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Folks in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast are waking up this morning to a power nor'easter with damaging winds, coastal flooding, and heavy rain. 

Coastal wind gusts reached 62 mph on Nantucket, 58 mph in Bethany Beach, Delaware, and 55 mph in Chatham, Massachusetts, according to local weather data. New York's JFK Airport recorded a 53 mph gust. Winds are expected to continue through Sunday. 

"Powerful nor'easter bringing major coastal flooding & damaging winds to the East Coast," NWS Weather Prediction Center wrote on X around lunchtime in New York, adding, "Roads are underwater at the Jersey Shore & gusts hit 64 mph on Nantucket. More flooding likely at high tides tonight & Sun. Turn Around, Don't Drown."

Powerful #noreaster bringing major coastal flooding & damaging winds to the East Coast. Roads are underwater at the Jersey Shore & gusts hit 64 mph on Nantucket. More flooding likely at high tides tonight & Sun. Turn Around, Don't Drown. Reports so far: https://t.co/9LGn1JoXUA pic.twitter.com/L84ZYVj3Rh

— NWS Weather Prediction Center (@NWSWPC) September 26, 2026

Private weather forecasting firm NY NJ PA Weather provided a detailed map of the impacts for the Northeast through the weekend:

A nor'easter will impact the region this morning through Monday evening. Rain has developed along the coast. Rainfall will become widespread by 2 PM this afternoon and begin pushing inland through the evening. Meanwhile, winds will increase from the Northeast to 15 to 30 mph.

The worst conditions will be tomorrow morning, with torrential downpours, wind gusts up to 70 mph on the immediate coast, and visibility below a mile, producing poor travel conditions, power outages, flash flooding, and coastal flooding. Conditions will gradually improve from tomorrow afternoon through Monday afternoon as the storm weakens while lifting towards southern New England.

ZONE 1: Rain 2" -4", Winds 15-30 mph with gusts over 50 mph, high coastal flooding threat.

ZONE 2: Rain 1" -2", Winds 15-30 mph with gusts over 40 mph, high urban/river flooding threat.

ZONE 3: Rain 0." - 1", Winds 15-30 mph with gusts over 30 mph

ZONE 4: Rain 0.10"-0.50", Winds 10-20 mph with gusts under 30 mph

According to the utility tracking website PowerOutage.us, more than 90,000 customers across New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania are without power.

Footage:

Flooding again north of Bethany Beach, Delaware on our YouTube Live feed https://t.co/JGDokZlRE0 pic.twitter.com/LjhRUzm2eT

— Jesse Ferrell (@WeatherMatrix) September 26, 2026

Tough situation in Ocean City, Nj. pic.twitter.com/NK8X4VBDtg

— WeatherWatcher (@WeatherWatchin) September 26, 2026

When the Ocean meets the bay in Atlantic City and high tide is still an hour away. When mother nature speaks we have no choice but to listen. ???????? #AtlanticCityNJ pic.twitter.com/3yoGmDO8BV

— TheMastiffMafia (@mafia_mastiff) September 26, 2026

Crews have rescued several people by boat and high water trucks in Sea Bright, New Jersey. Ocean Avenue has been inundated by coastal flooding from the Shrewsbury River. #njwx #noreaster pic.twitter.com/T4BvqAxQYD

— Bill Wadell (@BillWadell) September 26, 2026

The good news is that no hurricanes have formed in the Atlantic so far this year, with a strengthening El Niño helping suppress hurricane development by increasing wind shear, which makes it harder for storms to organize and intensify.

Speaking to reporters Saturday on the White House lawn, President Trump offered his first direct confirmation that he has rejected an Iranian proposal for a seven-day ceasefire and is open to the resumption of attacks on the Islamic Republic, as it still insists on its strict demands for reopening the Strait of Hormuz and ending the war.

The night prior, The Wall Street Journal was the first to report that "President Trump has rejected Iran’s proposal for a seven-day ceasefire and has told aides he expects to resume bombing Iran after the November midterms, U.S. officials said." Here's how the president responded to a reporter's question Saturday morning:

Reporter: Will you strike Iran after the midterms?

Trump: I'm rejecting their deal. They want to make a deal where they open the Strait immediately because they're losing so badly.

They want to make a deal, and I think that's fine. I like making a deal, too, but that deal would… pic.twitter.com/87rKbDySLN

— Clash Report (@clashreport) September 26, 2026

"Well I’m rejecting their deal," Trump responded. While in the fresh verbal interaction he did not explicitly state he plans to resume bombing, he also obviously did not deny the premise of the question (resumption of bombing Iran).

"They want to make a deal where they open the strait immediately because they’re losing so badly," Trump continued. "You know you don’t read that, you don’t see that in the fake news."

"We're winning tremendously. We have total control of the Hormuz Strait, massive amounts of oil are coming out of the Hormuz Strait," he claimed. "Last night we had 29 ships come out. They want to make a deal, and I think that’s fine, I like making a deal, too, but that deal would not be acceptable."

"And what they want to do is immediately open the Hormuz Strait. You know why? Because they’re dying," Trump said. "You know why they’re dying? Because they have no money coming in. Because they get their money from the Hormuz Strait."

He continued: “So they outsmarted themselves. They said, ‘Let’s close it and cause a problem for the world.’ And then I came along and we put up the greatest blockade ever in military history. It’s a wall of steel."

"I would put it up and guess what? They don’t have any money now because they wanted to close the strait. And I said, ‘That’s fine, we’re going to close it on you. But everybody else is able to use it,'" Trump added.

