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Well, this could be awkward for Americans traveling abroad. Beginning on January 21, the U.S. will indefinitely suspend immigrant visa processing from 75 countries as part of the Trump administrations crackdown on immigration. While the suspension only applies to those visas needed for employment or to join family in the U.S.and not student or tourist visasit includes many beloved travel destinations for Americans. The countries selectedincluding the Bahamas, Jamaica, and Thailandwere deemed high risk of public benefits usage by the State Department, according to a statement on Wednesday. The ban goes into effect next week, at which time no immigrant visas will be issued to nationals of the 75 affected countries until further notice. Under President Trump, we will not allow foreign nationals to abuse Americas immigration system and exploit the generosity of the American people, Tommy Pigott, spokesperson for the State Department, posted on the X platform on Wednesday. This announcement follows one from last week in which the U.S. added seven countries to a list of mostly African nations whose passport holders must post bonds of up to $15,000 to apply to enter the country. EFFECTS ON LEGAL IMMIGRATION This latest visa crackdown also builds upon prior bans that affected 40 countries, effectively barring entry for nearly half of the immigrants who came to the country legally in 2024, David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, wrote in a blog post. Linking the crackdown to concerns about welfare use among legal immigrants is not good justification for this type of immigration restriction, partly because immigrant visa recipients are already barred from receiving any federal means-tested public benefits for five years, Bier said. President Trump is leading the most anti-legal immigrant administration in American history, Bier wrote. This is just the latest action to slash legal entries to the United States. WHAT THE BAN COVERS The list also has notable exceptions, including several countries that are otherwise the subject of scrutiny by the current administrationChina, Mexico, and El Salvador, for example. Whats more, it doesnt target nationals from several countries for which the U.S. processed the most visas in recent years, such as the Dominican Republic, the Philippines, India, and Vietnam. In addition to the exception for tourist and student visas, dual nationals who have a valid passport from a country thats not on the list are exempt from the pause, according to the State Department. And no visas have been revoked, the agency said. POTENTIAL RIPPLE EFFECT Even though tourism visas arent affected, the change in visa policy could have a ripple effect. The U.S. is expected to see a boom in foreign tourism this year, bringing in more than 1.2 million visitors for the matches scheduled for June and July, according to estimates by Tourism Economics. In 2025, the U.S. welcomed 6% fewer foreign than in the previous year, according to figures released this week by the World Travel and Tourism Council. And a survey conducted in October by Global Rescue found that, as a result of U.S. international policy announcements in 2025, some 61% of American travelers believe theyll be viewed more negatively while traveling abroad. FULL LIST OF AFFECTED COUNTRIES The full list of countries affected by the ban on visas that goes into effect next week is: Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Antigua and Barbuda, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belize, Bhutan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Burma, Cambodia, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Colombia, Cote dIvoire, Cuba, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Dominica, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Fiji, The Gambia, Georgia, Ghana, Grenada, Guatemala, Guinea, Haiti, Iran, Iraq, Jamaica, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kuwait, Kyrgyz Republic, Laos, Lebanon, Liberia, Libya, Moldova, Mongolia, Montenegro, Morocco, Nepal, Nicaragua, Nigeria, North Macedonia, Pakistan, Republic of the Congo, Russia, Rwanda, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Tanzania, Thailand, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, and Yemen.
