Daniel Perry was jailed for 25 years for shooting dead protester Garrett Foster in Austin in 2020.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott has granted a full pardon to a former US Army sergeant and Uber driver who was jailed for 25 years for fatally shooting a Black Lives Matter protester in 2020.
Abbott, a Republican, in his pardon proclamation, cited the state’s “Stand Your Ground” self-defence law, one of the strongest such measures in the United States.
The announcement came shortly after the Texas Board of Pardons and Parole unanimously recommended a pardon for Daniel Perry and restoration of his firearm rights following an investigation that the board conducted at the governor’s request.
Perry, 37, was found guilty in April 2023 of murder in the death of 28-year-old Garrett Foster, a US Air Force veteran who was shot at a Black Lives Matter rally in Austin, the state capital, in July 2020.
The demonstration came amid a storm of protests across the country against racial injustice and police brutality in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers in May of that year.
Perry insisted he was acting in self-defence when he shot Foster, claiming he had no choice but to open fire with his handgun when Foster pointed the AK-47 he was legally carrying at Perry. Perry is white, as was Foster.
Perry was driving in Austin that night and had turned his Uber car onto a street where the demonstrators were marching, leading members of the crowd to believe they were in danger of being assaulted by his vehicle, according to media accounts of the incident.
During the trial, the two sides presented conflicting accounts of whether Foster levelled his gun at Perry.
‘Politics over justice’
In his pardon proclamation, Abbott said the jury’s verdict in effect “nullified” the state’s “Stand Your Ground” self-defence law. The statute removes a person’s duty to retreat from an unprovoked threat of violence before using deadly force if that person has a right to be there.
Perry’s lawyer, Doug O’Connell, said the pardon “corrects the courtroom travesty” of his client’s conviction, adding that Perry was “thrilled and elated to be free”.
“Daniel Perry was imprisoned for 372 days and lost the military career he loved,” O’Connell said in the statement, quoted by Austin television station KXAN. “We intend to fight to get Daniel’s military service characterisation upgraded to an honourable discharge.”
According to KXAN, Foster’s fiancee, Whitney Mitchell, shared her reaction in a joint statement with her mother, calling the pardon a “devastating blow” that “reopened deep wounds”.
Travis County District Attorney Jose Garza, a Democrat whose office brought the case against Perry, condemned the pardon, saying the parole board and the governor had “put their politics over justice and made a mockery of our legal system”.
The parole board gave no specific reason for its recommendation but said its investigation “delved into the intricacies” of Perry’s case, including a review of police reports, court records and witness statements.
Police say that man who first went missing in 1998 was held by a 61-year-old neighbour just a few minutes from his home.
An Algerian man who went missing in 1998 during the country’s civil war has been found alive in his neighbour’s cellar 26 years later, according to authorities.
The country’s Ministry of Justice said on Tuesday that the man, identified alternatively as Omar bin Omran or Omar B, disappeared when he was 19 years old and was long ago assumed to have been kidnapped or killed.
But he was found alive earlier this week at the age of 45, after being held captive by a neighbour in a sheepfold hidden by haystacks just 200 metres from his old home in Djelfa, part of northern Algeria.
The ministry said that an investigation into the “heinous” crime was ongoing and that the victim is receiving medical and psychological care.
Police detained the alleged captor, a 61-year-old doorman, after he attempted to flee. The kidnapping was discovered after the suspect’s brother posted revealing information on social media, amid an alleged inheritance dispute between the siblings.
“On 12 May at 8pm local time, [they] found victim Omar bin Omran, aged 45, in the cellar of his neighbour, BA, aged 61,” a court official said.
The victim’s mother died in 2013, when the family still believed he was likely dead. Media outlets in Algeria reported that bin Omran told his rescuers he could sometimes see his family from afar, but that he felt incapable of calling out because of a “spell” his captor cast upon him.
Bin Omran’s discovery on Sunday solves a mystery that had lingered in his community since Algeria’s bloody civil war. Relatives of war victims are still seeking justice for their missing and dead loved ones.
About 200,000 people were killed in the 1990s during the war, which pitted the government against Islamist fighters. That period is sometimes referred to as Algeria’s “Black Decade”.
As many as 20,000 people were believed to have been kidnapped over the course of the war, which ended in 2002. According to SOS Disparus, an Algerian association for those forcibly disappeared during the war, about 8,000 Algerians disappeared between 1992 and 1998 alone.
In New York, the fifth week of Donald Trump’s criminal hush-money trial has drawn to a close, as disbarred lawyer Michael Cohen testified for a thirdday about his interactions with the former United States president.
But Trump’s defence team again took the opportunity to try to poke holes in Cohen’s testimony on Thursday, blasting his credibility, his motivations and even his recollection of key events in the criminal case.
Cohen, formerly a member of Trump’s inner circle, is the prosecution’s star witness — and likely the last it will call before resting its case.
The former lawyer has alleged that Trump, a former Republican president and current presidential candidate, orchestrated a scheme to pay hush money to adult film star Stormy Daniels in the lead-up to the 2016 race.
Daniels maintained she had an affair with Trump, and prosecutors say she was poised to sell her story to the press when Trump, through Cohen, bought her silence for $130,000.
The payment, they allege, was aimed at suppressing negative coverage during the 2016 presidential election, which Trump eventually won. The Republican politician was already facing scrutiny at the time for an audio recording in which he described grabbing women by their genitals.
But Trump has denied the charges against him as well as the affair itself. He faces 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in the case, one of four ongoing criminal indictments against him.
He is the first US president, past or present, to face criminal charges. Here are the highlights from day 18 of the trial:
Michael Cohen departs his apartment building on his way to the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse in New York on May 16 [Andres Kudacki/AP Photo]
Defence questions Cohen’s motives
Straight away on Thursday, the defence resumed its attacks on Cohen, probing the disbarred lawyer for evidence that he was motivated by personal animus against Trump.
Early in the day’s proceedings, they confronted Cohen with recordings of his own voice, clipped from a 2020 podcast, showing the former lawyer relishing the prospect of a Trump conviction.
The recording captured Cohen saying he hoped “this man ends up in prison” and will “rot inside for what he did to me and my family”.
“It won’t bring back the year that I lost or the damage done to my family. But revenge is a dish best served cold,” Cohen said in one clip.
In another moment, he said, “You better believe that I want this man to go down.”
The audio clips painted a stark contrast with Cohen’s relatively demure behaviour on the witness stand: In the podcasts, he was animated, speaking at a furious pace that was punctuated by expletives.
