The industry for materials key to American manufacturing could receive extra government support under proposed legislation from a Michigan congresswoman.

The bill is named the ‘Unearth America’s Future Act.’ It would create new federal loans, tax credits, and programs to spur the domestic production and refining of critical minerals like copper, magnesium, and aluminum.

“What this bill is, is focused on public-private partnerships, supply chain opportunities, as well as recyclability, which is something that’s gaining a lot of traction in the critical materials space right now,” U.S. Representative Haley Stevens (D-MI 11) said about her pending legislation.

Stevens estimates her plan would invest around $10 billion dollars in the industry. It would cover loans, tax credits, partnerships, and the creation of a new national center to oversee research and development.

The policy proposal is a response to concerns about China’s dominance in the market for precious metals, especially those used in goods like smart phones or vehicle batteries.

Stevens said that makes both the country’s and Michigan’s current situations untenable.

“Leaving Michigan’s entire manufacturing base on the hook for materials coming from minerals that are refined in China, that’s a risk. And that’s not working,” she said.

The Trump administration has already issued executive orders aimed at increasing the country’s mining capacity, despite environmental concerns. Separately, existing bipartisan bills in Congress are also trying to address that issue.

Stevens, however, said her way of addressing the matter is by taking a similar approach to how the bipartisan CHIPS Act addressed a shortage of American semiconductor chip makers: increasing the capacity for processing and refining already-mined minerals.

“This will increase our resilience here in the United States of America, but it will also increase our domestic production capabilities, which means lowering costs, lowering costs, lowering costs — we need to lower costs, and that’s what this bill’s going to be about as well. And job creation,” Stevens said.

WASHINGTON — The State Department is warning U.S. diplomats of attempts to impersonate Secretary of State Marco Rubio and possibly other officials using technology driven by artificial intelligence, according to two senior officials and a cable sent last week to all embassies and consulates.

The warning came after the department discovered that an impostor posing as Rubio had attempted to reach out to at least three foreign ministers, a U.S. senator and a governor, according to the July 3 cable, which was first reported by The Washington Post.

The recipients of the scam messages, which were sent by text, Signal and voice mail, were not identified in the cable, a copy of which was shared with The Associated Press.

“The State Department is aware of this incident and is currently monitoring and addressing the matter,” department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce told reporters. “The department takes seriously its responsibility to safeguard its information and continuously take steps to improve the department’s cybersecurity posture to prevent future incidents.”

She declined to comment further due to “security reasons” and the ongoing investigation.

It’s the latest instance of a high-level Trump administration figure targeted by an impersonator, with a similar incident revealed in May involving President Donald Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles. The misuse of AI to deceive people is likely to grow as the technology improves and becomes more widely available, and the FBI warned this past spring about “malicious actors” impersonating senior U.S. government officials in a text and voice messaging campaign.

The hoaxes involving Rubio had been unsuccessful and “not very sophisticated,” one of the officials said. Nonetheless, the second official said the department deemed it “prudent” to advise all employees and foreign governments, particularly as efforts by foreign actors to compromise information security increase.

The officials were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

“There is no direct cyber threat to the department from this campaign, but information shared with a third party could be exposed if targeted individuals are compromised,” the cable said.

The FBI has warned in a public service announcement about a “malicious” campaign relying on text messages and AI-generated voice messages that purport to come from a senior U.S. official and that aim to dupe other government officials as well as the victim’s associates and contacts.

This is not the first time that Rubio has been impersonated in a deepfake. This spring, someone created a bogus video of him saying he wanted to cut off Ukraine’s access to Elon Musk’s Starlink internet service. Ukraine’s government later rebutted the false claim.

Several potential solutions have been put forward in recent years to the growing misuse of AI for deception, including criminal penalties and improved media literacy. Concerns about deepfakes have also led to a flood of new apps and AI systems designed to spot phonies that could easily fool a human.

The tech companies working on these systems are now in competition against those who would use AI to deceive, according to Siwei Lyu, a professor and computer scientist at the University at Buffalo. He said he’s seen an increase in the number of deepfakes portraying celebrities, politicians and business leaders as the technology improves.

Just a few years ago, fakes contained easy-to-spot flaws — inhuman voices or mistakes like extra fingers — but now the AI is so good, it’s much harder for a human to spot, giving deepfake makers an advantage.

“The level of realism and quality is increasing,” Lyu said. “It’s an arms race, and right now the generators are getting the upper hand.”

