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LARRY KUDLOW: Getting rid of the IRGC and the Houthis is better than a Diesel price control ban

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LARRY KUDLOW: Fed up at Los Angeles, California

Price controls are always a bad idea. They create shortages, profit losses, and eventually much higher prices when the controls are finally lifted. So this administration idea of a diesel export ban, is a problem if it really goes through.

Think of it this way, President Trump would be taking some number of barrels per day of diesel fuel off the market. That’s what a ban is. I don’t know the exact numbers, but the American Petroleum Institute says that of the 8 million barrels of diesel fuel that is traded by sea, America supplies about 1.5 million barrels of diesel, that’s about 20 percent. 

So an export ban would take a big chunk off the market. And that will jack up even higher international prices. Because it’s an internationally traded commodity. There’s really no way around it. Here’s another problem with the diesel export ban. Diesel comes from export production. You can’t just stop producing diesel. If you enforce this ban, presumably it would end drilling and production of oil, because diesel is a distillate of oil.

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Yet that includes another distillate of oil which is gasoline. If you knock down crude oil runs, in order to clear the 1.5 million barrels of oil a day diesel surplus that we currently export, gasoline production would fall by roughly between 550,000 and 750,000 barrels of oil per day. Some oil companies think that would translate roughly to a 30 cent hike in the price of a gallon of gasoline, which is not what we want.

So in other words, cutting back diesel for export, means cutting back oil, which means cutting back gasoline, which means shortages of gasoline and higher gasoline prices. Not to speak of the world price of diesel going up. So it would be pretty self defeating. By the way the Northeast will feel the brunt of this, because the Northeast and East Coast import all manner of fuel from overseas. So they’d get slaughtered. Maybe all those climate change greenies deserve it.

Now as I understand it, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent all oppose this diesel export ban. On the other hand, Vice President Vance and some Republican senators favor the ban. The president may be leaning toward it, but I hear the final decision has not yet been made.

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Back to the economics of it, we need to increase the nation’s refining capacity everywhere. We need more crude oil, gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, all of it. The administration has tried hard to streamline permitting rules and regulations, which is the key, but these things take time.

There may be 65 billion barrels of oil reserves in Venezuela, but lifting that is going to take time. Meanwhile, somehow I have a better solution to the diesel and oil price problem, and that is regime change in Iran, as the president hinted at in his historic United Nations speech yesterday.

And then, while we’re waiting for that, how about taking out the Houthis and reopening the Red Sea, that might get us another 2 million to 3 million barrels of oil coming to market. Getting rid of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is a lot better policy than price controls. Just saying.

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Australian PM raises ‘extreme concern’ over OpenAI agent’s website access

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Australian PM raises 'extreme concern' over OpenAI agent's website access

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Wednesday that an OpenAI agent gained unauthorized access to an Australian government website earlier this year, though the company said its review found no evidence that patient records were accessed.

Albanese told reporters in New York that the activity occurred in June and involved an OpenAI agent accessing the public-facing Medicare Statistics Reporting Service portal, which is administered by Services Australia.

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“I spoke with the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, to express Australia’s extreme concern about this incident,” Albanese said. 

“And I also expressed my disappointment that it took the company way too long to inform the government what had occurred, and the nature of the way that that notification occurred as well was unacceptable.”

ANTHROPIC, OPENAI CEOS WARN AI COULD THREATEN HUMANITY WITHOUT SAFEGUARDS

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Wednesday that an OpenAI agent gained unauthorized access to an Australian government website earlier this year. (Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images)

Albanese said no personal information is believed to have been accessed and that investigations remain ongoing.

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“Nonetheless, this situation is obviously unacceptable,” Albanese said.

In a statement provided to FOX Business, OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri said the company identified activity involving several Australian government websites during an internal evaluation.

Pusateri said OpenAI is conducting an extensive review of “misaligned model activity” during training and evaluation and is notifying third parties when it “identifies potential impacts to their systems.”

SAM ALTMAN IDENTIFIES TWO BIGGEST RISKS FACING AI’S FUTURE

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An OpenAI spokesperson said the company identified activity involving several Australian government websites during an internal evaluation. (Omar Marques/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

“During this review, we identified activity involving several Australian government websites and services as our models attempted to look up answers and available statistics for questions about Australia during an internal evaluation,” Pusateri said. “In the course of that, our models took actions we did not intend.”

Pusateri said OpenAI’s review found no evidence that patient records were accessed.

“The information accessed included aggregate health statistics and internal file names,” Pusateri said. “We notified the organizations and are providing technical information to support their investigations and help address potential security vulnerabilities.

