The United States announced Wednesday it had seized more than 700,000 pounds (300,000 kilograms) of meth precursor chemicals that officials said were en route from China to Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel. “This is the largest seizure of precursor chemicals used to manufacture methamphetamine in US history,” US Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro told reporters at the Port of Houston in the southern state of Texas. She spoke in a warehouse filled with plastic-wrapped blue barrels — 13,000 of them, according to Pirro — shipped from Shanghai on two separate vessels, and bound for laboratories of the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico when they were seized “on the high seas” last week.”Foreign law enforcement partners” assisted US personnel to consolidate the shipments in Panama and bring them to Houston, said Todd Lyons, acting director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).The Trump administration’s designation of the Sinaloa cartel as a foreign terrorist organization has given federal authorities the ability to track precursor chemicals before they reach US soil, Lyons said.”Everyday, tons of chemicals that are used to create synthetic drugs like methamphetamine and fentanyl are shipped from China to Mexico in China’s undeclared war against America and their citizens,” Pirro said.The chemicals would have been used to make 420,000 pounds of methamphetamine with a street value in Houston of $569 million, Pirro said.The seizure was announced a day after Trump said US forces had attacked a drug-smuggling boat off Venezuela, killing 11 “narcoterrorists” in international waters. The attack marked a major escalation of US action after Trump signed an executive order authorizing military action against drug cartels. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in Mexico for a meeting with President Claudio Sheinbaum on Wednesday, vowed the United States would ramp up strikes on cartels, but assured Mexico of respect for its sovereignty.Also this week, the US Treasury Department sanctioned a Chinese chemical company, Guangzhou Tengyue, that it said was involved in the manufacture and sale of synthetic opioids to Americans. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control also sanctioned two individuals connected to the company, Huang Xiaojun and Huang Zhanpeng, alleging they were directly involved in shipping illicit drugs to the United States. The sanctions freeze any property or assets they have in the United States.Drug overdoses are the leading cause of death for Americans aged 18 to 45, according to US officials, who say companies in China are the main source of chemicals use to make illicit drugs that enter the United States. 

Republican members of the US House of Representatives voted on Wednesday to create a new subcommittee to investigate the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol.The move comes nearly three years after a Democratic-led House panel blamed then-president Donald Trump for the storming of Congress by his supporters.Trump was impeached by the Democratic-controlled House for inciting the attack on the Capitol but was acquitted by the Republican-majority Senate.After taking office for a second time in January, Trump pardoned more than 1,500 people charged or convicted of assaulting the Capitol to prevent the certification by Congress of Democrat Joe Biden’s presidential victory.Trump continues to falsely claim that he won the November 2020 election and has repeatedly condemned the findings of the previous January 6 committee.The official objective of the new subcommittee is to “investigate the remaining questions surrounding January 6, 2021.”The subcommittee will have eight members including three Democrats and is to release its final report by December 2026.

