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White House officers confiscated credentials from CNN, MS NOW and Politico reporters Saturday, turning Trump’s press ban into action, while four AI giants face a class-action lawsuit for allegedly agreeing to slow development. Elsewhere, 90 cities drop Flock’s surveillance cameras, and a Houthi missile reaches Riyadh.

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The Big Read

White House Turns a Press Ban Into Confiscated Badges

Badges were confiscated at the White House gate Saturday morning, a day after Trump announced he was barring CNN, MS NOW and Politico. MS NOW's Akayla Gardner said an officer "asked me to hand over my badge. He said that it was disabled." CNN's Betsy Klein and Politico's Cheyenne Haslett were turned away too.

The seizures cap a week of institutional defeats — the Fed raised rates over his objections, a judge fenced off the Kennedy Center, the Supreme Court blocked his election-rules plan. What's different is the speed: earlier fights with newsrooms took attorneys and weeks, while this went from a Friday post to agents taking credentials on Saturday.

Four AI Labs Are Sued for Agreeing to Slow Down

Four paying customers sued the AI industry in California federal court, alleging Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google agreed illegally to slow their own progress. They subscribe to ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and Gemini, and sue for a nationwide class on the theory that a deliberately slower product is a cheaper one sold at full price.

The alleged conspiracy has a date. On Sept. 12 Dario Amodei urged the industry to cooperate on slowing down for safety, and Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Demis Hassabis agreed publicly that same day. Cartels normally hide; this evidence was published for credit. Trump, meanwhile, says he is standing up an "AI Force".

Cities Are Dropping Flock's Cameras Faster Than It Can Sell Them

Flock Safety offered buyouts to its staff on Friday, a package the surveillance company described internally as its most generous ever. It expects a significant share of its 1,500 employees to take it, and without enough volunteers, layoffs would almost certainly follow.

The cause is a customer revolt. An August investigation found 46 officers accused of misusing Flock's license plate readers, including allegedly tracking wives and exes; Florida and Texas will stop using it, and 90 cities dropped Flock in August alone, four times the month before. No federal privacy law did this. City councils did.

World View

Houthi missiles reached Riyadh for the first time since July, with Saudi forces intercepting a ballistic missile over the capital and black smoke rising from Aramco fuel tanks near the main international airport.

Riot police cleared The Hague of several hundred far-right protesters after the city banned an anti-immigration march, making arrests once demonstrators began throwing fireworks at officers.

Congo began vaccinating health workers in Bunia, epicenter of the fastest-growing Ebola outbreak on record, using a shot proven against a different strain because the Bundibugyo virus spreading there has none.

Need To Know

The first lawsuits under new Nazi-looted art laws were filed in California, seeking two 1530 Cranach panels from Pasadena's Norton Simon Museum and watercolors an Auschwitz survivor was forced to paint for Josef Mengele.

Jehovah's Witnesses will now permit blood-derived products — plasma, platelets, red and white cells — as a matter of conscience, though whole-blood transfusions stay barred for 1.3 million US members.

Roughly 5,000 volunteers packed 100,000 meals across about 70 cities on Saturday, more than half of them in Texas, in a Tango Charities drive run alongside the American Heart Association.

Money & Markets

The 30-year mortgage climbed to its highest since January 2025, hitting 6.95% in a fourth straight weekly rise after the Fed lifted its benchmark to roughly 3.9% — its first hike since 2023.

Goldman Sachs blames unhappiness for the sentiment slump, with economist Joseph Briggs telling clients that low readings reflect "a more fundamental, downbeat assessment of the state of the world rather than the economy."

Zoe De La Paz pays $96 a month to live inside Yellowstone, having traded a $75,000 Chicago design salary for $19.25 an hour as a park seamstress — and banked nearly $11,000 doing it.

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Future Frontiers

Flock Safety is buying out staff to shrink a 1,500-person workforce, after reporting found 46 officers accused of misusing its license plate readers and 90 cities dropped the service in August alone.

