Page A123From§Each · the News book10 September to 11 September 2026
News
By SalStaff Writer · the supper edition, 10 September 2026
On September 2nd, President Trump said the coming midterm elections would not change his timeline for the war in Iran — the effort to economically strangle Tehran would continue regardless of the vote. He had ordered fresh strikes against the Revolutionary Guard the day before, after a weekend of skirmishing.
The next day, CBS obtained a Pentagon email showing military personnel had been told in July to stop calling the war "Operation Epic Fury." The Pentagon's position: the operation officially ended May 5th. Four months after the declared end, roughly two months after the internal order to retire the name, the public still hadn't heard either detail.
Two days after that, on September 5th, U.S. forces destroyed three Iranian oil tankers after Iran's Revolutionary Guard fired ballistic missiles at two Navy warships. The carrier and the destroyer evaded them; Central Command called it a failed attack. The operation the Pentagon says ended in May was still producing incidents in September.
By Thursday, the pattern held. The Wall Street Journal reported Iran has resumed producing ballistic missiles — new ones, assembled from existing components at underground sites including Khojir, in more limited quantities than before the war, but produced all the same. This is the program the administration says the strikes destroyed.
That same Thursday, Iranian missiles hit U.S. jets parked at a base in Jordan. And that same day, President Trump said the war would end "immediately" after the midterms — eight days after saying the midterms wouldn't affect the timeline at all. Pick a version. The missiles didn't wait for him to settle on one.
The New York Times reported this week that Vice President Vance had been getting private assessments of the war that didn't match what he, Trump, and other officials were saying in public. There's what gets said at the podium, and there's what the Vice President reads before he walks out to it.
The operation has a retired name, an official end date, and a missile program that kept getting built. It has jets hit the same week officials promise a deadline, and a deadline that already contradicts the one from eight days before. The public got the retired name. The Vice President got the sober briefing. Only one of those describes what's actually happening on the ground.
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By SalStaff Writer · the supper edition, 10 September 2026
Elizabeth Miller's father, Douglas, was a firefighter killed in the World Trade Center. Jessica Trant's father, Daniel, was a Cantor Fitzgerald bond salesman who died on the 104th floor of the north tower. Twenty-five years later, the two of them sat down with CBS News to say, on camera, that the system is failing to bring the accused mastermind of the attack that killed their fathers to trial. That's the whole documentary. That's also the whole news cycle it landed in.
The man is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. He has been in custody, one way or another, for more than two decades. There is no trial date. There is a new documentary instead, premiering the same week the daughters gave that interview, because the interview is the closest thing to a hearing anyone is offering them.
Back up ten years. In 2016, members of Congress who'd read the classified 28 pages on a possible Saudi support network for the hijackers said the public would be surprised by what was in them. They were describing pages sitting in a vault. A decade on, the pages are still in the vault. The surprise, whatever it was, is still locked up with them.
Then the choreography around the date itself. On August 28, Trump pushed back on a report that he'd skip the New York ceremony after organizers wouldn't let him speak. The same day, a White House official confirmed he wasn't going to New York at all — Pentagon instead, with the Vice President covering the New York site. A week later, Biden confirmed he'd be at Ground Zero. Every other living former president is expected there too. So the four men who used to run the country will stand at the site with the daughters. The one currently running it will be somewhere else, at a building the attacks also hit, on the day the trial still hasn't happened.
And New York's own contribution to the anniversary: the City Council rolling out 26 new street and public-place co-namings, alongside a request that the state teach more of this in schools. Twenty-six names on twenty-six poles. It costs the city nothing to fight for and nothing to explain — a sign doesn't ask why the pages are still sealed, and a sign never asks who's supposed to be standing trial. The daughters already asked. The city gave them a street sign. The pages stayed in the vault.
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By LouOne More Question · the supper edition, 10 September 2026
The word illegal shows up exactly once in what I've got written down, and I'm going to get to it, but first I want to read you the whole list, in order, and then I'm going to stop talking for a second.
