Trump urges Middle East negotiators to 'move fast' on securing peace deal
As several negotiators congregate in Egypt today to cement a peace deal – which includes the release of the remaining Israeli hostages by Hamas, in exchange for Palestinian prisoners – Donald Trump urged expediency in a post on social media this weekend.
“I am told that the first phase should be completed this week, and I am asking everyone to MOVE FAST,” the president wrote on Truth Social. “ I will continue to monitor this Centuries old “conflict.” TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE OR, MASSIVE BLOODSHED WILL FOLLOW — SOMETHING THAT NOBODY WANTS TO SEE!”
Overnight, Israel continued its bombardment in Gaza. My colleagues report that at least 24 Palestinians have been killed in the last 24 hours. Latest figures, provided by the Gaza Health ministry, show that more than 67,000 Palestinians have been killed since the beginning on the conflict on 7 October 2023.
You can follow the latest developments coming out of Egypt on our dedicated liveblog below.
Donald Trump doesn’t have any public events scheduled today, per the White House.
However, press secretary Karoline Leavitt will hold a briefing for reporters at 1pm EST.
On Capitol Hill, the deadlock in Congress continues, with the House of Representatives out of session. Republican speaker Mike Johnson and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, a Democrat, continue to blame the other’s party for the ongoing government shutdown and an unwillingness to compromise.
Meanwhile, the Senate will hold votes at 5:30pm today, with both stopgap funding bills set to fail yet again in the upper chamber.
In 1999, Bill Clinton ascended one of the highest summits in Virginia to announce that “the last, best unprotected wild lands anywhere in our nation” would be shielded by a new rule that banned roads, drilling and other disturbances within America’s most prized forests.
But today, this site in George Washington national forest, along with other near-pristine forests across the US that amount to 58m acres, equivalent to the size of the UK, could soon see chainsaws whir and logging trucks rumble through them amid a push by Donald Trump to raze these ecosystems for timber.
The Trump administration has said it will rescind Clinton’s roadless rule, more than two decades after its introduction appeared to mark the end of the bitter battle between environmentalists and loggers over the future of America’s best remaining woodland.
The rule is “overly restrictive” and an “absurd obstacle” to development, according to Brooke Rollins, Trump’s secretary of agriculture, as she outlined its demise in June. The administration is in a hurry – an unusually short public comment period of 21 days for this rescission has just ended, following a Trump “emergency” order to swiftly fell trees across the US’s network of national forests, spanning 280 million acres.
The president has slapped tariffs on lumber imports, and the recent Republican spending bill requires more wood to come from American forests – a 78% increase in the amount of timber sold from national forests in the next nine years, an escalation that could trigger a frenzy of new cutting.
“We are freeing up our forests so we are allowed to take down trees and make a lot of money,” Trump has said. “We have massive forests. We just aren’t allowed to use them because of the environmental lunatics who stopped us.”
Yet advocates of the roadless rule argue these areas should not be viewed as mere sources of timber, pointing to their crucial ecological role in protecting and filtering the streams and rivers that provide clean drinking water to millions of Americans. The gnarled old-growth trees that have stood untouched for centuries in these places also act as a home to hundreds of threatened species, and are a vast carbon store in an age of climate breakdown.
Eswatini will receive 11 people deported by the US later this month, the government has said, the second group of third-country deportees to be sent to the southern African kingdom by the Trump administration in what lawyers and NGOs have described as violations of the migrants’ human rights.
A statement by the Eswatini government posted on social media said: “The individuals will be kept in a secured area separate from the public, while arrangements are made for their return to their countries of origin.”
It added that it would work with the International Organization for Migration on the returns. The statement did not specify where the deportees were originally from, when they would arrive in Eswatini and the reasons given by the US for deporting them. Eswatini’s acting government spokesperson, Thabile Mdluli, said she would respond later to a list of questions.
Donald Trump’s administration is attempting to ramp up deportations from the US. This has included striking deals with third countries including El Salvador, Rwanda, Uganda and South Sudan to remove dozens of migrants who have no connections to where they are being sent and are not given any opportunity to challenge their removals.
At least eight west African men were deported to their home countries via Ghana in September, despite fearing they would be subject to “torture, persecution or inhumane treatment”.
Five men from Cambodia, Cuba, Jamaica, Vietnam and Yemen were deported in July by the US to Eswatini, a country of 1.2 million people landlocked by South Africa and Mozambique, where they were put in a maximum security prison.
Trump urges negotiators to ‘move fast’ as Gaza ceasefire talks set to begin in Egypt
Donald Trump has urged negotiators to “move fast” in talks focused on the release of hostages held by Hamas in Gaza and a broader end to the war, as representatives arrived in Egypt for discussions set to begin on Monday.
The talks will focus on the first phase of Trump’s plan to end the war in Gaza, the Egyptian foreign ministry said, which is the release of the remaining 48 hostages held by Hamas in return for Palestinian prisoners held in Israel.
In a social media post late on Sunday, the US president said that talks were advancing rapidly, adding that the first phase “should be completed this week.” His encouragement came as Israel continued strikes on Gaza, killing 63 people in the 24 hours to Sunday evening.
The US envoy Steve Witkoff is expected to join the talks in Sharm el-Sheikh, according to Israeli media, in addition to Israel’s negotiators and a Palestinian delegation headed by Khalil al-Hayya, the deputy head of the political bureau of Hamas.
The Israeli government spokesperson Shosh Bedrosian told journalists that talks in Egypt would be “confined to a few days maximum”.
US forces on Saturday evening struck another vessel illegally carrying drugs off the coast of Venezuela, Donald Trump said on Sunday to thousands of sailors at a ceremony celebrating the US navy’s 250th anniversary.
