Evening Brief, Tuesday 22 September

Donald Trump escalated his fight with the White House press corps by revoking credentials for CNN, MSNOW and Politico, then watched the television pool answer with a rare boycott. ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox News refused to film designated presidential events after CNN was barred from taking its scheduled pool rotation, leaving Monday’s South Lawn helipad ceremony without television audio and turning the whirr of Marine One into the day’s most eloquent sound.

The excluded outlets sued in federal court, arguing that the administration punished viewpoint and denied due process. Judge Timothy Kelly scheduled a Wednesday hearing on an emergency restraining order, a familiar venue because he previously blocked a Trump-era pass revocation during the president’s first term. The White House says the reporters can still cover events from outside the grounds, but that answer ducks the practical value of access in a presidency built for camera angles.

The administration also launched Trump TV, a continuous White House YouTube stream that loops official footage to more than 3m subscribers but drew only about 1,500 concurrent viewers at first. That makes the strategy clearer: not mass audience yet, but message control. The case will define whether the government can turn access from a public function into a loyalty test.

Donald Trump, Mette Frederiksen and Jens-Frederik Nielsen signed a trilateral security pact in New York that lets America expand military infrastructure at Narsarsuaq and Mestersvig, adding to the existing Pituffik Space Base. Washington called the deal a lasting security arrangement; Denmark and Greenland stressed that sovereignty and self-determination remain intact, which is another way of saying that all three leaders wanted the same signature to mean slightly different things.

The Arctic pact landed during a crowded UN General Assembly, where António Guterres used his final opening address as secretary-general to press for binding oversight of artificial intelligence, climate liabilities and institutional reform. The UN is short of money and patience, yet it remains the room where leaders go when every bilateral problem starts bumping into every other one.

Another track ran through the Gulf. Iran said it could reopen the Strait of Hormuz within days if America removed its naval blockade, while Gulf leaders met Donald Trump to urge restraint after months of strikes, closures and interrupted oil and gas routes. Qatar and Pakistan kept mediating, and Saudi Arabia restarted its East-West Pipeline to bypass southern chokepoints.

The UN week has become a marketplace for security bargains, where Arctic runways, AI rules and oil lanes trade places in the same diplomatic queue.

Foreign ministers from the G7 demanded that Iran stop supplying weapons and assistance to Houthi forces, while Britain said it would provide time-limited refuelling support to Saudi aircraft defending Saudi airspace. The escalation follows Houthi advances around Mokha and strategic Red Sea islands, plus missile and drone strikes against Saudi targets. The Bab el-Mandeb route normally carries about 12% of global trade, so a local battlefield has again become a global invoice.

Saudi-led aircraft struck sites in Yemen, including Mokha and Al-Hazm, while Houthi-affiliated sources reported civilian and detainee deaths. Fighting between pro-government forces and Houthi fighters killed 154 people between Monday and Tuesday, and renewed combat has forced more than 130,000 Yemenis from their homes. Washington declined direct strikes after Saudi and Yemeni leaders asked Donald Trump for intervention, keeping bombers grounded while intelligence support continued.

Elsewhere, Israel Katz warned that Israel would evacuate Gaza City’s roughly 1m residents southward if Hamas abducted any Israeli soldier or civilian, a threat that sharpened legal alarms around forced displacement. In Ukraine, Russian strikes killed five people across Dnipropetrovsk and Mykolaiv as Volodymyr Zelensky arrived in New York seeking air defences and funding.

Castles rarely decide modern wars, but chokepoints do, and this week’s fighting shows how fast a trench line can become a shipping premium.

Germany’s Christian Democrats suffered three bruising regional defeats, and the worst came in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, where the CDU won 4.9% and fell below the 5% threshold for the first time in federal German history. The AfD won 38.2% there, reached 43.8% in Saxony-Anhalt and deepened the pressure on Friedrich Merz, who cancelled his UN trip to face his Bundestag group. A Forsa poll found 55% of respondents wanted him to step down as chancellor, which is not a gentle nudge from the electorate.

Berlin added a different headache. Die Linke won 25.7% and moved to negotiate with the Greens and SPD, while lead candidate Elif Eralp made the socialisation of large corporate housing portfolios a condition for coalition talks. The plan would target landlords with more than 3,000 units and could move 220,000 to 240,000 flats into public ownership, reviving the 2021 referendum that city leaders never fully implemented.

The victory party then gave rivals an opening when Issa Remmo, head of a family tied to organised crime, appeared at a Die Linke event in Neukölln. Party leaders said he had not been invited and was removed, but Greens demanded explanations before coalition talks, especially on organised crime and antisemitism concerns.

Friedrich Merz now faces pressure from the right and left at once: the AfD owns the protest vote in the east, while Berlin’s left has turned rent anger into negotiating power. His chancellorship begins to look less like command and more like damage control with a lectern.