This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day. Here are the latest developments:

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  Donald Trump traveled to Bullhead City, Arizona and Kalispell, Montana for campaign rallies today. In Arizona, Trump urged voters to elect Andy Biggs, a GOP congressman who’s running to unseat the state’s Democratic governor, Katie Hobbs. In Montana, Trump rallied for Kurt Alme, a Republican and the former US attorney for Montana, who is facing Alani Bankhead, a Democrat and a retired air force officer, as well as Seth Bodnar, an independent and US army veteran former president of the University of Montana.

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  The president traveled to campaign rallies today onboard the new Air Force One, a luxury Boeing 747-8 aircraft gifted by the Qatari government. Speaking about the plane during his appearance in Arizona, Trump said, “When you’re giving gifts, you take them, right?”

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  Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he feels personally betrayed by Donald Trump after it emerged that Ukraine’s military has had its access to Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite squeezed, raising doubts about long-term US support for Kyiv. The Ukrainian president, on a visit to London, accused Trump of picking the other side after more than four years of war, risking a breakdown in relations already strained by the US agreeing to buy diesel from Moscow.

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  The top Super Pac for Senate Democrats will pour more than $7m into two marquee races this cycle:Michigan and Maine. The Senate Majority Pac has reserved $3.7m for its campaign in Michigan, to support Democratic Senate nominee Dr Abdul El-Sayed. The group is also investing $3m in Maine, to boost Democrat Troy Jackson’s chances against Susan Collins.

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  Federal authorities investigating the Minnesota representative Ilhan Omar seized the Democratic lawmaker’s phone and have issued more than a dozen grand jury subpoenas, including to some of her relatives, according to a person briefed on the inquiry.

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  The justice department has threatened California over alleged noncitizen voters. In a letter addressed to the California secretary of state, Shirley Weber, on Tuesday, the acting deputy attorney general, Trent McCotter, said the justice department gave Los Angeles county officials a “password-protected thumb drive” with names of people that the federal government “believes are likely noncitizens”.

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  US price increases reached an annual rate of 3.7% in September, according to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, up from 3.4% in August. This final inflation report before the pivotal midterm elections comes amid polls showing widespread dissatisfaction with the Trump administration over the cost of living.

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  A record number of Georgians cast ballots in the first day of early voting this midterm cycle. According to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, there were 188,600 votes cast on Tuesday – an increase of more than 53,000 voters over the 2022 midterm election, which saw 134,962 early in-person votes.

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  Kamala Harris, the former vice-president and 2024 presidential nominee, will travel across the country in support of several Democrats facing competitive races in the final two weeks ahead of the November midterms, according to her office. During a podcast appearance yesterday, Harris said ‘I haven’t decided’ about a 2028 presidential run.

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Katie Zacharia, the new White House press secretary, told the New York Times on Wednesday that she misheard reporters who asked her on Tuesday where she had passed the bar exam.

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When reporters asked Zacharia, as she left the White House with Donald Trump on Tuesday, where she had passed the bar exam, since she has described herself as a lawyer, she replied, oddly: “I moved to China”.

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In a brief phone interview with the Times, she said: “I assumed the question was, ‘Where were you after law school?’

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“That’s all I could hear over the sound of Marine One,” she said, of the helicopter that was about to bring her and the president to the airport for his flight to Alaska. “And, wanting to respect protocol, the distance behind the president, kept me from moving closer to hear the question.”

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According to the Times, she added that when she first began appearing on television as a pro-Trump commentator, the president of Pepperdine law school, where she obtained her law degree in 2011, warned her not to call herself “attorney” or “esquire,” but said that using the term “lawyer” was allowed.

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That answer suggests that Zacharia simply did not pass the bar exam in any US state, before or after moving to China to work in a Chinese law firm.

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The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday night that Zacharia sat for the California bar exam after graduating from law school at Pepperdine in 2011, but failed to pass, according to a source it did not name.

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Speaking to reporters in Arizona on Wednesday, Donald Trump was asked about the allegation that Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s relatives in Egypt once supported the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist opposition movement.

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The president responded by lying that El-Sayed had called himself “a member of the Muslim Brotherhood”.

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“Abdul, or as I call him, Mohammed El-Sayed, he’s a member of the Muslim Brotherhood,” Trump said in a false statement posted on social media by the White House. “He said that years ago, he was a proud member,” the president continued, also falsely. “And you can’t have a member of the Muslim Brotherhood in Congress, being on one of our security committees.”

