Via The Cradle

Syria has begun trucking imported gasoline from its Baniyas Refinery into Iraq, adding a return leg to a route Baghdad has used to export its fuel since the US war on Iran led to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a senior Syrian oil official told Reuters on 25 September.

According to Tareq Shallash, who heads the Refining Directorate at the state-owned Syrian Petroleum Company (SPC), the first consignment – roughly 32,800 metric tons of gasoline – arrived aboard the Marshall Islands-flagged tanker Avanti and was pumped into storage at Baniyas before being loaded onto trucks this week.

Shallash said 77 tanker trucks have so far set off for the Iraqi border, with loading still in progress and more cargoes on the way.

He stressed that the fuel neither originates in Syria nor comes out of stocks earmarked for domestic consumption.

The shipments move under a transit contract between SPC and Qatar’s UCC Holding, which Shallash identified as both the supplier and the firm managing transport.

Iraq’s Oil Ministry confirmed the arrangement, with spokesperson Saleem al-Rikabi telling Reuters that “A contract was signed between SOMO and the Qatari company to supply Iraq with improved gasoline through the port of Baniyas by road tankers, and the supplies have in fact been delivered on a regular basis.”

Shallash said the deal is currently restricted to gasoline, though future agreements could open the route to crude, other petroleum products, and additional goods. 

Baghdad has already pledged to keep building overland alternatives through Syria even if Hormuz reopens, and Reuters reported in July that Iraqi fuel oil moved via Baniyas had reached the US for the first time. 

With Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz, Iraq – unable to ship its oil – has opened its borders to Syria. Thousands of fuel-laden tankers are being sent to the world market overland through Syria. Iraq has closed its airports to Iran’s planes.

İran’ın Hürmüz’ü kapatmasıyla petrolünü sevk edemeyen Irak’a Suriye kapılarını açtı. Binlerce petrol yüklü tanker kara yoluyla Suriye üzerinden dünya pazarına gönderiliyor.
Irak, İran’ın uçaklarına havaalanlarını kapattı. pic.twitter.com/I4Ub6a749E

— Murat Özer (@muratozer_ist) September 25, 2026

UCC Holding is also part of a consortium with Chevron and TI Capital studying the revival of a Kirkuk–Baniyas crude pipeline, after Iraq and Syria signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) in Washington in July. 

Reuters reported in August that the project could take four years and cost at least $15 billion, because it would require entirely new infrastructure. 

The great commercial real estate waiting game may finally be running out of time, according to Bloomberg.

For years after Covid fundamentally changed how Americans use office space, lenders and property owners managed to postpone much of the financial damage. Loans were modified, maturities were pushed out and buildings were given more time to recover. The basic assumption was that eventually interest rates would come down, employees would spend more time downtown and refinancing markets would reopen.

Instead, many owners are reaching the end of the runway with rates still elevated and buildings worth dramatically less than the debt sitting against them.

Chicago’s Aon Center offers an almost absurd illustration. The 83-story skyscraper changed hands for $712 million in 2015 and was subsequently refinanced, with $536 million of debt eventually packaged into commercial mortgage-backed securities. Today, after losing important tenants, the building is worth nowhere near that amount. Its latest appraisal came in at just $195 million — a decline of roughly 73% from its 2015 purchase price.

Bloomberg writes that when the debt matured in July, the owner couldn’t repay it and sought another three years to sort things out. This time the lender wasn’t interested. The request was “unequivocally denied.”

Situations like this are beginning to pile up across the country. Office loans packaged into CMBS are now delinquent at a 12% rate, according to Trepp. That puts distress near an all-time high and, remarkably, beyond the levels seen in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Meanwhile, approximately $64 billion of office CMBS loans come due this year and next. Nearly $40 billion of that pile is already delinquent, in default or flagged as potentially troubled.

But this isn’t one uniform nationwide office collapse.

New York has been surprisingly resilient, with finance, law and technology companies still competing for desirable space. San Francisco, despite enormous problems left over from the pandemic, has received a new source of demand from the AI boom.

Other cities have considerably less working in their favor. Chicago’s downtown office vacancy rate is roughly 27%. Denver’s has reached an astonishing 39%. Los Angeles and several other downtown markets are also struggling, especially in areas dominated by older office stock.

There’s also increasingly a tale of two office markets within individual cities. Companies willing to spend money on office space generally want newer buildings, good locations and modern amenities. That leaves yesterday’s Class B towers fighting over a shrinking pool of tenants while their economics deteriorate.

And some of the repricing has been brutal.

Denver’s Republic Plaza has lost roughly 80% of its value compared with when Brookfield financed the property in 2012. Chicago’s Citadel Center recently changed hands for $137 million, approximately 76% below what the building sold for in 2006. The situation is bad enough that CoStar expects roughly 11.5 million square feet of Chicago-area office space to simply disappear through demolition by 2031.

Even those enormous valuation declines may understate what lenders ultimately recover.

Distressed office properties sold this year have fetched prices roughly 20% below their latest appraisals, according to Deutsche Bank research cited in the report. In other words, marking a building down dramatically on paper doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve marked it down enough.

There is, however, another side to the collapse. Once prices fall far enough, someone eventually decides the risk is worth taking. That process is now beginning. Investors are stepping into buildings at fractions of their former valuations, effectively resetting the cost basis of properties that made little economic sense at yesterday’s prices.

