DENVER (AP) - U.S. officials cannot deny a passport application from an intersex Colorado resident based solely on a refusal to select male or female for gender, a federal judge said Wednesday. The U.S. State Department's varied explanations for rejecting the application weren't reasonable, U.S. District Judge R. Brooke Jackson said in his ruling, forcing him to set aside the decision as "arbitrary and capricious."
COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — As South Carolina rivers overflowed from Florence's torrential rain, deputies taking two women to a mental health facility drove into floodwaters that swamped their van and trapped the women inside, officials said Wednesday. The two deputies worked to free the women, who were being transported Tuesday night as part of a court order, but were not able to save them from the back of the van, Horry County Sheriff Phillip Thompson told reporters.
WILMINGTON, N.C. (AP) - The Latest on Florence (all times local): 6:10 p.m. The National Weather Service has confirmed that the remnants of Hurricane Florence spawned a total of eight tornadoes in Virginia earlier this week. The weather service's office in Wakefield, Virginia, said Wednesday that meteorologists have confirmed two additional tornadoes hit the area on Monday. That brings the total for that day to eight.
FARGO, N.D. (AP) - A North Dakota man accused of helping to kill a pregnant woman tightened a rope around her neck after his girlfriend sliced the baby from the victim's womb, a prosecutor said Wednesday, later suggesting the girlfriend couldn't have restrained the mom-to-be alone. William Hoehn is charged with conspiracy to commit murder in the death of 22-year-old Savanna Greywind, who was eight months pregnant when she was killed in August 2017.
ALAMEDA, Calif. (AP) - The relaxed new dress code at public schools in the small city of Alameda, across the bay from San Francisco, is intentionally specific: Midriff-baring shirts are acceptable attire, so are tank tops with spaghetti straps and other once-banned items like micro-mini skirts and short shorts. As students settle into the new school term, gone are restrictions on ripped jeans and hoodies in class. If students want to come to school in pajamas, that's OK, too.
LAKEPORT, Calif. (AP) - The U.S. Forest Service says the largest wildfire on record in California is 100 percent contained. The agency made the announcement Wednesday about the so-called Mendocino Complex of twin fires that erupted in July. The fires north of San Francisco killed a firefighter, destroyed 157 homes and scorched 720 square miles (1,865 square kilometers). That's an area more than twice the size of New York City.
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) - The U.S. Justice Department will double the funding it gives tribes for public safety programs and crime victims as it tries to tackle the high rates of violence against Native American women, a top official said. The department's third-highest ranking official said more than $113 million in public safety funding will be doled out to 133 tribes and Alaska Native villages to try to address the issue.
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Agribusiness company Monsanto has asked a San Francisco judge to throw out a jury's $289 million award to a former school groundskeeper who said the company's Roundup weed killer left him dying of cancer. DeWayne Johnson failed to prove that Roundup or similar herbicides caused his non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, and presented no evidence that Monsanto executives were malicious in marketing Roundup, attorneys for Monsanto said in court documents filed late Tuesday.
WILMINGTON, N.C. (AP) - The death toll from Hurricane Florence climbed to at least 37, including two women who drowned when a sheriff's van taking them to a mental health facility was swept away by floodwaters, and North Carolina's governor pleaded with thousands of evacuees not to return home just yet. President Donald Trump, meanwhile, arrived in storm-ravaged North Carolina on Wednesday and helped volunteers at a church in the hard-hit coastal town of New Bern.
