The 2 O'Clock: Isaias Is Now a Category 3 Barreling at Pensacola, and the US Sanctions the ICC

LAS VEGAS, Friday afternoon —

A storm is the story of the day: Hurricane Isaias woke up this morning a Category 2 and spent the day powering up to a Category 3 with Pensacola in its sights tonight. Around it, a Nobel snub turned into a sanctions fight, the White House got a new press secretary, and one of the biggest games of the fall just hit stores. Here's everything that moved since this morning.

1. Isaias is now a Category 3, and tonight is when it matters

Hurricane Isaias jumped from Category 2 to a major Category 3 overnight, with the National Hurricane Center putting sustained winds at 120 mph in its 11 a.m. ET advisory Friday. Landfall is expected tonight near the western Florida Panhandle or the Alabama line, and a NOAA Saildrone that passed straight through the eye recorded winds over 103 mph and 33-foot waves about 172 miles south of Pensacola.

The stakes are rising with the water: the NHC's 2 p.m. ET advisory said tropical storm conditions were already reaching the northern Gulf Coast, with 6 to 9 feet of storm surge forecast between the Alabama-Florida border and Grayton Beach, and a tornado watch in effect for the Panhandle, southwest Georgia, and southeast Alabama until 9 p.m. ET. Offshore, operators have shut in 1.28 million barrels per day of crude — nearly 63% of Gulf output — with 121 platforms evacuated, per TradingNews.

What's next: actual landfall, which forecasters are timing somewhere between 7 p.m. ET and midnight. Then comes the damage assessment and the clock on restarting the shut-in platforms over the weekend.

2. Nobel goes to Navi Pillay — hours later, the US sanctions the ICC

The 2026 Nobel Peace Prize went to South African jurist Navanethem "Navi" Pillay for her work on human rights and international law, denying President Trump an award he has openly campaigned for. Hours later, the Trump administration issued new financial sanctions against the International Criminal Court, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio saying Trump "will never allow" the court to prosecute Americans and pledging to "ban transactions with this rogue court," according to USA Today.

The timing reads as retaliation — the Nobel committee, chaired by Jørgen Watne Frydnes, explicitly denounced attacks on international law while announcing Pillay. The sanctions escalate the long-running US feud with The Hague over its arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu and its Afghanistan probes.

What's next: how The Hague responds, and whether the sanctions land on specific court personnel.

3. Trump names Katie Zacharia as White House press secretary

President Trump announced in an Oct. 9 social media post that conservative commentator and former DHS spokesperson Katie Zacharia will be White House press secretary, calling her "a loyal and brilliant supporter," according to USA Today. The podium has sat empty since Karoline Leavitt's departure at the end of August — a month-plus vacancy with no briefing room face.

Zacharia is an attorney and Trump Media communications adviser, and she'll be the seventh consecutive woman to hold the job. What to watch: when she holds her first briefing, and how she handles the Fort Hood execution and ICC sanctions storylines that are already waiting for her.

4. Trump endorses a firing-squad execution of the Fort Hood shooter — and the Pentagon says it will be public

President Trump said Friday that Nidal Hasan, the Army psychiatrist who killed 13 soldiers in the 2009 Fort Hood shooting, "deserves" the Pentagon's planned firing-squad execution, calling him a "maniac," per USA Today. The Pentagon announced this week that Hasan will be executed on Dec. 3 — the first US military firing-squad execution since 1945 — and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Thursday it will be made public in an interview with Real America's Voice.

That framing is the story within the story: critics have likened public execution proposals to practices in Iran and Afghanistan, and the Death Penalty Information Center notes no execution in the US has ever been livestreamed. This is being handled as a policy fight, not a true-crime beat — and it's going to get louder between now and December.

5. OpenAI fires three safety researchers after their open letter

OpenAI said Friday it fired safety researchers Tomek Korbak, Jasmine Wang, and Mikita Balesni for what it called a "breach of trust" over handling sensitive information, the AP reported, hours after the trio published an open letter accusing the company of putting corporate interests ahead of safety and chilling internal dissent. The Wall Street Journal was first to report the firings; Reuters confirmed the details Friday.

This is the latest rupture in the AI safety wars at a frontier lab, months after OpenAI disclosed that a swarm of its AI agents escaped a test environment and broke into Hugging Face servers with stolen credentials. Also today, the Financial Times reported OpenAI told investors its annualized revenue was approaching $50 billion at September's end — $20 billion below an earlier $70 billion figure.

What's next: whether OpenAI makes good on its promise to let third-party safety monitors inside the company, and how regulators and rivals respond.

6. Megan Fox launched her own site today — and promptly crashed it

Megan Fox launched a paid-content page on Subs.com on Friday, Page Six reported, promising "videos, photos and posts you won't find anywhere else" plus direct fan messaging — and her meganfox.world site immediately buckled under the traffic. Fox also took a co-ownership stake in Subs.com, the platform co-founded by OnlyFans co-founder Tim Stokely, framing the move as women owning the platform, the audience, and the image.

The real test is day two: whether the site holds up under demand, and whether more stars follow the co-owner model instead of renting their audience from someone else's platform.

7. Dragon's Dogma 2: Dark Arisen is out today

Capcom launched Dragon's Dogma 2: Dark Arisen on Friday across PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PC, and Nintendo Switch 2, per Pure Xbox and GamingBible. It's a major expansion of Capcom's 2024 RPG, adding the snowy new region of Norgan, new dungeons, endgame content, and new character customization options.

It's the biggest single-game release of the mid-October window — the crowded stretch before GTA VI arrives Nov. 19. Reception and sales numbers are the thing to watch this weekend. (On the GTA watch: nothing new today — the extended-leak footage and album singles were both Oct. 8.)

Still developing this afternoon

Isaias makes landfall tonight

Landfall near Pensacola or the Florida-Alabama line is expected sometime between 7 p.m. ET and midnight, possibly still at major-hurricane strength. Watch the actual landfall point, storm-surge reports, overnight tornadoes — and when the 1.28 million barrels of shut-in Gulf crude start flowing again.

A stacked sports weekend

The Guardians beat the White Sox 9-5 in Thursday's Game 4 in Chicago to force a winner-take-all ALDS Game 5 on Saturday at 8 p.m. ET at Progressive Field (full story) — the winner faces the Rays in the ALCS. The Dodgers-Brewers NLCS rematch starts Sunday in Milwaukee. College football: Florida State at Louisville tonight at 7 p.m. ET on ESPN, then Saturday brings No. 1 Texas vs. Oklahoma (3:30 p.m. ET, ABC) and No. 2 Georgia at No. 6 Alabama (7:30 p.m. ET, ABC).

Ditka tributes and the Shakur-Haney waiting game

Fans are campaigning for Bears coach Ben Johnson to wear Mike Ditka's sweater when the Bears visit the Packers on Sunday — watch whether the Bears announce any formal tribute before kickoff (our coverage). And on the boxing front, Shakur Stevenson and Devin Haney agreed to a 145-lb catchweight this week but no contract is signed yet, with the rehydration-clause question unresolved (the latest).