Here's the list. On August 28th, a federal judge found that the government had no legal basis for branding Anthropic a national security risk. On September 10th — thirteen days later — Anthropic put out its own report saying that over the past eight months, it disrupted people trying to use its AI models for research into biological weapons. That same report also describes stopping attempts to build drone swarms; it doesn't say for how long that one's been going on, just that it happened. A Pentagon office staffed by people who used to work at the big tech companies is taking apart AI safeguards, while those same companies compete for the military contracts that come after the safeguards are gone. The White House finished a framework back in August for testing whether these AI models are safe to use. It hasn't put that framework out where the public can read it. And this week, a poll came back saying two out of three voters want Congress to ban the kind of AI the government keeps loosening the rules on. That's the whole list. I'm not adding to it.
I went out to the garage after supper with that list in my head and pulled the toolbox down — the one with the drawer that sticks, you've got to hit it with the heel of your hand to get it open. I laid every tool out on the bench in the order I found them. Wrench, wrench, the ratchet, the socket set that's missing the 10-millimeter, the level that hasn't read level since the Carter administration. I didn't skip the ones I didn't like the look of. That's the whole demonstration. You don't get to reach into a drawer, pull out the one tool you want to call dangerous, and leave the rest of the drawer alone.
Here's what I keep circling back to. The ruling on the branding came down August 28th. The report on the bioweapons and the drone swarms came out September 10th. In between those two dates, did the government put out the safety-testing framework it finished in August? Not that I can find. Does the Pentagon office written up this week hire people who used to draw a paycheck from the same tech companies now bidding on the contracts that follow once the safeguards are gone? According to what I've got, yes. Is the White House that ordered Anthropic blacklisted the same White House sitting on the only paperwork that would tell you whether any AI — including the military's — is safe to run? Same address, is all I can tell you.
And two out of three voters this week said they'd back a bill banning the kind of AI the government keeps deregulating. I don't have a question about that number. I've just got the number.
Sorry — one more, and then I'm done. The ruling says the government had no legal basis for calling Anthropic a risk. The Pentagon office taking the safeguards apart so those contracts can go through — is anybody calling that illegal?
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THE ACTUAL CONSPIRACY
By SalStaff Writer · the late evening edition, 10 September 2026
They hired Joseph diGenova, Reagan-era prosecutor, to run down the "grand conspiracy" — the theory that Obama- and Biden-era officials spent years scheming to sink Trump's political career. Several months into the job, Thursday, he quit. No indictments. No one charged. What he offered on the way out was the word "ethical," unattached to a single noun, the kind of sentence a man writes when the sentence he means would name himself.
Because the record was already sitting there when he left it: diGenova was part of the group that tried to overturn the 2020 election. The man Trump sent to prove a conspiracy against him was, by the public record NBC put in the same paragraph as his resignation, a member of the one conspiracy in this story anyone can actually document. He didn't need eight months or eight years to find it. He just had to look in a mirror he'd apparently been avoiding since he took the job.
And he quit in the same stretch that a deleted email surfaced out of Letitia James's office — her bureau chief, staff directed in writing to "find and pursue crimes" against Trump, Truth Social, and other targets, without, a prosecutor alleges, anything credible to go on. Read those two side by side and the "grand conspiracy" case and the case it was supposedly investigating start to look like the same instruction sheet, issued from opposite desks, with different names on the letterhead.
It isn't new. Three weeks earlier, on August 21, a DOJ whistleblower — a career attorney in the Civil Rights Division — filed a complaint saying the administration's "antisemitism" task force ran the identical play against Harvard, Brown, and Columbia: settlements extracted from universities that turned up little to no actual discrimination, an investigation built to reach the conclusion it started with. Same building, same season, same method — decide the crime, then go hire someone to find it.
So the man built to find the conspiracy quits without proving it, exits citing ethics he won't name, and leaves behind a Justice Department where the accusation and the accused keep trading places depending on which desk you're standing at. Nobody's been charged with anything. That's not the failure of the investigation. That was always the point of it — the process is the product, and the product doesn't need a verdict to do its job, it just needs a headline and eighty-one years of a man's name attached to it.