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Despite Trump’s blatant lie, there is no evidence that El-Sayed is or ever has been a member of the group. The allegation he was being asked to respond to, which has become a centerpiece of the Republican campaign against El-Sayed, is that his mother and members of her family in Egypt might have once had sympathy for the group, based on three tweets posted in 2012 and 2013 by the candidate’s half-sister, Eman Abdelhadi, in response to political developments in Egypt after the revolution there.

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The social media posts from El-Sayed’s half-sister were reported this week by the Washington Free Beacon, a partisan, rightwing news site funded by a major Republican donor. The rightwing site was invited to accompany Trump on his trip to Arizona on Wednesday by the White House.

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On 24 June 2012, the day that a former Muslim Brotherhood leader, Mohamed Morsi, was elected Egypt’s president, with the support of secular pro-democracy activists who celebrated in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, Abdelhadi posted criticism of the Islamist group while saying that her family had supported it during its long years of opposition to the ousted dictator Hosni Mubarak.

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The same day, as secular supporters of the revolution that deposed Mubarak expressed relief that Morsi had defeated a military-backed candidate, Abdelhadi also posted: “Had an amazing talk with my mom about her activism in the Muslim Brotherhood during the early 70s while she was in college.”

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On 3 July 2013, when Morsi was deposed in a military coup by Gen Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, starting a bloody crackdown on Islamists and secular activists that lasts to this day, El-Sayed’s half-sister posted that she was praying for family members in Egypt who supported the Muslim Brotherhood.

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El-Sayed, who was raised by his father and stepmother – and grandparents – told NBC News on Wednesday that his half-sister’s tweets did not contradict his repeated statement that he has no ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. “I wasn’t raised by my mother,” El-Sayed said, adding that he has never talked to her about her days as a student activist in Egypt a decade before his birth in the US.

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Kamala Harris said she has not decided whether she will run for president in 2028, the former vice-president told Keke Palmer during an interview on the actor’s podcast Tuesday.

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At the end of the interview – which covered the midterm elections, the Trump administration and Black voters – Palmer asked whether Harris was considering a 2028 presidential run.

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“I haven’t decided. I haven’t decided yet. I will, I promise,” Harris said.

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Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said he feels personally betrayed by Donald Trump after it emerged that Ukraine’s military has had its access to Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite squeezed, raising doubts about long-term US support for Kyiv.

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The Ukrainian president, on a visit to London, accused Trump of picking the other side after more than four years of war, risking a breakdown in relations already strained by the US agreeing to buy diesel from Moscow.

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Ahead of a meeting with the UK prime minister, Andy Burnham, in 10 Downing Street, Zelenskyy appeared in a TV interview where he was asked whether the sudden restriction of Starlink was deliberate and if he felt betrayed by Trump.

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“Really, yes … but it’s a little bit more complicated ⁠than just my emotions or my feelings,” the Ukrainian president replied, adding: “It’s a pity that we are losing, we are losing a strong partner.”

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Here’s the full story from my colleagues Dan Sabbagh, Jessica ElgotandAndrew Roth:

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Speaking in Arizona, Donald Trump praised Republican gubernatorial Andy Biggs before repeating a common refrain of his campaign talk points, including denying the results of past elections.

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“I’ve known Andy Biggs from the time I started in politics, which wasn’t that long ago,” he said.

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He also vaguely alleged that broken voting machines in the state swayed a past election in favor of Democrats. Trump was perhaps speaking about Republican candidate Kari Lake’s loss to current governor Katie Hobbs in 2022.

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After losing to Hobbs, Lake formally challenged her loss, asking a court to throw out certified election results from the state’s most populous county and either declare her the winner or rerun the governor’s election in that county.

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Arizona has long been a focus of Trump’s. As my colleague Mary Jo Pitzl reported this summer, in 2020 “Republican officials in Maricopa county – Arizona’s largest county and one of the most competitive election battlegrounds in the country – resisted Trump’s efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the state, enduring threats, harassment and enormous pressure from the defeated president.”

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Following Katie Zacharia’s debut press briefing on Tuesday, we’ve been spending more time digging into her background.

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Zacharia was relatively unknown when Trump announced her selection to be his next press secretary last week, after the departure of Karoline Leavitt earlier this year. In the days since, several outlets have uncovered a series of since-deleted social media posts that promote debunked or baseless conspiracies.

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In a series of now-scrubbed posts on X, reviewed by the Guardian, Zacharia fawned over the Tesla and Space X founder, Elon Musk.

