The Pentagon did not inform the White House National Security Council or top adviser Jake Sullivan of Austin’s hospitalization at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, until Thursday, according to NBC News.

The Pentagon’s failure to disclose Austin’s hospitalization for days reflects a stunning lack of transparency about his illness, how serious it was and when he may be released. Such secrecy, at a time when the United States is juggling myriad national security crises, runs counter to normal practice with the president and other senior U.S. officials and Cabinet members.

Still, President Joe Biden spoke with Austin on Saturday, and expressed confidence in him, according to a White House official who was not authorized to speak publicly about internal discussions and spoke on condition of anonymity.

In a statement issued Saturday evening, Austin took responsibility for the delays in notification.

“I recognize I could have done a better job ensuring the public was appropriately informed. I commit to doing better,” said Austin, acknowledging the concerns about transparency. “But this is important to say: this was my medical procedure, and I take full responsibility for my decisions about disclosure.”

Austin, 70, remained hospitalized due to complications following a minor elective medical procedure, his press secretary said, as it became increasingly clear how closely the Pentagon held information about his stay at Walter Reed. In his statement, Austin said he is on the mend and is looking forward to returning to the Pentagon soon, but he provided no other details about his ailment.

Air Force Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said the White House and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were notified about Austin’s hospitalization, but he would not confirm when that notice happened.

Ryder said members of Congress were told late Friday afternoon, and other officials said lawmakers were informed after 5 p.m. It was not clear when key senior members of Austin’s staff were told, but across the Pentagon, many staff found out when the department released a statement about Austin’s hospital stay just minutes after 5 p.m. Many believed Austin was out on vacation for the week.

Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks, who took over when Austin was hospitalized, was also away. A U.S. official said she had a communications setup with her in Puerto Rico that allowed her to do the job while Austin, who spent 41 years in the military and retired as a four-star Army general in 2016, was incapacitated.

Ryder said Saturday that Austin is recovering well and resumed his full duties Friday evening from his hospital bed. Asked why the hospital stay was kept secret for so long, Ryder said on Friday that it was an “evolving situation,” and that due to privacy and medical issues, the Pentagon did not make Austin’s absence public. Ryder declined to provide any other details about Austin’s medical procedure or health.

“The Department of Defense deliberately withheld the Secretary of Defense’s medical condition for days. That is unacceptable,” said Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker, the highest-ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee. “We are learning more every hour about the Department’s shocking defiance of the law.”

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Arkansas, also criticized the delayed notice.

“The Secretary of Defense is the key link in the chain of command between the president and the uniformed military, including the nuclear chain of command, when the weightiest of decisions must be made in minutes,” said Cotton in a statement, adding that if Austin didn’t immediately tell the White House, “there must be consequences for this shocking breakdown.”

The Pentagon Press Association, which represents media members who cover the Defense Department, sent a letter of protest on Friday evening to Ryder and Chris Meagher, the assistant defense secretary for public affairs.

“The fact that he has been at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for four days and the Pentagon is only now alerting the public late on a Friday evening is an outrage,” the PPA said in its letter. “At a time when there are growing threats to U.S. military service members in the Middle East and the U.S. is playing key national security roles in the wars in Israel and Ukraine, it is particularly critical for the American public to be informed about the health status and decision-making ability of its top defense leader.”

Other senior U.S. leaders have been much more transparent about hospital stays. When Attorney General Merrick Garland went in for a routine medical procedure in 2022, his office informed the public a week in advance and outlined how long he was expected to be out and when he would return to work.

Austin’s hospitalization comes as Iranian-backed militias have repeatedly launched drones, missiles and rockets at bases where U.S. troops are stationed in Iraq and Syria, leading the Biden administration to strike back on a number of occasions. Those strikes often involve sensitive, top-level discussions and decisions by Austin and other key military leaders.

The U.S. is also the chief organizer behind a new international maritime coalition using ships and other assets to patrol the southern Red Sea to deter persistent attacks on commercial vessels by Houthi militants in Yemen.

In addition, the administration, particularly Austin, has been at the forefront of the effort to supply weapons and training to Ukraine, and he’s also been communicating frequently with the Israelis on their war against Hamas.

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Associated Press writer Colleen Long in Wilmington, Delaware, and Lisa Mascaro, Tara Copp and Farnoush Amiri in Washington contributed to this report.

The incentives announced Thursday include $90 million to improve a plant in Colorado Springs, Colo., and $72 million to expand a factory in Gresham, Ore., the Commerce Department said. The investments would enable Microchip Technology Inc., which is based in Chandler, Ariz., to triple its domestic production and reduce its dependence on foreign factories.

Much of the money would fund the making of microcontrollers, which are used by the military as well as in autos, household appliances and medical devices. Government officials said they expected the investments to create 700 construction and manufacturing jobs over the next decade.

Lael Brainard, director of the White House National Economic Council, emphasized that the funding would help to tame inflation.

“Semiconductors are the key input in so many goods that are vital to our economy,” said Brainard, adding that greater U.S. production of chips would have reduced the supply problems that caused the cost of autos and washing machines, among other goods, to rise as the country emerged from the coronavirus pandemic in 2021.

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The inflation rate has since eased, but the scars caused by the sudden price increases have damaged President Joe Biden’s public approval.

In August 2022, the Democratic president signed the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act, which provides more than $52 billion to boost the development and manufacturing of semiconductors in the United States.

In December, the Commerce Department announced the first grants by saying it reached an agreement to provide $35 million to BAE Systems, which plans to expand a New Hampshire factory making chips for military aircraft, including F-15 and F-35 jets.

Government officials expect to make additional funding commitments this year.

The deal represents the Biden administration’s boldest move yet to improve relations with the major oil-producing nation and extract concessions from the self-proclaimed socialist leader. The largest release of American prisoners in Venezuela’s history comes weeks after the White House agreed to suspend some sanctions, following a commitment by Maduro to work toward free and fair conditions for the 2024 presidential election.

Maduro celebrated the return of Alex Saab as a “triumph for truth” over a U.S.-led campaign of lies, threats and torture against someone he considers a Venezuelan diplomat illegally arrested on a U.S. warrant.

“President Biden, we won’t be anyone’s colony,” a defiant Maduro said with Saab at his side for a hero’s welcome at the presidential palace.

The release of Saab, long regarded by Washington as a bagman for Maduro, is a significant concession to the Venezuelan leader. Former President Donald Trump’s administration held out Saab as a trophy, spending millions of dollars pursuing the Colombian-born businessman, at one point even deploying a Navy warship to the coast of West Africa following his arrest in Cape Verde to ward off a possible escape.

U.S. officials said Biden’s decision to grant him clemency was difficult but essential in order to bring home jailed Americans, a core administrative objective that in recent years has resulted in the release of criminals once seen as untradeable.

“These individuals have lost far too much precious time with their loved ones, and their families have suffered every day in their absence. I am grateful that their ordeal is finally over,” President Joe Biden said in a statement.

The agreement also resulted in the return to U.S. custody of Leonard Glenn Francis, the Malaysian owner of a ship-servicing company who is the central character in one of the largest bribery scandals in Pentagon history.

But the exchange angered many in the Venezuelan opposition who have criticized the White House for standing by as Maduro has repeatedly outmaneuvered Washington after the Trump administration’s campaign to topple him failed.

In October, the White House eased sanctions on Venezuela’s oil industry following promises by Maduro that he would level the playing field for the 2024 election, when he’s looking to add six years to his decade-long, crisis-ridden rule. A Nov. 30 deadline has passed and so far Maduro has failed to reverse a ban blocking his chief opponent, María Corina Machado, from running for office.

Biden told reporters earlier in the day that, so far, Maduro appeared to be “keeping his commitment on a free election.” Republicans, echoing the sentiment of many in the U.S.-backed opposition, said Saab’s release would only embolden Maduro to continue down an authoritarian path.

“Disgraceful decision,” Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, posted on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.

The White House went to lengths to assure it won’t hesitate to snap back sanctions if Venezuela’s government fails to fulfill electoral commitments hammered out during negotiations with the opposition. A $15 million reward seeking Maduro’s arrest to face drug trafficking charges in New York also remains in effect, it said.

The agreement also requires Maduro’s government to release 21 Venezuelans, including a close ally of Machado, who has yet to comment on the release.

Among the Americans released are two former Green Berets, Luke Denman and Airan Berry, who were involved in an attempt to oust Maduro in 2019.

“It was literally an early Christmas present,” the family of Eyvin Hernandez, a Los Angeles County public defender arrested almost two years ago along the Colombia-Venezuela border, said in a statement.

The U.S. has conducted several swaps with Venezuela over the past few years, including one in October 2022 for seven Americans, including five oil executives at Houston-based Citgo, in exchange for the release of two nephews of Maduro’s wife jailed in the U.S. on narcotics charges. Like that earlier exchange, Wednesday’s swap took place on an airstrip in the Caribbean island nation of St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

Saab, who turns 52 on Thursday, hugged his wife and two young children as he descended the staircase of a private jet at the Simon Bolivar International Airport. Also present to welcome him was Venezuela’s first lady, Cilia Flores.

It was a stark reversal from the scene on another tarmac, in Cape Verde, where he was arrested in 2020 during a fuel stop en route to Iran to negotiate oil deals on behalf of Maduro’s government. The U.S. charges were conspiracy to commit money laundering tied to a bribery scheme that allegedly siphoned off $350 million through state contracts to build affordable housing. Saab was also sanctioned for allegedly running a scheme that stole hundreds of millions in dollars from food-import contracts at a time of widespread hunger mainly due to shortages in the South American country.

After his arrest, Maduro’s government said Saab was a special envoy on a humanitarian mission and was entitled to diplomatic immunity from criminal prosecution under international law.

“Life is a miracle,” Saab said, standing alongside Maduro at the neoclassical presidential palace in Caracas. “I’m proud to serve the Venezuelan people and this government, a loyal government, which, like me, never gives up. We will always triumph.”

Absent from Maduro’s chest-thumping was any mention of Saab’s secret meetings with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. In a closed-door court hearing last year, Saab’s lawyers said that he was for years helping that agency untangle corruption in Maduro’s inner circle and had agreed to forfeit millions of dollars in illegal proceeds from corrupt state contracts.

But the value of the information he shared with the Americans is unknown; some have suggested it may have all been a Maduro-authorized ruse to collect intelligence on the U.S. law enforcement activities in Venezuela. Whatever the case, Saab skipped out on a May 2019 surrender date and shortly afterward was charged by federal prosecutors in Miami.

The deal is the latest concession by the Biden administration in the name of bringing home Americans jailed overseas, including a high-profile prisoner exchange last December when the U.S. government — over the objections of some Republicans in Congress and criticism from some law enforcement officials — traded Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout for WNBA star Brittney Griner.

The swaps have raised concerns that the U.S. is incentivizing hostage-taking abroad and producing a false equivalence between Americans who are wrongfully detained abroad and foreigners who have been properly prosecuted and convicted in U.S courts.

“What happened to the separation of powers?” said Juan Cruz, who oversaw the White House’s relations with Latin America while working at the National Security Council from 2017-19. “Normally you would have to wait a defendant to be found guilty in order to be able to pardon him for a swap. This is an especially bad precedent with a Trump 2.0 potentially around the corner. It invites winking and nodding from the executive.”

But Biden administration officials say securing the freedom of wrongfully detained Americans and hostages abroad requires difficult dealmaking.

Making this deal more palatable to the White House was Venezuela’s willingness to return Francis.

Nicknamed “Fat Leonard” for his bulging 6-foot-3 frame, Francis was arrested in a San Diego hotel nearly a decade ago as part of a federal sting operation. Investigators say he bilked the U.S. military out of more than $35 million by buying off dozens of top-ranking Navy officers with booze, sex, lavish parties and other gifts.

Three weeks before he faced sentencing in September 2022, Francis made an escape as stunning and brazen as the case itself as he snipped off his ankle monitor and disappeared. He was arrested by Venezuelan police attempting to board a flight from Caracas and has been in custody since.

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Tucker reported from Washington and Garcia Cano from Caracas, Venezuela. Associated Press writers Michael Balsamo and Jim Mustian in New York, Julie Watson in San Diego and Matthew Lee in Washington contributed to this report.

Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla of California was on the phone constantly with administration officials questioning why the Senate negotiations did not include any meaningful consideration of providing pathways to citizenship for longtime immigrants lacking the proper legal documents.

New Mexico Democrat Sen. Ben Ray Luján made similar arguments as he tried to get meetings with top-level White House officials.

But when the talks didn’t seem to make enough difference, the influential lawmakers started leading the open opposition.

“A return to Trump-era policies is not the fix,” Padilla said. “In fact, it will make the problem worse.”

Padilla even pulled President Joe Biden aside at a fundraiser last weekend in California to warn him “to be careful” of being dragged into “harmful policy.”

The Latino senators have found themselves on shifting ground in the debate over immigration as the Democratic president, who is reaching for a border deal as part of his $110 billion package for Ukraine, Israel and other national security needs, has tried to reduce the historic numbers of people arriving at the U.S. border with Mexico.

The negotiations, which intensified Saturday at the Capitol as bargainers race to draft a framework by this weekend, come as the Biden administration has increasingly endured criticism over its handling of border and immigration issues — not just from Republicans, but from members of the president’s own party as well. Democratic cities and states have been vocal about the financial toll that they say migrants have been taking on their resources.

But left off the table in the talks are pro-immigration changes, such as granting permanent legal status to thousands of immigrants who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children, often referred to as “Dreamers,” based on the DREAM Act that would have provided similar protections for young immigrants but was never approved.

A few days after his conversation with the president, Padilla, Luján and Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., aired their concerns prominently at a Congressional Hispanic Caucus news conference in front of the Capitol.

They slammed Senate Republicans for demanding the border policy changes in exchange for Ukraine aid, and they criticized Biden for making concessions that they say ultimately undermine the United States’ standing as a country that welcomes immigrants.

Padilla said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has promised him and several other senators to allow them to see proposals before there is a final agreement. But Latino lawmakers have largely been left outside the core negotiating group, even as they consistently proposed progressive fixes to the U.S. immigration system.

Biden is facing pressure from all sides. He has been criticized about the record numbers of migrants at the border and he is also trying to address the political weakness before a potential campaign rematch next year with Donald Trump, the former Republican president, who has promised to enact far-right immigration measures.

And the issue is now tied to a top Biden foreign policy goal: providing robust support for Ukraine’s defense against Russia.

The White House and Senate leaders are pushing for a framework of the border deal by Sunday, in preparation for possible votes in the week ahead.

“We’ll need to have some kind of framework by the end of the weekend,” Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, the key Republican negotiator, said Saturday during a break in the talks that included Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

Recently during the negotiations, the White House has pushed to include provisions that would legalize young immigrants who came to the U.S. illegally as children, according to two people with knowledge of the closed-door talks. But others said that was quickly taken off the table by Republicans.

Senators said they are running into the complex nature of U.S. immigration law. “Byzantine,” said Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn..

“The amount of time it takes is not necessarily reflective of massive differences, it’s just about getting it right,” Murphy said. “Nobody’s storming out of these rooms, which is good news.”

The bipartisan group negotiating the package has acknowledged that it expects to lose votes from both the left and right wings of either party.

“Regardless of people’s political persuasions, this is a crisis,” said Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, an Arizona independent who is part of the core negotiating group. “There is nothing that is humane about having thousands of individuals sitting in the desert without access to restrooms or food or water, no shade, just waiting for days to interact with a Border Patrol agent. That’s what’s happening in southern Arizona.”

But immigration advocates have been rallying opposition to the proposed changes — often comparing them to Trump-era measures.

Using words like “draconian” and “betrayal,” advocates argued during a Friday call with reporters that the proposals would undermine U.S. commitments to accepting people fleeing persecution and do little to stop people from making the long, dangerous journey to the border.

One of the policies under consideration would allow border officials to easily send migrants back to Mexico without letting them seek asylum in America, but advocates argue it could just place them into the hands of dangerous cartels that prey on migrants in northern Mexico.

Advocates also say that when the Trump and Biden administrations previously used the expulsion authority on public health grounds during the pandemic, migrants sent back to Mexico didn’t return home. Instead they tried over and over again to enter the U.S. because there were no repercussions.

