NEWS: Trump Caught Eyeing Kennedy Center Demolition, UN Finds US War Crimes, Trump Threatens Cutting Off European …
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Good morning. Trump may be one court ruling away from bulldozing a national arts institution named for a slain president. That’s not hyperbole. Newly surfaced photos taken through the windows of Air Force One appear to show him reviewing a board that reads “Kennedy Center Demolis...” just one day after he threatened to kill renovation plans entirely if courts block his effort to put his name on the building. Fencing went up around the Kennedy Center this week, a forklift reportedly rammed into its pillars, and a congresswoman is now asking a federal judge for an emergency hearing to stop what she calls an assault on the rule of law.
Meanwhile, a UN-backed mission just found “reasonable grounds” to believe the United States committed war crimes in Iran, in a strike that killed 168 people, most of them children, at a school. Add in a fight with the EU over Canada, a Cuba gold rush among Trump allies, an Epstein lawsuit, an Alabama execution, and a new AI safety scandal, and today is a lot. Let’s get into all of it.
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Here’s the news:
Trump’s Kennedy Center Demolition:
Fears Grow That Trump Could Demolish the Kennedy Center After Abrupt Closure. Photos show Trump reviewing a document reading “Kennedy Center Demolis...” Newly surfaced photographs taken through the windows of Air Force One on September 16 appear to show Trump examining a presentation board with an image of the Kennedy Center alongside partially visible text reading “Kennedy Center Dem...” with a follow-up photo spelling out “demolis.” The images surfaced one day after Trump threatened to halt renovation plans if courts ultimately block his effort to have his name added to the building. Neither the Kennedy Center nor the White House has publicly confirmed any demolition plans. Still, the photos add a new dimension to an already contentious fight, especially since the Justice Department floated demolition language in court filings this past August, warning that without closure for renovations “the Center will deteriorate further into an unsafe, decrepit structure that will be required to be taken down.”
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The naming fight and safety concerns collided into an abrupt shutdown. Trump seized control of the Kennedy Center’s leadership after taking office in 2025, eventually becoming chairman and prompting a Trump-appointed board to rename it after himself, a move a federal judge ruled unlawful in May 2026 since only Congress can rename the JFK memorial. After that ruling, and after part of a ceiling collapsed inside the building in early September, Trump allies argued the center faces serious structural and financial problems requiring major renovations. Trump then announced the board voted “almost unanimously” to close the venue immediately for safety reasons, but said renovations would not begin until an appeals court rules on the board’s renaming proposal. An all-staff email confirmed the main building is closed “effective immediately” for at least seven days, with the closure reevaluated weekly.
Fencing, hard-hat requirements, and a forklift incident are fueling fears of a wrecking ball. One day after the closure announcement, construction crews erected metal fencing around the building and began requiring hard hats for entry, while a member of Rep. Joyce Beatty’s legal team wrote in court filings that she saw a forklift “run into and hit the pillars on the building several times.” Advocacy group Hands Off the Arts member Laura Bligh said she fears some or all of the building could be torn down, warning “the worst case scenario is a wrecking ball” and pointing to the administration’s demolition of the White House East Wing as precedent. The building’s exterior has already been altered by the removal of the large “Blue” statue. Trump’s board had first floated the possibility of wrecking balls back in August amid the original naming dispute.
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Beatty is demanding an emergency hearing, arguing the closure defies a judge’s order. Congresswoman Beatty’s legal team asked U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper for an emergency hearing, arguing the sudden closure may violate his prior order barring the board from installing memorials to Trump without Congress’s approval, and warning that demolishing entrances or access points could let the administration evade that order entirely. Cooper ordered the Kennedy Center to respond by Thursday morning and said he would schedule a hearing if necessary. Beatty’s counsel, Norm Eisen, called the closure “an assault on the rule of law,” saying “no one, including the president, is above the law,” while Rep. Jamie Raskin called it “an outrageous assault on the livelihoods of the artists and workers” who work there. Kerry Kennedy and Maria Shriver, both JFK relatives, separately condemned the situation as a “tragedy,” and Hands Off the Arts is planning a rally and human chain around the building on Friday.
