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Violent storms battering the central-eastern United States have killed at least 17 people, officials said Sunday, with the National Weather Service warning of “devastating” flash flooding.Flood warnings remain in effect, particularly in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Alabama, according to forecasters. Tennessee has been the hardest hit, with 10 deaths recorded in the western part of the state. Kentucky and Missouri each report two deaths, while Arkansas, Indiana, and Mississippi each count one, with tolls that could still rise.In Jeffersontown, Kentucky, buildings were left destroyed by a reported tornado, an AFP correspondent saw.Photos shared on social and local media showed widespread damage from the storm across several states, with homes torn apart, toppled trees, downed power lines and overturned cars.The National Weather Service said Sunday that “there is still some threat for heavy rainfall and flash flooding for portions of the Southeast and the Gulf Coast region going through this evening and overnight.””Flooding has reached record levels in many communities,” Kentucky’s Governor Andy Beshear wrote on social media Saturday, urging residents in the state to “avoid travel, and never drive through water.”Almost 140,000 customers were without power in five affected states Sunday, according to tracking website PowerOutage.us.Scientists say global warming is disrupting climate patterns and the water cycle, making extreme weather more frequent and ferocious.Last year set a record for high temperatures in the United States, with the country also pummeled by a barrage of tornadoes and destructive hurricanes.

Wall Street braced Sunday for significant losses at the start of the week over Donald Trump’s punishing tariffs on exports to the US, as oil prices plummeted even with countries seeking compromise with the defiant president.The Republican denied Sunday he was intentionally engineering a market selloff and insisted he could not foresee market reactions, saying he would not make a deal with other countries unless trade deficits were solved. “Sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something,” he said of the market pain that has seen trillions of dollars wiped off the value of US companies since the beginning of his tariff rampage.Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One, he added that he had engaged with world leaders on the issue to seek resolution over the weekend, claiming “they’re dying to make a deal.”Futures contracts for the New York Stock Exchange’s main boards were sharply down Sunday, suggesting more pain for battered Wall Street stocks when markets open Monday, while US oil dropped below $60 a barrel for the first time since April 2021.A little over half an hour after the contracts resumed trading at 2200 GMT, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 3.56 percent, while the broader S&P 500 index was down 3.85 percent.- ‘Deals and alliances’ -Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel — which has been hit with 17 percent tariffs, despite being one of Washington’s closest allies — will fly in for crunch talks with Trump Monday on the levies.Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer warned in a newspaper op-ed that “the world as we knew it has gone,” saying the status quo would increasingly hinge on “deals and alliances.”Trump’s staggered deadlines have left space for some countries to negotiate, even as he insisted he would stand firm and his administration warned against any retaliation.”More than 50 countries have reached out to the president to begin a negotiation,” Kevin Hassett, head of the White House National Economic Council, told ABC’s This Week on Sunday, citing the US Trade Representative.Vietnam, a manufacturing powerhouse that counted the US as its biggest export market in the first quarter, has already reached out and requested a delay of at least 45 days to thumping 46 percent tariffs imposed by Trump.Hassett said countries seeking compromise were doing so “because they understand that they bear a lot of the tariffs,” as the administration continues to insist that the duties would not lead to major price rises in the United States.”I don’t think that you’re going to see a big effect on the consumer in the US,” he said. – ‘Markets bloodbath’ -Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent also told NBC’s Meet the Press that 50 countries had reached out.But as for whether Trump will negotiate with them, “I think that’s a decision for President Trump,” Bessent said. “At this moment he’s created maximum leverage for himself… I think we’re going to have to see what the countries offer, and whether it’s believable,” Bessent said. Other countries have been “bad actors for a long time, and it’s not the kind of thing you can negotiate away in days or weeks,” he claimed.Despite hopes for negotiations to avert the worst economic carnage, there was widespread fear that the markets bloodbath could continue into the new trading week.In Saudi Arabia, where the markets were open Sunday, the bourse was down 6.78 percent — the worst daily loss since the Covid-19 pandemic, according to state media.Larry Summers, formerly Director of the National Economic Council under president Barack Obama, said “there is a very good chance there’s going to be more turbulence in markets the way we saw on Thursday and Friday.”Peter Navarro, Trump’s tariff guru, has pushed back against the mounting nervousness and insisted to investors that “you can’t lose money unless you sell,” promising “the biggest boom in the stock market we’ve ever seen.”Russia has not been targeted by the latest raft of tariffs, and Hassett cited talks with Moscow over its invasion of Ukraine as the reason for their omission from the hit list.On Wednesday a White House official suggested the reason for Russia’s omission was because trade was negligible thanks to sanctions.Trump has long insisted that countries around the world that sell products to the United States are in fact ripping Americans off, and he sees tariffs as a means to right that wrong.”Some day people will realize that Tariffs, for the United States of America, are a very beautiful thing!” Trump wrote on Truth social Sunday.But many economists have warned that tariffs are passed on to consumers and that they could see price rises at home.

