Pentagon says Trump and Hegseth ‘completely aligned’ on decision to cancel livestream of firing squad execution – live

We’re keeping an eye on the press conference between Pete Hegseth and his UK counterpart, Wes Streeting at the Pentagon. The pair are currently on the steps of the Department of Defense.

In the Rose Garden today, Donald Trump joked that “one of those beautiful robots” which they could make “look just like” the president could be sent out to campaign on his behalf.

“You wouldn’t know the difference. They make them pretty good. Send them out on the trail. I could sit home and watch them on television,” Trump said. “But, I love doing it.”

This comes as the president is in the middle of a midterm campaign blitz, to stump for everal Republican nominees across the country. After stops in Alaska, Arizona and Montana so far this week, the president will head to Georgia tomorrow, and Kentucky this weekend.

Trump will also head to Iowa on 22 October and 1 November, according to the chair of the Iowa Republicans.

The Pentagon has also now responded to Donald Trump’s decision to cancel the livestream of the execution of Nidal Hasan.

Chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said:

President Trump and Secretary Hegseth spoke about the decision to not livestream Hasan’s execution ahead of the Truth Social announcement. The Secretary supports the President’s decision, and they are completely aligned.

Here’s my colleague Anna Betts’s report:

Britain’s defence secretary Wes Streeting has stressed the importance of standing with Ukraine in its defence against Russia amid mounting fears over the United States’ commitment to Kyiv, the Press Association reports.

During his first visit to Washington in the role, Streeting warned that if Vladimir Putin’s aggression was rewarded, “the consequences will not remain confined to Ukraine or to my continent.”

Streeting is expected to meet his US counterpart Pete Hegseth in a bid to strengthen ties that have been strained by issues including Donald Trump’s stance on Kyiv and the widening US-Nato rift.

His visit comes a day after Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited London and said Trump had betrayed his country by curbing its access to a vital Starlink satellite communications system.

Streeting said today that the UK and US must strengthen their defence partnership to confront growing threats at a time when “it is not yet clear if this century will be defined by freedom or tyranny”.

Speaking at an event held by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies and the Royal United Services Institute, he said:

Britain and America have never been content to simply watch history unfold. At defining moments, we have helped determine its course.

The front line for freedom today can be found in Ukraine.

He continued:

Ukraine may be thousands of miles from American shores, but if aggression is rewarded, if borders can be redrawn by force, if the sovereignty of nations becomes negotiable, the consequences will not remain confined to Ukraine or to my continent.

So standing with Ukraine is not a choice between our values and our self-interest. It is a recognition that ultimately they are inseparable.

Susan Collins, the US senator of Maine, has dismissed allegations that she traded federal contracts for campaign cash as “completely false” after it emerged the FBI examined the claims.

Asked by a reporter about an ethics complaint filed last week by a Maine attorney, the Republican – currently campaigning to retain her seat ahead of November’s US midterm elections – said the allegations were recycled from 2020 and had been rejected by the Department of Justice, the FBI and the Federal Election Commission.

“The allegations are completely false,” Collins said. She said the University of Maine, not the defense contractor Navatek, had asked her to back a research grant, and that she had never heard of the company. Its former chief executive, Martin Kao, she said, was “a crook” whom neither she, nor the university, knew about.

“We have a picture of his meeting with me and with other people in my office that is many months before he ever made a single contribution,” she added. “He spun this story up again in the hopes that the judge would be lenient, or the prosecutor would be.”

My colleague Joseph Gedeon has the story:

Earlier we brought you our colleague Andrew Roth’s report on the collapse of the White House’s unilateral effort to negotiate an energy ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine, as Moscow sent a record swarm of drones overnight to attack infrastructure in central Ukraine and Kyiv appeared to resume strikes on Russian oil refineries despite warnings from Donald Trump.

Now CNN is reporting that Kyiv has run out of missiles for the US-made Patriot air defense system, leaving it more vulnerable to Russian ballistic missile attacks.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has repeatedly warned for months that his country is running out of the US-made Patriot interceptor missiles. According to CNN’s source, “almost all the ballistic missiles from the last [Russian] strike were not intercepted due to lack of the [interceptor] missiles.”

In a public statement on Wednesday, Zelenskyy pleaded for more stocks. “The American president has all the effective and necessary tools to bring peace closer through strength, justice, and pressure on the aggressor,” he said. “We ask for additional packages of Patriot missile interceptors for Ukraine.”

We’re getting some more reaction following Trump’s move to cancel the planned livestream of Nidal Hasan’s execution.

Thomas Massie, an outgoing Republican congressman from Kentucky who frequently spars with the president, said that “sanity prevails momentarily” in response to the news.

Meanwhile, one of Trump’s noted allies – far-right activist and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer – said that broadcasting Hasan’s execution would have “really helped improve the morale of Americans in our country”.

“We need to feel a sense of national pride and have events that draw clear lines between those of us who support America, and those of us who empathize with America’s enemies,” she wrote on X, claiming that “a lot of people” were “looking forward” to the execution live stream.

Reporting from Kyiv

The White House’s unilateral effort to negotiate an energy ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine has collapsed as Moscow sent a record swarm of drones overnight to attack infrastructure in central Ukraine and Kyiv appeared to resume strikes on Russian oil refineries despite warnings from Donald Trump.

