Good morning.
Donald Trump appeared at a CNN town hall last night to unleash a litany of lies about the 2020 election and E Jean Carroll’s lawsuit, just one day after a New York jury found the former president liable for sexual abuse and defamation.
Trump took questions from a friendly crowd of Republican and undeclared voters in New Hampshire, who often greeted the former president’s divisive comments and gestures toward the moderator Kaitlan Collins with laughter and applause.
Trump offered his thoughts on everything from the debt ceiling to abortion access and the war in Ukraine, but he frequently deflected when asked to outline specific policy objectives if he were to take back the White House next year.
The town hall turned combative as soon as it began, with Trump reiterating his lies about the 2020 election as Collins repeatedly interjected.
How did Collins handle Trump’s lies? Not well. Trump steamrolled over attempted interruptions from Collins as the town hall immediately turned into what many had feared: an opportunity for Trump to lie about dozens of topics, almost completely unfettered, across 60 minutes of primetime television.
What lies did he tell? The former president made false and misleading claims about the 2020 election, the January 6 insurrection, immigration, his border wall, abortion, his sexual abuse trial, the investigation into his handling of classified documents and other subjects. Here are the Guardian’s factchecks of some of Trump’s statements.
Ukraine ‘operation’ is ‘difficult’, says Kremlin spokesperson as US thinktank says Russian forces ‘constrained’ in Bakhmut
Moscow’s forces in Bakhmut are constrained by “pervasive issues with Russian combat capability”, the Institute for the Study of War, a US thinktank, has warned. “Continued attritional assaults” by Ukraine are further limiting Russia’s progress in the city, the ISW said.
Yesterday, a Ukrainian military unit said it had routed a Russian infantry brigade from frontline territory near Bakhmut, claiming to corroborate an account by the head of Russia’s Wagner group that the Russian forces had fled.
Later on, Col Gen Oleksandr Syrskyi, who heads Ukraine’s ground forces, said Russian units in some parts of Bakhmut had retreated by up to 2km (1.2 miles) as the result of counterattacks. He did not give details.
Wagner units have led a months-long Russian assault on the eastern city, but Ukrainian forces say the offensive is stalling.
What has Russia said about the situation? Russia’s military operation against Ukraine is “very difficult” but will continue, Tass news agency cited the Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, as telling a Bosnian television station yesterday.
What has Ukraine said about the spring counteroffensive? In an interview with several media outlets, including the BBC, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has said the country needs more time to prepare for a much-anticipated spring counteroffensive. He told viewers: “We can go forward and be successful. But we’d lose a lot of people. I think that’s unacceptable. So we need to wait. We still need a bit more time.”
George Santos pleads not guilty to fraud and money laundering
The Republican congressman George Santos, exposed for lying extensively about his background and campaign finance disclosures, yesterday pleaded not guilty in federal court in New York to multiple charges of fraud, money laundering, theft of public funds and making false statements.
Santos denies all 13 counts and was released on a $500,000 bond, though the US magistrate judge Arlene Lindsay forced Santos to surrender his passport and ordered him to give notice for any travel outside Long Island, New York City and Washington DC, where he was expected to return almost immediately.
The freshman congressman emerged from the federal courthouse in Central Islip, Long Island, shortly after his arraignment and used distinctly Donald Trump-like rhetoric to attack the criminal case as a conspiracy to damage him politically.
“It’s a witch-hunt,” Santos said. “I’m going to fight my battle, I’m going to fight the witch-hunt, I’m going to take care of clearing my name.”
What does the indictment say? It was unsealed earlier yesterday morning and contained seven counts of wire fraud, three of money laundering, one of theft of public money and two of making materially false statements in financial reports to the House of Representatives.
What will happen if he is found guilty? Santos faces a maximum sentence of 20 years on the top count, the US attorney’s office for the eastern district of New York said. He will not have to relinquish his seat, though according to House rules, members sentenced to at least two years cannot vote or be on committees.
