The guest list
Recently: What’s getting American teenagers off their phones? Ioakim Boutakidis on the strategies parents are using to help kids unplug.
Today: In 1988, the Assembly moved to Geneva after the Americans wouldn’t grant one visa. … The UN’s predecessor opened without the U.S., which had refused to join despite the fact that president of the United States designed it. … &c.
For members: An anti-war party banned from Russia’s elections for copyright infringement? Garry Kasparov on why Vladimir Putin needs his opposition not just beaten but gone. … & What’s in the ruins of Gaza? Standpoints from Gilead Sher, Pat Griffiths, and Lana Barreto.
+ New music from The War on Drugs …
Developments / U.S. & North America
A note of advice
On Tuesday morning in New York, about 10 minutes into a speech by the U.S. president, Donald Trump, Iran’s delegation stood up and walked out of the General Assembly. One delegate stayed in his seat. Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, wasn’t among the attendees—he speaks on Wednesday, and the Americans refused visas to members of his delegation, including his media team, setting limits on where the rest of them can go and what they can buy. Cuba’s delegation walked out when Trump called the country “an absolutely failed state.” He told every member of the International Criminal Court—an institution the U.S. has never joined—to “officially resign from this rogue institution immediately.”
No impediments
The 1947 agreement that put the United Nations in New York says American authorities “shall not impose any impediments to transit” to or from the headquarters district. Washington has now kept the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, and dozens of his officials out of the city for a second year—while last Thursday the Assembly voted 152 to 3 to let him speak by video. When the Americans refused the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat a visa in November 1988, the Assembly voted 154 to 2 to move itself to Geneva—where Arafat spoke 11 days later.
The way out
So what can the UN actually make anyone do? An institution holds the powers the states that made it agreed to give, Yuan Yi Zhu says. Almost all international law is the result of state agreement: treaties create duties, obligations and institutions. A few things bind whether or not a state consents—genocide is one—and they are narrow. When states dislike how an institution reads its own powers, they have no real way to fight back, Zhu says, “unless they leave the regime entirely.” … See “Contempt of court.”
‘Home of liberty’
On November 19, 1919, the U.S. Senate voted down the Treaty of Versailles, which not only ended the First World War but created U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations—the United Nations’ predecessor organization. This was the first peace treaty the Senate had ever rejected. It voted the treaty down again in March 1920, 49 to 35. That November, the League’s first meeting opened in Geneva anyway, in a building that had recently been the National Hotel, with more than 100 delegates from 42 states. To the applause of the delegates in attendance, Giuseppe Motta, the Swiss president, said, “Washington, home of liberty, and the United States cannot long remain out of the league.”
Meanwhile
American envoys nevertheless meet Iranian representatives for three hours in New York—per Trump, “a very good meeting.” … Denmark and Greenland grant the U.S. two new Arctic bases. … In Sinaloa, Mexico, President Claudia Sheinbaum says the military is staying put there, while blaming the fighting in the state on the Americans’ capture of a cartel leader two years ago. … A U.S. federal judge stops immigration agents from raiding Alabama building sites without warrants, after they arrested the same U.S. citizen three times. … & Astronomers find a crater 222 meters wide on the Moon that wasn’t there in April 2024.
Thoughts? concierge@thesgnl.com.
Feature
No bottom
An anti-war party banned from Russia’s elections for copyright infringement? Garry Kasparov on why Vladimir Putin needs his opposition not just beaten but gone.
Russia’s Central Election Commission has handed United Russia 58 percent of the party-list vote and 355 of the Duma’s 450 seats—the largest majority the party has ever held, on the highest parliamentary turnout since 2003. In August, Russia’s Supreme Court banned Yabloko, the only anti-war party with a following, on grounds including copyright violation: The party had used AI-generated images and a public-domain photograph of the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima. But without removing Yabloko, President Vladimir Putin already controlled the count.
Why clear the field, too?
AI will eliminate millions of jobs in the next five years. Yours doesn’t have to be one of them.
Here’s how to future-proof your career: Join the Superhuman AI newsletter, read by 1M+ professionals throughout leading tech companies and across sectors. Learn critical AI skills in just three minutes a day—and become the AI expert on your team.
From the despatch
DNA kits and excavators
What’s in the ruins of Gaza? Standpoints from Gilead Sher, Pat Griffiths, and Lana Barreto.
At Al Amal, in Khan Younis in southern Gaza, about 1,000 tonnes of broken buildings go into a crusher every day and come out as gravel. The UN Development Programme runs five crushing sites in the Palestinian-administered parts of the strip, with, according to UNDP, 77 machines in all: 30 wheel loaders, 28 trucks, five crushers, three compactors, five cranes, four water tanks, one excavator, and one backhoe loader. The gravel goes under roads, under shelters, and into rain barriers.
In the areas Israel holds, and along the Yellow Line drawn across Gaza by the October 2025 ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, the Israeli military and contractors working for its Defense Ministry take buildings down with bulldozers—more than 2,500 of them since the ceasefire, according to The New York Times. One military official said the army was dismantling “tunnels and buildings that have been booby-trapped”—though the Times couldn’t verify his account.
Israel is paying for the work. It agreed to do so in December 2025, an unnamed senior Israeli official told Ynet. In January, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said reconstruction before Gaza is demilitarized “will not happen.” Francesca Albanese is the UN Human Rights Council’s “special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967”—an independent expert rather than UN staff. On September 7, Albanese said the remains of the dead should be recovered and identified before anything is crushed.
What’s in the rubble?
Music
‘Who’s That’
The Philadelphia-based The War on Drugs has a new track on the soundtrack for EA Sports FC 27, the football video game …