Greg Chen, senior director of government relations for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said it would just make the border region “more chaotic, more dangerous.”

The policies under consideration would also be difficult to implement. Detaining migrants or families would lead to hundreds of thousands of people in custody — at a huge cost.

“These are all things that are extremely, extremely worrying,” said Jason Houser, the former chief of staff at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Prominent House Democrats are raising concerns. Reps. Nanette Barragán of California, the chair of the Hispanic Caucus, and Pramila Jayapal of Washington state, chair of the Progressive Caucus, along with Veronica Escobar of Texas, who is a co-chair of Biden’s reelection campaign, and Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, all joined at the Hispanic Caucus news conference.

Padilla warned that Biden’s concessions on border restrictions could have lasting impact on his support from Latino voters.

“To think that concessions are going to be made without benefiting a single Dreamer, a single farm worker, a single undocumented essential worker is unconscionable,” he said.

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Associated Press writer Seung Min Kim contributed to this report.

The White House unveiled a list of 48 drugs — from chemotherapy treatments to growth hormones used to treat endocrine disorders — whose prices increased faster than the rate of inflation this year. Under a new law, drugmakers will have to pay rebates to the federal government because of those price increases. The money will be used to lower the price Medicare enrollees pay on the drugs early next year.

“For years, there’s been no check on how high or how fast big pharma can raise drug prices,” President Joe Biden said Thursday, speaking in a lab at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. “Let’s call this for what it is – it simply is a rip off. They’re ripping off Medicare. They’re ripping off the American people. We’re now fighting back.”

This is the first time drugmakers will have to pay the penalties for outpatient drug treatments under the Inflation Reduction Act, passed by Congress last year. The rebates will translate into a wide range of savings — from as little as $1 to as much as $2,700 — on the drugs that the White House estimates are used every year by 750,000 older Americans.

The types of drugs on the government’s list vary. They include generic drugs, medications taken orally or injected, and treat a variety of disorders or illnesses, according to a review by the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists of the administration’s list.

But all of the drugs, the White House said, raised their prices significantly this year, many by nearly 20%.

The price decreases will only be seen for patients who access the drugs on Medicare Part B, the government outpatient care coverage. But the rebates are “an important tool to discourage excessive price increases,” Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, the administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, said Thursday in a statement.

Only a small number of drugs met the criteria for penalties, pointed out Stephen Ubl, the president of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, also called PhRMA.

“It’s a tiny fraction of overall working medicines,” he said.

As it readies for a 2024 reelection campaign, the Biden administration has rolled out a number of efforts to push pharmaceutical companies to lower drug prices. Last week, the White House announced it was considering an aggressive, unprecedented new tactic: pulling the patents of some drugs priced out of reach for most Americans.

“On no. We’ve upset Big Pharma again,” the White House posted on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter, last week, just hours after the announcement.

The president plans to make his push for lower drug prices a central theme of his reelection pitch to Americans.

The U.S. Health and Human Services agency also released a report on Thursday that will help guide its first-ever negotiation process with drugmakers over the price of 10 of Medicare’s costliest drugs. The new prices for those drugs will be negotiated by HHS next year, in the middle of next year’s presidential campaign.

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Associated Press writer Tom Murphy in Indianapolis contributed.

Under a plan announced Thursday, the government would consider overriding the patent for high-priced drugs that have been developed with the help of taxpayer money and letting competitors make them in hopes of driving down the cost.

In a 15-second video released to YouTube on Wednesday night, President Joe Biden promised the move would lower prices.

“Today, we’re taking a very important step toward ending price gouging so you don’t have to pay more for the medicine you need,” he said.

The administration did not immediately release details about how the process will work and how it will deem a drug costly enough to act. White House officials would not name drugs that might potentially be targeted.

There will be a 60-day public comment period. If the plan is enacted, drugmakers are almost certain to challenge it in court.

It’s the latest health policy pitch from a White House gearing up to make its efforts to tackle drug prices a central theme in next year’s reelection campaign. Biden frequently talks about the $35 cap on insulin for Medicare enrollees that went into effect this year, as well as a plan for government officials to negotiate some drug prices paid by Medicare for the first time in history.

The federal government, however, has never taken such a move against patents, a step called “march-in rights.” But some Democratic lawmakers, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, has in recent years lobbied the Health and Human Services agency to do so with certain drugs.

The conditions for how those “march-in rights” would be used have long been debated. Pharmaceutical companies have pushed back on the idea that prices alone are enough for Washington to act against a drug’s patent. The process proposed by the administration would clarify that the drug’s patent could be in jeopardy if its price is out of reach for Americans, White House officials said.

“For the first time, ever, the high price of that taxpayer-funded drug is a factor in determining that the drug is not accessible to the public on reasonable terms,” said Biden domestic policy adviser Neera Tanden.

The plan could threaten future drugs, according to the pharmaceutical lobbying firm Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, or PhRMA.

“This would be yet another loss for American patients who rely on public-private sector collaboration to advance new treatments and cures,” PhRMA spokesperson Megan Van Etten said.

Pharmaceutical companies have long relied on government research to develop new drugs. The most recent major breakthrough was the development of COVID-19 vaccines. U.S. taxpayers invested billions of dollars in the effort and were able, until recently, to access treatments and preventions for the virus without paying out-of-pocket for them.

When the public invests heavily in a private company’s drug, it’s fair to question whether they should have to pay high prices for it, said William Pierce, a former HHS official during President George W. Bush’s administration.

“The question becomes – what reward should there be for the taxpayers who help fund this product?” Pierce said.

President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping announced at a meeting Wednesday in California that China is telling its chemical companies to curtail shipments to Latin America and elsewhere of the materials used to produce fentanyl, which is largely finished in Mexico and then smuggled into the U.S.

China has also resumed sharing information about suspected trafficking with an international database.

“It’s a step in the right direction because not doing this would be negligent,” said Adam Wandt, an associate professor of public policy at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “If this is a diplomatic option that we did not take, every fentanyl death over the next decade would be on our heads.”

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But he and others described the steps as necessary in addressing the overdose crisis in the U.S. — but not sufficient.

Wandt said the steps should reduce the amount of fentanyl in the U.S., though when that happens depends on how much of the chemicals are already in possession of Mexican cartels. And even if fentanyl is eradicated, he said, “they will switch to another drug, which I predict will be even more lethal.”

Kevin Roy, the chief public policy officer at Shatterproof, a national group dedicated to combatting the addiction and overdose crisis, said that the steps announced were crucial, but they still have to be carried out.

“It’s only one part of a bigger picture,” Roy said.

He was also concerned that the nations did not reach any agreements on how to deal with laundering drug money through China, an issue that Rahul Gupta, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, identified at a congressional hearing this year as another major problem.

The Biden administration confirmed Thursday that as part of the arrangement, it was lifting trade sanctions against the Chinese Ministry of Public Security’s Institute of Forensic Science.

State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said the continued listing of the institute, known as IFS, was a barrier to sealing Chinese cooperation on the issue, which he said was a “top priority” for Biden going into the meeting with Xi.

“And so when we evaluated the issue and looked at all the merits of delisting the IFS, ultimately we decided that given the steps China was willing to take to cut down on precursor trafficking, it was an appropriate step to take,” Miller said.

The U.S. Commerce Department listed the institute in 2020, saying it was “complicit in human rights violations and abuses committed in China’s campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention, forced labor and high-technology surveillance against Uighurs, ethnic Kazakhs, and other members of Muslim minority groups.”

Fentanyl emerged as a widespread problem in the U.S. about a decade ago as there were crackdowns on prescribing opioid painkillers, which were linked to soaring death numbers already.

In the early days, it was largely shipped from China to the U.S., easily concealed in envelopes and small packages. Fentanyl’s potency makes it appealing to drug suppliers because it’s easy to ship. And because it’s made from chemicals in labs, it doesn’t rely on growing crops for drugs such as heroin, cocaine or marijuana.

Pushed by then-President Donald Trump, China agreed in late 2018 to crack down on shipments of finished fentanyl and some of its precursors. After that, more production moved to Mexico — with the raw materials still coming largely from China.

Synthetic opioids are now the biggest killers in the deadliest drug crisis the U.S. has ever seen. In 2014, nearly 50,000 deaths in the U.S. were linked to drug overdoses of all kinds. By last year, the total was more than 100,000, according to a tally by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More than two-thirds of those deaths — more than 200 per day — involved fentanyl or similar synthetic drugs.

The powerful drugs are showing up in different places in the nation’s supply of illicit substances. It’s in counterfeit pills and cocaine, in some cases causing overdoses in people who have no idea that they’re using fentanyl. It’s also sought out by some people with opioid use disorder. In many areas of the country, it’s mostly replaced the supply of heroin.

Xi said at a dinner Wednesday in San Francisco, “China sympathizes deeply with the American people, especially the young, for the sufferings that fentanyl has inflicted upon them.”

Biden said of the agreement, “It’s going to save lives, and I appreciate President Xi’s commitment on this issue.”

The tone has changed from earlier this year. In April, Wang Wenbin, a spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry criticized the U.S. for blaming China for the precursors, saying they’re “ordinary chemicals sold through normal trade.” And China blasted the U.S. over the summer for imposing sanctions on Chinese anti-drug efforts rather than praising their efforts.

A key part of the new announcement from China is that it is sharing information on the drug trade. It’s resumed submitting information to the International Narcotics Control Board for the first time in three years and agreed to launch a counternarcotics working group with the U.S.

“As we know only too well, the supply piece of this is just one part and we’re not going to solve the fentanyl overdose issue solely by reducing the supply,” said Regina LaBelle, who directs the Addiction and Public Policy Initiative at Georgetown University’s O’Neill Institute and served as acting director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy under President Biden.

She said that it’s significant that China and the U.S. are dealing with fentanyl, but it’s an issue that demands cooperation from other countries, too. Xi was meeting Thursday with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Biden was scheduled to meet with him Friday.

The rise of fentanyl across the U.S. has intensified efforts to reduce the danger. Naloxone, a drug that reverses overdoses, has become more widely available, including without prescriptions. A growing number of places are allowing drug screening kits so users can find out if their drugs include fentanyl. Harm reduction groups also preach that people using drugs should use a small amount first to test for adverse effects and that they should not use alone.

“We’re making investments in the United States in addressing prevention, treatment, recovery and harm reduction,” LaBelle said. “All of those things have to continue to be ramped up.”

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Associated Press writers Didi Tang and Aamer Madhani in San Francisco contributed to this article.

Both sides pledged cooperation that would bring the U.S. and China closer to resuming regular talks under what’s known as the Military Maritime Consultative Agreement, which until 2020 had been used to improve safety in the air and on the sea.

A senior U.S. official said after the Biden-Xi meeting ended that the military communication agreements mean that U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin can meet with his Chinese counterpart once that person is named. The official spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity to discuss a private meeting.

This also opens the door for agreements at less-senior levels, including allowing the Hawaii-based commander of U.S. Pacific forces to engage with counterpart theater commanders, the official said. The agreement further will likely mean operational engagements between ship drivers and others at a much lower level in each country.

Xi said after the meeting that he and Biden agreed to resume high-level military dialogues on the basis of equity and respect, according to a statement released by China Central Television, the state broadcaster.

The agreement comes after U.S. military leaders had expressed repeated concerns about the lack of communications with China, particularly as the number of unsafe or unprofessional incidents between the two nations’ ships and aircraft has spiked.

According to the Pentagon’s most recent report on China’s military power, Beijing has “denied, canceled or ignored” military-to-military communications and meetings with the Pentagon for much of last year and this year. The report warns that the lack of such talks “raises the risk of an operational incident or miscalculation spiraling into crisis or conflict.”

The U.S. views military relations with China as critical to avoiding any missteps and maintaining a peaceful Indo-Pacific region. Here’s a look at the often fraught relationship between the U.S. and Chinese militaries.

More than 15 years ago, the Defense Department was making progress in a growing effort to improve relations with Beijing as both sides stepped up military activities in the Indo-Pacific.

The U.S. was concerned about Beijing’s dramatic and rapid military growth. And China was suspicious of America’s expanding presence in the region. In an effort to improve transparency and communication, defense leaders from the two countries were meeting regularly. And in a 2008 speech in Singapore, then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates noted that relations with China had improved, and that a long-sought direct telephone link between the U.S. and China had finally been established. He said he had used it to speak with the defense minister.

He and other defense chiefs, Joint Chiefs chairmen and regional high-level U.S. commanders routinely traveled to China over the next decade, and Chinese defense leaders came to the Pentagon. “We don’t want miscalculations and misunderstandings and misinterpretations. And the only way you do that is you talk to each other,” noted then-Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel in 2013.

The following year Hagel made a historic visit to Yuchi Naval Base and became the first foreign visitor to go aboard China’s first aircraft carrier as it was docked at the base.

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The Defense Department’s 2014 report on China’s military power referred to “sustained positive momentum” in U.S. ties with Beijing, and noted there was a growing number of agreements, conferences, calls and military exercises. It said the two militaries established new channels for dialogue and signed two agreements to improve transparency and reduce the risks of unintended miscalculations by ships and aircraft in the Pacific.

Even as military leaders were meeting, the Obama administration’s widely touted “pivot to the Pacific,” which added troops, ships and other U.S. military activity in the region, triggered vehement criticism from Beijing. And China’s aggressive campaign to militarize a number of manmade islands in the South China Sea alarmed the U.S. and other allies in the Pacific.

Allies worried that China would seek to limit international transit through the region, and that the islands could be used as bases for military action. In 2018, the Trump administration abruptly withdrew an invitation for Beijing to participate in the military exercise known as Rim of the Pacific, citing what it called strong evidence that China had deployed weapons systems on the islands. China has argued that it is within its rights to build up defenses in the South China Sea on what it believes is its sovereign territory.

The Pentagon routinely complained that there was little tangible progress in the press for greater transparency in China’s military ambitions and its burgeoning defense budget. And China bristled at America’s continued support for Taiwan, the self-governing island that Beijing views as its own.

More broadly, the U.S. issued sharp condemnations of China’s escalating cyberattacks targeting government agencies and breaches and cyberespionage into sensitive defense programs.

Direct military contacts with Beijing dropped off during the COVID-19 pandemic, due both to travel restrictions and tensions over China’s potential responsibility for the deadly virus that began within its borders. And in August 2022, Beijing suspended all military contacts with the U.S., in the wake of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan.

Pelosi was the highest-ranking American lawmaker to visit Taiwan since 1997, when then-Speaker Newt Gingrich traveled there. And her visit sparked a surge in military maneuvers by China. Beijing dispatched warships and aircraft across the median line in the Taiwan Strait, claiming the de facto boundary did not exist, fired missiles over Taiwan itself, and challenged established norms by firing missiles into Japan’s exclusive economic zone.

U.S. officials suggested China was simply using Pelosi’s visit as a convenient excuse to cut off ties, which were strained by other points of contention, including economic sanctions.

But the lack of communications heightened worries about an increase in what the Pentagon calls risky Chinese aircraft and warship incidents in the past two years. Officials noted that even as tensions with Russia have spiked over the war in Ukraine, military commanders have continued to use a telephone line to deconflict operations in Syria.

The Defense Department last month released video footage of some of the more than 180 intercepts of U.S. warplanes by Chinese aircraft that have occurred in the past two years — more than the total number over the previous decade. Defense officials said the Chinese flights were risky and aggressive, but stopped short of calling most of them unsafe — a term used in egregious cases. They said this was part of a larger trend of regional intimidation by China that could accidentally lead to conflict.

Carolyn Bartholomew, chairwoman of the congressionally mandated U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, said a key goal for the administration should be to get a commitment from the Chinese government to scale back on such dangerous incidents.

Bonnie Lin, director of the China Power project at the Center for Strategic and International Security, a Washington-based think tank, said it was important to restart the talks under the maritime agreement.

Resumption “would be a signal that the two sides can work together more,” Lin said at a CSIS forum Tuesday.

___

Associated Press writers Tara Copp, Zeke Miller and Colleen Long contributed to this report.

Michael Whitaker is a former deputy FAA administrator and most recently served as chief operating officer of a Hyundai affiliate that is developing an air taxi.

