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The Pentagon’s top spokesman, Sean Parnell, confirmed that Hegseth “will be addressing his senior military leaders early next week.”
Across the military, there are 800 generals and admirals of all ranks. Many command thousands of service members and are stationed across the world in more than a dozen countries and time zones.
President Donald Trump didn’t seem to know about the meeting when he was asked about it by reporters during an Oval Office appearance later Thursday. https://apnews.com/article/pentagon-hegseth-meeting-military-commanders-4ceb8026bff7c652b08c08e8afb1df99
The orders come as Hegseth has unilaterally directed massive recent changes at the Pentagon — including directing that the number of general officers be reduced by 20 percent, firing senior leaders without cause and a high-profile new order to rebrand the Defense Department as the Department of War. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/09/25/hegseth-generals-quantico-meeting/?utm_source=alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=wp_news_alert_revere&location=alert
The Commerce Department reported Friday that its personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index was up 2.7% in August from a year earlier, a tick higher from a 2.6% year-over-year increase in July and most since February.
Excluding volatile food and energy prices, so-called core PCE inflation showed a 2.9% increase in prices from August 2024, same as in July. The increases were what forecasters had expected.
Prices rose 0.3% from July, compared to a 0.2% increase the month before. Core prices rose 0.2%, same as in July.
Separately, the report showed that inflation-adjusted consumer spending rose a healthy 0.4% from July, same as the month before, largely on a 0.7% increase in spending for goods; spending on services such as travel and dining out rose just 0.2%. https://apnews.com/article/federal-reserve-inflation-trump-tariffs-prices-consumer-0a10b8f245eb90115c84026d7061d2b0
A judge failed to appear for a scheduled court hearing in Eswatini on Thursday over the continued detention of four men deported by the United States to the southern African kingdom.
The case was brought by several non-profit organizations that have challenged the legality of holding the men from Cuba, Laos, Vietnam and Yemen without charges. The four were deported to Eswatini in mid-July under the Trump administration’s third-country deportation program. https://apnews.com/article/deported-immigration-eswatini-us-trump-353cccfae90c840dd86e5410fbcc01e1
Four years ago, President Donald Trump was persona non grata in the professional golf world, ostracized from the sport he loves in the wake of the U.S. Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021. The PGA of America pulled his chance to host its major championship and officials in his hometown, New York City, tried ousting his company from the golf course it had hired him to run.
On Friday, Trump will be front and center at the Ryder Cup at Bethpage Black — welcomed to the first day of competition by the very powers that once shunned him. The Ryder Cup is run by the PGA of America, the organization that yanked its 2022 PGA Championship from his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf course. https://apnews.com/article/trump-ryder-cup-golf-bethpage-black-860b3728bd39bf5c10356c6612ccc456
Trump’s claims during an address to the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday come amid a decline in Europe’s irregular border crossings, which have largely been decreasing for a decade. European Union countries have spent billions of euros to stanch the flow of unauthorized migration, which includes people who came to or remained in the EU illegally or who applied for asylum in one of its member states.
Asylum applications to Europe fell last year but had been rising since 2020. More than 900,000 people applied for asylum in EU countries in 2024, which was 13% fewer than in 2023, according to EU data. Since 2008, the first year for which such figures exist, asylum requests peaked in 2015 at 1.2 million. https://apnews.com/article/trump-migration-europe-prisons-a33c2622248d7314d2172078ec392356
It was at least the fourth instance of violence or a threat at an ICE or Customs and Border Protection facility in Texas this year. https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/25/us/wwk-dallas-ice-facility-shooting
GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN COMING —
In March, Schumer chose to vote with Republicans to pass a stopgap spending bill that kept the government open without securing any concessions. Many Democrats were so angry about Schumer’s decision that they called for his ouster, and demanded that Democrats in New York prepare to mount a primary challenge against him in 2028.
Now, Schumer is again helming negotiations to fund the government beyond the end of the month. Republicans need Democratic votes in the Senate to keep the government open, and Schumer is hoping to use that leverage to secure concessions from the White House and Republicans on health care. There is risk to this strategy, however: If no deal is reached and the government does shut down, voters could blame Democrats for the resultant chaos. v\ https://s2.washingtonpost.com/camp-rw/?trackId=598b051fae7e8a68162a1429&s=68d513b000d7a3268d96fd59&utm_campaign=wp_power_up&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&linknum=5&linktot=53
Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) said in a statement Wednesday. “These unnecessary firings will either be overturned in court or the administration will end up hiring the workers back, just like they did as recently as today.”
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) wrote on X that the administration’s “goal is to ruin your life and punish hardworking families already struggling with Trump Tariffs and inflation.”
