MIAMI

Trump is charged by the federal government over the classified documents, and pleads not guilty

A month after the state case in New York, a graver one: 37 federal counts, photographs of secret files in a ballroom and a bathroom, and a recording of the former president waving one around.

Donald Trump was arraigned in a federal courthouse in Miami on June 13 on 37 counts brought by the special counsel Jack Smith, including 31 under the Espionage Act for retaining national-defence information, and charges of obstruction and false statements for the effort to keep it. He pleaded not guilty. It is the first federal prosecution of a former president, and by the assessment of most lawyers a far more serious case than the New York hush-money charges of April: the indictment includes photographs of cartons of classified documents stored in a Mar-a-Lago ballroom, a shower and a bathroom, and a 2021 recording in which Trump appears to show a secret military document to people without clearance while acknowledging he could not declassify it.

The indictment is unusually detailed because much of its evidence comes from Trump's own lawyers and staff. The case will be heard in Florida, before a judge Trump himself appointed, and, like the others, is unlikely to reach trial before the 2024 election in which he leads the Republican field by a wide margin. He flew from the courthouse to a Miami restaurant, then home to New Jersey, and told supporters the prosecution was election interference. The Republican party, with a handful of exceptions, rallied to him. The machinery of the law is now running three separate cases against the likely nominee of one of the two major parties, and two more investigations, in Georgia and over January 6, are close behind.

UKRAINE

A dam is destroyed, a flood follows, and the counteroffensive begins in the water

The Kakhovka dam collapsed on June 6, draining a reservoir the size of a great lake across the towns below it. Each side blamed the other. Ukraine's long-awaited push began in its shadow.

The Kakhovka dam on the Dnipro river, held by Russian forces since the first days of the war, collapsed in the early hours of June 6, sending a wall of water through dozens of towns downstream, drowning homes and farmland, cutting off drinking water for hundreds of thousands, and threatening the cooling supply of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant upstream. Tens of thousands were displaced; the dead were counted in the water for days. Ukraine accused Russia of blowing it up from the inside to blunt the coming offensive; Russia blamed Ukrainian shelling. Independent engineers leaned toward an explosion within the structure, which only Russia controlled.

It came as Ukraine's long-signalled counteroffensive finally began, probing Russian lines in the south and east with the Western tanks and armour that had taken months to arrive. The early going was hard and slow. Russia had spent the winter and spring building deep defensive belts, minefields and trenches, and the first Ukrainian assaults met them head-on and paid for every kilometre. Western officials who had spoken of a decisive breakthrough began, quietly, to speak of a long summer.

SPORT

The PGA Tour makes peace with the money it spent a year calling blood

The PGA Tour stunned professional golf on June 6 by announcing a merger with LIV Golf, the rival circuit funded by Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund, whose lavish contracts had split the sport and whose backing the Tour had spent a year condemning as an attempt by a repressive state to launder its reputation through sport. The Tour's own players, who had turned down fortunes to stay loyal on the argument that LIV was morally compromised, learned of the deal from the news. The framework leaves the Saudi fund pouring money into a game whose establishment had drawn a line against exactly that, and it drew immediate scrutiny in Washington. In sport as in banking, the line held until the cheque cleared.

TECHNOLOGY

Apple bets $3,499 on a headset, and the Fed takes a breath

Apple unveiled the Vision Pro at its developer conference on June 5, a ski-goggle headset it calls a "spatial computer," priced at $3,499 and shipping next year, its first new product category since the Watch and its boldest bet that the screen you look at will one day be the space around you. The reaction split cleanly between wonder at the engineering and doubt about the price, the weight and the point. Two days of headlines later, on June 14, the Federal Reserve held interest rates steady at 5.00 to 5.25 percent, its first pause after ten straight increases, while signalling it was not finished. The same day, the European Parliament passed its version of the AI Act, moving the world's most comprehensive AI law a step closer to force.

IN BRIEF

The GOP field grows; the Mediterranean swallows a boat; heat

Chris Christie, Mike Pence and the North Dakota governor Doug Burgum joined a Republican presidential field now well into double figures, all of them trailing Trump by margins the indictments only seem to widen. A fishing boat crammed with as many as 750 migrants sank off Pylos, in southern Greece, on June 14, in one of the deadliest Mediterranean shipwrecks on record; perhaps 600 people drowned, most of them trapped below deck, and questions hardened about how the Greek coastguard shadowed the vessel for hours without rescuing it. Record heat settled over the American south and south Asia, another data point in a year of them.

