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The House on Tuesday approved a bill directing the Justice Department to release all files related to its investigation into the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, in a near-unanimous vote that was a stunning turn for an effort that Republicans had worked for months to kill.

Hours later, Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, won unanimous agreement for the Senate to pass the measure as soon as it arrived in the chamber, which would clear it for President Trump’s signature. Mr. Trump, who toiled for months to derail the bill but reversed himself once it was clear it would pass overwhelmingly, has said he would sign it.

A federal judge has dealt another blow to President Trump’s efforts to shutter Voice of America, a federally funded news group that had provided reporting to 360 million people every week in 49 languages until March. Judge Paul L. Friedman of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia blocked the president’s August executive order that cancelled collective bargaining agreements with the union that represented Voice of America employees, according to the judge’s written ruling filed on Tuesday. Trump’s efforts to close the entire news group have been stalled after pushback from courts and Congress.

Republican Clay Higgins was the sole vote against releasing the Epstein files.

Representative Clay Higgins, the Louisiana Republican who was the sole “no” vote in Congress on Wednesday against a bill to compel the Justice Department to release the Epstein files, has long stood out as a hard-right conspiracy theorist even in a Republican conference that trends that way.

In the past, Mr. Higgins, an ardent supporter of President Trump, has claimed that “ghost buses” took agents provocateurs to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to instigate the riot. He has made fantastical claims, promoting a theory that 200 F.B.I. informants were “embedded in the crowd” and “inside the Capitol dressed as Trump supporters.”

The Senate has adjourned for the evening, meaning that despite having agreed to quickly send the bill to compel the release of the Epstein files to the president’s desk, that will not happen until the Senate is back in session on Wednesday.

President Trump is prepared to sign the Epstein files bill as soon as it arrives at his desk, a White House official said.

For Trump, Epstein is the story that won’t go away.

It’s the one story line President Trump hasn’t been able to evade.

During his first term and now in his second, Mr. Trump has managed to deflect and defeat news cycles he views as negative to him, often by quickly diverting the media and public’s attention to a new topic.

t was pretty remarkable for the Republican majority in the Senate to agree to the Democratic leader’s maneuver to automatically pass the Epstein bill. Typically, the Senate’s majority would not want to see the action dictated by the minority. That the move worked underscores how much Republicans want to be rid of the issue, and quickly. The approach also avoids a recorded vote.

Schumer’s effort has succeeded. The bill will automatically pass once it is delivered to the Senate and advance to the president’s desk.

Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and minority leader, is about to push for unanimous consent to immediately pass the Epstein bill as soon as it comes over from the House. “Epstein victim groups have made clear that they support this bill as written, without amendments,” he said. “We should listen to them and pass this bill quickly.”

The move dares any Republican to object and go on the record moving to block a bill that just passed by a near-unanimous vote in the House.

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All but one member of the House voted to pass a bill on Tuesday that demanded the Justice Department to release the Epstein files. Hours later, Senator Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, won unanimous agreement for the Senate to pass the measure as soon as it arrived. President Trump, who was once friends with Epstein, initially opposed the vote, but caved to pressure and said he would support the measure.CreditCredit…Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times

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For astronomers, the sky isn’t exactly falling—yet the sky-high ambitions of tech companies seeking profits in Earth orbit and beyond are becoming too disruptive to ignore. SpaceX’s Starlink Internet service, built with thousands of telescope-photobombing satellites, is the poster child for this problematic trend, but it’s not alone. The latest start-up with brash out-of-this-world plans is Reflect Orbital, which has built a business case for beaming sunlight from orbit to power solar farms after dark. The company, based in Hawthorne, Calif., next to SpaceX’s former headquarters, recently sought a license from the Federal Communications Commission to launch its first satellite in 2026 and plans to put thousands more in orbit.

Maybe that could work. But experts have technological, environmental, and safety concerns. Marketed as “sunlight on demand,” Reflect Orbital’s high-frontier initiative is just one among many; other companies in the proliferating space industry want to launch space advertisements, human remains, and made-to-order artificial meteor showers. Such wide-ranging—and, to some, objectionable—projects are part of an ongoing shift from government-sponsored science or defense-focused missions to a new, commerce-dominated space era.

The satellite that Reflect Orbital aims to loft in 2026 is a test spacecraft dubbed EARENDIL-1—a Lord of the Rings–inspired name that, like many other tech companies and products that reference the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, would probably make the anti-industrial author roll in his grave.

