Los Angeles-area Wildfires: Updates From Jan. 8, 2025 - The Associated Press

CHICAGO — President Donald Trump announced Thursday he would pardon anti-abortion activists convicted of blockading abortion clinic entrances. Trump called it “a great honor to sign this.” “They should not have been prosecuted,” he said as he signed pardons for “peaceful pro-life protesters.” [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] The people pardoned were involved in the October 2020 invasion and blockade of a Washington clinic. Lauren Handy was sentenced to nearly five years in prison for leading the blockade by directing blockaders to link themselves together with locks and chains to block the clinic’s doors.

By ADRIANA GOMEZ LICON, Associated Press President Donald Trump is poised to sign the first bill of his new administration, and it is named after a slain Georgia nursing student whose name became a rallying cry during his White House campaign. If signed into law, the Laken Riley Act would require the detention of unauthorized immigrants accused of theft and violent crimes.

SEATTLE — President Donald Trump’s executive order denying U. S. citizenship to the children of parents living in the country illegally has faced the first of what will be many legal tests. It didn’t fare well. A Justice Department lawyer had barely started making his arguments in a Seattle courtroom Thursday when U.

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump is heading to hurricane-battered western North Carolina and wildfire-ravaged Los Angeles on Friday, using the first trip of his second administration to tour areas where politics has clouded the response to deadly disasters. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] The Republican president has criticized former President Joe Biden for his administration’s response in North Carolina, and he’s showered disdain on California leaders for water policies that he falsely claimed worsened the recent blazes. Trump is also considering overhauling the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order on artificial intelligence Thursday that will revoke past government policies his order says “act as barriers to American AI innovation.” To maintain global leadership in AI technology, “we must develop AI systems that are free from ideological bias or engineered social agendas,” Trump’s order says. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] The new order doesn’t name which existing policies are hindering AI development but sets out to track down and review “all policies, directives, regulations, orders, and other actions taken” as a result of former President Joe Biden’s sweeping AI executive order of 2023, which Trump rescinded Monday.

President Donald Trump has ordered the release of thousands of classified governmental documents about the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which has fueled conspiracy theories for decades. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] The executive order Trump signed Thursday also aims to declassify the remaining federal records relating to the assassinations of Sen. Robert F.