THE NEWS

New York Attorney General Letitia James’ legal battle against President Donald Trump over DOGE-linked access to sensitive Treasury systems ended Wednesday with a federal judge dismissing the lawsuit she spearheaded with 18 other states.The case stems from Trump’s January 2025 executive order establishing DOGE, which directed executive agencies to create DOGE teams and set July 4, 2026 as the termination date for the U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization.James led a coalition – which included New York and 18 other states – that sued the following month after Treasury gave DOGE-affiliated employees access to Bureau of the Fiscal Service systems, which process federal payments and contain sensitive financial information.JUDGE SAYS ISSUES IN TRUMP ADMINISTRATION ANTI-WEAPONIZATION CASE ‘ALIVE AND KICKING’ DESPITE DOJ PUSHBiden-appointed U.S. District Judge Jeannette Vargas ruled that the “plaintiffs’ claims related to access by DOGE-affiliated employees to sensitive Treasury information are dismissed as moot,” according to Wednesday’s order.Vargas said the Treasury DOGE team had been disbanded and no DOGE employees remained at Treasury, leaving no access practice for the court to enjoin. She separately dismissed the states’ claims over an automated payment-review system, finding they had not alleged that the process froze or canceled any specific federal payment due to them.The states argued the Trump administration unlawfully opened sensitive Treasury systems to DOGE, putting state financial information and federal payments at risk and exceeding the administration’s legal authority.EXCLUSIVE: INSIDE THE SECRETIVE MINE DOGE HELPED DRAG OUT OF A DECADES-OLD BUREAUCRATIC BLACK HOLEIn February 2025, Vargas granted the states a preliminary injunction barring Treasury’s DOGE team from the covered payment systems, then modified the order over the following months to permit access for personnel who complied with specified vetting, training, hiring, reporting and mitigation procedures.The Executive Order established DOGE and called for each department to assemble its own DOGE team to find fraud, waste and abuse before their termination date of July 4.TRUMP’S LAWYERS PUT DEM AG ON NOTICE FOR TARGETING HIS FAMILY IN NY FRAUD FIGHT: ‘CANNOT STAND’James has been a longtime critic and legal adversary of Trump, launching a civil fraud lawsuit against him and the Trump Organization in 2022 after campaigning on investigating his business practices.The case initially resulted in more than $450 million in penalties, though an appeals court later upheld Trump’s liability while voiding the financial penalty.Fox News Digital reached out to White House and the office of the New York Attorney General for comment.

Police in Florida released tense body camera video showing the moment a sword-wielding burglary suspect was tased by deputies after allegedly refusing to drop the weapon.The Alachua County Sheriff’s Office said they responded early Tuesday in Gainesville after a “caller stated a man forced his way into their home with a sword, and they were forced outside against their will by the intruder.””Hey, brother, do me a favor, drop the sword. Drop the sword on the ground, my man. Let me talk to you, OK? It’s the sheriff’s office,” a deputy could be heard telling 26-year-old Josiah Smith as police arrived at the scene.”Hey, we got him at gunpoint, he’s not compliant, he keeps approaching,” the deputy is then heard telling other officers.WATCH: TERRIFYING MOMENT SPEAR-WIELDING MAN LUNGES AT CALIFORNIA COPS BEFORE SHOTS RING OUT”Josiah, throw the sword away, OK? Hey, stop, stop! Don’t move, stop. Stop, stop!” the deputy eventually yells.The bodycam footage then shows Smith falling backwards as he is tased by police.WATCH: MAN ACCUSED OF AIMING FLAMETHROWER AT OFFICERS SERVING EVICTION NOTICE IN WILD BODYCAM VIDEO”Smith was non-compliant with deputies’ lawful commands, refusing to drop the sword or get on the ground. Deputies used a less lethal launcher, shooting a foam round at Smith in order to get him to drop the sword,” the Alachua County Sheriff’s Office said. “Unsuccessful, deputies deployed a taser, and Smith was detained.”An investigation into the incident revealed that Smith and the alleged victim did not know each other, according to the sheriff’s office.Smith was taken into custody and is now facing charges of armed burglary of an occupied dwelling, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, armed kidnapping and resisting without violence.

