AP News in Brief at 11:04 p.m. EDT

Trump pleads not guilty to federal charges that he illegally kept classified documents

MIAMI (AP) — Donald Trump became the first former president to face a judge on federal charges as he pleaded not guilty in a Miami courtroom Tuesday to dozens of felony counts accusing him of hoarding classified documents and refusing government demands to give them back.

The history-making court date, centered on charges that Trump mishandled government secrets that as commander-in-chief he was entrusted to protect, kickstarts a legal process that will unfold at the height of the 2024 presidential campaign and carry profound consequences not only for his political future but also for his own personal liberty.

Trump approached his arraignment with characteristic bravado, posting social media broadsides against the prosecution from inside his motorcade en route to the courthouse and insisting — as he has through years of legal woes — that he has done nothing wrong and was being persecuted for political purposes. But inside the courtroom, he sat silently, scowling and arms crossed, as a lawyer entered a not guilty plea on his behalf in a brief arraignment that ended without him having to surrender his passport or otherwise restrict his travel.

The arraignment, though largely procedural in nature, was the latest in an unprecedented reckoning this year for Trump, who faces charges in New York arising from hush money payments during his 2016 presidential campaign as well as ongoing investigations in Washington and Atlanta into efforts to undo the results of the 2020 race.

Always in campaign mode, he swiftly pivoted from the solemn courtroom to a festive restaurant, stopping on his way out of Miami at Versailles, an iconic Cuban spot in the city’s Little Havana neighborhood where supporters serenaded Trump, who turns 77 on Wednesday, with “Happy Birthday.” The back-to-back events highlight the tension for Trump in the months ahead as he balances the pageantry of campaigning with courtroom stops accompanying his status as a twice-indicted criminal defendant.

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Amazon says AWS is operating normally after outage that left publishers unable to operate websites

SEATTLE (AP) — Amazon’s cloud computing unit Amazon Web Services experienced an outage on Tuesday, affecting publishers that suddenly found themselves unable to operate their sites.

The company said on its website that the root cause of the issue was tied to a service called AWS Lambda, which lets customers run code for different types of applications.

Roughly two hours after customers began experiencing errors, the company posted on its AWS status page that many of the affected AWS services were “fully recovered” and it was continuing to recover the rest. Soon after 6:30 pm E.T., the company announced all AWS services were operating normally.

Amazon said it had experienced multiple error rates for AWS services in the Northern Virginia region where it clusters data centers. The company said customers may be dealing with authentication or sign-in errors when using some AWS services, and experiencing challenges when attempting to connect with AWS Support. The issue with Lambda also indirectly affected other AWS services.

Patrick Neighorn, a company spokesperson, declined to provide additional details about the outage.

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Leader of Belarus says he wouldn’t hesitate to use Russian nuclear weapons to repel aggression

MOSCOW (AP) — Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko declared Tuesday that his country had already has received some of Russia’s tactical nuclear weapons and warned that he wouldn’t hesitate to order their use if Belarus faced an act of aggression.

The brash comments from Lukashenko contradicted earlier statements by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who said Russian nuclear weapons would be deployed to Belarus next month and emphasized that they would remain under Moscow’s exclusive control.

Earlier this year, Putin announced the planned deployment of short-range nuclear weapons to Moscow’s neighbor and ally Belarus in a move widely seen as a warning to the West as it stepped up military support for Ukraine.

During his meeting Friday with Lukashenko, Putin said work on building facilities for the weapons would be completed by July 7-8, and they would be moved to Belarusian territory quickly after that.

Lukashenko said Tuesday that “everything is ready” for the Russian nuclear weapons’ deployment, adding that “it could take just a few days for us to get what we had asked for and even a bit more.”

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Impassioned appeals by ousted churches spotlight Southern Baptists’ stance against women pastors

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Longtime pastors of two churches — one massive and one modest-sized — made their final appeals to Southern Baptists on Tuesday, asking to have their churches returned to the denomination’s fold after being ousted for having women pastors.

Rick Warren, the retired founding pastor of Saddleback Church and author of the best-selling phenomenon, “The Purpose Driven Life,” called for the reinstatement of the California megachurch in a brief but impassioned address here at the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention. The Rev. Linda Barnes Popham of Fern Creek Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky, made a similar appeal to rejoin the convention.

“We should remove churches for all kinds of sexual sin, racial sin, financial sin and leadership sin – sins that harm the testimony of our convention,” Warren told the convention. But churches with “women on pastoral staff have not sinned,” he said. “If doctrinal disagreements between Baptists are considered sin, we all get kicked out.”

The more than 12,700 messengers, or church representatives, voted by ballot on whether to uphold the decision by the denomination’s Executive Committee in February to deem the two churches not in friendly cooperation.

Results aren’t expected until Wednesday morning. But if crowd reaction is any indication, Warren may be accurate in his earlier prediction that he’ll fall short, as a far louder applause went to the person he sparred with — Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, who gave rebuttals to both churches’ appeals.

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Prosecutors: Weapons expert in Alec Baldwin case was hungover on set; defense calls case mishandled

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — The weapons supervisor on the film set where Alec Baldwin shot and killed a cinematographer was drinking and smoking marijuana in the evenings during the filming of “Rust,” prosecutors are accusing, saying she was likely hungover when she loaded a live bullet into the revolver that the actor used.

They leveled the accusations Friday in response to a motion filed last month by Hannah Gutierrez-Reed’s attorneys that seeks to dismiss her involuntary manslaughter charge. The prosecutors accused her of having a history of reckless conduct and argued that it would be in the public interest for her to “finally be held accountable.”

