Category: National News Feed

SAN DIEGO (AP) — U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has moved to detain far more people than before by tapping a legal authority to jail anyone who entered the country illegally without allowing them a bond hearing.

Todd Lyons, ICE’s acting director, wrote employees on July 8 that the agency was revisiting its “extraordinarily broad and equally complex” authority to detain people and that, effective immediately, people would be ineligible for a bond hearing before an immigration judge. Instead, they cannot be released unless the Homeland Security Department makes an exception.

The directive, first reported by The Washington Post, signals wider use of a 1996 law to detain people who had previously been allowed to remain free while their cases wind through immigration court.

Asked Tuesday to comment on the memo, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press, Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said, “The Biden administration dangerously unleashed millions of unvetted illegal aliens into the country — and they used many loopholes to do so. President (Donald) Trump and Secretary (Kristi) Noem are now enforcing this law as it was actually written to keep America safe.”

McLaughlin said ICE will have “plenty of bed space” after Trump signed a law that spends about $170 billion on border and immigration enforcement. It puts ICE on the cusp of staggering growth, infusing it with $76.5 billion over five years, or nearly 10 times its current annual budget. That includes $45 billion for detention.

Greg Chen, senior director of government relations at the American Immigration Lawyers Association, began hearing from lawyers across the country last week that clients were being taken into custody in immigration court under the new directive. One person who was detained lived in the United States for 25 years.

While it won’t affect people who came legally and overstayed their visas, the initiative would apply to anyone who crossed the border illegally, Chen said.

The Trump administration “has acted with lightning speed to ramp up massive detention policy to detain as many people as possible now without any individualized review done by a judge. This is going to turn the United States into a nation that imprisons people as a matter of course,” Chen said.

Matt Adams, legal director of the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, said the administration is “adopting a draconian interpretation of the statute” to jail people who may have lived in the U.S. for decades, have no criminal history and have U.S. citizen spouses, children and grandchildren. His organization sued the administration in March over what it said was a growing practice among immigration judges in Tacoma, Washington, to jail people for prolonged, mandatory periods.

Lyons wrote in his memo that detention was entirely within ICE’s discretion, but he acknowledged a legal challenge was likely. For that reason, he told ICE attorneys to continue gathering evidence to argue for detention before an immigration judge, including potential danger to the community and flight risk.

ICE held about 56,000 people at the end of June, near an all-time high and above its budgeted capacity of about 41,000. Homeland Security said new funding will allow for an average daily population of 100,000 people.

In January, Trump signed the Laken Riley Act, named for a slain Georgia nursing student, which required detention for people in the country illegally who are arrested or charged with relatively minor crimes, including burglary, theft and shoplifting, in addition to violent crimes.

PITTSBURGH (AP) — President Donald Trump touted tens of billions of dollars of recent energy and technology investments Tuesday in Pennsylvania while boasting of a “true golden age for America” in energy policy and artificial intelligence.

Trump traveled to Pittsburgh at a summit helmed by Republican Sen. David McCormick that included dozens of top executives from companies aiming to make the city and the state a hot spot for advancements in robotics, artificial intelligence and energy. McCormick announced more than $90 billion of investments in the state — spurring tens of thousands of jobs — although some of the projects had already been in progress ahead of the summit.

“I think we have a true golden age for America. And we’ve been showing it, and it truly is the hottest country anywhere in the world,” Trump said at the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit, held at Carnegie Mellon University. “I’m honored to be in Pennsylvania, and I’m honored to be in Pittsburgh. And you’re going to see some real action here. So get ready.”

Trump has repeatedly pledged U.S. “energy dominance” in the global market, and Pennsylvania — a swing state critical to his wins in 2016 and 2024 — is at the forefront of that agenda, in large part due to its coal and gas industry that the Republican administration has taken steps to bolster.

Both the president and senior administration officials on Tuesday framed the investments as part of a race against China for the most advanced deployment of artificial intelligence, with Trump saying, “We are way ahead of China, I have to say.”

