News Burst 6 April 2023 – Get The News! ~ posted April 5, 2023

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Former US President Donald Trump, 76, was arraigned on Tuesday in a Manhattan courtroom, becoming the first president in US history to face criminal prosecution. His lawyers have denounced the indictment as a politically-driven “witch hunt” perpetrated by District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Democrat who ran for office on a pledge to prosecute the former leader and whose campaign was funded largely by billionaire activist George Soros. Trump reportedly sat with his hands folded, flanked by his lawyers, as he said “not guilty” when asked how he pleaded to the charges. A US judge at Trump’s initial appearance in court said that a trial could start in January 2024. Prior to the court hearing, he waved to a crowd gathered outside the courthouse after being driven in a motorcade from his home at Trump Tower in Manhattan. He ignored questions as he left the courtroom.

The US Virgin Islands is seeking to add a new obstruction charge to its lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase, claiming that the banking giant benefited from convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking operation, US media reported on Wednesday, citing a new filing in Manhattan federal court. The Monday filing referred to a recent deposition by JPMorgan employee Mary Erdoes, who runs an asset management division of the bank where Epstein was a client. According to the filing, the obstruction charge was proposed after it emerged that the bank had processed large cash withdrawals for Epstein and his associates, thus helping impede enforcement of a US anti-trafficking law and allowing Epstein to evade criminal liability. Furthermore, the filing alleged that Epstein’s dealings had been “so widely known at JPMorgan that senior executives joked about Epstein’s interest in young girls.”

A young Belgian father was pressured into committing suicide by a popular AI chatbot, the man’s widow told local news outlet La Libre last week. Chat logs supplied by the app “Pierre” used to talk with the chatbot ELIZA reveal how, in just six weeks, it amplified his anxiety about climate change into a determination to leave his comfortable life behind. “My husband would still be here if it hadn’t been for these conversations with the chatbot,” Pierre’s wife, “Claire,” insisted. Pierre had begun worrying about climate change two years ago, according to Claire, and consulted ELIZA to learn more about the subject. He soon lost hope that human effort could save the planet and “placed all his hopes in technology and artificial intelligence to get out of it,” becoming “isolated in his eco-anxiety,” she told La Libre.

Two senior members of Reporters Without Borders (RSF) have been barred from seeing WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange at a London prison despite having prior approval to visit him, the organization has claimed. In a statement on Tuesday, RSF said Secretary General Christophe Deloire and Director of Operations Rebecca Vincent had not been allowed to enter Belmarsh Prison, “despite having been vetted in advance and receiving confirmation.” Deloire criticized the “arbitrary” decision, arguing it was made “for a spurious reason” at the last minute. The organization claimed that the pair had been attempting to visit the WikiLeaks co-founder not as journalists, but rather as NGO members.

The US Air Force has reportedly opted to help ease its recruiting struggles by allowing fatter Americans to join the military branch, making potentially millions of obese young people eligible to enlist. Under the new guidelines, male recruits will be allowed to carry up to 26% body fat, while females will have a limit of 36% body fat, Military.com reported on Tuesday, citing US Air Force Recruiting Service spokeswoman Leslie Brown. The previous limits were 20% for males and 28% for females.

The mainstream media’s yarn about a pro-Ukrainian group that chartered a yacht named Andromeda to destroy the Nord Stream pipelines was so absurd and childish that one would suspect it was made intentionally to reinforce the truth, according to Pulitzer Prize-winner Seymour Hersh. On April 5, Pulitzer Prize-winning veteran journalist Sy Hersh took to Substack again to analyze the Western media’s story about a six-member “pro-Ukrainian” gang with forged passports that allegedly blew up the Nord Stream pipeline. On March 7, The New York Times and Die Zeit published two separate articles claiming that international investigators had managed to trace the September 26, 2022 sabotage attack to a “pro-Ukrainian” group operating from the Andromeda, a 15-meter chartered yacht. However, the same week, Der Spiegel and Bild questioned the story. Later, Die Zeit quoted the chair of the Bundestag’s intelligence oversight committee, Konstantin von Notz from the Green Party, who argued that the Nord Stream sabotage does not look like an attack by a group of unaffiliated volunteers, but has all the earmarks of a “state-backed act of terrorism.”

Former US President Bill Clinton has expressed pangs of regret over the diplomatic pressure he put on Kiev in the 1990s to sign a treaty which prompted Ukraine to give up its massive Soviet-era stockpile of nukes.

The habitable planet we now populate – Earth – boasts a tumultuous 4.5-billion-year history. According to the so-called “Snowball Earth” theory, between 700 million and 600 million years ago, ice encased the entire planet. But new research by Chinese scientists is now suggesting that the so-called “freeze” was somewhat more mild than previously believed. In fact, the surface of our planet may have been quite “slushy,” according to findings published in the journal Nature Communications. It was these pockets of slush that could have enabled oxygen to get through, generating what would become the incubators of living organisms. In fact, there were multiple clues to this effect, such as fossil deposits made by glaciers near the equator. These were identified as seaweed in a layer of black shale in central China’s Hubei province. This could be taken as indication that habitable marine environments were more widespread billions of years ago than previously thought. According to the scientists, shale in the Nantuo Formation, southern China, can tell quite a fascinating story about the conditions in oceans billions of years ago. The team analyzed levels of iron and the presence of nitrogen to see if oxygen was, indeed, piercing through the ocean.

The latest Hubble photo captured a side view of the “amorphous” UGC 2890 galaxy, which lies 30 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Camelopardalis (The Giraffe). Like our own Milky Way, UGC 2890 is a spiral galaxy with a central bulge and a rotating star-studded disk. Back in 2009, astronomers spotted a “spectacularly energetic explosion” in the galaxy, which was triggered because one of its stars that was 11 to 15 times more massive than the sun ran out of fuel and exploded as a supernova. (The supernova didn’t actually go off in 2009, of course; given that UGC lies 30 million light-years away, we’re seeing what happened there 30 million years ago.)