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On 22 May 2022, the new press secretary described Musk, a tech billionaire and Trump ally, as “based”. She went on to explain the term was applied “when you want to recognize someone for being themselves” and “courageous and unique or not caring what others think”.

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In another post from the same year, Zacharia also responded to one user sharing a widely circulated picture of Musk and Ghislaine Maxwell, the co-conspirator of the late sex-offender Jeffrey Epstein, at the Vanity Fair Oscar party in 2014, where Zacharia wrote “oh please, he already responded to this post. #oldnews”.

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Musk has not been charged with any wrongdoing in connection with Epstein, and has denied knowing Maxwell, claiming the photo which pictures her standing close to him is because she “photobombed” him.

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In other now-deleted posts, also from the same period, Zacharia directed various complimentary messages at Musk. “#IstandwithElon,” she wrote in one. In another she praised him for renouncing his support for the Democratic party and saying he would now support Republicans. “Smartest and richest man in the world right here is saying out loud what everyone else is thinking,” Zacharia wrote.

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However, last year Zacharia questioned whether Musk could have been trusted “from the beginning” while appearing as a guest on conservative commentator Buck Sexton’s podcast.

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“He’s heavily invested in China. A lot of people were questioning his allegiance to begin with. Where is his allegiance completely?” she asked on the show. In late 2025, Musk and Trump had a public falling out of the president’s sweeping domestic policy legislation. They have since reconciled and Musk, according to the New York Times, is spending record sums to help Republicans retain control of the midterm elections this cycle.

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The Bulwark previously reported on Zacharia’s since-deleted posts where she called on the administration to “suspend habeas corpus” – the constitutional right to challenge detention before a judge.

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Meanwhile, CNN also found now-deleted social media posts where Zacharia wrote and re-shared comments that accused prominent political figures and Hollywood elites of pedophilia. This includes longtime Democratic operative John Podesta – who was the notable target of the debunked Pizzagate conspiracy – which alleged that several prominent Democrats were part of a child sex-trafficking ring.

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  The top Super Pac for Senate Democrats will pour more than $7m into two marquee races this cycle:Michigan and Maine. The Senate Majority Pac has reserved $3.7m for its campaign in Michigan, to support the Democratic nominee in the Senate race, Dr Abdul El-Sayed, against the Trump-backed Republican, Mike Rogers. The group is also investing $3m in Maine, to boost Democrat Troy Jackson’s chances against Susan Collins. Meanwhile, Trump will travel to Bullhead City, Arizona, for a midterms rally, and will continue his campaigning blitz in Kalispell, Montana, later today.

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  The justice department has threatened California over alleged noncitizen voters. In a letter addressed to the California secretary of state, Shirley Weber, on Tuesday, the acting deputy attorney general, Trent McCotter, said the justice department gave Los Angeles county officials a “password-protected thumb drive” with names of people that the federal government “believes are likely noncitizens”. The justice department’s latest threat comes as the Trump administration seeks evidence to support unverified claims of voter fraud ahead of next month’s midterm elections.

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  US price increases reached an annual rate of 3.7% in September, according to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, up from 3.4% in August. This final inflation report before the pivotal midterm elections comes amid polls showing widespread dissatisfaction with the Trump administration over the cost of living. Overall, consumer prices went up 0.6% from August. Core inflation, which strips out volatile energy and food prices, also ticked up by 0.3% in September, to 2.6% annually.

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  A record number of Georgians cast ballots in the first day of early voting this midterm cycle. According to the Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, there were 188,600 votes cast on Tuesday – an increase of more than 53,000 voters over the 2022 midterm election, which saw 134,962 early in-person votes.

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  Kamala Harris, the former vice-president and 2024 presidential nominee, will travel across the country in support of several Democrats facing competitive races in the final two weeks ahead of the November midterms, according to her office. Harris will kick off her campaigning sprint on 21 October, when she heads to Nevada, before traveling to New Hampshire and Wisconsin, and then capping her sprint off in Georgia with a campaign event with Senator Jon Ossoff at the end of the month.

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The top Super Pac for Senate Democrats will pour more than $7m into two marquee races this cycle: Michigan and Maine.

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The Senate Majority Pac has reserved $3.7m for its campaign in Michigan, to support the Democratic nominee , Dr Abdul El-Sayed, against the Trump-backed Republican, Mike Rogers. The group is also investing $3m in Maine, to boost Democrat Troy Jackson’s chances against Susan Collins – the five-term moderate GOP incumbent, who Democrats see as increasingly vulnerable in a cycle where anti-Trump sentiment has colored much of the election.

