Good morning.
Donald Trump surrendered at the Fulton county jail yesterday evening on racketeering and conspiracy charges over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in the state of Georgia, where he was processed as any criminal defendant and had his mugshot taken.
The former president’s brief booking marks yet another stunning moment in which the Republican frontrunner in the 2024 race was again under arrest in a major criminal case.
The booking came during the prime-time viewing hours for the cable news networks, a time slot Trump is said to have insisted his lawyers negotiate with prosecutors in an apparent effort to discredit the charges and distract from the indignity of the surrender.
But Trump turned himself over to authorities without the special privileges afforded to him in his other criminal cases. In addition to the mugshot that he had desperately sought to avoid – the first ever taken of a former US president – Trump had his fingerprints taken and his weight recorded as 215lb, according to online records.
When will the trial begin? In a clear sign of the Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis’s belief that her team is ready to go to trial immediately, she asked for the trial of all 19 defendants to start on 23 October after one of the co-defendants, Trump’s former lawyer Kenneth Chesebro, apparently gambled and requested a speedy trial.
Will the trial harm Trump politically? It would be a mistake to assume that the mugshot and the spectacle of Trump’s surrender at jail will harm Trump politically, writes Sam Levine. It is likely to entrench support more deeply from those who back Trump and believe he is being persecuted. As both a candidate and president, Trump has made the politics of grievance, the feeling of being persecuted and wronged, central to his political identity. Trump is already using his indictments to rally his supporters.
‘Highly likely’ Yevgeny Prigozhin is dead, says UK
The UK’s defence ministry has said there is not yet definitive proof the Wagner group mercenary boss, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was onboard a plane that crashed with no survivors earlier this week but it is “highly likely” he is dead, Reuters reports.
“The demise of Prigozhin would almost certainly have a deeply destabilising effect on the Wagner group,” the ministry said in a defence intelligence update posted on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.
Vladimir Putin called Prigozhin a “talented businessman” with “a difficult fate”.
In a meeting at the Kremlin, the Russian president addressed the crash of the Wagner chief’s business jet for the first time, offering condolences to the families of the 10 people onboard. He said Prigozhin had returned to Russia from Africa on Wednesday and had met “some officials”, without specifying whom. “He was a man with a difficult fate. He made some serious mistakes in his life,” Putin said.
What caused the plane to crash? An explosion onboard probably brought down the plane presumed to be carrying the Wagner leader, a preliminary US intelligence assessment concluded. US and western officials said it determined Prigozhin was “very likely” to have been targeted and that the explosion was in line with Putin’s “long history of trying to silence his critics”.
What else is happening? Volodymyr Zelenskiy said early this morning he spoke with Joe Biden. Ukraine’s president said he thanked Biden for his Ukraine Independence Day greetings and support in the conflict with Russia. “Together, we prove that freedom and independence are worth fighting for,” he said in a statement. The US will begin flight training for Ukrainian pilots on F-16 fighter jets in October, the Pentagon has announced.
Maui county sues Hawaiian Electric over wildfires that killed more than 100
Maui county sued the Hawaiian Electric company yesterday over the fires that devastated Lahaina, saying the utility negligently failed to shut off power despite exceptionally high winds and dry conditions.
Witness accounts and video indicated sparks from power lines ignited fires as utility poles snapped in the winds, which were driven by a passing hurricane. The 8 August fire killed at least 115 people and left an unknown number of others missing.
The lawsuit said the utility had a duty “to properly maintain and repair the electric transmission lines, and other equipment including utility poles associated with their transmission of electricity, and to keep vegetation properly trimmed and maintained so as to prevent contact with overhead power lines and other electric equipment”.
Had the utility heeded weather service warnings and “de-energized their power lines during the predicted high-wind gusts, this destruction could have been avoided”, the lawsuit said.
What has Hawaiian Electric said? A company spokesperson did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
How is the search for the dead going in Maui? Hawaii’s governor, Josh Green, has warned local people this week to brace for a higher death toll from the destruction, as police still work to find those missing. About 1,100 people are still unaccounted for.
In other news …
A study suggests the benefits from cleaner air could be even greater than previous data had indicated. Researchers investigated the closure in 2016 of a coal processing plant on Neville Island in the Ohio River, near Pittsburgh. It resulted in an immediate reduction in air pollution for the local communities.
Digestion problems such as constipation or difficulty swallowing can double the chance of Parkinson’s disease, according to research. A study has established that four gut conditions could be an early warning sign of Parkinson’s disease.