He added that the US would also start looking at drug trafficking happening on land.
Trump made the comment during a speech at Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia, next to the Harry S Truman aircraft carrier. It was not immediately clear if he was referencing a strike announced on Friday by defense secretary Pete Hegseth.
During his speech, Trump said the navy had supported the mission “to blow the cartel terrorists the hell out of the water. There are no boats in the water anymore. You can’t find them.”
The navy has also been utilized to join an armed conflict with drug cartels, leading to four strikes in the Caribbean on what the administration says are fast-boats engaged in drug trafficking.
Trump added that if drug smugglers were not coming in by sea, “we’ll have to start looking about the land because they’ll be forced to go by land. And let me tell you that’s not going to work out out well for them either.”
The United Nations has condemned the US strikes – which the US defends as countering “narco-terrorist” members of Tren de Aragua, designated a foreign terrorist organization, in international waters – as extrajudicial executions.
The Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, accused Democrats of being “not serious” in negotiations to end the federal government shutdown, while the Democratic leader accused Republicans of driving the shutdown, now on its fifth day and expected to last at least through next week.
Talks between the opposing political parties stalled over the weekend, with no votes anticipated to end the standoff. A CBS poll found just 28% of Democratic voters and 23% of Republicans consider their party’s positions worth shutting down the government.
In his comments to NBC’s Meet the Press, Johnson said his body had done its work in passing a measure to keep the government financed but now it was up to the Senate “to turn the lights back on so that everyone can do their work”. He accused Democrats of failing to engage “in a serious negotiation”.
“They’re doing this to get political cover because Chuck Schumer is afraid that he won’t win his next re-election bid in the Senate because he’s going to be challenged by a Marxist in New York, because that’s the new popular thing out there,” he said, referring to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Bronx representative who may be looking to challenge Schumer for his Senate seat next year.
But Johnson’s counterpart, minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, told the same show JD Vance lied last week when he claimed Democrats were themselves being dishonest claiming they are not trying to give healthcare benefits to undocumented immigrants.
“Republicans are lying because they’re losing in the court of public opinion,” Jeffries said, and added his party was “standing up for the healthcare of hard-working American taxpayers, of working-class Americans, of middle-class Americans”.
Opening summary
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. My name is Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you the latest news lines over the next few hours.
We start with the news that a federal judge has temporarily blocked the Trump administration from deploying any national guard units to Oregon a few hours after the California governor, Gavin Newsom, announced he would sue the president over the planned deployment of his state’s troops.
Both states sought the temporary restraining order after the president sent guard members from California to Oregon earlier in the day. On Saturday, the same judge temporarily blocked the administration from deploying Oregon’s national guard troops to Portland.
The ruling by US District Judge Karin Immergut said there was no evidence that recent protests necessitated the presence of national guard troops, no matter where they came from. Immergut asked a Trump administration lawyer during a hearing on Sunday night:
How could bringing in federalised national guard from California not be in direct contravention of the [decision] I issued yesterday?
Immergut’s ruling on Sunday, which will remain in effect until at least 19 October, blocks the Trump administration from sending any national guard troops to Portland while Oregon and California seek a longer-term ruling in court.
Earlier on Sunday, Newsom had said national guard troops were already on their way to Oregon. “The Trump administration is unapologetically attacking the rule of law itself and putting into action their dangerous words – ignoring court orders and treating judges, even those appointed by the president himself, as political opponents.”
Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell announced the deployment on Sunday:
At the direction of the president, approximately 200 federalized members of the California national guard are being reassigned from duty in the greater Los Angeles area to Portland, Oregon to support US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal personnel performing official duties, including the enforcement of federal law, and to protect federal property.
Read the full story here:
In other developments:
The Trump administration will start mass layoffs of federal workers if the president decides negotiations to end the government shutdown are “absolutely going nowhere,” a senior White House official has said. Kevin Hassett told CNN he still saw a chance that Democrats would back down, but added that Trump was “getting ready to act” if he has to.
The Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, accused Democrats of being “not serious” in negotiations to end the federal government shutdown, while the Democratic leader accused Republicans of driving the shutdown, now on its fifth day and expected to last at least through next week.
US forces on Saturday evening struck another vessel illegally carrying drugs off the coast of Venezuela, Donald Trump said on Sunday to thousands of sailors at a ceremony celebrating the US navy’s 250th anniversary. The United Nations has condemned the US strikes – which the US defends as countering “narco-terrorist” members of Tren de Aragua, designated a foreign terrorist organization, in international waters – as extrajudicial executions.
Kristi Noem, Donald Trump’s homeland security secretary, called Chicago “a war zone” on Sunday after federal agents shot a woman and the governor of Illinois accused the administration of fueling the crisis rather than resolving it.
Negotiators have arrived in Cairo before talks on Monday expected to focus on the release of hostages held by Hamas in Gaza and a broader end to the war, as Israel continued strikes on the Palestinian territory, killing 63 people in the last 24 hours. The US envoy Steve Witkoff is expected to join the talks, according to Israeli media, in addition to Israel’s negotiators and a Palestinian delegation headed by Khalil al-Hayya, the deputy head of the political bureau of Hamas.
Trump is intensifying his attacks on George Soros little more than a year before the midterm elections for Congress, in what’s been described as a “chilling message to other donors”. The billionaire reportedly contributed more than $170m to help Democrats during the 2022 midterm cycle.
The Trump administration is targeting 100m acres of forest across the country for logging. One critical wilderness area – Ohio’s sole national forest – could be wiped out.
Updated
