The Federal Reserve on Wednesday approved its first interest rate hike in more than three years and indicated another to come, as part of an effort aimed at combating inflation brought on by spiraling oil prices and other factors.

In a move that markets widely anticipated, the central bank’s Federal Open Market Committee voted 12-0 to increase its key interest rate by a quarter percentage point, or 25 basis points. The move brought the overnight funds rate to a target range of 3.75%-4%.

“Inflation remains elevated,” the committee said in its brief post-meeting statement. “Today’s policy action will support a timelier return to the Committee’s 2 percent goal. The Committee will deliver price stability.” Despite a raft of conflicting recent statements from policymakers, markets had priced in a better than 90% chance that the FOMC would approve the increase, though there was chatter about the possibility of multiple dissents.

Persistently high inflation readings coupled with statements from Chairman Kevin Warsh a few weeks ago had convinced Wall Street that the Fed would OK its first rate increase since July 2023. Updated projections the committee released Wednesday showed that a strong majority of officials think another hike is possible later this year.

The dot plot grid of individual officials’ expectations indicated that 16 of the 18 participants – Chairman Kevin Warsh has chosen not to submit a dot since taking the position – expected another hike, with four of those seeing two more as possible. Two participants expected the committee to stop at one hike.

However, there are no increases penciled in for subsequent years, with one cut each indicated for 2028 and at least one for 2029. Officials also nudged up their expectations for inflation this year. They see the headline personal consumption expenditures price index at 3.7% and core excluding food and energy at 3.4%, both 0.1 percentage point higher than the last update in June. The Fed doesn’t expect to reach its inflation target until 2029, though it sees both measures dropping off sharply in 2027 – 2.3% for headline and 2.5% for core.

The committee had been on hold all year and was expected to stay there, until the tide began turning towards a hike in late August. The Fed rarely only moves once, as policymakers generally eschew incremental moves when they think inflation is too high and needs elevated rates, or when growth is too slow and the Fed tries to boost demand with lower rates.

While the move was expected, the rationale behind the hike was unusual. The Fed generally looks through the kind of inflation the economy is experiencing now, with the higher fuel costs from the Iran war and the lingering impacts from tariffs. However, officials in recent days have weighed the cost of continuing to look through the price increases, particularly in light of a stabilizing labor market. The committee lowered its outlook for the unemployment rate to 4.1%, down 0.2 percentage point from June.

The worry now is that the duration of the energy prices could raise inflation expectations and start to spread through the economy. Economists also see expanded investment in artificial intelligence as a potential inflationary factor. Also, the “transitory” episode from a few years ago is still fresh in policymakers’ minds, as Fed officials thought the supply-and-demand shock from the Covid pandemic eventually would fade. Instead, inflation readings hit 40-year highs before the Fed decided to act.

In July, the debate generated considerable dissent on the policy view, with three FOMC members voting against the decision to hold, preferring instead a quarter-point hike. At this week’s meeting, 2027 was a fairly close call, with eight officials pointing to another hike, six seeing the funds rate holding steady and four envisioning cuts. Markets already have been pricing in higher rates across the spectrum. Treasury yields have been surging. The 10-year note has risen about a quarter percentage point since Warsh’s remarks at the Fed’s Jackson Hole, Wyo., symposium on Aug. 28. The benchmark is up about a full percentage point since its February low. The 2-year note, which is most sensitive to rate expectations, has seen even sharper gains.

Borrowing costs are on the move as well. A 30-year fixed rate mortgage has soared to 7.19%, up some 38 basis points since the Jackson Hole speech and more than a full percentage point from a year ago, according to Mortgage News Daily.

Jeff Cox, CNBC

Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., introduced eight articles of impeachment Tuesday against Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, accusing him of exceeding constitutional and congressional limits on U.S. military action in Iran, Yemen and Venezuela.

Massie introduced the resolution on the House floor, where he spent more than an hour outlining allegations ranging from violations of the War Powers Resolution to unlawful military strikes and retaliation against a U.S. senator.

The first three articles focus on the administration’s war with Iran. Massie argues the conflict began without a congressional declaration of war or other statutory authorization and alleges Hegseth continued military operations despite congressional efforts to end U.S. involvement.

Massie also accused Hegseth of continuing hostilities beyond time limits established under the 1973 War Powers Resolution.

Other articles target the Pentagon’s conduct in military operations against suspected drug traffickers in the Caribbean. Massie alleges the administration improperly substituted military force for traditional law enforcement and failed to adequately protect civilians.

Another article concerns Operation Absolute Resolve, the U.S. mission that resulted in the capture of former Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. Massie alleges Hegseth lacked constitutional or statutory authority for the operation.

Massie also accused Hegseth of retaliating against Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., over Kelly’s participation in a video urging military personnel to reject unlawful orders.

The eighth article challenges U.S. military operations in Yemen, alleging Hegseth initiated hostilities without congressional authorization and failed to comply with War Powers reporting requirements.

“In all of this, Secretary Hegseth abused the powers entrusted to him as Secretary of Defense by subordinating the constitutional limits on the use of military force and the laws governing the conduct of hostilities to his own policy objectives,” Massie said.

American Greatness Staff

The FBI has now released its eighth tranche of files on Thomas Matthew Crooks — the 20-year-old who came within an inch of killing Donald Trump in Butler, Penn. Like the earlier drops, this one is 181 pages of interview summaries, invoices, evidence logs, and internal communications from FBI Pittsburgh. It’s heavily redacted, and 95 pages are withheld outright. In June I went through the fifth tranche, and found that the redactions said more than the visible text. What survives the redactors is still stranger than most of what you’ve heard about this case on television. Here’s what stood out to me.

1. The FBI had the ladder a week before Wray said it wasn’t found

On July 24, 2024, FBI Director Christopher Wray told the House Judiciary Committee: “We did not find the ladder at the scene.” He added that the Bureau did not believe Crooks used one to reach the roof.

A 302 in this release, dated July 17 — a full week before that testimony — records that a private citizen found a ladder and a long-gun bag “just inside the wooded area” of an empty lot beside the Village Square Mall in Bethel Park, along with two empty 20-round ammunition boxes. Inside the bag was Crooks’ Clairton Sportsmen’s Club membership badge, ID number 1133 [1927–1929].