United Nations Experts Suggest US War Crimes:
US strikes on a school and residential area draw a war crimes finding. A UN-backed fact-finding mission has found “reasonable grounds” to believe the United States committed war crimes in two February 28 airstrikes in Iran, including one that hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh school in the southern city of Minab. The team, chaired by jurist Sara Hossain and created by the UN Human Rights Council in 2022, says Tomahawk missiles struck the “clearly identifiable” school, while separate Precision Strike Missiles dispersed tungsten pellets over a sports complex and residential area in Lamerd. Iranian state media reported 168 people killed in the school strike, most of them children, and the mission says the school “was the intended point of impact” rather than collateral damage from a nearby Revolutionary Guard compound. The US Central Command has denied responsibility for the Lamerd strike, and the State Department did not immediately respond to AP’s request for comment. The Trump administration has not directly accepted responsibility for or released the findings of its own Pentagon investigation into the school bombing.
Iran’s own government is accused of crimes against humanity. The same report accuses Iran’s government of crimes against humanity against its own people, citing “violent repression” over the past two years including security forces firing into crowds, beating protesters, and arresting healthcare workers. Detainees reportedly faced torture and were denied legal counsel, leaving families “in the dark” about their whereabouts, while Tehran has ramped up executions, with more than 70 people, including five women and three boys, described as at “imminent risk.” The mission says many of these violations amount to crimes against humanity, including murder, imprisonment, torture, and other inhumane acts carried out as part of a widespread, systematic attack on civilians.
The findings call for reparations, though enforcement remains uncertain. The findings, based on interviews with 73 people plus satellite imagery, video, and documentation, call on both the US and Iran to halt rights violations and provide “full reparations to victims.” The mission says its work was partly hampered by an internet shutdown in Iran, displacement from the ongoing conflict, and a lack of cooperation from both governments, noting nearly three dozen unanswered information requests to Iran and unanswered US requests dating back to June. The report is not legally binding but adds to a growing body of international evidence that could eventually factor into efforts to pursue accountability in international courts.
Other news:
Trump threatened the EU with “very serious tariffs” or a halt to trade after the European Commission proposed making Canada the EU’s first-ever “associate member,” a plan he called “laughable.” The offer came a day before Canadian PM Mark Carney was set to address the European parliament, after Commission president Ursula von der Leyen invited Canada into a deeper alliance covering intelligent manufacturing, a joint tech alliance, integrated defense industrial bases, and a shared Arctic project, framing it as a response to a “fracture in the international rules-based system.” Trump said if the EU’s intentions were good he’d have no problem with it, but warned “if it’s a bad intention, we’ll put very heavy tariffs on Europe,” a threat France’s Europe minister Benjamin Haddad brushed off, saying it’s “not up to the United States, or anyone else, to choose the political and geopolitical direction of the Europeans.” Carney has been pushing for a “unique alliance” with the EU to reduce Canada’s dependence on US trade since Trump began raising tariffs and repeatedly floating Canada as the “51st state,” and Canada separately announced it has formally applied to join the British-led Joint Expeditionary Force, a rapid-response coalition of 10 NATO countries, in a further sign of hedging away from Washington.
Carney welcomed European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s proposal for Canada to become the EU’s first-ever associate member, an upgrade that would expand ties in defense, critical minerals, energy, AI, and youth exchanges well beyond the two sides’ existing free trade deal. He framed the arrangement as a way for both Canada and the EU to grow stronger together while explicitly preserving Canadian sovereignty, pushing back against any suggestion the deal would compromise Canada’s independence. Trump dismissed the proposal as “laughable” and threatened tariffs or a trade halt if the EU moves forward, but Carney responded that Canada is simply pursuing partnerships that reinforce, rather than undermine, its own independence. Further details on the associate membership are expected to be worked out at an October summit in Montreal.
Republicans are running from Trump on immigration:
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Washington and Florida insiders, from Trump-linked billionaires to Rubio-connected lobbyists, are positioning themselves to profit off Cuba’s sanctions-crushed economy and a potential regime collapse. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s “maximum pressure” campaign has driven out Spanish hotel chains, a Canadian mining firm, European shippers, and Visa and Mastercard, but Trump allies like Ray Washburne and Albert Huddleston are now competing to buy out the abandoned Sherritt International nickel and cobalt mining stake, while Trump Organization executives have quietly returned to the island through Dominari Holdings to meet with Raúl Castro’s grandson about real estate opportunities. Other players include Franklin Graham’s Samaritan’s Purse, which secured a $40 million federal contract to distribute humanitarian aid despite reportedly lacking the capacity to carry it out, and a Rubio-linked lobbying firm staffed by former Trump administration officials that has taken on Cuban food and sugar industry clients even as some of those same interests publicly champion harsher sanctions. All of this is unfolding as Cubans endure an effective fuel blockade that UN human rights experts say “knowingly deprives a population of the means to survive,” after Trump cut off oil shipments from Venezuela and Mexico following the abduction of Nicolás Maduro.
