Zero Rss

EU NatGas Hits Highest Since 2022 As Low Storage Sets Stage For Winter Cold-Snap Price Shock

European natural gas futures hit their highest level since December 2022 (early days of the Russia-Ukraine conflict) as domestic supplies remain well below the 15-year average. With the Northern Hemisphere winter approaching, the restocking phase may be jeopardized by maritime chokepoint madness across the Gulf and Red Sea, with the Strait of Hormuz and Bab al-Mandab Strait under threat.

Dutch benchmark futures jumped as much as 5.3% to 83.67 euros a megawatt-hour early Monday. Prices have tripled so far this year, and the latest surge comes after Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline was taken offline in recent days following a drone strike on pumping infrastructure.

Europe is heading toward the heating season with gas storage facilities just 68% full, well below the 15-year trend of about 85% for this time of year.

LNG arrivals into Western Europe retreated last week after an early-September recovery, while inventory replenishment slowed.

"The delay pushes any prospect of de-escalation even further out of reach," analysts at ING Groep NV wrote in a note earlier.

A Timera Energy analyst warned that one consequence of low gas storage "is a more fragile winter balance," adding, "That increases the potential for volatility if cold weather or another supply shock emerges faster than cargoes can respond."

Translation: one cold snap this coming winter could trigger sharp price swings and intensify pressure on European households, as the energy-stricken continent is more than ever held hostage to conflicts in the Middle East.

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/14/2026 - 08:25

US Miner Almonty Strikes Major Deal With Africa's Largest Tungsten-Producing Country

Almonty Industries is positioning itself to "become the leading Western producer of tungsten," potentially as early as 2027, as Western buyers confront a severe supply shortage sparked by China and, more broadly, what we've described as "resource nationalism."

Bloomberg reports that Almonty has partnered with Rwanda's government, securing a foothold in Africa's largest tungsten-producing nation. The deal aims to accelerate access to existing production and develop a traceable, conflict-free supply chain for Western governments, reducing dependence on China's quasi-monopolistic market position on not just tungsten but rare earths.

Under a binding agreement disclosed early Monday, Rwanda will receive a 25% stake in Almonty's local subsidiary in exchange for an exploration concession and a processing license. The Dillon, Montana-based miner will retain a 75% stake. 

Almonty's strategy to partner with Rwanda, as described by Bloomberg's James Attwood, targets one of the West's most pressing problems in its race to secure critical materials: new mines take years to build, while supplies are desperately needed. 

Attwood explained: 

Rather than waiting years for a new mine to be developed, the partnership plans to begin acquiring ore, pre-concentrate and panning tailings from existing licensed Rwandan producers, including small-scale miners. That material can initially be sold, upgraded or exported while the partners work toward building a permanent collection and processing facility in Rwanda.

CEO Lewis Black told Attwood in an exclusive interview that the Rwanda deal is the quickest and most viable solution to boost tungsten supply for the West, as new mines take years to develop and partnering with existing producers can deliver supplies more quickly. 

"Traders can play with the pirates," Black said. "We're only interested in licensed domestic output."

Black said the US government helped structure the deal but is not funding the new venture. Tungsten will be shipped to customers in the US, Europe, Japan and South Korea, he added.

The US government's involvement in the deal only suggests the urgency by the Trump administration to identify leading tungsten companies, such as Almonty, to quickly come up with solutions as China chokes the world of this critical material that underpins defense production, semiconductor manufacturing, AI data center buildouts, power grid upgrades and industrial tooling. 

Black also noted that the new venture plans to deploy a mobile processing unit near existing tailings dams and explore the roughly 12-square-mile Shyorongi concession. The deal boosts near-term supplies for Almonty while simultaneously developing a larger domestic processing and production base. 

Back said the deal with Africa's largest tungsten producer and ranked seventh globally in 2025 serves as a blueprint for other countries where small-scale tungsten mining is practiced and it only seems like Almonty can take this blueprint and begin building out a rapid sourcing network of tungsten and become the early leader in deliverable tungsten on an ex-China basis. 

For Almonty, the deal expands its existing network, which includes a major mine ramping up in South Korea, operations in Portugal and projects in Spain and the US.

Almonty began processing ore at its crown jewel, the Sangdong mine in South Korea, in June, marking its transition to scalable tungsten ore production, with throughput potentially increasing to 1.2 million tons of tungsten ore in 2027.

In July, Almonty expanded its agreement with Pennsylvania-based Global Tungsten & Powders, extending the term to 21 years, increasing total contracted volumes by 40% and improving pricing by approximately 6.3%. This establishes a direct route into US industrial and defense supply chains.

Almonty's most recent presentation describes itself as becoming the leading Western tungsten producer following Sangdong's Phase II expansion and an extension at Portugal's operating Panasqueira mine.

Almonty is pursuing that higher-value processing opportunity through a planned South Korean tungsten oxide plant with an initial annual capacity of 4,000 tons, then expanding to 6,000 tons.

Companies that can bring supply online sooner could capture a crucial early market advantage, including Almonty as it ramps up tungsten production in South Korea.

And that's why Jefferies initiated coverage earlier this month. 

Jefferies initiates critical mineral companies Almonty, Materion, USA Rare Earth and Neo Performance with Buy; the firms are expected to benefit from increased demand for supply outside of China.

Almonty (buy, PT $26.25)

Sees Almonty offering public exposure to Western tungsten…

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) September 2, 2026

Across the tungsten industry over the last several weeks, there have been troubling developments of "resource nationalism": 

• US Locks Down Scrap, UK Funds Mine, Zimbabwe Bans Exports, Vietnam Weighs Curbs

Last week, at the Jefferies Industrials Conference, MSC Industrial executive Martina McIsaac warned of a tungsten supply shock rippling through the company's supply chain and continuing to drive up industrial tooling costs. 

China's near-total control of the tungsten market ...

... which Beijing's February 2025 export-licensing requirements intensified the global shortage, contributing to a 70% decline in Chinese exports of ammonium paratungstate, or APT, through the first 11 months of 2025, according to Katusa analysts. 

Rotterdam APT prices jumped from around $390 per metric ton unit at the beginning of 2025 to roughly $3,400 this spring, according to Katusa Research. 

The shortage has spooked Wall Street, as mentions of "tungsten" on earnings calls have soared. 

Black said, "Better lucky than smart. Only need to be right once." 

The advantage today belongs to producers that can turn deals into verified and conflict-free deliverable tungsten. In a market defined by scarcity, as former Goldman commodities head Jeff Currie has warned, early movers that deliver reliable supplies to the West will earn Wall Street's recognition. That recognition could grow in the months ahead as the decoupling between China and the West accelerates.

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/14/2026 - 08:05

Bank Of England Spends £85k Researching How Best To Erase Churchill

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,

The Bank of England has spent more than £85,000 of research money to justify wiping Winston Churchill, Jane Austen, J.M.W. Turner and Alan Turing off Britain's banknotes and swapping them for hedgehogs, foxes and puffins.

A Freedom of Information trail shows Savanta was paid £49,000 to run focus groups that told officials historical figures were "elitist and divisive."

Another £22,500 went on public consultations about which animals should replace them. The Bank called the result a "positive evolution," not censorship.

Bank of England spent £85,000 on research to justify dropping Winston Churchill and other British heroes from banknotes https://t.co/gtu6zPAEZ5

— Daily Mail (@DailyMail) September 12, 2026

The October 2025 Savanta report, delivered months before the nature theme was announced, warned that portraits of notable Britons were "contentious and not representative of the UK's cultural and natural diversity."

Officials were told historical figures represented "a backward-looking vision of the UK that carries too great a risk of division and controversy."

Most of the 119 focus-group participants said featuring such people was "potentially divisive, elitist and disconnected from their own experiences."

Churchill sits on the current £5. Austen is on the £10, Turner on the £20, Turing on the £50. All are scheduled to go. King Charles stays on the front.

Governor Andrew Bailey is due to pick the animals by the end of 2026 from a shortlist that includes the European hedgehog, red fox, Atlantic puffin, barn owl, common frog and bottlenose dolphin.

What the fuck does a dolphin have to do with the history of Great Britain?

The Bank insists the driver was an earlier consultation of 44,000 responses in which nature came top, plus the need for new anti-counterfeit features. Chief cashier Victoria Cleland said: "The key driver for introducing a new banknote series is always to increase counterfeit resilience, but it also provides an opportunity to celebrate different aspects of the UK.

Nature is a great choice from a banknote-authentication perspective and means we can showcase the UK's rich and varied wildlife."

Critics were not buying the security alibi. Reform UK's Nigel Farage called the plan "absolutely crackers." Tory leader Kemi Badenoch said it was "erasing our history" and "a silly thing to do." Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey said Churchill "deserves better than being replaced by a badger."

The same Whitehall that now treats Churchill as a liability was simultaneously lobbying for something even more ideological. Cabinet Office officials from the Office for Equality and Opportunity wrote to the Bank's chief cashier arguing that current figures gave an "incomplete picture" of British identity. They wanted "greater representation of women, disabled people, ethnic minority communities and LGBT+ individuals" to "send a strong signal of progress and recognition."

Imagine that set of banknotes.

Shadow minister Alex Burghart said government officials had been "caught red-handed conspiring with the Bank of England to remove them from our banknotes." Banknotes, he added, "should feature the greatest Britons - the historic figures that unite our country. They shouldn't be chosen on the basis of Labour's equality laws."

This is not an isolated design tweak. It sits inside a years-long campaign against British history and culture.

In June 2020, Churchill's Parliament Square statue, the Washington statue and the Cenotaph were boarded up as Black Lives Matter riots rolled through London. A petition demanded the box come off. It was treated as a victory for the mob that wanted the bronze gone.

The statue has been defaced again since, including with pro-Palestine slogans in 2026. The pattern is the same: protect the monument from the crowd by hiding it, then treat the hidden monument as proof that the figure himself is the problem.

Now the United Nations has joined the lecture. A UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination guidance tells former slaving states that "public spaces should honour the contributions of people of African descent."

