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      FBI worker says he was wrongfully terminated for having Pride flag at desk

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      A longtime FBI employee has filed a lawsuit alleging that he was fired for displaying a Pride flag at his desk, naming FBI director Kash Patel, the justice department and attorney general Pam Bondi as defendants.According to David Maltinsky, an intelligence specialist who had served with the bureau for 16 years, his wrongful termination earlier this year was “unconstitutional and politically motivated”.The lawsuit claims the FBI violated Maltinsky’s first amendment rights and took retaliatory action against him for engaging in protected speech. Maltinsky is seeking a court order to restore his job.Maltinsky’s 18-page complaint, filed on Wednesday in the US district court for the District of Columbia, alleges that he was dismissed from the FBI academy last month for previously displaying the flag at his workstation with the support and permission of his supervisors.According to the complaint, the Pride flag, which the bureau flew from its flagpole in front of its Los Angeles building, was given to Maltinsky in recognition of his efforts to support the FBI’s diversity initiatives.“From a young age, all I have wanted to do is serve my country and ensure its security alongside the brilliant and dedicated men and women of the FBI,” said Maltinsky, who joined the bureau in 2009 and spent more than a decade supporting public corruption and cybercrime investigations including North Korea’s cyberattack on Sony Pictures in 2014.“I displayed that Pride flag – which in 2021 flew in front of the Wilshire federal building – not as a political statement, but as a symbol of inclusion, unity and equal service. These are the values that once made the FBI strong. Now it is a place where people like me are targeted. I believe I was fired not because of who I am, but what I am: a proud gay man,” he added.Earlier this year, Maltinsky was accepted into the FBI special agent training academy at Quantico, Virginia, until what he described as his “abrupt dismissal just three weeks before graduation”.Maltinsky’s lawsuit alleges that at some point after Donald Trump’s inauguration on 20 January, a co-worker reported an alleged concern to Maltinsky’s direct supervisor about the display of the Pride flag at his workstation.“Out of an abundance of caution, Maltinsky requested that the Chief Division Counsel for the LAFO [Los Angeles field office] review whether the display of the Progress Pride flag and placard was permissible,” Maltinsky’s complaint said, adding: ”The Chief Division Counsel advised Maltinsky that the display of the flag and placard did not violate any policy, rule, or regulation.”Nevertheless, on 1 October, Maltinsky was notified of his termination.In a letter cited in Maltinsky’s complaint, Patel wrote: “I have determined that you exercised poor judgment with an inappropriate display of political signage in your work area during your previous assignment at the Los Angeles Field Office. Pursuant to Article II of the United States Constitution and the laws of the United States, your employment with the Federal Bureau of Investigation is hereby terminated.”In a statement released on Wednesday, Maltinsky’s lawyer Kerrie Riggs said: “This administration’s unlawfully firing him is part of a larger campaign to rid federal agencies of employees who may have different viewpoints, or are from marginalized groups, or who dare speak out against discrimination. David’s fight is not just about him, but about securing the rights and freedoms of all federal employees.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe FBI declined to comment on the lawsuit. The Guardian has also reached out to the justice department.Maltinsky’s lawsuit follows another one filed in September by three former senior FBI officials who said they were wrongfully terminated, alleging that Patel said he had been directed by the White House to fire any agent involved in an investigation into Trump.Meanwhile, the FBI fired a nearly three-decade veteran earlier this month after Patel reportedly became furious by reports that the FBI director had taken a government jet to attend a wrestling event where his girlfriend performed the national anthem.Steven Palmer, a bureau veteran since 1998, was removed as head of the FBI’s critical incident response group, which manages major security threats and the agency’s jet fleet. More

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      The infidelity saga of RFK Jr, Nuzzi and her ex is unspooling: ‘It’s like they’ve opened all their trench coats’