It is also a departure from previous shutdowns, when employees have been temporarily taken off the job and then returned when new funding was approved. The memo instructs agencies to tell employees that they could be fired even if they aren’t furloughed during a shutdown. When the government closes due to lack of funds, some employees typically continue working — temporarily without pay — and others stay home. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/09/25/government-shutdown-omb-firings-trump/
Surrounding our solar system is a natural and enigmatic cosmic shield called the heliosphere — and a new mission has launched to help astronomers better understand it.
Created by the solar wind, a constant flow of charged particles that stream away from the sun, the heliosphere acts as an enormous bubble that protects the planets in our solar system from cosmic radiation permeating the Milky Way, our home galaxy.
In addition to Earth’s protective magnetic field, the heliosphere plays a major role in why life is possible on our planet — and how it perhaps once existed on others such as Mars.
Voyager 1 reached the heliosphere boundary in 2012, while the slower Voyager 2 crossed the boundary in 2018, providing snapshots in two specific locations. The information collected by these probes is helping scientists learn about the heliosphere’s cometlike shape. Once it reaches an orbit about 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth in about three months, IMAP will also capture observations of the solar wind in real time and measure particles that travel from the sun, study the heliosphere’s boundary between 6 billion and 9 billion miles (9.7 billion to 14.5 billion kilometers) away, and even collect data from interstellar space.
Predominately, IMAP will measure energetic neutral atoms, called ENAs, or uncharged particles that form when an energetic charged ion collides with a slow-moving neutral atom. The process that forms these particles, found wherever there is plasma, or charged gas, in space, also occurs throughout the heliosphere and along its boundary. IMAP will rely on tracking these particles to create a more complete map of the heliosphere, according to NASA. https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/24/science/heliosphere-spacex-nasa-imap-launch
The three satellites soared from Kennedy Space Center shortly after sunrise on the same SpaceX rocket. They aimed for a sun-orbiting lookout 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth, each on its own separate mission.
Altogether, the satellites from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, plus related costs, are worth about $1.6 billion. NASA’s Joe Westlake calls it “the ultimate cosmic carpool” by sharing a rocket to save money.
Heading the lineup is NASA’s Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe, the first to be deployed. It will scrutinize the outer limits of the heliosphere, the protective, solar wind-driven bubble of gas around our solar system. https://apnews.com/article/solar-storms-launch-nasa-noaa-e1e76b973123262c15e717bc515ae6f0
The first new episode of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” since his suspension averaged 6.3 million viewers via traditional television, more than three times the show’s typical TV viewership, even though the show was blacked out in dozens of markets.
In the key advertiser-friendly demographic of viewers ages 18 to 49, the show scored its “highest regularly scheduled episode in over 10 years,” ABC said Wednesday afternoon.
And on YouTube, Kimmel has been gaining more than a million views per hour. Combining ABC, YouTube and social media platforms, Kimmel’s monologue about free speech in America has reached tens of millions of people, and the view counts are still rising.
The preliminary Nielsen ratings, which will grow later once on-demand viewership is calculated, are all the more notable because the Kimmel telecast was not shown on scores of local ABC-affiliated stations. https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/24/media/ratings-jimmy-kimmel-return-abc-broadcast
“You know a lot of people watched our show last night,” Kimmel said during Wednesday’s monologue, though noting it was seen by “most of the country, not all of the country.”
Kimmel was alluding to the ongoing pre-emption of his show by Sinclair and Nexstar, two major TV station groups that together own at least 64 ABC affiliates in nearly 30 states.
“We are still not on the air on a number of ABC affiliates, including Seattle, Portland, Washington, DC, Nashville, New Orleans, St Louis, Salt Lake City, about 30 more,” he said. https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/25/media/jimmy-kimmel-return-second-show-trump-intl-hnk
“Our leader celebrates Americans losing their livelihoods because he can’t take a joke,” Kimmel said. “And I hope that if that happens, or if there’s even any hint of that happening, you will be 10 times as loud as you were this week.” https://s2.washingtonpost.com/camp-rw/?trackId=598b051fae7e8a68162a1429&s=68d513b000d7a3268d96fd59&utm_campaign=wp_power_up&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&linknum=5&linktot=53
It would have been natural for Chinese leader Xi Jinping to address the U.N. General Assembly in the 80th anniversary year of the founding of the United Nations. But he won’t.
The delicate state of U.S.-China relations may have played a role. Both sides want Xi to meet U.S. President Donald Trump but this week could have been too early, with little to show as the two governments remain locked in trade negotiations.
