name

After some initial resistance, CBS News has cut ties with contributor Peter Attia, whose name appears more than 1,700 times in the files of pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

Attia, a physician who specializes in longevity medicine, was among the 19 contributors named last month by CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss. A CBS News executive confirmed Attia’s departure Monday.

Attia’s resignation was agreed upon after discussions with Weiss, according to one of her associates. He had not appeared on the network since the announcement of his hiring in January.

Once Attia’s name showed up in the cache of Epstein files released by the Department of Justice earlier this month, it seemed as though cutting him loose would be a no-brainer for the news division.

But Weiss, who came to CBS News when parent company Paramount acquired her contrarian digital site the Free Press last fall, is highly skeptical of cancel culture and resisted immediate action, according to people familiar with her thinking.

A representative for Attia said he quit because “he wanted to ensure his involvement didn’t become a distraction from the important work being done at CBS.”

Any appearance on the network probably would have generated a spate of negative stories.

Attia’s email exchanges with Epstein included a crude discussion about female genitalia.

Another message showed Attia expressing dismay that he could not discuss Epstein’s activities. “You [know] the biggest problem with becoming friends with you? The life you lead is so outrageous, and yet I can’t tell a soul …,” Attia wrote.

In 2008, Epstein pleaded guilty to state charges of soliciting prostitution, including from a minor. He was found dead in his jail cell in 2019, about a month after being arrested on federal sex-trafficking charges

From a business standpoint, keeping Attia at CBS was untenable. Health-related segments are attractive to advertisers and it’s highly unlikely that any sponsor would want their commercials adjacent to him.

Attia had already been dropped by AGI, a company that makes powdered supplements,where he was a scientific advisor. He also stepped away from his role as chief science officer for David, a protein bar maker.

CBS News pulled an October “60 Minutes” profile of Attia that was scheduled to re-air this month.

Attia apologized for his interactions with Epstein. He said he had not been involved in any criminal activity and had never visited Epstein’s island.

“I apologize and regret putting myself in a position where emails, some of them embarrassing, tasteless, and indefensible, are now public, and that is on me,” Attia wrote. “I accept that reality and the humiliation that comes with it.”

Attia wrote the bestselling book “Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity” and hosts a popular podcast. His company, Early Medical, offers a program that teaches people to live healthier as they age.

Bethany Cosentino, the solo artist and co-founder of the rock band Best Coast, posted an open letter castigating her booking agency Wasserman Music over its founder’s connections to Jeffrey Epstein and relationship with convicted child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell.

Agency founder Casey Wasserman — also the head of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics organizing committee — was included in a recently released tranche of federal documents related to the Jeffrey Epstein investigation. While Wasserman was long known to have have flown with his then-wife Laura on Epstein’s plane with the disgraced financier, these new documents included sexually suggestive messages between Wasserman and Maxwell, Epstein’s consigliere who is serving a lengthy sentence in federal prison for child sex trafficking.

In a statement to the Hollywod Reporter, Wasserman said, “I deeply regret my correspondence with Ghislaine Maxwell which took place over two decades ago, long before her horrific crimes came to light. I never had a personal or business relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. As is well documented, I went on a humanitarian trip as part of a delegation with the Clinton Foundation in 2002 on the Epstein plane. I am terribly sorry for having any association with either of them.”

Meanwhile, Cosentino, a Wasserman client since 2021, wrote in a letter posted to social media that her agency head’s response to the backlash was “not enough… Regret without accountability is just damage control.”

“We are tired of learning, over and over, that men who control access, resources, money and so-called safety in our industry are given endless grace,” Cosentino wrote. “We are tired of being asked to treat proximity to something horrific as an unfortunate situation we should simply move past — especially when the person involved still holds all the power.”

“This letter is my public refusal to accept that this is ‘just how things are,’” she continued.

Cosentino specified that she is “In the Sam Hunt business,” referring to her longtime agent. “I am not in the Wasserman business. I have asked to remove my name and the band’s name from the company site. The position Casey Wasserman has put his agents in is inexcusable. This is a call for him to step down and a change of business name be imminent.”

