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COUNSELOR, N.M. (AP) — On a Tuesday in March, Billton Werito drove his son Amari toward his house in Counselor, New Mexico, navigating the bumpy dirt road that winds through a maze of natural gas pipelines, wellheads and water tanks. Amari should have been in school, but a bout of nausea and a dull headache kept him from class.“It happens a lot,” Amari explained from the backseat, glancing up from his Nintendo Switch. The symptoms usually show up when the sixth-grader smells an odor of “rotten egg with propane” that rises from nearby natural gas wells and wafts over Lybrook…

The US will also ‘enhance scrutiny of all future visa applications’ from China and Hong Kong, the State Department said.The United States will “aggressively revoke” the visas of Chinese students studying in the country, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has announced, as the administration of President Donald Trump continues its crackdown on foreign students enrolled at higher education institutions in the US. Rubio announced the shock move in a post on X, as well as a State Department statement published late on Wednesday, titled “New Visa Policies Put America First, Not China”. “Under President Trump’s leadership, the US State Department…

A United States federal judge has said that an effort by the administration of President Donald Trump to deport pro-Palestine student activist Mahmoud Khalil is likely unconstitutional. District Judge Michael Farbiarz of New Jersey wrote on Wednesday that the government’s claim that Khalil constituted a threat to US national security and foreign policy was not likely to succeed. “Would an ordinary person have a sense that he could be removed from the United States because he ‘compromise[d]’ American ‘foreign policy interests’ — that is, because he compromised US relations with other countries — when the Secretary has not determined that…

US electronic design automation software makers were told via letters to stop supplies to China, the FT reported.United States President Donald Trump’s administration has ordered US firms that offer software used to design semiconductors to stop selling their services to Chinese groups, the Financial Times has reported, citing people familiar with the move. Electronic design automation software makers, which include Cadence, Synopsys and Siemens EDA, were told via letters from the US Commerce Department to stop supplying their tech, the report, which was published on Wednesday, said. A spokesperson for the Commerce Department declined to comment on the letters but…

United States President Donald Trump has brushed aside criticism of his wide-ranging budget bill — known as the One Big Beautiful Bill — from a high-profile source, government adviser Elon Musk. On Wednesday, at a swearing-in ceremony in the Oval Office, Trump faced questions about Musk’s comments, which suggested the bill would balloon the national debt. The Republican leader responded with a degree of ambivalence, though he staunchly defended the bill’s tax cuts. “We will be negotiating that bill, and I’m not happy about certain aspects of it, but I’m thrilled by other aspects of it,” Trump said. “That’s the…

OXON HILL, Md. (AP) — With the benefit of hindsight, Vikram Raju knows there was almost no chance he would win after being a runner-up in the 2022 Scripps National Spelling Bee.“The chances of getting that high are infinitesimally small, and the chances of doing it again are an order of magnitude smaller, obviously,” Vikram said Wednesday. “So it’s a really daunting feeling as well because you always try to outdo yourself from the previous year.”Don’t tell Faizan Zaki those odds.Faizan, who lost to Bruhat Soma in a “spell-off” tiebreaker last year, was the only speller to earn a perfect…

US president says Harvard must ‘show us their list’ of foreign students to make sure they are not ‘troublemakers’.United States President Donald Trump has intensified his dispute with Harvard University, saying the college should cap foreign enrolments and share information with the government about its international students. “Harvard has to show us their lists. They have foreign students, almost 31 percent of their students. We want to know where those students come from. Are they troublemakers? What countries do they come from?” Trump told reporters at the White House on Wednesday. According to university enrolment data, foreign students make up…

US president says an Israeli strike ‘would be inappropriate to do right now because we’re very close to a solution.’United States President Donald Trump has said that he told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to hold off on any strike against Iran to give his administration more time to push for a new nuclear deal with Tehran, as several rounds of talks have been held in Oman and Italy. Trump told reporters on Wednesday at the White House that he relayed to Netanyahu a strike “would be inappropriate to do right now because we’re very close to a solution”. The…

Russia has proposed a new round of direct talks with Ukraine in Turkiye’s Istanbul on Monday with the goal of securing a lasting ceasefire, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov says after heavy bombardments of its neighbour and aerial exchanges in the past week. “We hope that all those who are sincerely, and not just in words, interested in the success of the peace process will support holding a new round of direct Russian-Ukrainian negotiations in Istanbul,”  Lavrov said in a statement on Wednesday. Kyiv responded a short time later, saying it had already submitted its version of the memorandum on…

Avelo Airlines, a struggling, Houston, Texas-based budget carrier, has faced weeks of backlash after taking a contract with the United States government to use its planes to deport migrants, the first commercial airline to do so. Avelo, which started the deportation flights in mid-May, defended the move in an April 3 letter to employees, saying its partnership with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency is “too valuable not to pursue”. Founded in 2021, the airline has been in financial turmoil and was projected to have only about $2m in cash on hand by June, the trade publication Airline Observer…