Whitaker will take over an agency that faces many challenges, including a surge in close calls between planes at major airports, a shortage of air traffic controllers, and aging technology that resulted in a brief nationwide halt in flights in January.

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Whitaker’s confirmation seemed assured last week, when members of the Senate Commerce Committee endorsed him unanimously.

On the Senate floor Tuesday, committee chair Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., said Whitaker’s priorities will be to “build a strong safety culture, attract new talent and keep pace with technology transformation.”

Whitaker was Biden’s second choice for the job. The nomination of Denver International Airport CEO Phil Washington languished for months, then failed to get out of the Commerce Committee because of opposition from Republicans and independent Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.

The FAA has been without a Senate-confirmed administrator since March 2022, when Stephen Dickson stepped down midway through his five-year term.

Elizabeth Alexander, the first lady’s communications director, said President Biden and his wife care deeply about the safety of White House staff and those who protect them every day.

“They remain grateful for the patience and support of the U.S. Secret Service and all involved, as they continue to work through solutions,” she said in an emailed statement, adding, “Commander is not presently on the White House campus while next steps are evaluated.”

Alexander did not say where the 2-year-old German shepherd was sent.

The statement came hours after White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked at her briefing Wednesday about another allegation that Commander had bitten a White House staffer.

Jean-Pierre referred questions to the first lady’s office, which said Commander and Dale Haney, the head groundskeeper at the White House, were playing and that no skin was broken in an incident that was photographed by a tourist and shared with a news organization, which published the image online.

The president’s latest step will help 125,000 borrowers by erasing $9 billion in debt through existing relief programs. In total, 3.6 million borrowers will have had $127 billion in debt wiped out since Biden took office.

“President Biden has long believed that college should be a ticket to the middle class, not a burden that weighs on families,” the White House said in a statement.

He’s been relying on a patchwork of different programs to chip away at debt. The relief was approved for three types of borrowers:

• Public Service Loan Foregiveness Program
• Income-Driven Repayment: These are borrowers who made 20 years or more of payments but never got the relief they were entitled to.
• Total and Permanent Disabilities: Borrowers who have a total or permanent disability who have been identified and approved for discharge through a data match with the Social Security Administration.

“For years, millions of eligible borrowers were unable to access the student debt relief they qualified for, but that’s all changed thanks to President Biden and this administration’s relentless efforts to fix the broken student loan system,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in a statement.

Biden was scheduled to make a formal announcement at the White House in the afternoon.

He promised to help alleviate the burden of student debt while running for president, and he’s been under pressure to follow through even though his original plan was overturned by the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court.

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Additional debt forgiveness could help alleviate the impact of the long-scheduled resumption of loan payments this month, which will put a dent in tens of millions of family budgets. But it is unlikely to undermine the economy’s strength in the long term even though analysts at BNP Paribas estimated it could take $100 billion out of consumers’ pockets and slow overall growth during the final three months of this year.

Republicans have fought Biden’s plans on student debt, but Wednesday’s announcement comes as they’re consumed by infighting on Capitol Hill. Hard-right Republicans forced a vote that ousted Rep. Kevin McCarthy as House speaker, leaving the chamber in chaos.

In addition, the NAACP is pushing Biden to expand debt forgiveness by allowing Parent PLUS loans, which parents use for their children’s college education, to be eligible for the SAVE Plan.

“Historically, education has been viewed as an entry point for marginalized communities to achieve upward mobility and begin building generational wealth,” NAACP President Derrick Johnson said in a statement that emphasized the disproportionate impact of debt on Black families. “It is unconscionable that, in their quest to provide their children with a brighter future, Black parents have fallen victim to a system that preys on their inherent disadvantage.”

Officials described the actions, which include charges against eight Chinese companies accused of advertising, manufacturing and distributing precursor chemicals for synthetic opioids like fentanyl, as the latest effort in their fight against the deadliest overdose crisis in U.S. history. The moves come one day before senior administration officials are set to visit Mexico, whose cartels are part of the global trafficking network, for meetings expected to involve discussion of the drug threat.

“We know that this network includes the cartels’ leaders, their drug traffickers, their money launderers, their clandestine lab operators, their security forces, their weapons suppliers, and their chemical suppliers,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said at a news conference. “And we know that this global fentanyl supply chain, which ends with the deaths of Americans, often starts with chemical companies in China.”

Besides charging eight companies, the Justice Department also indicted 12 executives for their alleged roles in drug trafficking. In a coordinated action, the Treasury Department announced sanctions against 28 people and companies — mostly in China but also in Canada — that will cut them off from the U.S. financial system and prohibit anyone in the U.S. from doing business with them. None of those charged has been arrested, but Garland said prosecutors intended to “bring every one of these defendants to justice.”

“It’s the latest step in the rapid scaling up of our work targeting the financial flows that power the global illicit drug trade,” said Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo. He said Treasury is also seeking out the friends, family members, and affiliates of the people who benefit from drug sales.

“If you benefit from the proceeds of this illicit activity, we are going to come after your assets,” he said.

Mexico and China are the primary sources for fentanyl and fentanyl-related substances trafficked directly into the U.S., according to the Drug Enforcement Administration, which is tasked with combating illicit drug trafficking. Nearly all the precursor chemicals that are needed to make fentanyl come from China. And the companies that make the precursors routinely use fake return addresses and mislabel the products in order to avoid being caught by law enforcement.

One of the examples cited by the Justice Department involves a Chinese pharmaceutical technology company that advertised xylazine, a horse tranquilizer that is often mixed to fentanyl to ensure a more potent high, and shipped the chemicals to the U.S. and to Mexico. One of the purchasers in Mexico, officials said, was a drug trafficker associated with the Sinaloa Cartel.

This latest action follows a series of measures taken this year against members of the Sinaloa cartel, cash couriers and cartel fraud schemes.

Republicans have complained, however, that the administration isn’t doing enough to stop fentanyl and the issue is likely to figure prominently in next year’s presidential campaign.

In February, 21 Republican state attorneys general wrote a letter to President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken calling on them to designate Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. Last year a group of Republican attorneys general asked the president to declare fentanyl a weapon of mass destruction. No such actions have been taken.

Fentanyl, a powerful opioid, is the deadliest drug in the U.S. today. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states that drug overdose deaths have increased more than sevenfold from 2015 to 2021.

More than 100,000 deaths a year have been linked to drug overdoses since 2020 and about two-thirds of those are related to fentanyl. The death toll is more than 10 times as many drug deaths as in 1988, at the height of the crack epidemic.

The U.S. has taken a slew of actions to stem the tide of fentanyl coming into the country. Overall, the Biden administration has imposed over 200 sanctions related to the illegal drug trade.

State lawmakers nationwide are responding to the deadliest overdose crisis in U.S. history by pushing harsher penalties for possessing fentanyl.

In a speech at the Family Summit on Fentanyl last week, Garland said the Justice Department was sending out some $345 million in federal funding over the next year, including money to support mentoring for at-risk young people and increase access to the overdose-reversal drug naloxone.

On Capitol Hill, a bipartisan group of legislators out of the Senate Banking and Armed Services committees has introduced legislation that would declare fentanyl trafficking a national emergency and prod Treasury to use its sanctions authority to quell the proliferation of the drug in the U.S.

It would also impose reporting requirements and enable the president to confiscate sanctioned property of fentanyl traffickers to use for law enforcement efforts.

__

Associated Press reporter Lindsay Whitehurst in Wilmington, Delaware, contributed to this report.

Blair, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2018, walked together with Biden to a ceremony on the White House’s south lawn with her cane and her service dog, an English Labrador named Scout.

When she reached the stage, she told Scout, “down” and “good boy.” As he lay near Biden’s feet, the president started to bend down to pet Scout, but Blair looked over and said, “yeah, stay.” That caused Biden to straighten up to full attention.

“I feel so powerful all of a sudden,” laughed Blair. Then, indicating a handheld microphone in addition to the one she was using affixed to the podium, she said, “I don’t need this. This is for someone else, correct?”

“It’s for me,” Biden said, prompting Blair to respond, “OK, the real guy.”

Blair, 51, is known for a number of memorable late ’90s/early ’00’s movie roles and her modeling career. In recent years she’s become a leading face of disability rights, calling herself Monday “a proud disabled woman.”

Blair told a crowd of advocates attending the ceremony, “Although I’d had symptoms since the age of 7, it took a lifetime of self-advocacy to finally lead me to a diagnosis at age 46, after living most of my life in pain and self-doubt.”

She said Judy Heumann, a renowned activist who helped secure passage of the legislation protecting the rights of disabled people being celebrated Monday and who died in March at age 75, “Taught me my worth.”

“The push towards equity continues,” Blair said. “Our laws and policies must reflect that our disabled lives are not of lesser value.”

Biden also hailed Huemann, noting that, “History shows it’s often not the people in power, but the power of the people that move the country forward.”

The Rehabilitation Act of 1973 prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability in programs conducted by federal agencies, and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 prevents discrimination against disabled people on everything from employment to parking to voting.

October is National Disability Employment Awareness Month, and Biden noted both bills received bipartisan support when clearing Congress.

“These laws are a source of opportunity, meaningful inclusion, participation, respect, and, as my dad would say, the most important of all, dignity,” Biden said. “Be treated with dignity. Ensuring that the American dream is for all of us, not just for some of us.”

Worker shortages have been a frustration for some employers, who upped their investments in new factories and construction projects after President Joe Biden signed into law funding for infrastructure, computer chips and a shift toward renewable energy sources. Finding employees to replace retirees also has become a challenge.

As part of the 2021 pandemic rescue package, state and local governments have committed $11 billion to worker training. The money must be spent by the end of 2026 and the administration is trying to ensure the investments pay off as promised.

“This is a chance to make a once-in-a-generation investment in the skills and well-being of workers in your communities — an investment that will reap benefits well beyond pandemic recovery,” Treasury Department official Veronica Soto says in draft remarks obtained by The Associated Press.

The eight-page playbook being issued in conjunction with the remarks details possible models that the administration believes state and local governments can follow.

The document encourages them to use registered apprenticeship programs, which have seen enrollment more than double over the past decade to 607,509 active apprentices, according to the Labor Department. Starting salaries for those who complete the programs average $80,000.

Harris County, Texas, committed $10.9 million to place 1,000 of its low-income residents into union apprenticeships and technology training programs, having put a focus on opportunities for women, people of color and those without a four-year college degree. The state of Maine plans to double its total number of apprenticeships with $11 billion.

Funding also has gone to community colleges, with Oklahoma budgeting $80 million to expand its nursing education programs. Connecticut is using $19.5 million to improve the mentorship and coaching given to community college students, a program that has increased students’ grades and kept more of them enrolled.

Money also is going to supportive services for child care and transportation, which are two of the big reasons why people are unable to complete training or stay on the job. Iowa is making $26.6 million available to help employers make child care available, while Phoenix’s airport is offering child care scholarships to workers.

Rear Adm. Keith Davids, commander of Naval Special Warfare Command, announced the new program Friday in a message to his force, calling it necessary to protect their health and military readiness. The Navy will be the first to begin random testing, but Army Special Operations Command said it will soon follow suit, although no start date has been set.

The Army and Navy have the largest and most well known special operations forces, including the Navy SEALs and Army’s Delta Force, Green Berets and Ranger Regiment. They are often called on to do the military’s most sensitive and dangerous missions. The physical and mental challenges of getting through their selection and training programs and the pressures of the risky missions can lead to some to use performance-enhancing drugs, although officials say the numbers are small.

The use of these drugs has been a somewhat limited but persistent problem across the military, but leaders have balked at increased testing because it is highly specialized, costly and requires contracting with the few labs that do such work. The military services have done occasional tests when they perceive a problem with an individual service member, but they must get special permission from the Pentagon to do routine, random testing.

The Air Force and the Marine Corps special operations commands said they have not yet requested a similar policy change.

According to the Navy command, four units will be randomly selected each month, and 15% of each will be tested. That will amount to as many as 200 sailors monthly, and those testing positive face discipline or removal.

A driving factor in the announcement, which has been in the works for months, was the death of a Navy SEAL candidate early last year.

Kyle Mullen, 24, collapsed and died of acute pneumonia just hours after completing the SEALs’ grueling Hell Week test. A report concluded that Mullen, from Manalapan, New Jersey, died “in the line of duty, not due to his own misconduct.” Although tests found no evidence of performance-enhancing drugs in his system, a report by the Naval Education and Training Command said he was not screened for some steroids because the needed blood and urine samples were not available, and that multiple vials of drugs and syringes were later found in his car.

The NETC’s broader investigation into SEAL training flagged the use of performance-enhancing drugs as a significant problem among those seeking to become elite commandos and recommended far more robust testing.

Investigations in 2011, 2013 and 2018 into suspected steroid use by SEAL candidates led to discipline and requests for enhanced testing. The use of hair follicle testing was denied at least twice by Navy leaders over that time, and random testing for steroids wasn’t authorized by the Defense Department.

Davids requested the policy change to allow the screening, and in January, the Pentagon undersecretary for personnel approved an exemption authorizing random testing within the Naval Special Warfare force. The testing only affects the roughly 9,000 active-duty military personnel and reservists on active-duty orders in the command. Civilians are not included.

The, random force-wide testing initiative, Davids said, is a commitment to the long-term health of every member of the Naval Special Warfare community.

Lt. Col. Mike Burns, spokesman for Army Special Operations Command, said it also has been approved for random testing and is working on developing a program.

The Navy has provided $225,000 to fund the testing contract through the end of this month, and it’s expected to cost about $4.5 million per year for the next two years.

Noting that the drugs are illegal, Davids has told his force that any number above zero is unacceptable, whether during training or downrange when sailors are deployed. He has urged sailors to talk to their teammates and commanders about the drugs and their risks.

“My intent is to ensure every NSW teammate operates at their innate best while preserving the distinguished standards of excellence that define NSW,” he said in his message to the force.

According to the command, personnel will still be allowed to get prescription medication to treat legitimate medical conditions.

Command leaders also stress that there is only anecdotal evidence of performance-enhancing drug use within the ranks.

Between February 2022 and March 2023, the Naval Special Warfare Center conducted more than 2,500 screening tests and detected 74 SEAL or Special Warfare Combat Crewmen with elevated testosterone levels, the command said. It said three candidates ultimately tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs. The testosterone tests are more common but less precise, and additional screening is needed to identify steroid use.

The new random testing will require that sailors provide two urine samples. One will be sent to the Sports Medicine Research and Testing Laboratory, a cutting-edge lab used by international sports to test for doping, and one will go to the Navy Drug Screening Laboratory Great Lakes to check for standard drugs.

If the test result is positive, the sailor will be notified, there will be a preliminary inquiry and if there is no legal reason for the drugs, the sailor will be subject to discipline and removal from the force. A SEAL or SWCC candidate will be removed from training.

Under Navy procedures, all SEALs and SWCC are informed of the substance ban and sign an acknowledgement of the prohibition.

The NETC report released earlier this year suggested that SEAL candidates may have gotten conflicting messages about the use of performance-enhancing drugs. In one case, it noted that during a discussion about the policy with Mullen’s class, an instructor, who was not identified, told sailors that all types of people make it through the course, including “steroid monkeys and skinny strong guys. Don’t use PEDS, it’s cheating, and you don’t need them. And whatever you do, don’t get caught with them in your barracks room.”

The report said that after an “awkward silence” the instructor added, “that was a joke.” It said some candidates interpreted it as an implicit endorsement of using the drugs. And it noted that routine barracks inspections have found the drugs or sailors have admitted their use.

On Wednesday, the Department of Health and Human Services said the issue has been “largely, if not completely” resolved.

HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra met earlier in the day with leading insurance companies, including CVS Health, UnitedHealth Group, Anthem, and Cigna, to review the progress of the Biden administration’s fall Covid vaccine campaign, agency spokesperson Jeff Nesbit told NBC News in an email.

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During the meeting, the insurance companies made clear that they are “fully covering the new vaccine shots,” according to a rundown of the meeting shared by HHS. They described the problem of some people being denied coverage as “systemic technical issues.”

One insurer, Aetna, said going forward, it would treat the new shot as a seasonal vaccine, meaning anywhere someone gets their annual flu shot, they can get a Covid vaccine.

The Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention signed off on the updated Covid vaccines earlier this month.

Read the full story on NBCNews.com here.

It also proposed a new regulation aimed at ensuring that LGBTQ+ children are protected in their foster homes from mistreatment due to their sexual orientation or gender identity.

More than 391,000 children were in foster care in 2021, according to a report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Many were removed from their homes and placed in foster care due to neglect, physical abuse or parental drug abuse. The average age of a child in foster care was 8.

The report said about 35% were placed in the home of a relative.

HHS issued a final regulation Wednesday that lets states simplify the process for family members to become caregivers.

“We’re going to start to give family a chance to really be family for these kids, especially for grandparents who oftentimes carry so much of a load and never get recognized for what they do,” HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra said.

HHS also laid out a proposed rule that, among other things, would require training for foster care providers on how to meet the needs of an LGBTQ+ child. States would be allowed to design those training programs.

That proposed rule will be open to public comment for 60 days before its finalized.

Another proposed rule would allow Native American tribes to be reimbursed for the legal costs of intervening in a state foster care court case over the parental rights of a child.

“These projects will make American rail safer, more reliable, and more resilient, delivering tangible benefits to dozens of communities where railroads are located, and strengthening supply chains for the entire country,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a statement.

The money is funding 70 projects in 35 states and Washington, D.C. Railroad safety has become a key concern nationwide ever since a train carrying hazardous chemicals derailed and caught fire in East Palestine, Ohio, in February. President Joe Biden has ordered federal agencies to hold the train’s operator Norfolk Southern accountable for the crash, but a package of proposed rail safety reforms has stalled in the Senate where the bill is still awaiting a vote. The White House is also saying that a possible government shutdown because of House Republicans would undermine railway safety.

The projects include track upgrades and bridge repairs, in addition to improving the connectivity among railways and making routes less vulnerable to extreme weather.

Among the projects is $178.4 million to restore passenger service in parts of Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi along the Gulf of Mexico for the first time since Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005.

“This is a significant milestone, representing years of dedicated efforts to reconnect our communities after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina,” Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., said in a statement. “Restoring passenger rail service will create jobs, improve quality of life, and offer a convenient travel option for tourists, contributing to our region’s economic growth and vitality.”

The grant should make it possible to restore passenger service to the Gulf Coast after Amtrak reached an agreement with CSX and Norfolk Southern railroads last year to clear the way for passenger trains to resume operating on the tracks the freight railroads own.

“We’ve been fighting to return passenger trains to the Gulf Coast since it was knocked offline by Hurricane Katrina. That 17-year journey has been filled with obstacles and frustration — but also moments of joy, where local champions and national advocates were able to come together around the vision of a more connected Gulf Coast region,” Rail Passengers Association President & CEO Jim Mathews said.

In one of the biggest other grants, the Palouse River & Coulee City Railroad in Washington state will get $72.8 million to upgrade the track and related infrastructure to allow that rail line to handle modern 286,000-pound railcars.

A project in Kentucky will receive $29.5 million to make improvements to 280 miles of track and other infrastructure along the Paducah and Louisville Railway.

And in Tennessee, $23.7 million will go to helping upgrade about 42 bridges on 10 different short-line railroads.

The announcement comes as Biden prepares to welcome leaders to Washington for a two-day U.S.-Pacific Island Forum Summit expected to focus heavily on the impact of climate change.

Biden has put a premium on improving ties in the Pacific amid rising U.S. concern about China’s growing military and economic influence. Plans for the diplomatic move were confirmed by two senior administration officials who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity before the formal announcement.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Biden would use the summit to strengthen “ties with the Pacific Islands and discuss how we address complex global challenges, like tackling the existential threat of climate change, advancing economic growth, and promoting sustainable development.”

Some of the leaders attended an NFL game in Baltimore on Sunday and later planned to visit a U.S. Coast Guard cutter in the city’s harbor for a briefing on combating illegal fishing and other maritime issues.

Pacific Island leaders have been critical of rich countries for not doing enough to control climate change despite being responsible for much of the problem, and for profiting from loans provided to vulnerable nations to mitigate the effects.

At last year’s summit, the White House unveiled its Pacific strategy, an outline of its plan to assist the region’s leaders on pressing issues like climate change, maritime security and protecting the region from overfishing. The administration pledged the U.S. would add $810 million in new aid for Pacific Island nations over the next decade, including $130 million on efforts to stymie the impacts of climate change.

The forum includes Australia, the Cook Islands, Micronesia, Fiji, French Polynesia, Kiribati, Nauru, New Caledonia, New Zealand, Niue, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Republic of Marshall Islands, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu.

Biden will welcome the leaders to the White House on Monday morning for talks and a working lunch. They also will meet on Monday with Biden’s special envoy on climate, John Kerry, for talks focused on climate change. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and U.N. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield will host the leaders at the State Department for a dinner.

Kerry and Samantha Power, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, will host the leaders on Tuesday for climate talks with members of the philanthropic community. The leaders also plan to meet with members of Congress. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen will host a roundtable with the leaders and members of the business community.

Power last month travelled to Fiji to open a new USAID mission that will manage agency programs in nine Pacific Island countries: Fiji, Kiribati, Nauru, Samoa, Tonga, Tuvalu, Republic of the Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, and Palau. The U.S. this year has opened embassies in Solomon Islands and Tonga, and is on track to open an embassy in Vanuatu early next year.

The White House said most members of the 18-member forum were dispatching their top elected official or foreign minister to the summit.

But the administration was “very disappointed” that Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare, who was in New York last week for the U.N. General Assembly, opted not to stick around for the White House summit, according to an administration official. The Solomon Islands last year signed a security pact with China.

Prime Minister Meltek Sato Kilman Livtuvanu of Vanuatu also is expected to miss the summit. He was elected by lawmakers earlier this month to replace Ishmael Kalsakau, who lost a no-confidence vote in parliament.

Biden earlier this year had to cut short a planned visit to the Indo-Pacific, scrapping what was to be a historic stop in Papua New Guinea, as well as a visit to Australia for a gathering with fellow leaders of the so-called Quad partnership so he could focus on debt limit talks in Washington. He would have been the first sitting U.S. president to visit Papua new Guinea.

The U.S. president is set to honor Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese with a state visit next month.

___

This story has been corrected to reflect that the United States will establish diplomatic relations, not open embassies, with two South Pacific nations, the Cook Islands and Niue.

“After every mass shooting, we hear a simple message … do something. Please do something,” he said from the Rose Garden, where he was joined by lawmakers and families of victims of gun violence. “My administration has been working relentlessly to do something.”

The new office of gun violence prevention will be led by Vice President Kamala Harris, a former prosecutor whose experience is perfect for this effort, Biden said. The office’s goals include ensuring a bipartisan gun safety law passed last year is fully implemented nationwide along with Biden’s executive actions to stop gun violence.

It will seek to find new actions the White House can take unilaterally as further congressional support for gun safety laws seems slim. It will aim to build better support systems in states and cities and coordinate support for families who have lived through mass shootings and violence.

“Shootings are the ultimate superstorm,” Biden said.

But the office is limited in what it can do. In order to tighten restrictions or pass a ban on so-called “assault weapons,” as Biden repeatedly called for, Congress would need to pass legislation. That seems unlikely. In the year since the 2022 law was passed, Republican support for restrictions has slipped.

Still, Biden and Democrats are banking on gun safety as a major party animator for 2024, particularly for younger voters. The president was joined Friday by Rep. Maxwell Frost, D-Fla., the youngest member of Congress, who said he got involved in politics because “I didn’t want to get shot in school.”

Firearms are the No. 1 killer of children in the U.S. So far this year 220 children younger than 11 have died by guns and 1,054 between the ages of 12 and 17 have died.

“We all want our kids to have the freedom to learn how to read and write instead of duck and cover, for God’s sake,” the president said.

Overall, stricter gun laws are desired by a majority of Americans, regardless of what the current gun laws are in their state. That desire could be tied to some Americans’ perceived impact of what fewer guns could mean for the country — namely, fewer mass shootings.

As of Friday, there have been at least 35 mass killings in the U.S. so far in 2023, leaving at least 171 people dead, not including shooters who died, according to a database maintained by The Associated Press and USA Today in partnership with Northeastern University.

Harris said while this violence impacts all communities, it does not do so equally — communities of color are far more likely to suffer.

“I have seen with my own eyes what a bullet does to the human body,” she said. “We cannot normalize any of this.”

Harris said that would make it easier for them to obtain an auto loan or a home mortgage. Roughly one in five people report having medical debt. The vice president said the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is beginning the rulemaking process to make the change.

The agency said in a statement that including medical debt in credit scores is problematic because “mistakes and inaccuracies in medical billing are common.”

“Access to health care should be a right and not a privilege,” Harris told reporters in call to preview the action. “These measures will improve the credit scores of millions of Americans so that they will better be able to invest in their future.”

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The announcement comes after a long push by the Biden administration to minimize the importance of medical debt in how people’s creditworthiness is rated. CFPB director Rohit Chopra said the credit reporting companies Equifax, TransUnion and Experian announced last March that they would stop reporting “some but not all medical bills on an individual’s credit report.”

In addition to pulling medical bills from credit reports, the proposal would prevent creditors from using medical bills when deciding on loans and stop debt collectors from using credit ratings to pressure people with health care-related debt. The government will hear feedback from small businesses and then issue a notice of a proposed rulemaking at some point next year.

By now, most student loan borrowers have accepted that, after a three-year break, their payments will restart in October. Some people, however, may actually have more time.

CNBC spoke to several borrowers who say have statements from their servicer showing their first payment’s due date is in November or December.

That’s not surprising, said Scott Buchanan, executive director of the Student Loan Servicing Alliance, a trade group for federal student loan servicer.

“Some borrowers may not be due until 2024,” Buchanan said.

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Your last payment may affect your next due date

Borrowers have different due dates, based on various factors about their loans. When a borrower made their last payment before or during the pause can impact when their next due date is, Buchanan said.

Many people made their usual student loan payment in March 2020, before former president Donald Trump first announced the pause on federal student loan bills and interest accrual, he explained.

Depending on when their loan servicer received those funds, it may have been considered an extra payment that has now pushed back their due date. Meanwhile, borrowers who made repeated payments during the pause will likely have even more time, Buchanan said.

You can contact your loan servicer or log in to StudentAid.gov to learn your exact due date, said higher education expert Mark Kantrowitz.

Recent graduates, meanwhile, may also get more time if they’re still in their grace period, Kantrowitz said. Grace periods usually span six months from graduation.

How to get ready for your student loan payment

Ahead of your due date, you want to make sure you are familiar with your loan servicer (millions of borrowers’ accounts have been transferred to a new company during the pandemic) and the payment amount you’ll owe. The typical federal student loan bill is $350 a month.

If you were enrolled in the standard 10-year repayment plan prior to Covid and still are, your monthly payment should not have changed. However, borrowers repaying their loans in an income-driven plan could see a different monthly obligation if their income has increased or decreased since three years ago.

If you are struggling financially, you should acquaint yourself with your options, including deferments and forbearances.

Until October 2024, borrowers will be shielded from the worst consequences of missed payments, the Biden administration recently announced.

For example, loans will not go into default and delinquencies will not be reported to credit reporting agencies, Kantrowitz said.

Late fees won’t be charged, either.

But as is the case with a forbearance, interest will continue accruing on your debt while you don’t make payments. As a result, Kantrowitz recommends borrowers start repaying their bills if they can.

“Doing otherwise will eventually hurt them,” he said.

In a letter obtained by NBC News, Democratic Sens. Bob Menendez and Cory Booker, who both represent New Jersey, home to Princeton, conveyed their “grave concern” about Elizabeth Tsurkov’s plight in their appeal to Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

They called on the administration “to use our close and abiding relationship with Iraq to raise Elizabeth’s abduction and call for her release at every opportunity and level.”

Read the full story on NBC News.com here

The Biden administration on Wednesday said it will resume offering free at-home Covid tests to American households Monday as the virus gains a stronger foothold nationwide. 

Americans will soon be able to use COVIDtests.gov to request four free tests, the administration said in a release. 

The government had offered free test kits through that website since January 2022, but the site stopped taking orders June 1 of this year to conserve supplies of the tests. 

The government is relaunching the program in time for the fall and winter when the virus typically spreads at higher levels. Covid hospitalizations have already increased for eight straight weeks — an uptick primarily driven by newer strains of the virus.

But the Biden administration noted that the at-home tests set to be delivered will detect currently circulating Covid variants. The kits are intended for use through the end of 2023 and will come with instructions for how people can verify if a test’s expiration date has been extended, the administration added.

Testing is a critical tool for protection as Covid infections climb again. But lab PCR tests — the traditional method of detecting Covid — have become more expensive and less accessible for some Americans since the U.S. government ended the public health emergency in May. 

The end of that declaration also changed how public and private insurers cover at-home tests, potentially leaving some people unable to get those tests for free through their plans. But certain local health clinics and community sites still offer at-home tests to the public at no cost. 

Also on Wednesday, the Biden administration said it will provide $600 million to strengthen manufacturing capacity at 12 Covid test manufacturers across the country. The administration expects to secure about 200 million tests from those companies. 

“These critical investments will strengthen our nation’s production levels of domestic at-home COVID-19 rapid tests and help mitigate the spread of the virus,” Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a statement.

Dr. Paul Wise, a pediatrician associated with Stanford University, interviewed families in the Rio Grande Valley area of Texas this summer and found children as young as 8 were separated from their parents while being held in the temporary custody of Customs and Border Protection, according to the document filed Friday in the Central District of California.

“Interviews with parents and children found that there were minimal or no opportunities for phone contact or direct interaction between parent and child. The separation of families and the lack of interaction while in custody do significant, and potentially lasting, harm to children, particularly younger children,” Wise said in the court filing. 

Wise also said some migrants reported children younger than 8 were separated. He noted that in the past some teenage males who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border with their mothers were separated from family pods that typically held younger children. But in the cases he documented this summer, the children being separated were much younger, according to the filing.

A Customs and Border Protection official told NBC News that the circumstances in which families are separated in CBP custody are rare and separation usually happens with a father is traveling alone with his children. If CBP personnel are not able to find a pod for that individual family due to overcrowding, they make an assessment based on the age of the children and sometimes put the children in a pod with other children of their age and gender, the official said.

Read the full story at NBCNews.com here.

But protesters say it’s not going to be enough. And they aimed their wrath directly at U.S. President Joe Biden, urging him to stop approving new oil and gas projects, phase out current ones and declare a climate emergency with larger executive powers.

“We hold the power of the people, the power you need to win this election,” said 17-year-old Emma Buretta of Brooklyn of the youth protest group Fridays for Future. “If you want to win in 2024, if you do not want the blood of my generation to be on your hands, end fossil fuels.”

The March to End Fossil Fuels featured such politicians as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and actors Susan Sarandon, Ethan Hawke, Edward Norton, Kyra Sedgewick and Kevin Bacon. But the real action on Broadway was where protesters crowded the street, pleading for a better but not-so-hot future. It was the opening salvo to New York’s Climate Week, where world leaders in business, politics and the arts gather to try to save the planet, highlighted by a new special United Nations summit Wednesday.

Many of the leaders of countries that cause the most heat-trapping carbon pollution will not be in attendance. And they won’t speak at the summit organized by U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in a way that only countries that promise new concrete action are invited to speak.

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Organizers estimated 75,000 people marched Sunday.

“We have people all across the world in the streets, showing up, demanding a cessation of what is killing us,” Ocasio-Cortez told a cheering crowd. “We have to send a message that some of us are going to be living on, on this planet 30, 40, 50 years from now. And we will not take no for an answer.”

This protest was far more focused on fossil fuels and the industry than previous marches. Sunday’s rally attracted a large chunk, 15%, of first-time protesters and was overwhelmingly female, said American University sociologist Dana Fisher, who studies environmental movements and was surveying march participants.

Of the people Fisher talked to, 86% had experienced extreme heat recently, 21% floods and 18% severe drought, she said. They mostly reported feeling sad and angry. Earth has just gone through the hottest summer on record.

Among the marchers was 8-year-old Athena Wilson from Boca Raton, Florida. She and her mother Maleah, flew from Florida for Sunday’s protest.

“Because we care about our planet,” Athena said. “I really want the Earth to feel better.”

