Returning briefly to the campaign trail, Donald Trump has called the judge presiding over his hush money trial “crooked” a day after being held in contempt of court and threatened with jail time for violating a gag order. The order bars him from making public statements about witnesses, jurors and some others connected to his trial, but he is still free to criticize the judge. The former president is visiting the swing states of Wisconsin and Michigan on Wednesday during his one-day break from court. Trump is trying to achieve a balancing act unprecedented in American history by running for a second term while also fighting felony charges in New York.

Before and after police officers arrested more than 100 people at Columbia University who were protesting the war in Gaza, New York Mayor Eric Adams blamed “outside agitators” for leading the demonstrations. Adams said Wednesday one of them was a woman whose husband was “convicted for terrorism.” But the woman, Nahla Al-Arian, wasn’t on Columbia’s campus this week and isn’t among the protesters who were arrested. Al-Arian told The Associated Press that Adams misstated both her role in the protests and the facts about her husband, Sami Al-Arian, a prominent Palestinian activist. Dating back to the Civil Rights movement, law enforcement officials have long sought to discredit protests by invoking the specter of outside agitators.

Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul said police shot and killed a student outside a middle school after receiving report of someone with a weapon and no one else was hurt. Kaul spoke Wednesday evening at the first law enforcement briefing on an incident that sent children fleeing amid gunfire earlier in the day. Authorities in Mount Horeb had previously said an active shooter who never got inside was “neutralized” outside the district’s middle school building Wednesday. Attorney General Josh Kaul said he state Department of Justice is handling the ongoing investigation into the shooting.

Florida’s ban on most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy has gone into effect, and some doctors are concerned that women in the state will no longer have access to needed health care. Fertility specialist Dr. Leah Roberts says the anti-abortion laws being enacted by Florida and other red states are being vaguely written by people who don’t understand medical science. Many women don’t even know they are pregnant by six weeks. The ban went into effect Wednesday and affects not just women who want to terminate viable pregnancies because of personal choice, but also nonviable pregnancies for women who want to have babies.