The top story this morning in major newspapers across the United States:

Clearly, President Trump's decision to cancel the meeting with North Korea was this morning's important national story.

The top story in this morning's Wheeling Intelligencer was:

Tumult Continues in Bethesda

Here's the lede:

The village voted Thursday to end its K-9 program and donate its police dog to the Belmont County Sheriff’s Office on the same night that the board accepted the resignations of two more police officers.

Okay, the Wheeling Intelligencer is not a national newspaper and like other city papers its size, its emphasis is often on local stories. However, Bethesda is 23 miles from Wheeling (it's not even in West Virginia) and its population is 1,246. Despite that, the village's problems with its small police force continues to be top-of-the-front-page news for the Wheeling newspapers often displacing national or West Virginia stories of significance. (See here and here for instance.)

The cancellation of talks with North Korea did make it into the morning paper. On page 7 is an edited version* of an AP story of which about 30% of the original remains. The last half of the AP story, which contained criticism of the president's action, was dropped as was the response from North Korea. Selective sentences were also edited and I could find no other paper with the following bold portions edited out of the story:

The senior U.S. official said the North violated a pledge to allow international inspectors to monitor the supposed implosion of the site Thursday. International journalists were present, but the U.S. government can’t verify the site’s destruction. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid overshadowing Trump’s comments Thursday.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, a staunch Kim ally, said the North Korean leader had in fact done “everything that he had promised in advance, even blowing up the tunnels and shafts” of his country’s nuclear testing site. Putin said of Trump’s announcement, “In Russia we took this news with regret.”

The AP story appears to have been edited locally to eliminate any possible criticism of the president (even from his friend Putin). Supporting this edited AP story would be this morning's lead editorial, "Refusing to Play by Kim's Rules." The editorial provides no new insights nor does it even explain which of Kim's "rules" that Trump refuses to play by.

By the way, if you add the number of words found in the editorial to those found in the edited Trump story, the total is still less than half of the number of words found in the Bethesda story. On second thought, given how poorly the Trump/North Korea story is handled by the Intelligencer, maybe we are better off just reading about the fate of police dogs and deputies in Bethesda, Ohio (population 1,246).

*Note: no link available -- the story in the morning paper is different from the story online.

Afternoon Update - the afternoon Wheeling News-Register moved the Bethesda police dogs to the bottom of the front page while carrying an AP story on page 13 that "Summit Talk Turns Warmer; Trump Says 'Talking To Them Now'." There was no new editorial explaining all of this to us.