People in the South, especially where the oil industry is, and the global south, “have not felt heard,” said 23-year-old Alexandria Gordon, originally from Houston. “It is frustrating.”

Protest organizers emphasized how let down they felt that Biden, who many of them supported in 2020, has overseen increased drilling for oil and fossil fuels.

“President Biden, our lives depend on your actions today,” said Louisiana environmental activist Sharon Lavigne. “If you don’t stop fossil fuels our blood is on your hands.”

Nearly one-third of the world’s planned drilling for oil and gas between now and 2050 is by U.S. interests, environmental activists calculate. Over the past 100 years, the United States has put more heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than any other country, though China now emits more carbon pollution on an annual basis.

“You need to phase out fossil fuels to survive our planet,” said Jean Su, a march organizer and energy justice director for the Center for Biological Diversity.

Marchers and speakers spoke of increasing urgency and fear of the future. The actress known as V, formerly Eve Ensler, premiered the anthem “Panic” from her new climate change oriented musical scheduled for next year. The chorus goes: “We want you to panic. We want you to act. You stole our future and we want it back.”

Signs included “Even Santa Knows Coal is Bad” and “Fossil fuels are killing us” and “I want a fossil free future” and “keep it in the ground.”

That’s because leaders don’t want to acknowledge “the elephant in the room,” said Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate. “The elephant is that fossil fuels are responsible for the crisis. We can’t eat coal. We can’t drink oil, and we can’t have any new fossil fuel investments.”

But oil and gas industry officials said their products are vital to the economy.

“We share the urgency of confronting climate change together without delay; yet doing so by eliminating America’s energy options is the wrong approach and would leave American families and businesses beholden to unstable foreign regions for higher cost and far less reliable energy,” said American Petroleum Institute Senior Vice President Megan Bloomgren.

Activists weren’t having any of that.

“The fossil fuel industry is choosing to rule and conquer and take and take and take without limit,” Rabbi Stephanie Kolin of Congregation Beth Elohim of Brooklyn said. “And so waters are rising and the skies are turning orange (from wildfire smoke) and the heat is taking lives. But you Mr. President can choose the other path, to be a protector of this Earth.”

Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears

Sullivan and Wang Yi held discussions Saturday and Sunday in Malta as “part of ongoing efforts to maintain open lines of communication and responsibly managing the relationship,” one of the officials said.

Their talks could lay the groundwork for a much-anticipated meeting between Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping this fall aimed at easing tensions between the world’s two largest economies in the wake of the surveillance balloon saga and China’s support for Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Administration officials have been preparing for a possible meeting in November around the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, or APEC, summit in San Francisco.

A meeting between the two leaders would come at a critical moment in U.S.-China relations.

Read the full story on NBCNews.com here.

The acknowledgment by the Iranian mission to the United Nations in New York comes as the Biden administration has issued a blanket waiver for international banks to transfer $6 billion in frozen Iranian money from South Korea to Qatar without fear of U.S. sanctions.

The moves by both Tehran and Washington appear to signal the prisoner swap is progressing as the money once held in South Korean won is converted into euros and moved to Qatar, where Iran will be able to use it for humanitarian purposes.

In a statement to The Associated Press, Ali Karimi Magham, a spokesman for the Iranian mission, confirmed the list of prisoners that Tehran wants released.

The five sought by the Iranians are:

— Kaveh Lotfolah Afrasiabi, an Iranian charged in 2021 with allegedly failing to register as a foreign agent on Iran’s behalf while lobbying U.S. officials on issues like nuclear policy;

— Mehrdad Ansari, an Iranian sentenced to 63 months in prison in 2021 for obtaining equipment that could be used in missiles, electronic warfare, nuclear weapons and other military gear;

— Amin Hasanzadeh, an Iranian and permanent resident of the United States whom prosecutors charged in 2019 with allegedly stealing engineering plans from his employer to send to Iran;

— Reza Sarhangpour Kafrani, an Iranian charged in 2021 over allegedly unlawfully exporting laboratory equipment to Iran; and

— Kambiz Attar Kashani, an Iranian-American sentenced in February to 30 months in prison for purchasing “sophisticated, top-tier U.S. electronic equipment and software” through front companies in the United Arab Emirates.

The U.S. State Department declined to comment, citing “the sensitivity of this ongoing process.”

The news website Al-Monitor, relying on a statement from the Iranian mission, first reported the Iranians’ identities on Monday.

On the U.S. side, Washington seeks the release of Siamak Namazi, who was detained in Iran in 2015 and later sentenced to 10 years in prison on internationally criticized spying charges; Emad Sharghi, a venture capitalist sentenced to 10 years; and Morad Tahbaz, a British-American conservationist of Iranian descent who was arrested in 2018 and also received a 10-year sentence.

The fourth and fifth prisoners were not identified. All five are under house arrest at a hotel in Tehran.

U.S. Republicans have criticized the possibility of an exchange, which is under discussion amid heightened tensions between Iran and the West over its nuclear program, as well as a series of ship seizures and attacks attributed to Tehran.

The Pentagon is considering a plan to put U.S. troops on board commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of all oil shipments pass moving out of the Persian Gulf.

A major deployment of U.S. sailors and Marines, alongside F-35s, F-16s and other military aircraft, is also underway in the region. Meanwhile, Iran supplies Russia with the bomb-carrying drones Moscow uses to target sites during its war in Ukraine.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken signed off on the sanctions waivers late last week, a month after U.S. and Iranian officials said an agreement in principle was in place. Congress was not informed of the waiver decision until Monday, according to the notification, which was obtained by The Associated Press.

The outlines of the deal had been previously announced and the waiver was expected. But the notification marked the first time the administration said it was releasing five Iranian prisoners as part of the deal. The prisoners have not been named.

The waiver drew criticism of President Joe Biden from Republicans and others who say the deal will boost the Iranian economy at a time when Iran poses a growing threat to U.S. troops and Mideast allies.

On X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa said “it’s ridiculous for US to be blackmailed into paying $6B for hostages which will help indirectly finance the number 1 foreign policy of Iran: terrorism.” Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas accused Biden of “paying ransom to the world’s worst state sponsor of terrorism.”

Another Iran hawk, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said the waivers were a sign the administration was secretly pursuing a broader deal with Iran to include more than the release of the detainees.

“Today’s news confirms there has already been a side deal including a $6 billion ransom and the release of Iranian operatives,” Cruz said in a statement.

The White House pushed back on all criticism of the waiver decision, saying it was only a “procedural step” aimed at fulfilling the tentative agreement reached with Iran in August.

“What is being pursued here is an arrangement wherein we secure the release of 5 wrongfully held Americans,” said Adrienne Watson, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council. “This remains a sensitive and ongoing process. While this is a step in the process, no individuals have been or will be released into U.S. custody this week.”

The waiver means that European, Middle Eastern and Asian banks will not run afoul of U.S. sanctions in converting the money frozen in South Korea and transferring it to Qatar’s central bank, where it will be held for Iran to use for the purchase of humanitarian goods.

The transfer of the $6 billion was the critical element in the prisoner release deal, which saw four of the five American detainees transferred from Iranian jails into house arrest last month. The fifth detainee had already been under house arrest.

Due to numerous U.S. sanctions on foreign banks that engage in transactions aimed at benefitting Iran, several European countries had balked at participating in the transfer. Blinken’s waiver is aimed at easing their concerns about any risk of U.S. sanctions.

People familiar with negotiations said they expect the detainees will be released as early as next week.

The American prisoners include Siamak Namazi, who was detained in 2015 and was later sentenced to 10 years in prison on internationally criticized spying charges; Emad Sharghi, a venture capitalist sentenced to 10 years; and Morad Tahbaz, a British-American conservationist of Iranian descent who was arrested in 2018 and also received a 10-year sentence. The fourth and fifth prisoners were not identified.

“To facilitate their release, the United States has committed to release five Iranian nationals currently held in the United States and to permit the transfer of approximately $6 billion in restricted Iranian funds held in (South Korea) to restricted accounts in Qatar, where the funds will be available only for humanitarian trade,” Blinken wrote.

The sanctions waiver applies to banks and other financial institutions in South Korea, Germany, Ireland, Qatar and Switzerland.

“I determine that it is in the national security interest of the United States to waive the imposition of sanctions … with respect to foreign financial institutions under the primary jurisdiction of Germany, Ireland, Qatar, the Republic of Korea, and Switzerland that are notified directly in writing by the U.S. government, to the extent necessary for such institutions to engage in transactions occurring on or after August 9, 2023,” Blinken wrote.

Sanctions waivers apply to transactions involving previously penalized entities such as the National Iranian Oil Company and Central Bank of Iran “ to transfer funds from accounts in the Republic of Korea to accounts in Switzerland and Germany and from accounts in Switzerland and Germany to accounts in Qatar, and to use the transferred funds for further humanitarian transactions in accordance with written guidance from the U.S. Government,” he wrote.

IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel said that with a boost in federal funding and the help of artificial intelligence tools, the agency has new means of targeting wealthy people who have “cut corners” on their taxes.

“If you pay your taxes on time it should be particularly frustrating when you see that wealthy filers are not,” Werfel told reporters in a call previewing the announcement. He said 1,600 millionaires who owe at least $250,000 each in back taxes and 75 large business partnerships that have assets of roughly $10 billion on average are targeted for the new “compliance efforts.”

Werfel said a massive hiring effort and AI research tools developed by IRS employees and contractors are playing a big role in identifying wealthy tax dodgers. The agency is making an effort to showcase positive results from its burst of new funding under President Joe Biden’s Democratic administration as Republicans in Congress look to claw back some of that money.

“New tools are helping us see patterns and trends that we could not see before, and as a result, we have higher confidence on where to look and find where large partnerships are shielding income,” he said.

In July, IRS leadership said it collected $38 million in delinquent taxes from more than 175 high-income taxpayers in the span of a few months. Now, the agency will scale up that effort, Werfel said.

“The IRS will have dozens of revenue officers focused on these high-end collection cases in fiscal year 2024,” he said.

A team of academic economists and IRS researchers in 2021 found that the top 1% of U.S. income earners fail to report more than 20% of their earnings to the IRS.

The newly announced tax collection effort will begin as soon as October. “We have more hiring to do,” Werfel said. “It’s going to be a very busy fall for us.”

Grover Norquist, who heads the conservative Americans for Tax Reform, said the IRS’ plan to pursue high wealth individuals does not preclude the IRS from eventually pursuing middle-income Americans for audits down the road.

“This power and these resources allow them to go after anyone they want,” he said. “The next step is to go after anyone they wish to target for political purposes.”

Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said the IRS’ new plan is a “big deal” that “represents a fresh approach to taking on sophisticated tax cheats.”

“This action goes to the heart of Democrats’ effort to ensure the wealthiest are paying their fair share,” he said in a statement.

David Williams, at the right-leaning, nonprofit Taxpayers Protection Alliance, said “every business and every person should pay their taxes — full stop.” However, “I just hope this isn’t used as a justification to hire thousands of new agents,” that would audit Americans en masse, he said.

The federal tax collector gained the enhanced ability to identify tax delinquents with resources provided by the Inflation Reduction Act, which Biden signed into law in August of 2022. The agency was in line for an $80 billion infusion under the law, but that money is vulnerable to potential cutbacks by Congress.

House Republicans built a $1.4 billion reduction to the IRS into the debt ceiling and budget cuts package passed by Congress this summer. The White House said the debt deal also has a separate agreement to take $20 billion from the IRS over the next two years and divert that money to other non-defense programs.

With the threat of a government shutdown looming in a dispute over spending levels, there is the potential for additional cuts to the agency.

Despite its name, the Situation Room is not a single room but instead a sprawling 5,500-square-foot complex with numerous meeting spots, all of which were gutted and refurbished at a cost of $50 million. A smaller room, where former President Barack Obama and top officials monitored the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011, was preserved in its entirety and sent to the Obama library.

Marc Gustafson, the White House director for the Situation Room, told reporters during a tour of the facility Thursday that the renovation was needed because of “heavy wear and tear” over the last 16 years, since the last big face-lift in 2007.

President Joe Biden saw the finished project this week and “loved it,” Gustafson said, adding that Biden has already had an intelligence briefing there. The Situation Room should be fully operational for calls with heads of state in the coming days, Gustafson said.

National security officials said they used other spaces throughout the West Wing and the Eisenhower Executive Office Building for calls with foreign leaders and other communications while the Situation Room was under construction.

Read the full story on NBCNews.com here.

Biden initially approved assistance to individuals and governments in Cook, Glynn and Lowndes counties.

Lowndes County, home to the city of Valdosta, experienced the worst damage, with estimates showing 80 homes destroyed and 835 homes sustaining major damage as winds reached nearly 70 mph (113 kph).

One man in Valdosta died when a tree fell on him as he tried to clear another tree from a road, sheriff’s deputies said.

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, in a letter sent Wednesday, requested aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to governments in 30 counties and individuals in the three counties Biden approved and added Appling County.

The Georgia Emergency Management Agency expects more counties to be added and additional types of assistance granted.

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Florida also has suffered three Idalia-related deaths. Biden initially approved seven counties in Florida for assistance after Idalia and has added six more.

“This assistance will quickly be put to good use helping those impacted by Hurricane Idalia,” Kemp said in a statement. “We will not stop calling for greater assistance until every Georgia county that sustained damage receives a federal disaster declaration and the help Georgians deserve.”

Aid to individuals can include cash to pay for temporary housing and repairs and low-cost loans to repair uninsured property. For local governments and electric cooperatives, FEMA will help reimburse debris removal and pay for emergency workers, as well as repair public infrastructure.

Kemp estimated Georgia governments saw at least $41 million in damage to public infrastructure, well above the $19 million threshold required statewide for a disaster declaration.

Individuals and business owners in the three counties can seek assistance online at www.DisasterAssistance.gov, by calling 1-800-621-3362 or by using the FEMA app.

Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., a senior member of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, said in a speech advocating for her confirmation that fellow senators had the chance to alter the course of American history.

“To hear her tell her story is to listen to the American dream come to life,” Menendez said of the Kugler, whose parents immigrated from Colombia.

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Kugler, 53, an expert on labor and international economics, is the World Bank’s group executive director for the United States. She took a leave from Georgetown University, where she is professor of public policy and economics since 2010 and also served as vice provost.

Kugler was also the Labor Department’s chief economist from September 2011 to January 2013, under President Barack Obama.

Read the full story on NBCNews.com here.

Biden’s refusal on the plea-bargain guarantees leaves it to military prosecutors and defense lawyers to try to hash out an agreement on a plea bargain. The terms under discussion would have the five Guantanamo detainees plead guilty and serve life sentences in exchange for being spared the death penalty.

Lawyers for the two sides have been exploring a negotiated resolution to the case for about 1 1/2 years. They had been waiting for about a year of that time to see if Biden would express opposition or support for some of the conditions that defense lawyers had been seeking.

Biden agreed with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s recommendation not to accept the proposed terms as a basis for plea negotiations, according to the National Security Council official, who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Biden was unsettled about accepting terms for the plea from those responsible for the deadliest assault on the United States since Pearl Harbor, the official said.

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The White House had been reluctant to weigh in on the matter. Biden believed that the decision was the responsibility of the senior military official overseeing the U.S. military proceedings at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, according to another person familiar with the matter who also was not authorized to comment and spoke on condition of anonymity.

The five defendants include Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, accused as the architect of the attacks, which were waged by commandeered commercial jetliners. The al-Qaida plot killed nearly 3,000 people outright in New York, the Washington, D.C.-area and Pennsylvania. The attack also changed the course of U.S. foreign policy and sparked deadly U.S. military invasions of Afghanistan, which had hosted al-Qaida, and Iraq, which had no role in the plot.

Pretrial hearings for the five have been underway at the U.S. military commission at Guantanamo Bay for more than a decade, with no trial date set. Legal questions, including the legal ramifications of the torture the men underwent after capture in the years immediately after the attack, have complicated the case. So have the logistical challenges of holding the proceedings outside the United States.

The announcement of Biden’s decision not to accede to some of the conditions sought by defense lawyers comes after U.S. military officials formally notified a widened circle of family members of 9/11 victims of the terms of the plea negotiations that were underway. Several of the survivors then spoke out publicly against a deal that would spare the five accused a trial and the risk of a death penalty.