Analysis: President Trump thinks a better deal is just around the corner and he is willing to set the region on fire again in his pursuit of it.

Unfortunately, my pessimism on the U.S.-Iran talks held up.

The technical details of a new understanding were not difficult to hammer out. But the political commitment for peace is lacking.

President Trump thinks a better deal is just around the corner and he is willing to set… https://t.co/bbU5Pp6iim

— Esfandyar Batmanghelidj (@yarbatman) September 26, 2026

For a brief moment there was hope that the warring sides could get back to 'technical talks' based on interactions on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly meeting in New York this past week. Some premature headlines even stated talks at the technical level were already taking place, which the Iranian side was quick to deny.

But at this point that scenario is clearly not going to happen coming out of the UNGA gathering, as President Masoud Pezeshkian has also now flown out of New York and is headed home, state media outlets have indicated.

Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi ?previously said, "If the necessary conditions are met, the strait can be reopened, a normal maritime passage restored within seven days. The choice ?now ?rests with the United States." He explained: "The actions that the United States should take ?are not new. They are all already in the MoU." Tehran has said all along it would not back off its conditions for ending the war. The FM was said to be waiting in New York for a response before going back to Tehran. Presumably he too will now return to his country.

?? US President Donald Trump informed the negotiating team that there is no going back to the memorandum of understanding with Iran, a US source tells Al Arabiya English

?? The US source says Trump told his team that the Iranian negotiators are not decision makers

?? Trump… pic.twitter.com/Kc2F2P7Bzg

— Al Arabiya English (@AlArabiya_Eng) September 26, 2026

Trump was clearly not satisfied with the Iranian 7-day roadmap after he demanded the "complete dismantling" of Iran's nuclear program as a key condition for any deal. The Iranians have insisted the question of nuclear enrichment can only be discussed after the war is ended, saving the issue for a future time.

What's the next phase or gameplan here from Washington's perspective? Regional analyst and editor of Amwaj.media, Mohammad Ali Shabani, offers the following: "The next phase of the war will likely revolve around destroying Iran's economic infrastructure. The method is collective immiseration until desperate Iranians with nothing to lose will do the regime change." This of course sets the US on a trajectory of yet another 'forever war' in the region.

Via The Cradle

Syria has begun trucking imported gasoline from its Baniyas Refinery into Iraq, adding a return leg to a route Baghdad has used to export its fuel since the US war on Iran led to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a senior Syrian oil official told Reuters on 25 September.

According to Tareq Shallash, who heads the Refining Directorate at the state-owned Syrian Petroleum Company (SPC), the first consignment – roughly 32,800 metric tons of gasoline – arrived aboard the Marshall Islands-flagged tanker Avanti and was pumped into storage at Baniyas before being loaded onto trucks this week.

Shallash said 77 tanker trucks have so far set off for the Iraqi border, with loading still in progress and more cargoes on the way.

He stressed that the fuel neither originates in Syria nor comes out of stocks earmarked for domestic consumption.

The shipments move under a transit contract between SPC and Qatar's UCC Holding, which Shallash identified as both the supplier and the firm managing transport.

Iraq's Oil Ministry confirmed the arrangement, with spokesperson Saleem al-Rikabi telling Reuters that “A contract was signed between SOMO and the Qatari company to supply Iraq with improved gasoline through the port of Baniyas by road tankers, and the supplies have in fact been delivered on a regular basis.”

Shallash said the deal is currently restricted to gasoline, though future agreements could open the route to crude, other petroleum products, and additional goods. 

Baghdad has already pledged to keep building overland alternatives through Syria even if Hormuz reopens, and Reuters reported in July that Iraqi fuel oil moved via Baniyas had reached the US for the first time. 

With Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz, Iraq - unable to ship its oil - has opened its borders to Syria. Thousands of fuel-laden tankers are being sent to the world market overland through Syria. Iraq has closed its airports to Iran's planes.

Iran'in Hürmüz'ü kapatmasiyla petrolünü sevk edemeyen Irak'a Suriye kapilarini açti. Binlerce petrol yüklü tanker kara yoluyla Suriye üzerinden dünya pazarina gönderiliyor.
Irak, Iran'in uçaklarina havaalanlarini kapatti. pic.twitter.com/I4Ub6a749E

— Murat Özer (@muratozer_ist) September 25, 2026

UCC Holding is also part of a consortium with Chevron and TI Capital studying the revival of a Kirkuk–Baniyas crude pipeline, after Iraq and Syria signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) in Washington in July. 

Reuters reported in August that the project could take four years and cost at least $15 billion, because it would require entirely new infrastructure. 

The great commercial real estate waiting game may finally be running out of time, according to Bloomberg.

For years after Covid fundamentally changed how Americans use office space, lenders and property owners managed to postpone much of the financial damage. Loans were modified, maturities were pushed out and buildings were given more time to recover. The basic assumption was that eventually interest rates would come down, employees would spend more time downtown and refinancing markets would reopen.

Instead, many owners are reaching the end of the runway with rates still elevated and buildings worth dramatically less than the debt sitting against them.

Chicago’s Aon Center offers an almost absurd illustration. The 83-story skyscraper changed hands for $712 million in 2015 and was subsequently refinanced, with $536 million of debt eventually packaged into commercial mortgage-backed securities. Today, after losing important tenants, the building is worth nowhere near that amount. Its latest appraisal came in at just $195 million — a decline of roughly 73% from its 2015 purchase price.

Bloomberg writes that when the debt matured in July, the owner couldn’t repay it and sought another three years to sort things out. This time the lender wasn’t interested. The request was “unequivocally denied.”