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      This week, Olivia Nuzzi – the US star political reporter known for her cozy access to top Republican figures – dropped an excerpt of her memoir, American Canto. In it, she detailed what she describes as an emotional affair with Robert F Kennedy Jr, who she calls “the politician”.Not to be outdone, Nuzzi’s ex-fiance and former Politico correspondent Ryan Lizza self-published an essay dishing on the day he found out Nuzzi was cheating on him, he claims – not with RFK Jr, as one might have expected, but with another former presidential candidate, Mark Sanford.The mudslinging between two of the more polarizing personalities in a profession filled with egos delighted a media class that revels in navel-gazing, schadenfreude and generally messy behavior. Over the course of four days it had a lot of material to work with.First came a glamorous profile of Nuzzi in the New York Times Style section on Friday, in which she mugged for the camera while driving a convertible down the Pacific Coast Highway, and was described by the writer Jacob Bernstein as “a Lana Del Rey song come to life” and the “modern iteration of a Hitchcock blonde”. The profile provided some details of her “digital affair” with RFK, according to Nuzzi: how the now US health secretary told her he would take a bullet for her, how they never slept together, how she advised him on campaign issues (most notably the dead bear carcass story).Then, on Monday, Nuzzi’s memoir excerpts were published in Vanity Fair, the glossy that appointed her west coast editor in September. She wrote about feeling anxious about Kennedy’s reported brain worm, and said the scion soothed her after a doctor who saw his brain scans told him he was fine: “Baby, don’t worry.” She mused: “I did not have to worry about the worm that was not a worm in his brain.”The latest entry into this unfurling drama came when Lizza published a “Part 1” of his side of the story on Monday night, using the metaphor of invasive bamboo growing behind the couple’s townhouse in Georgetown to describe Nuzzi’s secrecy in concealing an alleged affair with Sanford. Sanford, a former South Carolina governor and US representative who had weathered his own cheating scandal years prior, was profiled by Nuzzi for New York magazine during his short-lived 2020 election challenge to Trump. According to Lizza, Nuzzi became “infatuated” with the candidate after interviewing him.Lizza placed this piece of information as a cliffhanger; presumably we must tune into an impending “Part 2” to read Lizza’s recounting of Nuzzi’s affair with RFK Jr.Kennedy is married to actor Cheryl Hines, who has her own memoir out this month. He has denied Nuzzi’s claims of a sexual or romantic relationship, saying they only met once for an interview. He has not commented on the memoir excerpts. Nuzzi, Lizza, Kennedy and Sanford did not respond to requests for comment.All of this makes for grade-A gossip. But while Nuzzi and Lizza are not household names outside the Beltway and New York media circles, their story has wider ramifications. Trust in the US press is at an all-time low; a recent Gallup poll found that just 28% of respondents expressed a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in newspapers, television and radio to report the news fairly and accurately. (That’s down from 31% in 2024 and 40% five years ago.)