1. Boston University Law Professor Jed Handelsman Shugerman:
About a year ago, when Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, indicted former President Donald Trump, I was critical of the case and called it an embarrassment. I thought an array of legal problems would and should lead to long delays in federal courts.
After listening to Monday’s opening statement by prosecutors, I still think the Manhattan D.A. has made a historic mistake. Their vague allegation about “a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election” has me more concerned than ever about their unprecedented use of state law and their persistent avoidance of specifying an election crime or a valid theory of fraud. Read the rest. (Source: nytimes.com)
2. Donald J. Trump and President Biden scored overwhelming primary victories in the battleground state of Pennsylvania yesterday, facing opponents who had long since dropped out of the race. Mr. Trump appeared to take 83 percent of the vote against Nikki Haley, his former rival in the Republican primaries. Still, Ms. Haley won the votes of more than 155,000 Pennsylvanians across the state that is considered essential to victory in November, although she ended her campaign more than a month ago. (Ed. Note: That is a significant number. Source: nytimes.com)
3. President Joe Biden’s recent polling bump in key battleground states has mostly evaporated as a deep current of pessimism about the trajectory of the US economy hurts his standing with voters. The April Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll found Biden is ahead in just one of the seven states most likely to determine the outcome of his matchup with Donald Trump, leading Michigan by 2 percentage points. Biden trails the presumptive GOP nominee slightly in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and his deficit in Georgia, Arizona, Nevada and North Carolina is larger. Those results are largely a return to the previous state of the presidential race, before a strong State of the Union address appeared to power Biden in March to his best showing in the monthly poll since it began in October. (Source: bloomberg.com)
4. News Items Fact of the Day: As of last year, Amazon had installed more than 750,000 robots in its warehouses and it is investing hundreds of millions of (dollars) on developing and building more. (Source: newscientist.com)
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