Romania’s right-wing, anti-globalist AUR party George Simion has turned the detention of Călin Georgescu into the centerpiece of AUR’s confrontation with President Nicușor Dan, demanding the president’s suspension and portraying the episode as evidence that Romania’s corrupt political establishment is increasingly using state power against the increasingly popular sovereigntist opposition.
The clash comes less than two years after the annulment of the presidential election Georgescu had unexpectedly led, an intervention that continues to haunt the legitimacy debate surrounding Romania’s post-2024 political order.
“Nicușor Dan must be suspended!” Simion declared Thursday, accusing Dan of treating snap elections elections as something harmful to citizens and alleging that the president personally ordered Georgescu to be put in handcuffs.
While Simion has not publicly produced evidence showing that Dan directed DIICOT’s operational decisions, the accusation is a part of AUR’s wider argument that political and judicial power are increasingly converging against the sovereigntist camp.
President Nicușor Dan, who was elected in the 2025 rerun after Romania’s 2024 presidential vote was annulled following Georgescu’s historic, blow-out win, claimed, rather unconvincingly, in an interview with Antena 3 that snap elections would prolong Romania’s political uncertainty and would be “bad first and foremost for citizens.” He urged parliamentary parties to negotiate a government instead of sending the country immediately back to the polls.
AUR has flipped that argument on its head. Simion’s party presents a return to the ballot box not as dangerous instability but as the most direct way to restore political authority to voters after months of coalition bargaining and institutional deadlock.
The suspension campaign was already gathering steam before Georgescu’s latest detention. AUR launched the suspeND.ro platform to track parliamentary support, publish lawmakers’ positions and mobilize citizens around an effort to remove Dan through the constitutional suspension process.
Earlier this month, AUR said 119 parliamentarians and more than 390,000 members of the public had registered support through the initiative. The party was seeking 155 parliamentary signatures as it tried to transform popular anger into a formal constitutional challenge.
The legal threshold remains substantial. Under Romania’s Constitution, at least one-third of parliamentarians must initiate suspension, Parliament must then approve it by majority vote after consulting the Constitutional Court, and the final decision on removing the president goes to voters in a national referendum.
Georgescu’s detention has handed AUR a far more powerful symbol than any petition website could provide. DIICOT officers stopped the former presidential candidate in traffic Monday morning and took him to his Mogoșoaia home while investigators carried out five searches in Bucharest and surrounding areas
The operation lasted nearly nine hours before Georgescu was taken to DIICOT headquarters. Prosecutors detained him for 24 hours, and he was subsequently photographed leaving the building in handcuffs as supporters gathered outside.
DIICOT says Georgescu is being investigated alongside others for aggravated fraud and participation in an organized criminal group. Prosecutors allege that businessmen were promised access to major foreign credit facilities in exchange for financial guarantees, resulting in alleged losses exceeding €1.1 million.
https://agerpres.ro/justitie/2026/09/21/procurorii-diicot-au-solicitat-informatii-din-patru-tari-in-dosarul-de-inselaciune-al-lui-calin-geor–1595441?utm_source=chatgpt.com
In ordinary circumstances, the case might remain primarily a criminal matter. Georgescu’s political history makes that impossible: he is the outsider who stunned Romania’s governing class by finishing first in the opening round of the 2024 presidential election before the state cancelled the contest altogether.
The Constitutional Court annulled that election after intelligence services alleged, without providing any evidence, Russian-linked online interference, campaign irregularities and manipulation favoring Georgescu. To this day they have failed to provide evidence supporting their extraordinary claim, which effectively ended Romanian democracy. US Vice President JD Vance, Elon Musk, and US State Department have all slammed the decision to annul the presidential election and effectively suspend democracy.
Romania’s establishment institutions, for their part, have maintained that the intervention protected electoral integrity. AUR, Georgescu and much of the sovereigntist electorate have drawn the opposite lesson: when voters produced an outcome outside the established Euro-Atlantic globalist consensus, institutions stepped in and erased it.
That interpretation remains contested, but its political consequences are undeniable. The annulment created a lasting reservoir of distrust among voters who believe the state nullified their electoral choice and then prevented Georgescu from returning to the rerun, leaving every subsequent investigation of him vulnerable to accusations of political retaliation.
Dan later won the separately organized 2025 presidential election, giving his presidency a recognized constitutional basis. But for AUR’s electorate, legal validation has not erased the deeper legitimacy dispute created by the extraordinary cancellation that preceded his rise to office.
Simion has increasingly stopped speaking about that dispute in cautious parliamentary language. After Georgescu’s detention, he warned that “any of us could be next,” framing the police operation as a warning to anyone challenging Romania’s established political system.
That argument now gives AUR a much broader story to tell than one criminal investigation. The party points to the cancelled presidential election, Georgescu’s exclusion from the rerun, repeated criminal proceedings, searches by masked officers and his public appearance in handcuffs as evidence of what it describes as escalating institutional pressure on the sovereigntist movement.
The wider sovereigntist critique goes further still. AUR increasingly portrays Romania’s governing architecture as a closed, left-liberal Euro-Atlantic establishment—growing more authoritarian in method—in which Brussels-oriented parties, security institutions, and traditional political networks keep control of the country’s strategic direction while nationalist challengers remain outside the governing perimeter.
That is why Simion’s demand for snap elections carries more weight inside AUR than a normal tactical maneuver. The party presents another national vote as a way to return political authority to Romanians themselves rather than allowing yet another government to emerge from negotiations among parties whose public support and governing coalitions have repeatedly fractured.
Suspending Dan has therefore become part of AUR’s larger attempt to convert widespread distrust of Romania’s institutions into a constitutional struggle over popular sovereignty. Whether Simion can assemble the necessary parliamentary numbers remains uncertain.
Romania’s increasingly unpopular, globalist establishment—widely seen as illegitimate in the eyes of the people—now faces a problem that arrests, coalition deals and procedural arguments cannot solve on their own. After an annulled presidential election, the exclusion of its first-round winner, renewed criminal proceedings and another dramatic detention, AUR is betting that an expanding share of the electorate will see the central issue not as Georgescu alone, but as a more fundamental question: whether sovereignty still rests with Romanian voters or with the institutions claiming the power to decide when their choices can be allowed to stand.

The post Romania: AUR Chief George Simion Demands President’s Suspension as Georgescu’s Arrest Deepens Country’s Annulled-Election Legitimacy Crisis appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

What T. Boone Pickens Would Ask About AI CapEx

Authored by Patrick Feeley via Substack,

I keep waiting for someone in the AI discussion to talk like an owner. What we get instead is a week of model releases, token counts, and model-lab valuations that look like oil majors, while the harder questions about turbines, interconnect queues, and who answers for the spend sit offstage. That imbalance would have driven T. Boone Pickens up a wall.