“China and other countries are racing to catch up to America on AI, and we’re not going to let them do it,” Trump said during the hourlong roundtable held in a university gymnasium, speaking often from prepared notes. Flanked by several of his Cabinet members, company executives and local political leaders, Trump added that the U.S. will be “fighting them in a very friendly fashion.”

Before Trump spoke, his Cabinet members spoke of the need to produce as much energy as possible — especially from coal and natural gas — to beat China in the AI race for the sake of economic and national security.

“The AI revolution is upon us,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said during an earlier panel discussion. “The Trump administration will not let us lose. We need to do clean, beautiful coal. We need to do natural gas, we need to embrace nuclear, we need to embrace it all because we have the power to do it and if we don’t do it we’re fools.”

Some of the investments on a list released by McCormick’s office were not necessarily brand-new, while others were. Some involve massive data center projects — such as a $15 billion project in central Pennsylvania — while others involve building power plants, expanding natural gas pipelines, upgrading power plants or improving electricity transmission networks.

Google said it would invest $25 billion on AI and data center infrastructure over the next two years in PJM’s mid-Atlantic electricity grid, while investment firm Brookfield said it had signed contracts to provide more than $3 billion of power to Google’s data centers from two hydroelectric dams on the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania.

Frontier Group said it would transform the former Bruce Mansfield coal-fired power plant in western Pennsylvania into a new natural gas-fired plant, and AI cloud computing firm CoreWeave said it will spend more than $6 billion to equip a data center in south-central Pennsylvania.

Blackstone plans to spend $25 billion on data centers and building new natural gas-fired power plants in northeastern Pennsylvania, and the company will start construction by the end of 2028, said Jon Gray, its CEO.

McCormick, a first-term Republican senator who organized the inaugural event, said the summit was meant to bring together top energy companies and AI leaders, global investors and labor behind Trump’s energy policies and priorities.

The list of participating CEOs includes leaders from global behemoths like Blackstone, Bridgewater, SoftBank, Amazon Web Services, BlackRock and ExxonMobil and local companies such as the Pittsburgh-based Gecko Robotics, which deploys AI to bolster energy capacity.

“What’s exciting about this event is it’s a great catalyst for investments and closing deals in the region,” said Jake Loosararian, the founder and CEO of Gecko Robotics.

Administration officials at the summit included White House crypto czar David Sacks, Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Lutnick. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum also attended. Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, also spoke.

McCormick credited his wife, Dina Powell McCormick, with the idea for a summit. Powell McCormick served as Trump’s deputy national security adviser in his first term and is a former Goldman Sachs executive who is now at BDT & MSD Partners, a merchant bank.

Pittsburgh is home to Carnegie Mellon University, a prestigious engineering school, plus a growing industry of small robotics firms and a so-called AI Avenue that’s home to offices for Google and other AI firms. It also sits in the middle of the prolific Marcellus Shale natural gas reservoir.

“What’s going on is a rewiring of the economy, of the world over the next 15 years and that takes trillions and trillions and tens of trillions of dollars, and it starts with power,” said Bruce Flatt, CEO of Brookfield, during a panel discussion.

Pennsylvania has scored big investment wins in recent months, some driven by federal manufacturing policy and others by the ravenous need for electricity from the fast-growing AI business.

Nippon Steel just bought U.S. Steel for almost $15 billion, getting Trump’s approval after pledging to invest billions alone in U.S. Steel’s Pittsburgh-area plants.

Amazon will spend $20 billion on two data center complexes in Pennsylvania, while the one-time Homer City coal-fired power plant is being turned into the nation’s largest gas-fired power plant to fuel a data center campus. Meanwhile, Constellation Energy is reopening the lone functional nuclear reactor on Three Mile Island under a long-term power supply agreement for Microsoft’s data centers.

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Levy reported from Harrisburg, Pa. Associated Press writer Melissa Goldin in Washington contributed to this report.

