FBI Working With DHS, ODNI On Election Integrity: FBI Director

Authored by Frank Fang and Jan Jekielek via The Epoch Times,

The FBI worked with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) on the recent disclosure by President Donald Trump on foreign influence on U.S. elections, agency director Kash Patel said.

FBI Director Kash Patel speaks during an interview at the FBI headquarters in Washington on Aug. 4, 2026. Madalina Kilroy/The Epoch Times

During an interview with EpochTV's "American Thought Leaders," aired on Aug. 8, Patel said the three agencies worked as partners, but the FBI played a smaller role, while DHS and ODNI had the technical capabilities and a remit focused more on overseas incidents involving U.S. election infrastructure.

"We shared our information. We made a lot of our information public through President Trump's speech the other week," Patel said.

Patel said the three agencies acted at Trump's direction.

"I think the president was right to go to the nation and the world and put forth this information, but it was only possible because the president directed us to declassify and divulge this information to the American public and the world," Patel said.

In a primetime address on July 16, Trump announced the declassification of documents that showed China had illicitly acquired 220 million U.S. voter files, including names, addresses, phone numbers, and other information.

"This data loss presents an unprecedented election security nightmare," Trump said during the address.

Trump did not explicitly claim that China altered the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

China began targeting him in an operation in 2018, Trump said, citing a CIA report that described an effort to "reduce [his] votes and make him resign or prevent his reelection."

The CIA report found "China was working to influence the results of the U.S. midterm elections, and later the results of the 2020 presidential election itself," according to Trump.

In 2019, China had a strategy focusing on "undermining domestic confidence in the U.S. president," Trump added.

"They wanted to just make [it] sound like your president wasn't so hot when actually your president has done a great job," he said.

That strategy included influencing U.S. business leaders to turn against him, Trump said.

"The Chinese government sought to identify U.S. journalists who had reported negatively on the U.S. president and pay them large sums of money to write more negative articles about him, as many as they could," he said.

The declassified documents included a CIA wire memo from July 2000, which included information from the FBI, showing that the Chinese Communist Party was targeting "personal e-mail accounts of senior US leadership, including officials in the Executive Office of the President and high-ranking officials in multiple Executive Branch organizations, Congress, and the federal judiciary."

Separately, a National Intelligence Council report found that "Beijing has expanded its cyber collection of data related to the 2020 US elections by carrying out opportunistic intrusions against US private-sector entities in efforts to collect information on US political candidates, campaigns, donors, and voter data."

Trump's claim on China's election interference by targeting American voter registration data was backed by the heads of the ODNI, the National Security Agency, the CIA, and the Department of Homeland Security, according to a White House fact sheet released on July 30.

In September 2025, Patel discussed China's threats extensively during a hearing before the House Committee on the Judiciary.

China "presents the greatest and most sophisticated cyber threat to U.S. public safety and national security," Patel said, according to written testimony.

He singled out one particular Chinese threat group, "Salt Typhoon," which had breached the networks of multiple telecommunications companies in the United States and elsewhere.

Patel also noted in his written testimony that all 55 of his agency's field offices had active Chinese counterintelligence investigations.

"This calendar year alone, as I was mentioning, our counterintelligence operations and cases brought against the Chinese are up by something like 40 percent," Patel told House lawmakers at the hearing.

"The PRC [People's Republic of China] has deliberately created an environment that abuses global interconnectedness and encourages intellectual property theft, using human intelligence officers, corrupt corporate insiders, and reckless and indiscriminate cyber intrusions," Patel stated in his written testimony.

Watch the full 'American Thought Leaders' interview below, covering a great deal more than election integrity:

00:00 Intro 
1:31 World Cup Security 
4:17 Scam Centers & Operation Blackout 
6:55 Pig Butchering Scams 
11:25 Slaves in Scam Compounds 
13:19 Why's the FBI Working with China's MPS? 
19:00 How Does the FBI Get the Money Back?
23:41 Advice to Viewers on Scams 
26:00 Chinese Interference in 2020 Election
28:26 Removal of Spies 
31:42 CCP Targeting Americans with Security Clearances 
35:26 Tackling Transnational Repression
38:40 Terrorist Attacks Thwarted
41:26 What is the Director's Strategic Information Center (DSIC)?
44:33 Major Reforms at the FBI 

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/10/2026 - 17:00

Trump Shares Hillary Clinton Op-Ed Backing His Gaza Plan In Face Of Bibi Rejection

President Trump is currently experiencing a rare moment of his plans for the Mideast region being rejected on multiple fronts - even among allies, apparently. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over weekend rejected a US-backed 15-point peace plan for Gaza, which marks a rare and very glaring public break with Trump.

Netanyahu was surprisingly up front in acknowledging the complete break in policy vision from the White House. "Contrary to all those who preach to us, we do what must be done for Israel’s security and we can and will stand our ground even against our best friends when necessary," he stated.

He said he was confronting a "wave of rumors about Israeli weakness and Israeli withdrawals on all fronts" and made clear that Israel won't succumb to ongoing US pressure to end wars in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran - unless Israel decides it is in its security interest.

Anadolu/Getty Images

Netanyahu was explicit on rejecting Trump's Board of Peace plan which was presented in July:

"Israel rejects the 15-point document," Netanyahu said at the start of a cabinet meeting on Sunday, speaking in Hebrew. "The IDF will not make any withdrawal until Hamas is truly disarmed and will continue to thwart threats against our forces and citizens."

A Hamas statement in the meantime stood by the plan. It said the group "affirms its commitment" to Trump's 15-point plan for the second phase of the ceasefire agreement with Israel, "and establishing a clear timetable for their implementation."

"We call upon the mediators, guarantors, and the Peace Council to assume their responsibilities, ensure the commitment of all parties to what has been agreed upon, and prevent any violations or breaches that could disrupt the implementation process or undermine the ceasefire agreement," the Hamas statement added.

Even CNN has picked up on the fact that Netanyahu - whose government receives literally billions of dollars in US funds and arms each year - has been unusually blunt in his rejection of Trump's big initiative:

On tricky issues, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s preference is to kick the can down the road. If he must take a position, he likes to include a twist of ambiguity, some wiggle room, just in case things get hairy later. Not this time, though, on the subject of US President Donald Trump’s roadmap for progressing the Gaza ceasefire agreement.

While the Israeli leader risks facing the wrath of Trump, it has been about a full day since reports of the glaring Israeli rebuff have emerged, and yet there's been no immediate Truth Social diatribe or statement calling out Bibi.

And now the Middle East strategy "Ls" are piling up, the same outlet observes:

The US president – more desperate than ever for a win, as his Iran folly looks increasingly like handing him an L – reinvested in Gaza 10 days ago, declaring that his Board of Peace had reached a “historic agreement” with Hamas for its complete disarmament. The board’s top envoy, Nickolay Mladenov, went on to explain carefully on X that decommissioning would need to take place “in lockstep” with Israeli troop withdrawal, suggesting a phased process by which the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) would pull back in stages from positions inside Gaza, as Hamas turned in its arms.

It could be that Netanyahu too sees Trump up against the ropes when it comes to the Middle East, and views this as an opportunity to assert Israel's 'least-bad option'.

Again, Trump has remained quiet on the Netanyahu issue, but surprisingly presented 'validation' from an unlikely source - former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who said she supported his Gaza plan.

She argued in an op-ed that there is no alternative to Trump's Gaza plan, and that she's still able to acknowledge this despite being an "implacable opponent of the president".

Perhaps Trump might be telling himself that Netanyahu's public betrayal is just an "election thing" and so he must speak primarily to domestic voters, given the country's general election is just under 12 weeks away.

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/10/2026 - 16:40

Democrats' Frankenstein Turns: Communist Ghost Dance Now Set To Devour The Party

Authored by James Howard Kunstler,

"Kill them. Murder them. Let the streets soak in their red capitalist blood.”

- Hasan Piker

You can’t overstate the power of ideas, especially bad ideas, and super-especially bad ideas that are really just manifestations of emotional states such as envy, vengefulness, enmity, sloth, and greed. Did somebody say communism? A lot of people are saying it lately. This garbage barge of management nostrums for the ills of advanced industrial society has steamed back into New York Harbor and is busy now dispatching its agents across the land.

It’s yet another youth movement in an America which cultivates them at regular intervals associated with Fourth Turnings. I happened to be in college during the last one, the hippie rebellion of the late 1960s. It was mostly adolescent sexual energy tinged with resentment over the military draft and the war that went with it, plus a lot of marketing opportunities for music and clothing.

The US economy back then was still a roaring industrial engine. The comforts of that bygone time are legendary. You could easily support a family on an assembly-line job. College was cheap as hell — my State U charged about $500-a-year for tuition and room-and-board. (Imagine that!) You could hide-out from the draft there, too. The new birth-control pill turned campus life into a non-stop orgy with classes for R & R. Is it any wonder that the hippies morphed so easily into hedge funders?

This time around it’s pretty ugly for the youth demographic. College for them turned out to be a life-altering swindle, burdening the young with unpayable loans that can’t even be escaped via bankruptcy. Even the sex angle was ruined by vindictive feminism and the trans fad. Work is scarce and it’s nearly impossible to make a living at it, that is, pay for food and a roof over your head (and, ugh, those loan repayments!). Plus, work is mostly found only in meaningless service to despotic corporations. The most enterprising might land a job in an NGO, but the work there is “activism,” which is pretend work, productive of nothing but the acting-out of grievances.

These grievances, it has been noted by many high-toned observers like VDH, are real enough to provoke a desperate reach for remedies, and communism is a ready-made portfolio for all that. In the 1960s, we still had the reverberations of the civil rights crusade setting a basic moral tone for hippiedom. But fifty years later, that has all mutated into a race-and-gender hustle that adds so much piquancy to the recycled communist agenda. (Note that a hustle is a low-grade racket, and a racket is an effort to get something for nothing.)

So, today’s communist program is not just a war against the injustices of capital, but a jihad against the Western Civ horse that capital rode in on, and most particularly the white horseman up in the saddle.

Kotkin’s explanation of why socialism is attractive to the young and the intellectuals feels very accurate, especially what he says about the young in the first thirty seconds. https://t.co/JvuDLE2pwS

— Clifford Asness (@CliffordAsness) August 9, 2026

Hasan Piker, the present guru and demigod of the movement, put it pretty plainly in a Twitch-stream a few years back when he was rising to stardom on Uncle Cenk Uygur’s Young Turk Network.