In the messages between Wasserman and Maxwell, Maxwell said she “thought of [Wasserman] at inappropriate moments,” to which Wasserman answered “I think of you all the time… So what do I have to do to see you in a tight leather outfit? I am in NY tonight, youre not, what am I to do? Xoxo cw”

Later, Wasserman wrote “I thought we would start at that place that you know of, and then continue the massage concept into your bed…and then again in the morning…not sure if or when we would stop.” She responded: “Umm – all that rubbing – are you sure you can take it? The thought frankly is leaving me a little breathless. There are a few spots that apparently drive a man wild -I suppose I could practise them on you and you could let me know if they work or not?”

Wasserman Music is a leading talent agency, representing top acts like Chappell Roan and Kendrick Lamar. Previously, Billie Eilish left Wasserman after reports surfaced of separate incidents of alleged sexual misconduct from Wasserman.

Local politicians have called for Wasserman to back away from the Olympics committee. “I think Casey Wasserman needs to step down,” said L.A. County Supervisor Janice Hahn. “Having him represent us on the world stage distracts focus from our athletes and the enormous effort needed to prepare for 2028.”

It was a war fueled by colonialism, launched with the intent of humiliating a weaker country, fought in the name of revenge and waged by a racist president.

So leave it to President Trump to spike the proverbial football over the U.S. victory 178 years ago in the Mexican-American War.

Abraham Lincoln first earned national attention by calling out President James K. Polk’s lies about the lead-up to the conflict, which lasted from April 1846 to February 1848, on the floor of Congress. Ulysses S. Grant called the war “one of the most unjust ever waged.” Henry David Thoreau’s famous essay “Resistance to Civil Government” was written partly in response to the Mexican-American War, which he decried as “the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool.”

Other American paragons of virtue who were publicly opposed at the time: William Lloyd Garrison, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Frederick Douglass. Yet on Feb. 2, the anniversary of what Mexico calls the American Intervention, Trump declared that a war in which the United States conquered more than half of its southern neighbor for no reason other than it wanted to was a testament to “the unmatched power of the American spirit” and guided by “divine providence.”

And in case anyone was still wondering why Trump would feel fit to commemorate events that happened almost 200 years ago, he argued the job wasn’t done.

“I have spared no effort,” he blared, “in defending our southern border against invasion, upholding the rule of law, and protecting our homeland from forces of evil, violence, and destruction.”

No president since the Civil War has ever publicly bragged about the Mexican-American War in official proclamations. To do so would be rude, politically perilous, insulting to our biggest trade partner and just plain weird.

So of course Trump did it.

As I’ve repeatedly pointed out in my columnas, history is one of Trumpworld’s most important battlefronts. Like the pharaohs and emperors of antiquity, the president weaponizes the past to justify his present actions and future plans, omitting and embellishing events of yesteryear to fit a bellicose agenda. This is the guy, after all, who renamed the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America with one of his first executive orders in his second term and has punished news agencies that refuse to comply.

Trump has shown a special obsession with the Mexican-American War and its architect, Polk. The Wall Street Journal reported last year that the president saw his predecessor as a “real-estate guy,” which is like calling Josef Stalin an aficionado of big coats and bushy mustaches.

A former Tennessee governor and speaker of the House, Polk won the presidency in 1844 by promising to expand the United States by any means necessary. He annexed Texas despite the objections of the Mexican government, tried to buy Cuba from Spain and signed a treaty with Britain that secured for the U.S. what’s now Oregon, Washington, Idaho and parts of Montana and Wyoming.

But the grand prize for Polk was the modern-day American Southwest, which he and his allies viewed as untapped land wasted on mixed-race Mexicans and necessary for the U.S. to fulfill its Manifest Destiny.

He tried at first to buy the territory from Mexico; when the country refused, Polk sent troops to the Rio Grande and dared the Mexicans to attack. When they did, Polk went before Congress to seek a declaration of war, claiming Mexico had long inflicted “grievous wrongs” on Americans up to and including ripoffs and deaths and thus needed to be dealt with.

“We are called upon by every consideration of duty and patriotism,” the president said, “to vindicate with decision the honor, the rights, and the interests of our country.”

No wonder Trump’s recent proclamation called the Mexican-American War “legendary.”

Polk brushed aside the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War and secured land rights and American citizenship for Mexicans who decided to stay in their new country. Many of those Mexicans saw their property squatted on or seized by the courts of their new nation. Indigenous people saw their numbers plummet and their way of life obliterated. White settlers and corporations quickly swooped in to tap into the vast natural riches of these new territories, relegating the original inhabitants to being strangers in their own land.

No wonder Trump replaced a portrait of Thomas Jefferson in the Oval Office with one of Polk shortly after the start of his second term.

Trump has made expansionism a hallmark of his second presidential term, including trying to wrest Greenland from Denmark and constantly referring to Canada as the “51st state.” Critics accuse him of trying to usher in a new era of imperialism. But all he’s doing is continuing the Mexican-American War, which never really ended.

Americans have been skeptical of brown-skinned people since the days of the Alamo, always fearful Latinos are one step away from insurrection and thus must always be subjugated. My ethnic group has suffered lynchings, legal segregation and stereotypes that continue to the present day. This is the mindset and legacy Trump relies on for his deportation deluge, the playbook he uses to persecute undocumented people with demonizing language and wholesale lies.

Relations between the United States and Mexico will always be fraught — our relationship is just too complicated. But when another American president marked the hundredth anniversary of the Mexican-American War, his approach was far different.

In 1947, Harry S. Truman became the first U.S. commander in chief to visit Mexico City. At a state dinner at the National Palace, he acknowledged that “it would be foolish to pretend that fundamental differences in political philosophies do not exist” and euphemistically referred to the Mexican-American War as a “terrible quarrel between our own states.”

But Truman spent the rest of the speech preaching allyship in a new world where Mexico and the United States should see each other not as enemies but friends.

“Though the road be long and wearisome that leads to a good neighborhood as wide as the world, we shall travel it together,” Truman told the appreciative audience. “Our two countries will not fail each other.”

The following day, the president visited a shrine to the Niños Héroes — the Boy Heroes, six teenage military cadets who died in one of the last battles of the Mexican-American War and thus hold an exalted place in the Mexican psyche. Truman, to the surprise of his hosts, placed a wreath on the monument.

“Throughout the day,” the New York Times reported, “people shouted his name, with the inevitable ‘viva,’ wherever United States citizens appeared on the streets or in cafes.”

Today, “Viva” sure isn’t going to be a word Mexicans use if they utter Trump’s name.

WASHINGTON — President Trump said Sunday that he will move to close Washington’s Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for two years starting in July for construction, his latest proposal to upend the storied venue since returning to the White House.

Trump’s announcement on social media follows a wave of cancellations by leading performers, musicians and groups since the president ousted the previous leadership and added his name to the building. Trump made no mention in his post of the recent cancellations.

His proposal, announced days after the premiere of “Melania,” a documentary about the first lady, was shown at the center, is subject to approval by the board of the Kennedy Center, which has been stocked with his handpicked allies. Trump chairs the center’s board of trustees.

“This important decision, based on input from many Highly Respected Experts, will take a tired, broken, and dilapidated Center, one that has been in bad condition, both financially and structurally for many years, and turn it into a World Class Bastion of Arts, Music, and Entertainment,” Trump wrote in his post.

Neither Trump nor Kennedy Center President Ric Grenell, a Trump ally, have provided evidence to back up their claims about the building being in disrepair, and in October, Trump had pledged the center would remain open during renovations. In Sunday’s announcement, he said the center will close July 4, when he said the construction would begin.

“Our goal has always been to not only save and permanently preserve the Center, but to make it the finest Arts Institution in the world,” Grenell said in a post, citing funds Congress approved for repairs.

“This will be a brief closure,” Grenell said. “It desperately needs this renovation and temporarily closing the Center just makes sense — it will enable us to better invest our resources, think bigger and make the historic renovations more comprehensive. It also means we will be finished faster.”

The sudden decision to close and reconstruct the Kennedy Center is certain to spark blowback as Trump revamps the popular venue. The building began as a national cultural center and Congress renamed it as a “living memorial” to President Kennedy — a champion of the arts during his administration — in 1964, in the aftermath of his assassination.

Opened in 1971, it serves as a public showcase year-round for the arts, including the National Symphony Orchestra.

Since Trump returned to the White House, the Kennedy Center is one of many Washington landmarks that he has sought to overhaul in his second term. He demolished the East Wing of the White House and launched a massive $400-million ballroom project, is actively pursuing building a triumphal arch on the other side the Arlington Bridge from the Lincoln Memorial, and has plans for Washington Dulles International Airport.

Leading performing arts groups have pulled out of appearances at the Kennedy Center, most recently composer Philip Glass, who announced his decision to withdraw his Symphony No. 15 “Lincoln” because he said the values of the center today are in “direct conflict” with the message of the piece.

Last month, the Washington National Opera announced that it will move performances away from the Kennedy Center in another high-profile departure after Trump’s takeover of the U.S. capital’s leading performing arts venue.

The head of artistic programming for the center abruptly left his post last week, less than two weeks after being named to the job.

A spokesperson for the Kennedy Center could not immediately be reached and did not respond to an emailed request for comment.

Late last year, as Trump announced his plan to rename the building — adding his name to the building’s main front ahead of that of Kennedy — he drew sharp opposition from members of Congress, and some Kennedy family members.

Kerry Kennedy, a niece of John F. Kennedy, said in a social post on X at the time that she will remove Trump’s name herself with a pickax when his term ends.

Another family member, Maria Shriver, said at the time that it is “beyond comprehension that this sitting president has sought to rename this great memorial dedicated to President Kennedy,” her uncle. “It is beyond wild that he would think adding his name in front of President Kennedy’s name is acceptable. It is not.”

Late Sunday evening, Shriver posted a new comment mimicking Trump’s own voice and style, and suggesting the closure of the venue was meant to deflect from the cancellations.

She said that “entertainers are canceling left and right” and the president has determined that “since the name change no one wants to perform there any longer.”

Trump has decided, she said, it’s best “to close this center down and rebuild a new center” that will bear his name. She asked, “Right?”

One lawmaker, Rep. Joyce Beatty, an Ohio Democrat and ex-officio trustee of the center’s board, sued in December, arguing that “only Congress has the authority to rename the Kennedy Center.”

Price and Mascaro write for the Associated Press. AP writer Darlene Superville contributed to this report.

How do you find the missing?

If you do find them, how can you help?

Oakland civil rights attorney James Cook has been on the ground in Minnesota for months figuring out answers to these question as he goes.

A fast-talking Minneapolis native who still lives in the Twin Cities part time, Cook is one of a handful of attorneys who have dropped everything to aid (for free) those caught up in the federal crackdown — protesters, immigrants and detained citizens — too many of whom have found themselves facing deportation, arrest or even been disappeared, at least for a time.

“They are leaders that are on the ground really helping people through this process,” Minnesota school board member Chauntyll Allen told me.

She’s one of the protesters arrested inside a local church, charged with conspiracy to deprive others of their constitutional rights by Pam Bondi’s politicized Department of Justice, which also Friday arrested journalist Don Lemon for the same incident. Cook is one of the lawyers now representing Allen.

“It shows us that the judicial arm, or some of the judicial arm of our democracy, is willing to step up and ensure that our democracy stands strong,” Allen said of Cook and others like him.

While it’s the images of clashes in the streets that captivate media and audiences, it’s lawyers like Cook who are fighting an existential battle in the background to preserve the rule of law in a place where it is increasing opaque, to put it gently.

The legal work behind detentions has largely been an overlooked battlefield that will likely rage on years after ICE departs the streets, leaving in its wake hundreds if not thousands of long-and-winding court cases.

Beyond the personal fates they will determine, the outcome of the civil litigation Cook and others are spearheading will likely force whatever transparency and accountability can be pulled from these chaotic and troubling times.

It’s time-consuming and complicated work vital not just to people, but history.

Or, as Cook puts it, “I’ll be 10 years older when all this s— resolves.”

Cook told me this while on his way to the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building where some detainees are being held, maybe. It’s hard to find out. A few years ago, when immigration enforcement in Minnesota ramped up under the first Trump term, activists tried to get the name of the building changed, arguing Whipple, the first Protestant Episcopal bishop in the state, had been an advocate of the marginalized and wouldn’t want his name associated with what the feds were up to.

It didn’t work, but the movement’s slogan, “What would Whipple do?” still has resonance in this town, where two American citizens, Alex Pretti and Renee Good, have been fatally shot while protesting — incidents ugly enough that Bruce Springsteen wrote a song about them.

Cook is well aware that the guns carried by the federal agents are not for show, even without the Boss’ new ballad. Just a few days ago, one of the first times he drove his beat-up truck up to the gate, the federal guards at Whipple pointed their guns at him.

“I’m like, ‘Hey, I’m going to take my keys out of the ignition, drop them on the ground. So please don’t shoot,’” he said.

They lowered the guns, but Cook was scared, a feeling that doesn’t come easy.

Long before his law degree, when he was a punk-rock loving teen in the 1980s, fresh out of Southwest High, the public school not too far from Whipple, a former coach convinced him to give up college dreams and instead pursue a shot at making the first Muay Thai kickboxing team at the Olympics.

The martial art ended up not making it as an official Olympic sport, but the experience launched Cook into a professional boxing and kickboxing career that took him to competitions around the world, and taught him fear is not a reason to back down.

But, “Father Time is undefeated,” Cook said. “I got older and I started losing fights, and I was like, all right, time to get back to life.”

That eventually led him to obtaining a law degree in San Francisco, where after an intern stint as a public defender, he decided he wanted to be a trial attorney, fighting in court.

He started cold-calling John Burris, another Bay Area lawyer who is an icon of civil rights and police misconduct cases. Burris, who has been called the “Godfather of Police Litigation,” was involved in the “Oakland Riders” case in 2000, when officers were discovered to have planted evidence. He also represented Rodney King, the family of Oscar Grant, and the family of Joseph Mann among many others.

But Burris, a boxing fan, didn’t respond to Cook’s calls until the young lawyer offered him free tickets to one of his fights, which he was still doing on the side.

“And then immediately I got a call back,” Cook said.

Burris said Cook’s history as a fighter intrigued him, but “I did say to James, you can’t be a fighter and lawyer. You can’t get punched in your head all the time.”

Cook did not take this advice.

Still, Burris said, “It was his persistence that I admired, because the type of work we’re involved in, you need people who are dedicated, who have some real commitment to the work, and he showed that kind of consistency and dedication.”

Cook’s been working with Burris more than 20 years now, but until recently, the labyrinth of the immigration system wasn’t his area of expertise. It’s been a crash course for him, he said, on the often arcane laws that govern who gets to stay in America and who doesn’t.

It’s also been a crash course on what a civil rights emergency looks like. Along with his work looking for locked-up immigrants, Cook spends a lot of time on the streets at protests, helping people understand their rights — and limitations — and seeing first hand what is happening.

“If you ever wondered what you would have done in Germany, now is the time,” he said. “Now is the time to do something. People are being interned.”

In the hours after Pretti was shot, Cook was at the location of the shooting, in the middle of the tear gas, offering legal help to anyone who needed it and bearing witness to conduct that will almost certainly face scrutiny one day, even if government leaders condone it now.

“The way the officers chase people down, protesters who were really just protesting lawfully and were beaten and pepper sprayed and gassed — all those are civil rights violations,” Burris said. “And so the law is the guardrails. So there has to be lawyers who are prepared to protect those guardrails and to stand as centurions, as I refer to us.”

Cook has tried to calm protesters, he told me, and prevent clashes. But people are mad, and resolute. His greatest fear is summer — when warm weather could bring even larger crowds if enforcement is still ongoing. He’s worried that the actions of the federal agents will spill over into anger at local cops enforcing local laws, leading to even more chaos.

“I’ve always supported cops as long as they do their job correctly,” Cook said.

For now, he’s taking it one day at a time, one case at a time, one name at a time.

Tuesday, Cook passed through the armed checkpoint at Whipple carrying a list of about seven people, folks who have been picked up by federal agents for one reason or another, or reasons unknown, and now cannot be located. They are not in the public online system that is meant to track detainees, and family and friends have not heard from them.

If he’s lucky, Cook will get information on one or two, that they are indeed inside, or maybe at a detention center in Texas, where many have been sent. But there will be more whose location remains unknown. He’ll make calls, fill out forms and come back tomorrow. And the tomorrow after that.

“This is what we do,” he said. “I’m always in it for the long run. I mean, you know, shoot, yeah, that’s kind of the way it works.”

NEW YORK — Newly disclosed U.S. government files on Jeffrey Epstein have prompted the resignation of a top official in Slovakia and revived calls in Britain for former Prince Andrew to share what he knows with authorities about Epstein’s links to powerful individuals around the world.

The fallout comes a day after the Justice Department began releasing a massive trove of files that offers more details about Epstein’s interactions with the rich and famous after he served time for sex crimes in Florida.

The prime minister of Slovakia accepted the resignation Saturday of his national security advisor, Miroslav Lajcak, the country’s former foreign minister who once had a yearlong term as president of the U.N. General Assembly. Lajcak wasn’t accused of wrongdoing but left his position after photos and emails revealed he had met with Epstein in the years after the disgraced financier was released from jail.

The disclosures also have revived questions about whether longtime Epstein friend Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly known as Prince Andrew, should cooperate with U.S. authorities investigating Epstein.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Saturday suggested Mountbatten-Windsor should tell American investigators whatever he knows about Epstein’s activities. The former prince has so far ignored a request from members of the U.S. House Oversight Committee for a “transcribed interview” about his “long-standing friendship” with Epstein.

President Trump’s Justice Department said Friday it had released more than 3 million pages of documents along with more than 2,000 videos and 180,000 images under a law intended to reveal the material it collected during two decades of investigations of Epstein, once a close friend of Trump.

The files, posted to the department’s website, included documents involving Epstein’s friendship with Mountbatten-Windsor and Epstein’s email correspondence with longtime Trump advisor and former White House aide Stephen K. Bannon, New York Giants co-owner Steve Tisch and other prominent contacts with people in political, business and philanthropic circles, including billionaires Elon Musk — another former Trump advisor — and Bill Gates.

Other documents offered a window into various investigations, including ones that led to sex trafficking charges against Epstein in 2019 and his accomplice and longtime confidant Ghislaine Maxwell in 2021, and an earlier inquiry that found evidence of Epstein abusing underage girls but never led to federal charges.

Slovakian official resigns

Robert Fico, Slovakia’s prime minister, said Saturday that he had accepted Lajcak’s resignation.

Lajcak hasn’t been accused of any wrongdoing, but emails showed that Epstein had invited him to dinner and other meetings in 2018.

The records also include a March 2018 email from Epstein’s office to former Obama White House general counsel Kathy Ruemmler, inviting her to a get-together with Epstein, Lajcak and Bannon, the conservative activist who was Trump’s White House strategist in 2017.

Lajcak said his contacts with Epstein were part of his diplomatic duties. Pressure mounted for his ouster from opposition parties and a nationalist partner in Fico’s governing coalition.

Draft indictment detailed Epstein’s abuse

The FBI started investigating Epstein in July 2006 and agents expected him to be indicted in May 2007, according to the newly released records. A prosecutor wrote up a proposed indictment after multiple underage girls told police and the FBI that they had been paid to give Epstein sexualized massages.

The draft indicated prosecutors were preparing to charge not just Epstein but also three people who worked for him as personal assistants.

According to interview notes released Friday, an employee at Epstein’s Florida estate told the FBI in 2007 that Epstein once had him buy flowers and deliver them to a student at Royal Palm Beach High School to commemorate her performance in a school play.

The employee, whose name was blacked out, said some of his duties were fanning $100 bills on a table near Epstein’s bed, placing a gun between the mattresses in his bedroom and cleaning up after Epstein’s frequent massages with young girls, including disposing of used condoms.

Ultimately, the U.S. attorney in Miami at the time, Alexander Acosta, signed off on a deal that let Epstein avoid federal prosecution. Epstein pleaded guilty instead to a state charge of soliciting prostitution from someone under age 18 and got an 18-month jail sentence. Acosta was Trump’s first Labor secretary in his first White House term.

Epstein offers to set Andrew up on a date

The records have thousands of references to Trump, including emails in which Epstein and others shared news articles, commented on his policies or gossiped about him and his family.

Mountbatten-Windsor’s name appears at least several hundred times, including in Epstein’s private emails. In a 2010 exchange, Epstein appeared to set him up for a date.

“I have a friend who I think you might enjoy having dinner with,” Epstein wrote.

Mountbatten-Windsor replied that he “would be delighted to see her.”

Epstein, whose emails often contain typographical errors, wrote later in the exchange: “She 26, russian, clevere beautiful, trustworthy and yes she has your email.”

Concerns over how Justice Department handled records

The Justice Department is facing criticism over how it handled the latest disclosure.

One group of Epstein accusers said in a statement that the new documents made it too easy to identify those he abused but not those who might have been involved in Epstein’s criminal activity.

“As survivors, we should never be the ones named, scrutinized, and retraumatized while Epstein’s enablers continue to benefit from secrecy,” it said.

Meanwhile, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, pressed the department to let lawmakers review unredacted versions of the files as soon as Sunday. He said in a statement that Congress must assess whether the redactions were lawful or improperly shielded people from scrutiny.

Department officials have acknowledged that many records in its files are duplicates, and it was clear from the documents that reviewers took different degrees of care or exercised different standards while blacking out names and other identifying information.

There were multiple documents where a name was left exposed in one copy but redacted in another.

Epstein’s ties to powerful on display

The released records reinforced that Epstein was, at least before he ran into legal trouble, friendly with Trump and former President Clinton. None of Epstein’s victims who have gone public has accused Trump or Clinton of wrongdoing. Both men said they had no knowledge Epstein was abusing underage girls.

Epstein killed himself in a New York jail in August 2019, a month after being indicted.

In 2021, a federal jury in New York convicted Maxwell, a British socialite, of sex trafficking for helping recruit some of Epstein’s underage victims. She is serving a 20-year prison sentence. She was recently relocated to a less-restrictive lockup in Texas, which has drawn additional criticism of the Trump administration.

U.S. prosecutors never charged anyone else in connection with Epstein’s abuse. One victim, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, sued Mountbatten-Windsor, saying she had sexual encounters with him starting at age 17. The now-former prince denied having sex with Giuffre but settled her lawsuit for an undisclosed sum.

Giuffre died by suicide last year at age 41.

The Associated Press is reviewing the documents released by the Justice Department in collaboration with journalists from Versant, CBS and NBC. Journalists from each newsroom are working together to examine the files and share information about what is in them. Each outlet is responsible for its own independent news coverage of the documents.

Sisak, Kirka and Finley write for the Associated Press and reported from New York, London and Washington. AP journalists from around the country contributed to this report.

Eclectic and cozy define the spirit of this North Hollywood coffee shop owned by Jennifer Jackson and Libby Ward. The name (and whale logo) is a playful twist on corporate giant Starbucks (with “Starbuck” being a character in “Moby Dick”), and the satire extends to the names of the drink sizes: guppy (small), trout (medium) and whaley (large).

Inside, the whimsical nautical vibe continues in the front room with a floor mural, resembling the deep blue sea and various colorful sea creatures, done by local illustrator Tak Sparks.

Three back rooms with bold colored walls — green, blue, yellow and orange — feel like living rooms with wooden stools, desks, chairs and tables, area rugs, upholstered armchairs and worn leather seats. Out back, a shaded patio strung with Edison bulbs extends the seating.

The walls recently featured art by local comic artist/illustrator Josh Maikis, as well as art by two of the shop’s employees’ parents, J.H. Smith’s ink and intaglio prints and Carolyn Root’s wildlife paintings.

In the front space, bags of free coffee grounds are available for customers to take home for composting. There’s also a propagation station where you can leave or take plant clippings.

Beyond seasonal drinks and espresso-based drinks, try unusual signature offerings like the Shiny Squirrel, a blended espresso with caramel, whipped cream, white and dark chocolate, and sprinkles on top. Or, if coffee isn’t your thing, there are smoothies, hot chocolate and Italian sodas, and a wide array of teas. Jackson is also an herbalist and makes some of them, including Good Night Moon and Frankie Goes to Hollywood, with her own herbs.

Here, the coffee doesn’t stop at the beverages. Even a caprese sandwich has coffee in the balsamic vinegar.