By MONIKA PRONCZUK, Associated Press

DAKAR, Senegal (AP) — Citing national security concerns, President Donald Trump on Wednesday banned citizens of 12 countries, primarily in Africa and the Middle East, from entering the United States and restricted access for citizens of seven other nations, resurrecting and expanding a hallmark policy of his first term.

The travel ban applies to citizens of Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen.

The policy change restricts entry for citizens of Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela who are outside the U.S. and do not hold a valid visa.

The policy takes effect Monday at 12:01 a.m. and does not have an end date.

Here’s what to know about the new rules:

How Trump justified the ban

Since returning to the White House, Trump has launched an unprecedented campaign of immigration enforcement that has pushed the limits of executive power and clashed with federal judges trying to restrain him.

The travel ban results from a Jan. 20 executive order Trump issued requiring the departments of State and Homeland Security and the Director of National Intelligence to compile a report on “hostile attitudes” toward the U.S.

The aim is to “protect its citizens from aliens who intend to commit terrorist attacks, threaten our national security, espouse hateful ideology, or otherwise exploit the immigration laws for malevolent purposes,” the administration said.

In a video released on social media, Trump tied the new ban to a terror attack Sunday in Boulder, Colorado, saying it underscored the dangers posed by some visitors who overstay visas. The suspect in the attack is from Egypt, a country that is not on Trump’s restricted list. The Department of Homeland Security says he overstayed a tourist visa.

Who is exempt from the ban

1. Lawful residents: citizens of designated countries who have obtained legal residency in the U.S.
2. Dual citizens: U.S. citizens who also have citizenship of one of the banned countries.
3. Some athletes: athletes and their coaches traveling to the U.S. for the World Cup, Olympics or other major sporting event as determined by the U.S. secretary of state.
4. Afghans who worked for the U.S. government or its allies in Afghanistan and are holders of Afghan Special Immigrant Visas.
5. Iranians belonging to an ethnic or religious minority who are fleeing prosecution.
6. Certain foreign national employees of the U.S. government who have served abroad for at least 15 years and their spouses and children.
7. Refugees: Those who were granted asylum or admitted to the U.S. as refugees before the ban entered into force.
8. Individuals with U.S. family members who apply for visas in connection to their spouses, children or parents.
9. Diplomats and foreign government officials on official visits.
10. Those transiting the U.S. to the U.N. headquarters solely for official business related to the U.N.
11. Representatives of international organizations and NATO on official visits in the U.S.
12. Children adopted by U.S. citizens.

Which countries are affected

Trump said nationals of countries included in the ban pose “terrorism-related” and “public-safety” risks, as well as risks of overstaying their visas. He also said some of these countries had “deficient” screening and vetting or have historically refused to take back their own citizens.

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His findings rely extensively on an annual Homeland Security report of visa overstays of tourists, business visitors and students who arrive by air and sea, singling out countries with high percentages of remaining after their visas expired.

“We don’t want them,” Trump said.

The inclusion of Afghanistan angered some supporters who have worked to resettle its people. The ban makes exceptions for Afghans on Special Immigrant Visas, generally people who worked most closely with the U.S. government during the two-decade war there.

The list can be changed, the administration said in a document circulated Wednesday evening, if authorities of designated countries make “material improvements” to their own rules and procedures. New countries can be added “as threats emerge around the world.”

Early reactions to the ban

International aid groups and refugee resettlement organizations roundly condemned the new ban.

“This policy is not about national security — it is about sowing division and vilifying communities that are seeking safety and opportunity in the United States,” said Abby Maxman, president of Oxfam America.

The African Union Commission expressed concern Thursday about the “the potential negative impact” of the ban on educational exchanges, business ties and broader diplomatic relations.

“The African Union Commission respectfully calls upon the U.S. administration to consider adopting a more consultative approach and to engage in constructive dialogue with the countries concerned,” the commission said in a statement.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, called the order “unnecessary, overbroad and ideologically motivated.”

