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Ad Council “Campaign for Freedom”

A senior official with the embattled United States Agency for International Development sent an email Tuesday to remaining bureau leaders with guidance on "clearing our classified safes and personnel documents" at the aid agency's Washington, D.C., headquarters, according to a copy of the email obtained by ABC News.

The message urged officials to "shred as many documents first" and to "reserve the burn bags for when the shredder becomes unavailable or needs a break," according to the email, sent by Erica Carr, the acting executive secretary.

"The only labeling required on the burn bags are the words 'SECRET' and 'USAID/(B/IO)' in dark sharpie, if possible," the email said.

It was not immediately clear why the message was sent, but some current and former USAID officials speculated that it has to do with clearing out office space that is expected to be taken over by Customs and Border Patrol, as Elon Musk, the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, announced on X last month.

Musk, who last month said, without evidence, that "USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die," has been overseeing the dismantling of the agency.

NASA’s newest space telescope rocketed into orbit Tuesday to map the entire sky like never before — a sweeping look at hundreds of millions of galaxies and their shared cosmic glow since the beginning of time.

SpaceX launched the Spherex observatory from California, putting it on course to fly over Earth’s poles. Tagging along were four suitcase-size satellites to study the sun. Spherex popped off the rocket’s upper stage first, drifting into the blackness of space with a blue Earth in the background.

The $488 million Spherex mission aims to explain how galaxies formed and evolved over billions of years, and how the universe expanded so fast in its first moments.

Closer to home in our own Milky Way galaxy, Spherex will hunt for water and other ingredients of life in the icy clouds between stars where new solar systems emerge.

The cone-shaped Spherex — at 1,110 pounds (500 kilograms) or the heft of a grand piano — will take six months to map the entire sky with its infrared eyes and wide field of view. Four full-sky surveys are planned over two years, as the telescope circles the globe from pole to pole 400 miles (650 kilometers) up.

Spherex won’t see galaxies in exquisite detail like NASA’s larger and more elaborate Hubble and Webb space telescopes, with their narrow fields of view.

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — U.S. arms deliveries to Ukraine resumed Wednesday, officials said, a day after the Trump administration lifted its suspension of military aid for Kyiv in its fight against Russia’s invasion, and officials awaited the Kremlin’s response to a proposed 30-day ceasefire endorsed by Ukraine.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said it’s important not to “get ahead” of the question of responding to the ceasefire, which was proposed by Washington. He told reporters that Moscow is awaiting “detailed information” from the U.S. and suggested that Russia must get that before it can take a position. The Kremlin has previously opposed anything short of a permanent end to the conflict and has not accepted any concessions.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. Agriculture Department is ending two pandemic-era programs that provided more than $1 billion for schools and food banks to purchase food from local farmers and producers.

About $660 million of that went to schools and childcare centers to buy food for meals through the Local Foods for Schools program. A separate program provided money to food banks.

In Maine, the money allowed the coastal RSU 23 school district to buy food directly from fisherman, dairy producers and farmers for school meals, said Caroline Trinder, the district’s food and nutrition services director.

“I think everyone can say that they want kids at school to receive the healthiest meals possible,” Trinder said. “It’s the least processed, and we’re helping our local economy, we’re helping farmers that may be the parents of our students.”

The cuts will hurt school districts with “chronically underfunded” school meal budgets, said Shannon Gleave, president of the School Nutrition Association.

“In addition to losing the benefits for our kids, this loss of funds is a huge blow to community farmers and ranchers and is detrimental to school meal programs struggling to manage rising food and labor costs,” Gleave said in a statement.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A launch pad problem prompted SpaceX to delay a flight to the International Space Station on Wednesday to replace NASA’s two stuck astronauts.

The new crew needs to get to the International Space Station before Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams can head home after nine months in orbit.

Concerns over a critical hydraulic system arose less than four hours before the Falcon rocket’s planned evening liftoff from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. As the countdown clocks ticked down, engineers evaluated the hydraulics used to release one of the two arms clamping the rocket to its support structure. This structure needs to tilt back right before liftoff.

President Donald Trump has moved forward with a plan to put sweeping tariffs on all goods coming into the United States from Canada and Mexico, threatening a trade war with its closest trading partners — and higher prices for Americans on thousands of consumer goods.

... The U.S. was scheduled to begin collecting a 25% tariff on nearly all goods from Mexico and Canada starting at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday, according to a draft public notice of the rules posted Monday. Canadian energy products would be levied at a lower rate of 10%.

... On Monday, Trump also added an additional 10% tariff on all imports from China on top of the 10% tariff he put on Chinese goods last month, which includes products such as electronics, footwear, medicines and cosmetics. Those tariffs are in addition to tariffs already put in place during Trump's first term in office.

President Trump's imposition of blanket 25% tariffs on all goods imported from Canada and Mexico drew swift vows of retaliation from the United States' immediate neighbors on Tuesday. China, which was hit with a second 10% tariff on U.S. exports since Mr. Trump took office, bringing the total levy to 20%, immediately announced its own reciprocal measures — deliberately targeting America's agricultural sector.

Below is a look at the measures being imposed or planned by Canada, China and Mexico, and the rhetoric coming from officials in those countries as Mr. Trump ramps up his trade war against one of America's biggest adversaries, and its two closest neighbors.

Several countries have taken significant measures to try to encourage people to have more children and combat falling birth rates, but the U.S. is not one of them. Although the Department of Transportation was recently directed to give precedence to "communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average," earlier this month.

Now Musk, who President Donald Trump tapped to head the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has vocalized support for tax incentives for mothers.

Top US and Russian officials have agreed to continue planning an end to the Ukraine war and to pursue closer cooperation amid concerns in Kyiv and across Europe that Donald Trump could push for a settlement favouring Vladimir Putin.

Elon Musk, President Donald Trump’s billionaire ally, on Sunday repeatedly attacked CBS’s “60 Minutes,” suggesting the team behind the news program deserves a “long prison sentence” for what he described as their efforts to interfere in the 2024 presidential election.

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The president himself has previously calledfor the news program to be “immediately terminated.”

Still, Paramount, the parent company of CBS, has reportedly been mulling reaching a settlement agreement with Trump in the $10 billion lawsuit he brought against the network last year, accusing “60 Minutes” of deceptively editing its interview with Harris. But the Wall Street Journal on Friday reported some executives have raised concerns that settling the lawsuit could expose them to legal threats.