AP News in Brief at 12:04 a.m. EDT

Trump set to meet with Xi in Beijing as war and inflation weigh on his presidency

BEIJING (AP) — President Donald Trump is set to arrive in Beijing on Wednesday for his highly anticipated summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping at a restless moment for a world worried about war, trade and artificial intelligence.

“We’re the two superpowers,” Trump told reporters as he departed the White House on Tuesday. “We’re the strongest nation on Earth in terms of military. China’s considered second.”

While Trump likes to project a sense of strength, the visit occurs at a delicate moment for his presidency as his popularity at home has been weighed down by the U.S. and Israel’s war with Iran and rising inflation as a consequence of that conflict. The president is seeking a win by signing deals with China to buy more American food and aircraft, saying he’ll be talking with Xi about trade “more than anything else.”

The Trump administration hopes to begin the process of establishing a “Board of Trade” with China to address differences between the countries. The board could help prevent the trade war ignited last year after Trump’s tariff hikes, an action China countered through its control of rare earth minerals. That led to a one-year truce last October.

But Trump comes to Beijing at a time when Iran continues to dominate his domestic agenda. The war has led to the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, stranding oil and natural gas tankers and causing energy prices to spike to levels that could sabotage global economic growth. The U.S. president declared that Xi didn’t need to assist in resolving the conflict, even though Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi was in Beijing last week.

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Hegseth gets bipartisan grilling on rising costs of the Iran war and Trump’s end game

WASHINGTON (AP) — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth faced tough questions Tuesday from Republican and Democratic lawmakers about the Trump administration’s end game for the Iran war, the conflict’s rising $29 billion cost and its impact on diminishing U.S. weapons stockpiles.

While the Pentagon chief softened his tone from hearings before Congress nearly two weeks ago, notably avoiding the same pointed criticism of lawmakers, he got far more pushback from members of his own Republican Party about the levels of U.S. munitions used in the Iran war and President Donald Trump’s intense criticism of traditional allies for not taking part in the conflict.

“I take issue with the characterization that munitions are depleted in a public forum,” Hegseth said. “That’s not true.”

Even as he insisted that the U.S. military has plenty of missile defense systems and other munitions for the Iran war or future conflicts, Hegseth told House and Senate lawmakers overseeing defense spending that the Trump administration is working to ramp up production of weapons.

Pentagon officials also told lawmakers that the cost of the Iran war has risen to about $29 billion, the vast bulk of which — roughly $24 billion — is related to replacing munitions and repairing equipment but also includes operational costs to keep forces deployed. That is up from the overall total of $25 billion that Pentagon comptroller Jay Hurst revealed nearly two weeks ago. He said the updated estimate does not include the cost to repair or rebuild U.S. military sites damaged in the region.

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Trump and Hegseth claim ‘control’ over Iran and the Strait of Hormuz as ceasefire talks are stalled

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Kuwait said on Tuesday that Iran launched a failed attack earlier this month on an island where China is helping build a port in the Gulf Arab country. The accusation came just hours before U.S. President Donald Trump was to depart for Beijing on a high-stakes visit over the Iran war and other issues.

Trump said he would have a “long talk” about Iran with Chinese President Xi Jinping but said trade would be a bigger focus. As he left for the summit, Trump again threatened Iran if its leaders don’t reach an agreement on its nuclear program.

“We have Iran very much under control,” Trump said. “We’re either going to make a deal or they’re going to be decimated. One way or the other, we win.”

Iranian state media quoted the country’s foreign ministry as calling “baseless” the allegation by Kuwait, which came under attack by Iran in the war and during the shaky ceasefire that is still holding. But the allegation and ongoing attacks in the region have threatened to reignite open warfare.

The narrow Strait of Hormuz remains in Iran’s chokehold, the U.S. is maintaining a blockade against Iran and negotiations between the two countries appear at a standstill.