The Rubio hoax comes after text messages and phone calls went to elected officials, business executives and other prominent figures from someone who seemed to have gained access to the contacts in Wiles’ personal cellphone, The Wall Street Journal reported in May.

Some of those who received calls heard a voice that sounded like Wiles, which may have been generated by AI, according to the newspaper. The messages and calls were not coming from Wiles’ number, the report said. The government was investigating.

Copyright 2025 NPR

Sumit Chanda, a professor of immunology and microbiology at Scripps Research who focuses on pandemics, has made a career out of preparing for disaster.

But Chanda faced a disaster of a different kind this year, when the future of his research was thrown into doubt by the Trump administration’s cuts to science funding.

On Tuesday, Chanda stood alongside roughly two dozen other scientists in the lobby of the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill for what resembled a science fair — but with a twist. Instead of students presenting class projects, the event featured leading researchers from across the country standing in front of posters outlining their work — and the federal cuts that now threaten it.

Attendees said the event, which was organized by Democrats on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, was meant to showcase the kind of future advancements in science and medicine that may be lost because of the cuts.

“These discoveries may not just save our own lives, but the lives of people we love,” Adam Riess, who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2011, said at the event.

“Nearly every innovation that defines our era, every breakthrough from my field and from those of my colleagues, traces back to basic science research,” he added.

NPR sought comment from the White House and the Republican chair of the House committee, Rep. Brian Babin, but did not receive immediate replies.

Chanda leads one of nine pandemic response centers once funded by the National Institutes of Health that have been summarily defunded. They were part of a plan to develop broad-spectrum antiviral drugs targeting the types of pathogens most likely to trigger future pandemics and forward-deploy them around the world to be ready the moment a dangerous outbreak is detected.

“When the next pandemic happens, we rush drugs to, say, Wuhan. We contain that epidemic. So it doesn’t become a pandemic,” he explains.

He’s not even sure exactly why his NIH grant was cut. He got an email saying essentially “now that the pandemic is over, these funds are no longer needed,” without further explanation, he says.

Chanda isn’t alone. Several of the scientists NPR talked to, such as Kimiko Krieger, an assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the Bloomberg School for Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, didn’t get a clear explanation as to why their funding had been pulled.

Krieger is studying how the lack of certain vitamins can contribute to the accumulation of DNA damage in prostate tumors in African American men, who are more than twice as likely to be diagnosed with prostate cancer than other demographics. She found out that her NIH grant had been terminated when she got an email saying her research is “amorphous.”

Scott Neuman / NPR / NPR Kimiko Krieger, an assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the Bloomberg School for Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, stands before a poster describing her research that lost federal funding.

“I don’t know what is amorphous about cancer research or about prostate cancer patients,” she says. “I’m guessing they probably didn’t really read into my work.”

Austin Becker, a professor in the Department of Marine Affairs at the University of Rhode Island, has spent more than a decade developing tools to assess and forecast the impacts of extreme weather events, such as hurricanes, on the Southern New England coast. As a result, he’s been able to develop a “hyperlocal” tool to help emergency managers and resilience planners make quick decisions in such cases.

“I was sitting in the Rhode Island State House, preparing to testify in support of our tool, when I got the email,” Becker says about receiving the notice that the Department of Homeland Security grant would be eliminated. He says there was no hint prior to the email that the project had been targeted for cuts.

Asked whether the administration’s antipathy to climate change, which President Trump has called a “hoax,” might be a factor, he says: “These are early warning systems. They help emergency managers act before infrastructure fails.

“Yes, they’re motivated by climate change, but they solve today’s problems,” he says, pointing to the recent devastating floods in Texas where the death toll has surpassed 100.

But David Corey, a professor of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School who is developing therapies for childhood deafness, has no doubt about the cause of his funding cut. In Corey’s case, it is all about the more than $2.2 billion in multiyear grants and contracts to Harvard that the administration has frozen after the university rejected demands from the White House that it change hiring, admissions and other policies.

Corey and colleagues have spent years carefully studying some 200 genes that cause inherited deafness. He points out that this kind of basic research has already paid dividends.

“Our work mapping how those proteins function has directly led to potential therapies,” says Corey.

One part of his research involves using a virus to deliver a healthy copy of a gene into cells, allowing them to reproduce and replace the version that causes deafness. One such gene is too large to fit in a virus, so Corey’s team “had to figure out a way of snipping out a bit, of shortening the protein in a way that it was still functional.” But without “years and years and years of work on understanding the structure of the protein,” it would not have been possible to do that, he says.

