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GUATEMALA CITY (AP) — A judge ordered Thursday that Guatemalan journalistJosé Rubén Zamorabe returned to house arrest again while awaiting trial after spending nearly a year in jail in his latest stint of incarceration.

Zamora, the 69-year-old founder of El Periodico newspaper, had spent more than two years behind bars awaiting trial before a judge granted him house arrest in October 2024. Prosecutors immediately appealed and won rulings thatsent him back to jail in March 2025.

Zamora had been imprisoned since July 2022, when he was charged with money laundering, amounting to around $38,000, and in June 2023 he was sentenced to six years in prison. The sentence was overturned by an appeals court because of errors in the process.

The journalist and free press advocates maintain that the prosecution is revenge for the investigative work of his newspaper against the administration of ex-President Alejandro Giammattei.

Current President Bernardo Arévalo last year called the prosecution "absolutely spurious" and said it was another example of the Attorney General's office prosecuting people who reported corruption.

The Trump administration on Thursdayrevoked a scientific findingthat climate change is a danger to public health, an idea that President Donald Trump called "a scam." But repeated scientific studies say it's a documented and quantifiable harm.

Trump Climate Science

Again and again, research has found increasing disease and deaths — thousands every year — in a warming world.

The Environmental Protection Agency finding in 2009, under the Obama administration, has been the legalunderpinning of nearly all regulations fighting global warming.

"It boggles the mind that the administration is rescinding the endangerment finding; it's akin to insisting that the world is flat or denying that gravity is a thing," said Dr. Howard Frumkin, a physician and professor emeritus of public health at the University of Washington.

Thousands of scientific studies have looked at climate change and its effects on human health in the past five years and they predominantly show climate change is increasingly dangerous to people.

Many conclude that in the United States, thousands of people have died and even more were sickened because of climate change in the past few decades.

For example, a study on"Trends in heat-related deaths in the U.S., 1999-2023" in the prestigious JAMA journal shows the yearly heat-related death count and rate have more than doubled in the past quarter century from 1,069 in 1999 toa record high2,325 in 2023.

A 2021 study inNature Climate Changelooked at 732 locations in 43 countries — including 210 in the United States — and determined that more than a third of heat deaths are due to human-caused climate change. That means more than 9,700 global deaths a year attributed to warming from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas.

Anew study published this weekfound that 2.2% of summer deaths in Texas from 2010 to 2023 were heat related "as climate change brings more frequent and intense heat to Texas."

Research is booming on the topic

In the more than 15 years, since the government first determined climate change to be a public health danger, there have been more than 29,000 peer-reviewed studies that looked at the intersection of climate and health, with more than 5,000 looking specifically at the United States, according to the National Library of Medicine'sPubMed research database.

More than 60% of those studies have been published in the past five years.

"Study after study documents that climate change endangers health, for one simple reason: It's true," said Frumkin, a former director of the National Center for Environmental Health appointed by President George W. Bush.

In a Thursday event at the White House, Trump disagreed, saying: "It has nothing to do with public health. This is all a scam, a giant scam."

Experts strongly disagree.

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"Health risks are increasing because human-cause climate change is already upon us. Take the2021 heat domefor example, that killed (more than) 600 people in the Northwest,'' said Dr. Jonathan Patz, a physician who directs the Center for Health, Energy and Environmental Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "The newclimate attribution studiesshow that event was made150-fold more likely dueto climate change."

Patz and Frumkin both said the "vast majority" of peer-reviewed studies show health harms from climate change. Peer-reviewed studies are considered the gold standard of science because other experts pore over the data, evidence and methods, requiring changes, questioning techniques and conclusions.

More than just heat and deaths

The various studies look at different parts of health. Some looked at deaths that wouldn't have happened without climate change. Others looked at illnesses and injuries that didn't kill people. Because researchers used different time periods, calculation methods and specific aspects of health, the final numbers of their conclusions don't completely match.

Studies also examineddisparities among different peoplesandlocations.A growing field in the research are attribution studies that calculate what proportion of deaths or illness can be blamed on human-caused climate change by comparing real-world mortality and illness to what computer simulations show would happen in a world without a spike in greenhouse gases.

Last year an international team of researchers looked at past studies to try to come up with ayearly health cost of climate change.

While many studies just look at heat deaths, this team tried to bring in a variety of types of climate change deaths — heat waves, extreme weather disasters such as 2017's Hurricane Harvey, wildfires, air pollution, diseases spread by mosquitos such as malaria — and found hundreds of thousands of climate change deaths globally.

They then used the EPA's own statistic that puts a dollar value on human life — $11.5 million in 2014 dollars — and calculated a global annual cost "on the order of at least $10 billion."

Studies also connect climate change towaterborne infections that cause diarrhea,mental health issuesandeven nutrition problems, Frumkin said.

"Public health is not only about prevention of diseases, death and disability but also well-being. We are increasingly seeing people displaced by rising seas, intensifying storms and fires," said Dr. Lynn Goldman, a physician and dean emeritus at the George Washington University School of Public Health.

"We have only begun to understand the full consequences of a changing climate in terms of health."

Cold also kills and that's decreasing

The issue gets complicated when cold-related deaths are factored in. Those deaths are decreasing, yet in the United States there are still13 times more deaths from cold exposure than heat exposure,studies show.

Another studyconcludes that until the world warms another 2.7 degrees (1.5 degrees Celsius) from now, the number of temperature-related deaths won't change much "due to offsetting decreases in cold-related mortality and increases in heat-related deaths."

But that study said that after temperatures rise beyond that threshold, and if society doesn't adapt to the increased heat, "total mortality rises rapidly."

The Associated Press' climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP'sstandardsfor working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas atAP.org.

NEW YORK (AP) — New York politicians defiantly raised a rainbow flag Thursday at theStonewall National Monumentamid a boisterous, cheering crowd, rebuking the Trump administration forremoving the well-known symbolof pride from the LGBTQ+ landmark.

"We did it," said Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal after helping raise the flag near an existing American flag in a tiny Greenwich Village park jammed with more than a hundred people. Many onlookers chanted "Raise it Up!"

"If you can't fly a Pride flag steps from Stonewall monument, at the National monument for LGBTQ liberation, where can you fly it?" asked Hoylman-Sigal, a Democrat who is the first openly gay person elected to his job. "So we put it back."

Until a few days ago, the flag had flown for several years on a flagpole in the park at the heart of the National Park Service-run site. The park is across the street fromthe Stonewall Inn, the gay bar where a 1969 police raid sparked an uprising and helped catalyzethe modern LGBTQ+ rights movement.

The initial rainbow flag-raising, on a pole brought to the park, was short-lived. Activists, annoyed that the rainbow flag was flying lower on a separate pole, promptly took it down and raised it again on the same pole as the American flag, leaving the two flags on the same rope billowing in the chilly breeze.

Jay W. Walker, one of the activists who helped secure the Pride flag in its eventual spot, said advocates would restore it again if the park service pulls it down.

"We will keep doing this," he said, adding: "Our community is not going to stand for our park, our flagpole, to be disrespected by the Trump administration."

The park service has said it's complying with federal guidance on flags, including a Jan. 21 park service memo that largely restricts the agency to displaying those of the United States, the Department of the Interior and POW/MIA recognition, with exceptions that include providing "historical context."

The Interior Department on Thursday dismissed the flag raising as a "political stunt" and criticized the city's Democratic leadership.

"Today's political pageantry shows how utterly incompetent and misaligned the New York City officials are with the problems their city is facing," the department said in a prepared statement.

Activists who hadpressed for the flag displayconsider its removal a deliberate insult that compounds other recent changes that they find objectionable and ominous, such aseliminating many references to transgender peopleat the monument.

"The new Trump administration is literally stealing our pride, or attempting to," Ken Kidd, whoaided early efforts to get the flag installed permanently, said in an interview Wednesday. "It is a form of identity theft, where they are truly trying to take away those symbols of what we stand for — those symbols of our history, those symbols of our progress, those symbols of our future."

The flag's removal also drew complaints from a series of New York's Democratic officials, including Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Gov. Kathy Hochul, U.S. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand.

A rainbow flag still appears on a city-owned pole just outside the park, and smaller ones wave along its fence, where alocal volunteer maintains them.

After Democratic former President Barack Obamacreated the Stonewall monumentin 2016,advocates yearnedto see the Pride flag fly daily on federal land. When it finally happened some years later, they saw the display as an acknowledgment of LGBTQ+ people's place and visibility in the nation.

Soon after Trump, a Republican, returned to office last year, he took aim atdiversity, equity and inclusioninitiatives in the U.S. government and beyond. In one such move, his Defense secretary, Pete Hegseth,renamed a Navy shipthat had been named for Harvey Milk,a slain gay rights activistand San Francisco city official who served during the Korean War. The vessel is now named for Chief Petty Officer Oscar V. Peterson, a World War II sailor who received the Medal of Honor.

Trump's administration also has scrutinized interpretive materials at national parks, museums and landmarks and soughtto removeor alter descriptionsthat the government says are "divisiveor partisan" or "inappropriately disparage Americans past or living."

The park service has not answered specific questions about the Stonewall site and the flag policy, including whether any flags were removed from other parks.

As the Pacific warms, there is a growing chance of neutral El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) conditions this spring, according to the latest update from NOAA Thursday morning, with a better than 50% chance of El Niño returning this autumn, including the peak of hurricane season.

We are nearing the peak of the current La Niña, solidly in the moderate category as far as La Niñas go. This area of colder water is circled in red on the map below.

La Niña occurs when the ocean's surface temperatures in the central and east-central equatorial Pacific reach a specific cooler-than-average temperature. El Niño is the warming of the same area of the Pacific and has a different set of weather effects around the planet.

(MORE:Climate Change Threatens The Winter Olympics' Future)

Neutral conditions are the state between El Niño and La Niña, meaning the water in the Pacific is neither warmer nor cooler than average. This condition will be reached after near-average temperatures are sustained for a multi-month period, and will be indicated by the disappearance of blue colors on the map below in the circled area.

Here's what this forecast means for the next few months:

Impacts

Spring impacts:Years that have shifted from moderately (and relatively) chilly in the Pacific to average have featured some predictable temperature tweaks stateside from March to April.

• Cooler-than-average temperatures from the Northern Rockies to the interior Northeast.

• Reliably warmer than average temperatures in the Southeast and in the Southwest.

By May and June, the signal becomes much more mixed using these analogs, but that's not surprising as the jet stream, and its influence over the Lower 48, typically weakens. One of the meteorological features that ENSO has its hands in is the jet stream. Warming conditions in the Pacific (i.e. a slide toward neutral conditions) could also muddy any connections with weather in the U.S.

Summer impacts?El Niño and La Niña usually have their biggest impacts on the weather in winter, when they've been in place for several months. But if El Niño can develop fast enough, it could at least subtly affect both temperatures and rainfall in the U.S. this summer.

El Niño summers tend to be cooler in the East and Rockies and wetter in the Southeast.

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From a global perspective, the defining warmth of an El Niño will give this summer a push toward the top of the warmest years on record.

(Further beef up your forecast with our detailed, hour-by-hour breakdown for the next 8 days – only available on ourPremium Pro experience.)

Quieter hurricane season ahead?In El Niño hurricane seasons, stronger shearing winds and sinking air often occur over at least the Caribbean Sea and some adjacent parts of the Atlantic Basin. This tends to limit the number and intensity of storms and hurricanes, especially if the El Niño is stronger.

El Niño isn't the only factor that can shape how a hurricane season goes. Bursts of dry air and sinking air or a lack of tropical waves are all other factors that can change how a season goes.

Forecast caveat you should know about:What lies beyond the springtime months is often highly uncertain.

That's because of what's known as aspring predictability barrier– a time of year when models struggle with accurate predictions.

Spring is a time when the ocean is more likely to be closer to average in the temperature department due to the shift out of the polarized summer and winter seasons in their respective hemispheres.

Winds across the equator are also often weaker during the spring because there's less temperature contrast in either hemisphere.

These factors make the signals that climatologists use to make forecasts more fuzzy, leading to a drop off in the accuracy of the forecasts.

Jonathan Belleshas been a digital meteorologist forweather.comfor 9 years and also assists in the production of videos for The Weather Channel en español. His favorite weather is tropical weather, but also enjoys covering high-impact weather and news stories and winter storms. He's a two-time graduate of Florida State University and a proud graduate of St. Petersburg College.

By Julia Harte

Feb 12 (Reuters) - White House border czar Tom Homan announced on Thursday that U.S. President Donald Trump had agreed to end an immigration-enforcement surge in Minnesota, drawing down thousands of federal agents whose presence provoked tumultuous protests for weeks.

Here's a timeline of events ‌in the operation:

December 1, 2025: The federal government launches Operation Metro Surge "to significantly increase 'at-large' arrests of illegal aliens in the Twin Cities metropolitan area." ‌The move comes after attacks by Trump and other federal officials on Minnesota's Somali community, which they accuse of fraud involving millions of federal dollars intended for social services. Operation Metro Surge will ultimately send ​nearly 3,000 additional federal officers and agents to the Twin Cities.

December 18: Minneapolis police chief criticizes federal immigration officers for dragging a woman through a snowy city street and waving a firearm at onlookers, some of whom were recording the scene. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement says in a statement that agents arrested two U.S. citizens for assaulting federal officers.

January 7: Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three who had been observing ICE operations is shot dead in her car by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, setting ‌off protests and a sharp debate about her killing. State ⁠investigators say they are shut out of the federal inquiry into the shooting.

January 8: As protests over the shooting of Good reverberate across Minnesota and the U.S., a U.S. border agent shoots and wounds two people in Portland, Oregon, while conducting a ⁠vehicle stop.

January 11: Tens of thousands of protesters take to the streets of Minneapolis and other U.S. cities as part of more than 1,000 rallies organized to protest the Trump administration's deportation drive.

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January 12: Minnesota sues the Trump administration in an effort to block the surge of immigration-enforcement officers, accusing the Republican administration of racially profiling its citizens and of ​targeting ​Minnesota because of its Democratic leanings. Democratic stronghold Illinois, where an immigration crackdown named "Operation Midway Blitz" ​began in 2025, files a similar lawsuit.

January 13: At least ‌a dozen federal prosecutors indicate plans to leave the U.S. Justice Department over the Trump administration's handling of Good's shooting and other civil rights cases.

January 16: Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey accuse Trump of weaponizing the Justice Department against his enemies after it is reported that the agency has opened a criminal investigation into them and other state officials over an alleged conspiracy to impede immigration agents.

January 20: ICE agents detain five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, Ecuadoreans who both entered the U.S. legally as asylum applicants, as they arrive home from preschool. Both are taken to a family detention facility in Texas. ICE agents apprehend ‌three other students from Conejo Ramos' school district in the same week.

January 22: Federal agents arrest ​three Minnesotans who took part in a demonstration inside a church against a pastor they say ​has a leadership role with ICE. Eventually nine people, including former CNN ​host Don Lemon who had been covering the protest, will face federal charges of violating religious rights in connection with the ‌demonstration, alarming First Amendment proponents.

January 24: Federal immigration officers fatally shoot ​Alex Pretti, an intensive-care nurse trying to ​help other protesters. Video of the encounter verified by Reuters shows Pretti holding a cellphone as he was wrestled to the ground by agents, and an officer removing a gun from Pretti's body shortly before the first shots were fired.

January 26: The Trump administration confirms that Homan is taking over ​Operation Metro Surge from Gregory Bovino, a top U.S. ‌Border Patrol official who has drawn heavy criticism from Democrats and civil liberties proponents. After a private phone call, Trump and Walz signal a ​thaw in their relationship and a mutual effort to defuse tensions.

February 4: The Trump administration withdraws some 700 federal immigration-enforcement agents from ​Minnesota, leaving about 2,000 agents in place.

(Reporting by Julia Harte; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

GUATEMALA CITY (AP) — A judge ordered Thursday that Guatemalan journalistJosé Rubén Zamorabe returned to house arrest again while awaiting trial after spending nearly a year in jail in his latest stint of incarceration.

Zamora, the 69-year-old founder of El Periodico newspaper, had spent more than two years behind bars awaiting trial before a judge granted him house arrest in October 2024. Prosecutors immediately appealed and won rulings thatsent him back to jail in March 2025.

Zamora had been imprisoned since July 2022, when he was charged with money laundering, amounting to around $38,000, and in June 2023 he was sentenced to six years in prison. The sentence was overturned by an appeals court because of errors in the process.

The journalist and free press advocates maintain that the prosecution is revenge for the investigative work of his newspaper against the administration of ex-President Alejandro Giammattei.

Current President Bernardo Arévalo last year called the prosecution "absolutely spurious" and said it was another example of the Attorney General's office prosecuting people who reported corruption.

BERLIN (AP) — One-day strikes by unions representing pilots and cabin crew at Lufthansa caused a wave of flight cancelations Thursday at Germany's biggest airline.

Lufthansa criticized the walkouts as disproportionate but said it expects to offer a largely normal flight program Friday.

Lufthansa said the strikes called by the Vereinigung Cockpit and UFO unions led to extensive cancelations, but didn't give a specific figure. The departures board at the airline's main Frankfurt hub suggested most of its flights from there Thursday morning were canceled.

The airline said it was trying to rebook passengers onto flights by partner airlines and other companies from the Lufthansa group, which includes airlines such as Swiss, Austrian Airlines and Brussels Airlines.

The two unions called for the 24-hour walkouts on Tuesday.

Vereinigung Cockpit called for walkouts on flights departing from Germany in a dispute over the pension system for pilots at the airline and its Lufthansa Cargo unit.

UFO called for members to strike on flights departing Frankfurt and Munich and flights by the Lufthansa Cityline unit in a dispute over its demand for negotiations on various issues.