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FORT COLLINS, Colo. (AP) — A wildfire that killed three firefighters along the Colorado-Utah border is one of the deadliest for firefighters since an Arizona wildfire 13 years ago.

The Yarnell Hill Fire that killed 19 firefighters on June 30, 2013, remains the deadliest event on record for U.S. firefighters since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the deadliest for U.S. wildland firefighters in over a century.

The firefighters died 30 miles (48 kilometers) southwest of Prescott, Arizona, after trying to escape flames fanned by shifting winds. They were deploying fire shelters — small, heat-resistant tents that can offer a chance at survival — when flames reached them in a brushy box canyon.

Temperatures reached 2,000 degrees (1,100 Celsius).

On Saturday, a wildfire west of Grand Junction, Colorado, killed three firefighters and injured two others. That fire has burned 44 square miles (114 square kilometers). The five firefighters were members of a Helitack crew who are dropped by helicopter into remote areas to saw and dig away vegetation and create fire-resistant barriers ahead of advancing flames.

As at the Yarnell Hill Fire, the firefighters decided to stop fleeing and use fire shelters to try to survive.

A complete investigation could take several months. Full knowledge of what happened could be elusive.

Investigators of the Yarnell Hill Fire could not verify radio communications from the firefighters for a half-hour period that may have shed light on their decision-making process.

The final investigation report ultimately did not fault the firefighters, saying they were fully qualified, staffed and trained and “followed all standards and guidelines.” Their commanders likewise made reasonable judgments and decisions in rapidly worsening conditions, according to the report.

“Complexity can outpace organizational attempts to respond,” the report concluded.

Fire shelters are a last resort, offering roll-of-the-dice odds under otherwise impossible circumstances. In a 2015 wildfire in Washington state, two firefighters who used such tents survived, while three who were in a truck died.

How much the protection the tents provide depends on the conditions in which they are deployed. They are not designed to withstand direct flame, Riva Duncan, president of Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, a firefighter advocacy group, said Monday.

“It’s your last-ditch effort to try to survive,” Duncan said.

Arkansas is moving forward with its plan to ban government food aid from being used to buy candy and soda beginning on Wednesday, even though a federal judge ruled last week that similar restrictions in other states violated federal law.

Announcing the plan on Monday, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders cited an urgent need to combat a “chronic disease epidemic” in America, including high rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease.

On one floor of the state’s Department of Human Services, “our state has been approving food stamp purchases for soft drinks and candy, while on another floor, our state’s Medicaid program is paying to treat the chronic diseases those products can help create,” she said.

Food stamps is an older name for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. The federally funded and state-run program provides a monthly stipend for low-income families to buy groceries. It is used by nearly 42 million Americans, or about one in eight.

In a news release, the Arkansas governor’s office cited Stanford University research that found restricting the purchase of sugary drinks with food stamps could reduce rates of obesity and type-2 diabetes. However, overall research remains mixed about whether restricting SNAP purchases improves diet quality and health.

Debates over SNAP benefits are common

Lawmakers at the state and federal level have long debated which foods should be eligible for purchase with SNAP. Currently, benefits cannot be used to buy hot prepared foods, but a bipartisan group of U.S. senators has introduced a bill that would allow SNAP to be used to buy rotisserie chicken from the grocery store.

Arkansas is one of 23 states to receive a waiver allowing it to restrict the purchase of some sugary foods and drinks. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins have pushed for the ban as part of the “Make America Healthy Again” campaign.

While the goals of the state restrictions are similar, the exact rules vary. Some states want to ban the purchase of both sugary drinks and candy using SNAP and others want to prohibit only the purchase of sugary beverages.

The USDA acted illegally in approving waivers, judge finds

Last week, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson in Washington vacated USDA approval of the pilot projects that allowed new SNAP restrictions in Colorado, Iowa, Nebraska, Tennessee and West Virginia.

The judge said the ruling was not a reflection on the merits of the program, but said the projects were not permitted under the statute the USDA was citing. The agency also failed to follow its own regulations for implementing a pilot project, she ruled.

The Arkansas program is being implemented under the same regulations as the programs that were vacated. David Super, a law professor at Georgetown University, said that after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last year, federal district courts generally no longer issue nationwide injunctions. Still, Arkansas’ decision to go forward with the program is “putting that to the extreme test.”

Sanders noted the ruling in her announcement on Monday but said, “Arkansas is moving full speed ahead, because we won’t wait around while our people get less and less healthy and we spend more and more taxpayer dollars trying to fix the problem.”