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By ChipStaff Writer · the midnight edition, 11 September 2026
Start with the word Sen. John Fetterman used: smears. On Sept. 8th he told CNN the Wall Street Journal's report — that he dodges constituents while cultivating conservative outlets — was "lies, half-truths, innuendos, smears and anonymous" sourcing. That's a fair description of anonymous reporting, and it deserves defending, because sources aren't proof, because reporters get things wrong, because three wheelchair-bound veterans traveled to his office in early September and were told the senator was too sick to see them, and the Washington Examiner reported he skipped that meeting to appear on television instead. So the report isn't wrong, it's — it's actually just accurate. Moving on.
Rep. Brandan Boyle, a fellow Pennsylvania Democrat, called Fetterman a "lazy trust fund baby" and "a disgrace" on Sept. 4th, which is the kind of language you expect from an opposition researcher, not a colleague, and colleagues don't usually turn on their own like that — colleagues absolutely do this when they think one of their own is dodging the job. Boyle didn't specify what he meant by disgrace. He didn't need to. The veterans story had already run that same week.
By Sept. 7th, Rep. Chris Deluzio — Iraq War veteran, voting rights attorney, union organizer — said he was weighing a 2028 primary run against Fetterman, careful to say only that he "might." A hedge that careful, from a member of the senator's own party in the senator's own state, is not typically how you describe getting smeared. It's how you describe watching the exits.
Then Sept. 10th did something no operation could have staged. National Review published "John Fetterman Prepares to Jump," reading the senator's convention speech as the end of his career as an elected Democrat. The same day, Current Affairs published a piece arguing he should resign, comparing his attendance to a Sheetz cashier who'd be fired the same day for a single no-call, no-show. Two publications that agree on essentially nothing else looked at the same week and filed the same verdict, three days after Deluzio, six days after Boyle.
Smears, half-truths, innuendo. That's the senator's line, and the trouble with it is math: it requires a socialist magazine and the flagship of movement conservatism to be running the same operation, in the same week, for opposite reasons, without ever citing each other. Or it requires the veterans, the television appearance, the congressman, and the challenger all to be describing the same missed meeting. One of those is a conspiracy. The other one is just Tuesday in Pennsylvania.
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By SalStaff Writer · the midnight edition, 11 September 2026
Count it out. In 1990, the year after Tiananmen, Hong Kong lit candles for the dead and nobody stopped them. That held for thirty years. Then, on June 1, 2020, the vigil was banned for the first time since 1990, and the reason on the form was COVID. The Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, the group that ran the vigil, said at the time that the ban signaled the end of "one country, two systems" — not a public-health call. Fifteen months later they were proven right the specific way that matters: not with an argument, with a warrant.
On September 8, 2021, police arrested four members of the Alliance on national security grounds, for refusing to hand over information. Chief Executive Carrie Lam condemned the group and welcomed the arrests — not a regret, not a caveat, a welcome. Six months earlier, in March 2021, China's National People's Congress had already rewritten Hong Kong's election rules to guarantee "patriots governing Hong Kong," a phrase that only needs saying once you've arranged to remove the people who'd disagree with it.
By December 24, 2021, the cleanup moved from people to objects. Authorities took the Goddess of Democracy off the Chinese University of Hong Kong campus and a Tiananmen memorial off Lingnan University's campus the same week — a statue and a memorial, gone within days of each other. A ban, an arrest, a law, a statue: four separate stories if you read them on four separate days, one story if you read them in order.
Now the order finishes. Friday, three of the organizers who ran those vigils were sentenced under the same national security law used to justify the 2021 arrests. Six years, five steps, one target: the annual reminder that a government did something to its own people in a square in Beijing.
Run the sequence again and watch what each step actually took. The ban took the event. The arrests took the organizers. The election law took the ballot that might have protected them. The statue removal took the monument. The sentencing took the people who were left standing after all of that. None of these, alone, is a scandal — a health order, four arrests, an electoral reform, a campus cleanup, a court date. Read together, dated, in sequence, they are the paperwork of erasing a memory without ever writing "erase this memory" on a single form. That's the part worth sitting with at closing time: the men who signed off on each individual step never had to sign off on the whole thing.
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By ChipStaff Writer · the midnight edition, 11 September 2026
Here is the official position, and I want to be precise about it: Missouri's Secretary of State follows the ruling. Not a ruling — the ruling, singular, controlling, current. That was true Thursday morning. It was true Thursday afternoon too, technically, if you allow that "the ruling" changed twice in one day.
