🇺🇸🇨🇳 Trump and Melania introduced Xi and his wife at the White House state dinner. The 4 of them walked into the East Room after a day of talks, flyovers, and noise outside the gates. This is the honor Washington keeps for the relationships it wants to look permanent. A dinner does not settle Taiwan, AI or tariffs, but it tells the room who still gets the formal table and the band. The deals tomorrow will be smaller than the lighting tonight. That's the point: Make the rivalry look house-trained for a few hours. Writer: Lucas

🇮🇷🇺🇸 Iran’s president is now openly saying Tehran wants a deal with Trump BEFORE the U.S. midterms. Pezeshkian told reporters at the UN that Iran wants Washington to return to the June ceasefire MOU before November, after Trump argued Tehran was waiting to see how he performs in the elections. And Pezeshkian went further: he said Iran is open to inspections of its nuclear facilities and denied that his government is seeking to assassinate Trump. He also revealed that he has already met twice with Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, including one seven-hour meeting last month. Khamenei has barely been seen publicly since taking power after his father was killed in an Israeli strike. Source: NBC / Writer: Sol

🇵🇰 Pakistan is cracking down hard ahead of Imran Khan's march on Islamabad, and 2 families tied to his party say they were targeted. Punjab PTI leader Raja Shahbaz Bhatti says police broke down his gate and searched his home last night. Separately, KPK Assembly Speaker Babar Saleem Swati says his nephew, Kamal Saleem Swati, survived a deadly attack and an attempted kidnapping, and has released CCTV footage of the incident. The march, which is planned for Sunday, is demanding Khan's release, and the government is pulling out every stop to keep it from happening. Punjab, Pakistan's most populous province, has banned any gathering of 5 or more people in public for the next 13 days, citing intelligence warnings of possible suicide bombings and car bombs at large crowds. Islamabad is already on lockdown, mobile and internet service is set to be cut in neighboring Rawalpindi, and reports say roads into the capital will be blocked with shipping containers and trenches, with bus routes suspended. For a march the government says it isn't worried about, it's going to a lot of trouble. Source: @MohUmair87 / Writer: Julie

🇺🇾 Imagine moving somewhere that didn’t exist a few years ago... Praxis says construction has begun on an entirely new city in Uruguay, with its first residents expected to arrive in 2027. Building a city is one thing. Convincing people to build their lives there is the real test. Would you take the gamble and become one of its first residents? Writer: Val

🇬🇧 LIZ TRUSS, JAMES HECKMAN & EYAL HERTZOG: THE NEXT FREE-SPEECH FIGHT MAY BE OVER WHO CONTROLS HISTORY ITSELF We used to worry about governments censoring newspapers. James Heckman thinks AI creates a much stranger problem: a handful of companies could increasingly control the information people use to understand reality. “𝘞𝘪𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯 𝘢 𝘺𝘦𝘢𝘳 𝘰𝘳 𝘵𝘸𝘰, 𝘧𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘰𝘳 𝘧𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘩𝘶𝘮𝘢𝘯 𝘣𝘦𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘭𝘥 𝘤𝘢𝘯 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘳𝘰𝘭 𝘩𝘰𝘸 𝘸𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘬.” His concern is that AI increasingly becomes the interface between people and history. If the underlying digital record is manipulated, buried or rewritten, most users may never know what disappeared. Former UK Prime Minister Liz Truss approaches the same problem from the political side. She argues Britain has accumulated laws, regulators and institutions that increasingly restrict what can be said, while traditional media itself is constrained by commercial and institutional pressure. But Truss rejects the idea that the battle is already lost. “𝘐 𝘯𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘬 𝘪𝘵'𝘴 𝘵𝘰𝘰 𝘭𝘢𝘵𝘦.” That is where Heckman and Eyal Hertzog think technology can change the equation. Their Roundtable project is trying to put professional journalism on-chain, allowing publishers to remain independent while sharing distribution, monetization and infrastructure without a single platform being able to deplatform them or cut off their revenue. The internet decentralized publishing, then somehow rebuilt the gatekeepers. The bet is that the next version can remove them again. @TrussLiz @JamesCHeckm @Eyal

🇺🇸 300 families walking through ONE Arizona food bank every day… and demand just shot up 40% Hope for Hunger in Glendale is seeing a flood of people needing groceries, a reminder that for hundreds of local families, keeping food on the table has become something they can’t manage alone. A 40% surge doesn’t happen in a vacuum, so it's clear: America is in a crisis. Source: ABC15 Arizona YT / Writer: Val

🇺🇸 Medical examiners in Maryland just ruled that the hanging death of a black man who was found swinging from a tree in Prince George's County on Sunday was a suicide. As soon as the body was found, suggestions that it was a lynching began spreading online. What should have been a tragic non-news event needed a press conference because too many people saw a pattern that wasn't really a pattern. Writer: Mhedi

🇮🇷 Iran's FM spokesman is comparing U.S. fuel price blame games to Hitler's excuse for invading Poland. Esmaeil Baqaei says Washington is banking on the public forgetting who actually started the war that shut down the Strait of Hormuz and wrecked commercial shipping. And then, he really went there: “In 1939, Hitler similarly framed his invasion of Poland as a defensive action.” He wrapped up by asking whether blaming the victim is strategic brilliance or plain old historical amnesia. Source: @IRIMFA_SPOX / Writer: Julie