The same 601W connected to the troubled Aon Center recently bought Chicago’s 175 West Jackson Boulevard for only $41 million, nearly 90% below its pre-Covid sale price. Elsewhere in Chicago, investors acquired the debt behind another major tower for around $100 million, roughly 76% below the building’s previous purchase price.

That’s probably the most important part of what is happening now. An office recovery doesn’t necessarily require these buildings to regain anything close to their old valuations. It requires the old valuations to finally die.

For years, the industry could avoid discovering what many of these buildings were actually worth because lenders kept extending loans and owners kept waiting. As maturities arrive and extensions become harder to obtain, those theoretical losses increasingly have to become actual ones.

And only after that happens can buildings move into new hands at prices that make sense in the post-Covid world. As Polpo Capital’s Dan McNamara put it: “One of the scariest headlines is that office CMBS delinquencies are higher than after 2008.”

“And it’s going to go higher as we face more maturities.”

Authored by Jay Rogers via American Greatness,

Sunday, June 14, 2026. UFC Freedom 250 on the White House lawn. Five men, coordinating over Signal, planned to send explosives-rigged drones over the arena, force a panicked evacuation, and then use sniper positions to cut down fleeing “high-value targets.” One plotter typed the plan out like a game plan: “Position your teams in the purple dots, counter sniper and drones.” A mother in Ohio noticed her son’s behavior had turned dark and made the call authorities wish every parent would make. The FBI got there first, and the indictments later expanded to eight.

That plot makes a good headline. It is not, on its own, the story. The story is what that arrest represents: one save, pulled from a haystack that grows bigger and messier every week.

My thesis is simple. The real danger to this country right now is not any single plot. It is that we no longer reliably know who is inside our borders, and the men and women tasked with finding out are stretched thin, doxxed, and increasingly obstructed by their own countrymen while they try.

Start with the scale of the job. According to DHS’s own tally, assaults on ICE officers rose 1,300 percent and vehicular attacks on agents rose 3,200 percent over the past year, with more than 180 vehicle attacks recorded since January 2025 alone. In Minneapolis this January, a woman used her car to wedge federal agents between two vehicles while a crowd threw rocks and pulled agents from their cars. Protesters in New York City barricaded streets with garbage to keep agents from making an arrest. None of that is civil disobedience in the Thoreau sense. It is a bet, made by ordinary Americans who should know better, that following an ICE agent’s car carries no real cost, placed against people doing a legally authorized job under conditions most of us would not last a week inside.

None of that fog assembles itself for free. Following the money is a due diligence habit from thirty years of vetting where capital comes from, not a conspiracy theory. A federal grand jury is examining Neville Roy Singham, an American businessman tied to Chinese state media, for possible violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. The House Ways and Means Committee says Singham and his wife, CODEPINK co-founder Jodie Evans, ran more than $20 million through shell companies and donor-advised funds to a single activist hub, The People’s Forum, from 2017 to 2022, and says the money reaches allied causes overseas as well as at home. CodePink is one of hundreds of organizations that turned out for this year’s “No Kings” demonstrations alongside Indivisible, a group that has drawn long-running grants from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. None of that proves a dollar of foreign or billionaire money bought a single blockade outside an ICE vehicle in Minneapolis, and a fair-minded columnist has to say so plainly.

Cartels do not need to fund a protest movement to profit from the fog. Their financing model already runs on it. Drug and human trafficking pay for the cartel’s guns, boats, and sicarios, and every hour an ICE agent spends negotiating a mob instead of working a smuggling lead is an hour that revenue stream stays open. That is a domestic financial interest as real as any foreign one, and an unresolved financing trail running through the picture, foreign and criminal alike, is exactly the kind of ambiguity a subversion campaign is built to exploit. You do not need proof of a tidy conspiracy for the fog to work. You only need enough real, unanswered questions that nobody can say with confidence who benefits.

ICE agents are not a separate category from the intelligence and law enforcement community. They are the street-level end of the same chain that produced the UFC arrests, the officers who verify the name and make the call on who gets detained. That job has gotten harder because the population they are screening got much larger before anyone finished sorting it. Homeland Security’s own counterterrorism guide has tracked Tren de Aragua cells operating in at least nineteen states, running armed home invasions, kidnapping, extortion, and human trafficking, with one member of Congress calling it “MS-13 on steroids.” Cartel sicarios move through the same smuggling corridors as the men, women, and children being trafficked for labor and sex. None of that requires a foreign spy service. It only requires a country that has lost the capacity to tell friend from enemy inside its own borders, because it stopped bothering to check.

If you want to see that fog dramatized, watch Season 3 of Lioness. The show buries a Russian intelligence operation under Ukrainian double agents, Belarusian contractors, an Iran-aligned militia, and finally a private revenge plot, until nobody, not the CIA, not the audience, can say with confidence who is actually running things. That confusion is the point. Yuri Bezmenov, the Soviet defector who spent the 1980s warning American audiences about ideological subversion, argued that an adversary rarely needs an army when it can flood a country with enough contradictory information that its own institutions cannot agree on what is happening or who is responsible. Analysts call the Lioness version of this the attribution trap: enough true fragments, pointing in enough directions, to make a wrong conclusion look reasonable. Trade the show’s Moscow handlers for a Tren de Aragua cell, a trafficking network, and a mother’s 911 call, and you have the exact same trap playing out in Minneapolis, Ohio, and every city where a crowd calls an ICE team the enemy.