So Wray’s statement was accurate in the narrowest possible sense: the ladder was not at the scene in Butler. It was 40 miles away in a wood lot — and already in FBI custody — when he chose those words. Nobody on the committee asked the follow-up, because nobody knew to.

The recovery itself is weird. The citizen didn’t leave the items where he found them. He loaded the ladder and the bag into his pickup and drove them to the parking lot of a Crowne Plaza hotel, where the Evidence Response Team photographed and collected them. As they finished, a “slim piece of black plastic, with potentially a button on one side” fell out of the tailgate. The citizen said it wasn’t his. Agents bagged it as evidence. The file doesn’t say what it was. FBI(25-cv-2216)-1928 — ladder and long-gun bag collected at the Crowne Plaza

2. The FBI was looking for a second phone

Four days later, on July 21, a special agent and a supervisor walked a linear search pattern across that same area — coordinates given to six decimal places — and rummaged through a dumpster “for a phone believed to be associated with Thomas CROOKS” [1920–1922].

They also searched a second location, an apartment complex on Library Road, because its coordinates were “saved on CROOKS’ phone,” and reviewed a funeral home’s security cameras covering the road outside it for the morning of July 13.

They found nothing. But the search only makes sense if investigators believed a device existed that they did not have. Crooks’ primary Samsung was recovered from his body. Elsewhere in the file, evidence item 1B40 is a separate Samsung containing a year of texts and calls ending in July 2023 — so the Bureau had at least two of his phones and was, a week after the shooting, hunting for a third. FBI(25-cv-2216)-1920 — dumpster search for a phone associated with Crooks

3. Someone who looked like Crooks walked into a gun store 120 miles away — with two men

Every witness in this file, family included, says the same thing: Crooks did everything alone. He went to the range alone, bought ammunition alone, had “no friends in general.”

Then there is Keystone Armory in Edinboro, Penn., two hours north of Bethel Park. The store called FBI Pittsburgh itself to report that on May 25, 2024, a “person of interest who resembles the shooter” spent about an hour browsing the store “accompanied by a white male believed to be around his mid 30’s and another older white male with a gray beard.” The lookalike bought 20 rounds of 7.62x54R — Mosin-Nagant ammunition — with a MasterCard at 12:41 PM [1933–1936].

The timing is plausible. Crooks was booked into a 5 PM carbine class in Mars, Penn., that same day; Edinboro to Mars is a comfortable drive. The store handed over its surveillance video. The release contains no follow-up 302 confirming or ruling out the identification, and no indication anyone identified the two men. Either it wasn’t him, in which case the file should say so — or it was, in which case the “lone wolf with no friends” story has a hole in it. The Bureau hasn’t felt obliged to tell us which. FBI(25-cv-2216)-1933 — Keystone Armory tip, Edinboro (lookalike + two men)

4. A stranger on the range the day before

On July 12, the afternoon before the shooting, Crooks was at the Clairton Sportsmen’s Club rifle range. He signed the log at 2:45 PM; the cameras show him arriving at 12:45. The club’s officers told agents the footage “shows CROOKS talking with another, unknown club member on the range. This member was the only other person on the rifle range” [1851].

He shot two guns that day: his AR and “an older military style rifle” — which, if you’re keeping score at home, is the kind of gun that fires 7.62x54R.

Agents photographed the unknown man and his vehicle off the club official’s phone, then ran DMV checks on every name on the sign-in sheet. Whatever came of it is not in this release. FBI(25-cv-2216)-1851 — Clairton range; unknown club member with Crooks

5. The contents of the gun bag

Alongside the sling, gloves, earmuffs, and safety glasses you’d expect in a rifle bag, agents inventoried a Stanley 12-foot tape measure, a red Sharpie, a Hyper Tough stapler, and a box of light-duty staples [1928]. Make of that what you will; the agents didn’t.

6. Four encrypted Belgian email accounts, and two foreign governments

An analyst reviewing Crooks’ phone found it had repeatedly accessed Mailfence — described in the file as “an encrypted email service hosted in Belgium” — between April 15 and July 8, 2024, across what appear to be four separate account IDs [1947–1948]. On July 15, two days after the shooting, FBI Counterterrorism sent formal “Foreign Dissemination Requests” to two governments, names redacted, asking for “any and all records” on accounts found on the device [1972–1982]. Rep. Mike Waltz later said the accounts traced to Belgium, New Zealand, and Germany. What those governments sent back, if anything, is not here.

7. The Deputy Attorney General personally authorized something

A five-page 302 dated July 19 opens: “per authorization by the Office of the Deputy Attorney General, as conveyed by the Office of the United States Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania,” two FBI officials “accessed the [redacted]” pertaining to Crooks [1896]. The rest of the five pages is black. Thirteen further pages were pulled from this release as “Referral/Consult” — bureaucratic shorthand for records that belong to a different agency. Which agency is not stated.

Whatever DAG-level sign-off was required to look at, it wasn’t a Samsung or a gun-club sign-in sheet. Those didn’t need one.

8. The father’s account

The interview with Crooks’ father gives us more of an idea who his son was. Thomas, according to his father’s FBI interview, talked to himself constantly, and more so after community college — “moving his hands and speaking to himself.” At night his parents heard what “sounded like he was dancing and whispering.” Two or three times a week he paced the house. His father joked with him about hearing voices; Thomas answered, without anger, that there were no voices, he was just talking to himself. He had recently bought a chest rig and ceramic plates. He bought ammunition online “going from website to website until he found a site that would sell to him.” And, perhaps most relevant: “THOMAS not known to write, and no writings or manifestos were found.”

The father learned his son was the shooter from two CNN reporters, who called him before the police did. A neighbor was contacted by a New York Times reporter before the FBI knocked [1795]. The press beat the Bureau to Bethel Park.

9. The anti-Trump story falls apart

A classmate had told a task-force officer that Crooks made anti-Trump statements. Her lab partner, interviewed a week later, said “she couldn’t have gotten it more wrong,” that he was “very upset” the claim had been passed along, and that Crooks never once discussed anything personal [1938]. Another classmate described him as the smartest person in the room, unable to tolerate small talk, and — on seeing the news — thought it was “analogous to having a course with Lee Harvey Oswald” [1894].

