Montana
Judge dismisses young climate activists’ lawsuit challenging Trump on fossil fuels
BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — A federal judge on Wednesday dismissed a lawsuit from young climate activists seeking to block President Donald Trump’s executive orders promoting fossil fuels and discouraging renewable energy.
U.S. District Judge Dana Christensen said the plaintiffs showed overwhelming evidence climate change affects them and that it will worsen as a result of Trump’s orders.
But Christensen concluded their request for the courts to intervene was “unworkable” because it was beyond the power of the judiciary to create environmental policies.
The 22 plaintiffs included youths who prevailed in a landmark climate trial against the state of Montana in 2023. During a two-day hearing last month in Missoula, the activists and experts who testified on their behalf described Trump’s actions to boost drilling and mining and discourage renewable energy as a growing danger to children and the planet.
A United Nations agency said on Wednesday that heat-trapping carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere jumped by the highest amount on record last year, “turbo-charging” the climate and making weather more extreme.
Legal experts said the young activists and their lawyers from the environmental group Our Children’s Trust faced long odds in the federal case. The Montana state constitution declares that people have a “right to a clean and healthful environment,” but that language is absent from the U.S. Constitution.
White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said Wednesday’s ruling marked a victory for the administration and voters who supported its agenda to create American “energy dominance” by producing more fossil fuels.
“President Trump saved our country from Joe Biden’s wildly unpopular Green Energy Scam and he will continue to ‘DRILL, BABY, DRILL’,” Rogers said in an e-mailed statement.
Christensen said in a 31-page ruling that injunction sought by the activists would have effectively meant reverting to the environmental policies of the Biden administration. Enforcing it would have required scrutiny of every climate-related action taken since Trump took office in January, the judge added.
That would mean monitoring “an untold number of federal agency actions to determine whether they contravene its injunction,” Christensen wrote. “This is, quite simply, an unworkable request.”
The climate activists will appeal Wednesday’s ruling, said Julia Olson, chief legal counsel at Our Children’s Trust.
“Every day these executive orders remain in effect, these 22 young Americans suffer irreparable harm to their health, safety, and future,” Olson said. “The judge recognized that the government’s fossil fuel directives are injuring these youth, but said his hands were tied.”
A previous federal climate lawsuit in Oregon from Our Children’s Trust went on for a decade before the U.S. Supreme Court declined to consider their final appeal this year. Christensen cited that case in concluding that the plaintiffs in Montana lacked standing to sue the government.
“This Court is certainly troubled by the very real harms presented by climate change,” he wrote. “This concern does not automatically confer upon it the power to act.”
Attorneys for the U.S. Department of Justice and more than a dozen states led by Montana had urged Christensen to dismiss the case.
Acting Assistant Attorney General Adam Gustafson said in a statement that the lawsuit was a sweeping and baseless challenge to Trump’s energy agenda that the court correctly threw out.
Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen said the rule of law had prevailed.
“Our suspicions were confirmed – this was just another show trial contrived by climate activists who wasted the taxpayer’s money,” he said.
Only a few states, including Montana, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and New York, have environmental protections enshrined in their constitutions.
Montana’s Supreme Court upheld the 2023 trial outcome last year, requiring officials to more closely analyze climate-warming emissions. To date, that has yielded few meaningful changes in a state dominated by Republicans.
Ohio
Jury finds woman guilty in the fatal stabbing of 3-year-old outside store
CLEVELAND (AP) — A jury has found an Ohio woman guilty in the fatal stabbing of a 3-year-old boy as he sat in a grocery cart outside a supermarket in suburban Cleveland.
Bionca Ellis, 34, of Cleveland, will be sentenced Oct. 27. She has been held in jail on a $5 million bond since being indicted by a grand jury last year.
Ellis was found guilty Wednesday — after a weeklong trial — on nine criminal counts, including aggravated murder, felonious assault, child endangering and aggravated theft, for the June 3, 2024, attack that killed Julian Wood and left his mother injured, according to Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Michael C. O’Malley’s office.
Authorities said Ellis entered the Giant Eagle grocery store in North Olmsted armed with two knives that she had stolen from the Volunteers of America Thrift Store next door. They said she spotted Julian and his mother, Margot Wood, near the front and followed them into the parking lot.
The mother was about to load her groceries into her vehicle when Ellis ran at them with a knife, stabbing the toddler twice, in an attack that took less than five seconds, before walking away. The boy died at a hospital while Margot Wood was treated for a stab wound to her shoulder. Prosecutors said she suffered that injury as she tried to pull the boy out of the cart during the attack.
Ellis’ defense attorneys had entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity.
Margot Wood and Jared Wood, the toddler’s father, delivered a statement to reporters after the verdict thanking the community for its support.
“Everybody that’s visited him, commented, sent love, we appreciate you guys so much,” Margot Wood said. “This was for him today.”
California
Graduate student charged with drugging, raping multiple women
LOS ANGELES (AP) — A University of Southern California graduate student who police say is a serial sexual predator has been charged with drugging and raping multiple women as investigators look for additional victims, Los Angeles authorities said.