Brett Eagleson, whose father was killed in the 2001 attacks, welcomed the administration’s decision. “We look forward to the day that we can praise our government for finally giving us justice and holding all parties involved in the attacks accountable,” he said in a statement.

The Department of Interior’s scrapping of the leases comes after the Biden administration disappointed environmental groups earlier this year by approving the Willow oil project in the petroleum reserve, a massive project by ConocoPhillips Alaska that could produce up to 180,000 barrels of oil a day on Alaska’s petroleum-rich North Slope.

Some critics who said the approval of Willow flew in the face of Biden’s pledges to address climate change lauded Wednesday’s announcement. But they said more could be done. Litigation over the approval of the Willow project is pending.

“Alaska is home to many of America’s most breathtaking natural wonders and culturally significant areas. As the climate crisis warms the Arctic more than twice as fast as the rest of the world, we have a responsibility to protect this treasured region for all ages,” Biden said in a statement.

His actions “meet the urgency of the climate crisis” and will “protect our lands and waters for generations to come,” Biden said.

Alaska’s Republican governor condemned Biden’s moves and threatened to sue. And at least one Democratic lawmaker said the decision could hurt Indigenous communities in an isolated region where oil development is an important economic driver.

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Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, who drew criticism for her role in the approval of the Willow project, said Wednesday that “no one will have rights to drill for oil in one of the most sensitive landscapes on earth.” However, a 2017 law mandates another lease sale by late 2024. Administration officials said they intend to comply with the law.

The Biden administration also announced proposed rules aimed at providing stronger protections against new leasing and development in portions of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska that are designated as special areas for their wildlife, subsistence, scenic or other values. The proposal still must go through public comment. Willow lies within the reserve but was not expected to be impacted by the proposed rules.

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge’s 1.5-million acre (600,000-hectare) coastal plain, which lies along the Beaufort Sea on Alaska’s northeastern edge, is seen as sacred by the Indigenous Gwich’in because it is where caribou they rely on migrate and come to give birth. The plain is marked by hills, rivers and small lakes and tundra. Migratory birds and caribou pass through the plain, which provides habitat for wildlife including polar bears and wolves.

Alaska political leaders — including some Democrats — have long pushed to allow oil and gas drilling in the refuge in part because of its economic impact on Indigenous communities in an area with few other jobs. Many of those same voices pressed Biden to approve the Willow project for the same reason.

“I am deeply frustrated by the reversal of these leases in ANWR,” said U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola, a Democrat, using a common shorthand for the refuge. “This administration showed that it is capable of listening to Alaskans with the approval of the Willow Project, and it is some of those same Inupiat North Slope communities who are most impacted by this decision. I will continue to advocate for them and for Alaska’s ability to explore and develop our natural resources.”

Alaska’s congressional delegation in 2017 succeeded in getting language added to a federal tax law that called for the U.S. government to hold two lease sales in the region by late 2024.

Drilling opponents on Wednesday urged Congress to repeal the leasing provision from the 2017 law and permanently make the coastal plain off limits to drilling.

“It is nearly impossible to overstate the importance of today’s announcements for Arctic conservation,” said Jamie Williams, president of the Wilderness Society. “Once again, the Arctic Refuge is free of oil leases. Our climate is a bit safer and there is renewed hope for permanently protecting one of the last great wild landscapes in America.”

Alaska Republican U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan denounced Biden’s actions as the latest volley in what he called a “war on Alaska.”

Two other leases that were issued as part of the first-of-its-kind sale for the refuge in January 2021 were previously given up by the small companies that held them amid legal wrangling and uncertainty over the drilling program.

After taking office, Biden issued an executive order calling for a temporary moratorium on activities related to the leasing program and for the Interior secretary to review the program. Haaland later in 2021 ordered a new environmental review after concluding there were “multiple legal deficiencies” underlying the Trump-era leasing program. Haaland halted activities related to the leasing program pending the new analysis.

A draft environmental review was released Wednesday.

The Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, a state corporation that won seven leases in the 2021 sale, sued over the moratorium but a federal judge recently found the delay by Interior to conduct a new review was not unreasonable.

The corporation obtained the leases to preserve drilling rights in case oil companies did not come forward. Major oil companies sat out the sale, held after prominent banks had announced they would not finance Arctic oil and gas projects.

Bernadette Demientieff, executive director of the Gwich’in Steering Committee, thanked the administration for the lease cancelation but she said in a statement, “we know that our sacred land is only temporarily safe from oil and gas development. We urge the administration and our leaders in Congress to repeal the oil and gas program and permanently protect the Arctic Refuge.”

___

An earlier version of this report misspelled Bernadette Demientieff’s last name.

Daly reported from Washington, D.C.

The 3-ton pockmarked, gray concrete slab sits between a bullring, a lighthouse and the border wall, which extends into the Pacific Ocean.

“May this be a lesson to build a society that knocks down walls and builds bridges,” reads the inscription below the towering Cold War relic, attributed to Tijuana Mayor Montserrat Caballero and titled, “A World Without Walls.”

For Caballero, like many of Tijuana’s 2 million residents, the U.S. wall is personal and political, a part of the city’s fabric and a fact of life. She considers herself a migrant, having moved from the southern Mexico city of Oaxaca when she was 2 with her mother, who fled “the vicious cycle of poverty, physical abuse and illiteracy.”

The installation opened Aug. 13 at a ceremony with Caballero and Marcelo Ebrard, Mexico’s former foreign secretary who is now a leading presidential candidate.

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Caballero, 41, is married to an Iranian man who became a U.S. citizen and lives in the United States. She and their 9-year-old son used to cross the border between Tijuana and San Diego.

Since June, Caballero has lived in a military barracks in Tijuana, saying she acted on credible threats against her brought to her attention by U.S. intelligence officials and a recommendation by Mexico’s federal government. Weeks earlier, her bodyguard survived an assassination attempt.

Caballero said that she doesn’t know who wants to kill her but suspects payback for having seized arms from violent criminals who plague her city. “Someone is probably upset with me,” she said in her spacious City Hall office.

Shards of the Berlin Wall scattered worldwide after it crumbled in 1989, with collectors putting them in hotels, schools, transit stations and parks. Marcos Cline, who makes commercials and other digital productions in Los Angeles, needed a home for his artifact and found an ally in Tijuana’s mayor.

“Why in Tijuana?” Caballero said. “How many families have shed blood, labor and their lives to get past the wall? The social and political conflict is different than the Berlin Wall, but it’s a wall at the end of the day. And a wall is always a sphinx that divides and bloodies nations.”

President Joe Biden issued an executive order his first day in office to halt wall construction, ending a signature effort by his predecessor, Donald Trump. But his administration has moved ahead with small, already-contracted projects, including replacing a two-layered wall in San Diego standing 18 feet (5.5 meters) high with one rising 30 feet (9.1 meters) and stretching 0.6 mile (1 kilometer) to the ocean.

The wall slices through Friendship Park, a cross-border site inaugurated by then-U.S. first lady Pat Nixon in 1971 to symbolize binational ties. For decades, families separated by immigration status met through barbed wire and, later, a chain-link fence. It is a cherished, festive destination for tourists and residents in Mexico.

At an arts festival in 2005, David “The Human Cannonball” Smith Jr. flashed his passport in Tijuana as he lowered himself into a barrel and was shot over the wall, landing on a net on the beach with U.S. border agents nearby. In 2019, artist Lizbeth De La Cruz Santana covered the Tijuana side of the wall with paintings of adults who moved to the U.S. illegally as young children and were deported. Visitors who held up their phones to bar codes were taken to a website that voiced their first-person narratives.

Cline said he was turned away at the White House when he tried delivering the Berlin Wall relic to Trump and then trucked it across the country to find a suitable home. He said the piece has found “its second life” at the Tijuana park alongside the colorful paintings on the border wall that express views on politics and immigration.

The U.S. government has gradually restricted park access from San Diego over the last 15 years in a state park that once allowed cross-border yoga classes, religious services and music festivals. After lengthy consideration, the Biden administration agreed to keep the wall at 18 feet for a small section where some access will be allowed.

Dan Watman of Friends of Friendship Park, which advocates for cross-border park access, said the 60-foot (18.3-meter) section that will remain at the lower height is only a token gesture. “The park on the Mexican side has become sort of a one-sided party,” he said.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection said that it anticipates replacing the “deteriorated” two-layer barrier by November and that the higher one under construction ”will provide much needed improvements.”

The Berlin Wall installation has gotten rave reviews from visitors.

Sandra Flores, 55, who vacationed from the Mexican port city of Mazatlan, drew parallels between the Berlin slab and the U.S.-built wall.

“It’s a little less severe here than it was in Germany but it’s a wall that divides nations, lives, social and economic lives and everything related to the United States,” she said.

Lydia Vanasse, who works in the financial sector in San Diego and lives in Tijuana, said the relic took her back to her 20s when the Soviet empire fell and Germans were suddenly allowed to move freely.

“San Diego and Tijuana are sister cities,” she said. “The wall separates us, but we are united in many ways. It would be better if there wasn’t a wall.”

Direct criticism of any U.S. president or policy has been rare.

Tijuana’s mayor said she understands the need for the U.S. to enforce borders and she has warm relations with U.S officials, including Ken Salazar, the ambassador to Mexico. She said Salazar asked her to evict migrants who camped with hopes of getting asylum in the U.S. and blocked access to a U.S. border crossing in 2022. She heeded his recommendation.

Any failures at the border are a collective responsibility of governing nations, the mayor said.

“We are against violence, we are against family separation, we are against division, and that’s what the wall represents,” she said.

___

Associated Press video journalist Eugene Garcia in Los Angeles contributated to this report.

Biden will recognize Taylor at a ceremony next week, the White House announced Friday.

On the night of June 18, 1968, Taylor took off in his attack helicopter to rescue four men on a long-range reconnaissance team that had become surrounded and was in danger of being overrun by enemy troops. He had to figure out a way to get them out, otherwise “they wouldn’t make it.”

David Hill, one of the men Taylor saved that night, said Taylor’s actions were what “we now call thinking outside the box.”

Hill and the three others were on a night mission to track the movement of enemy troops in a village near the Saigon River when they were found by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops. An intense firefight ensued and soon they were running out of ammunition. They radioed for help.

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Taylor flew off in his attack helicopter, arriving just minutes later at the site northeast of what at the time was Saigon, since renamed Ho Chi Minh City. He asked the patrol team to send up some flares to mark their location in the dark. Taylor and a pilot in an accompanying helicopter started firing their ships’ Miniguns and aerial rockets at the enemy, making low-level attack runs and braving intense ground fire for about half an hour.

But with both helicopters nearly out of ammunition and the enemy continuing to advance, Taylor surveyed the team’s intended escape route to a point near the river and concluded that the men would be overrun if they tried to get there.

He had to think of something else.

Now running low on fuel and with the reconnaissance team also nearly out of ammunition, Taylor directed his wingman to fire the rounds left in his Minigun along the team’s eastern flank and then head back to base camp, while Taylor fired his remaining rounds on the western flank. He used the helicopter’s landing lights to distract the enemy, buying time for the patrol team to head south and east toward a different extraction point he had identified.

After they arrived, Taylor landed under heavy enemy fire and at great personal risk. The four team members rushed toward the helicopter and clung to the exterior — it only had two seats — and Taylor whisked them away to safety. He was on the ground for about 10 seconds.

“I finally just flew up behind them and sat down on the ground,” Taylor said during a telephone interview this week. “They turned around and jumped on the aircraft. A couple were sitting on the skids. One was sitting on the rocket pods, and I don’t know where the other one was, but they beat on the side of the ship twice, which meant haul a- -. And we did!”

What Taylor did that night had never before been attempted, the Army said.

Hill put their odds of survival at “absolutely zero” without Taylor’s outside-the-box thinking.

“His innovation was well beyond the call, as was his courage,” said Hill, the only member of the patrol team who is still alive. “And that’s the short of it, folks.”

Taylor basically concocted the plan as he flew along.

“There’s nothing in the book that says how to do that and I think about 90% of flying a helicopter in Vietnam was making it up as you go along,” he said. “Nobody could criticize you ‘cause they couldn’t do any better than you did and they didn’t know what you were doing anyway.”

Taylor said he flew hundreds of combat missions in UH-1 and Cobra helicopters during a year’s deployment in Vietnam. “We never lost a man,” he said.

“You just do whatever is expedient and do whatever to save the lives of the people you’re trying to rescue,” he said.

Taylor was engaged by enemy fire at least 340 times and was forced down five times, according to the Army. He received scores of combat decorations, including the Silver Star, a Bronze Star and two Distinguished Flying Crosses.

Taylor left Vietnam in August 1968, a couple months after that flight. He was released from active duty in August 1970, having attained the rank of captain, and was discharged from the Army Reserve in October 1973. He later ran a roofing and sheet metal company in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He and his wife, Toni, live in Signal Mountain, Tennessee.

Hill said he and supporters of Taylor were astonished to learn decades after that harrowing night that Taylor had not been awarded a Medal of Honor.

Taylor had been awarded a Silver Star, one of the military’s top honors for valor in combat. But to his supporters, that medal represented a “failure by the Army to adequately, or his commanders at the time, to adequately recognize his valor, his courage, his dedication” in Vietnam, and “we were determined to turn that around,” Hill said.

They wanted Taylor to have a Medal of Honor, the military’s highest decoration given to service members who go above and beyond the call of duty, often risking their lives through selfless acts of valor.

So the team dug into the process, gathering documentation, witness statements and other information, including asking Bob Corker, then Taylor’s home-state senator, for his help. After more than six years of pushing, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin approved the Army’s recommendation and forwarded Taylor’s file to Biden.

Biden signed off and called Taylor in July with the news.

Specifically, the federal Health and Human Services Department has recommended taking marijuana out of a category of drugs deemed to have “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.” The agency advised moving pot from that “Schedule I” group to the less tightly regulated “Schedule III.”

So what does that mean, and what are the implications? Read on.

FIRST OF ALL, WHAT HAS ACTUALLY CHANGED? WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

Technically, nothing yet. Any decision on reclassifying — or “rescheduling,” in government lingo — is up to the Drug Enforcement Administration, which says it will take up the issue. The review process is lengthy and involves taking public comment.

Still, the HHS recommendation is “paradigm-shifting, and it’s very exciting,” said Vince Sliwoski, a Portland, Oregon-based cannabis and psychedelics attorney who runs well-known legal blogs on the topic.

“I can’t emphasize enough how big of news it is,” he said.

It came after President Joe Biden asked both HHS and the attorney general, who oversees the DEA, last year to review how marijuana was classified. Schedule I put it on par, legally, with heroin, LSD, quaaludes and ecstasy, among others.

Biden, a Democrat, supports legalizing medical marijuana for use “where appropriate, consistent with medical and scientific evidence,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Thursday. “That is why it is important for this independent review to go through.”

SO IF MARIJUANA GETS RECLASSIFIED, WOULD IT LEGALIZE RECREATIONAL POT NATIONWIDE?

No. Schedule III drugs — which include ketamine, anabolic steroids and some acetaminophen-codeine combinations — are still controlled substances.

They’re subject to various rules that allow for some medical uses, and for federal criminal prosecution of anyone who traffics in the drugs without permission. (Even under marijuana’s current Schedule I status, federal prosecutions for simply possessing it are few: There were 145 federal sentencings in fiscal year 2021 for that crime, and as of 2022, no defendants were in prison for it.)

It’s unlikely that the medical marijuana programs now licensed in 38 states — to say nothing of the legal recreational pot markets in 23 states — would meet the production, record-keeping, prescribing and other requirements for Schedule III drugs.

But rescheduling in itself would have some impact, particularly on research and on pot business taxes.

WHAT WOULD THIS MEAN FOR RESEARCH?

Because marijuana is on Schedule I, it’s been very difficult to conduct authorized clinical studies that involve administering the drug. That has created something of a Catch-22: calls for more research, but barriers to doing it. (Scientists sometimes rely instead on people’s own reports of their marijuana use.)

Schedule III drugs are easier to study.

In the meantime, a 2022 federal law aimed to ease marijuana research.

WHAT ABOUT TAXES (AND BANKING)?