10. Somebody else paid for the cremation

This one isn’t in the FBI file; it landed the same day I was finishing this piece. The New York Post reports that Crooks’ cremation was paid for by an “anonymous donor.” The source is a note at the end of an FBI summary of an interview with Crooks’ father — part of a trove of records the Bureau handed to Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley for his own Butler inquiry, which the Post obtained. The information, the document says, appears to have come from the family’s lawyer. An addendum notes the father was “retired” and the mother on leave from work, which the Post reads as the family being unable to cover the cost; elsewhere in the same records the father describes himself as “unemployed” at the time of the shooting. The Post couldn’t reach him.

I flagged the cremation itself in June. The FBI released Crooks’ body to his family on July 23, 2024, ten days after the shooting, and the family had it cremated. Nobody told the Butler County coroner, nobody told local law enforcement, and when Rep. Clay Higgins showed up on August 5 to examine the remains on behalf of the House task force, he found that “on J23, Crooks was gone.” The Bureau’s response at the time was that releasing a body to next of kin is routine, which is true, but beside the point: it is not routine to do so while a congressional investigation into that body’s final afternoon is under way.

What’s new is that the family didn’t pay for it. Someone else did, and that someone doesn’t want to be named. Perhaps it was simple charity for a family in the worst week of its life; the father was out of work, the mother on leave, and there are worse things to spend money on than sparing them a bill. That would be a kind thing to do, and an easy thing to say. It would also be easy for the Bureau, which wrote the note, to say who it was. It hasn’t. One correction to the record

Crooks’ last ammunition purchase at Allegheny Arms was not in the morning, as widely reported. Store video shows him entering at 1:32 PM on a system the store admits runs 17 minutes slow — real time roughly 1:50 PM, minutes after his father says he left the house at 1:45 [1862]. He asked for five- and ten-round magazines. The store had none.

For the record: what the fifth tranche already told us

This release doesn’t stand alone. When I went through the fifth tranche in June, the striking thing wasn’t anything the FBI said; but rather everything unsaid. Roughly 150 pages in a single release were withheld not under any FOIA exemption but as “Sealed Pursuant to Court Order” — a seal the Department of Justice has never identified by court, proceeding, or party, in a case with a dead shooter and no charged co-conspirator. Two witnesses were interviewed at the Cranberry Marriott the evening after the shooting, and every substantive line of both 302s was blacked out “per ICE,” which is not an agency that asserts exemptions over ordinary domestic witnesses. A rally-goer described to agents two unidentified men on the AGR perimeter in the hour before the shooting — one screaming at spectators from a red Chevy pickup, the other in fatigue pants with a camera bag walking into the AGR building — and the file showed no sign either was ever identified. And four days in, the Counterterrorism Division had already pivoted from investigating the shooter to monitoring the public’s reaction to him under the “domestic violent extremist” framing, tool name redacted.

Put the two tranches together and the same question keeps asking itself. The fifth release had two unidentified men on Meridian Drive; the eighth has two unidentified men in a gun store in Edinboro and an unidentified man on the range in Clairton. The fifth had 150 pages under an unexplained seal; the eighth has a five-page memo that required the Deputy Attorney General’s sign-off and is entirely black. Each tranche adds a detail that doesn’t fit the lone-wolf account, and each tranche is missing the pages that would explain it. What this adds up to

None of this proves a conspiracy, and I’m not claiming it does. What it proves is that the public account of this case has been shaped as much by what officials chose not to mention as by what they said. The ladder existed and was in evidence when the Director said it wasn’t found. Investigators were hunting for a phone they never disclosed. A store two hours away reported the shooter with two companions, and the file goes silent. A five-page memo needed the Deputy Attorney General’s permission and is entirely blacked out.

Two years on, the FBI has still not explained any of it. The documents suggest it could. Whether it will depends on whether anyone with subpoena power reads them.

Tom Elliott

These days one reads fewer stories proclaiming the turning of the tide in the Russia-Ukraine war. There are also fewer tweets from Donald Trump threatening Iran with imminent destruction.

Now that the noise has receded, it is a good time to listen. I am not hearing of a successful Ukrainian counteroffensive. What I am hearing instead is the thud of Russian jackboots marching deeper into the parts of the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine that Vladimir Putin does not yet control.   

Meanwhile, in the southwest of the Arabian Peninsula, the Houthis have taken control of the strategic port city of Mokha. The city lies just to the north of the Strait of Bab el-Mandeb, which connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean. So far, the Houthis have not been able to interdict shipping through the Strait, as Iran did in the Strait of Hormuz. But since capturing Mokha they have also seized Perim Island, in the middle of Bab el-Mandeb, putting them in a far stronger position to threaten passing ships. If they succeed in closing the Strait, Iran and its allies would control the main maritime bottlenecks of the Middle East. 

That spells economic peril for the West. Before the war, the vast majority of oil produced in the Arabian Peninsula traveled through the straits of Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb. Right now, about 400,000 barrels of Saudi Arabian oil flow through Bab el-Mandeb per day, only a small fraction of production. And after the Houthis captured Mokha, the price of Brent crude, the international benchmark, is back to around $100 per barrel. This is not the short, sharp oil-price shock that the markets had anticipated when the Iran war started. Leon Panetta, who was director of the CIA under President Obama, now warns of a “forever war”, with no signs of it being resolved one way or the other.  

Economists and central bankers have neatly divided the economic consequences of the war into three scenarios: baseline, adverse and severe. I would describe the situation we are in today as adverse, heading towards severe.  

A crude oil price of $100 translates into higher prices for petrol, diesel, heating oil, kerosene and other downstream products. A severe winter could lead to heating gas shortages in Germany, for the country’s storage tanks are already at record-low levels. A $100 oil price is not one at which our Western economies function smoothly.  

It is a price, however, at which the Russian economy functions very well. And oil, ominously, is what links the two wars. The longer the war in Iran lasts, the greater the financial boost for Russia, whose main exports are oil and gas. As a result, an unwelcome scenario presents itself: the US loses its war against Iran, and Ukraine loses to Russia. 

Most wars do not end in outright victories or defeats. My central expectation for both is a messy draw: some dirty deal that would leave Iran charging money for passage through the Strait, with Trump and his business associates getting a cut. For Ukraine, I would define a draw as Russia keeping its presently occupied territories and obtaining assurances that Ukraine will stay outside Nato. But the odds of a bad outcome, from a Western perspective, are shortening.  

