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The national average for diesel hit $6.06 a gallon, an all-time record, with California pushing near $8. Truckers and farmers are paying roughly 63 percent more to fill up than they were a year ago, and because diesel moves nearly everything on a shelf, analysts warn the pain shows up in grocery and retail prices next. The squeeze traces back to the Ukraine and Iran wars knocking out refining capacity and choking tanker traffic.
Ceremonies are underway across the country today for the quarter-century mark since the attacks. President Trump and the First Lady are at the National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial for a two-hour service including the reading of the 184 names lost on Flight 77, while Vice President Vance joins former Presidents Bush, Clinton, Obama and Biden at Ground Zero, where politicians have been barred from speaking since 2012. Earlier this week Trump awarded a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom to Welles Crowther, the "man in the red bandana" who saved 18 people in the South Tower.
Republicans just closed out an unprecedented midterm convention with Trump headlining and promising a $5,000 dividend to every adult citizen if the GOP holds both chambers on November 3rd. Vice President Vance used his night-two speech to call Democrats "the party of hatred," and freed American hostages from Venezuela, Afghanistan and Russia delivered the emotional centerpiece of the evening. Trump billed his second term as "the greatest two years in the history of the presidency."
For the second time in a week, the justices refused to let Missouri use its Republican-drawn map, which dismantled Democrat Emanuel Cleaver's Kansas City-based 5th District. The state's own Supreme Court found Secretary of State Denny Hoskins in contempt Thursday for telling local officials to use the new lines anyway, though the court said he purged the contempt by reversing course the same day. The whole mess stems from dueling state and federal orders issued minutes apart on September 8th.
Iran-backed Houthi fighters landed on Mayyun Island, also known as Perim, after Yemeni government forces withdrew, giving them a foothold inside the strait itself rather than just its approaches. It follows Thursday's capture of the port city of Mokha. Bab el-Mandeb and Hormuz together carry roughly a quarter of the world's seaborne crude and nearly a third of maritime trade, meaning Iran-aligned forces now sit astride both.
Iran launched 20 ballistic missiles toward a base used by American forces in Jordan; Jordanian air defenses intercepted 18 and the other two fell in empty terrain with no casualties. The IRGC also claims it captured an unmanned US submersible at the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz, and US forces have been striking Iranian oil tankers in return. Brent crude pushed back above $100 a barrel, and a senior Iranian source says Tehran has roughly two months of gasoline left.
Vladimir Putin arrived in India today for a three-day visit, holding a bilateral with Prime Minister Modi ahead of the 18th BRICS summit at Bharat Mandapam this weekend. The agenda runs through defense, energy, civil nuclear cooperation, critical minerals and fertilizer, with the Kremlin confirming talks on BrahMos missile upgrades and completing S-400 deliveries. Xi Jinping and Iran's President Pezeshkian are among the other leaders attending.
A Falcon 9 lifted the secret USSF-153 payload off Space Launch Complex 4-East on California's central coast, then stuck the landing on the droneship Of Course I Still Love You. The booster was flying its 27th mission. Nobody's saying what's aboard, though drop-zone geometry points to classified low-Earth-orbit satellites built on SpaceX's Starshield bus.
A University of Queensland-led team compiled the largest-ever catalog of Type Ia supernovae — exploding white dwarfs used as cosmic measuring sticks — and the data prefers a dark energy that weakens over time instead of the fixed constant the standard model assumes. Combined with cosmic microwave background and galaxy-clustering data, the signal lands at roughly three sigma. It independently echoes what the DESI survey found using an entirely different method.
A portable CT scanner called ENCI, built by a team from the University of Hamburg and DESY, can image cuneiform tablets still sealed inside their original clay envelopes and reconstruct the text in minutes. Among the first letters read is one from a woman named Anna-anna to her merchant husband Ennum-Assur, complaining that a debtor refused to repay silver to her because she wasn't the man of the house. Hundreds of these sealed envelopes have sat unopened in museum drawers since they were dug out of Kultepe in central Anatolia.