Moscow accused Ukraine of launching a strike against a Russian oil refinery in the Ryazan region, its first since Trump abruptly declared an “energy ceasefire” that neither Russia nor Ukraine said they had agreed to.

Trump has demanded that Volodymyr Zelenskyy stop attacking Russian oil refineries, claiming it is the cause of a global rise in the price of diesel fuel.

An attack on two neutral ships in Romanian territorial waters at the mouth of the Danube River indicated that strikes against vulnerable commercial targets are set to expand.

On Wednesday Zelenskyy said he would resume strikes on Russian oil refineries, after briefly halting them to demonstrate that Ukraine was ready for peace talks. “The block [on attacking refineries] is out. We’re done,” he told the Financial Times. He also attacked a gap in US intelligence sharing as “dangerous”.

Trump suddenly declared an “energy ceasefire” last week, writing on TruthSocial: “Effective immediately, there is an ENERGY CEASEFIRE in the War between Russia and Ukraine. Both parties have agreed. Do not break it!”

Prior to the president’s announcement that the live stream of Nidal Hasan’s execution by firing squad will no longer go ahead, a new poll from the Washington Post and ABC News showed that 80% of Americans oppose a live online broadcast of the execution.

While the partisan breakdown shows that more Democrats (91%) oppose a live stream, 64% of Republicans still opposed the move.

Meanwhile, a majority of Americans, 53%, support executing Hasan by firing squad – while 42% are opposed.

Following the news that Donald Trump has canceled a plan to livestream the execution of Nidal Hasan, more lawmakers have welcomed the decision.

“Good. So sick to have ever considered this,” wrote Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat, on X.

Meanwhile, Republican Senator John Curtis of Iowa, said “this is the right move, both for the loved ones of the victims and for the country.”

Curtis urged the administration to reconsider broadcasting the execution last week, warning that “cultivates an appetite for executions as a form of entertainment”, and is “not an effective deterrent”.

The president expressed private misgivings about the Pentagon’s move to broadcast the execution by firing squad, according to an Axios report published earlier this week, citing four people who had spoken with Trump.

A reminder that last week, Pete Hegseth told rightwing broadcaster Real America’s Voice that the firing squad execution of Nidal Hasan, scheduled for 3 December, would be available to watch online.

Hasan’s sentence is the first military execution in more than 60 years, and would have been the first in US history to be publicly broadcast.

Democrats and several Republicans said the decision to livestream the execution would align the US with authoritarian countries who make a public “spectacle” of executions and could run the risk of radicalizing people watching by turning Hasan into a martyr.

On Friday, vice-president JD Vance appeared to quell concerns that the execution would actually be live streamed. “First of all, I’ve seen these announcements. I don’t know that that’s actually going to happen,” Vance told reporters, after he was asked about how he squares his Christian faith with the Pentagon’s decision to broadcast the execution. Vance also said that if the decision was made to livestream Hasan’s execution, he was “not going to be watching it”.

Donald Trump has said that the execution of Nidal Hasan, the US army doctor who killed 13 people at the Fort Hood military base in 2009, would not be livestreamed.

The decision, issued via a post on Truth Social, comes after bipartisan backlash to defense secretary Pete Hegseth’s announcement that Hasan’s execution by firing squad, would be broadcast online.

“Many very good and well meaning people would rather not watch him die, through streaming, or through any other visual device,” Trump wrote on Thursday. “He [Hasan] will die, as scheduled, by firing squad, but this event will not be streamed.”

Today, a number of my colleagues who cover business, labor and consumer rights will be taking your questions about the impact of the economy of the upcoming midterms – now fewer than three weeks away.

Food and gas prices remain high, the job market is unstable, consumers are angrier than ever, and a new Fed chair, Kevin Warsh, took over this year.

As we mentioned earlier, our exclusive polling shows that a majority of Americans (61%) believe the US is already experiencing a recession.

Tune in here:

Alongside his midterm stumping, Trump has devoted time to tout the his various renovation projects on the White House. On Truth Social the president shared pictures of the building’s South entrance and the new heliport – which he has frequently praised while speaking to reporters before boarding Marine One on the South Lawn.

“The exterior walls and ornamentation, both missing and in bad condition, has been fully restored to the Highest Level, giving the White House many decades of additional life! It had to be done, and I am very proud to be the President who did it!” Trump wrote. “Likewise, the Ballroom and Military Complex, is on time, and on budget, and will make an unbelievably beautiful addition, the first since the West Wing in 1901, to the White House.”

However, Trump is not the first president over the last century to undertake this kind of work. In 1942, Franklin D Roosevelt added a second-story to the East Wing. Prior to that he added an indoor therapy swimming pool in 1933, which would eventually become the press briefing room. Later, Harry Truman rebuilt the entire interior with a steel frame and added the Truman Balcony on the exterior of the White House.

The estimated cost of Trump’s ballroom has also ballooned. The Guardian previously reported the number sits around $400m, while the Washington Post has reported total costs could reach $600m.

In June, the administration also redirected $352m in federal funds, designated for the Secret Service, toward’s the project. The funds were drawn from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the president’s sweeping domestic policy legislation. However, the law stipulates the money may only be spent on Secret Service personnel, training facilities, technology and related costs, not construction.