency while descending sharply ahead of...

"This case involves an unprecedented effort to use state law to regulate global conduct," Kannon Shanmugam, a lawyer for the oil companies, told the justices.

Mason Miller was raw with emotion following Sunday's loss.