Trump’s hush-money trial to begin next month
A New York judge yesterday set a March 25 trial date for Donald Trump’s hush-money case, clearing the way for the first prosecution of a former American president and ensuring that Trump will face at least one jury before Election Day.
The judge rejected Trump’s bid to throw out the Manhattan district attorney’s criminal charges against him, which stem from a hush-money payment to the porn star Stormy Daniels in 2016.
It will be Trump’s first criminal case to go to trial, and it might not be the last: He is facing 91 felony counts across four criminal indictments in Washington, D.C., Florida and Georgia, as well as Manhattan.
Unlike the federal cases in Washington and Florida, the case in Manhattan is insulated from federal intervention, so Trump would not be able to pardon himself or otherwise use the presidency as a legal shield.
Explosions and gunfire rocked the Nasser Medical Complex in the city of Khan Younis before the predawn raid. Several people were killed and wounded, according to a doctor there and Doctors Without Borders, which had staff members at the hospital. (The specific casualty claims could not be immediately confirmed.)
Gazan officials said that at the start of the week there were 8,000 displaced people sheltering at the hospital, and hundreds of patients and medical workers. Many of them fled before the raid, and it was not clear how many people remained in the hospital when it happened.
The Israeli military said it had detained dozens of people, but it did not say who, or why, and it did not say whether hostages or Hamas fighters had been found.
A new U.S. satellite push
The Pentagon is experimenting with new approaches to bolster the military’s growing presence in space, an initiative that feels urgent after intelligence revealed that Russia was making advances on a space-based nuclear weapon that could potentially strike U.S. satellites.
One such approach aims to blanket low Earth orbit with hundreds of smaller, cheaper satellites, instead of a few very large ones. (The idea is rather like the Starlink internet communications system that Elon Musk’s SpaceX already has in orbit.) Even if an adversary knocked out several U.S. satellites, there would still be many more to take their place.
An aerospace engineer and space security scholar at the American Enterprise Institute said that by the end of the decade, the Pentagon would most likely have 1,000 new satellites in low-Earth orbit.
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Russian troops with amputated limbs and other serious injuries return home to find a patchwork system of treatment and, often, efforts to keep them out of the public eye.
The Kremlin wants to avoid encouraging an antiwar movement that could undermine the war in Ukraine. As for the soldiers, they are often sent back to the front as soon as possible, or left to navigate what some described as an indifferent system for treatment.
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The Seine’s booksellers get an Olympic reprieve
Bouquinistes, booksellers whose wooden stalls have lined the Seine in Paris for centuries, are a beloved symbol of the city’s culture.
So the stalls’ proprietors, and many intellectual Parisians, were incensed when they learned that nearly 600 of the stalls would have to be moved away from Paris’s great river during the Olympic Games there this summer. Bouquinistes vowed to fight, and petitions supporting them circulated widely.
Their efforts appear to have succeeded. This week, President Emmanuel Macron deemed the booksellers “a living heritage of the capital” and said they could stay.
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