“Journalism has a trust problem, and the fact that all this dirty laundry is getting aired is not going to help that,” said Patrick R Johnson, an assistant professor of journalism at Marquette University. “Because two people with significant followings are behaving in this way, other people, everyday individuals, are going to make assumptions that more journalists are behaving this way, even though they aren’t. And that’s news literacy 101: people are making assumptions based on what they can see, whether or not that is what is happening.”The image of a female journalist sleeping with her source titillates Hollywood (see: House of Cards or Clint Eastwood’s Richard Jewell, which portrayed a real-life but since deceased journalist bedding an FBI agent for tips, much to the anger of the journalist’s family and colleagues), the trope is mostly the stuff of fiction. It is also a major ethical violation, for obvious reasons – it creates a conflict of interest and a too-close relationship between reporter and source. As Moira Donegan wrote for the Guardian last year, revelations like the one about Nuzzi and RFK Jr only make it “harder” for the reporter’s peers to do their jobs and “cast all female professionals under the suspicion of corruptibility and unseriousness”. (The trope apparently once bothered Nuzzi herself; in 2015, she tweeted: “Why does Hollywood think female reporters sleep with sources?”)Nuzzi, who is 32, burst on to the New York Twitterati scene as an intern in Anthony Weiner’s 2013 mayoral campaign and published an account of her experience in the New York Daily News. She parlayed this into a staff position at the Daily Beast while she was still a Fordham University undergraduate.Nuzzi covered Trump’s political rise and went on to serve as New York magazine’s first Washington DC correspondent, filing gossipy profiles of people like Donald Trump, Stormy Daniels and Michael Cohen that often co-starred herself. Ahead of the 2024 election, she wrote about Joe Biden’s cognitive state, and profiled RFK Jr when he was but a long-shot independent candidate.Nuzzi left New York magazine when their entanglement, which violated the publication’s standards around conflicts of interest and disclosures, was revealed shortly before the election. She wrote in a statement that the relationship “should have been disclosed to prevent the appearance of a conflict”, and apologized to her colleagues. She and Lizza broke up.Lizza, who is 51, has his own baggage: in 2017, he was fired from the New Yorker after a sexual misconduct allegation emerged in the early days of the #MeToo movement. He denied the claims and went on to write for Esquire and Politico. The couple were supposed to publish a book on the 2020 election together that never materialized.In the wake of their breakup, Nuzzi filed for a protective order against Lizza, claiming blackmail and harassment. Lizza denied her allegations, and Nuzzi withdrew her request for protection last November.In his essay, Lizza painted himself as a casualty of a mercurial ex’s “betrayal”. “It’s almost as if he’s hurt that he was the victim of her decisions” regarding RFK Jr and Sanford, said Johnson, the journalism professor. “It’s as if he’s on this weird tour to fix his image from before.”Mark Feldstein spent 20 years as an on-air investigative correspondent at CNN, ABC News and other local affiliates. He is now the chair of broadcast journalism at the University of Maryland. He described the Nuzzi-Lizza story as “self-immolation on both their parts”.“This takes journalism self-branding to a crazy and extreme extent,” Feldstein said. “It certainly fuels the disdain that so many Americans have for journalists not being objective, not being neutral. This confirms the stereotype of journalists as self-promoting vultures wallowing in the gutter.”Feldstein recalled Geraldo Rivera’s 1991 memoir, Exposing Myself, which chronicled the journalist’s sexual exploits and was written off as unprofessional. “It was met with universal horror at the time among journalists, because it was such an outlandish, self-promoting, degrading publicity stunt,” Feldstein said.However, in the era of the attention economy, Nuzzi and Lizza’s tell-alls are all but expected. As Feldstein puts it: “It’s like they’ve opened their trench coats and exposed to all of us what they’re hiding underneath. It’s not a pretty sight.” More

