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The U.S. Trade Representative's office announced Wednesday that Washington will not renew the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement in its current form, citing persistent trade deficits Trump says should be surpluses. The move triggers the pact's six-year "sunset" review, reopening the deal for fresh annual negotiations, with a third round of bilateral talks with Mexico slated for the week of July 20.
The president took his first presidential flight Wednesday aboard the newly refurbished Boeing 747-8i donated by Qatar, headed to Medora, North Dakota, for the opening of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library. Trump praised the roughly $400 million jet on the tarmac as "maybe the greatest commercial plane ever built."
The DOE announced that three advanced small reactors have reached "criticality," meeting Trump's Fourth of July goal four days ahead of schedule. The final one, Deployable Energy's 1-megawatt "Unity" microreactor, went critical late Tuesday, joining earlier milestones from Antares Nuclear and Valar Atomics.
The administration marked the end of decades of paper-based retirement processing at a limestone mine 230 feet underground in Boyers, Pennsylvania, where over 400 million records once trapped roughly 10,000 retirements a month in an analog backlog. Officials say the millions of documents will now be shredded as records go fully digital.
Entering the second day of indirect talks in Doha, Iran is now pressing for international recognition of its authority to decide which ships pass through the strait and to charge transit fees. Washington urged Tehran to "think bigger," arguing a broader sanctions-lifting deal would be far more valuable than "a gangster tactic to try and charge a toll."
Iran's negotiators declined to meet directly with U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, forcing all business through Qatari mediators, with Qatar's foreign ministry confirming no high-level meetings were scheduled. Crude prices ticked higher on the diplomatic stall, though oil has still fallen nearly $30 over the past month.
As the earthquake recovery drags into a grim second week, a group of women in La Guaira state caught local police officers pillaging a collapsed building and trying to make off with a box of U.S. dollars. The women tore the cash apart on the spot rather than let the officers steal it.
The CDC is tracking about 770 human West Nile cases, roughly 40% higher than the usual pace this deep into the season, with experts calling both the intensity and the share of infected mosquitoes unusual. All seven Minneapolis-Saint Paul metro counties have tested positive, along with hot spots in Georgia.
Archaeologists excavating ahead of an offshore wind project near Friston in East Suffolk, England, uncovered a previously unknown Anglo-Saxon settlement of wooden longhouses. Some of the structures stretched up to 62 feet long, pointing to a substantial early medieval community.
Two climbers featured in Netflix's "Skywalkers: A Love Story" scaled the Empire State Building's spire Wednesday, unfurled a banner, and one pulled out a ring and proposed at the top. NYPD took the pair into custody with charges pending, and the building called the stunt "unauthorized" but said no visitors were in danger.
