By LARRY NEUMEISTER, Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — A federal judge who presided over the sex trafficking case against financier Jeffrey Epstein has rejected the government’s request to unseal grand jury transcripts.

The ruling Wednesday by federal Judge Richard Berman in Manhattan came after the judge presiding over the case against British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s former girlfriend, also turned down the government’s request.

Maxwell is serving a 20-year prison sentence after her conviction on sex trafficking charges for helping Epstein sexually abuse girls and young women. Epstein died in jail awaiting trial.

A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment.

Berman said the information contained in the Epstein grand jury transcripts “pales in comparison to the Epstein investigative information and materials in the hands of the Department of Justice.”

According to Berman’s ruling, no victims testified before the Epstein grand jury. The only witness, the judge wrote, was an FBI agent “who had no direct knowledge of the facts of the case and whose testimony was mostly hearsay.” The agent testified over two days, on June 18 and July 2, 2019. The rest of the grand jury presentation consisted of a PowerPoint slideshow shown during the June 18 session and a call log shown during the July 2 session, which ended with grand jurors voting to indict Epstein. Both of those will also remain sealed, Berman ruled.

Maxwell’s case has been the subject of heightened public focus since an outcry over the Justice Department’s statement last month saying that it would not be releasing any additional documents from the Epstein sex trafficking investigation. The decision infuriated online sleuths, conspiracy theorists and elements of President Donald Trump’s base who had hoped to see proof of a government cover-up.

Since then, Trump administration officials have tried to cast themselves as promoting transparency in the case, including by requesting from courts the unsealing of grand jury transcripts.

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“The government is the logical party to make comprehensive disclosure to the public of the Epstein file,” Berman wrote in an apparent reference to the Justice Department’s refusal to release additional records on its own while simultaneously moving to unseal grand jury transcripts.

“By comparison,” he added, “the instant grand jury motion appears to be a ‘diversion’ from the breadth and scope of the Epstein files in the Government’s possession. The grand jury testimony is merely a hearsay snippet of Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged conduct.”

Meanwhile, Maxwell was interviewed at a Florida courthouse weeks ago by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, and the House Oversight Committee had also said that it wanted to speak with Maxwell. Her lawyers said they would be open to an interview but only if the panel were to ensure immunity from prosecution.

In a letter Maxwell’s lawyers, Rep. James Comer, the committee chair, wrote that the committee was willing to delay the deposition until after the resolution of Maxwell’s appeal to the Supreme Court. That appeal is expected to be resolved in late September.

Comer wrote that while Maxwell’s testimony was “vital” to the Republican-led investigation into Epstein, the committee would not provide immunity or any questions in advance of her testimony, as was requested by her team.

This illustration provided by W.M. Keck Observatory depicts the insides of an exploding star. (Adam Makarenko/W. M. Keck Observatory via AP)

By ADITHI RAMAKRISHNAN, AP Science Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — Scientists for the first time have spotted the insides of a dying star as it exploded, offering a rare peek into stellar evolution.

Stars can live for millions to trillions of years until they run out of fuel. The most massive ones go out with a bang in an explosion called a supernova.

Using telescopes that peer deep into space, researchers have observed many such explosions. The cosmic outbursts tend to jumble up a dying star’s layers, making it hard for scientists to observe the inner structure.

But that wasn’t the case for the new discovery, a supernova called 2021yfj located in our Milky Way galaxy.

The collapsing star’s outermost layers of hydrogen and helium had peeled away long ago, which wasn’t surprising. But the star’s dense, innermost layers of silicon and sulfur had also shed during the explosion.

“We have never observed a star that was stripped to this amount,” said Northwestern University’s Steve Schulze, who was part of the discovery team that published the research Wednesday in the journal Nature.

The finding lends evidence to ideas scientists have about how large stars look near the end of their lives, organized into layers with lighter elements on the outside and heavier ones close to the core.

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“Because so many of the layers had been stripped off this star, this basically confirmed what those layers were,” said Anya Nugent, who studies supernovas at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. She was not involved with the new research.

It’s not yet clear how this star got so whittled down — whether its layers were flung off violently in the final stages of its life or yanked away by a twin star. Future research may yield clues, though scientists acknowledged such an event may be tough to capture again.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Ramsey County Judge Leonardo Castro struck down Minnesota’s binary trigger ban Monday, citing a violation of the state’s “single subject” clause — and sparking conversation over the Minnesota Legislature’s use of “omnibus bills.”

