Georgia Judge Says Two Defendants in Trump Case Will Get Early Trial Together

Sidney Powell followed Kenneth Chesebro in demanding a speedy trial, but neither defendant in the election interference case wanted to be tried with the other.

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By Richard Fausset and Danny Hakim

Richard Fausset reported from Atlanta and Danny Hakim from New York.

Sept. 6, 2023, 5:59 p.m. ET

Two of Donald J. Trump’s co-defendants in the Georgia election-interference case will go to trial together on Oct. 23, a judge ruled on Wednesday. The defendants, Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, had asked to be tried separately from one another.

The ruling from Judge Scott McAfee of Fulton County Superior Court, however, is contingent on the case remaining in state court — a situation that could change if other defendants succeed at moving the case into a federal courtroom.

Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, is still holding out hope that all 19 defendants in the racketeering case can be tried together. One of her prosecutors said during a hearing on Wednesday that the state would take approximately four months to present its case, calling roughly 150 witnesses. That estimate does not include the time it would take to pick the jury.

But during the hearing, Judge McAfee said he remained “very skeptical” that a single trial for all 19 defendants could work. For one thing, some of the accused, including Ms. Powell and Mr. Chesebro, have invoked their right to a speedy trial while others have not.

With an Escaped Killer Loose, an Unsettling Encounter in a Darkened House

As the search for a convicted murderer continues, a mixture of fear and unease has settled over the community outside Philadelphia where he escaped and is believed to be hiding.

By Campbell Robertson and Joel Wolfram

Campbell Robertson reported from Bethesda, Md., and Joel Wolfram from Pocopson Township, Pa.

Sept. 6, 2023Updated 6:29 p.m. ET

The French doors were cracked open to the night outside, and someone was down in the kitchen. Ryan Drummond, standing noiselessly at the top of the stairs, was sure he knew who it was.

Grasping a frame with a picture of his wife and children — the only possible weapon at hand — Mr. Drummond, 42, ran through his options. He decided: best to let the intruder understand that he knows he’s in the house. He flicked the lights on and off.

A terrifying moment passed.

Then the lights flicked back in response.

For nearly a week since a convicted murderer slipped away from the Chester County Prison, the people in the area, a quiet stretch of farmland and wooded thickets about an hour’s drive outside Philadelphia, have had to live with a relentless unease. Teams of police officers jog through backyards, drones buzz in the skies, and for a time, helicopters shuddering overheard blared the sound of a woman’s voice pleading in Portuguese — the mother of the man who escaped, begging, in a recording, for him to give himself up.

The fugitive, Danelo Cavalcante, 34, was convicted on Aug. 16 of stabbing his former girlfriend, Deborah Brandao, nearly 40 times, killing her in front of her children. On Aug. 22, he was sentenced to life in prison. Last Thursday morning, a little over a week after the sentencing, he disappeared.

In a news conference on Wednesday, Howard Holland, the acting warden of the prison, described for the first time how Mr. Cavalcante escaped. A little before 9 a.m., while a basketball game was going on outside in the exercise yard, he said, Mr. Cavalcante crab-walked up two parallel walls — putting his hands on one wall and his feet on the other and quickly climbing to the roof, a feat captured on video that was shown at the news conference.

He pushed through two installations of razor wire, some of which was put in after another inmate escaped by the same route in May, and scaled a fence before making his way off the prison grounds. The earlier escape was thwarted within minutes when a corrections officer in a watchtower saw the person fleeing and sounded the alarm. But this time, the officer in the tower, for some reason, did not see Mr. Cavalcante, whose absence was discovered by officers in his cell block nearly an hour later. Mr. Holland said the Pennsylvania attorney general’s office was investigating the escape.

Mr. Cavalcante has been seen in the seven days since, once by a prison employee, several times in the ghostly infrared light of security cameras and most recently, said Lt. Col. George Bivens of the Pennsylvania State Police, by a resident who spotted him on Tuesday evening in a creek bed, heading into the woods. The police arrived on the scene but were unable to track him, Colonel Bivens said, after a search dog suffered a “heat related emergency.”

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/law/hunter-biden-indictment-september-29-c4f77986?mod=hp_lead_pos1

WASHINGTON—Special counsel David Weiss said Wednesday he would seek an indictment of Hunter Biden by Sept. 29, keeping the younger Biden’s legal problems in the spotlight as President Biden pursues his re-election campaign.https://www.wsj.com/us-news/law/hunter-biden-indictment-september-29-c4f77986?mod=hp_lead_pos1

Weiss’s statement, issued in an update to the federal court in Delaware, provided confirmation that prosecutors are moving ahead with a criminal case against the younger Biden, after his legal team and the government have traded blame in recent weeks over the implosion of two previously negotiated agreements that would have resolved a long-running investigation into Hunter Biden’s tax and business dealings.

Biden had expected to plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax counts—and agree to other conditions to skirt prosecution on a gun charge—and avoid jail time.

Instead, the deal unraveled at a court hearing in July, talks to salvage it approached an impasse and Attorney General Merrick Garland named Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss as a special counsel to continue the investigationhttps://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/06/health/yale-mental-health.html

By Anemona Hartocollis and Ellen Barry

Anemona Hartocollis reported from New York, and Ellen Barry from New Haven.

Sept. 6, 2023, 3:00 a.m. ET

In the weeks after Rachael Shaw-Rosenbaum, a first-year student at Yale, died by suicide in 2021, a group of strangers began convening on Zoom.

Some of them knew Ms. Shaw-Rosenbaum. But many only knew what she had been going through, as she struggled with suicidal thoughts and weighed the consequences of checking herself into the hospital.

One, a physician in her early 40s, had been told years ago to withdraw from Yale while she was hospitalized after a suicide attempt, an experience she recalls as chillingly impersonal, “like you’re being processed through this big machine.”

Another, a classical pianist in his 20s, withdrew from Yale amid episodes of hypomania and depression, feeling, as he put it, “not just excluded but rejected and cut off and forgotten about.”