Trump's UN speech: annihilation or a deal
Today is Thursday, September 24, 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 66 and a low of 50, with clear skies.
- The headline of the week came at the United Nations, where President Trump told world leaders he faces a choice on Iran: strike a deal, or, in his words, annihilate the Islamic Republic. He says he expects an agreement after the midterms.
- Iran's president Masoud Pezeshkian answered the annihilation threat with his own speech, accusing the US and Israel of terrorism and saying Tehran is ready for dialogue but will never bow its head or bend the knee. He insisted Iran won't surrender its nuclear program.
- Chinese leader Xi Jinping arrived in Washington for a three-day state visit, greeted by Trump personally at Joint Base Andrews, with a Rose Garden review and a state dinner to follow. Expectations are deliberately low: no big business deals, since Chinese CEOs mostly skipped the trip, and analysts say the two sides are deadlocked on trade, Taiwan and AI regulation.
- Sam Altman and Dario Amodei took their warnings to the UN Security Council, with OpenAI's boss saying humans could lose control of the future to AI, and Anthropic's cautioning that poorly managed AI risks humanity as a whole. Hugging Face's CEO raised the concentration of power.
- Trump signed a three-party defense agreement with Denmark and Greenland in New York, giving the US permanent control over the island's security, permission to build more bases, and a veto on non-NATO investment there. It falls far short of making Greenland American territory, which is what he originally demanded.
- With diesel hitting record prices, the White House is reportedly preparing a 90-day ban on US diesel exports, and Trump says a decision is coming fast. His own cabinet is objecting: the energy secretary called it a blunt tool that doesn't work, and Treasury and Interior have protested.
- The political cost of the Iran conflict is now obvious inside the Republican Party. Michigan Senate candidate Mike Rogers, Iowa reps Ashley Hinson and Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Ohio senator Jon Husted and Michigan gubernatorial candidate John James all called for the war to end this week, citing punishing fuel prices.
- CNN, MS NOW and Politico went to federal court today over their expulsion from the White House, arguing the ban violates the First Amendment. The Justice Department's answer is that press access is a privilege, not a right, and that their reporting on White House construction and munitions depletion threatened national security.
- The Washington Post reports the first architect of Trump's White House ballroom repeatedly warned before resigning last year that the design lacked adequate emergency exits and fire containment. Trump brushed him off, telling architects that building codes don't apply to White House construction, because, quote, I am the code.
- Vice President JD Vance and health administrator Mehmet Oz announced the administration is canceling coverage for roughly 750,000 to 760,000 people enrolled in Affordable Care Act marketplace plans, alleging improper enrollment. Another 419,000 may face additional verification. For scale, about 19 million people buy plans through the exchanges.
- ProPublica reports the FBI's public corruption unit is investigating Maine Senator Susan Collins, the allegation being that defense contractor Navatek put unlawful money into her 2020 campaign, then won federal contracts worth millions. Collins chairs Senate Appropriations. Her office denies any deal, though her campaign gave the money back and emails suggest staff knew.
- Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5 and OpenAI answered about ninety minutes later with GPT-6 Sol and Luna, and the real story wasn't benchmarks, it was the bill. Sol costs half what Opus does per token, and Luna sits at roughly one percent of the flagship price.
- Meta's AI agent Muse passed 500,000 users about a week after launch, dragged bank and insurer stocks lower on fears agents will optimize away consumer inertia, and got Shopify's blessing to shop on users' behalf. Amazon blocked it from its marketplace outright.
- Alibaba revealed its new in-house AI accelerator, the Zhenwu V900, billing it as China's most powerful chip with triple the performance of its predecessor, and paired the launch with a plan to grow toward a 20-gigawatt global data center network by 2032, including new cloud regions in Finland, Türkiye and the Netherlands.
- With David Sacks back in Silicon Valley, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has emerged as the leading candidate for Trump's newly created AI czar job. That matters beyond the title: Bessent has already opened a channel with China's vice premier on a possible notification mechanism for AI incidents that threaten national security.
- And before you go, a little extra from The New York Times. That is how many hours are in the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen's seven-opera cycle "Licht," which got underway on Saturday with a premiere at the Deutsche Oper Berlin. The answer: 29
- 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.