NEW YORK (AP) — Most U.S. stocks slumped on Tuesday after the latest update on inflation hurt Wall Street’s hopes for lower interest rates.

The S&P 500 fell 0.4%, though it’s still near its all-time high set last week, as 90% of the stocks within the index fell. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 436 points, or 1%.

Tech stocks were an outlier, though, and the Nasdaq composite rose 0.2% to set another record thanks to Nvidia, the market’s most influential stock.

Stocks felt pressure from a report showing inflation in the United States accelerated to 2.7% last month from 2.4% in May. Economists pointed to increases in prices for clothes, toys and other things that tend to get imported from other countries. Their prices could be rising because of the tariffs that President Donald Trump has proposed on countries worldwide in hopes of getting them to open their markets further to U.S. products.

“Inflation has begun to show the first signs of tariff pass-through,” according to Ellen Zentner, chief economic strategist for Morgan Stanley Wealth Management.

To be sure, the inflation rate reported on Tuesday morning wasn’t far from what economists expected. And an underlying measure of inflation that economists think is a better predictor of future trends accelerated by less than feared.

Altogether, the data helped cause Treasury yields to yo-yo a few times in the bond market before they began rising.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury climbed to 4.48% from 4.43% late Monday. The yield on the two-year Treasury, which more closely tracks expectations for what the Federal Reserve will do with short-term interest rates, rose to 3.95% from 3.90%.

A further acceleration in inflation could tie the hands of the Fed, which has been keeping interest rates on hold this year after cutting them at the end of last year. That’s because lower rates can give inflation more fuel, along with a boost for the economy. Wall Street loves lower rates because they goose prices higher for stocks and other investments, and Trump himself has been clamoring for the Fed to cut more quickly.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell, though, has been adamant that he wants to wait for more data about how tariffs affect the economy and inflation. Following Tuesday’s inflation report, traders are still overwhelmingly betting that the Fed will cut its main interest rate by the end of the year. But they pulled back their bets on the number of potential cuts, according to data from CME Group.

No one knows for sure if Trump will follow through on the stiff tariffs he’s proposed, or if he’ll flinch and back down if the economy and financial markets show too much pain. The hope is that he’ll reach trade deals with other countries beforehand that will lower the sky-high tariff rates that Trump has proposed.

Trump on Tuesday said he struck a deal with Indonesia, where it committed to buying energy, agricultural products and planes from the United States. Trump also said imports from Indonesia, which is the world’s fourth-largest country by population, would face a tariff of 19% instead of the 32% that he had threatened earlier.

On Wall Street, tech stocks were the outliers and rose after Nvidia said the U.S. government assured it that licenses will be granted for its H20 chip again and that deliveries will hopefully begin soon. Nvidia’s 4% gain was by far the strongest force pushing upward on the S&P 500.

Earlier this year, Nvidia said that U.S. restrictions on the chips used in artificial-intelligence development chiseled billions of dollars off its results for the first quarter of the year.

Stocks of big U.S. banks, meanwhile, were mixed following their latest profit reports.

JPMorgan Chase slipped 0.7% despite reporting a stronger profit than analysts expected, as CEO Jamie Dimon warned of risks to the economy because of tariffs and other concerns.

Citigroup rose 3.7% following its better-than-expected profit report. But Wells Fargo fell 5.5% following its own, as it trimmed its forecast for an important way that it makes money.

All told, the S&P 500 fell 24.80 points to 6,243.76. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 436.36 to 44,023.29, and the Nasdaq composite rose 37.47 to 20,677.80.

In stock markets abroad, indexes slipped in Europe after a mixed session in Asia. Indexes rose 1.6% in Hong Kong but fell 0.4% in Shanghai after a report said China’s economic growth slowed only slightly last quarter despite pressure from Trump’s tariffs.

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AP Business Writer Yuri Kageyama contributed.

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — A man indicted Tuesday on charges he fatally shot the Democratic leader in the Minnesota state House and her husband, and wounded another lawmaker and his wife, confessed to the crimes in a rambling handwritten letter to FBI Director Kash Patel, but didn’t say why he targeted the couples, prosecutors said.