Once the satellite reaches its approximately 600-kilometer-high orbit, it will deploy a giant 18-by-18-meter mirror to redirect sunlight down to targets on Earth. (The mirror’s area is twice the size of a volleyball court.) In addition to describing the solar-power-boosting benefit of the technology, the company’s website advertises other applications, too, such as “unforgettable” sunlit evenings at “entertainment venues, corporate events, and urban public spaces.” Reflect Orbital is financed by investors, including Sequoia Capital and the billionaire Baiju Bhatt, and is supported by a $1.25-million Small Business Innovation Research contract from the U.S. Air Force as well.

Reflect Orbital’s project comes with many engineering challenges, however. “It’s simple but not easy,” says Darren McKnight, a systems engineer and senior technical fellow at LeoLabs, a spacecraft- and debris-tracking company based in Menlo Park, Calif. “People look at each individual technology and say, ‘See, it’s possible,’ but don’t put it all together.”

Overheating and station-keeping could be big problems for the sprawling, sunbathed satellite, as could the precise control required to pinpoint a reflected beam onto targets far below. The beam would also shed some of its energy in the atmosphere, with the potential for clouds and inclement weather to dramatically degrade its intensity. Overcoming these overlapping challenges would be a tall order, and the transmission losses alone could be astronomical across such vast distances, McKnight says. Reflect Orbital isn’t the first organization to attempt giant mirrors in space for the purpose of beaming sunlight onto Earth: Russian space agency scientists pursued and even launched a prototype spacecraft in the 1990s before ultimately abandoning the effort.

Reacting to the company’s announcements, a group of astronomers produced a fact sheet on October 6. It stated, “There are already solutions right here on Earth to many of the problems ‘sunlight as a service’ purports to solve. This approach is simply a reckless and inefficient use of Earth orbit, a precious and finite resource.” In a statement to Scientific American, Reflect Orbital’s chief strategy officer Ally Stone said the company “is committed to protecting dark skies,” and that its first missions would involve “tightly controlled light spots steered well away from observatories and sensitive areas.”

If the company’s plans come to fruition, following its tests next year, it will begin launching more mirror-toting satellites, ultimately building a mega constellation of 4,000 by 2030. Each would be capable of casting a 5 km-wide beam about four times brighter than the full moon down to Earth. But atmospheric scattering would ensure that some light escapes each beam, says John Barentine, a Tucson, Ariz.–based astronomer and executive officer of Dark Sky Consulting, which advises companies and city officials on outdoor lighting use. “We’ve calculated that, even relatively far from the beam, the [satellites] would still have an apparent brightness that would make them among the brightest objects in the night sky,” he says.

Large numbers of satellites in low-Earth orbit are crucial to Reflect Orbital’s plans because a daisy-chain approach is required to consistently illuminate a target on the ground. A single satellite there could only beam sunlight to a surface target for some four minutes before flying out of range, whereupon another satellite would take over with its own beam. This process could continue for an hour or two during twilight and dawn. In addition to the potential effects on ground-based astronomical observatories, which already struggle to study the universe through existing levels of light pollution, Barentine fears the beaming could also have dire consequences for nocturnal wildlife—as well as the celestial views of everyday stargazers.

Besides Reflect Orbital’s planned fleet of satellites, he cites other companies’ bright spacecraft—not only SpaceX’s Starlink mega constellation, which now includes more than 8,000 among its ranks, but also Amazon’s growing Project Kuiper satellite fleet. Other problematic projects are AST SpaceMobile’s BlueBird satellites and its BlueWalker 3 prototype, which Barentine and his colleagues have shown to be exceptionally bright.

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Customs and Border Patrol agents made an arrest on the grounds of a church in front of children in Charlotte as federal officers surged into the Democratic-led city for the Trump administration’s latest anti-immigration operation.

Immigration agents descended on North Carolina’s largest city over the weekend against fierce objections from local leaders, leading to the arrests of at least 81 people within one day, according to Gregory Bovino, a top border patrol official for Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda.

In one reported sting, agents turned up at a church in the east of the city Saturday as 15 to 20 churchgoers were doing yard work on the property and children were playing games, according to the Charlotte Observer.

The masked agents’ presence caused some of the churchgoers to run into the nearby woods, but officers detained one member of the group, according to the church’s pastor, who did not wish to be identified.

“They took one of the members of the church, they don’t ask nothing, they just took him,” the pastor told the newspaper. “One of these guys with immigration, he [said] he was going to arrest one of the other guys in the church. He pushed him.”

The pastor claimed the agents did not show any identification before they detained the suspect, whose wife and child were reportedly inside the church at the time.

Members of the church were aware the anti-immigration operation was starting this weekend, but believed they would be safe on church grounds, said 15-year-old Miguel Vazquez.

“We thought church was safe and nothing gonna happen,” Vazquez told the Observer. “But it did happen.”

The arrest appears to be one of the first instances where the Trump administration has deliberately entered church grounds to carry out anti-immigration enforcement.

The Independent has requested comment from the Department of Homeland Security.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has been accused of violating First Amendment protections and infringing on religious freedoms after the Trump administration rescinded previous Immigration and Customs Enforcement policy that prohibited enforcement actions in sensitive locations such as places of worship, as well as schools and hospitals.

Faith leaders have hit back with lawsuits in recent months to stop immigration enforcement arrests in their places of worship.

Hundreds of demonstrators protested against Homeland Security’s so-called “Operation Charlotte’s Web” in marches across the city over the weekend.

Charlotte’s New Covenant AME Church, which was not believed to be targeted by CBP, is condemning the administration’s tactics.

“This is not a partisan issue —this is a humanitarian issue,” the church posted in a statement on social media.

“To witness individuals, including U.S. citizens, being snatched off the street and violently forced into vans is more than a travesty of justice; it is a violation of human dignity and a crime against humanity,” the statement added.

Elsewhere in the city, footage began circulating of Border Patrol agents questioning two workers hanging Christmas lights in a homeowner’s front yard.

The homeowner, Rheba Hamilton, filmed the agents speaking to the workers in Spanish, asking them which country they were from.

One agent told the workers, “If you are a citizen, there should be no problems,” and asked, “Do you know which country you are from, sir? Are you an American citizen?”

They did not respond, and the agents did not make any arrests.

The Trump administration’s mass deportation operations have seen a boost in ICE and border patrol agents in major Democratic-led cities with large immigrant populations in recent months, including Chicago, Los Angeles, and Portland.

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Resident captures Border Patrol agents questioning garden workers in her garden

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It was unclear how quickly Mr. Trump’s tightly controlled Justice Department might release files on Mr. Epstein, or whether the president’s seeming backing of the idea might speed such a release, regardless of the vote. When he ordered the department to look into Democrats associated with Mr. Epstein last week, his own ties to the disgraced financier were receiving renewed scrutiny because of a release of a trove of emails in which Mr. Epstein claimed Mr. Trump knew of his activities.

The Republican base remains split over the files, and the tension has led to a falling-out between Mr. Trump and one of his closest political allies, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.

On Sunday, minutes after Mr. Trump publicly reversed course on the Epstein files, he said on social media that Ms. Greene “is working overtime to try and portray herself as a victim when, in actuality, she is the cause of all of her own problems.” Mr. Trump has escalated his attacks on Ms. Greene in the past week, calling her a “traitor,” something that she says has led to death threats.

Ms. Greene is far from the only Republican lawmaker pushing to release the files.

Hours before Mr. Trump’s announcement on Sunday evening, Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who has helped lead congressional efforts, suggested in an ABC News interview that “100 or more” House Republicans could vote in favor of releasing the Epstein files this week despite opposition from the president. Speaker Mike Johnson also predicted significant G.O.P. support, acknowledging on Sunday that there would be “lots of votes” for the bill.

Mr. Johnson said last week he would move up the timeline for a vote on the bill to this week, and told “Fox News Sunday” that the House just needed to “get this done and move it on.”

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President Trump speaking to reporters before boarding Air Force One at Palm Beach International Airport on Sunday.Credit…Pete Marovich for The New York Times

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Beere also stated that the alleged shooter came to campus for a “specific reason”, though he declined to elaborate. He emphasized Beam’s community presence, saying Beam was “open to helping everybody in our community”.

According to a reporter for the Citizen news outlet who attended a Wednesday meeting at Laney’s downtown campus, Beam used that gathering to express his unease about current security measures. Beam urged officials to reinstate armed security guards, citing past thefts at the field house, where he worked daily.

Beam had described how stolen items were never recovered, and no suspects were identified by the college’s security contractor. He also questioned a recent idea to arm six guards, asking whether it would sufficiently address the problem.

The district had reportedly previously ended its partnership with the Alameda county sheriff’s office five years earlier and shifted to an unarmed security force, according to the Mercury News.

The 66-year-old coach was shot Thursday at Laney College and died the following day. The shooting was the latest incident in an epidemic of gun violence afflicting school and college campuses across the US.

Tributes and expressions of grief have since poured in from both professional and high school sports communities following Beam’s death.

Beam’s coaching career began with a dominant run at Skyline High, where he led the team to 15 Oakland Athletic League titles from the 1980s through the early 2000s. He later achieved similar success at Laney College before stepping away from coaching last year to focus on his duties as athletic director. His influence reached a national audience after Netflix highlighted Laney’s football career in its 2020 season of Last Chance U.

At this unsettling time

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In his first presidency, Donald Trump called journalists the enemy; a year on from his second victory, it’s clear that this time around, he’s treating us like one. 

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John Beam during football practice at Skyline high school in Oakland, California, on 5 October 2000. Photograph: Kendra Luck/AP

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The system was continuing to dump rain in coastal areas between Orange and San Diego Counties and was spreading inland into southeastern California and southern Nevada.

The storm pulled in a band of moisture known as an atmospheric river, bringing rain to Santa Barbara and Ventura Counties overnight and spreading into Los Angeles County by Saturday morning.

By early Saturday afternoon, some locations in the mountains of Santa Barbara County had recorded more than eight inches since Thursday. Downtown Santa Barbara had received more than four inches.

As of noon, downtown Los Angeles had recorded nearly two inches of rain since Friday — more than double the average monthly total of 0.78 inch for the entire month of November.

The storm system moving through the region and a second system arriving on its heels in Northern California on Sunday have churned up seas and brought big waves to beaches.

At Garrapata State Beach along the Big Sur coastline, a father and his 5-year-old daughter were swept out on Friday by waves estimated to be between 15 to 20 feet high.

The Monterey County Sheriff’s Office confirmed that the father was later found dead and said that the child was missing.

And a 71-year-old man in Sutter County, near Sacramento, died after his vehicle was swept away by floodwaters, according to Sierra Pedley, a spokeswoman with the Sutter County Sheriff’s Office.

Todd Hall, a forecaster with the National Weather Service, said that the rate at which the rain was falling on Saturday was impressive. The burn scar from the Palisades fire received 0.5 inch of rain in 15 minutes on Saturday morning, a rate at which a debris flow could occur.

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A car crushed by a fallen tree in Altadena, Calif., on Saturday, after a powerful storm moved through the region. Credit…Philip Cheung for The New York Times

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This week, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) announced that the homecoming for three of its astronauts was delayed after a piece of space junk struck the Shenzhou 20 spacecraft that was intended to ferry them back to Earth from China’s Tiangong space station. While the agency continues to investigate the extent of the damage, independent experts say the incident is a clear sign that the danger of proliferating orbital debris is only going to grow.

Although this is the first known time a return to Earth has been affected by debris, scientists have long warned that the rising amount of space junk makes such disruptions inevitable.

“It was only a matter of time before this happened,” says research analyst Lauren Kahn of Georgetown University.

Space junk is essentially all the human-made objects floating in space that are no longer useful. As orbital launches and other space activities have increased, so have the fragments produced by collisions, accidental breakups, spent rocket stages, and more. In Earth orbit, debris can drift through space for decades, gradually descending because of atmospheric drag before finally experiencing a fiery reentry. The result, Kahn says, is that parts of Earth’s orbital environment are rife with hazardous objects that can collide with vital space infrastructure.

A recent analysis, co-authored by Kahn, tracked 34,000 pieces of space debris larger than 10 centimeters that were cataloged from 1958 to mid-April 2025. The researchers found that 73 percent of all tracked debris in orbit today can be traced back to just 20 major sources—from launches by China, the U.S., and Russia.

According to NASA, as of today, there are more than 45,000 human-made objects orbiting Earth. Some of them could cause severe damage to space stations and satellites, endangering the global space economy floating above us, which is currently valued at more than $600 billion.

While objects larger than 10 cm can be found and tracked, the real danger comes from harder-to-see debris that can be as small as a bullet and travel at more than 27,000 kilometers per hour. “Those are the scary ones,” says Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. “They are time bombs in orbit.”

Although the CMSA has not revealed more details about the object that may have hit the Shenzhou 20 spacecraft, McDowell says that even a small piece could be dangerous if it struck a key system.

Still, the astronauts are expected to be safe, McDowell says, because China has another spacecraft docked to the space station and ready to retrieve them if they cannot return on the Shenzhou 20 craft.

A Cascade of Collisions

The greatest fear among space scientists is that debris could trigger a chain reaction of satellite collisions, creating even more junk, a nightmare scenario known as the Kessler syndrome.

In recent years, astronomers tracking space junk have focused on low-Earth orbit (LEO), where human space missions operate alongside communication and observation satellites. According to the analysis co-authored by Kahn, most space

debris—more than 83 percent of tracked objects, as of April 2025—is in LEO.

Right now, there are about 13,000 active satellites orbiting Earth, about 10 times more than there were a decade ago. Because of that, McDowell says, satellites often must move out of the way to avoid crashing into other satellites or debris. These movements, called avoidance maneuvers, already happen tens of thousands of times every year. The number of maneuvers grows much faster than the number of satellites because more satellites mean more chances to cross paths. If satellites increase 10-fold, maneuvers could rise a 100-fold, making orbital traffic far more difficult to manage safely.

Even as this risk rises rapidly, there are still plans for launching mega constellations of tiny satellites akin to those that are already orbiting as part of SpaceX’s Starlink system, along with a newly emerging push for orbital data centers such as Nvidia’s Starcloud. “There’s no limit right now on how many satellites you can launch,” McDowell says.

Two problems are especially worrying, says Victoria Samson, chief director of space security and stability at the Colorado-based nonprofit Secure World Foundation: there is currently no way to clean up space debris, and there is very little international coordination to prevent further debris-creating collisions, especially between the U.S and China.

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Threats of retribution and revenge seem to be everywhere in our public discourse. They may play well in some arenas, but when it comes to protecting kids from sexual abuse, they can backfire — badly.

As an emergency physician who works in a children’s hospital, I provide medical care to pediatric patients who are brought to the emergency room because they experienced sexual abuse. Statistically, 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 20 boys are sexually abused during childhood. Researchers have documented many reasons why children may not readily disclose abuse, such as guilt, shame, feeling that they are at fault, fear for their safety, or concern that no one will believe them.

There’s another barrier to disclosure that has been largely overlooked by parents and professionals alike, one that I’ve repeatedly encountered in my conversations with children and adolescents: Young people are less likely to disclose sexual abuse if they are taught that their loved one will retaliate with violence.

Here is the scenario that I see far too often: A teenager, statistically female, presents to the emergency department after being sexually assaulted. When I ask her if her parents know about what happened, she begs me not to tell a particular person, typically her father, because “he told me that if this ever happened, he would kill the person who did that to me.”

That teenager might decide not to disclose the abuse to protect her father from the perceived consequences he might face if he retaliated against the perpetrator of her abuse. She may consider whether she would rather suffer in silence and risk being raped again or risk losing her father if he were to get hurt, killed, or arrested while pursuing the person who abused her.

Instead of vowing retribution, we should assure our children that we will always love them, no matter what happens, and that they should feel safe talking with us about anything and everything.

To be clear, this is not just about fathers and daughters; I have seen people of all ages and genders struggle with these impossible calculations. Further complicating the matter, more than 80% of perpetrators of childhood sexual abuse are known to the victim and may even be part of their family. Countless kids have told me they were afraid to say anything because they did not want one member of their family, whom they love and trust, to be harmed while going after the family member who had abused them.

Sometimes, children are so scared about how an adult might react that they fail to report the abuse — and are repeatedly raped — for years before finally being brought in for emergency care. In these cases, the abuse is often discovered by someone like a teacher or counselor, and the child’s parents still do not know about the abuse.

Parents and loved ones might think they are helping their kids feel safer by threatening retribution. Some might even think that promising to take matters into their own hands is helpful. Perhaps they know that fewer than 3% of rapists ever receive a felony conviction.

While our justice system clearly needs reform, how we talk with our kids about sexual violence also needs attention. When parents and other loved ones tell their children and teenagers that they would take matters into their own hands, they are adding to their child’s burden, not easing it. Even if these threats are not intended to be taken literally, kids often take them at face value anyway.

After seeing the harm that this messaging can cause to kids who face abuse, I have come to believe that these types of statements are misguided. Threatening to retaliate against someone who hurts their child allows an adult to have the illusion of control without doing the difficult work of considering what kind of help might truly be needed from them if the child were to experience sexual abuse.

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As an emergency physician in a children’s hospital, I’ve treated kids who have suffered in silence, without telling their parents, far too often.

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“Nothing announced yet, but soon to be,” Jerry Inzerillo, chief executive of the Diriyah development and a longtime friend of President Trump, said in an interview. He said it was “just a matter of time” before the Trump Organization sealed a deal.

Saudi officials toured the Diriyah development with Mr. Trump during the president’s official state visit in May, with the goal of piquing his interest in the project, Mr. Inzerillo said.

“It turned out to be a good stroke of luck and maybe a little bit clever of us to say, ‘OK, let’s appeal to him as a developer’ — and he loved it,” Mr. Inzerillo said.

Next week, Prince Mohammed is expected to make his first visit to the United States in seven years. He hopes to sign a mutual defense agreement with Washington and potentially advance a deal to transfer American nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia.

That sets up a scenario in which Mr. Trump discusses matters of national security with a foreign leader who is also a key figure in a potential business deal with the president’s family.

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