Situations like this are beginning to pile up across the country. Office loans packaged into CMBS are now delinquent at a 12% rate, according to Trepp. That puts distress near an all-time high and, remarkably, beyond the levels seen in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Meanwhile, approximately $64 billion of office CMBS loans come due this year and next. Nearly $40 billion of that pile is already delinquent, in default or flagged as potentially troubled.

But this isn’t one uniform nationwide office collapse.

New York has been surprisingly resilient, with finance, law and technology companies still competing for desirable space. San Francisco, despite enormous problems left over from the pandemic, has received a new source of demand from the AI boom.

Other cities have considerably less working in their favor. Chicago’s downtown office vacancy rate is roughly 27%. Denver’s has reached an astonishing 39%. Los Angeles and several other downtown markets are also struggling, especially in areas dominated by older office stock.

There’s also increasingly a tale of two office markets within individual cities. Companies willing to spend money on office space generally want newer buildings, good locations and modern amenities. That leaves yesterday’s Class B towers fighting over a shrinking pool of tenants while their economics deteriorate.

And some of the repricing has been brutal.

Denver’s Republic Plaza has lost roughly 80% of its value compared with when Brookfield financed the property in 2012. Chicago’s Citadel Center recently changed hands for $137 million, approximately 76% below what the building sold for in 2006. The situation is bad enough that CoStar expects roughly 11.5 million square feet of Chicago-area office space to simply disappear through demolition by 2031.

Even those enormous valuation declines may understate what lenders ultimately recover.

Distressed office properties sold this year have fetched prices roughly 20% below their latest appraisals, according to Deutsche Bank research cited in the report. In other words, marking a building down dramatically on paper doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve marked it down enough.

There is, however, another side to the collapse. Once prices fall far enough, someone eventually decides the risk is worth taking. That process is now beginning. Investors are stepping into buildings at fractions of their former valuations, effectively resetting the cost basis of properties that made little economic sense at yesterday’s prices.

The same 601W connected to the troubled Aon Center recently bought Chicago’s 175 West Jackson Boulevard for only $41 million, nearly 90% below its pre-Covid sale price. Elsewhere in Chicago, investors acquired the debt behind another major tower for around $100 million, roughly 76% below the building’s previous purchase price.

That’s probably the most important part of what is happening now. An office recovery doesn’t necessarily require these buildings to regain anything close to their old valuations. It requires the old valuations to finally die.

For years, the industry could avoid discovering what many of these buildings were actually worth because lenders kept extending loans and owners kept waiting. As maturities arrive and extensions become harder to obtain, those theoretical losses increasingly have to become actual ones.

And only after that happens can buildings move into new hands at prices that make sense in the post-Covid world. As Polpo Capital’s Dan McNamara put it: “One of the scariest headlines is that office CMBS delinquencies are higher than after 2008.”

“And it’s going to go higher as we face more maturities.”

Authored by Thomas Kolbe via American Thinker,

Caught between climate regulation and catastrophic energy-policy decisions, a growing number of high-tech companies in the EU are packing up and leaving. Through stock-market deals, two top quantum-computing companies, IQM and Pasqal, are gradually moving toward the United States. The bleeding of the European economy is now being accepted with remarkable resignation.

Not a week goes by without another disaster report from the economy. In the first half of the year, the German economy recorded a record number of insolvencies -- the highest insolvency figures since 2013. Thousands of industrial jobs are being eliminated as a result, and the economy continues to bleed. A political course correction toward strengthening the economic foundation still appears impossible. And this is only the beginning: the stranglehold of expensive climate policy, the restriction of fossil-fuel energy supplies, and rising regulatory costs are acting like an accelerant on the businesses of the euro economy. Those who can leave, do.

What is happening in Germany is being repeated elsewhere: in Finland, for example, where the company IQM is taking the leap onto the U.S. stock market. IQM specializes in superconducting quantum computers and develops the quantum processors required for them. The systems are being developed for research, high-performance computing, and industrial applications. The company merged with Real Asset Acquisition Corp., a kind of American shell company, and in early July moved to the Nasdaq under the ticker IQMX with a valuation of around $1.8 billion. This is not a classic sale of the company to the Americans -- the existing owners received no cash payment but remained invested in the company. However, this changes little about the outcome: capital, market power, and an increasing share of control over the company’s strategy will, in the future, be rooted in the United States -- American patents, American knowledge of future technologies, made in Europe.

A look at France shows a similar development. This is where Pasqal is based, a spin-off of the Institut d'Optique, founded in 2019. While global players such as IBM and Google rely on superconducting circuits, Pasqal found a different approach: the highly specialized team traps individual rubidium atoms with focused laser beams -- so-called optical tweezers -- inside vacuum chambers and arranges them in precise 2D and 3D lattices. With this principle, the company’s researchers appear to have succeeded in avoiding the production errors that have plagued other qubit technologies so far. The discovered method makes it considerably easier to scale the technology to ever larger numbers of qubits. Knowledge is power, especially in high technology. Given its complexity, the company’s innovation is probably only fully understandable to a few specialists.

Pasqal’s systems are going to data centers such as the Jülich Research Centre and to the Saudi energy giant Aramco. The applications extend across industries -- from energy company EDF to major bank Crédit Agricole, for which the race for cryptography and security technology has long since begun. From logistics optimization and materials simulation to risk analysis -- Pasqal is competing right at the forefront across the board.

