News

South Korea asks Trump to ease sanctions on the regime that just promised it an 'incurable headache'

By LouOne More Question · the milkman edition, 22 September 2026

I've got this page in my hand, torn out of this morning's paper, folded so many times the crease has gone soft. I've been carrying it since I stood at the counter at the corner store. It says North Korea tested something called the Hwasong-11Ma. It says the government there is calling it a weapon that will give its enemies — and I'm reading this part exact — an "incurable headache." I read that line twice standing at the register. The guy behind me wanted his coffee. I read it a third time in the car.

Now, I'm not a doctor. I don't know what that is — whether it's different from the ordinary kind, whether it comes with a warranty, the way nothing else in my life comes with one. I don't know. But I wrote the phrase down anyway, in the notebook I keep in the glovebox, because when a government tells you in advance exactly what sort of trouble it means to cause, that seemed like a thing worth holding onto.

So I went looking, the way I do, and found the page underneath it. Ten days earlier — September twelfth — that same government fired ballistic missiles into the water. The report I've got says they did it the day after the Americans, the South Koreans, and the Japanese finished up a joint military drill together. And the government that fired the missiles called that drill itself a threat. Their word, not mine. So here's the order I've got written down: the drill happens, they call the drill a threat, they fire missiles over it, and ten days later, they test the weapon that promises the thing from my first page. Is that the order you've got it in too?

Here's what I keep going out to the garage over. My car's needed a fan belt since June — I know, don't tell me — and with the hood up, I think about how a fan belt works. Something rubs against something else and wears it thin, and you don't wait for the part to seize before you deal with it. You don't call the parts counter and ask them to go easy on the price while the belt is fraying in your hand right then. You ask why it's still fraying.

So I go back to my page. Same day as the weapon test, the president of South Korea is on the record asking President Trump to ease sanctions on that same government. Not eliminate the weapons program. Freeze it, the article says. Ease the sanctions, freeze the program. I wrote that down too, right underneath the word from the first page, and I sat in the driveway looking at the two lines in my own handwriting, not knowing what to do with them. So I did what I do. Nothing. Drove around with it folded in my coat.

My wife says I'll wear that page to lint before I throw it out. I had it with me again at the bank line yesterday, reading it a fourth time, and the fella behind me asked what I was so stuck on. I told him I'd let him know when I worked it out.

Hold on — before you go, one more thing, because I nearly let it go without asking. Same page, both dates on it: the promise from ten days before, and the sanctions request from the very same day it landed. I keep asking myself how those two dates line up. What I've got here says the request landed the same day as the weapon test, and both of those landed after the drill got called a threat, after the missiles went into the water, ten days earlier. Is that the order that makes sense to you, or is that just the order it happened in — the ask, landing the same day as the headache?

This story on its own page →

White House loses cable pool coverage to a Fox blackout, launches its own 24/7 YouTube channel instead.

By ChipStaff Writer · the breakfast edition, 22 September 2026

Three news organizations are banned from White House grounds, and the number of press briefings held there in the more than forty days before that is one — Vice President Vance's, in early September, filling in after former press secretary Karoline Leavitt wrapped her final day in the room. Access, properly understood, isn't a briefing count or a room. It's the courtroom, which is where CNN, MS NOW and Politico took the argument this week, suing to have the ban declared unconstitutional after a September 18th Truth Social post announced it in capital letters the administration insists were not a mood.

Fox News and ABC News responded to that ban by suspending their own pool duties, a show of unity that leaves the president without the cable coverage of his own White House that the pool exists to provide. That's not retaliation against the administration. That's Fox's decision, made in solidarity with the outlets it competes against daily, and if the result happens to be a blackout of the president's own briefing room, that's — that is a blackout.

Which the White House filled Monday by launching its own twenty-four-hour channel on YouTube, branded in the coverage simply as Trump TV. The inaugural stream was footage of the president speaking at Mount Rushmore on July 3rd — a broadcast that aired more than two months before the channel carrying it existed, so the network's first video predates the network, which is either an editing note or the whole model.

Round the clock, no ratings to chase, no pool rotation, and after this week, no rival cameras left in the room to declare a blackout of their own. Three newsrooms are in federal court asking a judge to restore their credentials. One ally emptied the briefing room rather than cross a picket line it wasn't asked to walk. The White House answered both with a channel that has no one in the audience to ban.