Boone passed away in Dallas on September 11, 2019. He was 91. He grew up in Holdenville, Oklahoma, worked as a geologist at Phillips Petroleum, quit, and built Mesa Petroleum from a shoestring into a company that could force Gulf Oil into Chevron’s arms. Later he ran an energy hedge fund out of Dallas and spent a decade trying to shove the country onto wind and natural gas before the transmission system could carry either. Two things always set him off. Soft managements that treated shareholders as a nuisance. And a national energy policy that treated imported oil as something America just had to live with.

If he were still in the room this week, he would not be picking sides in a chatbot fight. He would start with the physical bill of materials that decides who can actually build AI.

Power first. Every incremental megawatt of AI load is an order for firm generation. New combined-cycle gas capacity for the post-2027 cohort is now running near $2,000 a kilowatt, roughly double the cost of earlier plants, with turbines on multi-year backorder. Existing, grid-connected gas plants have been changing hands near $1 million a megawatt, about half the cost of building new. In Boone’s language, it is getting cheaper to find megawatts on the floor of the exchange than in a turbine queue.

Then metal. Copper goes into the transformers, busbars, and switchgear that move that power to the rack. Tin goes into the solder on every board and optical module. Fastmarkets’ AI-chain work puts solder-related tin exposure on track for roughly a tenth of global solder-tin demand by 2030. Gallium and germanium go into power electronics and high-speed optics. The United States is 100 percent import-reliant for gallium, more than 50 percent for germanium, about 77 percent for refined tin, and about 57 percent for refined copper. China accounts for the overwhelming share of primary gallium refining. None of that stack turns on a two-year Capex slide.

Only then would he get to the denominator. What does each new dollar of Capex earn, and what did that dollar cost to fund? Underneath the math sits the question he put to every oil company he ever owned. Who works for whom?

The Mesa Years

Most readers remember the shareholder campaigns. Fewer remember how improbable the man behind them was. Boone was born in 1928 and went to Texas A&M on a basketball scholarship. After an injury he transferred to Oklahoma A&M, where he took a degree in petroleum geology in 1951. He had not yet found his footing, and his father delivered a line Boone would repeat for the rest of his life. A fool with a plan can beat a genius with no plan. His parents, his father added, were worried their son was a fool with no plan. Get a plan. Boone took the point. Every campaign he ran afterward began with a written plan and a number, and he had little patience for executives who could offer neither.

He spent a few years as a Phillips geologist, went out on his own, and in 1956 formed Petroleum Exploration, Inc. with two backers in Amarillo. It went public in 1964 as Mesa Petroleum, named for the flat-topped land of the Texas Panhandle. Four years later Mesa made a hostile tender for Hugoton Production, a Kansas gas company larger than itself, and won. That deal set the pattern. By 1981 Mesa was one of the largest independent oil companies in the world, with more than $2 billion of assets, and still small next to the companies Boone would go after next. Cities Service. Gulf. Phillips. Unocal.

The method was consistent. He looked for oil companies whose reserves were worth more than the equity market would credit under the people running them. He bought stock, pressed for a restructuring, a sale, or cash returned to owners, and moved on. Critics called it greenmail. Boone called it accountability.

Gulf was the campaign that defined him. In 1983 Mesa and its partners accumulated a large position in Gulf Oil, one of the Seven Sisters and many times Mesa’s size. With the stock around $44, Boone argued publicly that Gulf’s reserves supported something closer to $114 a share, and that management had depleted more than half the company’s reserves in a decade. His remedy was not to shut anything down. It was to place a quarter of Gulf’s cash flow, roughly $750 million a year, into a royalty trust paid directly to shareholders. The board refused, and in 1984 Chevron acquired Gulf for $13.2 billion, then the largest merger in American corporate history. Measured against the size of the U.S. economy, that is the equivalent of a transaction of more than $100 billion today, or roughly half of what Alphabet expects to spend on capital this year. The Pickens group realized a pretax gain of approximately $760 million.

The size of the gain was not the lasting significance. The lasting significance was that a small independent from the Texas Panhandle had shown the market something it preferred not to see. As Boone put it, it had become cheaper to look for oil on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange than in the ground, and the boards sitting on that discount could be made to answer for it.

Unocal showed the limits of the approach, and its most durable result. In 1985 Fred Hartley answered Mesa with a self-tender that excluded Mesa by design, and the Delaware Supreme Court allowed it. Boone lost money on the campaign. But within about a year the SEC adopted its all-holders rule, and a tender offer that treated one class of owner differently from another was no longer available to a board. Every American board still operates under that rule. The following year Boone founded the United Shareholders Association and reduced his philosophy to two sentences. Stockholders are owners. Management are employees. That is still the cleanest description of what is missing from most AI board presentations, which are full of pilots and roadmaps and almost never say who will answer for the roadmap if it is still a slide in 2028.

The Second Act

Most people with Boone’s first career would have stopped. Mesa moved from Amarillo to Dallas in 1989, and by 1996 Boone had left the company that made his name. He was nearly seventy. The following year he founded BP Capital and went back to work on the same idea that had powered the raids, which is that physical reality eventually overrules the consensus story. In the years before the 2008 oil peak, when many analysts treated high prices as an aberration, he argued publicly and with his own capital that supply could not keep pace with demand. He was early more than once and said so cheerfully. He was right on direction often enough that those who dismissed him looked careless in hindsight.