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E-Commerce
The average long-term U.S. mortgage rate is now down to its lowest level in more than three years. The benchmark 30-year fixed mortgage rate eased to 6.06% this week, down from 6.16% last week, mortgage buyer Freddie Mac said Thursday. One year ago, the rate averaged 7.04%. The last time the average rate was lower was Sept. 15, 2022, when it was at 6.02%. Meanwhile, borrowing costs on 15-year fixed-rate mortgages, popular with homeowners refinancing their home loans, also fell this week, dropping to 5.38% from 5.46% last week. A year ago, that average rate was at 6.27%, Freddie Mac said. Lower mortgage rates boost homebuyers purchasing power, good news for home shoppers at a time when the housing market remains in a deep slump after years of soaring prices and elevated mortgage rates have shut out many aspiring homeowners. Uncertainty over the economy and job market are also keeping many would-be buyers on the sidelines. Mortgage rates began easing in July in anticipation of a series of Fed rate cuts, which began in September and continued last month. The Fed doesnt set mortgage rates, but when it cuts its short-term rate that can signal lower inflation or slower economic growth ahead, which can drive investors to buy U.S. government bonds. That can help lower yields on long-term U.S. Treasurys, which can result in lower mortgage rates. The pullback in mortgage rates helped drive sales of previously occupied U.S. homes higher on a monthly basis the last four months of 2025. Even so, home sales remained stuck at a 30-year low last year, extending the housing markets slump into its fourth year. Lower mortgage rates have been helpful for home shoppers who can afford to buy at current rates. The median U.S. monthly housing payment fell to $2,413 in the four weeks ending Jan. 11, according to Redfin. Thats a 5.5% drop from the same period a year earlier and near the lowest level in two years. The latest drop in rates comes after President Donald Trump announced last week that the federal government would buy $200 billion in mortgage bonds in a bid to reduce mortgage rates. Lower rates spurred a sharp increase in homeowners seeking to refinance their existing home loan to a lower rate last fall, a trend that has continued into this year. Applications for mortgage refinancing loans soared 40% last week from the previous week and accounted for 60% of all home loan applications, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. Applications for loans to buy a home climbed 16%. With mortgage rates much lower than a year ago and edging closer to 6%, MBA expects strong interest from homeowners seeking a refinance and would-be buyers stepping off the sidelines, said MBA CEO Bob Broeksmit. Economists generally expect mortgage rates to ease further this year, though most recent forecasts show the average rate on a 30-year mortgage remaining above 6%, about twice what it was six years ago. Still, rates would have to drop considerably for homeowners, who bought or refinanced when mortgage rates hit rock bottom earlier this decade, to take on a new loan at a far higher rate. Nearly 69% of U.S. homes with an outstanding mortgage have a fixed-rate of 5% or lower, and slightly more than half have a rate at or below 4%, according to Realtor.com. By Alex Veiga, AP business writer
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E-Commerce
A surging stock market and a flurry of deal-making padded the profits of Wall Street’s two big investment banks, which both saw a double-digit jump in profits in the fourth quarter. Goldman Sachs’s net earnings rose 12% from a year earlier, posting a profit of $4.62 billion, or $14.01 a share. Meanwhile, Morgan Stanley said it earned $4.4 billion, or $2.68 per share, compared to a profit of $3.71 billion, or $2.22 per share, compared to a year earlier. Wall Street has been bolstered by the Trump administration’s deregulatory policies, which have led corporations to seek out mergers and acquisitions, as well as the surge of investor interest in artificial intelligence companies and those who stand to benefit from the mass adoption of technologies like ChatGPT. Fourth-quarter investment fee revenues over at Goldman were up 25% year-over-year and Morgan Stanley saw a 47% jump in revenue in its investment banking division. Both banks said their investment fee backlog, which is a signal of how much deal-making is still pending that banks are working on, increased significantly in the fourth quarter. Goldman and Morgan’s results reflect the strong earnings out of the other big banks that reported their results this week. JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup all saw jumps in fourth-quarter profits, but their results were dampened by the ongoing tensions that Wall Street is having with the White House over the issue of the independence of the Federal Reserve and President Donald Trump’s interest in capping credit card interest rates at 10%. Along with a strong investment banking performance, Goldman Sachs also agreed to sell off its Apple Card credit card portfolio to JPMorgan Chase last week, effectively exiting its brief experiment in consumer banking. The bank sold the credit card portfolio at a discount to JPMorgan, a sign of how desperately Goldman wanted to exit the business and put the Apple Card behind it. ___ This story has been corrected to show that Morgan Stanley’s investment banking revenues rose 47%, not 22%. By Ken Sweet, AP business writer