Under the federal tax code, businesses involved in “trafficking” in marijuana or any other Schedule I or II drug can’t deduct rent, payroll or various other expenses that other businesses can write off. (Yes, at least some cannabis businesses, particularly state-licensed ones, do pay taxes to the federal government, despite its prohibition on marijuana.) Industry groups say the tax rate often ends up at 70% or more.

The deduction rule doesn’t apply to Schedule III drugs, so the proposed change would cut pot companies’ taxes substantially.

They say it would treat them like other industries and help them compete against illegal competitors that are frustrating licensees and officials in places such as New York.

“You’re going to make these state-legal programs stronger,” says Adam Goers, an executive at medical and recreational pot giant Columbia Care. He co-chairs a coalition of corporate and other players that’s pushing for rescheduling.

Rescheduling wouldn’t directly affect another pot business problem: difficulty accessing banks, particularly for loans, because the federally regulated institutions are wary of the drug’s legal status. The industry has been looking instead to a measure called the SAFE Banking Act. It has repeatedly passed the House but stalled in the Senate.

ARE THERE CRITICS? WHAT DO THEY SAY?

Indeed, there are, including the national anti-legalization group Smart Approaches to Marijuana. President Kevin Sabet, a former Obama administration drug policy official, said the HHS recommendation “flies in the face of science, reeks of politics” and gives a regrettable nod to an industry “desperately looking for legitimacy.”

Some legalization advocates say rescheduling weed is too incremental. They want to keep focus on removing it completely from the controlled substances list, which doesn’t include such items as alcohol or tobacco (they’re regulated, but that’s not the same).

National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws Deputy Director Paul Armentano said that simply reclassifying marijuana would be “perpetuating the existing divide between state and federal marijuana policies.” Minority Cannabis Business Association President Kaliko Castille said rescheduling just ”re-brands prohibition,” rather than giving an all-clear to state licensees and putting a definitive close to decades of arrests that disproportionately pulled in people of color.

“Schedule III is going to leave it in this kind of amorphous, mucky middle where people are not going to understand the danger of it still being federally illegal,” he said.

___ Associated Press writer Colleen Long contributed from Washington.

The proposal comes after a mandate from President Joe Biden to find ways to strengthen background checks following the passage of bipartisan legislation on guns last year.

People who sell firearms online, at gun shows or other places outside brick-and-mortar stores would be required to be licensed and run background checks on the buyers before the sales under the rule proposed by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

A firearm-industry trade group swiftly raised concerns about the proposal, though, and said it could face a court challenge if finalized in its current form.

The bureau estimates that the rule would affect anywhere from 24,500 to 328,000 sellers. It is aimed at those who are in the business of gun sales, rather than those with personal collections.

Background checks help prevent guns from being sold to people convicted of crimes, teenagers and others who are legally blocked from owning them, said the agency’s director, Steve Dettelbach. Federally licensed firearm dealers are also required to keep records and sell guns with serial numbers, both of which help law enforcement trace weapons used in crimes.

“Unlicensed dealers sell guns without running background checks, without keeping records, without observing the other crucial public safety requirements by which the (federally licensed firearm dealer) community abides,” he said.

Attorney General Merrick Garland said Congress passed the gun legislation to reduce gun violence, including by expanding background checks, and said the new rule implements that mandate.

Overall, stricter gun laws are desired by a majority of Americans and in particular background checks, regardless of what the current gun laws are in their state, according to a recent AP-NORC poll on guns. That desire could be tied to some Americans’ perceived impact of what fewer guns could mean for the country — namely, fewer mass shootings. As of Monday, there have been at least 33 mass killings in the U.S. so far in 2023, leaving at least 163 people dead, not including shooters who died, according to a database maintained by the AP and USA Today in partnership with Northeastern University.

Over the weekend, three Black people were shot to death by a white man wearing a mask and firing a weapon emblazoned with a swastika in Jacksonville, Florida. The shooter, who had purchased the weapons legally despite previously being involuntarily committed for a mental health exam, killed himself.

The legislation last year Congress passed was the most comprehensive gun control in 30 years and it followed a deadly mass shooting in a Uvalde, Texas, elementary school.

The 2022 law toughened background checks for the youngest gun buyers, sought to keep firearms from domestic violence offenders and aimed to help states put in place red flag laws that make it easier to take weapons away from people judged to be dangerous.

Biden has said the law doesn’t go far enough. White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Thursday the administration would continue to push for more gun control.

“This administration will do everything it can to combat the epidemic of gun violence that is tearing up our families, our communities and also our country apart,” she said.

The Giffords Center to Prevent Gun Violence applauded the proposed rule change, saying it closes a “gaping loophole.” Executive Director Peter Ambler said the Biden administration had taken a “giant step forward towards our goal of universal background checks.”

Kris Brown, president of the gun control group Brady, said more than 1 in 5 gun sales in the U.S. are conducted without a background check.

Gun rights groups, on the other hand, have argued it would do little to stop the gun violence problem. Those advocates have previously quickly sued over other ATF rule changes that they argue infringe on gun rights.

The National Shooting Sports Foundation, an industry trade group, said it has “significant concerns” about the proposed rule, arguing it appears to go beyond what the bipartisan legislation allows and could require “ordinary citizens” to become licensed. It warned of a court challenge if the rule is finalized as written.

The proposed rule will be open for public comment for 90 days. It was not immediately clear when it might become final.

HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra said Wednesday on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, that the agency has responded to President Joe Biden’s request “to provide a scheduling recommendation for marijuana to the DEA.”

“We’ve worked to ensure that a scientific evaluation be completed and shared expeditiously,” he added.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement that HHS had recommended that marijuana be moved from a Schedule I to a Schedule III controlled substance.

“HHS has done the right thing,” Schumer, D-N.Y., said. “DEA should now follow through on this important step to greatly reduce the harm caused by draconian marijuana laws.”

Rescheduling the drug would reduce or potentially eliminate criminal penalties for possession. Marijuana is currently classified as a Schedule I drug, alongside heroin and LSD.

According to the DEA, Schedule I drugs “have no currently accepted medical use in the United States, a lack of accepted safety for use under medical supervision, and a high potential for abuse.”

Schedule III drugs “have a potential for abuse less than substances in Schedules I or II and abuse may lead to moderate or low physical dependence or high psychological dependence.” They currently include ketamine and some anabolic steroids.

Biden requested the review in October 2022 as he pardoned thousands of Americans convicted of “simple possession” of marijuana under federal law.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden, D-Ore., issued a statement calling for marijuana to be completely descheduled. “However, the recommendation of HHS to reschedule cannabis as a Schedule III drug is not inconsequential,” he added. “If HHS’s recommendation is ultimately implemented, it will be a historic step for a nation whose cannabis policies have been out of touch with reality.”

Bloomberg News first reported on the HHS recommendation.

In reaction to the Bloomberg report, the nonprofit U.S. Cannabis Council said: “We enthusiastically welcome today’s news. … Rescheduling will have a broad range of benefits, including signaling to the criminal justice system that cannabis is a lower priority and providing a crucial economic lifeline to the cannabis industry.”

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The Biden administration announced on Wednesday it would forgive $72 million in student debt for more than 2,300 borrowers who attended Ashford University.

The aid will go to students from the online for-profit school based in San Diego, who requested loan cancellation through the U.S. Department of Education’s borrower defense process. That relief goes to borrowers who were misled or defrauded by their college.

The department said that Ashford University made substantial misrepresentations to students between 2009 and 2020. In their applications, former students of the school described an inability to complete their programs or obtain employment.

In 2020, the University of Arizona announced a plan for its affiliated foundation to acquire Ashford University and turn it into the University of Arizona Global Campus, according to the Department of Education. The University of Arizona took direct ownership of UAGC at the end of June 2023.

The University of Arizona and UAGC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Eligible borrowers will be notified in September, the Department of Education says.

The Biden administration has so far canceled $116 billion in student debt for more than 3.4 million people through the borrower defense program, income-driven repayment plans and Public Service Loan Forgiveness.

President Joe Biden’s attempt at forgiving up to $20,000 of the debt for tens of millions of Americans was blocked by the U.S. Supreme Court in June. Biden has since said he’ll try to reduce people’s balances another way.

The new rule, shared with The Associated Press ahead of the announcement, would require employers to pay overtime to so-called white-collar workers who make less than $55,000 a year. That’s up from the current threshold of $35,568 which has been in place since 2019 when the Trump administration raised it from $23,660. In another significant change, the rule proposes automatic increases to the salary level each year.

Labor advocates and liberal lawmakers have long pushed a strong expansion of overtime protections, which have sharply eroded over the past decades due to wage stagnation and inflation. The new rule, which is subject to a public commentary period and wouldn’t take effect for months, would have the biggest impact on retail, food, hospitality, manufacturing and other industries where many managerial employees meet the new threshold.

“I’ve heard from workers again and again about working long hours, for no extra pay, all while earning low salaries that don’t come anywhere close to compensating them for their sacrifices,” Acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su said in a statement.

The new rule could face pushback from business groups that mounted a successful legal challenge against similar regulation that Biden announced as vice president during the Obama administration when he sought to raise the threshold to more than $47,000. But it also falls short of the demands by some liberal lawmakers and unions for an even higher salary threshold than the proposed $55,000.

Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, almost all U.S. hourly workers are entitled to overtime pay after 40 hours a week, at no less than time-and-half their regular rates. But salaried workers who perform executive, administrative or professional roles are exempt from that requirement unless they earn below a certain level.

The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute has estimated that about 15% of full-time salaried workers are entitled to overtime pay under the Trump-era policy. That’s compared to more than 60% in the 1970s. Under the new rule, 27% of salaried workers would be entitled to overtime pay because they make less than the threshold, according to the Labor Department.

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Business leaders argue that setting the salary requirement too high will exacerbate staffing challenges for small businesses, and could force many companies to convert salaried workers to hourly ones to track working time. Businesses that challenged the Obama-era rule had praised the Trump administration policy as balanced, while progressive groups said it left behind millions of workers.

A group of Democratic lawmakers had urged the Labor Department to raise the salary threshold to $82,732 by 2026, in line with the 55th percentile of earnings of full-time salaried workers.

A senior Labor Department official said the new rule would bring the threshold in line with the 35th percentile of earnings by full-time salaried workers. That’s above the 20th percentile in the current rule but less than the 40th percentile in the scuttled Obama-era policy.

The National Association of Manufacturers last year warned last year that it may challenge any expansion of overtime coverage, saying such changes would be disruptive at a time of lingering supply chain and labor supply difficulties.

Under the new rule, some 300,000 more manufacturing workers would be entitled to overtime pay, according to the Labor Department. A similar number of retail workers would be eligible, along with 180,000 hospitality and leisure workers, and 600,000 in the health care and social services sector.

The Bidens went to Eliot-Hine Middle School, located east of the U.S. Capitol, to mark the District of Columbia’s first day of school for the 2023-24 year. Seventh graders coming down the stairs for their lunch into the cafeteria were giggling as the president and first lady greeted them. Inside Heather Thomas’ eighth grade class, the students were bouncing out of their seats and yelling with glee as the two walked to the front of the room.

“I’m shaking hands with the president!” one student exclaimed.

Biden said he remembered how it felt to come back to school after a summer away.

“You all look so excited to be in math class,” he said to the students. “What’s your hardest subject, by the way?”

The students all yelled: “Math!”

The Bidens were joined at the school by Mayor Muriel Bowser and the schools chancellor. The event kicks off several back-to-school activities for the first lady, who is traveling later in the week to the Midwest to celebrate teachers and to highlight the mental health needs of students.

Jill Biden is a longtime teacher. She’s the first first lady to continue her career outside the White House. She teaches English and writing at Northern Virginia Community College, which is where she taught during the eight years her husband was President Barack Obama’s vice president. She goes back to school on Tuesday, she told the class, and has been busy preparing lesson plans.

“What you probably don’t know about your teachers is that no matter how long you’ve been teaching, the night before you can barely sleep because you’re so excited,” she said. “Because we love our students.”

The students squealed as Biden went around and shook their hands.

“I want to shake your hand!” one boy yelled.

The school was built in 1931 and was recently modernized with state-of-the-art facilities. It has about 300 students. According to its website, it is focused on rigorous academic and socio-emotional instruction, and it receives federal funding to help support low-income students.

Officials are already expecting updated COVID-19 vaccines that contain one version of the omicron strain, called XBB.1.5. It’s an important change from today’s combination shots, which mix the original coronavirus strain with last year’s most common omicron variants. But there will always be a need for updated vaccines as the virus continues to mutate.

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People should be able to start rolling up their sleeves next month for what officials hope is an annual fall COVID-19 shot. Pfizer, Moderna and smaller manufacturer Novavax all are brewing doses of the XBB update but the Food and Drug Administration will have to sign off on each, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention must then issue recommendations for their use.

“I signed off this morning on a proposal we have to present to the Congress a request for additional funding for a new vaccine that is necessary, that works,” Biden, who is vacationing in the Lake Tahoe area, told reporters on Friday.

He added that it’s “tentatively” recommended “that everybody get it,” once the shots are ready.

The White House’s $40 billion funding request to Congress on Aug. 11 did not mention COVID-19. It included funding requests for Ukraine, to replenish U.S. federal disaster funds at home after a deadly climate season of heat and storms, and funds to bolster the enforcement at the Southern border with Mexico, including money to curb the flow of deadly fentanyl. Last fall, the administration asked for $9.25 billion in funding to combat the virus, but Congress refused the request.

For the week ending July 29, COVID-19 hospital admissions were at 9,056. That’s an increase of about 12% from the previous week. But it’s a far cry from past peaks, like the 44,000 weekly hospital admissions in early January, the nearly 45,000 in late July 2022, or the 150,000 admissions during the omicron surge of January 2022.

“We’re leaving nobody behind,” Biden told a packed East Room filled with lawmakers, advocates and people who have benefited from his economic policies. “We’re investing in all of America — in the heartland, and coast to coast.”

His remarks, delivered on the anniversary of the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, came as the White House ramped up efforts to illustrate the real-world impact of Biden’s economic plans.

At a White House event Wednesday afternoon to celebrate a year since he signed the bill, the president stood alongside people — from union workers to small business owners to consumers — who the White House says have been aided by the law. That sweeping package, along with the bipartisan infrastructure law and a massive bill that bolsters production of semiconductor chips, make up the core of what the White House has branded “Bidenomics.” It’s aggressively promoting the concept as Biden seeks to improve his standing with voters amid his re-election campaign.

Before the East Room event, the administration rolled out a new online tool on invest.gov that relays stories from across the country about the impact of the president’s economic agenda.

The White House is on a sprint to connect what they say is a popular economic agenda with an unpopular incumbent president, as polls show a majority of voters consistently disapprove of Biden’s handling of the economy even amid signs of a U.S. economic upswing.

The inflation rate has cooled over the past year to a more manageable 3.2% annually, while job growth has stayed solid and the economy has avoided the recession that many analysts said would be needed to bring down prices. On Tuesday, the Census Bureau reported that retail sales have climbed 3.2% over the past 12 months.

That level of consumer spending led the investment bank Goldman Sachs to raise its expectations for overall growth in the third quarter to an annual rate of 2.2%. The Atlanta Federal Reserve’s GDPNow estimate jumped even higher with the forecast of third-quarter growth reaching 5%.

The evidence of economic strength has yet to translate into political gains for Biden, who has devoted the past several weeks to traveling the U.S. He’s emphasized the roughly $500 billion worth of investments by private companies that have been spurred by his policies.

Aides say the mood of the American electorate has been dampened in recent years by outside forces such as a once-in-a-century pandemic and said it would take time for laws signed by Biden to have an impact on voters’ sentiments.

“Once those investments happen, once those jobs are created, once those people are at work, in red districts, purple districts, blue districts, it’s very hard to walk away from that,” White House energy adviser John Podesta said Wednesday. “And so I’m quite confident that as the public really begins to feel the presence of this law in their lives, particularly on that workforce side, it’s here to stay.’’

Meanwhile, U.S. Treasury marked the law’s anniversary by releasing a new analysis that it says shows new clean energy investments spurred by the law are largely benefitting underserved communities. The agency report issued Wednesday states that new investments in clean energy, electric vehicles and batteries are concentrated in areas with lower employment, wages and college graduation rates.

