The Trump administration announced Friday that it rolled back a key protection for endangered species.
Specifically, it said it was repealing a previous definition of prohibited “harm” to endangered animals and plants under the Endangered Species Act.
Under prior regulations, expressly prohibited “harm” includes significantly changing a species’s habitat to the point that it “actually kills or injures wildlife” by preventing food, shelter or breeding.
The administration said it was making its move to speed up approvals for projects that would have been slowed under previous rules of the road, which it described as outdated.
“For years, federal agencies abused the ESA to obstruct lawful land use and burden American families and businesses,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in a statement.
Environmental advocates warned that repealing the definition could allow developers to trample over important habitats — harming at-risk animals and plants in the process.




Tensions between the Trump administration and the Smithsonian Institution have escalated after a White House report accused the National Museum of American History of promoting a "radical, activist ideology."
An Israeli soldier’s photo of a Palestinian man from Gaza stripped to his underwear, blindfolded and bound face-down to an iron rod corroborates extensive reporting on Israeli torture of Palestinians in detention and itself may constitute a war crime, rights groups have said.
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a man killed by federal immigration agents during a traffic stop in Houston this week, was not the intended target of the “enforcement operation”, the Department of Homeland Security said on Thursday.
And so to war. Again. After a ceasefire and a hiatus, Donald Trump is now into the second day of a new phase of bombing Iran, with the US military claiming to have struck 170 Iranian targets in the past 48 hours.
Wally Funk, a trailblazing aviation pioneer who was denied the opportunity to become a Nasa astronaut and half a century later became the oldest woman to travel into space, has died aged 87.
A key government agency is proposing to lessen the scope of environmental reviews for nuclear reactors, limiting public input and exempting some reactors altogether.





