It wants statues, memorials, rewritten schoolbooks and "reparatory justice." Historian Matt Goodwin's response was two words: "jog on." Professor Robert Tombs called the campaign "sinister" and "a huge financial and political scam."

While Churchill is priced off the currency, Sadiq Khan's Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square has been given over to Tschabalala Self's five-metre Lady in Blue: an overweight black woman in a tight dress and heels, billed as an "everywoman" and "a symbol of confidence and purpose."

Self said she is "not an idol to venerate or a historic figurehead to commemorate." City Hall called it an excellent addition. Large parts of the public called it an eyesore bolted onto the square that holds Nelson atop his column.

So let's recap. They boxed up the county's greatest leader. Commissioned consultants to declare him elitist and divisive. Lobbied for identity-group replacements. Installed a cartoon figure next to Nelson. Invited the UN to demand African statues as atonement. Then they spent £85,000 proving that a hedgehog is less "divisive" than the man who kept the country free from Nazi rule.

God help us.

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Tyler Durden Mon, 09/14/2026 - 07:45

Fed Rate Hikes Will Increase US Interest Costs By $50 Billion

The biggest problem with the "short-terming" of the US Treasury stock, which under Bessent's extension of Yellen's Activist Treasury Issuance playbook, which pushed the percentage of T-Bills as a percentage of total debt to 23% - the highest since 2010 excluding the emergency surge during the covid crisis which relied entirely on Bills for government funding and briefly pushed the Bill percentage above 25% - even as total US debt rose above $40 trillion for the first time ever... 

... is that any rate hike will immediately increase the amount the country is spending on interest.

Which is especially concerning because, as we wrote on Friday when discussing the August budget deficit, gross US interest (for the LTM period) is now a record $1.4 trillion and is set to surpass Social Security as the largest US outlay within 2 years, likely hitting $2 trillion before 2030.  

The dramatic deterioration in the US fiscal picture prompted BofA's chief economist Aditya Bhave to pen a report ("In the interest of time", available to pro subs) in which he wrote that "the recent rise in interest rates, particularly at the long-end, coupled with US total debt crossing the $40tn threshold sparked a wave of commentary on the US fiscal picture."

According to Bhave, while elevated deficits since the pandemic have certainly contributed to the higher term premium, it’s unlikely that crossing the $40tn threshold contributed to the recent increase in long-term yields. That's because markets tend to respond to changes in the expected path of deficits and Treasury issuance rather than the level of debt alone. Importantly, there has been no policy announcement or fiscal development that meaningfully altered those expectations recently.

Instead, BofA notes, it appears that the recent rise in yields has been driven by higher inflation expectations owing to the rise in energy prices and questions over the Fed’s commitment to its price stability mandate, which were partially quieted by Warsh at Jackson Hole.

Regardless of what has driven the rise in yields, the BofA economist team cautions that higher interest rates across the curve do warrant a renewed focus on deficits. The deficit this year is on pace to once again eclipse 6% of GDP and a major reason for that is rising interest expense which has exceed spending on Defense and Medicare. The trend in interest costs is also notably worse than Medicare, Defense Spending and even Social Security, which have been more stable.

Source: BofA

And while the trend of US interest expense growth is already ruinous, here BofA repeats what we said above, namely that the current level of interest rates is likely to exacerbate these trends as Treasury refinances maturing debt at higher borrowing costs.

According to BofA calcs, the average interest rate on outstanding marketable Treasury debt remains well below prevailing market yields, at roughly 3.4%. Looking specifically at coupon-bearing securities, current market rates imply that debt rolled over in coming years will be refinanced at interest rates approximately 1.4 percentage points higher, on average, than those on the securities being retired.

Source: BofA

Most importantly, and this is what we started the post with, is that the Treasury's increased reliance on bills also leaves borrowing costs more sensitive to near-term monetary policy. As Bhave writes, nearly $7 trillion of Treasury bills are currently outstanding, the vast majority of which mature within one year. 

Source: BofA

Assuming the Fed hikes rates by 75bp this year as BofA expects (once this week, and two more times before the latest Fed Hiking cycle ends), BofA concludes that annual interest costs on outstanding T-bills could increase by roughly $50bn or ~15bps of GDP.

It gets worse.

As a reminder of the pernicious nature of compounding debt, in addition to higher refinancing costs on the horizon, BofA warns that a more fundamental concern is the feedback loop between interest rates and debt. Ultimately, debt sustainability depends not only on the level of interest rates, but also on how those rates compare with nominal GDP growth. When nominal growth exceed borrowing costs, debt-to-GDP ratios can stabilize over time. However, as the gap between interest rates and nominal growth narrows, higher debt levels become increasingly difficult to sustain.

The risk is that the self-reinforcing dynamic between interest costs and deficits can further narrow that gap over time.

Meanwhile, there is a feedback loop between higher interest costs and deficits that we must account for. Higher interest costs increase deficits and Treasury borrowing needs, which in turn result in even more interest expense. Increased Treasury issuance can put upward pressure on term premiums as investors demand greater compensation to absorb a larger supply of duration. Higher term premiums raise borrowing costs, which further increase interest expense and deficits, creating a self-reinforcing dynamic.

Obviously, the risk from this dynamic is not immediate, which only makes it worse as generations of politicians can sweep it under the rug (dealing with unsustainable spending and debt is not only unpleasant, it is a career killer for politicians), until it becomes to late to deal with it and the problem explodes. Sure enough, this dynamic emerges only gradually as a larger share of the debt stock is refinanced at higher rates and interest expense consumes an increasing share of federal spending. To illustrate this, BofA simulates debt-to-GDP trajectories under three scenarios for how interest rates respond to higher debt.

Source: BofA

In the low, central, and high scenarios, a 1 percentage point increase in the debt-to- GDP ratio raises interest rates by 1bp, 2bp, and 3bp, respectively. While the effects are modest initially, the trajectories diverge meaningfully over longer horizons as higher debt levels lead to higher borrowing costs, which further accelerate debt accumulation.

The composition of deficits matters

The growing share of deficits attributable to interest costs has important implications for both the economy and financial markets. That's because deficits driven by rising interest expense provide far less support to economic activity than deficits associated with tax relief or government spending, and are far less defensively politically. In addition, they may crowd out both public and private investment by placing sustained upward pressure on long-term interest rates. Over time, they constrain the government's ability to provide fiscal support during economic downturns, potentially slowing the pace of recovery and resulting in a full-blown fiscal crisis.

For markets, the changing composition of deficits matters because it can lead to greater Treasury issuance without a corresponding boost to economic growth. As a result, it may place additional upward pressure on Treasury supply, term premiums, and ultimately the long end of the yield curve.

To see this in practice, look no further than interest rates on the long-end of the Treasury curve... but not just in the US - anywhere else too. 

In conclusion, nobody wins from adding another $50 billion of interest cost to the country (except for America's short-term creditors of course). As Peter Tchir wrote earlier, with interest expense already an issue relative to defense or discretionary spending, a rate hike does not help on that front.

Putting it together, the Academy Securities trader wrote that he finds it "difficult to imagine President Trump liking the idea, even if it helps the longer end of the yield curve, or that stocks have priced it in."

Of course they haven't, but stocks remain hypnotized in an AI-bubble, which ironically is kept afloat only thanks to record debt issuance (now that capex is funded largely from new debt), which will come to a crashing halt once Treasury yields spike and the credit market slams shut once. And as always happens, all of these things will take place all at once triggering the next Fed bailout of, well, everything. 

More in the full BofA note available to pro subscribers

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/14/2026 - 06:55

Unfair Gains? Let's Talk About A European Windfall Tax

Authored by Mark Nayler via FEE,

After another summer of heatwaves and wildfires, Spain is petitioning the EU to create a climate adaptation fund. In a letter sent to the EU's climate commissioner Wopke Hoekstra, the Spanish minister for the ecological transition Sara Aagesen Muñoz said that Europe needs a blanket strategy to help its member states cope with climate change, and to mobilize the "resources needed to deliver the necessary investments." The mobilizing strategy favored by Muñoz is a permanent windfall tax on energy companies, many of which have cashed in on higher gas and oil prices resulting from the wars in Ukraine and Iran. She also recommends more mutual debt financing, similar to the (supposedly one-off) Next Generation EU scheme introduced to help member states recover from the pandemic - an unpopular idea that is unlikely to be a feature of the EU's next seven-year budget.

It wouldn't be the first time that the EU has taxed exceptional profits. In 2022, in reaction to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Brussels imposed a minimum levy of 33% on fossil fuel companies' surplus profits, defined as being 20% above their annual averages from 2018 (this in itself highlighted one problem with windfall taxes - namely, defining "surplus" profit). So far, however, the EU has resisted reintroducing what Meg O'Neill, the CEO of BP, calls a "highly flawed response to the situation", instead pointing out that individual countries can introduce their own windfall taxes. Last month, Portugal imposed a tax of 33% on oil companies benefiting from the Iran war, saying that it was "both fair and necessary to create a solidarity mechanism."

The fairness of windfall taxes, of course, is one of the most questionable things about them. As the Portuguese finance ministry said when introducing its windfall levy, the elevated profits of oil and gas providers this year have resulted "solely from external market conditions." So why punish them? Advocates of an EU-wide windfall tax base their argument on this fact; but precisely the same circumstance provides a compelling reason to oppose them.

On this view, such taxes penalize oil and gas companies for benefiting from the operation of neutral market forces. These companies are also, of course, susceptible to market downturns - so one might expect to see them compensated by the state in hard times as well as heavily taxed during booms. That they are never compensated in this way suggests that windfall levies aren't really about fairness. One suspects that many of their advocates want to punish energy companies, even when their extraordinary profits have been achieved without subterfuge, corruption, or creative bookkeeping. Proponents of windfall taxes also tend to assume that the resulting money would be better invested by governments than private entities. But as several controversies around the Next Gen EU scheme have reminded us, that is not a given.