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Trump’s redistricting push fizzles in South Carolina Senate but wins in Missouri’s top court

President Donald Trump’s push to redraw the nation’s U.S. House districts received mixed results Tuesday as South Carolina senators defied his desires but Missouri’s top court upheld a new map that could help Republicans win an additional seat in the November midterm elections.

Rather than waning, a national redistricting battle that began 10 months ago has intensified — inflamed by a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that weakened the federal Voting Rights Act and provided grounds for states to try to eliminate voting districts with large minority populations.

Republican lawmakers in Louisiana are wrestling with how politically aggressive to be when redrawing House districts after the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated a majority-Black district as an illegal racial gerrymander.

The ripples of the Louisiana ruling already have led to new U.S. House districts in Tennessee and have extended to Alabama, where Republican Gov. Kay Ivey announced an Aug. 11 special primary for four of the state’s seven congressional districts. That came after the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday overturned an order mandating use of a map with two largely Black districts. The state plans to switch to a map passed in 2023 that has only one majority-Black district, giving Republicans a chance to win an additional seat.

Republicans think they could gain as many as 14 seats from new House maps enacted so far in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Florida and Tennessee. Democrats, meanwhile, think they could gain six seats from new maps in California and Utah. The Virginia Supreme Court last week struck down a redistricting effort that could have yielded four more winnable seats for Democrats.

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French hantavirus patient is critically ill, on an artificial lung as total cases grow to 11

PARIS (AP) — A French woman infected in the deadly hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship is critically ill and being treated with an artificial lung, a doctor at the Paris hospital caring for the sickened passenger said Tuesday. The outbreak has now reached 11 total reported cases, 9 of which have been confirmed.

Three people on the cruise died, including a Dutch couple that health officials believe were the first exposed to the virus while visiting South America.

The French passenger hospitalized in Paris has a severe form of the disease that has caused life-threatening lung and heart problems, said Dr. Xavier Lescure, an infectious disease specialist at Bichat Hospital.

He said the woman is on a life-support device that pumps blood through an artificial lung, providing it with oxygen and returning it to the body. The hope is that the device relieves enough pressure on the lungs and heart to give them some time to recover. Lescure called it “the final stage of supportive care.”

With the evacuation of all passengers and many crew members completed, the MV Hondius is now sailing back to the Netherlands, where it will be cleaned and disinfected.

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Trump’s FDA chief is out after angering pharma CEOs, vaping lobbyists and anti-abortion activists

WASHINGTON (AP) — The head of the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Marty Makary, is resigning after a rocky tenure that drew months of complaints from health industry executives, anti-abortion activists, vaping lobbyists and other allies of President Donald Trump.

News of Makary’s departure Tuesday came just 13 months after he was confirmed to lead the powerful regulatory agency.

A surgeon and health researcher, Makary came to prominence among Republicans as an outspoken critic of public health measures during the COVID-19 pandemic, when he frequently appeared on Fox News Channel. But he struggled to manage the FDA’s bureaucracy and failed to win the confidence of its staff after mass layoffs, leadership upheavals and a series of controversies in which the agency’s scientific principles appeared to be overridden by political interests, including those of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

“He’s a great doctor, and he was having some difficulty,” Trump told reporters outside the White House. “But he’s going to go on and he’s going to do well.”

Trump later confirmed in a social media post that Kyle Diamantas, the agency’s chief for foods, is expected to take over as acting commissioner. Diamantas is an attorney with personal ties to Donald Trump Jr.

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Wall Street’s record-setting run halts as AI stocks slump and oil prices rise

A sudden halt for technology stocks put the brakes on Wall Street’s record-setting run Tuesday.

The S&P 500 fell 0.2% from its all-time high set the day before. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 56 points, or 0.1%, while the Nasdaq composite sank 0.7% from its own record.

