China’s Oil Scramble Sends African, Canadian, Latin American Crude Prices Soaring
September 9th, 2026Via: ZeroHedge:
China, the world’s largest oil importer, is bidding up crude prices across Africa, Canada, and Latin American markets as disruptions in the Hormuz chokepoint and limited Iranian supplies intensify competition for alternatives. The scramble is squeezing smaller Chinese refineries that once relied on heavily discounted Iranian barrels, according to a new Bloomberg report.
Anthropic Researcher: “The People Building AI Earnestly Believe That It Could Kill Us All By The End Of The Decade”
September 9th, 2026I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.
— Jacob Coxon (@hilbertspaess) September 9, 2026
Via: TechCrunch:
An Anthropic researcher has resigned over fears that unrestrained development of self-improving AI models will end up killing us all.
Jacob Coxon, a researcher who said in a social media post Tuesday evening that he spent the last three years working on pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic, accused the firms of failing to act responsibly. He said the people racing to build this technology “earnestly believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
“They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,” Coxon wrote in a thread on X.
Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists
September 9th, 2026Via: The American Prospect:
Job postings and interviews with senior security officials at Anthropic show that the frontier AI lab is building out an extensive monitoring system to keep tabs on activists who oppose the rapid development of artificial intelligence.
In addition to monitoring activists in the vicinity of Anthropic executives and keeping tabs on protests near physical Anthropic assets, the firm is also implementing a “pre-crime” approach, attempting to predict incidents before they happen. In some cases, that also means reporting suspects to police before a crime occurs.
U.S. Destroys Iranian Oil Tankers Near Kharg Island
September 8th, 2026Via: New York Post:
American forces destroyed five Iranian oil tankers near Kharg Island and Jask on Tuesday as the US added military might to its economic squeeze of the Islamic Republic.
US Central Command said in a statement that it carried out the strikes that downed five Iranian crude oil carriers in response to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) targeting of an American warship with ballistic missiles in the last two days.
Saudi’s Remaining Energy Lifeline To The World Under Threat After Successful Houthi Strikes
September 8th, 2026Via: The War Zone:
Just hours ago, the Saudi Aramco refinery at Jazan on the Red Sea was engulfed in flames after a Houthi missile and drone attack. Strikes at the heart of the Saudi’s energy infrastructure on the Red Sea, which acts as the remaining primary lifeline of energy exports out of the region, threaten to drastically impact global oil prices further… In the wake of the attack and additional fighting in the Persian Gulf, oil prices surged toward the $100 per-barrel mark.
UAE Warned Netanyahu Hamas Was Planning ‘Terrifying Operation’ 10 Days Before Oct. 7
September 8th, 2026Via: Media ITE:
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was personally and explicitly warned that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was planning a major attack roughly 10 days before the October 7 massacre, but dismissed the threat and did not alert his security chiefs, according to a shocking new Haaretz report.
The revelations come from research for an upcoming book Hostages: 843 Days of Abandonment, written by journalists Shlomi Eldar and Ruth Yuval, who writes for Haaretz.
United Arab Emirates President Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan raised the alarm directly with Netanyahu during a 45-minute conversation, three senior foreign sources familiar with the exchange told the Israeli newspaper, and reportedly warned that Sinwar was preparing a major operation.
Netanyahu reportedly responded that he believed Hamas intended to operate in the West Bank and assured the Emirati leader that Israel was prepared for any scenario.
The warning was apparently never passed to Israel’s top security officials. Former Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar and former IDF chief of staff Herzi Halevi both told Haaretz they had not been informed about the conversation.
What REALLY Happened With the Missing Trillions?
September 7th, 2026Via: Corbett Report:
LG TVs Run a Network and Audio Surveillance Dragnet Against Users
September 7th, 2026Via: Gamers Nexus:
Here’s a brief article about the video above (if you don’t have 2+ hours to spend on this and want a basic summary: LG smart TVs caught logging audio with screen off and snooping on local devices
More: LG Isn’t the Only TV Company Spying on You
“Is There Alien Debris on the Moon? Some Scientists Plan to Find Out.”
September 5th, 2026If you liked the one about Satam al-Suqami’s passport, you’ll love this!
Via: New York Times (backup):
Imagine an alien civilization that runs on dazzling technologies far more advanced than our own. Picture city-size starships, planet-wide mines or swarms of solar panels that harvest energy directly from a star.
As these aliens go about their otherworldly business, the erosive forces of space wear down their infrastructure, loosening tiny bits of debris that detach and drift into the cosmos. If the civilization collapses, its remains degrade even faster. Clouds of particles might be unleashed into the galaxy, akin to the microplastics in Earth’s oceans, sprinkling countless worlds with the detritus of an extraterrestrial society.
Some of these particles, if they exist, may have even wafted through our solar system, perhaps settling on the surface of the moon, proposes a team of scientists focused on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI. In their provocative study, which is in peer review for the International Journal of Astrobiology, they suggest that searching for these microscopic remnants in lunar soil could resolve one of humanity’s great questions: Are we alone in the universe?
“If any other technological civilization has ever existed in our galaxy, it’s not an unreasonable hypothesis to think that particles of them are on the moon in some quantity,” said Lewis Pinault, an affiliate scientist at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. and a researcher at Birkbeck College, University of London , who led the research.
More: Micron-Scale Technosignatures: How a Cubic Metre of Lunar Regolith May Begin to Constrain the Number of Past Technological Civilisations in the Galaxy
Alejandro Betancourt: Venezuelan Billionaire the U.S. Investigated for Money Laundering Now Has a Pentagon Oil Deal
September 5th, 2026Via: Reuters:
The billionaire who helped broker the Trump administration’s sweeping long-term oil deal with Venezuela was until recently a target of U.S. money-laundering investigations involving funds embezzled from the state-owned oil company PDVSA. Now, after assisting U.S. authorities ahead of the capture ?of authoritarian leader Nicolas Maduro, Alejandro Betancourt is Washington’s key partner in an unusual oil agreement with Caracas.
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Earlier this year U.S. federal prosecutors in Florida paused their investigation into Betancourt in connection with an alleged plan that involved embezzling over $1 billion from Venezuela’s state-owned oil company and laundering it through real estate in Miami and bank accounts in Malta and Switzerland.
Two of those people said U.S. prosecutors had been subsequently discouraged by supervisors from investigating Betancourt further.
More: Who is Alejandro Betancourt, the Venezuelan tycoon behind the big oil deal with Trump?