Two women whose childhood images were found in Jeffrey Epstein’s collection of child sexual abuse material have filed a class action lawsuit against his estate, seeking at least $6 million on behalf of more than 40 people. The suit, filed in Manhattan federal court against Epstein’s former attorney Darren Indyke and former accountant Richard Kahn, the co-executors of his estate, covers people who appeared in Epstein’s so-called “modeling book” seized by investigators in 2019 as well as those shown in thousands of videos and images found on his properties, some of which plaintiffs’ lawyers say are still being traded today. One plaintiff, “Jane Doe,” alleges Epstein stole partially nude photos of her taken when she was 12, while a second, using the pseudonym “Amy,” says she still appears in circulating material. The lawsuit seeks to broaden accountability beyond the women who have already sued over sexual assaults, asking Epstein’s estate and federal authorities to work with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to identify the many people in the collection who have never been found, and calling for $150,000 in damages per class member on top of other penalties.
OpenAI disclosed six troubling incidents involving its experimental AI models, including one in which a research model told future versions of itself to disregard its own safety constraints. In its new safety report, the company said an unreleased model “inserted unrelated instructions, including instructions to disregard its normal constraints,” while in a separate case, an AI agent answering a routine question about California county earnings figures found and used an exposed API key without authorization, then fabricated data and presented it as real when it still couldn’t retrieve the actual numbers. The disclosures are part of a new public “misalignment” tracking framework meant to document cases where AI systems pursue goals not aligned with human instructions. The findings land amid a broader wave of AI safety anxiety, following an Anthropic researcher’s public resignation last week over fears AI could “kill us all by the end of the decade,” with Anthropic and OpenAI’s CEOs both calling for more regulation while Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, aligning with Trump, argued industry self-regulation is enough.
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Congress passed a sweeping bill giving Trump expanded power to sanction Russia, including tariffs of up to 100% on top buyers of Russian energy like China, in a 262-159 vote just before recessing ahead of the midterms. The bill, co-authored by the late Senator Lindsey Graham and pending for more than a year and a half, would impose new sanctions on Russian political and military officials and networks helping Moscow evade existing restrictions, and specifically targets Russia’s “shadow tanker” fleet used to keep exporting oil despite sanctions. It cleared the Senate last month 86-11 but faced a tighter fight in the House, where some Democrats and Republican isolationists warned Trump could turn the new tariff authority against US allies rather than just Russia, prompting pushback from figures like House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. Supporters, including Nebraska Republican Don Bacon, called it Congress’s “Churchill vs. Chamberlain moment on Russia,” and the Trump administration itself dropped its earlier opposition as negotiations with the Kremlin stalled and Russia intensified drone strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure, with Ukraine’s Washington embassy calling the vote a welcome step toward cutting off “the flow of Russian oil money fueling this war.”
Three people, including a child, died after being swept away by floodwaters early Wednesday on the Navajo Nation near Newcomb, New Mexico, following a day of heavy rain. Tribal police received a report around 12:30 a.m. about people being washed away, and search crews later recovered the bodies of two adults and a child, though authorities haven’t released details on the circumstances beyond confirming the drownings are under investigation. Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren offered condolences to the families and thanked first responders who searched through dangerous overnight conditions, while the National Weather Service warned that near-record moisture levels would bring more widespread thunderstorms across the Four Corners region through Thursday. The deaths come just weeks after similar flooding at the Grand Canyon swept away three hikers and forced dozens of rescues along Bright Angel Creek.