Trump said last week they would meet at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in South Korea at the end of October, though China hasn’t confirmed that. https://apnews.com/article/china-xi-li-qiang-un-general-assembly-acfc8122131e307ff4173ec2550082ad
Xi has tried to position China as a leader of countries that feel disadvantaged by the U.S.-dominated, post-World War II order.
At the Shanghai Cooperation summit and again in his meetings with Putin, he proposed an initiative to build “a more just and equitable global governance system.”
China doesn’t want to overturn the global order but change it so it better serves its interests, Li said.
“China and Russia do not yet have the power to change the world order but they are constantly pushing for reforms that benefit them,” he said. https://apnews.com/article/china-russia-xi-putin-ee3d091f38c833d1c586b491f9eab004
YouTube will offer creators a way to rejoin the streaming platform if they were banned for violating COVID-19 and election misinformation policies that are no longer in effect, its parent company Alphabet said Tuesday.
The move is the latest in a cascade of content moderation rollbacks from tech companies, who cracked down on false information during the pandemic and after the 2020 election but have since faced pressure from President Donald Trump and other conservatives who argue they unlawfully stifled right-wing voices in the process.
It comes as tech CEOs, including Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, have sought a closer relationship with the Republican president, including through high-dollar donations to his campaign and attending events in Washington. https://apnews.com/article/youtube-reinstatement-covid-election-misinformation-5809a1da0afece53d6e2088e4ac5e462
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell on Tuesday signaled a cautious approach to future interest rate cuts, in sharp contrast with other Fed officials this week who have called for a more urgent approach. More than half of Americans oppose Trump's actions thus far.
If the Fed were to cut rates “too aggressively,” Powell said, “we could leave the inflation job unfinished and need to reverse course later” and raise rates. But if the Fed keeps its rate too high for too long, “the labor market could soften unnecessarily,” he added. https://apnews.com/article/federal-reserve-jobs-inflation-powell-bccc5ad2114d0f9a19e0f6db4aeadf82
The poll: A Washington Post-Ipsos poll found 53 percent of Americans oppose Trump’s actions since assuming office again, while 41 percent support them. Yet, Trump wins elections. He is an excellent “mob boss” operationally https://www.washingtonpost.com/the-seven-trump/2025/09/23/what-to-know-about-donald-trump-/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=wp_the7-tracking-trump
Trump very much wants to win the Nobel Peace Prize. He would be the fifth US president to do so, joining Woodrow Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt, Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama.
The UN recognizes 193 countries and most, more than 150, now recognize Palestine as a state. The countries that joined the list this week include France, Belgium, Monaco, Luxembourg, Malta, Britain, Canada, Australia and Portugal.
Trump vs. Lula was a window into MAGA at the U.N.
On Wednesday, Brazil is staging a meeting in New York of more than two dozen democratic nations. The discussions — branded “Democracy Forever” and focused on defending democracies, fighting disinformation and regulating big tech — will pull in leaders from all continents. More than 40 Nobel laureates, including Filipina journalist Maria Ressa and American economist Joseph Stiglitz, signed a letter endorsing the initiative that backed the spirit of “multilateralism” and the need to “promote democracy by strengthening institutions, addressing income inequality and tackling the online information ecosystem.”
The United States under Trump was not invited this year, for obvious reasons. Beyond his affinity for Bolsonaro, a hard-right firebrand who waxed nostalgically about Brazil’s military dictatorship, Trump and his allies have lashed out against foreign governmental attempts to regulate U.S. big tech companies. They scoff at U.N. development goals and, more broadly, dismiss the multilateralist ethos that defines forums like the United Nations.
In his speech, Trump offered little on addressing shared global challenges and decried the waste and inefficiencies of U.N. agencies. His main message centered on the need for Western countries to reject both immigration and clean energy policies. He played to his base, rather than the assembled dignitaries, with talk of a climate change “hoax” and visions of Western Europe falling to migrant hordes. The reaction was largely one of stunned silence.
“In Trump’s first term, leaders who opposed his policy stances held out hope that his election was an aberration and that the United States would soon return to its more familiar internationalist role,” my colleagues wrote. “Now they recognize that Trump is speaking on behalf of a strong constituency in his country — and that the changes he is bringing to the international system could outlast his presidency.”
Lula’s position, in contrast, reflects that of many of the world’s other leaders. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/09/23/trump-lula-unga-speech-brazil/
New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani said Monday evening he’s willing to appear at a town hall hosted by a local ABC station now that the national network says it will reinstate Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show.
Earlier in the day, Mamdani announced he was pulling out of the event following ABC’s decision to suspend the late-night host.
“Last week, Disney/ABC caved to Trump administration pressure. Millions of Americans helped them find their backbone. Whether you watch Jimmy Kimmel or not, today’s decision is a victory for free speech,” the Democrat wrote on X.