I want to be fair to the other side of this, because a fiduciary who only argues one direction is not doing his job. Most people who crossed the border illegally came for work, not to join a cartel cell, and treating every landscaper or line cook as a suspected sicario is both wrong and beneath us. But risk management has never worked by assuming the best case. My thirty years advising clients on risk exposure taught me the same lesson: you do not get to ignore a tail risk because it is a small allocation of your portfolio. When millions of people entered the country without so much as a name check, the honest answer to “who is here” became “we do not fully know,” and that uncertainty is the actual product Bezmenov’s model sells to an adversary, whether the adversary is a foreign state, a cartel, or a gang.

So here is the uncomfortable ask. Praise the FBI agents who stopped a massacre at the White House, absolutely. Then extend that respect down the chain to the ICE officers doing the dangerous work of finding out who is here, and stop pretending that following their vehicles, publishing their names, or surrounding them is a form of protest rather than an assist to the fog Bezmenov described.

A country that cannot agree that its own law enforcement deserves to do its job without being ambushed has already done half of an adversary’s work for it. The rest gets finished by every sicario, trafficker, and sleeper cell that slips through while we argue about who the real threat is.

The state of California spends billions of state and local tax dollars each year on welfare benefits for illegal immigrants through programs built to sidestep federal restrictions on public assistance, according to a new report from City Journal.

The report estimates that California taxpayers spent at least $11 billion subsidizing illegal immigrants during the last fiscal year. Federal law prohibits states from spending federal money on illegal immigrants, so Sacramento built a shadow welfare system financed with state and local funds and opened it to anyone who walks in. Residents paying the nation’s highest tax rates cover the tab. The pool of potential beneficiaries keeps growing, with more than a quarter of California’s residents today foreign-born.

Reporters for the outlet visited four public-services offices across Southern California to see how the system works on the ground. Officials at every stop confirmed that illegal immigrants can sign up for benefits themselves or collect them through their children. Nobody seemed concerned about who might be asking.

The authors described the reception they got from caseworkers in Glendale and Los Angeles, where staff walked them through the eligibility rules for noncitizens.

Local officials were remarkably transparent. In Glendale, we spoke to a welfare officer about California’s Cash Assistance Program for Immigrants (CAPI), a state-funded alternative to Supplemental Security Income that provides monthly cash assistance to low-income noncitizens who are elderly or disabled.

 “If [you are] a citizen, you cannot get CAPI,” he said. “I don’t care about legal or not. Not being [a] citizen [is the key].”

 In Los Angeles, we heard more of the same. We asked another welfare officer about the benefits available to illegal immigrants and their children. While some state programs are closed to illegals, we learned, they are open to those aliens’ U.S.-born children.

For the children, the key program is CalWORKs, California’s counterpart to the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. Illegal immigrant parents remain ineligible themselves, yet they can draw payments on behalf of any child born in the United States.

“If you were born here and the child was born here, you get money for two,” the welfare officer told the reporters. “Because she is not and the child is, she only gets money for the child, and not for her.”

It all adds up quickly. Illegal immigrants can qualify for CAPI, public health coverage, and a range of tax credits, while their American-born children can tap CalWORKs and Section 8 housing vouchers on their own. A hypothetical household of five, with two illegal-immigrant parents, an illegal-immigrant grandparent, and two U.S.-born children could collect more than $100,000 a year in combined public benefits, a sum that exceeds the pretax income of plenty of working California families.

Health care accounts for the largest share. California carved out a state-only funding stream inside Medi-Cal to offer “full-scope” coverage to illegal immigrants, and about 1.7 million people signed up. The cost runs near $10 billion a year, more than double what the state’s own legislative analyst projected. Gov. Gavin Newsom shows little embarrassment over the overrun. On a podcast, he boasted about his “controversial” decision to extend full Medi-Cal coverage to illegal immigrants.

Eligibility rules add another layer. The report details a legal designation state officials apply to certain migrants who would otherwise fall outside the programs.

California also uses a distinct legal category that enables certain migrants to qualify for state programs. The state deems certain aliens to be “permanently residing under color of law”—living in California with the “knowledge and permission” of immigration enforcement—and allows them to use this designation to enroll in Medi-Cal, CAPI, and other government programs. In practice, because aged or disabled individuals are typically not deported, this means elderly foreign retirees can arrive in California and receive extensive benefits.

In effect, California has built a retirement plan for foreigners and handed the bill to citizens struggling to fund their own.

BenefitsCal, the state’s welfare application portal, tells CalWORKs applicants it will accept a “statement” that they “intend[s] to file or [is] taking steps to become federally eligible.” A declaration of intent now doubles as documentation.

Of course, the gravy train for illegal immigrants extends beyond health care. In 2022, Newsom signed legislation opening taxpayer-funded food assistance to low-income illegal immigrants, and starting in October 2027, residents 55 and older will qualify regardless of immigration status, at an estimated added cost of up to $400 million a year.

California’s Low Cost Auto Insurance Program advertises subsidized coverage “regardless of immigration status.” In 2025, Newsom signed a law barring California LifeLine, a program that provides free phones and cell service, from requiring a Social Security number, essentially inviting illegals to use it. Meanwhile, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the governor’s wife, has promoted the California Earned Income Tax Credit, whose materials assure applicants that having “no Social Security number” is “no problem.” 

