United States President, Donald Trump, has pardoned 23 anti-abortion activists, including some convicted of blockading a reproductive health clinic and intimidating staff and patients.
The pardons were issued a day before March for Life, an annual anti-abortion rally in Washington DC.
Meanwhile a US judge has temporarily blocked Trump’s order to change birthright citizenship, which was slated to take effect in February.
Trump has also ordered the declassification of files relating to the deaths of John F Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr as part of another flurry of executive orders.
Elsewhere in an interview with Fox News, Trump says he “would rather not” impose tariffs on China, after previously threatening sweeping action on the world’s second-biggest economy.
Trump is expected to address via videolink America’s largest annual anti-abortion rally later on Friday.
In 2020, he became the first US president to attend the rally in person.
Previous Republican presidents, including George W Bush and Ronald Reagan, have addressed the group remotely.
The annual demonstration first began in 1974 – a year after the US Supreme Court legalised abortion in Roe v Wade. BBC