Trump refiles $10bn defamation suit against WSJ over report on Epstein ties – US politics live

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PCE data shows a rise in inflation

The Bureau of Economic Analysis released the latest Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) price index, excluding food and energy, Thursday morning.

The PCE price index rose in April at an annual rate of 3.8% – that is an increase from 3.5% in March and 2.8% in February.

This is the first inflation report to be released under Kevin Marsh, the new fed chair.

The index is a measure of prices that people living in the US, or those buying on their behalf, pay for goods and services. It’s often called the core PCE price index, because two categories, food and energy, are not included to make underlying inflation clearer.

Melody Schreiber

Abortion restrictions in the US have made it more difficult to access care for miscarriages, a new study stays.

The new research found that since the June 2022 Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturning Roe v Wade, pregnancy care has fractured along state lines; it’s getting increasingly harder to access healthcare for miscarriages in US states with abortion restrictions.

In states where abortion bans went into effect following Dobbs, miscarriage management is shifting away from medications, especially mifepristone, and toward a wait-and-see approach, restricting the options for patients experiencing miscarriages and falling beneath standards of care in the US.

“We wanted to understand how, when you restrict access to abortion, that might affect people who are having a pregnancy loss or an early miscarriage,” said Maria Rodriguez, lead author of the study, professor of obstetrics and gynecology, and director for the Center for Women’s Health at Oregon Health & Science University. “What we found was that people had fewer choices to the type of care they got, and they were receiving lower-quality care as well.”

The study, published by the Journal of the American Medical Association on 18 May, looked at a total of 123,598 people with private insurance. Some 54,181 of the patients lived in states with restrictions on abortion after six weeks that were triggered by the Dobbs decision, while 69,417 lived in comparison states.

States with trigger bans saw a 2.8 percentage point increase in expectant management – meaning more patients were sent home to wait and see what would happen with their miscarriages – and a 2.2 percentage point decrease in medication management – meaning fewer people were prescribed standard-of-care medications for managing miscarriages. Patients who were prescribed medication, but lived in ban states saw a 13.8 percentage point increase in misoprostol-only treatment, which is safe but is not the standard of care in the US and may take longer, resulting in more discomfort.

A judge on Thursday declined to block president Donald Trump’s executive tightening rules on mail-in voting in a loss for the Democratic party, whose lawyers argued that it could disenfranchise millions of voters.

The decision comes as Trump’s Republicans are locked in a tight battle to keep control of both houses of the US Congress in the November midterm elections.

Trump has for years pushed the false claim that his 2020 election defeat was the result of widespread voter fraud and has criticized voting by mail.

The executive order signed by Trump on 31 March directed his administration to compile a list of confirmed US citizens eligible to vote in each state and to use federal data to help state election officials verify who is eligible to vote.

It also required the US Postal Service to only deliver ballots to voters on each state’s approved mail-in ballot list, and required states to preserve election-related records for five years.

Donald Trump has threatened to “blow up” Oman if it fails to “behave” in a casual aside during a cabinet meeting, as the US scrambles to reopen the strait of Hormuz.

The US president made the threat after reports of talks between Iran and Oman about jointly charging a toll for ships passing through the crucial waterway, which has been all but closed since the start of the US-Israel war on Iran.

“The strait is going to be open to everybody,” Trump declared on Tuesday. “Nobody’s going to control it. We’re going to watch over it. We’ll watch over it. But nobody’s going to control it. That’s part of the negotiation that we have.”

In addition to Oman’s decades-long military and economic ties with the US, the Gulf nation of 5.3 million people has played a mediation role in the war and has itself come under attack from Tehran.

For more on this story, see our Middle East crisis live blog here:

Uwa Ede-Osifo

California governor Gavin Newsom is looking to thwart Donald Trump’s $1.776bn “anti-weaponization fund” by imposing a 100% tax on any payout received by state residents.

In May, the Department of Justice (DoJ) announced a fund to compensate alleged “victims of lawfare and weaponization”. It’s unclear who qualifies under this category.

The fund was the product of a settlement reached between Trump and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) – the agency the president sued over his leaked tax returns.

Critics, including Newsom, have slammed the fund as a “boondoggle” designed to divert money to Trump’s allies. Speculation has swirled that its benefactors could include the individuals who were arrested in the 6 January 2021 siege of the US Capitol. The Trump administration has described the rioters as patriots and since pardoned many who were charged in relation to the attack.

“People who assault cops and overthrow democracy don’t deserve a taxpayer-funded payday,” Newsom wrote in a Wednesday post to X, after announcing his plan at a news conference.

Guatemala has agreed to conduct joint strikes with the United States against drug traffickers in its territory, the New York Times reported.

The move marks an escalation of US president Donald Trump’s crackdown on drug cartels operating out of Latin America.

Guatemalan president Bernardo Arevalo agreed to the strikes with US defense secretary Pete Hegseth in a call last week, the Times reported, quoting two people familiar with the talks.

The Central American nation has formally requested “cooperation in operations led by Guatemalan security forces against drug trafficking organizations” in a letter to Hegseth, Arevalo’s office told The Times.

The two officials told the newspaper that the United States and Guatemala had also agreed to “other military action” to target drugs gangs, without giving further details.

Trump refiles $10bn defamation suit against WSJ over report on Epstein ties

Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog.

Donald Trump has refiled a defamation lawsuit seeking at least $10bn in damages against the Wall Street Journal over its reporting on his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, after a judge threw out an earlier version over legal deficiencies.

The lawsuit is one of several that the president has brought in his personal capacity against news organizations, part of what critics say is a wider pressure campaign against the media.

The lawsuit claims that the Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper tarnished his reputation with an article describing a birthday card to deceased sex offender Epstein as bearing Trump’s signature.

Trump and his lawyers said the card is fake, even after it was released by lawmakers investigating Epstein’s case, Reuters reported. The president is seeking at least $10bn in damages, according to the amended lawsuit - the same amount he had previously sought.

“At the time of publication, Defendants recklessly disregarded whether the Defamatory Statements were true and/or they purposefully avoided the discovery of the truth,” lawyers for Trump wrote in the amended complaint.

It comes as the Trump administration opened a criminal investigation into E Jean Carroll, the writer who accused the president of sexual assault, according to news reports.

Prosecutors, the New York Times and CNN reported on Wednesday, are looking into whether Carroll, 82, committed perjury in a 2022 deposition during her civil lawsuits against Trump, in which she said she did not accept outside financial support for her legal battles.

In other developments:

• In a new interview with CBS News, Jill Biden, the former first lady, said that she was “frightened” as she watched her husband, then-president Joe Biden, freeze up during his disastrous 2024 debate against Donald Trump. Pressed to explain what happened, Jill Biden said: “I don’t know what happened. I mean as I watched it, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, he’s having a stroke’. And it scared me to death.”

• Two House Democrats, Don Beyer of Virginia and Dina Titus of Nevada, announced that they plan to introduce a bill that would “explicitly prohibit construction of President Trump’s proposed ‘triumphal arch’ outside Arlington National Cemetery”.

• Cam Higby, a rightwing activist disguised as a pro-Palestinian activist, disrupted a news conference with the Democratic congressmen Jerry Nadler and Dan Goldman outside the Delaney Hall immigration detention center in Newark, New Jersey.