All this is happening while ordinary Californians drain their savings, work longer hours, and go into debt to cover rent, groceries, and one of the country’s heaviest tax burdens, all to fund benefits for people who entered the country illegally.

Authored by J.B. Shurk via American Thinker,

Consider these recent news headlines:

(1) “NYC Turns Back to Gas Buses After Finding Out the Hard Way That the Electric Versions Have Big Problems,”

(2) “As a Former Head of MI6 it’s Clear That Britain’s Climate Policy is Leaving Us Dangerously Exposed to Our Enemies,” and

(3) “Spain: 74% of sex-crime suspects are foreigners in Basque Country.”

They come from three different Western nations and involve three dissimilar subjects – public transportation, national security, and violent crime – yet each news story exposes the real-world consequences of government failure:

(1) In order to pursue “Net Zero” carbon goals, New York dumped a ton of money into electric buses that are too expensive and entirely unreliable for the city’s needs.

(2) Britain’s former top spy is finally ready to admit publicly that his country’s delusional obsession with “climate change” has devastated the United Kingdom’s capacity for industrial and energy self-sufficiency, rendering the former superpower dependent on foreign adversaries for future survival.

(3) Even though foreigners make up only 10% of the Basque region’s population, they account for 74% of rape arrests, 73% of homicide arrests, 95% of drunk-driving arrests, 80% of theft arrests, and 78% of violent robberies.

What’s so striking about these news stories is their “well, duh!” factor. An ordinary, rational person would have no problem predicting the failures of a citywide electric bus fleet, the offshoring of a nation’s critical industries, or open border policies that invite foreign invasion. Yet mayors, governors, and prime ministers have pursued these catastrophic programs anyway, while heads of espionage agencies and millions of government bureaucrats either support their harmful decisions or shamefully stay silent.

The middle article links to the transcript of a speech that Sir Richard Dearlove delivered to the Global Warming Policy Foundation in London last week. It was a good speech concerning an important subject, and Dearlove deserves some credit for articulating a point of view that goes against the powerful flow of “politically correct” Western orthodoxy. But he gave this speech from the comfortable perch of quasi-retirement with little to lose aside from a few honorary board positions. Where was his voice when he was in a position to actually do something about the U.K.’s suicidal energy policies?

In his speech, Dearlove explained how his Cold War experiences taught him “that the country’s war-fighting potential resided in its industry, that our most vulnerable link was the fuel chain…and that our industrial base could be rebuilt and repaired.” Now, however, there is “very little industry left to protect, and we cannot rebuild non-existent industries which lie in foreign jurisdictions beyond our reach.” Dearlove concluded that the U.K. must “rebuild the strategic industries we require to ensure that we can defend our island fortress and be a reliable ally to friendly democracies around the world.”

These are absolutely true statements. Blue-collar workers throughout the West have been making these arguments for fifty years. Had an ordinary Brit with few credentials been in charge of MI6, that person would have been screaming profanities and ringing alarm bells long before the U.K. closed its last coal mines and steel factories. Shouldn’t that embarrass Britain’s “ruling elites”? And if it doesn’t, shouldn’t “ruling elites” be considered a danger to the public’s prosperity and security?

Long-overdue, post-career wake-up calls bring to my mind President Eisenhower’s 1961 Farewell Address during which he warned Americans against the growing dangers from an emerging “military-industrial complex.”

Although his turn of phrase continues to be used sixty-five years later, it would have been nice if the former Supreme Allied Commander and five-star general had used his two terms as president of the United States to tackle that problem before it got completely out of hand. Eisenhower certainly had the expertise to see its destructive potential more clearly than most, but he chose to outline the threat on his way out the door and leave it for others to solve. Some historians believe that parts of the MIC had a hand in President Kennedy’s assassination, and if that is true, then Eisenhower’s failure to promptly act had extraordinarily far-reaching consequences that included the death of his successor.

The generations of Americans who were born after Eisenhower’s tenure have given him much credit for recognizing that the symbiotic relationship between Big Government and Big Business was evolving into an unconstitutional and anti-American oligarchy that we know today as the “permanent bureaucracy,” the “ruling class,” or the “Deep State.”

Perhaps if the American general-turned-president had neutralized the Deep State in the first decade after WWII, we would not have endured some of the worst chapters in recent American history, including the Vietnam War, the debasement of the U.S. dollar, the FBI’s soft coup d’état against President Nixon, fifty years of “global warming” con games, sixty years of mass immigration from third-world nations, NAFTA’s industry-killing bloodbath, China’s entry into the WTO, the 9/11 Islamic terror attacks, the Global War on Terrorism, Obamacare’s government takeover of medicine, the Russia Collusion Hoax, the COVID information war against the Bill of Rights, numerous rigged elections decided by unlawful voters and mail-in-ballot fraud, multiple assassination attempts on President Trump, the assassination of Charlie Kirk, leftist-inspired violence against conservatives, and the Democrats’ manufactured AI fearmongering going on today.

Diagnosing problems without taking concrete steps to solve those problems produces a perverse phenomenon:

The worse unsolved problems become, the more prescient the person warning about them appears.

