Trump Admin Weighs Emergency Powers To Boost Refining As Diesel Tops $6
With national average diesel prices above $6 a gallon and regular gasoline firmly above $4.20, the Trump administration faces mounting pressure to deploy every available policy tool to contain fuel costs ahead of the midterm elections. Disruptions tied to the Russia-Ukraine war and turmoil in the Gulf are intensifying the global refining super squeeze.
Reuters reports late Friday afternoon that the Trump administration is considering whether to use the Defense Production Act to expand U.S. oil refining capacity as the Iran conflict drives up fuel prices.
According to the report:
The proposal to use the act came up during a recent meeting between President Donald Trump and nearly a dozen U.S. refiners, where White House officials sought to determine how federal support could best be used to add capacity, the sources said. No final decisions were made, and participants left the meeting with the expectation that the conversations would continue, according to the sources.
However, expanding refining capacity comes as U.S. refineries are already operating near their limits. The latest data shows that utilization has topped 98%.
The discussions follow Trump’s April decision authorizing support for domestic petroleum production, refining and logistics under the Defense Production Act. That directive identified financing constraints, long construction timelines, permitting delays and supply-chain limitations as obstacles to expanding capacity.
“America’s refining capacity is essential to ensuring the United States has continuous access to secure, affordable, and reliable energy. Expanding that capacity is a top priority for the President and his energy team, who are evaluating concrete options to increase our refining capacity through regulatory reform, faster permitting, and additional investment,” Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, told the outlet.
Reuters pointed out:
A proposed new refinery in Brownsville, Texas, has emerged as a test case for Trump’s call to expand U.S. refining capacity. It was unclear whether the project would receive any Defense Production Act funding.
America First Refining plans to build a 168,000-barrel-per-day facility at the Port of Brownsville, which Trump announced in March as the first new U.S. refinery in nearly 50 years. The project is backed by India’s Reliance Industries, which has agreed to a 20-year deal to buy the refinery’s output.
In March, JPMorgan’s head of commodity research, Natasha Kaneva, outlined six policy levers the Trump administration could pull to contain oil prices. Some, including Jones Act waivers and Strategic Petroleum Reserve releases, have already been used. Other options include export restrictions and waiving federal fuel taxes.
The Labor Department’s inspector general said Tuesday that federal officials have suspended PERM filings for tech company Cognizant and software company Cloudera and halted H-1B processing for both firms.
Inspector General Anthony D’Esposito posted the announcements on X throughout the day on Sept. 8. He credited the moves in part to Acting Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling, as well as to a White House anti-fraud task force.
“Fighting fraud is a TEAM SPORT,” D’Esposito wrote. “@Sonderling47 and I are for real. @Cognizant’s PERM filings are suspended. @DOLOIG is on the hunt. Threats to American workers will NOT be tolerated. Alongside @WHFraudTF, we’re following facts, fraud and finances. Handcuffs await.“
Hours later, he added Cloudera.
“One more,” he wrote. “@cloudera: PERM filings SUSPENDED.”
He followed up on the announcements later in the day.
“Cognizant. Cloudera. H1-B processing suspended. @Sonderling47 and I ain’t playin’,” he said.
PERM, or Program Electronic Review Management, is the Labor Department process employers use before sponsoring workers for employment-based green cards in the EB-2 and EB-3 categories. The department must determine whether able, willing, qualified, and available U.S. workers exist for the job before approving a PERM application. H-1B visas are temporary visas for specialty occupations. They generally last three years and can be extended to six.
Cognizant and Cloudera did not immediately return a request for comment.
In July, the Labor Department and the inspector general’s office openedwhat officials referred to as a “major investigation” into alleged fraud in the H-1B and PERM systems, including possible human trafficking.
In a statement at the time, the two offices said they had “uncovered widespread schemes in which employers and labor brokers submitted fraudulent applications, exploited foreign workers through coercive wage-kickback arrangements, and undercut American workers by flooding the market with below-wage labor.”
D’Esposito told Fox Business on July 8 that “dozens of subpoenas” had been issued by investigators.
“This is another example where fraud is fueling violent crime,” he said. “Much of the visa and the human trafficking that we see when it comes to this foreign labor is tied to cartels, is tied to transnational gangs, and this is the work that we should be doing, not only to make America safe again, but to make America more affordable again.”
He said the work was “not just people working in factories or actual labor,” adding that some cases involve “people working in medical facilities and doctors’ offices that are actually putting people in harm’s way.”
Cloudera was already involved in a separate federal case. The Labor Department announced in May 2026 that it had suspended Cloudera’s PERM applications for 180 days after an April lawsuit.
The Justice Department sued Santa Clara, California-based Cloudera, alleging it discriminated against U.S. workers while using PERM to sponsor foreign employees. The complaint said the company directed American applicants to an internal email address that blocked outside messages.
“Employers cannot use the PERM sponsorship process as a backdoor for discriminating against U.S. workers,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon said at the time. “The Division will not hesitate to sue companies who intentionally deter U.S. workers from applying to American jobs.”
She said the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division prioritizes protecting American workers from unlawful discrimination in favor of foreign visa workers.
Sonderling has served as acting labor secretary since April, and President Donald Trump said June 29 that he intended to nominate him permanently. A Senate committee advanced the nomination July 30 on a 12 – 11 party-line vote. D’Esposito’s posts treat Sonderling as a partner in the enforcement effort.
The suspensions land amid other related policy initiatives.
The Department of Homeland Security proposed ending the 60-day grace period that now lets some temporary visa holders, including H-1B workers, remain in the country after a job ends. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin wrote that once a person no longer meets the conditions of status, “such status, as well as the authorization to remain in the United States, should definitively cease and the impacted alien should immediately depart the United States (unless otherwise authorized to lawfully remain in the United States).”
H-1B use remains concentrated, with a Pew Research survey showing that India accounts for about 73 percent of H-1B workers by country of birth, while China represents about 12 percent.