Jason Bowles, Gutierrez-Reed’s attorney, said Tuesday that the prosecution has mishandled the case.

“The case is so weak that they now have chosen to resort to character assassination claims about Hannah,” Bowles told The Associated Press. “The prosecution has abandoned the idea of doing justice and getting to the actual truth apparently.”

A preliminary hearing for Gutierrez-Reed is scheduled in August. A judge is expected to decide then if there’s probable cause for Gutierrez-Reed’s charge to move forward.

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The Beatles are releasing their ‘final’ record. AI helped make it possible

LONDON (AP) — Artificial intelligence has been used to extract John Lennon’s voice from an old demo to create “the last Beatles record,” decades after the band broke up, Paul McCartney said Tuesday.

McCartney, 80, told the BBC that the technology was used to separate the Beatles’ voices from background sounds during the making of director Peter Jackson’s 2021 documentary series, “The Beatles: Get Back.” The “new” song is set to be released later this year, he said.

Jackson was “able to extricate John’s voice from a ropey little bit of cassette and a piano,” McCartney told BBC radio. “He could separate them with AI, he’d tell the machine ‘That’s a voice, this is a guitar, lose the guitar’.”

“So when we came to make what will be the last Beatles record, it was a demo that John had that we worked on,” he added. “We were able to take John’s voice and get it pure through this AI so then we could mix the record as you would do. It gives you some sort of leeway.”

McCartney didn’t identify the name of the demo, but the BBC and others said it was likely to be an unfinished 1978 love song by Lennon called “Now and Then.” The demo was included on a cassette labeled “For Paul” that McCartney had received from Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, the BBC reported.

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Golden Knights blast Panthers 9-3 in Game 5 to capture first Stanley Cup title

LAS VEGAS (AP) — The Golden Knights delivered their city a true Vegas-style party from dazzling passes to Mark Stone’s hat trick to all-out goal celebrations, capturing the young organization’s first Stanley Cup with a 9-3 romp over the beaten up and exhausted Florida Panthers on Tuesday night.

Coach Bruce Cassidy, in a nod to the Knights’ brief history, started five of the original Vegas players known as the Misfits and put the sixth on the second shift. Cassidy sounded confident the day before the game that his team would play well, and it certainly did, blowing open a one-goal game in the second period to lead 6-1.

Vegas closed out the series in five games to win the cup before a delirious franchise-record crowd of 19,058 at T-Mobile Arena that drowned out the pregame introductions of forward Jonathan Marchessault and goalie Adin Hill and cheered all the way through the final buzzer.

Stone’s hat trick — with the third into an empty net with 5:54 left — was the first in a Stanley Cup Final since Colorado’s Peter Forsberg in 1996, also against the Panthers.

The Knights got the rest of their scoring from Nic Hague, Alec Martinez, Reilly Smith, Michael Amadio, Ivan Barbashev and Nicolas Roy. Martinez’s goal in the second period came nine years to the day after he delivered the double-overtime goal in Game 5 to give the Los Angeles Kings’ the cup.

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Los Angeles city councilman charged with 10 counts, including embezzlement and perjury

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Prosecutors charged a Los Angeles city councilman with 10 counts, including embezzlement and perjury, Tuesday in the latest criminal case to upend the scandal-plagued governing board of the nation’s second-largest city.

Curren Price Jr. faces five counts of embezzlement of government funds, three counts of perjury and two counts of conflict of interest, according to the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office.

Price was charged for having a financial interest in projects that he voted on as a council member, and having the city pay nearly $34,000 in medical benefits for his now-wife while he was still married to another woman, Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón said in a statement.

Between 2019 and 2021, Price’s wife allegedly received payments totaling more than $150,000 from developers before Price voted to approve projects, according to Gascón’s statement. He also is accused of failing to list the money his wife received on government disclosure forms.

“This alleged conduct undermines the integrity of our government and erodes the public’s trust in our elected officials,” Gascón said.

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Teacher who was shot by 6-year-old student in Virginia has resigned, school officials say

The first-grade teacher who was shot by her 6-year-old student in Virginia has resigned from her position, school officials said Tuesday, more than two months after she sued the district for $40 million.

The last day of Abby Zwerner’s contract was Monday, Newport News Public Schools said in a statement. The district said that Zwerner notified human resources in March that she wouldn’t be returning next school year.

Zwerner, 25, was shot in the hand and chest as she sat at a reading table in her first-grade classroom on Jan. 6. She spent nearly two weeks in the hospital, has endured multiple surgeries and told NBC that she sometimes “ can’t get up out of bed.”

Zwerner filed her lawsuit in early April, alleging that school officials ignored multiple warnings that the boy had a gun and was in a violent mood that day.

The school board has pushed back, asking a judge to dismiss the case and arguing that Zwerner should get workers compensation instead.

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Republicans to cut University of Wisconsin budget in ongoing fight over diversity and inclusion

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Republican state lawmakers were poised Tuesday to cut funding for University of Wisconsin campuses as the GOP-controlled Legislature and school officials continue to clash over efforts to promote diversity and inclusion.

The vote comes just days after Republicans refused to fund the university’s top building project priority — a new engineering facility on the flagship Madison campus.

Tensions between Republicans who control the Legislature and the state’s university system are nothing new. But the fight this year centers on issues of free speech and UW’s work to advance diversity and racial equity.

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, the state’s top Republican, said ahead of a meeting of the budget-writing committee on Tuesday that he wants it to cut all funding the university system would use for diversity initiatives. He estimated the cuts would total $32 million.

“I hope we have the ability to eliminate that spending. The university should have already chosen to redirect it to something that is more productive and more broadly supported,” Vos told The Associated Press.