The Column

The headset and the shrinking bet

Apple's $3,499 goggles are an engineering marvel and a confession. The biggest company in the world is reaching for the next platform because the last one is running out of room.

By Daniel Reeve

I have been a product person for most of my career, and I watched the Vision Pro announcement the way a product person watches any launch from Apple: not for the demo, which is always beautiful, but for the bet underneath it. Every big product is a bet about where value is going to be. The iPhone bet that the computer would become the phone, and it was right, and it made Apple the most valuable company on Earth. So the question I actually care about is not whether the headset is impressive, because of course it is. It is what bet a $3,499 face computer represents, and I think the honest answer is a slightly anxious one.

Here is the thing about the smartphone: it is finished. Not dead, finished, in the way a mature technology is finished. The phones do not get meaningfully better each year, people keep them longer, the growth has gone out of the market because everyone who wants one has one. That is a wonderful position to be in and a terrifying one, because a company the size of Apple cannot grow on replacement sales alone. It needs a next thing, a new surface where software lives and money flows, and it has been looking for one for years. The Watch is a nice business, not a new platform. The car project has consumed a decade and shipped nothing. The headset is the reach for the next platform, and the price and the hedged language around it, "spatial computing," told me they are not sure they have found it either. They are placing the bet because the table requires a bet, not because they have seen the cards.

This is the pattern I try to teach people about mature technology markets, and it applies far below Apple's altitude, right down to the software I build. When a category stops growing, the incumbent has two moves. It can extract more from the customers it has, which is what subscriptions and services and price rises are, or it can reach for a new category before a startup does, which is expensive and usually fails. Apple is doing both at once: the services business quietly became enormous while everyone watched the hardware, and now the headset is the reach. The reach gets the applause. The extraction pays the bills.

I do not know if the Vision Pro works as a product. My instinct is that this version is a developer kit with a luxury price, a way to get the software built while the hardware gets lighter and cheaper over three or four generations, which is exactly how the Watch and the phone were really born. What I am confident about is the shape of the bet, because it is the shape every company reaches in the end. The thing that made you great matures. The growth stops. And you are left choosing, under pressure, between squeezing what you have and gambling on what you might build. Apple has more room to do both than anyone alive. Most companies get to make that choice exactly once, with far less margin for error, and the headset is a $3,499 reminder that even the best of them can feel the walls of a finished market closing in.

The Ledger

The EU Parliament passes its AI Act; Apple enters spatial computing; the models keep improving quietly. Regulation in Brussels, hardware bets in Cupertino, and no let-up in the underlying race.

Data centers & power

Two weeks after Nvidia's trillion-dollar day, the build-out continues to be the least-covered big story in technology. The chips are ordered. The power to run them is not yet built.

Rates

Fed pauses at 5.00-5.25 percent after ten straight rises, but pencils in two more this year. The debt-ceiling deal has cleared; the Treasury is now issuing bonds heavily to refill its account.

Real estate

US 30-year mortgage 6.69 percent (June 15). The pause helps sentiment but not affordability, and commercial-office distress grinds on beneath the regional banks.

India tech

Modi heads to Washington next week for a state visit heavy on technology and defence. The relationship the American technology industry most wants to deepen, and the one India most wants to bank, is on display.

What we called wrong

Nothing to retract this fortnight. But the Pylos shipwreck, 600 drowned with a fraction of the coverage a lost submersible will shortly command, is a judgement on all of us about which lives the news decides are news.

The Back Page

Il Cavaliere

Silvio Berlusconi died in Milan on June 12, at 86, and Italy lowered its flags for a man who had spent thirty years being the most Italian thing about Italy. He built a television empire, bought AC Milan and won it everything, entered politics in 1994 to save himself as much as his country, and served as prime minister three times across two decades, longer than anyone since Mussolini. He was convicted of tax fraud, tried for paying an underage dancer, mocked for the bunga-bunga parties and the hair transplant and the endless gaffes, and he outlasted all of it, because a large part of the electorate saw in his appetites and his shamelessness not a scandal but a mirror, and forgave him the way you forgive yourself. He invented, more or less, the modern strongman-entertainer, the businessman who runs on being rich and rude and one of us, and every country now has a version of him. He was the original. Italy buried him with a state funeral and could not quite decide whether it was mourning or relief.