Vance Boelter also wrote in the letter that Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz had approached him about killing the state’s two U.S. senators, fellow Democrats Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith.

Asked by a reporter if all that was a fantasy, acting U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson replied: “Yes, I agree.”

“There is little evidence showing why he turned to political violence and extremism,” Thompson said. “What he left were lists: politicians in Minnesota, lists of politicians in other states, lists of names of attorneys at national law firms.”

The indictment handed up murder, stalking and firearms charges against Boelter. The murder counts in the deaths of former Democratic House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, could carry the federal death penalty. The indictment also charged Boelter with shooting and wounding a state senator and his wife, and attempting to shoot their adult daughter.

Thompson said a decision on whether to seek the death penalty “will not come for several months” and will be up to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi. Minnesota abolished its state death penalty in 1911, but President Donald Trump’s administration says it intends to be aggressive in seeking capital punishment for eligible federal crimes.

Prosecutors initially charged Boelter with the same six counts. But under federal court rules they needed a grand jury indictment to take the case to trial. His arraignment, where he could enter a plea, will probably be scheduled for later in the week, Thompson said

Boelter’s federal defender, Manny Atwal, did not immediately return messages seeking comment on the indictment and the new allegations.

Political extremism as a motive

Thompson also disclosed new details at a news conference. He said investigators had found the handwritten letter, which was addressed to the FBI chief, in a car Boelter abandoned near his home.

“In the letter, Vance Boelter claims that he had been trained by the U.S. military off the books and he had conducted missions on behalf of the U.S. military in Asia, the Middle East and Africa,” Thompson said.

The letter doesn’t specifically say though why he targeted the Hortmans and Hoffmans.

Boelter’s political and religious views

Friends have described Boelter as an evangelical Christian with politically conservative views who had been struggling to find work. At a hearing July 3, Boelter said he was “looking forward to the facts about the 14th coming out.”

In an interview published by the New York Post on Saturday, Boelter insisted the shootings had nothing to do with his opposition to abortion or his support for Trump, but he declined to discuss why he allegedly killed the Hortmans and wounded the Hoffmans.

“You are fishing and I can’t talk about my case…I’ll say it didn’t involve either the Trump stuff or pro life,” Boelter wrote in a message to the newspaper via the jail’s messaging system.

Boelter also faces state murder and attempted murder charges in Hennepin County, but the federal case will go first.

Other details of the case

Prosecutors say Boelter, 57, who has lived in rural Sibley County south of Minneapolis, was disguised as a police officer, driving a fake squad car, wearing a realistic rubber mask and wearing tactical gear around 2 a.m. on June 14 when he went to the home of Sen. John Hoffman, a Democrat, and his wife, Yvette, in the Minneapolis suburb of Champlin. He allegedly shot the senator nine times, and Yvette Hoffman eight times, but they survived. He also allegedly tried to kill their adult daughter, Hope, but they pushed her out of the way and she was not hit.

Prosecutors allege he then stopped at the homes of two other lawmakers. One wasn’t home while a police officer may have scared him off from the other target. Boelter then allegedly went to the Hortmans’ home in nearby Brooklyn Park and killed both of them. Their dog was so gravely injured that he had to be euthanized.

Brooklyn Park police, who had been alerted to the shootings of the Hoffmans, arrived at the Hortman home around 3:30 a.m., moments before the gunman opened fire on the couple, court documents said. Boelter allegedly fled and left behind his car, which contained notebooks listing dozens of Democratic officials as potential targets with their home addresses, as well as five guns and a large quantity of ammunition.

Thompson said the gun used to shoot the Hoffmans was found near the Hortman home, while the gun used to shoot the Hortmans was recovered from a pond near their home a few days later.

Law enforcement officers finally captured Boelter about 40 hours later, about a mile (1.6 kilometers) from his rural home in Green Isle, after what authorities called the largest search for a suspect in state history.