The defence also sought to underscore why Cohen felt such hatred for his former boss. Lawyer Todd Blanche implied Cohen was angling for a White House position as chief of staff — and was ultimately disappointed.
“The truth is, Mr Cohen, you really wanted to work in the White House, correct?” Blanche asked Cohen.
“No, sir,” Cohen replied, later saying Blanche was not “characterising” his motivations correctly.
US Representative Lauren Boebert attends a news conference outside the courtroom with other Republican supporters of former President Donald Trump [David ‘Dee’ Delgado/Reuters]
Cohen testifies to lying under oath
Cohen remains a key pillar of the prosecution’s case, as the only witness who can testify to certain private discussions about the hush-money payment at the centre of the trial.
So the defence on Thursday continued to batter his credibility, asking him to revisit moments when he lied under oath, in order to cast doubt on his current testimony.
Blanche, for example, raised the fact that Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to lying before Congress about a failed attempt to build a version of Trump Tower in Moscow.
“You lied under oath, correct?” Blanche asked Cohen, who responded: “Yes, sir.”
Cohen has long maintained he lied at the time out of loyalty to Trump.
Blanche also pressed Cohen on statements he made indicating he felt pressure to plead guilty when faced with the 2018 charges, which included tax evasion and campaign finance violations.
When defendants plead guilty in court, they must affirm they made the plea of their own volition. Blanche used that point to ask Cohen: Did he lie under oath when he said he pleaded guilty of his own free will?
“That was not true,” Cohen said.
In addition, the defence highlighted instances where Cohen used artificial intelligence to generate fake legal citations in a court application, again calling into question the former lawyer’s reliability.
Former US President Donald Trump exits the courtroom during a break at the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse on May 16 [Jeenah Moon/Pool via Reuters]
Defence challenges Cohen’s testimony
Having raised questions about Cohen’s trustworthiness, the defence zeroed in on key moments from his testimony for the prosecution.
Cohen, for instance, testified earlier this week that he called Trump’s bodyguard Keith Schiller in October 2016 as a means of reaching Trump himself.
The call, Cohen explained, was about the “Stormy Daniels situation” and the hush-money payment they planned to transfer to her lawyer.
But on Thursday, Trump’s defence questioned if that was the real reason Cohen was in touch with Schiller at the time. Blanche, the defence lawyer, suggested that Cohen was instead seeking Schiller’s help to deal with a 14-year-old who had been making harassing calls to his phone.
Blanche showed the jury text messages Cohen wrote to Schiller on the same night as the 2016 conversation, saying, “Who can I speak to about harassing calls to my cell and office?”
He proceeded to ask Cohen if his description of the 2016 phone conversation “was a lie” and whether the focus was on the harassing calls, not on hush money.
“Part of it was about the phone calls, but I knew that Keith was with Mr Trump at the time, and it was more than potentially just this,” Cohen responded.
After a break, Blanche questioned Cohen about how he could recollect specific details from so long ago.
“These phone calls are things I’ve been talking about for the last six years,” Cohen said in reply. “They were and are extremely important, and they were all-consuming.”
Lawyers meet with Judge Juan Merchan during one of many sidebars held during day 18 of Donald Trump’s trial [Jane Rosenberg/Reuters]
Defence argues contract was ‘perfectly legal’
The prosecution struck back multiple times at the defence’s assertions, punctuating the cross-examination with objections and requests for “sidebar” conversations with the judge.
But the defence proceeded to try to undermine the prosecution’s central narrative, that Trump tried to conceal the hush-money payment to Daniels as part of a broader effort to influence the 2016 election.
Rather, Blanche tried to frame the actions as ordinary legal maneouvres.
He presented Cohen with a copy of the nondisclosure agreement Daniels signed and noted Trump’s signature was nowhere to be found on it. Then he asked Cohen, “In your mind, then and now, this is a perfectly legal contract, correct?”
Cohen agreed. “Yes, sir.”
He also had Cohen confirm that nondisclosure agreements were a regular practice in business law.
Blanche further questioned whether the hush-money payments had anything to do with the 2016 election at all.
He pointed to past statements Cohen made about a separate hush-money payment made to a doorman, saying that Trump was “concerned” about the doorman’s story because “it involved people that still worked with him and worked for him”.
The defence also raised comments where Cohen echoed Trump’s allegation that Daniels was extorting him for money to keep quiet.
“In your mind, there were two choices: pay or don’t pay and the story comes out,” Blanche asked Cohen, who replied with his usual, “Yes, sir.”
The cross-examination of Cohen is set to resume on Monday. Trump had requested the trial take a recess on Friday to allow him to attend the graduation of his youngest son, Barron.
Representative Matt Gaetz, centre, leads a news conference on May 16 in support of Donald Trump, while a protester holds up a sign that calls him and the other Republicans present ‘bootlickers’ [Andrew Kelly/Reuters]
Trump surrogates crowd the court
As much as Cohen was in the spotlight during the day’s proceedings, so too were the gaggle of Republican lawmakers who accompanied Trump to court.
Trump is famous for demanding loyalty from his fellow Republicans — and so, as the trial stretches on, several prominent politicians have made the pilgrimage to the Manhattan Criminal Court to show their support.
On Thursday, that entourage included no fewer than nine members of the US House of Representatives, including Florida firebrand Matt Gaetz, Colorado’s Lauren Boebert and Arizona’s Andy Biggs.
In fact, so many members of the House Oversight Committee were in attendance that a vote was delayed to allow them to fly back from New York to Washington, DC.
That vote concerns a resolution to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt for failing to turn over audio recordings related to another Trump case, this time pertaining to his handling of classified documents after leaving office.
While in New York, though, several of the representatives took the opportunity to denounce the myriad legal troubles facing Trump.
Gaetz, for instance, described Trump as the “Mr Potato Head of crimes”, a reference to a children’s toy with interchangeable parts.
He explained that prosecutors “had to stick together a bunch of things that did not belong together” to cobble together a case against the ex-president.
Gaetz also sparked criticism for a social media post he made on Thursday morning, showing him watching Trump enter the courtroom.
“Standing back and standing by, Mr President,” Gaetz wrote.
Critics pointed out that his words echoed a statement Trump made in 2020 when asked in a televised debate about white supremacist groups and far-right militias like the Proud Boys.
“Proud Boys, stand back and stand by,” Trump said at the time. He later denied knowing who the Proud Boys were. Senior members of the group have since been found guilty and sentenced to prison for their participation in the storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Donald Trump’s erstwhile lawyer Michael Cohen has faced a tough cross-examination, as he delivered a second day of testimony in the former United States president’s hush-money trial in New York.