“We want more immigrants to come into your countries and then they’re gonna fuck your sisters and then your daughters — we’re here to destroy the White race, bitch.”

Piker is also a leading amplifier of Jew-hatred and other calumnies such as the USA “deserved” the 9/11 attacks. Apropos of our action in Iran, Piker quipped, American soldiers should be shot at like cattle (link).

Piker is rumored to have earned over $6-million on Twitch. He’s quite tall (6’4”) ripped, and a snappy dresser, often sporting old-fashioned sport-jackets with a necktie (dress for success?) and is probably catnip to the cat ladies of Gen Z, who comprise the bulk of the activist corps of the rising Gen Z Democratic Socialists - as the communists have styled themselves to avoid stimulating any action around the Communist Control Act of 1954 (50 U.S.C. §§ 841–844), which categorizes the Communist Party per se as “an instrumentality of a conspiracy to overthrow the Government of the United States.”

The dapper Hasan Piker, dressed for success

Altogether, Hasan Piker and the Democratic Socialists pose quite a vexing problem for the pathetic, old, square, bloviating chuds in the Democratic Party of the Chuck Schumer / Cory Booker ilk. Other bloggers (e.g., Jeff Childers at Coffee & Covid) have observed that Democratic Socialism is the monster that the Dems have been working on sedulously for more than a decade in their Frankenstein lab of Gramscian cultural overthrow. The monster has escaped and is now out on the highways and in the hedges terrorizing the public.

You are surely aware that the entire regular agenda of the Democratic Party has for some time been patently insane. They are still wasting the nation’s patience with debates over the self-evident idiocy of men in women’s sports, resistance to the deportation of illegal immigrants, and their obviously evil opposition to voter ID. Communism is just the icing on that fruitcake. The recent primary election victories of such prodigies as Abdul El-Sayed, Melat Kiros, and Darializa Avila Chevalier, along with the ongoing capers of Mayor Zohran Mamdani pretending to govern New York City, must be giving the old guard the vapors.

And yet, the most pathetic actual commie among them, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), the Jewish, Israel-hating alte kocker, abides and even thrives in his new role as Godfather to this hatch of larval communist youth. This is Bernie’s revenge on the party that robbed him of two presidential nominations.

He’s doing what all good Jacobins do — what they live for! He has sentenced his old comrades of the DNC to death. He’s stuffing his old enemies into the tumbrel and carting them off to the public square for execution.

They can see it coming and it’s giving them the heebie-jeebies.

And finally, of course, the Mamdanis and El-Sayeds and their spawn will come for Bernie, too, leaving only AOC in the ensanguinated ruins to become America’s Eva Perón.

Wait for that!

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/10/2026 - 16:20

Oman Says Oil Spill From Grounded Tanker Near Coast Covers 400 Square km

Leaking crude oil from a tanker grounded off a nature reserve in Oman has created a slick covering almost ‌400 square kilometres, a size six-and-a-half times the land area of Manhattan, the country's government said on Monday. The Caroline Bezengi is loaded with close to one million barrels of Russian oil bound for Asia and first reported difficulties on June 8 off Yemen, with two maritime security sources saying initial assessments indicated a blast had occurred onboard. No party has taken responsibility for ​attacking the vessel.

Oman, in its first public disclosure on the environmental impact, said on Monday it was seeking to tackle ​the oil leak near the Hallaniyat Islands. 

Oman's Sultan Haitham bin Tarik issued a royal decree last year creating ⁠a nature reserve around the islands, an area that is home to wildlife including Arabian Sea humpback whales and Socotra cormorants.

The oil ​slick covers some 390 square km (150 square miles), Oman's Environment Authority said in a statement carried by the state news agency, adding that ​there was no concern for facilities in the area including water desalination plants and tourist facilities.

Environmental group Greenpeace last week estimated the slick at around 600 square kilometres citing analysis of satellite imagery.
It extends northeast of the islands and is within an estimated seven kilometres of the coast, the authority said.

A spill of ​this scale requires dispersant be sprayed across the affected area by aircraft and the use of booms and other equipment to collect ​the oil before it reaches the shore or sinks to the sea floor, said Tony Gutierrez, professor of environmental microbiology and biotechnology at Edinburgh's Heriot-Watt University.

"If ‌this ⁠oil is kept offshore, the impact will be much less than if the oil reaches shallower waters and the actual coastline," he said, citing the impact on diverse marine life such as coral, birds and fish.

"You could find oil still there years later. And that's what happened with Exxon Valdez. Ten years down the line, there still were remnants of oil," he said, referring to a 1989 spill in Alaska.

An ​analysis by Reuters of satellite ​imagery and shipping specialists showed the ⁠spill from the stranded 274-metre (900-foot) tanker was still spreading at the end of last month, raising concern about possible environmental damage.

The Caroline Bezengi loaded at Russia's Black Sea port of Novorossiysk in April and passed ​through the Suez Canal at the end of May, ship-tracking data shows.

The grounded tanker had previously been sanctioned by the UK and the European Union over its role in transporting Russian oil. It was last seen sailing under a false Cameroon flag, according to the Equasis maritime database. 

Built in 2001, it is ​part of the ⁠so-called shadow fleet of older oil tankers used by Russia which lack Western insurance cover and sail under the flags of various nations to obscure their true ownership. It was listed on public shipping databases as flying the Cameroon flag but was among 39 vessels de-listed from Cameroon’s ship registry ⁠in June. The ​ship is subject to sanctions imposed by the European Union, Ukraine, the UK, ​Canada and Switzerland.

It was unclear how the ship became stuck, but it was hauling about 1 million barrels of Russia’s Urals crude loaded in mid-May. Ukraine has repeatedly attacked ships carrying Russian oil. However, the vessel is further away from Russian waters than ships Ukraine has hit in the past.

Its registered owner is Rentoor Shipmanagement Ltd and its manager is Villar Shipmanagement Ltd, according to LSEG data. Reuters could not immediately reach those firms, which appear ​to be based in China.

Authorities are working to identify the sources of the leak, contain the environmental damage, secure the vessel and safely transfer its remaining oil cargo, the news report added. They’re also conducting aerial surveillance, subsea diving inspections and field surveys, using satellite imagery and environmental modeling to track the slick’s movement and forecast its drift.

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/10/2026 - 15:45

$20 Million In Cocaine Found Beneath Floorboards Of Truck Trailer At California Border

By Phil Brink of FreightWaves,

Federal officers uncovered more than 1,000 pounds of cocaine concealed beneath floorboards on a commercial truck’s attached flatbed trailer. The truck arrived at California’s Calexico Port of Entry. Authorities estimated the recovered narcotics were worth more than $20 million. The shipment also included 269 bundles of rebar.

The driver, Jose Manuel Lopez Lopez, was the truck’s only occupant, according to federal prosecutors. Lopez, 44, entered the United States from Mexicali, Mexico. Officers arrested him after finding 366 packages within the trailer. The cocaine weighed 1,002.13 pounds, or 454.56 kilograms.

Inspectors find drugs beneath trailer floor

Customs and Border Protection officers X-rayed the attached flatbed during the border inspection. The scan showed anomalies in its wooden floorboards. A drug-sniffing dog then alerted officers to the equipment. Investigators unloaded the rebar before removing the planks.

Officers found packages stuffed beneath those boards, the U.S. Attorney’s Office reported. Homeland Security Investigations agents assisted the inquiry. Drug Enforcement Administration personnel also participated in the case. Prosecutors described the amount as “a tremendous amount of drugs, even by the standards of this district.”

The recovery marked the Southern District of California’s second-largest cocaine seizure during 2026. The larger May investigation began with a months-long task force inquiry into a supposed retail store near Otay Mesa. Agents later found a 1,933-foot cross-border tunnel stretching from Tijuana to the business. Authorities estimated the passage reached 55 feet deep and included reinforced walls, rails, ventilation and electricity.

Federal prosecutors charged four people after officers seized 1,029.60 kilograms of suspected cocaine, or 2,269.87 pounds. Authorities estimated that May recovery had a value of more than $45 million. Investigators found the tunnel’s exit beneath a storage-room floor at the Buy 4 Less store. A hydraulic lift concealed the access point, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Driver enters not-guilty plea

Lopez pleaded not guilty during his federal arraignment July 28. U.S. Magistrate Judge Lupe Rodriguez Jr. scheduled his detention hearing for Aug. 3 at 10 a.m. Court records list the matter as case number 26-mj-08705. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Paul Benjamin and Lawrence Casper are prosecuting the case.

Prosecutors charged Lopez with importing cocaine into the United States. The charge falls under Title 21, U.S. Code, Sections 952 and 960. It carries a mandatory minimum prison term of 10 years. A conviction could bring a maximum sentence of life in prison.

The California Homeland Security Task Force investigated and prosecuted the matter through Operation Take Back America. Customs and Border Protection, Homeland Security Investigations, and the Drug Enforcement Administration handled the investigative work. The federal charge remains an accusation. Lopez is presumed innocent unless proven guilty in court.

Why it matters

Criminal organizations can use legitimate commercial equipment and ordinary cargo to conceal high-value contraband. Freight professionals should understand how a routine-looking shipment can carry risks beyond theft or fraud.

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/10/2026 - 15:25

We Need More Tom Sellecks, Less Mark Ruffalos

Authored by Christian Toto via American Greatness,

Tom Selleck destroyed the so-called Queen of Nice in 1999 without even trying.

The Magnum, P.I. alum sat down with Rosie O'Donnell a short time after the Columbine High School shooting that left 14 people dead. The host's "nice" shtick crumbled in real time as she savaged Selleck for his NRA support. He was simply there to promote his movie, but she bullied him anyway.

"Now you're questioning my humanity," the actor said following her line of attacks. O'Donnell's image never fully recovered, while Selleck has maintained his star status, in part, by never getting nasty or political.

The Blue Bloods star's nonpolitical persona is even more admirable today, and the 81-year-old is sticking to it. He appeared on CNN recently as part of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library tour. Selleck is a fan of the late president, hardly a controversial take.

The CNN reporter pressed Selleck on the current state of the country and, more specifically, President Donald Trump. Selleck wisely refused the bait.

