9/11 families gather at World Trade Center and Pentagon to remember victims on 25th anniversary – US politics live

Key events

Donald Trump has arrived at the Pentagon ceremony to commemorate the victims of the September 11 attack.

The president is set to speak and take part in a wreath-laying ceremony.

Memorial ceremony under way in New York

The memorial ceremony in New York is under way. Families of the people who died in the city gathered at the 9/11 memorial to commemorate their loved ones.

A moment of silence was held before relatives read out the names of those killed that day.

Vice-president JD Vance and New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani are among those at the ceremony.

You can follow proceedings here:

Memorial ceremony commences at the Pentagon

The memorial ceremony for the 25th anniversary has commenced at the Pentagon. You can watch the feed at the top of this blog or here:

US inflation remained high in August as military conflict with Iran continues

Gaya Gupta

US consumer prices remained stubbornly high in August as the end of the ceasefire between the US and Iran pushed energy prices up, according to data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics released on Friday.

The annualized inflation rate was 3.4%, the same as it was in July. The most recent peak was seen in May, when the inflation rate hit a three-year high at 4.2%. Core inflation, which strips out volatile energy and food prices, increased to 2.4% in August.

Despite dipping from its most recent peak, inflation remains above levels that were seen before the war in Iran, largely because of higher energy prices.

Donald Trump will start his day in Washington. In a short while he’ll arrive at the Pentagon with his wife, Melania, for a ceremony and wreath laying to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the September 11 terror attacks.

While Trump will stay in DC, vice-president JD Vance is in New York at Ground Zero with all living former presidents, to attend the memorial service at the site of the attacks in lower Manhattan.

He’ll spend the rest of the day in meetings before traveling to Ireland, where he’ll spend the weekend talking with leaders and the Irish president, Catherine Connolly, and the taoiseach, Micheál Martin.

He saw the first one on September 11 itself. “Missing”, said a hastily designed poster on the window of a bar in Tribeca providing food and water to first responders. It was a plea for information about a person who had vanished in the deadliest terrorist attack in US history.

“I was like, ‘Wow, this is going to be …’” recalls Phil Buehler, an artist and photographer who had watched the twin towers collapse from his office window. “But you knew that there would be very few survivors. You knew it then.”

The missing posters kept coming in the days after 9/11, and Buehler kept photographing them. But having amassed more than 500 images, he put them away in a box on a top shelf because he could not bear to look at them.

As the 25th anniversary of the atrocity neared, he decided to revisit them and will put a selection on public display for the first time this week. Countenance: The 9/11 Missing Posters, an installation at Most Holy Trinity – St Mary’s church in Brooklyn, places 144 pictures across 24 translucent vellum panels, in vertical pairs reminiscent of the twin towers.

The World Trade Center was always a favourite subject for Buehler. He had been photographing it since 1973, when he was 16. On September 11 2001, as an advisory board member for a tech startup, he had been invited to a conference at the Windows on the World restaurant at the top of the north tower, but turned the offer down (a friend intended to go but was delayed).

“The guy that invited us died that day and I think my friend feels guilty about it,” he says quietly by phone, recalling the day on which nearly 3,000 people were killed by hijacked airliners in New York, northern Virginia and Pennsylvania. “You realise how close – everybody had a story.”

He has told the story hundreds of times, but it never seems to fade. If anything, it only becomes more vivid. “Oh, gosh,” exclaims Stanley Praimnath, his voice cracking with an “ooooooh!” as if bearing a weight. “It’s like reliving that day.”

Nearly 3,000 people died in the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington DC on September 11 2001. But Praimnath and another office worker, Brian Clark, were two of only four individuals known to have survived from above the impact zone in either tower of the World Trade Center. The two strangers met in the smoke and fire of the 81st floor of the south tower, and walked down 1,620 steps into the rest of their lives.

Their split-second decisions that day made all the difference. Over the next 25 years, both men moved from middle age into old age and retirement. Both enjoyed family weddings and watched children and grandchildren grow. Both saw US presidents come and go as old wars ended and new wars began. They remained friends through it all.