Omnibus bills are single pieces of legislation that bundle several smaller pieces of legislation into one large bill. While the Minnesota Constitution states that bills must stay within the bounds of a “single subject,” topics outside the omnibus bill’s intended subject sometimes creep in.

In the case of the 2024 bill, Castro ruled against one provision banning binary triggers — a device added to a firearm that allows it to fire once when the trigger is pulled and again when it’s released — which had been added to “a bill for an act relating to taxation.”

The trigger ban wasn’t the only non-tax-related subject that made its way into the 1,400-page bill — constructed in the last hours of the 2024 session — others include lane splitting and filtering for motorcyclists, as well as a requirement for health plans to cover abortions and related services.

“This Court will go no further than severing the Binary Trigger Amendment from the 2024 Omnibus Bill. But make no mistake, during the late hours of May 19, 2024, lawmaking did not ‘occur within the framework of the constitution,’ ” Castro wrote in his ruling Monday.

“This Court respectfully suggests that if there has ever been a bill without a common theme and where ‘all bounds of reason and restraint seem to have been abandoned,’ this is it; and if there has ever been time for the ‘draconian result of invalidating the entire law,’ that time is now,” he wrote.

Senate Minority Leader Mark Johnson, R-East Grand Forks, said the court’s ruling affirms Minnesota’s single-subject rule, and that the rule is in place to “stop what Democrats did” in 2024.

“This decision is a reminder that the legislative process exists to put Minnesotans first, not to sidestep them,” Johnson said. “I applaud the court for reaffirming that the people’s business must be done in the light of day, not buried in last-minute sham hearings for mega-bills. Today’s district court ruling is a validation that the consequences for a total abuse of power are just beginning.”

Minnesota has long used omnibus bills, and they are not just created by Democrats. In 2018, Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton vetoed an omnibus bill Republicans sent to him that was roughly 1,000 pages long, citing the sheer size, among other reasons.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, parties regularly challenged Minnesota’s laws based on alleged violations of the Constitution’s single-subject clause, and courts struck down several of the challenged laws, according to House Research, a nonpartisan research department for the Minnesota House of Representatives.

“By the 1930s there were fewer challenges that cited the clause, and by the 1970s courts made it clear that they would give great deference to the Legislature,” House Research wrote in a 2020 report.

In recent years, there have been few successful challenges. In 2000, the Supreme Court found a section of a large omnibus bill unconstitutional, and in 2005, the Court of Appeals found the Personal Protection Act unconstitutional for similar reasons, according to House Research.

Including Minnesota, 43 states have a single-subject rule for their state legislatures, but not all of them take it seriously or have courts that strictly enforce it. Castro’s ruling Monday was a rarity in 21st-century Minnesota.

Lawmakers, state officials react

Other lawmakers echoed Johnson’s sentiments on Monday.

Speaker of the House Lisa Demuth, R-Cold Spring, said the bill should be invalidated in its entirety, as Castro “respectfully” suggested in his ruling.

“This ruling is exactly what House Republicans warned about when the monstrous 1,400-page bill was passed without any meaningful feedback or even opportunity to access the bill: the process was flawed, and the bill should be invalidated,” Demuth said.

Rep. Paul Novotny, R–Elk River, said the 2024 end-of-session “mega-bill” that was “rushed” through both chambers late at night was “logrolling.”

“The court confirmed today what many of us warned about from the start: this was a bad policy, shoved into a bad bill, using a bad process,” he said. “Minnesotans deserve a Legislature that plays by the rules, respects the Constitution and conducts business in the open.”

Democratic leaders Jamie Long, DFL-Minneapolis, and Senate Majority Leader Erin Murphy, DFL-St. Paul, both said they were disappointed in the ruling regarding binary triggers, but did not comment on the judge’s warning against the use of the single-subject rule.

Attorney General Keith Ellison said at an unrelated press conference Tuesday that he couldn’t confirm whether his office will appeal the ruling, but that he will make an announcement soon.

For now, enforcement of the binary trigger ban — which went into effect Jan. 1 — is permanently prohibited.