The Brief

In a single month, 2025 is the second most destructive fire year in California history, with more than 16,000 homes and other structures damaged or destroyed by two fires in the Los Angeles area. Most of those structures were in neighborhoods where the boundaries between human development and natural landscapes blur — the area fire officials and researchers call the wildland-urban interface, or WUI (woo-ee).

When a wildfire approaches one of these areas, the results can be hazardous as a fire can transition from consuming trees, shrubs and plants to devouring homes and other structures often constructed in ways that are vulnerable to burning. And it’s also where California has been building homes for decades — nearly 45% of homes built between 1990 and 2020 are located in places with lots of vegetation ready to fuel a fire.

A CalMatters analysis has found that as of 2020, nearly 14 million Californians, or one in three, lived in the sprawling 7-million-acre zone that makes up the wildland-urban interface. And this isn’t just a problem for Californians living in rural parts of the state: All 58 counties in California have such areas, along with many across the country. The interface grows by about 2 million acres a year nationwide, according to the U.S. Fire Administration.

Sarah McCaffrey, a social scientist who worked for the U.S. Forest Service for decades, put it another way: Structural fires and wildland fires — and the interface is where the two come together.

Just because a development is located within the wildland-urban interface doesn’t mean a fire will occur there, but there may be deadly and destructive consequences if one does. While under 3% of the statewide interface has been affected by wildfire in the last decade, thousands of homes in the zone have been destroyed, according to a CalMatters analysis.

Since 2018, Cal Fire, the state’s fire agency, has inspected all of the buildings within 100 meters of a fire perimeter and assessed the level of damage. The most destructive fires in California history have largely damaged or destroyed homes within the wildland-urban interface, including the two largest fires in Los Angeles County this year — the Palisades and Eaton fires, which demolished entire neighborhoods and killed 28 people as of Jan. 24.

The Eaton Fire killed at least 17 people and destroyed more than 9,400 structures, roughly 9,200 of which were within the interface as is much of Altadena, where the San Gabriel Valley rises to meet the San Gabriel Mountains. The map below shows inspections of buildings conducted by Cal Fire following the Eaton Fire along with the wildland-urban interface, illustrating just how destructive a major conflagration can be for suburban areas.

The other major fire in L.A., the Palisades Fire, apparently raced down the Santa Monica Mountains toward Pacific Palisades, which is nearly entirely within the interface. The hurricane-force winds stoked and spread the flames and destroyed at least 6,800 structures while nearly 4,100 were undamaged.

The deadliest and most destructive fire in California history, the Camp Fire, destroyed the town of Paradise in Butte County in 2018 as the massive blaze burned both the natural and built environment. The fire damaged or destroyed nearly 20,000 structures and killed 85 people.

Having a home in the wildland-urban interface doesn’t guarantee that it’s going to burn down if a wildfire engulfs the neighborhood. Many factors contribute to that possibility, such as the year when the home was built, nearby fuel management practices that aim to reduce nearby flammable objects, weather and, yes, luck.

Despite all this, some experts say the wildland-urban interface isn’t the only, or perhaps even the best, way to measure fire hazard or risk because it wasn’t designed for that. It can collapse nuance to narrowly focus our attention.

“There’s nothing about fire risk in the WUI [wildland-urban interface] map,” said McCaffrey. “There are some papers that show that roughly a third of houses lost in fires are not in the WUI right? But we target all our attention to the WUI.”

An example of how the boundary between the wild and urban landscape doesn’t necessarily translate to high fire risk is the 2017 Tubbs Fire in Sonoma County. The Coffey Park neighborhood of Santa Rosa was nearly leveled even though it’s not technically in the wildland-urban interface, just next to it. The fire destroyed more than 5,000 structures and killed 22 people.

“There’s actually a legal or technical forestry definition of the wildland-urban interface, and it has to do with the number of structures per acre and the amount of vegetation,” said Judson Boomhower, an assistant professor in the economics department of UC San Diego. “I think sometimes it’s more useful to talk about building in high wildfire hazard places.”

The ways to reduce the risk of fire spreading from house to house depend on the nuances of each neighborhood, particularly how densely packed the buildings are.

“If houses are, you know, 80 or 100 feet apart, then all our focus on defensible space and zone zero and all that stuff probably makes a lot more sense,” said McCaffrey. “Because then, you know, it’s a good chance my house could survive if I’ve done all this, even if my neighbor’s house catches on fire.”

On the other hand, some of the homes in Pacific Palisades look so close together that even ensuring that there is nothing flammable within five feet might not have prevented the spread of the fire, said McCaffrey. A law signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in September 2021 required the State Board of Forestry and Fire Protection and the State Fire Marshal to make suggestions for creating an ember-resistant zone within five feet of a structure in a high fire severity zone.

State intervention has helped to reduce destruction in these more wildfire-prone areas. Research from 2021 concluded that California homes built after 2008 were nearly half as likely to be destroyed compared with those built in 1990 if a wildfire burned through the neighborhood, largely because of improved building code regulations.

California faces a chronic housing shortage and megafires boosted by climate change, but with millions of residents already living in the wildland-urban interface, state policymakers will face questions of how to protect people and where to rebuild after disaster strikes.