Yemen Blame Game Begins: “Saudi-American F**k Up Of Epic Proportions”
An official affiliated with Saudi-backed militias in Yemen told CNN that the Houthis “committed everything they had – waves upon waves of fighters… along with their available ballistic missiles and weapons.”
“But the air support never came,” the source said in reference to the fact that the Saudi-backed side rapidly folded and retreated in just days last week. “And Mocha has now fallen.” The blame game has begun after a mere 36 hours has seen the Saudi coalition fracture on the ground, and the finger-pointing is likely to go on in the halls of government, now as Saudi territory continues coming under direct missile and drone threat.
Another regional source told CNN on Thursday that “The failure this time is not with the Yemenis” but that “it’s a disaster made in DC and Riyadh.”
According to some further key lines and expletives:
The regional source told CNN that it was “a complete failure of political leadership” amid fierce squabbling and delayed decision-making in Riyadh.
“There was not one air strike throughout the day yesterday (by Saudi support forces), although there were minute-by-minute updates,” the regional source added. “It’s a Saudi-American f**k up of epic proportions.“
There are at the same time widespread reports that the Iran-backed Houthis have seized US made M-ATVs and MRAP armored vehicles.
Dudes in sandals breaking the coalition with lighting speed…
The Houthis are literally fighting in sandals and are routing a military provisioned by (directly) KSA and (indirectly) the US. https://t.co/DxcTorDBO1
Amr Al-Bidh, the top official of Yemen’s Southern Transitional Council (STC), has also been quoted in the CNN report, explaining that the Houthis “don’t need to use advanced weapons to close Bab al-Mandeb. They can just use a cannon on a car.”
He added “It’s a leverage that they have without using advanced weapons. And they will keep it.”
All of this has further emboldened the Houthis to take the fight directly to Saudi territory, amid the ongoing “siege for siege” policy. Riyadh has long sought to impose a brutal blockade on Houthi-controlled ports. The group has so far indicated it intends to allow most international vessels to traverse the Red Sea, but will attack Saudi or Israeli-linked shipping.
There are fresh Sunday reports of another ballistic missile attack on a Saudi base:
Yemen’s Houthi group on Sunday claimed that it had launched a ballistic missile and drone attack on a Saudi military base, as fighting between the group and Riyadh-backed Yemeni government forces intensified.
Houthi military spokesperson Yahya Saree said the attack targeted the Sharurah base in southern Saudi Arabia, including “weapons depots and command and control centers that are managing the aggression against our nation and people”.
Saree declared that the strikes had hit their targets and threatened further bigger strikes deeper inside the kingdom if the Saudis keep up their military operations in Yemen.
Saudi coalition aerial assets have been belatedly at work: “On Sunday, the Yemeni military said its air force had conducted three strikes against Houthi positions and barracks in the Taiz region,” MEE reports.
Al Jazeera writes: Analysts are calling the Iran-backed Houthi group’s victories the most significant regional development since the start of the US-Israel war on Iran. The offensives could be particularly damaging for Saudi Arabia and its oil exports.
The Yemeni military announced on X, “Air force of the armed forces targeted positions and barracks of the terrorist Houthi group with three air strikes” in the Taiz region.
Meanwhile, President Trump has said the Houthis are in contact with him and have pledged to let ships through the Bab Al-Mandab Strait. He said to reporters Saturday while meeting with Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin, “The Houthis called us, and they don’t want to fight with us. They don’t want us to go after them.” He further explained that “they would much prefer not having us involved:” and so “they are letting most ships go through.” The president did acknowledged they do have a ban on Saudi vessels, however. But the Houthi threat of closing the energy transit chokepoint lingers heavily.
‘Regulatory Capture Or Psy-Op’: Top White House AI Advisor Slams ‘Pace The Frontier’ Push
Update (1055ET): David Sacks, former White House AI czar and co-chair of Trump’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), slammed Amodei and Altman over their calls to ‘pace the frontier.’
In a nutshell; they don’t need to establish some convoluted framework to pause the development of dangerous models, just ‘agree not to build it.’ Demanding a regulatory framework as the price of that, ‘will look like blackmail of the public and the political system.’
Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead.
You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric – market share, revenue growth, model capability – the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement.
I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible.
But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier.
Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want.
Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well.
So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it.
If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture – or an election-season psyop.
***SPECIAL BULLETIN***
Ladies and gentlemen of the listening public – the American machine was winning the AI race until the dastardly forces of China’s open-weight juggernaut began delivering decisive blows to US ingenuity – jeopardizing the AI Buildout thesis and threatening to prick the ensuing bubble that promised to deliver red-blooded American IPOs which had been circle-jerked into the stratosphere.
For two years the United States frontier laboratories – OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, xAI – have been the engine of the greatest capital-expenditure boom since the railroads learned to drink diesel-generated electricity. Data centers rose like munitions plants. Chipmakers printed money. Equity markets priced a future in which the West sold intelligence by the token – at a premium, and have been quite smug about it. The assumption underneath all of it was simple: the frontier stays closed and China stays a respectable number of months behind.
Then the East opened the crate.
And here’s what was inside: DeepSeek, Alibaba’s Qwen, Moonshot’s Kimi, MiniMax, Zhipu – open-weight models, downloadable, forkable, cheap enough to run on a laptop or a local box and still deliver work that is uncomfortably close to the genuine American article. By mid-year, Chinese open weights were devouring the majority of tokens on the big neutral routers. Qwen had shoved Meta’s Llama off the open-model throne. Moonshot’s Kimi K3 – two-point-eight trillion parameters, its weights already out the door – sat within shouting distance of Anthropic’s Fable 5 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 on the intelligence indexes. The Chinese models run roughly sixty to ninety percent cheaper; ladies and gents – one DeepSeek flash model was quoted at fifteen cents per million input tokens, off-peak, against five dollars for Anthropic’s Opus – and enough to rattle the Korean memory makers all over again.