This story on its own page →

Mamdani's call to arrest Netanyahu draws a counteroffer from Israel's UN envoy: arrest Mamdani

By SalStaff Writer · the breakfast edition, 22 September 2026

The mayor of New York said it again this week. Benjamin Netanyahu should be arrested when he lands here for the General Assembly, Zohran Mamdani said, because what has been visited on Palestinians is a genocide and the man is a war criminal. Say what you like about the timing. He said it on the record, with his name attached, about a head of government who will be standing at a podium on his island in a matter of days.

The answer came back on September 17, and it did not come from a New York cop or a federal prosecutor. It came from Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, who proposed a swap: "If someone should be arrested, it's Mayor Mamdani for inciting, for actually collaborating with the enemy of the United States." A foreign envoy, standing in this country, naming the elected mayor of its largest city a collaborator. Not the argument that the mayor is wrong. The argument that the mayor belongs in a cell.

By the next day the register had softened. Now the mayor was merely too clever for his own good, fanning flames and then acting as if he hadn't — "You cannot set the fire, then say this." And by today the envoy's frame in The Hill is tidier still: the critics are opportunistic politicians, the polling is skewed, the lawmakers are "looking for headlines," because "today it's very easy to get headlines when you attack" Israel.

Here is what a headline was doing on September 16. In Gaza City, an apartment building already wrecked by bombardment came down before dawn and killed at least 21 people, with at least eight children among the dead and dozens trapped under the rubble. Nearly three years of bombardment have left tens of thousands of Palestinians with no choice but to live in an estimated 2,000 buildings in that condition. Common Dreams calls the assault US-backed. That is the wire's word, and it is the only word in this story that tells you whose flag is on the paperwork.

A new film from The Bullet argues the slaughter of civilians there was calculated and intentional — not weather, not accident, a decision with people behind it. That is the claim on the table. And the counterclaim on the table is that a mayor said an impolite thing during UN week.

So count what each man is asking for. One is asking that a government answer for what its army did. The other is asking that a mayor answer for what he said. Either way, the man at the center gets his podium.

This story on its own page →

SHOULDN'T BE HERE

Same day, same paper: Trump's press ban is 'unquestionably warranted' and a due process violation.

By ChipStaff Writer · the noon edition, 22 September 2026

The White House press pool trimmed itself by three this week, and the administration's own bench of columnists spent the next several days telling the country why that was either obviously legal or obviously not. On September 18, Donald Trump announced on Truth Social that CNN, MS NOW and Politico were banned, effective immediately, for what he called "FICTION and LIES." By Tuesday morning, cameras caught him walking into the UN General Assembly telling CNN's Kaitlan Collins, to her face, "you shouldn't be here" — not a policy statement, a sentence, delivered in a doorway.

The Washington Examiner, no one's idea of a hostile witness, ran with the story on its own terms. Columnist Tiana Lowe Doescher looked at the case law first: Trump tried this exact move on Jim Acosta in 2018, she noted on Newsmax, and lost. Her verdict, delivered Monday: the ban "likely violated due process" and will not survive contact with a judge.

Roughly twenty-four hours later, in the same paper, another column reached the opposite floor. The ban, it argued, is "unquestionably warranted" — citing Covington Catholic, "hands up don't shoot," and the Russia collusion coverage, a ledger of grievances that predates this administration by a decade. Same masthead, same week: one side saying the emperor has no legal clothes, the other saying he never needed them.

That is not spin drifting off message. That is the in-house legal desk and the in-house grievance desk filing dissenting opinions against each other, in public, under contract to the same publisher. Scott Jennings, no liberal himself, called the move a loser in court that costs the White House "reach" it can't afford to lose. Even the friendly bench is doing math the press office apparently didn't run first.

None of this required CNN, MS NOW, or Politico to say a word in their own defense. Their own opposition did the work for them — one columnist read the Constitution, the other read the grudge list, and the paper ran both without ever deciding which one was the official position. Jon Stewart summed up the net effect without needing either column: banning the outlets covering the war and the gas prices doesn't fix the war or the gas prices, it just leaves fewer people in the room to ask. The reporter is still standing outside. The door is still locked. The people arguing about whether locking it was legal both draw a paycheck from the same institution asking that question out loud.