The Pacific islands should be a “zone of peace”, Fiji’s prime minister, Sitiveni Rabuka, has said, adding that he hopes a rivalry between the US and China in the strategic region does not develop into a military conflict. Rabuka was speaking after attending a summit meeting of several Pacific island leaders, where climate breakdown and regional security dominated the agenda.
News outlets including the New York Times, CNN, Reuters and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) have blocked a tool from OpenAI, limiting the company’s ability to continue accessing their content. OpenAI is behind one of the best known artificial intelligence chatbots, ChatGPT.
Stat of the day: dementia risk study finds 11 key factors behind condition
Scientists have identified 11 risk factors for dementia and used them to develop a tool that can predict whether someone will develop the condition in the next 14 years. The number of people living with dementia globally is forecast to nearly triple to 153 million by 2050, and experts have said it presents a rapidly growing threat to future health and social care systems. But targeting key risk factors, several of which involve lifestyle, could avert about 40% of cases. Researchers compiled a list of 28 known factors linked to dementia risk and then identified the strongest predictors. This produced a list of 11 predictive factors, which were then used to develop the UK Biobank Dementia Risk Score (UKBDRS) tool. The 11 factors are age, education, a history of diabetes, a history of depression, a history of stroke, parental history of dementia, levels of deprivation, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, living alone and being male.
Don’t miss this: BS High – a fake football school and the devastating effects of a conman’s lies
In August 2021, two high school football teams met in the Pro Football Hall of Fame stadium in Canton, Ohio, for a much-hyped matchup shown live on ESPN. When it quickly became a 58-0 blowout, suspicion descended most heavily on the losing side – an outfit called Bishop Sycamore purporting to be a faith-based school that actually turned out to be fake. The scandal rocked the sports world, lit up social media and had Hollywood producers rushing to unpick the sordid affair. Travon Free, the veteran comedian and TV writer, was already workshopping titles. “So the Bishop Sycamore movie is definitely gonna be called ‘BS’ right?” he tweeted.
In an age when many sports documentaries have become stylized PR, the story of an online school that turned out to be fake is a high mark for the genre.
… Or this: ‘Grabbing you by the lapels’ – a history of eye-catching NYC subway posters
The New York subway, which has more stations than any underground railway in the world, is notorious for crowds, delays, dirt and rats. But it can also be a place of the sublime. For three-quarters of a century the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York, one of America’s most important colleges for art and design, has been producing posters to catch the eye and lift the mood of commuters bustling through subterranean stations. It is the longest-running advertising campaign in the history of the city’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Now more than 200 posters from this collection will be displayed above ground at the SVA Chelsea Gallery in an exhibition, Underground Images: A History.
“I’m hoping that the people who see this will make the connection, which the posters were originally conceived to make,” said Francis Di Tommaso, the director of SVA Galleries. “Here’s visual arts. It’s grabbing you by the lapels. It’s got your eyeballs. That’s what we do here. This is our product. We make artists.”
Climate check: carbon credit speculators could lose billions as offsets deemed ‘worthless’
Carbon credit speculators could lose billions as scientific evidence shows many offsets they have bought have no environmental worth and have become stranded assets. Amid growing evidence that huge numbers of carbon credits do nothing to mitigate global heating and can sometimes be linked to alleged human rights concerns, there is a growing pile of carbon credits equivalent to the annual emissions of Japan, the world’s fifth largest polluter, that are unused in the unregulated voluntary market, according to market analysis. From Apple to Disney, Gucci to Shell, many of the largest companies in the world have used carbon credits for their sustainability efforts from the unregulated voluntary market, which grew to $2bn (£1.6bn) in size in 2021 with prices for many carbon credits rising above $20 an offset.
Last Thing: belligerence and hostility – Trump’s mugshot defines modern US politics
Mugshots define eras. Bugsy Siegel peering malevolently from beneath his fedora in a 1928 booking photo summed up the perverse romance of gangsters in the prohibition age. Nearly half a century later, mugshots of David Bowie, elegantly dressed but dead-eyed after his arrest for drug possession, and a dishevelled Janis Joplin, detained for “vulgar and indecent language”, spoke to the shockwaves created by the counterculture. Now comes what Donald Trump Jr described as “the most iconic photo in the history of US politics” before the booking picture of his father glaring into the camera was even taken. But whether deeply divided Americans view the first ever mugshot of a former president as that of a gangster or a rock star is very much in the politics of the beholder, writes Chris McGreal.
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