By MORGAN LEE and THOMAS PEIPERT

SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) — Three people were killed when monsoon rains triggered flash flooding in a New Mexico village, sending walls of water, mud and debris rushing down mountainsides that have been repeatedly scarred over recent years by wildfires and post-fire flooding.

A man, a 4-year-old girl and a 7-year-old boy were swept away Tuesday by floodwaters, the village of Ruidoso said in a statement. The village is about 130 miles (210 kilometers) southeast of Albuquerque.

Village officials said no one else has been reported missing as of Wednesday morning.

Mayor Lynn Crawford said the community is devastated by the loss of life, a tragedy that it not unfamiliar for the popular summer retreat. Before the monsoon began, Ruidoso had made much progress in recovering from last year’s deluge and the mayor acknowledged that the village will have to start over in some areas.

“As bad as it is, it could have been way worse because people did heed the warning, did get the higher ground,” he said during a radio address. “But we do have people that are in greater need today than they were yesterday.”

Dozens of swift water rescues

Search and rescue crews were out Wednesday in places that had been hard to reach before dark on Tuesday evening.

Emergency crews completed at least 85 swift water rescues in the Ruidoso area, including of people who were trapped in their homes and cars as the water rose Tuesday, said Danielle Silva of the New Mexico Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.

Two National Guard rescue teams and several local crews already were in the area when the flooding began, Silva said, and more Guard teams were expected.

The water receded by nightfall, leaving cars stranded in the mud and public works scrambling to clear debris from the roadways. Several roads remained closed Wednesday, and the mayor said it would take time to restore utilities in the most damaged neighborhoods.

The floods came just days after flash floods in Texas killed over 100 people and left more than 160 people missing.

A locator map showing the location of flash floods in New Mexico. (AP Digital Embed)

Residents urged to seek higher ground

In New Mexico, officials urged residents to seek higher ground Tuesday afternoon as heavy rainfall caused the Rio Ruidoso to rise nearly 19 feet (2.7 meters) in minutes. The National Weather Service issued flood warnings in the area, which had been stripped of vegetation by wildfires.

A weather service flood gauge and companion video camera showed churning water surge over the river’s banks into surrounding forest.

Kaitlyn Carpenter, an artist in Ruidoso, was riding her motorcycle through town Tuesday afternoon when the storm started to pick up. She sought shelter at the riverside Downshift Brewing Company with about 50 other people and started to film debris rushing down the river.

She spotted a house float by with a familiar turquoise door. It belonged to the family of one of her best friends. She said the family was not in the house and was safe.

“I’ve been in that house and have memories in that house, so seeing it come down the river was just pretty heartbreaking,” Carpenter said.

Village officials continued Wednesday to encourage people to call an emergency line if their loved ones or neighbors were missing or affected by the flood.

A vulnerable area after last year’s wildfires

The area has been especially vulnerable to flooding since the summer of 2024, when the South Fork and Salt fires raced across tinder-dry forest and destroyed an estimated 1,400 homes and structures. Residents were forced to flee a wall of flames, only to grapple with intense flooding later that summer.

“We know that the water levels seemed to be higher than they were last summer,” Silva said. “It is a significant amount of water flowing throughout, some of it in new areas that didn’t flood last year.”

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Matt DeMaria, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Albuquerque, said storms formed in the early afternoon over terrain that was scorched by wildfire. The burn scar was unable to absorb a lot of the rain, as water quickly ran downhill into the river.

Preliminary measurements show the Rio Ruidoso crested at more than 20 feet (6 meters) — a record high if confirmed — and receded Tuesday evening.

Three shelters opened for people who cannot return home.

Cory State, who works at the Downshift Brewing Company, welcomed in dozens of residents as the river surged and hail pelted the windows. The house floating by was “just one of the many devastating things about today,” he said.

The sight brought back painful memories for Carpenter, whose art studio was swept away during a flood last year. Outside, the air smelled of gasoline, and loud crashes could be heard as the river knocked down trees in its path. She said it was terrifying.

Crawford said people are anxious and afraid, as the monsoon is sure to bring more rain throughout the summer.

“Yesterday was a good lesson — you know that Mother Nature is a much bigger powerful force than we are,” he said. “And that we can do a lot of things to protect ourselves and to try to help direct and whatever, but we cannot control.”

Peipert reported from Denver. Associated Press writers Matt Brown in Denver, Hallie Golden in Seattle, Susan Montoya Bryan in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Hannah Schoenbaum in Salt Lake City contributed to this report.

NEW YORK (AP) — X CEO Linda Yaccarino said she’s stepping down after two years running Elon Musk’s social media platform.

Yaccarino posted a positive message Wednesday about her tenure at the company formerly known as Twitter and said “the best is yet to come as X enters a new chapter with” Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI, maker of the chatbot Grok.

Musk hired Yaccarino, a veteran ad executive, in May 2023 buying Twitter for $44 billion in late 2022.

He said at the time that Yaccarino’s role would be focused mainly on running the company’s business operations, leaving him to focus on product design and new technology.

