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Trump says potential land strikes could extend beyond Venezuela

Asked by a reporter at the Oval Office about his repeated threats to escalate his attacks on Venezuela with land strikes, Donald Trump responded: “It’s not only land strikes on Venezuela, it’s land strikes on horrible people that are bringing in drugs.

He continued: “It doesn’t necessarily have to be in Venezuela. People bringing in drugs to our country are targets.”

His comments came as Democrats continue to call for the release of footage of his administration’s strikes against a vessel off the coast of Venezuela in September.

Donald Trump is at the Oval Office providing congressional gold medals to members of the 1980 US Olympic hockey team, which defeated the Soviet Union team in a major upset.

The president put on a white cowboy hat, surrounded by honorees who also arrived in cowboy hats.

The event comes as Trump is facing scrutiny over House Democrats’ release of new photos from the estate of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, which included images of Trump, Bill Clinton and and the British former royal Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. The White House responded that the controversy was a “Democratic hoax”.

Democratic leaders call for release of boat strike video

Top Democratic leaders have urged Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, to release the “complete, unedited video” of the Venezuelan boat attacks on 2 September, which involved a second hit that killed two survivors of an initial strike.

Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, the leaders of the congressional chambers, along with Mark Warner, the vice-chair of the Senate intelligence committee, sent a letter to Hegseth today reiterating the request that the full footage be disclosed to all members of the House and Senate before the end of the legislative session this month.

The letter also called for a public release, saying:

We also urge you to expedite the public release of the video, taking into account appropriate precautions to protect sources and methods, so that the American people can judge for themselves the legality and necessity of their government engaging in such activities that potentially put our men and women in uniform at risk.

TSA is providing names of all air travelers to US immigration officials, report says

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is providing the names of all air travelers to immigration officials, dramatically expanding the Trump administration’s use of data sharing for deportations, according to a new New York Times report.

TSA provides a list multiple times a week to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) of people coming through airports, the report says. ICE allegedly uses the list to match it with its own database of people facing deportation and then sends immigration agents to the airport to make arrests.

The report, based on documents obtained by the New York Times, says it’s unclear how many arrests have been made due to this data sharing, but said the collaboration led to the arrest of Any Lucia López Belloza, a 19-year-old college student detained at the Boston airport, leading to her deportation.

Tricia McLaughlin, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson, said in a statement to the New York Times: “The message to those in the country illegally is clear: The only reason you should be flying is to self-deport home.”

US lifts sanctions on Brazilian judge in Bolsonaro case

The US Department of the Treasury has lifted sanctions imposed on the Brazilian supreme court justice who oversaw the conviction of the former president Jair Bolsonaro.

Justice Alexandre de Moraes had been under Global Magnitsky sanctions, which target individuals accused of human rights abuses, since July. His wife Viviane Barci de Moraes – who was added the sanctions list in September – was also removed from the register on Friday.

The move had been repeatedly requested by Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, in negotiations with Donald Trump to roll back the 50% tariffs on Brazilian imports.

House Democrats release more Epstein photos

The House oversight Democrats have released more than 70 additional photos from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate:

The continuing disclosure comes after a latest batch that featured notable figures, including Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Woody Allen and Bill Gates. Our earlier coverage:

Arizona senator Ruben Gallego joined striking Starbucks baristas on the picket line in Gilbert on Friday.

“This is the stuff that happens when corporate power does not want to give way to worker power,” the Arizona Democrat told a group of employees, some of whom carried signs that said “Stop Corporate Greed” and “No CEO is worth 6,666x its average workers.”

Gallego, according to videos from his office, encouraged the workers to “keep up the fight”.

“The only way we have any type of real power – any type of real chance for working class people to have any type of leverage against the rich and the powerful is when they unionize and they organize and they fight back together,” he said, before leading a “si se puede” chant.

Earlier this month, Senator Bernie Sanders appeared on the picket line with workers in New York, alongside the city’s mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani.

The Red Cup Rebellion began last month with thousands of workers walking off the job in a bid to ramp up pressure on the world’s largest coffee chain following months of stalled contract negotiations. The strike has grown, with thousands of baristas in more than 130 cities bracing for the “longest” industrial action in company history.

Ramon Antonio Vargas

The death of former US senator Mitt Romney’s sister-in-law in October has been ruled a suicide, the Los Angeles county medical examiner’s office said recently.

Carrie Romney, 64, was found dead next to a suburban Los Angeles parking garage. The medical examiner’s office didn’t immediately rule on a cause of death at the time, saying it needed to investigate further. But on Tuesday the agency said it had concluded Carrie Romney died as a result of suicide – and from blunt traumatic injuries after falling off the rooftop of the garage, as the Los Angeles news outlet KABC reported.

Carrie married Mitt Romney’s older brother, George “Scott” Romney, a prominent attorney in Michigan who is also the father of the former Republican Committee chair Ronna Romney McDaniel. Scott Romney had reportedly filed to divorce Carrie – his third wife – in June.

Mitt Romney was Massachusetts governor from 2003 to 2007, and US senator for Utah for six years beginning in 2019. He unsuccessfully ran for the US presidency twice, losing the Republican nomination to the late John McCain in 2008 before clinching it four years later. Barack Obama, the last Democratic candidate to win consecutive presidential terms, ultimately won both of those elections.

