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Donald Trump is arraigned in a Manhattan courtroom, the first former president ever charged with a crime

Thirty-four felony counts, a not-guilty plea, and a motorcade watched by the world. The republic did the ordinary thing and it felt extraordinary.

Donald Trump surrendered to the Manhattan district attorney on the afternoon of April 4, was fingerprinted, and sat at a defence table while a judge read 34 counts of falsifying business records against him. He pleaded not guilty. The charges, brought by District Attorney Alvin Bragg, concern a $130,000 payment made to the adult-film actress Stormy Daniels in the closing days of the 2016 campaign, and the way the reimbursement to Trump's then-lawyer Michael Cohen was booked as legal expenses. Each count is a felony; together they carry, in theory, years in prison, though a first offence of this kind rarely does.

It was the first time in the country's history that a former president had been criminally charged, and the machinery of it was deliberately, almost defiantly, mundane. There was no perp walk. Trump flew up from Florida, spent a night at Trump Tower, rode down to the courthouse in a motorcade broadcast live by every network, spent about an hour inside, and flew back to Mar-a-Lago, where he gave a speech that night attacking the judge, the prosecutor and their families. Legal scholars are divided on the strength of the case; the theory that elevates the bookkeeping misdemeanour to a felony, that it was done to conceal a second crime, is novel and will be fought over for months. A trial, if it happens, is unlikely before next year, in the middle of the campaign in which Trump is the Republican front-runner.

Three more investigations sit behind this one: the classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, the effort to overturn Georgia's 2020 result, and the federal January 6 inquiry, any of which legal observers consider graver than the case that got there first. Trump's campaign said it raised more than $10 million in the days around the arraignment.

TECHNOLOGY

An open letter asks the industry to pause; Italy pulls the plug on ChatGPT

Four months after ChatGPT, the backlash has a petition and a regulator. Neither is likely to slow anything down.

An open letter published by the Future of Life Institute on March 29 called on all AI labs to "immediately pause for at least six months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4," warning of "profound risks to society and humanity." It gathered thousands of signatures, including Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak and a number of serious researchers, and also, in the first rushed days, a scattering of fake ones. Its critics split into two camps that rarely agree: those who said it overstated the danger, and those who said a six-month pause was both unenforceable and beside the point, since the labs racing hardest would simply not comply.

Two days later, on March 31, Italy's data-protection authority did something with actual force behind it: it ordered OpenAI to stop processing Italians' data and effectively blocked ChatGPT in the country, citing the lack of a legal basis for training on personal information and the absence of age controls. OpenAI took the service down in Italy while it negotiated. Regulators in France, Germany, Ireland and Canada said they were watching. The contrast was the point of the fortnight: the industry's own attempt to slow itself down was a letter with no teeth, and the only thing that actually stopped a product was a privacy law written years before anyone had heard of a large language model.

DEFENSE

Classified US documents appear on the open internet

A trove of highly classified American intelligence documents, including assessments of Ukraine's air defences and evidence of US spying on allies, surfaced on gaming and messaging platforms and then spread across social media in the first week of April. The Pentagon called it a serious breach and opened an investigation; officials spent the week telephoning allies to explain. The material appeared genuine, if in places crudely altered, and painted a bleaker picture of Ukraine's coming offensive than public statements had. How it got from a secure vault to a Discord server was, at press time, unknown.

EUROPE

Finland joins NATO

Finland became the 31st member of NATO on April 4, doubling the alliance's land border with Russia and ending three-quarters of a century of neutrality that the invasion of Ukraine had made untenable in a year. Its foreign minister handed over the accession documents in Brussels; the blue-and-white flag was raised at alliance headquarters. Sweden, which applied at the same time, remains blocked by Turkey and Hungary. Moscow said it would strengthen its forces in the west.

AMERICA

A school shooting in Nashville

A former student walked into the Covenant School, a small Christian primary in Nashville, on the morning of March 27 and killed three nine-year-old children and three adults with two rifles and a handgun bought legally, before police shot her dead. It was the deadliest American school shooting of the year so far and prompted the now-standard sequence: vigils, a fight in the Tennessee legislature that ended with the expulsion of two Democratic lawmakers who protested for gun control, and no change to the law.

IN BRIEF

Bakhmut; Ozempic; Twitter labels; a jury in California

The battle for Bakhmut ground into its ninth month, the longest and bloodiest of the war, with Russia's Wagner mercenaries claiming the centre of a city now almost entirely rubble. Demand for Ozempic and Wegovy, diabetes drugs that produce dramatic weight loss, outran supply and began reshaping how the food and pharmaceutical industries think about appetite. Twitter labelled National Public Radio "state-affiliated media," the tag it uses for propaganda outlets, then changed it to "government-funded"; NPR quit the platform. A California jury cleared Gwyneth Paltrow of fault in a 2016 ski collision on March 30 and awarded her the symbolic one dollar she had sought.

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The Ledger

The pause letter (unenforceable) and Italy's ban (enforceable) frame the fortnight. Regulation, not a moratorium, is how this gets slowed, and it will be about data and disclosure first. Watch the EU AI Act, now moving through Brussels.

Data centers & power

Quiet on the front page. Under it, every one of these models is training on Nvidia hardware in a data centre somewhere, and the demand curve is bending upward. Nobody is pricing the electricity yet.

Rates

The banking scare has done some of the Fed's tightening for it; markets read the March turmoil as worth roughly a rate rise. The March jobs and inflation prints land after this issue.

Real estate

US 30-year mortgage 6.28 percent (Freddie Mac, April 6). Commercial property, especially offices, is the slow-motion worry behind the regional-bank story.

India tech

India is days from being declared the world's most populous country. The services industry's pitch, a young workforce at scale, has never had a better number behind it, and never a harder question about whether the work it does is the work AI is about to automate.

What we called wrong

In No. 4 we wrote that Google had shown "what it looks like when the confident machine is wrong in public with your name on it." Fair, but we implied it might cost Google the race. A fortnight of Bard improving and Bing plateauing says we should not have written the obituary in February.

The Back Page

The Spaniard in the green jacket

Jon Rahm won the Masters on the evening of April 9, closing with a four-under 68 at Augusta National to finish twelve under and four clear, on what would have been the sixty-sixth birthday of Seve Ballesteros. Rahm, from the Basque Country, kept a photograph of Seve in his mind all week and said so afterwards, in tears. He had started the tournament by four-putting the first green on Thursday and made a birdie and an eagle in the next three holes, which is the whole of golf in four holes: the game punishes you and then, before you have finished being punished, offers you everything back. He is the fourth Spaniard to wear the green jacket, after Ballesteros, José María Olazábal and Sergio García, and he putted the last one in as the Georgia light went gold.

The Fortnight's Fable

The King Who Taxed the Rain

A king who needed coin declared that since the rain fell upon every field it plainly belonged to the crown, and he taxed each farmer for the water that came from the sky. The farmers, unable to pay for weather, grew less and hid what they grew, and the harvest shrank, and the tax upon a smaller harvest brought the king less than he had gathered in the years before he thought to own the rain.

Moral: charge a country for the rain and you will soon rule a drier one, and collect less from it than you did when the sky was free.