First Trump co-defendant Scott Hall pleads guilty in Georgia election case: Live

The House of Representatives rejected a Republican-authored attempt at a short-term spending bill that would have kept the federal government from shutting down, making it much more likely that federal employees will be furloughed or forced to work without pay and many government programmes will be shuttered when the fiscal year ends at midnight on 30 September.

The bill would have provided a 31-day extension to government funding while enacting massive cuts in domestic programmes and new immigration restrictions that were opposed by Democrats.

Democratic Rep Maxwell Frost (D-FL) said Republicans have failed to fix the internal problems that caused a fight to name a speaker at the beginning of the year.

A civil trial stemming from a multi-million dollar fraud lawsuit targeting Donald Trump, his adult sons and chief associates will likely proceed next week after a New York appeals court rejected a last-ditch attempt to stall the hearings amid a mountain of criminal and civil cases facing the former president.

The two-page appellate court decision on 28 September dismissed Mr Trump’s lawsuit against the judge presiding over his case in an effort to stall the civil trial’s start date on 2 October.

A ruling comes just days after the judge’s blockbuster decision finding Mr Trump and others liable for more than a decade of fraud after a years-long investigation from the state attorney general.

Donald Trump says he will not pick any of the Republicans running against him for the party’s 2024 presidential nomination to be his running mate if wins the primary.

The former president skipped the second GOP debate and poked fun at the “job candidates” taking part during his own competing speech at a Michigan auto parts factory.

“We are competing with the job candidates, they are all running for a job. They are all job candidates. They will do anything, secretary of something, they even say VP. Has anyone seen a VP in that group? I don’t think so,” Mr Trump told the crowd at Drake Enterprises, an automotive manufacturing plant in Clinton Township.

And he added: “They don’t have a crowd like we have, thousands of people outside who couldn’t get in.”

The former president visited the battleground state the day after Joe Biden joined the UAW picket line to support striking workers.

Donald Trump is suing a former MI6 officer and the intelligence consultancy he founded, High Court records show.

The former US president is bringing a data protection claim against Orbis Business Intelligence and its founder Christopher Steele, who previously ran the Secret Intelligence Service’s Russia desk.

According to a court order published on Thursday, a two-day hearing in Mr Trump’s legal action is set to start on October 16, which is thought to be the first hearing in the claim.

No other details of the case have been made available, but Mr Trump is not expected to attend.

Mr Steele was the author of the so-called Steele dossier, which included allegations that Mr Trump had been “compromised” by the Russian security service, the FSB.

The dossier, leaked to BuzzFeed in 2017, also alleged that Mr Putin “supported and directed” an operation to “cultivate” Mr Trump as a presidential candidate for “at least five years”.

Mr Trump denied the claims.

Donald Trump’s speech to a crowd in Clinton Township, Michigan, could not have contrasted with the day-earlier visit by his likely 2024 opponent to any greater degree.

While Joe Biden was on the picket line and making a name for himself as the most pro-labour president since at least FDR, if not in history, Donald Trump was preparing for a much different visit to the Rust Belt — one that was in many ways very typical of a politician like him.

For days leading up to Mr Trump’s Wednesday visit, a cascade of news stories highlighted his plans to “speak to union autoworkers”. The Detroit Free Press, New York Times and other reputable media outlets ran with the claim that Mr Trump would speak to an audience of 500 “former and current” union autoworkers, based on details released by the Trump campaign on day four of the United Auto Workers (UAW) strike.

The second GOP primary debate drew in the lowest number of TV viewers since Donald Trump first became a presidential candidate back in 2016.

Less than 10 million people tuned in to watch the Republican primary debate, which was not attended by Mr Trump, on Wednesday night, according to the Nielsen ratings service.

Meanwhile, streaming platforms attracted around 200,000 viewers, as reported by Fox News.

That is compared to the 12.8 million people who tuned in to watch the first of GOP primary debate at the end of August, also shunned by the former president.

The figures mark the lowest TV audience for any Republican presidential debate since January 2016, when Trump initially entered the race, and the Fox Business debate that same month drew in just over 11 million viewers.

Outgoing Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley seemed to refer to former president Donald Trump as a “wannabe dictator” in remarks made at his retirement ceremony.

Mr Milley, who steps down from the role after a four-year term, first hailed the US military as “unique among the world’s armies” during his speech.

“We don’t take an oath to a country,” he continued. “We don’t take an oath to a tribe. We don’t take an oath to a religion.”

And then he appeared to take a swing at the ex-commander-in-chief.

“We don’t take an oath to a king, or queen, or a tyrant or a dictator. And we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator. We don’t take an oath to an individual.”

It comes after Mr Milley confirmed he was taking “adequate safety precautions” in response to apparently threatening language used by Mr Trump in a post on his social media platform, Truth Social.

Gen Milley’s charisma and outspokenness initially endeared him to then-President Trump, who rejected his Pentagon leaders’ choice for chairman and chose Mr Milley.

After posting a slew of bizarre campaign videos on Thursday morning, Donald Trump was back on Truth Social later in the day complaining that the Republican Party debates were a “complete waste of time”.

In addition to admonishing the Republican National Committee for going ahead with the showdown between the seven candidates who took to the stage at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, he said that they should instead be fighting against election interference.

The former president also offered both praise and scathing reviews of each of his rivals for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination — who are substantially behind him in every poll taken so far.

Donald Trump says he will not try to have his Georgia election interference case moved from state to federal court.

Lawyers for the former president notified a Fulton County court that he would not seek to switch the location of the sweeping Rico case in which he and 18 others are charged.

The move came three weeks after Mr Trump’s former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows had his bid to move his case to federal court denied by a judge.

Mr Trump and all of the other defendants, including former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, have pleaded not guilty to charges that they plotted to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the state. Mr Trump faces 13 felony charges in the Rico case.

His filing on Thursday stated that his decision came down to his “well-founded confidence that this Honorable Court intends to fully and completely protect his constitutional right to a fair trial and guarantee him due process of law throughout the prosecution of his case in the Superior Court of Fulton County, Georgia.”

The court filing added: “President Trump now notifies the Court that he will NOT be seeking to remove his case to federal court.”