Cohen is the prosecution’s star witness — and his testimony marks the pinnacle of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case against the former president.
On Tuesday, prosecutors also announced that Cohen will be the final witness they plan to call, as the first criminal trial against a US president nears its seeming conclusion.
As he returned to the witness stand on Tuesday, Cohen sought to make the case that Trump, his former boss, orchestrated a hush-money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels — and then covered it up by filing the charges as “legal expenses”.
The former Republican president, who is seeking re-election in November, faces 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in the case.
Cohen described a meeting with Trump at the White House in 2017 during which the pair allegedly discussed a repayment plan to reimburse Cohen for the hush-money payment.
The former lawyer has maintained he made the $130,000 payment at the behest of Trump to prevent Daniels from going public with a sexual encounter she says she had with the former president. Trump has denied that any such encounter took place.
Trump has also slammed the case as a politically motivated “witch-hunt”, and his legal team on Tuesday sought to portray Cohen as a liar who cannot be trusted.
But prosecutors believe Trump tried to influence the outcome of the 2016 vote by engaging in a “catch-and-kill” scheme to stifle media coverage that could have negatively affected his campaign for the White House.
Here are the key takeaways from day 17 of the trial:
Cohen details Oval Office meeting
Early on Tuesday, Cohen recounted an Oval Office meeting with Trump in February 2017, wherein the newly inaugurated president allegedly said Cohen would soon be receiving the first two installments of a bonus package.
That package, Cohen said, included reimbursements for the Daniels payment.
“I was sitting with President Trump, and he asked me if I was OK,” Cohen told the jurors. “He asked me if I needed money, and I said, ‘All good,’ because I can get a cheque.”
Cohen testified that Trump then told him, “OK, make sure you deal with Allen,” a reference to Allen Weisselberg, the chief financial officer of the Trump Organization at the time.
Prosecutor Susan Hoffinger also walked Cohen through a series of invoices and checks — some signed by Trump himself — that Cohen said were falsely marked as paying for retainer services.
“There was no retainer agreement, was there?” Hoffinger asked.
“No, ma’am,” Cohen replied.
In the courtroom, Trump was seen to react at various points in Cohen’s testimony, leaning over to speak with his lawyer Emil Bove, seated to his left.
Trump sits at the defendant’s table during his criminal trial in New York on May 14 [Justin Lane/Pool via Reuters]
Cohen says he lied to protect Trump
The 57-year-old former lawyer also testified on Tuesday that a February 2018 statement he released about the hush money-payment was purposely “misleading”.
The statement declared, “Neither the Trump Organization nor the Trump campaign was a party to the transaction.”
Cohen explained that the statement was “deceptive”, because it was neither the Trump Organization nor the campaign that was a part of the transaction. “It was Mr Donald J Trump himself,” Cohen said.
He added that he made the statement “in order to protect Mr Trump, to stay on message”.
Cohen also told the jurors that he helped craft a pair of statements purportedly from Daniels, the adult film star, denying her affair with Trump.
The first came after The Wall Street Journal reported in 2018 that he arranged the $130,000 hush-money payment to Daniels. The second was written after Cohen said he heard Daniels was planning to go on comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night TV show.
Cohen explained he contacted Keith Davidson, the lawyer who represented the adult film star in the hush money deal, to put together the statement, which Daniels issued on the day of her appearance. It reiterated that she had not been paid “hush money” to deny the claim.
Cohen testified that he knew the statements were false because he had helped craft them — and that he knew the payment had been made because he had paid it.
He also said he regretted “lying, bullying people” during his many years working for Trump.
“To keep the loyalty and to do the things that he asked me to do, I violated my moral compass. And I suffered the penalty, as has my family,” Cohen said.
Defence presses Cohen on credibility
Trump’s defence team pressed Cohen during cross-examination on Tuesday afternoon, seeking to poke holes in his testimony and present him to the jury as a serial liar seeking revenge against a former boss.
Cohen served time in federal prison for various crimes, including some related the hush-money payment, and has admitted to lying under oath. He has also been vocal about his antipathy towards Trump, with whom he had a public falling-out.
Under aggressive questioning from Trump lawyer Todd Blanche, Cohen acknowledged calling the former president a “dictator douchebag” on the social media platform TikTok.
The defence also showed jurors pictures of Trump-themed merchandise for sale on Cohen’s website, including shirts with an illustration of the former president behind bars. Blanche pointed to statements Cohen made on his podcast as well, indicating the former lawyer would like to see Trump convicted.
In one of several moments when Blanche asked Cohen if he wanted to see Trump found guilty, the former lawyer hedged: “I would like to see accountability. It’s not for me. It’s for the jury and this court.”
Blanche pressed him: “I’m just asking you, yes or no: Do you want to see President Trump get convicted in this case?”
“Sure,” Cohen replied.
Cohen’s shorter answers under cross-examination marked a contrast with his more voluble testimony with prosecutors, and court observers noted he carefully hedged in several of his responses, using ambiguous language to skirt the defence team’s questions.
Republicans show support; appeals court upholds gag order
Mike Johnson, speaker of the US House of Representatives, travelled to court with Trump in his motorcade on Tuesday, in a prominent show of support.
They were joined by other prominent right-wing figures, including North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum and Vivek Ramaswamy, both of whom ran against Trump for this year’s Republican presidential nomination.
The appearances come as Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, retains a solid grip on the party despite his legal troubles.
Speaking to reporters outside the courtroom, Johnson weighed in on the case. “Trump is innocent of these charges,” he said.
The case, he added, “is not about justice. It’s all about politics, and everybody can see that.”
The House speaker also slammed the gag order against Trump, which prevents him from publicly speaking against witnesses, jurors and family members of court officials.
The former president has been fined multiple times and held in contempt of court for violating that order since the trial began last month.
Separately on Tuesday, a New York appeals court rejected an attempt by Trump’s legal team to have the gag order lifted.
Judge Juan Merchan, who issued the gag order, “properly weighed” Trump’s free speech rights “against the court’s historical commitment to ensuring the fair administration of justice in criminal cases, and the right of persons related or tangentially related to the criminal proceedings from being free from threats, intimidation, harassment, and harm”, the appeals court ruled.
Mexico City, Mexico – Mother’s Day on Friday was a sombre occasion for Joanna Alvear of Toluca, Mexico.
She began her day with hundreds of other women in the shadow of the towering Mother’s Monument, a stone obelisk in the centre of Mexico City.