Warner Bros. new video game-based film “A Minecraft Movie” smashed records in its opening weekend in North American theaters, digging up an estimated $157 million in ticket sales, analysts said Sunday.That total for the film, made along with Legendary Pictures and starring Jack Black, Jason Momoa and Jennifer Coolidge, far surpassed expectations, making it the year’s biggest domestic release.It was also the most successful adaptation ever from a video game, bettering the $146 million opening of 2023’s “Super Mario Bros. Movie.”With $144 million in overseas ticket sales, film’s estimated $301 million take more than doubled its non-paltry $150 million production budget, Variety reported, crediting in part the huge popularity of the video game, which has sold more than 300 million copies.”The domestic box office has been asleep in 2025, and this is an overdue wakeup,” said analyst David A. Gross. He said the film had remarkable cross-generation appeal and that while reviews were “not good, these pictures are made for moviegoers, not critics.”In a very distant second place for the Friday-through-Sunday period was MGM’s “A Working Man,” an action thriller starring Jason Statham, at $7.3 million. In third, at $6.7 million, was “The Chosen: Last Supper Part 2,” the latest episode in a faith-based series about Jesus and his disciples from Fathom Events.Fourth place went to “Snow White,” at $6.1 million. Made for an estimated $250 million, the film’s domestic total of just $77.4 million in three weeks out, coupled with $90 million in sales overseas, is considered a major disappointment for Disney.  And Universal’s horror film “The Woman in the Yard,” starring Danielle Deadwyler, placed fifth, at $4.5 million.Rounding out the top 10 were:”Death of a Unicorn” ($2.7 million)”The Chosen: Last Supper Part 1″ ($1.9 million)”Hell of a Summer” ($1.8 million)”The Friend” ($1.6 million)”Captain America: Brave New World” ($1.4 million)

More than 50 countries have sought talks with President Donald Trump in a scramble to ease punishing tariffs on exports to the United States, the White House said Sunday, as trade partners braced for further fallout.The Republican has remained defiant since unleashing the blitz of tariffs on stunned countries around the world Wednesday, insisting that his policies “will never change” even as markets went into a tailspin. He took to the golf course Sunday, according to his own post on Truth Social.Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel — which has been hit with 17 percent tariffs, despite being one of Washington’s closest allies — will fly in for crunch talks with Trump Monday on the levies.Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer warned in a newspaper op-ed that “the world as we knew it has gone,” saying the status quo would increasingly hinge on “deals and alliances.”Trump’s staggered deadlines have left space for some countries to negotiate, even as he insisted he would stand firm and his administration warned against any retaliation.”More than 50 countries have reached out to the president to begin a negotiation,” Kevin Hassett, head of the White House National Economic Council, told ABC’s This Week on Sunday, citing the US Trade Representative.Vietnam, a manufacturing powerhouse that counted the US as its biggest export market in the first quarter, has already reached out and requested a delay of at least 45 days to thumping 46 percent tariffs imposed by Trump.Hassett said countries seeking compromise were doing so “because they understand that they bear a lot of the tariffs,” as the administration continues to insist that the duties would not lead to major price rises in the United States.”I don’t think that you’re going to see a big effect on the consumer in the US,” he said. – ‘Markets bloodbath’ -Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent also told NBC’s Meet the Press that 50 countries had reached out.But as for whether Trump will negotiate with them, “I think that’s a decision for President Trump,” Bessent said. “At this moment he’s created maximum leverage for himself… I think we’re going to have to see what the countries offer, and whether it’s believable,” Bessent said. Other countries have been “bad actors for a long time, and it’s not the kind of thing you can negotiate away