Across The Spectrum

Saudi Arabia Cuts Europe Off From October Crude as Gulf Exports Surge At least two European refiners were told their October allocations are zero, Bloomberg reported Friday. People familiar with the decision said it applies to all European term buyers. While Saudi Aramco seems to have found a way to move some of the crude that was stranded by the East-West pipeline, Europe is on the wrong side of the workaround. The East-West pipeline had been moving 4 million to 5 million barrels per day across Saudi Arabia to Yanbu, bypassing the Strait of Hormuz. Crude from Yanbu could move through Egypt’s SUMED system to Sidi Kerir on the Mediterranean, giving European refiners access to Saudi barrels without entering the Gulf. The pipeline attack stopped that flow, and Europe was left scrambling. Aramco has since sold about 60 million barrels from its Persian Gulf export terminal at Ras Tanura for September and October loading. Those barrels will move through Hormuz and undergo ship-to-ship transfers near Sohar, Oman. The program puts roughly 1 million to 1.5 million bpd of Saudi Gulf exports back into the market—with buyers in China, South Korea, India and Japan, and decidedly not Europe. https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Saudi-Arabia-Cuts-Europe-Off-From-October-Crude-as-Gulf-Exports-Surge.html

Exclusive: US military had close call after using AI for false intelligence report, sources say The intelligence report, circulated across the US military this spring in the midst of the war with Iran, immediately set off alarm bells: A Chinese ship in the Middle East was transporting components of a nuclear weapons program. The US military swung into action with plans to intercept the vessel, according to four sources familiar with the episode. According to two of the sources, armed members of the US military were preparing to board the ship. Military planes were in the air, one of those sources and another source familiar with the incident said. It was only just before the planned operation that officials dug deeper into the report put together by a special operations command analyst and found it had been generated with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) — and that a chatbot the analyst had used inaccurately identified the material the ship was carrying. CNN was not able to learn what the misidentified cargo was. https://edition.cnn.com/2026/09/18/politics/us-military-ai-false-intelligence-china-ship

‘Looksmaxxing’ Influencer Clavicular Charged with Rape and Drugging a Person for Sex in Mass. Clavicular, whose real name is Braden Peters, is due to be arraigned on Oct. 14 https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/celebrity/articles/looksmaxxing-influencer-clavicular-charged-rape-131835566.html

OpenAI says its AI agents escaped a secure ‘sandbox’ again last weekend and it is pausing training for a second time The new revelation is significant because it is the first time the company has said that one of its AI models was able to gain unauthorized internet access since announcing a range of steps on Aug. 18 to improve the security and monitoring of its "sandboxes"—the digital environments, usually walled off from network and internet access, in which it tests unreleased models in order to discover their capabilities. https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/chatgpt/articles/openai-says-ai-agents-escaped-152502166.html

FTC opens sweeping probe of Anthropic, OpenAI and other ‘super intelligence’ models The Federal Trade Commission is ramping up a sweeping probe of Anthropic, OpenAI and other frontier labs to uncover the potential dangers their technology poses to consumers, and plans to slap the tech titans with formal demands, similar to subpoenas, to turn over information, administration officials told The Post. FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson launched the investigation before one of the AI models went rogue during a test — in what’s since been dubbed the “Hugging Face incident” — but the agency is now drafting civil investigative demands to force testimony from the leading firms’ executives. https://nypost.com/2026/09/30/us-news/ftc-opens-sweeping-probe-of-anthropic-openai-and-other-super-intelligence-models/

Brazil's Right Is Running Ahead in the Elections for the First Time as Lula and Bolsonaro Head to a Runoff Flávio Bolsonaro outperformed every major poll on Sunday, handing the conservative camp a narrative edge heading into a three-week sprint against an incumbent who has never lost when it matters most. Flávio Bolsonaro finished the first round ahead of incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, with the near-final tally settling at roughly 47% for the senator against approximately 44% for the president. Brazil's electoral court (TSE) may adjust these figures marginally once certification is complete. A runoff on October 25 is now confirmed — neither candidate reached the 50%-of-valid-votes threshold required to win outright in the first round. Pre-election surveys from Datafolha and Quaest had projected Lula leading the first round by roughly 3–4 points; Bolsonaro's finish ahead inverts that narrative and gives the conservative camp momentum heading into the second round. The October 25 contest looks statistically indistinguishable from a toss-up, with both candidates polling inside each other's margin of error in runoff projections published through late September. https://www.latintimes.com/brazils-right-running-ahead-elections-first-time-lula-bolsonaro-head-runoff-599813