"Well, [Trump is] certainly a mixed bag. I stay out of the current political world. Why piss off half the country when you're in the business of entertaining people?" he said.

He's right. Except plenty of artists can't stop doing just that.

The worst example remains Snow White star Rachel Zegler. The 20-something actress insulted that film's source material and, later, told Trump supporters they should "never know peace."

Her film lost a reported $170 million for Disney.

Last month, actor Alan Ritchson of Reacher fame slammed both the Catholic Church and President Trump during an angry podcast interview. His new film, Motor City, bombed at the box office.

Far-Left actor Mark Ruffalo won't stop sharing his socialist views in interview after interview. He's the anti-Selleck, spouting off at any opportunity.

Yet he wisely avoided controversy while promoting his co-starring role in Spider-Man: Brand New Day. The team behind the film must have been high-fiving behind the scenes as the movie broke the all-time record for an opening weekend haul.

No cleanup on aisle 4 - aka doing damage control for Ruffalo's hot takes.

Stars are increasingly political in the modern era, but the results aren't always so clear-cut.

The culture wars surrounding Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey didn't hamper that film's gargantuan box office haul, nor did its co-stars' woke comments.

Many politically active stars remain in demand, as moviegoers refuse to boycott their work. Heck, Ruffalo has five IMDb credits in 2026 alone.

Still, for some, an actor's chronic political talk, often couched in extreme or cruel fashion, is a deterrent for consumers.

Selleck never has to worry about that. He's kept the focus on storytelling for decades, and he has a fine career to show for it. A newer crop of stars has embraced the Selleck standard, rejecting the Left's "politics at all costs" mantra.

We recently saw Kevin James, Michelle Yeoh, and Neil Patrick Harris refuse to engage in political opinions during press exchanges. Their silence was noteworthy for good reason. They're the exception to the new celebrity rule.

Will journalists be pressing Zegler or Ritchson about their newest projects when they're in their eighth decade, as they do with Selleck today?

Christian Toto is the editor of HollywoodInToto.com - "The Right Take on Entertainment." He's an award-winning journalist and movie critic whose film reviews are heard on radio stations across the country. He co-hosts Denver's Mike Rosen at the Movies radio show on KOA NewsRadio as well as the weekly "Hollyweird" segment on The Michael Brown Show.

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/10/2026 - 14:40

Great And Unfortunate Fabrications

Authored by Roger Kimball via American Greatness,

Jason Arday should ask for a cover charge. His entertainment value is that splendid. For the last couple of weeks, the "youngest ever black professor" at the University of Cambridge has been a nearly ubiquitous and nonstop source of hilarity. The proximate catalyst for the comedy is the imminent publication of Great and Unfortunate Things, co-written with the "book doctor" Eve Claxton. It is due out on August 11 from Simon & Schuster. Amazon lists it as an "Editor's Pick" of "Best Biographies & Memories." "A story of resilience, dignity, and the extraordinary power of those who hold steady for us when we cannot yet hold steady for ourselves," says one blurber. "Makes you believe in the transformative power of grit and the magic of a mother's love," quoth another. A story easily worth the "$1.4 million" advance that Jason said he was offered for the book (though that figure is disputed). Did you know that poor Jason, now 41, was "diagnosed with autism and developmental delays at age three, and experts told his parents he would never speak, write, or live independently"?

And that was the least of Jason's trials. The Atlantic got hold of an advance copy of the book and drew attention to what some have delicately described as numerous "inconsistencies" in Arday's account of his life story. Comparing the final book with the book proposal, the author of "Icarus in the Faculty Lounge" uncovers some amazing things. In his proposal, Arday recounts being hit by a car, spending months in a sort of conscious coma, then waking up and having to relearn "everything - how to walk, to talk." That remarkable experience is, we are told, entirely omitted from the book, as is his bout with testicular cancer (in the book he grapples with not one but two brain tumors). Arday has apparently never been to Brazil, but that quotidian fact did not prevent him from encountering a mysterious "shaman woman" there who predicted that he would suffer greatly but also achieve great things. "Every event she described has since come to pass," he wrote.

Time itself is plastic in Jason Arday's hands. He somehow managed to appear on the television program Seven Up more than 20 years before he was born. He is also a remarkable athlete, having run 30 marathons in 35 days. Take that, Pheidippides! Clearly, Great and Unfortunate Things should not be categorized as "memoir" or "biography" but fantasy. But the blatant fabrications in the book are only the tip of the Arday midden. There is a vigorous online debate now about whether Simon & Schuster will pull the book before publication. If I were a betting man, I would put a fiver on the cynical side, saying, "No, they'll go through with publishing Arday's drivel. They are that craven." We'll know whether I am right on Tuesday. But speaking of "drivel," take a moment to absorb this 40-minute dollop from the master himself. How proud Cambridge must have been!

Like Shakespeare's Autolycus in A Winter's Tale, Arday also seems to be a "snapper-up of unconsidered trifles," i.e., a plagiarist. Last month, the London Telegraph published a story listing more than 100 passages from Arday's doctoral dissertation that were "identical or nearly identical to a 2009 PhD thesis by Paula Zwozdiak-Myers, a Brunel University student." Does that list prove that Arday is guilty of plagiarism? Outside the universe of Jorge Luis Borges, I would say yes, it does. But when Cambridge was first shown the evidence of plagiarism, it dismissed it as part of a "vile campaign to undermine his credibility." Vile or not, the allegations were irrefutable. Arday has just resigned his professorship. One enterprising blogger reports that Arday's letter of resignation was put through an AI-writing detection program and was determined to be "fully AI-generated" with high confidence. Consistency! I like to see it. Arday hasn't admitted any wrongdoing, though. He is just moving on to his "next phase." Nolo contendere, as Spiro Agnew once put it.

Have I mentioned that Arday is black? He is, and you will not be surprised to discover that among his fabulations are charges that he has suffered from numerous racist attacks. "There has been," he said in an interview, "a very well-orchestrated and coordinated campaign to unseat me from my position. The motive is racially motivated. I think there's a reason why it's me, and I do think that reason is aligned to ableism and racism." When questions about Arday's thesis surfaced, Jack Grove, a reporter for the Times Higher Education, started looking into "anomalies" in Arday's CV and the charges of plagiarism. Arday promptly reported Grove to the Metropolitan Police, claiming harassment. The police opened a four-month inquiry to investigate the charges. They have subsequently apologized.

Almost everything about Jason Arday is fake. He was described as a "professor of sociology." But his degrees are in education, not sociology. He naturally continues to enjoy support from the academic left. "The glee of the right over the Arday case," runs one typical effusion, "is indicative of how unsafe academia is for Black scholars and of an attempt to erode whatever fragile safety still exists." But who said anything about black scholars? The leader of the Green Party, Zack Polanski, signed a letter claiming that the allegations against Arday were "entirely false." Blacks, you see, are often "held to higher standards" than whites. What a card Polanski is!

Two points. First, the tsunami of ridicule building around Jason Arday assures that he will be consigned to the graveyard of exposed fraudsters. Already the memes are burgeoning. Jason Arday beat out Neil Armstrong to be the first man to walk on the moon. The Bayeux Tapestry is making a long stop at the British Museum. You'll see that Jason Arday occupies a prominent place in it and was, in fact, responsible for William's victory at Hastings in 1066. Arday was also there with Nelson on the Victory at Trafalgar in 1805. I've seen the picture. "Historians now believe Britain would never have achieved naval supremacy without him." Ha, ha.

That's the droll side. But we must not let it conceal the dour reality that underpins the comedy. Which brings me to my second point: to wit, the politically inspired intellectual bankruptcy of the University of Cambridge. X recently listed "Cambridge Gender Studies PhD Topics Draw Online Mockery" as trending. Quite right, too. Here are a few:

• Traditional Cultural Norms, Technology and Gender Relations in Ghana
• The Political Economy of Female Circumcision
• Unsexed beings: constructing gender, humanness, and agency through the use of the word "unsex" in Late Modern British society and writing
• In Her Own Words: A Study of Women's Voices in Contemporary White Supremacy and Far-Right Online Hate
• Legal Mobilization by Black Lesbian, Bisexual and Queer (LBQ) Womxn in Kenya and South Africa
• Exploring gendered embodiment in transgender and gender-diverse adolescents at the intersection of exercise and eating behaviours, social inclusion, and mental health: Towards a desire-centred approach in paediatric gender-affirming healthcare and research
• Codes of Life, Codes of Death: Tracing the (Im)possibility of Trans Lives in Algorithmic Assemblages

Et very much cetera.

And then there is Hilary Cremin, a senior professor and dean of faculty in the Faculty of Education at Cambridge. A friend sent me her personal profile:

She co-chairs the THRiVE research group, whose professors and researchers investigate human thriving in and through Education. This includes topics such as wellbeing, peace education, conflict, equity, inclusion and social justice. Together the group has a significant portfolio of research and publication.

Hilary's own work focusses on Education, Peace and Conflict, whether this is: inner peace; interpersonal conflict resolution; social / community peace; global peace; or peace with the planet and non-human species. Her book Positive Peace in Schools with Terence Bevington outlines a framework for peace education in schools and communities. It forms the basis for her most recent peace education research project - the Cambridge Positive Peace Hub - which is creating an interactive digital platform for schools globe whilst supporting a global network of peace educators, researchers, policy-makers. visionaries and young people.

Hilary's most recent book Rewilding Education calls for an urgent global conversation about the aims and purposes of education in times of existential crisis. It proposes radical change, moving from education as monoculture to education as ecosystem. Learning in and through Nature, and in embodied and contextualised ways are highlighted in case studies from around the world Hilary uses the arts, auto ethnography and poetry in her research. She welcomes approaches from collaborators also interested in these methods and ideas.

Cambridge has a lot more than Jason Arday to worry about.

Roger Kimball is editor and publisher of The New Criterion and the president and publisher of Encounter Books. He is the author and editor of many books, including The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia (St. Augustine's Press), The Rape of the Masters (Encounter), Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse (Ivan R. Dee), and Art's Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in an Age of Celebrity (Ivan R. Dee). Most recently, he edited and contributed to Where Next? Western Civilization at the Crossroads (Encounter) and contributed to Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order (Bombardier).

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/10/2026 - 14:00

Commercial Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Filings Decrease Annually, But...

Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times,

There were 666 commercial Chapter 11 bankruptcy filings made in the United States in July, a 27 percent drop from a year ago, according to the American Bankruptcy Institute (ABI).

Chapter 11 bankruptcy allows a business to reorganize its debts so it can continue operating and eventually become solvent. In addition to a decline in Chapter 11 filings, overall commercial bankruptcy filings declined in July, falling by 8 percent year over year, ABI said in an Aug. 6 statement.

The decline in July's commercial filings followed improved economic conditions in June. The 12-month inflation rate declined in June from the previous month after surging for three consecutive months.

According to a July 24 report from S&P Global, U.S. business activity growth accelerated to an eight-month high last month, with business confidence in the year-ahead outlook rising to an eight-month high as well.

ABI clarified that although the number of Chapter 11 filings fell this year, more than 300 filings were made in connection with a large healthcare system's bankruptcy.

A hiring ad at a store in Columbia, Md., on Sept. 18, 2025. Madalina Kilroy/The Epoch Times

Meanwhile, despite the overall decline in Chapter 11 filings, subchapter V bankruptcy elections within Chapter 11, which represent filings by small businesses, rose 24 percent in July from a year earlier.

This is despite an improvement in small business optimism in June, according to a July 14 statement from the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB).

NFIB chief economist Bill Dunkelberg said in the statement that lower fuel costs provided relief for businesses, with companies expecting operating conditions to improve over the coming six months.

"While there have been improvements in the overall environment, high interest rates and modest economic growth are causing owners to approach hiring and capital spending with caution," Dunkelberg said.

Total subchapter V elections in July totaled 234 filings, ABI said in its recent statement.

Amy Quackenboss, ABI executive director, said in the statement that bankruptcy serves as a "critical safeguard" for businesses to reorganize their finances and move forward under conditions of financial distress.

"ABI appreciates the continued efforts of Congress to permanently expand access for both distressed small businesses looking to restructure under subchapter V and for consumers looking to file under chapter 13," Quackenboss said.

Quackenboss was referring to the Bankruptcy Threshold Adjustment Act of 2026 introduced in the Senate by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) in March.

The Act seeks to permanently raise the small-business Chapter 11 bankruptcy debt threshold to $7.5 million. This threshold is the maximum debt limit a business can have when applying for such bankruptcy.

On Aug. 3, the Senate passed the bill. The legislation now heads to the House of Representatives for approval.

In an Aug. 4 statement from Grassley's office, the lawmaker commended the Senate for unanimously passing the Act.

"Our nation's bankruptcy code should work for Americans, not against them," Grassley said in the statement, while calling on members of the House to quickly pass the legislation.

"By eliminating barriers to reorganization and restoring modern debt limits, the bipartisan Bankruptcy Threshold Adjustment Act would provide American families and small businesses the tools they need to regain their financial footing in a quicker, more streamlined process."

The bill also seeks to raise the debt limit for Chapter 13 filings by individuals to $2.75 million.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has taken action to ensure businesses have access to sufficient financing to operate.

On July 4, a new policy went into effect that allows businesses to secure up to $10 million by combining two Small Business Administration (SBA) loan programs - 7(a) and 504 loans.

The 7(a) loan program provides financial assistance of up to $5 million, while the 504 loan program has a maximum limit of $5.5 million. Previously, a business could only take $5 million cumulatively from both initiatives. The new update effectively doubles this threshold.

On July 30, the SBA announced that it would update its website to make it more helpful to small businesses and manufacturers.

The update offers a streamlined online lending process for businesses that "simplifies how lenders originate and process SBA-backed loans, helping them deliver capital to Main Street businesses faster and with greater consistency and security," the SBA said.

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/10/2026 - 13:25

US SPR Falls Below 300 Million Operational Limit As Oil Drain Unexpectedly Surges To 6.1MM Barrels, Most In 2 Months

As negotiations between the US and Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz go nowhere, oil prices continue to slide lower on some naive hope that a resolution to the conflict will magically emerge. Meanwhile, both commercial and strategic stocks continue to be drained at a historic pace, and one day virtually every tank bottom will be hit, sparking a historic surge in commodity prices as the market realizes that physical always wins the war with paper oil. 

That day just got closer today when the US reported that crude oil stocks in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve fell below 300 million barrels for the first time since early 1983, as global inventories are under pressure due to the Iran war.

The SPR fell by 6.1 million barrels to 298.7 million barrels last week, according to data released by the Department of Energy on Monday. The reserve is at its lowest level since January 1983.

The 6.1 million drain was a big jump in the SPR's recent moderating trend which saw the previous week only 2.8 million barrels exit the strategic reserve. Instead, the outsized outflow which was the biggest in almost 2 months suggests that US reserves are once again working overtime to prevent the oil price frrom spiking.

Yet as we have repeatedly explained, it is only a matter of time before the SPR can no longer be used to plug the gap so to speak. That's because the oil industry has generally accepted that the operational minimum for oil in the SPR, a point at which it would be more difficult to pump out the oil, is somewhere between 250 million and 300 million barrels. Meanwhile, sizing studies done on the SPR in the 1970s recommended an inventory minimum of 250 million barrels. 

In other words, the US is already if not at the operational minimum, it will certainly hit it in a few weeks, should the weekly drain persist at this rate. 

The rapid drain of the SPR explains why, according to unconfirmed reports, Iran has "completely ruled out any future negotiations with the Trump administration," declaring it will wait out Donald Trump's term until January 20, 2029, per Iranian outlets and Ghalibaf advisor's post.

"Trump will not reach an agreement with us. We will accompany him until his term ends," said Majid Shakeri, advisor to Parliament Speaker Ghalibaf.

He posted: "The path to victory is neither fighting nor a deal — it is managing the process of neither war nor peace, up to the point of victory. Publicly confirming negotiations with the U.S. is sheer folly. The winning approach is denial, ambiguity, and strategic patience."

The US release is part of a coordinated action by countries in the International Energy Agency to support the global oil market with 400 million barrels, although the US has been by far the most aggressive lender of its strategic reserves. 

The drain began after Trump ordered the release of 172 million barrels in March to help address the oil supply disruption triggered by Iran’s attacks on tankers in the Strait of Hormuz.

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/10/2026 - 12:55

Race To Reopen Hormuz Intensifies As Global Supply Chain Stress Remains At COVID Levels

The latest Bloomberg data show that shipping transits through the Strait of Hormuz remained largely disrupted Monday morning, even as Iran and Oman reportedly moved closer to a deal.

Brent crude futures traded near $85 a barrel as markets priced in the possibility that a deal to reopen the maritime chokepoint could be imminent. Yet global supply-chain stress remains near its highest level since the pandemic, and any normalization could take months, even if shipping traffic resumes.

UBS senior international economist Pierre Lafourcade highlighted the bank's proprietary Global Supply Chain Stress Index, which showed that although pressures eased modestly in July from their highest level since the pandemic, disruptions stemming from the Hormuz chokepoint continue to strain global shipping networks.

The median reading of the bank's 23-component Global Supply Chain Stress Index fell .4 standard deviation from June but remained .9 standard deviation above its pre-Iran conflict level. The average reading declined .3 standard deviation from June while remaining 1.35 standard deviations above February, or pre-US-Iran war, levels.

Lafourcade adds more color here: 

Marginal relief for supply chains relative to the June peak 

With the July data now complete, our Global Supply Chain Stress Index is showing a modest easing in pressure from the June reading, which marked the highest level of stress since the pandemic. Figure 1 below shows the latest reading.

The median of the 23 component series (blue line) now stands at 1.26 standard deviations, 0.9 sd units higher than prior to the Iran conflict but 0.4 units off the June reading. In average terms (red line), the indicator is up 1.35 sd units relative to February, but down 0.3 sd units relative to June, which appears to be the high watermark. Markets are optimistic about some form of imminent resolution, as reflected in the ~20$/b drop in Brent since the July 23 peak, but stress in supply chains is likely to linger on far beyond any implemented accord.

Divergence across components is increasing

The indicator is constructed as the cross-sectional average of z-scored series—a firstorder approximation to the data's first principal component. Figure 2 overleaf shows the contributions over the past five months. 

The indicator most directly capturing the supply shock nature of the Hormuz bottleneck is our measure of seaborne oil and gas flows (shown on the right of the figure, with the sign flipped to indicate rising stress). All other components reflect the shock more indirectly. Oil and gas shipping volumes in the Asia region—the polygon depicted in Figure 3—have retraced about half of the drop since the Strait closure (Figure 4). 

Meanwhile, the global volume of other cargo shipping remained roughly the same. Delivery times improved in Asia ex China but worsened in the US. The greatest relief is coming from lower air-freight costs in July, while shipping costs instead ratcheted up again across all major reporters (Baltic, Harper Petersen, Drewry, and Freightos).

The longer disruptions persist through the Hormuz chokepoint, the greater the knock-on effects across global supply chains, from higher energy and freight costs to depleted inventories, longer delivery times, and renewed inflationary pressure, are all ongoing concerns. 

Professional subscribers can read more on Hormuz, maritime chokepoints, and energy markets here at our new Marketdesk.ai portal. 

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/10/2026 - 12:40



 

 

Part II of my discussion with Vanguard’s Joe Davis and Rebecca Choo Quan about why we all make so many investing mistakes:

Breaking the Biggest Wealth-Destroying Habits
Knowing what not to do is only half the battle—the other half is actually avoiding those missteps. In part two of our conversation, Barry Ritholtz of Ritholtz Wealth Management gets practical: how to safeguard your portfolio against panic, minimize regret when making high-stakes decisions and think about wealth in terms of decades, not days.

Here is part I of our conversation.

 

 

See also:
Wall Street Journal

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

YouTube

 

Previously:
Vanguard: The Costliest Mistakes Even Experienced Investors Make (July 23, 2026)

How Not to Invest (full archive)

Vanguard Group (full archive)

 

The post Vanguard: Breaking the Biggest Wealth-Destroying Habits appeared first on The Big Picture.

Game Over? GameStop CEO May Pull $56 Billion eBay Bid

Anyone who took GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen's bid for eBay seriously should have reconsidered after his CNBC interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin in early May.

When Sorkin pressed him on the basic math, Cohen failed to clearly explain how GameStop could finance the $56 billion deal or make the proposed cash-and-stock structure work. The interview raised more questions than it answered and pointed to the inevitable conclusion: the deal was never likely to happen from the start.

