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Twenty-five years after hijacked airliners brought down the World Trade Center and tore into the Pentagon, the United States paused on Friday to mark the deadliest terror attack on American soil. Ceremonies unfolded at all three sites — Ground Zero in Manhattan, the Pentagon in Arlington, and the field outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania where United 93 crashed. Four former presidents attended the New York memorial; President Donald Trump delivered remarks at the Pentagon. For the first time, the New York ceremony added a seventh moment of silence honoring those who have since died from 9/11-related illnesses.

The mood is starkly different from a generation ago. A new Reuters/Ipsos poll found Americans now fear domestic extremists considerably more than foreign terrorists — a full inversion of the anxiety that defined the post-9/11 era. Nearly one in four Americans has no personal memory of the attacks at all. The trial of alleged mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and three co-defendants is not scheduled to begin at Guantanamo until June 2028, nearly 27 years after the crime.

The anniversary is layered with uncomfortable ironies. Thousands of undocumented immigrants who joined the toxic cleanup at Ground Zero — and who are dying at elevated rates from the resulting cancers and respiratory diseases — now say they are hiding from ICE raids intensified under the Trump administration. A long-overdue federal health study of the roughly 25,000 children who lived or attended school near the towers is only now being launched. And in New York, some critics urged Muslim Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani to skip memorial events — a controversy that drew a pointed rebuke from the brother of Mohammad Salman Hamdani, a Muslim NYPD cadet who died trying to help victims.

The lessons of 9/11 remain contested. Intelligence-sharing between US and allied agencies has been transformed and countless plots foiled. But the two-decade "war on terror" that followed reshaped American foreign policy, civil liberties and national identity in ways the country is still reckoning with — even as a new war with Iran now dominates the headlines the anniversary was meant to fill.

The trade war between the United States and Canada — long the closest US economic partner — moved from rhetoric to real damage this week. On Tuesday the US banned imports of Canadian motorcycles, dairy products and a broad swath of alcoholic beverages, escalating an already acrimonious dispute. Canadian retaliatory tariffs took effect the same day. Formal negotiations have stalled.

The pain is concentrated in the auto sector, where decades of integration mean a single part can cross the border six or seven times before ending up in a finished vehicle. Auto-parts suppliers on both sides warn the tariffs are unraveling that supply chain in real time, threatening plant idlings and pushing car prices higher just as consumer patience with inflation is running out.

Politically, the damage is landing hardest in exactly the states Republicans need to hold Congress. NPR focus groups of Michigan swing voters found even Trump-curious voters angry about looming price increases on cars, groceries and beer. That anxiety was echoed inside the Republican midterm convention this week in Dallas, where empty upper decks and nervous chatter about turnout underscored the political cost of a trade war with America's friendliest neighbor.

Economists warn this is not a rounding error. US-Canada goods trade tops $900 billion a year. When combined with a war-driven oil price spike, escalating tariffs are pushing US wholesale prices higher and complicating the Federal Reserve's calculus on rates. What began as a Trump negotiating tactic has become a genuine economic drag with no obvious off-ramp.

Anthropic on Thursday disclosed that it had identified and blocked multiple attempts to use its Claude AI models for "malicious activity" that could support the development of biological weapons, along with a long list of state-sponsored cyberattacks, surveillance campaigns and influence operations. The company's threat intelligence report catalogued misuse cases from December 2025 through August 2026, including actors linked to Russian cyber-espionage and an Iranian propaganda institution, and accused Chinese AI firms of trying to replicate Claude's capabilities via model distillation.

Anthropic highlighted five specific case studies of biological-weapons-related misuse, calling biology "one of the most serious risks of frontier AI." Google echoed the warning this week, disclosing that a user had attempted to extract from Gemini a "complete, step-by-step technical guide for synthesizing weaponised biological agents." A separate New York Times report describes a mock AI-driven cyberattack on China's WeChat that exposed acute vulnerabilities and is pushing Beijing and Washington toward faster AI safety talks.

The warnings are landing in a fractured policy environment. Senator Bernie Sanders this week demanded a moratorium on advanced AI development and an outright ban on "artificial superintelligence." President Trump rejected any slowdown, arguing that "if we don't win AI, we're going to be put in a very bad position." The New York Times editorial page called the threat "real" and demanded immediate action.

The throughline is uncomfortable but clear: the same frontier models that write code and draft memos are being probed, right now, by state actors and lone bad actors for capabilities that could enable mass-casualty attacks. Voluntary corporate disclosure is useful but is not a regulatory regime. Until governments impose enforceable safety standards on frontier models, the world is relying on the companies building the risk to also police it.