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      Jimmy Kimmel on Epstein files congressional vote: ‘Make no mistake – this isn’t over’

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      Late-night hosts celebrated the congressional votes to release the Epstein files and decried Donald Trump’s warm meeting with the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.Jimmy KimmelTuesday was “a very big day” in Washington DC, said Jimmy Kimmel on Tuesday evening, as both the House and Senate voted near unanimously to authorize the justice department to release investigative files related to the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.“Ultimately even [speaker] Mike Johnson voted yes on releasing the files,” Kimmel noted, meaning that the bill now heads to the White House, where it will probably66 be signed by Trump.“The goal was to have the bill pass by such a large margin that Trump can’t put his little orange thumb on the scale and give it the old Cheeto veto,” he explained. “But make no mistake: this isn’t over. He’s not giving up. If anyone thinks he’s going to release all of the Epstein files, I’ve got a beautiful East Wing of the White House to sell you.”That’s because even after the vote, “Trump cronies” in the justice department still have the power to withhold information to “protect ongoing investigations, protect innocent people or for reasons of national security”.“But they would never do anything like that, would they?” Kimmel joked. “They’re sworn to protect the constitution of the United States!“Something is fishy,” he added. “Trump rolled over faster than that dog Ghislaine Maxwell gets to play with in her country club prison.”On that note: “It is amazing the kind of special treatment you get when half of the most powerful people from the last 30 years don’t want to see you testifying in court.”Stephen Colbert“When it comes to Congress, it’s increasingly rare that things happen,” said Stephen Colbert on Tuesday’s Late Show. Which made Tuesday, when the House voted 427-1 to release the Epstein files, all the more notable.The measure then headed to the Senate, which passed it unanimously overnight, after the Late Show taping. “Tomorrow, we might know everything he and his pervert buddies did,” said Colbert. “Meaning it’s Epstein Rockin’ Eve – stay up for a ball drop you’re gonna want to miss.”The vote marked “a huge loss for Trump, make no mistake”, he continued. “For going on four months now, Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson fought the release of the Epstein files with every congressional tool they had, and keep in mind: Congress is loaded with some major tools.”“But when it looked like Republicans were defecting en masse and they were going to lose big, they were suddenly all in, like they always were – right, Mike?”Colbert then played a clip of Johnson claiming that “Republicans support maximum transparency. We always have. The president of the United States supports maximum transparency.”“Yes, the president has always supported maximum transparency, a healthy diet of leafy greens and the understated androgynous sensuality of a flat-chested woman,” Colbert mocked. “The president would be here, but he can’t talk right now as he’s jogging to Bible study.”Colbert also criticized Trump’s chummy White House visit with the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. And when a reporter brought up the murder of the journalist and regime critic Jamal Khashoggi, which US intelligence concluded was authorized by the crown prince, Trump reacted angrily. “Things happen, but he knew nothing about it, and we can leave it at that,” he said. “You don’t have to embarrass our guest by asking a question like that.”“Yes, how dare you embarrass our guest!” Colbert mocked. “Now he’s going to feel all self-conscious when he tries to chop up somebody like you.”Seth MeyersAnd on Late Night, Seth Meyers returned to a meeting earlier this month between Trump and representatives from Switzerland, in which they gifted the president a special Rolex desktop clock and a 1kg personalized gold bar. “So now foreign officials are just openly giving him gold?” he wondered. “Trump’s turning into a live-action political cartoon. Next time, someone’s going to give him a big sack with a dollar sign on it.”In a new interview with a British rightwing news channel, Trump said that people will ask him: “What do you recommend for growing your children?”“I don’t know if I want advice on raising children from someone who doesn’t even know it’s called ‘raising children’,” Meyers said, laughing.In the same interview, Trump said: “I’ve never had a drink in my life, and I don’t take drugs.”“Maybe one of the best endorsements I’ve ever heard for drinking and doing drugs,” Meyers quipped. More