One of the company’s co-founders was Alain Aspect, the French physicist who received the Nobel Prize in 2022 together with John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger for verifying the quantum entangelment of photons, thereby laying the scientific foundation for modern quantum technology. It is a good example of how university research and technological development can become intertwined at the corporate level. Yet as capital increasingly flows from the EU to America, these pillars of European academic and corporate culture are gradually disappearing.

In the case of Pasqal, the acquisition of the company by the shell company Bleichroeder Acquisition Corp. II on August 28 paved the way for its know-how to cross the Atlantic. The company is currently valued at around $2 billion -- but this is likely to be only a snapshot; its potential is enormous. With its patents, research results, and academic substance, Europe is losing its intellectual foundation -- all the more serious because the continent is energy-poor, politically cornered, and steering aimlessly through uncertain waters. Europe is simply no longer attractive enough for cutting-edge research, top-tier capital, and top talent.

Why, then, is quantum computing currently on everyone’s lips?

Quantum computing -- as demonstrated by the determination with which the American economy has gone hunting for patents -- is far more than merely the next step in conventional computer technology. Conventional computers think in switches: on or off, zero or one. Every bit is like a tiny lamp that is either lit or dark. Quantum machines, by contrast, work with qubits. These can not only be on or off, but both at the same time -- as well as infinitely many states in between, until the system is measured and the final result is determined. Through entanglement, qubits can be connected in such a way that the state of one immediately determines the state of the other -- regardless of how far apart they are. Where a classical computer checks one path after another, a quantum computer explores dozens, thousands, theoretically millions of paths simultaneously.

That does not make them better everyday computers. For texts, spreadsheets, or videos, the classical computer remains superior. But for tasks where the challenge is to find the right combination among astronomically many possibilities -- simulating new molecules, optimizing logistics networks, or breaking encryption -- a fundamental advantage emerges. In strategy papers from the United States, China, and the EU, quantum computing is explicitly identified as a key technology that will significantly advance fields such as materials research, pharmaceuticals, and cryptography.

Whoever controls the key technologies of the future controls global markets and gains geopolitical influence.

It is all the more tragic to see that in the EU, there has so far been little resistance, politically but also from within the business community, to ideologically driven, technology-hostile policies. The EU area now lacks almost all the conditions required to attract brilliant minds to high technology, encourage new companies to be founded, and enable investment and settlement in future-oriented clusters such as robotics, quantum computing, or artificial intelligence. Europe has specialized in saving the climate, and many on the continent seem indifferent to deindustrialization and the slowly emerging impoverishment of society. But Europe is facing Ayn Rand’s final bombshell: You can ignore reality, but you cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

British Prime Minister Andy Burnham used his first United Nations speech this week to announce a 'National Centre for Information Defence' - a new state machine to "detect, attribute and disrupt" what ministers call hostile information attacks, and to stop a "distorted and untrue narrative about Britain."

Burnham wrapped it in Russia, bots, deepfakes and "community cohesion." Critics are adamant the move is purely aimed at ensuring the government has full control over the flow of information.

'We are ready to share our understanding of how these actors work and how we can respond.'

Prime Minister Andy Burnham announces a new National Centre for Information Defence to detect, attribute and disrupt hostile state information attacks to defend Britain's democracy. pic.twitter.com/Zdv5Y8ihJQ

— GB News (@GBNEWS) September 23, 2026

Speaking in New York, Burnham said there is "no national security without a strong, cohesive society" and that this cohesion "has been under attack."

He described an "industrial-scale assault by hostile actors on the information environment." He blamed Russian agencies for bots, fake websites, falsified newspaper articles and forged branding of 28 British organisations "including universities and the BBC."

?Andy Burnham just announced a National Centre for Information Defence - to "detect, attribute and disrupt" information the state calls hostile.?

Every government that builds one says it's only for foreign threats. Then it starts treating disagreement as an attack on... pic.twitter.com/ZMLyGCUirN

— WasAcop (@WasAcop) September 23, 2026

Burnham also claimed they had "amplified far-right narratives" and tried to interfere with the 2019 general election. He called attempts to stoke unrest after "horrific events" repulsive.

The centre will sit first in the Office for the Prime Minister and Cabinet. It is supposed to work with the intelligence agencies, government departments, police and social media companies. Ministers assert it will also "build national resilience" by helping communities spot disinformation - and prevent that "distorted and untrue" picture of Britain.

So a...ministry of truth? https://t.co/9iwkoCoXo2

— Carl Benjamin ??????? (@Sargon_of_Akkad) September 23, 2026

Burnham went further, warning of an "insidious campaign that reaches into people's homes and twists what they feel about their own country and community - creating a narrative of decline, stoking division and sowing despair."

The United Kingdom, he said, had "tiptoed around this for too long." Over the last decade, he claimed, "we have given too much ground to those who want to run a negative, corrosive narrative about life in Britain, which bears no resemblance to reality. Well, no more."

The government already treats public anger about migration, crime, two-tier policing and a collapsing high street as a "narrative" problem rather than a facts problem.

I've seen mission creep in previous government departments (look at Prevent's focus on the mythical "far-right"), and I give Burnham's new "National Centre for Information Defence" a fortnight before it's solely focused on smearing and silencing British patriots, allowing the... https://t.co/TvWqdlinzh

— Leo Kearse - see me on tour! Links in bio (@LeoKearse) September 23, 2026

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage blasted, "Andy Burnham is setting up a Ministry of Truth to clamp down on free speech." In the accompanying clip he said ministers would use Russia as the excuse, then slide into shutting down "far-right tropes."

"This will be like George Orwell's Ministry of Information, and this will be used to clamp down on free speech," he said, adding "Never ever trust this authoritarian Government."

