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Xi and his wife, Peng Liyuan, landed shortly before 6 p.m. Wednesday. Trump and Melania Trump met them on a red carpet, with six F-22s and six F-16s parked on the field and two B-1 bombers overhead during the anthems. The last American president to greet a foreign leader at that airfield was John F. Kennedy, who met Harold Macmillan there in 1962. This is Xi's first state visit to Washington in 11 years, and the third meeting with Trump after Busan in October 2025 and Beijing in May. Bloomberg reported that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the trade truce would be extended by two months. A state dinner is set for Thursday, with executives from OpenAI, Google, and Nvidia expected. Reuters reported that Trump is expected to ask for the release of two U.S. citizens, Youlin Chen, held since late 2024, and Min Zin, arrested in June, and that Jimmy Lai's case is also on the list. Lai, a British national, has been in custody in Hong Kong since December 2020 and was sentenced to 20 years in February. A senior U.S. official said China remains the main supplier of fentanyl precursor chemicals to Mexican cartels.

Politico reported Wednesday, citing five people familiar with the talks, that the White House was preparing a 90-day export ban. President Trump said Tuesday that he backed a ban. Wright, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum objected to a total ban, those people said. A White House official then denied that a ban was being prepared. Wright later said the discussion is how to move more diesel into the United States while gasoline and jet fuel keep flowing. He said the United States is the largest diesel exporter, so a refinery that cannot ship diesel will cut runs. AAA put the national average near a record $6.52 a gallon. Stocks are under 97 million barrels, about 13 percent below the five-year seasonal average. October ultra-low-sulfur diesel futures fell 4 percent, to $4.7437 a gallon. The Iran and Ukraine wars have tightened deliveries, and the November midterms are six weeks away. Two days before Sunday's German state votes, Chancellor Friedrich Merz announced a fuel-price cap tied to the same spike.

The money would cover 66 programmes, including housing, diesel generation, and waste removal. The board said about $18 billion has been pledged and $280 million has arrived. It estimates full recovery at about $71.4 billion over ten years. Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff, and Tony Blair spoke at a meeting beside the General Assembly. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said more countries had offered funds and that the board was still asking. Board member Michael Eisenberg told the BBC that unexploded ordnance has to be cleared and that hundreds of kilometres of tunnels are still under the strip. The Hamas-run health ministry counts 1,381 Palestinians killed, including 300 children, in Israeli strikes since the October ceasefire. The Israeli military says five soldiers have been killed in combat in that period and one contractor died in an operational accident. The board comes from the 20-point plan Trump presented with Benjamin Netanyahu in September 2025. In July Hamas said it would disarm if Israel withdrew. Netanyahu rejected that and said the army would stay until Hamas was disarmed.

A leak from inside A7 shows Rosneft-linked traders supplying that hard currency so Russian buyers could pay abroad after the big banks were cut off from Swift. Ilan Shor, a Moldovan businessman, founded A7 with Russian state backing, including the defence-linked bank Promsvyazbank. On Monday the same paper reported that A7 had moved more than $6.9 billion through international banks, with $1.1 billion reaching Standard Chartered accounts in Hong Kong between late 2024 and August 2025. Igor Sechin runs Rosneft. The United States put the company under full sanctions in October 2025.

A NOAA Hurricane Hunter flight on Tuesday measured sustained winds near 180 mph, about 285 km/h. The National Hurricane Center downgraded the storm to category 4 on Wednesday morning and said the intensity may fluctuate. President Claudia Sheinbaum said a direct landfall is not in the current track and named Jalisco, Colima, and Michoacán as the states at risk. Forecasters expect up to 6 inches of rain, and 8 inches in spots, with a tropical-storm warning on parts of the southwest coast. A key patch of the central-eastern Pacific was 3.05 degrees Celsius above average on September 19, past the 3.02 degree mark from the 2015 El Niño. The Pacific has had 15 storms this season. Polo is the strongest of three now between Hawaii and the mainland.

About 950 agents ran for 21 hours and used 210 million tokens. They collected more than 200,000 reverse transcriptases, marked 3,500 candidate systems, and wrote reports on 20. The system has three parts: a reverse transcriptase that copies RNA into DNA, a partner gene whose job is unknown, and a long array of evenly spaced repeats. It shows up mainly in bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria. The underlying enzyme had already been seen in a jumbo phage. Anthropic says Claude was the first to tie it to the array and the extra protein. Scientists in the company's Bay Area lab, opened this spring, did the bench work. Dario Amodei said a Stanford group had previously found a system similar in some ways. The biological function is still unknown. Reuters had reported the wet lab days earlier. This is the lab's first announced result.

On CNBC Wednesday he said, "It's go time," and that the administration had planned for the chance that Congress would not pass a new law. The Clarity Act failed in the Senate on September 15 with 49 votes, short of 60. Last week the commission sent two proposals, Regulation Crypto Asset Transactions and Regulation Crypto Asset Markets, to the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Selig has been the only sitting commissioner since he took the job in December 2025. In a Tuesday keynote at the New York Fed's Treasury Market Conference he said crypto and precious metals may suit 24-hour trading, and that agricultural products, energy, and some financial contracts may not. The SEC issued an Innovation Exemption on September 17 for venues that trade tokenized securities.

The tokens would trade on the NYSE digital alternative trading system announced in January, which is planned for 24-hour trading, fractional shares, stablecoin funding, and on-chain settlement. The service waits on that system and on regulatory approval. Blockchain.com says it has 44 million confirmed accounts. It already sells tokenized stocks in Europe with Ondo Finance, and a spokesperson declined to say how many customers had bought them. ICE Data Services, part of NYSE parent Intercontinental Exchange, will distribute Blockchain.com's crypto data. Blockchain.com will add ICE and NYSE feeds to its app. Peter Smith is the crypto firm's chief executive. The SEC recently opened an exemption that lets platforms sell blockchain versions of stocks without the full exchange rulebook. The Citi Institute's base case is $5.5 trillion of tokenized assets by 2030.

The glasses are about five times lighter than the Quest 3 because the compute, battery, and storage sit in a puck on an optical tether. That puck has 12 gigabytes of memory, 128 gigabytes of storage, and a microSD slot. Six outward cameras track the hands. Meta calls it the first IMAX Enhanced VR device and says ESPN, TNT Sports, and others will offer more than 100 immersive U.S. sports events a year. The same Connect keynote, at 4 p.m. Pacific from Menlo Park, added camera-free Ray-Ban Meta Audio glasses from $349, shipping October 13, and Ray-Ban Meta Gen 3 glasses from $449, on sale the same day. Ray-Ban Display goes on sale in Britain from £749 and in Canada from CA$1,149, with France, Italy, and Germany at €899 and an October 13 date. Muse, Meta's agent, is coming to the AI glasses.

CVE-2026-94127 is a heap-based buffer overflow scored 9.8. An unauthenticated attacker can run code when an APM access policy and an OAuth authorization-server profile sit on the same virtual server. Appliance mode is affected. F5 says the bug is in the data plane. Versions 21.1.0, 17.5.0 through 17.5.1, and 17.1.0 through 17.1.3 are in scope. Hotfixes shipped Tuesday. CISA put the flaw on its known-exploited list and told federal agencies to protect affected systems by Friday, September 25. Shadowserver is tracking more than 15,000 BIG-IP APM systems exposed to the internet. F5 is offering an iRule for sites that cannot install the hotfix immediately.

He spoke on Wednesday, a day after President Trump told the same hall he could annihilate Iran if there is no deal and that he expects an agreement after the November 3 midterm elections. The war is nearly seven months old. It followed strikes with Israel in June 2025 and a larger campaign that began at the end of February. On Wednesday Iran's foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, told Germany's foreign minister, Johann Wadephul, that Europe was enabling Israeli crimes and that Tehran could not be blamed for insecurity in the Strait of Hormuz. About a fifth of the world's seaborne oil and gas moved through that strait before the war.