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      ‘May I meet you?’ is just the latest in horrible dating advice from billionaires | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Sit down and pay attention, because this column might change your life. I bring you tidings from the Nazi-filled wilderness that is now X, where Maga-adjacent billionaire Bill Ackman has generously decided to dispense romantic advice to the masses. Online culture, Ackman notes, has “destroyed the ability to spontaneously meet strangers”. The antidote to this, he suggests, are four simple words.“May I meet you?”That’s it. That’s the strategy. Ackman used this pickup line throughout his youth and, he says, it served him well. He didn’t even have to put “I’m a billionaire,” in front of the sentence – it was the syntax that women found sexy.“I think the combination of proper grammar and politeness was the key to its effectiveness,” Ackman mused. “You might give it a try.” And by “you”, he explains, he means everyone, not just young heterosexual men. “I think it should also work for women seeking men as well as same sex interactions,” Ackman proclaimed.View image in fullscreenA real man of the people, Ackman took time out of his busy billionaire schedule to add a little more context to his advice, which he explains is motivated by concern about the “next generation’s happiness and population replacement rates”. Per Ackman, you should try to be in motion while chatting someone up. This strategy “works much more effectively when you are moving”, he noted. “So on subways, elevators, escalators, airplanes, buses, and even walking down the street, it is most effective.”I have debased myself for numerous columns (just Google “Arwa Mahdawi accidental laxatives” or “Arwa banana”) but I do have my limits. Walking around the streets of Philadelphia asking women who set off my gaydar “may I meet you?” being one of them.But while I haven’t tried the Ackman approach myself, the advice has gone viral and various other people are giving it a whirl. It’s too early to do a quantitative assessment of its effectiveness but I hope that some enterprising social scientists are applying for funding for a future study. It’s perfect material for a future Ig Nobel prize.While we wait for a peer-reviewed analysis to come out, I must confess that I have my doubts that imposing yourself on strangers in the subway is going to do much to help “population replacement rates”. This may be a wild take but it’s possible that not supporting genocidal wars (Ackman has been a big cheerleader of Israel’s actions in Gaza) that have made prenatal care virtually nonexistent and killed an average of a child an hour, might be more effective when it comes to population replacement. That’s assuming we think all populations are equal, of course.Doing something about the exorbitant price of childcare, and the dire state of public schools in affordable areas of the US might also encourage more people to have kids. Since I’m churning out the hot takes over here, it’s also possible that young people might go out on the town more if the cost of living hadn’t become so expensive, and they had more disposable income. In short: solving underlying social issues that wealth-hoarding billionaires have exacerbated might prove more effective than a grammatically interesting pickup line.But what do I know, eh? I’m not a billionaire. Far better if plebs like me keep quiet and listen to our social and economic betters. So, in that spirit, and in the hopes of solving the population crisis, I have put together a few bits of relationship advice from the rich and infamous:1 Putting a wife to work is a very dangerous thing: avoid at all costsOnce you have found your future spouse through the May-I-Meet™ method, you should try to hold on to them. According to our great leader Donald Trump that means avoiding a working relationship. “If you’re in business for yourself, I really think it’s a bad idea to put your wife working for you. I think it’s a really bad idea. I think that was the single greatest cause of what happened to my marriage with [first wife] Ivana,” Trump told ABC news in 1994. RIP Ivana, who is now dead and buried under the first hole of Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey.2 Sabotage your co-worker’s carFox News host Jesse Watters is not a billionaire like Ackman or Trump, but he lives in a mansion so is still worth listening to. During a 2022 episode of the panel series The Five, Watters boasted that he “let the air out of“ now wife Emma DiGiovine’s tires when he “was trying to get [her] to date” him. “She couldn’t go anywhere. She needed a lift, I said, ‘Hey, you need a lift?’ She hopped right in the car,” Watters recalled. The Fox news host was 43 at the time, by the way, and DiGiovine, who is his second wife, was 29 and an associate producer on his show at Fox News. After some backlash about “Deflategate” he claimed this tactic, which he said “works like a charm”, was a joke.3 Cozy up to a sex offender (DO NOT REPEAT THIS INSIGHT)The latest batch of Jeffrey Epstein-related documents to be released reveal that Harvard professor and economist Larry Summers spent years discussing relationship advice with the convicted pedophile. In one 2018 email, Summers forwarded Epstein an email from a woman and asked for advice on when to write back. “Think no response for a while probably appropriate,” Summers said. Epstein agreed: “she’s already beginning to sound needy 🙂 nice.” In another email Summers complained that attitudes to dating had become too woke. The “American elite think if u murder your baby by beating and abandonment it must be irrelevant to your admission to Harvard,” he wrote to Epstein. “But hit on a few women 10 years ago and can’t work at a network or think tank. DO NOT REPEAT THIS INSIGHT.”4 Offer your sperm to strangers over supperIf one is simply concerned with increasing the population rather than meeting a life partner you can always go the Elon Musk route and donate your sperm willy-nilly. According to a 2024 New York Times report, Musk has “offered his own sperm to friends and acquaintances”. The same piece notes: “At a dinner party held at the home of a well-known Silicon Valley executive [in 2023] Mr. Musk offered to provide his sperm to a married couple he had met socially only a handful of times.” (Musk has denied this.) Or, if that sounds too exhausting, you can be like Russian-born billionaire Pavel Durov and fund free IVF treatments for women who use your sperm. Durov now has more than 100 biological children in 12 countries via sperm donation. Perhaps, in the future, one of Durov’s children will bump into one of Musk’s many children and ask: “May I meet you?” More