How the ban is different from 2017

During his first term, Trump issued an executive order in January 2017 banning travel to the U.S. by citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries including Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen.

It was one of the most chaotic and confusing moments of his young presidency. Travelers from those nations were either barred from getting on their flights to the U.S. or detained at U.S. airports after they landed. They included students and faculty, as well as businesspeople, tourists and people visiting friends and family.

The order, often referred to as the “Muslim ban” or the “travel ban,” was retooled amid legal challenges until a version was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2018.

The ban affected various categories of travelers and immigrants from Iran, Somalia, Yemen, Syria and Libya, plus North Koreans and some Venezuelan government officials and their families.

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By SETH BORENSTEIN, M.K. WILDEMAN, MELINA WALLING, JOSHUA A. BICKEL and MATTHEW DALY, Associated Press

When the head of the Environmental Protection Agency announced a wide-ranging rollback of environmental regulations, he said it would put a “dagger through the heart of climate-change religion” and introduce a “Golden Age” for the American economy.

What Lee Zeldin didn’t mention: how ending the rules could have devastating consequences to human health.

The EPA-targeted rules could prevent an estimated 30,000 deaths and save $275 billion each year they are in effect, according to an Associated Press examination that included the agency’s own prior assessments as well as a wide range of other research.

The Gibson Power Plant operates Thursday, April 10, 2025, in Princeton, Ind. (AP Photo/Joshua A. Bickel)

It’s by no means guaranteed that the rules will be entirely eliminated; they can’t be changed without going through a federal rulemaking process that can take years and requires public comment and scientific justification.

But experts say the numbers are conservative and that even a partial dismantling of the rules would mean more pollutants such as smog, mercury and lead — and especially more tiny airborne particles that can lodge in lungs and cause health problems. It would also mean higher emissions of the greenhouse gases driving Earth’s warming to deadlier levels.

“More people will die,” said Cory Zigler, a professor of biostatistics at Brown University who has studied air pollution deaths from coal-fired power plants. “More of this type of pollution that we know kills people will be in the air.”

What went into AP’s examination of the pollution rules

The AP set out to look at what could happen if all the rules were eliminated, by first examining exhaustive assessments the EPA was required to produce before the rules were approved. Though the agency’s priorities can change as presidential administrations change, the methods for the assessments have been largely standard since Ronald Reagan’s presidency and are deeply rooted in peer-reviewed scientific research.

The AP used those and eight different government and private group databases for its estimate of financial costs, some death estimates and analysis of pollution trends. AP performed additional analysis of potential deaths by drawing on peer-reviewed formulas and scientific research on the impacts of increased heat and pollution. And AP vetted its work with multiple outside health experts, who said it is scientifically justified, but likely an undercount.

Multiple experts say the science behind the rules is strong, and they pointed to the rigorous process that must be followed to change them, including requirements for public comment.

Zeldin acknowledged as much last month.

“I’m not going to prejudge outcomes with what will be a lot of rulemaking,” Zeldin said in April.

Virtually all the benefits from the rules come from restricting the burning of coal, oil and natural gas. The fossil fuel industry was a heavy contributor to President Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign and Republicans overall. In announcing the proposed changes, the EPA repeatedly cited the costs of the rules and omitted the benefits in all but one instance.

Calculating costs and benefits is contentious

Asked for comment on the AP findings, an EPA spokesperson said the agency’s plans would “roll back trillions in regulatory costs and hidden ‘taxes’ on U.S. families.”

“Unlike the Biden EPA attempts to regulate whole sectors of our economy out of existence, the Trump EPA understands that we do not have to choose between protecting our precious environment and growing our economy,” spokesperson Molly Vaseliou said.

Scott Segal, an attorney at Bracewell LLP who represents energy and manufacturing interests, suggested that EPA analyses under the Biden administration emphasized worst-case scenarios, inflated health benefit claims and missed the big-picture economic benefits of booming industry.