For one, there is clearly a risk that other European countries might be drawn into the war — just as there is an escalation risk in the Middle East. The two wars could also fuse into a broader Eurasian conflict that acts as a proxy war between the US and China. 

And I doubt that the aging societies of Western Europe have the stomach for a sustained fight. These countries are having to borrow money to meet their defense spending targets. Nor do they have an excess of young men eager to fight the Russians in a war that could later involve the use of nuclear and chemical weapons. In the event of war, our massive wealth and income redistribution systems would have to be painfully cut back, with millions thrown into immediate poverty. 

It is easier, then, to send money to Ukraine without committing troops. Ukraine has received hundreds of billions of pounds in military and financial support from the West, but Russia has still managed to outspend it. Russia hit a short recession earlier this year but is now recovering, in part due to the rise in the oil price. 

At the same time, the US, and by extension Ukraine, is suffering from a shortage of interceptor missiles used to take down incoming missiles and drones. Despite its formidable military capabilities, the US is not geared up for a long war. Its weak link is the supply chain. The same is happening in Europe, where decades of running down defense spending have taken their toll.  

Britain has an army of 75,000 troops, a force so depleted that it could only “seize a small market town on a good day”. These are the immortal words of General Sir Richard Barrons, a former military commander and co-author of the UK’s recent defense review.  

what makes us so certain we can stop Russia winning in Ukraine? The Russians, too, are brimming with confidence. They are so confident of victory right now that they are no longer even interested in peace talks. 

When Steve Witkoff, Donald Trump’s special envoy for peace missions, and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, visited Vladimir Putin last week, it turned into a toe-curling embarrassment. Putin was happy to receive them and hear their sycophantic praise. But he did not appear in a hurry to cut a peace deal, and the commentary in the Russian media about the visit was caustic. Dmitry Drize, a political commentator at Kommersant FM, wrote: “The visit followed the standard formula — arrival, restaurant, reception in the Kremlin… One would really like to see something more.” 

We have clearly moved beyond the period of US-Russian rapprochement marked by the Anchorage summit between Trump and Putin in August last year. At the time, Russian elites fell over themselves in their praise for Trump. No longer. Putin has the look of a man who thinks he can win.  

He has miscalculated before and may do so again. His invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was a shambles. But the Russian army regrouped, and Russia is today in a stronger position than its opponent.  

For many in the West, though, the idea of a Russian victory is still too painful to contemplate. If we treat something as unthinkable, we do not think about it. But underestimating your enemy is exactly how you lose wars. Even after four and a half years, I do not understand the strategic objective of Western support for Ukraine. I am not questioning the principle, but I fail to see what exactly the intended purpose is in concrete strategic terms. 

One of the few in Europe who pretends to have a strategy is Radosław Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister. His words do not reassure me. He once defined the strategy as one of exhausting the enemy, much as the Allied Powers defeated Germany in World War I. But the situation today is not comparable. Russia has not hit critical energy shortages as Germany did back then. The idea that we would win an endurance contest against Putin when oil prices are high seems over-optimistic. 

Last week, Sikorski claimed in a separate interview that the EU economy is nine to 10 times larger than that of Russia. This is not merely a false statistic; it is a Napoleonic-scale misjudgment of the size of Russia. Measured in dollars, the EU is indeed much bigger. But because Russia has been cut out of the dollar markets, that’s not a smart way to look at relative size. The best way to compare ourselves with a country like Russia, China or Iran, especially for military purposes, is purchasing power — literal bang for the buck. On that metric, the EU is three times as large as Russia. And even that does not tell us what we need to know, because the EU is spending only a tiny proportion of its economic output on helping Ukraine, whereas Putin is spending a lot more.  

The military metrics tell no more flattering a story. The EU has 1.3 million active military personnel, approximately the same as Russia. But in terms of military production, Russia beats the EU hands down. For example, Russia produces 3.4 million large howitzer shells per year, substantially more than the EU’s projected annual capacity of two million. This is true for many other weapons categories as well.

Back in March, Trump said the White House expected the war to last for four or five weeks. But historians have seen that kind of delusion before. When Germany started World War I in August 1914, Kaiser Wilhelm confidently told his troops: “You will be home before the leaves have fallen from the trees.” Today’s equivalent is the assertion that Russia and Iran are easy to defeat because we are so much richer than them.

The bottom line is that Trump has no strategy for the Middle East, just as Europeans have no strategy for Ukraine. We are rich and creditworthy enough to keep supporting Ukraine and battle Iran a little longer. But in either case I struggle to see a path to victory, for we are not willing to put our money, and our troops, where our mouth is. 

Wolfgang Munchau

Katherine Schaffstall

Updated Tue, September 15, 2026 at 2:06 PM EDT

The brother of the now-notorious holdout juror in Lindsay Clancy‘s murder mistrial is speaking out, revealing why he believes his sibling voted the mom criminally responsible for killing her three children.

“I don’t think religion had anything to do with it,” the anonymous juror’s brother told the New York Post on Tuesday, September 15, disputing online claims that Catholicism impacted the holdout juror’s decision. (The holdout male juror has decided to withhold his identity from the public following the high-profile case’s controversial mistrial ruling.)

“[He] looked at the case, and he made the call,” the brother continued. “For me, that’s how I would do it. I would just listen to the case with all the evidence, and go from there.”

The sibling then acknowledged that the holdout juror’s decision was met with mixed public responses.

Lindsay Clancy’s Defense Team Breaks Silence After Judge Declares Mistrial Amid Deadlocked Jury

“His choice was good for some people, but not good for other people,” he said, adding that both his sibling as well as the rest of his family have been scrutinized in the wake of the trial. On September 4, Judge William Sullivan ruled a mistrial in the case after jurors were deadlocked 11-1, failing to find Clancy guilty or not guilty by reason of insanity for killing her kids Cora,5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months, in January 2023.

“My family cannot leave the house,” the brother claimed, adding that their critics “are leaving notes at my mother’s house.”

“They won’t leave us alone and we don’t know anything,” he continued. “People have been calling me, like, crazy.”