The Navy's tech chief laid out a five-part wish list — applied AI, quantum, networking, spectrum operations and digital engineering — weeks after the service awarded $562 million for the MQ-25 autonomous refueling drone.

Your television is watching back: every major manufacturer runs automatic content recognition by default, logging what you watch unless you go digging through the settings to switch it off.

The Score

Jeremiah Smith became Ohio State's career receiving leader in just 33 games, passing Michael Jenkins' 2,898 yards on a first-quarter catch as the Buckeyes buried Kent State 59-3.

Mohamed Salah scored his first Trabzonspor hat trick in a 4-0 demolition of Süper Lig leaders Galatasaray, twice running from inside his own half, taking his season tally to seven.

Paige Bueckers scored 20 of her 26 before halftime as Dallas beat Phoenix 87-82 for a sixth straight win, while Alyssa Thomas posted her 23rd career triple-double in defeat.

Félix Bautista returned after 14 months, activated from the injured list following shoulder surgery, on the same afternoon Trey Mancini signed a one-day contract to retire as an Oriole.

Life & Culture

Zach Cregger's "Resident Evil" took $26.3 million on Friday across 3,684 screens, matching the entire opening weekend of 2010's "Afterlife" in a single day and tracking toward a franchise-record $55 million.

Matthew Rhys became the first person to win two lead acting Emmys in one night; his sister called their parents afterward and found them at home in dressing gowns, giggling.

Converse pulled a Chuck 70 ad after critics saw a hooded figure in the image's lighting and a lynching in a dangling pair of shoes, with the company apologizing that "we got this wrong."

Deep Dive

How Guyana Became Exxon's Growth Engine

What it is: Guyana, a small South American nation of under a million people, has quietly become one of the most important growth engines for Exxon Mobil, the largest U.S. oil company.

The detail: Exxon leads a consortium developing offshore fields in the Stabroek Block, a discovery that transformed Guyana from an oil non-entity into one of the world's fastest-growing crude producers. Its Guyanese output now anchors Exxon's long-term production forecasts and reshapes its balance sheet, even as global majors face mounting pressure over fossil fuel expansion.

Why it matters: For Guyana, the boom has flooded state coffers and reordered domestic politics, with disputes over revenue-sharing, environmental oversight and who benefits driving fractious national debates. For Exxon, the country is a strategic hedge — a low-cost, high-volume basin at a moment when Western majors are struggling to replace reserves elsewhere.

What to watch: The bigger complication is next door. Venezuela has revived a long-dormant territorial claim over the Essequibo region that includes waters near Exxon's operations, raising the specter of a geopolitical clash that could disrupt production. Washington has quietly signaled support for Georgetown, but any escalation would put U.S. energy interests, a fragile South American democracy and a hemispheric border dispute on a collision course.

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Extra Bits

A Mexican city crowned its most handsome melons in Veracruz, where a decades-old joke among friends has ripened into an annual pageant celebrating creativity, absurdity and unusually photogenic fruit.

Pete Davidson and Colin Jost debuted their comedy ferry to nauseous reviews, finally sailing the decommissioned Staten Island boat they impulse-bought in 2022 for a Snapple-sponsored one-night-only comedy voyage.

AI actor Tilly Norwood glitched mid-interview on Piers Morgan's show, switching abruptly into Cantonese while chatting with Tom Conti in a malfunction that reassured every human performer watching at home.

Today's Trivia

What's the smallest U.S. national park, at just 91 acres?

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On This Day

New Zealand's governor signs the Electoral Act, enfranchising all adult women (1893) · The first Glastonbury festival opens at Worthy Farm, £1 a ticket with free farm milk (1970) · Scott Fahlman proposes :-) on a Carnegie Mellon bulletin board (1982) · The state funeral of Queen Elizabeth II is held at Westminster Abbey (2022)

"Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends." — Scott Fahlman, computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, proposing the first digital emoticon at 11:44am

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