His favorite story was about a geologist who falls from a tall building and, passing the fifth floor, thinks so far, so good. He meant the optimism. He also meant that you still had to land. The Pickens Plan of 2008 was that temperament applied to the whole country. Build wind across the Great Plains, build the transmission to carry it, move natural gas out of power generation and into heavy trucks, and cut the import bill. He committed real capital, including an order for 667 GE turbines for a Texas Panhandle project that foundered when transmission could not reach the load, credit markets seized, and cheap shale gas undercut the wind economics. He spent years finding homes for those turbines. It was, in effect, a dry hole with a purchase order.

The critics were right that the plan was harder than the advertisements. But the lesson has aged well. The binding constraint then was wires. Today it is wires, interconnection, turbines, and metal. Artificial intelligence did not create the problem of moving power from where it is cheap to where it is needed. It made the load arrive all at once.

The Same Signal, Forty Years Later

The idea underneath Boone’s campaigns is the one worth borrowing this year. It was about what happens when an industry is flooded with cash and keeps pouring it back into the ground.

Crude prices rose roughly tenfold during the 1970s, and the majors emerged with more cash than they had sensible uses for. Michael Jensen later put the 1984 cash flow of the ten largest oil companies at $48.5 billion. Very little went back to owners. The industry kept spending heavily on exploration and development even where average returns sat below the cost of capital. The market noticed before the boards did. John McConnell and Chris Muscarella found that while higher capital-spending announcements generally helped industrial stocks, higher exploration budgets pushed oil stocks down. Owners were saying, in the only language available to them, that the next dollar sunk into the ground was worth less than a dollar left in their hands.

Set this year’s numbers beside that history. Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft are on track for combined 2026 capital spending on the order of $700 billion to $745 billion, most of it tied to AI infrastructure. On July 22, 2026, Alphabet beat on revenue, raised full-year Capex guidance to $195 billion to $205 billion, reported free cash flow of about negative $5.9 billion for the quarter, and sold off hard after hours. The market was sending the same signal McConnell and Muscarella recorded four decades ago.

The fair caveat matters, and Boone would have offered it himself. The oil majors of the early 1980s were often reinvesting into flatter demand. The hyperscalers are reinvesting into demand that is still compounding, and cloud backlogs are real. But the question Boone asked never depended on whether demand was growing. It depended on whether the marginal dollar earns more than it costs, and whether anyone outside management is allowed to check.

The second half of his insight applies well below the hyperscalers. Proven reserves already in the ground, owned by someone else, were cheaper than new ones, and the same arithmetic now runs through the power market. Existing gas plants have been trading near half the cost of new combined-cycle capacity. The largest buyers have drawn the obvious conclusion. Rather than wait years for a grid connection, they are pulling generation toward the load. Entergy is building gas plants to serve Meta’s Hyperion data-center campus in Louisiana. In Texas, ERCOT has fielded large-load interconnection requests on a scale that would have seemed implausible five years ago, and the Legislature has moved to set terms for how those loads connect.

In Boone’s language, it has become cheaper to find megawatts on the floor of the exchange than in a turbine queue. An energized site with an interconnection agreement is the proven reserve of this cycle, and the companies that hold one are not always valued for it.

Ready, Aim, Aim, Aim

Boone had a phrase for corporate delay. Ready, aim, aim, aim. He used it on oil executives who preferred another study to a decision, and it describes the enterprise AI economy with uncomfortable precision. MIT’s Project NANDA work on generative AI in business, widely covered in 2025, reported that the vast majority of organizations studied were showing no measurable P&L return despite tens of billions in enterprise spend. Treat that finding as directional, not scripture. Even well-run companies are not immune to slow kill decisions. McDonald’s tested AI voice ordering with IBM at more than 100 drive-thrus beginning in 2021 and ended the test in 2024 without a rollout. Ending a pilot that does not work is the right decision. The question an owner asks is why it took three years to reach it.

The tools are no longer the main problem. For a great many ordinary operating uses they are good enough. Ownership is the problem. If no executive’s compensation depends on turning the spending into cash, the spending becomes theater.

Consider what Boone would do if he were thirty-five today with capital behind him. He would not start with the hyperscalers. He would start where he started with Hugoton, with a company larger than his own whose assets were worth more than its management was delivering. Today that is often a small or mid cap industrial, distributor, or services business that has announced an AI program, committed a meaningful share of its free cash flow to it, and still reports no metric tied to the result. He would read two years of filings and earnings calls and total the committed spend, including the parts buried in IT budgets and consulting contracts. He would buy enough stock to be taken seriously. Then he would pick up the telephone, because he always preferred a voice to an email, ask for the plan in writing, and give management a date. If the plan never arrived, he would take the same questions to the other shareholders and, if necessary, to the public. That was Hugoton, and Gulf, and every campaign in between. It was never about hostility. It was about a calendar.

Five Questions T. Boone Pickens Would Ask AI Companies Today

None of these are exotic. They are the questions a well-run family office puts to the operating businesses it owns, and most public boards have not yet put them to their own AI programs.

