Authored by Tsvetana Paraskova via OilPrice.com,

China aims to have electric and hybrid vehicles account for as much as 70% of all passenger car sales by 2030, in a massive transport shift set to further dent oil demand for road fuels.

As of the end of last year, the share of the so-called new energy vehicles was 54% of all passenger vehicle sales.

In the new five-year plan for the automotive industry compiled by nearly a dozen Chinese government agencies, China also targets to have 40% of new commercial vehicle sales be electric by 2030.

The 70% target by 2030 could even be achieved earlier than planned, analysts say, as this year’s oil and fuel price shock is accelerating the shift to electric vehicles.

EVs and hybrids accounted for 65% of China’s total passenger car sales in August, according to data by the local Passenger Car Association (PCA) cited by Bloomberg.

The ambitious EV targets are expected to continue eroding road fuel demand in China, which has been falling for the second year in a row. This year, the decline has been steeper amid the energy price shock following the start of the war in Iran.

Chinese state refiners expect continued declines and prepare for the future of plateauing and falling road fuel demand.

For example, China’s Sinopec, the world’s top refiner by capacity, expects Chinese oil demand to drop by 8.9% in 2026 from a year earlier amid demand destruction from higher oil prices and the acceleration of electric vehicle adoption. Gasoline demand is set for an 8.7% decline, while diesel consumption is expected to crash by 11.4%, Sinopec Economics & Development Research Institute says.

The high oil prices destroyed some demand and sped up the adoption of EVs, which has been growing anyway in recent years, suppressing total oil demand even without blocked crude supplies in the Middle East.

Authored by Vincent Geloso via FEE,

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is not a publication most would be familiar with. It is meant as a repository of overviews of big topics in philosophy broadly defined, inclusive of political theory. As such, entries added to it are unlikely to generate strong responses by the experts deeply familiar with each individual entry. Every rule has exceptions though.

Recently, Chiara Cordelli, a political philosopher at the University of Chicago, delivered her “three years in the making” commissioned piece on “capitalism.” The piece went viral. The reason that it sparked such attention is that it read to many as basically a rehash of old online talking points spewed by more refined trolls. That is unfair but there is truth to the claim that there is no smoke without fire. It is indeed a boring “takedown” of capitalism.

Let me be precise here: the problem is not that the entry is critical of capitalism. There is nothing wrong with criticising capitalism, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman or classical liberalism. The problem is that much of the discussion does not pass even a modest ideological Turing test. An ideological Turing test asks whether one can state an opposing position so accurately that its proponents would recognise the argument as their own before one proceeds to criticise it. Here, too often, they would not.

This points to a common reflex in debates over “capitalism” and “neoliberalism.” The vocabulary is often not used to define but rather rationalise already-held ideological priors. The characteristics one dislikes are incorporated into the definition of the system, after which those same characteristics are rediscovered as criticisms of it. The conclusion has, in part, been smuggled into the premises. But these end up being recycled over and over as one scholar states it before another regurgitates it back as fact and so forth.

Some examples help show this usual reflex. When describing the “market capitalism” advanced by Hayek and Friedman, Cordelli claims that they believed capitalism required “complete, private, and unregulated markets,” and that this stemmed from their acceptance of a “general equilibrium” view, with the implication that “capitalism goes wrong when it is politically interfered with.” But both claims – which underlie much of the entry – are massively incorrect. Not minor quibbles, mind you, but major and easily verifiable errors. Friedman initially advocated antitrust laws and, while he moderated on this front later in life, he still believed they did some good. He supported a negative income tax – a variant of a guaranteed minimum income – and schooling vouchers. Hardly the mark of someone who believed in the complete absence of political interference. Hayek for his part rejected the idea of general equilibrium altogether and preferred to speak of competition and markets as discovery processes. He defended regulation of natural monopolies and he also spoke in favour of some basic welfare state functions.

But this is not new. This description of Hayek and Friedman – and others like them – has been there since the 1960s and it can be found in the work of many. So too are the replies pointing all of this out. The claim has been recycled and vomited back. The replies have been ignored – the mark of the inability to undergo the key Turing tests I mentioned. Thus, the entry massively misrepresents what it dubs “normative defences” of capitalism.