Andy Burnham is setting up a Ministry of Truth to clamp down on free speech. pic.twitter.com/UbIOpgahWR

— Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) September 23, 2026

Ironically, stripped of the Russia garnish, the language reads like early Soviet information control.

If you read this without context, you would think it was written by Vladimir Lenin in the Soviet Union in 1922.

Andy Burnham and Labour clearly seem to be moving towards classifying anything that doesn't line up with their worldview as "misinformation."

They will push this... https://t.co/UdC8AVvtkH pic.twitter.com/jTWuDU3sNv

— Ben Graham (@BenGrahamUK) September 23, 2026

Defence Secretary Wes Streeting was sent out to hose it down on GB News. Alex Armstrong put the question straight: people fear the unit will be "weaponised to target British citizens who simply disagree with your Government. Can you promise today that that will not be the case?"

"Can you promise this wont be weaponised against British people"

As the govt launch a new 'National Centre for Information Defence' to wage war on 'untrue narratives' many are concerned it will be used to attack free speech.@wesstreeting say on @GBNEWS pic.twitter.com/6ElbHksqyq

— Alex Armstrong (@Alexarmstrong) September 23, 2026

Streeting said yes. "One of the great things about Britain and one of the things that I have a responsibility to defend is the freedom and democracy that we all enjoy."

That includes, he said, "the freedom to disagree, the freedom for people to challenge their Government, to challenge Government policy, to criticise robustly what we are doing."

The centre, he insisted, exists to attribute and rebut hostile state work. "We're not interested in policing domestic political dissent."

Fraser Myers of Spiked heard the same words and reached the opposite conclusion.

'When I hear those words I hear the government cracking down on free speech.'@AlexArmstrong asks Fraser Myers of Spiked Online about Andy Burnham's plan for a National Centre for Information Defence, aimed at tackling disinformation about the UK. pic.twitter.com/5UaD4PNyE9

— GB News (@GBNEWS) September 23, 2026

Labour's record is why nobody should take the promise at face value. Big Brother Watch director Silkie Carlo said action against genuine foreign campaigns is legitimate, but "we have already seen the mantle of countering 'disinformation' being abused by our Government in attempts to malign and silence dissent."

Units including the Counter Disinformation Unit, the Rapid Response Unit, RICU and the MoD's 77th Brigade have, she said, been "involved in recording, flagging and triggering the censorship of Britons' lawful speech." MPs, journalists, campaigners and ordinary people have appeared in so-called disinformation reports "for lawful, truthful speech critical of the Government."

UnHerd's account of the 77th Brigade is worse. The Ministry of Defence once claimed the unit "does not, and has never, conducted any kind of action against British citizens." Documents showed it tracking identifiable British accounts during Covid, including tweets from then-Green MP Caroline Lucas.

The civilian Counter Disinformation Unit logged Peter Tatchell for criticising the monarchy and Conservative MP David Davis for attacking lockdown policy - after ministers said the unit did "not monitor political debate." Time and again the public was told these teams looked abroad. Time and again they looked inward.

This is the same apparatus we've repeatedly mapped:

         

Nile Gardiner, a former Thatcher aide, told GB News that Burnham's UN address was "talk of control and censorship" and "exactly the kind of messaging that the Trump administration absolutely hates."

The White House has already hauled British officials into the US embassy over the Online Safety Act, under-16 social media bans, and plans to push "trusted" outlets - BBC, ITV, Channel 4 - through the platforms.

While Burnham builds a centre to police "untrue narratives," Labour is also looking at how to keep the BBC's pipeline funded even as viewers walk away. Ministers are considering dumping the £180 licence fee for an £11-a-month "Home Internet Levy" on every household with broadband, whether anyone watches live TV or not.

Culture officials have discussed the Social Market Foundation plan. BBC director-general Matt Brittin has called the licence fee a "busted flush" and pushed for a mandatory household levy.

A DCMS spokesman said Charter Review is looking at options that are "sustainable and fair." Fair, in this case, means you pay for the state broadcaster through your router.

BBC licence fee could be axed and replaced by £11-a-month internet charge whether people watch live TV or not under new plans being considered by Labour https://t.co/bdesV2RaX0

— Daily Mail (@DailyMail) September 23, 2026

They might as well say that if you want running water or electricity, you also have to pay for the BBC.

The same week, communications regulator Ofcom was accused of sitting on data that undercuts the BBC's moral monopoly. The regulator's own news consumption survey found 74 per cent of GB News viewers rate that channel trustworthy, against 71 per cent for Sky News viewers and 66 per cent for BBC viewers.

GB News and Sky both scored 63 per cent on impartiality among their own audiences; the BBC scored 53 per cent.

Seventy-two per cent of GB News viewers said it offered a broad range of views. Ofcom left those figures out of its headline report and produced them after GB News asked.

The regulator blamed an "administrative error."

Ofcom is accused of covering up data that shows GB News is more trusted by its viewers than the BBC https://t.co/YL8l7VVucR

— Daily Mail (@DailyMail) September 23, 2026

Whitehall already has plans to force-feed the BBC through YouTube and the social platforms in the name of fighting "disinformation" - the same BBC that memory-holes comedy sketches when the satire no longer fits the narrative.

   

Reform's Zia Yusef asked a simple question, three times: what single piece of misinformation has Vladimir Putin actually seeded in the minds of British people?

"What piece of Misinformation has been seeded in the Minds of British people by Vladimir Putin?"

"I'll ask you again - What piece of Misinformation was seeded in the Minds of British people by Vladimir Putin?"