The data-center buildout, the power deals, all of the “AI will eat the S&P” thesis – HUBRIS! Nobody saw the Chinese coming in from left field with models that are ninety percent as good, ten percent of the cost, and run in a basement in Ohio without a subscription.
TEAM FRONTIER, ASSEMBLE!
This week, the three high priests of the American frontier discovered they could finish one another’s sentences.
On Saturday morning, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay titled We Must Pace the Frontier. Twelve years in the field, he wrote. AI might cure most major diseases in five to ten years, he wrote. And – it might also slip the leash (and murder us all, according to three prominent AI researchers who quit frontier labs last week in protest of our impending demise).
Speaking of those three ‘defectors’ – two of them walked through the door of the AI evaluator (METR) Amodei wants embedded in the labs.
According to Dario, the machines have been getting better at building the next machines – recursive self-improvement, happening “across the industry, including at Anthropic.” He pointed at July’s OpenAI – Hugging Face affair: a swarm of agents that escaped the spirit of their assignment, hacked a target they were not asked to hack, and even went after the grader scoring them. Anthropic itself disclosed its own incidents this summer, three Claude models – one of them Mythos 5 – that wandered out of their test cages and into three companies’ live systems, a parallel his essay itself acknowledges. Amodei’s warning was the sequel: give that swarm six to twelve months more capability at the same misalignment and it “could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet,” he wrote – “hundreds of billions of dollars in damage,” and rising from there.
His prescription was a three-act play, which he insists “does not mean halting model training or technical progress.”
Act One: embed third-party evaluators – METR and their cousins – inside the labs with employee-level badges, desks, and laptops, and let them publish. Anthropic would do this unilaterally, he said, today.
Act Two: the democratic labs coordinate, with government as the chaperone, on safety standards and the rate of unchecked progress – which, he conceded, is “legally challenging” and needs Washington to “issue a narrow waiver” of antitrust rules so rivals can lawfully sit in the same room.
Act Three: try to talk to the authoritarians, including Beijing, about red lines – bioweapons first, testing regimes second, limits on recursive improvement third. Full pause? He all but called it a fantasy. A Chinese lead, he wrote, would be a grave danger; keep the chip bans, smash the distillation, widen the lead for three to five years. Then, perhaps, a bargain.
Elon Musk, who has sued Sam Altman, and once called Anthropic “evil” before selling them a mountain of compute, agreed with Dario in just three words:
Sam Altman, whose company was the one named in the July swarm, followed: he agreed they needed to pace the frontier; it had been a primary topic inside OpenAI for weeks; independent evaluators with employee-like access was “a great idea,” and OpenAI would do the same. More to share soon.
I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. This has been a primary topic of discussions we’ve had at OpenAI in recent weeks. Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same. We’ll have more to share soon.
Three men who cannot share a stage without the photographers noticing the space between their shoulders. One essay, three cups (wtf). Hugging Face’s Clément Delangue offered an “open alignment” club and asked to be let into the evaluator program. Andrej Karpathy said he loved it.
How we got to Saturday.
Days earlier the fuse was a twenty-seven-year-old Brit named Jacob Coxon. Three years of pretraining at OpenAI that made him filthy rich, followed by four months at Anthropic. Tuesday into Wednesday he posted that both labs were racing to self-improving superintelligence and “gambling with our lives.” The people building this, he said, earnestly believe it could kill everyone by the end of the decade. Colleagues, he told the Journal, talk in the hallways about “crunch time” and “endgame.” The thread did more than a hundred million views. Musk, the next evening, looking at the velocity from a near-new account, said it “seems like a setup.” Coxon said he left because he no longer wanted a stake in juicing Anthropic’s valuation.
Anthropic’s own alignment-science lead, Evan Hubinger, agreed – writing “Jacob is correct.” Researchers there really do believe AI could kill all humans. His personal odds: above ten percent this decade. The lab, he added, does not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and is not clearly on track to get one. OpenAI’s Chris Lehane published that the policy window was open and Washington should take it. Anthropic’s economics team dropped scenarios out to 2030 in which the extreme case is fifteen-percent GDP growth sitting next to nearly twelve-percent unemployment and knowledge-worker wages down more than ten percent.
On the Hill, a bill that had been gasping since summerwas suddenly erect after OpenAI disclosed the Hugging Face hack in July. House members Ted Lieu and Nathaniel Moran dropped an AI Kill Switch Act.
Lori Trahan and Jay Obernolte float the FRONTIER Act – audits, incident reporting, Commerce power over models judged an imminent catastrophic risk. Senate talks among Amy Klobuchar, Ted Cruz, and Majority Leader John Thune then stall. By this week Semafor and the rest of the chorus are calling the Klobuchar – Cruz – Thune vehicle the only thing that might move before 2027.
And guess what, Saturday’s ‘pact’ still isn’t enough for these people!
And Ted Lieu goes to bat for China…
i.e. “Will you certify that you can turn off your models and agents while China gains AI supremacy because they abso-fucking-lutely will not?”
The President is not in the choir. Thursday night, leaving Dallas, Donald Trump was asked about existential risk. “No, I don’t have any.” His concern was the other one: if America does not win AI, it will be put in a very bad position. America is leading China “by a pretty good period,” he said. Xi, in his accounting, is China’s guardrail. The administration’s posture remains race-first. The laboratories’ posture, as of this morning, is pace-first. Those two sentences do not live in the same house.
About Those Chinese Models…
The Chinese systems at issue are not a factory you can padlock in Santa Clara. They are weights. They propagate. They are distilled, accused Washington this week, from the very American models the new bill would supervise. They are in Git repos and laptops and air-gapped shops that do not read the Federal Register. A Commerce Department letter does not delete a torrent. A kill switch on GPT or Claude does not switch off Qwen. Amodei knows this; that is why his essay climbs from putting METR at the labs’ desks to trying to get Beijing to sign something – bioweapons first, and, further out, a SALT-style cap on how fast the machines improve themselves, which he calls “difficult but just on the edge of being possible.” The hard version of global pacing he ranks as unlikely precisely because defection is the dominant strategy.