But the name is the Inflation Reduction Act after all, despite the minimal impact that the law has had in actually taming cost prices over the past year. So the administration is also rolling out a new report from the Department of Energy that shows the law will cut electricity rates up to 9 percent and lower gas prices by up to 13 percent by the year 2030.

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Associated Press writers Josh Boak, Matthew Daly and Fatima Hussein contributed to this report.

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A week after the deadly blaze that leveled most of historic Lahaina began, many who survived have begun moving into hundreds of hotel rooms set aside for displaced locals.

Crews had covered about 25% of the search area, the police chief said Monday. Police Chief John Pelletier told NBC’s “TODAY” show that the search, which is being conducted with dogs, was going slowly because the animals were getting tired from the heat and rough terrain. He said the emotional toll is draining not just for the town, but also their local rescuers.

“I don’t think anybody is prepared to have this type of situation,” Pelletier said Tuesday morning. “And let’s realize this. When folks are shifting through burn debris, and dust is on you, it’s not just dust on you. It’s our dead. And I don’t think anybody really is used to that when they go home and they take off the uniform. And it’s really somber to think about that.”

Gov. Josh Green asked for patience and space to do the search properly as authorities became overwhelmed with requests to visit the burn area.

“For those people who have walked into Lahaina because they really wanted to see, know that they’re very likely walking on iwi,” he said at a news conference on Maui, using the Hawaiian word for “bones.”

Just three bodies have been identified so far and officials will start releasing names on Tuesday, according to Maui Police Chief John Pelletier, who renewed an appeal for families with missing relatives to provide DNA samples.

Green warned Monday that scores more bodies could be found. The wildfires, some of which have not yet been fully contained, are already the deadliest in the U.S. in more than a century. The cause was under investigation.

Authorities paused a system that had allowed Lahaina residents and others to visit devastated areas with police permits. Kevin Eliason said when he was turned away, the line of cars with people waiting to get a placard had grown to at least 3 miles (5 kilometers) long.

“It’s a joke,” Eliason said. “It’s just crazy. They didn’t expect, probably, tens of thousands of people to show up there.”

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The blaze that swept into centuries-old Lahaina last week destroyed nearly every building in the town of 13,000. That fire has been 85% contained, according to the county. Another blaze known as the Upcountry fire has been 65% contained.

Even where the fire has retreated, authorities have warned that toxic byproducts may remain, including in drinking water, after the flames spewed poisonous fumes. That has left hundreds unable to return home.

The Red Cross said 575 evacuees were spread across five shelters on Monday, including the War Memorial Gymnasium in Wailuku. Green said that thousands of people will need housing for at least 36 weeks.

More than 3,000 people have registered for federal assistance, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and that number was expected to grow.

“We’re not taking anything off the table, and we’re going to be very creative in how we use our authorities to help build communities and help people find a place to stay for the longer term,” agency administrator Deanne Criswell said.

FEMA has started to provide $700 to displaced residents to cover the cost of food, water, first aid and medical supplies. The money is in addition to whatever amount residents qualify for to cover the loss of homes and personal property.

The Biden administration is seeking $12 billion more for the government’s disaster relief fund as part of its supplemental funding request to Congress.

Meanwhile, the local power utility has faced criticism for not shutting off power as strong winds buffeted a parched area under high risk for fire. It’s not clear whether the utility’s equipment played any role in igniting the flames.

Hawaiian Electric Co. Inc. will cooperate with the state’s investigation as well as conducting its own, President and CEO Shelee Kimura said.

Kimura said many factors go into a decision to cut power, including the impact on people who rely on specialized medical equipment. She also noted that shutting off power in the fire area would have knocked out water pumps.

“Even in places where this has been used, it is controversial and it’s not universally accepted,” she said.

Fueled by dry grass and propelled by strong winds from a passing hurricane, the flames on Maui raced as fast as a mile (1.6 kilometers) every minute in one area, according to Green.

As firefighters battled the flames last week, a flurry of court actions were lodged over access to water.

Some state officials say there is not enough water available for firefighters in central Maui, and blame a recent ruling by an environmental court judge. The ruling did not directly affect water supplies to Lahaina, the attorney general’s office said Monday.

On Wednesday morning, Judge Jeffrey Crabtree issued an order temporarily suspending water caps he imposed for 48 hours. The judge also authorized water distribution as requested by Maui fire officials, the county or the state until further notice if he could not be reached.

But that wasn’t enough for the state attorney general’s office, which later filed a petition with the state Supreme Court blaming Crabtree for a lack of water for firefighting. The state asked the court not to let Crabtree alter the amount of water to be diverted or to put a hold on his restrictions until the petition is resolved.

It’s part of a long-running battle between environmentalists and private companies over the decadeslong practice of diverting water from streams that started during Hawaii’s sugar plantation past.

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Kelleher reported from Honolulu, and Weber from Los Angeles. Associated Press journalists Haven Daley in Kalapua, Hawaii; Beatrice Dupuy in New York; and Josh Boak in Washington contributed.

Colleges can focus their recruiting in high minority areas, for example, and take steps to retain students of color who are already on campus, including by offering affinity clubs geared toward students of a certain race. Colleges can also consider how an applicant’s race has shaped personal experience, as detailed in students’ application essays or letters of recommendation, according to the new guidance.

It also encourages them to consider ending policies known to stint racial diversity, including preferences for legacy students and the children of donors.

“Ensuring access to higher education for students from different backgrounds is one of the most powerful tools we have to prepare graduates to lead an increasingly diverse nation and make real our country’s promise of opportunity for all,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement.

The guidance, from the Justice and Education departments, arrives as colleges across the nation attempt to navigate a new era of admissions without the use of affirmative action. Schools are working to promote racial diversity without provoking legal action from affirmative action opponents.

Students for Fair Admission, the group that brought the issue to the Supreme Court through lawsuits against Harvard and the University of North Carolina, sent a letter to 150 universities in July saying they must “take immediate steps to eliminate the use of race as a factor in admissions.”

In its guidance, the Biden administration offers a range of policies colleges can use “to achieve a student body that is diverse across a range of factors, including race and ethnicity.”

It also offers clarity on how colleges can consider race in the context of an applicant’s individual experience. The court’s decision bars colleges from considering race as a factor in and of itself, but nothing prohibits colleges from considering “an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life,” the court wrote.

How to approach that line without crossing it has been a challenge for colleges as they rework admissions systems before a new wave of applications begin arriving in the fall.

The guidance offers examples of how colleges can “provide opportunities to assess how applicants’ individual backgrounds and attributes — including those related to their race.”

“A university could consider an applicant’s explanation about what it means to him to be the first Black violinist in his city’s youth orchestra or an applicant’s account of overcoming prejudice when she transferred to a rural high school where she was the only student of South Asian descent,” according to the guidance.

Schools can also consider a letter of recommendation describing how a student “conquered her feelings of isolation as a Latina student at an overwhelmingly white high school to join the debate team,” it says.

Students should feel comfortable to share “their whole selves” in the application process, the administration said. Previously, many students had expressed confusion about whether the court’s decision blocked them from discussing their race in essays and interviews.

The administration clarified that colleges don’t need to ignore race as they choose where to focus their recruiting efforts. The court’s decision doesn’t forbid schools from targeting recruiting efforts toward schools that predominately serve students of color or low-income students, it says.

Countering a directive from Students for Fair Admissions, the new guidance says colleges can legally collect data about the race of students and applicants, as long as it doesn’t influence admissions decisions.

Echoing previous comments from President Joe Biden, the guidance urges colleges to rethink policies that tend to favor white, wealthy applicants. “Nothing in the decision prevents an institution from determining whether preferences for legacy students or children of donors, for example, run counter to efforts to promote equal opportunities for all students,” the guidance said.

At the same time, the Justice and Education departments warned that they’re ready to investigate if schools fail to provide equal access to students of all races, adding that the administration “will vigorously enforce civil rights protections.”

The guidance arrives as colleges work to avoid the type of diversity decline that has been seen in some states that previously ended affirmative action, including in California and Michigan. Selective colleges in those states saw sharp decreases in minority student enrollment, and some have struggled for decades to recover.

Biden brought up the issue while speaking Wednesday in Belen at a factory that produces wind towers.

“I’m prepared to help in terms of making sure that those folks are taken care of,” he said.

The state’s place in American history as a testing ground has gotten more attention recently with the release of “Oppenheimer,” a movie about physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and the top-secret Manhattan Project.

Biden watched the film last week while on vacation in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.

Democratic Sen. Ben Ray Lujan of New Mexico spoke of how the first bomb was tested on soil just south of where the event was. The senator also discussed getting an amendment into the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which gives payments to people become ill from nuclear weapons tests or uranium mining during the Cold War.

“And those families did not get the help that they deserved. They were left out of the original legislation,” Lujan added. “We’re fighting with everything that we have” to keep the amendment in the National Defense Authorization Act.

Last month, the U.S. Senate voted to expand compensation. The provisions would extend health care coverage and compensation to so-called downwinders exposed to radiation during weapons testing to several new regions stretching from New Mexico to Guam.

Biden said he told Lujan that he’s “prepared to help in terms of making sure that those folks are taken care of.”

Biden announced the plan for the new national monument to preserve about 1,562 square miles (4,046 square kilometers) just outside Grand Canyon National Park, National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi confirmed a day earlier. It will mark the president’s fifth monument designation.

Biden arrived Monday evening at Grand Canyon National Park Airport, where he was greeted by Democratic congressmen Raúl Grijalva and Ruben Gallego. Biden embraced them when he got off Air Force One and the trio chatted for a few minutes. Grijalva, who serves on the House Natural Resources Committee, has repeatedly introduced legislation to create the monument.

He spoke in an area that was between Pinyon Plain Mine, which is being developed and has not opened, and Red Butte, a site culturally significant to the Havasupai and Hopi tribes.

Representatives of various northern Arizona tribes were invited to attend the president’s remarks. Among them were Yavapai-Apache Nation Chairwoman Tanya Lewis, Colorado River Indian Tribes Chairwoman Amelia Flores, Navajo President Buu Nygren and Havasupai Tribal Councilwoman Dianna Sue White Dove Uqualla. Uqualla is part of a group of tribal dancers who will perform a blessing.

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“It’s really the uranium we don’t want coming out of the ground because it’s going to affect everything around us — the trees, the land, the animals, the people,” Uqualla said. “It’s not going to stop.”

Tribes in Arizona have been pushing Biden to use his authority under the Antiquities Act of 1906 to create a new national monument called Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni. “Baaj Nwaavjo” means “where tribes roam,” for the Havasupai people, while “I’tah Kukveni” translates to “our footprints,” for the Hopi tribe.

Tribes and environmentalists for decades have been trying to safeguard the land north and south of Grand Canyon National Park, while Republican lawmakers and the mining industry tout the economic benefits and raise mining as a matter of national security.

The Interior Department, reacting to concerns over the risk of contaminating water, enacted a 20-year moratorium on the filing of new mining claims around the national park in 2012.

A U.S. Geological Survey in 2021 found most springs and wells in a vast region of northern Arizona known for its high-grade uranium ore meet federal drinking water standards despite decades of uranium mining.

In 2017, Democratic President Barack Obama backed off a full-on monument designation. The idea faced a hostile reception from Arizona’s Republican governor and two senators. Then-Gov. Doug Ducey threatened legal action, saying Arizona already has enough national monuments.

Opponents of establishing a monument have argued it won’t help combat a lingering drought and could prevent thinning of forests and stop hunters from keeping wildlife populations in check. Ranchers in Utah near the Arizona border say the monument designation would strip them of privately owned land.

The landscape of Arizona’s political delegation has since changed considerably. Gov. Katie Hobbs, Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, an independent, are all on board. Hobbs, a Democrat, has openly urged Biden to issue a designation. In a letter sent to Biden in May, Hobbs claimed that she heard from people across the political spectrum, including sporting groups and outdoor groups, in support of a monument.

Mining companies and the areas that would benefit from their business remain vehemently opposed. Buster Johnson, a Mohave County supervisor, said the monument proposal feels solely politically driven and there should have been another hearing on the matter. He doesn’t see the point of not tapping into uranium and making the country less dependent on Russia.

“We need uranium for the security of our country,” Johnson said. “We’re out of the game.”

No uranium mines are operating in Arizona, although the Pinyon Plain Mine just south of Grand Canyon National Park has been under development for years. Other claims are grandfathered in. The federal government has said nearly a dozen mines within the area that has been withdrawn from new mining claims could still potentially open, even with the monument designation, because their claims were established before 2012.

After Arizona, Biden will go on to Albuquerque on Wednesday, where he will talk about how fighting climate change has created new jobs. He’ll then visit Salt Lake City on Thursday to mark the first anniversary of the PACT Act, which provides new benefits to veterans who were exposed to toxic substances. He’ll also hold a reelection fundraiser in each city.

The new rule makes it extremely difficult for people to be granted asylum unless they first seek protection in a country they’re traveling through on their way to the U.S. or apply online. It includes room for exceptions and does not apply to children traveling alone.

The decision by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals grants a temporary reprieve from a lower court decision that had found the policy illegal and ordered the government to end its use by this coming Monday. The government had gone quickly to the appeals court asking for the rule to be allowed to remain in use while the larger court battles surrounding its legality play out.

The three-judge panel ruled 2-1 in favor of the government’s request to stay the lower court’s ruling while the appeal goes forward. They also said they would expedite the hearing for the appeal with both sides expected to send in their arguments to the court by mid-September and a hearing to be held at an unspecified date, meaning a relatively fast timeline to review the case.

Judges William Fletcher and Richard Paez, who were both appointed by President Bill Clinton, ruled in favor of the stay but gave no reason for their decision. Judge Lawrence VanDyke, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, dissented. In his dissent VanDyke seemed to agree with the legality of the rule in theory but said it was little different than previous rules put forward by the Trump administration that were shot down by the same appeals court when Trump was in office. He suggested that the judges had been moved to grant the stay because they feared that if the case went all the way to Supreme Court, that body would have done it instead.

“I wish I could join the majority in granting a stay. It is the right result. But that result, right as it may be, isn’t permitted by the outcome-oriented mess we’ve made of our immigration precedent,” VanDyke wrote.

The new asylum rule was put in place back in May. At the time, the U.S. was ending use of a different policy called Title 42, which had allowed the government to swiftly expel migrants without letting them seek asylum. The stated purpose was to protect Americans from the coronavirus.

The administration was concerned about a surge of migrants coming to the U.S. post-Title 42 because the migrants would finally be able to apply for asylum. The government said the new asylum rule was an important tool to control migration.

Rights groups sued, saying the new rule endangered migrants by leaving them in northern Mexico as they waited to score an appointment on the CBP One app the government is using to grant migrants the opportunity to come to the border and seek asylum. The groups argued that people are allowed to seek asylum regardless of where or how they cross the border and that the government app is faulty. They also argue that the new asylum rule is essentially a reboot of two previous rules put forward by President Donald Trump that sought to limit asylum — the same point Judge VanDyke alluded to in his dissent.

The groups also have argued that the government is overestimating the importance of the new rule in controlling migration. They say that when the U.S. ended the use of Title 42, it went back to what’s called Title 8 processing of migrants. That type of processing has much stronger repercussions for migrants who are deported, such as a five-year bar on reentering the U.S. Those consequences — not the asylum rule — were more important in stemming migration after May 11, the groups argue.

“The government has no evidence that the Rule itself is responsible for the decrease in crossings between ports after Title 42 expired,” the groups wrote in court briefs.

But the government has argued that the rule is a fundamental part of its immigration policy of encouraging people to use lawful pathways to come to the U.S. and imposing strong consequences on those who don’t. The government stressed the “enormous harms” that would come if it could no longer use the rule.

“The Rule is of paramount importance to the orderly management of the Nation’s immigration system at the southwest border,” the government wrote.

The government also argued that it was better to keep the rule in place while the lawsuit plays out in the coming months to prevent a “policy whipsaw” whereby Homeland Security staff process asylum seekers without the rule for a while only to revert to using it again should the government ultimately prevail on the merits of the case.

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Follow Santana on Twitter @ruskygal.