Xi Jinping arrived in Washington on Wednesday for his first state visit to the United States in eleven years, and the formal ceremony at the White House moved forward Thursday morning: a guard of honor review, bilateral talks in the Oval Office, and a state dinner in the East Room this evening. This is the second Trump-Xi meeting of 2026. They sat down in Beijing in May, and both governments used the word “stable” to describe the outcome. Stable isn’t the aspiration it used to be. It used to be the floor.
The last time Xi came to Washington for a state visit was 2015, under Barack Obama’s second term. That visit produced a joint statement on cybersecurity and climate change, formalized commitments on cyber espionage, and the kind of public ceremony that suggested the relationship was managed competition with a shared set of rules. A lot happened between 2015 and now: the tariff escalations, the pandemic, the technology restrictions, the competing military buildups in the Pacific. What the two leaders are searching for now is something lower than what existed in 2015, and both governments seem to understand that. Neither side has announced what this summit will produce, which may be the point. A communique about stability is harder to attack than a communique about partnership. (NPR)
At the General Assembly on Wednesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy proposed what he called an energy ceasefire: Ukraine would halt attacks on Russian energy infrastructure if Russia stopped targeting Ukraine’s. The war is in its fifth year. Zelenskyy also called for a three-way meeting with Trump and Putin as quickly as possible. Trump told reporters afterward that he speaks with Putin regularly and that “something is going to happen.” Russia sent Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Putin’s place, as it has for several years now. Lavrov said Russia is willing to negotiate lasting peace but won’t simply pause the fighting.
Russia began its systematic campaign against Ukraine’s electrical grid in October 2022, when temperatures were dropping and the logic of infrastructure strikes was winter itself. Ukraine rebuilt generators, dispersed capacity, and adapted faster than most analysts expected. But energy remains the lever both sides understand. An energy ceasefire, if it held, would be the first mutual restraint agreement to last since a similar 30-day halt on energy strikes, agreed in March 2025, broke down within weeks. No one is predicting that this one would hold. The history of partial ceasefires in this war, including an attempted grain corridor agreement in 2022 that Russia withdrew from unilaterally, doesn’t provide much comfort. (CNBC)
A federal judge heard arguments Wednesday on whether to block the Trump administration’s ban barring CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from White House grounds. The Department of Justice argued that press access to the White House is a privilege and not a constitutional right, and that the three outlets had published verifiable falsehoods and sensitive national security information. The judge, who was appointed by President Trump, expressed skepticism on the procedural question: the administration hadn’t followed due process requirements established by earlier court rulings before revoking the credentials. Major television networks suspended video coverage of the president in solidarity with the three outlets. On Thursday, Judge Kelly ordered access temporarily restored, calling the ban likely unconstitutional. The administration has not yet said whether it will comply.
The Nixon administration’s effort to pressure the press was comprehensive enough to produce an official enemies list, attempted license challenges against television stations hostile to the administration, and the Huston Plan, which proposed using federal agencies to surveil journalists and political opponents. Those efforts ended with Nixon’s resignation. No administration has successfully excluded named news organizations from the White House grounds through legal means for more than brief periods. What happens when a court orders access restored and an administration has to decide whether to comply is no longer hypothetical. That question is now live. (Washington Post)
Hurricane Polo is tracking north along Mexico’s Pacific coast as one of the most powerful storms ever recorded in the eastern Pacific Ocean. It peaked Tuesday with sustained winds of 180 miles per hour and a minimum central pressure of 892 millibars, the second-lowest pressure ever measured in the eastern Pacific. Only Hurricane Patricia in 2015 reached lower, at 872 millibars, before making landfall near Jalisco as a Category 4 and weakening rapidly over the Sierra Madre mountains. Polo is currently at Category 4 to 5 strength. Tropical storm warnings cover Michoacán state and extend from Tecpan de Galeana to Manzanillo. Seas up to 46 feet near the storm’s center and up to eight inches of rain along the warning zone are expected. The storm is forecast to remain a major hurricane through the weekend and approach Baja California early next week.
The eastern Pacific hurricane season has produced two Category 5 storms in eleven years that pushed the all-time pressure record, which is a different pattern than the previous several decades. Whether that reflects a statistically meaningful shift or the ordinary noise of a small dataset is a question climatologists haven’t resolved. The people in Michoacán don’t need the question resolved to know what they’re facing. (NPR)
U.S. stocks fell Wednesday as strong economic data drove Treasury yields toward multi-decade highs, reviving concern about another Federal Reserve rate increase before the end of the year. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed down 360 points at 51,503, a decline of 0.69 percent. S&P Global’s purchasing managers index showed new orders rising alongside the steepest increase in input and output prices in several years. McDonald’s, Alphabet, and Home Depot were the largest Dow decliners. Today’s economic calendar includes August new home sales data.
The Federal Reserve raised rates eleven times between March 2022 and July 2023, bringing the federal funds rate from near zero to a range of 5.25 to 5.5 percent, the highest level since 2001. It began cutting in September 2024 and has moved cautiously since, with inflation proving stickier than the central bank’s models anticipated at each stage of the cycle. Wednesday’s PMI numbers are the kind of data point that doesn’t require a rate hike on its own but keeps the possibility from being dismissed. Markets have been pricing out a cut in October. They’re starting to price in a hike instead. (Charles Schwab)
New research published this week found evidence that long COVID may damage the dopamine-releasing neurons in the brain, offering the first coherent biological explanation for a cluster of symptoms that have made the condition difficult to define and nearly impossible to treat: persistent fatigue, low motivation, slowed movement, and difficulty with memory and concentration. Dopaminergic neurons regulate reward, movement, and motivation. Damage to them is the mechanism behind Parkinson’s disease. Nobody is describing long COVID as a form of Parkinson’s, but the neurological overlap is now documented, and it changes what the condition is.
The COVID pandemic began six years ago. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 3.4 percent of American adults had long COVID symptoms at the time of its 2022 national survey, with the true number in dispute and the measurement methods inconsistent across subsequent estimates. A biological mechanism isn’t a treatment. But treatments that address dopaminergic dysfunction exist; they don’t reverse the underlying damage, but they address its symptoms, and they’re available. You can’t begin working on a treatment for something you haven’t characterized. For six years, long COVID wasn’t fully characterized. Now it’s a little closer. (ScienceDaily)
And in The Hague on Wednesday: the International Criminal Court convicted a former rebel commander from the Central African Republic on four counts of crimes against humanity, including torture and unlawful imprisonment. The CAR conflict has been running for more than a decade, involving government forces, United Nations peacekeepers, and multiple armed factions, including groups backed by Russian paramilitary organizations. It is one of the least covered ongoing wars in the world. Most people couldn’t find it on a map without trying.
The ICC was established in 1998 under the Rome Statute, which the United States signed but never ratified. It takes years to bring cases to trial. Conviction rates are low. The court has no army, no enforcement mechanism, and depends on member states to arrest and surrender suspects, which they often don’t. None of that is a secret. But someone who ordered and committed atrocities in a country that the global press covers, when it covers it at all, as a footnote has been convicted because investigators collected evidence, prosecutors built a case, and a court handed down a verdict that will be enforced. The process is slow. It’s expensive. It’s imperfect. It’s also working. Today, it worked. (International Criminal Court)