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      What to know about the US Senate vote on releasing the Epstein files

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      The intensively discussed files related to the disgraced former financier and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein passed a significant milestone on Tuesday when Congress voted overwhelmingly in favor of releasing them.After months of deliberate delays and manoeuvres, the House of Representatives voted by 427 to one in favor of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, legislation which would, if enacted, require the justice department to release all unclassified materials on Epstein, who died in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges. The Senate has unanimously agreed to swiftly pass the bill, which would then head to the White House for Donald Trump’s signature.Tuesday’s sweeping passage was rendered all but inevitable after the president on Sunday reversed himself and called for the release of the files, declaring “we have nothing to hide” and labelling the controversy over the files a “Democrat hoax”.Trump’s volte-face followed the failure of intense White House efforts to persuade two female Republican members of Congress, Lauren Boebert and Nancy Mace, to withdraw their names from a discharge petition to force the House speaker, Mike Johnson, to hold a floor vote on releasing the files.Faced with the prospect of numerous Republicans defying his wishes by voting with Democrats in favor of releasing the files, the president decided to cut his losses by bowing to the inevitable. Before Trump changed his tune on the files, Thomas Massie, the maverick Republican representative from Kentucky – who had co-sponsored the bill along with Democrat Ro Khanna – had predicted that 100 Republicans would vote for release.In the event, Trump’s green light appeared to have the effect of freeing even more GOP representatives of their previous inhibitions against joining all 214 House Democrats. Clay Higgins of Louisiana, a close Trump ally, was the sole member of the House to vote against the measure; five representatives did not vote.How did it fly through the Senate so fast? The bill appeared headed for at least some resistance in the Senate as of this weekend. John Barrasso, the Republican majority whip, had said he would “take a look” at the bill if it passed the House, but also told NBC’s Meet The Press that he thought Democrats were more interested in turning Trump into “a lame duck president than achieving accountability and transparency” .But that resistance faded in the face of the overwhelming vote in the House. The lopsided vote helped Democrats push the measure through by expedited procedure of unanimous consent, which does not require a formal roll call vote. “The American people have waited long enough. Jeffrey Epstein’s victims have waited long enough,” Chuck Schumer, the top Senate Democrat, said in a floor speech on Tuesday. “Let the truth come out. Let transparency reign.” Will Trump sign it?Trump told reporters on Monday that he would sign the bill if it arrives on his desk. Yet despite this pledge and his late U-turn on releasing the files, Trump could still use his presidential veto power to block passage – though doing so at such a late stage would surely fan suspicions that he has something to hide.Could such a veto be overcome?Yes. A presidential veto can be overridden if both chambers vote to do so by a two-thirds majority. Both chambers already surpassed that in spectacular fashion. The only member of Congress to vote against the bill was Clay Higgons, a Lousiana Republican representative.What cards can Trump play if overwhelming congressional votes compel the justice department to make the files public?Even if Trump signs the bill – whether of his own volition or by force because House and Senate majorities override his veto – his recent announcement of a justice department investigation into prominent figures (other than himself) mentioned in last week’s trove of Epstein emails released by the House oversight committee have fueled fears that any version of the files released could be incomplete or selective.Last Friday, Trump instructed the US attorney general, Pam Bondi, to open an investigation into links between Epstein and former president Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, a former US treasury secretary and ex-president of Harvard University, Reid Hoffman, a venture capitalist noted for funding Democrats and liberal causes, and the bank JPMorgan Chase. The investigation could enable the justice department to withhold certain documents on the argument that releasing them would be prejudicial.In the final analysis, Trump could have ended all uncertainty by ordering the files to be released without waiting for Congress to force his hand. More

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      WHO to lose nearly a quarter of its workforce – 2,000 jobs – due to US withdrawing funding

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      The World Health Organization has said its workforce will shrink by nearly a quarter – or over 2,000 jobs – by the middle of next year as it seeks to implement reforms after its top donor, the United States, announced its departure.US President Donald Trump’s administration withdrew from the body upon taking office in January, prompting the agency to scale back its work and cut its management team by half.Washington is by far the UN health agency’s biggest financial backer, contributing about 18% of its overall funding.The Geneva-based WHO projects that its workforce will shrink by 2,371 posts by June 2026 from 9,401 in January 2025 due to job cuts as well as retirements and departures, according to a presentation set to be shown to its member states on Wednesday.It does not include the many temporary staff, or consultants, which UN sources say have been made redundant. A WHO spokesperson confirmed the total number of staff leaving the organisation and said the workforce would shrink by up to 22%, depending on how many vacant posts are filled.While the global health agency said in August that hundreds of staff had departed, this is the first time it has given the full scale of the expected change to its global staff.“This year has been one of the most difficult in WHO’s history, as we have navigated a painful but necessary process of prioritisation and realignment that has resulted in a significant reduction in our global workforce,” said Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in a message to staff on Tuesday seen by Reuters, adding that the process was now nearing an end.“We are now preparing to move forward with our reshaped and renewed Organization,” he added.The slides also showed that the Geneva-based body has a $1.06bn hole in its 2026-2027 budget, or nearly a quarter of the total required, down from an estimated gap of $1.7bn in May.That excludes $1.1bn of expected funding that includes deals at various stages of negotiation, the slides showed, without giving details.The WHO spokesperson said that the portion of the two-year budget currently unfunded was lower than in previous years, attributing that to a smaller budget; the launch of a fundraising round; and an increase in member states’ mandatory fees. More