Toward the end of Dearlove’s speech, Britain’s former top spy argued that the government of which he was an integral part had monumentally failed:

“The first responsibility of government is the safety of the nation. However, successive governments have forgotten this, and Britain is now caught in an energy trap of its own making. As with rebuilding our armed forces, it will take a significant national effort to extract us and bring us back to a position of safety. The task is urgent.”

This is certainly true.

The question is why so many successive governments in the U.K. and across the West have betrayed their own citizens and made their nations much less safe.

Because normal citizens would never have offshored their own industrial and manufacturing jobs to adversarial nations such as communist China.

Normal citizens would not have conspired with transnational human trafficking gangs to import tens of millions of unassimilable illegal aliens.

Normal citizens would not have imposed “green energy” regulations that make it harder for farmers to grow food and for businesses to pay their bills.

Normal citizens would not mandate that unreliable electric vehicles replace internal combustion engines while power grids crash due to insufficient supplies of wind and solar energies.

These kinds of policies are so obviously foolish and suicidal that only our credentialed “ruling class” could justify them.

Does that tell us that our bureaucrats are too stupid to keep our nations safe, as Dearlove rightly recognizes as the first responsibility of government? Or are these self-destructive national policies proof that Western bureaucracies are waging war against Western citizens?

Certainly Western governments are guilty of failing their peoples. The only question remaining is whether their failures stem from a combination of incompetence and hubris or treason and malice.

As Western citizens ponder that question, they are quickly taking matters into their own hands.

Spaniards in Ceuta are destroying government shelters built for foreign invaders.

A British village has voted to secede from the U.K. after the government announced plans to house an army of foreign immigrants next door.

The price of government betrayal might soon be the fall of a Western capital.

Recognizing problems is not good enough. Governments that cause more problems than they fix do not deserve to survive.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), a US government-funded international news organization, has released a new report on the teardown of a mostly intact Russian Geran-4 “Seeker” turbojet drone, revealing what makes these new one-way attack drones deadlier than the older piston-powered Geran-2s.

We first detailed the new 300 mph Geran-4 in a report earlier this summer titled “Drone War Enters Terrifying New Phase As Russia Deploys 300-MPH Jet-Powered Shahed.”

Drone warfare is evolving so quickly, and it is truly terrifying, as these new drones are much faster, fly at higher altitudes, and can evade conventional air defense systems, as demonstrated in Ukraine right now.

RFE/RL analysts got their hands on one of these new drones, conducted a complete teardown, and inspected its components. They found many foreign-made components, much of which came from China.

The teardown also revealed that the jet’s brain used Texas Instruments chips (markings scraped off, logos still readable).

Here’s what they found:

• Chinese mesh modem: radio + live video out to ~300 km, and it can relay so one Geran hands the link to the next.
• Operators can sit in Bryansk, Oryol, or Crimea and fly it all the way in if the mesh is up.
• Two GSM modems with SIMs (Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and some EU carriers have shown up on these drones) to ping location over the cellular network.
• A 16-channel CRPA antenna to blunt Ukrainian jamming.

Watch:

RFE/RL takes apart a Russian Geran-4 drone to uncover what makes the jet-powered unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) faster, harder to intercept, and capable of operating deep inside Ukraine — from its turbojet engine and advanced camera to foreign-made communications and navigation… pic.twitter.com/WGNdlpS9w1

— Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (@RFERL) September 25, 2026

We warned in May: “And just wait until micro jet engines become standard on suicide drones …”

Read: Logic Of Violence: We Are Nowhere Near The Endgame In Drone Wars

Summary

• Trump rejects Iran proposal: WSJ

• Tehran denes reports of ‘technical talks’ after it proposed 7-day roadmap to end the war and (eventually) restart nuclear talks.

• Hormuz reopening discussed in exchange for US concessions in NY, including lifting the blockade. 

• Tehran seeks sanctions relief, declares will hold to conditions, including restored oil exports and access to frozen funds.

• US-Iran talks reportedly show progress, with Qatar helping bridge differences.

• Escalation risk remains: Iran threatens a broader response – to ‘spread war to Indian Ocean’ if attacked again.

Trump Rejects Iran’s 7-Day Ceasefire Proposal

That was fast–huge late Friday night bombshell via The Wall Street Journal:

President Trump has rejected Iran’s proposal for a seven-day ceasefire and has told aides he expects to resume bombing Iran after the November midterms, U.S. officials said.

Tehran’s proposal would have reopened the Strait of Hormuz and resumed nuclear talks in return for the U.S. lifting its blockade of Iranian ports, which is causing deep damage to the country’s economy. Trump says openly that Tehran is begging for a deal after the midterms that dismantles its nuclear program.

But privately Trump is skeptical Iran would meet his demands and has told his staff that he sees a renewed bombing campaign as likely, the officials said. 

Where do we go from here? So much for oil prices being artificially kept down, as the entire Friday drop is set to be erased.

Trump is reportedly expected to resume bombing Iran after the midterm elections, WSJ says.

OR, is this a classic Trump ‘tough’ negotiating ploy? The hardliners in the IRGC are unlikely to play ball.

The Friday Afternoon Denial

Via state media Fars:

Axios and Al Jazeera’s claim about Iran-US talks denied, reports Fars; News regarding another round of talks is false, and claims technical experts from Iran were sent to NY to join the talks, is untrue

This was either the result of more premature or false Axios reporting, or else there’s a possible in strategy divergence between IRGC vs. presidential delegation in New York. More from Fars:

IRGC Spokesperson says we will not stop punishing the US until Iran’s seven conditions are met; our missiles are capable of destroying America’s multi-layered defenses, Fars reports

‘Technical Talks’

Are we back to headline ping-pong pushing down oil prices?