Throughout the course of the seven-week trial, the defense argued that Clancy should not be held criminally responsible for the killings — which she admitted to — due to her documented mental health struggles, including postpartum depression, postpartum psychosis and bipolar disorder.

The prosecution argued that she should be found guilty regardless of her documented mental health issues, claiming she was capable of differentiating right from wrong at the time and engaged in the premeditated murder of her children.

The prosecution has not publicly announced if it will retry the case at the time of publication.

While the trial made national headlines, the brother revealed he did not know his sibling was on the jury until the case ended in a mistrial.

We didn’t know. That’s why I was shocked,” he said. “He didn’t tell us anything.”

Lindsay Clancy Asks Judge to Declare Her Not Guilty After Mistrial in Murder Case

While the holdout juror has not come forward following the trial, his past has come under scrutiny. It was revealed that the man, who comes from a Haitian immigrant family, was arrested in 2021 after he allegedly attacked his then-wife over the couple’s crying infant. The charges were later dropped.

Four years later in 2025, he was accused of beating the teenage nephew who called police on him during the alleged domestic violence attack, according to court records viewed by the outlet.

The juror was issued a restraining order against the nephew at the time he was picked to serve on Clancy’s jury. The order expired during the trial.

Several of the other jurors have since come forward to reveal they are not sure why the holdout juror refused to find Clancy not guilty by reason of insanity, particularly after he allegedly admitted to having reasonable doubt.

“There were several times I would ask him to show us, like, evidence or, you know, describe a witness testimony that helped to prove what he was saying, and he couldn’t,” juror Nick Dargie told ABC News on September 9. “There wasn’t a single piece of evidence or witness testimony that he used to prove why he was thinking the way he was, which is why we ultimately sent in that note.”

He added, “Otherwise, there’s nothing wrong with somebody having a completely opposite opinion. That would be a hung jury. That is our justice system.”

Critical vulnerabilities: The Administrative State’s greatest structural vulnerability is that its operational power derives entirely from delegated authority it did not earn and cannot independently defend — it governs by borrowed legitimacy, and that borrowing is now being called. The Supreme Court’s Loper Bright decision (2024) eliminated Chevron deference, stripping agencies of the judicial rubber-stamp that for four decades allowed them to interpret their own statutory authority expansively with near-automatic court approval; rulemaking that once survived challenge under a deferential standard now faces de novo judicial scrutiny that many rules will not survive. Schedule F and DOGE-driven reductions-in-force attack the personnel permanence that made the administrative state’s resistance function possible — career staff who cannot be removed are the mechanism of embedded resistance, and that mechanism is now legally and operationally contested.

The Administrative State is also institutionally incapable of defending itself publicly: it cannot campaign, cannot fundraise, cannot appeal directly to voters, and must rely entirely on allied media, congressional Democrats, and federal employee unions to wage its political defense — proxies whose own credibility and political leverage are simultaneously degraded.

Perhaps most critically, decades of aggressive rulemaking conducted on the assumption that Chevron deference was permanent has left an enormous inventory of legally vulnerable regulations now exposed to challenge, creating a target-rich environment for a coordinated litigation strategy by Republican state AGs and conservative legal organizations that could roll back a generation of Administrative State expansion through the same judicial process The Hive used to entrench it.

ENFORCEMENT AND INTIMIDATION

These critical functions are performed by The Hive’s “stingers”: Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL). [Note: these three are key players but only representative of the stingers exploited by the Democrat Party when needed.]

Function: Their function is to provide street-level enforcement, intimidation, and political disruption on demand in support of Democrat political narratives of the moment. Framing them as “Brown Shirts” is historically instructive: these organizations serve the same functional role that paramilitaries have served in revolutionary political movements throughout history — they apply coercive social force against political opponents, create conditions of fear that suppress dissent, and generate media-amplified spectacle that advances narrative objectives.

Each organization in this cluster has a distinct operational profile:

Antifa is deliberately decentralized (no formal membership, no leadership structure) — a design that provides deniability to the broader network while maintaining operational coordination through encrypted communications, shared logistical networks, and common ideological training. Its primary function is suppression of opposition speech and assembly: deplatforming conservative speakers at universities, attacking journalists who cover it critically, intimidating political opponents’ public events, and creating enough ambient threat that self-censorship becomes widespread. The 2020 “Summer of Love” in Portland and Seattle demonstrated that when Antifa operates with municipal tolerance or active protection, it can effectively seize and hold territory.

Black Lives Matter (the organizational network, distinct from the sentiment) functions primarily as a political mobilization and fundraising apparatus with a secondary street-action capacity. The collapse of BLM Global Network Foundation’s finances under Patrisse Cullors — $90 million in donations largely unaccounted for — exposed the degree to which BLM functions as a financial extraction mechanism from sympathetic donors, with genuine community organizing as a secondary concern. Its primary political function is electoral: it concentrates Black voter mobilization energy and provides a moral framework (systemic racism as foundational American condition) that justifies the entire DEI/equity regulatory apparatus.

PSL [Party for Socialism and Liberation] is the most explicitly Leninist of the three — a cadre organization with formal structure, international connections, and a specific front-group strategy. PSL organizes under the ANSWER Coalition banner, coordinates major anti-war and anti-Israel street demonstrations, and maintains operational relationships with foreign government-aligned media (it has received coverage and support from RT and other state-adjacent outlets). PSL’s street actions provide the radical flank that makes mainstream Democrat positions appear moderate by comparison. This is a cognitive warfare tactic that, once recognized, can easily be discerned.

Critical function in The Hive: These organizations create what political scientists call the “radical flank effect” — the presence of a maximalist, disruptive edge makes moderate-seeming actors more influential. When BLM mobilizes national protest, incremental police reform legislation becomes the “responsible” compromise. When Antifa burns a federal courthouse, congressional Democrats appear reasonable by comparison. The Hive’s electoral actors benefit from the street action’s pressure without formally coordinating with it.

Critical vulnerabilities: The stingers suffer from a fundamental strategic paradox: their utility to The Hive is inversely proportional to their visibility. When these organizations operate below the threshold of mainstream attention, they effectively suppress local opposition, intimidate targets, and generate radical-flank cover for the party’s electoral actors; when they escalate to the level of sustained urban disorder, burning federal courthouses, or occupying city blocks, they produce a backlash effect that directly damages the electoral coalition they nominally serve — the 2020 summer riots are credibly assessed to have cost Democrats House seats and nearly the presidency itself, with internal Democrat polling showing “defund the police” as a significant electoral liability.