What is the total committed AI spend, including the pieces buried in IT, consulting, and cloud contracts?
Which line on the income statement is supposed to improve, by how much, and by when?
Whose compensation depends on that result?
What happens to the program if the target is missed by half?
How does the return compare with the simplest alternative, which is returning the capital to the owners?
The last question is the Gulf royalty trust in modern form. Managements with good answers generally welcome an engaged shareholder. Managements without them are running a science project on someone else’s balance sheet. The difference is rarely the model. It is almost always the plan.

Boone would have been a handful in any boardroom this year, and he would have enjoyed every minute of it. Yet the lesson of his career is an optimistic one. The oil industry he pressed in the 1980s emerged leaner, better capitalized, and more attentive to its owners, and the shareholders who stayed the course were well rewarded. The AI buildout can follow the same path. The demand is real, the technology works, and the physical constraints of power and metal are problems that capital and discipline know how to solve. What the moment requires is owners willing to ask for the plan and managements confident enough to produce one. Boone spent sixty years insisting that a fool with a plan beats a genius without one. The companies that take that advice in this cycle will set the standard for the rest, and their owners will be glad they asked.

Sources

Alphabet Q2 2026 earnings release – Capex guidance $195-205B; Q2 P&E purchases $44.9B; Q2 free cash flow about -$5.9B link
Alphabet after-hours selloff on the Capex raise, July 22, 2026 link
Hyperscaler 2026 Capex context (Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft combined on the order of ~$700B-$745B depending on definition) link
Enverus – existing gas-plant M&A near ~$1.0M/MW vs new CCGT replacement cost near ~$2.0M/MW for the post-2027 cohort (July 15, 2026) link
Fastmarkets – AI-chain solder tin exposure rising toward ~10.6% of global solder-tin demand by 2030 link
USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026 – U.S. net import reliance: gallium 100%; germanium >50%; refined tin ~77%; refined copper ~57% link
Chevron acquires Gulf Oil, 1984 (~$13.2B); Pickens group pretax gain (~$760M) link 1 link 2
SEC all-holders / best-price tender offer amendments after Unocal (1986) link
Pickens launches United Shareholders Association, 1986 link
Mesa Power orders 667 GE wind turbines for the Texas Panhandle project, 2008 link
Michael C. Jensen, “The Agency Costs of Free Cash Flow, Corporate Finance, and Takeovers” link
John J. McConnell and Chris J. Muscarella, “Corporate Capital Expenditure Decisions and the Market Value of the Firm,” Journal of Financial Economics (1985) link
Entergy gas generation approved to serve Meta’s Hyperion load in Louisiana link
MIT NANDA / State of AI in Business 2025 – directional on weak P&L conversion of enterprise genAI spend; not peer-reviewed link
McDonald’s ends IBM AI drive-thru test, 2024 link
This note is for research and discussion only. It is not an offer to sell, or a solicitation to buy, any security. Sargasso Capital Management may hold positions discussed or related instruments and may change those positions without notice.

Tyler Durden
Thu, 09/24/2026 – 10:20

We have reached the final day of the WNBA season.Regardless of if you follow it or not, the season has come and gone, and if you consume sports, you’ve probably heard about many of the main stories from the season. We’ve had Enes Kanter talk about wanting to declare himself eligible for the draft, more Caitlin Clark drama, injury storylines, and of course, the league seemingly shooting themselves in the foot. However, I want to focus on the good for this final day as the Fever take on the Lynx.The good for the Indiana Fever: Kelsey Mitchell. This has been a decent season for the Fever, but this team isn’t trying to win the regular season; they are trying to win in the playoffs. We routinely see the Fever getting the best effort from their opponent because of the attention that comes when playing against Indiana. Part of the reason the Fever are so dangerous is that they have elite scorers at three positions. We all know how good Clark is, and the attention she commands. Even Aliyah Boston is recognized as a great talent as a former No. 1 pick.However, Kelsey Mitchell is the player who stands out the most to me with her scoring. She has increased her scoring each year for the past four seasons and is over 1,000 points for the year. As of tonight’s game, she is at 1,076 points, setting the single-season record for most points in a season. This is just the third 1,000-point season in league history, and the first by someone other than A’ja Wilson. Mitchell doesn’t even need to do most of the damage shooting from deep; she can score from all three levels. To her credit, she can shoot from three and has increased her made threes each year since 2020.CAITLIN CLARK RETURNS AFTER FIBA TITLE AS KELSEY MITCHELL SETS WNBA SCORING MARK IN FEVER VICTORY OVER TEMPOOver on the other side of the court, they have the Minnesota Lynx, with their good being Olivia Miles. The Lynx are already locked up with the #1 seed in the postseason, and normally you’d attribute that to Napheesa Collier. Last year, Collier was the MVP of the league and dominated for the Lynx. She got injured in the playoffs and only came back 15 games ago. Collier has been up to her old tricks, scoring in bunches and contributing a ton of rebounds. In 15 games this season, she is averaging 17.5 points and 6.9 rebounds.CLICK HERE FOR MORE OUTKICK SPORTS COVERAGEThe real story of this team is not Collier. Everyone expected the Lynx to step back because of Collier’s injury. Instead, they drafted Olivia Miles, and, as the saying goes, the rich got richer. Miles has been simply fantastic for the Lynx. She is averaging almost 20 points per game for Minnesota in her first season and broke Clark’s rookie points record. She is also averaging 4.7 rebounds and six assists. She is very efficient, too, shooting almost 50-40-90 from the key areas.CAITLIN CLARK, INDIANA FEVER DROP STATEMENT WIN ON TOP-SEEDED LYNX IN FINAL HOME GAMEThe only issue with this game is that we are not going to see Miles, and I’d doubt we’ll see much of Collier either. The Fever are listing Caitlin Clark as probably to play.A win can give the Fever the 5th seed in the postseason, but a loss might put them at the sixth seed. Indiana can face the Dream or the Aces depending on where they land with their seeding, and I personally would rather face the Dream if I were them. I expect the Fever to go all out for this win and cover the -3.5 spread. There just isn’t anything to gain for Minnesota.For more sports betting information and plays, follow David on X/Twitter: @futureprez2024

