Travel and visa restrictions imposed by the Trump administration threaten patient care at hundreds of hospitals that depend on medical residents recruited from overseas. Foreign medical residents often serve as the front-line caregivers at busy safety-net hospitals in low-income communities. Normally the residents begin work on July 1. Orientation programs for some of them already started this week. Now some of those hospitals are racing to prevent staffing shortages. “If international medical graduates can’t start their medical residencies on time on July 1, the ramifications are so far-reaching that it is really unconscionable,” said Kimberly Pierce Burke, executive director of the Alliance of Independent Academic Medical Centers. Senior residents leave hospitals in June and go on to start their careers, she noted. Hospitals rely on new residents to replenish their ranks. “If they don’t come on July 1, that leaves a hole in the patient care team,” Burke said. “Who’s going to pick up the slack?” On May 27, the Trump administration suspended new interview appointments for foreign nationals applying for J-1 visas. The visas, for participants in cultural or educational exchange programs, are used by most medical residents arriving from overseas. On Wednesday, the State Department lifted the pause on visa appointments, according to an official who spoke anonymously to discuss an internal policy change. It was not immediately clear how many, or how quickly, physicians could be granted their visas. — NEW YORK TIMES

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CYBER

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Iran flicks its internet ‘kill switch’ as cyber attacks mount

A woman on a rooftop in Tehran, Iran, checked her smartphone for news Thursday. ARASH KHAMOOSHI/NYT

Iran imposed a nationwide internet and telephone blackout, telling civilians it’s necessary to prevent Israeli cyber attacks as fears grow the United States will join the ongoing conflict. The Ministry of Communications and Information Technology called the measure needed and temporary, “given the abuse of the country’s communication network by the aggressor enemy,” according to a statement cited by the semi-official Tasnim news agency. It’s a further sign that Israel and Iran are escalating their conflict online as well as with missiles — ratcheting up hacking and cyberarmy efforts to disrupt infrastructure and essential services and track human targets. Access to a limited number of domestic services and websites was still available, the Iranian ministry said, without giving further details. Since Wednesday afternoon, both mobile phones and domestic landlines in Iran were unreachable from outside the country. Some Iranians appeared to be able to make calls domestically despite the restrictions. — BLOOMBERG NEWS

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SOCIAL MEDIA

Trump extends TikTok ban deadline for a third time, without clear legal basis

TikTok offices in Culver City, Calif. Bing Guan/Bloomberg

President Trump on Thursday signed an executive order to keep TikTok running in the United States for another 90 days to give his administration more time to broker a deal to bring the social media platform under American ownership. Trump disclosed the executive order on the Truth Social platform Thursday morning. “He’s making an extension so we can get this deal done,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Thursday. “It’s wildly popular. He also wants to protect Americans’ data and privacy concerns on this app. And he believes we can do both at the same time.” It is the third time Trump has extended the deadline. It is not clear how many times Trump can — or will — keep extending the ban as the government continues to try to negotiate a deal for TikTok, which is owned by China’s ByteDance. While there is no clear legal basis for the extensions, so far there have been no legal challenges to fight them. — ASSOCIATED PRESS

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CLIMATE

Banning plastic bags works to limit shoreline litter, study finds

A shopping bag clung to a tree in Paterson, N.J., in 2018. Bryan Anselm/NYT

At tens of thousands of shoreline cleanups across the United States in recent years, volunteers logged each piece of litter they pulled from the edges of lakes, rivers, and beaches into a global database. One of the most common entries? Plastic bags. But in places throughout the United States where plastic bags require a fee or have been banned, fewer bags end up at the water’s edge, according to research published Thursday in Science. Lightweight and abundant, thin plastic bags often slip out of trash cans and recycling bins, travel in the wind, and end up in bodies of water, where they pose serious risks to wildlife, which can become entangled or ingest them. They also break down into harmful microplastics, which have been found nearly everywhere on Earth. Using data compiled by the nonprofit Ocean Conservancy, researchers analyzed results from 45,067 shoreline cleanups between 2016 to 2023, along with a sample of 182 local and state policies enacted to regulate plastic shopping bags between 2017 and 2023. They found areas that adopted plastic bag policies saw a 25 percent to 47 percent reduction in the share of plastic bag litter on shorelines, when compared with areas without policies. The longer a policy was in place, the greater the reduction. “These policies are effective, especially in areas with high concentrations of plastic litter,” said Anna Papp, one of the authors and an environmental economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. — NEW YORK TIMES