🇸🇦 Saudis unveiled its first homegrown flagship EVs... and they went STRAIGHT for absurd numbers. CEER’s new EXOBOT sedan and SUV are being built in Saudi Arabia, with the top-spec version pushing 1,111 hp and 1,500 Nm of torque. The sedan does 0–100 km/h in 2.1 seconds, while the SUV takes 2.4 🤯 Writer: Sol

🇨🇳🇺🇸 Chinese ships keep turning up off Alaska, which is exactly why America is locking China out of Greenland... Four Chinese research vessels have sailed through the U.S. Arctic this year, close to last year's total of five already, running through the Aleutians and the Bering Strait with some pushing all the way to the North Pole, according to the Coast Guard's Arctic commander. They stayed in international waters but never gave notice, and the Coast Guard is watching whether they're scouting seabed deposits of lithium, cobalt and rare earths or hunting for a military edge. Beijing calls itself a "near-Arctic" state and runs icebreakers the Pentagon says double as military research platforms. The Greenland deal Trump signs Tuesday bars any adversary from bases or sensitive investments on the island without Washington's approval and adds two new American bases, which reads very differently next to this. Locking down Greenland is the right call, because the Arctic holds the minerals and the shortest paths to the U.S. homeland, and Beijing is clearly doing its homework there. Source: Daily Caller, Reuters / Writer: Daniel

🇺🇸🇺🇳 Trump is heading to the UN as multiple global flashpoints threaten to get even hotter With major conflicts and geopolitical tensions converging in New York, the gathering puts U.S. foreign policy under an intense international spotlight while opening the door to consequential diplomacy behind closed doors. The world doesn’t need another week of speeches… it needs to find out whether anyone in that building can stop the next escalation. Writer: Val

🚨🇺🇦🇺🇸 Zelensky has landed in New York for a face-to-face with Trump, who wants a peace deal before winter He'll sit down with the president on the sidelines of the General Assembly, two weeks after Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner flew into Kyiv straight from three hours with Putin and pushed him to find a breakthrough before the cold arrives. Ukraine has spent those two weeks hitting back, with drones setting fire to a refinery inside Moscow, while Russia's last big barrage sent about 60 missiles. Washington's newest $2.7 billion air defense package for Kyiv contains zero Patriots, because America burned through its own stock fighting Iran. Winter is Russia's best weapon and Ukraine's air defense is the thinnest it has been all war, so any deal pushed on Zelensky this week gets negotiated from Kyiv's weakest point of the year. Source: @TabzLIVE on TG / Writer: Daniel

🇷🇺 How many attacks can a nuclear power absorb before someone makes the decision the entire world fears? Alex Jones and Simeon Boikov argue Russia has repeatedly chosen restraint rather than nuclear escalation, while warning that continued strikes could shrink the margin for miscalculation; their claims about deliberate efforts to provoke Moscow remain disputed. That leaves the nightmare question: is restraint keeping the nuclear threshold safely out of reach… or are both sides getting dangerously comfortable walking toward it? Writer: Val

🇷🇺🇺🇦 Another Russian refinery is burning after an overnight drone attack. This time it’s Rosneft’s Kuibyshev refinery in Samara, where videos showed a major fire and a thick column of black smoke after explosions were reported overnight. The plant can process roughly 7 million tons of crude a year and produces diesel, jet fuel and other petroleum products. The wider Samara refining hub has been repeatedly targeted, with nearby Syzran currently offline after another strike earlier this month. Writer: Sol

🇺🇸🇮🇷 The Navy says it isn't going back to its Middle East headquarters in Bahrain anytime soon after Iran wrecked it... Iran hit Naval Support Activity Bahrain, home of the Fifth Fleet for 30 years and about 8,300 sailors, civilians and families, on the very first day of the war while families were still living there, and kept hitting it for days. Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao says Iran "blew the hell out of Bahrain," and ships now get resupplied from Diego Garcia on 14 to 18 day cycles instead of five to seven, which is how the Lincoln ended up short on food. Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle told an evacuated sailor at a town hall: "We're not getting back in there anytime soon, I just want to be completely honest with that." About 1,450 people got pulled out, many now paying rent in two countries while reimbursement claims crawl, and one spouse told CBS her family has started pulling money from their kids' college funds. Pushing American bases out of the Gulf was one of Iran's core demands in the June memorandum, and Tehran is getting it by missile instead of by treaty, with the families who lived there covering the bill out of their children's savings. But the US insists they are winning... Source: CBS News / Writer: Daniel

🇬🇧🇮🇱 Here’s a use of British taxpayer money most people probably never imagined: topping up donations that support Israeli military veterans British supporters of the Yahalom Foundation are directed through a UK charity arrangement where eligible donations receive 25% Gift Aid, with advertised projects including psychological treatment and a £5,000 “therapeutic healing journey” for veterans returning from Gaza. The money starts as a private donation… but once Gift Aid enters the equation, Britain’s public purse becomes part of the story. Should taxpayers be helping increase donations destined for military-veteran programs overseas? Source: Declassified UK YT / Writer: Val