Dangerous wildfire smoke impacting more than a dozen states
Wildfire smoke from Canada shrouds the sun as it rises behind the Chrysler Building in New York City, July 17, 2026. (Gary Hershorn/ABC News)
(NEW YORK) — Dangerous wildfire smoke is impacting more than a dozen states on Saturday morning as air quality alerts span from the Upper Midwest and Great Lakes to New England, south through the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic.
More than 900 wildfires are burning across Canada, sending smoke into the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, though a storm system moving through Saturday could help clear some of the haze.
The Midwest and Upper Great Lakes are expected to see poor air quality through the weekend as northwesterly winds push a plume of smoke into the region.
Meanwhile, the Storm Prediction Center has issued a Level 3 of 5 risk for severe storms across parts of the Ohio Valley, Northeast and Mid-Atlantic. Major cities along the Interstate 95 corridor, including New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., could be affected. Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Buffalo are also expected to see strong storms.
The rounds of showers and storms will bring the threat of damaging winds, hail, a few tornadoes and chances for flash flooding in certain areas.
Flood watches are in effect for parts of the Northeast, including New York City and Philadelphia, through Saturday evening as heavy rainfall could trigger flash flooding.
Elsewhere, monsoonal moisture is expected to extend from West Texas and southern New Mexico into central and northern Arizona and southern Utah, where daytime heating could trigger thunderstorms capable of producing heavy rainfall and flash flooding.
A severe storm threat also extends into parts of Virginia and the Carolinas, where scattered storms could produce damaging winds and heavy rainfall as Charlotte, Raleigh and Virginia Beach are among the cities that could be affected.
President Trump Signs Executive Order At The White House (Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — A federal judge is raising concerns about whether Donald Trump’s attempt to sue the IRS for $10 billion can proceed, signaling she could throw out the case because the president oversees the government entities he is suing.
Judge Kathleen Williams raised the issue in an order on Friday denying a request to delay the case amid possible settlement talks.
She noted that Trump and the defendants — the Treasury Department and IRS — may not be “sufficiently adverse” to one another for the case to proceed.
“Moreover, although President Trump avers that he is bringing this lawsuit in his personal capacity, he is the sitting president and his named adversaries are entities whose decisions are subject to his direction. Indeed, President Trump’s own remarks about this matter acknowledge the unique dynamic of this litigation,” she wrote.
Williams ordered both Trump’s lawyers and the Department of Justice to submit briefs about why the case should proceed and set a hearing for next month. For the case to proceed, Trump’s lawyers and the DOJ need to establish that the lawsuit is “a dispute between parties who face each other in an adversary proceeding.”
“Typically, adverseness is found in a situation where one party is asserting its right and the other party is resisting,” she noted.
But with Trump in charge of the very government entities he is suing, Williams noted that the required adverse relationship between the parties may not exist. She added that Trump has signed multiple executive orders tightening the president’s control over the executive agencies like the Department of Justice.
“One such employee of the executive branch, the Attorney General, has a statutory obligation to defend the IRS when it is hailed into court, but then is ostensibly required by executive mandate to adhere to the President’s opinion on a matter of law in such a case. This raises questions over whether the Parties here are truly antagonistic to each other,” Williams noted.
Trump, his sons Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., and the Trump Organization filed a lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service and Treasury Department in January related to the unauthorized disclosure of tax information during Trump’s first term.
A government contractor with the IRS pleaded guilty in 2023 to stealing the tax information of Donald Trump and other wealthy Americans and leaking it to media outlets in 2019 and 2020.
In a court filing last week, lawyers for the Trumps said that they were “in discussions” with the Department of Justice to potentially resolve the lawsuit and requested a deadline extension so they can “engage in discussions designed to resolve this matter and to avoid protracted litigation.”
The filing said both sides agreed to the 90-day extension. The Department of Justice had not yet responded to the lawsuit and faced an impending deadline this month.
The Trumps, in the suit, argued that the IRS and Treasury Department should have had “appropriate technical, employee screening, security, and monitoring” to prevent the theft of tax information.
A group of former government officials last month filed an amicus brief with the court to raise concerns about the ethics of the president suing his own government for billions.
“This case is extraordinary because the President controls both sides of the litigation, which raises the prospect of collusive litigation tactics,” the amicus filing said. “To treat this case like business as usual would threaten the integrity of the justice system and the important taxpayer and privacy protections at the heart of this case.”
Police cordon off an area close to the Islamic Center of San Diego after reports of an active shooter on Monday, May 18, 2026. (K.C. Alfred / The San Diego Union-Tribune via Getty Images)
(SAN DIEGO) — Three adult men, one of whom was a security guard, were killed in a shooting at the Islamic Center of San Diego on Monday, authorities said.
The security guard appeared to play a “pivotal role” in keeping the shooting from being worse, police said at a news conference.
Both suspects, who are teenagers, are dead from apparent self-inflicted gunshot wounds, police said.
All children are safe, police said.
Photos show children being evacuated from the area.
Police said the shooting is currently being considered a hate crime since it took place at a mosque.
The Islamic Center of San Diego says it is the largest mosque in San Diego County.
“We strongly condemn this horrifying act of violence,” Tazheen Nizam, the executive director of the San Diego chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said in a statement. “Our thoughts are with everyone impacted by this attack. No one should ever fear for their safety while attending prayers or studying at an elementary school.”
In New York City, the NYPD said there’s “no known nexus to NYC or specific threats to NYC houses of worship,” but the department said it is increasing officer deployments to mosques “out of an abundance of caution.”
