Key events
Donald Trump’s plan to convert Alcatraz back into a maximum-security prison could cost roughly $2bn (£1.5bn), Axios reported on Friday, citing administration sources.
Alcatraz was closed as a maximum-security prison in 1963 after 29 years of operation, because it was too expensive to continue operating.
Trump previously said he would order the long-shuttered facility, now operated as a historical site in San Francisco Bay, to once again house violent criminals, reports Reuters.
Opening summary: Trump threatens to sue WSJ
Good morning and welcome to our live coverage of US politics where, after days of resistance and trying to play down the story, Donald Trump has directed his attorney general, Pam Bondi, to seek the release of grand jury testimony related to Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking case.
The president said on Truth Social he had authorised the justice department to seek the public release of the materials, citing “the ridiculous amount of publicity given to Jeffrey Epstein”.
It comes after the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump allegedly contributed a sketch of a naked woman to Epstein’s 50th birthday album.
Trump denied to the Journal that he was the author of the birthday message and, hours after the story was published, announced he intended to file a lawsuit in a post on Truth Social, decrying the reporting as fake and condemning it as what he called “the Epstein Hoax”.
In other developments:
-
The US’s Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed president Donald Trump’s $9bn funding cut to public media and foreign aid early on Friday, sending it to the White House to be signed into law. The chamber voted 216 to 213 in favour of the funding cut package.
-
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert has been cancelled and will end in May 2026 after a 33-year run, the network CBS announced. The news comes days after Colbert criticised the network’s parent company, Paramount, for settling a lawsuit with Trump for $16m (£12m) over the US president’s claim that CBS News deceptively edited an interview with the then presidential candidate Kamala Harris.
-
Five migrants deported by the US to the small southern African country of Eswatini, under the Trump administration’s third-country programme, will be held in solitary confinement for an undetermined time, an Eswatini government spokesperson has said. The spokesperson said a UN agency will repatriate five men to their home countries, but the agency said on Thursday that it had not been contacted. The men, who the US says were convicted of serious crimes and were in the US illegally, are citizens of Vietnam, Jamaica, Cuba, Yemen and Laos.
