Appeal court judge denies Trump’s third attempt this week to delay hush money trial – as it happened

Here’s more from Donald Trump’s comments to reporters while at a campaign event in Atlanta after the Arizona state supreme court’s ruling upholding a 1864 abortion law.

Asked if Arizona’s ruling went too far, Trump replied:

Yeah, they did. That will be straightened out. As you know, it’s all about state’s rights. It will be straightened out. I’m sure the governor and everybody else are going to bring it back into reason and that it will be taken care of, I think, very quickly.

Joe Biden said he is considering a request from Australia to end the prosecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Asked about the request as he hosted the Japanese prime minister, Fumio Kishida, Biden replied:

We’re considering it.

Assange, an Australian citizen, faces 18 charges over WikiLeaks’ publication of classified documents, largely the result of a leak by the former US army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning.

Assange, 52, has been fighting US extradition efforts from the UK’s Belmarsh prison, where he has been since 2019 for skipping bail during a separate legal battle.

Donald Trump has told reporters he believes the Arizona supreme court went too far with its ruling, CNN’s Alayna Treene reports.

10 Apr 202412.05 EDT

Dominic Rushe

A closely watched measure of US inflation picked up in March, rising to an annual rate of 3.5%, the Department of Labor announced on Wednesday.

The consumer-price index (CPI) – which measures a broad range of goods and services – rose 0.4% from February, higher than the 0.3% expected. Core CPI, which removes the volatile food and energy categories, rose 0.4% from February in contrast to an expected 0.3%.

In a statement, Joe Biden said the report showed his administration has “more to do to lower costs for hardworking families”, adding:

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.

The House speaker, Mike Johnson, is expected to meet with fellow Republican Congress member Marjorie Taylor Greene today, marking the first time the two have spoken since Greene filed a motion to vacate the speakership late last month.

Johnson and Greene were slated to speak last Friday, but that plan reportedly fell through. Asked about the upcoming meeting during a press conference alongside other House GOP leaders, Johnson described Greene as “a friend”, adding:

Marjorie and I don’t disagree, I don’t think, on any matter of philosophy. We’re both conservatives. But we do disagree sometimes on strategy and with regard to what we put on the floor and when and those things.

The meeting comes a day after Greene escalated her criticism against Johnson in a scathing memo to colleagues in which she accused him of a “complete and total surrender” to the Democrats’ agenda.

10 Apr 202411.47 EDT

Martin Pengelly

The far-right Florida Republican Matt Gaetz forced Kevin McCarthy out as House speaker last year “because he slept with a 17-year-old” and wanted a congressional ethics investigation to end, McCarthy charged on Tuesday.

“I’ll give you the truth why I’m not speaker,” McCarthy said, at an event at Georgetown University in Washington.

Because one person, a member of Congress, wanted me to stop an ethics complaint because he slept with a 17-year-old, an ethics complaint that started before I ever became speaker. And that’s illegal and I’m not gonna get in the middle of it. Now, did he do it or not? I don’t know. But ethics was looking at it. There’s other people in jail because of it. And he wanted me to influence it.

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The House ethics investigation of allegations against Gaetz opened in 2021, when Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, was speaker. The House investigation was paused when Gaetz was investigated by the Department of Justice for sex trafficking, over allegations that he paid for sex and had sex with an underage woman. In December 2022, Joel Greenberg, a former Florida tax collector whose arrest led to the investigation of Gaetz, was sentenced to 11 years in prison for offences including sex trafficking a minor.

In February 2023, prosecutors said they would not issue charges. The House ethics investigation then restarted. Gaetz denies wrongdoing.

Donald Trump is learning the hard way that there is no middle ground on abortion inside the Republican party, NBC News’ Chuck Todd writes.

The former president is hoping that he can separate himself from the most restrictive positions on the issue, he says.

Ironically, Trump’s controversial position shouldn’t, in theory, be controversial in the GOP. Trump is simply espousing what the party said it supported for decades before the supreme court’s 2022 Dobbs decision: Leave it to the states. But abortion conservatives want to go further with a federal limit. As is now fairly clear, simply returning the decision over reproductive rights to the states wasn’t really the goal of the anti-abortion movement pre-Dobbs. The goal was to roll back access to abortion, in whatever expedient way they could find.

The Arizona abortion ban is even dividing Republican families, according to Politico Playbook.

Clint Bolick is one of the four Arizona supreme court justices who supported reinstating the 1864 law.

His wife, Arizona state senator Shawnna Bolick, who faces a tough re-election this year, repudiated the effect of the court decision, posting to social media on Tuesday:

Considering today’s Arizona Supreme Court ruling to uphold Arizona’s 1864 territorial abortion ban, it is time for my legislative colleagues to find common ground of common sense: the first step is to repeal the territorial law.

Kamala Harris will visit Arizona as part of her nationwide reproductive freedoms tour, just days after the state supreme court upheld a near-total abortion ban.

The vice-president will appear in Tucson on Friday, her office announced on Tuesday after the court decision, although her visit had reportedly already been scheduled.

The White House said Harris would highlight “extremists” in the state who were pushing for abortion bans during her visit.

Harris issued a statement following the Arizona ruling, laying the blame on Donald Trump for rolling “the clock to a time before women could vote”. Last month she said the former president had handpicked three members of the US supreme court “because he intended for them to overturn Roe … He intended for them to take your freedoms, and he brags about it.”

Joe Biden welcomed Japan’s prime minister, Fumio Kishida, to the White House this morning as he hailed “unbreakable” US-Japanese ties and lauded the Japanese leader’s quick “courageous” opposition to Vladimir Putin’s full-fledged invasion of Ukraine and for improving relations with South Korea

“Ours is truly a global partnership. For that, Mr Prime Minister Kishida, I thank you,” Biden said.

Now our two countries are building a stronger defense partnership and a strong Indo-Pacific than ever before.

Kishida will address Congress on Thursday and join Biden and the president of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos Jr, for a meeting expected to focus on Beijing’s South China Sea incursions.

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