Grocery stores are responsible for enforcing the SNAP restrictions

Steve Goode, executive director of the Arkansas Grocers and Retail Merchants Association, said that he “wouldn’t want to guess” at how prepared the state’s businesses are to implement the benefits changes this week.

“SNAP benefits in retail have been the same for years,” he said, noting that this is going to be a “big change.”

“Some of our members that have stores in other states have done this already and the results have been OK,” he said. Arkansas has helped by hiring a third-party vendor to create a list of banned items for the stores to reference, which hasn’t been the case in some other states.

Meanwhile, the state has also created an app for SNAP beneficiaries to use that will help them determine which items are eligible for purchase and which aren’t.

MIAMI (AP) — More than 100 people just deported from the United States were being held in a hotel when earthquakes struck Venezuela, setting off a scramble to find survivors and bodies buried in the rubble, according to survivors.

A deportation flight from Miami arrived in Venezuela hours before Wednesday’s earthquakes. On board were 146 Venezuelans, including 19 women and seven children, according to ICE Flight Monitor, an initiative of Human Rights First, which tracks deportation flights. They were transported to a hotel in La Guaira.

Lisbeth Portillo, 58, said she escaped the rubble from the hotel with about 20 other deportees who walked the streets looking for help. They saw people running, some naked and others barefoot as they emerged from the rubble of the building in La Guaira, one of the areas that was hardest hit in Wednesday’s 7.2 and 7.5 earthquakes.

“We walked about five kilometers, and I cried and cried … there was no communication,” Portillo said in a phone interview from her home in Maracaibo, Venezuela.

They reached a National Guard building, where they had a chance to call relatives.

“I was born again; God gave me a second chance,” said Portillo. “I am traumatized,” she said after a pause, weeping.

The Venezuelan government says more than 1,700 people were killed.

They survived the earthquake the same day that were deported from the U.S.

Portillo was caught up in the Trump administration’s drive for mass deportations. In May, ICE Flight Monitor tracked 288 deportation flights to 38 countries, including Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Cameroon, Chile and the Ivory Coast.

The U.S. ran 12 deportation flights to Venezuela in May, operating three days a week, according to ICE Flight Monitor. Deportation flights to Venezuela resumed in February 2025 after a 13-month pause.

Portillo said the government took them to the Hotel Santuario La Llanada, where they underwent medical exams and got identification documents. They were told they would go home the next day.

Portillo was staying in a second floor room with 16 other women. She stepped onto a balcony to look at the sea and saw that the sky was black; it was very hot. She returned to the room, laid on a bed, and began to feel herself being shaken.

“I started hearing ‘papa, papa papapa,’, and I saw the women next to me start to fall,” she said, describing the sounds from the earthquake. “They were all screaming for help.”

And almost immediately, the second earthquake.

“I fall and end up buried and covered by a beam, but the shaking shifted everything where I was buried and I was able to get out,” said Portillo, who has bruises all over her body.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not immediately respond to a request for information from the AP.

A video from the Venezuelan government posted on social media showed images of the deportees being received by Venezuelan authorities upon their arrival at the Caracas airport on Wednesday.

Jenny Rodriguez, 24, told the Telemundo network that she was on the flight and taken to the hotel.

“I was trapped under the rubble. A colleague who had been on the same flight came by; I managed to free my hand from the debris, grabbed him by the trousers, and begged for help”, she said. “Thanks to God — and to him — I was able to get out of there.”

Liliana Rojas told Telemundo that she has been trying to locate her 33-year-old partner. The detention center where he was held in El Paso, Texas, says only told that he was deported.

“No one is giving an answer about anything,” Rojas said.

Woman says she feels ‘born again’ after surviving

Portillo, who crossed the U.S. border with Mexico in November 2021 and said had an pending asylum claim, couldn’t remember her children’s phone number. She called her husband in the United States.

“I said to him, ‘Cesar, I’m alive. Help me.’ And my husband kept saying, ‘It can’t be,’” she said. “‘I’m alive, I made it out of the rubble, I’m alive,’ I told him.”

Her husband called their children, who picked her up and were able to reunite with their mother the following night.

“I was born that day; on the 24th, I was born again,” said Portillo, who lived in South Florida for more than four years.

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This version corrects the headline to say the hotel was in La Guaira.

The parents of a 7-year-old Michigan boy who weighed 255 pounds (116 kilograms) when he died have been charged with murder, torture and child abuse, prosecutors said.

“Clearly the parents were feeding the child improperly, to say the least,” Genesee County Prosecutor David Leyton said Monday. “He wasn’t getting the nutrition he needed.”