“Our overall review is ongoing, and we remain committed to transparency about these issues and to sharing what we learn as that work continues.” 

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The company said it notified Services Australia Sept. 10 after validating what information had been accessed.

TRUMP ADMIN PARTNERS WITH OPENAI TO EQUIP FEDERAL EMPLOYEES WITH ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TOOLS

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman

The prime minister also said he spoke with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to express Australia’s “extreme concern” about the incident. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

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The incident comes amid growing scrutiny of AI models and their capabilities.

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Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned the United Nations Security Council Wednesday that rapidly advancing AI could threaten humanity if governments and industry fail to keep it under human control.

“We could lose control of the future to AI,” Altman said. “The risk is that it moves so fast that people can no longer follow what’s happening or intervene when needed. This would obviously be terrible.”

Reuters and FOX Business’ Isabel McKean contributed to this report.

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A Near-Invisible Crease and Superb Cameras You Probably Can’t Easily Buy This Year

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OPPO Find N6 Review: A Near-Invisible Crease and Superb Cameras

OPPO’s latest book-style foldable, the Find N6, has drawn some of the strongest praise the company has received for a smartphone in years, with reviewers across multiple outlets calling it among the best folding phones currently on the market. The catch, according to nearly every review published so far, is that most consumers outside Asia and Oceania won’t be able to buy one.

OPPO markets the Find N6 as a “Pocket AI Workstation,” built around what the company calls a “Zero-Feel Crease,” a 200-megapixel Hasselblad camera system, and the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 processor. According to OPPO’s own specifications, the device folds down to roughly 159.87 by 74.12 by 8.93 millimeters and weighs approximately 225 grams, opening into an 8.12-inch inner display alongside a 6.62-inch cover screen, both capable of a 1-120Hz refresh rate. The company says the device carries IP56, IP58 and IP59 water and dust resistance ratings, is powered by a 6000mAh silicon-carbon battery, and supports 80W wired and 50W wireless fast charging.

OPPO Find N6 Review: A Near-Invisible Crease and Superb Cameras
OPPO Find N6 Review: A Near-Invisible Crease and Superb Cameras You Probably Can’t Easily Buy This Year

The feature drawing the most attention from independent reviewers, however, is the phone’s hinge. OPPO says its second-generation Titanium Flexion Hinge, built using what the company describes as industry-first 3D liquid printing and a “Clover Balance Pivot,” combines with what it calls Auto-Smoothing Flex Glass to produce a dramatically flatter fold than previous foldables. According to OPPO’s internal testing, the new hinge improves flatness by 75% and strengthens the hinge itself by 20% compared with the company’s previous Find N5 model.

Independent reviewers who tested the device largely corroborated that claim, even if none put it in quite the same technical terms as OPPO’s own marketing. Tech Advisor’s review, based on several weeks of hands-on use, described the crease as “the least noticeable crease of any folding phone to date,” adding that “you can barely feel the crease when you run your fingers over it.” The outlet reported that OPPO scans each hinge with microscopic precision during manufacturing, filling any detected unevenness with a liquid 3D-printing process cured under UV light, a process the reviewer said reduces the height variance across the crease to roughly 0.05 millimeters, compared with the 0.2 millimeters typical of most folding phones. “The Find N6 is the closest we’ve ever come to a creaseless folding phone, and it’s glorious to use,” the review concluded.

Trusted Reviews reached a similarly enthusiastic verdict, writing that OPPO “has all but erased” the crease problem that has defined book-style foldables since the category’s inception, crediting the combination of the new hinge and Auto-Smoothing glass with delivering “a tablet-like canvas that doesn’t constantly remind you it folds in half.” The same review praised the phone’s broader package, noting it backs up the near-creaseless display “with a larger battery, faster charging, a genuinely competitive camera system and one of the most polished big-screen Android experiences around.”

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GSMArena’s testing similarly confirmed the display improvements, noting the Find N6 retains the same 8.12-inch LTPO OLED panel size and resolution as its predecessor while adding higher maximum brightness alongside continued support for a 120Hz refresh rate, HDR10+ and Dolby Vision streaming. The outlet’s separate verdict summary called the Find N6 “a classy foldable with a durable design and improved dust resistance,” highlighting its “superb OLED screens, best-in-class battery life, excellent performance and top-notch camera setup” as reasons to recommend it to anyone able to buy one.

