North America

MEXICO CITY (AP) — U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other top American officials are visiting Mexico on Wednesday to discuss shared security issues, foremost among them trafficking of the synthetic opioid fentanyl, but also arms trafficking and increasing migration.

The latest round of the High-Level Security Dialogue brings Blinken, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, among others, together with their Mexican counterparts for two days of talks.

NEW YORK (AP) — The fraud trial that could block former President Donald Trump from doing business in New York drilled down Wednesday into the question of who — his company or hired accountants — bore responsibility for financial statements that the state calls fraudulent.

McALLEN, Texas (AP) — The Biden administration announced it waived 26 federal laws in South Texas to allow border wall construction on Wednesday, marking the administration’s first use of a sweeping executive power employed often during the Trump presidency.

HOLYOKE, Mass. (AP) — A shooting claimed the life of a baby that was delivered after its mother was one of several people hit by gunfire during a fight Wednesday on a downtown street in the western Massachusetts city of Holyoke, authorities said.

The pregnant woman was shot in the afternoon while seated on a public bus and taken to a hospital in critical condition, the Hampden District Attorney’s Office said.

“The infant, who was delivered, and needed life-saving medical services, tragically passed away,” it added.

Iowa. (AP) —Over the past two weeks, Donald Trump said shoplifters should be immediately shot, suggested the United States’ top general be executed and mocked a political opponent’s husband who was beaten with a hammer.

NEW YORK (AP) — Most of the top Republican candidates running for president in 2024 reacted grimly to the ouster of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy by a faction of hard-liners in their own party, while one contender embraced the chaos and the front-runner for the nomination notably did not denounce the move.

Many agreed that it was a clear sign that new leadership was needed, not just in the House of Representatives but also in the party as a whole.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden gathered other world powers Tuesday to coordinate on Ukraine as it battles Russia in a war now almost 20 months long — a deliberate show of U.S. support at a time when the future of its aid is entangled with a volatile faction of House Republicans who want to cut off money to Kyiv.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Lawmakers who had been sitting in stunned silence gasped at the declaration: The office of speaker “is hereby declared vacant.”

For the first time ever, a House speaker had been voted out of the position, plunging Congress into a new degree of turmoil. “Now what?” someone in the chamber yelled out.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Former Vice President Mike Pence on Tuesday criticized his former boss-turned-rival, Donald Trump, for calling retired Gen. Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a traitor over phone calls he made to China in the final stormy months of their administration.

“Frankly what Donald Trump said about him in that tweet, about treason and death, was utterly inexcusable,” the GOP presidential candidate said at a national security and foreign policy event at Washington’s Georgetown University co-hosted by The Associated Press.

BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) — A North Dakota lawmaker who had flown to Arizona to be part of his sister’s sendoff before she deployed overseas gave the woman a hug and told her to “stay safe.”

Hours later, state Sen. Doug Larsen, his wife, and their two young sons were killed on their way home when the single-engine Piper Cherokee he was flying crashed in Utah on Sunday after a refueling stop.