A UAP whistleblower is making an extraordinary claim about what the U.S. government is keeping behind closed doors, saying the government is in possession of recovered craft.”Does the government have craft that have been recovered? Yes they do,” Dylan Borland said on the “Hang Out with Sean Hannity” podcast.Borland made the assertion in the latest episode of the show, where he joined television host Ben Hansen to discuss what whistleblowers say they know about the government’s handling of UAP and allegedly recovered craft.UFO WHISTLEBLOWER CLAIMS BILLIONS IN SECRET SPENDING HIDDEN FROM CONGRESSHannity pressed Borland directly on whether he knew “for a fact” that the government possessed such craft, and whether restrictions surrounding his work would allow him to answer the question publicly.He responded: “Yes.”His claim comes after a group of UAP whistleblowers called on President Donald Trump to waive nondisclosure agreements they say prevent them from fully disclosing what they know to the American public.MARCO RUBIO ADDRESSES UAP GOVERNMENT COVER-UP ALLEGATIONS, SAYS TRUMP WOULD GIVE A SPEECH IF ADMIN KNEW MOREDuring the conversation, Hannity also pointed to individuals he had spoken with previously who said they had knowledge of recovered craft. He asked Borland whether he knew people who had made similar assertions.”Probably, yes,” Borland responded.Hannity also discussed claims from individuals who say they faced intimidation, workplace harassment and threats after coming forward with UAP-related information. Borland appeared to affirm those accounts during the interview.Hannity has held previous podcast discussions about UAPs, including one conversation with Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., and Luis Elizondo about alleged Pentagon UAP cover-ups, exotic materials, destroyed pilot data and more.”Hang Out with Sean Hannity” fans can watch or listen to Hannity’s full conversation with Borland and Hansen on iHeartRadio, YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever they get their podcasts.

Week 3 is here in the NFL, and I really hope it is nothing like Week 2. Let’s toss aside the sports betting aspect for a moment, but we saw three young quarterbacks- Caleb Williams, Jaxon Dart, and Jayden Daniels- get injured. Timetables are uncertain for some returns, but either way, football is better with primary quarterbacks available. We have two in tonight’s game between the Falcons and Packers.The Atlanta Falcons are getting back a starting quarterback of their own. Well… kind of.They are getting Michael Penix Jr. back, but he is returning and taking over for Cooper Rush. The original starter was supposed to be Tua Tagovailoa, but he’s been unavailable all season. Penix Jr. will have his hands full trying to figure out what to do with this offense. They don’t lack playmakers – Bijan Robinson is solid, Drake London is a really good receiver, and Kyle Pitts (although drafted too high) is still a solid option.In the first two games, the Falcons were essentially outmatched. Is that because Rush was under center? In game one, they scored 13 points, but last week they could only get 3 points against a team that almost allowed 60 points in Week 1. The offense wasn’t terrible by some measures – they had 17 first downs, one fewer than the Panthers. However, they had three turnovers; if they shore those up, maybe it’s a more competitive game.MICHAEL PENIX JR. OFFICIALLY NAMED FALCONS STARTER FOR A SHORT-WEEK TRIAL BY FIRE AGAINST PACKERSOn the other side of the field is a team with more than enough questions of their own. The Packers are 1-1, but it wasn’t easy to get that victory. They had to go into New Jersey to face the Jets, and they were forced into an overtime game with them. They came out on top 20-17. I don’t want to act like we should be impressed or pleased with that performance, but perhaps it is something to build on, and now they get their first home game.THE CRAIG CARTON SHOW–UNFILTERED, UNAPOLOGETIC AND UNMISSABLE. DOWNLOAD HIS DAILY PODCAST NOW!In Week 1 it wasn’t much better for the Packers. Green Bay was fine against the Vikings, at least for the first half of the game. They struggled to get much going against the Minnesota defense and gave up their lead in the second half. It wasn’t just that; they barely could score and couldn’t keep Carson Wentz from marching down the field. I do blame the front office. I’m not exactly sure that Jordan Love is an elite quarterback, but his receiving options certainly don’t help make him much better. Couple that with Josh Jacobs being out, and this offense should be expected to struggle.JETS COLLAPSE LATE AGAINST PACKERS, MISS CHANCE AT FIRST 2-0 START SINCE 2015 IN OVERTIME LOSSThe Falcons haven’t done much on defense to give you reason to believe this, but there should be adjustments here. On a short week, facing 0-3, you’re trying everything out of desperation. I think they will put pressure on the Packers, and Love hasn’t looked all that comfortable yet this season. Maybe being at home will help, but I think that’s where we see a boost to their defense as well. Give me the under 45.5 for this “Thursday Night Football” game.For more sports betting information and plays, follow David on X/Twitter: @futureprez2024