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      Trump news at a glance: Bill to release Epstein files approved by Senate and House

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      The Senate on Tuesday gave swift approval to legislation that will force the release of investigative files related to the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, following a near-unanimous vote in the US House of Representatives and a reversal by Donald Trump and his Republican allies. The administration relented after months of trying to forestall the bipartisan effort involving a scandal that has dogged the president since his return to the White House.The Senate acted by unanimous consent, which requires approval from each senator but does not require a formal roll call vote, expediting the process. Hours earlier, the House overwhelmingly approved the bill on a 427-1 tally.“The American people have waited long enough. Jeffrey Epstein’s victims have waited long enough,” Chuck Schumer, the top Senate Democrat, said in a floor speech on Tuesday, before asking the chamber to pass it unanimously. “Let the truth come out. Let transparency reign.”Senate approves bill to release Epstein files after near-unanimous House voteThe bill next goes to Trump for his signature. The president indicated on Monday that he would sign the measure.Though Trump has for months dismissed the uproar over the government’s handling of the Epstein case as a “Democrat hoax”, he signalled his support for the House bill over the weekend, and said he would sign the measure if it reaches his desk.Democrats, along with survivors of Epstein and their advocates who were seated in a House gallery, broke into applause after the bill was passed. The sole “no” vote came from Clay Higgins, a Louisiana Republican who said he worried the measure would make public identifying details of witnesses, potential suspects and others caught up in the investigation.Read the full storyTrump shrugs off Khashoggi murder during Saudi prince’s White House visitDonald Trump has shrugged off the Saudi regime’s 2018 murder of the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, saying the journalist was “extremely controversial” and unpopular, dismissing the killing by observing “things happen”.The US president made the remarks at the White House on Tuesday while welcoming Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for the first time since Khashoggi’s murder and dismemberment in Istanbul by Saudi state operatives.Read the full storyJudge rejects ‘racially gerrymandered’ maps in Texas that gave Republicans extra districtsNew maps that added five Republican districts in Texas hit a legal roadblock on Tuesday, with a federal judge saying the state cannot use the 2025 maps because they are probably “racially gerrymandered”.The decision is likely to be appealed, given the push for more Republican-friendly congressional maps nationwide and Donald Trump’s full-court press on his party to make them. Some states have followed suit, and some Democratic states have retaliated, pushing to add more blue seats to counteract Republicans.Read the full storyTrump faces criticism for referring to female Bloomberg reporter as ‘piggy’Donald Trump, who has a history of making extremely personal attacks on female journalists, referred to a Bloomberg News correspondent as a “piggy” during a clash onboard Air Force One on Friday.While the remark did not initially get much attention, it picked up some traction on Tuesday and has drawn backlash from fellow journalists, including some who have previously been attacked by Trump themselves.Read the full storyMany of US education agency’s powers reassigned to other federal departmentsDonald Trump’s administration has taken new steps toward dismantling the US Department of Education by reassigning many of its responsibilities to other federal agencies.The move prompted a fresh wave of criticism, as prominent Democrats accused the administration of “slashing resources” for schools and students across the US.Read the full storyMass federal immigration sweeps expand to North Carolina capitalFederal authorities were conducing operations in Raleigh, North Carolina on Tuesday, local officials said, after a weekend where more than 100 people were arrested in Charlotte.The Democrat governor of the state, Josh Stein, a critic of the operations, posted on social media that his office was aware of the reports of the impending Raleigh operations. “To the people of Raleigh,” he wrote, “if you see something wrong, record it and report it to local law enforcement. Let’s keep each other safe.”Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      A New Jersey man whose lengthy prison sentence for fraud convictions was commuted by Donald Trump in 2021 is now headed back to federal prison for another fraud conviction.

      California farms applied an average of 2.5m lbs of Pfas “forever chemicals” per year on cropland from 2018 to 2023, or a total of about 15m lbs, a new review of state records shows.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened Monday 17 November. More