The Week Magazine June 23, 2023

The trial of a politician is bound to appear, well, political. With Trump now charged under the Espionage Act, supporters and detractors alike wonder whether he can possibly get a fair trial. MAGA Republicans see the process as inherently unfair, because the Justice Department is currently under a Democratic administration—but by that logic, no politician could ever be prosecuted by appointees of the other party. Critics of Trump, who include most Democrats but also many Republicans and independents, worry that the judge overseeing his trial, Aileen Cannon, will tip the scales of justice in his favor. And that fear has merit. Simply being a Trump appointee isn’t cause for recusal. But Judge Cannon is no ordinary Trump appointee. She’s an extremely inexperienced one who has already proved herself shockingly biased…

What happened Donald Trump was arraigned in a Florida courtroom this week, becoming the first former U.S. president to be charged with federal crimes even as he campaigns for a second term in the White House. Trump pleaded not guilty to a 37-count indictment charging that he violated the Espionage Act, obstructed justice, and put national security at risk by taking hundreds of classified documents from the White House, hoarding them at his Florida and New Jersey estates, and conspiring to hide them from investigators. The documents reportedly included top-secret details of nuclear programs and America’s vulnerabilities to military attack, intelligence on foreign adversaries, and a Pentagon “attack plan” on Iran. They were among more than 80 boxes of documents stored in locations such as a bathroom, a ballroom, and…

What happened With their spring counteroffensive fully underway, Ukrainian forces reclaimed small slivers of land this week, even as Kyiv said its troops were battling under Russian “air and artillery superiority.” Ukrainian authorities said they had retaken about 35 square miles of territory, mostly little villages in the Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions. Russian military bloggers corroborated a Ukrainian advance as far south as Makarivka in Donetsk—just 55 miles from the southern tip of the “land bridge” that connects the Russian-occupied east of the country to the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula. Cutting off those supply lanes is the major goal of the counteroffensive. Also this week, a Ukrainian missile strike in southern Donetsk reportedly took out Maj. Gen. Sergei Goryachev—the 10th Russian general killed in the war, and one the pro-Kremlin…

Richard Fierro, the 45-year-old Army veteran who subdued the Club Q gunman in November, served as grand marshal in the Colorado Springs Pride Parade last week. Fierro and his family had gone to Club Q to see a drag show when a man stormed in with a semiautomatic rifle, shooting 22 people before Fierro tackled him. “I’m humbled beyond belief to be accepted into the community and asked as a straight dude to grand marshal their parade,” Fierro said. The march’s theme this year was the power of resilience. To keep their muscles strong and stimulate their brains and bodies, the 12 elephants at the Houston Zoo practice sessions of “elephant yoga” every day. The training, which lasts between 30 seconds and five minutes, includes lifting their front and back…

“You’d think there’d be some kind of opportunity here,” said Alexander Sammon in Slate. In a normal, pre-Trump world, the news that the “undisputed front-runner” for a party’s presidential nomination had been indicted on federal criminal charges would have rival candidates stampeding to the microphones with some variant of the message “Doing federal crimes is not good and I did not do federal crimes, which is one reason to vote for me.” But following Donald Trump’s indictment last week, the other GOP candidates reacted to the first federal indictment of a former president by rallying to this president’s defense—with even archrival Ron DeSantis calling the charges “a mortal threat to a free society.” As jaw-dropping details from the indictment began to circulate—including Trump showing visitors military battle plans for…

Good week for: Artificial reunions, after Paul McCartney announced that the Beatles will release their final record this year, featuring vocals of the late John Lennon extracted from an old demo cassette using AI tools. McCartney, 80, said AI is “exciting because it’s the future.” The local pizza joint, after Zume, an automated pizza company that used robots to make its pies inside delivery trucks, shut down. Launched with nearly $500 million in venture-capital funding, Zume and its robots never mastered the art of delivering a hot pizza without the cheese sliding off. Strength in numbers, after female fans of mega pop star Taylor Swift, who vastly outnumber males on her current tour, have taken over men’s rooms to shorten the time it takes to pee. Bad week for: Umami,…