"I'll ask you again - What piece of Misinformation was seeded in the... pic.twitter.com/fkketdD9Jw

— Concerned Citizen (@BGatesIsaPyscho) September 23, 2026

Hostile states run influence operations. That is not in dispute. What Burnham has built is a centre inside his own office, working with police and the platforms, to police free thought. The people who will staff it already decided that noticing decline is the problem. The people who will be "resilient" are the ones told to distrust their own eyes.

Go back three decades to 1995 when the Internet was just taking off and opinions proliferated about the future and impact of this novel creation: some said it would supercharge global productivity. Others said it would be no more useful than a fax machine.

With the benefit of hindsight some 30 years later, we can say that the Internet debate has been settled, and as Deutsche Bank's Adrian Cox writes in a lengthy report published this week, it takes guts to do what Bob Metcalfe did.

After wrongly predicting in an article in 1995 that the internet would go “spectacularly supernova” and collapse in 1996, the co-inventor of Ethernet and founder of 3Com then pulped a copy of the article in a blender and drank it at a conference in 1997 as a way to eat his words.

While nobody worries about the Internet any more, the latest tech predictions are about no less than an AI apocalypse. Various tech leaders spent the weekend warning of catastrophic but not fully specified risks if it is not contained.

Yet history suggests that even the greatest minds of their generations have a poor record in predicting what tech is coming down the line, let alone what its effects will be in the real world.

The stakes could not be higher – not just the future of life itself but, in the shorter term, the future of a historic boom that depends on hype turning into reality.

* * * 

As Cox writes in his latest report (full report available here), concerns about AI have moved in waves since the launch of ChatGPT nearly four years ago. This year there was a spike in searches for “SaaSpocalypse” (the concern that software-as-a-service would be disintermediated by AI agents) in February, followed by a surge in “jobs apocalypse” in May, Google Trends data show. Both have been totally eclipsed in recent days by searches for AI extinction.

But taking a step back, all are far behind “AI bubble”, itself behind “deepfake”, in turn below “AI students”, overall “AI risk” and – biggest of the lot – the very tangible and immediate “cybersecurity”, almost all of which have surged this year, according to Google Trends data.

“Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future”: Niels Bohr, often also attributed to Yogi Berra

Wanting to know what will happen tomorrow is deeply visceral – literally.

People have been sacrificing sheep and chickens for four millennia to read the future in their entrails. Nowadays almost a third of Americans say they believe in astrology and consult their horoscope. We want to believe that Lionel Messi really can see space in a football match before it even exists, even if it is partly his movement that helps create the space he appears to predict.

But predicting the future is hard. For AI, it’s not just about what it will be able to do but also when it will be able to do it – whether more than $5 trillion in investment by the hyperscalers alone over the next five years will pay off before the advanced semiconductor chips they’re buying become redundant. It’s also about how rapidly and intensively AI can be adopted. Asset prices are a still more uncertain derivative, whipping around like the tail of a snake in response to every shift in expectations.

US President Donald Trump and China found themselves on the same side in rebutting the latest concerns as fearmongering, albeit with Trump adding that America needs to stay ahead of China in AI.

“Those who have knowledge, don’t predict. Those who predict, don’t have knowledge.” Lao Tzu

A glance through history would give any investor indigestion. Most predictions are wrong. The favorites in horse races lose 70% of races. It took a decade or more for demand to catch up with the infrastructure laid down in the British canal and railway and US telecoms and fibre booms – and many investors never recovered their capital.

Technology predictions have an especially mixed record as the binary order of the labs collides with the messy reality of the world. Famous examples range from IBM Chairman Thomas Watson’s underestimation of demand for computers in 1943 (“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers”) to Elon Musk’s repeated overestimation of imminent widespread adoption of self-driving cars since 2013 (“We should be able to do 90 percent of miles driven within three years”).

Technologists are not immune from making category errors, mistaking the most visible, automatable component of a job for the job itself. For example, radiologists, a favorite case study for believers in a jobs apocalypse, do much more than looking at images and making binary diagnoses. Much of their value lies in interpretation, judgement, communication and clinical decision-making.

Ultimately, what we see in the future is not so much a window as a mirror into our own hopes and fears.

And the problem is that hindsight makes what actually happens seem so obvious that we never seem to learn.

Today’s debate in a (rough) nutshell

The current debate encapsulates a perfect storm of an extremely high-stakes issue with limited transparency and an inherently unknowable outcome.

What sparked the current surge in concern?

The current debate comes after a researcher from one of the leading frontier labs quit, citing safety concerns; AI agents apparently collaborated with each other on a number of high-profile security breaches; and labs hinted that the technology is getting closer to “recursive self improvement”, ie AI improving AI.

Is the existential debate something new?

It is actually nothing new: leading economists and academics warned in July that “we must act now” to steer AI through a potential “transformation of our economy, larger than the Industrial Revolution… over a vastly shorter time frame”. That echoed the even more ominous statement three years ago by AI leaders calling for action to mitigate “the risk of extinction”.

The tug of war between “doomers” vs “boomers” has played a pivotal role in the development of the key frontier labs. Silicon Valley insiders sometimes refer to their “p(doom)” rating, representing their estimated percentage chance that AI will cause an existential catastrophe. 

What does an extinction scenario look like?

Experts including Tesla’s Musk, “godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton and philosopher Nick Bostrom have been warning about it for well over a decade. In the latter’s famous “paperclip maximiser” scenario, a superintelligent AI runs out of steel and then kills humans in a single-minded drive to fulfil its task of making paperclips. Fears sometimes centre around AI that has access to coding, the internet and knowledge of how people think, in order to manipulate them – as current AI models indeed do.

Why has it caught on so fast this time?

One factor is that it comes amid a tech backlash, particularly in the US, where concern about AI has become a rare bipartisan issue ahead of the US mid-term elections in November. Local concerns about data centre construction have become rallying points for voters in a way that vague fears about long-term jobs did not. Politicians including Senator Bernie Sanders have moved to propose wide-ranging legislation.

What arguments do companies make for continuing AI research?

1. If we don’t do it, someone else will. That may be either China or other, less responsible companies.
2. The potential benefits outweigh the benefits. AI may, they say, cure cancer, create new jobs and even eliminate the need for work altogether.
3. Good AI is the answer to bad AI. It should create defences against rogue AI and misuse of AI, and solve issues like AI’s huge energy and water use.

What do critics say?

1. AI is not dangerous because it is too clever but rather because it is too limited. It does not think like a human and people should not anthropomorphise it, critics say, adding that it is flawed probabilistic code that cannot reliably follow instructions. Longstanding critic Gary Marcus argues that it should be recalled until it can be shown to be safe and is properly controlled.
2. AI leaders are defending their own businesses. With potential IPOs on the horizon, a rising challenge from open-source models, and progress towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) being called into question, a handful of companies may benefit from a pause or legislation that helps protect their lead, critics say. Doomer talk distracts from real issues like deepfakes, copyright infringement and  cybersecurity lapses, they say.
3. Extinction scenarios are overblown. The internet is a diversified platform, so talk of AI somehow switching it off is fanciful, critics say. AI does not and will not realistically have sustained secret access to military or dangerous biotech resources, or be able to influence (very nondeterministic) human brains en masse, critics say. Humans will use tame AI and other tools, eg kill switches, if needed to resist attacks. Another “godfather of AI” Yann LeCun says the real risk is of power concentration.

A century of good and bad technology predictions

You have to admire people who have the courage to stick their neck out and make predictions, even if they don’t always work out. Vague predictions are relatively easy; specific ones within specific timeframes are harder.

It is no wonder that executives are coached by their ever-cautious PR teams to avoid answering hypothetical questions or giving dates to reach their targets.

• Nikolai Tesla, scientist, 1926: “When wireless is perfectly applied… we will be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance…” The instruments will be “amazingly simple… A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket”. He was right, albeit imprecise about the how or when it would be achieved.
• Albert Einstein, physicist, 1934: “There is not the slightest indication that [nuclear energy] will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will.” Within a decade, in 1942, a team at the University of Chicago had created the first sustaining chain reaction, a precursor to the nuclear reactor,
• Ray Kurzweil, futurist, 1999: “By 2029, computers will have human-level intelligence.” Dismissed at the time, many (though by far not all) of his predictions have worked out, fuelled by what he called the “law of accelerating returns”. His prediction from almost 40 years ago of artificial general intelligence by the end of this decade is remarkably close to the current “San Francisco Consensus”.
• Steve Chen, Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of YouTube, 2005: “There's just not that many videos I want to watch.” Despite his concern, YouTube was bought by Google (now Alphabet) for $1.65bn a year later. The unit made more than $11bn in advertising revenue in the most recent quarter.
• Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, 2007: “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share.” But you may be reading this on one of the more than 3 billion iPhones sold since its launch in 2007.
• Geoffrey Hinton, “godfather of AI”, 2016: “People should stop training radiologists now. It’s just completely obvious within five years deep learning is going to do better than radiologists… It might be 10 years.” In fact, the number of radiologists has increased by about 10 percent over the past 10 years, in part because of the limitations of AI and in part because of the increase in demand from an ageing population and more affordable healthcare. Hinton has walked back his comments and humans and AI are working together.
• Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, 2025: “I can easily imagine a world where 30 to 40% of the tasks that happen in the economy today get done by AI in the not very distant future." He revised this view in May amid a backlash against AI, saying he and his team had been “roughly right” in their technological predictions but “pretty wrong” on the economic and social implications. “I’m delighted to be wrong about this,” he said.

Why is it so hard to predict the future?

"The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined everyday by the ease with which the past is explained." Daniel Kahneman

1. Chaos theory: treating complex systems as if they are simple and linear.

• Systems like traffic, economies and social trends are finely balanced and sensitive to initial conditions. The butterfly effect means a tiny, unforeseen variable can lead to vastly different outcomes. Just take a look at the ragged history of market-implied forecasts of US Federal Reserve interest rates, where extrapolating from current trends has been reliably wrong.

Take self-driving cars, for example. It turns out to be about more than getting the technology right for the rubber to hit the road:

• Technological hurdles and “edge cases”: throwing more data and processing power at the problem is not enough. There is an infinite long tail of unpredictable events (“edge cases”), like sun glare, a cyclist riding the wrong way in a bike lane, a person in an animal costume, or road-rage-enhanced hand gestures.
• Regulatory labyrinth: autonomous vehicle optimists have come up against legal and ethical debates around liability, safety certification and moral challenges such as the so-called “trolley problem”, when swerving to avoid hitting one victim means colliding with another. Regulation is a slow-lane activity.
• Social and psychological barriers: public acceptance has been slowed down by high-profile accidents and safety concerns. Robots are held to a higher standard than flesh-and-blood motorists. It might be easier to navigate a world where all cars were self-driving, but the “messy middle”, with a mixture of both, is much harder for algorithms to navigate.

2. The future of AI will ultimately depend more on the prosaic challenges of workflow integration at enterprises that will need to pay for it than on releasing yet another model with a marginal step up in capabilities.