FIRST ON FOX: A University of Maryland research lab that received nearly $700,000 in additional federal funding from the Trump administration this year is facing a civil rights complaint alleging that it uses race and ethnicity to determine access to some research-related opportunities.The Equal Protection Project (EPP) filed the complaint with the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights against UMD’s Lavender Lab, a National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded lab that studies suicide, substance use and other health outcomes among LGBTQ+ people and Black, Indigenous and People of Color.EPP is asking HHS to investigate whether the lab’s LGBTQ+ Teens of Color Advisory Board and its research assistant selection practices give priority to non-White applicants.”Some people may ask what is wrong with prioritizing non-whites in a program which is designed to study non-whites,” EPP founder William Jacobson told Fox News Digital. “When you receive federal funding, you cannot discriminate in the administration of your programs.”JUSTICE DEPARTMENT LAUNCHES TITLE VI INVESTIGATION INTO DEI PROGRAMS AT ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY”You do not need to have an advisory board, you do not need to hire research assistants based on race to fulfill the purposes of this grant,” Jacobson continued.The complaint comes as the Lavender Lab continues receiving millions of dollars through the NIH for research examining alcohol and drug use among “sexual minority adolescents of color.”One of the lab’s principal projects, titled “Long-Term and Daily Associations Among Intersectional Minority Stress, Structural Oppression, and Alcohol Use and Misuse Among Sexual Minority Adolescents of Color,” began in May 2022 and is scheduled to run through April 2027. The complaint cites approximately $3.6 million in total federal obligations and roughly $2.2 million in outlays at the time of its filing.NIH records cited in the complaint show the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism provided another $695,192 for the project for fiscal year 2026.The complaint points first to the lab’s LGBTQ+ Teens of Color Advisory Board, which said it was “specifically looking for teens in the US who identify as both LGBTQ+ and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) to join our board” in an Instagram post.A NEW YORK UNIVERSITY FACES JUSTICE DEPARTMENT INVESTIGATION OVER ‘BLACK MALE INITIATIVE’According to the complaint, board members are paid to help review research, provide feedback and participate in professional-development activities, with some also receiving leadership opportunities.EPP also targeted the Lavender Lab’s research-assistant program, which offers positions to undergraduate and master’s-level students.Although the positions are generally unpaid, the complaint stated that undergraduate research assistants may receive academic course credit, and some students may be able to participate through federal work-study. Research assistants generally commit to at least two semesters and a minimum of eight hours per week.The lab stated it “especially encourage[s] and invite[s] candidates from traditionally marginalized backgrounds” to apply and that applicants with experience conducting research involving “LGBTQ and BIPOC communities” through “cultural humility, intersectionality, and social justice approaches” will receive the “strongest consideration.””Discrimination based on race or ethnicity at institutions receiving federal funding is unlawful regardless of which group is targeted or benefits,” Jacobson said. “Treating individuals as avatars of their demographic identity rather than as individuals with unique merits and circumstances undermines fairness, merit, social cohesion, and the rule of law.”TRUMP ADMIN’S PUSH TO SCRAP DEI IN FEDERAL GOVERNMENT TAKES LANDMARK STEP WITH NEW HIRING RULEEPP alleges that the language indicates race or ethnicity may play a role in the selection process. The complaint asks HHS to investigate whether the practices violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color or national origin in federally funded programs, as well as the Affordable Care Act.”Because the Lavender Lab is operating under an HHS health care related grant, the non-discrimination provisions of the Affordable Care Act must be adhered to, and HHS has authority to enforce those provisions,” Jacobson said.EPP’s complaint also questions federal funding for research focused on intersectionality, which the Lavender Lab says guides its work. The lab studies how sexual-minority status, race, ethnicity and what it calls “structural oppression” affect health outcomes.”The conduct at the Lavender Lab calls into question whether HHS should be funding intersectionality-focused research at all,” Jacobson said. “Intersectionality is a race- and ethnicity-focused group-identity approach. It is no surprise that where the focus is racial identity that programming could cross the line into civil rights violations.”Jacobson said EPP has found federal dollars going to programs that use intersectionality and is calling for tighter rules on that funding.SIGN UP TO GET THE POLITICS NEWSLETTER”We have identified hundreds of millions of dollars of federal funding for programs that incorporate intersectionality,” Jacobson said. “Given the civil rights danger from an ‘intersectional’ approach, we call on the administration to issue a new executive order and agency guidance closing the ‘intersectionality loophole’ by including intersectionality in the ban on unlawful discriminatory DEI practices in federal grantmaking.”Fox News Digital reached out to the University of Maryland, HHS and the White House for comment. 

AI-Generated Image by Grok
When archery meets lunacy.
Usually, we are here to talk about knife violence epidemic plaguing Britain and Europe in general – but this time an even crazier story has arisen.
It turns out a 68-year-old British man has been arrested after allegedly firing a bow and arrow several times in a Huddersfield street, in West Yorkshire.
The man has been detained under the UK Mental Health Act.
Armed officers were deployed in response, but citizens restrained the man before police arrived.
The Telegram reported:
“Footage of the incident in Skelmanthorpe appeared to show a man standing by the roadside before drawing back the weapon and shooting several times.
West Yorkshire Police said officers were called shortly after 5.30pm on Tuesday following reports of a man acting erratically, including by throwing rubbish and household items out of a car while driving.”
Screengrabs Social Media/X
When armed officers arrived at the scene, the man had already been restrained ‘by members of the public’.
“He was arrested on suspicion of possession of an offensive weapon in a public place at around 6pm and remains in custody.
Photographs from the scene and further footage showed an arrow embedded in the side of a white van and another lying on the ground..”

