Mounting pressure over President Donald Trump’s alleged ties to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein has reportedly rattled and divided Republican congress members so deeply that the House speaker called an early recess on Tuesday.
Democrats had pushed for a vote to release files related to Epstein as Trump fends off questions over his relationship with the financier, who died by suicide in his jail cell in 2019. Now the House will break up on Wednesday instead of Thursday in what Democrats say is a way to dodge the vote.
Here’s the what’s happened today:
House speaker says calls for an Epstein files vote ‘political games’
Republicans downplayed the decision to cut short the workweek, while arguing that the White House has already moved to resolve questions about the case. Last week, Trump asked the attorney general, Pam Bondi, to release grand jury testimony, although that is expected to be only a fraction of the case’s documents.
The House speaker, Mike Johnson, dismissed the calls for a vote as “political games” and also argued that Congress must be careful in calling for the release of documents related to the case, for fear of retraumatizing his victims.
Trump claims new CBS owner will give him airtime
Trump has claimed the future owner of the US TV network CBS will provide him with $20m worth of advertising and programming – days after the network cancelled The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. The US president recently reached a $16m settlement with Paramount, the parent of CBS News, over what he claimed was misleading editing of a pre-election interview with the Democratic candidate for president, Kamala Harris.
Trump pulls US out of Unesco
The US will quit the United Nations’ culture and education agency Unesco, the US state department has said, as Donald Trump continues to pull out of international institutions. The move is a blow to the Paris-based global organization, founded after the second world war to promote peace through international cooperation in education, science and culture.
Obama breaks silence on Trump’s ‘outrageous’ call to prosecute him
Barack Obama has broken his silence on calls from Trump for him to be prosecuted by unequivocally rejecting his successor’s accusations that he tried to engineer a “coup” after Trump’s 2016 election victory by “manufacturing” evidence of Russian interference.
His office called the accusations “nonsense”, “misinformation”, “outrageous” and “a weak attempt at distraction”.
Trump announces Japan trade deal after weeks of fraught negotiations
Trump has announced a trade deal with Japan, potentially resolving weeks of fraught negotiations between the two allies which had caused political uproar and economic uncertainty in Tokyo. While he gave few details of the deal, he described it as “massive” in a social media post, adding that “Japan will invest, at my direction, $550 Billion Dollars into the United States.”
Coca-Cola to launch Coke with cane sugar in the US after Trump post
Coca-Cola has announced it will launch a product made with US cane sugar this year, days after Trump claimed the company had agreed to replace high-fructose corn syrup. But the company said that the drink would be an additional product rather than a replacement for the drink containing corn syrup.
What else happened today:
Catching up? Here’s what happened on 21 July 2025.
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