Latest: Iran-US negotiations in New York have moved beyond initial diplomatic contacts into a more detailed technical phase, with sources in Tehran describing the atmosphere as increasingly positive, CBS reports, citing Al Jazeera.

And an official Iranian caution, or possibly even brush off, in reaction… Tehran signaling it intends to stick by its original conditions:

Senior Iranian official says Strait of Hormuz will remain closed, no nuclear talks with US until Iran’s conditions are met, Reuters reports, citing sources; Iran will make no concessions on its nuclear program

AJ: A US official told Al Jazeera says Washington is in a strong position and controls the Strait of Hormuz, therefore we are not in a hurry to reach an agreement with Iran

For a rehash of what’s played out over the last 24 hours on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly meeting:

• Iran’s proposed seven-day plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz if the US drops its blockade is being discussed as an accelerated version of a previously discussed 60-day process, and would include urgent measures to get both countries back into direct negotiations over Iran’s nuclear programme.
• The key Iranian demands under discussion include sanctions relief, the lifting of restrictions on oil exports and access to frozen Iranian funds.
• The two sides also continue to discuss arrangements for the Strait of Hormuz, including whether Iran and Oman could return to a form of joint management under an agreed framework involving regional countries and the United States, as well as arrangements governing the passage of US vessels.
• Despite the outstanding issues, sources in Tehran characterised the negotiations as making some progress, with talks continuing and Qatar working to bridge differences between the two sides.

Also, President Trump has just said he discussed the Iran conflict with China’s Xi.

And crude tumbles…

BUT…

Independent Iranian Journliast Ghaderi reiterates that the narrative presented by some US media is incomplete

A few key points about the latest status of negotiations between #Iran and #America, that show the window for diplomacy is closing. I reiterate that the narrative presented by some US media is incomplete.👇 pic.twitter.com/zWriFfoorf

— Mohammad Ghaderi | محمد قادری (@ghaderi62) September 25, 2026

7-Day Roadmap Proposed

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Aragchi has newly proposed to the US side a seven-day roadmap aimed at ending the war, while the top Iranian delegation is still in New York City engaged in deep diplomacy on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.

Aragchi is said to be planning to stay through the weekend while waiting on a US response to the plan. So far it seems Tehran hasn’t backed down from its core conditions, and its roadmap proposal is said to closely parallel the 14-point Memorandum of Understanding that was signed by President Trump back in June, but which has since completely collapsed. The plan is new but is still being largely seen as just repackaged.

Q: Will you give up the 60% enriched uranium?

Pezeshkian: Yes, within the framework of international law, based on the Nonproliferation Treaty. Whatever we are supposed to adhere to, we will. pic.twitter.com/6v9WqG9AMP

— Clash Report (@clashreport) September 24, 2026

“Araghchi stressed that Iran was ready to begin putting the plan into effect as soon as Washington agreed to it,” Al Jazeera reports.

Interestingly, also last night Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian told journalists, “We don’t want it to get to the midterm elections.” He added: “We wish Americans to return to the MoU before the midterms.” Here’s where things stand in terms of Iran’s position being represented in New York:

• Iran’s Foreign Minister Araghchi said the Strait of Hormuz can reopen if certain conditions are met by the US and that it would be better to implement before the Midterms, according to a Sky reporter.
• IRGC spokesperson warned in the event of another attack, Iran’s method of defence will change including geography of the confrontation, the type of equipment and weapons used, and targets in defensive operations in line with new conditions.

This contradicted Trump’s words given to the UN General Assembly during his speech. He said “They’re waiting to see how I do in the midterm election.”

White House spokesperson Anna Kelly had in follow-up to Trump’s address said, “The President is courageously ensuring that such an evil country never possesses a nuclear weapon, which will make the entire world safer and more stable.”

Iran has said it will not be ‘bullied’ – but Pezeshkian appears to be offering something on the nuclear front alongside this seven-day roadmap overture, or at least according to a future timeline assuming a ceasefire is agreed to.

He explained in a Fox interview that in accord the framework of international law, Iran could give eventually up highly enriched uranium. But he was also fundamentally using the moment to highlight who is not a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty – Israel.

Packaging is new but what’s inside is basically the offer that’s been on the table for weeks: It’s a return to the MOU, just on a compressed timetable

But the message from both Washington and diplomats in the region has been that Trump isn’t interested in returning to the MOU…

— Gregg Carlstrom (@glcarlstrom) September 25, 2026

Pezeshkian further said it was up to the United States to choose when the war would end. “It’s America that must choose whether it wants to end this or not,“ Pezeshkian said in response to a question by Fox’s Bret Baier.

Tehran has meanwhile said it is ready to escalate, and even spread the war beyond the Persian Gulf region, into the Indian Ocean for example (where the UK-US have the Diego Garcia base).