Muñoz's letter to the EU's climate ministry comes less than a month after several EU member states put the idea of a EU-wide windfall tax to Ireland, which currently holds the six-month, rotating presidency of the Council of the EU. Germany, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Poland, and Austria are requesting that the presidency puts this idea on the agenda at the next meeting of EU finance ministers, due in Dublin on September 18 - 19. Echoing Muñoz's call, they said that the EU needs a "common approach, one that ensures that those who are profiting from the crisis do their part to ease the burden on the general public."

This is another questionable assumption - that an EU-wide tax on energy providers would transubstantiate into lower prices for consumers. But in some countries, it might have the opposite effect: as with Trumpian tariffs, higher operating costs could simply be passed on to customers. Patrick Pouyanné, CEO of TotalEnergies, has already warned that the company's price caps of €1.99 ($2.30) and €2.25 ($2.60) for petrol and diesel, respectively - introduced in March and so far estimated to have cost the company around €200 million ($233 million) - would be scrapped if the French government imposed a windfall tax on profits connected with the Iran war.

Windfall taxes also create an unstable regulatory environment, which in turn can dramatically reduce share values. In July 2022, when Spain's Socialist prime minister Pedro Sánchez announced a one-off "solidarity" tax on Spain's biggest banks, Spanish-listed banking groups slumped by €5 billion ($5.8 billion; along with fossil fuel companies, banks are the most common target of morally-motivated windfall taxes). This "temporary" tax, which now operates on a sliding scale, has been rolled over until at least next year, highlighting another problem - that windfall levies often stick around well past their stipulated deadlines. The longer they exist, the less attractive the affected companies become to investors.

This was the main reason why ExxonMobil sued the EU over its "solidarity" tax in 2022, a year in which the American energy giant's third quarter profits hit almost $20 billion, the largest it had ever posted and triple those of the previous year ("more money than God," as then-US President Joe Biden put it). Filed through its Dutch and German subsidiaries at Luxembourg's general court, ExxonMobil's complaint stated that Brussels's windfall tax would "undermine investor confidence, discourage investment, and increase reliance on imported energy and fuel products." The case has yet to be resolved - but European courts would surely see many more like it if Spain's recommendations are acted on.

The most devastating criticism of Spain's proposal of a permanent windfall tax to combat climate change, however, is that it would be utterly self-defeating. It will cost an estimated €27 trillion ($31 trillion) for the EU to reach its 2050 climate neutrality goals, with the majority of that capital expected to come from the private sector. According to the European Central Bank: "Public policies should aim to remove structural rigidities, improve regulatory and administrative efficiency and foster green innovation." The EU's recent deregulation drive has those aims in mind; but a windfall tax on energy companies - especially if it remained in place for years, as Muñoz recommends - would have the opposite effect, by restricting the private sector's ability to invest. Oil and gas companies are going to need more money than God to help facilitate the green transition.

In its focus on long-term prevention, rather than short-term reaction, the EU's new wildfire strategy shows the direction in which the bloc should be heading with its climate policies. Punishing companies that have profited from geopolitical turmoil might cater to public anger at their windfalls; but in the long run it won't benefit consumers, nor will it help Europe reach its climate goals. To realize those, the EU needs to work with its biggest energy companies, not against them.

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/14/2026 - 06:30

Gas Turbine Shortage Sends AI Developers Back To Boilers And Steam

Elon Musk recently warned that “turbines are sold out through 2030,” saying SpaceX and Tesla would probably need to make turbine blades and vanes internally.

ELON MUSK: “Turbines are sold out through 2030. In order to bring enough power online, SpaceX and Tesla will probably have to make the turbine blades and vanes internally. There are only three casting companies in the world that make these, and they’re massively backlogged.” pic.twitter.com/YlKHznBXhK

— DogeDesigner (@cb_doge) August 29, 2026

SpaceX is preparing a factory in Bastrop, Texas, to tackle that casting bottleneck, and Musk says bringing production in-house could get gas turbines online up to 18 months sooner.

This is where it becomes important to be specific as to which type of turbines he is referring to…

POWER Magazine reports that data center operators are pairing industrial boilers with steam turbines to bypass the gas turbine backup. Applied Digital CEO Wes Cummins stated gas turbines ordered today might not arrive until 2032.

Not all turbines are equal. Gas turbines are designed to handle high temperatures and loads, which require extremely unique alloys and manufacturing techniques. Steam turbines handle relatively lower temperatures and allow for a wide range of alloys to be used.

Don't be fooled by the names, though. Both the gas turbine and the steam turbine are ultimately running on natural gas piped directly to the site.

The gas turbines would take the fuel supplied directly and generate electricity from it. Steam turbines require an intermediate step where the gas supply will be burned on site to boil water, which will be used to spin the turbine for electricity production.

Steam turbines and boilers enjoy an older, more established supply chain capable of ramping production up and down quickly, which is why POWER quotes Rentech Boiler Systems as being able to manufacture and deliver a packaged boiler within a year.

Babcock & Wilcox is already seeing significant interest in the new approach with a $2.4 billion agreement with Base Electron to supply 1.2 GW of generation for Applied Digital's AI campuses. B&W is providing boilers for the on-site power plant with operations anticipated in 2028.

Existing nuclear and new natural gas remain the most prominent answers to the data center power question. As we covered recently, Google is securing nuclear supply in Finland with a 22-year agreement with Fortum.

The ultimate goal of most of the hyperscalers is to eventually find their facilities powered 100% by renewables and/or nuclear energy, with the fossil fuels serving as the bridge in the meantime.

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/14/2026 - 05:45

Commerce Department Finalizes Steep Duties On Solar Imports From India, Indonesia, Laos

Authored by Kimberly Hayek via The Epoch Times,

The Commerce Department on Friday finalized steep duty rates on imports of solar cells and panels from India, Indonesia, and Laos, stating that it found that producers in those countries dumped cheap products in the United States and benefited from unfair government subsidies.

Anti-dumping margins were set at 123.04 percent for Indian producers, 94.36 percent for Indonesian producers, and 65.43 percent for producers from Laos.

Countervailing duty rates ran higher. Indian producers were assigned 126.09 percent. Indonesian producers face rates between 73.2 percent and 173.7 percent. Lao producers were given rates between 82.03 percent and 153.67 percent.

The trade case was brought by the Alliance for American Solar Manufacturing and Trade. Members include U.S. manufacturers First Solar, Hanwha Qcells, and Mission Solar Energy.

Friday's final determinations "are an essential step toward enforcing our trade laws and restoring fair competition for U.S. solar manufacturers and the workers they employ," Tim Brightbill, lead attorney for the Alliance, said in a statement.

"We will keep monitoring import data and holding bad actors accountable wherever they move next."

The U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) is scheduled to make a final determination Oct. 14 on whether the imports materially injured or threatened to injure domestic manufacturers. If the commission votes in the affirmative, the Department of Commerce is expected to issue final duty orders in November.

The United States first imposed anti-dumping and anti-subsidy duties on Chinese solar products in 2012. Manufacturers there shifted production to other Asian countries.

In August 2023, the Department of Commerce found that certain Chinese solar producers shipped products through Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam for minor processing to circumvent tariffs that would apply to Chinese imports.

In April 2025, the Department of Commerce announced plans to impose duties of up to 3,521 percent on solar cell imports from those four countries.

The department said companies there were receiving subsidies from the Chinese regime, and that those countervailing duty investigations were among the first in which it made an affirmative finding that companies received transnational subsidies.

The ITC found in May 2025 that the U.S. solar industry was threatened with material injury by the subsidized Southeast Asian imports. New tariffs on products from Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam followed in June 2025.

After those four countries were hit, Chinese solar companies expanded across Southeast Asia to places that, at the time, had not drawn comparable U.S. solar trade tariffs, including Laos and Indonesia.

William A. Reinsch, a former Clinton administration trade official and senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, described the pattern as "a huge cat and mouse game."

Washington has added other measures to the same supply chain. On Aug. 6, President Donald Trump signed a proclamation establishing a price floor and a 15 percent tariff on imports of polysilicon and related products, including wafers, solar cells, and solar modules. The measures take effect Dec. 4.

Minimum import prices in the proclamation are $21 per kilogram for polysilicon, $100 per kilogram for polysilicon ingots and wafers, 22 cents per watt for solar cells, and 38 cents per watt for solar modules.

"We're setting prices so that the Chinese can't dump anymore, and we're setting tariffs to say build it here," Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said after the signing.

America's share of global polysilicon production capacity fell to less than 2 percent in 2024 from 50 percent in 2005, according to the proclamation. Global production has grown by more than 270 percent since 2020. Inventories reached a record 400,000 tons by the end of 2024.

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/14/2026 - 05:00

Turkey Arrests 162 In LGBTQ+ Raids

Turkish police arrested at least 162 people and searched the offices of six LGBTQ+ associations in weekend raids designed to support the country's campaign to protect family values. The Ankara-based LGBTQ+ rights group Kaos GL claimed that beyond arrests, the government had also cut access to dozens of websites and social media accounts belonging to associate groups and rights advocates.

Turkish Justice Minister Akin Gurlek said investigations, prompted by accusations of prostitution and obscenity, were coordinated by prosecutors in Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, Aydin and Mersin and involved judicial proceedings against 162 suspects, nine associations and 13 businesses across 15 provinces.

"As per the duty to protect families and children given to the state by the constitution, no criminal organization, abuse network or illegal activity which targets children, youths or families will be tolerated!" Gurlek added in a social media post.

Authorities say they seized drugs, digital equipment, smuggled alcohol and a gun in weekend police operations targeting gay bars and night clubs as well as a hammam that was said to be a place of prostitution.

The Istanbul prosecutor's office added that it had found evidence indicating that children and minors were being inappropriately swayed on issues tied to sexual orientation and gender identity.

Rights groups say the government is unfairly targeting the LGBTQ+ community, with Kaos GL saying that it had been accused of making "posts containing obscenities" accessible to children.

The weekend police operation was dubbed "My Family is Safe" by the government and was part of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's "Decade of Family and Population" scheme, which is designed to reverse plummeting birthrates in the aging country.