Remembering the victims

Sen. Hoffman is out of the hospital and is now at a rehabilitation facility, his family announced last week, adding he has a long road to recovery. Yvette Hoffman was released a few days after the attack.

Hope Hoffman said in a statement Tuesday that she was relieved that Boelter will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

“Though I was not shot physically, I will now forever coexist with the PTSD of watching my parents be nearly shot dead in front of me and seeing my life flash before my eyes with a gun in my face,” she said.

Hortman led the House from 2019 until January and was a driving force as Democrats passed an ambitious list of liberal priorities in 2023. She yielded the speakership to a Republican in a power-sharing deal after the November elections left the House tied, and she took the title speaker emerita.

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Associated Press reporter Ed White in Detroit contributed to this report.

Gabriel House had seen better days.

The 100-unit assisted-living facility that burned Sunday night, killing nine people so far, opened in 1999 in Fall River, Massachusetts. Some photos on its Facebook page show neat rooms but older-looking carpeting and furniture. Her granddaughter didn’t like the assisted-living center, but 86-year-old Eleanor Willett wanted something that left her money to play the slots at a casino. She earned too much to qualify for Medicaid but not enough to afford a higher-priced assisted-living facility, Holly Mallowes told The Associated Press Tuesday.

“She said, ‘I don’t need much, but a roof over my head and someplace to put my sewing machine,’” Mallowes said.

Willett was the oldest to die. Here’s what is known so far about the victims.

Eleanor Willett

A Massachusetts native, Willett spent more than 20 years as a secretary and even worked briefly as a cocktail waitress, her granddaughter said.

Her home was always a base for everyone in her family, Mallowes said.

“My mom worked a lot and Grammy’s was always a place we called home,” said Mallowes, 45. “We lived with her often. She was very strong. She outlived two husbands and raised five children. She was absolutely a joy.”

Mallowes, a paralegal who lives in Dartmouth, described her grandmother as “very religious” and a “devout Catholic.”

“She wanted to be somewhat independent,” Mallowes said of Willett’s decision to move to Gabriel House in Fall River, about 50 miles (80 kilometers) south of Boston. “To leave her home alone all day, I was to afraid something might happen.”

“As our grandparents and parents get older, we say ‘I’ll make it to go see them a different day’ and you always put it off,” Mallowes said. “See them while you can. Tomorrow is not promised.”

Kim Mackin

Mackin, 71, was a violist who performed in Boston-area orchestras, according to her nephew, Austin Mackin.

She was described in a statement from family members as “gifted beyond words.”

“We will all miss Kimmy,” the statement read. “Beyond being exceptionally kind, few knew that she was a brilliant musician.”

Kim Mackin received a full scholarship to the Manhattan School of Music and after graduating, toured the world as first chair viola.

Richard Rochon

Breonna Cestodio described her 78-year-old uncle, Rochon, as “a very quiet guy,” yet a “great guy.”

“He kept to himself,” she told reporters. “He was a sharpshooter in the Army. He loved getting visits from all of his nieces and nephews.”

Rochon moved into Gabriel House about a year ago. Cestodio had little good to say about the facility, remarking that it always seemed hot inside the building.

“Every time you visited him, he was sweating,” she said. “No air in the building. I never saw any workers, except in one closed-off section. I never saw any workers.”

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Associated Press writer Mark Scolforo contributed from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The University of Michigan is under federal scrutiny after two Chinese scientists linked to the school were separately charged with smuggling biological materials into the United States.

The Education Department on Tuesday opened an investigation into the university’s foreign funding, citing the pair of cases that were announced days apart in June. It said the “highly disturbing criminal charges” raise concerns about Michigan’s vulnerability to national security threats from China.

“Despite the University of Michigan’s history of downplaying its vulnerabilities to malign foreign influence, recent reports reveal that UM’s research laboratories remain vulnerable to sabotage,” said Paul Moore, chief investigative counsel of the department.

