The high court granted a petition from companies and groups representing oil refiners and biofuel producers that seeks to revive their lawsuit against the Biden administration’s reinstatement of California’s clean cars program. In 2022, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) gave California the OK to enforce rules that required car companies to sell new cars in the state that produced less pollution. The industry and red states sued over this action. They have argued the Biden administration...

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz has ordered the country’s troops who reoccupied the buffer zone between Syria and Israel to dig in and prepare to stay there through the winter. Katz’s order comes just days after insurgent forces in Syria seized control of Damascus and former Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad fled the country. On Dec. 8, as Assad’s fall from power became apparent, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared a 1974 deconfliction agreement between Israel and Syria to be...

Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and some Democratic senators did not hold back their criticism of outgoing colleagues, Sens. Joe Manchin (I-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) for voting down one of President Joe Biden’s nominees. On Wednesday, Manchin and Sinema voted against the nomination of Lauren McFerren to another term on the National Labor Relations Board. The nomination failed by one vote. The NLRB oversees U.S. labor laws and makes important decisions about labor disputes, collective bargaining, and...

On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court took up a case that could change the scope of tax exemptions for religious groups. The court agreed to hear the case after the Catholic Charities Bureau, which is based in Superior, Wisconsin, appealed a Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling that denied it a religious exemption from paying unemployment taxes. Wisconsin law says employers who operate "primarily for religious purposes" are exempt from the state's unemployment tax system. However, the state's Supreme...

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has filed a lawsuit against a New York abortionist, accusing her of unlawfully mailing abortion drugs to a woman in Texas. Those abortion drugs landed the mother in the emergency room after causing her to hemorrhage, the filing says — and they ended the life of her unborn child. Paxton is asking the court to fine the abortionist $100,000 for each violation of the law, including practicing without a license, and mailing abortion drugs. “In this case, an out-of-...

Earth just experienced its second-warmest November on record — second only to 2023 — making it all but certain that 2024 will end as the hottest year ever measured, according to a report Monday by European climate service Copernicus. Last year was the hottest on record due to human-caused climate change coupled with the effects of an El Nino. But after this summer registered as the hottest on record — Phoenix sweltered through 113 consecutive days with a high...

November was Earth’s second-warmest month in 175 years of record-keeping, and the year is all but certain to be the warmest on record, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Average worldwide land and ocean surface temperatures for the month were 2.41 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the 55.2-degree average in the 20th century. Only last November, which was 0.14 degrees warmer, surpassed this year.

This year is now almost certain to be the hottest year on record, data shows. It will also be the first to have an average temperature of more than 1.5C above preindustrial levels, marking a further escalation of the climate crisis. Data for November from the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) found the average global surface temperature for the month was 1.62C above the level before the mass burning of fossil fuels drove up global heating. With data for 11 months of 2024...

HOUSTON — An Alabama woman who accused Jay-Z and Diddy of raping her when she was 13 years old sat down with NBC News to recount what she called a “catastrophic event”: a limo ride to a white house, a drink that made her feel woozy, a sexual assault by rap stars that would ruin her life. But the woman and her lawyers also acknowledge that there were some inconsistencies in her account in response to questions by NBC News. “I have made some mistakes” in her recollections of that...

TBILISI, Dec 14 (Reuters) - Georgian lawmakers elected Mikheil Kavelashvili, a hardline critic of the West, as president on Saturday, setting him up to replace a pro-Western incumbent amid major protests against the government over a halt to the country’s European Union accession talks last month. The ruling Georgian Dream party’s move to freeze the EU accession process until 2028, abruptly halting a long-standing national goal that is written into the country’s constitution, has...