Is college basketball back?
SENATE PASSES 'PROTECT COLLEGE SPORTS ACT' 77-22
The Senate passed the Protect College Sports Act 77-22 on Monday night, handing the NCAA the limited antitrust exemption it has spent a decade and a pile of lobbying money chasing. Ted Cruz and Maria Cantwell wrote it together, which tells you how badly Washington wanted the transfer portal to stop being a 24-hour auction. Here is the deal for players. One transfer without a penalty, with carve-outs for grad school, a coach bailing, or a program getting cut. A five-year window to play. Agents capped at 5%. Schools can share up to $48.8 million a year with athletes, up from the $21.3 million figure from the House settlement. Football coaches are also barred from taking another head job midseason. Power conferences get capped at 20 schools after Florida's Ashley Moody bumped the number up from 19, naming Miami, Florida State and USF as programs that might want a seat next time realignment goes off. Trump called it "a really big deal" on Truth Social. Chris Murphy says it hands the NCAA authority over athletes without enough coming back the other way, the Congressional Black Caucus opposes it, and Rand Paul was the only Republican voting no. Then the House left on recess until after the November midterms.
EARTH FAILS ITS ANNUAL PHYSICAL, GOING 2 FOR 9 ON KEY METRICS
Earth went in for its annual physical and came back with seven of nine planetary boundaries breached. The Planetary Health Check 2026 comes from the Planetary Boundaries Science Lab at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and is written by more than 60 scientists, and lead author Boris Sakschewski said the diagnosis is unambiguous, with pressure rising across every boundary already outside the safe operating space. That is scientist for "you are both the patient and the problem." The failing seven are climate change, biosphere integrity, land system change, freshwater change, biogeochemical flows, novel entities, and ocean acidification, which broke its boundary in 2025. All seven are now at their highest recorded levels of transgression. Four of them, climate, biosphere, biogeochemical flows and novel entities, are parked in the high risk zone. CO2 hit a record 426 parts per million because fossil fuel burning has not slowed anywhere near enough. Now the part nobody put on the poster. The only two boundaries that improved over the last decade are stratospheric ozone and aerosol loading, which happen to be the exact two things the world ever passed real rules about. The treatment works. We took it once and then quit. Fine print: the report is co-published by PIK and Planetary Guardians, an NGO, so it is a scientist-written annual assessment rather than a peer-reviewed journal paper. The 426 is still 426.
AMERICA SAYS GOODBYE TO IRAQ AFTER 23 YEARS
US forces are off their last bases in Iraq by Wednesday, September 30, ending a 23-year military presence that began with the 2003 invasion and cost 4,500 American lives. Central Command confirmed there will be no ceremony open to the press. Twenty-three years, two wars, one occupation, and the exit gets less fanfare than a Best Buy closing. The pullout was agreed in 2024 under Biden and is being carried out by the Trump administration while the US is actively at war with Iran, which is the country most thrilled about it. A commander in the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, the umbrella group for Iran-backed factions, called the withdrawal a historic victory and a crushing defeat for the American project. Iran says its actual goal is pushing US forces out of the entire Middle East, and it just got one off the board. The other half of the deal is going worse. Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi, a former businessman, promised Trump at the White House in July that he would have the militias disarmed by September 30. That date is now June 30, 2027. Step one is reportedly a 90-day pause on militia attacks, so the heavily armed groups have agreed to take a quarter off. Kurdish officials wanted the Americans to stay longer, a Sunni tribal leader in Fallujah said Iraq is not ready to run its own security file, and Iraqi officials are warning that ISIS sleeper cells are still sitting there.
MAN DOES JET SKI DOUGHNUTS THROUGH BANGKOK STREETS
Bangkok declared a citywide disaster on Saturday after nearly 48 hours of rain, with parts of the city taking more than 300mm in three days. Sunday evening, 27-year-old Sorn Keadsiri responded to all that by putting a jet ski on submerged New Phetchaburi Road and doing doughnuts, barefoot, while a friend filmed him and cheered. The spray went across sidewalks, pedestrian bridge steps and roadside walls. Around him, motorcyclists were trying to get home, cars sat dead where their engines had quit, and residents were floating through waist-deep water in inflatable paddling pools and shopping trolleys. He posted the clip to Facebook captioned "B K K D R I F T." By Monday morning the account was gone, which is the fastest anything moved in Bangkok all weekend. Makkasan police charged him with causing a public nuisance and obstructing traffic, and charged the cameraman with helping him do it. Bangkok North Municipal Court handed down a month in jail and a 10,000 baht fine, cut it to 15 days and 5,000 baht for the guilty plea, suspended the jail and gave him a year of probation. The jet ski was impounded, with police asking the court to keep it permanently. His explanation to police was that he graduated abroad and was unaware of Thai culture, and that he only wanted to make people smile. Thai social media, currently bailing out their living rooms did not smile.
PARAMOUNT IS BORROWING $44 BILLION TO BUY A COMPANY SIX TIMES ITS SIZE
Paramount Skydance spent Monday on investor calls hawking about $44.4 billion of secured bonds, roughly $32 billion of it investment grade and $12.4 billion of it junk. Add last week's $7.5 billion term loan and the permanent financing package runs to $51.9 billion. All of it is fuel for the $110 billion Warner Bros. Discovery takeover. Worth noting who is eating whom here. Paramount's market cap is around $11.5 billion. Warner's is around $77.4 billion. The combined company comes out the other side carrying roughly $80 billion in debt with annual interest well over $6 billion. Bond buyers did not flinch. The $12.4 billion second-lien piece is the largest high-yield offering on record and it pulled in more than $23 billion of orders at yields running up near 9%. The leverage math depends entirely on who you ask. Paramount tells lenders net leverage lands at 4.3x at close once synergies are counted, with investment grade credit metrics in three years. S&P ran it and got 7.6 times EBITDA, parked there through 2027. David Ellison has promised more than $6 billion in synergies, and everyone at Warner knows what that word actually buys. Also, the deal isn't closed. Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin still hasn't approved the antitrust settlement with 12 state attorneys general. Paramount penciled in October 7 anyway, because a ticking fee of about $7 million a day starts October 1 whether the judge is ready or not.
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