Authorities say it was intended to make sure that society does not see LGBTQ+ activity as "normal" and that raids were carried out to "protect children, the institution of the family, and our shared moral values."

Although same-sex relations are not illegal in the country, homophobia is rife, with President Erdogan blaming LGBTQ "perverts" for Turkey's rapidly declining birthrates.

That would seem a rhetorical diversion from the actual complexity of reasons for the decline, which Erdogan — who has ruled as the country's authoritarian president since 2014 as well as serving as its influential prime minister for 10 years before that — has called "a disaster."

Though Turkey's statistical agency, TurkStat, tracked a sharp decline in the total fertility rate between 2013 and 2023 (from 2.11 to 1.51), the shift brings birthrates in the country closer to those in other developed nations.

Observers say the real reasons for the drop are more likely of a structural and institutional nature rather than one chalked up to lifestyle.

Turkey's chronically worsening financial crisis, inflation, skyrocketing housing prices, family unfriendly workplace environments, limited access to affordable childcare, and higher educational and employment rates for women are all considered reasons for Turks to postpone having children, as well as for having fewer when they finally do.

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/14/2026 - 04:15

The UN Arms Embargo On Sudan Is Broken. America Has A Plan To Fix It

Authored by Hussain Abdul-Hussain via RealClearWorld,

The U.S. is rightly pushing the UN Security Council to expand the Sudan arms embargo before it expires this Saturday. Outlined by Ambassador Mike Waltz and Senior Advisor Massad Boulos, the proposal would expand restrictions nationwide to cover all territory and warring factions. A comprehensive countrywide ban eliminates regional geographic loopholes used by illicit traffickers and provides the legal teeth necessary to choke off foreign weapons, especially drones, fueling Sudan's devastating civil war, now in its fourth year.

To pass the resolution, America needs nine affirmative votes from the Council's 15 members. Alongside permanent members France and the UK, Washington's draft enjoys the support of Denmark, Greece, and Latvia. Panama and Bahrain could raise supporters to eight, one short of a majority.

Conversely, opponents include Somalia and Pakistan, two allies of Turkey and Saudi Arabia whose governments plan to continue arming the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF). Two other African Council members, Liberia and Congo, are leaning "no," joined likely by Colombia. Together with the permanent members Russia and China, the total no votes add up to seven, enough to block the resolution without forcing a Russian or Chinese veto.

Opponents of the full embargo argue that the SAF is the legitimate "state institutions" and should be allowed to arm itself while starving its rivals. This position aligns with SAF's chief, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, who believes he can eliminate the Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

However, America correctly argues that the war in Sudan is a stalemate. Neither faction is strong or well-resourced enough to overcome its rivals, prevail, and govern the enormous Sudanese territory, an area larger than Texas, California, Montana, and New York combined.

Sudan is the third-largest nation in Africa, and its population of 53 million comprises over 500 distinct groups speaking more than 400 languages. While Arabic-speaking Sunni Muslims form the largest heritage group, they are fragmented into distinct regional and tribal confederations.

Historically, the Arab Riverine tribes - the Ja'alin, Shaigya, and Danagla - dominated Khartoum politically and economically, forming the backbone of Omar al-Bashir's former regime and the mainstay of the SAF today. In contrast, the nomadic Baggara Arab tribes from Kordofan and Darfur serve as the demographic base for the RSF. Meanwhile, non-Arab, indigenous African communities include the pastoralist Beja of the Red Sea hills, the Nuba of the central mountains, and the sedentary Fur, who gave the Darfur region its name.

Since gaining independence in 1956, Sudan has been ruled by military autocrats and the Muslim Brotherhood. By the 1990s, severe droughts and desertification pushed nomadic Arab herders south into lands traditionally owned by sedentary, non-Arab African farmers.

In 2003, non-Arab Sudanese launched a rebellion. Khartoum organized Arab militias - the Janjaweed, predecessor of the RSF - to engage in widespread atrocities alongside SAF. These brutal, raid-based tribal tactics are being repeated in the current civil war.

Since independence, Sudan has experienced only four brief stints of democracy. The last began in 2019, when labor unions toppled the Islamist Bashir regime and began rebuilding a democracy underwritten by SAF's Burhan and RSF's Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (Hemedti).

By 2021, the two generals deemed the civilian government redundant and dissolved it to rule jointly. However, former regime elements of the Muslim Brotherhood engineered a comeback by driving a wedge between the two men, convincing Burhan he could become the country's undisputed ruler. Civil war erupted in April 2023. Burhan claimed the mantle of the legitimate government and declared the RSF an illegal militia. The RSF fought back, and the war continues to rage.

The U.S. State Department has already accused both sides of committing war crimes and has imposed targeted sanctions.

The Quad - comprising America, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the UAE - drafted a plan to end the war, requiring both generals to step down and restore civilian rule. Burhan, however, rejected the settlement, insisting the war will only end with the SAF's total military victory.

As the conflict unfolded, the Quad clung to its toothless plan while the UN Security Council unanimously renewed an arms embargo every September that failed to stop foreign powers from supplying various factions. Now, America is coming to the UN with a plan that has teeth: a blanket arms embargo on all armed Sudanese factions.

The ongoing civil war has completely upended the alliances of Sudan's past conflicts. The SAF alliance is heavily dominated by Arab and Muslim Brotherhood factions, earning it the backing of Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia.

Conversely, the RSF positions itself as anti-Islamist, receiving sponsorship from predominantly Christian and non-Arab Ethiopia, Kenya, and Uganda, alongside Chad and the UAE.

Treating all warring factions inside Sudan as equal aggressors and starving them of weapons is the best course of action.

A total embargo will lower the tempo of death and destruction, shut down the backdoor war economy, and might finally convince all parties that a military victory is impossible, leaving a negotiated political settlement as the only way forward.

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/14/2026 - 03:30

Is Britain Abandoning Military Defense To Fund More Socialism?

It's a curious position for European governments; for the past few years they have been rattling their sabers over the Russian war in Ukraine, calling for boots on the ground.  It's the kind of intervention that would automatically trigger WWIII.  Yet, these same governments are completely unprepared in terms of military spending, armament and training.  

When the British government refused to join the US blockade against Iran in the Strait of Hormuz, almost no one cared because the British have allowed their navy to decay into irrelevance.  Twenty years ago, they had nearly 50 active fighting vessels and today they are down to 22 vessels.  Britain's GDP per capita is currently lower than the state of Alabama.  And, they keep importing thousands upon thousands of third world migrants, with the vast majority relying on taxpayer funded subsidies. 

When given a choice between funding the British military or funding more immigrants, the government has chosen to fund more immigrants.  Britain has increased welfare spending by 16% in the past 5 years alone.    

A year ago the Brits, under pressure from the Trump Administration, took steps to expand their defense budget in order to better meet an increase in NATO obligations.  Multiple European countries have been avoiding these obligations for a long time, instead relying on the US to foot the bill while they enjoyed extra cash to spend on subsidized programs.  However, the British increase in their defense budget doesn't mean much if the military is not actually allowed to spend any money.

The British Army has been ordered to pause most “non-essential” collective training (large live-fire drills, tank/Apache exercises, etc.) for UK-based units that are on standby (only 4% of British units are actually deployed).  The immediate reason is a shortage of cash in the Ministry of Defence’s day-to-day resource budget (RDEL). Fuel and ammunition prices have risen faster than planned, meaning routine training budgets drawn up years earlier no longer cover the same activity.

Their defense budget expansion is not even keeping up with inflation.   Leftists in the UK, of course, blame Trump.  But inflation in Europe hit well before Trump returned to office and the lack of accountability on the part of British progressives is not going to save them from the fallout.

Military officials warned two years ago that British training standards were outdated by a decade.  In June of this year, Defense Secretary John Healey quit after government refusals to provide adequate funding for training.  

Healey is now the Chancellor, and he's due to present a budget in October that still has yet to find roughly £1.4 billion a year for the next three years to fund a plan stays within the government’s fiscal rules. The military is required to create a budget without diverting money from health or education programs. The training pause is a short-term cash-management measure - Longer-term funding questions remain unresolved.

An easy way to stockpile significant funding for British defense would be to stop all immigration and remigrate millions of third world residents who are feeding on government welfare.  But this is something the current leadership will never do.  Multiculturalism is their priority, for reasons that remain a mystery. 

On the bright side, less funding and less capability for Europe's armies means a lesser chance that they will be shipped off to Ukraine to start a world war.     

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/14/2026 - 02:45

Foreigners Responsible For 87% Of Thefts, 61% Of Sexual Violence On Paris Public Transport

Via Remix News,

Foreigners account for a massive share of thefts, sexual violence, and robberies on Paris public transport in 2025, according to new government data.

According to compilations from the SSMSI data files, foreigners accounted in 2025 for 87 percent of simple thefts on Île-de-France public transport, 60 percent of robberies, and 38 percent of physical assault.

In addition, foreigners account for 61 percent of sexual violence cases on Paris public transport and its surrounding regions.

National figures for foreigners committing crimes on public transport are lower but still high, approximately 76 percent of simple-theft suspects are foreigners and 71 percent of all theft suspects are foreigners.

Some groups are highly overrepresented among foreigners.

Maghrebi nationals, for instance, account for about 40 percent of theft suspects in transport nationwide, while making up roughly 2 percent of the national population, according to data analyst Marc Vanguard.

? Des chiffres CHOC sur l'insécurité viennent de sortir.

? Dans les transports en commun, les étrangers représentent 87% des mis en cause pour vols simples en Île-de-France, et 76% sur la France entière.

Tous les chiffres dans ce fil ??? pic.twitter.com/WK38I3FlKL

— Marc Vanguard (@marc_vanguard) September 10, 2026

INSEE's latest estimate puts foreigners at 9.1 percent of France's population in 2025, or around 6.3 million people. Their share is higher in Île-de-France, especially in the multicultural Seine-Saint-Denis department, but the crime for foreigners is still disproportionately high. In total, police and gendarmerie recorded 104,880 victims of theft, violence, or payment fraud in public transport nationwide in 2025, down 2 percent from 2024 and 22 percent from 2016 - the lowest level in a decade, including the pandemic years.

???? A Brazilian tourist was subjected to a vicious sexual assault on a French train on Wednesday morning, and only escaped being raped thanks to the intervention of a brave woman who filmed the assailant to scare him off.

Jhordana, 26, had been visiting her brother in Paris.... pic.twitter.com/pxOTu4fZXf

— Remix News & Views (@RMXnews) October 19, 2025

Theft without violence still accounts for 77 percent of those victims. Thefts and payment frauds fell but recorded physical and sexual violence rose slightly, jumping 3 percent. Drug-use and trafficking suspects in transport rose another 5 percent after the sharp Olympic-year jump in 2024.

It should be noted that among the "French" perpetrators, their potential migration background is not recorded. There are approximately 10 million people in France with a foreign background, including second-generation citizens with a migration background. As a result, a French citizen who is an ethnic Algerian, for instance, would be recorded as a French perpetrator in all crime statistics. France does not keep data on the race of crime suspects, as required by national law.

More broadly speaking, there are estimates that foreigners and French citizens with a migration background account for two out of three crimes in France.

??? This public awareness campaign in France shows a White man as the harasser on a bus.

French interior ministry stats from recent years have shown that 69% of violent crimes, including sexual assaults and harassment, on public transport in the greater Paris region were... pic.twitter.com/H3fRwEWtK2

— Remix News & Views (@RMXnews) July 3, 2025

Read more here...

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/14/2026 - 02:00

"Human Extinction By 2030"... Remember That Major AI Psy-Op We Talked About?

Authored by Kit Knightly via OffGuardian,

I've been documenting the increasingly hysterical coverage of 'rogue AI' for the last six weeks, predicting a major psy-op or false flag.

Well, kids it looks like the psy-op part is here. So far no false flag...but with the greatest level of hysteria since the early days of Covid circulating, maybe they won't need to DO anything.

Maybe insane claims about a phantom threat will be enough.

Oh yes, did you know Artificial Intelligence has a "10% chance of wiping out humanity before the end of the decade"?

That's the headline on every single mainstream paper, the trending topic on every social media platform, the talking point on every news channel.

Yes, from the producers of long-running hit show "CLIMATE CHANGE WILL KILL US ALL!" and the international sensation "COVID WILL KILL US ALL!" comes the latest experience in fear everyone is talking about.

And this latest wave is already being used to push new "regulation", which should alarm anyone.

It all started with a young man, apparently named Jacob Coxon, who is allegedly a former AI researcher for OpenAI and later Anthropic.

Yesterday he announced his resignation from the latter, citing ethical concerns about the danger of "unregulated" artificial intelligence.

And, as is usually the case when an obscure person resigns from his job for supposed ethical concerns, his resignation was the subject of an exclusive article in the Wall Street Journal,

Oh and a simultaneously published thread on Twitter/X - from what is allegedly Coxon's own account that had - so far as can be seen - never been used before.

AMAZINGLY, within hours Coxon's alarming claims had gone "viral".

Now some old cynics out there will be thinking at this stage "hmmm correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't this look suspiciously like a narrative roll-out"?

But I'm sure the terminally gullible will hasten to reassure you that this is the way real life definitely works.

It's just a coincidence that everyone across the entirety of the political punditry spectrum is engaged in amplifying one single message.

In another of those startling synchronicities which we don't need to think about too much, at exactly the same time that Coxon was hitting the mainstream headlines, Joe Rogan - king of the mainstream alternative media - had another AI researcher on his show, spouting his own dire warnings.

AI experts have been crawling out of the woodwork, all keen to endorse Coxon's position - or even call it an underestimate.

You must have seen Geoffrey "the godfather of AI" Hinton on the BBC, telling Victoria Derbyshire he agreed with Coxon's risk assessment:

"You just said that 10% doesn't seem an unreasonable estimate that AI could kill all humans" "Yes" "Wow... oh my God."@vicderbyshire speaks to Nobel Prize Winner and so-called 'Godfather of AI' Geoffrey Hinton about predictions by an Anthropic researcher that there's a more... pic.twitter.com/sGYQI57REF

— BBC Newsnight (@BBCNewsnight) September 9, 2026

A 10% chance of killing every single person on Earth in the next three and a half years.

No, really.

They're less clear how exactly that's going to happen - but that's not the important part. The important part is we need to DO something.

Everyone from Matt Walsh to Glenn Greenwald agrees on that.

And what do we need to DO?

Why, REGULATE of course. That's what Coxon said in one of his MANY media interviews in the last twenty-four hours (and as someone who has been aware of Coxon's existence since some time yesterday I can tell you I trust him absolutely):

The guy who helped train the models left Anthropic and said AI is more dangerous than a nuclear weapon. Jacob Coxon spent 3 years at OpenAI and Anthropic. He says the labs think this could kill everyone by the end of the decade and they are still racing each other. His answer...

— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) September 10, 2026

He floats an AI non-proliferation treaty "like we have for nuclear weapons" - as if it's a wildly coincidental brand new idea, and not a paraphrase of the same talking point dozens of people - including Bill Gates - have been suggesting for months.

But what would a global AI treaty actually look like? And what would it achieve? And who will be in control of implementing it?

Well, for a potential taste here's what US Congressman Bill Foster tweeted:

A "hardened" internet? Is that what we can expect?

No more "untraceable access" to AI facilities? Restrictions on "anonymous payments"? What exactly does that mean?

Perhaps "proof of humanity" or "proof of personhood" should be required to use the internet? Or maybe the internet should have "borders"?

Then there's the kill switches of course, both the US and UK are close to implementing those:

We need to pass the AI Kill Switch Act NOW. https://t.co/bZYEb8GWIR

— Rep. Ted Lieu (@RepTedLieu) September 10, 2026

Last week, coincidentally, a group of Lords from the UK's upper house was calling for "kill switches", not just for AI programs, but for data centres in general [emphasis added]:

A group of peers is calling for the British government to be able to deactivate powerful AI systems and switch off the country's data centres in the event of the tech posing a threat to national security

And who will have control of these kill switches and other control mechanisms? You? Or the usual suspects?

Of course if you've already allowed yourself to be manipulated into believing data centers are the Spawn of Satan, you'll probably think a kill switch is a great idea - and happily overlook that it's just putting yet more control into the hands of institutions that already brought you the 'covid' scam and 9/11.

If any such people are reading this - does it occur to you yet that THIS was always the end point of those panic memes you hoovered up so uncritically?

Be careful what you wish for.

In this looming world of "regulated" AI, governments could be empowered to shut down access to sites, networks or even the internet as a whole in the event of alleged "rogue AIs" becoming a "threat to national security".

And if YOU or your output or you interactions get labelled as potential AI, or you have your access restricted purely based on your location or IP address?

Well, good luck telling anyone as you scream inside your soundproof bubble.

This can go further - and we'd be fools to just assume it won't.

In the name of preventing the spread of "rogue AI" (or "rouge AI" according to half the hysterics on social media), the internet can have information bulkheads which can be used to quarantine sections, nations, networks or individual sites "infected" with digital these digital "invasive species".

You may have to prove your humanity with face scans or similar, and there may be strict limitations on what regions and/or databases you can reach, how much of your money you can spend without additional checks, etc.

Even the restricted internet of today might look like freedom compared to the' post-AI-Regulation' revised world wide web.

And today's security state might be something to look back on with nostalgia when the 'post-AI-Regulation' revised worldwide surveillance and supply line controls kick in.

But don't think about any of that - that nice guy Jacob you never heard of a week ago is warning you.

Listen to him on the mainstream media platform they gave him.

Demand your government saves you.

I'm sure this time it really will.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/13/2026 - 23:30

Trump Calls On Zelenskyy To Stop Attacks On Russian Diesel Facilities

By Tom Gantert of Epoch Times

President Donald Trump has called on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to stop targeting Russian diesel fuel as the attacks are causing a global shortage and diesel in the United States has hit a record high.

Trump was asked by a reporter on Sunday if he’d had conversations with Zelenskyy about the issue.

Zelenskyy “has to do one thing. He has to stop knocking out diesel fuel in Russia,” Trump told reporters on the sidelines of the Irish Open, adding that he had spoken to the Ukrainian president about it. “There are plenty of other targets. Don’t hit diesel fuel, because that’s hurting, that’s hurting the world.”

Ukraine has targeted Russia’s oil and gas industry for months with long-range attacks and Russia has responded with fuel rationing. In July, Russia banned diesel exports.

Diesel in the United States rose to $6.20 a gallon on average on Sunday, a new record, while regular gas is selling for $4.31 a gallon on average, according to AAA.

Zelenskyy has defended Ukraine’s tactics of striking Russian refineries.

The Ukrainian president posted video on June 28 of a Ukrainian strike on a Russian fuel facility.

“Last night, our long-range sanctions reached two oil refineries in Russia. The Slavyansk oil refinery in the Krasnodar region was hit – about 300 kilometers [186 miles] from the frontline,” Zelenskyy said in the post on X.

“We also reached a refinery in the Yaroslavl region, approximately 700 kilometers [435 miles] from our border. We continue our operations that weaken Russia’s ability to wage this war. Each of our long-range sanctions means fewer resources serving Russia’s war machine, and another step toward peace. We will continue to respond to Russian terror.”

Ukraine’s energy infrastructure has also been attacked by Russia, according to Zelenskyy.

“The Russians are burning warehouses with food and gas stations, pharmaceutical facilities and ordinary passenger trains, residential buildings and civilian businesses,” Zelenskyy said in a Sept. 12 post on X.

The International Energy Agency said in a September 2026 report that diesel and gasoil exports from Gulf countries averaged 390,000 barrels per day in August, just over one-quarter of their levels before the war with Iran began in February. Restricted traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has sharply reduced shipments from the region.