in days or weeks,” he claimed.Despite hopes for negotiations to avert the worst economic carnage, there was widespread fear that the markets bloodbath could continue into the new trading week.In Saudi Arabia, where the markets were open Sunday, the bourse was down 6.78 percent — the worst daily loss since the Covid-19 pandemic, according to state media.Larry Summers, formerly Director of the National Economic Council under president Barack Obama, said “there is a very good chance there’s going to be more turbulence in markets the way we saw on Thursday and Friday.”A drop like that following the announcement of tariffs “signals that there’s likely to be trouble ahead, and people ought to be very cautious,” he wrote on X.Peter Navarro, Trump’s tariff guru, has pushed back against the mounting nervousness and insisted to investors that “you can’t lose money unless you sell.””Right now, the smart strategy is not to panic, just stay in, because we are going to have the biggest boom in the stock market we’ve ever seen under the Trump policies,” Navarro, who has become the public face of tariffs, told Fox News. Russia has not been targeted by the latest raft of tariffs, and Hassett cited talks with Moscow over its invasion of Ukraine as the reason for their omission from the hit list.”There’s obviously an ongoing negotiation with Russia and Ukraine, and I think the President made the decision not to conflate the two issues. It doesn’t mean that Russia, in the fullest of time, is going to be treated wildly different than every other country,” Hassett said.On Wednesday a White House official suggested the reason for Russia’s omission was because trade was negligible thanks to sanctions.Trump has long insisted that countries around the world that sell products to the United States are in fact ripping Americans off, and he sees tariffs as a means to right that wrong.But many economists have warned that tariffs are passed on to consumers and that they could see price rises at home.

The US attorney general on Sunday defended the administration’s decision to seek the death penalty for Luigi Mangione, the young man accused of gunning down a top health-insurance executive on a New York sidewalk.”The president’s directive was very clear,” Pam Bondi told Fox News Sunday. “We are to seek the death penalty when possible.”Bondi had announced Tuesday that prosecutors would seek the death penalty for 26-year-old Mangione, accused of having tracked UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson for days before walking up behind him and firing from a pistol.The brazen killing brought to the surface deep public frustration with the US health insurance system, with many social media users painting Mangione not as a villain but as a folk hero.But Bondi told interviewer Shannon Bream that “we’re not going to be deterred by political motives.”Asked about young people seen wearing T-shirts that say “Free Luigi” or even show him with a halo, Bondi responded: “If there was ever a death case, this is one. This guy is charged with hunting down a CEO, a father of two, a married man, hunting him down and executing him? Yeah.”I feel like these young people have lost their way.”Mangione’s lawyer Karen Friedman Agnifilo has denounced the Justice Department decision as “barbaric” and “political.” The suspect has pleaded not guilty to state charges but has yet to enter a plea on federal charges.President Joe Biden late last year commuted the sentences of nearly every person in a federal prison facing execution.Public support for the death penalty in the US has steadily declined amid reports showing the innocence of several alleged killers.But Trump vowed during his 2024 campaign to execute those still on federal death rows, saying Biden had commuted the death sentences of “37 of the worst killers in our country.”On January 20, his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order calling for the death penalty in federal crimes involving the murder of a police officer or a capital crime committed by an undocumented alien. He ordered the attorney general to ensure that states allowing capital punishment have sufficient drugs “to carry out lethal injection,” and to evaluate whether the 37 people whose sentences Biden commuted “can be charged with state capital crimes.”  