And then, the preferred views of the entry’s author also eschew major criticism raised at it. The best illustration of this is visible in the considerably detailed treatment that Karl Marx gets. Marx is presented as complete, coherent and accurate. No mentions are made of the fact that Das Kapital self-contradicts itself via the well-known transformation problem. Marx first argues that the value of commodities is determined by the labour required to produce them (i.e., the labour theory of value). This is the key foundation of “exploitation” theory in Marxist theory. But he later recognises that competition tends to equalise profit rates across industries. For that to happen, market prices must diverge from labour values. The problem, then, is explaining how one gets from labour-determined values to observed competitive prices without abandoning the labour theory of value itself. Marx never provides a fully consistent solution to that transformation. And no solution to the problem exists.

It explains why Marxist predictions fail to materialise. The most obvious example is that wages and incomes for unskilled workers were rising while Marx was writing his works. Not only that, he was writing in Britain – a society where inequality was actually falling! Moreover, in the United States – the country most often described as most capitalist by Marxists then and now – even socialist writers like Charles Spahr produced data which, when used with subsequent works, show massive growth in living standards at the bottom while inequality between the top 1% and the bottom 90% either stagnates or actually declines.

Not only did Marx predict that capitalism would generate pauperisation; he also added that it generated persistent pressure to lengthen working hours and lower labour’s share of national income. Historical evidence runs strongly against these predictions: working hours have fallen dramatically since the nineteenth century, both annually and as a share of waking life – with only modest influence on unions or legislation. Marx’s prediction about labour’s share of income also fares poorly empirically, as many studies find that greater economic freedom (a proxy for capitalism) and globalisation are associated with a larger share of national income accruing to labour. In fact, in causal empirical tests, economies that become more capitalist (by liberalising) tend to show rising boats for everyone. Taken together, these findings suggest that some of Marx’s central empirical predictions about capitalist labour markets have been contradicted rather than confirmed by subsequent economic history.

All of these massive holes in the Marxist account of capitalism are ignored and set aside. The criticisms are still presented as high-quality despite the fact that they have repeatedly failed to generate the predictions they are supposed to.

This is precisely where the usual reflex in debates over “capitalism” becomes problematic: early and criticised claims (even debunked ones) are built into the description of capitalism itself and then rediscovered as criticisms of it, even when the empirical evidence points in the opposite direction. Once repeated often enough, such claims pass from one scholar to another as established facts, with the original empirical proposition increasingly insulated from serious testing. The entry falls prey to this and while it does offer insight into how some people think about capitalism, it is merely a sophisticated rant – nothing more.

This article was originally published by CapX.

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

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

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

The audience laughed, but he was being serious.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Bill Maher (@billmaher) September 12, 2026

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

After it was widely reported this week that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman urgently sought military assistance from President Donald Trump amid the rapid Houthi takeover of Yemen’s Red Sea coast from the forces of the internationally recognized Sanaa government, Trump has said the Houthis are in contact with him and have pledged to let ships through the Bab Al-Mandab Strait. 

Trump is currently in Ireland. 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.

Trump: “The Houthis called us. They don’t want to fight with us. They let us know they don’t want to fight with us. They don’t want us to go after them. They would much prefer not having us involved, and they are letting most ships go through. There’s just one country they’re not… pic.twitter.com/munm8N0Gys

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 12, 2026

Indeed this is consistent with Ansar Allah’s latest statements declaring the Red Sea passage remains open, but closed to Saudi and Israeli-linked shipping.

This seems to confirm prior reporting that said Trump rejected MbS’ request for US military intervention in Yemen. To review:

Axios: Trump declined Saudi requests to strike Ansarallah as they advanced Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman called U.S. President Donald Trump twice on Thursday, urging him to launch strikes against Yemen’s Ansarallah as they advanced along the Red Sea coast toward Bab al-Mandab, two U.S. officials told Axios. Trump declined, with Washington saying it has no plans to intervene directly for now.

It seems Washington also doesn’t want to see the Iran conflict explode into a runaway regional war which would certainly greatly exacerbate the global energy crisis.

Aaran Kennedy, a maritime security analyst with the global consultancy, Control Risks, has described to Al Jazeera that while “These advances strengthen the Houthis’ already strong position over the Red Sea. They simply make it even easier for the Houthis to target shipping” – the reality remains “It doesn’t necessarily mean that, right now, they’re going to expand their maritime target set.”

Kennedy believes a full Bab al-Mandeb closure is unlikely. “Just because the Houthis have gained this territory near the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, it doesn’t mean that they’re going to close it down. That situation remains highly unlikely. But what it does do is it expands their capabilities because it puts their weaponry closer to the Red Sea shipping lanes.”

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.

Here’s what we know https://t.co/nrVeKbd8EJ pic.twitter.com/qsqxbeJ0dh

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) September 11, 2026

But this does also ultimately given Tehran huge leverage, given it can persuade its Houthi allies anytime to take drastic action over the strait. Houthi threats over regional waters was on full display during the height of the Gaza War, which saw the US Navy get involved in the Red Sea, but warships later departed under the guise of handing security over to regional as well as European allies.

