Trump publicly rejects Iran’s Hormuz deal as Ukraine strikes kill 4 and Grok 4.7 lands
Lavrov blames Europe at the U.N.; Ethiopian Tigray fighting intensifies; third-country deportation briefs still due Monday.
12 PM CT video brief · 1:21Presenter voice and image generated with AI tools.Read transcript
I'm Nora Vale with your 12 PM World Brief for Saturday, September 26th. President Trump told reporters he has rejected Iran's seven-day plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. He said Tehran wants the deal because they're losing so badly, and he restated that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. What this means. For you and your family already paying the Hormuz premium, a public no is clearer than a private leak. Pressure should stay tied to free passage and a real nuclear red line. In Ukraine, Russian attacks killed four people on Saturday, including two women under rubble in Zaporizhzhia. At the United Nations, Russia's foreign minister accused Europe of blocking peace talks the Trump administration wants. What this means. Four more civilians dead is not a negotiating posture. As Americans, we need partners who raise the cost of Russian strikes, not endless process. At the White House, the clock is running on an $810 million pocket rescission as the fiscal year ends Wednesday. Senator Susan Collins called the move a clear violation of the law. And at the Supreme Court, no new midday orders. Third-country deportation briefs are still due Monday at 4 p.m. Eastern. Full stories and sources are at WorldBriefNow.com. I'm Nora Vale. Thanks for watching.
President Donald Trump told reporters at the White House on Saturday that he had rejected Iran’s seven-day proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and pause regional fighting, saying “I reject their proposal” and “I’ve rejected their deal” before departing for Tennessee, Reuters and Fox News reported. Trump said Tehran wants the strait opened immediately “because they’re losing so badly” and “because they have no money coming in,” adding the United States has “total control of the Hormuz Strait” and that “last night we had 29 ships come out.” The New York Post reported he also posted on Truth Social that “IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON!!!,” while Iran’s military command warned of risks to U.S. interests if Washington “makes a mistake,” and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi’s team planned to remain in New York until Wednesday, Iranian state media said.
Russian attacks killed four people across Ukraine on Saturday, officials said, including two women trapped under rubble in Zaporizhzhia and two people killed in Sumy, the Associated Press reported via the New York Post; President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote that Russia is “escalating every single day” and listed strikes on residential homes in Kyiv, Zaporizhzhia, and the Odesa, Sumy and Kharkiv regions. Officials on both sides said Ukrainian strikes killed six people in Russia and Russian-occupied territory, including three in Krasnodar region where a drone attack sparked fires at industrial sites that Russian media said included an oil refinery, Al Jazeera reported citing AFP and AP. At the United Nations General Assembly on Saturday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused Europe of doing “everything it can to thwart peace talks in which the [Donald] Trump administration is interested,” while saying Moscow would achieve its military aims “no matter the circumstances.”
Intensified fighting between Ethiopia’s federal army and Tigrayan forces has raised fears the 2022 Pretoria peace agreement could collapse, Al Jazeera reported Saturday, days after seven armed groups announced the Ethiopian Peoples’ Forces Alliance for Survival seeking to remove Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. The alliance’s largest members include the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, the Amhara Fano National Movement and the Oromo Liberation Army; fighting has intensified in southern Tigray and spread into neighboring Afar and Amhara regions, with Tigrayan forces taking control of airports at Mekelle, Axum and Shire — a step the African Union said is inconsistent with Pretoria. Each side blames the other for starting the latest clashes; the AU called for an immediate halt and asked former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo to engage the parties, while IGAD urged neighbors not to widen the crisis.
Before leaving the White House for a college football trip to Knoxville, Tennessee, President Donald Trump told reporters he had rejected Iran’s ceasefire proposal and framed Tehran as negotiating from weakness, Fox News and Reuters reported. “They want to make a deal where they open the strait immediately because they’re losing so badly,” Trump said, claiming “We’re winning tremendously” and calling the U.S. blockade “a wall of steel,” with 29 ships exiting the strait the prior night in his account. He separately posted on Truth Social that Iran “CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON,” the New York Post reported, as Treasury’s planned Wednesday shutdown of Iranian airline services and secondary-sanctions pressure continued to shape regional talks — including Iraq seeking U.S. exemptions for some airports, Fox News noted.
Editor’s note (Sep 26, 2026): We fell short of our standards. An earlier version of our analysis began “Cutting NGO pipelines that treat the border as a client list is a legitimate taxpayer priority”; it now begins “Scrutinizing federal grants to outside groups that serve migrants is a legitimate taxpayer priority.” The facts are unchanged. We apologize for falling short of our standards.
The White House’s Friday evening “pocket rescission” of about $810 million in congressionally appropriated funds remained the live spending fight Saturday as the federal fiscal year ends Wednesday, according to ABC News and the administration’s own briefing. The package includes $567 million in HHS funding the White House said went to programs and NGOs serving refugees, asylees and other non-citizens, plus cuts across Education, HUD, DOJ and DHS accounts; Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins, R-Maine, called any rescission without congressional approval “a clear violation of the law” and said the Government Accountability Office has concluded pocket rescissions are unlawful under the Impoundment Control Act. ABC noted the Supreme Court last year allowed a prior foreign-aid pocket rescission to proceed while stating that stay was not a final determination on the merits.
As of midday Saturday, the Supreme Court’s public docket for Department of Homeland Security v. D.V.D., No. 26A406, still showed only Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Sept. 24 order directing respondents to file a response by 4 p.m. EDT Monday, Sept. 28, with no further Saturday order on the government’s stay application. The application, docketed Sept. 24 after submission to Justice Jackson, seeks a stay to restore third-country deportations while the First Circuit appeal proceeds; the Court’s orders page listed no new miscellaneous order dated Sept. 26. Interim emergency relief on related earlier dockets has previously noted that stays are not final merits determinations while litigation continues.
xAI on Saturday published “Introducing Grok 4.7,” describing the model as its most capable release for coding and knowledge work, trained with a longer reinforcement-learning run on harder multi-hour tasks and with stronger self-verification and safeguards than Grok 4.6. The company said Grok 4.7 is available in Cursor and Grok Build and through the Grok API, third-party coding harnesses and cloud routers, priced from $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens — the same list price as Grok 4.6 — with a faster variant at twice the output speed and twice the price. On CursorBench 4.0, xAI reported Grok 4.7 at 46.3% versus 40.4% for Grok 4.6, and said the model leads the company’s prior release on several professional and safety benchmarks it published.
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