US congressman Henry Cuellar was held up at gunpoint while his car was stolen in Washington on Monday evening, according to local media reports.

Cuellar, a Republican from Texas, was reportedly parking about a mile (1.6km) from the US Capitol when he was approached by three armed people.

He was unharmed and his vehicle was later recovered. US Capitol Police said in a statement that detectives were working to track down the suspects.

The incident happened at about 21:30 local time (01:30 GMT) in the city’s south-eastern Navy Yard neighborhood. As well as the car, the 68-year-old’s phone and iPad were also taken, according to Mr Cuellar’s chief of staff Jacob Hochberg. It is not clear if these have been returned.

The number of carjackings in Washington has been on the rise in recent years. In 2021, the local police department launched a task-force to deal with the issue.

According to the latest police figures, there have been 750 incidents of carjacking in the city so far this year and 75% of these offences involved guns.

Mr Cuellar is currently serving his 10th term in the US House of Representatives for Texas’ 28th congressional district.

(BBC)

Former President Donald Trump has attacked a judge and prosecutor in a day of courtroom drama as he attended the opening of a fraud trial that could threaten his business empire.

On entering the room on Monday dressed in a blue suit, Mr Trump – who turned up voluntarily – looked ahead as he walked past the prosecutor who brought the case. State’s attorney general Letitia James, sitting in the front row, averted her gaze. Their paths did not cross for the rest of opening statements as both sides laid out their case.

Mr Trump, the Trump Organization, several executives and two of his children – Donald Jr and Eric – are the defendants in the civil trial in New York Superior Court. They are accused of fraud, falsification of business records, issuing false financial statements and conspiracy.

As the trial got under way, the former president occasionally glanced in the direction of Judge Arthur Engoron as he addressed the court.

Moments beforehand, in a tirade outside court that echoed across the chamber, Mr Trump had called the judge a “rogue adjudicator”.

In 2012, Nobel Prize-winner Dr Denis Mukwege was attacked by gunmen – a consequence, he believes, of criticising the Democratic Republic of Congo government’s policies on gender-based violence.

A decade later, living under the protection of UN peacekeepers, Dr Mukwege has launched another challenge against the nation’s leadership. He will be running for president in elections due in December, he announced on Monday.

Known as “Dr Miracle”, the 63-year-old rose to global fame for performing reconstructive surgery on women who had been raped in the country’s war-torn east. His hospital has so far treated more than 50,000 survivors of sexual violence, while he has cemented himself as one of the world’s foremost experts in his field.

Dr Mukwege was born in 1955 in Bukavu, a city in eastern DR Congo. After numerous visits to see sick members of the community with his preacher father, he decided he wanted to become a doctor. He began his training at a medical school across the border in Burundi, later studying gynaecology and obstetrics at the University of Angers in France.

In 1998, he set up a clinic in his home city. The doctor intended Panzi hospital to be for maternal health, with his team treating new or expecting mothers. However, when war broke out, more and more women came to the clinic with gruesome injuries from sexual violence committed by various armed groups.

In 2013, Dr Mukwege told the BBC that rape in eastern DR Congo was part of a ‘stratergy’ to force communities away from their land and resources.

For three decades the region has been wracked by conflict, with numerous armed groups battling for gold and other valuable resources. Different militias have been accused of carrying out indiscriminate rape – tens of thousands of women are thought to have been attacked over the course of the conflict, Amnesty International has reported.

Dr Mukwege told the BBC about his first experience of treating a woman who had been raped and mutilated by armed men. “After being raped, bullets had been fired into her genitals and thighs,” Dr Mukwege said of the first rape survivor that came to his clinic. “The real shock came three months later. Forty-five women came to us with the same story.”

Along with his colleagues, Dr Mukwege has since treated tens of thousands of victims and become “the world’s leading specialist in the treatment of wartime sexual violence”, according to the Nobel Prize.

(BBC)