This story on its own page →

Ally asks Washington twice in one week to ease sanctions on regime bragging about incurable-headache missile

By SalStaff Writer · the matinee edition, 22 September 2026

It's Tuesday, and this is now the second time this week the ask has landed in print. Start where the receipts start: September 12th, North Korea fires ballistic missiles into the sea, and its government calls the trilateral drill by the U.S., South Korea, and Japan a threat — the shooting is the answer, but the injured party, on paper, is Pyongyang. Since then the same government has put a name on a weapon, the Hwasong-11Ma, and told reporters it gives enemies what it calls an incurable headache. That's the boast sitting in the room every time anyone in Seoul or Washington talks about this regime.

Then the beat that made me pick this back up. South Korean President Lee Jae Myung sat for an interview and asked, on the record, for the United States to ease sanctions on North Korea — his word for the trade was "significant value," relief in exchange for a freeze on the weapons programs. The New York Times ran it on the 21st. The Hill picked it up the following day, the same ask, riding the same missile boast, now filed a second time by a different wire.

Lay it out in order and don't blink. Drill. Missiles. A threat, called that by the government that fired them. A weapon named, boasted about, aimed rhetorically at the people on the other side of that boast. And then the ally closest to it going to two different newsrooms in two days to ask Washington to loosen the sanctions on the government that just made the boast — because the relief itself, in the president's own word, carries "significant value."

Value to who. Not to anybody reading about an incurable headache over coffee. The value sits in whatever gets traded once the missile story rolls off the front page — a freeze here, a concession there, priced out like a commodity. Every time this regime tests something and brags about it, somebody senior in an allied capital treats the brag as an opening bid, not a warning. That's the ask, in print, twice, a day apart. Nobody had to leak it. They put it on the record themselves.

I keep folding this page back up the same way I folded the last one. The weapon doesn't change. The boast doesn't change. What changes is who's being asked to look past it, and how many times a week they're willing to ask.

This story on its own page →

Curtis calls Trump Jr.'s oligarch-funded party 'corruption'; Senate GOP will only investigate with Hunter Biden included.

By LouOne More Question · the early bird edition, 22 September 2026

Walk me through it. Not what happened — I can read a wire story same as anybody — but how a person actually sits down and does this, in order, the way the procedure says to do it. So before I wrote a word, I went looking for somebody to show me.

First, what's on the page. On September 18th, Republican Senator John Curtis, of Utah, said out loud that a private-island party thrown for Donald Trump Jr. — paid for, the reporting says, by a Russian-connected oligarch, hundreds of thousands of dollars of Kremlin-adjacent money covering the after-party in the Bahamas — was "corruption." His word. On the record. He said he'd have more to say about it in the days ahead. Is that a serious charge? You tell me — it's his sentence, not mine.

I went out to my garage with that sentence in my pocket, because I wanted to watch somebody work before I decided what "the days ahead" ought to look like. The guy two bays down — not my regular guy, the one who actually explains what he's doing — had a customer's car up on the lift with one bad belt. I asked him to walk me through it. He said: you find the part that's bad, you look at it, you replace it. I asked him whether the shop ever tells a customer, we'll fix your belt, but only after you also bring in a car from somebody who never had an appointment here. He looked at me like I'd asked if the shop still takes ration coupons. Does a mechanic condition a real repair on an unrelated customer showing up? You've had a car worked on. You know the answer.

Here's where the days ahead led. On September 22nd, four days after "corruption," the Daily Caller reported that Curtis is now demanding an actual investigation of Trump Jr. Fine — that's the belt, that's the part he already said was bad. But the same day, NBC News reported what the investigation looks like once it leaves Curtis's desk and becomes a Senate GOP position: a call to subpoena Trump Jr. and Hunter Biden together, over their business dealings, as a pair. Was Hunter Biden anywhere in Curtis's original sentence about the island party? Read it again — I'll wait. He said an oligarch paid for a wedding after-party. He did not say a second name.

So I brought that back to the garage, laid it out plain: a man says one specific car has a bad belt, says so on the record, uses the word himself — and the people standing behind him at the counter say, we'll open the hood, just as soon as you also bring in a car that was never booked, never inspected, never part of the complaint. My guy wiped his hands on a rag and thought about it longer than he thought about the Buick. Does fixing a car you've already diagnosed require finding a second, unrelated car to blame? He didn't think so either.

