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The nation paused Friday for the quarter-century mark, with the 2,977 names read aloud at Ground Zero and ceremonies at the Pentagon and Shanksville. President Trump spoke at the Pentagon observance, while Vice President JD Vance joined former Presidents Bush, Obama, Clinton and Biden in Lower Manhattan alongside New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Trump also hosted NYPD first responders at the White House with a piece of Ground Zero steel on display.
The agency released several dozen President's Daily Briefs on Friday detailing what Clinton and Bush were told about Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida before the hijackings. The documents show repeated warnings about hijack plots in the years leading up to the attacks. Separately, 9/11 families used the anniversary to press Trump to release still-redacted files they believe point toward Saudi involvement.
The consumer price index rose 0.4 percent in August and 3.4 percent over the year, with core prices up 0.3 percent on the month — more than forecasters expected. Energy did most of the damage: gasoline is up 27.4 percent year over year and fuel oil up 52 percent. Producer price inflation hit 5.4 percent in August, and traders are now pricing in a real chance the Fed raises rates rather than cuts.
AAA put the national diesel average at $6.06 a gallon on Friday, up from $5.98 the day before and $5.85 a week earlier — a record. Regular gas sits at $4.29, up fifteen cents in a week, with Brent crude trading near $104 after briefly topping $109 overnight. Because diesel moves freight, that number tends to show up in grocery prices a few weeks later.
Yemeni and Iranian officials say Tehran pressed Houthi rebels to capture key Yemeni Red Sea ports and to strike Saudi Arabia, in the latest escalation of a war now roughly six months old. Houthi missiles and drones hit Saudi Aramco storage and refining sites at Abha, Najran and Jizan, forcing some facilities offline. Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has collapsed to a handful of vessels a day, down from about 125 before the war.
For a second straight day Friday, Russian drones targeted roadside fuel stations in and around Kyiv, part of a widening campaign against everyday civilian infrastructure that has also hit food distribution hubs and seed-oil plants. The city of Pavlohrad held a day of mourning for five people killed near shopping malls in a daylight drone strike that wounded 67. Ukraine is answering with deep strikes of its own, including an overnight drone attack that set the Saratov oil refinery ablaze.
The head of Britain's MI5 marked the anniversary with a blunt warning that the next strategic shock could already be taking shape somewhere intelligence services are not currently looking. He cautioned against preparing to fight "yesterday's enemy, using yesterday's methods, against yesterday's target." An FBI official echoed the theme this week, noting al-Qaida and ISIS still use 9/11 as a recruiting rallying cry, with online radicalization making threats harder to spot.
Trump's executive order signed at Johnson Space Center creates a United States Space Academy under NASA's civilian leadership, and the jockeying to host it is underway. Administrator Jared Isaacman, who chairs the presidential commission owing a report within 120 days, says it will "operate more like the Merchant Marine Academy than the Air Force Academy," with graduates free to go to industry carrying a reserve obligation. States must submit applications by October 26, with groundbreaking no later than 2027 and a first class of 300 students in 2028.
Federal investigators believe Iranian actors were behind the coordinated cyberattack that hit more than 30 Minnesota water systems, and CISA says threat actors are going after programmable logic controllers and locking operators out by changing passwords. Energy, water and telecommunications are the three sectors drawing the most attention, and a group calling itself APT Iran has publicly promised "unexpected and critical events." A joint NSA, CISA, FBI, Energy and EPA advisory also flagged reconnaissance against Siemens S7 industrial controllers using scripts disguised as legitimate monitoring tools.
The 49ers and Rams met at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on Friday in a game streamed exclusively on Netflix, and fans were not charmed. Complaints ranged from not being able to find the broadcast at all, to cricket-ground sightlines that put spectators a country mile from the field, to a crowd that never quite figured out when to make noise. One fan summed it up: "Absolute crazy work for the NFL to put this game in Australia and behind a Netflix paywall."
