Donald Trump’s increasingly serious legal problems are translating into a cash boom for his third presidential campaign, a staffer told Politico this week. The campaign is due to release official fundraising numbers by the end of the month, per an upcoming Federal Election Commission (FEC) deadline. But a campaign official familiar with the matter provided the eye-popping sum to Politico: $34m, a haul that puts him firmly on top of the GOP primary field, dollars-wise, and depicts a campaign picking up steam as Mr Trump apparently solidifies his support base within the GOP primary voter population. In the first quarter of 2023, Mr Trump’s campaign had presented a fundraising total of $18.8m — impressive, but not nearly as high as his latest quarter. However, a greater share of donations is now being diverted to the Save America PAC, the twice-indicted former president’s vessel for outside spending that has fronted the bulk of his legal costs in recent months. Previous news reports indictated that the donation levers were pulled on Mr Trump’s WinRed donation page to divert as much as 10 per cent of every donation to the Save America PAC, up from just 1 per cent of every gift earlier this year. The total is likely to bolster Mr Trump’s argument against Republican candidates like primary rival Will Hurd who have argued that Mr Trump’s legal problems will jeopardise his chances of winning a general election against President Joe Biden. While polling backs up Mr Hurd’s assertion at present, the Trump campaign’s war chest will prove a counter-argument that paints the former president as the candidate with GOP voter enthusiasm and the funding necessary to wage an effective general election campaign. Mr Trump faces a growing field of GOP rivals, including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, and his former vice president, Mike Pence. But he has remained dominant across polling of the field for months, even amid his two criminal indictments for allegedly falsifying business records in New York and the alleged illegal retention of classfied materials at Mar-a-Lago. The legal pressure mounting against the former president is likely to escalate in the coming weeks, given the two investigations known to be currently ongoing involving him and his closest advisers. Officials in Fulton County, Georgia are weighing whether to bring criminal indictments against Mr Trump and members of his legal team over their efforts to alter the lawful election results in that state, while the Department of Justice has been reported by The Independent to be weighing a superceding indictment charging Mr Trump with dozens of offences related to the January 6 attack and his related efforts to block Joe Biden’s election victory. Read More Judge's order limits government contact with social media operators, raises disinformation questions Special counsel Jack Smith subpoenas Arizona Secretary of State’s office in January 6 probe Trump attorney who was key to election conspiracies retires from legal practice

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A study suggests that convincing yourself that food has a higher calorie content may suppress your appetite and help you lose weight. Alia Crum and her colleagues at Yale University gave 46 healthy volunteers the same 380-calories milkshake. However, some participants were told it was a low-calorie choice, whilst others were told it was high in calories. The 'low-calorie' bottle of the shake claimed it to have zero percent fat, zero added sugar and be only 140 calories. Whilst the 'high-calorie' bottle was labelled as 'indulgent' and accounted to 620 calories. The team measured levels or ghrelin before and after volunteers drank the shake. Ghrelin is a hormone released by the stomach when we are hungry. "It also slows metabolism," Crum said, "just incase you might not find that food." Once you have a big meal after you ghrelin rises, your level proceed to drop again, telling your brain that you've had enough to eat and it's time to start metabolising, in order to burn the calories ingested. Meaning that when we have something like a small salad, ghrelin levels don't drop as much, and metabolism isn't triggered in the same way. For a while, scientists believed that ghrelin levels change in response to the nutrients in your stomach. But Crum's study pushed back on that belief. If participants believed they were drinking the high-calorie shake, the body responded as though the participants had consumed more than they actually had. "The ghrelin levels dropped about three times more when people were consuming the indulgent shake (or though they were consuming the indulgent shake)," Crum said. However, it doesn't mean the nutrients doesn't matter, but Crum suggests that the metabolic model may need to be rethought. "Our beliefs matter in virtually every domain, in everything we do," Crum says. "How much is a mystery, but I don't we've given enough credit to the role of our beliefs in determining our physiology, our reality." Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings. How to join the indy100's free WhatsApp channel