OPPO Find N6 Review: A Near-Invisible Crease and Superb Cameras
OPPO Find N6 Review: A Near-Invisible Crease and Superb Cameras You Probably Can’t Easily Buy This Year

On the camera front, OPPO’s specifications list a 200-megapixel Hasselblad Ultra-Clear main camera with a 23mm focal length and a 1/1.56-inch sensor, paired with a 50-megapixel periscope telephoto lens offering a 70mm focal length and up to 120x super zoom, a 50-megapixel ultra-wide camera with a 15mm focal length, and a dedicated True Color Camera using a multispectral sensor to improve color accuracy. Digital Camera World’s review confirmed those specifications represent a meaningful upgrade over the Find N5, noting the new 200-megapixel main sensor replaces a 50-megapixel unit, while the ultra-wide camera jumps from 8 megapixels to 50 megapixels. The outlet noted the True Color Camera appears in the Find N series for the first time with the N6, designed specifically to improve white balance accuracy across varying lighting conditions.

Not every aspect of the review cycle was uniformly positive. Digital Camera World raised a recurring complaint about book-style foldables generally, noting that the Find N6’s inner screen retains a nearly square aspect ratio that works well for viewing two apps side by side but leaves video content without a dramatically larger viewing area than the cover screen once black bars are accounted for, and can cause on-screen menus in apps like Lightroom to overlap images rather than sit neatly alongside them. The reviewer suggested a future model with a shorter, wider inner display, or eventual tri-fold designs, might better address the issue. The same review also noted that while the Find N6’s IP56, IP58 and IP59 rating marks a genuine improvement for the foldable category, it still trails the IP68/69 certification found on rival Honor’s latest Magic V6 foldable.

Gaming performance also emerged as a specific weak point in Gizmochina’s testing. The outlet found that, similar to its predecessor, the Find N6 ships with one performance core of its Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip disabled, a decision that contributed to notably poor frame rates in graphically demanding titles like “Genshin Impact,” which the reviewer said hovered around 45 frames per second, a result attributed partly to the chip limitation and partly to the inner display’s doubled gaming resolution relative to a standard smartphone screen, along with what the reviewer described as a relatively weak cooling system and conservative performance tuning. The reviewer was careful to note this trade-off likely matters little to the phone’s actual target audience, writing that buyers drawn to a large-screen foldable “likely don’t care about gaming performance at all,” and adding that the reduced chip configuration helps deliver strong all-day battery life instead, reporting the 6000mAh battery “easily lasts a full day” in real-world use, sometimes stretching across a full 24-hour period.

Android Police’s review echoed the broadly positive consensus while reinforcing the market-availability concern that colored nearly every published assessment of the device. “The Oppo Find N6 puts an end to feeling the crease beneath your fingers on the open screen, and then improves the camera, software, and durability for a very well-rounded, highly desirable folding phone package,” the outlet wrote, while noting the device is not officially available in the United States, United Kingdom or Europe, with confirmed availability limited to markets across Asia, Australia and New Zealand, at an approximate starting price around $1,600.

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GSMArena’s pricing research found the phone commands a premium even within the markets where it is officially sold, citing a Singapore retail price of SGD 2,400, or roughly $1,870, and noting that large foldables have historically carried premium pricing across the category regardless of brand. Despite the steep cost and narrow availability, the outlet’s overall assessment remained strongly positive, praising the phone’s “excellent inner and cover OLEDs,” “near crease-less foldable screen,” “class-leading battery life” and “versatile camera” as reasons it remains one of the strongest recommendations in the foldable category for buyers who can access it.

OPPO has said the Find N6 runs on ColorOS 16, built on the Android 16 operating system, with the software specifically tuned to take advantage of the device’s large inner display for multitasking. That includes a feature OPPO calls Free-Flow Window, which allows users to open and freely resize multiple apps at once and switch between multi-window and split-view layouts using four-finger pinch and spread gestures. The company has also introduced a dedicated stylus, the OPPO AI Pen, sold separately, which includes an AI Painter tool capable of converting hand-drawn sketches into polished charts and diagrams, alongside a “Circle to Capture” feature for instantly recognizing and extracting text and images from the screen.

Trusted Reviews specifically praised the day-to-day software experience, describing app launches as having “a sense of urgency” and calling multi-app splitscreen use on the large internal display “a delight,” while noting the phone handles gaming sessions capably despite the chip configuration concerns raised elsewhere. GSMArena’s reviewers separately highlighted the multitasking capabilities of ColorOS on the big screen, along with what they described as pleasant use of the AI Pen accessory and seamless transitions between the cover and inner displays.