***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:

Dario is right

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 12, 2026

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.

— Sam Altman (@sama) September 12, 2026

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.

Seems like a setup

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 10, 2026

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 summer was 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.

This is your correspondent, signing off.

After the media spent the last two weeks casting pent up handmaiden feminist energy at the ‘male holdout’ juror who caused a mistrial in the Lindsay Clancy case, “CBS Mornings” anchor Gayle King had a visible record scratch after one of the karen jurors revealed that the holdout was a black man that the white ladies virtually lynched in the town square of national dialogue for not letting Clancy off the hook for murdering her children. 

“Was the person of color a woman or a man?” King asked juror Paula Devlin, who explained how 11 members of the jury were white and one was a person of color. 

“Is the holdout juror… a person of c– a black man?” King probed further…

To which Devlin replied: “Yes” – causing King to have to ‘sit with that.’

Watch:

NEW: Lindsay Clancy juror Paula Devlin reveals on ‘CBS Mornings’ that the lone, male holdout juror who voted to find Clancy guilty of murdering her children was the *only* person of color — a black man.

The 11 not-guilty jurors — who hectored him for a week to cave — were all… pic.twitter.com/5qirHNGCyx

— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) September 11, 2026

Reminder – this wasn’t just a black man, it was an arrogant black man.

Female jurors in the Lindsay Clancy trial FUME over the lone male holdout: “He was very arrogant. He just completely disregarded the information they gave.” pic.twitter.com/3TF0SrlG6t

— TheBlaze (@theblaze) September 8, 2026

Needless to say, it’s all anyone’s talking about today…

“The other jurors have spent all week calling the lone male holdout an arrogant, uncooperative dummy who didn’t understand the law or follow the rules. Now we come to find out that they were talking about the only black guy in the room this whole time. Leftists have accidentally sided with 11 white bullies against a black man who stood up to them. Just an absolutely amazing twist. You couldn’t script it any better,” said the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh, who had several great takes. 

This is amazing. The Left has been trashing this guy all week only to find out that he was the only black person on the jury, getting hounded by bossy white women. Just perfect. https://t.co/yooCcogaU8

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) September 11, 2026

This comedy skit is priceless now listen to the end pic.twitter.com/Olf4LXLQ82

— MoonriseBill (@MoonriseBill) September 11, 2026

The Left trying to figure out how to smear the lone holdout juror in the Lindsay Clancy trial now that they know it was a black man.pic.twitter.com/XJnIGRksvz

— C3 (@C_3C_3) September 11, 2026

This is so much better knowing the hold out juror is a black man. pic.twitter.com/eKkzkvlEQ8

— Rosie Memos (@almostjingo) September 11, 2026

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is floating the end of a 60-day grace period that currently allows some immigrants to remain in the United States after they lose their jobs.

Immigrants with temporary work visas such as H-1B visas would have to immediately leave the country if they no longer have a job, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said in a proposed rule filed on Sept. 10 and set to be formally published in the Federal Register on Sept. 11.

Such visas are contingent on an immigrant’s employment, and a company sponsors the employee. Some of the visas are granted only to workers who have specialized expertise.

DHS originally provided the grace period to encourage immigrants who no longer have jobs to remain in the United States and try to obtain another form of legal status or get another job, Mullin said. But rulemakers did not sufficiently consider the negative effects of the grace period, such as burdening immigration officers who handle additional paperwork from visa holders during the time period, he said.

“DHS now believes that once the alien is no longer fulfilling the very specific conditions under which he or she was admitted or otherwise provided 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),” he wrote.

“This is generally consistent with the requirements for aliens admitted or otherwise provided status in other non-immigrant categories when the alien fails to fulfill the very specific conditions under which he or she was admitted or otherwise provided status.”

If finalized, the change could cause thousands of jobs to not be filled by specialty foreign workers, DHS estimates.

The department is presuming that the companies looking to fill the jobs “will either offer the same jobs to equally qualified U.S. workers or go through the I-129 petition process depending on their workforce requirement,” the notice said, referring to the process of bringing foreign workers to the United States.

“In some situations, aliens who have gone abroad can be readmitted for employment if the I-129 petition filed on their behalf is approved and the alien is admissible. Even though these petitioners would witness a temporary loss of productivity, they might be able to gain U.S. workers for the positions that were generally offered to … nonimmigrants during the possible grace period,” the notice reads.