They also told their story – countless times – in churches, schools, TV studios and elsewhere. “It could be 800, 1,200, a number like that,” Clark estimates.

Praimnath, in a separate interview, muses: “People refer to me as ‘the 9/11 guy’. It doesn’t feel repetitive. It is like unloading baggage from my shoulder, like washing my soul with tears. It is comforting to know that people out there still want to hear.”

On 11 September, 25 years ago, Osama bin Laden drove with a small number of al-Qaida retainers and aides to a remote location in eastern Afghanistan. His convoy of SUVs was accompanied by a minivan converted into a makeshift communications centre.

The van’s rudimentary equipment did not allow Bin Laden to watch the 19 men he had started sending to the US more than a year before fly planes into the twin towers in New York and the Pentagon near Washington DC, killing about 3,000 people. But he listened as shocked radio announcers broke the news.

Within days of the murderous assault, the then president, George W Bush, had begun framing the US response as a global “war on terror”, a clumsy, inappropriate and counterproductive strategic choice.

For those of us reporting on the ground during this period – watching US bombers over Afghan mountains and tanks in Baghdad streets, interviewing aspirant suicide bombers or the victims of attacks by extremist groups that proliferated from the UK to the Philippines – the errors and failures of this “war on terror” were glaring.

This unprecedented and indiscriminate series of campaigns would lead to invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, involve torture, renditions and alliances with dubious regimes, cost huge amounts of money, destabilise swathes of the Middle East and bring suffering to millions of people.

Was this what Bin Laden had hoped to achieve?

Sara Braun

As the United States commemorates the 25th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, in which nearly 3,000 people were killed in New York City, Washington DC and Pennsylvania, the Guardian asked American readers to share how the attacks affected their day-to-day lives and the country at large.

Many readers shared their feeling of patriotism in the days following the attacks while also highlighting how the government’s response to 9/11 expanded government surveillance and fueled Islamophobia in the country. For those who were adults at the time of the attacks, the day marked a cataclysmic shift. For those too young to remember it, it served as the context for the complicated and violent world they grew up in.

“When 9/11 first happened, everyone became your friend. We were all together in this loss, and the country felt like home everywhere. Driving down a suburban street every house displayed an American flag,” wrote Jennifer Jasensky, a 55-year-old paralegal based in Milford, Connecticut. “It was a beautiful sight, like something out of a book or Hallmark movie.”

Elizabeth Zorko, a retired election administrator in Omaha, Nebraska, recalled a similar phenomenon: “I remember meeting the eyes of total strangers and there was a look that wasn’t there before, as if a deep personal connection had been forged by this shared horrific experience.”

That feeling of unity soon gave way to anger and division, in large part due to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, begun by the George W Bush administration and framed as necessary conflicts to help the US win the war on terror.

A generation of spies had lost an enemy but not yet found a role. Then came 9/11.

A decade after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, al-Qaida’s devastating attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001 announced to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that the long era of battling communism, for which it had been founded, was officially at an end.

It was to be replaced by a no-holds-barred “war on terror” that would leave the CIA with a soiled reputation over falsified intelligence that led to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and an extraordinary rendition program in which suspects were subjected to “enhanced interrogations” at secret sites that official US inquiries subsequently defined as torture.

The US intelligence community was dramatically transformed after two planes flew into the World Trade Center, a third smashed into the Pentagon, and a fourth crashed in the Pennsylvania countryside after passengers overcame the hijackers.

Accounts of what unfolded inside the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, suggests an organization unprepared for the drastically changed world the attacks ushered in, despite an awareness among some in the intelligence community that al-Qaida and its leader, Osama bin Laden, represented a clear and present danger.

Ramon Antonio Vargas

Anna Sweeney Rossman was only five years old when her mother, flight attendant Madeline Amy Sweeney, died onboard an airliner that terrorists hijacked and deliberately flew into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. And for years, she said in an interview on Wednesday, Rossman’s grief primarily centered on her mother’s absence from certain milestones in her life.

She recalled how planning her 2023 wedding – particularly shopping for a dress – hit her especially hard without her mom there. And Rossman said it was as much a blow to not have her mom there for the birth of her daughters, each younger than two, as the US prepared to mark the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on Friday.

