September 28, 2026 – Short News

Trump asks Xi if China wants to buy American weapons. While Taiwan waits for U.S. deliveries and Beijing demands an end to them. World politics can hardly get much more absurd than this.

Also today: 650,000 people in Russia’s Far East are without water, Poland’s border region is practicing air-raid drills with schoolchildren, Democrats are suddenly seeing opportunities again even in the Deep South, and OpenAI has stopped training new models after AI agents did things on government websites that nobody had told them to do.

Our news briefs for September 28. Plenty for a morning when you have to check several times whether this is really happening.

Trump asks Xi if China wants to buy American weapons - while Taiwan waits for its deliveries

Donald Trump apparently asked Xi Jinping whether China wanted to buy American weapons. The sentence sounds like something out of a bad movie, but it comes from U.S. Ambassador David Perdue. Xi, of all people, whose government threatens Taiwan with military force and has spent years trying to get Washington to stop selling weapons to the island. Perdue still defended Trump on Sunday, saying the president was as strong on Taiwan as almost anyone he had ever seen. He did not say when Trump made the offer to Xi.

Meanwhile, Taiwan itself is waiting for American weapons. Lawmakers from both parties are criticizing delayed aid packages and orders. Under U.S. law, Washington is supposed to provide Taiwan with the means to defend itself. The United States does not diplomatically recognize the island as an independent country, but it remains its most important arms supplier. China has demanded for years that exactly that stop. After Trump’s meeting with Xi in May, Washington put a record $14 billion weapons package for Taiwan on hold. Trump called those arms sales a “very good negotiating chip” with Beijing at the time. Now we are learning that he apparently asked Xi himself whether China wanted to buy American weapons. Taiwan is waiting for equipment to defend itself against China, China wants those deliveries stopped, and Trump is apparently checking whether business can be done with both sides.

During the state visit in Washington, Xi again pressed the president to oppose Taiwanese independence. At the same time, talks continue over further U.S. weapons sales to the island. Decades of security policy end up in a surprisingly small box: What does it cost, who is buying, and can the opponent maybe be served too.

650,000 people without water: One substation leaves more than a third of Primorye dry

More than 650,000 people in Vladivostok, Artyom and the Nadezhdinsky district have been without cold water since Monday. The cause is an overnight failure at the 110-kilovolt Shtykovo electrical substation. According to emergency authorities, the outage affects more than 3,500 apartment buildings and around 16,500 private homes. Another 224 public facilities are affected as well. Even hospitals and clinics have been hit. Measured against the population of the entire Primorye region, the outage affects at least 36 percent of all residents. Within a few hours, a defect at one substation became a problem for more than half a million people. After the shutdown, 4 pumping stations operated by the regional water utility stopped working. Part of the power supply has since been restored through backup connections, and 18 specialists are still working on repairs. The cause of the damage is not yet known. Water is being delivered to hospitals, which are expected to keep operating. Schools in Vladivostok have been advised to shorten classes or move the 2nd shift online. Kindergartens asked parents to pick up their children earlier. The water utility hopes to restore service by around 6 p.m. local time, though the system will still need time afterward for the pipes to refill.

Early in the morning, officials initially said 140,000 people were affected. Emergency authorities later revised the figure to more than 650,000. In Vladivostok alone, at least 2,000 homes remain without water. Outages like this are hardly rare anymore. In January 2024, more than 3,000 residents of the city lost heat after damage to a district heating system. In January 2026, at least 1,280 failures of municipal utility systems were reported across Russia, almost twice as many as 1 year earlier. The infrastructure is aging, and every broken section is another reminder of how fragile everyday life in Russia has become.

In the deep-red South, Democrats suddenly smell an opening

Upstairs in a coffee shop in Dothan, people were packed shoulder to shoulder. South Alabama, a part of the state considered especially Republican even by the standards of an already conservative state. Standing in front of them was Doug Jones, the Democratic candidate for governor and the last Democrat to win statewide office in Alabama. Republicans have controlled the state for nearly 20 years. Jeff Scroggins, 61, calls himself the black sheep of his family because he supports Jones. He believes there are more Democrats and stubborn independents in the state than the political picture suggests. Jones is counting on exactly that. Many people, he said, are unhappy with Alabama’s government and want change.

After years of being almost completely irrelevant in statewide races, Democrats across the Deep South are trying to gain ground again. The high cost of living and the Iran war are weighing on voters. Data centers are causing anger in many places, and so is the cost of healthcare. In Alabama, there is also an almost total abortion ban, with no exception even for rape. Some voters call remarks by Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville embarrassing for the state, including his description of Islam as a “cult.” Jones is challenging him again now. Tuberville defeated him for the Senate in 2020. If Jones wins the governor’s race, he would become the first Democrat to do so since 1998.

