Trump says Arizona court’s near-total abortion ban ruling went too far: Live updates

State appeals court judges have already shot down two of his attempts this week. Jury selection is scheduled to begin on 15 April.

Alex Woodward has the details:

Former president Donald Trump says that Arizona went too far after the state high court issued a ruling outlawing abortion unless a patient’s life is in danger.

“Yeah, they did and I think it’ll be straightened out and, as you know, it’s all about state’s rights and it will be straightened out,” Politico reports Mr Trump said at a campaign event in Atlanta today when asked if the ruling went too far. “And I’m sure the governor and everybody else have got to bring it back into reason and that it will be taken care of I think.”

In a 4-2 bombshell decision, the state’s supreme court on Tuesday upheld a Civil War-era law that criminalises abortions, and those who help a woman obtain one, only with exceptions to save a woman’s life. The law makes it a felony punishable by two to five years in prison.

The state’s supreme court had been mulling over whether to resurrect the law, which was enacted 50 years before Arizona gained statehood or follow a 2022 law that bans abortions only after 15 weeks unless medically necessary to save a woman’s life.

The ban will go into effect in 14 days.

Ariana Baio reports on the court’s decision:

CNN reports that Donald Trump’s legal team have filed another appeal in the hush money case with the trial set to begin on Monday.

They are challenging the order by Judge Juan Merchan denying that the former president can argue he has presidential immunity from prosecution.

Mr Trump’s lawyers are also challenging Judge Merchan’s “refusal” to recuse himself from the trial and a previous ruling about how trial dockets are made public.

They have asked an appeals court to hold a hearing on 6 May.

The trial is scheduled to start on 15 April.

Stay tuned for more details…

Gustaf Kilander has the story:

On Tuesday, the former president was nowhere to be seen on the list of the world’s richest people, going from Bernard Arnault, the CEO of LVMH, the world’s largest luxury goods company, at $223bn, to John Sall, a businessman and computer software developer, in spot 500.

Trump Media, the parent company of Truth Social, began trading at $78 and finished its first day at $57.99, allowing Mr Trump to join the list of the world’s 500 richest people. But by Wednesday morning, the stock was trading at just above $36 – a likely cause of Mr Trump’s removal from the list of the top billionaires.

Shares in the company went down by 12 per cent on Friday and eight per cent on Monday, USA Today noted.

David Cameron has rejected Donald Trump’s reported peace plan for Ukraine and warned against ‘appeasing’ Putin just days after his surprise meeting with the former US President to push for extra funding for the war.

Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky has also slated the idea, to give up swathes of territory to Russia, branding it “primitive”.

The foreign secretary said a show of Ukrainian “strength” rather than “appeasement and weakness” would bring the conflict to a halt.

Kate Devlin, The Independent’s UK politics and Whitehall editor, has the latest:

US consumer prices increased more than expected in March as Americans paid more for gasoline and rental housing, leading financial markets to anticipate that the Federal Reserve would delay cutting interest rates until September.

The third straight month of strong consumer price readings reported by the Labor Department on Wednesday followed on the heels of news last week that job growth accelerated in March, with the unemployment rate slipping to 3.8% from 3.9% in February. Fed Chair Jerome Powell has repeatedly said the US central bank is in no rush to start lowering borrowing costs.

In the 12 months through March, the CPI increased 3.5%, the most since September, also as last year’s low reading dropped out of the calculation. That followed a 3.2% rise in February. The Fed has a 2% inflation target. The measures it tracks for monetary policy are running considerably below the CPI rate.

Economists polled by Reuters had forecast the CPI gaining 0.3% on the month and advancing 3.4% on a year-on-year basis.

Though the annual increase in consumer prices has declined from a peak of 9.1% in June 2022, the disinflationary trend has virtually stalled in recent months.

With the cost of living looming large over November’s election, here’s how the candidates reacted:

Today’s report shows inflation has fallen more than 60% from its peak, but we have more to do to lower costs for hardworking families. Prices are still too high for housing and groceries, even as prices for key household items like milk and eggs are lower than a year ago. I have a plan to lower costs for housing—by building and renovating more than 2 million homes—and I’m calling on corporations including grocery retailers to use record profits to reduce prices. Fighting inflation remains my top economic priority. We’re making progress: wages are rising faster than prices, incomes are higher than before the pandemic, and unemployment has remained below 4% for the longest stretch in 50 years. But we have more to do: my agenda is lowering costs for prescription drugs, health care, student debt, and hidden junk fees. Rather than proposing solutions for hardworking families, Congressional Republicans want to slash taxes for billionaires and big corporations, while helping special interests and Big Pharma raise prices. I won’t let them.

INFLATION is BACK—and RAGING! The Fed will never be able to credibly lower interest rates, because they want to protect the worst President in the history of the Untied States!

The law predating Arizona’s statehood provides no exceptions for rape or incest and allows abortions only if the mother’s life is in jeopardy. Arizona’s highest court suggested doctors can be prosecuted under the 1864 law, though the opinion written by the court’s majority didn’t explicitly say that.

The Tuesday decision threw out an earlier lower-court decision that concluded doctors couldn’t be charged for performing abortions in the first 15 weeks of pregnancy.

As with many other days, Donald Trump began his morning with a lengthy stream of conscious rant on Truth Social.

Here’s what the former president wrote:

The White House Thugs should not be allowed to have these dangerous and unfair Biden Trials during my campaign for President. All of them, civil and criminal, could have been brought more than three years ago. It is an illegal attack on a Political Opponent. It is Communism at its worst, and Election Interference at its Best. No such thing has ever happened in our Country before. On Monday I will be forced to sit, GAGGED, before a HIGHLY CONFLICTED & CORRUPT JUDGE, whose hatred for me has no bounds. All of these New York and D.C. “Judges” and Prosecutors have the same MINDSET. Nobody but this Soros Prosecutor, Alvin Bragg, wanted to take this ridiculous case. All legal scholars say it is a sham. BIDEN’S DOJ IS RUNNING THE CASE. Just think of it, these animals want to put the former President of the United States (who got more votes than any sitting President!), & the PARTY’S REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE, IN JAIL, for doing absolutely nothing wrong. It is a RUSH TO THE FINISH. SO UNFAIR!

– There is no evidence that the trials have anything to do with Joe Biden as he has no jurisdiction over local or state cases (such as the hush-money trial and Georgia election interference case) and the federal cases are handled by Special Counsel Jack Smith specifically to avoid political interference.

– All criminal prosecutions of the former president were recommended by grand juries of members of the public.

– Charges were not made three years ago as each case was still under investigation. The civil case brought by E Jean Carroll was originally filed in 2019.

– This is not communism by any definition.

– The former president is not gagged except that he is not allowed to attack members of the court staff or their families.

– If all of these judges and prosecutors have the “same mindset” it is to prosecute and try people charged with crimes.

– The Department of Justice is not running the Manhattan District Attorney’s case against Mr Trump.

The federal judge presiding over the classified documents case against former President Donald Trump granted a request by prosecutors aimed at protecting the identities of potential government witnesses.

But US District Judge Aileen Cannon refused to categorically block witness statements from being disclosed, saying there was no basis for such a “sweeping” and “blanket” restriction on their inclusion in pretrial motions.

The 24-page order centers on a dispute between special counsel Jack Smith‘s team and lawyers for Trump over how much information about witnesses and their statements could be made public ahead of trial. The disagreement, which had been pending for weeks, was one of many that had piled up before Cannon and had slowed the pace of the case against Trump — one of four prosecutions he is confronting.