Some of the sharpest drops hit chip companies and stocks that had been on electric runs because of the artificial-intelligence boom. Intel slumped 6.8% after its stock had more than tripled so far this year. Micron Technology dropped 3.6% after coming into the day with a gain of nearly 180% for the year to date, and CoreWeave sank 6.1% to cut into its gain of 60% for 2026.

The pullback for AI stocks began earlier in the day in Asia, where South Korea’s Kospi index sank 2.3% from its all-time high on worries that the government may redistribute windfall AI profits from companies to its citizens.

Also weighing on Wall Street was another rise in oil prices as the war with Iran threatens to drag on. The price for a barrel of Brent crude climbed 3.4% to settle at $107.77 as a fragile U.S.-Iran ceasefire looks more tenuous. The war has essentially shut the Strait of Hormuz to oil tankers, keeping them stuck in the Persian Gulf instead of delivering crude to customers worldwide.

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The Iran war is hitting home as gasoline prices fuel inflation surge of 3.8% in the US

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. consumer prices climbed sharply again last month as the 10-week war with Iran delivered higher gasoline prices and more pain for Americans.

The Labor Department’s consumer price index rose 3.8% from April 2025, the biggest jump in three years, and up from a 3.3% year-over-year gain in March. On a month-to-month basis, April prices rose 0.6% from March as gasoline prices rose 5.4%, according to the data released Tuesday. The month-over-month gain was down from a 0.9% increase in overall prices from February to March, when the initial financial shock from the war hit the U.S. economy.

Labor Department figures showed that gasoline prices are up more than 28% compared with a year ago. However, the AAA motor club listed the average regular gallon of gasoline above $4.50 on Tuesday, about 44% more than it cost last year at this time.

Excluding volatile food and energy costs, so-called consumer core prices rose 0.4% last month from March and 2.8% from April 2025, relatively modest readings that suggest the energy price burst has yet to spill over more broadly into prices for other goods.

Grocery prices rose 0.7% from March to April as meat prices rose after they had declined slightly in the month before.

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Trump’s proposed ‘Golden Dome’ estimated to cost $1.2 trillion, far more than he initially said

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s plan to put weapons in space — pitched as a “Golden Dome for America” missile defense program — is estimated to cost $1.2 trillion over a 20-year period, according to a new analysis from the Congressional Budget Office, a far heftier sum than the initial $175 billion price tag he gave last year.

The nonpartisan CBO report, published Tuesday, is described as an analysis that reflects “one illustrative approach rather than an estimate of a specific Administration proposal.”

The futuristic system was ordered by Trump in an executive order during his first week in office. He said then that he expected the system to be “fully operational before the end of my term,” which wraps up in January 2029.

“Over the past 40 years, rather than lessening, the threat from next-generation strategic weapons has become more intense and complex with the development by peer and near-peer adversaries of next-generation delivery systems,” Trump said in his executive order, justifying the need for the missile defense system.

The CBO’s estimates are in part based on a lack of details from the Defense Department about what and how many systems will be deployed, “making it impossible to estimate the long term cost” of the Golden Dome system, the report says.

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Denver airport security missed trespasser who was killed by plane on runway

FORT COLLINS, Colo. (AP) — Workers at Denver airport missed a security breach by a man who scaled a perimeter fence and crossed a runway where he was hit and killed in a fiery collision by a plane with 231 people on board, authorities said Tuesday.

The runway fatality underscores the longstanding challenge of keeping intruders out of major airports. Denver International Airport sprawls across 53 square miles (138 square kilometers) — twice the size of Manhattan — on open prairie northeast of the city center.

The 41-year-old trespasser triggered an alarm as he crossed into the airport in a remote area about 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) from the terminal late Friday night. But security personnel mistakenly attributed that alarm to a herd of deer that was nearby and the airport did not find out about the intruder until after the fact, when the pilot notified the control tower that the plane had hit somebody.

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EDITOR’S NOTE — This story includes discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know needs help, the national suicide and crisis lifeline in the U.S. is available by calling or texting 988. There is also an online chat at 988lifeline.org