Massive Gas Pipeline Blast Rocks Damascus Suburbs – 2nd Suspected Sabotage This Week A huge explosion has rocked a Damascus suburb area on Wednesday evening (local), in what could be the second act of suspected sabotage against natural gas infrastructure in just a few days. “A gas pipeline exploded Wednesday near the Tishreen power station in Syria’s Eastern Ghouta area in the Damascus countryside,” Alikhbariah TV reported. […]

Newsom Signs Laws Banning Shock Gloves And Taxing Immigration Detention Centers Authored by Chase Smith via The Epoch Times, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed 21 bills on Sept. 29 aimed at limiting federal immigration enforcement in the state, including a ban on officers using shock gloves and a new 25 percent tax on private detention centers. California Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks in Los Angeles on Sep. 25, 2024. John […]

Hegseth Orders Cyber Command, Intel Agencies To Counter Foreign Threats To Midterms Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has directed U.S. Cyber Command and the Pentagon’s combat support agencies to focus intelligence and cyber tools on foreign efforts to interfere in the 2026 midterm elections. The Department of War (DoW) memo circulated Monday and dated Sept. 22 was addressed to the Cyber Command chief and the directors of the […]

Micron Flat After Strong Revenue Guidance Offsets Slight Margin Miss The highly anticipated Micron earnings (since memory is the one place in the sector in the market where all those massive new bond sales are funding) are finally out and they painted a solid, if slightly mixed, picture compared to buyside bogeys. As we said in our preview, what would matter today is not what the company did in Q4, but how it guided to Fiscal Q1 […]

Who Keeps The Money When AI Rewrites Bank Code? Authored by Patrick Feeley via Substack, The code most American banks run on was designed in 1959, the year Alaska and Hawaii became states. A committee of government and industry people wrote COBOL so that business programs could be read by people who were not mathematicians, and a good part of it was modeled on FLOW-MATIC, an earlier language from Grace Hopper, a Navy officer. I […]

Sex, Spies, And The FOMC: How Beijing Turned A Senior Fed Economist Into Its “Inside Man” For years, conspiracy theorists have insisted that the Federal Reserve is run for the benefit of a foreign power. It turns out they were – at worst – only half wrong: it’s just that the foreign power in question wasn’t getting the FOMC minutes through the front door, but via a lovesick Fed economist, an online dating site, a set of silk […]

Trump Responds To Watchdog Report: Force Powell Off The Fed Board – Or Sue Him Update (1554ET): So much for “finality.” Minutes after the Fed’s own inspector general cleared the Eccles renovation of criminality – and of administrative misconduct – President Trump made clear he is not treating the Horowitz report as the last word. Powell, Trump said on Truth Social, should be “forced to resign” from the Board of Governors. If he […]

Police “Islamophobia” Training Equates Farage’s Words With Hate Crime Authored by Steve Watson via MODERNITY, North Yorkshire officers sat through a publicly funded “Islamophobia” talk that treated Reform UK leader Nigel Farage’s remarks on British values as if they belonged in the same conversation as a racially aggravated attack. The trainer then asked the room which man had done “the most harm” – the politician on national […]

Stabbed Indian Pilot Foils Crash Plot By Crazed Omani Co-Pilot As Jet Plunged 18,000 Feet Summary:  Heroic Captain Fights Off Omani Co-Pilot In Suspected Hijacking Of Israel-Bound Jet CNN Sources Say Co-Pilot Tried To Hijack Plane  Omani Co-Pilot Stabbed Pilot  Midair Horror: FlyDubai Pilot Reportedly Stabbed, Israeli News Says Incident Treated As “Full-Fledged Terror Attack” New Details  New details have emerged about […]

Top Shia Cleric Says US Should Compensate Iraqis As Last American Forces Leave Via Middle East Eye Influential Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has said the US should compensate Iraqis for the damage inflicted on the country, as the last American troops pull out of Iraq. In a statement on Wednesday, which is the deadline for American forces to end their 12-year presence (since the start of ‘Inherent Resolve’ against ISIS) in the […]

Mother Arrested After Toddler Pulls Loaded Gun From Backpack At Michigan Daycare A toddler pulled a loaded handgun from a backpack inside a Michigan daycare Monday, leaving a teacher to step in before anyone was hurt. The child’s mother has been arrested, while the father, reportedly a Detroit police officer, is the subject of a separate departmental review. Local reporting describes an incident captured on surveillance video and a […]

Navy Awards Boeing $20 Billion Contract For Next-Generation Fighter Authored by Tom Gantert via The Epoch Times, Boeing has secured a contract worth more than $20 billion to develop the U.S. Navy’s next-generation carrier-based fighter. The Boeing Co. logo is displayed outside of company offices near Los Angeles International Airport in El Segundo, Calif., on Jan. 18, 2024. Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty ImagesThe Navy contract […]