Most of the women wore the same grim expression: furrowed brows, tightly clenched jaws and piercing eyes, some brimming with tears. Like many of them, Alvear clutched a homemade poster to her chest, its cheery yellow colour belying its heart-breaking plea: “I’m still searching for you. Lilith, I love you.”
She represents one of the estimated 111,000 missing persons in Mexico today.
Every year on Mother’s Day, the families of the “disappeared” join with activists and concerned citizens to march through the streets of the capital, demanding answers in the tens of thousands of unsolved cases.
This year’s protest, however, held special significance. It comes in lead-up to pivotal nationwide elections on June 2, when every seat in Mexico’s Congress will be up for grabs, as well as the presidency.
But as the tenure of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador draws to a close, some question whether his administration has done enough to address the widespread disappearances — and whether his successor can improve upon his track record.
Family members like Alvear said they have had to spearhead their own searches, relying on personal resources in the absence of government support.
In Alvear’s case, her daughter Lilith Saori Arreola Alvear, a 21-year-old transgender woman, went missing while on vacation with friends in Playa Zicatela, Oaxaca, on January 2, 2023.
Months passed, and in desperation, Alvear read Mexico’s Standardised Protocol for Searching for Missing Persons to better understand the investigation. That’s when she started to notice the shortfalls in how her daughter’s case was being handled.
“When I read the approved protocol for searching for missing persons, I realised that, in reality, the protocols that had to be done were not done,” Alvear said.
“So I am a mom who has searched for Lilith with her own resources.”
At the Mother’s Monument in Mexico City, Joanna Alvear holds up a poster of her missing daughter Lilith [Chantal Flores/Al Jazeera]
A president’s promise
Lopez Obrador was voted into office six years ago, in July 2018, after campaigning on the promise of seeking justice for missing persons.
One of the most pressing issues of that election cycle was the case of the Ayotzinapa 43, the mass disappearance four years prior of 43 students from a rural teacher’s college.
The case had plunged the popularity of then-President Enrique Pena Nieto to new lows, as his government oversaw a flawed investigation riddled with alleged cover-ups, inconsistencies and accusations of torture and forced confessions.
But Lopez Obrador promised justice for the Ayotzinapa 43 and other victims — and transparency in any future investigations.
“We will find out where these young men are and punish those responsible,” he said in 2018, standing with the students’ families.
Lopez Obrador ultimately won in a historic landslide: His election marked a blistering defeat for the governing Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), as he notched one of the largest margins of victory in decades.
Once in office, the left-wing leader sought to make good on his campaign promises. Just two days after being sworn in, Lopez Obrador announced the creation of a truth commission dedicated to investigating the Ayotzinapa 43.
A demonstrator at the annual Mother’s Day march wears a T-shirt raising awareness for the missing ‘Ayotzinapa 43’, a group of student-teachers who disappeared in 2014 [Chantal Flores/Al Jazeera]
A legacy in question
But in the years since, sentiment has soured among the families of the missing. Justice remains elusive, and some have accused Lopez Obrador of focusing more on burnishing his own image than producing substantial results.
Under Lopez Obrador’s leadership, the number of disappearances has also continued to climb, surpassing 100,000 in 2022.
An estimated 111,540 people were registered as “disappeared” from January 1962 to September 2023, according to the United Nations, citing Mexico’s own statistics. The vast majority of cases, however, were recorded after 2006, a fact often credited to Mexico’s “war on drugs“.
But critics say Lopez Obrador has tried to cast doubt on those statistics, by conducting a new government census to suss out “false” disappearances.
By December, the new census could only confirm 12,377 cases — a number that families and advocates say fails to represent the true scale of the problem.
“The figures are less, because he [the president] says they are less. Where are our children?” asked Nora Torres, who participated in the Mother’s Day march as part of the group Buscando Nuestros Desaparecidos en Tamaulipas, which searches for the disappeared.
“Most of our relatives do not appear on the registry. Where are they? We want them to tell us where they are.”
The human rights group Amnesty International also pointed out that the new census categorised 80,000 people “ambiguously” to arrive at the new, lower total. It called on the Mexican government “to ensure transparency” and involve the relatives of the disappeared in any further census processes.
Later, in mid-March, Interior Minister Luisa Maria Alcalde said that there are officially 99,729 people missing.
But the government has framed the backlash as part of an opposition smear campaign, and tensions have been running high.
In February, a group protesting the lack of progress in the Ayotzinapa case used a pickup truck to smash a door to the presidential palace. Then, on Monday, protesters threw firecrackers at the palace after eight soldiers accused of involvement in the students’ disappearance were released from pre-trial detention. Twenty-six police officers were injured.
For his part, Lopez Obrador accused reporters and volunteer searchers last week of suffering from a “a delirium of necrophilia” in their search for the missing and presumed dead.
The families of the disappeared mark Mother’s Day with an annual march through Mexico City [Chantal Flores/Al Jazeera]
New election, new promises
Many of the women at this year’s Mother’s Day march expressed scepticism that the situation will change under a new administration.
“We do not believe anything. They are pure promises — pure promises for us mothers,” said Torres, who travelled from Ciudad Victoria, Tamaulipas, in northern Mexico, to participate.
Presidents in Mexico are limited to a single six-year term at a time. That means Lopez Obrador cannot run for a second consecutive stint as president.
So his protegee, former Mexico City mayor Claudia Sheinbaum, has stepped forward to represent his party, Morena, instead.
Polls show her maintaining a healthy lead over Xochitl Galvez, a senator running on behalf of the conservative National Action Party.
Both candidates have attempted to address public concern about the disappearances — as well as systemic issues like the government corruption used to cover up crimes.
“We must address the causes. We must reduce the crime of disappearance, and we must attend to the victims,” Sheinbaum said on March 19, during a news conference in Reynosa, Tamaulipas.
Both she and Galvez have campaigned on improving public security as part of the solution.
Sheinbaum has largely focused on tackling poverty as a means of lowering crime. But Galvez has taken a stiffer approach, promising to build a high-security prison and use “the necessary bullets” to subdue criminal networks.
On Mother’s Day, Galvez met with the mothers of the missing in the northeastern city of Ciudad Victoria to discuss their concerns.
“There are women who today have nothing to celebrate,” she said at the campaign stop. “There are women who suffer the absence of their children.”
But critics point out that Galvez’s political coalition, Strength and Heart, includes the PRI — the same party that faced criticism for mishandling the Ayotzinapa case before Lopez Obrador’s term.
