US President Donald Trump told law enforcement chiefs Friday to investigate links between Jeffrey Epstein and ex-president Bill Clinton, seeking to deflect growing questions about his own ties to the late alleged sex trafficker.Under mounting pressure from the release of a new trove of Epstein emails, Trump also demanded the Justice Department and FBI probe banking giant JPMorgan Chase and ex-Harvard president Larry Summers, who served as Clinton’s treasury secretary.The 79-year-old Republican accused Democrats of pushing the “Epstein hoax” after emails emerged in which the disgraced financier suggested Trump “knew about the girls” and spent hours with one of the victims at his house.”I know nothing about that. They would have announced that a long time ago,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One as he headed to Florida for the weekend.”Jeffrey Epstein and I had a very bad relationship for many years.” Questions about his long friendship with Epstein have dogged Trump since his return to the White House in January.Epstein died in prison in 2019 — by suicide, authorities ruled — before he could face trial on federal sex trafficking charges. But questions over his alleged masterminding of a sex ring where powerful men were provided with underaged girls have only mounted.Trump said on Truth Social that he would be “asking” Attorney General Pam Bondi and the FBI “to investigate Jeffrey Epstein’s involvement and relationship with Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, Reid Hoffman, J.P. Morgan, Chase, and many other people and institutions.””Records show that these men, and many others, spent large portions of their life with Epstein, and on his ‘Island.'”Bondi named senior New York prosecutor Jay Clayton to “take the lead” on Trump’s request.- ‘Damning information’ -The order for a probe comes even though the FBI and Justice Department said in a memo in July that they had not uncovered evidence that would justify an investigation of uncharged third parties.That memo also sparked a huge backlash in Trump’s MAGA movement after it said a “client list” Bondi claimed to have been reviewing did not in fact exist.Democratic former president Clinton has long faced scrutiny over his ties to Epstein and flew on his private plane, although he has never been accused of wrongdoing in the scandal, either.Epstein said that Clinton had “never ever” been to his notorious private island in the Caribbean, according to several emails in the latest trove dating from 2011 and viewed by AFP.Clinton spokesman Angel Urena said on X that the emails “prove Bill Clinton did nothing and knew nothing. The rest is noise meant to distract from election losses, backfiring shutdowns, and who knows what else.”JPMorgan Chase — which in 2023 agreed to pay $290 million to settle a class action lawsuit brought by victims of Epstein, its former client — rejected Trump’s claims.”The government had damning information about his crimes and failed to share it with us or other banks,” it said in a statement to AFP.”We regret any association we had with the man, but did not help him commit his heinous acts.”There was no immediate comment from Summers or Hoffman, the founder of professional networking app LinkedIn. – ‘No middle ground’ -Trump’s message and comments broke two days of silence over the scandal, which has overshadowed his victory lap after Democrats agreed to end the longest government shutdown in US history.The email traffic between Epstein and friends said Trump had spent “hours” with Virginia Giuffre, an Epstein victim and his main accuser.The White House said that Giuffre, who died by suicide in April, had cleared Trump of any wrongdoing and had declared that Trump “couldn’t have been friendlier.”Trump’s efforts to put a lid on the scandal have repeatedly failed, in part because there are photos and videos of him interacting with Epstein decades ago.Another problem is that Trump and some of his close allies had in the past promised his right-wing base they would seek the release of all the evidence against Epstein.The US House of Representatives is to vote as early as next week on a motion demanding that the White House release the files, after a rebellion by a handful of MAGA lawmakers provided sufficient votes.Surviving Epstein victims and the relatives of Giuffre sent US lawmakers a letter Friday urging the release of those files and saying: “There is no middle ground here. There is no hiding behind party affiliation.”Trump on Friday made clear he does not want the effort in Congress to proceed.”Don’t waste your time with Trump. I have a Country to run!” he said on social media.

As the Studio Museum reopens this weekend in its gleaming new building, New York’s premier institution for Black art finds itself looking back and looking forward at the same time.Colorful signs featuring permanent works have sprouted near the museum’s home in Harlem, a center point in Black life and imagination in America for more than a century.The museum, closed for the more than seven-year project, has commissioned new works to commemorate the reboot, which features expanded studios for the institution’s artists-in-residence program.But the 57-year-old museum is also hearkening back to its roots with a retrospective of the late Tom Lloyd, whose electronically programmed wall sculptures anticipated today’s digital age.Some of the same pieces were hung in the museum’s inaugural 1968 show back when works by artists of African descent were mostly absent from New York’s leading museums.Today’s art scene is very different. Rashid Johnson, Amy Sherald and others are regularly showcased in shows at the Guggenheim, Whitney and other nameplate New York museums, which have also hosted retrospectives belatedly recognizing Black movements.”In the time of the museum’s life, we have seen this incredible trajectory and some of that is a result of the work that the museum did in its establishment and its early years,” said Studio Museum director Thelma Golden, who oversaw a more than $300 million drive to finance a teardown and newbuild project that cements the museum’s ties to Harlem.”The aperture opens, but even with that, we still believe deeply in the work that continues to need to be done.”- ‘Truly current work’ -The museum’s history is laid out in photos of the 1968 groundbreaking, and there are posters of jazz nights, “Uptown Friday” gatherings, high school programs and of shows such as a retrospective of James Van Der Zee, a famed photographer during the Harlem Renaissance.The founders’ ambitions included creating a place distinct from New York establishments like the Museum of Modern Art.The Studio Museum will present “truly current work,” founders wrote in 1966. The work “could turn out to be a flash in the pan or could conceivably begin an entire new school or new direction in art.”Backers also sought to redefine Harlem, “which is all too often equated with slums, violence and other evils,” and to deepen the commitment of supporters — some white — to “make New York City a united city rather than one which is currently divided by an invisible Berlin wall.”Key turning points included 1981, when the Studio Museum broke ground at its current address at 144 West 125th Street.Another shift came after Golden joined in 2000, when the mission statement was expanded beyond US-born creators to artists of African descent “locally, nationally and internationally.”- Signature works -That broadened scope is boldly expressed on the building’s exterior with a red, black and green flag by David Hammons inspired by the Pan-African flag of the 1920s associated with activist Marcus Garvey.Another signature work is Houston Conwill’s “The Joyful Mysteries,” containing statements by seven prominent Black Americans written for future generations. The time capsules will be opened in September 2034, 50 years after their creation.The new edifice itself nods to Harlem’s architectural vernacular, with a mass of geometries in gray concrete and glass. The building has received rapturous reviews, and this weekend offers the public a first look.Golden described the site as aiming to “redefine what a museum can be in its space and content.”She credited her predecessors, not all of whom lived to see Black art achieve mainstream acceptance.”I am well aware that they did not get to see the fruits of the labor,” Golden told AFP. “The inheritance I have from them is that they believed so deeply that that belief carries from ’68 to this moment.”

A South Carolina man who pleaded guilty to three murders was put to death by firing squad on Friday, the third such execution in the southern US state this year.Stephen Bryant, 44, was convicted of killing three people during a 2004 crime spree, writing the message “catch me if u can” on a wall in the blood of one of his victims.Bryant was shot by a three-person firing squad at a prison in the state capital Columbia and pronounced dead at 6:05 pm (2305 GMT), the South Carolina Department of Corrections said.South Carolina has now executed three convicted murderers by firing squad this year, the first such executions in the United States in 15 years.Since the US Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, the vast majority of executions in the country have been conducted by lethal injection.A man convicted of raping and murdering a six-year-old girl was executed by lethal injection in Florida on Thursday. It was that state’s 16th execution in 2025, the most in the nation.There have been five each in Alabama and Texas.The South Carolina Department of Corrections (SCDC) said before the execution that Bryant was to be restrained in a metal chair with a hood over his head 15 feet (five meters) away from a wall with a rectangular opening.The firing squad of SCDC volunteers was to shoot through the opening.All three rifles were to have live ammunition, and an “aim point” will be placed over the condemned man’s heart.There have been 43 executions in the United States this year, the most since 2012, when the same number of inmates were put to death.Thirty-five of this year’s executions have been carried out by lethal injection, three by firing squad and five by nitrogen hypoxia, which involves pumping nitrogen gas into a face mask, causing the prisoner to suffocate.The use of nitrogen gas as a method of capital punishment has been denounced by United Nations experts as cruel and inhumane.The death penalty has been abolished in 23 of the 50 US states, while three others — California, Oregon and Pennsylvania — have moratoriums in place.President Donald Trump is a proponent of capital punishment and, on his first day in office, called for an expansion of its use “for the vilest crimes.”

The US National Archives published a batch of newly declassified government records on Friday about Amelia Earhart, the American aviator who vanished over the Pacific in 1937, officials said.Earhart went missing while on a pioneering round-the-world flight with navigator Fred Noonan, and her disappearance is one of the most tantalizing mysteries in aviation lore.President Donald Trump ordered the declassification and release in September of all US government records related to Earhart’s ill-fated final flight.Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said the documents released on Friday included “newly declassified files from the National Security Agency, information on Earhart’s last known communications, weather and plane conditions at the time, and potential search locations.”Further documents would be publicly released on the National Archives website on a “rolling basis” as they are declassified, Gabbard said in a statement. Many of the thousands of documents published online on Friday have been released previously by the National Archives or made available to researchers, and aviation experts consider it unlikely that the latest material will shed any new light on Earhart’s disappearance.Earhart’s final flight has fascinated historians for decades and spawned books, movies and theories galore.The prevailing belief is that Earhart, 39, and Noonan, 44, ran out of fuel and ditched their twin-engine Lockheed Electra in the Pacific near Howland Island while on one of the final legs of their epic journey.Earhart, who won fame in 1932 as the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, took off on May 20, 1937 from Oakland, California, hoping to become the first woman to fly around the world.She and Noonan vanished on July 2, 1937 after taking off from Lae, Papua New Guinea, on a challenging 2,500-mile (4,000-kilometer) flight to refuel on Howland Island, a speck of a US territory between Australia and Hawaii.They never made it.