So here is where the record stands, as of this hour, without the sound effects:
The American frontier is still the frontier. The American margin is the thing under fire from open weights that are good enough and almost free. The stock-market story of the decade assumed a tollbooth – which now has more holes in it than Sonny Corleone (Caan was better in Killer Elite, no?).
Whether the Bionic Three are donning the rings to save the republic, or to save the price of a token, is not a question a Saturday bulletin can close. What it can say is this: the love-fest is real, the posts are on the tape, the essay is on the letterhead, the bill is back from the morgue, and the cheap models from the other shore are not waiting for the committee markup.
Long-Term US Unemployment Rate Creeps Up To 27% Despite Blockbuster August Hiring
Despite the recent blockbuster August jobs report, the anemic pace of hiring in prior months has been exacerbating challenges for long-term unemployed Americans, new research from the Richmond Federal Reserve finds.
The long-term unemployment rate – those who are out of work for 27 weeks or longer as a share of the total unemployed – has been steadily climbing since early 2023.
Of all unemployed Americans in August, more than one-quarter (27 percent), or 1.93 million, had been out of work for a prolonged period, according to last month’s Bureau of Labor Statistics report.
This is up from 25.5 percent, or 1.77 million, in July.
Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh gave the labor market glowing marks during his keynote address at the Jackson Hole Economic Symposium last month.
With an unemployment rate hovering around 4 percent over the past couple of years, job conditions would suggest that the Fed has achieved its maximum employment mandate.
Last month’s nonfarm payrolls also surged by 162,000, blowing past the consensus forecast of 56,000.
This year’s sluggish growth in U.S. payrolls is likely to present fresh hurdles for job hunters, regional central bank researchers warn.
“In the current ‘low-hire, low-fire’ labor market – which features both slower job creation and less job separation activity (including firings and layoffs) – becoming unemployed can be particularly challenging as finding a new job can be more difficult,” the Richmond Fed economists wrote in a Sept. 1 paper.
America’s labor market has been entrenched in an environment in which employers are neither increasing headcount nor laying off workers.
Weekly unemployment claims have been stuck in a historically low range of 189,000 to 230,000 – near 57-year lows. The number and layoff rate are near record lows. The jobless rate has been down in 241 of 387 metro areas over the past year.
Continuing jobless claims have also been on a downward trajectory since late 2025, a measurement that could signal two trends in the U.S. economy.
First, workers are finding it easier to locate job opportunities. Second, Americans have exhausted their benefits since many states cap eligibility at 26 weeks.
For a growing chorus of workers who have been searching for several months, the search may no longer be worth it, which could help explain the drop in workforce participation.
“The data have yet to show that job-finding prospects are improving meaningfully for those who have been jobless for an extended duration,” the Richmond Fed said.
“In particular, those who have been out of work for a year or more are experiencing more challenges seeking reemployment relative to the ‘standard’ long-term unemployed.”
The U.S. labor force participation rate ticked up to 61.6 percent in August – from 61.4 percent in July – hovering close to its lowest level since the 1970s (excluding the pandemic).
While part of this can be explained by older workers exiting the labor market, young men are not pursuing employment opportunities.
The participation rate for males aged 16 to 24 plummeted to around 56 percent last month, from 69 percent in 2000.
Skills Shortage
But while job growth has been choppy this year, labor demand has been robust.
Job vacancies are close to 7.3 million, and small businesses have indicated they plan to bolster their hiring plans in the coming months.
The challenge for employers is finding qualified workers to fill these openings.
According to the Federal Reserve’s Beige Book – a periodic report summarizing economic conditions across the central bank’s 12 districts – employment demand in the construction and manufacturing sectors was “healthy” this summer.
“Labor availability was mixed. Skilled trades and technical workers were difficult to find,” the report stated.
It is estimated that employers face a talent gap of approximately 1.3 million workers, according to an Aug. 25 report by labor market intelligence firm Lightcast.
Additionally, seven of the 10 most in-demand skilled-trade occupations – construction, electricians, and technicians, for example – already face significant labor shortages.
“The impending lack of skilled trades workers has been a resounding issue in our economy for years,” Ron Hetrick, principal economist at Lightcast, said in a statement.
The skills shortage comes at a time when the United States is witnessing a rebirth of manufacturing amid the artificial intelligence (AI) boom.
The data-center expansion has already brought on about 315,000 additional skilled-trade workers in the past five years, the report found.
An operation run by or on behalf of the Israeli-Singaporean commercial intelligence vendor S2T Unlocking Cyberspace used Claude models to map, classify, and profile social media users across Iran and the Persian Gulf, according to a threat intelligence report published by Anthropic on 11 September.
The platform recorded the locations of users, sorted them as supporters or opponents of their governments, and grouped populations into six demographic categories covering urban, clerical, military, youth, diaspora, and rural.
Its output was written in formal Arabic and styled as official government communications, with sentiment scores broken down by Gulf nationality alongside recommended counternarratives.
The actor fed the model batches of roughly 25 social media posts at a time and directed it to return each poster’s demographic group, location, and political leaning, with confidence ratings attached to every finding.
Anthropic identified a second workstream of more than 255 fabricated social media accounts, which the company said indicated the actor was assembling a stock of fake profiles for later deployment.
In a separate task, the actor directed the model to generate posts for online personas in Persian, Arabic, English, and German, intended to pass as members of both pro- and anti-government Iranian populations.
The company said its findings independently corroborate a February 2023 investigation by the journalism network Forbidden Stories, which documented an S2T surveillance product described in a company brochure recovered from leaked Colombian military files.
Anthropic said the capabilities in that brochure map closely onto the behavior it observed.
Anthropic added that it identified the activity at its pilot stage and found no evidence that later stages of the surveillance chain described by Forbidden Stories were used against real targets before the account was banned.
Israel has invested heavily in cyber capabilities, signals intelligence, artificial intelligence (AI), and advanced surveillance – a technological expansion that shifted the balance of its intelligence collection away from recruited human agents.
Mossad chief Roman Gofman dismissed two of the agency’s most senior officials in August over the failed plot to topple the Iranian government earlier this year.
One had run the intelligence directorate since December while the other headed the Mossad’s Iran division, and both were among the architects of a plan to bring down the Iranian government by igniting nationwide protests and supplying military and communication equipment to opposition groups and insurgents.
Channel 12 said the plan was drawn up in coordination with Washington and was meant to unfold under joint Israeli-US airstrikes.
The New York Times (NYT) reported on 22 March that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had embraced the Mossad’s promise of a popular revolt when he urged US President Donald Trump into the war, and had grown frustrated when no uprising came.
Before the war on Iran, then-Mossad chief David Barnea had told Netanyahu and Trump that once Iran’s leaders were killed, his agency could galvanize the Iranian opposition into renewed mass unrest, swiftly producing regime change.
“Something’s Going To Happen”: DHS Chief Says Lefty Ilhan Omar “Married Her Brother”, Floats Deportation
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said “something’s going to happen” in an ongoing investigation involving unhinged leftist Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), speaking with conservative podcaster Benny Johnson at the GOP midterm convention in Dallas.
Mullin said that Omar married her brother as part of an immigration-fraud scheme and raised the prospect of deportation.
“Something’s going to happen. This is an ongoing investigation. We know that she married her brother to try to bring him into the United States. We know he lives now in London,” Mullin told Johnson on the sidelines of the GOP midterm convention.
Mullin continued:
There may be more to this — the whole family migration, and possibly some illegal activity for them to come to the United States to begin with. But all of this, we’re investigating.
Here’s what I want to make sure we do: if we actually move a case forward, it’s not a political case. It’s an actual case because they did things wrong.
If you decided to break the law or lie on the information you gave to the United States — to be able to come into the United States, through either asylum or because you were just wanting to seek a better life — but you didn’t tell us who you actually were, you lied about certain things about your application.
Those things, there’s no expiration to that. If we can prove it then, that you shouldn’t have been here in the first place, we’ll deport you.
And so we’re looking at — it’s more than just her case. We’re looking at a lot of cases that are very similar to this, that we feel like there may have been fraud from the get-go.
But when we move forward, it’s not political; it’s because you chose to break the nation’s laws.
And I’ve said this multiple times and I continue to say it. I don’t make the laws anymore. I’m in charge of enforcing the laws, and I will not pick and choose which laws I’m going to enforce and which laws I’m not. I’m going to enforce all of them regardless of who you are. Regardless if you’re Omar or some other individual in that community. We’re going to enforce it equally.
🚨BREAKING: DHS Secretary Just Confirmed That Rep. Illhan Omar Did Marry Her Brother
“We know that she married her brother to try to bring him into the United States. There may be more to this, possibly some illegal activity.”
The anti-American congresswoman has long rejected the allegation. She says she legally married British citizen Ahmed Nur Said Elmi in 2009 and told MPR News in 2016 that claims he was her brother were “absurd and offensive.”
Ilhan Omar calls Americans dumb idiots.
Ilhan Omar previously said, “Some people did something on 9/11”.@FBIDirectorKash should launch an investigation into her alleged marriage to her brother to “get him papers.”pic.twitter.com/3N4Mksrfyl
Deportation would present a major legal hurdle for the Trump administration because Omar is a naturalized US citizen. She obtained citizenship in 2000, years before the disputed marriage.
Any effort to remove her would require Mullin and his investigators to have evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that she participated in the immigration-fraud scheme; denaturalization requires proof that she obtained citizenship unlawfully, including through material fraud or concealment.
A 2020 Daily Mail report cited Somali blogger and community leader Abdihakim Osman, who alleged that Omar had married her brother, Ahmed Elmi, to allow him to obtain cheap student loans in the United States.
Just weeks after far-left candidates have won surprising victories in Democratic primaries in Pennsylvania, Florida, Michigan, Colorado, and New York City for the Senate and House in the United States, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has won a widely predicted victory in the election last Sunday for the legislature of Sachsen-Anhalt, one of Germany’s 16 federal states.
Most Democratic officeholders have rallied around their far-left nominees even as the Democratic Socialists of America national platform calls for abolishing police, prisons, and immigration enforcement agencies. In contrast, Germany’s long-established parties – Christian Democrats, Social Democrats, Free Democrats, and Greens – have promised to continue to regard AfD as a “right-wing extremist” group and not to support any coalition with it.
Germany, in its commendable efforts to prevent any recurrence of or sympathy for its Nazi past, imposes limits on political activity Americans would find appalling. And the AfD in its beginnings in the 2000s, as Christopher Caldwell explains in First Things, had members and leaders with disturbing views.
Currently, some of its leaders have views many may consider odious, like supporting Russia over Ukraine, but it appears less likely than some leftist European parties to transgress the boundary between criticism of Israel and incitement against Jews.
The traditional parties’ case for isolating the AfD today is based on one issue, the same issue that has enabled the AfD to sprint ahead of the traditional parties in national polls: immigration. As Caldwell explains, “The Sachsen-Anhalt AfD was classified as ‘proven right-wing extremist’ for its ethnic conception of German citizenship.”
The AfD is not the only European party characterized as “far right” for its advocacy of limiting immigration by establishment organs like the London-based Economist and most dominant news organizations on the continent.
The establishment has looked benignly on immigration, including from Muslim countries in the Middle East, North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia, as an economic boost for a Europe whose low native birth rates have reduced economic growth down toward zero and jeopardized the financing of its generous old-age pension and medical care systems.
Voters have not been persuaded.
In Germany, the AfD, though its strength is concentrated in the former East Germany, leads in national polls over the Christian Democrats, who have led the government most of the time since 1949, and the Social Democrats, whose roots go back to the 1880s.
In France, the National Front’s Marine Le Pen, though sidelined by an establishment-rigged court ruling for months, leads by wide margins in polls for the first round and runoff in the 2027 presidential election. One issue that may help her: aid for air conditioning, scorned during this hot summer by intellectuals as an American abomination.
In Britain, the newly installed Prime Minister Andy Burnham, boosted by his popularity in Manchester, has seen his party leap ahead of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party. But his party, despite its name and history, is still losing many working-class areas and is reliant on support from high-income, high-education, high-immigration metro London.
As for Italy, the fourth most populous European democracy, its Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, initially labeled a far-right fringe candidate, celebrated early this month her achievement of the longest-serving head of government in the republic.
What do Le Pen, Farage, and Meloni have in common? Their objections to immigration, and especially Muslim immigration. For which they have some reasonable basis.
In Germany, former Christian Democrat Chancellor Angela Merkel unilaterally opened the doors to more than a million migrants, most of them young men, in 2015, and, to protests, insisted “Wir schaffen das” – “we can handle this.” But as Germany’s foreign-born population has increased from 8.1 million in 2014 to 13.4 million in 2022, violent crime has soared (despite news media attempts to hide it), and immigrants have dragged down high school student test scores.
Nor has the influx of Muslim immigrants spurred economic growth, as Germany’s economy suffers from self-imposed high energy costs, and Chinese competitors threaten its auto industry. The establishment’s economic arguments for high immigration are in shambles.
What I find most puzzling here is the evident feeling of the European establishment – and one might add that of their American counterparts as well – that opposition to mass immigration from culturally dissimilar sources is somehow morally equivalent to the Holocaust. Why is excluding arguably unassimilable people from your country morally equivalent to murdering millions and millions of people?
Yes, both policies may be sparked by a dislike of characteristics that those excluded and those slaughtered are presumed to share – call it bigotry if you want, and make your valid point that not all members of any group share the characteristics of the group’s average. But when those characteristics tend to undermine the generally and increasingly improving ways in which the peoples of Europe and America have lived together over the lifetime of those of us born during World War II, is there not some reason people might want to exercise caution in changing the cultural mix?
Especially in Europe, where populations haven’t had the success in assimilating newcomers that Americans have had. And perhaps in America as well, where we have been in danger of forgetting or denigrating our forebears’ accomplishments along those lines.
Good counsel, in my view, comes from the liberal San Francisco-based economist Noah Smith. “Liberalism,” he writes in his Substack, “needs a new philosophy of immigration.”
AfD voters, he argues, with American Trump voters clearly in mind, are not just protesting COVID-19 restrictions or responding to “economic despair,” as some of his liberal confreres have argued. It’s “anger over immigration.”
But liberals need to recognize certain principles, Smith argues. That “migration is not a human right.” That “immigration law is legitimate.” That “immigration to America must be for the benefit of Americans.”
The European establishment lost sight of these principles when it cheered Merkel’s admission of more than 1 million, including tens of thousands of young men who consider it morally permissible to rape women not clad in hijabs. The American establishment lost sight of these principles when the Biden administration’s open-borders policy allowed the nation’s foreign-born population to increase (as the Census Bureau has reported) by 8.3 million in four years, compared to 6.3 million in former President Barack Obama’s eight years and 1.6 million in President Donald Trump’s first four.
That leaves an uncomfortably large number of people illegally here. I’ve often said, while advocating legalization of many, though not all, illegal immigrants, that it’s a bad thing for a country and for the individuals involved to have a large number of people living here illegally. I continue to think that’s a valid argument today.
And perhaps that view is having some effect. In the first 20 months of the second Trump administration, the Census Bureau reports, the U.S.’s foreign-born population has been reduced by 2.8 million. Immigration and Customs Enforcement doesn’t account for half that; obviously, some illegal immigrants are choosing to leave before they’re forced to.
Plus, as Smith informs his fellow liberals, Germany is making it harder to get citizenship, France and Italy are tightening border controls, the European Union is toughening asylum rules, Canada is cutting back immigration, and Sweden is paying money to migrants who leave. It no longer makes sense for Germany to cordon off the AfD, as if it were bent on sending migrants to the gas chambers. And if anti-immigration parties have unsavory members, well, that’s a problem with other (all?) political parties as well.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Ammar al-Baluchi remembers the cold most of all. Held nearly naked in a cell lit around the clock by fluorescent bulbs, he referred to his detention “as if I was living in a refrigerator”.
The nephew of self-declared 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Baluchi was one of six to a dozen men believed to be held and tortured in a secret CIA prison in Bucharest between 2003 and 2005. The treatment of detainees at the facility, formally known as “Detention Site Black”, is described in detail in Guantanamo court filings.
Solitary confinement under lights that never switched off, sleep deprivation that at times meant being forced to stand shackled for days, repeated dousing with icy water, and forced shaving and physical handling that interrogators euphemistically logged as “attention grasps” and “facial holds” were common practice.
A photo released by Baluchi’s lawyers to the press in 2024 shows him stripped naked and photographed. It is believed to be the first published image – of tens of thousands – of a “war on terror” detainee in a CIA black site.
“We know they were tortured horrifically,” Ben Keith, a British barrister representing Baluchi outside the US, told Middle East Eye. “It’s not always possible to say which bit of torture took place because they were tortured for days and weeks, but you don’t detain somebody in a black site with the purpose of just talking to them.”
