The county medical examiner's office said Monday that 29 people had died as a result of the wildfires that burned entire towns in the Los Angeles area this month. According to a statement from the office, the new reported death was a hospitalized person who perished in the Palisades Fire, which broke out on January 7 and destroyed thousands of homes in the Pacific Palisades and along the Pacific Coast. According to fire officials, the Palisades Fire started on January 7 under strong winds and has now burned 23,448 acres and destroyed 6,837 confirmed residences and other structures. According to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, damage assessment teams are almost done with their inspections. As of Monday night, the fire was 95% contained. Residents who had previousl...

Chicago As they got ready to approach what they referred to as their target, a number of Customs Enforcement and Immigration officers, together with other federal employees, waited in unmarked vehicles. Christopher Fragoso Lara, 25, is from Mexico and was convicted of aggravated battery, domestic battery, home invasion, and firearm possession, according to ICE. He had been seen by a surveillance crew at his place of employment, a tire store in Chicago, on Monday morning. As Fragoso Lara was speaking to a customer outdoors in below-freezing weather, agents blocked off the street outside the establishment and took him into custody. When NBC News was infiltrated with the agents during operations across the Chicago area on Monday morning, the arrest happened without any problems. Before daw...

Washington Several Senate Republicans are opposed to President Donald Trump's choice of former Representative Lori Chavez-DeRemer as labor secretary, pointing to her prior pro-union views that are at odds with those of the business community. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., a senior member of the committee that would supervise her nomination, told NBC News on Monday that he would not back her. I am the principal author of the right-to-work bill and its national spokesperson. I don't think it's a good thing that she supports the PRO Act, which would not only conflict with the national right to work but also supersede state laws pertaining to that right. Watch live political coverage And supporting her would be difficult for me because it's a major concern of mine. He said, "So I won't support her...

On Monday, Google announced that when federal maps change their names, they will adopt the names that President Donald Trump prefers for Denali, the Gulf of Mexico, Mount McKinley, and the Gulf of America. The president instructed the Secretary of the Interior to implement the modifications within 30 days in an executive order signed on his first day back in office on January 20. According to Trump's order, the U.S. Geological Survey, which is part of the Department of the Interior, must update the federal Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) to reflect the new names. Requests for comment on Monday were not immediately answered by survey spokespeople. Former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, Trump's nomination for interior secretary, was questioned during a confirmation hearing on J...

Two former USAID officials, one current agency official, and one source directly familiar with the decision told NBC News that more than fifty civil career servants and foreign service officers at the U.S. Agency for International Development were placed on administrative leave Monday afternoon, effective immediately. According to two former USAID officials and one current official, the operation targeted senior attorneys in particular, as well as senior leadership in bureaus around the agency. Late Monday afternoon, USAID staff were notified of the decision. According to the email that NBC News was able to receive from USAID Acting Administrator Jason Gray, "We have identified several actions within USAID that appear to be designed to circumvent the President's Executive Orders and the ma...

According to the Salt Lake County sheriff, DNA evidence helped lead to an arrest in Utah in a deadly stabbing that occurred in 2005 and remained unexplained for over two decades. According to the sheriff's office on Friday, Mark Munoz, 53, was arrested Thursday on a murder charge in connection with the August 6, 2005, stabbing death of Jason Royter at his Magna home. According to sheriff's detective Ben Pendern, the case broke when Munoz, who is characterized as homeless and frequently moves, was charged with a crime in another state and had a DNA sample submitted into an index system. At a press conference, Sheriff Rosie Rivera stated that this family has persevered despite the toll that these kind of incidents take on families. "We also don't give up," she remarked. According to authori...

Washington President Donald Trump's chief prosecutor for Washington, D.C., announced Monday that he is starting a special study to examine how the Justice Department handled a federal charge against many of the 1,500 offenders who were pardoned by the president last week. Following Trump's inauguration, Ed Martin, who took over as acting head of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia, announced that he was assigning two officials to examine the use of an obstruction of justice charge that the Supreme Court found had been applied too broadly against certain defendants on January 6. Martin's office pushed to dismiss prosecutions against violent rioters who attacked police officers on January 6 and abolished the Justice Department's Capitol Siege Section. Following Trump's ...

Madison, Wisconsin. In an attempt to regain his position as a professor at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, a former chancellor who was sacked for his role in the adult entertainment industry filed a federal lawsuit on Monday. Because of the salaciousness of a prominent university administrator producing pornographic films and discussing them in public, as well as the issues it raises regarding free expression, Joe Gow's story has attracted national attention. A spokesman for the Universities of Wisconsin, Mark Pitsch, declined to comment on the case, stating merely that the system does not comment on ongoing legal proceedings. Regents fired Gow after learning about porn hobby After discovering through an anonymous complaint that Gow and his wife, Carmen Wilson, had created ...

DORAL, Fla. — House Republicans in the chamber thought that President Donald Trump's public reflections on Monday on seeking a third term were a joke, but Trump keeps making them. One week after taking the oath of office for a second term, Trump told House GOP legislators at a rally here, "I've raised a lot of money for the next race that I assume I can't use for myself, but I'm not 100% sure." I believe I'm not permitted to run once more. Trump persisted in considering a second presidential run, encouraging Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., who had just brought him onstage, to pledge a fresh start. Can I go running again? Trump enquired. I'd better keep you out of that, Mike. Johnson, a former constitutional attorney, was observed laughing at Trump's remarks while they were on stage togethe...

NEW YORK As the globe observed International Holocaust Remembrance Day, a life-size model of the covert annex where Anne Frank wrote her well-known diary opened in New York City on Monday. The annex has never been fully reconstructed outside of Amsterdam, where it is a focal point of the Anne Frank House museum, until the display at the Center for Jewish History in Manhattan. The New York reproduction, however, depicts the five rooms as they would have appeared during the time that the Frank family and others were in hiding, whereas the original extension was purposefully left empty. The rooms are crammed with furnishings and belongings, including a replica of the desk where Frank kept her journal. In order to portray Frank's tale in a fresh and engaging way, particularly for people who ...