We’re due to hear from Donald Trump at a bill signing ceremony in the Oval Office. That was meant to start at 3pm ET, but we’ll bring you the latest lines as soon as that begins.

After a hugely busy week of news, it was only days ago that Donald Trump described Europe as “weak” and “decaying” and warned of “civilizational collapse” on the continent due to immigration.

His administration also published its blueprint for national security, which suggests that democracy might not be as important to the Trump White House as it has been for previous administrations.

Jonathan Freedland speaks to the US military scholar Joseph Stieb about the Trump administration’s national security strategy in the latest episode of Politics Weekly America.

Joseph Gedeon

Donald Trump is facing a federal lawsuit seeking to halt construction on his $300m White House ballroom, with historic preservationists accusing the president of violating multiple federal laws by tearing down part of the iconic building without required reviews or congressional approval.

The legal challenge, filed on Friday by the Trust for Historic Preservation in the US district court for the District of Columbia, represents the most significant attempt yet to stop Trump’s 90,000-sq-ft addition to the White House complex. The organization is seeking a temporary restraining order to freeze all construction activities until proper federal oversight procedures are completed.

“No president is legally allowed to tear down portions of the White House without any review whatsoever – not President Trump, not President Joe Biden, and not anyone else,” the complaint reads. “And no president is legally allowed to construct a ballroom on public property without giving the public the opportunity to weigh in.”

Here's a recap of the day so far

Democrats on the House oversight committee have published 19 new photos from the 95,000 they have received from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate today. In the latest drop, there are pictures of Bill Clinton alongside the late sex-offender and his accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell. There are also pictures of Donald Trump and Epstein at social events, pictures of billionaires like Richard Branson and Bill Gates, as well as several photographs of former Trump adviser Steve Bannon and film director Woody Allen.

Also included in this latest batch of pictures from the Epstein estate are explicit photos of sex toys. One appears to show a black latex glove with ridges on the fingers, and another features ropes, restraints and a book on “shibari” – a type of Japanese bondage. Another picture features a bowl of “Trump condoms” selling for $4.50. On the parody packaging it makes fun of the president’s style of speech, reading: “I’m HUUUUGE!”

Upon releasing the most recent trove of photos from the Epstein estate, the oversight committee’s top Democrat – Robert Garcia – said “it is time to end this White House cover-up and bring justice to the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein and his powerful friends”. Meanwhile, Republicans on the committee, along with the White House, accused Democrats of “selectively releasing cherry-picked photos with random redactions to try and create a false narrative”.

In other news today, Donald Trump said today that the leaders of Thailand and Cambodia have agreed to a cease fire in their ongoing border conflict. In a post on Truth Social, the president said he spoke to Thailand’s Anutin Charnvirakul and Cambodia’s Hun Manet this morning. “They have agreed to CEASE all shooting effective this evening, and go back to the original Peace Accord made with me, and them, with the help of the Great Prime Minister of Malaysia, Anwar Ibrahim,” Trump wrote.

Today, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced it would terminate all family reunification parole (FRP) programs for immigrants from Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti and Honduras, and their immediate family members. A reminder that FRP is a program whereby a citizen or green card holder could, with authorization, keep their family together in the US while members who are foreign nationals apply for permanent residency. They would have temporary parole in the US – allowing them to live and, in some cases, work while waiting for their case to be assessed.

The navy has sent a report to the Pentagon about Senator Mark Kelly’s role in a video published to social media last month, where six Democratic members of Congress urged active service members to “refuse illegal orders”, according to multiple outlets. According to the New York Times, the Pentagon’s office of general counsel is “providing a legal review and input” of the navy’s report, per a Department of Defense official, who spoke to the Times on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the investigation.

Democrats on the House judiciary committee on Friday will ask Aileen Cannon, the judge who presided over the case against Donald Trump for allegedly hiding classified documents, to release the portion of special counsel Jack Smith’s report concerning his prosecution.

Smith is scheduled to appear next week for a behind-closed-door deposition with the Republican-led committee, where he may discuss his investigation into allegations that Trump took classified materials to his properties and then hid them from federal authorities. The special counsel dropped that case against Trump, as well as another concerning his meddling in the 2020 election, in the aftermath of his re-election victory last year.

Cannon earlier this year ruled that the classified documents portion of Smith’s report stay unreleased, citing ongoing proceedings against two co-defendants in the case. However attorney general Pam Bondi dropped charges against those co-defendants earlier this year, and in a motion to Cannon shared with the Guardian, the Democrats will argue that there is now no reason to keep the second portion of Smith’s report from being released.

White House responds to latest Epstein estate photos from oversight Democrats

In response to the latest trove of photos from the Epstein estate, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said that oversight Democrats are “selectively releasing cherry-picked photos with random redactions to try and create a false narrative”.

“Here’s the reality: Democrats like Stacey Plaskett and Hakeem Jeffries were soliciting money and meetings from Epstein AFTER he was a convicted sex offender,” she added in a statement. “The Democrat hoax against President Trump has been repeatedly debunked.”