Furthermore, the decentralized, leaderless structure that provides Antifa legal deniability simultaneously makes it strategically uncontrollable — no Hive coordinator can dial the violence up or down on an electoral schedule, meaning the stingers can and do erupt at politically inopportune moments.

Stu Cvrk, American Greatness

The grip of Iran-allied Houthi rebels on the narrow sea passage between Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, a vital route on the shortest maritime link between Asia and Europe, has sparked fears of rising oil prices and shipping costs.

By Julien BouissouPublished on September 14, 2026, 

Between pipeline attacks and control over the Bab al-Mandab Strait, Iran’s allies have begun targeting new infrastructure critical to global trade just as the pressure from the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf had started to ease.

In just a few days, Yemen’s Houthi rebels seized the coastal city of Mokha and several islands in the Red Sea, consolidating their hold on the Bab al-Mandab Strait, the waterway between the Arabian Peninsula and Africa. Meanwhile, drones launched from Iraq damaged Saudi Arabia’s East-West oil pipeline on Thursday, September 10, forcing its shutdown the following day.

The consequences are not only regional but global, raising fears of higher oil prices and increased shipping costs at a time when inflation is already high in Europe and the United States.

You can share an article by clicking on the share icons at the top right of it.
The total or partial reproduction of an article, without the prior written authorization of Le Monde, is strictly forbidden.
For more information, see our Terms and Conditions.
For all authorization requests, contact syndication@lemonde.fr.

The Bab al-Mandab Strait, whose Arabic name means “Gate of Tears” because of the dangerous currents and winds that make navigation perilous, has never lived up to its name more than now. As a result of the Yemeni rebels’ takeover, ships are being forced to turn back and take lengthy detours, especially those loading or unloading goods at Saudi ports.

Together with the Suez Canal, the strait is an essential passage along the shortest sea route connecting Asia and Europe. Even though the rebels have stated that navigation is “safe” for all except Saudi Arabia, it remains uncertain whether Western shipping companies will continue to use it.

The alternative is to sail around Africa via the Cape of Good Hope, a much longer and costlier journey, adding at least 10 days to the trip. Between 2023 and 2025, major companies like MSC, Maersk and CMA CGM used this route after an attack on a vessel in November 2023. The Houthis stormed the ship, which was owned by an Israeli businessman, boarding it via helicopter, taking it to their shores and eventually sinking it in May 2026. They justified the operation by their support for Palestinians.

You can share an article by clicking on the share icons at the top right of it.
The total or partial reproduction of an article, without the prior written authorization of Le Monde, is strictly forbidden.
For more information, see our Terms and Conditions.
For all authorization requests, contact syndication@lemonde.fr.

The Bab al-Mandab Strait, whose Arabic name means “Gate of Tears” because of the dangerous currents and winds that make navigation perilous, has never lived up to its name more than now. As a result of the Yemeni rebels’ takeover, ships are being forced to turn back and take lengthy detours, especially those loading or unloading goods at Saudi ports.

Together with the Suez Canal, the strait is an essential passage along the shortest sea route connecting Asia and Europe. Even though the rebels have stated that navigation is “safe” for all except Saudi Arabia, it remains uncertain whether Western shipping companies will continue to use it.

The alternative is to sail around Africa via the Cape of Good Hope, a much longer and costlier journey, adding at least 10 days to the trip. Between 2023 and 2025, major companies like MSC, Maersk and CMA CGM used this route after an attack on a vessel in November 2023. The Houthis stormed the ship, which was owned by an Israeli businessman, boarding it via helicopter, taking it to their shores and eventually sinking it in May 2026. They justified the operation by their support for Palestinians.

You have 63.69% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only. null

Subscribe now to read the full story.

Your credit card has expired.

Update your payment information to keep your subscription running. Update Payment details

Subscribe now to read the full story.

Your payment failed.

Update your payment information to keep your subscription running Update Payment details

For Americans who follow the Russian-Ukrainian war, the past few months must look very strange. In the first half of summer, the story from Kyiv – and the many western media outlets that repeated it – was that Ukraine was winning. Then, not long after the NATO summit in July, Kyiv announced it lacked the interceptors to prevent a winter disaster. The country needed 300 missiles to survive, we were told. Even if these 300 missiles arrive, they are unlikely to protect a country as large as Ukraine from the sheer volume of Russian ballistic attacks and glide-bomb strikes. Now it’s September, and Ukraine says it’s facing a $27 billion shortfall in defense funding. There seems to be a vast difference between the public relations campaign and the reality in Ukraine.

There is a feeling that the western political establishment would rather see Russia burn than Ukraine saved

I know a little about that public relations campaign. I was President Zelensky’s first press secretary, entering office alongside him in 2019. I left in 2021 and remained sympathetic to the President as he fought the Russian invasion. But by 2025, I’d come to the conclusion that Ukraine will never be able to win this war militarily. The only solution is a negotiated peace.

Under the current Ukrainian regime, the chances of peace seem remote. In late June, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy approved a 40-day campaign of long-range drone strikes within Russia to force the Kremlin to end the war. It was supposed to be an “influence operation,” designed to show the Russian people the true cost of the conflict. But it was Ukrainians who suffered the most. The Kremlin instead escalated, bringing more destruction, more death and none of the negotiations that would ultimately save lives. Russia, it seems, was only emboldened by the attacks. The Kremlin merely reiterated its conditions for ending its aggression.

It is, of course, Russia who started this war. Its forces have tortured, raped, deported and killed Ukrainians. There is no moral symmetry between Kyiv and the Kremlin. Yet it is clear that the Ukrainian heroism of 2022 is long gone. Kyiv’s war policies have hardened into permanent mobilization and superficial PR – empty slogans and moral posturing are all that’s now offered. The desperate situation in Ukraine’s streets is concealed so that the refusal to compromise can be dressed up as courage.

In 2022, when the war began, the whole country stood up to defend itself. Men lined up at recruitment offices, and cities that Moscow tried to seize successfully resisted. All this naturally produced admiration throughout the world – and glorification in the western media and political circles. Today, that same glorification has become an unbearable burden. There is a feeling that the western political establishment would rather see Russia burn than Ukraine saved. Our daily losses are treated as an acceptable price for that end.