The US attorney general said Sunday that it would be “a heavy lift” for Donald Trump to find a legal way to run for a third term as president.”I wish we could have him for 20 years as our president,” Pam Bondi told Fox News Sunday, “but I think he’s going to be finished, probably, after this term.”The US Constitution was amended in 1947 to set a two-year limit on the presidency, not long after Franklin Roosevelt died near the start of his fourth term in the White House.But constitutional amendments require approval by two-thirds of both houses of Congress, as well as ratification by three-quarters of the 50 states, which political analysts say is extremely unlikely.”That’s really the only way to do it,” Bondi said. “It’d be a heavy lift.”Trump’s early talk of seeking a third term struck many as fanciful, but on March 31 the 78-year-old president told NBC News that he was “not joking” about the possibility.He said there were “methods” that would allow it to happen. The remarks by Bondi, a former Florida attorney general, about the difficulty of a legal third term appear to align with the views of most constitutional scholars.But as a confirmed Trump loyalist holding the government’s top law-enforcement office, her comments take on greater significance.Earlier in the interview with Fox’s Shannon Bream, Bondi spoke out against the broad legal pushback the still-young Trump administration has faced as he moves aggressively to put his policies in place.”We’ve had over 170 lawsuits brought against us — that should be the constitutional crisis right there,” she said. “We’ll continue to fight” those cases as they move through the courts.Bondi defended the administration’s decision to seek the death penalty in the case of Luigi Mangione, who is charged with the December 4, 2024 killing on a New York sidewalk of health insurance executive Brian Thompson.”The president’s directive was very clear: we are to seek the death penalty when possible,” she said. “If there was ever a death case, this is one.” Bondi exulted in one recent legal victory, when the Supreme Court on Friday sided with the administration in a dispute over the Education Department’s move to freeze so-called DEI grants — involving efforts to ensure diversity, equity and inclusion.The right-leaning court allowed the administration to continue freezing $64 million intended for teacher training and professional development.”We just got a great win,” Bondi said, “and we’ll continue to fight every day.”

An American neurologist and an Italian epidemiologist whose work revolutionized the treatment of multiple sclerosis on Saturday won a prestigious Breakthrough Prize, the award nicknamed the “Oscars of science.”Stephen Hauser and Alberto Ascherio were recognized for their decades researching the debilitating neurodegenerative disease, which affects nearly three million people worldwide and was long considered an impenetrable enigma.Hauser’s work on multiple sclerosis (MS) started more than 45 years ago, when he met a young patient named Andrea, “an extraordinarily talented young woman who was already an attorney” and working at the White House under then-president Jimmy Carter, he told AFP.”Then MS appeared in an explosive fashion and destroyed her life,” he said.”I remember seeing her, unable to speak, paralyzed on the right side, unable to swallow, and soon, unable to breathe on her own, and I remember thinking that this was the most unfair thing I had ever seen in medicine.”Then 27 years old, he decided to make it his life’s work.- Rough road -“At the time, we had no treatments for MS. In fact, there was also a pessimism that treatments could ever be developed,” said Hauser, now 74 and director of the neuroscience institute at the University of California San Francisco.Scientists knew the disease, which damages the central nervous system and leads to paralyzing cognitive and motor problems, was caused by the immune system turning on the body.But they thought the white blood cells known as T cells were the lone culprit.Hauser questioned that.Studying the role played in the disease by B cells, another type of white blood cell, he and his colleagues managed to recreate the damage MS causes to the human nervous system in small monkeys known as marmosets.The US federal body overseeing medical research dismissed the link as “biologically implausible,” and turned down their application for funding for a clinical trial.But Hauser and his team pressed on.They persuaded pharmaceutical company Genentech to back testing. In 2006, they got resounding results: treatments targeting B cells were associated with “a dramatic, more than 90-percent reduction in brain inflammation,” Hauser said.It was “something of a scope that had never been seen before.”That threw open a door to bring new treatments to market that slow the advance of the disease in many patients.But it also raised other questions. For example, what would cause our white blood cells to turn against us?- The virus connection -That was a question that puzzled Ascherio, today a professor at Harvard.He decided to investigate why MS mostly affected people in the northern hemisphere.”The geographical distribution of MS was quite striking,” he told AFP.”MS is very uncommon in tropical countries and near the equator.”That made him wonder whether a virus could be involved.He and his team carried out a long-term study following millions of young US military recruits.After nearly 20 years of research, they came up with an answer. In 2022, they confirmed a link between MS and the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), a common infection responsible for another well-known disease, infectious mononucleosis, or mono.”Most people infected with EBV will never develop MS,” said Ascherio, 72.But everyone who develops MS has had EBV first.The discovery still did not explain why MS occurs. But it fuelled hope of finding new treatments and preventive measures for a disease that remains uncurable, and whose current treatments do not work on all patients.Ascherio’s breakthrough could also help treat other conditions.”We are now trying also to extend our investigation, to investigate the role of viral infection in other neurodegenerative diseases, like Alzheimer’s or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis,” also known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease, he said.The link remains theoretical for now. But “there is some evidence,” he said.”It’s like where we were on MS 20 or 30 years ago.”