President Donald Trump has made it a priority to increase transparency around foreign gifts and contracts to U.S. universities, especially those tied to China. Similar investigations have been opened at Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California, Berkeley.

It joins efforts from Republicans in Congress who have urged universities to cut research ties with China, saying China exploits the relationships to steal technology. Michigan ended a partnership with a university in Shanghai in January amid pressure from House Republicans who called it a security risk.

The new investigation demands financial records from Michigan, along with information about research collaborations with institutions outside the U.S. The Education Department accuses Michigan of being “incomplete, inaccurate and untimely” in its public disclosures around funding from foreign sources.

In a statement, UM spokesperson Colleen Mastony said the university will cooperate with federal investigators and takes its responsibility to comply with the law “extremely seriously.”

“We strongly condemn any actions that seek to cause harm, threaten national security or undermine the university’s critical public mission,” Mastony wrote.

Federal authorities brought charges in June against a Chinese scientist and his girlfriend — who worked at a lab at the University of Michigan — after the FBI said it halted their effort to bring a toxic fungus into the United States.

Days later, authorities arrested a Chinese scientist who was arriving in the U.S. and has been accused of shipping biological material to a laboratory at the University of Michigan.

In June, the university announced a review of protocols related to research security.

In a letter to the university, however, the Education Department said some school officials have downplayed the vulnerability of research collaborations with Chinese institutions. It singles out Ann Chih Lin, director of the university’s Center for Chinese Studies, who has publicly said the threat of technology theft from China is overstated.

“Lin’s apparent indifference to the national security concerns of the largest single source of funding for UM’s annual research expenditures — the American taxpayer — is particularly unsettling,” Education Department officials wrote.

Federal law requires universities to report all gifts and contracts from foreign sources totaling $250,000 or more. The law went mostly unenforced until Trump’s first term, when the Education Department opened a dozen inquiries into universities accused of underreporting foreign money. The Biden administration closed most of those cases, but the effort has recently been renewed.

Many U.S. universities acknowledge a need to improve research security but caution against treating Chinese scholars with hostility and suspicion, saying only small numbers have been involved in espionage.

Last year, House Republicans issued a report finding that hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding had gone toward research that ultimately boosted Chinese advancements in artificial intelligence, semiconductor technology and nuclear weapons.

China is the second-largest country of origin for foreign students in the U.S., behind only India. In the 2023-24 academic year, more than 270,000 international students were from China, making up roughly a quarter of all foreign students in the United States.

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The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

MP Materials, which runs the only American rare earths mine, announced a new $500 million agreement with tech giant Apple on Tuesday to produce more of the powerful magnets used in iPhones as well as other high-tech products like electric vehicles.

This news comes on the heels of last week’s announcement that the U.S. Defense Department agreed to invest $400 million in shares of the Las Vegas-based company. That will make the government the largest shareholder in MP Materials and help increase magnet production.

Despite their name, the 17 rare earth elements aren’t actually rare, but it’s hard to find them in a high enough concentration to make a mine worth the investment.

They are important ingredients in everything from smartphones and submarines to EVs and fighter jets, and it’s those military applications that have made rare earths a key concern in ongoing U.S. trade talks. That’s because China dominates the market and imposed new limits on exports after President Donald Trump announced his widespread tariffs. When shipments dried up, the two sides sat down in London.

The agreement with Apple will allow MP Materials to further expand its new factory in Texas to use recycled materials to produce the magnets that make iPhones vibrate. The company expects to start producing magnets for GM’s electric vehicles later this year and this agreement will let it start producing magnets for Apple in 2027.

The Apple agreement represents a sliver of the company’s pledge to invest $500 billion domestically during the Trump administration. And although the deal will provide a significant boost for MP Materials, the agreement with the Defense Department may be even more meaningful.

Neha Mukherjee, a rare earths analyst with Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, said in a research note that the Pentagon’s 10-year promise to guarantee a minimum price for the key elements of neodymium and praseodymium will guarantee stable revenue for MP Minerals and protect it from potential price cuts by Chinese producers that are subsidized by their government.