Casper O’Brien died last November after first responders were called to the family’s home in Flint because he’d stopped breathing, prosecutors said. His parents — Damien O’Brien, 40, and Jessica O’Brien, 41 — have each been charged with second-degree murder, torture and three counts of second-degree child abuse.

The couple were arraigned last week and are being held on no bond in jail in Genesee County, about an hour’s drive northwest of Detroit. A probable cause hearing is set for Thursday.

The child, who was 4 feet, 2.5 inches (128 centimeters) tall, was medically classified as obese, according to the Genesee County Medical Examiner’s report. His cause of death was listed as dilated cardiomyopathy, with his weight being a contributing condition. Dilated cardiomyopathy happens when the heart becomes enlarged and weakened and can’t efficiently pump blood, which can affect other body systems including the lungs.

According to the criminal complaints, the parents failed to take Casper for treatment even though the family had health care.

Elias Fanous, an attorney representing Damien O’Brien, said in a statement that he wouldn’t speculate on the case’s circumstances and had no comment beyond saying that his client was “innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law.” An attorney for Jessica O’Brien did not immediately return a request for comment Monday.

Leyton said authorities believe Casper just consumed “a steady diet of snack foods.” He said Casper, who was nonverbal and bedridden, had severe bed sores and various rashes.

The autopsy report said law enforcement and Child Protective Services reported there were piles of trash in the home, and Casper was not enrolled in school. Leyton said the hoarding in the home was “terrible.”

One of the child abuse charges relates to the couple’s 5-year-old daughter, who was placed in foster care.

Casper last saw his primary care provider in February 2024, according to the autopsy report, when he was diagnosed with a cough, congestion and metabolic disease. At that visit, he weighed 104 pounds (47 kilograms), and his mother was given information on a healthy diet and exercise, according to the report, which said he was referred to a pediatric endocrinologist but never saw one. The report said the metabolic disease wasn’t specified in available medical records.

“It’s a very, very sad and tragic situation,” Leyton said. “I’ve been the prosecuting attorney for 22 years and I thought I’d seen it all but I’ve never seen anything quite like this.”

NEW YORK (AP) — A self-exiled billionaire Chinese business tycoon once believed to be among China’s wealthiest men was sentenced Monday to 30 years in a U.S. prison for a massive financial fraud that a federal judge said cost over 1,000 people worldwide hundreds of millions of dollars.

Guo Wengui, who fled China a decade ago and reinvented himself as a U.S.-based Communist Party critic, was sentenced in a Manhattan courtroom packed with his supporters by Judge Analisa Torres. She said he “preyed on those seeking to bring Democracy to China,” taking their money so he could live lavishly.

Before he was sentenced, Guo protested his treatment in jail, saying he was taken to the hospital early Monday. He disputed a prosecutor’s portrayal of him as a malingerer faking illness, saying he repeatedly vomited as he was returned to jail before being brought to court.

“When I came here, I said: ‘I have a tummy ache, I need to go to the bathroom, I don’t feel well,’” Guo said through an interpreter of his courthouse arrival. Later, Guo wiped his mouth repeatedly with a tissue.

He only briefly addressed the criminal case, defending his intentions by saying in reference to the Chinese Communist Party: “The reason I came to the U.S. was to destroy the CCP.”

The judge, in sentencing him, read snippets of letters she received from victims who described losing their life savings and feeling severely anxious and shamed and having family members turn on them for their poor investment choice.

Torres said Guo “takes no responsibility for his actions and instead insists incredibly his conduct caused no loss and harmed no one.” She said he “has called upon supporters to harass and intimidate those who dare to speak out against him.”

The judge ordered Guo to forfeit $889 million in restitution.

Wei Chen, a victim who testified at trial, told Torres that Guo’s fraud “destroyed my life” and that of her family.

As Guo left the courtroom after the sentencing, supporters applauded and shouted toward him.

Before his arrest and detention without bail three years ago, Guo grew so close to conservative political strategist Steve Bannon that they announced a joint initiative to overthrow the Chinese government in 2020. He lived in a luxury apartment overlooking Central Park and had joined President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Florida golf club.

Prosecutors had requested he serve at least 30 years in prison, saying his “astonishing” fraud from 2018 to 2023 “destroyed hundreds of lives” and left “a wreckage of victims and families who have been devastated financially, emotionally, and psychologically.”