The artist who painted US President Donald Trump in what he criticized as a “purposefully distorted” portrait has said his remarks have harmed her business.Colorado removed the official portrait of Trump from display in the state’s capitol building last month after the president complained that it was deliberately unflattering.”Nobody likes a bad picture or painting of themselves, but the one in Colorado, in the State Capitol… along with all other Presidents, was purposefully distorted,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform on March 24.”The artist also did President Obama, and he looks wonderful, but the one on me is truly the worst,” Trump said.The 78-year-old Republican called for the oil painting to be taken down, and said the artist, Sarah Boardman, “must have lost her talent as she got older.”The Democrat-controlled Colorado legislature said the same day as Trump’s complaint that the painting would be removed from the gallery in the capitol’s rotunda — where it had been hung since 2019 — and placed in storage.Boardman has responded to Trump’s critique in a statement on her website, saying she completed the work “accurately, without ‘purposeful distortion,’ political bias, or any attempt to caricature the subject, actual or implied.””President Trump is entitled to comment freely, as we all are, but the additional allegations that I ‘purposefully distorted’ the portrait, and that I ‘must have lost my talent as I got older’ are now directly and negatively impacting my business of over 41 years,” the British-born artist said.Boardman added in the undated statement that for the six years that the portrait of Trump hung in the Colorado capitol, she “received overwhelmingly positive reviews” on the commissioned work.However, since Trump’s comments “that has changed for the worst,” she said.In addition to Trump and former president Barack Obama, Boardman was also commissioned to paint a portrait of ex-president George W. Bush.

Violent storms battering the central-eastern United States have killed at least 16 people, officials said, with the National Weather Service warning on Saturday of “severe” flash flooding in the coming days.A line of fierce storms stretching from Arkansas to Ohio has damaged buildings, flooded roadways and produced dozens of tornadoes in recent days.Tennessee was hardest hit by extreme weather, with state authorities saying on Saturday that 10 people had died across the western part of the state.Two people were killed due to floods in Kentucky, according to state Governor Andy Beshear, including a child who was “swept away by floodwaters.”Photos shared on social and local media showed widespread damage from the storm across several states, with homes torn apart, toppled trees, downed power lines and overturned cars.”Severe, widespread flash flooding is expected” into Sunday in parts of the central-eastern region, the National Weather Service (NWS) said, warning that “lives and property are in great danger.”Two storm-related deaths were recorded in Missouri and one in Indiana, according to local media reports and authorities.A five-year-old was found dead in a home in Little Rock, Arkansas “in connection to the ongoing severe weather,” the state’s emergency management agency said in a statement.”Flooding has reached record levels in many communities,” Kentucky’s Governor Beshear wrote on social media Saturday, urging residents in the state to “avoid travel, and never drive through water.”More than 100,000 customers were without power in Arkansas and Tennessee as of early Sunday, according to tracking website PowerOutage.us.The NWS on Saturday said that moderate to severe tornadoes could form in parts of the Tennessee Valley and Lower Mississippi Valley on Sunday, along with “severe thunderstorms.”Scientists say global warming is disrupting climate patterns and the water cycle, making extreme weather more frequent and ferocious.Last year set a record for high temperatures in the United States, with the country also pummeled by a barrage of tornadoes and destructive hurricanes.