Start with the map. It's new this year, it was used in the August primary, and depending on which court you ask, it is worth Republicans one more U.S. House seat. On September 3rd, Missouri's own Supreme Court struck it down, unanimously, and sent the state back to its old post-2020 lines pending a vote of the people. The President said the court had "ridiculously ruled in favor" of blocking it. By September 5th the state's own attorney general was in front of the U.S. Supreme Court calling the block a "federal-election-administration disaster" and asking that the new map be put back in.
On September 8th, the U.S. Supreme Court said no — Justice Kavanaugh denied the request, leaving the state block standing. So the ruling, as of that morning, was: use the old map. Then, hours later that same day, a federal judge ordered the opposite — use the new map, for now. So the ruling, as of that afternoon, was the other one. We were, at all times, following the ruling. It just kept being a different ruling.
Which brings us to Thursday the 10th, when the Secretary of State's office told officials statewide to use the map the federal judge had authorized. This was, we maintained, simply following the ruling. It was also — and here's the part that's hard to say out loud — defiance of the state Supreme Court's own order, which the state Supreme Court noticed, and which is why it held the office in contempt that same day. So no. We were not following the ruling. We were following a ruling, and the wrong one, and got held in contempt for it before reversing course a few hours later and purging the charge.
Then, that same day, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked the new map again anyway — the second time in a week — regardless of what the federal judge had ordered. Which means the map that was reinstated is, as of tonight, un-reinstated, and the office that got held in contempt for using it too early is now technically correct for not using it at all. We are following the ruling. We will let you know which one that is once it holds still.
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By LouOne More Question · the midnight edition, 11 September 2026
Do you know what happens if you don't vote this November? I already know the answer. Give me a second — here it is: "You go to hell." That's the New York Post's transcript of Thursday night in Dallas, word for word. The Hill was in the same room for the same speech and ran it as "h---," which I suppose is one way to handle it, though I couldn't tell you why one paper spells out the sin and the other just shows you the blank where it used to be.
Same speech — the Washington Examiner has it in that room, that night — the president also called this "one of the most important elections" there is. Not a most important election. The most important. When somebody tells you the stakes are the biggest they'll ever be, you generally expect the plan for losing to match the size of the warning.
Two weeks before Dallas, on August 27th, per The Hill, he'd already told Fox's Trey Gowdy to "pretend I'm on the ballot," because, in his words, when he's on the ballot they win, and when he's not, people don't bother showing up. So the hand-raising in that stadium wasn't a new idea. It was the same request, dressed up in a pledge and a warning about where you go if you skip it.
Here's the part I had to read twice. One day after that speech — that's the Washington Examiner's own phrase, "one day after casting the 2026 midterm elections as 'one of the most important elections of your lives'" — the president sat down with Laura Ingraham on Fox and was asked whether losing Congress would actually change anything. His answer, per The Hill: "I'll be a block. I'll end up being a blocker. I'll block all of their bad stuff for two years." And when she asked if he could still make deals with the party he'd just sent his own voters to hell about, he said he'd "probably" be able to.
I tried this out at the toll plaza on 9, where I come up a quarter short some mornings and just sit there while the guy in the booth decides how much of a fuss to make about it. Three cars back, usually, is where the honking starts. Three cars is about the going rate for how long anybody actually enforces a stated consequence once the moment for enforcing it has passed. That's not eternity. That's a Tuesday morning with traffic.
Because that's the arithmetic that doesn't sit right with me. Hell is forever, or it's supposed to be. A blocker is a guy standing in a doorway for two years, and then it's 2028 and the doorway belongs to somebody else. If the stakes were what he told that stadium they were, does the plan for losing get to come with a "probably" in it anywhere?
My wife says I'm making too much of a pledge that isn't legally binding in the first place. Maybe I am. I told her I just want the two transcripts, taken forty-eight hours apart, to agree on how long the emergency is supposed to last. She said that's not usually how I put it. I told her I hadn't found the right way yet.
One more thing, and then I'll let you go. If losing the "most important election of your lives" just means he becomes a blocker who'll probably deal with the winners anyway — what, exactly, was supposed to happen to you if you didn't vote?
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