The proposal will be available online on Sept. 11. Parties can comment on the proposal for 60 days. Officials will then decide whether to finalize it, potentially with alterations in response to comments.

The two main 9/11 ceremonies on Friday marking 25 years since the terror attacks were held at Ground Zero in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington DC. President Trump attended the latter while VP JD Vance was present at the former.

War Secretary Pete Hegseth also helped lead remembrance events at the Pentagon, but at the annual NYC commemoration, Vance appeared to keep a lower profile while listening from the audience to names being read out.

Trump and Hegseth in their respective addresses tried to tie the ongoing Iran war to Sept. 11, 2001. They both sough to frame current Iran action as a continuation of the Global War on Terror.

“We salute the service members working right now to ensure the world’s number one sponsor of terror, the Islamic Republic of Iran, will never ever have a nuclear weapon,” Trump said at the Pentagon.

As for Hegseth, he spoke just ahead of the president and said that US forces remain “vigilant” against the “Islamic theocracy” in Iran.

“Our warriors have fought an Islamic theocracy that has wished us death for nearly half a century, that cheered on 9/11,” he said.

“A regime that has sponsored terrorist attacks against Americans for decades, killing thousands, including our comrades in Iraq and Afghanistan. But they did not factor in this president,” the Pentagon chief continued.

“We’re still sending terrorists where they belong — to hell — and tankers to the bottom of the ocean, where they belong,” Hegseth added. “And we are ensuring that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon.”

Ironically it was close American ally Saudi Arabia which actually factors in most directly to the 9/11 tragedy, and family members of victims have filed a lawsuit against the kingdom for state-level and intelligence complicity in the terror attacks.

The majority of the 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, and each and every one of them was a Sunni Muslim. As for Iran, it is a historic enemy of the Sunni Saudi kingdom and practices Shia Islam, which Riyadh considers ‘heretical’.

Trying to link Iran to 9/11 also has a whiff of Bush-era propaganda to it. Not only did some NeoCon pundits at the time try to link Tehran to it, but a major talking point was also a far-fetched ‘Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda alliance’.

Of course, Saddam was a secular Ba’athist autocrat and historically sought to persecute radical fundamentalist sects. Still, Iraq got invaded on the heels of Afghanistan and Saddam was overthrown by US forces.

More recently, in the last decade of the Syria proxy war, Iranian officers and Shia militias were typically the ones along the front lines fighting ISIS and other Sunni jihad movements. The latter were often sponsored by the Gulf states as well as US intelligence. When it comes to the Middle East and Washington policy, nothing is ever as it seems.

Authored by Mike McDaniel via AmericanThinker.com,

Among the things a police career taught me is that a small number—usually single digits—of felons commit most felonies. They’ll draw in other criminals, involve them in their crimes, and when convenient, abandon them to arrest. There is no honor among thieves. And the number of the most prolific felons increases and decreases slightly from place to place, and in relation to the specific type of crime.

In some places, crooks specialize in home or business burglaries. In others, specialization might involve burglarizing vehicles or carjacking.

But one thing is certain: take these small bands of crooks out of circulation, and the number of their crimes in those areas immediately, dramatically plummets. The trick is identifying the crooks and rolling them over on each other. Catch some in the act or with the evidence, and the second part is usually easier than the first. When they’re put away, innumerable people we’ll never know don’t end up as victims.

Of course, these kinds of positive results also rely on prosecutors willing to prosecute and judges willing to keep criminals in jail and hand down realistic sentences. That’s a real issue in blue cities and states.

Now it seems Sweden is discovering this reality, particularly where gang-committed, immigrant crime is involved. And it’s about time too. Reports out of Sweden, which has shown suicidal empathy for third-world barbarians, indicate that hand grenade(?!) attacks have become common. At PJ Media, Stephen Green explains:

So Sweden elected a conservative prime minister four years ago who promised to send criminal migrants back to their home countries, and you’ll never believe what happened next.

Violent crime went down. Way down. Particularly gang violence, according to a new report out this week.

Imagine that.

Graphic: X Post

When he campaigned for the PM spot in 2022, Ulf Kristersson — then a member of the Swedish parliament or riksdag — said of violent acts: “If you commit such crimes in Sweden and are not a Swedish citizen, you should be thrown out of the country.”

Apparently, Swedes got tired of dodging grenades and having their women raped.

By the summer of ’22, escalating gang shootings and even bombings were commonplace in what had once been a country better known for spas than jihads. In total, Sweden suffered 361 shootings, 62 shooting deaths, and 90 bombings. The problem with migrant gangs escalated so quickly that Swedish authorities didn’t bother to record bombings until 2018.