“If you only count lives saved by regulation, not lives harmed by regulation, the math will always favor more regulation,” Segal said. “This framing misses the larger point: public health isn’t just about air quality — it’s also about job security, housing, access to medical care, and heating in the winter.”

The EPA regulatory analyses are immense documents that numerous health and environment researchers and former officials say are grounded in science, not politics. For example, in January 2024, the EPA produced a 445-page analysis of tightening standards on dangerous particle pollution that cited more than 90 different scientific publications, along with scores of other documents. The Biden EPA presented four different regulatory scenarios and ultimately chose one of the middle options.

Two experts who reviewed AP’s work said the EPA documents that underpinned the analysis were themselves conservative in their estimates. University of Washington health and environment professors Kristi Ebi and Howard Frumkin said that’s because EPA looked at added heat deaths and air pollution mortality, but did not include climate change’s expected deaths from increased infectious disease, flooding and other disaster factors.

“This is a rigorous, compelling and much-needed analysis,” said Frumkin, who was appointed director of the CDC’s National Center for Environmental Health during George W. Bush’s administration. ”It makes clear that regulatory rollbacks by the Trump administration will have major, direct consequences for health and well-being. Because of these regulatory rollbacks and funding cuts, Americans will die needlessly.”

That’s a sentiment echoed by two former Republican EPA administrators, William Reilly and Christine Todd Whitman, who served in the George Bush and George W. Bush administrations respectively.

“This administration is endangering all of our lives — ours, our children, our grandchildren,” said Whitman, who led EPA under George W. Bush.

How regulations helped clear the air

A visit to Evansville, Indiana, helps show how EPA regulations have made a difference.

A church, bottom right, stands in downtown Evansville, Ind., Friday, April 11, 2025. (AP Photo/Joshua A. Bickel)

The city of about 115,000 lies where the state’s southwest tip meets Kentucky at the curving Ohio River. Industry lines the banks and coal barges float past carrying loads destined to fuel power plants.

Kirt Ethridge, 30, grew up in Evansville and still lives there. As a child, he recalls looking down from high ground into the bowl-shaped valley where the heart of the city lies and seeing a haze of pollution atop it. He thought that was normal.

He didn’t think much of the looming smokestacks of the coal-fired power plants and factories that ringed the city, nor the line of inhalers waiting on a bench before he and his classmates ran the mile. He suffered asthma attacks in class, sometimes more than once a week, that sent him to the nurse’s office. Once, he was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance.

“It’s a very scary feeling, particularly as a kid, to not be able to get enough air in your lungs,” he said, describing it as like “breathing through a straw.”

Kirt Ethridge hugs his daughter, Eliza, 5, while at a playground Thursday, April 10, 2025, in Evansville, Ind. (AP Photo/Joshua A. Bickel)

In southwestern Indiana, coal-fired power plants were to blame for between 19,000 and nearly 23,000 deaths from 1999 to 2020, according to work by Zigler published in the journal Science that examined death rates among Medicare recipients and modeled where plants’ pollution would spread.

Nationally, he and his team found a sharp decline in air pollution deaths from coal-fired power plants after the mid-2000s, from an average of 43,000 a year to just 1,600 a year in 2020, with a similar cut in particle pollution. That’s when two different forces came into play: Cheaper and less polluting natural gas pushed aside dirtier and costlier coal, while at the same time stricter regulations required more pollution control devices such as scrubbers.

Duke Energy operates its biggest power plant near Evansville — Gibson Station, which can power about 2.5 million homes. Emissions have declined significantly as the company installed scrubbers that pull unwanted chemicals out of smokestacks, along with other pollution control technology. Duke Energy spokeswoman Angeline Protegere said the scrubbers were a response to “regulations over the years as well as market factors.”

Put simply, the air got cleaner around places like Evansville. Vanderburgh County and neighboring counties violated national annual air standards for fine particles from 2005 to 2010, but no longer do, even as standards have tightened.