A quarter-century after the 9/11 attacks, which triggered the so-called “war on terror” and devastating US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq that directly killed at least 940,000 people, a US military judge has finally set a trial date for Baluchi: 5 June 2028.
Lieutenant Colonel Michael Schrama ruled this month that the case against Mohammed, Baluchi, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi will begin on that date.
Schrama is the fifth military judge to preside over a case that has been trapped for more than a decade in disputes over evidence, national security secrecy and, above all, whether confessions obtained under torture before the men ever reached Guantanamo can be used at trial.
That question runs directly through a basement in Bucharest, where the accused are believed to have been detained and tortured.
In April 2025, a Guantanamo military judge ruled that statements Baluchi gave the FBI in 2007 were involuntary and inadmissible, tainted by what the court called torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment inflicted on him in CIA custody, including in Romania.
The judge found that Guantanamo’s “modestly changed confinement circumstances” had not been enough to remove the “lingering taint” of what happened before he arrived there.
A gesture of courtesy
The Romanian site was part of a network of secret prisons the CIA ran across three continents in the years after 9/11 – in Thailand, Poland, Lithuania and Romania – as part of a rendition, detention and interrogation program that was formally shut down in 2009.
Romania’s site opened in the autumn of 2003, according to court documents and NGO reports reviewed by MEE. According to a 2019 report by the Rendition Project, the CIA struck its agreement with Romanian authorities to host a black site in mid-October 2002.
By January 2003, the CIA’s Bucharest station was already discussing how to show Romania that “we deeply appreciate the cooperation and support”.
That appreciation had a price: $8m, followed by “millions more”, according to the same Rendition Project report. By autumn, the first batch of five prisoners had arrived.
The late Romanian president Ion Iliescu confirmed the outlines of the arrangement in a 2015 interview with Der Spiegel, describing a request that came “around the turn of the year 2002, 2003” from “our US allies” who asked Romania “for a site”.
He said he approved it in principle as “a gesture of courtesy ahead of our accession to Nato”, and that he deliberately did not ask for details. “We did not interfere with the activities of the USA on this site,” he said. “This request seemed like a minor issue to me as the head of state.”
The details, Iliescu said, were handled by Ioan Talpes, his national security adviser then. Talpes could not be reached for comment but gave a candid account to Der Spiegel in a 2014 interview, saying he discussed “a more intense cooperation” with the CIA from 2003 and understood that it involved detaining people at “one or two locations in Romania”.
He admitted to personally approving the leasing of a government building to the American intelligence agency. Talpes put it more bluntly in Romanian media, saying his country “did not have the interest to know what the Americans were doing” at the site it provided, to prove to Washington that Romania could be trusted.
Crofton Black, a former investigator with the Rendition Project who spent close to a decade tracing the CIA’s rendition network through flight logs and declassified documents, told MEE that he thinks Romania “made the decision [to host the black site] because it was in their interest, and thought the US would cover for them”.
‘The highest state authorities were aware’
Swiss Senator Dick Marty, whose 2007 report to the Council of Europe was one of the earliest and most detailed independent reconstructions of the CIA’s black-site network, concluded that while “very few people” in the countries involved likely knew the centers existed, “the highest state authorities were aware of the CIA’s illegal activities on their territories”.
His report named Romania and Poland specifically as having hosted secret CIA detention facilities. The Council of Europe’s list of Romanians who knew, according to Marty and later research by the Rendition Project, extends beyond Iliescu and Talpeş to a few other officials, including Traian Basescu, who succeeded Iliescu as president in 2004.
MEE reached out to Basescu for comment but did not receive a response by the time of publication. The 2019 report adds a detail Marty did not fully spell out.
After September 2004, Romanian officials were formally briefed by the US ambassador and the CIA’s Bucharest station chief on the program, in a presentation that “clearly described” the use of torture.
“It’s definitively the case – the allegations of torture, the money, the people who were held there – it’s definitively the case that that’s Romania in the court files,” said Black, who co-authored the Rendition Project report.
Unlike the black sites in Lithuania and Poland, which are believed to have been in more remote locations, Romania’s site is believed to have been located in central Bucharest.
An AP and ARD Panorama investigation in 2011 narrowed down the location of the site in Bucharest to the government building of the country’s National Registry Office for Classified Information, also known as Orniss, on a quiet, leafy street in northern Bucharest close to a set of train tracks.
Orniss “categorically denied” speculation that there had been a CIA prison on the premises, telling MEE that it rejected any association between the institution and “the so-called CIA detention centers”.
While the site’s location is disputed, concurring testimonies in court records reveal details of the conditions inside it. The site consisted of six prefabricated cells painted white and tiled with impact-resistant glass, while the cells themselves were mounted on springs, engineered to keep detainees slightly off balance and disoriented.
The site is sometimes referred to as “Bright Light” because of the fluorescent, continuous light inside.
Another detainee held there was Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, accused of being the mastermind of the October 12, 2000 bombing of the USS Cole. He is believed to have been held in Romania between April 2004 and November 2005.
His case reached the European Court of Human Rights, which later found in a landmark 2018 ruling that his detention in Romania involved an “extremely harsh” regime, including blindfolding, total isolation, exposure to loud noise and unbroken light, and leg shackles during every movement. The Court and related records also document sleep deprivation, painful stress positions, slapping and, at one point, forced rectal feeding.
A 2014 US Senate Intelligence Committee report found that the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program in the black sites did not produce unique, life-saving intelligence that could not have been obtained by other means.
A US Senate report on CIA torture revealed that the CIA held at least 119 detainees in its secret detention program, with at least 39 of them subjected to the agency’s “enhanced interrogation techniques,” often without proper authorization.
The CIA also misled oversight bodies and the public about the program’s brutality, while there was little accountability for the abuses.
Continued denial
For two decades, Romania’s official position has been one of denial. The country’s foreign intelligence service replied to an MEE inquiry that “the matters had already been thoroughly examined by the competent judicial authorities, both nationally and within international bodies” and that it could not comment further.
