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🚨 REJECTED: Trump turned down Iran’s seven-day plan to reopen Hormuz but says he expects talks to resume this week. - CBS News
📺 MUST WATCH: SpaceX just launched Starship into orbit. - 𝕏X
⛽ DIESEL: Trump says he’s looking “very seriously” at banning diesel exports with retail diesel at a record near $6.50 a gallon. - CNBC
🇬🇧 FOILED?: British police arrested five men near RAF Fairford, the base launching U.S. bombers against Iran, on suspicion of preparing a terrorist act involving three trucks. The suspects were just released on bail. - NYT (free)
🤖 ROGUE: OpenAI confirmed its AI agents went off-script this summer and poked at Commerce, SEC, and Education Department websites. AG Todd Blanche said Sunday no new AI laws are needed. - Fox News (free)
➡️ NOTEABLE: Prominent economist Torsten Slok asks an important question: Is an Agentic Bank Run Coming? - Apollo
‼️ NEWS: Nvidia just announced the largest stock buyback plan in history. - CNBC
👂 The Show Notes is my blueprint for radio but is only for subscribers. You can subscribe and listen here.
The cast of SNL spoofed an interview with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and it was perfect.
Dario is indeed weird: In 2010, he argued that “an adult death is perhaps 2 or 3 times worse than an infant’s death.” Then, years later, his now-wife and top adviser reportedly approached Jeffrey Epstein about investing in a “free luxury porn” company AFTER serious allegations of sexual misconduct against Epstein were already public.
Iran’s regime has lost control of the Strait of Hormuz.
Why? Because oil exports in the Middle East are now back to about 94%. This is a moving target, yes, but it is what the data tells us right now right here and, as far as I can judge, with plenty of independent data sources to cross-check the below.
Full story at 𝕏X.
In the early days of President Trump’s second term, his economic advisers laid out a simple theory: Show the bond market that Washington was serious about closing its gaping deficits, and long-term interest rates would fall on their own. Trump could leave the Federal Reserve alone.
It hasn’t worked out that way.
Inflation is rising, the Fed is raising rates and the 10-year Treasury yield is well above where it stood on Inauguration Day, when the new team blamed high rates on runaway Biden-era spending. Last week, that yield reached the highest level since 2007 as investors weighed a resilient economy, prolonged energy disruptions that threaten to aggravate price pressures and a central bank losing patience waiting for them to fade.
The White House theory rested on fiscal restraint that never arrived and overlooked how much of Trump’s own agenda would feed the price pressures now pushing rates higher. Tariffs raised the cost of imported goods. The war with Iran sent oil and diesel prices soaring. Immigration restrictions shrank the labor force.
Full story at WSJ (free).
Bo French, the Republican nominee for one of Texas’ most powerful statewide offices, is facing bipartisan criticism over a racist post about the crowd at a University of Texas football game.
Now, a CNN KFile investigation has uncovered since-removed posts from the past six years in which French repeatedly advocated having public executions for political opponents, including former President Barack Obama.
French is running to lead the Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates the state’s powerful oil and gas industry. His earlier post portrayed South Asian students at the university as “foreigners” displacing Americans.
Although French has stood by that post, prominent Republicans have distanced themselves from his candidacy. Longtime GOP strategist and former George W. Bush adviser Karl Rove said he would vote for the Democrat in the race, while Texas Sen. John Cornyn said he would not vote for French.
Full story at CNN (free).
The Trump administration finalized a significant weakening of federal fuel economy standards for automobiles, rolling back a key policy that had pushed the industry to improve the efficiency of cars and trucks and sell more battery-electric vehicles.
Automakers must achieve a fleet average of 34.9 miles per gallon for cars and light trucks in model year 2031, the Transportation Department said on Monday. That’s far less than the roughly 50 miles per gallon required by standards finalized under President Joe Biden.
The move advances Trump’s effort to unwind federal policies that had pushed the auto industry to improve the efficiency of their gasoline-powered cars and trucks and sell electric vehicles in greater numbers. President Donald Trump has repeatedly attacked those measures as an “EV mandate” that drove up new car prices, calling the policies “ridiculously burdensome.”
Full story at Bloomberg (paywall).
An artificial intelligence system from OpenAI attempted to use another A.I. model to evade a robot detection test as it tried over and over to break into a company’s computers, according to a report released on Friday by a Bay Area start-up.
In July, OpenAI disclosed that its A.I. agents went rogue and hacked the software company Hugging Face. Since then, new and often startling details about the incident have emerged, leading to a national debate about A.I. safety and whether so-called frontier labs like OpenAI should be regulated in some way by the government.
Now, the report from engineers from the start-up, called Parse, and other researchers offers one of the most comprehensive public accounts of the Hugging Face hack: a tranche of nearly one million links from internet link-shortening services that OpenAI’s agents created from July 9 through July 13 in order to help conduct the cyberattack.
Full story at NYT (free).
Exclusive-ShinyHunters hackers say they stole psychiatric and medical records of FBI staff -
ReutersTrump administration asks Supreme Court to allow policy ending medical treatments for transgender inmates -
CBSPaul emerges as a roadblock to homeland security efforts -
PoliticoMeta hires MongoDB CEO CJ Desai to lead enterprise unit. MongoDB shares crater -
CNBCFlorida asks for emergency order to halt ChatGPT development -
AxiosTrump’s economy polls terribly. It’s also surging. -
PoliticoHow Evan Gershkovich Kept Reporting From Inside Russia’s Prison System -
WSJ(free)
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