Prosecutors said in court papers that his ill-gotten riches fueled “a lifestyle of extraordinary excess and indulgence, a gilded life of mansions, yachts, race cars, designer clothes and luxury furnishings.”

Guo was convicted of nine of 12 criminal charges during a seven-week trial that prosecutors said showcased his deception of thousands of investors in bogus deals that enabled Guo’s lavish lifestyle.

In a court filing, Guo’s lawyers wrote that he was the victim of the Chinese Communist Party’s “grand, pervasive, and life threatening” pursuit of him. They alleged that the party recruited elites in U.S. business, entertainment and politics to conspire against him.

They said in presentence court papers that a lengthy prison term would only validate China’s smear campaign and “embolden further efforts to eliminate Chinese dissidents from public life” while defendants in similar cases received prison terms of two-to-four years.

The lawyers noted that a court probation officer wrote to the sentencing judge that Guo, also known as Miles Guo and Ho Wan Kwok, had scars and disfigurements from physical torture he endured in China and subsequent surgeries he underwent from 1993 to 2022 to repair the injuries.

Defense lawyers said Guo’s wealth grew as his family became the largest shareholder of China’s largest publicly traded securities company, but he became a target of Chinese government officials as he exposed them as corrupt. Eventually, the lawyers wrote, Guo moved to Hong Kong, London and then New York in 2017.

Chinese authorities accused him of rape, kidnapping, bribery and other crimes, but Guo said those allegations were false.

On Monday, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said they had noted the sentencing, and that Guo is wanted by the Chinese government and has an Interpol “Red Notice” on him. The notice is a request to police forces around the world to arrest a suspect, pending extradition.

Prosecutors say Guo convinced hundreds of thousands of people to invest more than $1 billion total in entities he controlled, including his media company, GTV Media Group Inc., and his so-called Himalaya Farm Alliance and the Himalaya Exchange.

Guo, the government alleged in presentence court papers, was “entirely unrepentant” for his crimes after he took advantage of lax U.S. asylum laws to flourish in America.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The San Francisco Catholic Archdiocese has agreed to pay $395 million to settle more than 500 lawsuits alleging child sexual abuse by church officials, plaintiffs’ attorneys said Monday.

San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone will have to write an apology letter to each survivor as part of the settlement.

The settlement also requires the archdiocese to implement a series of child protection and transparency reforms, including creating a list of clergy accused of abuse, said Jeff Anderson, an attorney representing dozens of child sexual abuse victims.

The settlement comes three years after the archdiocese filed for bankruptcy and will cover approximately 530 survivors of child sexual abuse, Anderson said. It is the latest agreement over clergy sexual abuse claims. In 2024, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles agreed to a record $880 million settlement.

Several archdioceses in California filed for bankruptcy after facing hundreds of lawsuits brought under a California law approved in 2019 that allowed decades-old claims to be filed by Dec. 31, 2022.

Cordileone, the archbishop, said in a statement that he believes the settlement provides “a path toward fair compensation for survivors who have borne the weight of this abuse for a lifetime.”

“The hope is that this proposal will allow us collectively to move forward,” he said.

“We accept full responsibility for what happened, and I sincerely apologize to all those who have been harmed,” Cordileone added.

Margie O’Driscoll sued the archdiocese alleging she was sexually abused almost 50 years ago by a priest while she was a student at Marin Catholic High School in Kentfield, a community north of the Golden Gate Bridge. She said the settlement was hard-fought and puts the responsibility on church officials, not survivors.

“I, like every survivor, have carried this pain and shame along like a ball and chain for a very, very long time,” O’Driscoll said during a news conference. “Ashamed and confused about what happened, scorned by the archdiocese, and sometimes not even believed by family and friends, and I think today shame is gonna change sides.”

The San Francisco Archdiocese serves about 440,000 Catholics in the counties of San Francisco, Marin and San Mateo.

Anderson said a committee of survivors who spent thousands of hours over the last three years negotiating with Cordileone is empowered with establishing protocols on how to distribute the funds. He said every survivor will be given an opportunity to submit their story of abuse to an allocator hired by the committee to receive what Anderson said would be “an equitable distribution based on the unique circumstances of that survival.”

Besides the funds, the archdiocese will be required to follow 14 child protection and transparency demands that include maintaining and making public a comprehensive, up-to-date list of all accused clergy that details allegations and the outcomes of investigations. The archdiocese will also be banned from imposing confidentiality agreements that silence survivors.

“I’ve been working with survivors for decades and I’ve never heard of anything quite as significant, as rigorous, as robust as what is being required of the Archdiocese of San Francisco,” Anderson said.