Good morning.
Federal prosecutors have charged Donald Trump over his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election in a desperate attempt to stay in power, the latest criminal case before the former president that comes just weeks after he was charged with retaining national defense information.
The indictment, filed in federal district court in Washington, charges Trump with one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States; one count of conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding; obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding; and conspiracy against rights.
Over the course of 45 pages, the indictment brought by the special counsel Jack Smith outlined in stark detail how Trump and his allies knowingly spread false allegations of election fraud, convened fraudulent electors and attempted to block the certification of the election on 6 January.
The indictment also listed six co-conspirators who played central roles in the plot to keep Trump in office. While they were unnamed, the descriptions of five of the six matched those of the Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, John Eastman and Ken Chesebro, and the former US justice department official Jeff Clark.
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What has Trump said? The former president hit back on Truth Social: “Why didn’t they bring this ridiculous case 2.5 years ago? They wanted it right in the middle of my campaign, that’s why!”
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What’s the reaction from others been like? While Democrats and progressives welcomed Trump’s federal indictment, the former president’s chief rival for the 2024 Republican nomination rallied to his defense. RonDeSantis decried the alleged “swamp mentality”.
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What happens next? Trump has been summoned to appear before a federal magistrate judge in Washington DC tomorrow. Smith, the special counsel, said he would seek a “speedy trial”, and stressed that the former president was entitled to a presumption of innocence until proven guilty. Here are six key takeaways from the news.
AI use in breast cancer screening as good as two radiologists, study finds
The use of artificial intelligence in breast cancer screening is safe and can almost halve the workload of radiologists, according to the world’s most comprehensive trial of its kind.
Breast cancer is the most prevalent cancer globally, according to the World Health Organization, with more than 2.3 million women developing the disease every year.
Screening can improve prognosis and reduce mortality by spotting breast cancer at an earlier, more treatable stage. Preliminary results from a large study suggest AI screening is as good as two radiologists working together, does not increase false positives and almost halves the workload.
The interim safety analysis results of the first randomised controlled trial of its kind involving more than 80,000 women were published in the Lancet Oncology journal.
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What were the results of the study? In total, 244 women (28%) recalled from AI-supported screening were found to have cancer, compared with 203 women (25%) recalled from standard screening. This resulted in 41 more cancers being detected with the support of AI, of which 19 were invasive and 22 were in situ cancers. The use of AI did not generate more false positives, where a scan is incorrectly diagnosed as abnormal. The false-positive rate was 1.5% in both groups.
Immortal cells: Henrietta Lacks’ family settle lawsuit over HeLa tissue harvested in 1950s
The laboratory equipment maker Thermo Fisher Scientific has settled a lawsuit brought by the estate of Henrietta Lacks, a long-deceased cancer victim whose “immortal” cells have lived on to fuel biomedical research for decades, lawyers for the estate have said.
The story of Lacks, a young African American woman who died in Baltimore in 1951, was made famous in Rebecca Skloot’s 2010 book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which became a movie in 2017 featuring Oprah Winfrey.
The HeLa cell line, the first to survive and reproduce indefinitely in lab conditions, has been cultivated in vast quantities and used in a range of medical research worldwide, including to test the polio vaccine, research the effects of radiation on human cells, and develop a treatment for sickle-cell anaemia.
The tissue sample that became the HeLa cell line was cut from Lacks’ cervix at Johns Hopkins hospital in Baltimore without her knowledge during surgery to treat her cervical cancer. Lacks died of the disease at age 31. Since then, it is estimated, 50m tonnes of her cells have been produced.
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What did the family say when they sued? Lacks’ estate sued Thermo Fisher in Baltimore federal court in 2021, asserting her family had “not seen a dime” of money that Thermo Fisher made from cultivating the HeLa line of cells that originated from tissue taken without Lacks’ consent during a medical procedure in 1951. The lawsuit accused Waltham, Massachusetts-based Thermo Fisher of unjust enrichment, arguing it illegally commercialised Lacks’ genetic material. “Black suffering has fuelled innumerable medical progress and profit, without just compensation or recognition,” the lawsuit said.
In other news …
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More than 10 Russian drones were downed during an overnight attack on Kyiv, Ukrainian officials said early this morning. Sergiy Popko, the head of the Kyiv city military administration said Russia had used a barrage of Iranian-made Shahed drones, with debris hitting several areas.
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Researchers have found the paintings deemed more pleasant by adults are also more captivating for babies. The team say their findings suggest certain biases in what we choose to look at are already present in infancy and carry over into adulthood, although life experiences also have an impact on which paintings we end up preferring when we get older.
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The rating agency Fitch downgraded the US government’s top credit rating yesterday, a move that drew an angry response from the White House and surprised investors. Fitch cited fiscal deterioration over the next three years and repeated down-the-wire debt ceiling negotiations.
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Three of Lizzo’s tour dancers have accused the singer of sexual harassment, and of creating a hostile work environment through sexual, racial and religious harassment in several incidents between 2021 and 2023, according to a lawsuit filed yesterday.
Stat of the day: Oldest species of swimming jellyfish discovered in 505m-year-old fossils
The oldest species of swimming jellyfish ever recorded has been discovered in 505m-year-old fossils, scientists have said. The fossils were found at Burgess Shale in Canada, an area known for the number of well-preserved fossils found there. The new species, which has been named Burgessomedusa phasmiformis, resembles a large, swimming jellyfish with a saucer or bell-shaped body up to 20cm high.
Its roughly 90 short tentacles would have allowed it to capture sizeable prey. Jellyfish belong to a subgroup of cnidaria, the oldest group of animals to exist, called medusozoans. They are made of 95% water and decay quickly, so fossilised specimens are rarely found, but the specimens – found in the late 1980s and early 1990s – were exceptionally well preserved. “Finding such incredibly delicate animals preserved in rock layers on top of these mountains is such a wondrous discovery,” said Dr Jean-Bernard Caron, a curator of invertebrate palaeontology at the Royal Ontario Museum
Don’t miss this: Tori Bowie’s death highlighted a devastating reality for Black women in the US
The Olympic sprint champion Tori Bowie was one of track and field’s most striking personalities, a speed demon as well as a style icon, the elite runner whose go-to accessory was a colorful hair scarf, writes Andrew Lawrence. In April the sheriff’s deputies in Orange county, Florida, discovered her dead inside her home after no one had seen or heard from her for several days. An autopsy found that the 32-year-old had died while eight months pregnant, after going into premature labor. Her baby, called Ariana in Bowie’s funeral program, was stillborn.
In death, Bowie has become a symbol of a US child birthing epidemic that has reached crisis point. Here was a double world champion and one of the fastest women ever, dying from something women all over the planet go through every day. According to a 2021 CDC report, there was a 40% rise in maternal deaths in the US over the previous year. The danger is even more acute for Black women, who are three times more likely than their white counterparts to die from pregnancy-related causes in the US.
Climate check: ‘Silent killer’ – experts warn of record US deaths from extreme heat
The punishing heatwaves that have scorched much of the US could result in a record number of heat-related deaths this year, experts have warned, amid a spike in hospitalizations from collapsing workers. Among those needing hospital treatment are heat-exhausted hikers and even people who have suffered severe burns from touching blistering concrete and asphalt. Heat is the leading weather-related cause of mortalities in the US, outpacing deaths from hurricanes by a factor of eight to one, and this summer’s record-breaking temperatures, worsened by the human-caused climate crisis, have led to fears a new annual high death toll will be set in 2023.
“This year looks on pace to potentially break records, in terms of heat and heat mortalities,” said Gregory Wellenius, an expert in environmental health at Boston University School of Public Health.
Last Thing: Filipino couple wade through flood waters on wedding day
On the morning of Paulo and Mae Padilla’s wedding, flood waters had risen past knee level. All the roads in their neighborhood were submerged. Their province, Bulacan, in the Central Luzon region of the Philippines, has been hit by relentless rains driven by two typhoons. But the couple were determined to go ahead with their big day. The groom, Paulo, told the local broadcaster GMA: “Even if our vehicle is sinking [in the flood], we still wanted to push through just to be able to come here.” Guests made it to the church on Sunday, after wading through the waters in flip-flops and rubber boots and a video of Mae walking down the aisle shows the trail of her gown soaked and the tiles of the historic Barasoain church submerged in water. The footage has been shown on local news outlets, and shared widely on social media, where many praised Paulo and Mae for persevering against the odds.
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