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This comes after reports that the Senate Majority Pac has also paused ad spending in North Carolina and Georgia. Semafor was first to report on the updated spend.

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In leaked audio obtained by Rolling Stone, Ken Paxton – the Republican nominee for US Senate in Texas – said that Greg Abbott – the incumbent GOP governor – was “struggling” in his re-election bid against Democratic state legislator Gina Hinojosa.

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“Yes, Abbott is struggling, but he has a lot of money. [Hinojosa] has none,” Paxton told attenders at a private donor event in Washington DC, according to Rolling Stone. Paxton said that even though Hinojosa has “no name ID” the race is “still close”.

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He added: “[Abbott] didn’t have any primary, like I did, that was brutal with all the negative ads.”

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This is the latest audio leak from the 24 September event, where Paxton appears to have justified his extremely competitive race, in which he’s trailing in the polls against his Democratic opponent, James Talarico.

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Earlier this month, Axios reported Paxton admitted privately that rising fuel prices as a result of Donald Trump’s Iran war were hurting Republicans ahead of the midterms, in a recording from the same fundraiser.

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The justice department has threatened California over alleged noncitizen voters.

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In a letter addressed to the California secretary of state, Shirley Weber, on Tuesday, the acting deputy attorney general, Trent McCotter, said the justice department gave Los Angeles county officials a “password-protected thumb drive” with names of people that the federal government “believes are likely noncitizens”, Reuters first reported.

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The letter, which gives state officials 48 hours to review the list, demands California withhold mail-in ballots from the listed people until their citizenship is confirmed, adding that ballots mailed back should be “segregated” and that those already returned should not be counted “until citizenship has been determined”.

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The justice department added that if California officials do not comply, it “will have no choice but to seek emergency relief”.

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“Allowing noncitizens to vote cancels citizen votes,” McCotter wrote in the letter.

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The justice department’s latest threat comes as the Trump administration seeks evidence to support unverified claims of voter fraud ahead of next month’s midterm elections.

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Kamala Harris, the former vice-president and 2024 presidential nominee, will travel across the country in support of several Democrats facing competitive races in the final two weeks ahead of the November midterms, according to her office.

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Harris will kick off her campaigning sprint on 21 October, when she heads to Nevada to campaign with Democratic gubernatorial candidate Aaron Ford. She’ll then spend the rest of the week making stops in Mississippi to stump with Scott Colom, the Democratic nominee facing an uphill battle in the US Senate race; New Hampshire to campaign with congressman Chris Pappas – who is vying for the open Senate seat in the state; and Wisconsin to drum support for gubernatorial candidate David Crowley.

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Harris will cap off her tour with a campaign event with Senator Jon Ossoff in Georgia at the end of the month.

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A record number of Georgians cast ballots in the first day of early voting this midterm cycle.

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According to the Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, there were 188,600 votes cast on Tuesday – an increase of more than 53,000 voters over the 2022 midterm election, which saw 134,962 early in-person votes.

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“This record-breaking turnout proves that voters have confidence in the integrity of our elections,” said Raffensperger.

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US price increases reached an annual rate of 3.7% in September, according to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, up from 3.4% in August.

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This final inflation report before the pivotal midterm elections comes amid polls showing widespread dissatisfaction with the Trump administration over the cost of living.

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Price increases are the highest they have been since the annual inflation rate reached a three-year peak of 4.2% in May. Gasoline accounted for over half of overall price increases, up 34% from last year. Fuel oil, which is used to heat homes, increased by 74% from last year, a worrying sign for households heading into the winter. Air travel, which many Americans rely on during the holidays, also increased by 22.4%.

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Overall, consumer prices went up 0.6% from August. Core inflation, which strips out volatile energy and food prices, also ticked up by 0.3% in September to 2.6% annually.

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Price increases this year have largely driven by the US-Israel war with Iran, which has caused energy prices to soar. Average gas prices remain over a dollar per gallon more than last year, according to data from AAA. Meanwhile diesel, which powers domestic supply chains, reached a record-high last month.

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Here’s the full report:

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A federal judge ordered the White House on Tuesday to continue allowing journalists from CNN, MS Now and Politico to access the building as the media coalition’s lawsuit against the Trump administration plays out.

