| | | | | | | Hello. Donald Trump has attended a hearing about his hush money court case in New York. Georgia would have also been on his mind, as a court is considering misconduct allegations against the prosecutor who is leading an election-subversion case against him. Our reporters followed both hearings. BBC News Mundo correspondent Leire Ventas was given access to a maximum security jail in El Salvador that holds members of the country's main gangs and that has been criticised for human rights violations. Finally, let’s congratulate Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on his engagement, which marks a first for the country. |
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| | | | | | Questions Answered | | Trump’s first criminal trial gets a date | | | | Donald Trump said he believed the case to be “rigged”, in comments to the media after leaving the courtroom. Credit: Reuters |
| | A New York judge has ruled Donald Trump must face trial on 25 March in the hush-money case linked to adult film actress Stormy Daniels. It would be the first time a former president has sat as a criminal defendant in a trial. | | | | Remind me, what is this all about? | | Stormy Daniels says she and Mr Trump had sex at a celebrity golf tournament in 2006. She also says that a decade later, his personal attorney Michael Cohen paid her $130,000 (£103,500) to stay silent about the alleged encounter during Mr Trump's presidential run. Mr Trump denies they ever had an affair. | | What’s the specific accusation of wrongdoing? | | Prosecutors allege Mr Trump had Mr Cohen make the payments, and then fraudulently recorded the transactions on his business's books as legal expenses, when in fact he was paying Mr Cohen back for the hush-money payments. Ordinarily, falsifying business records is a misdemeanour. | | Why is Mr Trump facing a criminal trial? | | Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has justified bringing felony charges by saying Mr Trump intended to defraud in order to conceal a second crime. He has not fully revealed his theory of the second crime, but indicated last year that his office was considering a handful of options. Mr Bragg has said Mr Trump falsified business records to "conceal crimes that hid damaging information from the voting public during the 2016 presidential election". | | | | | | |
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| AT THE SCENE | Tecoluca, El Salvador | | Life inside El Salvador’s mega-jail | | | | Inmates only get to leave these cells for 30 minutes a day to exercise. Credit: Lisette Lemus/BBC | | Cecot, short for Centre for the Confinement of Terrorism, is a gargantuan prison complex built to hold "high-ranking" members of the country's main gangs. Critics of President Nayib Bukele and his security policies have called it a "black hole of human rights", where international guidelines on prisoner rights are flouted. | | | | Leire Ventas, Special correspondent, BBC News Mundo |
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| The prison may have been called "the Alcatraz of Central America" but it is not run down - everything is new, smooth, recently painted. Hooded guards keep watch from above, gun in hand. Below, the prisoners climb onto the four-storey bunks on which they sleep. Without any mattresses or sheets, they have to lie on bare metal.
They eat the food they are given - rice, beans, hard-boiled eggs or pasta - with their hands. "Any utensil can be [fashioned into] a deadly weapon," the director explains. There is nothing else within the cell's three cement walls apart from two sinks for prisoners to wash in and two toilets, which inmates have to use in plain sight of everyone else. And there is nothing else to do but watch time go by. |
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| | The big picture | | Winning performance | | | | The cobra is considered sacred in some parts of the African country of Benin. Credit: Pablo Porciuncula/AFP |
| | Rio's hotly contested Carnival parade competition has crowned this year’s winner. The Viradouro samba school won with a tribute to Benin. The West African country is the ancestral home of many whose forebears arrived in Brazil as slaves. | | | | |
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| | | For your downtime | | Se habla Spanglish | | Mixing Spanish and English creates new, constantly evolving expressions. | | |
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| | And finally... in Australia | | Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has marked Valentine’s Day by proposing to his partner, Jodie Haydon. The 60-year-old politician is the first Australian leader to become engaged while in office. Here’s the selfie the happy couple took to share the news. |
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| | | | | | | | US Election Unspun newsletter | | Cut through the noise in the race for the White House, every Wednesday to your inbox. | | |
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| | | | More BBC newsletters | | • | Football Extra: Latest news, insights and gossip from the Premier League, weekdays. Subscribe. | | • | Royal Watch: The full story from royal correspondent Sean Coughlan, every Thursday. Subscribe. | | • | Tech Decoded: Timely, trusted tech news from global correspondents, twice-weekly. Subscribe. |
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– Sofia |
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