The killing joke

Recently: How much control does China really have over Russia? Sergey Radchenko on great-power politics, Moscow’s growing energy exports, and Beijing’s new sway.

Today: U.K. authorities arrest two teenagers, allegedly from the Scattered Spider cybercrime collective that cons corporate help desks. Trump confesses his disappointment in Putin. A massive asteroid makes its way past Earth. An earthquake triggers Pacific tsunami warnings. & The EU has an idea for using frozen Russian assets.

+ John Jamesen Gould on why the late-night American television host Jimmy Kimmel would end up off the air within hours of a Trump-administration threat.

& New music from Spoon ...

Teenagers vs. the world

British authorities arrested two young men on Tuesday, charging them on Wednesday: Thalha Jubair, 19, from East London, and Owen Flowers, 18, from Walsall—both alleged core members of the notorious “Scattered Spider” cybercrime collective that uses social engineering to breach corporate networks.

American prosecutors unsealed charges at the same time against Jubair for participating in at least 120 computer network intrusions from May 2022 to September 2025, targeting 47 organizations. Officials are accusing Flowers of attacking London’s transport system and two major U.S. healthcare networks; Jubair allegedly targeted American critical infrastructure.

The coordinated arrests belong to a pattern of confrontations with a new generation of cybercriminals who weaponize systems designed precisely to protect institutions. Scattered Spider—made up mainly of English-speaking teenagers recruited from gaming platforms like Roblox and Minecraft—developed social-engineering attacks that bypass traditional defenses by, for example, simply calling IT departments and impersonating employees. Scattered Spider reportedly became notorious after allegedly being involved in cyberattacks that led to the shutdown of MGM Resorts and Caesars Entertainment in 2023, and has been linked to breaches at AT&T, Ticketmaster, and dozens of other major corporations—though attribution and involvement in some cases remain under investigation.

In effect, if not by intention, these new-gen hackers are treating billion-dollar corporate networks like video games—and have been remarkably successful at it.

The big questions now appear to be how law enforcement can counter criminals who exploit human psychology rather than software vulnerabilities—and how organizations themselves can defend against the oldest hack of all: convincing someone to hand over the keys.

Meanwhile

• U.S. President Donald Trump floated the idea of creating a Pacific equivalent to NATO during his final press conference with Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer, while also expressing frustration with Russia over Ukraine negotiations: “Putin has really let me down.”
• NASA has confirmed that asteroid 2025 FA22, roughly 520 feet wide and the size of a large building, flew past Earth without incident on September 18 at a distance of about 842,000 kilometers while moving along at 38,826 kilometers an hour: “Even harmless flybys are important for scientists.”
• A magnitude 7.8 earthquake hit 128 kilometers east of Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula—about 10 kilometers below the Earth’s surface—shallow, for an earthquake—prompting tsunami warnings for parts of Alaska and Hawaii, with potential waves up to three meters above standard tide levels: “Videos posted on Russian social media showed furniture and light fixtures shaking in homes, and also a parked car rocking back and forth on a street.”
• The European Union is discussing a “reparation loan” to Ukraine backed by frozen Russian assets that would bypass potential vetoes from Hungary, with Ukraine only required to repay once it receives war compensation from Russia: “To avoid blackmailing the EU with a veto by some, an intergovernmental agreement would probably be the way to go.”
• From The Signal: What do you do if you’re the European Union, and you’re sitting on more than $200 billion belonging to the Kremlin? Sir William Browder on a potential turning point in the Ukraine war.

The killing joke

Why would the late-night American television host Jimmy Kimmel end up off the air within hours of a Trump-administration threat? Stephen Hanson on the old historical model for the new American presidency.

—John Jamesen Gould

Jimmy Kimmel—if you don’t know him, his show Jimmy Kimmel Live! aired on Disney’s ABC network in the U.S. from 2003 until yesterday—perpetrated on Monday what he’s done to greater or lesser effect for more than two decades: observational humor.

The observation this time was that the “MAGA gang”—the Trump administration and its core support—was “desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.”

The joke may or may not have been funny—you can decide that if you care to—but it was a clean hit, as we say in hockey, because it was plainly true: Since Tyler Robinson’s arrest—arguably longer—Trump-aligned commentators had been consistently branding Robinson as a leftist, while glossing over the (fragmentary, strange, but still conspicuous) ideological affinities he might have had with their own movement. Kimmel was doing what he, late-night comedians, and court jesters for thousands of years have always done—pointing out convenient omissions in powerful narratives.

By Wednesday evening, Kimmel’s show was off the air indefinitely.

Here’s the timeline: Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr appeared on the podcast The Benny Show on Wednesday, calling Kimmel’s remarks “the sickest conduct possible.” He then delivered what anyone might be forgiven for interpreting as a protection-racket ultimatum: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

Typically, for those unfamiliar with the American regulatory environment, the FCC doesn’t police late-night comedy content. But Carr—a Trump appointee—wasn’t making regulatory arguments. He was making an offer Disney couldn’t refuse.

Nexstar Media Group, which owns two dozen ABC affiliates and happens to be seeking FCC approval for a $6.2 billion merger, announced it would preempt Kimmel’s show. Disney pulled the plug nationwide soon after.

Carr didn’t cite violations or invoke specific powers; his implicit threat to broadcast licenses and pending mergers did the work. Trump celebrated the suspension and suggested NBC now cancel their own late-night guys, Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers.

If you slow it down, you can see what happened here pretty clearly: Carr threatened consequences, Disney executives calculated the cost of defiance, and accommodation won. By all appearances, Disney weren’t making an editorial judgment; they were making a business decision—in a wild new regulatory environment.

All of which tracks with the governing style Stephen Hanson describes, and ascribes to the American president and his people, here in The Signal: It’s not fascism, or anything so easily recognizable to the pop-culture–infused contemporary historical imagination; it’s patrimonialism—running the state “as a family business” rather than through modern-democratic institutions bound by law.

If we want to understand this governing style, a model like Adolf Hitler is beside the point—but, say, old Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), would not be.

Patrimonialism involves doling out state assets to loyalists while punishing those who don’t play along. As such, it turns regulatory agencies into tools for demanding personal loyalty rather than enforcing neutral standards.

“The whole notion of a conflict of interest depends on a legal order that patrimonialism rejects,” Steve says. “There is no conflict of interest if your goal is to build loyalty to the ruler.” Which means, while you might see Carr’s threats as regulatory overreach, Trump sees them as business as usual …

+ Read John Jamesen Gould on what’s ahead at The Signal … & Hywel Mills, with an update on our migration to Ghost.

‘Chateau Blues’