Although the former president’s office has not announced any upcoming trips to any of his resorts, multiple people familiar with the plans said he had been actively preparing for a visit to the U.K. soon. Though final details had not been nailed down, local officials had been amplifying security measures in anticipation, and local politicians were petitioning him not to come.

A trip to Scotland would have been Trump’s first visit out of the country since leaving the White House. He last visited the U.K. in 2019, during which he spent time at his golf resort in Doonbeg, Ireland. The former president was in the U.K. for a state visit with Queen Elizabeth II and former U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May, and met with President of France Emmanuel Macron.

ROME — As a billionaire property tycoon, media magnate and three-time prime minister of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi’s career has already spanned decades.

In recent years, however, his profile has been much diminished. Thanks to illness, he has often appeared at party events by video link, and was banned from public office in Italy for four years after a tax fraud conviction.

Yet now 85, when most people his age would be putting their feet up, the former Italian prime minister has decided to stand for election. “That way everyone would be happy,” he told Rai radio with his inimitable self-assurance.

Bar a miracle, the election on September 25 is likely to produce a triumphant right-wing coalition, with Berlusconi as the kingmaker, buying him a position of influence for the next five years.

American Airlines agrees to buy 20 supersonic planes from Boom

American Airlines has agreed to purchase 20 supersonic Overture planes from Boom Supersonic, the companies announced Tuesday.

The deal is the second firm order in the last two years for Boom, still years from building its first commercial airplane. United Airlines made a commitment last year to buy 15 Overture jets.

“Passengers want flights that are faster, more convenient, more sustainable and that’s what Overture delivers,” Boom CEO Blake Scholl told CNBC. “Flight times can be as little as half as what we have today, and that works great in networks like American where we can fly Miami to London in less than five hours.”

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/16/american-airlines-agrees-to-buy-20-supersonic-planes-from-boom.html

WASHINGTON—Attorney General Merrick Garland deliberated for weeks over whether to approve the application for a warrant to search former President Donald Trump’s Florida home, people familiar with the matter said, a sign of his cautious approach that will be tested over coming months.

The decision had been the subject of weeks of meetings between senior Justice Department and FBI officials, the people said. The warrant allowed agents last Monday to seize classified information and other presidential material from Mar-a-Lago.

Mr. Garland now faces a more momentous decision that will further sharpen an already unprecedented and politically fraught situation: whether to pursue charges against Mr. Trump or any of his allies over their handling of the records at issue and their interactions with Justice Department officials seeking to retrieve them.

A decision to bring charges in the matter against Mr. Trump or any of his allies would thrust the Justice Department deeper into a political environment in which the former president’s supporters and Republican lawmakers are already accusing Mr. Garland and the department of overreach.

The Justice Department is targeting the cash that Jan. 6 rioters have made after the insurrection, AP reports.

Federal authorities seized tens of thousands of dollars from a defendant who sold his footage from Jan. 6.

A Florida man’s plea deal allows the U.S. government to collect profits from any book he gets published over the next five years.

Prosecutors want a Maine man who raised more than $20,000 from supporters to surrender some of the money because a taxpayer-funded public defender is representing him.

An armada of 2020 election deniers is running in major battleground races. Lots of the candidates are winning GOP nominations.

The big picture: 54 of the 87 GOP nominees for battleground state offices with a say in election certification have questioned the 2020 presidential election results, The Washington Post reports.

Those offices include governor and lieutenant governor, secretary of state and attorney general, and members of Congress.
🇺🇸 The list of 2020 deniers includes:

12 of 13 candidates in Arizona.
13 of 19 in Georgia.
10 of 16 in Michigan.
5 of 9 in Nevada.
1o of 19 in Pennsylvania.
4 of 11 in Wisconsin.

The Republicans’ Senate campaign committee has slashed its television ad reservations in three critical battleground states for the fall, a likely sign of financial troubles headed into the peak of the 2022 midterm election season.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee has cut more than $5 million in Pennsylvania, including its reservations in the Philadelphia media market, according to two media-tracking sources.

Reservations in Wisconsin, in the Madison and Green Bay markets, have also been curtailed, by more than $2 million. And in Arizona, all reservations after Sept. 30 have been cut in Phoenix and Tucson, the state’s only two major media markets, amounting to roughly $2 million more.

So far around $10 million had been canceled as of midday Monday, though more changes to the fall reservations were in progress. The states where ad reservations have been canceled are home to three of the nation’s most competitive Senate contests.

Donald Trump “has to” announce a campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 in the next two weeks, a senior Trumpworld source said, if the former president wants to head off being indicted under the Espionage Act after the FBI search at Mar-a-Lago last week.

In messages obtained by the Guardian, the source indicated Trump needed to announce because politically it would be harder for the US Department of Justice (DoJ) to indict a candidate for office than a former president out of the electoral running.

The source also suggested Ron DeSantis, Trump’s only serious competitor in Republican polling, will not run in 2024 if Trump chooses to enter the race.

“He can wait,” the source said of the Florida governor.