That report said that Ukraine’s attacks on Russia’s refining system have compounded the diesel supply issues.

The IEA said U.S. diesel prices surpassed $200 per barrel in early September, which was 94 percent above their pre-war level. Diesel and other similar fuels account for nearly 30 percent of global oil demand.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/13/2026 - 22:45

Federal Investigation Of Gavin Newsom Expands

According to a new report, the Justice Department has expanded its federal criminal investigation into California Gov. Gavin Newsom to include his international travel and personal expenses related to a nonprofit that funds his trips through private donations rather than taxpayer money.

Earlier this month, the US Attorney's Office served subpoenas asking for about six years' worth of communications relating to the California State Protocol Foundation, according to the San Francisco Standard. They sought records concerning the foundation's donors and fundraising, Newsom's overseas travel and events, and any money that had been used for his personal and living expenses.

The Protocol Foundation exists, on paper, to spare California taxpayers the cost of Newsom's travel expenses, but it has instead raised other ethical and legal issues.

Since 2019, he has steered more than $7.5 million in outside donations to the nonprofit, with about $5.1 million coming from funds left over from his 2019 and 2023 gubernatorial inaugurations. However, the remaining donor roll includes corporations and foundations that have business before the California state government, creating the appearance of a pay-to-play arrangement in which companies like CVS, Zoox, and a Blue Shield-linked foundation gain access to, or favor with, a governor whose regulatory decisions directly affect their bottom lines.

Newsom also sought money from the left-leaning dark-money outfit New Venture Fund and crypto billionaire Chris Larsen. Foundations tied to philanthropists Susie Tompkins Buell and Lisa Stone Pritzker round out the list, and both have separately bankrolled Newsom's political operation and his wife Jennifer Siebel Newsom's nonprofits. Federal investigators are looking at her taxes too, in a separate probe.

Investigators also sought records from several Newsom aides, including Becca Prowda, his chief protocol officer and the aide who manages his overseas trips. Prowda is married to San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie, a detail that adds another layer to California's small and increasingly tangled political class.

Just a few hours to go!

Newsom, naturally is playing the victim card, framing the subpoenas as retribution from a president he has spent years attacking. "Governor Newsom went after the king, and as he warned in June, the tyrant is now coming after everyone around him," Tara Gallegos, a spokesperson for his office, said in a statement. "This is what Donald Trump does to his enemies: investigate first, hunt for a crime that doesn't exist second."

The problem is that this nonprofit, which is supposedly meant to keep Newsom's travel off the public books, runs almost entirely on Newsom's own bench of former staffers. Steve Kawa chairs the shady foundation and previously served as Newsom's chief of staff during his San Francisco mayoral years. Newsom appointed him to the High-Speed Rail Authority board in May, and Kawa subsequently became its chairman. Jason Elliott, another longtime Newsom advisor, sits on the foundation's board and also landed an appointment to the Rail Authority. Jim DeBoo, a former Newsom chief of staff, serves as the foundation's secretary according to its latest IRS filings. Board members were also subpoenaed as part of the investigation.

Meanwhile, the foundation also covered the cost of Newsom's State of the State speech during the pandemic at an empty Dodger Stadium, and reportedly paid for the burner phones the governor sent to top tech CEOs the previous year. According to IRS records, by the end of 2024 the nonprofit had spent almost $600,000 more than it had received in the two previous years and had a net balance of just $7,790.

A spokesperson for the nonprofit defended the arrangement, saying it "has proudly supported both Republican and Democratic administrations in fulfilling their duties representing all of California through public events and international engagements."

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/13/2026 - 22:00

BRICS Steps Off The Dollar, With Iran Pressing Hardest

Authored by former CIA officer Larry Johnson

The 18th BRICS summit opened on Saturday with the bloc taking its most concrete step yet toward loosening the grip of the US dollar, adopting a 45-page New Delhi Declaration on the first day and endorsing a payments architecture built to route cross-border trade around the Western financial system. For most members the move was incremental. For Iran — under sweeping US sanctions, a naval blockade, and roughly six months into a war with the United States and Israel — it was closer to a lifeline.

The declaration and the payment rails

Leaders gathered at the Bharat Mandapam convention center adopted the New Delhi Declaration 2026 unanimously on the opening day, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi emerging from a closed session to report that no member had objected to the text. The economic centerpiece was a commitment to expand trade and investment settled in members’ own national currencies, and to link their domestic payment and messaging systems so that transactions can move without passing through the dollar-denominated SWIFT network. According to the declaration, the bloc’s payment task force had studied cross-border interoperability of those channels and examined using local currencies for trade settlement and investment.

The mechanism drawing the most attention was BRICS Pay, a decentralized payment-messaging framework that stitches together India’s UPI, China’s CIPS, and Russia’s SPFS into a shared interoperability layer — a way to clear payments among members outside SWIFT. The declaration also referenced a pilot for a gold-backed “Unit” token.

During 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi on September 13, 2026, Indian Press Information Bureau via AFP

Just as telling was what the bloc again declined to do. There was no endorsement of a single common BRICS currency; India in particular has resisted that leap, favoring interoperable national-currency settlement over the political and monetary complexity of a shared unit. The result, as several observers characterized it, is incremental financial de-dollarization rather than a monetary union — plumbing, not a new reserve currency.

Washington's answer

The response from Washington was immediate. President Trump threatened tariffs of up to 100% on the bloc, extending a pressure campaign he has waged all year against what he calls BRICS’s “anti-American” trajectory. The threat carries genuine weight for export-dependent members that rely on the US market — but its deterrent power erodes with each transaction the bloc succeeds in routing through non-dollar channels.

That is the paradox Washington now faces: the tariffs are meant to punish de-dollarization, yet de-dollarization is precisely what blunts the tariffs.

Iran at the front of the line

No member arrived with more at stake than Iran. President Masoud Pezeshkian pressed the case for national-currency trade, telling reporters that expanding the use of members’ own currencies in intra-bloc commerce was among the most important steps the group could take. Tehran has pushed throughout the summit for mechanisms to insulate members from Western financial pressure — a priority sharpened by the sanctions and blockade it now faces.

Crucially, the summit institutionalizes at the multilateral level what Iran has already been building bilaterally. On January 29, 2026, Tehran signed a trilateral strategic pact with China and Russia, an agreement whose economic core is the construction of alternative financial mechanisms that sidestep SWIFT and reduce exposure to the dollar-centered system. That pact rests on foundations already in place: an Iran–Russia monetary agreement, operational since early 2025, that settles trade directly in rials and rubles and links Russia’s Mir card network to Iran’s Shetab system; a 25-year Iran–China cooperation framework; and the plain fact that China now buys the overwhelming majority of Iran’s oil, much of it settled in yuan.

The implication cuts against the common assumption that Iran is scrambling for a dollar workaround. It already has one. For Tehran, BRICS Pay is not a novel escape hatch but a larger, sanctions-resistant network onto which it can graft trade it is already conducting outside Western channels — and a multilateral blessing for the parallel financial architecture it has spent two years assembling with Moscow and Beijing.

Where BRICS drew the line - and where it didn’t

The declaration’s language on the region’s wars was the most fought-over in the text, and the outcome was uneven: sharp in places, deliberately vague in others. Reaching consensus reportedly required negotiations that ran until 4 a.m., driven mainly by a rift between Iran and the United Arab Emirates.

On the US–Israeli war against Iran, the bloc expressed deep concern and called for maximum restraint, dialogue and diplomacy — but it named neither the United States nor Israel, and condemned no country outright. That hedge was the price of unanimity. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi had pressed BRICS to condemn what he called unlawful US and Israeli aggression; the UAE pushed back hard, accusing Tehran of using the summit to justify its own missile and drone barrages against Gulf states. India, in the chair, acknowledged “differing views among some members” and steered the text toward common ground. The language was firmer in tone than a bland appeal for peace, but well short of the unequivocal condemnation of the strikes on Iran that Tehran had won from the Rio summit a year earlier — a notable step back on that specific question, not forward.

Yet Iran signed the text anyway, and that was the summit’s quieter diplomatic story. Tehran — which has spent the war firing missiles and drones at the UAE, most recently at the Al Minhad Air Base in late August — put its name to language its Gulf adversary could also accept, while Pezeshkian met the Abu Dhabi crown prince on the sidelines in the two sides’ highest-level contact since the fighting began. Iran’s willingness to sit inside the consensus rather than force a rupture signaled that it read the declaration’s direction — deep concern over the escalation and a call to protect civilians — as acceptable enough, even without the naming it had sought. But the same words served Abu Dhabi: the call to respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of states pointed as much at Iran’s strikes on the Gulf as at the US–Israeli assault on Iran. The consensus held because the text could be read both ways.

‘Trumpism’ spawns rare unity at Brics summit https://t.co/c7aGUWgJaT

— Financial Times (@FT) September 13, 2026

On Lebanon, the bloc was sharper, and it named Israel directly. The leaders condemned the continued violations of Lebanon’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, called on Israel to withdraw its occupying forces from all Lebanese territory, demanded full implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1701, and condemned all attacks against the UNIFIL peacekeeping force — extending condolences for peacekeepers killed in the south, among them four Indonesians, and demanding accountability. It amounts to some of the most direct criticism of Israel in any BRICS declaration to date, even though Israel is named only three times in the entire 45-page document. The declaration separately took note of the International Court of Justice proceedings brought by South Africa against Israel over Gaza, and rejected any unilateral moves to alter the status of occupied Jerusalem.

For India, the shift is best measured against where Modi stood barely six months earlier. On February 25–26 he made a landmark visit to Israel — the first Indian premier to address the Knesset, honored with its Speaker’s Medal as the first foreign leader to receive it, presiding over the elevation of ties to a “special strategic partnership” and a defense co-production track. When the US and Israel opened their war on Iran forty-eight hours after he left, killing Iran’s supreme leader in an airstrike, New Delhi stayed conspicuously silent — no condemnation of the strikes, no condolence for the killing — and let its own Iran links, from Chabahar port funding to bilateral trade, wither under US pressure. That silence held for months.

