SEATTLE — The Washington Supreme Court has ruled the state's natural gas initiative unconstitutional, ending a 2024 effort to turn voters out against policies intended to curb climate change.

Voters passed Initiative 2066 with 52% of the vote, but it was struck down in Superior Court in 2025. Not long after, state Attorney General Nick Brown ...Read more

CHICAGO — Juan Muñoz is tired of remembering the events of Oct. 3, 2025.

On that day, at the height of Operation Midway Blitz, Muñoz was among hundreds of people protesting the blitz at the Broadview processing center when dozens of agents confronted the crowd outside the building and began to make arrests.

Muñoz, a trustee of west ...Read more

Peter Max, the pop artist and hippie icon who helped define the vibrant psychedelic style of the 1960s and whose work graced posters, album covers, T-shirts, dinnerware, postage stamps and beyond, has died. He was 88.

Max died Monday at a Manhattan hospital, according to a statement provided to The New York Times by his son, Adam Max. No cause ...Read more

SAN DIEGO — San Diego County warned doctors at the Otay Mesa Detention Center this week that continued weeks-long delays in reporting suspected tuberculosis cases “may subject health care providers to professional licensing actions.”

The letter, dated Tuesday and signed by Dr. Sayone Thihalolipavan, the county’s public health officer, ...Read more

MINNEAPOLIS — Standing handcuffed in an orange jumpsuit behind plexiglass, ICE agent Christian Castro appeared in a Minnesota courtroom Thursday after months of resistance and faced charges that he shot a Venezuelan immigrant during Operation Metro Surge and later lied about it to the FBI.

Castro’s alleged shooting of Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis...Read more

SEATTLE — Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson joined Democratic Party lawmakers and other allies Thursday in warning voters against an initiative on the November ballot that would modify parents’ and students’ rights in public schools.

Supporters of state Initiative 001, including conservative millionaire Brian Heywood’s Let’s Go Washington ...Read more

Diplomatic relations between Costa Rica and Cuba are formally severed and will remain so until the Cuban people “recover their freedom,” the Central American nation’s foreign minister, Manuel Tovar Rivera, said Thursday.

“There is a rupture of diplomatic relations,” the minister said in an interview with The Miami Herald, clarifying ...Read more

ORLANDO, Fla. — Republican gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds said Thursday he supports broadening the uses of hotel taxes in Florida, specifically to allow the levy on room nights and short-term rental stays to be spent on transportation and infrastructure projects.

While both he and his Democratic opponent David Jolly have said they ...Read more

CHICAGO — Veteran U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent Luis Uribe tried to tell a federal jury this week that he was raised to respect women, that “no means no” and “stop means stop.”

“I’ve never raped anybody in my whole life,” Uribe said emphatically from the witness stand Tuesday. “I never robbed anybody in my whole ...Read more

Former Sen. Jon Kyl, once a key player in Arizona politics and a powerful voice in Republican leadership, has died at the age of 84.

His family announced his death on Thursday of complications from an unspecified neurological disease, sharing a statement with Arizona’s KTAR News. Kyl had previously announced at the end of 2025 that he would ...Read more

LOS ANGELES — The 36-year-old woman charged with murder in a violent, high-speed crash that killed two people in Chatsworth on Tuesday was under the influence of drugs and had narcotics in the car when she drove the wrong way on city streets and broadsided a Metro bus, prosecutors said.

The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office on ...Read more

PHILADELPHIA — Pennsylvania is seeking more emergency aid from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to respond to the state’s largest measles outbreak in more than 30 years, but only if the federal agency acknowledges the four measles-associated deaths Pennsylvania has reported.

The CDC has so far declined to publicly report ...Read more

Minnesota’s streak of almost six months without a new measles case ended this week when an infection was confirmed in an unvaccinated adult in one of the state’s least-vaccinated counties.

The state’s 18th measles case of 2026 was reported Thursday in Fillmore County — not far from the southwestern Wisconsin region that has reported ...Read more

NEW YORK — As New York braces for multiple daily protests around this year’s United Nations General Assembly, NYPD officers will flood midtown Manhattan to protect the public and controversial world leaders scheduled to attend, including President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch ...Read more

Diesel fuel prices in the U.S. continue to break all-time records, hitting $6.28 a gallon as a national average on Sept. 14, 2026, and they aren’t likely to come down anytime soon. Because diesel is the fuel for freight transportation, farming and construction – and is related to a key heating fuel – the effects are set to spread across...Read more

MIAMI — At a state-run detention facility known as Alligator Alcatraz, immigrant detainees had different names for the roughly 4 feet by 4 feet cages in which officers left men shackled for hours in the Florida Everglades.

The punishment cell. A dog cage. The punishment box. Lawyers called them the sun cages.

But outside the compound, Gov. ...Read more

BOISE, Idaho — The family of Bryan Kohberger, the man who pleaded guilty to killing four University of Idaho students but now claims he’s innocent, says they back his legal effort to withdraw his plea in favor of a trial.

Kohberger’s family, consisting of parents Mary Ann and Michael and older sisters Amanda and Mel, said in a written ...Read more

MIAMI — José Javier Rodríguez, the Democratic candidate for Florida attorney general, is demanding an investigation into the now-closed detention facility known as Alligator Alcatraz following a federal watchdog report that detailed inhumane conditions there, laying the blame directly on his Republican opponent.

“My opponent is James ...Read more

Three lobbyists whose clients helped cover expenses for state lawmakers attending a bourbon tour each agreed to pay a $1,000 civil fine on Thursday and avoid the possibility of a misdemeanor criminal conviction.

Attorneys for lobbyists David Ferrell, Douglas Bowen Heath and Douglas Miskew each said in state Superior Court that their clients ...Read more