Critics have accused the government of casting doubt on the number of missing people in Mexico [Chantal Flores/Al Jazeera]
Families push for ‘empathy’
Many families have called for this year’s candidates to restore the government bodies once tasked with searching for their missing loved ones.
Within the last year, for instance, the National Search Commission saw its staff reduced by half. The National Centre for Human Identification (CNIH), meanwhile, was dismantled after less than two years in existence.
The centre had been charged with examining the estimated 52,000 unidentified bodies discovered in Mexico since 2006.
But many relatives of those who have disappeared told Al Jazeera they care little which candidate takes power — so long as action is taken to find their loved ones.
“We are neither with one party nor with another. The only thing we want is for whoever is going to be in the government to really do something for us,” said Lourdes Romero Diaz, whose brother-in-law went missing in Mexico City in 2019 along with two co-workers.
Romero explained that the process of filing police reports can be traumatising for the families involved — and the stalled, sputtering nature of the investigations can increase the stress they feel.
“It is quite exhausting,” said Romero. “The worst thing is that our president and our leaders turn a blind eye and say that nothing is happening here, both in Mexico City and in the country.”
But when politicians do pay attention to cases like hers, Romero added that she sometimes questions their motives. She expressed concern that politicians could use the disappearances — and the outrage they arouse — to curry public favour.
“We do not agree that our relatives are used as political loot. They are not an object that they can use to monetise or use in their policies,” she said.
Ana María Velázquez remembers her missing son, Carlos Eduardo Monroy Velázquez, with a message pinned to her T-shirt [Chantal Flores/Al Jazeera]
Another mother in Friday’s march, Ana Maria Velazquez, told Al Jazeera her 20-year-old son Carlos Eduardo Monroy Velazquez disappeared two years ago while trying to cross the border into the United States.
She hopes this year’s candidates will deliver what she and other family members have been longing for: understanding — and answers.
“I would like them to have more empathy because the truth is, we haven’t had any support,” she said. “The state has not given us any response.”
United Nations says about 400 women die from domestic violence in Kazakhstan each year, but many cases go unreported.
Warning: This article contains details of violent domestic abuse that some may find upsetting.
Kazakhstan’s top court has sentenced a former economy minister to 24 years in prison for torturing and murdering his wife, following a widely watched trial that many saw as a test of the president’s promise to strengthen women’s rights.
Kuandyk Bishimbayev, 44, was found guilty and sentenced by the Supreme Court on Monday.
His trial, which has been broadcast live over the past seven weeks, has been seen as an attempt by authorities to send a message that members of the elite are no longer above the law.
Surveillance footage played during the trial showed Bishimbayev repeatedly punching and kicking his wife, 31-year-old Saltanat Nukenova, and dragging her by her hair, near naked, into the VIP room of a restaurant owned by his family in the country’s largest city, Almaty.
As she lay dying in the suite with no security cameras covered in her blood, Bishimbayev phoned a fortune teller, who assured him his wife would be fine. When an ambulance finally arrived 12 hours later, Nukenova was pronounced dead at the scene.
Videos were also found on Bishimbayev’s mobile phone in which he insulted and humiliated the visibly bruised and bloodied Nukenova in the hours before she lost consciousness on the morning of November 9 last year.
This June 2017 photo provided by Aitbek Amangeldy shows a selfie taken by his sister, Saltanat Nukenova, in Astana [Courtesy of Aitbek Amangeldy via AP]
President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has said he wants to build a fairer society including improved rights for women.
The case has helped rally public support behind a law criminalising domestic violence, which parliament passed last month.
Days after Nukenova’s death, her relatives launched an online petition urging authorities to pass “Saltanat’s Law” to bolster protection for those at risk of domestic violence. When the trial began, more than 5,000 Kazakhs wrote to senators urging for tougher laws on abuse, according to local media reports.
Government data show that one in six women in the Central Asian nation has experienced violence by a male partner.
According to the United Nations, about 400 women die from domestic abuse in the country each year. These figures could be higher as many cases go unreported.
During the trial, Bishimbayev admitted to beating his wife, but said some of her injuries were self-inflicted. He denied torturing or planning to murder her.
He served as the oil-rich nation’s economy minister from May to December 2016.
Bishimbayev was convicted of bribery in 2018 and sentenced to 10 years in prison, but walked free after less than three years thanks to an amnesty and parole.
Kuandyk Bishimbayev, the country’s former economy minister, is escorted into court in Astana, Kazakhstan. [File: The Kazakhstan Supreme Court Press Office Telegram channel via AP]
Michael Cohen, the key prosecution witness in Donald Trump’s hush-money case, has testified against the former United States president in one of the most widely anticipated days in court since the trial began.
Cohen, Trump’s former personal lawyer and fixer, told the court on Monday that he lied and bullied on behalf of his former boss.
“It was what was needed in order to accomplish the task,” said Cohen, periodically glancing over at Trump, who was slouched in his chair at the defendant’s table in the New York City courtroom.
Prosecutors have accused Trump of falsifying business records related to hush-money payments made before the 2016 election, which he won.
The prosecution’s case hinges on a $130,000 payment Cohen made to adult film star Stormy Daniels before the vote, in an effort to keep her from speaking publicly about a 2006 sexual encounter she says she had with Trump.
The former president has denied that any such encounter took place. He also has rejected the charges against him as politically motivated. The trial has come as Trump campaigns for re-election in November.
Here are the key takeaways from Cohen’s testimony on day 16 of the trial.
Cohen says he did ‘whatever’ Trump wanted
Cohen, 57, testified on Monday that it was fair to describe his role as being a fixer for Trump, testifying that he took care of “whatever he wanted”.
Rather than work as a traditional corporate lawyer, Cohen reported directly to Trump and was never part of the general counsel’s office for the Trump Organization.
Among his duties were renegotiating bills from business partners, threatening to sue people and planting positive stories in the press, he said.
Trump, he added, communicated primarily by phone or in person and never set up an email address.
“He would comment that emails are like written papers, that he knows too many people who have gone down as a direct result of having emails that prosecutors can use in a case,” Cohen said.
A courtroom sketch shows Cohen being questioned by prosecutor Susan Hoffinger as Trump sits with his eyes closed on May 13 [Jane Rosenberg/Reuters]
Cohen details effort to quash bad press
Cohen testified that — at a meeting in 2015 with Trump and David Pecker, then-publisher of the National Enquirer — the trio discussed using the supermarket tabloid to boost Trump’s candidacy while attacking his rivals.