Israel's Cabinet unanimously approved a proposal on Sunday to designate violence against Armenians by the Ottoman Empire during World War I as a genocide.

The step, which still needs approval in Parliament, reflects deteriorating ties between Israel and Turkey. Turkey has fiercely lobbied to prevent countries from officially recognizing the mass deaths of Armenians around 1915 as a genocide, even as Armenians have pushed for it.

Historians estimate that up to 1.5 million Armenians were killed by Ottoman Turks around the time of World War I, an event widely viewed by scholars as the first genocide of the 20th century. Turkey denies that the deaths constituted genocide, saying the toll has been inflated and that those killed were victims of civil war and unrest.

For years, Israel never officially broached the subject for fear of angering Turkey, but that relationship has soured over the past two decades, especially as the most recent wars in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran have dragged on.

"Despite the extensive and unambiguous historical documentation, the Armenian Genocide remains to this day the subject of an institutionalized campaign of denial and minimization, including a manipulative rewriting of history, mainly by the Turkish government," said Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar, who brought the decision to the government.

He noted that Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have previously described the violence against Armenians as a genocide. But it has never been formally recognized in a vote by Israel's Knesset.

"It is never too late to do the right thing," Saar said Sunday, calling it a "moral and historical duty."

He noted that 32 countries, including the United States, Syria and Lebanon, have also classified the violence as a genocide. It was not immediately known when Sunday's decision, approved unanimously by Israel's Cabinet, would go to the parliament for approval.

Turkey called Israel's move a "politically motivated" step meant to distract from the country's own actions against Palestinians.

"The Israeli government, which systematically persecutes the Palestinian people in full view of the world and is being tried at the International Court of Justice for genocide against the people of Gaza, aims to cover up its own crimes," the Turkish Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

"This malicious attempt, which disregards legal and historical facts, reveals the predicament of Netanyahu and his accomplices, who have arrest warrants against them in connection with the investigation into crimes committed against Palestinians at the International Criminal Court," the statement added.

Israel and Turkey were once close allies, but relations soured during the rise of Turkey's Islamist President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, leading Israel to reconsider its position.

Israel has faced repeated accusations, including from the United Nations and Turkey, that its offensive in Gaza amounts to genocide. Israel, founded in the wake of the Holocaust, denies the accusations.

Israel launched the war in response to Hamas' Oct. 7, 2023, attack. Gaza's Health Ministry, part of the Hamas government, says over 73,000 people have been killed, roughly half of them women and children. Israel says it does not target civilians and accuses Hamas of using civilians as human shields.

Last week, a team of independent experts commissioned by the United Nations accused Israel of deliberately shooting children in Gaza and repeated accusations that Israel has carried out a genocide. Israel called the report a "libelous sham."
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The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld a Mississippi law that allows election officials to count mail-in ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but received up to five days after it.

The ruling is a loss for the Republican Party, which brought the case, ahead of this year's midterm elections.

Eighteen states and territories, including Mississippi, have such mail ballot grace periods. Most of the states are Democratic-led, including California, Illinois and New York. A dozen additional states have grace periods for ballots returning from overseas, like from military members.

The court's ruling was 5-4, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett authoring the opinion, joined in the majority by Chief Justice John Roberts and the court's liberal wing of Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

"[T]he election-day statutes require the electorate's choice to be made on election day. That occurs so long as election day is the deadline for individuals to vote—as it is in Mississippi," Barrett wrote. "But the election-day statutes do not set a deadline for ballot receipt, so they do not prevent Mississippi from counting ballots postmarked before election day yet received afterward."

Justice Samuel Alito authored the dissent, writing in part that the "majority's holding spawns a slurry of troubling election-law questions and risks further undermining Americans' confidence in election integrity."

How the battle over grace periods ended up at the Supreme Court

These grace periods have historically provided voters time to get their absentee ballots to officials in case there are any issues with the Postal Service — as well as any other unforeseen issues, such as weather events.

But Republicans have been fighting these grace periods in recent years — an effort led by President Trump.

Ahead of the 2024 election, the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign filed legal challenges — including one against Mississippi's law — alleging that these grace periods violate the Constitution. They argued that Congress sets the end of an election, not states.

At the time, many of the lawsuits were dismissed by judges across the country, but the conservative 5th Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Republicans, setting up the Supreme Court case.

Trump also signed an executive order last year — which was quickly blocked by lower courts — that required that all votes be received by Election Day during federal elections.

Many state officials, particularly in Democratic-run states with universal mail-in ballot programs, raised concerns about such a requirement.

Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs said in a statement last year that more than 250,000 ballots that had been postmarked on time arrived after Election Day during the 2024 election.

"Had this rule been in effect," he said, "those voices would have been silenced, especially in rural areas where mail delivery can take longer."
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The Supreme Court on Thursday restricted the use of a relatively new law enforcement technique that allows police to tap into giant tech-firm databases to see who was near the scene of a crime.

Writing for the 6-3 majority, Justice Elena Kagan said that the technique, known as geofencing, violates the Fourth Amendment's prohibition against unreasonable searches.