“This is the kind of long-term commitment needed to reshape global rare earth supply chains,” Mukherjee said.

Trump has made it a priority to try to reduce American reliance on China for rare earths. His administration is both helping MP Materials and trying to encourage the development of new mines that would take years to come to fruition. China has agreed to issue some permits for rare earth exports but not for military uses, and much uncertainty remains about their supply. The fear is that the trade war between the world’s two biggest economies could lead to a critical shortage of rare earth elements that could disrupt production of a variety of products. MP Materials can’t satisfy all of the U.S. demand from its Mountain Pass mine in California’s Mojave Desert.

The deals by MP Materials come as Beijing and Washington have agreed to walk back on their non-tariff measures: China is to grant export permits for rare earth magnets to the U.S., and the U.S. is easing export controls on chip design software and jet engines. The truce is intended to ease tensions and prevent any catastrophic fall-off in bilateral relations, but is unlikely to address fundamental differences as both governments take steps to reduce dependency on each other.

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Associated Press writers David Klepper and Didi Tang in Washington and Michael Liedtke in San Francisco contributed.

NEW YORK (AP) — Two people in New Jersey were killed after their vehicle was swept up in floodwaters during a storm that moved across the U.S. Northeast overnight, authorities said Tuesday.

Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat, noted the deaths occurred in the northern New Jersey city of Plainfield, where there were two storm-related deaths July 3. A third person was killed in North Plainfield during that previous storm.

“We’re not unique, but we’re in one of these sort of high humidity, high temperature, high storm intensity patterns right now,” Murphy told reporters after touring storm damage in Berkeley Heights. “Everybody needs to stay alert.”

The names of the two latest victims were not immediately released Tuesday. Local officials said the vehicle they were riding in was swept into a brook during the height of the storm.

“Emergency personnel responded quickly, but tragically, both individuals were pronounced dead at the scene,” according to a statement the city posted online.

The heavy rains also caused flash floods in New York and south-central Pennsylvania on Monday night into early Tuesday, prompting road closures and snarling some service on the New York City subway.

It was the second-highest one-hour rainfall ever recorded in Central Park at more than 2 inches (5 centimeters), surpassed only by the remnants of Hurricane Ida in 2021, according to local officials.

Flooding in the New York City subway

Viral videos posted online showed water flooding down into one Manhattan subway station, submerging the platform while passengers inside a train watched on.

Janno Lieber, chair and CEO of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, told ABC 7 in New York the city’s sewer system got overwhelmed by the rain and backed up into the subway tunnels and to the stations. In several cases, he said, the backup “popped a manhole,” creating the dramatic “geyser” seen in some videos.

“What happened last night is something that is, you know, a reality in our system,” he told the TV station, noting the backup happens when more than 1 3/4 inches of rain falls in an hour. “We’ve been working with the city of New York to try to get them to increase the capacity of the system at these key locations.”

City officials said their venerable sewer system worked as well as it could, but it simply was not built to handle that much rain.

“Imagine putting a two-liter bottle of water into a one-liter bottle. Some of it’s going to spill,” Environmental Protection Commissioner Rohit Aggarwala said at a virtual news briefing Tuesday.

Lieber said full service was restored to the subway, as well as commuter rails, after hundreds of people worked overnight to restore operations.

Flooding has proven to be a stubborn problem for New York’s subway system, despite years and billions of dollars’ worth of efforts to waterproof them.

Superstorm Sandy in 2012 prompted years of subway repairs and flood-fighting ideas, and some have been put into practice. In some places, transit officials have installed or are installing storm barriers at subway station entrances, seals beneath subway air vents and curbs to raise the vents and entrances above sidewalk level.

Meanwhile, summer thunderstorms and the remains of hurricanes have repeatedly flooded parts of the subway system anew. In 2021, the remnants of Hurricane Ida killed more than a dozen New York City residents, largely in basement apartments, and sent water cascading again into subways, renewing attention to resiliency proposals.