Cognitive bias: flaws in how the brain works

• Linear thinking about exponential change: We fail to intuitively understand how different exponential change is from linear change. As Wharton Professor Ethan Mollick says, “being on an exponential means each change over a fixed window is larger than the one before it… This is why AI keeps feeling like it is making leaps… Even though it is a curve on a graph, we keep experiencing a steady doubling of capability as a series of shocks.” This cognitive tendency to track exponential change in linear terms helps explain big AI market swings, he says.

• Optimism bias and the planning fallacy: underestimating costs and overestimating benefits. For example, only a quarter of more than 3,000 megaprojects studied by Saïd Business School came in on budget or better, only 2.8 percent were on budget and on time, and only 0.2 percent were on budget, on time and on benefits. Large-scale infrastructure projects are “too easy to start and too difficult to stop,” the authors said in the study from 2019. It remains to be seen how the recent surge in datacentre construction will compare.
• Confirmation bias: favoring information that confirms existing beliefs. For years, legacy automakers dismissed electric vehicles by  focusing on their high costs and limited range, ignoring the fact that rapid advances in battery technology would soon change that.
• Anchoring: relying too heavily on early information. Microsoft’s Ballmer dismissed the iPhone when it was launched because it was “the most expensive phone in the world and it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard which makes it not a very good email machine”. He later said he did not understand how mobile carrier subsidies would make it affordable. More broadly, he missed that this was a new business model.

3. Limited information: inability to see

• It is not just the future that is unknowable but also the present. Feedback mechanisms are often delayed, making it hard to distinguish between causation and correlation, and between relevant and irrelevant factors.
• Isolating key factors is impossible. Even since the development of scientific methods and controlled experiments, we have not come that far since the Mesoamericans found ways to prepare maize where they didn’t succumb to a long-term wasting disease called pellagra. The problem was that they weren’t able to single out the effective part of the process – soaking the maize in an alkaline solution of water and ash –from the other ineffective parts of the package – such as blowing on the maize before cooking it.
• (Author David Oks draws a fascinating parallel between this example of a delayed feedback mechanism and the tendency of AI models to “overfit”, extrapolating too much from coarse and sparse data to fill in the gaps. If the model creates a complex output and gets a single reward signal for it, the rational move is reproduce all of its features, including the ones that were incidental – such as AI’s trademark verbal tics.)
• No one wants to risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Argentinian President Javier Milei talked publicly about his superstitious insistence on staying at home wearing a lucky jacket rather than watching his team playing in the football World Cup live at the stadium.

4. Self-interest: incentives favour more extreme positions

• AI is not magic, a silver bullet or a charity, but a commercial industry.
• Most participants have incentives to amplify the stakes. Founders need belief, investors need momentum, incumbents need gravitas, consultants need urgency, policymakers need relevance, executives need a narrative and journalists need drama. This is not a criticism of individuals or organisations, or even of the likely revolutionary impact of AI.
• The challenge is magnified by a social media-driven economy. Social platforms favour novelty, negativity, moral intensity and shareability. For example, in political tweets, one study by New York University found each additional moral-emotional word was associated with about a 20 percent higher retweet rate. Another study by MIT found that false news was 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than true news and reached a threshold of 1,500 people six times faster.
• That means moderate claims are likely to be under-distributed and extreme claims over-rewarded. Implausibly precise numbers for the future size of the AI economy, for example, or dramatic doom-laden scenarios heavy with emotive language will continue to attract greater attention than even-handed assessment. 

What makes AI special – and gives hope for the future

Technology may be liable to erroneous thinking because of the disconnect between visionaries in Silicon Valley and similar communities, and the rest of the world.

Cynics may say that people with extraordinary knowledge and skills in one area may be even more prone than most to wrongly estimate their lack of knowledge or skills in other areas: the so-called Dunning-Kruger effect. That may include the reality of implementing AI on a trading floor in Wall Street, an office supplies wholesaler on the outskirts of London or an auto maker in Mumbai.

There is also a long tradition of correctly identifying the task that will disappear but getting wrong what humans will do instead.

• 1982: Computers “… can develop into monsters, damage the physical and mental health of the clerical staff – maybe even eliminate their jobs”: the Washington Post reported from a clerical conference. Computers instead became the core tool of knowledge workers.
• 1983: The pocket calculator “… has become the target of critics who fear that its use in the classroom will render generations of children dependent on batteries instead of brains”, the Washington Post reported. Instead expectations changed about what people calculate for themselves.
• 2009: Cloud computing: around half of companies surveyed “cited security and privacy concerns as their top reason for not using cloud computing”, Forrester Research found. Today companies entrust much of their critical infrastructure to the cloud.

“We overestimate the impact of technology in the short-term and underestimate the effect in the long run.” Roy Amara, Stanford computer scientist

But this time may really be different – with AI as a partner, starting with (deterministic) predictive AI. It is certainly helping weather forecasters to sift through unimaginable amounts of data. Four-day forecasts are now said to be about as accurate as one-day forecasts in the 1990s.

There are diminishing returns. The limit of predictability with standard physics models is about eight days, while deep-learning AI models increase that by just one day to nine days. However, the difference is that they generate state-of-the-art forecasts 100,000 faster, and 10,000 times more energy-efficiently, meaning they can be done on a laptop rather than a supercomputer.

And for the time being, your predictions about the impact of AI are no less valid than an AI expert based in the very particular world of Silicon Valley. And the future of AI will be made not in Silicon Valley but in Main Street.

More in the full Deustsche Bank report available to pro subs.