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1 Trump's Lawyers Cross-Examine Michael Cohen
In their first crack at him, Michael Cohen faced stern questioning from Donald Trump's defense team Tuesday in the former president's hush money trial. The disbarred lawyer told jurors Monday that he was following Trump's orders when he bought porn star Stormy Daniels's silence about an alleged affair with Trump. But Trump's attorney, Todd Blanche, avoided addressing the specifics of the payoff at the center of the case while working to show that Cohen may have had a motive to lie about his former boss. At one point, he asked if Cohen had been "obsessed" with Trump, whom he once idolized, and asked Cohen to confirm he hadn't been lying when he said nice things about Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign. "At that time, I was knee-deep into the cult of Donald Trump, yes," Cohen said.
2 Fed Chair Says Inflation Remains Higher Than Expected
Speaking at a conference in Amsterdam yesterday, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell didn’t sound very optimistic about the idea of an interest rate cut. Talking to the annual general meeting of the Foreign Bankers’ Association, Powell said that inflation numbers have been “higher than I think anybody expected,” and went on to say “we’ll need to be patient and let restrictive policy do its work.” The Fed has held the interest rate in a targeted range of 5.25-to-5.5-percent since July, and is the highest the interest rate has been in around 23 years. While Powell gave every indication that rates aren’t coming down anytime soon, he did give some better news when he was asked if the Fed might consider raising rates even further. “I don’t think that’s likely, based on the data that we have, that the next move that we make would be a rate hike,” Powell said. The Labor Department’s producer price index, which tracks wholesale costs, rose 0.5-percent in April, which was higher than analysts had expected.
3 Eight Killed, 38 Hurt In Farmworker Bus Crash In Florida
Around 6:30 am yesterday, a pickup truck driven by Bryan Maclean Howard allegedly sideswiped a bus carrying 53 migrant farmworkers. The bus veered off the road after the collision and overturned just off West Highway 40 in central Florida, killing eight people and sending 38 others to the hospital. Howard was arrested on eight counts of driving under the influence-manslaughter, according to the Florida Highway Patrol, and remains in the hospital. While the fatality count stood at eight last night, that might not be the final number according to FHP Lt. Patrick Riordan. At a press briefing yesterday, Lt. Riordan said that eight of the people who were sent to the hospital were in critical condition and that there was a “high probability this may be beyond eight fatalities.” Some of the farm workers who were on board the bus were Mexican, according to Mexican Foreign Affairs Secretary Alicia Barcena; the bus was on its way to a farm in the area at the time of the crash.