Thursday, September 24, 2026 · Evening Edition

Today

By StaffNews Desk

Good morning. President Trump hosted Xi Jinping at the White House on the Chinese leader's first trip to Washington in more than a decade, holding two meetings with AI, trade, Iran and Taiwan atop the agenda before a state dinner. The guest list tells you who this economy runs for: AI executives and some of the country's most prominent CEOs filled the room honoring Xi. As the two leaders addressed their competition over artificial intelligence, Xi issued a call from the White House for AI to remain "under human control" — a day after OpenAI's Sam Altman appeared at a UN Security Council meeting on AI. The apocalypse is dinner-table talk for the men who profit from building it, and human control is what they promise while capital sets the pace.

At the UN, Benjamin Netanyahu defended the Iran war and railed against Israel's critics as hundreds of diplomats walked out, leaving an increasingly isolated leader speaking to emptying seats. He dismissed Gaza genocide allegations and told Zohran Mamdani, who has called for his arrest, "You can't silence me" — a campaign speech and full-on defense of Israeli settlements, delivered as eleven European countries and Canada move to sanction the West Bank.

In Texas, a state system error left tens of thousands of voter registration applications unprocessed for months, forcing county officials to race through the backlog weeks from the midterms. The same machinery that jails voters loses them by the tens of thousands: while Florida charged 20 people with voter fraud, most of them noncitizens, Texas quietly misplaced a city's worth of registrations. And Crystal Mason's decade-long fight over an illegal-voting conviction ended Thursday when Texas's highest criminal court let her acquittal stand.

Elsewhere, James Copenhaver, 76, one of three rally attendees shot at the 2024 Butler rally, died in Pittsburgh. Ken Paxton opened a probe into hundreds of Texas data centers over their water use, even as Tesla prepared to open its first heavy-duty truck factory in Sparks, Nevada — capital's water and capital's factories, both on the public's tab. Meanwhile, Medicare for All is finally within reach as the politics catch up to patients and physicians.