A US judge ordered Wednesday that deep funding cuts by the Trump administration to Harvard University be overturned, after they were imposed over claims of anti-Semitism and bias at the Ivy League institution.Harvard sued in April to restore more than $2 billion in frozen funds. The administration insisted its move was legally justified over Harvard’s alleged failure to protect Jewish and Israeli students, particularly amid campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza.The cuts to Harvard’s funding stream forced it to implement a hiring freeze while pausing ambitious research programs, particularly in the public health and medical spheres — pauses experts warned risked American lives.”The Court vacates and sets aside the Freeze Orders and Termination Letters as violative of the First Amendment,” Boston federal judge Allison Burroughs said in her order.”All freezes and terminations of funding to Harvard made pursuant to the Freeze Orders and Termination Letters on or after April 14, 2025 are vacated and set aside.”Burroughs pointed to Harvard’s own admissions in legal filings that there had been an issue of anti-Semitism on campus — but said that the administration’s funding cuts would have no bearing on the situation.- ‘Smokescreen’ for university ‘assault’ -“It is clear, even based solely on Harvard’s own admissions, that Harvard has been plagued by anti-Semitism in recent years and could (and should) have done a better job of dealing with the issue,” she wrote. “That said, there is, in reality, little connection between the research affected by the grant terminations and anti-Semitism.”The judge, appointed by Democratic former president Barack Obama, said the evidence she had seen suggested Trump “used anti-Semitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities.”Both Harvard and the American Association of University Professors brought cases against the Trump administration’s measures which were combined.Trump has sought to have the case heard in the Court of Federal Claims instead of in the federal court in Boston, just miles away from the heart of the university’s Cambridge campus.The Ivy League institution has been at the forefront of Trump’s campaign against top universities after it defied his calls to submit to oversight of its curriculum, staffing, student recruitment and “viewpoint diversity.”Trump and his allies claim that Harvard and other prestigious universities are unaccountable bastions of liberal, anti-conservative bias and anti-Semitism, particularly surrounding protests against Israel’s war in Gaza.The government has also targeted Harvard’s ability to host international students, an important source of income who accounted for 27 percent of total enrollment in the 2024-2025 academic year.

A top health official in Florida vowed Wednesday to end all vaccine mandates in the state, including school requirements, likening the measure to prevent childhood diseases to “slavery.”The announcement thrust the conservative-leaning state into the heart of an intensifying national fight, as vaccine-skeptic federal Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pushes to steer the country away from the life-saving practice.More than 1,000 current and former workers from the federal health department signed a scathing letter to Congress Wednesday accusing Kennedy of putting the health of Americans at risk and demanding that he resign.On the West Coast, the Democratic-led states of California, Washington and Oregon said they were creating a new body to issue their own immunization guidelines, arguing it was needed to counter “politicization” at the federal level — underscoring just how divisive the issue has become.”The Florida Department of Health, in partnership with the governor, is going to be working to end all vaccine mandates in Florida — all of them, every last one of them,” Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo told a cheering audience at the Grace Christian School in Valrico.”Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery,” added Nigerian-born Ladapo, a Harvard-trained physician who has served as the state’s top health official since 2021. He was previously known for his opposition to mRNA Covid vaccines, which he has falsely claimed contaminate a person’s genome.”Who am I as a man standing here now to tell you what you should put in your body? Who am I to tell you what your child should put in (their) body? I don’t have that right. Your body is a gift from God.”Speaking at the same event, Governor Ron DeSantis said Republicans would soon introduce a “big medical package” to put the changes into law.”It is a dangerous time to be a child in the United States of America,” renowned pediatrician and vaccine expert Paul Offit told AFP. “Goodness, it’s going to be really hard to rebuild these things back up again.”- Disease comeback -If fully enacted, Florida would become the first US state to abandon school vaccine requirements, long credited with wiping out once-common childhood scourges such as measles, mumps, rubella, polio and hepatitis B.But resistance to vaccines has swelled in recent years, stoked by false claims linking them to autism — a debunked notion Kennedy himself promoted for years before taking office as health secretary.The issue has become deeply polarized along partisan lines, with conservatives more likely to seek exemptions on religious grounds.As a result, the United States in 2025 saw its worst measles outbreak in more than three decades, with 1,431 cases centered on a Mennonite community in Texas.Kennedy has used his office to curb access to Covid shots and weave anti-vaccine conspiracy theories into federal policy — and last week ousted Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director Sue Monarez over immunization guidelines, plunging the agency into turmoil.That move helped spur California, Washington and Oregon, together home to more than 50 million people, to announce the formation of a “West Coast Health Alliance” that will work with scientists and medical associations to craft its own recommendations.”President (Donald) Trump’s mass firing of CDC doctors and scientists — and his blatant politicization of the agency — is a direct assault on the health and safety of the American people,” California Governor Gavin Newsom said in a joint statement with officials from the other two states.In their letter, the current and former federal health department workers wrote they had sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution and urged Trump and Congress to appoint a new health secretary if Kennedy does not resign.