It broke at Bishkek. On September 1, at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit, Modi signed a declaration condemning the military strikes on Iranian territory as violations of international law, offering condolences for the slain Iranian leader, and backing Iran’s sovereignty and its rights under the Non-Proliferation Treaty — the first time India had endorsed language condemning the US–Israeli assault. From the leader who had embraced Netanyahu in February, that was a genuine reversal, not a calibration. The New Delhi Declaration eleven days later was actually softer on Iran than Bishkek, and the reason is instructive: the SCO has no Gulf Arab members, but BRICS has the UAE, which pushed back hard and forced the unnamed “deep concern” formula — even as the bloc kept firm, named criticism of Israel over Lebanon. India’s arc across 2026, from the Knesset medal to the Bishkek condemnation, is the real measure of the move; the hedged Iran passage in the New Delhi text reflects the BRICS bargaining table, not a retreat from it.

What is real, and what is symbolic

Sober assessment is warranted. BRICS Pay is a messaging and interoperability layer, not a replacement for the dollar as the world’s reserve asset, and nothing in the New Delhi Declaration displaces the dollar’s dominance in global reserves, commodity pricing, or third-country trade. The bloc’s unity also has limits the declaration papered over rather than resolved: the consensus on the Middle East held only because the text avoided naming the aggressors Iran wanted named, and the Iran–UAE rift that nearly sank the negotiations has not gone away. Grand pronouncements about a post-dollar order have a long history of outrunning the mechanics.

But the asymmetry inside the bloc is the point. What reads as incremental to India or Brazil — countries with full access to Western markets and finance — is closer to existential for Iran and Russia. For a state locked out of SWIFT and dollar clearing, a payment rail that functions precisely because it does not touch the dollar is worth far more than any debate over reserve-currency theory. The New Delhi Declaration will not dethrone the dollar. What it does is hand the bloc’s sanctioned members a collective, expanding, and now formally endorsed alternative to the system Washington has used to isolate them.

Respect for BRICS is GROWING — Putin

'Many in the world are attracted by our basic values and ideals'

'BRICS has always stood for including ALL countries without exception' pic.twitter.com/61To8Bn5ZV

— RT (@RT_com) September 13, 2026 The backdrop

All of this unfolds under the shadow of simultaneous wars — in Ukraine and across the Middle East — and an Iran conflict, triggered by US–Israeli strikes in late February, that has pushed oil above $100 a barrel, disrupted the Strait of Hormuz, and now bleeds into the escalation between Saudi Arabia and Yemen’s Houthis. It is an environment that gives the de-dollarization agenda its urgency: the more Washington wields financial and military pressure, the greater the incentive for the targeted states to build channels beyond its reach. Day two of the summit turns to supply chains, energy security, and the bloc’s Economic Strategy 2030.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/13/2026 - 21:30

Trump's Grid Battery Ban Leaves Developers Guessing

Authored by Haley Zaremba via OilPrice.com,

The United States is trying to build up its energy storage capacities at a rapid scale. At the same time, it is trying to wean itself off of Chinese battery tech. In many ways, these two goals are in direct opposition to each other.

China dominates global supply chains for clean energy tech in general, but especially when it comes to lithium-ion batteries, which power everything from your phone to your car. Approximately 80 percent of all battery cells in the world are made in China according to figures from the International Energy Agency. What is more, Beijing controls the production of EV battery cathode active material (85 percent of global production) and anode active material (more than 90 percent), and refines the vast majority of the critical minerals involved in their manufacturing.

The Trump administration is eager to challenge Beijing's outsized presence in the global energy sector as part of its stated goal to establish "energy dominance." Toward the end of August, the Trump administration declared a national emergency that effectively bars the use of Chinese-made batteries in grid-scale energy storage systems, pointing to cybersecurity concerns as the rationale. In the same month, the federal government awarded $500 million in funding to seven companies working on battery minerals, manufacturing, and recycling with the express purpose of building up the domestic sector in order to reduce reliance on Chinese supply chains.

However, these measures are falling short. Way short. "It takes decades and tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars" to build the kind of supply chains that would be capable of competing with China according to Tu Le, founder and managing director of Sino Auto Insights. "We don't have decades. We have five, six, seven years to try to become competitive," he was recently quoted by Quartz.

"We have a ton of innovation coming out of the United States," Le went on to say. "These small fledgling companies are super innovative, but getting and building prototypes of what they're trying to sell is one thing. Being able to mass produce them at a high quality level, repeatably in the millions of units is another thing entirely."

Moreover, critics have pointed out that the August 26 executive order is vaguely worded, calling for the ban of "any foreign-produced bulk-power system electric equipment", and may only serve to slow down the growth of the domestic energy storage sector. Analysis from BloombergNEF notes that, as a result of the state of emergency and the uncertainty around its terms, battery projects "face near-term delays or cancellations as developers await guidance, reconsider existing contracts, or shift suppliers."

The effort may also be too little, too late to make up for the damage that the Trump administration has already done to the domestic battery manufacturing sector by rolling back critical Biden-era supportive legislation. Repealing laws supporting domestic manufacturers and the EV sector as a whole (which is far and away the largest market for these batteries on a global scale) has cost U.S. battery manufacturers time and money when both are in short supply.

And then there is another critical dilemma: is the real problem that the Trump administration's efforts are insufficient, or that they are misguided entirely? "All this tension raises a broader question for me," Casey Crownhart wrote in an article for the MIT Technology Review this week: "How much should countries take advantage of cheap, available tech, versus cutting off major sources to force development of their own factories even if that comes at a higher cost?"

Of course, allowing for the near-total monopolization of global critical infrastructure in the hands of just one country, and an authoritarian one at that, is also a bad option. It's a sticky situation that no executive order can solve overnight.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/13/2026 - 20:30

Arab Spring 2.0? Fuel Riots Erupt In Syria As Instability Spreads Across Mideast

New footage posted on X shows what appear to be protests, with Israeli news organizations saying the anger is erupting because of skyrocketing fuel costs, reminiscent of the Arab Spring food riots 15 years ago.

i24NEWS reports that demonstrations have popped up in parts of Raqqa, Hasakah and Deir ez-Zor provinces, with protesters blocking roads and stopping oil tankers as rising energy costs intensify affordability pressures.

Videos on X, including one from Middle East Observer, show the chaos unfolding.

Protests in Syria following the rise in fuel prices pic.twitter.com/PjOsnIw95s

— Middle East Observer (@ME_Observer_) September 13, 2026

Other footage:

🇸🇾 Protests Escalate in Syria

Large crowds have taken to the streets in Maarrat al-Numan, with protesters blocking the Aleppo–Damascus highway as demonstrations over the Al-Sharaa government’s latest fuel-price increases grow increasingly confrontational.

Diesel prices jumped… https://t.co/9lkTD7Yfh3 pic.twitter.com/5YzAhxCVBx

— DD Geopolitics (@DD_Geopolitics) September 13, 2026

🇸🇾 Fuel protests spread to Hama

Protests have erupted again in Hama, where demonstrators are blocking roads around Orontes Square (Sahat al-Asi) and burning tires in response to soaring fuel prices. pic.twitter.com/7ouwK1h91J

— DD Geopolitics (@DD_Geopolitics) September 13, 2026

The unrest underscores just how quickly higher fuel costs can ignite public anger and fuel social unrest.

i24NEWS added more color to the situation:

According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, security forces affiliated with the Ministry of Interior fired live ammunition while attempting to disperse the demonstrators. Tensions remained high as security personnel sought to reopen the roads and remove protesters from the area.

A separate report from Times of Israel states:

Protests have broken out in different parts of Syria over increased fuel prices, with demonstrators blocking a main highway in Idlib province for several hours.

The government announced what it said were temporary price increases for gasoline, diesel and other petroleum products earlier today, citing rising global fuel prices as a result of the US-Iran war. The price of gasoline increased by about 30% and diesel by 40%.

Syrian Energy Minister Mohammed al-Bashir said yesterday that Syria is producing about 102,000 barrels of oil per day, while it needs about 325,000 barrels per day for domestic consumption and is relying on imports to make up the difference.

Renewed instability in Syria could widen the fallout from the US-Iran conflict, creating new openings for armed groups, straining regional security, and placing pressure on President Ahmad al-Sharaa's US-aligned government.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/13/2026 - 20:00

Truckers Hauled Hundreds Of Kilos Of Cartel Cocaine On US-Canada Freight Lanes

By Phil Brink of FreightWaves.com,

Federal prosecutors charged a California restaurant operator after agents seized more than 40 pounds of methamphetamine. Investigators found the drugs inside his residence and Hyundai Sonata, according to a federal affidavit. Searches also uncovered three firearms, a digital scale and $11,800 in cash. The operation grew from a wider organized crime investigation involving long-haul truck drivers.

A federal grand jury indicted Kawal Preet Singh, 50, on Sept. 3. The indictment contains five counts, including two methamphetamine distribution charges from May 12 and July 13. Two additional counts accuse Singh of possession with intent to distribute on Aug. 18. Each drug count involves at least 500 grams of methamphetamine. A fifth count alleges he possessed an Accu-Tek handgun to further a trafficking offense. Singh operated a Round Table Pizza restaurant in Dinuba, California. Authorities claim he distributed wholesale quantities from that business while armed with illegal firearms.

Trucking network moved cocaine across borders

The FBI’s Fresno Resident Agency opened its organized crime investigation during February 2025. Intelligence connected suspected participants with drug trafficking, extortion, human trafficking and cargo theft. Agents received information about a Fresno-area narcotics trafficker called “Camy” during May 2026. An informant described Camy as a Sikh Indian man involved in long-haul trucking.

The source claimed Camy worked with other Sikh Indian drivers who transported narcotics. Investigators later developed evidence concerning hundreds of kilograms of cocaine entering from Mexico. The affidavit attributes those shipments to an unspecified Mexican cartel. Some loads reportedly continued through the United States before reaching Canada.