Arrows fired at members of the public caught on camera
Police have arrested a 68-year-old man after a bow and arrow was reportedly fired at passing vehicles in Skelmanthorpe.
Police were called at 5.37pm after reports of a man acting erratically, throwing rubbish and… pic.twitter.com/cOQx00QR0w
— Yapp (@YappAppLtd) September 22, 2026

Police first receiving reports of a man acting erratically, ‘throwing rubbish and household items from a car while driving’.
GB News reported:
“Further calls were then received reporting that the man had got out of the vehicle and was firing a bow and arrow in the street and at passing vehicles.
[…] West Yorkshire Police said no one was injured, although a number of vehicles were damaged after being struck by arrows.
The man was initially taken into police custody before being detained under Section 136 of the Mental Health Act. He was taken to hospital for an assessment and has since been detained for mental health treatment.”
Read more:
LAWLESS LONDON: Woman Arrested After Allegedly Stabbing Four Men With a Pair of Scissors (VIDEOS)

The post UK INSANITY: Deranged Man Arrested After Firing a Bow and Arrow at Passing Vehicles – Archer Is Restrained by Citizens Before Armed Police Arrive (VIDEO) appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

Watch Live: Trump Receives China’s Xi, Delivers Initial Remarks

LIVE: Arrival Ceremony and initial Trump-Xi remarks:

The moment of President Xi’s arrival at the White House:

NOW: Trump welcomes Xi Jinping to the White House. pic.twitter.com/zvXVkxqaGj
— Clash Report (@clashreport) September 24, 2026
For more of our analysis and what to expect:

Read: Mr. Xi Comes To Washington: What Wall Street Banks Are Expecting

*  *  *

Chinese stocks slipped overnight as the two-month extension of the US-China trade truce fell short of some Wall Street expectations (some desks were hoping for +6 months), offering limited reassurance that today’s talks would deliver a long-lasting trade deal, stabilize bilateral ties, and ease uncertainty over global trade.

The mainland CSI 300 Index dropped 1.7%, while the Hang Seng China Enterprises Index pared losses and closed flat. Broader Asian equities also came under pressure after a global bond selloff gathered pace as investors responded to stronger-than-expected US economic data on Wednesday and weak Treasury auction demand amid increasing fears of further Federal Reserve tightening

The two-month truce extension through Jan. 10 removes an immediate source of uncertainty but falls short of the three-to-six-month extension some Wall Street desks were hoping for. 

As we detailed in an overnight note titled “Mr. Xi Comes To Washington: What Wall Street Banks Are Expecting,” President Trump rolled out the red carpet for President Xi Jinping at Joint Base Andrews on Wednesday.

President Xi Jinping just arrived in Washington, D.C. for a state visit to the U.S.
President Trump and Mrs. Trump warmly received President Xi and his wife Madame Peng Liyuan at the airport. pic.twitter.com/MkXecYvx2Z
— Mao Ning 毛宁 (@SpoxCHN_MaoNing) September 24, 2026

B-1 Lancer flies over as President Trump welcomes Chinese President Xi to the United States.
Looks like an episode from The Office the way the camera zoomed in on Xi’s face. pic.twitter.com/cqOYgKwnsQ
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) September 23, 2026
Xi’s first White House visit since September 2015 includes bilateral talks, a South Lawn ceremony and a black-tie dinner later today with technology executives including Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Tesla/SpaceX’s Elon Musk and OpenAI’s Sam Altman. Private tea with the Trumps and a National Archives visit are also on the books. 

The high-level diplomatic visit comes as unresolved disputes mount. Trade talks center on the duration of the tariff truce, a proposed “Board of Trade” arrangement covering roughly $30 billion in goods on each side, and potential Chinese purchases of soybeans, Boeing aircraft and LNG. Rare earth supplies, technology restrictions, Iran and Taiwan also loom over the summit.

On the AI front, low-cost Chinese open-weight models are pressuring US frontier labs and eroding moats. Restrictions on advanced chips, allegations that Chinese companies distilled US models, and a proposed AI hotline add another layer to negotiations.

The broad expectation across JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, TD Cowen and Raymond James is that the summit will produce limited breakthroughs. Wall Street’s focus now shifts to how long the truce lasts and whether either side makes concrete concessions.

Earlier this morning, former acting deputy US Trade Representative Wendy Cutler told Bloomberg TV that the temporary US-China trade truce extension signals Trump’s dissatisfaction with Beijing’s rare earth exports and agricultural purchases.

It’s a “way, way shorter time than China had hoped for; China wanted to extend that truce until the end of Trump’s term,” Cutler told Bloomberg’s Heidi Stroud-Watts.

She continued, “We’re at a point in our relationship with China where big deliverables are just no longer possible, and we’re talking about managing the relationship and keeping it stable, but not improving and strengthening it.”

Matt Maley, a veteran Wall Street strategist and chief market strategist at Miller Tabak + Co., wrote in a note that the two-month extension may disappoint investors who were hoping for a longer-term deal and may not bode well for equities. “A lot of investors that I have been speaking to were hoping for a six-month extension,” he said.

Read what JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, TD Cowen and Raymond James have to say here.

Tyler Durden
Thu, 09/24/2026 – 10:15