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E-Commerce
An investigation into a sprawling betting scheme to rig NCAA and Chinese Basketball Association games ensnared 26 people, including more than a dozen college basketball players who tried to fix games as recently as last season, federal prosecutors said Thursday. The scheme generally revolved around fixers recruiting players with the promise of a big payment in exchange for purposefully underperforming during a game, prosecutors said. The fixers would then place big bets against the players teams in those games, defrauding sportsbooks and other bettors, authorities said. Calling it an international criminal conspiracy, U.S. Attorney David Metcalf told reporters in Philadelphia that this case represents a significant corruption of the integrity of sports. The indictment suggests that many others including unnamed players had a role in the scheme but werent charged, and Metcalf said the investigation was continuing. The varying charges against the 26 defendants, filed in federal court in Philadelphia, include bribery, wire fraud, and conspiracy. Concerns about gambling and college sports have grown since 2018, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a federal ban on the practice, leading some states to legalize it to varying degrees. According to the indictment unsealed Thursday, fixers started with two games in the Chinese Basketball Association in 2023 and, successful there, moved on to rigging NCAA games as recently as January 2025. The fixers scheme grew to involve more than 39 players on more than 17 different NCAA Division I mens basketball teams, who then rigged and attempted to rig more than 29 games, prosecutors said. They wagered millions of dollars, generating substantial proceeds for themselves, and paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to players in bribes, prosecutors said, with payments to players typically ranging from $10,000 to $30,000 per game. Prosecutors named more than 40 schools that were involved in games that were targeted by the scheme. Rigged games included those played by teams in major conferences, such as Big East and Atlantic 10, prosecutors said. Some were games against nationally ranked programs while some were playoff games, including the first round of the Horizon League championship and the second round of the Southland Conference championship. Some of the allegedly targeted teams were Tulane University, Buffalo State University, DePaul University, Robert Morris University, University of Southern Mississippi, Abilene Christian University, Eastern Michigan State University and the University of New Orleans. Players often recruited teammates to cooperate by playing badly, sitting out or keeping the ball away from players who werent in on the scheme to prevent them from scoring. Sometimes the attempted fix failed, meaning the fixers lost their bets. To entice players, fixers would text photos of stacks of cash. In one case, a fixer encouraged a player to recruit a St. Louis University teammate by texting him one such photo: send that to him if he bite he bite if he dont so be it lol, the indictment said. Four of the players charged Simeon Cottle, Carlos Hart, Oumar Koureissi and Camian Shell played for their current teams in the last few days, although the allegations against them do not involve this season, but the 2023-24 season. Of the defendants, 15 played basketball for Division I NCAA schools during 2024-25 season, prosecutors say. Five others last played in the NCAA in the 2023-24 season while another, former NBA player Antonio Blakeney, played in the Chinese Basketball Association in the 2022-23 season. The remaining five defendants were described as fixers who recruited players and placed bets. They include two men who prosecutors say worked in the training and development of basketball players. Another was a trainer and former coach, one was a former NCAA player and two were described as gamblers, influencers and sports handicappers. One fixer reassured another by texting him there were no guarantees in this world but death taxes and Chinese basketball, court papers said. At the end of the Chinese Basketball Association’s 2022-23 season, fixers put nearly $200,000 in bribe payments and shared winnings from rigged games into Blakeney’s storage locker in Florida, authorities said. In many instances, the defendants wagers on the rigged games were successful. The sportsbooks would not have paid out those wagers had they known that the defendants fixed those games, the indictment said. One betting scandal after another has rocked the sports world, where gambling revenue topped $11 billion for the first three-quarters of last year, according to the American Gaming Association. Thats up more than 13% from the prior year, the group said. The NCAA does not allow athletes or staff to bet on college games, but it briefly allowed student-athletes to bet on professional sports last year before rescinding that decision in November. The indictment follows a series of NCAA investigations that led to at least 10 players receiving lifetime bans this year for bets that sometimes involved their own teams and their own performances. And the NCAA has said that at least 30 players have been investigated over gambling allegations. More than 30 people were also charged in last years sprawling federal takedown of illegal gambling operations linked to professional basketball. Marc Levy and Tassanee Vejpongsa, Associated Press Associated Press writer Maryclaire Dale contributed.
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E-Commerce
President Donald Trump on Thursday announced the outlines of a health care plan he wants Congress to take up as Republicans have faced increasing pressure to address rising health costs after lawmakers let subsidies expire. The cornerstone is his proposal to send money directly to Americans for health savings accounts so they can handle insurance and health costs as they see fit. Democrats have rejected the idea as a paltry substitute for the tax credits that had helped lower monthly premiums for many people. The government is going to pay the money directly to you, Trump said in a taped video the White House released to announce the plan. It goes to you and then you take the money and buy your own health care. Trump’s plan also focuses on lowering drug prices and requiring insurers to be more upfront with the public about costs, revenues, rejected claims and wait times for care. Trump has long been dogged by his lack of a comprehensive health care plan as he and Republicans have sought to unwind former President Barack Obamas signature legislation, the Affordable Care Act. Trump was thwarted during his first term in trying to repeal and replace the law. When he ran for president in 2024, Trump said he had only concepts of a plan to address health care. His new proposal, short on many specifics, appeared to be the concepts of a plan. Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, described it to reporters on a telephone briefing as a framework that we believe will help Congress create legislation. It was not immediately clear if any lawmakers in Congress were working to introduce the Republican presidents plan. A White House official who was not authorized to speak publicly and described some details on condition of anonymity said the administration had been discussing the proposal with allies in Congress, but was unable to name any lawmakers who were working to address the plan. Few specifics on health savings accounts The White House did not offer any details about how much money it envisioned being sent to consumers to shop for insurance, or whether the money would be available to all Obamacare enrollees or just those with lower-tier bronze and catastrophic plans. The idea mirrors one floated among Republican senators last year. Democrats largely rejected it, saying the accounts would not be enough to cover costs for most consumers. Currently, such accounts are used disproportionately by the wealthiest Americans, who have more income to fund them and a bigger incentive to lower their tax rate. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked at her briefing Thursday whether the president could guarantee that under his plan, people would be able to cover their health costs. She did not directly answer, but said, If this plan is put in place, every single American who has health care in the United States will see lower costs as a result. Enhanced tax credits that helped reduce the cost of insurance for the vast majority of Affordable Care Act enrollees expired at the end of 2025 even though Democrats had forced a 43-day government shutdown over the issue. Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, has been leading a bipartisan group of 12 senators trying to devise a compromise that would extend those subsidies for two years while adding new limits on who can receive them. That proposal would create the option, in the second year, of a health savings account that Trump and Republicans prefer. The White House official denied that Trump was closing the door completely on those bipartisan negotiations, and said the White House preferred to send money directly to consumers. Plan follows massive cuts to health programs Trumps plan comes months after the Republicans big tax and spending bill last year cut more than $1 trillion over a decade in federal health care and food assistance, largely by imposing work requirements on those receiving aid and shifting certain federal costs to the states. Democrats have blasted those cuts as devastating for vulnerable people who rely on programs such as Medicaid for their health care. The GOP bill included an infusion of $50 billion over five years for rural health programs, an amount experts have said is inadequate to fill the gap in funding. The White House said Trump’s new proposal will seek to bring down premiums by fully funding cost-sharing reductions, or CSRs, a type of financial help that insurers give to low-income ACA enrollees on silver-level, or mid-tier plans. From 2014 until 2017, the federal government reimbursed insurance companies for CSRs. In 2017, the first Trump administration stopped making those payments. To make up for the lost money, insurance companies raised premiums for silver-level plans. That ended up increasing the financial assistance many enrollees got to help them pay for premiums. As a result, health analysts say that while restoring money for CSRs would likely bring down silver-level premiums, as Trump says, it could have the unwelcome ripple effect of increasing many peoples net premiums on bronze and gold plans. Lowering drug prices is a priority Oz said Trump’s plans also seeks to have certain medications made available over the counter instead of by prescription if they are deemed safe enough. He mentioned higher-dose nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and peptic ulcer drugs as two examples. It was unclear whether the White House is asking Congress to take steps to make more prescription drugs available over the counter. For decades, the Food and Drug Administration has had the ability to do that. The heartburn drug Prilosec, as well as numerous allergy medications, are among those the FDA has approved for over-the-counter sales. The FDA only approves such changes if studies show patients can safely take the drug after reading the package labeling. Companies must apply for the switch. The White House said Trumps plan would also codify his efforts to lower drug prices by tying prices to the lowest price paid by other countries. Trump has already struck deals with a number of drugmakers to get them to lower the prices. As part of that, the drugmakers have agreed to sell pharmacy-ready medicines directly to consumers who can shop online at the White House’s website for selling drugs directly to consumers, TrumpRx.gov. TrumpRx did not yet have any drugs listed on Thursday. Oz said drugs will be available on the website at the end of the month. Michelle L. Price and li Swenson, Associated Press AP Health Writer Matthew Perrone contributed to this report.
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E-Commerce