Riess, whose Nobel-winning work showed that the universe was expanding at a faster and faster rate, expressed concern about the “brain drain” that would result from an interruption in funding for important scientific research even if a future administration restored it.

In terms of his own work, he says, he’s spent the last two decades working on refining the value of the Hubble Constant — a key parameter that describes how fast the universe is expanding.

“When you go 19 years working on it and then you go, ‘oh, we’re going to cut the budget this year,’ it’s a waste of that effort,” he says.

“The really smart people who have opportunities, you know, will go to where the science is being done, whether it’s Europe or China or other places,” he says, adding, “I’m definitely hearing from a lot of colleagues who are saying, … ‘I need to look at, what’s plan B.'”

Copyright 2025 NPR

Out: Amazon’s Prime Day that’s actually one day. In: Prime Day that’s stretched to a four-day affair, in hopes of enticing both shoppers and sellers at a time of pricing uncertainty given ever-shifting tariff plans.

The midsummer sales, between July 8 and 11, might offer an early test of the long-touted consumer resilience that’s been propelling the U.S. economy through the Trump administration’s shakeup of import costs.

Spending across U.S. retailers over these four July days is once again expected to reach records, equivalent to two Black Fridays’ worth. That’s according to Adobe, whose forecasts are based on its tracking of online transactions. Adobe predicts shoppers will spend $23.8 billion this week, up by 28% compared to last year.

Adobe also says discounts are on par with last year’s, but the context is new: Shoppers are increasingly hunting for deals and considering how tariffs might affect future prices.

“We can expect to see some of the most popular deals on consumer electronics, since buyers will be on the lookout for bargains and to avoid potential tariff-driven price increases later in the year,” said Sky Canaves, a retail analyst at the research firm Emarketer.

Electronics and back-to-school supplies are expected to top many shoppers’ lists. Sellers are under pressure to raise prices on both thanks to tariffs imposed by President Trump — particularly on China. Best Buy has sounded alarms about computers, laptops and other tech gear.

Chinese imports face an effective new tariff of 30% — a temporary reprieve from Trump’s original 145% tariff as the U.S. and China try to negotiate a trade deal. The White House is similarly negotiating with all other countries, and on Monday Trump pushed the deadline for those deals from July 9 to August.

Trump frames tariffs as a fee paid by other countries — a sort of punishment for a trade imbalance. But it’s often U.S. importers — wholesalers and retailers — who foot the bill and typically pass some of the cost to consumers. Walmart, for example, has warned prices will rise as a result.

The strong job market and wage growth have allowed U.S. shoppers to keep spending through inflation and tariff uncertainty. Plus, many stores have absorbed tariff costs so far — or they’re selling off products they had rushed to import before tariffs kicked in. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told CNBC last week that’s the tactic its sellers have used and prices haven’t gone up “appreciably.”

Spending at restaurants and stores dipped in May compared to April, down 0.9% in the latest Commerce Department report. One major driver was a decline in auto sales after people had rushed to buy cars and trucks earlier in the spring, hoping to get ahead of tariffs. Data for spending in June is due next week.

Prime Day originally began as a way for Amazon to boost sales during an ordinarily sleepy time and draw more subscribers into its membership program. Now, it’s an industry-wide “Black Friday in July” as most rivals, including Walmart and Target, chase the mid-year shopping dollars.

In fact, spending at other retailers began growing faster than at Amazon during Prime Day sales, which have lately been a two-day event. But now the four-day stretch is giving Amazon a boost, and Emarketer projects that the retailer will account for 75% of Prime Day spending compared to less than 60% last year.

Editor’s note: Amazon is among NPR’s recent financial supporters and pays to distribute some NPR content.

Copyright 2025 NPR

Most of the reported deaths in the July 4 floods occurred in Kerr County, Texas, along the Guadalupe River. Provisional river gauge data from the U.S. Geological Survey, recorded at various points along the river, showed water levels spiking to record levels over the course of a few hours.

Loading…

The river gauge closest to Camp Mystic is about five miles downstream of the camp, where the south and north forks of the Guadalupe River merge. It recorded a rise of more than 25 feet in two hours, before going silent for the rest of the day.

Loading…

The website for the National Water Prediction Service lists what might happen if a river gauge hits certain levels. For the Guadalupe River at Hunt river gauge — the one downstream from Camp Mystic in the chart above — one might expect to see:

“Major flooding” at camps along the south fork of the river (an area that includes Camp Mystic) at 25 feet

“Disastrous life-threatening flooding” at 32 feet

The area is known for being susceptible to flash flooding. Ana Campbell of Texas Public Radio reported: