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• Morgan Stanley is facing scrutiny from the Republican head of the US House China committee over its role in underwriting the Hong Kong initial public offering (IPO) of Zijin Gold International Co.
• The committee is questioning whether Morgan Stanley performed enough due diligence, given that Zijin Gold's parent, Zijin Mining Group, is on a US blacklist for allegedly violating restrictions on using forced labor.
• The request for information from Morgan Stanley is part of a broader review into the involvement of Wall Street banks in IPOs of Chinese companies with known ties to China's military or past track records of labor abuses.

...

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.myserv.one/post/23098630

Community organizer Katie Wilson… campaigned on a message of affordability in a city where the cost of living has soared. Wilson’s platform calls for progressive taxation to raise revenue from the wealthiest households and corporations to pay for affordable housing and social programs benefiting families. Wilson spoke to reporters Thursday after Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell conceded.

Katie Wilson: “I want everyone in this great city of ours to have a roof over their head. I want universal child care and free K through 8 summer care. I want worldclass mass transit. I want great, safe public spaces where kids can run around with abandon. I want stable, affordable housing for renters. I want social housing. I want much more land and wealth to be owned and stewarded by communities instead of corporations. I want a robust economy with thriving small businesses, great living wage jobs, and strong rights for workers.”

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been asking — repeatedly — where the promised Trump phone is, whether it exists, and what happened to all the money people have already paid for deposits. And I’m going to keep doing that every week for the foreseeable future.

Not everyone thinks I should. I’ve been told that covering Trump Mobile is “playing into his hands,” that “this obvious con [doesn’t need] any more publicity,” and that “we don’t need to read about it literally every week.” And those are just the nice messages — you don’t want to see some of the other ones.

Still, I think it’s a fair question. Why am I here week in, week out, writing about a phone that, as best as we can tell, doesn’t actually exist? Why didn’t we just call it bad and impossible and move on with our lives?

The short answer is: because it matters.

The long answer is: We can’t move on because this is still playing out, and it still needs reporting. If the T1 Phone 8002 would just arrive at buyers’ houses and turn out to be a real, probably quite bad, smartphone, that would be that. But no one has the phone yet. No one has even seen the phone yet. And Trump Mobile has gone suspiciously silent, with no updates in months to its website or social media profiles.

This also sits squarely in The Verge’s lane. You want us to stick to phones? This is it! It’s a phone — at least in name — and we want to know what’s going on with it.

In fact, it sits in the eye of a perfect storm of Verge-iness. It’s a phone, and we cover those. It’s probably vaporware, and we’re always happy to call out products that will never actually exist. It creates a pretty clear regulatory problem for the FCC, and we love pointing opportunities for Brendan Carr to be a dummy. And, yes, it’s about politics — The Verge covers that. Always has, always will.

But more than that, it’s something that’s worth calling out, and calling out often. In the grand scheme of the Donald Trump administration, a gold Android phone that won’t actually be made in the US is pretty small fry. But it’s emblematic of empty promises and naked grifts, of baseless claims that they don’t expect to ever be called out on. This is an administration presiding over one of the biggest tech industry booms (bubbles?) in decades, that had a tech bro as one of its chief advisers, and that welcomed half of Silicon Valley at the inauguration, and it doesn’t know that you can’t build $500 Android flagships in the United States?

Trump Mobile, for the third week in a row, did not respond to a request for comment.

One reporter with whom Epstein connected frequently was Landon Thomas Jr., a financial journalist at the New York Times. Thomas exchanged dozens of emails with Epstein between 2015 and 2018, years after the financier’s conviction for soliciting a minor.

In the emails, Thomas tipped off Epstein about inquiries by other reporters and claimed to have vouched for Epstein, whom he said he called “one hell of a guy.” In one exchange, Thomas coached Epstein on how to repair his reputation.

The relationship was a two-way street. Epstein, who died in a Manhattan federal jail in 2019 awaiting trial on charges of sex trafficking, was reportedly a valued source for Thomas. In the emails released Wednesday, one of the topics Epstein fed information to Thomas was about Donald Trump’s allegedly lecherous behavior. In the exchanges — through his trademark style of lowercase letters and abundant typos — Epstein alludes to Trump’s predilection for young women.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/38976177

Heavy rains flood tents of displaced Palestinians in Gaza. Israel returns the bodies of 15 Palestinian captives to Gaza one day after Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad return the body of an Israeli captive. The second revision of a U.S. ceasefire draft resolution at the UN Security Council is shut down by Russian and Chinese objections over the “Board of Peace,” and Moscow submits its own draft with a more limited “international stabilization force” and no “supervisory” board. Two Palestinian teenagers fatally shot by Israeli troops in the West Bank. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announces “Operation Southern Spear” aimed at targeting “narco-terrorists” in the Western Hemisphere. New State Department directive could deny foreigners visas to U.S. for certain medical conditions, such as diabetes or obesity, or a lack of economic resources. Starbucks workers go on strike nationwide. Utilities regulators look to cash out after the end of their term. Global carbon emissions are set to hit a record 38.1 billion metric tons this year. Saudi Arabia intends to do business with Lebanon again. Cambodia evacuates hundreds along its border with Thailand. U.S. declares four European anti-fascist groups “international terrorist organizations.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/38975337

By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Mr. Dionne is a contributing Opinion writer.
Oct. 16, 2025

https://archive.ph/IBWOs

Beyond the specifics, history teaches that progressive mayors prosper when they understand why voters put them in office. Sheri Berman, a Barnard College political scientist and a widely respected scholar of social democracy, offers a brisk two-part formula. “Successful left-wing mayors,” she told me, “focused on (a.) problems in their cities, and (b.) problems where they had the power to do something.”

For history buffs, Mr. Mamdani has done the service of rekindling an interest in a largely forgotten American tradition, the “sewer socialists” who ran a significant list of cities in the last century. The most durable among them was Daniel Hoan, the socialist mayor of Milwaukee from 1916 to 1940. You don’t get re-elected that often by being a failure.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/38974260

When the city becomes a “luxury product,” even the comfortable start to rebel.

https://t.co/hHgbUFXwRd
By Eliza Shapiro
Nov. 7, 2025

But she also wonders how long her children can reasonably share a single bedroom, with curtains surrounding each of their beds. And when she and her husband look for larger apartments nearby in Kensington, their relatively affordable neighborhood, everything is out of their price range.

“It doesn’t feel like there’s any next step that we could reasonably achieve,” Ms. Schutzengel said.

It’s a feeling that is shared by a constituency of young-ish, middle-class-ish New Yorkers who are disillusioned by a city of shimmering wealth that they can’t quite seem to access. Rather than seeing a New York of boundless possibility — or at least of apartments with in-unit washers and dryers — they see a mirage.

And now they have helped to make Zohran Mamdani the city’s next mayor.

The convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein apparently served as a behind-the-scenes adviser to the former Trump official and Maga influencer Steve Bannon during an August 2018 media campaign to defend Trump and his agenda, and to promote Bannon’s media ventures.

Text messages released by the House oversight committee on Wednesday detail a six-day exchange between the men from 17 to 23 August, and show Epstein coaching Bannon on television appearances and political messaging.

One side of the conversation is sent from an iMessage account associated with an Epstein email address, and while the name of Epstein’s correspondent is redacted in the documents as released, contextual clues – including references to Fox News appearances, his August 2017 firing from the White House and his work on the documentary Trump @War – make it clear the other participant is Bannon.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/38786546

…

That included Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel, who Epstein sent an email to in 2014 saying “that was fun , see you in 3 weeks.”

Four years later, Epstein asked if Thiel was enjoying Los Angeles, and, after Thiel said he couldn’t complain, replied “Dec visit me Caribbean.” It’s unclear if Thiel ever responded. 

In emails with Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, an Emirati businessman, Epstein complimented Bannon, saying in 2018 that “We have become friends you will like him.”

“Trump doesn’t like him,” responded Sulayem.

A year earlier, Sulayem asked Epstein about an event where it appeared Trump would be in attendance, asking, “Do you think it will be possible to shake hand with trump.”

“Call to discuss,” Epstein wrote back.

…

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/41724942

To make this massive data dump more accessible, COURIER has compiled the 20,000 documents from Epstein’s estate into an easily searchable repository via Google Pinpoint. Use the search tool here.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/38952809

Ms. Wilson, a self-described socialist, joined the race after Mayor Bruce Harrell opposed taxing high-income residents to finance construction of new housing.

https://archive.ph/sS7E3

Ms. Wilson is a co-founder of the Transit Riders Union, an advocacy group behind a number of local measures to expand transit access, increase renter protections and add housing through new and higher taxes on the rich. She had never sought public office before this year, and was prompted to enter Seattle’s mayoral race only after the incumbent, Bruce Harrell, became the public face of an effort to block a new tax on high earners to pay for housing construction.

The central issue of the campaign was the high price of housing in Seattle, a topic that came up repeatedly...

The URL parameter that the Minnesota Star Tribune uses to indicate something is a gift link is also used by common analytics platforms, so most lemmy instances remove it.

Access options:

• gift link, via shortener to keep Lemmy from mangling it
• archive.today — one of the charts is broken

https://archive.ph/2KJDu

Katie Wilson, who narrowly defeated the incumbent, Bruce Harrell, emerged from the city’s left-wing activist class and brings with her little experience in governing.

In a state without an income tax, the mayor-elect has promised to pursue what she calls “progressive” new sources of revenue to pay for housing and other basic services, including potential local taxes on capital gains, digital advertising and buildings purposely left vacant. She has pledged to push a $1 billion bond to build more homes and new protections for renters, who make up 56 percent of the city.

“There was a time when we saw Seattle as kind of a laboratory for progressive policy,” Ms. Wilson said in an interview this fall. “And that time’s not now anymore. But why can’t it be?”