The Rest of the World Report | September 25, 2026 — Morning Edition
The View From Everywhere Else
Weekday morning and evening editions. Saturdays once. Good news on Sundays. All sources labeled.
WHO GOT ACCESS
Chinese state television had a camera inside President Trump’s welcome ceremony for Xi Jinping on Thursday. CNN did not.
A federal judge had ruled Thursday morning that the White House violated the due process rights of CNN, MS NOW and Politico by banning them, and ordered their access restored for 14 days. The administration did not comply. Reporters from all three outlets were still turned away from the White House grounds Thursday morning. CNN had been scheduled as the television pool for Xi’s visit that evening. Access was not actually restored until around noon, after Trump’s press conference with Xi had already concluded. The rest of the US television pool, Fox, ABC, CBS and NBC, boycotted the event in solidarity rather than take CNN’s place at the camera.
China Global Television Network (CGTN) and the state news agency Xinhua faced no such restriction. CGTN published video and photographs of Xi’s arrival within hours, along with the full text of his welcome remarks. Xi told the ceremony the two countries “shoulder a historic responsibility of advancing human development and progress.” He said competition between them “should be kept within bounds,” describing it as a race rather than a contest with a winner and a loser. A separate CGTN piece the next morning led with Trump calling the visit “historic.” Neither CGTN article mentioned the press exclusion happening on the same White House grounds.
The pattern is not new. During Trump’s first term, Russian state media photographed a Trump meeting from which the US press pool was excluded.
🌍 Translator’s Note: CGTN’s three pieces on the visit share a common shape. Each is ceremonial, each quotes Xi and Trump on partnership and cooperation, and none mentions that the US outlets normally covering this kind of event were locked out of the building. That is not an oversight. State media covering a state visit reports the ceremony the state wants reported. What CGTN’s coverage shows, read against what was happening on the White House grounds at the same hour, is what an American president’s welcome looks like when the only cameras inside belong to the visiting government’s own press.
🇺🇸 What American readers need to know: A US court found the ban on CNN, MS NOW and Politico violated due process, and the administration ignored the order for most of a working day. In that window, footage of a sitting US president’s welcome ceremony reached the public first through Chinese state television, not through the White House press corps.
Sources: CNN (US — Thursday exclusion timeline, TV pool boycott, Kerry Picket statement); Axios (US — Judge Kelly’s order and Fifth Amendment ruling, compliance timeline); CGTN (China, state media — arrival coverage); CGTN (China, state media — Xi’s welcome remarks, full text); CGTN (China, state media — Trump’s “historic” remarks)
THE MECCA PACT
Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and Pakistan are calling their military chiefs together over a mutual defense agreement most of the world has not seen tested yet.
The three countries’ foreign ministers met Thursday at Saudi Arabia’s UN mission in New York and announced plans for an urgent meeting of their military chiefs of staff. Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud, Pakistan’s Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar, and Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan did not set a date for that meeting or specify what form of support might follow. The trigger is the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement the three countries signed on August 7, 2026, which states that an attack on one signatory is considered an attack on all three. Their first Strategic Political and Defence Committee meeting under that agreement took place in Istanbul on August 31. Thursday’s call for a military chiefs’ meeting is the most concrete step announced since.
The immediate cause is a sharp escalation in Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia. The Saudi-led coalition said Thursday it intercepted and destroyed six ballistic missiles fired at Taif and Yanbu. Houthi forces separately claimed drone attacks on Riyadh and on a Saudi Aramco facility in Yanbu. Inside Yemen, fighting between Houthi and government forces killed at least 150 fighters in 24 hours, and Houthi forces have continued gaining ground around the Bab el-Mandeb strait. Saudi Arabia’s Grand Mufti, Sheikh Saleh bin Fawzan, issued a rare public statement Thursday urging soldiers on the frontlines to “remain permanently prepared to carry out” their duty, calling defense “among the greatest duties and acts of devotion, for which lives and souls are sacrificed.”
🇺🇸 What American readers need to know: Three of Washington’s own regional security partners just triggered the first real test of a mutual defense pact against Iran-backed Houthi forces, without American involvement in the announcement. A formal military response from this bloc would reshape a war Washington has spent months trying to manage from the outside.
Sources: Al Jazeera (Qatar, state-funded/editorially independent — foreign ministers’ meeting, Mecca agreement terms, Houthi attack details); The National (UAE — Grand Mufti statement, ministers named); Arab News Pakistan (Saudi Arabia — confirmation)
THE THIRD AIRPORT
Ethiopia’s civil war looks bigger than yesterday’s edition reported, not because it grew overnight, but because two more of the alliance’s factions and two more captured airports are now confirmed.
Ethiopia’s military said Thursday it killed 272 Tigrayan fighters and wounded 260 more in fighting in North Wollo, in the Amhara region bordering Tigray, with several more captured. The claim came from a statement on the Ethiopian National Defence Force’s Facebook page and has no independent confirmation. The Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) has not disputed that fighting occurred there, only the casualty figure. Tigrayan forces have seized three federal government-controlled airports as of Wednesday, up from the single airport this edition reported yesterday.
The alliance fighting the government is now confirmed to include the Amhara Fano National Movement and the Oromo Liberation Army alongside the TPLF, former enemies of both Addis Ababa and each other now coordinating militarily under the banner announced Sunday. TPLF spokesman Michael Asgedom said the 2022 Pretoria peace agreement, which ended the 2020-2022 Tigray war, is “no longer valid.” That earlier war killed roughly 600,000 people. Ethiopian conflict researcher Surafel Getahun warned that a renewed war “would likely end up far bloodier and more widespread” than that one.
🇺🇸 What American readers need to know: Africa’s second-most populous country is sliding back into a civil war that already killed hundreds of thousands of people once this decade, this time with former enemies fighting on the same side against the government. It remains almost entirely absent from American coverage.
Sources: CNN (US wire, republished — alliance composition, TPLF quote, Getahun quote, Pretoria agreement context); Al Jazeera (Qatar, state-funded/editorially independent — casualty claim, North Wollo location, TPLF response)
TWO SOLDIERS, FIVE CIVILIANS
Two Israeli reservists were killed and at least five Palestinians died over the same 24 hours.
The Israeli military said an aerial drone crashed at a military post in Gaza and did not explode on impact. Two soldiers approached it, and it exploded moments later, killing them both. They were identified as Nadav Kali, 24, and Ofek Moalem, 23, of the 7007th Battalion, 16th Brigade. The incident is under review. Their deaths bring Israeli military fatalities in Gaza to 970 since October 2023.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said Israeli strikes killed four Palestinians, including a girl, Thursday evening, in strikes on al-Sawarha in al-Zawayda and heavy gunfire and shelling around Bureij refugee camp and Khan Younis. Hospitals reported five Palestinians killed and 35 injured over the preceding 24 hours, including one person who died of earlier injuries. Since the October 2025 “ceasefire” began, Israeli fire has killed at least 1,408 Palestinians and wounded 4,916, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. The total since October 2023 now stands at 74,050 killed and 175,030 wounded.
🇺🇸 What American readers need to know: Nearly a year into a “ceasefire,” Israeli fire has killed more than 1,400 Palestinians, and Thursday added two more Israeli soldiers to that same war’s toll. Neither side’s dead show up much in American coverage on an average day, and Thursday was an average day.
Sources: Al Arabiya (UAE — soldier names, unit, drone incident details); Palestine Information Center (Palestinian, citing Gaza Health Ministry and hospital sources — Thursday strikes, casualty figures, cumulative totals)
295 DRONES OVERNIGHT
Russia launched 295 drones at Ukraine between Thursday evening and Friday morning. Ukrainian air defenses shot down 267 of them.
Two people were killed and nine injured in Kyiv, where bomb disposal experts also defused an unexploded 230-kilogram ballistic missile warhead. Sixteen garage units were destroyed in the capital’s Obolonskyi district. In Odesa, three people were injured, including a child, and a hospital’s consultative center sustained roof and upper-floor damage. Four more people were injured in the Kherson region.
French President Emmanuel Macron said Thursday that Russian drones reaching French territory “could happen,” while separately denying a Spanish newspaper’s report that the CIA had specifically warned France of an imminent attack. Italy’s defense minister corroborated that denial. Macron said Russia is treating Europe as, in his words, the strategic heart of the war in Ukraine, and that multiple indicators point to Russia preparing further operations against European targets, though he stressed that remains a possibility rather than a confirmed plan.
🇺🇸 What American readers need to know: A European leader is now saying openly that a Russian drone strike on his own country is plausible, not hypothetical. Overnight barrages of this size have become routine enough that a two-person death toll barely registers as news, in Ukraine or in the United States.
Sources: Ukrinform (Ukraine, state wire — drone and interception figures, casualty and damage details); Euronews (European, multilingual, broadly centrist — Macron quotes, CIA warning denial)
NO WATER IN HIS LUNGS
A Jackson County, Mississippi grand jury found no evidence of a crime in Nolan Wells’ death this past Tuesday. The state autopsy released since then does not obviously support the official explanation of how he died.
Wells’ body was found near Horn Island on July 4. The grand jury’s “no true bill” finding, which we reported Tuesday, rested on a conclusion that he “likely drowned,” based on the body’s condition, location and position when found. But the state autopsy found no fluid in Wells’ airway, lungs or stomach, which the family’s legal team says is inconsistent with drowning. The same autopsy documented two contusions on the back of Wells’ skull that remain unexplained.
A second dispute broke Thursday over Wells’ phone. At a press conference, attorney Ben Crump’s team, represented by forensic expert Andrew Garrett, said deleted data, specifically Snapchat activity, was found on the device between Wells’ last known use of it and when his parents received it. Jackson County District Attorney Angel Myers McIlrath disputed that characterization, saying the deleted activity belonged to other Snapchat users, not anyone who physically accessed Wells’ phone. McIlrath also said Crump’s team had previously told her office that no one accessed the phone during that window at all, a claim she says now contradicts their public statements. GPS data placed Wells’ phone on Horn Island as of 2:20 p.m. on July 4, the last time he used it. Crump said Thursday that the case “still needs to be investigated,” and that they “cannot simply close the chapter.”
🇺🇸 What American readers need to know: The official cause of death and the physical evidence do not obviously agree, in a case where a grand jury has already declined to bring charges. That gap, not any specific accusation, is what keeps this case open.
Sources: Mississippi Today (Mississippi, nonprofit newsroom — autopsy findings, phone GPS and forensic details, Crump quote); WLOX (Mississippi, local NBC affiliate — press conference claims, McIlrath response)
NUMBERS AT PUBLICATION
🇮🇷 Iran: 3,684 killed
🇱🇧 Lebanon: 8,953 killed, 30,643 wounded
🇮🇱 Israel: 1,200+ killed, ~5,400 wounded
🇺🇸 US military: 23 killed, 794 wounded
🇵🇸 Gaza: 74,050+ killed (total war), 4,916 wounded (since ceasefire)
🇵🇸 West Bank: 322 killed (incl. 74 children), 5,927 wounded (incl. 946 children) since January 2025
🛢️ Brent crude: $104.70/barrel
⛽ US gas: $4.49/gallon
Sources: HRANA (Iran); Lebanon MOPH; INSS (Israel); DCAS (US); OCHA (West Bank); gazacasualties.org (Gaza total); Gaza Health Ministry via WAFA (Gaza since ceasefire); OilPrice.com (Brent); AAA (US gas).
“Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government.” — Thomas Jefferson, 1789