Ukraine has lost more than half its population in the 35 years since it declared independence from the Soviet Union. The largest collapse in population has happened since Russia’s full-scale invasion. By the most sober estimates, some 20 to 25 million people remain in the territory Kyiv still controls. Roughly half are of retirement age. At most, four million men are of conscription age. Russia can draw on the recruitment pool of approximately 10 times the number of fighting age men. Waging a war of attrition is therefore national suicide, not valor. Yet this is the strategy that the Zelensky government pursues.

The economy tells the same story. Ukraine is now entirely dependent on western aid, which is shrinking. Money that was supposed to be used to rebuild the country is being consumed by war. Public debt has crossed 110 percent of GDP. Russia, by contrast, has not had to borrow anywhere near this scale to wage its war, and it is still selling energy to the European Union. Since 2022, European countries have paid Moscow well over $230 billion for fossil fuels – more than they have given Kyiv in aid of all forms. Despite the innumerable sanctions packages, Russia keeps earning money and has a much stronger fiscal position than most EU states. Meanwhile, Ukraine is being crippled by the death of its people and the destruction of its productive base, while its debts keep accumulating.

European countries have paid Moscow over $230 billion for fossil fuels – more than they have given Kyiv in aid

Since the “influence operation” this summer, more than 90 percent of Ukrainian warehouses have been hit, our energy system has been torn apart and a humanitarian catastrophe will arrive with the winter snow. In the fifth year of full-scale war, the state’s offer to civilians in the worst-affected regions is often simply: leave. People on the front line who have no money and no means are told to go somewhere else.

Every day Ukraine loses more of its people. Those who want their children to have proper healthcare and education are forced to emigrate. The number of people dying in Ukraine is roughly four times the number of births. The nation is perishing, and yet the war grinds on.

Finland lost land after a devastating war, yet it managed to preserve its nation and its future. Ukraine could still become a frontier between the West and Russia: armed, sober and alive. But the present strategy is pushing us down a different path: that of Afghanistan.

The West spent 20 years pouring trillions of dollars into that conflict. All it achieved was flourishing corruption, decades of death and eventually the fall of Kabul to the Taliban. As in Ukraine, there was heavy censorship in western media. Most of those who reported from the region were uncompromising in their support of the Afghan state machine and the war, no matter what.

We see many of the same parallels in Ukraine. Extraordinarily, corruption rivals the war in rankings of public opinion as the biggest national problem. There are those in the Ukrainian government who are making millions of dollars from this war. I have just been sanctioned by the Zelensky government for saying so publicly.

Meanwhile, normal Ukrainian men do not leave their homes for months, for fear of press gangs who hunt them in the streets. There are reports of the disabled being pushed into frontline combat, of men dying mysteriously in recruitment offices, of women fighting to save husbands from being kidnapped in plain daylight. According to the Ukrainian ombudsman, only 2-3 percent of those seized in press gang raids ever reach the frontline. Many pay, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars, to buy their way out. The corruption around this system runs into the billions of dollars annually. I do not blame my people for refusing to fight for a machine they no longer believe in.

If the purpose of this war was to create a path for Ukraine to join NATO, that prospect is already off the table. If the purpose was to recover territory, Ukraine is losing more of it, not taking it back. If it was to protect democracy, then the wartime martial law has already killed it. Freedom of speech has been greatly restricted, institutions have been corrupted, basic political rights suspended, the constitution violated, political opponents persecuted. All of this with a casualness about human life that would be recognized as deeply authoritarian anywhere else.

The war in Ukraine has lost any plausible theory of victory. At this point, it only lines the pockets of a corrupt and narrow circle of elites while the country itself perishes. Ukraine can still choose the Finnish road: stop the bleeding, hold what can be held, restore the economy and a way of life to which people can return. The other road is already visible. It is a road down which we lose land and people every day – and with them, the chance that there will be a Ukraine left to win.

Iulia Mendel, The Spectator

Gad LevanonChief Economist at The Burning Glass Institute…Published Sep 15, 2026

In early 2025, almost no one predicted a recovery in American manufacturing. But manufacturing output has been recovering for a year and a half, and this year hiring finally joined it: factory employment stopped falling in December and has added 58,000 jobs in 2026. The recovery is narrow. Almost all of it, in output and in hiring, comes from advanced manufacturing: chemicals including pharma, machinery, computers and electronics, and transportation equipment. The rest of the sector is still flat or shrinking. The job gains are modest and probably always will be, because these are the most capital-intensive factories in the economy and another wave of automation is arriving soon. But the jobs that are coming pay about a third more than the ones manufacturing has been losing. Output growing fast, employment growing a little, better jobs than the old ones: after two decades of flat output and shrinking payrolls, I’ll take it.

In early 2025, almost no one predicted a recovery in American manufacturing. The sector had been going nowhere for a long time: US factories produce about as much today as they did in 2000, and output was flat to down from 2022 through 2024. Then it turned. Year-over-year growth went from −1.7% in early 2024 to +2% last fall, and so far in 2026 output is growing at about a 4% annual rate, the strongest sustained growth since 2018 if you set aside the COVID rebound. For the first year and a half, this recovery was only about output. This year hiring joined. Manufacturing employment fell in 2024 and 2025, stopped falling in December, and has added 58,000 jobs in 2026. You can see it in the chart below: for the first time in years, output and employment are rising together.

The recovery is narrow. It comes almost entirely from what I’ll call advanced manufacturing: chemicals including pharma, machinery, computers and electronics, and transportation equipment. These are the R&D-heavy subsectors. The grouping is rough (within transportation equipment, aerospace is booming while autos are roughly flat), but the split doesn’t depend on exactly where you draw the line. Advanced output is up more than 3% over the past year. The rest of manufacturing is flat, and has been drifting down since 2022. The drivers are the ones you’d guess: semiconductors and computers riding the AI buildout, aerospace recovering, and power and grid equipment shipping from multiyear backlogs. What about tariffs? The industries older tariff rounds were meant to protect (apparel, furniture, textiles, paper) are still shrinking. The 2025 rounds do target chips, pharma, and autos, so tariffs probably help the advanced side. They push in the same direction as everything else here: more advanced production in the US.

