The White House Beat: President Trump yesterday signed an executive order widening economic sanctions against North Korea, targeting major North Korean industries, international banks, and shipping companies. Despite threating to destroy North Korea, Trump is now only tightening an economic tourniquet to get the North to stop its missile and nuclear development programs.

“North Korea’s nuclear weapons and nuclear development is a grave threat to peace and security in our world, and it is unacceptable that others financially support this criminal, rogue regime,” the President said.

China also announced that its central bank and subsidiaries will no longer do business with North Korea.

In a Relationship: Facebook, which was created at Harvard as a way to find hot members of the opposite sex, is giving investigators 3,000 ads that may have been placed by Russian sources to influence the 2016 election.

Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg appeared on Facebook Live to say he does not want anyone “to use our tools to undermine democracy.”

After initially stonewalling congressional investigators, Facebook admitted on Sept. 6 that Russian operatives had bought ads on Facebook during the campaign. Some of them trashed Hillary Clinton and praised Donald Trump. There were at least 470 Facebook accounts linked to Russia.

Zuckerberg said, “We are looking into foreign actors, including additional Russian groups and other former Soviet states.”

The Russia Thing: Former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer is known as a copious note taker who filled notebooks while working the press office for the Republican National Committee and President Trump. Now those notes may be of interest to investigators looking at the Russia connection, according to several news outlets.

While we’re on Spicer, he said on ABC’s “Good Morning America” that he never knowingly lied while he was press secretary and Trump never asked him to. About his declaration that the inauguration crowd was the largest ever he said, “I could’ve probably had more facts at hand and been more articulate.”

One fact he could have had on hand; it was not the largest inaugural audience ever.

Spicer is trying to rehabilitate his image, but he appears to have been rejected as a political commentator by all the major networks because is credibility is shattered. He’s getting testy. This week he replied to a text from a reporter with, “Please refrain from sending me unsolicited texts and emails Should you not do so I will contact the appropriate legal authorities to address your harassment.”

Disaster Bounce: President Trump’s approval ratings are up because of the government’s handling of hurricane disasters in Texas and Florida. CNN gives him a 40 percent approval rating, with 55 percent disapproval.

Brain Damage: Researchers have found that Aaron Hernandez, the former New England Patriot convicted of murder who killed himself in prison, had advanced chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the deteriorating brain condition caused by repeated blows to the head. His family donated his brain for research.

Hernandez, who died at 27, was found to have the worst case researchers have found in anyone his age. The doctor who examined his brain said Hernandez had stage 3 CTE, which causes cognitive impairment and trouble planning and organizing.

The Hernandez family is suing the NFL on behalf of his daughter, claiming the league knew about the dangers of repeated concussions and didn’t do enough to prevent them.

Call a Taxi: The city of London announced it is revoking Uber’s license to operate citing safety reasons.

The Obit Page: Liliane Bettencourt, the billionaire French heiress to the L’Oréal cosmetics fortune has died outside Paris at age 94.

A lifelong socialite, Bettencourt was the only child of Eugène Schueller,

a Nazi sympathizer who acquired property seized from Jews in Germany. He was a chemist who invented a hair dye, founding a business that grew after his death to acquire Lancôme, Maybelline, Helena Rubinstein, and Giorgio Armani. It now employs more than 77,000 people in 130 countries.

Liliane Schueller married André Bettencourt, who began the war as an anti-Semitic propagandist and ended it as a hero of the resistance.

Bettencourt lived a lavish life with homes and yachts in in the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, and the Seychelles decorated with art by Monet, Matisse, Picasso and Mondrian.

She was a generous philanthropist, but her later years were marked by a scandal in which she took up with a man 25 years younger who bilked her for $1.4 billion.

War of Words: North Korean leader Kim Jong-un yesterday, reacting to President Trump’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly, called Trump a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard”

A dotard is a person who’s becoming senile. That’s the thing about Kim Jong-un. He makes you stop and think.

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