Although wildland firefighters are at high risk for smoke-related health issues, the U.S. Forest Service has been slow to offer protection. For decades, respirators weren’t allowed.

For the first time, federal firefighters will be encouraged to wear respirators to protect them against smoke-related hazards as they work to put out wildland blazes.

The Forest Service announced Wednesday that firefighters were authorized to use N95 respirators on the fire line, a major policy reversal as the agency for decades did not allow such protections, even as studies demonstrated the health harms of wildfire smoke.

“It’s long, long overdue,” said George Broyles, a longtime Forest Service firefighter who has researched wildfire exposure risks. “There’s no doubt that our men and women out there are at higher risk of cancer and heart disease.”

To Broyles, the policy change represents a long-awaited acknowledgment from the Forest Service that wildfire smoke is toxic and that the agency ought to find ways to reduce its workers’ risks.

Lawmakers and advocates condemn ‘disastrous’ decisions that allow Trump officials to strip away migrant protections

Lawmakers and immigration advocacy groups on Thursday sharply denounced two US supreme court rulings that allowed the Trump administration to strip certain immigration protections and fundamentally reshape the asylum system.

Dozens of groups, advocates and members of Congress called the court’s decisions “disastrous” and “cruel”, while the Trump administration, Republican lawmakers and anti-immigrant groups celebrated the rulings.

“Today, Trump’s loyalists in the supreme court have joined forces with him to deny immigrants’ internationally recognized human rights and advance an authoritarian, white-supremacist agenda at home,” said the Illinois congresswoman Delia Ramirez, a Democrat. “The supreme court’s decisions put more than 350,000 TPS holders at risk of deportation and countless more asylum seekers’ lives in danger.”

LSE analysis highlights litigation linked to energy sources, water consumption and air pollution

The proliferation of datacentres and AI is increasingly at the forefront of environmental litigation around the world, from the US and UK to Chile to Ireland, a report has found.

In an analysis of about 3,600 climate-related lawsuits filed since 2015, the latest annual review of climate litigation by the London School of Economics (LSE) found a growing number of cases challenging the energy sources, water consumption and air pollution of datacentres, all of which have related climate implications.

One of the first cases was filed in 2020 in Chile’s capital, Santiago, where Google was planning a huge datacentre in the Cerrillos area. A group of residents and the local council challenged permits given to Google, raising concerns about the impact of the development on the city’s already climate-stressed water supply.

Donald Trump’s campaign to rebrand the Pentagon as the Department of War won another victory on Wednesday when Republicans on the panel that controls military funding voted to formally endorse the renaming.

The House Appropriations Committee adopted the change during deliberations on its $1.1 trillion defense funding bill. The vote marks the third panel to agree to permanently ditch the existing nearly 80-year-old Department of Defense name.

Appropriators voted 32-25 along party lines to adopt a Republican-only slate of amendments to the Pentagon funding bill that also targeted diversity and inclusion efforts, abortion and other wedge issues that have spurred partisan rancor on the influential spending panel in recent years.

Randy Smith’s resignation was part of plea deal after attack on podcaster Bobby Couvillion at a Madisonville restaurant

A suburban New Orleans sheriff who had held one of his community’s most prominent political offices for a decade has retired shortly after pleading guilty to battering a podcaster who often criticized him.

Randy Smith, 61, also agreed to serve more than a year of probation after admitting to a late May beating at a steakhouse where he had bought 18 alcoholic beverages on his tab on a Friday afternoon – which all but halted his four-decade policing career.

Smith had been sworn in as the elected sheriff of St Tammany parish, Louisiana, on 1 July 2016, succeeding a predecessor who eventually pleaded guilty to federal bribery charges and was separately convicted of serial child sexual molestation.

At least 164 people have died and 971 were injured after a pair of powerful quakes rocked Venezuela, Acting President Delcy Rodríguez said Thursday.

The acting president had said earlier that at least 32 people have died after Wednesday evening’s 7.2 and 7.5 magnitude earthquakes, and that the toll was expected to rise.

The quakes were among the strongest to strike Venezuela in more than a century and could be felt throughout the region. Buildings were evacuated in places as far away as Brazil’s Amazon, about 1,700 kilometers (1,050 miles) from Venezuela’s capital, Caracas.

Iran’s IRGC warns that any new Hormuz shipping route announced without Tehran’s coordination is unacceptable and dangerous.

All vessels must contact IRGC Navy on the designated channel before transiting, or face enforcement action, Iran says.

Shipping traffic has remained far below prewar levels despite the U.S.-Iran interim agreement.

The Pentagon said Wednesday that boot camps for all the military services are once again requiring the flu vaccination for all recruits after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made the shot optional for the military at the end of April.

The development, confirmed to The Associated Press by a Pentagon official, comes amid a growing, weekslong, flu outbreak at the U.S. Air Force’s boot camp at Lackland Air Force Base that has sickened nearly 300 people. However, the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss details not cleared for public release, maintained that the permission to mandate the vaccinations was unrelated to the outbreak.

When Hegseth first announced the repeal of the flu vaccine mandate in April, citing “medical autonomy” and religious freedom, he allowed the services to ask for exceptions — or permission to keep the vaccine mandatory — within 15 days of the rollout.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) says New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is going to have to smooth things over with congressional Democrats after backing several progressive candidates who ousted incumbents during Tuesday’s primary elections.

Asked if Mamdani’s endorsements were making him “enemies” with Democrats in Washington, D.C., Jeffries told CNN that he and Mamdani “strongly” disagreed over his primary picks ahead of Election Day.

Now, according to Jeffries, the mayor has serious “work to do in terms of the conversations that he’s going to have with members of Congress moving forward.”

China has a right to target people outside of its borders who contravene its new law on ethnic unity, a senior official said on Wednesday, adding that this was in line with international practice, and was legal and ‌necessary.

China passed the law in March to create a "shared" national identity among the country's 55 ethnic minority groups, which include Tibetans and Uyghurs, some of whom chafe under Chinese rule and have over the years often staged protests, some of them violent.

The new law, which goes into effect on July 1, includes a clause saying people and groups beyond ⁠the borders of the People's Republic of China can be held legally accountable for undermining "ethnic unity and progress or inciting ethnic separatism".

Outside Rep. Adriano Espaillat’s primary night party, four men on the sidewalk were dressed in full neon sequins, trying to get the party started. Inside, the bar had barely opened.

Espaillat spent 20 years trying to get to Washington and another 10 years in Congress. He arrived to give his concession speech and left in under 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, the real party was going on about three miles away. That’s where Zohran Mamdani was completing his victory lap of three celebrations with candidates who likely would not have gotten near Congress without his endorsements, just a year after he stunned the political world by beating Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic mayoral primary.