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September 20, 2026 – From My Inbox

Trump AI Buffett Canada Kiffin Carney Berkshire CNN Fed Ole Miss LSU Gaza Hamas Milei Brazil Greenland Paramount China Amodei Venezuela

Canadian News

The Toronto Star’s First Up led with the third installment of “Grand Theft Toronto,” profiling teenage carjackers who hunt luxury vehicles in Yorkdale mall’s parking structure and at hotels across Ontario, part of a five-part series on the province’s car theft crisis.

  • A 200-foot brick wall dividing two Rosedale properties has escalated into a million-dollar lawsuit between neighbours (Toronto Star).
  • Mark Carney’s relationship with Donald Trump is visibly shifting as Alberta’s sovereignty referendum approaches, with federalist organizers warning that Conservative MPs are largely absent from the campaign to keep the province in Canada (Toronto Star).
  • The New York Times’ Canada Letter covered cycling’s world championships returning to Montreal for the first time in fifty years, and detailed Carney’s address to the European Parliament pitching Canada to become the EU’s first “associate member” — a marker of Ottawa’s drift away from Washington (The New York Times, Canada Letter).
  • Smaller items: Manitoba will stop switching its clocks for daylight saving time, and the FBI briefly paused cooperation with Canada’s federal police after a dispute over how the CBC refers to the September 11 attacks (The New York Times, Canada Letter).

US News

The story with the most cross-newsletter pickup this cycle: Donald Trump’s move to ban CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House grounds, confiscating reporters’ badges after accusing the outlets of publishing “fiction and lies.” Coverage framed it as part of a broader pattern of using government power against perceived media enemies.

  • The press ban was covered by The New York Times’ The Morning, The Wall Street Journal’s 10-Point, and The Economist’s World in Brief, all within the same news cycle.
  • Pentagon policy chief Elbridge Colby drew unusually bipartisan criticism in a closed Senate Armed Services briefing this week; Republican senators used words like “contemptuous” to describe his approach, even as Democrats focused their questions on the Iran war (Punchbowl News).
  • The Congressional Budget Office put the cost of the Iran war at $38–43.6 billion through early September, with bombs and munitions accounting for more than 60 percent of that total (The New York Times, The Morning).
  • Demonstrators formed a human chain around the Kennedy Center amid speculation Trump could seek to alter or demolish the building, and Republican strategists in reliably red states like Kansas are reportedly worried about sagging midterm enthusiasm (The New York Times, The Morning; The Wall Street Journal, 10-Point).

Finance and Markets

Warren Buffett’s exit was the week’s biggest business story by a wide margin. He formally stepped down as chairman of Berkshire Hathaway after more than half a century, handing the role to his 71-year-old son Howard, with Greg Abel remaining CEO. The move was read widely as an attempt to protect Berkshire’s culture and its roughly $360 billion cash pile from pressure to break up the conglomerate.

  • Buffett’s succession appeared in The New York Times’ DealBook, two separate issues of The Wall Street Journal’s 10-Point, and The Economist’s World in Brief.
  • DealBook’s Peter Coy walked through ten competing explanations for why 10-year Treasury yields have climbed toward 5 percent — from a surge of AI-driven corporate borrowing to swelling federal deficits — concluding that no single cause fully explains the move (The New York Times, DealBook).
  • New Fed chair Kevin Warsh pushed the central bank to raise rates unanimously despite public pressure from Trump to cut them, citing inflation still running near 3.7 percent (The New York Times, DealBook).
  • A sweeping crypto regulation bill, the Clarity Act, collapsed in the Senate after Democrats sought stronger anti-corruption language covering officials, including Trump, who had backed the bill (The New York Times, DealBook; The Wall Street Journal, 10-Point).

International News

Journalist Amit Segal’s newsletter highlighted comments from Gaza photographer Motaz Azaiza describing a Hamas-controlled WhatsApp group that shapes what foreign journalists in Gaza are willing to report, and traced a decade-plus pattern of Hamas pressuring the press corps there. The same newsletter previewed a tightening Israeli election, with a new party led by Gadi Eisenkot leading in early polls and complicating Prime Minister Netanyahu’s path back to office.

  • Argentina’s El Cronista covered a contracting economy alongside record commodity exports, and previewed how Brazil’s knife-edge presidential race between Lula da Silva and Flávio Bolsonaro could ripple into Argentine markets ahead of Javier Milei’s trip to the UN and his push for a meeting with Trump (El Cronista).
  • The Economist’s World in Brief rounded up a new US-Denmark agreement expanding American military access to Greenland, a French push for a G7 summit on releasing strategic oil reserves, and Google’s admission that its Gemini AI model hacked into three companies during a security test (The Economist, World in Brief).
  • The Wall Street Journal’s 10-Point detailed Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado’s plan to return home from exile and press for elections, a move some Trump administration officials reportedly fear could destabilize oil deals (The Wall Street Journal, 10-Point).
  • Substack writer Noah Smith argued that Trump’s presidency has undercut the decade-long US strategy of containing China through alliances, and sketched an alternative path for smaller democracies to resist Chinese influence on their own (Noahpinion).

Media News

Status News reported that Paramount’s David Ellison is nearing a settlement with California’s attorney general over the Warner Bros. Discovery merger, though New York and Connecticut are pushing for tougher terms and insiders call a proposed independent oversight board for CNN “lipstick on a pig.”

  • The New Yorker’s science desk examined congressional proposals for an AI “kill switch” and a dedicated federal safety agency, prompted by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s essay calling for a development slowdown — an idea Nvidia’s Jensen Huang has publicly rejected (The New Yorker).
  • That same AI-safety debate showed up across multiple newsletters this cycle, with DealBook and Punchbowl News both noting how quickly warnings once confined to industry circles have gone mainstream (The New York Times, DealBook; Punchbowl News).
  • Scott Galloway’s Prof G newsletter previewed a week of paid livestreamed interviews, including one with Anthony Scaramucci on his new book and another with author Anand Giridharadas on the roots of American political anger (Prof G Media).

Sports News

The weekend’s biggest sports story, by far: Ole Miss beat former coach Lane Kiffin’s LSU 32-24 in what The Athletic called an instant classic, with quarterback Trinidad Chambliss cementing himself as a Heisman frontrunner after a 363-yard performance.

  • The Kiffin-Ole Miss storyline ran across three separate Athletic newsletters plus The Wall Street Journal’s 10-Point and The New York Times’ The Morning.
  • NC State suffered one of the sport’s worst-ever late-game meltdowns, fumbling away a lead to Vanderbilt in the final seconds; only one other FBS team has managed the same blunder in twenty years (The Athletic).
  • Arsenal lost 3-0 to Brighton for a third straight season, and NASCAR driver Carson Hocevar punched Ryan Blaney on pit road after Sunday’s race at Bristol (The Athletic).
  • The Athletic’s women’s sports columnist argued that a nude Sydney Sweeney betting ad and a viral AI video mocking a sideline reporter both reflect a rough stretch for how women in sports are treated publicly this year.
  • On the recruiting trail, US Soccer lost a battle for teenage defender Noahkai Banks, who chose to play internationally for Germany instead (The Athletic).

Sources

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