Rossman furthermore admitted that it was “really scary” to think about how she was approaching the age her mother was when she was killed: 35.

Nonetheless, in remarks arriving as hundreds of millions across the US sought ways to pay tribute to those taken by the deadliest terrorist attack in the country, Rossman said she has drawn strength to confront her circumstances from the valor her mom showed in her final moments on American Airlines flight 11.

Officials credit Rossman’s mother, who also went by just Amy Sweeney, with helping authorities on the ground identify the flight’s hijackers by telephoning details about them to her supervisor. She did shortly before becoming one of nearly 3,000 people killed that day as terrorists crashed planes into New York City’s World Trade Center, the Pentagon in Washington DC and a field in Pennsylvania.

It’s been 25 years since the terrorist attacks of September 11, and during this time Muslim Americans have learned how to live in that dangerous space between other Americans’ fears and their ignorance.

The fear was clear from the beginning. Immediately following 9/11, Muslim Americans faced what Human Rights Watch called “a severe wave of backlash violence”.

A tide of hate rose up against ordinary Muslims and those who appeared to be Muslim, including at least three murders in the immediate backlash after the attacks.

The federal government, for its part, began targeting Muslim immigrants in a massive surge of repression that legal experts soon compared with the Palmer Raids of the 1920s.

The ignorance was just as evident. Even Oprah Winfrey did her part to allay it, dedicating an episode of her show in October 2001 to “Islam 101”. The Qur’an leapt on to the New York Times bestseller list that fall.

Yet despite these early efforts at education, most Americans still learned little about Islam and Muslims.

One 2006 study found that only a third of those polled realized that Muslims worship the same God as Christians and Jews do. Close to 10% of respondents thought Muslims worship a “moon god”.

Trump to commemorate 25th anniversary of 9/11 attacks at the Pentagon

President Donald Trump is set to observe today’s 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks by attending a ceremony at the Pentagon.

It’s the second year in a row for Trump to mark the day at the Pentagon. The president, who is originally from New York, last attended the ground zero ceremony there in 2024.

During last year’s commemoration at the Pentagon , Trump delivered remarks recounting moments from the day of the attacks, including snippets of conversations from passengers who were aboard the hijacked airplanes.

At a Tuesday event at the Ellipse just outside the White House, Trump vowed to “never forget” victims, noting that the attacks were one of few moments in history that “divide time into really what came before” and after.

For the first time, this year’s ceremony will add a silent moment to honor people who were exposed to the clouds of toxic dust released by the twin towers’ collapse and have since died of cancer and other illnesses.

Questions remain about how many people developed health problems linked to the dust.

It’s a reminder of how the attacks’ long shadow has reached into many corners of life in the US and beyond.

Police officer Casey Kloepfer plans to spend time today at the Brooklyn station house where his father, officer Ronald Kloepfer, reported to work that day before being called to the World Trade Center. He didn’t make it home.

Casey Kloepfer was only four, but he grew up hearing about his father’s affinity for helping people and for a job that enabled him to do so. He became an officer this past June, AP reported

“It’s big footsteps to fill, but it’s definitely something that I take very seriously and want to continue to honor him and be the best police officer I can,” he said by phone this week.

The 29-year-old wears his father’s badge number and even has joined the New York Police Department lacrosse team, which his dad founded.

As clear as that cloudless September morning, Jenna Jacobs McPartland remembers the moment everything changed. “I was cleaning the bathroom and watching the Today show in the background and nine months pregnant,” the 52-year-old recalls by phone. “I think they were showing ‘Today throws a wedding’ when the news broke in.”

A plane had hit the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York. McPartland did not know that her husband, Ariel Jacobs, was attending a conference at its Windows on the World restaurant. “I called his office to say, ‘Hey, turn on the TV. Do you guys know what’s going on?’ His assistant said, ‘Oh my God, Jenna, he’s there.’ The whole world disappeared and there was this sort of hollow collapsing feeling.”

