Judge Aileen Cannon has set a date for the trial in the classified documents case against former President Donald Trump. The Trump-appointed judge has signed a court order listing the trial as starting on 14 August of this year in Fort Pierce, Florida. “This case is hereby set for a Criminal Jury Trial during the two-week period commencing August 14, 2023, or as soon thereafter as the case may be called,” the court order states. “Any change of plea must be taken prior to 5:00 p.m. on the last business day before trial is scheduled to begin,” it adds. The court order is likely to be challenged as motions are filed, including requests for the trial to be delayed. “All pre-trial motions and motions in limine must be filed by July 24, 2023,” the court order states. Scott MacFarlane of CBS News noted that “This timeline seems quite aspirational.. not likely to hold”. Judge Cannon appears to have created what’s called a “rocket docket” seemingly in an attempt to push the trial through the judicial system. Most federal trials take as long as a year as both parties prepare for the proceedings, The Daily Beast noted. Legal experts have previously indicated that Judge Cannon can be unpredictable and that she has ruled in favour of Mr Trump in the past after he appointed her shortly before leaving the White House. While overseeing Mr Trump’s challenge to the raid of his Mar-a-Lago estate last year, she added more red tape, slowing down the FBI probe. Former federal prosecutor Brandon Van Grack told The New York Times that the proposed trial date probably won’t stand as the discovery process of handing over classified evidence to the defence legal team hasn’t started yet. But he said that the date “signals that the court is at least trying to do everything it can to move the case along and that it’s important that the case proceed quickly”. “Even though it’s unlikely to hold, it’s at least a positive signal — positive in the sense that all parties and the public should want this case to proceed as quickly as possible,” he added. As Mr Trump struggles to retain lawyers to represent him, it’s unclear if the defence wants the case to move quickly and for the case to be resolved ahead of the 2024 election or if there will be attempts to delay it until after the election. But Mr Trump has for decades attempted to delay legal cases and this case is likely to be given the same treatment. If the trial goes beyond the election and Mr Trump is elected, he may theoretically attempt to pardon himself. He may also order his attorney general to drop the charges against him, The Times notes. Following Mr Trump’s indictment in Miami, Special Counsel Jack Smith indicated that he wanted a speedy trial. Judge Cannon wrote in the court order that the trial is set to be held at her home courthouse in Fort Pierce, a small town in the north of the Southern District of Florida. More follows...

A Roman fresco has been discovered that reveals what could be an ancient ancestor of pizza from 2,000 years ago. The painting was recently discovered during excavations in the Regio IX area of Pompeii’s archaeological park in Italy. The remains of the Roman city are close to Naples, the birthplace of pizza, and the artwork itself is believed to be two thousand years old. "What was depicted on the wall of an ancient Pompeian house could be a distant ancestor of the modern dish,” experts at the archaeological park said in a statement. The fresco appears to depict a round focaccia bread served with a variety of fruits. Experts think the bread is seasoned with a herb cheese spread known as a moretum which was eaten by the Romans, The Guardian reported. The bread is served with wine and fruits including pomegranate, a date and something that looks like pineapple although that fruit was not discovered by Europeans until 1493 when Christopher Columbus came across it in Guadeloupe. The "pizza" also lacks two classic ingredients; tomatoes and mozzarella. Tomatoes were introduced to Europe from the Americas in the 16th century and so were unavailable in Roman times.- Some experts believe that the discovery of mozzarella may have led directly to the invention of pizza in the 1700s. Pompeii itself was buried under ash when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79AD. More than 1,300 victims have been found over the last 250 years in the archaeological site 14 miles south of Naples. Every resident died when the city was hit by a ‘pyroclastic’ hot surge. These surges are a collection of hot gas and volcanic materials that flow down the side of an erupting volcano at high speed. They are more dangerous than lava because they are faster, with speeds of 450mph and temperatures of 1,000C. Read More Italy might stop hiring foreign museum directors. The head of Milan's Brera hopes to leave his mark Pompeii: Three new skeletons discovered in ruins from 79 AD eruption Remains of Pompeii men who ‘died in earthquake’ before Vesuvius eruption found

Twitch announced Oct. 20 that it's expanding its simulcasting policy to include all live streaming

They might not be Cricket World Cup contenders or even make the semifinals, but Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Bangladesh all have the potential to beat many of the top teams because of their skillful spin bowlers

WASHINGTON President Joe Biden expects to have the debt ceiling bill on his desk by June 5, before

LONDON British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak will commit to a promise to build 1 million homes by the

Colorado medical providers will need to get patients’ prior consent before medical students can perform pelvic exams on them while they are unconscious for a procedure under a bill signed into law

Suspect John Snowling, too, died in the shooting during a confrontation with responding sheriff deputies

JPMorgan Chase & Co. has quietly built a global unit focused on catering to the ultra-wealthy and their

Alpha gameplay of Creative Assembly's next project, Hyenas, has leaked online.

U.S. officials say the number of suicides among military members and their families dipped slightly in 2022, compared with the previous year

Earth was once hit by an extreme solar storm that would devastate human civilisation if it happened today, tree rings show. Scientists were able to piece together the solar storm from ancient tree rings that were found in the French alps, and showed evidence of a dramatic spike in radiocarbon levels some 14,300 years ago. That spike was the result of a massive solar storm, the biggest ever found by scientists. If a similar event happened today, it could knock the power grid offline for months and destroy the infrastructure we rely on for communications, scientists have warned. The researchers behind the new study have urged that the extreme nature of the newly discovered event should be a warning for the future. “Extreme solar storms could have huge impacts on Earth. Such super storms could permanently damage the transformers in our electricity grids, resulting in huge and widespread blackouts lasting months,” said Tim Heaton, professor of applied statistics in the School of Mathematics at the University of Leeds. “They could also result in permanent damage to the satellites that we all rely on for navigation and telecommunication, leaving them unusable. They would also create severe radiation risks to astronauts.” Further work is needed to ensure that the world is protected from similar events happening again, scientists said. And more research is required to actually understand how and why they might happen. Scientists have found nine extreme solar storms, or Miayake Events, that happened in the last 15,000 years. The most recent of them happened in the years 993 AD and 774 AD, but the newly found one was twice as powerful as those. Researchers do not know exactly what happened during those Miyake Events, and studying them is difficult because they can only be understood indirectly. That makes it difficult for scientists to know how and when they might happen again, or if it is even possible to predict them. “Direct instrumental measurements of solar activity only began in the 17th century with the counting of sunspots,” said Edouard Bard, professor of climate and ocean evolution at the Collège de France and CEREGE. “Nowadays, we also obtain detailed records using ground-based observatories, space probes, and satellites. “However, all these short-term instrumental records are insufficient for a complete understanding of the Sun. Radiocarbon measured in tree-rings, used alongside beryllium in polar ice cores, provide the best way to understand the Sun’s behaviour further back into the past.”  The largest solar storm that scientists were able to actually observe and study happened in 1859, and is known as the Carrington Event. It caused vast disruption to society, destroying telegraph machines and creating a bright aurora so bright that birds behaved as if the Sun was rising. The Miayake Events like the newly found storm would have been vastly more powerful, however. They were discovered by slicing ancient trees that are becoming fossils into tiny rings, and then analysing the radiocarbon that was present in them. Their work is published in a new article, ‘A radiocarbon spike at 14,300 cal yr BP in subfossil trees provides the impulse response function of the global carbon cycle during the Late Glacial’, in the journal The Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences.