AFP USA

US President Donald Trump said Friday he was pulling his endorsement for key ally Marjorie Taylor Greene after a string of disagreements, calling the hard-right lawmaker a “ranting lunatic.”It marks an extraordinary rift in Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement a year before US midterm elections, with Trump facing growing criticism on the cost of living and the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. “I am withdrawing my support and Endorsement of ‘Congresswoman’ Marjorie Taylor Greene,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social network.”All I see ‘Wacky’ Marjorie do is COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN!”Trump said he would be open to backing an opponent if Republicans in her state of Georgia decided to mount a primary challenge against Greene, saying people there were “fed up with her and her antics.””If the right person runs, they will have my Complete and Unyielding Support. She has gone Far Left,” Trump said.Trump has, largely successfully, supported primary challenges against Republicans he considers insufficiently loyal in the past.Greene responded quickly on X saying “I don’t worship or serve Donald Trump.” She asserted that Trump was attacking her as punishment — and as a warning to other Republicans — because she supports efforts for Congress to call on the administration to release the full Epstein probe files.The split comes at a delicate time for Trump, following heavy off-year election losses earlier this month that have caused Republican jitters a year away from the 2026 midterms.Firebrand Greene, 51, was until recently a diehard pro-Trump supporter — even wearing a “Trump Was Right About Everything” hat when he addressed Congress in March. She has since broken with him on a host of issues, and Trump expressed frustration with her for the first time on Monday, saying she had “lost her way.”The first signs came when she split with other Republicans over the summer when she called Israel’s war in Gaza a “genocide.”Greene has also been critical on health care and particularly the cost of living crisis, telling Trump to focus on the “home front” instead of foreign policy and peace deals.Perhaps the most sensitive area of criticism has been Greene’s position on the Epstein scandal, which ensnared Trump again in recent days with the release of a new trove of emails.After becoming a leading voice calling for justice for victims of the notorious sex offender over the summer, Greene this week was one of a few MAGA rebels who backed a call by Democrats on a vote to push Trump to release files relating to the Epstein probe.”And of course he’s coming after me hard to make an example to scare all the other Republicans before next weeks vote to release the Epstein files,” Greene said in her X post Friday night.”It’s astonishing really how hard he’s fighting to stop the Epstein files from coming out that he actually goes to this level,” she added.Greene’s sudden shift has prompted speculation that she is lining up for her own presidential bid in 2028, although she has dismissed it as “baseless gossip.” Famed for her scathing comments towards Democrats and journalists, Greene had previously made her name as a fierce defender of Trump’s policies.She also embraced QAnon conspiracy theories and in 2018 asserted that California wildfires were ignited by a space laser controlled by the Jewish Rothschild family.

US President Donald Trump said Friday he was pulling his endorsement for key ally Marjorie Taylor Greene after a string of disagreements, calling the hard-right lawmaker a “ranting lunatic.”It marks extraordinary rift in Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement a year before US mid-term elections, with Trump facing growing criticism on the cost of living and the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. “I am withdrawing my support and Endorsement of ‘Congresswoman’ Marjorie Taylor Greene,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social network.”All I see ‘Wacky’ Marjorie do is COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN!”Trump said he would be open to backing an opponent if Republicans in her state of Georgia decided to mount a primary challenge against Greene, saying people there were “fed up with her and her antics.””If the right person runs, they will have my Complete and Unyielding Support. She has gone Far Left,” Trump said.Trump has, largely successfully, supported primary challenges against Republicans he considers insufficiently loyal in the past.The split comes at a delicate time for Trump, following heavy off-year election losses earlier this month that have caused Republican jitters a year away from the 2026 midterms.Firebrand Greene, 51, was until recently a diehard pro-Trump supporter — even wearing a “Trump Was Right About Everything” hat when he addressed Congress in March. She has since broken with him on a host of issues, and Trump expressed frustration with her for the first time on Monday, saying she had “lost her way.”The first signs came when she split with other Republicans over the summer when she called Israel’s war in Gaza a “genocide.”Greene has also been critical on health care and particularly the cost of living crisis, telling Trump to focus on the “home front” instead of foreign policy and peace deals.Perhaps the most sensitive area of criticism has been Greene’s position on the Epstein scandal, which ensnared Trump again in recent days with the release of a new trove of emails.After becoming a leading voice calling for justice for victims of the notorious sex offender over the summer, Greene this week was one of a few MAGA rebels who backed a call by Democrats on a vote to push Trump to release files relating to the Epstein probe.Greene’s sudden shift has prompted speculation that she is lining up for her own presidential bid in 2028, although she has dismissed it as “baseless gossip.” Famed for her scathing comments towards Democrats and journalists, Greene had previously made her name as a fierce defender of Trump’s policies.She also embraced QAnon conspiracy theories and in 2018 asserted that California wildfires were ignited by a space laser controlled by the Jewish Rothschild family.

OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma, blamed for helping to fuel a deadly opioid crisis, said Friday that a US bankruptcy judge will sign off on a deal to settle thousands of lawsuits against the company, which will cease to exist.Purdue and other opioid makers and distributors were accused of encouraging free-wheeling prescription of their products through aggressive marketing tactics while hiding how addictive the drugs are.Earlier this year, several US states reached a $7.4 billion settlement with the Sackler family and Purdue, the company they owned for decades, that will see funds routed to affected communities and individuals.Federal judge Sean Lane said in a New York court that he would sign off on the company Chapter 11 plan, with a formal ruling expected at a hearing on Tuesday.”Today cements the end of a long chapter, and brings us very near to the end of the book for Purdue,” board chairman Steve Miller said in a statement. “Soon, Purdue will cease to exist.””We will now commence the process of satisfying all outstanding requirements for Purdue to emerge from bankruptcy so that resources from the settlements can flow to communities across America as quickly as possible,” he said.The Sacklers will pay $6.5-7.0 billion while the company will pay $900 million. A separate fund of $865 million will be created to compensate victims.The remnants of Purdue will become Knoa Pharma, a company owned by a foundation, that will provide opioid use disorder treatments and overdose reversal medicines, “with no obligation to maximize profits,” the company said.For many people, opioid addiction begins with prescribed pain pills, such as OxyContin, before they increase their consumption and eventually turn to illicit drugs such as heroin and fentanyl, an extremely powerful synthetic opioid.The Sacklers have consistently denied wrongdoing over the opioid crisis.The company statement says the family “have had no involvement in Purdue since the end of 2018,” while officials said the January settlement had ended the Sacklers’ control of Purdue Pharma.

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.

Elon Musk’s Grokipedia carries thousands of citations to “questionable” and “problematic” sources, US researchers said Friday, raising doubts about the reliability of the AI-powered encyclopedia as an information tool.Musk’s company xAI launched Grokipedia last month to compete with Wikipedia — a crowdsourced information repository authored by humans that the billionaire and others on the American right have repeatedly accused of ideological bias.”It is clear that sourcing guardrails have largely been lifted on Grokipedia,” Cornell Tech researchers Harold Triedman and Alexios Mantzarlis wrote in a report seen by AFP.”This results in the inclusion of questionable sources, and an overall higher prevalence of potentially problematic sources.”The study, which scraped hundreds of thousands of Grokipedia articles, said the trend was particularly notable in topics pertaining to elected officials and controversial political topics.Grokipedia’s entry for “Clinton body count” — a widely debunked conspiracy theory that links the deaths of multiple people to former president Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary — cites InfoWars, a far-right website notorious for peddling misinformation.Other Grokipedia articles cite American and Indian right-wing media outlets, Chinese and Iranian state media, anti-immigration, antisemitic or anti-Muslim sites, and portals accused of promoting pseudoscience and conspiracy theories, the report said.”Grokipedia cites these sources without qualifying their reliability,” it said.The study found that Grokipedia articles often “contain exactly identical copies of text” from Wikipedia, a site it has intended to outshine.It said Grokipedia articles not attributed to Wikipedia are 3.2 times more likely than those on the rival platform to cite sources deemed “generally unreliable” by the English Wikipedia community.They are also 13 times more likely to include a “blacklisted” source which is blocked by Wikipedia, it added.- ‘Trustworthiness’ -AFP’s request to xAI for comment generated this auto response: “Legacy Media Lies.”Musk — the world’s richest person and owner of social media platform X who poured hundreds of millions of dollars into US President Donald Trump’s election campaign — has said that Grokipedia’s goal is “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”On Thursday, Musk said he plans to rebrand Grokipedia as “Encyclopedia Galactica” when it is “good enough (long way to go).””Join @xAI to help build the sci-fi version of the Library of Alexandria!” Musk wrote on X.Musk and the US Republican Party have frequently accused Wikipedia of being biased against right-wing ideas. Last year, Musk urged his more than 200 million followers on X to stop donating to Wikipedia, dubbing the site “Wokepedia.”In a recent interview with the BBC Science Focus podcast, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales rejected claims it has a left-wing bias as “factually incorrect,” while acknowledging there were areas for improvement among its volunteer community. “Unlike Grokipedia, which relies on rapid AI-generated content with limited transparency and oversight, Wikipedia’s processes are open to public review and rigorously document the sources behind every article,” Selena Deckelmann, chief product and technology officer at the Wikimedia Foundation, told AFP.”It is precisely this deliberate openness and community model that upholds the neutrality and trustworthiness essential for a global encyclopedia: no single individual, company, or agenda can exert influence over the work.”

An American football coach featured in the hit Netflix documentary series “Last Chance U” has died after being shot in the head on campus, police said Friday.John Beam, a coach and father figure who guided generations of athletes at Laney College in Oakland, California, was targeted on Thursday by a gunman who apparently knew him.Beam, 66, was rushed to a hospital where he died of his injuries on Friday morning, Oakland Police said.The shooting had sparked police appeals for help, as former players and public officials heaped praise on the coach.Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee called him “a giant in Oakland — a mentor, an educator, and a lifeline for thousands of young people.””For over 40 years, he has shaped leaders on and off the field.”Oakland Police arrested Cedric Irving Jr after a huge manhunt over what they said was a targeted attack.Irving, whom the San Francisco Chronicle said had confessed to the crime, was taken into custody at a train station near Oakland before dawn Friday.”Last Chance U” ran for five seasons on Netflix, chronicling the lives and struggles of young men playing on the football teams at US community colleges.The first two seasons were set in Mississippi, the next two in Kansas, with the final season — which debuted in 2020 — set in Oakland, a city in the San Francisco Bay Area.The show looks at the role that such programs play in offering discipline and opportunity to young men who often lack both.Some of those who participate in these teams are hoping to move from their community college — publicly funded institutions that offer associate degrees — to larger universities with more developed football programs that feed into the professional NFL.Collegiate-level sport in the United States has a huge following, and can make stars of very young athletes well before they turn professional.Some colleges have football stadiums that hold more than 100,000 fans, which are fully packed for every game.Many football fans avidly follow these theoretically amateur teams, despite the ever-changing cast of players.

Nick Adams couldn’t help but smile as he showed his son the planes hanging in Washington’s Air and Space Museum, which reopened Friday after a month closed due to the US government shutdown. “We had been planning this trip for a little while and were nervous with everything shut down, but were excited to see everything open up again,” said the 37-year-old visiting from Texas. Washington is not only the US political capital but also a cultural hub with over a dozen free museums, many of which are renowned for their quality. Some 16 million people visited them last year.But those institutions were forced to close after October 1 due to a budget deadlock among lawmakers that ended most federal funding for a record 43 days. President Donald Trump signed a bill late Wednesday to reopen the government after some Democrats sided with his Republicans on a temporary spending bill. German tourist Johanna Tennigkeit, 30, told AFP she was “so happy” to see the museums open again as she visited with her partner. “I couldn’t imagine that this is closed. This is so sad for every tourist but also for the people working here because they didn’t get money,” she said. – ‘Meant to be’ -Mitzi Sobash, a retired 66-year-old who lives in Washington, was thrilled to be able to guide her cousin Dorita Vargas on her first trip to Washington. “It’s been almost six weeks since we’ve been able to go to the museums, and they’re really wonderful here,” Sobash said.Vargas, a nurse, agreed: “This is my first time in DC, and I’m super excited. It was just meant to be.”More than 100 people were waiting to enter the Air and Space Museum around 30 minutes before it opened on Friday. “We were so lucky that we were able to book a pass because there was so much traffic on the website and on my phone it actually worked,” Tennigkeit, the German tourist, said in the entry hall.She added that she wanted to visit as many Smithsonian Institution museums — run by the US government — as she could and was most excited about the Museum of Natural History. Staff will also be pleased to see the institutions back open as many were furloughed during the shutdown, while other federal personnel like air traffic controllers had to work without pay. “Honestly, I’m just glad to see it reopened,” said Adams, the Texas father. “Glad to see everybody come to the table and come to an agreement that could get it opened back up and get paychecks back in people’s pockets and get stuff like this open for these kids to come see.”