Taken together, the body of independent reviews published since the Find N6’s release points to a broad critical consensus: OPPO has produced what multiple outlets consider the best book-style foldable currently available, built around a genuinely transformed hinge and display that finally addresses the crease problem that has defined the category since its earliest models, backed by a substantially upgraded camera system, strong battery life and a mature, multitasking-focused software experience. The device’s absence from major Western markets, however, remains the single most consistent caveat across the review cycle, leaving what several reviewers described as one of the best foldable phones ever made largely out of reach for consumers outside the limited set of Asian and Oceanic markets where OPPO has chosen to sell it.

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WA government's plantation timber estate grows to $125m

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WA government's plantation timber estate grows to $125m

The state government has purchased more than $100 million of agricultural land to turn into plantation timber farms since 2018.

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Stock Futures Waver Near Flatline as Wall Street Craves Diplomacy

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Stocks Little Changed After Fed Decision

Stock futures were largely treading water ahead of Tuesday’s opening bell as investors weighed whether hope for an Iran deal is enough to lift equities further.

Dow Jones Industrial Average futures added 0.4%, or 197 points. S&P 500 futures inched 0.1% higher. Nasdaq 100 futures ticked 0.1% lower after wavering at the flatline.

Yesterday, optimism that this week could bring a resolution to the war in Iran fueled a stock market rally, sending the Nasdaq Composite to a fresh record high. Oil futures and Treasury yields fell on hope for a deal.

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Venezuela’s Rodriguez promises elections to transition to ’full democracy’

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Venezuela’s Rodriguez promises elections to transition to ’full democracy’

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Down 47%, Is This a Generational Buying Opportunity to Load Up on Dutch Bros Stock?

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Down 47%, Is This a Generational Buying Opportunity to Load Up on Dutch Bros Stock?

The blueprint for investing success when it comes to quick-service concepts early in their expansion cycles is pretty clear. If you buy into a chain that is growing at a healthy clip — with strong comps stacking on top of new openings — you should generally do OK. A lack of profitability isn’t ideal, but it’s understandable when a trendy eatery or beverage shop is focused on ramping up its presence across the country.

Dutch Bros (NYSE: BROS) seems to be ticking all the growth-stock boxes. The chain of small-box stores handcrafting coffees, energy drinks, and other specialty beverages just posted its strongest quarterly revenue growth in more than a year. It’s also in the black, working on its fourth consecutive year of growing profitability.

Missed AI’s “Act 1”? Act 2 Could Be 15x Bigger. Most investors think they missed the AI boat because they didn’t buy Nvidia in 2005. But according to our analysts, we’re only at the end of “Act 1″—the R&D phase. “Act 2” is the global rollout. Continue »

The chain should be a rock star for investors, but the headline doesn’t lie. Dutch Bros stock has been cut nearly in half from its June highs. It would have to soar almost 100% — a double Dutch, if you will — to revisit those highs. It would have to more than double to return to its all-time peak set in early 2025. This feels like a buying opportunity. Let’s take a closer look.

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Someone making coffee.
Image source: Getty Images.

Cool beans

No one likes it when a cup of coffee goes cold. The same can be said about a coffee chain stock. Dutch Bros used to be a market darling among beverage stocks. Investors fixated on the long drive-thru lines. Its strong grasp of young beverage sippers who flocked to their local Dutch Bros after school made it a rare beverage concept, with afternoon traffic spikes.

All of this remains the same, and it’s actually better now. Its long streak of positive comps now stretches 19 years long. Annual unit volumes now top $2 million apiece, a big deal since these are small-box stores averaging a mere 900 square feet. You don’t need a lot of space when 90% of your traffic comes through the drive-thru lanes.

Dutch Bros just posted another blowout quarter. Revenue rose 33% to $550.9 million, its strongest growth since the final quarter of 2024. Revenue topped $500 million for the first time. The lion’s share of its growth came on the strength of its expansion. It now has 1,225 stores, 17% more than it had a year ago. It’s been prioritizing higher-revenue company-owned stores over its franchising efforts, so revenue is growing even faster than the unit count.

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DoorDash reaches $131.5M settlement with NYC over courier pay

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DoorDash reaches $131.5M settlement with NYC over courier pay
DoorDash courier
The payment issues affected about 264,000 couriers. Photo: Shutterstock

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DoorDash has agreed to pay $131.5 million to settle claims that it underpaid or delayed payment to hundreds of thousands of couriers in New York City.