The storm’s effects in New Jersey and Pennsylvania

The storm prompted multiple water rescues in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where streets and basements flooded after roughly 7 inches (18 centimeters) of rain fell. Some roads remained closed in parts of Pennsylvania and New Jersey on Tuesday. Murphy said the pavement buckled in some locations and state and local officials were assessing the level of damage in several counties, noting the White House had reached out to his office.

A major east-to-west highway in New Jersey was closed to make emergency repairs while dozens of flights were delayed or canceled at area airports Tuesday.

Most flash flood watches and warnings had expired in parts of New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania as the rain moved on.

In one flooded North Plainfield neighborhood, a house caught on fire and collapsed amid the storm. Murphy said there was an explosion at the house but the family was not home and there were no injuries. The cause was under investigation.

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Haigh reported from Connecticut.

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This story has been corrected to reflect Janno Lieber is CEO of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, not the Metropolitan Transit Authority.

NEW YORK (AP) — A federal judge in Texas removed a Biden-era finalized rule by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that would have removed medical debt from credit reports.

U.S. District Court Judge Sean Jordan of Texas’s Eastern District, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, found on Friday that the rule exceeded the CFPB ‘s authority. Jordan said that the CFPB is not permitted to remove medical debt from credit reports according to the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which protects information collected by consumer reporting agencies.

Removing medical debt from consumer credit reports was expected to increase the credit scores of millions of families by an average of 20 points, the bureau said. The CFPB states that its research has shown outstanding healthcare claims to be a poor predictor of an individual’s ability to repay a loan, yet they are often used to deny mortgage applications.

The three national credit reporting agencies — Experian, Equifax and TransUnion — announced last year that they would remove medical collections under $500 from U.S. consumer credit reports. The CFPB’s rule was projected to ban all outstanding medical bills from appearing on credit reports and prohibit lenders from using the information.

The CFPB estimated the rule would have removed $49 billion in medical debt from the credit reports of 15 million Americans. According to the agency, one in five Americans has at least one medical debt collection account on their credit reports, and over half of the collection entries on credit reports are for medical debts. The problem disproportionately affects people of color, the CFPB has found: 28% of Black people and 22% of Latino people in the U.S. carry medical debt versus 17% of white people.

The CFPB was established by Congress after the 2008 financial crisis to monitor credit card companies, mortgage providers, debt collectors and other segments of the consumer finance industry. Earlier this year, the Trump administration requested that the agency halt nearly all its operations, effectively shutting it down.

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PARIS (AP) — France’s prime minister proposed on Tuesday the elimination of two public holidays from the country’s annual calendar — possibly Easter Monday and the day marking the Allied victory over the Nazis — to save money in next year’s budget.

That’s among a raft of spending cuts laid out by Prime Minister Francois Bayrou in a sweeping, and potentially doomed, budget plan. He argued that removing two state holidays would bring in tax revenues generated from economic activity, contributing to around 44 billion euros ($51.3 billion) in overall savings.

President Emmanuel Macron tasked Bayrou with crafting a budget that shaves costs to bring down France’s staggering debt and deficit — while also adding billions in new defense spending to face what Macron says are resurgent threats from Russia and beyond.

Bayrou questioned the religious importance of Easter Monday. And Victory Day, celebrated on May 8, comes in a month that has become a “veritable Gruyere,” or holey cheese, of days off that includes May Day and the Catholic holiday of Ascension, he said.

He said that those holidays were just suggestions, and that he was open to other ideas. France currently has 11 official holidays per year.

With no parliamentary majority, Macron’s centrist grouping must win support from adversaries on the left and right to pass the budget this fall. Bayrou’s proposals, which are just a first step in the budget process, were quickly assailed by unions and the far-right National Rally, the largest single party in the lower house of Parliament.

Bayrou’s job is precarious, and he could be voted out if he fails to reach compromise on the budget.