Court records identify Singh as a subject within that broader inquiry. However, the affidavit never explicitly identifies Singh as Camy. It also does not accuse him of personally hauling cocaine aboard commercial vehicles. Authorities disclosed no carriers, drivers, USDOT numbers, routes or border crossings.

Searches uncover methamphetamine and firearms

A federal magistrate authorized searches involving Singh, his home and restaurant on Aug. 13. Agents watched him drive from his residence to the Dinuba business five days later. They approached after he unlocked the entrance and entered alone. Investigators then executed warrants at both locations around 11 a.m.

Agents seized Singh’s iPhone before interviewing him inside the restaurant. The affidavit states he acknowledged storing methamphetamine for a friend “because of friendship.” He also claimed he had not sold that drug for approximately two months. Investigators later found a photograph showing a white crystalline substance on his device.

The residence contained approximately 13.8 kilograms of suspected methamphetamine, court records show. His Hyundai held another 4.9 kilograms that produced a positive presumptive result. Combined weight reached approximately 18.7 kilograms, or more than 41 pounds. Agents found similarly packaged substances across the searched locations.

Investigators recovered two concealed handguns from the restaurant, including one unserialized weapon. The residence contained an Accu-Tek semiautomatic pistol, digital scale and $11,800 in assorted denominations. Authorities found cash plus that firearm hidden inside clothing within a closet near three methamphetamine bags. An HSI agent called those circumstances consistent with bulk narcotics distribution. Prosecutors also seek forfeiture of proceeds, facilitating property, firearms and ammunition following any conviction.

Major questions remain unanswered

The government has not identified Camy or explained Singh’s possible connection with that person. Officials also withheld the suspected cartel’s name, participating carrier details and shipment routes. Court filings do not disclose whether agents searched or seized any commercial trucks. Records provide no identified cargo theft victims, trafficking survivors or related charges.

Singh faces at least 10 years and potentially life imprisonment following any drug conviction. The firearm count carries another consecutive term between five years and life. A judge released him under home detention, location monitoring and other conditions on Aug. 24. Federal law presumes Singh innocent unless prosecutors prove every charge beyond a reasonable doubt. Following a FreightWaves inquiry, the U.S. Attorney’s Office provided the complaint and indictment. Those records did not answer questions about Camy, participating carriers or Singh’s connection to the trucking network. Singh’s attorney had not responded before publication. This story will be updated if additional responses arrive.

Why it matters

Criminal organizations can exploit legitimate trucking activity to move drugs, stolen cargo and trafficking victims across borders. Freight professionals need accurate information about how authorities identify networks operating within commercial transportation.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/13/2026 - 19:30

Bill Maher Delivers A Brutal 9/11 Reality Check To The Left

Bill Maher used the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks to say something that once required no courage at all: terrorists are terrorists. That the observation now counts as provocative says something about how far we've come since 2001.

On Real Time with Bill Maher, in a segment titled "Clash of Civilizations," Maher walked through what has happened in the 25 years since 9/11.

"Since it's the 25th anniversary of 9/11, and since, for 25 years, we've been kept relatively safe from anything close to another 9/11, how about a hand for the Americans who made that happen? Because it didn't just happen; there was a war on terror, and we won," he said. "And yet so much has changed since 9/11; for example, back then we were against the terrorists."

The audience laughed, but he was being serious.

Around the 20th anniversary, for example, four American journalism associations issued guidance insisting that "terrorism should only be used in quotes because it's emotionally and politically loaded." Canadian state broadcasters instructed staff, "Do not refer to the September 11th attacks as terrorist attacks." The BBC told its reporters that using the word "terrorist" can be a "barrier rather than an aid to understanding."

The pattern shows that the media establishment many years ago concluded moral clarity amounted to a kind of bigotry and that to name an ideology responsible for mass murder was the same as harboring hatred towards all those who happen to share that ideology.

Maher made that distinction himself by dividing radical Islamism from Islam in general and also separating both of them from the issue that liberals consistently avoid, which is why so many of them came to sympathize with the side that attacked the West rather than with the side that was attacked.

Maher revisited his own history on this point, playing a clip of himself from shortly after the attacks on his ABC show Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher in which he argued that political correctness "is something we can no longer afford" because "feelings are going to get hurt so that actual people won't."

Maher lamented that the idea of "ditching political correctness and actually being honest" never "even got off the ground."

He then pointed out that after 9/11, there was a big debate over whether it was a "clash of civilizations." According to Maher, "it was, and it still is." But that clash isn't between Muslims and Christians, but rather radical Islamism and Western liberalism.

Maher then referred to a poll that showed that one in five young Americans now holds a positive view of Osama bin Laden (which would have been unthinkable 25 years ago) and compared it to how Luigi Mangione came to be seen as a folk hero; he assassinated Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. In both cases, a killer becomes a symbol of grievance, and the actual victims become a footnote to a woke narrative about systemic injustice.

"You hear it in a lot of places now that the worst thing about 9/11 was innocent Muslims came under suspicion," Maher continued. "Yeah, where that did happen, it's wrong, but the worst thing about 9/11 was 3,000 people got roasted at the office. But the prevailing view of so many young people is that 'Well, come on, we're the worst country ever, so if someone attacks us, they can't be all bad.' That certainly wasn't the attitude 25 years ago. In fact, I know a guy whose show got canceled just for saying that terrorists weren't cowards, and that guy was right; they weren't cowards. But I'll tell you who is: Democratic Party politicians. And I'll tell you why, because nowhere has this moral confusion become more obvious than in a place called Gaza."

Maher argued that activists have recast the conflict as genocide at the hands of Israel to serve broader attacks on capitalism, borders, and Western institutions. "And the fact that so many prominent Democrats go along with it is, to me, the party's worst moment since they undid Reconstruction after the Civil War."

The prevailing view of so much of the young left in America is that we’re the worst country ever, so if someone attacks us, they can’t be all bad. pic.twitter.com/u01HsCRnv3

— Bill Maher (@billmaher) September 12, 2026

Maher's monologue traces a straight line from post-9/11 unity against Islamic terrorism to a political culture on the left that now treats the side committing violence as more sympathetic than the side that was attacked. Younger generations have learned to locate the villain in American power rather than in the perpetrators of an attack. Maher describes the slow erosion of the basic instinct to know who the villain is when violence occurs. That instinct used to be reflexive, requiring no debate and no hedging. Its disappearance from mainstream left-wing politics isn't a matter of nuance or sophistication - it's actually a failure of judgment in the name of tolerance.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/13/2026 - 19:15

Shareholder Ownership Gives Way To Corporate Control

Authored by Iain O'Brien via RealClearMarkets,

Today's business ownership landscape is increasingly complicated by financial, voting, contractual and capital arrangements. A direct relationship between ownership and control can no longer be assumed, particularly for strategically important companies.

Sika, a Swiss chemicals company, entered a four-year corporate battle in 2014, when building-material firm Saint-Gobain announced it would buy a controlling majority. Although the Burkard family owned 16% of shares, a dual-class structure granted them over 52% of voting rights. Sika showed why economic ownership does not necessarily equal voting power.

A relevant example took place between American firms Endeavor Group Holdings, now WME Group, and Silver Lake, in 2024. Endeavor agreed to be taken private by Silver Lake, which already controlled over 70% of Endeavor's voting rights. Silver Lake could therefore approve the merger, effectively controlling the company's future before owning it. Mubadala, Goldman Sachs and other investors also took part, making a true "owner" difficult to define.

The stakes change when a company is deeply involved in a country's industrial capacity. Energy infrastructure, semiconductors, and critical-mineral producers introduce geopolitical considerations.

Korea Zinc, among the world's most prominent refined zinc producers, has seen a dispute with Young Poong putting the history of the two firms and their controlling families in the spotlight. Korea Zinc emerged from a partnership between the Choi and Jang families, who control Korea Zinc and Young Poong respectively. The Choi family has maintained management control despite Young Poong being the largest shareholder, with a stake of 33-37%. In 2024, Young Poong partnered with South Korean MBK Partners, launching a tender offer resulting in joint ownership of over 46% of voting shares.

The transaction created several layers of control. Young Poong agreed to a cooperation agreement to jointly exercise voting rights with MBK Partners. While Young Poong continued to hold shares, MBK acquired a stronger role in deciding how they would be used. On a newly formed board at Korea Zinc, directors nominated by MBK would later outnumber those selected by Young Poong, essentially determining the board's composition. A call option on Young Poong's Korea Zinc shares was also granted to MBK Partners. The option has drawn controversy because Young Poong is alleged to have granted MBK highly favorable terms at below market costs, exposing it to significant financial losses.

MBK's business ties highlight how assigning a single national identity to a modern company may prove difficult. China's sovereign wealth fund represents roughly 5% of one of MBK Partners' investment funds. Such ties raised concerns among Korea Zinc management that their firm would eventually come under Chinese control. Concerns about Chinese influence have also been highlighted in relation to Project Crucible, a joint Korea Zinc led venture, which Young Poong and MBK Partners initially opposed because it placed too much control in the hands of the US government, posing a national security risk to Korea. More recently, however, Young Poong and MBK Partners have changed their approach, taking a more supportive public position towards the project. This included hosting a promotional reception in Tennessee during which they sought to give the impression of ownership over the project.

Separate questions have also been raised about Young Poong's environmental, financial and managerial issues related to a smelting plant project. These concerns gained renewed attention following Korean police's decision to reopen an investigation into alleged environmental law violations by Young Poong Counsel Hyung-jin Jang.

The cases above illustrate why regulators and investors need to look beyond the registry of shareholders. In Sika's case, a minority stake could carry majority voting power, while Endeavor controlled votes before owning a majority of economic interests. In Korea Zinc's case, the battle involves shareholder alliances, control rights and internationally sourced capital with vast potential geopolitical implications.

Traditional concepts of ownership no longer capture where control in companies resides. This matters for governments screening transactions with economic sovereignty, national security and competitiveness in mind. The era of the shareholder may be giving way to an era where control matters more than ownership.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/13/2026 - 18:30