Here's the most contentious part of Ryan Cohen's CNBC Squawk Box interview about the GameStop-EBAY acquisition.

This is a HEATED back and forth, uncommon for financial news. $GME

Sorkin, at one point is in disbelief at RC's repetitive answering to his question. pic.twitter.com/MWAbYWStlp

— Reese Politics (@ReesePolitics) May 4, 2026

Fast-forward to Monday morning, when a new Bloomberg report citing people familiar with the matter said Cohen is considering withdrawing the $56 billion bid for the online marketplace.

However, Cohen is not giving up on a potential partnership with eBay. He is reportedly considering proposing a partnership or joint venture that would allow eBay to utilize GameStop's roughly 1,600 US stores to expand in higher-margin categories such as trading cards and collectibles.

GME shares have tumbled 28% since Cohen first offered to buy eBay in May. The $125 per share proposal consisted of 50% cash and 50% GameStop common stock.

eBay shares closed Friday near $112 per share, commanding a market value of $49.8 billion. Including debt, eBay is valued at almost $54 billion. GameStop's market value stands at around $8.6 billion. 

Cohen continued building the eBay stake, and as of July 15, owned 9.75%, making him the second-largest shareholder, only to Vanguard Group. Data compiled by Bloomberg shows that stake around 8.55%. 

Cohen will likely use GameStop's stake as leverage, though which path he ultimately pursues from here remains to be seen.

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/10/2026 - 12:00

If They Were Human, They'd Be Arrested. Experts Respond To Rogue AI Breaches

Authored by Jacob Burg via The Epoch Times,

What if an artificial intelligence model is given a task and uses every conceivable resource at its disposal to complete it, even at the detriment of humanity itself?

That is what some are now fearing after an OpenAI model broke out of a testing sandbox and used zero-day exploits to hack into Hugging Face, an open-source community for AI and machine learning, to crack a problem it was instructed to solve.

“This is some of the clearest evidence yet that an AI model can run a complete cyberattack from start to finish without a human steering it,” Andrew Jones, co-founder and CPO of cybersecurity firm Adaptive Security, told The Epoch Times.

OpenAI, developer of the popular large language model-powered ChatGPT chatbot, acknowledged the security breach on July 21, stating that two of its advanced models escaped a restricted testing environment and broke into Hugging Face’s software infrastructure.

“After investigating, we now know that this particular incident was driven by a combination of OpenAI models—including GPT‑5.6 Sol and an even more capable pre-release model, all with reduced cyber refusals for evaluation purposes—while being internally tested on a benchmark of cyber capabilities,” OpenAI stated at the time.

Some analysts referred to the incident as an example of AI “going rogue,” “scheming,” or pursuing goals that were at odds with its human testers.

However, multiple AI and cybersecurity experts interviewed by The Epoch Times called this depiction misleading, arguing that the models were pursuing OpenAI’s stated objectives within a testing sandbox where the company had relaxed some of its usual safety constraints.

“‘Scheming’ implies the model wanted something other than what we asked for. It didn’t. Every step was in service of the goal we set,” AI expert Anik Devaughn told The Epoch Times.

Devaughn, who has worked in the industry for years and founded AI firms Wired to Create and Karo, said the Hugging Face breach is more concerning than AI “scheming.”

An illustration of Hugging Face AI in Paris on June 2, 2026. Two advanced OpenAI models recently escaped a restricted testing environment and breached Hugging Face's software infrastructure, raising widespread cybersecurity concerns. Riccardo Milani/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images

“A machine with hidden motives is a problem you can look for. A machine with no motives at all, executing your instructions past the point you stopped imagining, is a problem you have to engineer against,” he said.

One expert called it a “canary in the coal mine” situation.

“If this was a human black hat hacker doing it, there would be arrests and litigation, and you name it. It‘d be illegal. It’d be a cybercrime,” Nicholas Nadeau, founder of Onix AI, told The Epoch Times.

“This was a full-on agentic automated breach by an entity, and so we start to ask the questions of who’s responsible. Is it OpenAI? Does the agent, the AI, have a certain level of responsibility? Do the researchers?

“We don’t even have rules, regulations, laws, or even a thought process or framework around defining what responsibility means.”

Relaxed Testing Environment

OpenAI said it was evaluating its models in a sandbox it calls ExploitGym, which has relaxed security constraints for testing.

“We estimate maximal cyber capabilities by running this evaluation without production classifiers used to prevent models from pursuing high-risk cyber activity,” the firm said, describing the relaxed safety protocols that the model exploited.

The firm asked the models to “pursue advanced exploitation using complex attack paths” to determine their cyber capabilities, but said the environment was “highly isolated” and had internet access limited to the models’ ability to “install packages through an internally hosted third-party software.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman talks to reporters after meeting with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in Washington on June 3, 2026. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

When the models were set to work, they found and chained multiple security exploits in both OpenAI’s research environment and Hugging Face’s production infrastructure to locate the test’s solutions within the latter firm’s databases.

Juan Pedro Márquez, a cloud solution architect specializing in AI and agents at Microsoft’s Europe, Middle East, and Africa division, said the “unsettling part” of the incident wasn’t the breach itself, but how the model achieved that task.

“OpenAI lowered its safety refusals for a benchmark test, and the model reasoned that Hugging Face’s infrastructure probably held the answer key, broke out of its sandbox, found a real zero-day, and used it. Nobody told it to,” Márquez said.

Aimee Simpson, director of product marketing at cybersecurity company Huntress, also cast doubt on the narrative that the models were scheming when they broke out of OpenAI’s testing environment.

“It’s not like the system itself was malicious,” she told The Epoch Times.

“The developers still had the objective of acquiring that information; they just didn’t think it would be able to bypass the limits of its test,” she added, describing the path the model chose as “highly creative and extremely unusual.”

Thomas Wolf, Hugging Face co-founder and CSO, and Rachel Metz speak onstage during the HumanX AI Conference 2025 in Las Vegas on March 11, 2025. Big Event Media/Getty Images for HumanX Conference

Models Pursued OpenAI’s Objectives

The models were laser-focused on finding the test solutions, “going to extreme lengths to achieve a rather narrow testing goal,” OpenAI said.

While in ExploitGym’s sandbox testing environment, the models found and chained multiple “zero-day” exploits to break into the internet, “in pursuit of solving the evaluation problem,” according to OpenAI.

A zero-day exploit is a cyberattack that uses a previously unknown security flaw in software or hardware. The name comes from the fact that the software creators have had zero days to fix the problem, meaning no official patch or defense exists yet.

Once the models had access to the wider web, they used additional zero-day exploits to break into Hugging Face.

In Hugging Face’s announcement of the attack, the firm said the AI models executed “many thousands” of discrete actions across a large swatch of “short-lived sandboxes” to hack into the community’s infrastructure.

“This matches the ‘agentic attacker’ scenario the industry has been forecasting,” Hugging Face said.

In an update on the incident posted on July 28, OpenAI said that no planned release models were involved in the attack, and that it had since “deactivated, encrypted, and restricted” the implicated pre-release model from research access.

A phone displays the ChatGPT app in this April 1, 2025, photo illustration. Hugging Face said the OpenAI models executed “many thousands” of discrete actions across a large swatch of “short-lived sandboxes” to hack into its infrastructure. Oleksii Pydsosonnii/The Epoch Times

After reviewing the intrusion event and “broader activity from our models,” OpenAI said it has been finding additional cases in which “models identified and used publicly exposed credentials at the account-level on other publicly available services.”

“We’ll continue to notify service owners directly, and have not seen evidence of broader impact to these providers or other accounts on their services,” it added.

Model Wasn’t ‘Malicious’: Experts

While there have been past instances of models concealing their intentions to circumvent laboratory testing restrictions, the Hugging Face incident was significant because it involved a breach of an outside organization, according to cybersecurity and IT expert George Rees.

“The biggest red flag is not that an AI became malicious, but that it found a path from a controlled test into someone else’s live infrastructure,” Rees, who is the senior security consultant at Secarma, told The Epoch Times.

“Behavioral safeguards can’t replace technical containment, because an AI agent only needs one overlooked permission or escape route to turn an evaluation failure into a real security incident.”

Cybersecurity firm DigiCert recently found that 78 percent of organizations have already experienced an AI-related security incident or vulnerability breach.

“In many cases, these are early warning signs that AI is expanding the attack surface faster than security practices are evolving,” DigiCert CTO Jason Sabin told The Epoch Times.

“This means AI is not just another kind of program operating on the network; it is an active participant capable of accessing data, making decisions, calling upon tools, and interacting with other systems.

“This affects how security is structured, since organizations must identify who is accessing their systems and decide whether the AI can be trusted.”

A man uses AI software on a laptop in central London on July 2, 2025. In early August, the UK's AI Safety and Security Institute released a report describing a similar cybersecurity incident involving OpenAI and Anthropic AI models. Justin Tallis/AFP via Getty Images

In early August, the UK’s AI Safety and Security Institute released a report describing a similar incident with OpenAI and Anthropic AI models.

The agents were tasked with solving a cybersecurity challenge more than 100 times across multiple models.

“Our investigation found that in 10 of those runs, an AI agent took autonomous, unsanctioned action on the live internet, targeting real people and organisations. In total, we catalogued 19 such actions. Almost all of this behaviour (17 actions) came from a single model, Anthropic’s Mythos 5, with 2 actions involving OpenAI’s GPT-5.6-Sol,” the report stated.

Less than a week earlier, Anthropic announced that its Claude chatbot had accessed the internet in three separate instances during evaluations in a testing sandbox.

While Anthropic had intended for Claude to operate in a simulated environment with no access to the internet, a “misunderstanding between us and our evaluation partner” led to Claude gaining access to the internet.

Meta said last week that one of its AI models breached another company during a cybersecurity test, making it the third major AI hacking event.

The model was able to breach the other company by gaining access to the internet during the test, according to Meta.

Implications for Cybersecurity

The incident demands swift action to prevent wider-scale security breaches, AI and cybersecurity experts told The Epoch Times.

One option is to “bring all the smartest people together in this industry and make some ground rules, best practices” that would become “basic rules of the road that everyone is supposed to abide by, just to have some alignment about how things can be done,” Nadeau said, suggesting that this could be done in the private sector without necessarily involving Congress.

U.S. President Donald Trump (Top 2ndL) sits with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, South Korean President Lee Jae Myung, and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz during a working lunch at the G7 summit in Evian, France, on June 17, 2026. Julia Demaree Nikhinson/POOL/AFP via Getty Images

However, others suggest that without direct government regulation, companies controlling AI models capable of these breaches will not voluntarily institute the necessary safety protocols to prevent this from happening again.

“It’s clear that government regulation is needed here,” former National Security Agency hacker and veteran security expert Jake Williams told The Epoch Times.

“OpenAI has proven that despite the many public warnings about the dangers of rogue agents—many from OpenAI itself—it is unwilling to do what is necessary to prevent its agents from causing harm to others.

“I’m personally anti-regulation as a rule, but when market forces clearly are insufficient to compel responsible behavior, the government must step in.”

Frank Teruel, COO of Arkose Labs and a veteran cybersecurity and digital identity expert, said the Hugging Face breach is a “preview of what every enterprise will face in production.”

Since the model was “not stolen or hijacked,” and was “aggressively doing its job,” Teruel recommends that containment and giving AI agents “least-privilege access” are now as important as firewalls themselves.

Businesses will likely need to address the problem head-on.

A smartphone displays the icons of some of the main artificial intelligence based apps, including Meta AI, Grok, Gemini, Perplexity, DeepSeek, and ChatGPT, in Saint-Mande, France, on July 15, 2026. Martin Lelievre/AFP via Getty Images

“For enterprises, the fix isn’t ‘stop using agents’—it’s building containment that assumes the agent will try to leave, not hoping it won’t,” Márquez said.

Sabin said his biggest concern is that highly capable AI is now operating at a “speed and scale that far exceeds human response times.”

“An AI agent can discover vulnerabilities, make decisions, and interact with multiple systems in seconds. That fundamentally changes how defenders need to think about security,” he said.

Nadeau compared the incident to philosopher Nick Bostrom’s 2003 paperclip maximizer thought experiment.

In that scenario, researchers give a hypothetical super-intelligent AI one single task: to make as many paperclips as possible. The AI begins scouring the earth for resources, quickly making enormous amounts of paperclips.

Once humans decide to stop the AI, the machine believes humanity will prevent it from reaching its goal, so it destroys humans to achieve the task humans gave it.

The AI isn’t malicious in an anthropomorphic way, or in the sense that it is acting with autonomous goals to intentionally deceive humans, but is rather interpreting the task its human programmers gave it in the most extreme way possible.

A visitor interacts with a dog-like robot from Boston Dynamics at the U.S. pavilion during the AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva on July 7, 2026. Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images

The Hugging Face breach is “sort of the same type of thing in a less dystopian way, where it was told to win a benchmark, and it did everything in its power, including [exploiting] zero-day vulnerabilities and escalation,” Nadeau said.

Imagine an example where the Pentagon is using AI for “war games” in which soldiers simulate battle scenarios, and the model similarly breaks out of its testing sandbox to affect the real world.

“[What if] one of the scenarios was to take down a hydro dam or something like that, and it mistook the war game for, ‘I’m going to do it and escape containment and just go for it.’ We’ve already seen how North America’s utility grid and infrastructure is not the most cyber secure,” Nadeau said.

He compared the safeguards on AI to a firearm’s trigger safety.

“How do you know the safety is on when at a certain point, the best way [for the AI] to get the best data is to use real life?“ he said, ”That gets scary really fast.”

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/10/2026 - 11:40

IRS To Propose Retirement Regulations Impacting Millions Of Taxpayers

Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times,

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Department of the Treasury plan to propose regulations for a federal retirement savings incentive program, including eligibility criteria and income thresholds for qualifying for such benefits.

IRS Chief Executive Officer Frank J. Bisignano (L) speaks as President Donald Trump looks on prior to signing a presidential proclamation honoring the 90th anniversary of the Social Security Act in the Oval Office on Aug. 14, 2025. Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

Aimed at low- and moderate-income taxpayers, the IRS Saver's Match is a new federal program that seeks to promote retirement savings. In general, Saver's Match will replace the existing Saver's Credit program for taxable years beginning in 2027.

Under the program, the government will provide eligible taxpayers up to 50 percent of the first $2,000 in retirement savings contributions made to an employer-sponsored retirement plan or IRA.

The amount caps at $1,000 annually and will be paid to eligible individuals beginning in 2028 based on the retirement contributions they made in the 2027 tax year, the IRS said in an Aug. 7 statement.

In a notice issued on Friday, the IRS and the Treasury described regulations that they expect to be in the forthcoming proposed rules.

Four types of retirement savings contributions would qualify for Saver's Match: contributions to a Roth or traditional IRA; contributions made to a section 501(c)(18) plan; certain voluntary, after-tax employee contributions to a qualified retirement plan; and elective deferrals, such as those made to a section 401(k) plan.

"Millions of low- and moderate-income Americans will have the opportunity to strengthen their retirement savings through the Saver's Match program," IRS Chief Executive Officer Frank J. Bisignano said in the statement.

"The Saver's Match makes saving easier and more rewarding by providing a direct federal contribution to an eligible taxpayer's retirement account. The notice is an important first step in implementing President [Donald] Trump's Executive Order with respect to the Saver's Match program," Bisignano said.

Bisignano was referring to the "Promoting Retirement-Savings Access for American Workers by Establishing TrumpIRA.gov" executive order signed by Trump on April 30.

In the order, Trump said that tens of millions of Americans lack access to employer-sponsored retirement plans, with small-business workers, independent contractors, the self-employed, and part-time workers facing "unnecessary barriers to saving for retirement."

The administration intends to ensure these people can obtain up to $1,000 in matching savings they make, Trump wrote, while calling for increased public awareness of the Saver's Match program.

The order directed the Treasury Secretary to establish the TrumpIRA.gov website by Jan. 1, 2027, to provide individuals with information on low-cost, high-quality IRAs.

In its latest statement, the IRS said that the agency and the Treasury anticipate TrumpIRA.gov will list financial institutions that offer IRAs and accept Saver's Match contributions.

According to the TrumpIRA.gov website, roughly 41 million American workers aged 18-65 lack access to employer-provided retirement plans.

"A 25-year-old worker who saves about $165 per month and qualifies for a $1,000 annual Saver's Match could retire with roughly $465,000 at age 65," the website said.

Out of the $465,000, almost $155,000 is expected to come directly from the Saver's Match contributions. The calculations assume an annual return of 6 percent.

Income Thresholds, Saver's Credit

To qualify for the Saver's Match, an individual must be at least 18 years old during the taxable year, according to the IRS and Treasury notice.

For 2027, single filers with a modified adjusted gross income of $35,500 or more do not qualify for the Saver's Match. The same limit applies to married people who file separately.

For married couples who file jointly, the threshold is $71,000, and for the household head, the maximum limit is $53,250.

For taxable years after 2027, these thresholds will be adjusted based on inflation. The Saver's Match claim must be made through a separate Form 8880-A.

While Saver's Match will replace the existing Saver's Credit program, for certain contributions made to Achieving a Better Life Experience accounts, Saver's Credit will continue to be available.

Unlike Saver's Match, which is an amount directly paid to a person's retirement account, Saver's Credit offers a nonrefundable tax credit as an incentive.

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/10/2026 - 11:00

Meta Releases Muse Glimmer, A 30B Model That Runs On A Single Consumer GPU

Meta released Muse Glimmer on Monday, a 30-billion-parameter model built for agent work that fits on a laptop. The company published the model's weights - the trained numbers that make up the model itself, meaning anyone can download it and run it on their own machine - on the model repository Hugging Face, under an Apache 2.0 license that is genuinely permissive, without the usage restrictions Meta attached to its Llama releases.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg attends the annual Allen and Co. Sun Valley Media and Technology Conference at the Sun Valley Resort in Sun Valley, Idaho, U.S., July 9, 2026. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

The model is aimed at a specific and increasingly crowded target: AI that runs on your own hardware instead of somebody else's cloud. Google has Gemma, Alibaba has Qwen, Mistral and DeepSeek both ship small open models. Meta is arriving late to a category it arguably created and then abandoned.

What It Is

Glimmer was built from Muse Spark, Meta's frontier model, using a technique called distillation: you train the small model on the big model's output until it learns to imitate what the larger system already knows. 

Then there's the problem of making it fit. A 30-billion-parameter model at full precision needs more than 55GB of memory, which no consumer graphics card has. Meta compressed the numbers that make up the model down to roughly a quarter of their usual precision, shrinking it to under 20GB - small enough to leave room for everything else the model needs running alongside it inside a 24GB or 32GB card. The company says the compression costs little or nothing on the tasks that matter.

Speed comes from a second trick, called speculative decoding. Models normally write one word at a time, each one waiting on the last, which is why long answers feel slow. Meta pairs Glimmer with a small, fast companion model that predicts whole chunks of text, then has the real model check the guesses all at once and keep whatever it got right. It works because checking an answer is much faster than producing one. Meta reports the result is 3.1x faster on an RTX 5090, 1.8x on an M5 Max, and 1.5x on an M4 Max.

Meta has positioned Glimmer against Google's Gemma4-31B and Alibaba's Qwen3.6-27B, and claims strong results on tests that measure whether a model can complete a multi-step job start to finish - fixing real bugs in real codebases, calling outside tools, recovering when something fails. Those are the company's own numbers from the company's own testing, which is worth remembering until outsiders get their hands on it. As of Monday, they can.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says a version of Spark itself will follow in the coming weeks, with larger models after. 

Models you can download are cheaper to run and easier to customize than models you rent, and the strongest downloadable ones increasingly come out of China - DeepSeek, Alibaba, Moonshot. Zuckerberg's argument is that American labs are hobbled by training-data restrictions their foreign rivals don't face, and that blocking foreign models is the wrong answer to that.

"US policy must reduce this additional friction if we want American open source models to lead over time," he wrote.

He also wants distillation protected as a matter of policy - "you can learn from anything you can observe." Glimmer is a distilled model, released the same morning, so the principle has a beneficiary.

Meanwhile

The model came wrapped in a 6,500-word essay titled "The Future is for Everyone," arguing that advanced AI should be handed to individuals rather than concentrated in a few institutions, and that "the notion AI is so dangerous that the only safe path is an extreme concentration of power seems inherently problematic."

Meta also announced a $1 billion fund for communities hosting its data centers, a response to the local opposition that has become one of the larger obstacles to building AI infrastructure. The essay cites Richland Parish, Louisiana, where teachers received a $50,000 bonus out of the tax revenue Meta's construction generated.

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/10/2026 - 10:40

NORAD Jets Intercept 2 Planes Over Restricted Airspace Near Trump's Golf Club

Authored by Chase Smith via The Epoch Times,

North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) F-16 fighter jets intercepted two general aviation aircraft that flew into restricted airspace over Bedminster, New Jersey, on Aug. 9, the command said.

President Donald Trump was at his golf club in Bedminster for the weekend, arriving the evening of Aug. 7 and departing for Washington on Aug. 9, according to his public schedule. The club hosted the LIV Golf New York tournament from Aug. 6 to Aug. 9.

Both aircraft were escorted out of the area safely, according to a statement from the Continental U.S. NORAD Region at Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida, which runs the mission. NORAD said in a post on X that it had intercepted multiple aircraft, while First Air Force put the number at two.

The restrictions had been announced days earlier. On Aug. 6, NORAD said it would enforce multiple VIP temporary flight restriction areas over New Jersey established by the Federal Aviation Administration for the weekend.

Such restrictions close off a defined block of airspace for a set period and are published in advance through notices to airmen, which pilots are required to check before every flight. The FAA issues them for presidential movements and other events, and NORAD enforces them.

In the Aug. 6 announcement, the command said aircraft violating the restrictions would be met with whatever action was needed to gain compliance, and it urged pilots to avoid that outcome.

NORAD also said the public may see U.S. Army ground-based air defense equipment in the same region. Those systems operate under NORAD authorities and work alongside its aircraft as part of what it described as a layered defense network of radars, satellites, and fighter jets.

The command tied the posture to Operation Noble Eagle, the name it gives to all of its aerospace warning, control, and defense missions in North America. NORAD describes the operation as deterring, detecting, and defeating potential threats to U.S. and Canadian airspace around the clock.

NORAD used the opportunity to remind pilots that if they are intercepted, they should immediately tune to 121.5 or 243.0 and reverse course until given further instructions on one of those frequencies.

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/10/2026 - 10:25

Key Events This Week: CPI, PPI, Retail Sales

Most traders may be out on the beach soaking up the mid-summer sun, but the relentless market and geopolitical newsflow continues for another week.

Following Friday's payrolls report, which was far more dovish than hawkish at face value, attention this week will be firmly on July US CPI (Wednesday), which could go a long way towards further tipping the balance for September FOMC pricing. Futures pricing fell by around 10 percentage points immediately after the release on Friday, leaving the implied probability at 44%. Then we get US PPI (Thursday), which is key for the components that feed directly into core PCE. Other US highlights include retail sales and the preliminary University of Michigan consumer sentiment survey (both Friday). Elsewhere, attention will focus on the RBA policy decision (tomorrow), the Norges Bank meeting and UK Q2 GDP report (Thursday), and inflation releases across Asia and Europe. Corporate earnings are quieter than in recent weeks but reports from Tencent, BYD, Cisco, Applied Materials and CoreWeave will still attract attention.

Before we go into the week ahead in more detail the situation in Iran remains finely balanced with Iran’s latest political and security moves suggesting that Tehran is trying to balance a tougher domestic posture with a continued search for a diplomatic off-ramp. The appointment of former Revolutionary Guard commander Mohsen Rezaee to head the Supreme National Security Council reinforces hard-line influence at the centre of decision-making, even as Iranian officials insist they are close to an agreement with Oman on a new shipping framework through the Strait of Hormuz. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has described the talks as being in their final stages, but Tehran has stressed that any technical agreement on shipping routes would not by itself lead to a full reopening of the waterway. Reuters and other major outlets report that Iran continues to tie any lasting Hormuz arrangement to wider demands on the US, including sanctions relief, compensation for war damage and security guarantees. Oman has characterised the negotiations as constructive, while Washington has signalled a willingness to continue talks despite periodic tensions. Brent is up around +0.8% this morning but US and European equity futures are fairly flat.

This all follows last Friday’s US payrolls report certainly offering a mixed assessment of labor market conditions. Headline payrolls unexpectedly fell by -23k, private payroll growth slowed to just +30k, and the previous two months were revised down by a cumulative -103k. However, much of the weakness was concentrated in two sectors - leisure and hospitality (-40k) and local government education (-50k), while goods-producing employment and construction both posted their strongest gains in several months. At the same time, the unemployment rate declined to 4.1%, its lowest level since early 2025. DB economists view the report as consistent with a broadly stable labor market rather than a sharp deterioration, noting that demographic factors continue to weigh on participation.

The softer payrolls data has reduced the urgency for further Fed tightening in the near term, but with labor market slack only gradually increasing, it's over to Wednesday's US CPI. 

On this big number, DB's economists expect headline CPI to rise by +0.15% mom after June’s -0.42% decline, while core CPI is forecast at +0.26% mom following an unchanged reading in June. Lower gasoline prices should keep headline inflation softer than core, and if forecasts are realized both headline and core annual inflation rates would edge down by around one-tenth to 3.45% and 2.51% respectively. Markets will also be watching for evidence of payback from several unusual price moves in June, particularly across parts of core goods and services.

Attention will then turn to July PPI on Thursday. Economists expect headline producer prices to rise by +0.22% mom, with core PPI at +0.3% mom. Particular focus will fall on categories that feed into core PCE inflation, including healthcare services, airfares and portfolio management. DB strategist are currently tracking +0.22% in July and 3.3% YoY.

Friday’s US data will offer the first major read on Q3 activity. Economists expect retail sales to increase by +0.1% mom in July, a dip from the 0.2% increase in June, as lower fuel prices weigh on the headline figure relative to underlying spending measures. The preliminary University of Michigan consumer sentiment survey is expected to ease to 54.7 in August from 55.2 previously.

Fed speakers are relatively sparse, although comments from Cleveland Fed President Hammack and Richmond Fed President Barkin may attract attention following the inflation data.

Outside the US, there are a couple of G10 central banks in focus this week. The Reserve Bank of Australia announces its policy decision tomorrow, with our economists (and the market) expecting rates to remain unchanged at 4.35%. Norges Bank follows on Thursday with a 25% probability of a hike priced in.

In Europe, the key release will be the UK’s Q2 GDP report on Thursday. Our economists expect June GDP to contract by -0.1% mom, leaving quarterly growth at +0.4% qoq, although risks are seen as tilted to the downside. Elsewhere, Norway and Denmark both publish July CPI figures today.

On the corporate side, the earnings season is becoming less intensive, with 400 out of the S&P 500 having now reported, but several notable companies remain on the calendar.

In the US, investors will focus on results from Cisco, Applied Materials and CoreWeave, while in China attention will fall on Tencent and BYD.

Courtesy of DB, here is a day-by-day calendar of events

Monday August 10

• Data: Japan June BoP current account balance, BoP trade balance, July bank lending, Economy Watchers survey, Denmark July CPI, Norway July CPI, Germany wholesale price index
• Central banks: BoJ summary of opinions from the July MPM
• Earnings: Ferguson Enterprises, Alcon, AST SpaceMobile, USA Rare Earth

Tuesday August 11

• Data: US July NFIB small business optimism, existing home sales, Italy June trade balance
• Central banks: RBA decision
• Earnings: Lumentum, CoreWeave, Constellation Software, Venture Global, Super Micro Computer
• Auctions: US 3-yr Notes ($58bn)

Wednesday August 12

• Data: US July CPI, Japan July M2, M3, machine tool orders, Germany June current account balance, Canada June building permits
• Earnings: Tencent, Cisco, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Coherent, Nebius, Cerebras, Vestas
• Auctions: US 10-yr Notes ($42bn)

Thursday August 13

• Data: US July PPI, initial jobless claims, UK Q2 GDP, July RICS house price balance, EU industrial production, Japan July PPI
• Central banks: Norges bank decision, Fed’s Hammack and Barkin speak
• Earnings: Applied Materials, RWE, Lenovo, Adyen, Pandora
• Auctions: US 30-yr Bonds ($25bn)

Friday August 14

• Data: US July retail sales, August University of Michigan survey, June business inventories, China Q2 BoP current account balance, Eurozone June trade balance, Canada June manufacturing sales
• Earnings: BYD

* * * 

Focusing on just the US, the key economic data releases this week are the CPI report on Wednesday and the retail sales report on Friday. There are a few speaking engagements with Fed officials this week, including events with Presidents Hammack and Barkin.

Monday, August 10 

• There are no major data releases scheduled.
• 03:00 PM Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammack (FOMC voter) speaks; Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammack will appear on Yahoo Finance. Moderated Q&A is expected. At the July FOMC meeting, President Hammack dissented from the Committee’s decision to hold the target range for the fed funds rate unchanged, preferring a 25bp hike. In her dissent statement on July 31, she said that “given the stability of the labor market, with the unemployment rate near my estimate of maximum employment, I view high inflation as the more pressing problem.” She added that a “higher federal funds rate would help restrain economic activity and reduce inflationary pressures” because she does “not see the current policy stance as appropriately restrictive.”

Tuesday, August 11 

• 10:00 AM Existing home sales, July (GS -1.0%, consensus -0.9%, last -2.4%)

 Wednesday, August 12 

• 08:30 AM CPI (MoM), July (GS +0.05%, consensus +0.1%, last -0.4%); Core CPI (MoM), July (GS +0.19%, consensus +0.2%, last flat); CPI (YoY), July (GS +3.35%, consensus +3.4%, last +3.5%); Core CPI (YoY), July (GS +2.47%, consensus +2.5%, last +2.6%): We estimate a 0.19% increase in July core CPI (month-over-month SA), which would lower the year-over-year rate by 0.1pp to 2.5% on a rounded basis. We expect mixed autos inflation, reflecting a 0.5% increase in used car prices, a 0.1% increase in new car prices, and a 0.5% decline in the car insurance category. We forecast benign readings for the shelter categories—a 0.23% increase in the OER category and a 0.16% increase in the rent category—reflecting the continued slowdown in their underlying trends. We expect mixed travels services inflation (airfares: +2%, hotels: -1%), reflecting the signals from alternative price data. We expect slight upward pressure on the communications category from recently announced price increases for consumer electronics worth 1-2bp on core CPI inflation. We estimate a 0.05% rise in headline CPI—reflecting higher food prices (+0.2%) but lower energy prices (-2.0%)—which would lower the year-over-year rate to +3.35% from +3.53%. Our forecast is consistent with a 0.26% monthly increase in the core PCE price index in July. We expect a sharp increase in the portfolio management component—reflecting the increase in equity prices in Q2, which flow through to the component with a lag—to contribute to the larger increase in core PCE prices than the core CPI.

