Haryana Roadways employees have backed the bandh call and all toll booths will remain free for three hours as part of the strike.
Protesting farmers will continue their march to Delhi but have agreed to more talks on Sunday. The farmers decision followed their third meeting with the government late last night, hours before their nationwide strike Friday.
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Unauthorized gatherings are banned in Noida and other parts of Gautam Buddh Nagar district in view of the ‘Bharat Bandh’ called by the Samyukt Kisan Morcha, a major farmers’ organization involved in the 2020-21 farmers’ protest, and Central Trade Unions. These organisations are not part of the ‘Delhi Chalo’ march, but broadly, their demands are the same.
The organisations have called on farmers to suspend all agricultural work between 6 am-4 pm and stage road blockades across the country.
Senior leaders of nine Central Trade Unions will hold a joint protest at Jantar Mantar over 21 demands, including a law guaranteeing minimum support price (MSP) for crops, minimum pension, and minimum wage.
Haryana Roadways employees have backed the bandh call and all toll booths will remain free for three hours as part of the strike. Most offices and banks are expected to stay open.
The farmers-police standoff continues at the Punjab-Haryana border with the farmers asserting they will continue with their march to Delhi. Thousands of them – with ration and diesel expected to last for months – began their march on Tuesday, demanding a law on MSP, farm law waiver, and solutions to other issues.
The third round of talks in Chandigarh was held after they faced tear gas and water cannons used by cops. Two Union Ministers – Arjun Munda and Piyush Goyal – and Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann attended the meeting.
U.S. President Joe Biden boards Marine One with his son Hunter Biden en route to Camp David, from Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, U.S. June 24, 2023. REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz Purchase Licensing Rights
The U.S. special counsel leading a criminal probe into President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, said a former FBI informant was charged with lying about the pair’s alleged involvement in business dealings with Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings.
In a statement on Thursday, Special Counsel David Weiss, opens new tab said a federal grand jury had indicted Alexander Smirnov, 43, on charges of making a “false statement” and “creating a false and fictitious record” in relation to an FBI probe. Smirnov faces a maximum penalty of 25 years in prison if convicted.
Burisma and Hunter Biden’s role at the company have been heavily scrutinized, opens new tab following unproven claims from Republican former President Donald Trump and others that Democrat Joe Biden improperly tried to help his son’s business interests in Ukraine. The White House has denied the claims.
Smirnov was arrested on Wednesday at Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas, Nevada, after his arrival in the U.S. from overseas, Weiss said.
It was not immediately clear whether Smirnov had an attorney.
The indictment unsealed on Thursday appeared to deal a blow to the Republican accusations that the U.S. president profited from his son’s business in Ukraine.
“For months we have warned that Republicans have built their conspiracies about Hunter and his family on lies told by people with political agendas, not facts,” Hunter Biden’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, said in a statement. “We were right and the air is out of their balloon.”
In December, the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives voted to formally authorize, opens new tab an ongoing impeachment inquiry into the U.S. president. Some Republicans at the time referenced Hunter Biden’s prior role at Burisma to say they were “mighty suspicious of folks from the president’s family making tens of millions of dollars in professions in which they had no experience.”
Donald Trump’s hush-money trial will go ahead as scheduled with jury selection starting March 25, a New York judge ruled Thursday, turning aside demands for delay from the former president’s defense lawyers, who argued it would interfere with his campaign to retake the White House.
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The decision means that the first of Trump’s four criminal prosecutions to proceed to trial is a case centered on years-old accusations that he sought to bury stories about extramarital affairs that arose during his 2016 presidential run. Other cases charge him with plotting to overturn the results of the 2020 election and illegally hoarding classified documents at his Florida estate.
In leaving the trial date intact, Judge Juan Manuel Merchan pointed to the recent delay in the separate prosecution in Washington related to efforts to undo the 2020 election. That case, originally set for trial on March 4, has been effectively frozen pending the outcome of Trump’s appeal on the legally untested question of whether a former president enjoys immunity from prosecution for actions taken while in office.
Noting that he had resisted defense lawyer urgings from months ago to postpone the trial, Merchan said, “In hindsight, frankly, I’m glad that I took that position, because here we are and the D.C. case did not go forward.” He said he decided to stick with the trial date after speaking last week with the judge in the Washington case, Tanya Chutkan.
The hush-money trial is expected to last six weeks, Merchan said.
Assuming the New York case remains on schedule, it will open just weeks after the Super Tuesday primaries, colliding on the political calendar with a time period in which Trump will be looking to sew up the Republican race and emerge as the presumptive nominee in this year’s presidential contest. His attorneys cited that schedule in urging the judge to reconsider the March trial date.
“We strenuously object to what is happening in this courtroom,” said defense lawyer Todd Blanche, adding that “the fact that we are now going to spend, President Trump is now going to spend, the next two months working on this trial instead of out on the campaign trial running for president is something that should not happen in this country.”
Trump made a similar case after leaving the courtroom, telling reporters that “instead of being in South Carolina and other states campaigning, I’m stuck here.”
“We’ll just have to figure it out,” he added. “I’ll be here during the day and I’ll be campaigning during the night.”
In fact, Trump has repeatedly attended court proceedings where his presence was not required and he went to court Thursday voluntarily. The judge had said he could join remotely by video from Georgia, where he was contemplating attending a simultaneous hearing in his criminal case there.
Thursday marked Trump’s first return visit to court in the New York case since that historic indictment made him the first ex-president charged with a crime. Since then, he has also been indicted in Florida, Georgia and Washington, D.C.
The hearing was held amid a busy overlapping stretch of legal activity for the Republican presidential front-runner, who has increasingly made his court involvement part of his political campaign. On Monday, for instance, he voluntarily attended a closed hearing in a Florida case charging him with hoarding classified records.
A separate hearing was unfolding in Atlanta on Thursday as a judge considered arguments on whether to toss Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis off the state’s election interference case because of a personal relationship with a special prosecutor she hired.
The New York case has long been considered the least legally perilous of the four indictments filed against Trump last year, with the alleged misconduct — generally known to the public for years — seen by many as less grave than accusations of mishandling classified documents or plotting to subvert a presidential election.
Chutkan officially delayed the Washington case last month, with the Supreme Court now weighing the immunity question. There’s no new date. The classified documents case in Florida is set for trial May 20, but that date could be moved. No trial date is scheduled in the Atlanta case.
Over the past year, Trump has lashed out at Merchan as a “Trump-hating judge,” asked him to step down from the case and sought to move the case from state court to federal court, all to no avail. Merchan has acknowledged making several small donations to Democrats, including $15 to Trump’s rival Biden, but said he’s certain of his “ability to be fair and impartial.”
