The White House press ban, and the TV blackout
Today is Wednesday, September 23, 2026
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- Good morning, and welcome to Hark News. Here's what the world got up to while you slept. First, the weather in New York. A high of 65 and a low of 51, with cloudy skies.
- President Trump barred CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House over coverage he calls fake news. The three outlets sued on First Amendment grounds, and ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox have pulled their cameras from the presidential pool in protest.
- At the United Nations, President Trump spent much of his address defending the war with Iran, saying his choice is between a deal that lets Iran rebuild or annihilating the Islamic Republic.
- Xi Jinping lands in Washington tomorrow, and the likeliest concrete outcome is an AI hotline. Semafor and POLITICO both report Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent pitched Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng on a notification mechanism, a direct line for AI incidents with national security implications.
- Meta's shopping agent Muse hit number one in the app stores, and Amazon told it to leave, calling it an unauthorized third-party agent. Shopify's Tobi Lütke immediately rolled out the welcome mat with Shop Pay checkout across its stores.
- Paramount settled its antitrust suit with twelve state attorneys general, unblocking the Warner Bros. Discovery merger. The concessions: a board of journalists to guarantee editorial independence at CNN and CBS News, a minimum slate of theatrical releases with fines attached, more US production money, and the studio lots stay put.
- Diesel hit an all-time high of $6.51 a gallon, and Republicans from Iowa to Alaska spent the week begging for relief. Trump, reversing course, said he'd back a ban on diesel exports.
- The Saudi-Houthi conflict is escalating, with Riyadh struck over the weekend and new warnings for the province bordering Yemen. Still, oil slipped back under $100 a barrel after Reuters reported Saudi Arabia restarted its East-West pipeline and could resume Red Sea exports from Yanbu.
- OpenAI and Anthropic are reportedly nearing a binding agreement to stress-test each other's commercial models, two direct rivals agreeing to poke at one another's systems before anyone else does.
- Stocks ripped. The Nasdaq closed at a new all-time high, the S&P had its best day since August, AMD crossed the trillion-dollar market cap club, and bitcoin hit an eight-month high above $86,000.
- Axios reports the frontier has a new battleground: cost. OpenAI released GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna, cutting prices for top business customers by about 50%, and Anthropic's Opus 5.5 runs roughly 40% cheaper than Opus 5. xAI's Grok 4.7 launched on price-performance, though Ben's Bites called it a token-hungry downgrade that gave back the savings.
- The US, Denmark and Greenland signed a security agreement giving Washington broad military authority over the island, including plans for two new American bases, while reaffirming Greenlandic sovereignty.
- Flights across the Northeast were grounded after a Philadelphia radio system failed and its New Jersey backup turned out to be inoperative, because an Amtrak construction crew had cut a fiber line, per Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy.
- The memory chipmaker CXMT says its latest chip platform is entering mass production. That's a notable milestone for a company that's been steadily winning domestic market share in China away from the industry's global giants, Samsung and SK Hynix.
- Utah Republican Senator John Curtis is asking the Senate Judiciary Committee to subpoena Donald Trump Jr., citing his overseas business ties and a wedding reportedly paid for by a Russian oligarch.
- This is António Guterres's last general assembly, and Costa Rica's Rebeca Grynspan leads the informal polls to replace him, which would make her the UN's first female secretary-general.
- Semafor Business has a dry, enjoyable piece on the fintech reversal. SoFi, which once advertised the beginning of a bankless world, is now America's 46th biggest bank.
- Matt Levine's lead: Silver Lake took controlled company Endeavor private at $27.50 a share, and by closing, Endeavor's stake in TKO alone was worth more than the entire purchase price. Minority shareholders are demanding Delaware appraisal.
- The Pragmatic Engineer got inside Microsoft's plan to make Windows agent-friendly: native agent identity, a registry of on-device MCP servers, an OS-agnostic sandbox system called MXC, and Windows ML for running local models. The context is humbling.
- NPR's health correspondent Rhitu Chatterjee covers the growing number of Americans turning to AI chatbots for emotional support. So when OpenAI added an optional ChatGPT feature letting users name someone to alert in a mental health crisis, she went looking for it, and couldn't find it.
- Bipartisan permitting reform talks have hit a wall, with Semafor and Axios both reporting a pre-midterm deal is fading. Senator Brian Schatz says agreement is close but wants the Pentagon's wind permit blockade lifted first.
- The National Council on Problem Gambling issued its strongest warning yet on prediction markets, saying people are suffering real financial and relationship harm. Kalshi, which joined and funds the group and still calls its activity trading, disagreed.
- And before you go, a little extra from The New York Times. That's the width, in feet, of a crater newly discovered on the moon. NASA says that it's the largest fresh crater seen there since at least 2009, and that the impact that made it — an explosion comparable to one from 15,500 tons of TNT — likely occurred sometime in the spring of 2024. The answer: 728
- And that's your world for today. The full stories and the links are waiting in the app. Tap through, bookmark what matters, and share what's worth sharing. And if you want to see what stuck, take today's quiz in the app: five quick questions. And if Hark is making your mornings a little better, share it with a friend. It's the best way to help us grow. I'll see you again tomorrow morning. Until then, have a great day.