US says hold on weapons delivery won’t be a one-off if Israel presses ahead with Rafah city offensive – as it happened

Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell has refused to comment on Donald Trump’s ongoing criminal trial surrounding his hush-money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels.

Speaking to reporters on Wednesday in response to whether Trump’s ongoing trial would give him pause over his support for Trump as president, McConnell said:

I’m not going to be commenting on the presidential election ... I’m going to concentrate on trying to turn this job over to the next majority leader of the Senate.”

Here are further details on the US signaling to Israel potential future pauses in arms shipments over Israel’s planned invasion of Rafah:

US officials have signalled to Israel that more arms shipments could be delayed if the Israeli military pushes ahead with an offensive in Rafah, Gaza, in what would mark the start of a major pivot in relations between the two countries.

Lloyd Austin, the US defence secretary, confirmed on Wednesday that the Biden administration had paused the supply of thousands of large bombs to Israel, in opposition to apparent moves by the Israelis to invade the city.

“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 told a Senate hearing.

“And again, as we have assessed the situation, we have paused one shipment of high payload munitions,” he said, adding: “We’ve not made a final determination on how to proceed with that shipment.”

Read the full story here:

Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley won more than 20% of the votes in Indiana’s Republican presidential primary on Tuesday, months after she dropped out of the race.

Haley announced she was suspending her presidential campaign in March after being soundly defeated by Donald Trump on Super Tuesday, but her continued support shows persistent discontent among GOP voters with the former president. Haley has not endorsed Trump.

Haley’s support was largest in Indiana’s urban and suburban counties, AP reported. She won 35% of the vote in Indianapolis’s Marion county and more than one-third of the vote in suburban Hamilton county.

Robert F Kennedy Jr, the third-party presidential candidate, said a health problem he experienced in 2010 “was caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died”, according to a report.

In a divorce case deposition from 2012 the New York Times said it obtained, Kennedy said he experienced “memory loss and mental fogginess so severe that a friend grew concerned he might have a brain tumour”.

Neurologists who treated Kennedy’s uncle, the Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy, before his death aged 77 from brain cancer in 2009, told the younger man he had a dark spot on his brain scans, and concluded he too had a tumor. But, Kennedy reportedly said, a doctor at New York-Presbyterian hospital posited another explanation: a parasite in Kennedy’s brain. In the 2012 deposition, Kennedy reportedly said:

I have cognitive problems, clearly. I have short-term memory loss, and I have longer-term memory loss that affects me.

In his recent interview, the Times said, Kennedy said he had recovered from such problems. The paper also said Kennedy’s spokesperson, Stefanie Spear, responded to a question about whether the candidate’s health problems could compromise his fitness to be president by saying:

That is a hilarious suggestion, given the competition.

A growing number of Republican lawmakers are pushing to require a citizenship question on the questionnaire for the census, and exclude non-US citizens from the results that determine each state’s share of House seats and electoral college votes.

The GOP-led House is expected to vote today on the Equal Representation Act which calls for leaving out “individuals who are not citizens of the United States.” The bill is unlikely to pass the Democratic-controlled Senate and is opposed by the White House.

The proposal has set off alarms among redistricting experts, civil rights groups and Democratic lawmakers, and comes as Republicans make immigration a key campaign issue ahead of the November elections.

“It’s taking it closer to reality than it has ever been,” a former census official told AP.

This is part of a cohesive strategy in the GOP ... of getting every single possible advantage when the country is so closely divided.

The 14th amendment says the “whole number of persons in each state” should be counted during the apportionment process. Besides helping allocate congressional seats and electoral college votes, census figures guide the distribution of $2.8tn in federal money.

Here are the full details on the latest decision by Georgia’s state appeals court surrounding Donald Trump by the Guardian’s Kira Lerner:

The Georgia state court of appeals on Wednesday said it will consider an appeal from Donald Trump of an order allowing Fani Willis, the district attorney, to continue prosecuting his election interference case in Fulton County.

In a one page order, the appeals court said it would allow Trump to challenge the decision not to disqualify Willis over her relationship with her deputy. Trump has ten days to file a notice of appeal, the court said.

Last month, prosecutors urged the appeals court not to hear the appeal. “The present application merely reflects the applicants’ dissatisfaction with the trial court’s proper application of well-established law to the facts,” prosecutors wrote in a 19-page filing.

For the full story, click here:

Elise Stefanik, New York Republican representative and staunch Donald Trump ally, responded to the latest decision of Georgia state’s appellate court, tweeting:

BREAKING: Another one of the Democrats’ illegal sham cases is CRUMBLING. President Trump will have his appeal HEARD in Georgia! The Far Left Democrats’ only strategy for the 2024 election has been blatant lawfare and election interference but that plan is failing.

Stefanik, who is widely considered to be a potential running mate for Trump, has thrown her support behind the former president on numerous occasions. In addition to echoing Trump’s descriptions of January 6 prisoners as “hostages”, Stefanik has also filed ethics complaints against two judges overseeing cases against Trump or his allies.

Here is the full text from the notice by the Georgia court of appeals on considering Donald Trump’s disqualification request of Fani Willis:

Upon consideration of the application for interlocutory appeal, it is ordered that it be hereby granted. The appellant may file a notice of appeal within 10 days of the date by this order. The clerk of superior court is directed to include a copy of this order in the record transmitted to the court of appeals.

The appeals court’s latest notice comes after Judge Scott McAfee, who is overseeing the election interference case involving Trump and more than a dozen co-defendants, ruled in March that Willis should not be disqualified from prosecuting the defendants.

The defendants are accusing Willis of misconduct and having a conflict of interest in the case – specifically alleged financial gain – due to her romantic relationship with her then deputy Nathan Wade.

In March, Wade submitted his resignation request to Willis, in turn allowing Willis to continue on as lead prosecutor in the case.

With Joe Biden’s upcoming visit, it is important to note that Donald Trump once touted the Foxconn location at Racine, Wisconsin, as the “eighth wonder of the world”.

In 2018, Trump spoke at a ceremonial groundbreaker for the factory which never happened, saying: “As Foxconn has discovered, there is no better place to build, hire and grow than right here in the United States.”

However, in 2021, Foxconn largely abandoned the promised $10bn factory. In an updated deal with Wisconsin reported by Reuters at the time, Foxconn said it was going to reduce its planned investments to $672m and had planned on reducing the jobs from 13,000 to 1,454.

Here are some more details on Joe Biden’s upcoming announcement in Racine, Wisconsin, later today:

The AI datacenter is set to construct 2,300 union construction jobs and 2,000 permanent jobs.

Microsoft also plans to provide “skilled opportunities for thousands more Wisconsinites in the digital economy”, the White House said.

Specifically, the tech giant will partner with Gateway Technical College to develop a datacenter academy that trains 1,000 Wisconsinites for datacenter and Stem roles by 2030, and will employ up to 2,000 people in permanent roles at its Racine facility, the White House added.

In a statement released ahead of Joe Biden’s visit to Wisconsin later today, the White House took a jab at Donald Trump’s former administration and said:

Six years ago, the prior administration touted a $10 billion investment by Foxconn that never materialized – now Microsoft will build a new AI datacenter on the same land, powering industries of the future in Wisconsin.

Today, president Biden will travel to Racine, Wisconsin – the same location as the failed Foxconn investment that the prior administration visited six years ago – to showcase a community at the heart of his commitment to invest in places that have been historically overlooked or failed by the last administration’s policies.”