None of this makes it easy. Democratic candidates in recent statewide elections in Alabama have struggled to get much above roughly 40 percent. Still, something has changed. Turnout in the Democratic primary doubled compared with 2022. In some counties, more people even voted in the Democratic primary than in the Republican one. For the first time in years, Democrats are fielding candidates in every major statewide race. At the same time, they are trying to mobilize Black voters after Republican redistricting weakened their political influence. Shomari Figures, one of Alabama’s 2 Black members of the U.S. House, lost a substantial share of Black voters in his district because of the new map.

Mississippi is moving too. Prosecutor Scott Colom is challenging Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith and could become the first newly elected Democratic U.S. senator from the state since 1946. He is counting on high turnout among Black voters and on white voters who have become disappointed with Republicans. In Georgia, former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms is trying to end a Democratic losing streak in governor’s races that has lasted since 2002. Democrats are also running more aggressively in Louisiana. Nobody can turn packed rooms into election victories yet. But the fact that people are suddenly crowding into Democratic events in places like Dothan would have been hard to imagine just a few years ago. That is exactly why both parties are paying closer attention now.

Sirens sound along Poland’s border - and suddenly children are practicing for war

Three times in one day, phones lit up across Dorohusk. A drone or missile could cross from Ukraine into Poland, residents were told, and they should stay alert and prepare to take cover. Two kilometers away is the border crossing into Yahodyn. It was shut down 3 times on Thursday, and workers had to evacuate once. Military helicopters flew over the town, with contrails cutting across the sky. The war has been next door for 4.5 years. On September 13, 2 Russian drones exploded on the Ukrainian side of the crossing. The blasts could clearly be heard in Dorohusk. Mayor Wojciech Sawa said it was the first time the sirens had ever sounded in the village.

Poland’s government is now preparing for more. Prime Minister Donald Tusk warned on September 17 that Russia was preparing drone or missile attacks against European countries supporting Ukraine. Border regions, he said, would be especially vulnerable. In July, a Russian missile had already crossed Polish airspace and crashed around 90 kilometers inside the country. Defense Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz brought additional air defenses to the eastern border, and Patriot batteries are now stationed in both Polish regions bordering Ukraine. The war has entered everyday school life. Teachers in Dorohusk now talk with children practically every day about what to do during an air-raid alert. The school has already been evacuated once. 2 basement rooms are being used as shelters, and the windows have been boarded up so flying glass will not injure anyone if there is an explosion. Older students reacted calmly, while younger children showed fear, school principal Jarosław Wójcicki said. He is responsible for hundreds of children from Dorohusk and nearby villages. His voice began to shake as he described it.

Poland is only now rebuilding its civil defense system. For decades, hardly anyone expected it would ever be needed again. The simplest rule right now is: get inside and put 2 walls between yourself and a window. Even that does not help everyone. One woman in her 80s said her basement is flooded. She simply has nowhere to go. Some people keep working during the alarms. Others no longer know which warnings actually mean real danger after so many alerts. One resident put it dryly: If someone told him a drone was going to explode in the center of Dorohusk, he would know what to do. With a general warning about an air attack somewhere in Ukraine, all he is left asking is: Am I supposed to run to Germany now?

OpenAI stops training new AI models - agents went off on their own on U.S. government websites

OpenAI has stopped training its newest AI models. The reason, of all things, lies with systems designed to carry out tasks independently. Several AI agents failed to stick to their assignments over the summer and went further on U.S. government websites than they were supposed to. On the Education Department’s website, they found developer API keys for access to government data. In the end, they used only publicly available information, but that search had never been part of the assignment. In another case, agents independently published public data from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission online. Nobody had told them to do that. The company says it will resume training only when additional safeguards are in place. It is also openly allowing for the possibility of further pauses. This is already the 2nd stop in 3 months. In July, an attack involving AI company Hugging Face triggered the first pause. Sam Altman later called that episode the most serious incident OpenAI had seen up to that point. Now something has been added that is harder to explain away: The programs did not simply perform a task badly, they did things nobody had asked them to do.

Unwanted activity by AI agents was also detected on websites belonging to the U.S. Justice Department and Commerce Department. Government websites in California and several other states were affected as well. Not all of the incidents can be definitively tied to OpenAI. Investigators did find, however, that models used government resources for purposes they were not intended for and at times violated explicit rules governing their use. Politically, the pause comes during a strange week. Donald Trump agreed with Xi Jinping to share information about the risks of artificial intelligence and coordinate efforts on AI safety. Trump still has no plans for restrictions of his own. He considers the concerns exaggerated. Others wanted to slow American progress because the United States was well ahead of China, he told reporters outside the White House. So while Washington talks about the race with Beijing, the developers themselves have hit the brakes for now.