Hiring splits the same way. Advanced manufacturing employs about 4.8 million people, 38% of all manufacturing workers, and has added 54,000 jobs this year. Employment in the rest of manufacturing is flat this year and down over the past 12 months. You can see it in the chart: advanced pulled ahead in the post-COVID hiring boom, gave some of it back, and is now growing again. The rest of manufacturing is still drifting down.

Let’s not get too excited. Fifty-some thousand jobs in eight months is a modest number, and I doubt it will ever be a big one. These are the most capital-intensive factories in the economy. Semiconductor output has grown 15% a year for two years (some of that is quality adjustment, but the direction is clear) while semiconductor payrolls actually fell. And many of the buildout’s jobs land in construction rather than on the factory floor: construction as a whole has added 87,000 jobs this year, in a year when plant, data-center, and substation building is booming. Still, modest growth beats the alternative, and it can last. The equipment makers are shipping from backlogs that stretch to 2030, and TSMC, Micron, and Lilly all have plants starting production next year.

The jobs are also better than the ones manufacturing has been losing. Advanced manufacturing pays $43.54 an hour on average, a third more than the $32.92 in the rest of the sector. The famous manufacturing pay premium is by now really an advanced-manufacturing premium: the rest of the sector pays below the private-sector average of $37.75, while every advanced subsector pays above it. Part of the gap is occupational mix, more engineers and fewer line workers, but that’s exactly the point. The sectors adding jobs pay a third more than the sectors losing them.

Let’s not get too excited. Fifty-some thousand jobs in eight months is a modest number, and I doubt it will ever be a big one. These are the most capital-intensive factories in the economy. Semiconductor output has grown 15% a year for two years (some of that is quality adjustment, but the direction is clear) while semiconductor payrolls actually fell. And many of the buildout’s jobs land in construction rather than on the factory floor: construction as a whole has added 87,000 jobs this year, in a year when plant, data-center, and substation building is booming. Still, modest growth beats the alternative, and it can last. The equipment makers are shipping from backlogs that stretch to 2030, and TSMC, Micron, and Lilly all have plants starting production next year.

The jobs are also better than the ones manufacturing has been losing. Advanced manufacturing pays $43.54 an hour on average, a third more than the $32.92 in the rest of the sector. The famous manufacturing pay premium is by now really an advanced-manufacturing premium: the rest of the sector pays below the private-sector average of $37.75, while every advanced subsector pays above it. Part of the gap is occupational mix, more engineers and fewer line workers, but that’s exactly the point. The sectors adding jobs pay a third more than the sectors losing them.

Let’s not get too excited. Fifty-some thousand jobs in eight months is a modest number, and I doubt it will ever be a big one. These are the most capital-intensive factories in the economy. Semiconductor output has grown 15% a year for two years (some of that is quality adjustment, but the direction is clear) while semiconductor payrolls actually fell. And many of the buildout’s jobs land in construction rather than on the factory floor: construction as a whole has added 87,000 jobs this year, in a year when plant, data-center, and substation building is booming. Still, modest growth beats the alternative, and it can last. The equipment makers are shipping from backlogs that stretch to 2030, and TSMC, Micron, and Lilly all have plants starting production next year.

The jobs are also better than the ones manufacturing has been losing. Advanced manufacturing pays $43.54 an hour on average, a third more than the $32.92 in the rest of the sector. The famous manufacturing pay premium is by now really an advanced-manufacturing premium: the rest of the sector pays below the private-sector average of $37.75, while every advanced subsector pays above it. Part of the gap is occupational mix, more engineers and fewer line workers, but that’s exactly the point. The sectors adding jobs pay a third more than the sectors losing them.

Ron Paul

In California, gas stations are facing a unique challenge. The station signs are only configured to go up to $9.99 per gallon and at several stations the price of diesel has reached that maximum. Diesel prices are higher than they have ever been in history.

Worse, according to some news reports the advertising of the maximum price of $9.99 per gallon is meant to signal to truck drivers that they have run out of diesel altogether. Expensive diesel is a hit to the economy, but running out of the fuel at any price is a whole different kind of crisis.

Our highways are filled with semi-trucks burning diesel to bring the products we depend on to the markets. Our freight trains use diesel to transport what is not transported by truck. When the price of diesel increases, the cost of everything moved by that diesel also increases. This is one reason we are seeing much more inflation than the government wants to admit.

The diesel crisis is getting so serious that even President Trump has been forced to admit it. Of course, instead of taking at least part of the blame over his war of choice against Iran and his continuation of the proxy war against Russia through Ukraine, he is blaming Ukraine’s military strikes on Russian energy infrastructure.

President Trump is now asking Ukraine to stop attacking Russian energy resources because diesel is a global commodity and the scarcity produced by the attacks is hitting us here at home. But the strikes deep inside Russia are guided by US intelligence, which provides the targeting data for Ukraine.

The Russia/Ukraine war is only part of the problem. Despite President Trump’s bluster about controlling the Strait of Hormuz, the fact is Iran is in control and very little oil – or anything else – makes it out without Iranian approval.

Yemen’s Iran-allied Houthis joining the fight only makes matters worse. Over the weekend they attacked Saudi Arabia’s bypass pipeline, taking much more oil off the market.

The real problem here is not oil or diesel. The real problem is that wars of choice spin out of control and destroy the economies of those who launch them. Empires throughout history have been undone by endless overseas wars. No amount of bragging about the size and strength of our military can change this reality.

Now we are seeing the chickens coming home to roost.

President Trump has justified tanking the US economy by claiming the attack on Iran was essential because they were about to get a nuclear weapon. Our intelligence community disagreed, but he refused to listen and took his cue from Netanyahu instead.

It turns out Iran actually does have a “nuclear weapon.” That weapon is the ability to control the world’s oil flows at a margin high enough to cripple the economies of any country seeking to conquer it. According to press reports, former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard tried to warn President Trump that Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz if attacked but he didn’t want to hear it.

The Founders were determined to prevent the executive branch from being able to start wars for this very reason. The “people’s branch” of government – Congress – is where they placed the power to launch wars. We are now seeing the consequences of ignoring their very wise advice.

Ron Paul