“Seek Higher Ground Now”: A Near Dam Failure In New Mexico Was Just The Warm-Up For A Record El Niño A flood-control dam in southern New Mexico came close enough to failing Tuesday that the National Weather Service ordered people downstream to get out of the way. Forecasters issued a flash flood emergency for McLeod Dam near Garfield in Doña Ana County, after dam operators and county officials reported that failure was […]

Trump’s $200BN Korean “Investment” Is A Gas Plant With No Customers, Eight Reactors With No Sites, And A Pipeline Seoul Calls A “Future Discussion” A week ago, we wrote that South Korea had finally found a home for the first slice of the $350 billion it promised Trump: a $22.3 billion, 6.3GW gas plant in Encinal, Texas, with no customers, no PPA, and turbines that may not show up this decade. That left, as we put it then, “$328 […]

Congress Keeps The Trading Desk Open: Senate Dems Sink Lawmaker Trading Ban 53-47 A midterm messaging bill that was never going to become law just confirmed the only bipartisan consensus that matters: members of Congress still get to play the tape. Senate Democrats just blocked cloture on a bill that would have stopped lawmakers from buying new publicly traded stocks. The vote was 53-47. Sixty were required. But guess what […]

It’s Time For The Right To Return Fire Authored by Tom Klingenstein via TomKlingenstein.com, In this essay, Thomas Klingenstein argues that the Right has made a category error: treating lawfare as a series of discrete legal disputes when it is better understood as a system of political power. His answer isn’t simply better defense, but counterpressure – a new public-interest law firm, led by Jeff Clark, meant to defend […]

Gulf Exports Roar Back To Pre-War Levels, Goldman Says; Blas Sees “Trump Has Advantage” On Hormuz The US conflict with Iran has been ongoing for seven months and will soon enter its eighth month. Diplomatic signals this week, along with another request for a US SPR dump and reports of Gulf oil export flows improving toward prewar levels, have sent Brent crude futures down to around $103 a barrel. Goldman analysts Yulia Zhestkova […]

“BigMacGPT”: McDonald’s Uses AI To Figure Out How Much Your Next Burger Will Cost Depending On Location One week after McDonald’s held its investor day at its Chicago headquarters, Wall Street has soured on a near-term turnaround effort, with Deutsche Bank analysts saying it has effectively been delayed.  Now, a new report says the quick-service restaurant chain behind the Big Mac is rapidly expanding its use of artificial […]

Signs Of Fresh Houthi Attack On Saudi Aramco Facilities Update(1159ET): While very unconfirmed at this early stage, the Houthis have reportedly attacked the Abqaiq oil city in eastern Saudi Arabia this afternoon (local), reports IRNA citing anonymous news sources. Abqaiq is at the heart of of Saudi crude processing, and it has been struck previously in the context of the Saudi-Yemen conflict. However, there have been conflicting […]

Bank of Korea To Buy 1 Ton Of Gold In First Purchase Since 2013 Add South Korea to the list of countries taking tentative steps to hedge their exposure to the US dollar, and fiat in general. The Bank of Korea will buy approximately one ton of domestically produced gold in December, worth 200 billion won, according to the office of Rep. Chung Tae-ho of the Democratic Party of Korea, a member of the National Assembly’s Strategy and […]

Oil Hits Session High After DOE Shows Lowest Midwest Gasoline Stocks On Record Oil prices rose to session highs after today’s DOE inventory data refuted the latest cheerful API prints from Tuesday afternoon. Instead of the API-reported builds in distillates and gasoline, the DOE said that in the last week both products drew, with a modest increase in Cushing inventories, while crude inventories rose by 922K API     Crude +1.0mm […]

Feds Investigate Kinzinger Over Alleged Kalshi Bets On Own Pardon Former Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger is reportedly under investigation by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission over prediction-market trades tied to an unusually personal event: whether President Joe Biden would pardon him. According to Politico, citing three people familiar with the matter, the CFTC has been examining trades made by a Kalshi account linked to […]

Migrant Caravan Headed For US Border Has ‘Zero Chance’ Of Entering, DHS Chief Warns Another migrant caravan from Honduras has “zero chance” of entering the United States, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin.  U.S. Army combat engineers place razor wire on the U.S.-Mexico border wall to reinforce security in El Paso, Texas, as seen from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, on July 24, 2025. Jose Luis Gonzalez/Reuters”The caravan has zero chance of […]

FTC Launches ‘Rogue AI’ Probe Of OpenAI, Anthropic – And Takes Aim At Their Regulatory Moat The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is launching a sweeping, aggressive probe into top frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic. However, the investigation goes far beyond simply asking questions about autonomous software run amok, and its chairman has made clear he won’t let Silicon Valley use recent AI failures to build an insurmountable […]

Hung, Drawn, And Third-Quartered: Roll On Q4 By Michael Every of Rabobank Today ends Q3, which has been a shocker even in a year of major market shocks. Wars dragged on and spread. Russia-Ukraine saw energy sites hit and hybrid attacks against Europe increase. Saudi Arabia, not Iran, is now under missile fire and both oil exporters are partly blockaded. France gave the first sign of getting dragged into the war, which conflated […]