Further UNGA Highlights

Recap of some of the highlights from the UN this week, via Middle East Eye:

• The US-Israeli war on Iran and the Israel-Palestine conflict continued to occupy prime positions on the fourth day of the UN General Assembly. Somali President Mohamed Hassan Sheikh Mohamud said his country was “suffering” as a result of the US-Israeli war, which has driven up the price of energy and food. Meanwhile, European Union Council president said the EU supports efforts to “find a solution to the conflict”. He added that “freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz must be preserved without conditions and without hindrance”.

• Crown Prince of Kuwait Sabah Al Khaled condemned the “illegal Iranian aggression” in his address to the UN Security Council on Thursday. Kuwait was one of the Gulf states hardest hit by Iran in retaliation for the US-Israeli war on the Islamic Republic. Kuwait is home to tens of thousands of US troops and military bases. US facilities in Kuwait were attacked along with civilian sites like Kuwait airport and energy infrastructure.

• Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a pugnacious speech at the United Nations General Assembly, attacking everyone from New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the leaders of Western Europe, as he tried to counter Israel’s growing international isolation. 

• Meanwhile, hundreds of protesters took up positions around the UN headquarters before Netanyahu’s arrival and continued protesting while he spoke inside. Support for Palestinian statehood and disappointment over the ongoing attacks on Gaza were repeatedly brought up during the event.

• Vice President of Yemen Abdullah Abdulkader al-Alimi-Bawzer condemned the Houthis in his address to the UN General Assembly and tried to rally the global community to help fight the group. He said the government of Yemen had supported a peace initiative backed by the governments of Saudi Arabia and Oman, while the Houthis rejected it and “instead escalated their actions in the Red Sea and Bab el-Mandeb to serve an Iranian agenda”.

Overnight Developments Recap

via Newsquawk

• Iran Foreign Minister Araghchi said Iran presented a proposal to US through mediators this week to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and restart negotiations towards a final deal, while it called for US to meet certain conditions within 7 days, according to CNN.
• Iranian President Pezeshkian said in Fox News interview that Iran does not want a nuclear bomb. They reached an agreement with the US President that was signed, and are still ready to move forward based on the same principles, adds it wasn’t Iran that closed the Strait of Hormuz and it was open. They didn’t seek war and that it was imposed on them, while they don’t seek war but will defend themselves. They didn’t start the war but will respond decisively.
• Iranian President Pezeshkian said Iran is ready for an agreement with the US and makes demands only within the framework of international law and could give up highly enriched uranium if it reaches an agreement with the US, according to TASS.
• Iran’s President Pezeshkian said Tehran wants to revive its ceasefire memorandum of understanding with the US before the November midterm elections, saying Iran does not want talks delayed until after the vote. said:. Iran is open to inspections of its nuclear facilities and denies that Tehran is seeking to assassinate President Trump or his family.
• Iran’s Foreign Minister Araghchi said the Strait of Hormuz can reopen if certain conditions are met by the US and that it would be better to implement before the Midterms, according to a Sky reporter.
• IRGC spokesperson warned in the event of another attack, Iran’s method of defence will change including geography of the confrontation, the type of equipment and weapons used, and targets in defensive operations in line with new conditions.
• Iranian Brigadier General Sheikh said “we seek to expand our capabilities and reconsider our tactics and technologies”, via Al Mayadeen.
• Sources say a return to the June 18 memorandum of understanding between Iran and the US is no longer sought by either side, with both seeking amendments to some clauses, further complicating negotiations, Al-Akhbar reported.
• Pakistan’s Defence Minister said intensive efforts are underway to establish a mechanism for ending the conflict as quickly as possible and reopening the Strait of Hormuz, according to Tasnim.

* * *

Authored by Haley Zaremba via OilPrice.com,

China just broke ground on a revolutionary new hybridized energy production and storage facility. The power plant will store excess energy in the form of molten salt, and then produce electricity during peak demand times through a supercritical carbon dioxide system. The goal of the project is to limit energy waste while also stabilizing the local power grid. The project could also inform future next-gen energy and energy storage systems, including for application in the nuclear power sector and even on the moon.

Construction of the Ruitan demonstration project began last week in Shandong province in eastern China. The facility is expected to be up and running by next year, at which point it will be the first of its kind to operate on the planet. The first phase of the project will involve a supercritical unit with a capacity of 50 megawatts, and a molten salt energy storage system with a 100 megawatt capacity.

The facility is being built on the site of an existing coal-fired plant, the Bajiao power station in Yantai. The new system will capture surplus energy from the coal plant when demand is low and store it in the form of thermal energy within a molten salt reactor. Then, at peak demand hours, that thermal energy will be used to power a supercritical unit that uses carbon dioxide to spin a turbine to create electricity, instead of using steam like a traditional power plant. The carbon dioxide is held under very specific temperature and pressure ranges, at which point the molecules behave like both a liquid and a gas and can power a closed-loop system.

Supercritical carbon dioxide units offer several critical advantages. “These plants are smaller than traditional units, do not require water, have higher power generation efficiency and produce fewer carbon emissions,” reports the South China Morning Post. Moreover, they are highly adjustable and more agile than traditional power plants.

The experimental site is just one of a huge number of cutting edge and next-gen clean energy technologies being developed and deployed across China. The country is currently home to the biggest and fastest-growing clean energy tech sector on the planet, with research and development of new methods on the rise at an astonishing pace. In 2000, Chinese companies filed approximately 5 percent of the world’s clean energy patent applications. By 2022, that figure was 75 percent.