By DEVI SHASTRI

The U.S. is having its worst year for measles spread in more than three decades, with a total of 1,288 cases nationally and another six months to go in 2025.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday that the national case count surpassed 2019, when there were 1,274 cases for the year and the country almost lost its status of having eliminated the vaccine-preventable illness. That could happen this year if the virus has nonstop spread for 12 months.

This year’s outbreaks, some of them interconnected, started five months ago in undervaccinated communities in West Texas. Three people have died — two children in Texas and an adult in New Mexico — and dozens of people have been hospitalized. Public health experts maintain the true case count may be higher than state health departments have confirmed.

North America has three other major measles outbreaks, with 2,966 cases in Chihuahua state, Mexico, 2,223 cases in Ontario, Canada and 1,230 in Alberta, Canada. Twelve other states have current confirmed outbreaks of three or more people — Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma and Utah — and four other states saw their outbreaks end.

The measles, mumps and rubella vaccine is 97% effective at preventing measles after two doses.

The World Health Organization said in 2000 that measles had been eliminated from the U.S.

The CDC identified 22 outbreaks in 2019, the largest being two separate clusters in New York — 412 in New York state and 702 in New York City. These were linked because as measles was spreading through close-knit Orthodox Jewish communities, the CDC said.

It’s a similar situation in North America this year, where the Canada, Mexico and Texas outbreaks stem from large Mennonite communities in the regions. Mennonite churches do not formally discourage vaccination, though more conservative Mennonite communities historically have low vaccination rates and a distrust of government.

A recent study found childhood vaccination rates against measles fell after the COVID-19 pandemic in nearly 80% of the more than 2,000 U.S. counties with available data, including in states that are battling outbreaks this year.

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Only 92.7% of kindergarteners in the U.S. had the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine in the 2023-2024 school year, below the 95% needed to prevent outbreaks. In Gaines County, Texas, the epicenter of the Texas outbreak, only 82% of kindergarteners were up-to-date with MMR vaccines.

State and federal leaders have for years kept funding stagnant for local public health departments’ vaccination programs that are tasked with reversing the trend.

“What we’re seeing with measles is a little bit of a ‘canary in a coal mine,’” said Lauren Gardner, leader of Johns Hopkins University’s independent measles and COVID tracking databases. “It’s indicative of a problem that we know exists with vaccination attitudes in this county and just, I think, likely to get worse.”

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

By MATT BROWN and MICHELLE L. PRICE, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden’s former White House physician is refusing to answer questions as part of the House Republican investigation into Biden’s health in office.

Dr. Kevin O’Connor invoked doctor-client privilege and his rights under the Fifth Amendment during an appearance Wednesday before the House Oversight Committee, his attorneys said.

Republicans are conducting a sweeping investigation into Biden’s actions in office and questioning whether the Democrat’s use of an autopen in office may have been invalid. They have also claimed that some policies carried out by the White House autopen may be invalid if it is proven that Biden was mentally incapacitated for some part of his term.

Biden has strongly denied that he was not in a right state of mind at any point while in office, calling the claims “ridiculous and false.”

David Schertler, one of O’Connor’s lawyers, said in a written statement he prepared for the committee that the doctor would not violate his oath of confidentiality with his patients. He also said the House Oversight committee should hold off on its investigation until Attorney General Pam Bondi concludes an investigation that the Oversight Committee’s chair, Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, said she has launched into the use of the autopen.

“The pending Department of Justice criminal investigation leaves Dr. O’Connor no choice but to invoke his constitutional rights under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution to any questions posed by the Committee,” Schertler said in the statement.

Comer, in a statement, said O’Connor’s decision not to testify made it “clear there was a conspiracy.”

“The American people demand transparency, but Dr. O’Connor would rather conceal the truth,” Comer said.

In a June subpoena of O’Connor, Comer said that claims of physician-patient privilege under the American Medical Association’s code of ethics “lack merit” because that code is not part of federal law. He said the committee’s subpoena meets the AMA’s own requirement that physicians must share a patient’s medical information if “legally compelled to disclose the information” or “ordered to do so by legally constituted authority.”

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Comer has said his committee will release a report of all its findings after the probe is complete. He has issued subpoenas for O’Connor and Anthony Bernal, former chief of staff to former first lady Jill Biden. Last month, Neera Tanden, former director of Biden’s domestic policy counsel, gave voluntary testimony.

Comer has requested testimony from nearly a dozen former senior Biden aides, including former White House chiefs of staff Ron Klain and Jeff Zients; former senior advisers Mike Donilon and Anita Dunn; former deputy chief of staff Bruce Reed, former counselor to the president Steve Ricchetti, former deputy chief of staff Annie Tomasini and a former assistant to the president, Ashley Williams.

President Donald Trump’s White House has waived executive privilege, a right that protects many communications between the president and staff from Congress and the courts, for almost all of those senior staffers. That clears the way for those staffers to discuss their conversations with Biden while he was president.