Evening Wrap: Trump rejects Iran’s Hormuz plan as DOT tees up Monday CAFE rollback
A recap of Saturday’s biggest stories — Tehran still awaits a formal mediator reply, Ukraine’s aerial war leaves 16 dead, SpaceX lands USSF-385, U.S.–China tariff relief and coal buys, pocket rescission toward Wednesday, and SCOTUS’s third-country brief due Monday.
Evening Wrap video brief · 3:07Presenter voice and image generated with AI tools.Read transcript
I'm Nora Vale with your Evening Wrap for Saturday, September 26. Trump rejected Iran's seven-day Hormuz plan. Tehran still awaits a formal mediator reply and insists only a negotiated solution can break the deadlock. What this means. For your family at the pump, Hormuz still hangs on a written answer with real enrichment limits. At least 16 killed as Russia and Ukraine traded strikes. Zelenskyy cites 55% jet-drone intercepts. Trump presses a settlement. What this means. For you and your paycheck, monthly body counts are why America needs an endgame — not blank checks. At the U.N., China's vice president pressed Gulf sovereignty and an end to Cuba pressure, without naming the U.S. What this means. For you paying a Hormuz premium, a summit handshake is not China dropping cover for Iran and Cuba. DOT finalizes lower fuel-economy standards Monday — about 34.5 mpg by 2031, down from 50.4. AAA has gas near $4.48. What this means. For you shopping for a truck, Washington should stop forcing cars you never asked for. Watch Monday's final number. Pocket rescission of ~$810M still runs toward Wednesday's fiscal-year end; Sen. Collins calls it unlawful. What this means. For you as taxpayers, cutting waste is right — but Congress still holds the purse. SpaceX lofted USSF-385 from Vandenberg at 9:01 a.m. CT. Booster B1100 landed on OCISLY about nine minutes later — its 10th flight. What this means. For you as Americans, free enterprise just did a hard national-security job and brought the booster home. No new Supreme Court orders Saturday. The third-country deportation response is still due Monday at 4 p.m. Eastern. What this means. Monday's brief tests whether lower courts can block authorized removals — for your community's safety, watch the Court. In national weather, from the National Weather Service: Hurricane Nolo, with top winds near 90 mph, may bring impacts to parts of Hawaii. Impacts from a significant Nor'easter will extend through the weekend into Monday especially for the coastal sections of the northeastern U.S. into the Mid-Atlantic. 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 he rejected Iran’s proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and pause regional fighting within seven days, saying Tehran wants the waterway opened “immediately because they’re losing so badly,” Reuters reported. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said late Saturday that Tehran had seen an initial reaction but still awaits a definitive reply through mediators and will decide based on that message, The Guardian reported with Reuters and AP; a later Reuters update quoted Araghchi insisting “only a negotiated solution” can break the deadlock and that reopening Hormuz hinges on Iran’s conditions being met. The Wall Street Journal earlier reported Trump privately expects airstrikes could resume after the November midterms; a senior Iranian official separately told Reuters Tehran would show “no flexibility” on its nuclear program even if Washington accepted the plan.
Authorities on both sides said Russian and Ukrainian strikes killed at least 16 people over about 24 hours Saturday, France 24 reported with AFP, with Kyiv reporting at least six dead in Sumy, Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk — including a 17-year-old girl — and Russia reporting deaths in Krasnodar, Belgorod and occupied areas. In his Saturday evening address, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukrainian air defenses are currently intercepting 55 percent of the jet-powered drones Russia launches. Speaking before his Tennessee trip, President Donald Trump said 25,000 people died last month in the war and again pressed Zelenskyy to “settle with Putin,” Fox News and the Associated Press reported.
Chinese Vice President Han Zheng, speaking Saturday at the U.N. General Assembly without naming the United States, said the sovereignty and security of Middle East countries including the Gulf should be respected and urged the “relevant country” to stop using the threat of force against Cuba and to lift its blockade and sanctions, Reuters reported. The remarks came days after President Donald Trump hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping in Washington; U.S. Ambassador to China David Perdue said Friday that Trump warned Xi against supporting Iran and received assurances China would not do so. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov later echoed China’s call for Washington to lift what he called the siege of Cuba.
After President Xi Jinping’s state visit, the White House said the United States and China reached consensus under their Board of Trade on recommendations for more favorable tariff treatment on $30 billion of non-sensitive goods in each direction. Favorable treatment for U.S. exports would cover agricultural goods, fish and seafood, logs and wood products, cosmetics and medical devices; U.S. imports covered include small appliances, toys, holiday decorations and children’s car seats. China will import at least 10 million metric tons of U.S. coal in 2027 and again in 2028, and the two sides established a “super intelligence” dialogue plus an incident channel, per the White House fact sheet amplified Saturday by Fox News, the New York Post and the Washington Examiner.
The Transportation Department on Monday will finalize sharply lower vehicle fuel-economy standards through 2031 after President Donald Trump said Saturday he approved rules ending what he called the Biden administration’s EV mandate, Reuters reported. The administration’s December proposal set a fleetwide average of about 34.5 miles per gallon by 2031, down from 50.4 under Biden, and estimated average new-vehicle costs would fall by about $930; Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said a “major victory for America’s auto workers is coming Monday.” AAA put the national average for regular gasoline near $4.48 a gallon on Saturday, the New York Post reported.
The White House’s pocket rescission of about $810 million in congressionally appropriated funds — announced Friday and still pending as the federal fiscal year ends Wednesday, Sept. 30 — includes $567 million in HHS services for refugees, asylees and other non-citizens, according to the White House statement and CNBC. Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins, R-Maine, called the maneuver a clear violation of the Impoundment Control Act and said the Government Accountability Office has concluded pocket rescissions are not permitted. The package also targets Education migrant-student programs, HHS research lines and other accounts the White House labeled wasteful.
As of Saturday night, 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, seeks a stay of lower-court limits on the government’s ability to remove certain noncitizens to third countries. The Court’s public orders page listed no new Saturday miscellaneous order changing that deadline.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 lifted off at 9:01 a.m. CT Saturday from Space Launch Complex 4 East (SLC-4E) at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, carrying the U.S. Space Force USSF-385 mission, a classified national-security payload; details were not released. Booster B1100, on its 10th flight, landed successfully on the Of Course I Still Love You droneship in the Pacific at about 9:10 a.m. CT, SpaceX said. Space.com and other outlets confirmed the West Coast liftoff and droneship landing; SpaceX has not publicly confirmed payload deployment for the classified mission.
xAI 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. xAI attributed frontier price-performance on CursorBench 4.0 to the new model and said it leads the company’s own tests on dual-use cyber and biosafety refusals.
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