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Timothy Kelly, a district court judge, had on 24 September granted a 14-day reprieve for the news organizations, which six days earlier had been banned by the president in an extraordinary move from entering the White House grounds “as a result of their constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS”.

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“Defendants (except for President Trump) and their agents, representatives, and all persons or entities acting in concert with them, shall not execute, implement, or enforce the September 18, 2026, decision to revoke the White House ‘hard pass’ press credentials held by employees of CNN, MS NOW, and POLITICO, thereby maintaining the status quo since the Court’s entry of a temporary restraining order on September 24, 2026,” the judge wrote in granting a preliminary injunction requested by the plaintiffs.

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The organizations filed a lawsuit on 21 September seeking to overturn the ban as a violation of their rights under the US constitution. But that temporary restraining order expired on Tuesday, bringing the media companies into court late last week to ask for a preliminary injunction that would lift the ban during the duration of the lawsuit, which could take months.

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During arguments at the E Barrett Prettyman Federal Courthouse in Washington, Kelly seemed inclined to lift the ban indefinitely, telling a lawyer for the federal government that his side had “a notice problem” that was “probably the biggest hurdle” they had to overcome.

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The family of a British man who was killed by a tiger at a wildlife park have spoken of their “severe distress” after Donald Trump shared a video of the incident on social media.

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The president posted footage of William Chapman, 23, being fatally attacked by a tiger at the Yorkshire Wildlife Park to 13m followers on his Truth Social platform on Tuesday evening.

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Trump accompanied the short clip – which showed the animal biting and clawing Chapman as he sat in the enclosure, but not him being killed – with the signed message: “Don’t ever mess with nature!”

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On Wednesday morning Trump followed this up with another post – this time an AI-generated video of him grappling with a tiger, which appears to mimic the original.

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The clip, which is accompanied by the song ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’, features the president copying the pointing gesture made by Chapman and ends with him hugging the animal.

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Chapman’s family said in a statement that “deeply offensive media content is causing them severe distress”.

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They also posted a tribute describing him as a “bright, warm and engaging young man” and questioning what part his “significant mental illness over a number of years” and prescribed strong medication played in the incident.

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Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog.

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Donald Trump will attend campaign rallies in Arizona and Montana later today, having spent the past 24 hours in Alaska – a sign of his party’s recent polling woes.

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Conservative Alaska is one of several states where the Democrats have a chance of flipping a Senate seat amid voter dissatisfaction with the cost of living and the Iran war.

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Polling has shown Democratic candidate Mary Peltola tied ⁠or slightly ahead of incumbent Republican senator Dan ⁠Sullivan in a state the president carried by 14 percentage points in 2024.

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Here, as in much of the United States, the president’s approval rating is flopping, hit by rising diesel and gasoline prices and a conflict in the Middle East that has proven deeply unpopular with voters.

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Opening for Trump, Sullivan acknowledged that Alaskans face “challenges” when it comes to energy costs. But “the conflict in the Middle East is temporary”, he said. “The true forever war is the national Democrats’ war against Alaska oil and gas ⁠and our jobs.”

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The president has taken to campaigning in conservative-leaning ​parts of competitive states, rather than in more politically diverse areas with more votes potentially up for grabs.

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At one point, Trump pardoned two local repair shop owners who were convicted of violating the federal Clean Air Act for removing pollution controls on diesel engines.

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He also encouraged Republicans to vote by mail – a process he has repeatedly sought to curtail and discredit. Trump will spend Wednesday campaigning in Arizona and Montana.

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In other developments:

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  In Alaska, Trump repeated his false claim that he had to start his war on Iran because “they were two weeks away from having a nuclear weapon”. In fact, US intelligence agencies reported to Congress in 2025 that Iran had suspended its pursuit of nuclear weapons in 2003. Despite that assessment, in the summer of 2025, Trump ordered the US bombing of Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities which he later claimed had “obliterated” the country’s nuclear program. Eight months after that, he launched a full-scale war on Iran, justified, he now says, by Iran being just weeks away from getting the bomb.

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  Onboard Air Force One on his way to Alaska for a campaign rally, the president of the United States posted video of a British man who was fatally mauled by a tiger last week on his social media platform with the mocking caption: “Don’t ever mess with nature!”

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  The new White House press secretary, Katie Zacharia, passed on an opportunity to set the record straight on whether she is licensed to practice law anywhere in the United States. Asked “Where did you pass the bar exam?” Zacharia just said: “I moved to China.”

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Key events