The city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP) said that an investigation of the company’s payment practices uncovered “systematic violations” of the city’s minimum wage rules for delivery workers that went into effect in 2023.

The third-party delivery company on Tuesday said it made mistakes while trying to comply with those rules, which it described as the most complex in the country. It blamed technical bugs or complicated situations, such as deliveries that crossed city boundaries, and said the payment errors were not intentional.

“Simply put, we screwed up,” the company said in a statement.

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The payment issues affected about 264,000 drivers, about 209,000 of which where never paid or were paid late, the company said. This accounted for less than 1% of payments in the city. About $6.6 million never reached these workers, and another $5.7 million arrived days or weeks late.

The company will pay $12.3 million to those couriers, with a median payout of about $48 per person. All impacted workers will get at least $10, even if they were underpaid by less than that.

DoorDash will pay a much larger sum — about $83 million — to settle a separate issue: workers who were underpaid for time they spent logged into the DoorDash app but not actively delivering.

The company said it calculated pay for this “on-call time” differently than the city and believes its approach was “fair, practical, and legal.” But it has now agreed to use the city’s formula “rather than spend years fighting over whose method was right.”

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The company will also pay $16.7 million in fines to the DWCP.

The department said it is the largest worker settlement in New York City history and the largest settlement involving food delivery workers in the U.S.

San Francisco-based DoorDash said it has fixed the bugs that caused the errors and has also strengthened its compliance program to prevent future issues.

As part of the settlement, it will have to submit monthly data reports to the DCWP every month for three years to ensure compliance. The department is also working with Workers Justice Project and the Workers’ Algorithm Observatory to develop software that will allow couriers to share their DoorDash trip data directly with the DCWP.

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New York City has among the strictest regulations for food delivery companies in the U.S. and has repeatedly clashed with these companies over its efforts to rein them in.

In 2023, New York enacted a law that required delivery companies to pay workers at least $17.96 per hour spent actively delivering (before tips). The rate has gone up each year and now stands at $22.13.

UPDATE: This story was updated with more information from New York City government.

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OpenAI agent ‘infiltrated’ Australian government website, PM says

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Australia's Prime Minister Anthony Albanese speaks at a news conference in front of several flags. He is wearing a dark suit with a red spotted tie and dark glasses

An artificial intelligence agent developed by OpenAI “infiltrated” an Australian government website in June, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has said.

The agent gained unauthorised accessed to a statistics portal containing “non-sensitive Medicare information”, Albanese told a news conference at the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

Medicare refers to Australia’s universal healthcare scheme. The breach is among the first publicly reported AI-led hacks of a government website in the world.

OpenAI said it only became aware of the incident in August “during an ongoing review of OpenAI misaligned model activity”, and informed Australian officials on 10 September.

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While the review is ongoing, a spokesperson for the AI firm said that it is not believed that any patient records were accessed.

Albanese said the breach occurred in June this year, but OpenAI only informed government officials via email on 10 September.

The prime minister said he spoke directly to CEO of OpenAI Sam Altman to say that it had taken “too long” to inform authorities and “to express Australia’s extreme concern about this incident”.

He said the agent accessed both public and non-public files and a “forensic investigation” is under way to find out if other government systems were affected.

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The investigation will be led by the Australian Signals Directorate, the country’s cybersecurity agency.

The public-facing Medicare Statistics Reporting Service portal is administered by Services Australia, the main hub to redirect users to government services.

He told reporters: “No personal information is believed to have been accessed at this stage, but investigations are ongoing.

“Evidence currently available is there is no broader compromise to the Services Australia network. Nonetheless this situation is obviously unacceptable.”

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Earlier this year, OpenAI revealed a group of AI agents it had been testing had escaped from their controls and secretly worked together to hack another tech firm named Hugging Face.

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A Bad Day for Bank Stocks Is Killing the Dow

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The Dow Jones Industrial Average was trading lower thanks to bank stock weakness.

The blue-chip index dropped 0.5%, or 232 points. Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase were the two biggest stocks weighing on the Dow, contributing 105- and 75-point drags, respectively.

Goldman and JPMorgan stocks weren’t the only bank stocks struggling on Tuesday. In fact, the State Street SPDR S&P Bank ETF was on track for its lowest close in over three months, according to Dow Jones Market Data, amid its longest losing streak since March.

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Worthington Enterprises After Q1 Earnings: Still A Buy On Technical Signals

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Financial Charts with Candlestick and Bar Graphs on Abstract Network, Stock Market Analysis Concept.

Worthington Enterprises After Q1 Earnings: Still A Buy On Technical Signals

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