The same is true across the United States. The amount of tiny airborne particles in the last 10 years nationwide is one-third lower than 2000-2009, EPA statistics show. Smog pollution is down nearly 15% and sulfur dioxide has plunged 80%.

“The Clean Air Act, the EPA’s founding legislation, has been a powerful engine for improving public health as our air has grown visibly clearer and cleaner,” said Gina McCarthy, who headed the EPA under President Barack Obama and served as Biden’s White House climate adviser. “Millions of Americans have avoided illnesses, hospital visits, and premature deaths thanks to EPA’s cleaner car and truck standards in concert with rules that limit industrial pollution.”

Five rules saving more than $200 billion a year

Five rules together were estimated to have more than $200 billion a year in net benefits, based on EPA documents that estimated reduced illnesses and deaths and the costs for companies to comply.

Three rules dealt with cars and trucks. The “clean car rule” is a tightening of EPA emission standards for vehicles that was supposed to take effect for 2027 model years and eventually have annual net benefits of more than $100 billion a year, according to the agency’s 884-page regulatory analysis. The EPA estimated that over the next three decades this rule alone would prevent 7.9 billion tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide, 8,700 tons of particulate matter and 36,000 tons of nitrogen oxides.

Two other proposed rules — one that deals with car models from 2023 to 2027 and another aimed at heavy trucks and buses — are estimated to save nearly $38 billion a year combined through reduced health problems from air pollution, according to EPA’s own detailed calculations.

EPA plays up costs, plays down benefits of targeted rules

Almost none of those benefits are to be found in 10 fact sheets the EPA produced in conjunction with Zeldin’s announcement. Nine make no mention of benefits from the rules, while eight mention the costs.

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In 17 of the 20 rules with explicit cost-benefit analyses, AP found that estimated benefits are larger than the costs — and sometimes far larger.

For example, Biden’s proposed power plant rule was designed to save more than $24 billion a year, prevent about 3,700 annual premature deaths and 3 million asthma incidents from fossil fuel-powered plants, according to EPA documents last year and work by the Environmental Protection Network. Under Trump, the EPA’s fact sheet on that rule notes nearly $1 billion in costs but nothing about the far higher estimated benefits.

Another rule the EPA updated last year sets standards for pollution permitted in the air, called National Ambient Air Quality Standards. The update, required by the Clean Air Act, cuts allowable soot particles by 25% to reflect new science on the harms from such pollution. The EPA in Biden’s time calculated the change would annually save as much as $46 billion, 4,500 premature deaths and 800,000 asthma incidents.

But the new EPA fact sheet only mentions the estimated costs of the change — about $614 million — and not benefits estimated at 76 times that amount.

“The human body count and human health toll of particulate matter alone is just absolutely massive,” said K. Sabeel Rahman, a Cornell law professor who was a top federal regulatory officer from 2021 to 2023. “Literally tens of thousands of people will lose their lives” if the standard is rolled back, he said.

A penguin-shaped nebulizer

In southwest Indiana, many people have noticed a positive difference from the EPA regulations. And they’re concerned about changes.

In Bloomfield, Jessica Blazier’s 11-year-old son Julian has multiple health conditions that make him more sensitive to air quality, including nonallergic rhinitis, which inflames his nasal passage and makes breathing “feel like a knife sometimes,” in his words. Jessica Blazier said the proposed EPA rule rollbacks are “almost adding insult to injury in our particular circumstance.”

Jessica Blazier, center, prepares an infusion for her son, Julian, right, Wednesday, April 9, 2025, in Bloomfield, Ind. (AP Photo/Joshua A. Bickel)

In Evansville, Ethridge is now raising kids of his own, including a 5-year-old daughter who was born early and doesn’t tolerate respiratory illnesses well. Whenever Eliza gets sick, she uses a children’s nebulizer that is shaped like a penguin and stored in an igloo-shaped case.