By the last election, even the governing soft-on-crime Social Democrats promised tougher measures, but that wasn’t enough to stop Kristersson from putting together a coalition big enough to oust the SD.

Sweden didn’t bother to report bombings until 2018? That’s terminal suicidal empathy, but the Swedes had enough. They better funded the police, did more wiretapping, and directly focused on stopping gang recruitment among the young.

As it turns out — and again, you won’t be shocked by this — sending foreign criminals home is just as effective as locking up homegrown thugs. But the numbers must be seen to be believed. 

Shootings are down “by 80 per cent since their 2022 peak,” the Financial Times reported on Monday, and Kristersson reduced “the number of asylum seekers to its lowest in four decades.”

It was apparently a huge deal earlier this year when one Swedish paper reported “No shootings in May.”

“The fact that you have headlines saying no shootings at all this month: it says something,” Kristersson told the FT.

Sadly, the national tendency toward suicide may once again assert itself:

Still, Sweden holds another national election on Sunday, and the Social Democrats could very well take power again. “There’s a lot of discussion about the Winston Churchill effect,” Mattias Karlsson, the nationalist Sweden Democrats’ chief ideologue, said.

Having all but won the war, will Swedish voters reject the man who got them this far?

The “Churchill effect” refers to what happened to Winston Churchill after WWII. Without him, England likely would have fallen to the Nazis. He was, during the war, the indispensable man, but once the war was won, he was put out to pasture, and the kinds of political forces that would have lost the war wormed their way back into power.

Having once again discovered the benefits of national sanity, Will Sweden fall back into leftist delusion and defeat? Perhaps there’s a lesson there for our midterms and beyond.

We have for many years carefully followed and documented what has emerged in the over two decades since the 9/11 attacks concerning Saudi state complicity. Families of 9/11 victims have long had a lawsuit pending against Saudi government. The kingdom’s intel officials show up in all kinds of declassified documents, and there remain plenty of unanswered questions concerning several other shady individuals.

On Friday during the 25th anniversary memorial service for 9/11 at Ground Zero in New York City there was an incredibly rare moment in which the widow of a victim broke from the script and openly called for 9/11 truth and justice. When she called out Saudi Arabia, a close US ally whose highest intel officials were frequently seen with then President George W. Bush (see “Bandar Bush”), it elicited applause from the crowd.

A 9/11 widow just rent rogue in NYC…

She read her husbands name and then called out Islamic terror and Saudi Arabia.

She called out Bush, Obama, Biden and JD Vance/Trump while they sat right in front of her. The entire crowd at ground zero cheered. pic.twitter.com/xICEZL6FOv

— Geiger Capital (@Geiger_Capital) September 11, 2026

“For 25 years, administration after administration, including leaders in front of us here today, chose to protect the Saudis instead of standing with the 9/11 families,” Terry Strada, whose husband Tom Strada – a bond broker – was killed in the north tower of the World Trade Center, stated.

“They withheld evidence,” Strada continued. “They vetoed JASTA [Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act]. They broke promises, both public and private. It has been one betrayal after another.”

She called on the Trump administration to “tell the Saudis to stop lying” and to “Tell them that if they want to be friends with the USA, they cannot continue to deny all of this, all of the pain, all of the destruction that we have all been suffering through.”

Axios reports additionally that:

Another man participating in reading the names of the victims also appealed to Trump to “release the unredacted files that implicate Saudi Arabia while what’s left of the victims’ families are still alive to see it.”

The oil-rich nation has long fought ongoing claims from victims’ families, but last year, a federal judge determined that enough evidence existed to infer the kingdom employed two operatives to assist the hijackers, Axios’ Marc Caputo previously reported.

Vice President JD Vance was in attendance for the Friday Ground Zero Memorial while President Trump led events at the Pentagon, which was also attacked on that tragic day.

🚨WATCH: Vice President JD Vance listens as 9/11 victims’ family members call for an investigation into Saudi Arabia’s alleged role in the attacks.

🎥:C-SPAN pic.twitter.com/6cClIH4DA5

— Off The Press (@OffThePress1) September 11, 2026

Strada expressed appreciation for Vance attending the event and urged him to “carry that message back” to the president.

The United States and Saudi Arabia have been essentially tied at the hip for many decades of what can be called a long-running and institutionalized “oil for guns” relationship. The Saudis also helped Washington topple Assad in Syria, and host an array of US bases and closely work with US intelligence.

*  *  *

Meanwhile, in Epstein’s very interesting art collection…