According to the testimony, Trump told Pecker to let Cohen know if he became aware of negative press that might arise, and the three men agreed that Pecker would try to suppress any such stories.
As Trump prepared to announce his campaign for president, he allegedly told Cohen that there would be “a lot of women coming forward”.
Cohen further explained that, as Trump’s then-lawyer, he sought to harness the power of the National Enquirer for his boss’s benefit, given its high visibility next to the cash registers at tens of thousands of supermarkets across the US.
He testified that he went to Trump immediately after the National Enquirer alerted him to a story being peddled about an alleged affair with former Playboy model Karen McDougal.
Cohen recalled going to Trump’s office and asking him if he knew McDougal or anything about the story. Cohen said Trump then told him to make sure that the story doesn’t get released.
Cohen said he thought the story would have a “significant” impact on Trump’s presidential campaign if it were to be published.
The McDougal news came shortly after the National Enquirer paid $30,000 to squash a doorman’s false rumour that Trump had a child out of wedlock. “You handle it,” Cohen remembers Trump telling him after learning that the doorman had come forward.
Cohen’s testimony on Monday echoed similar claims from Pecker, the publisher, earlier in the trial. Pecker testified about the so-called “catch-and-kill” scheme to suppress stories that could negatively affect Trump before the 2016 vote.
Publisher pressed him for reimbursement, Cohen says
After the National Enquirer paid $150,000 to suppress McDougal’s story, Cohen testified that the tabloid’s publisher was hounding him to get Trump to reimburse him for the cost.
Cohen recounted meeting Pecker at his favourite Italian restaurant and the publisher being upset about not being repaid for burying the story about Trump’s alleged affair with the ex-Playboy model.
Pecker was concerned, Cohen said, that “it was too much money for him to hide from the CEO of the parent company” and he’d already laid out $30,000 to suppress the doorman’s story.
Cohen added that, at some point, Pecker had also expressed to him that his company, American Media Inc, had a “file drawer — or a locked drawer as he described it — where files related to Mr Trump were located”.
Cohen said he was concerned because the publisher’s relationship with Trump went back years and that Pecker was in the running to head another media company. Cohen feared what would happen to the files if Pecker left.
Trump attends the sixteenth day of his trial at Manhattan Criminal Court on May 13 [Steven Hirsch/Pool via Reuters]
Trump furious at Daniels’ claims, Cohen says
Cohen also told jurors on Monday that Trump was furious that Daniels, the adult film star, was shopping a story about the sexual encounter she says she had with the ex-president.
“He said to me, ‘This is a disaster, a total disaster. Women are going to hate me,’” Cohen testified. “‘Guys, they think it’s cool, but this is going to be a disaster for the campaign.’”
Cohen explained he learned that Daniels was selling her story at a critical moment for Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. An audio recording had just been leaked from the TV show Access Hollywood, in which Trump bragged about grabbing women’s genitals.
The tape left the Trump campaign scrambling to contain the damage only weeks before Election Day in November 2016.
The ex-president’s defence team has suggested the payment to Daniels could have been made to spare Trump and his family embarrassment, not to boost his campaign. But Cohen testified that Trump appeared solely concerned with the effect on his presidential bid.
“He wasn’t thinking about Melania. This was all about the campaign,” said Cohen, referring to Trump’s wife. At the defence table, Trump shook his head.
Cohen added that he recalled Trump saying, “Just get past the election, because if I win, it will have no relevance because I’m the president, and if I lose, I won’t really care.”
‘Just do it,’ Cohen says Trump told him
Cohen also provided detailed testimony about the hush-money payment that he made to Daniels, which is at the heart of the prosecution’s case.
Cohen said Trump urged him to delay sending payment to Daniels’s lawyer until after the election, telling him that the story would no longer matter. In October 2016, with Daniels’s story about to come out, Cohen said Trump told him to finally pay up.
“He expressed to me: Just do it,” Cohen testified, saying Trump advised him to meet Trump Organization executive Allen Weisselberg and figure it out. Weisselberg baulked at paying, however, so Cohen said he decided to come up with the money himself.
“I ultimately said, ‘OK, I’ll pay it,’” Cohen testified, explaining that he resisted paying out of his own pocket, but eventually relented after Trump promised him, “You’ll get the money back.”
Trump’s lawyers have argued that Cohen acted on his own, a notion he rejected on the witness stand. “Everything required Mr Trump’s sign-off,” Cohen said on Monday.
Cohen also described during his testimony how he set up a shell company — falsely listed as a “real estate consulting company” — to facilitate the payment through a bank across the street from Trump Tower.
Prosecutors showed phone records to jurors indicating that Cohen called Trump’s line twice on the morning he visited the bank.
Trump’s defence team is expected to challenge Cohen’s credibility during cross-examination later this week and paint him as a liar who cannot be trusted.
Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to federal charges related to the hush-money payments, as well as for lying to Congress. He was sentenced to three years in prison.
The fourth week of Donald Trump’s criminal hush-money trial in New York has come to a close, with the prosecution hinting that it would soon rest its case.
Nevertheless, on Friday, the prosecution continued to call a line of witnesses, seeking to bolster its case that Trump, a former United States president, intentionally falsified business documents in an effort to influence the outcome of the 2016 election.
The documents in question pertain to an alleged hush-money payment made to the adult film star Stormy Daniels, who came forward with allegations that she and Trump had an affair.
Trump has denied any sexual relations with Daniels, but in 2016, his former lawyer Michael Cohen transferred $130,000 to Daniels to buy her silence.
Cheques to reimburse Cohen for the payment were classified as “legal expenses”, a label the prosecution says was designed to conceal their true purpose. Trump faces 34 felony counts of falsifying business records as a result.
Trump’s defence team, however, has denied any wrongdoing, saying that the former president merely aimed to avoid embarrassment for his family. It has also sought to have a mistrial declared in the case.
Here are five main takeaways from day 15 of the criminal trial, the first in history to feature a US president:
Madeleine Westerhout has testified about her past experiences serving in Trump’s White House [File: Andrew Harnik/AP Photo]
Trump aide returns to the witness hand
The first witness to take the stand on Friday was a familiar face: Madeleine Westerhout, who appeared a day earlier to testify to how Trump managed his affairs while in the White House.
A former White House aide who served as a personal assistant to Trump, Westerhout explained that the then-president would regularly receive envelopes from New York with cheques to sign.
But as cross-examination proceeded on Friday, Westerhout was pressed about the details she presented and whether she could have been aware of the precise business matters Trump was attending to.