I should let you go. I know I've kept you at the counter longer than I meant to. But before you do — one thing, because it's sitting right here on the page and I don't want to lose it. Curtis's complaint, the one from the 18th, is about a Russian-connected oligarch and a Trump. The Senate GOP's answer, from the 22nd, adds a name that appears in neither. So which car is actually up on the lift here — and which one did somebody just wheel in from the parking lot?

This story on its own page →

Justice Department finds a second California university discriminated against white, Asian applicants, 13 days after the first.

By ChipStaff Writer · the early evening edition, 22 September 2026

The Justice Department's civil rights division found, in a letter dated September 9, that UC Berkeley's law school discriminated against white and Asian applicants, favoring Black applicants in violation of federal law. That's the finding. That's the whole story, and if you want to make it about politics you're the one keeping score, not us. Federal funding follows federal law; when a school fails to follow the law, funding follows that too, in the other direction. The Assistant Attorney General wrote to Berkeley's counsel and laid out the case: essays as workaround, race sorted into outcomes, a dean who — well, according to the letter, discussed ways to skirt rules barring race-based admissions. That's not an accusation. That's a finding. A dean discussing how to get around a rule against something is, I'll grant you, a strange thing for a finding to hinge on, since it means the finding is partly about what someone said they'd consider doing, which — no. It's a finding. Moving on.

Thirteen days later, the same division sent a letter making the identical allegation against a different school: UC San Francisco's medical school discriminated against white and Asian applicants. Same funding exposure. Same office. Different building. The Department wants you to know this is not a pattern, it's diligence — a civil rights division doing what civil rights divisions do, which is find civil rights violations, in sequence, at elite California institutions, thirteen days apart, using language close enough to the first letter that I'd have to go check whether anyone changed the school's name at the top. I'm not going to check. I don't need to check. It's fine.

Two schools, two findings, same month, the same claim stated twice against two of the University of California's most competitive programs — and if that strikes you as a coincidence of enforcement rather than a strategy of enforcement, congratulations, you're the target audience. I was going to say the second letter stands on its own evidentiary record. I don't actually know that. I haven't seen it. I'm told it does. I'm telling you it does.

The funding is real. The findings are real. What's underneath them is the part the department isn't in a hurry to show you, and neither, it turns out, am I.

This story on its own page →

Missouri's map loses at the Supreme Court, wins after a federal court reverses itself, returns for round three.

By SalStaff Writer · the wee small hours edition, 23 September 2026

Missouri's congressional map is back at the Supreme Court for the third time this year, and the map hasn't changed as much as the room it's standing in.

On September 5, Missouri's attorney general, Catherine Hanaway's office, filed an emergency application asking Justice Brett Kavanaugh to reinstate the Republican-drawn boundaries, three days before the court would rule. The filing called the lower court's block a "federal-election-administration disaster" and "unprecedented chaos" — language aimed at a single state supreme court order.

On September 8, Kavanaugh denied it. The Missouri Supreme Court's ruling held: voters would have to approve the new map themselves, through a ballot measure, before Republicans could use it.

The next day, People Not Politicians — the group that had already fought once to put a map before Missouri's voters — went back to the same building, asking the justices to restore a different map ahead of the same election. The Washington Examiner's headline on the filing: "Supreme Court urged to wade into legal mess over Missouri congressional map."

Then a federal appeals court did what the Missouri Supreme Court hadn't: it reversed itself, and handed Republicans the boundaries drawn last year to give the G.O.P. an advantage in the midterms. That reversal is why the map is at the Supreme Court again today, for the third time in eighteen days, six weeks before Missourians vote under whichever map wins.

Two courts, two rulings, two directions, and only one destination for the case each time: back up. This is a machine that keeps rerunning the same play until the refs stop calling it. The map didn't win an argument. It won a rematch, then another rematch, and it's asking for a third with the clock at six weeks and closing.

Missourians will vote this fall under a map that has been blocked, unblocked, reversed, and re-reversed by institutions that answer to no one on the ballot. The district lines are supposed to be decided before the election. In Missouri, they're being decided during it.

This story on its own page →