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Trump and Mamdani to meet in Oval Office on Friday after months of bickering
Donald Trump has confirmed a long-awaited meeting with New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani will happen in Washington this week.
The sit-down, which Trump said on social media would take place on Friday in the Oval Office, could possibly represent a detente of sorts between the Republican president and Democratic rising star.
Saying it was “customary” for an incoming New York City mayor to meet with the president, Mamdani spokesperson Dora Pekec said the incoming mayor planned to discuss with Trump “public safety, economic security and the affordability agenda that over one million New Yorkers voted for just two weeks ago”.
Following recent Republican losses in several states, Donald Trump has begun to embrace Zohran Mamdani’s focus on affordability. Photograph: Angela Weiss,saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
Trump for months has slammed Mamdani, falsely labelling him a “communist” and predicting the ruin of his home town if the democratic socialist was elected. He also threatened to deport Mamdani, who was born in Uganda and became a naturalised American citizen in 2018, and to pull federal money from the city.
But following the November elections – in which Republicans lost badly in Georgia, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Virginia, as well as New York – Trump has spoken more about affordability, which had been a focal point across the Democratic campaigns. Last week in a social media post he declared that the Republicans were the “Party of Affordability!” This comes as the president and his fellow Republicans insist the economy has never been stronger.
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Opening summary
Donald Trump signed a bill on Wednesday directing the justice department to release files from the investigation into the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, surrendering in the face of joint pressure from Democratic opponents and the president’s conservative base.
The signature marked a sharp reversal for Trump, who had the authority as president to release the documents himself, but chose not to.
Democrats have gloried in the controversy over the files and the possibility they may contain compromising information about Trump, who had a personal friendship with Epstein, who died in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
Trump sought to flip that script after signing the bill in a posting to Truth Social that pointed out Epstein’s ties to the Democratic party.
“Perhaps the truth about these Democrats, and their associations with Jeffrey Epstein, will soon be revealed, because I HAVE JUST SIGNED THE BILL TO RELEASE THE EPSTEIN FILES!,” Trump wrote on Wednesday night.
The justice department has 30 days to release all files related to Epstein, including the investigation into his death by suicide in a federal prison cell. The legislation permits redacting identifying information of victims, but specifically bars officials from declining to disclose information over concerns about “embarrassment, reputational harm or political sensitivity”.
Meanwhile, Trump has confirmed a long-awaited meeting with New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani will happen in Washington this week, setting up an in-person clash between the political opposites who for months have antagonised each other.
The sit-down, which Trump said on social media would take place on Friday in the Oval Office, could possibly represent a detente of sorts between the Republican president and Democratic rising star.
Calling Mamdani by his full name – and putting the mayor-elect’s middle name of Kwame in quotation marks – Trump posted on Wednesday night that Mamdani had asked for the meeting, promising: “Further details to follow!”
More on these stories in a moment, but first, here are some other key developments:
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Trump’s anti-climate agenda could result in 1.3m more deaths globally, analysis has found. A ProPublica and Guardian analysis that draws on sophisticated modeling by independent researchers found that Trump’s “America First” agenda of expanding fossil fuels and decimating efforts to reduce emissions will add substantially to the human cost, with the vast majority of deaths occurring outside the US.
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Federal prosecutors on Wednesday said they had never presented the final version of the indictment filed against James Comey to a full federal grand jury, a concession that adds to mounting challenges in their effort to prosecute the former FBI director.
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A state department is proposing to suspend 38 universities including Harvard and Yale from a federal research partnership program because they engage in diversity, equity and inclusion hiring practices, according to an internal memo and spreadsheet obtained by the Guardian. The memo, dated 17 November, recommends excluding institutions from the Diplomacy Lab – a program that pairs university researchers with state department policy offices – if they “openly engage in DEI hiring practices” or set DEI objectives for candidate pools.
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Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard University, will stop teaching at the school while it investigates his connection to the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, a spokesperson for Summers said on Wednesday. Emails recently released by the US House oversight committee reignited questions about Summers’ relationship with Epstein, who died in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal charges of sex-trafficking minors. Many of the messages indicated a friendship that lasted well into 2019. Contact only ceased shortly before Epstein was arrested in July of that same year.
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Democratic representative Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick of Florida was indicted by a federal grand jury for allegedly funneling more than $5m worth of federal disaster funds from her company into her 2021 congressional campaign. The indictment states that Cherfilus-McCormick and her brother, Edwin Cherfilus, stole $5m in Fema overpayments that their family healthcare company received, moving the money through multiple accounts to hide its origins.
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