Trump defence lawyer Susan Necheles also asked Westerhout about the amount of work the then-president juggled each day.
“Would you see him signing things without reviewing them?” Necheles asked at one point.
Westerhout responded, “Yes.” She also testified that Trump was worried about how rumours of an affair with Daniels would affect his family.
“My understanding was that he knew it would be hurtful to his family,” Westerhout said, echoing a centrepiece of the defence’s argument.
Trump’s lawyers have maintained that the former president did not seek to sway the 2016 election but rather to shield his wife and children from news that might cause them discomfort.
Defence lawyer Emil Bove questions paralegal Jaden Jarmel-Schneider on May 10 [Jane Rosenberg/Reuters]
Technical witnesses fill out the day
Four more witnesses took the stand after Westerhout, testifying to technical aspects of the case and other evidence collected.
They included two representatives from major phone services: compliance analyst Daniel Dixon from AT&T and Jenne Tomalin from Verizon.
They briefly authenticated phone records, tracing communications between key figures in the trial, like Allen Weisselberg, the former chief financial officer for the Trump Organization.
The last two witnesses on Friday came from the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office: Georgia Longstreet — a familiar face on the stand — and Jaden Jarmel-Schneider, both paralegals.
Longstreet reviewed social media posts and text messages on behalf of the district attorney’s office.
During Friday’s testimony, she read aloud text messages Daniels’s manager Gina Rodriguez exchanged with an editor from the National Enquirer tabloid in 2016, before she accepted a hush-money payment from Trump’s then-lawyer Michael Cohen.
Jarmel-Schneider, meanwhile, spoke to the data collected from Cohen’s phone.
He discussed, for example, why a recorded conversation between Cohen and Trump — seemingly about a hush-money payment to Playboy model Karen McDougal — appeared to be so short: Cohen had another call coming in.
Prosecutors also used Jarmel-Schneider’s testimony as an opportunity to display on screen the 34 documents Trump allegedly falsified — the basis for the case.
Former President Donald Trump walks with his defence lawyer Todd Blanche on May 10 [Curtis Means/DailyMail.com via AP, Pool]
Larry King interview barred from evidence
During breaks in the witness testimony, the prosecution sought to convince Judge Juan Merchan to allow a 1999 interview between Trump and CNN personality Larry King into evidence.
The interview contained a segment where Trump professed to be familiar with campaign finance laws, something the prosecution hoped to use to buttress its case that he knew his actions were illegal.
But the defence argued that an interview from 1999 had little relevancy to a case hinged on events in 2016, by which time campaign finance laws had changed.
Judge Merchan ultimately sided with the defence. The 1999 interview, he said, was “too attenuated” by the long stretch of time between the events in question.
Former lawyer Michael Cohen is expected to testify in the New York hush-money trial on Monday [File: Yuki Iwamura/AP Photo]
Cohen attacks Trump from TikTok
Another matter before the court was the question of Cohen’s presence on the social media platform TikTok.
Cohen is a key witness for the prosecution. He is expected to testify on Monday that Trump himself directed the hush-money payment to Daniels — and that the former president also ordered the subsequent falsification of the business records.
The defence, however, has sought to shift the blame away from Trump, saying that any criminal activity was Cohen’s fault instead.
Cohen and Trump have had a bitter relationship in recent years. Cohen left Trump’s employ in 2018, and the two men have exchanged lawsuits over legal fees and breached trust.
During the trial, Trump has been under a court-imposed gag order that bars him from speaking out against any witnesses, including Cohen. But he has violated that gag order multiple times, including to call Cohen a “liar” and share an article that labelled Cohen a “serial perjurer”.
But on Friday, Judge Merchan turned his attention to the comments Cohen himself was making on TikTok, attacking Trump.
The defence team had asked the judge to issue a separate gag order against Cohen, to stem his comments.
“It’s becoming a problem every single day that President Trump is not allowed to respond to this witness but this witness is allowed to continue to talk,” defence lawyer Todd Blanche said.
The prosecutors, however, argued they had little control over what Cohen said in his free time.
Judge Merchan, nevertheless, issued a stern warning. The prosecutors, he said, should tell Cohen “that the judge is asking him to refrain from making any more statements” about Trump.
“That comes from the bench,” he added.
Paralegal Georgia Longstreet testifies at the Manhattan criminal court on May 10, sharing messages sent by Stormy Daniels’s manager Gina Rodriguez [Jane Rosenberg/Reuters]
Two more prosecution witnesses to go
Friday’s court proceedings ended with an acknowledgement that the prosecution’s case is winding to a close.
Lawyer Joshua Steinglass told the court that the prosecution anticipated calling two more witnesses, then potentially resting its case.
“It’s entirely possible” that the prosecution could finish presenting evidence by next week, Steinglass explained.
The coming week is expected to be a short one, though: The court takes a midweek break every Wednesday, and on Friday, May 17, Trump requested the day off to attend his son Barron’s graduation.
With Friday’s hearing finally at an end, Trump exited the courtroom and spoke to the press, denouncing the prosecution’s case as a “scam”.
He complained that the court hinged on events that happened years ago, in 2016 — and that the charges landed in the middle of his current re-election campaign.
“It’s all fake. The whole case is fake,” he said as he left court for the day.
The United States has halted the shipment of some types of heavy bombs to Israel and US President Joe Biden has also pledged to halt the supply of some offensive weapons and artillery shells to the country if it goes ahead with its assault on Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah.
Here’s what we know so far.
What is the US saying?
Biden issued this warning, possibly his starkest yet against Israel, during an interview with CNN on Wednesday. In the same interview, he also said that the US would continue to supply defensive arms such as Iron Dome interceptors, underlining his continued support for Israel’s defence.
US officials said on Wednesday that the US had paused a shipment of heavy bombs, including 1,800 of 2,000-pound (907kg) bombs and 1,700 of 500-pound (227kg) bombs.
The Washington-based news outlet Politico reported that the weapons held back also include Boeing’s Joint Direct Attack Munitions, which are guidance kits that convert “dumb” bombs dropped in free-fall, ballistic trajectory into precision-guided ones.
These weapons had been included in an earlier shipment for Israel, approved before the recent supplemental aid package authorised by the US Congress in April, which assigned $26.38bn for Israel, including $9.1bn for humanitarian purposes.
At a US Senate hearing on Wednesday, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said the US is reviewing near-term security assistance to Israel in the context of Israel’s ongoing attacks on Rafah.