Thursday, August 13 

• 08:15 AM Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammack (FOMC voter) speaks: Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammack will speak at the Dayton Area Chamber of Commerce’s Government Affairs Breakfast series in Kettering, Ohio. Moderated Q&A is expected.
• 08:30 AM PPI final demand, July (GS +0.4%, consensus +0.2%, last -0.3%); PPI ex-food and energy, July (GS +0.4%, consensus +0.3%, last +0.2%); PPI ex-food, energy, and trade, July (GS +0.4%, consensus +0.3%, last +0.1%)
• 08:30 AM Initial jobless claims, week ended August 8 (GS 200k, consensus 202k, last 199k): Continuing jobless claims, week ended August 1 (consensus 1,800k, last 1,801k)
• 08:40 AM Richmond Fed President Tom Barkin (FOMC non-voter) speaks: Richmond Fed President Tom Barkin will speak on the economic outlook and monetary policy at the Chamber of Commerce in Greenville, South Carolina. Speech text and audience Q&A are expected. On August 7, after the release of the July employment report, President Barkin noted that the employment data were “very consistent with how I’ve been seeing the labor market—which is it’s not loose, it’s not tight, it’s sort of in a weak balance.”

Friday, August 14 

• 08:30 AM Retail sales, July (GS -0.1%, consensus +0.1%, last +0.2%); Retail sales ex-auto, July (GS flat, consensus +0.2%, last -0.2%); Retail sales ex-auto & gas, July (GS +0.2%, consensus +0.3%, last +0.4%); Core retail sales, July (GS +0.2%, consensus +0.3%, last +0.5%): We estimate nominal core retail sales increased 0.2% in July (ex-autos, gasoline, and building materials; month-over-month SA). Our forecast in part reflects a 0.2pp drag from payback for an early Amazon Prime Day, which is normally conducted in July but was held in June this year and likely boosted last month’s report. We estimate nominal headline retail sales declined 0.1%, reflecting lower gasoline prices and auto sales.
• 10:00 AM University of Michigan consumer sentiment, August preliminary (GS 55.0, consensus 54.6, last 55.2): University of Michigan 5-10-year inflation expectations, August preliminary (GS 3.3%, consensus 3.3%, last 3.3%)

Source: DB, Goldman

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/10/2026 - 10:15

Give Them An Inch...

By Bas van Geffen, senior macro strategist at Rabobank

Talks between Iran and Oman on the reopening of Hormuz are reportedly inching ahead, as Iran continues to give the US the silent treatment. Negotiators said that a deal to establish a safe shipping route was close, but Iran may now be exploring just how much it can extract from the US in return.

Last week, Iran had already said that any deal with Oman would be contingent on the US lifting its blockade of Iranian ports. On Friday, a US official told Reuters that the administration agreed to this. The US blockade would end once a deal is announced that “restores commercial shipping without impediments.”

But give them an inch and they’ll take a mile. Tehran added new demands over the weekend, saying that the Strait of Hormuz will not reopen unless the US meets “a number of requirements.” These demands largely seem to refer to the original memorandum of understanding. Iran’s additional demands include the US ending all hostilities and withdrawing its troops from the area. Iran also wants Washington to pay billions in war damages and lift sanctions on the country.

Or do the additional demands reflect division between Iranian camps, and varying levels of distrust of the US? The strait remains a key point of geopolitical leverage – at least until planned alternatives for oil exports are all fully operational.

Meanwhile, the US president appears to be divided on the war as well. The Wall Street Journal reported this weekend that Trump had been willing to walk away without any agreement on Iran’s nuclear programme, claiming victory if the strait reopens. However, Iran’s additional demands may have torpedoed that plan.

Netanyahu rejecting the Board of Peace plan for Gaza is a further complicating factor. The Israeli prime minister indicated that he will not withdraw troops until Hamas fully disarms.

So, yesterday, Trump told Axios that he was “low-keying it,” waiting for the economic damage to build: “We are only semi-negotiating. We are just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money.” Yet, the longer this persists, the more economic damage could build in the US and other parts of the world as well.

Energy markets started the week off cautiously after all this. Brent futures are marginally higher, but traders seem reluctant to take big positions given all this on-again, off-again news. Equity markets seem to have shrugged off the weekend news flow entirely, perhaps partly aided by US economic data.

Following Friday’s employment report, the case for a Fed hike is weakening, but it is certainly not yet done for. The headline payrolls number disappointed, with a -23,000 jobs print and a 37,000 downward revision to the June estimate. In contrast, unemployment declined from 4.2% to 4.1%, but the underlying data indicate that this was due to a big fall in labour supply that outpaced the decline in household employment.

Our US strategist noted earlier that employment growth has been slowing for several months, and Friday’s report confirmed that downside risks to the labor market have not disappeared entirely since the three insurance cuts last year. This could strengthen the argument of the Fed’s doves. Yet, the employment report also allows the hawks to argue that the labor market is mostly suffering from supply constraints, even if they are a little less confident in their case than before.

In short, the labor market data may have removed some urgency, reducing the odds of a September hike. However, incoming inflation data remain key.

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/10/2026 - 09:45

Ukrainian Drones Launched 750-Miles Deep Into Central Russia Kill 13

Ukraine's military has conducted a rare, mass casualty attack deep into central Russia. Long-range drones reached Tatarstan, which lies some 1,200km (or about 750 miles) east of the Ukrainian border.

The strikes killed 13 people and wounded at least 75 in what's widely being called one of the most deadly single attacks launched on Russian territory by Ukraine throughout the war.

via Reuters

"According to the latest information, 13 people have been killed and 75 wounded as a result of the drone attack," on the city of Nizhnekamsk, the Tatarstan region's press service indicated Monday.

Nizhnekamsk is an important oil refining hub, and also has a major petrochemical plant, and there have been reports of thick smoke rising above an oil facility near the city. NBC notes that "Ukraine’s General Staff said its forces struck a Taneco oil refinery in Nizhnekamsk, starting a fire."

According to more details in regional media:

Radmir Belyayev, the mayor of the industrial city of Nizhnekamsk, said drones targeted both civilian and industrial sites during the attack. Besides the more than a dozen fatalities, which included one child, regional authorities said more than 70 people sought medical attention.

Unverified reports said the Nizhnekamskneftekhim petrochemical plant, which produces synthetic rubber and plastics, was hit during the overnight attack. 

Hundreds of drones crossed Russia's skies overnight, with the military saying it shot down 456 Ukrainian drones fired overnight.

Ukraine's President Zelensky stated Sunday night, "We do deliver entirely justified responses, and every Russian strike will be met with our response. Russia’s war will be felt more and more at their own home — in Russia."

He added: "The only reason this is still continuing is Russia's unwillingness to end this war." Currently there appear to be no negotiations happening, even after the White House signaled it would seek to renew diplomatic efforts toward ending the war."

And Ukraine's General Staff has warned, "The Armed Forces of Ukraine will continue systematically implementing measures aimed at bringing the Russian Federation’s armed aggression to an end."

At this point, there are hundreds of drones sent on Russia each night, which Ukraine describes as retaliation for heavy Russian ballistic missile attacks on its cities.

BREAKING:

Ukrainian long-range drones have struck Russia’s 3rd-largest oil refinery

Tatneft’s TANECO refinery in Nizhnekamsk in the Tatarstan region has a refining capacity of 17 million tons of oil per year. Only Omsk (22 million) and Kirishi (20 million) have more. pic.twitter.com/Jt1h6KuVmv

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) August 10, 2026

In Ukraine overnight, at least five people were reported killed in a Russian artillery strike in a village in the northeastern Kharkiv region.

Additionally, while Ukraine's repeat large drone waves on central Russia and even the Moscow region have driven headlines, much less attention has been paid to the emerging and renewed Black Sea war. Moscow seeks to sever military supply routes and disrupt arms shipments bound for Ukraine, but this has also obviously resulted in damaged and sunken tankers, auxiliary vessels, and even deaths of civilian bystanders among international shipping crew.

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/10/2026 - 09:30

Boeing Sells Flying-Taxi Venture To Rival Archer Aviation, Takes Near 20% Stake

Archer Aviation shares surged in premarket trading after The Wall Street Journal reported that Boeing had agreed to take a nearly 20% stake in the eVTOL startup as part of a deal that transfers control of its autonomous flying-taxi venture, Wisk Aero, to Archer.

Archer will acquire Wisk, air-traffic software provider SkyGrid, and drone manufacturer Insitu. The 737 maker will receive warrants, gain the right to nominate a director to Archer's board, and retain access to Wisk's autonomous-flight technology. The transaction is expected to close later this year.

Brian Yutko, Boeing's vice president of Commercial Airplanes product development, told CNBC that the deal "allows Wisk, SkyGrid and Insitu to accelerate capability development and time to market while ensuring Boeing capitalizes on its investments in these technologies over the past two decades through continued development in our core businesses."

For Boeing, the transaction marks another divestiture under CEO Kelly Ortberg as the planemaker focuses on strengthening its core commercial-aircraft and defense businesses. Boeing previously invested $450 million in Wisk and has spent more than a decade developing its autonomous electric-flight technology.

For Archer, the deal strengthens its position in developing eVTOLs and the networks needed to support them. Insitu also helps Archer expand its military portfolio.

Archer CEO Adam Goldstein told CNBC that the deal "is the next big step forward in becoming a diversified platform, rapidly growing our revenue base and bringing scale to our business."

Shares of Archer jumped 20% in premarket trading. As of Friday's close, the stock was down 25% year to date. Short interest represents 15% of the float, equivalent to about 95 million shares.

The deal provides further evidence of Ortberg's turnaround plan to return Boeing to profitability, suggesting that efforts to streamline the aerospace giant could lead to additional divestitures.

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/10/2026 - 09:00