On September 20 the AfD took 38.2 percent in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. Merz's CDU finished on 4.9 percent, under the 5 percent line for a seat, the party's worst state result. The same day Die Linke won Berlin with 25.7 percent and the CDU, which had led the city government, fell to 18.8 percent. On September 6 the AfD won Saxony-Anhalt with 43.8 percent. Merz said he would stay in office and take the reforms through the Bundestag. Two days before Sunday's votes he announced a €2.5 billion tax cut and a fuel-price cap. The Social Democrats, his coalition partner, lost heavily in Saxony-Anhalt and Berlin and held second place in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. Eastern state premiers from both parties have asked for a proposed pension change to be dropped. An SPD paper called the pension ideas a source of enormous uncertainty for workers and employers.

The Interior Ministry counted 15,801,162 registered voters, 7,288 candidates, 28 parties, and two independent lists. Polls ran from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. The constitution requires the king to name the prime minister from the party that finishes first. The next government will run preparations for the 2030 World Cup, which Morocco is hosting with Spain and Portugal. Early constituency counts on Wednesday night had the Justice and Development Party ahead in several cities, including Meknes. A national result is due on Thursday. The vote is the first parliamentary election since a youth protest movement and a migration crisis.

He told local broadcasters that "billions with a capital B" were waiting, and he singled out mandatory local equity transfers in mining and telecommunications. On BusinessDay he asked for Equity Equivalent Investment Programmes, already used in other sectors, to cover mining and telecommunications as well. He said Black Economic Empowerment stays in place. Last week the administration imposed visa restrictions on South African officials it did not name. South Africa is a leading supplier of platinum-group metals, which U.S. industry uses. Bozell has also kept expropriation without compensation on Washington's list of open demands. That law is in the South African courts.

Dmitriev runs the Russian Direct Investment Fund and has been Moscow's channel to Trump's circle. The Straits Times attributed the travel to sources. The trip comes in the same week Trump urged Volodymyr Zelensky to stop striking Russian refineries, with diesel supply as the stated reason, and in the same week the EU cleared another €3 billion for Kyiv.

He spoke on Tuesday and called the court an out-of-control and rogue institution. The court sits in The Hague under the Rome Statute, which took effect in 2002. The United States has never ratified that treaty. On Wednesday, in her first speech to the General Assembly, Japan's prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, said Japan supports the court and the rule of law. Japan is a state party.

The department's probe alleged that the school favored Black and Hispanic applicants and discriminated against white and Asian applicants. UCSF rejected those findings. The dispute follows the Supreme Court's 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which ended race-conscious admissions at universities that take federal funds.

On Tuesday the court said one essential cancer medicine carried a maximum retail price of ₹27,000 while retailers were supplied at ₹2,700. The judges called the gap a robbery in daylight against patients.

He called those forecasts hurtful and unscientific. By Monday Nvidia, Broadcom, AMD, and Micron were the four U.S. chipmakers valued above $1 trillion. The Nasdaq closed at a record on Tuesday.

The target is in the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, adopted at COP15 in December 2022. Countries agreed to protect and conserve at least 30 percent of land and of ocean by 2030. The research, reported Wednesday, says current designations leave that mark out of reach.

The Associated Press reported that cuts in U.S. aid have reduced funding for climate monitoring and research across the Himalayas. The floods hit in August. The search is still open.

Folha de S.Paulo reported the filings with the Supremo Tribunal Federal and the Tribunal Superior Eleitoral. Brazil votes for president on the first Sunday of October. The same day's paper carried a separate request from Flávio Bolsonaro, himself under investigation in the Dark Horse case, asking Justice André Mendonça to look at ties between Lula and Vorcaro.

A confirmation hearing is the step the Senate uses before she can take the job. Scott Gottlieb, who ran the agency in the first Trump administration, told CNBC that the hearing is a chance to rebuild the FDA after a large round of staff cuts. The commissioner is a presidential appointment, and the Senate has to vote.

Ioannis Tsiokos shared the paper on September 16. Quanta reported the claim in its updates column. In March 2023 David Smith, Joseph Samuel Myers, Craig Kaplan, and Chaim Goodman-Strauss showed that one tile, the hat, can cover the plane without a repeating pattern. A single tile that does the same in three dimensions would be a further result. A peer-reviewed proof of Chair44 has not been announced.