“We’ve been very clear…from the very beginning that Israel shouldn’t launch a major attack into Rafah without accounting for and protecting the civilians that are in that battle space,” Austin said.
What damage can heavy bombs cause?
On explosion, a 500-pound bomb can severely harm or kill everything or anyone within a 20-metre (65 feet) radius. A 2,000-pound bomb has a destruction radius of 35 metres (115 feet), according to the Project on Defense Alternatives (PDA), which conducts defence policy research and analysis.
Depending on the type of surfaces it hits, a 500-pound bomb can create a crater of, on average, 25 feet (7.6 metres) across and 8.5 feet (2.6 metres) deep. A 2000-pound bomb will carve out a crater 50 feet (15 metres) across and 16 feet (5 metres), according to the PDA.
A 2015 report by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) says of the 2000-pound bomb: “The pressure from the explosion can rupture lungs, burst sinus cavities and tear off limbs hundreds of metres from the blast site.”
Israeli forces used 2,000-pound bombs on the Jabalia refugee camp on October 31, according to analysis by The Guardian and The New York Times. Two impact craters estimated to be 40 feet (12 metres) wide were identified.
Is it legal for Israel to use these bombs in Gaza?
Aerial bombing in densely populated areas is not explicitly illegal in international humanitarian law. However, civilians cannot be targets of the bombing and any civilian casualties must be “proportionate” with a specific military aim. Both the Additional Protocol I of the 1949 Geneva Conventions and the Hague Convention of 1907 lay down these rules. Israel is a signatory to both.
If the numbers of civilian casualties are not proportionate and are “clearly excessive” as measured against any direct military advantage, then the attack qualifies as a war crime according to the statute of the International Criminal Court, which is investigating Israel’s war on Gaza.
How has Israel reacted to Biden’s statement on offensive weapons shipments?
Israel asserts that its only interest is in destroying Hamas and that it does not target Palestinian civilians. It claims to take all precautions to avoid unnecessary casualties. It has justified its assault on Rafah with the claim that the city is home to Hamas’s remaining battalions. More than one million civilians have taken shelter there from the Israeli bombardment on other parts of the Gaza Strip over the past seven months, however.
On Thursday, Gilad Erdan, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations told Israeli public radio Kan: “This is a difficult and very disappointing statement to hear from a president to whom we have been grateful since the beginning of the war.”
Erdan said Biden’s warning would bolster the positions of Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah.
“If Israel is restricted from entering an area as important and central as Rafah where there are thousands of terrorists, hostages and leaders of Hamas, how exactly are we supposed to achieve our goals?” he said.
How much military aid does the US provide to Israel?
The US sends Israel about $3bn a year, most of which is provided as Foreign Military Financing (FMF).
The US has historically supplied substantial foreign aid to Israel; a total of $297bn (adjusted for inflation) between 1946 and 2023, $216bn of which was in military aid and $81bn in economic aid, according to data from the US Agency for International Aid (USAID). Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of US aid since its founding.
After the Hamas attack on October 7, the US sent navy ships such as guided missile cruisers armed with naval guns and destroyers alongside $2bn worth of munitions to Israel.
Israel is reliant on US military aid because of a global ammunition shortage following the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, Israeli daily business newspaper, the Calcalist reported, adding that while the Israeli military has avoided conceding this in public, Major General Eliezer Toledano admitted in March that the army is reducing air attacks in order “to better manage the economy of armaments”.
Has the US paused military aid to Israel before?
Yes. The US paused military aid to Israel in 1982, when then-President Ronald Reagan imposed a six-year ban on cluster weapons sales to Israel. This followed a congressional investigation which revealed that Israel had used the weapons on areas with civilian populations when it invaded Lebanon in 1982.
What is happening in Rafah?
Israel launched a military offensive on Rafah and seized control of the Gaza side of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, cutting off access to humanitarian relief, on Tuesday, hours after Hamas agreed to a ceasefire deal. This followed an overnight assault on the area using warplanes which killed at least 12 civilians.
After Israel’s relentless bombardment of the Gaza Strip since the start of the war on October 7, more than one million internally displaced Palestinians have taken shelter in Rafah – many of them previously displaced from other parts of Gaza following Israel’s orders to evacuate from those areas. More than 34,000 Palestinians have been killed over the course of the war, most of them women and children. Thousands more are missing, feared dead under the rubble.
As Rafah is the southernmost city of the Gaza Strip, observers say that civilians now have nowhere else to go.
Judge says setting a new date would be ‘imprudent’, raising further doubt about whether the trial will start before the November 5 US election.
A United States judge in Florida has postponed indefinitely former President Donald Trump’s trial on charges that he illegally kept classified documents after leaving office.
US District Judge Aileen Cannon said on Tuesday that Trump’s trial would no longer begin on May 20, but she did not set a new date for proceedings to start, casting further doubt on whether he will face trial before the November election when he hopes to win the presidency for a second time.
Trump faces dozens of charges accusing him of illegally keeping top secret documents that he took from the White House in 2021 after losing the election to Democrat Joe Biden. Also accused of obstructing the FBI’s efforts to get the papers back, Trump has pleaded not guilty and denied wrongdoing.
The prosecution and defence had both acknowledged that the May date trial would probably need to be delayed, given still-unresolved issues in the case and because Trump is currently on trial in New York in connection with alleged hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 presidential election. The New York case involves several of the same lawyers who are representing Trump in the Florida case.
Judge Cannon, who was appointed by Trump in 2020, scheduled pre-trial hearings to take place until July 22.
She said it would be “imprudent” to set a new trial date given the uncertainties.
Special Counsel Jack Smith, who brought case, has proposed proceedings begin in July.
Trump’s lawyers have said it should not start until after the November 5 election, although suggested an August 12 date in response to an order from Cannon to propose a timeline for the case.
The other two cases relate to his alleged attempts to overturn the result of the 2020 election – he has already been charged in a Georgia state court over the allegations while the Supreme Court is weighing Trump’s arguments that he is immune from federal prosecution in a separate case brought by Smith.
“We’re in this absolutely unprecedented situation where a defendant is potentially going to have the power to shut down his own prosecution,” said George Washington University law professor Randall Eliason, an expert in white-collar criminal cases.
“That’s an argument for getting the case to trial before the election.”
Trump has sought to portray all the legal cases against him as politically motivated.
The charges in the Florida case include violations of the Espionage Act, which criminalises the unauthorised possession of national defence information, as well as conspiracy to obstruct justice and making false statements to investigators.
Cannon has denied two attempts by Trump to dismiss the charges, but several remain pending.
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