“Accused for years of copying the technologies of other countries, China now dominates the renewable energy landscape not just in terms of patent filings and research papers, but in what analysts say are major contributions that will help to move the world away from fossil fuels,” the New York Times wrote in an August 2025 report.

This assertive approach has helped China to rapidly establish itself as the world’s first electrostate. Between the years 2019 and 2025, China outspent the rest of the world combined on energy energy investing, contributing more than half of the $1.1 trillion invested globally. By comparison, the United States, the world’s largest economy, saw a relatively paltry $236 billion in clean energy investing. This has given China unprecedented reach and leverage in global clean energy markets. Thanks to the extreme concentration of clean energy manufacturing and development in China, the rest of the world is reliant on Chinese technologies to enable their own clean energy buildout.

And when it comes to energy storage, the United States is moving backward. In an attempt to wean U.S. markets off of Chinese clean energy supply chains, the Trump administration recently ordered a ban on using Chinese-made batteries in utility-scale energy storage systems. However, the vague wording of the executive order has left developers in limbo, while barring U.S. companies from buying affordable Chinese-made batteries may kneecap capacity additions in the short term.

While the technology being developed at Ruitan cannot directly compete with battery storage and will likely never make up a huge segment of the energy storage system, it is one piece of an all-of-the-above approach to energy tech that has allowed Beijing to establish what will likely be lasting energy dominance on a global scale.

The Ansar Allah movement, commonly called the Houthis, have remained the most recognizable name and force in Yemen of late, but lesser known among many headline consumers is the country’s internationally recognized government, which is directly backed by the Saudis and recognized by the United Nations.

Rashid Al-Alimi, ​president of the ‘legitimate’ government based out of Sanaa, ‌on Friday called ​on ‌all Yemenis to ⁠mobilize and join the armed ⁠forces against the Houthi rebels’ onslaught.

The general call to arms, coupled with a declaration of ​future ‌general ‌amnesty to any Houthi fighters who decide to lay down their weapons and defect – suggests that the Saudi-backed coalition seeks desperate measures.

“I call upon the sons of our great people to engage in general mobilization and national mobilization, to rally around their armed and security forces,” Al-Alimi, who is also Supreme Commander of the Yemeni Armed Forces, said in a speech.

Things quickly went from bad to worse for Riyadh on the Yemen front this month, especially after Houthi rapid gains along the Red Sea coast.

After some direct drone or missile hits on the East-West pipeline earlier in September (which may have been Iraqi Shia militias, per US officials), Saudi Aramco told European refineries that it would cancel crude shipments in October. But Reuters has since reported that the pipeline has restarted.

The Saudis are currently trying to rally support from Mecca Defense Pact allies Pakistan and Turkey, though its anything but clear how much support these will actually commit.

In the midst of all this, somewhat unexpectedly, French President Emmanuel Macron declared he would send “military means” to help shield the vital Yanbu oil terminal from Houthi attacks – though it’s unclear what precise difference a handful of ground units might make.

More Houthi ballistic missiles were launched on Saudi Arabia this week:

🇫🇷🇸🇦🇾🇪 L’Arabie saoudite a dit avoir intercepté une attaque de missiles tirés du #Yémen voisin par les Houthis pro-iraniens. Les défenses aériennes ont abattu six missiles visant les régions de Taïf et de Yanbu.

👉 Emmanuel #Macron a déclaré y envoyer des “moyens militaires”… pic.twitter.com/P76NzF7RIy

— FRANCE 24 Français (@France24_fr) September 25, 2026

“We are going to send military resources, that is to say, soldiers, radar systems and defense systems, to protect this site,” but “not to get us involved in any conflicts,” Macron informed French media.

But instead they could just find themselves in the direct line of fire for Houthi projectiles.

Authored by News Desk via The Cradle,

China has sent Iran around 1,300 shipments of missile and drone parts this year through the end of June, as the Islamic Republic faced a brutal US-Israeli campaign against it, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on 23 September.

One of the shipments arrived the same day the April ceasefire was announced, according to Iranian customs data cited by the outlet.

It carried a shipment for the Iranian Defense Ministry that included electronic components used to make parts for drones and missile guidance systems.

Another Chinese shipment two days later carried drone parts for Iran, worth more than $6 million, according to WSJ.

WSJ writes that there has been a surge in Chinese cargo flights to Iran over the past year, coinciding with several new Iranian warnings.

Tehran’s military recently said it received intelligence of upcoming US attacks.

After the 12-day war between Iran and Israel in June 2025, Hebrew media began expressing concern over Chinese military support for Iran.

The concern lay with Chinese-Iranian cooperation on the manufacture of surface-to-surface missiles, Yedioth Ahronoth said in August last year.

Since the start of the latest illegal war by Washington and Tel Aviv, Iran has inflicted unprecedented damage on US military installations across the region.

Israel, which uses heavy military censorship to cover up losses, was also heavily targeted.

The Islamic Republic recently warned that new weapons will be used in the event of a renewed escalation by the US or Israel.

“Iran is prepared for a prolonged war,” said Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) spokesman Brigadier General Hossein Mohebbi this week.

He added that “If a new aggression takes place, there will definitely be significant changes in our defense and our counteroffensive.”

“We will definitely bring new weapons with new capabilities into the battlefield, and the world will be surprised,” Mohebbi went on to say. “We will definitely change the geography of the war.”