Ariel Jacobs did not live to see his son, Gabriel, born six days after September 11, 2001. McPartland, then living in Briarcliff Manor, New York, would marry twice more, set up a grief support charity, and become a chef and restaurateur. Each 9/11 anniversary, she has a picnic at the cemetery where a few pieces of bone from her late husband are buried.

Speaking from Fairfield, Connecticut, McPartland says: “Ari was an incredibly joyful person who cherished his life. I made a conscious choice to honour him by living as joyfully as I can. It’s not always easy. I still cry pretty frequently. If there’s a movie with a building getting blown up, or if I’m reading a book and they casually mention ‘post 9-11 this’ or whatever, it catches me off guard. The grief finds a place to live in the heart, and you visit it.”

McPartland and other victims’ families have learned to live with that grief over the past 25 years. But America writ large has struggled to carry the weight of the worst terrorist attack in its history. The world’s most powerful nation responded by inflicting terror of its own, betraying its history as a safe harbour for immigrants, and pitting Americans against one another. The initial heroism, goodwill and unity of 9/11 gave way to discord at home and diminished moral authority abroad.

McPartland adds: “It makes me incredibly sad and bordering on angry that the death of my husband has been invoked to cause more violence. It is the othering of people that got him killed in the first place and, when we Americans fail to learn that lesson and choose collectively as a nation to other people, whether it’s immigrants or other nations, that is a deepening of that tragedy that is sickening and unfathomable to me.”

US marks 25 years since the 9/11 attacks

Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog.

It is the 25th anniversary of 9/11, as Americans come together to remember and commemorate the devastating effects of the attacks, which claimed the lives of 2,977 victims.

Today’s milestone anniversary will bring memorial rituals – wreath-laying, flag-flying, moments of silence, vigils and readings of victims’ names - and volunteer projects in tribute to the day.

“In the course of history, there are a few moments that divide time into, really, what came before” and after, president Donald Trump said at a 9/11 remembrance in Washington this week.

The Republican, who was in New York on 11 September 2001, has often recounted his memories and said he plans to attend the Pentagon’s anniversary ceremony later today.

Vice-president JD Vance is expected to attend the observance at the September 11 Memorial in New York, while other administration officials are headed to the Flight 93 Memorial in Pennsylvania.

Planned remembrances extend far beyond the attack sites, from beams of light projecting from New Hampshire’s Mount Washington to a stair climb at Mississippi State University’s football stadium to a ceremony at Honolulu’s 9/11 memorial.

In other developments elsewhere today:

Donald Trump doubled down on his pledge to pay all US adults $5,000 if Republicans hold on to control of Congress in the midterm elections. He’s one of the few people to actually mention the pledge tonight, as many lawmakers and officials – including his vice-president, JD Vance – avoided mentioning the so-called “dividend” altogether. Trump defended his plan: “We can do that because our country has never done better. We’re taking in trillions, trillions of dollars.”

In a shorter address to voters than his nearly two-hour speech on Wednesday, Trump again pleaded with voters to “pretend I’m on the ticket” in November. In an improvised pledge of allegiance to himself, Trump directed the audience to commit to voting in the midterm elections at all costs. The president asked Republicans in the arena to repeat: “I don’t care if I’m registered or not. I’m going to try. And cheat like hell like they do.” Trump also told those gathered in Dallas that they would “go to hell” if they didn’t vote.

Earlier, JD Vance urged Republicans who may oppose parts of the Trump administration’s agenda not to abandon the party in November’s congressional races. The vice-president pointed to Charlie Kirk – the conservative activist killed a year ago today – to argue that voters shouldn’t “throw the baby out with the bathwater” over “a policy issue here or there”, an apparent nod to dissent over the Iran war that he avoided naming.

Vance’s speech, in many ways, was an audition for a possible 2028 presidential run. He spent much of his time on stage setting out the threats of the so-called “far left”, listing the administration’s greatest hits and slamming Joe Biden’s tenure in office.

Meanwhile, dozens of demonstrators gathered outside the arena to protest Trump’s policy agenda. Dallas police said that two people were taken into custody after an alleged assault involving a counter-protester and for blocking a roadway.