A revolution is underway in gene editing — and at its forefront is David Liu, an American molecular biologist whose pioneering work is rewriting the building blocks of life with unprecedented precision.A professor at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Liu was awarded a Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences on Saturday for developing two transformative technologies: one already improving the lives of patients with severe genetic diseases, the other poised to reshape medicine in the years ahead.He spoke with AFP ahead of the Los Angeles ceremony for the prestigious Silicon Valley-founded award.He will receive $3 million for his work on “base editing” and “prime editing,” and plans to donate most of it to support his charitable foundation.”The ability to change a DNA sequence of our choosing into a new sequence of our choosing is a fundamentally very powerful capability,” the 51-year-old said, foreseeing uses not just in human medicine but areas like developing more nutritious or disease-resistant crops.- Correcting the code -DNA is made up of four chemical “letters” — the nucleotide bases A, G, T and C. Mutations in this sequence cause thousands of human diseases, yet until recently, gene editing could only fix a limited number of them.Even CRISPR-Cas9, the groundbreaking technology that earned a Nobel Prize in 2020, has major limitations.It cuts both strands of the DNA helix, making it most useful to disrupt rather than correct genes, while the process can introduce new errors.”Being able to use genome editing to treat genetic diseases requires, in most cases, ways to correct a DNA misspelling, not simply to disrupt a gene,” Liu said.That insight led his lab to develop base editing, which uses the Cas9 protein — disabled so it can no longer cut both DNA strands — to find a target DNA sequence and another enzyme to convert one letter to another — for example, C to T or G to A.Reversing the change — from T to C or A to G — was tougher. Liu’s team overcame the challenge by engineering entirely new enzymes.These base editors can now correct about 30 percent of the mutations that cause genetic diseases. The technology is already in at least 14 clinical trials.In one of them, Beam Therapeutics — which Liu co-founded — announced it had treated patients of AATD, a rare genetic disorder affecting the lungs and liver, with a single drug infusion.While traditional gene therapies often disrupt faulty genes or work around them, base editing repairs the mutation itself.”This was the first time that humans have corrected a mutation that causes a genetic disease in a patient,” Liu said.- Cystic fibrosis hope -Base editing, quickly dubbed “CRISPR 2.0,” can’t fix every mutation.About 70 percent of the roughly 100,000 known disease-causing mutations remain out of its reach, including those caused by missing or extra letters.To expand the toolkit, Liu’s lab introduced prime editing in 2019 — a method capable of replacing entire sections of faulty DNA with corrected sequences.If CRISPR is like scissors that cut DNA, and base editors are like using a pencil to correct individual letters, then prime editing is the equivalent of a word processor’s “find and replace” function.Creating this tool required a series of breakthroughs Liu’s team describes as “small miracles.” The result is, he said, “the most versatile way we know of to edit the human genome.”Among the targets Liu and his team have already pursued with prime editing: cystic fibrosis, a common genetic disease usually caused by three missing DNA letters that causes thick mucus buildup in the lungs and digestive system.Liu’s lab has made much of its work freely accessible, sharing DNA blueprints through a nonprofit library used by tens of thousands of labs worldwide.”The science we create — which is ultimately funded by society, through governments and donors — ultimately goes back to benefit society.”This year’s Breakthrough Prize awards come at a fraught moment for US science, as President Donald Trump’s government strips funding for institutions like the National Institutes of Health (NIH).”The NIH is a treasure, not just for this country but for the world,” said Liu. “Trying to dismantle the heart of what supports science in this country is like burning your seed corn.”