Joseph diGenova, the veteran Republican lawyer and Trump ally tapped to lead a Justice Department investigation into whether former law enforcement and intelligence officials conspired against Donald Trump, announced Wednesday that he had resigned. The inquiry has been described by the New York Times as "the most fevered of the many revenge investigations that President Trump has demanded the Justice Department undertake" — a sprawling effort to retroactively criminalize the Russia probe and other investigations of Trump.

His departure lands amid a broader pattern of institutional friction. The Supreme Court this week again rejected the Trump-backed Republican effort to install a new congressional map in Missouri, and a federal judge allowed a state-level contempt hearing to proceed against Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins over his handling of the redistricting fight. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court publicly reprimanded District Court Judge Shelley Joseph over a 2018 incident in which an immigrant left the courthouse through a back door, a case the Trump Justice Department has aggressively pursued as part of its immigration crackdown.

Media and civil-liberties pressure is escalating in parallel. Jimmy Kimmel said this week that Trump's FCC has "threatened" his show over booking decisions, forcing an interview with Democratic Texas Senate candidate James Talarico to be posted to YouTube rather than aired on ABC. The League of United Latin American Citizens sued the Department of Homeland Security to keep ICE officers away from polling places at the midterms, citing DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin's statement that agents could enter polls.

At the Republican midterm convention in Dallas, Trump asked attendees to raise their hands and pledge personal allegiance to him — an image that captures the moment. The diGenova resignation is a small setback for the administration's retribution agenda, but the broader machinery of pressure on courts, regulators, broadcasters and voters is expanding, not receding.

Climate scientists this week confirmed that August 2026 was the hottest month ever recorded on Earth, extending a streak of record-shattering temperatures that has now become the defining fact of the planet's climate. The finding, reported by multiple monitoring agencies and highlighted in PBS's news wrap, comes as a still-strengthening El Niño — projected to be one of the strongest on record — reshapes weather globally.

Paradoxically, the Atlantic hurricane basin has gone eerily quiet. For the first time in the satellite era (from the 1960s onward), no hurricane has formed in the Atlantic by mid-September, the climatological peak of the season. Only five named tropical storms have appeared. Forecasters attribute the calm to El Niño-driven wind shear and heavy Saharan dust, both of which suppress tropical development.

The eastern Pacific tells the opposite story. Thirteen named storms and five hurricanes have already formed there, and major Hurricane Lowell battered Hawaii this week with damaging winds and flooding. In New York, a Legionnaires' disease outbreak in the Bronx has killed one person and infected four more — the latest cluster tied to warm-weather cooling tower conditions, following an earlier Manhattan outbreak that killed 11.

The scientific consensus is unambiguous: human-caused greenhouse gas emissions are driving these records, and El Niño years are now stacking on top of an ever-warming baseline. Quiet Atlantic seasons are not evidence against climate change — they are exactly what a strong El Niño superimposed on a warming world looks like. The real story is that August's global heat record is now the sixteenth in roughly two years.

Elena Rybakina reached her first US Open final on Wednesday night in Flushing Meadows, coming back from a set down to defeat American Coco Gauff and end the home favorite's run. The victory carries a second prize: Rybakina officially rises to world No. 1, displacing the very player she will meet in Saturday's final, Aryna Sabalenka. The Rybakina–Sabalenka matchup pits two of the hardest hitters in the modern women's game against each other with both the title and the top ranking on the line.

The men's draw produced its own American storyline. Frances Tiafoe reached the semifinals after what he and his team have openly described as a season of reckoning — at the start of the year his inner circle told him to change his approach or walk away. He chose to change, retooling his training, mindset and shot selection. The result is a return to the Open's final four and a genuine shot at a first Grand Slam title.

Elsewhere in sports, the NFL opened its international slate with the San Francisco 49ers dominating the Los Angeles Rams 40-something to 7 in front of more than 100,000 fans at the Melbourne Cricket Ground — the league's first regular-season game in Australia. And in Germany, the US women's basketball team crushed Hungary 108-56 to reach the FIBA World Cup semifinals behind 19 points from Napheesa Collier.

Saturday's US Open women's final is the marquee event: a pure baseline power matchup with the No. 1 ranking hanging on it. Rybakina, calm and clinical; Sabalenka, ferocious and aggressive. It is exactly the kind of top-two showdown women's tennis has been waiting for.