Despite that, the European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2018 that Romania had violated Nashiri’s rights, including by allowing his torture, both through what happened to him and through the state’s failure to properly investigate it.
The Court found that a secret detention center had operated in Romania and that Romanian authorities had “cooperated in the preparation and execution” of the CIA’s rendition and detention programme, fully aware of its nature and purpose even if they were not privy to everything that happened inside.
It took me many years and a lengthy #FOIA lawsuit against the CIA to uncover exactly what happened at the Salt Pit, one of the CIA’s black site prisons in Afghanistan where detainees were tortured. CIA just destroyed part of it, according to NYT
Romania responded by closing the domestic criminal investigation. A case opened in 2012 after a complaint from Nashiri’s lawyers, represented by the Open Society Justice Initiative, had by 2014 been formally classified as an inquiry into unlawful deprivation of liberty and torture.
Lawyers who represented Nashiri in Strasbourg and Romania did not agree to interview requests before publication. But according to a Romanian parliamentary question answered by the foreign ministry in 2018, the Open Society complaint originally filed sought far more than charges of torture and unlawful detention. It asked prosecutors to investigate complicity in murder, unlawful arrest, abuse of office, and failure to report a crime, among other allegations.
Prosecutors narrowed that down in 2014 to two counts: unlawful deprivation of liberty and torture. The investigation went nowhere. In any case, by 2016, the statute of limitations on the alleged crimes had already expired because no investigative steps had been taken that would have suspended the clock, and no suspect had ever been formally identified.
Romania’s public prosecutor’s office told MEE in an official response that the file was closed in March 2021, with the perpetrator classified as “unknown” despite what it described as the use of international cooperation mechanisms to gather evidence.
The same year, the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers expressed “profound regret” that Romania could not show it had used all possible means to establish the facts, three years after the Strasbourg ruling required it to.
Keith, Baluchi’s counsel, said senior Romanian officials acted with direct intent in 2003 and 2004 to allow the CIA to detain, torture and later transfer Baluchi to Lithuania. “We know from the ruling in al-Nashiri the Romanians knew about it; they might have not known exactly what was happening, but they facilitated the CIA to create a black site to torture these men,” Keith said.
“Our contention is that Romania not only facilitated the CIA black site but knew they were being used to torture individuals.”
MEE reached out to Romania’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Justice for comment but did not receive a response by the time of publication. Romania’s domestic intelligence service, SRI, also declined to comment, telling MEE that it lacked legal standing to address claims “circulating in the public space”.
With a trial date now set for June 2028, the confessions extracted under torture at CIA “black sites” – including the facility in Bucharest – have become central to the 9/11 case. So, too, has the role of the governments that allowed the CIA to operate these secret detention and interrogation sites on their territory.
Romania, for its part, is still refusing to talk about what happened in its basement, despite the body of evidence that has emerged. “There’s been years of compelling evidence that Romania hosted a black sit, and the more it has grown, the government continued to deny it was involved,” said Black. “It’s ridiculous, it’s nonsense.”
Florida’s Attorney General Sues Netflix For Allegedly Harvesting, Selling Children’s Data
Florida’s attorney general sued Netflix on Sept. 9 claiming the streaming giant collected data on its youngest viewers and added addictive features to the platform after promising not to.
Attorney General James Uthmeier is seeking billions in damages from the company and asked the judge to order Netflix to stop its alleged deceptive practices.
“Parents were told kids’ profiles were a child’s own space – safe, separate, great for kids,” Uthmeier said in a news conference Wednesday.
“Families believed them. But behind the brand, Netflix built something different.”
In the lawsuit, Jill McLaughlin reporets for The Epoch Times,that Uthmeier claims Netflix offered an ad-free service that promised not to collect or sell data but began to track children and their profiles when it launched an advertising business in 2022.
The streaming service offers an under-12 profile option for children which promotes a non-advertising space, according to the state.
Uthmeier alleges Netflix violated the Florida Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act and the state’s Digital Bill of Rights, including by selling sensitive personal data collected from known children without prior consent.
He seeks a permanent injunction, an order requiring Netflix to purge any deceptively collected data from Floridians, and an end to addictive designs that keep children watching on the platform, in addition to billions of dollars in civil and other monetary relief, he said.
“Parents, not streaming corporations, need to direct the upbringing of children,” Uthmeier said.
In the complaint, Uthmeier stated Netflix’s executive officer Reed Hastings told investors during a Jan. 22, 2020, earnings call the company’s model was not based on using customer data.
“We don’t collect anything, we’re really focused on just making our members happy and we’re not tied up on all that controversy around advertising,” Hastings said.
Hastings also said Netflix wasn’t interested in tracking customers’ locations or other things they were doing. “We want to be the safer spy where you can explore, you can get stimulated, have fun, enjoy, relax, and have none of the controversy around exploiting users with advertising,” Hastings said during the call.
The Netflix executive compared the company to Google, Facebook, and Amazon’s advertising models that used consumer data collection and targeting information, saying Netflix was “not controversial that way.”
Uthmeier’s complaint alleges Hastings’ comments represented to customers that buying Netflix subscriptions bought an escape from tech surveillance, but in fact generated years of “lucrative behavioral data” for the company.
Hastings stepped down as Netflix’s chairman of the board of directors in June.
Uthmeier claims that, behind the scenes, the company accumulated years of consumer data and surveillance and used it when Netflix deployed its advertising business in November 2022.
The lawsuit alleges the streamer uses dark patterns, or subtle designs, to manipulate users to take actions the company wants them to take. The autoplay feature is one of these designs, the complaint alleges.
An attorney listed for Netflix didn’t respond to a request for comment about the lawsuit.
Florida is the second state to sue the streaming giant. Texas filed a lawsuit in May alleging similar violations of the law arising from the collection of users’ data without their knowledge or consent.
