OPEC+ Agrees To Boost Output By Another 206,000 Barrels A Day When Strait Of Hormuz Reopens

White House And Pentagon Clash Over $80M ReElement Critical Minerals Deal The Pentagon is reconsidering an $80 million conditional loan to rare-earths refiner ReElement Technologies, raising tensions with the White House over efforts to reduce US reliance on China for critical minerals, according to Bloomberg. The loan, announced in November through the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital (OSC), was part of a broader $1.4 billion critical-minerals initiative alongside Vulcan Elements. But officials reviewing the deal have questioned ReElement’s ability to scale production and meet long-term revenue targets, according to people familiar...

Chinese County Orders Lawyers To Get Government Approval Before Defending Criminal Charges Authored by Michael Zhuang via The Epoch Times, A county justice bureau in southwestern China has ordered local law firms to report cases related to the government's "anti-organized crime" campaign and obtain official approval before lawyers can argue that a defendant's alleged offense should be classified differently. The No. 2 Intermediate People's Court in the Beijing suburb of Fangzhuang on Aug. 15, 2006. Goh Chai Hin/AFP via Getty ImagesThe notice, issued directly to law firms by the Justice Bureau of...

Anthropic's $2 Trillion Bet Is That Nothing Goes Wrong The most revealing aspect of a $2 trillion Anthropic IPO is not the staggering valuation, but the suspension of disbelief required to justify it. To buy into that number, investors must assume that artificial intelligence is becoming economically indispensable at breakneck speed, that a formidable moat will protect a handful of frontier-model developers, and that the exorbitant costs of computing infrastructure will not eventually crush their margins. More crucially - they must wager that the political, technical, and institutional risks inherent to an increasingly...