A "geofence warrant" entails drawing a virtual fence around a geographic area where a crime was committed. The government can then seek a warrant to require a tech company to search its data to identify any of its users who were within the geofence at the time of the crime.

This case stems from a robbery in the suburbs of Richmond, Va. A man stole $195,000 from a bank, but after two months, the case had gone cold. That is, until detectives served a warrant on Google, asking for the location information of cellphone users in and around the bank for the hour before and after the crime was committed.

Complying with the warrant, Google initially found the names of 19 people who were in or near the bank, but Google pushed back, ultimately providing the police with the names of just three people whose location data showed they were at the bank. When police went to the home of one of them, they found a pistol matching one seen on security camera footage of the robbery and nearly $100,000 in cash. That man, Okello Chatrie, later confessed and was convicted of the crime.

His attorneys argued in filings to the court that geofence searches violate the Fourth Amendment because they allow the government "to search first and develop suspicions later." The geofence warrants in this case directed Google to search millions of users' location histories, meaning that millions of people were subjected to a search despite never having done anything suspicious.

But the government argued in its filings that because people can choose not to give companies like Google their location data, that data is not constitutionally protected.
Copyright 2026 NPR

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday overturned a 91-year-old precedent that has prevented presidents from removing members of independent agencies at will. The decision represents a significant win for the Trump administration and a major expansion of the president's control over parts of the government once seen as a check on his powers.

In a 6-3 ruling, the court found that President Trump's March 2025 firing of Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter without cause was lawful.

Since its creation of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in 1914, Congress has held that commissioners can only be fired for "inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office." Slaughter was presented with no such reason for her removal, only told her "continued service on the FTC is inconsistent with [the Trump] Administration's priorities."

Last summer, a lower court found her firing was unlawful, citing a 1935 landmark decision known as Humphrey's Executor, a case prompted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt's attempted firing of an FTC commissioner over ideological disagreements. The court unanimously held that while the president has the power to remove purely executive officers for any reason, that unlimited power does not extend to agencies like the FTC, whose duties, the court found, "are neither political nor executive, but predominantly quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative."

Rebecca Kelly Slaughter was appointed in 2018 to fill a Democratic seat on the Federal Trade Commission. She was fired by the Trump administration in 2024.

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Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote: "Although it is up to the Senate to decide whether to confirm those with whom the President would prefer to work, neither Congress nor the courts may saddle him with those with whom he cannot work. Subordinates who exercise the President's power are subject to removal by him. Then, and only then, can they remain accountable to the President, and the President to the people."

The three liberal justices dissented.

The independence of the Federal Reserve remains intact — for now. The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, can remain in her job until litigation is resolved in the lower courts.

A final blow to a 91-year-old precedent

Thursday's decision marks a final blow to Humphrey's Executor.

"If anything more is left of Humphrey's, the Court overrules it," Robert wrote in the majority opinion.

During Trump's first term, the Supreme Court chipped away at the precedent when it let Trump fire the head of another independent agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).

In that case, the Supreme Court held that the firing was permissible because the CFPB is run by a single director rather than a multimember board. Chief Justice John Roberts described Humphrey's Executor as applying only to multimember agencies "that do not wield substantial executive power."

Now with this latest decision, the conservative majority has found reason to give the president power over multimember agencies, too.

The ruling essentially turns FTC commissioners into at-will employees, who serve at the pleasure of the president. It also effectively ends Congress' requirement that the FTC be bipartisan, so that no one party has too much sway.

Congress dictated that no one political party can hold more than three seats on the five-member commission, recognizing the vast influence the FTC has over the lives of everyday Americans.

The agency's commissioners are antitrust experts, uniquely positioned to keep watch over all kinds of companies — big tech companies, pharmaceutical companies, manufacturers and media companies — ensuring their practices aren't harming regular people.

Now, going forward, there's nothing to stop any president from removing commissioners from the opposing party and leaving the seats vacant, which is what Trump has done.

After his firing of two Democratic FTC commissioners last year, the only remaining commissioners are Republicans.

The independence of a multitude of other agencies also in doubt

The ruling also throws into question the protections afforded to members of a multitude of other federal agencies, including the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Merit Systems Protection Board and the Consumer Product Safety Commission, where Trump has also fired Democratic members.

Like the FTC, those agencies play important roles in the daily lives of Americans, protecting people from discrimination and abuse on the job and unsafe products, including toys.

Congress created those agencies and many others following the Supreme Court's decision in Humphrey's Executor, assuming that they would operate with some degree of independence from the White House.

In an interview last fall with NPR, Slaughter said it was vital for the Supreme Court to preserve its independence.

"Independence allows the decision-making that is done by these boards and commissions to be on the merits, about the facts, and about protecting the interests of the American people," she said. "That is what Americans deserve from their government."

James M. Burnham, an attorney who has served in both Trump administrations, offered the counter view, arguing that Congress' limits on the president's removal powers have been unconstitutional from the beginning.

"I don't think there is such a thing as an independent agency because everything has to be in one of the three branches of government," he argued. "I don't think they've ever been independent."
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