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
Flint Hills, Kansas near Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve. (Wolfgang Kaehler/LightRocket via Getty Images)
(NEW YORK) — America has lost about half of one of its most prominent and iconic landscapes, and protecting what’s left is key to ensuring healthy ecosystems and biodiversity in the future, experts told ABC News.
The continental U.S. has lost about half of its historic grasslands prior to European settlement, according to a press release from America’s Grasslands Coalition, a network of conservation organizations, researchers and government agencies that aims to restore North America’s native prairie and grassland ecosystems. An estimated 98% of native tall grass prairies has been eradicated, Ryan Sensenig, a grassland ecologist at the University of Notre Dame, told ABC News.
While grasslands are typically associated with the Great Plains, they used to exist in nearly every region of the U.S., Dwayne Estes, co-founder and executive director of the Southeastern Grasslands Institute told ABC News.
Grasslands were common everywhere from the Atlantic coastlines to the Mississippi River and into the Rocky Mountains and the West Coast, according to experts. Regions that are not typically associated with grasslands, including New York, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida, were covered in them, Estes said.
They are part of the very fabric of North America’s natural heritage, “from sea to shining sea,” Patrick Keyser, director of Tennessee’s Center for Native Grasslands, told ABC News.
Grasslands continue to be threatened, experts say
Today, grasslands continue to disappear at an “alarming rate,” the coalition said.
Invasive plant species have infiltrated many of the natural grasslands, said David Wedin, director of the University of Nebraska’s Center for Grassland Studies. And most recently, development of housing, shopping malls and interstate highways — and now data centers — are popping up in areas that would have been grasslands, Keyser said.
Currently, grasslands cover about 1 million square miles in the continental U.S., according to America’s Grasslands Coalition. This includes savannahs and shrublands.
The most prominent pockets of native grasslands that still exist today are in the Flint Hills of Kansas, which contains about 4.5 million acres of grasslands, and the Nebraska Sandhills, which has about 12 million acres of grasslands.
The area of Nebraska is still an intact grassland. Much of the land is privately owned cattle ranches, but there is still a lot of native grassland and species left there, Wedin said.
Central Montana also contains scattered patches of native grasslands, Keyser said.
There are more than 1,000 native grasses that have been documented in the U.S. The two species of dominant native grasslands in the U.S. include the big bluestem, a robust grass that can grow to 10 feet tall and make for “excellent” cattle forage, and the little blue stem, a much smaller plant that is common on sandier, drier soils, Keyser said.
When US grasslands began to vanish
Indigenous communities relied on grasslands to survive, Sensenig said. They would practice prescribed burning to maintain the grasslands and enhance its biodiversity, Sensenig said. Native Americans would use the plant species for basket-weaving and currency and feed on the grazers, such as bison, elk and deer, Sensenig added.
“Eastern Massachusetts was historically dominated by grasslands before European settlement, and in that area people used to eat these things called prairie chickens regularly,” Keyser said, adding that prairie chickens require extensive grassland for their habitat.
Other evidence of grasslands on the East Coast includes thousands of insect and plant species that are tied to grasslands that still exist in the region, Estes said.
Grasslands east of the Mississippi River have been gone for “a very long time,” Estes said.
As early as the 1690s, grasslands began to disappear from places like Philadelphia and Baltimore, even before the nation was founded, Estes said.
In the 1700s and 1800s, pioneers began to clear land where there were fewer trees to create their farms. They tended to prioritize semi-open areas, Keyser said.
“Eastern grasslands were lost so long ago that basically they’ve been erased from society’s collective memory,” Estes said. “They were lost before the camera was invented.”
Grasslands continued to be eradicated as settlers migrated West.
The Transcontinental Railroad later brought settlers into the Great Plains in the 1870s, and gasoline-powered tractors led to widespread plowing of the native grasslands in the region, Keyser said.
“So, consequently, what had been a grassland ecosystem became a cornfield,” Keyser said.
Why grasslands are so important
Grasslands play a vital role in supporting wildlife, storing carbon, sustaining food systems and maintaining ecosystem balance, according to America’s Grasslands Coalition.
Grasslands also store huge amounts of carbon, which helps to regulate the atmosphere, Sensenig said. It is important for soil conservation, water regulation and wildlife habitat, Wedin said.
Grasslands are thought to store 30% of the world’s soil-based carbon — and 80% of that carbon is beneath the ground in the soil, Sensenig said.
Keystone herbivore species such as the American bison, elk and mule deer live in grasslands and help to regulate the rich plant biota for other creatures to thrive, Keyser said. Birds, pollinators and smaller mammals, such as prairie dogs, also depend on the open, grassy ecosystem and assist in maintaining the biodiversity, Estes said.
Grassland ecologists are concerned about the gradual degradation of grasslands due to lack of management and climate change and other changes to the environment, such as intensive modern agriculture, Wedin said.
“These sorts of chronic, low-level threats have a cumulative impact on our grasslands,” Wedin said.
Nearly half of 2,014 Americans surveyed are unfamiliar with grasslands, according to findings released Wednesday by America’s Grasslands Coalition.
Increasing appreciation and awareness of America’s grasslands is key to accelerating conservation action, according to the coalition.
The upcoming 250th birthday of America is an integral time to raise awareness of the importance of grasslands, Ginette Hemley, senior vice president of wildlife conservation at the World Wildlife Fund, said in a statement.
“As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, this is a moment to recognize the landscapes that have shaped the nation,” Hemley said. “From iconic species like bison to the communities that depend on them, grasslands are part of that heritage — and protecting them is part of our shared future.”