“I want to raise my kids in Evansville,” he said. “I don’t want to raise my kids in a bowl of pollution.”

Borenstein and Daly reported from Washington, Walling and Bickel from Evansville, Indiana, and Wildeman from Hartford, Connecticut.

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

By WILL WEISSERT, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping spoke on Thursday at a time when stalled tariff negotiations between their two countries have roiled global trade.

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The conversation was reported by Xinhua, a Chinese state media outlet. The White House did not immediately comment.

Trump had declared one day earlier that it was difficult to reach a deal with Xi.

“I like President XI of China, always have, and always will, but he is VERY TOUGH, AND EXTREMELY HARD TO MAKE A DEAL WITH!!!,” Trump posted Wednesday on his social media site.

Trade negotiations between the United States and China stalled shortly after a May 12 agreement between the two countries to reduce their tariff rates while talks played out. Behind the gridlock has been the continued competition for an economic edge.

By MATT OTT, Associated Press Business Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — Filings for U.S. unemployment benefits rose to their highest level in eight months last week but remain historically low despite growing uncertainty about how tariffs could impact the broader economy.

New applications for jobless benefits rose by 8,000 to 247,000 for the week ending May 31, the Labor Department said Thursday. That’s the most since early October. Analysts had forecast 237,000 new applications.

Weekly applications for jobless benefits are considered representative of U.S. layoffs and have mostly bounced around a historically healthy range between 200,000 and 250,000 since COVID-19 throttled the economy five years ago, wiping out millions of jobs.

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In reporting their latest earnings, many companies have either lowered their sales and profit expectations for 2025 or not issued guidance at all, often citing President Donald Trump’s dizzying rollout of tariff announcements.

Though Trump has paused or dialed down many of his tariff threats, concerns remain that a tariff-induced global economic slowdown could upend what’s been a robust U.S. labor market.

In early May, the Federal Reserve held its benchmark lending rate at 4.3% for the third straight meeting after cutting it three times at the end of last year.

Fed chair Jerome Powell said the potential for both higher unemployment and inflation are elevated, an unusual combination that complicates the central bank’s dual mandate of controlling prices and keeping unemployment low. Powell said that tariffs have dampened consumer and business sentiment.

Earlier this week, the government reported that U.S. job openings rose unexpectedly in April, but other data suggested that Americans are less optimistic about the labor market.

Tuesday’s report showed that the number of Americans quitting their jobs — a sign of confidence in their prospects — fell, while layoffs ticked higher. And in another sign the job market has cooled from the hiring boom of 2021-2023, the Labor Department reported one job every unemployed person. As recently as December 2022, there were two vacancies for every jobless American.

The Labor Department’s more comprehensive monthly employment report comes out Friday, with analysts expecting that U.S. employers added a slim 130,000 jobs in May, down from 177,000 in April.

The government has estimated that the U.S. economy shrank at a 0.2% annual pace in the first quarter of 2025, a slight upgrade from its first estimate. Growth was slowed by a surge in imports as companies in the U.S. tried to bring in foreign goods before Trump’s massive tariffs went into effect.

Trump is attempting to reshape the global economy by dramatically increasing import taxes to rejuvenate the U.S. manufacturing sector. The president has also tried to drastically downsize the federal government workforce, but many of those cuts are being challenged in the courts and Congress.

In a regulatory filing early Thursday, the packaged consumer goods company Procter & Gamble said it expected to cut 7,000 jobs — about 15% of its nonmanufacturing workforce — as part of a two-year restructuring plan.

Other companies that have announced job cuts this year include Workday, Dow, CNN, Starbucks, Southwest Airlines, Microsoft and Facebook parent company Meta.

The four-week average of jobless claims, which evens out some of the week-to-week gyrations during more volatile stretches, rose by 4,500 to 235,000, the most since late October.

The total number of Americans receiving unemployment benefits for the week of May 24 inched down by 3,000 to 1.9 million.