In other news …
Hong Kong’s government has passed a law that allows authorities to ban foreign lawyers from working on national security cases, completing a months-long effort to block a UK lawyer from defending the media mogul and activist Jimmy Lai. He had sought to engage the UK lawyer Tim Owen in defending the charges.
Violence continued to erupt in Pakistan after the arrest of the former prime minister Imran Khan, with the death toll rising to nine and the military deployed across the country. Overnight, two more leaders from Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party were arrested.
A US army sergeant was sentenced to 25 years in prison on Wednesday, for fatally shooting an armed man during a Black Lives Matter protest in Texas – even after the Republican governor said he wanted to pardon the man. Daniel Perry, 36, was convicted of murder in April for killing Garrett Foster during the downtown Austin protest in July 2020.
The death of Banko Brown, 24, a Black trans community organiser, has sparked outrage and calls for resources for San Francisco’s unhoused queer youth. Brown, who was unarmed, was shot by a Walgreens security guard on 27 April after reportedly trying to take snacks from the store.
Stat of the day: California to pay $24m in record civil rights settlement over man’s in-custody death
California will pay a $24m civil rights settlement to the family of a man who died in police custody after screaming “I can’t breathe” as multiple officers restrained him while trying to take a blood sample, lawyers said on Tuesday. Seven California highway patrol officers and a nurse were charged with involuntary manslaughter earlier this year in connection with the 2020 death of Edward Bronstein, 38. Annee Della Donna and Eric Dubin, attorneys for Bronstein’s young children, said it was the largest civil rights settlement of its kind by the state of California, and the second largest nationally since the city of Minneapolis paid $27m in the George Floyd case. The settlement comes amid renewed scrutiny of potentially fatal restraints after last week’s killing of Jordan Neely, who was placed in a chokehold by a US marine veteran.
Don’t miss this: ‘It is hateful and mean’: fighting back with the banned book reading room
“I was struck by somebody who felt so strongly about his art that he was willing to create something that would get him potentially killed.” The artist Eric Gottesman is talking about the Ethiopian novel Oromay (Pointless), which was published in Amharic by the author Baalu Girma in 1983, was banned five days later, and ultimately got its author killed. “That dedication of an artist to speak truth to power was humbling, awe-inspiring, confusing – it made me ask, why do we do these things as artists?”
His latest show in New York includes a banned books annexe featuring books that have been prohibited in American schools since 2021. When Gottesman was first exploring the idea of a banned books reading room, he was “shocked” to realise that school districts just an hour or two away from New York City had banned books like Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer, Jazz Jennings’s Being Jazz, and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Beloved. “This isn’t just a thing that we hear about in the news, it’s very present and close,” he said.
Climate check: Impact of warmer seas on fish populations leads to rise in pirate attacks
Dwindling fish populations caused by the climate crisis are leading to an increase in pirate attacks, according to a new study looking at two piracy hotspots over the past two decades. Warmer seas have negatively affected fisheries in east Africa, one of the world’s worst areas for piracy; while in the South China Sea, another hotspot for attacks, it has had the opposite effect: fish populations have risen. This phenomenon created a “rare natural experiment” in which to test the links between climate breakdown and piracy risk, according to Gary LaFree, one of the co-authors of the paper, published in the American Meteorological Society journal, Weather, Climate, and Society.
Last Thing: 50 first dates in 2023: one woman’s wild romantic odyssey – and what it reveals about love
“I always ask really weird questions on dates,” says Hannah Zaslawski. “One of my favourites is: ‘If you were a kitchen utensil, what would you be? I mean, what would you be?’” I panic – spoon? – but Zaslawski’s a pro. “OK, what kind of spoon?” she probes. Soon we’re laughing about wooden spoons (wholesome; rustic) and it’s easy to see how her mission to go on 50 first dates – a daunting prospect for most – would appeal to the peppy Australian. Zaslawski moved from Sydney to London last year and started documenting her dates on TikTok as a way to keep friends back home in the loop about her love life. With 53k followers now invested in her “dating journey”, her honest videos are helping countless others negotiate the ruthless world of modern dating.
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