“We’ve reached out to WABC to reschedule the town hall,” he added. https://apnews.com/article/zohran-mamdani-kimmel-nyc-mayor-bdb4033e7d60d6c81a80d16c8499bfed Led by …
When President Donald Trump brought his trademark braggadocio to the United Nations’ rostrum in his first term, he was met with an unfamiliar-for-him response from the delegates: mocking laughter.
Seven years later, few could imagine the scene repeating itself. Once the object of skepticism and open derision by his foreign counterparts, Trump arrives at the UN General Assembly on Tuesday as an avatar of a changing world order that has little use for global institutions like the one he’s speaking at.
Instead of laughing in his face, world leaders are now devising ever-more-lavish displays of flattery to enter Trump’s good graces. And rather than a novice in a shrine to multilateralism, Trump is now the president who has rocked global arrangements on trade and security, all while hollowing out the post-World War II international system that his predecessors built and worked to uphold. https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/23/politics/un-general-assembly-trump-speech Trump’s RETRIBUTION unto the world — Trump wins, the world loses.
President Donald Trump will meet with the Democratic leaders in Congress this week ahead of a looming risk of a federal government shutdown.
Trump has agreed to meet with Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, who are insisting on talks as the Democrats work to preserve health care programs as part of any deal to fund the government ahead of next week’s Oct. 1 deadline. https://apnews.com/article/trump-shutdown-congress-democrats-health-care-ce86b9021837ad2a6b32f7f484207714
Feb. 12: Trump removes the AP from White House press pool
Trump decided to remove the AP from the White House press pool. That meant AP journalists no longer would have access to the Oval Office, Air Force One and other events not open to a full press corps. The move was in retaliation for AP’s decision not to follow his lead in changing the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America in all instances.
The AP Stylebook calls for referring to the body of water by its original name while acknowledging the new name Trump chose. The reasoning is that AP disseminates [GENERIC] news around the world and must ensure that place names and geography are easily recognizable to all audiences.
The wire service later sued Trump and a district court sided with the AP in April, affirming on First Amendment grounds that the government cannot punish the news organization for the content of its speech. A federal appeals court in June stayed that decision. https://apnews.com/article/kimmel-trump-media-lawsuits-newspapers-d48448bd0d940e87c4dbeefcda5699fb
The first phase of the development, to be completed in the next five to seven years, will use nascent recycling machinery to spin radioactive reactor waste into fresh, usable fuel for plants. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/09/22/trump-nuclear-waste-recycling-risk/
“The importance of this work is that it provides the first strong evidence that there are not a lot of Dyson Spheres in our galaxy, contrary to the expectations of some that they might be an inevitable end-state of technological species’ expansion out into their solar systems,” said study coauthor Jason Wright, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State University, via email.
“The candidates Matías (Suazo) has found are important because whatever they are — and they are likely stars surrounded by material from some sort of rare event, like a planetary collision, although they could be Dyson spheres — they are rare and interesting objects worthy of further study, for instance by the James Webb Space Telescope.” https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/13/science/dyson-spheres-alien-life-evidence-scn
Look forward to secular government [authority] as the most productive.
President Donald Trump wants the world to understand that Charlie Kirk’s killing will not temper him or induce him to mend the country’s divides.
No one familiar with Trump’s conduct over the last decade will have been surprised that his speech that was awash in gratitude for Kirk was also laced with his own political preoccupations. At one point, he even previewed a White House announcement on autism on Monday.
Trump issued fresh warnings that he’d respond to Kirk’s assassination with a crackdown on “radical” left-wing groups he accuses of fomenting violence against conservatives. He lashed out at the media and progressives, promised to double down on crime crackdowns, and even returned to his false obsession that the 2020 election was stolen. https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/22/politics/trump-kirk-vance-funeral-analysis
Republicans extolled conservative activist Charlie Kirk at a memorial Sunday as a religious leader of almost biblical stature who transformed the party and was critical to delivering the presidency to Donald Trump. More than a dozen of the party’s most powerful leaders predicted that Kirk’s slaying will galvanize their political movement for generations to come.
“He’s a martyr now for American freedom,” President Donald Trump said after walking onstage to a fireworks display while country singer Lee Greenwood performed “God Bless the USA.” “I know I speak for everyone here today when I say that none of us will ever forget Charlie Kirk, and neither now will history. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/09/21/charlie-kirk-memorial-gop/?utm_source=alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=wp_news_alert_revere&location=alert Again, look forward to SECULAR government [authority] as the most productive.
— life.flow.productivity of 168 hours available —
— into Sunday
used 32 hours to