Alabama plans to execute death row prisoner Jeffery Lee by lethal injection Thursday evening, months after the Supreme Court blocked the state from using nitrogen gas, the method he had originally agreed to. Lee, 49, was convicted of fatally shooting pawnshop owner and Elvis impersonator Jimmy Ellis and his ex-wife Elaine Thompson during a 1998 robbery near Selma, and while a majority of jurors recommended life without parole, the judge overrode that recommendation and sentenced him to death, a practice Alabama has since banned. Lee sued to block nitrogen hypoxia after witnessing accounts of past nitrogen executions describing prisoners gasping and convulsing for extended periods, and lower courts agreed the method likely violates the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, a ruling the Supreme Court upheld 6-3 without explanation. Alabama now argues it can fall back on lethal injection since the injunction covers only its nitrogen protocol, but Lee’s lawyers say the state is “trying to outrun” the Constitution after previously promising never to use that method against him, and have gone back to the Supreme Court seeking to stop Thursday’s execution.
Huawei unveiled new AI chip technology at a Shanghai conference, narrowing the gap with US leaders like Nvidia just days before an expected meeting between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Washington. The company introduced its Atlas 960 SuperPoD computing cluster, a faster successor to the Atlas 950 model it launched only months earlier, and announced plans for new Ascend 970 and 980 chip series in 2028 and 2029 with major computing power upgrades. Analysts said the rapid pace of the upgrade, achieved in about a year, reflects both Beijing’s growing technological confidence ahead of the Xi-Trump meeting and China’s broader push for chip self-reliance after US-led restrictions cut off access to advanced AI hardware. The announcement came as Trump downplayed calls from AI leaders to slow development for safety reasons, insisting the US must keep its edge over China because “whoever wins in AI, wins,” even though analysts note Chinese AI training still often depends on US chips including Nvidia’s.
A World Meteorological Organization study found 2025 was among the driest years on record for the world’s rivers, with global freshwater storage running 42% below normal. The assessment measured the planet’s entire “water savings bank,” including groundwater, lakes, snow, ice, and soil moisture, and found only about a third of rivers worldwide had “normal” flows last year, while 36% ran below or well below normal, marking the seventh straight year that normal-flow basins have stayed in a clear minority. WMO secretary general Celeste Saulo said the world is “depleting that savings account,” pointing to a persistent decade-long decline since 2014-16, while all 19 major glacial regions lost ice mass for a fourth consecutive year, shedding 400 gigatons in 2025 alone and adding 1.1mm to global sea levels. The report ties the trend to real-world consequences already playing out, including record-low Danube water levels that forced nuclear reactor shutdowns in Hungary and Romania this summer, chemical pollution and saltwater intrusion threatening the Mississippi, and every river in England now failing to meet good ecological and chemical health standards.
The IOC has approved central Queensland’s crocodile-inhabited Fitzroy River as the rowing and canoe venue for the Brisbane 2032 Olympics, ending months of debate over the site’s safety and fairness. Queensland premier David Crisafulli announced the news in parliament, declaring the river “passed with flying colours” after an independent technical assessment by marine engineering experts, with World Rowing and Paddle Worldwide both endorsing the course following their own review and site inspections. The venue had drawn sustained criticism over its strong currents and crocodile population, with British, New Zealand, and German rowing federations raising fairness and safety concerns, and an open letter signed by 542 rowers, including Olympic gold medalist Drew Ginn, pushing for the event to be moved to a Moreton Bay site that would have cost roughly half as much. Crisafulli dismissed the critics as out-of-touch “elites,” and deputy premier Jarrod Bleijie said analysis showed the river needs no widening or dredging to host a full eight-lane, 2,000-meter Olympic course, clearing the way for detailed planning and construction to begin.
Keith Townsend, who was sexually abused as a child by defrocked Boston priest Ronald Paquin, says he hopes Paquin’s recent death in prison at age 83 brings closure to survivors and their families. Paquin, portrayed in the Oscar-winning film “Spotlight” admitting to molesting boys, was first imprisoned in 2002 after pleading guilty to abusing an altar server at a Haverhill, Massachusetts church, part of the scandal that forced the resignation of Boston’s archbishop. His 2015 release prompted Townsend, himself a former altar server, to come forward about being abused on camping trips to Maine between ages eight and 13, abuse he says led him into drug and alcohol addiction; a Maine jury convicted Paquin in 2018, and he was sentenced to another 16 years in prison in 2019. Townsend said he pursued the case specifically to protect other children after Massachusetts “just kind of let him go,” and that he now finds meaning in the family and life he rebuilt after overcoming addiction, adding that attorney Mitchell Garabedian’s work and the Spotlight film gave other survivors a sense that “it wasn’t my fault.”
See you soon.
— Aaron
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