Sizhe Weng, a 30-year-old Chinese national also known as Steven Weng, was arrested Aug. 28, though the district attorney and police just released statements about the case on Wednesday.
Weng has pleaded not guilty to eight felony counts including forcible rape and sodomy by controlled substance or anesthesia, according to the LA County District Attorney’s Office.
Weng was held without bail and could not be reached for comment. A lawyer for him could not be found, and the LA Public Defender’s Office didn’t respond to an email asking if one of its attorneys is representing Weng.
USC said in a statement Wednesday that it is cooperating fully with police and has taken steps to bar Weng from campus.
“Providing a safe environment for learning, teaching, and research is our top priority,” the statement said.
Detectives began investigating in January after receiving information from authorities about a potential suspect who plied women with drugs before raping them in Los Angeles, police said in a statement.
“Evidence was recovered at Weng’s residence that corroborated his involvement in drug facilitated sexual assaults of multiple victims dating back to 2021 and continuing into 2025,” the police statement said. Investigators said Weng put unspecified incapacitating drugs in his victims’ food or drinks.
Weng first enrolled as a doctoral student at USC in 2021, prosecutors said.
District Attorney Nathan Hochman urged any other potential victims to contact the police department’s Robbery-Homicide Division.
If convicted as charged, Weng faces 25 years to life plus 56 years in state prison, the DA’s office said.
New York
A discarded straw leads to murder charges in 1984 killing of teen
MINEOLA, N.Y. (AP) — Four decades after prosecutors sent the wrong men to prison for the rape and murder of a 16-year-old Long Island girl, DNA obtained from a discarded straw has led to the indictment of a new suspect.
Richard Bilodeau, 63, of Center Moriches, was arraigned Wednesday on two counts of murder in the death of Theresa Fusco.
The high school junior disappeared after leaving her part-time job at a Lynbrook roller-skating rink in November 1984. Her nude body was found weeks after the assault, buried under leaves in a wooded area near the rink.
Three men were convicted in the killing and served several years in prison before they were exonerated by DNA evidence in 2003. They sued for wrongful imprisonment, and two were each awarded $18 million.
Fusco’s father, Thomas, was among those in the Mineola court as Bilodeau pleaded not guilty and was remanded to the county jail.
After the hearing, he said it was “heartbreaking” to relive her daughter’s death “over and over again” but expressed hope that the arrest was a “finalization” in the ordeal.
“I loved her and I miss her. She lives in my heart, as you can see,” Fusco said as he produced a photo of Theresa from his jacket pocket during a news conference with prosecutors. “I never gave up hope. I’ve always had faith in the system.”
Bilodeau’s lawyer, Jason Russo, declined comment, saying he had just met Bilodeau shortly before the court hearing.
Bilodeau was 23 and living with his grandparents when Fusco was killed, prosecutors said. If convicted, he faces up to 25 years to life in prison.
County authorities started watching Bilodeau last year after developing what they said were “multiple investigative leads.”
In February 2024, investigators recovered a cup and straw they said Bilodeau had used and discarded at a smoothie café in neighboring Suffolk County. DNA extracted from the straw matched a sample taken from Fusco’s body in 1984.
“The past has not been forgotten,” Nassau County District Attorney Anne Donnelly said at a press conference after the hearing. “We will never stop fighting for victims. My office is determined to see justice for Theresa and her family.”
During the arraignment, Assistant District Attorney Jared Rosenblatt said investigators went to speak with Bilodeau at his workplace after matching his DNA with the crime scene evidence.
At the time, he said, Bilodeau told investigators: “Yeah, people got away with murder, back then.”
“Well, Mr. Bilodeau, it’s 2025, and your day of reckoning is now,” Rosenblatt said in court.
Fusco’s killing drew wide attention in 1984, partly because she disappeared around the same time and area as two other teenage girls, one of whom was a friend of Fusco.
Kelly Morrissey, 15, went missing earlier in 1984 and was never found.
The body of Jacqueline Martarella, 19, of Oceanside, turned up the following year at a nearby country club golf course.
The three men who were wrongfully convicted of killing Fusco worked together as movers and one of them had dated Morrissey. DNA testing that was not available in the 1980s later proved someone else raped and killed her.
Attorneys for two of the men, in a lawsuit seeking compensation, argued they were victims of police misconduct.
A federal jury agreed, finding the lead detective in the case, who by then had died, had both fabricated hair evidence and hid other evidence from prosecutors.
Judge dismisses young climate activists’ lawsuit challenging Trump on fossil fuels
BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — A federal judge on Wednesday dismissed a lawsuit from young climate activists seeking to block President Donald Trump’s executive orders promoting fossil fuels and discouraging renewable energy.
U.S. District Judge Dana Christensen said the plaintiffs showed overwhelming evidence climate change affects them and that it will worsen as a result of Trump’s orders.
But Christensen concluded their request for the courts to intervene was “unworkable” because it was beyond the power of the judiciary to create environmental policies.
The 22 plaintiffs included youths who prevailed in a landmark climate trial against the state of Montana in 2023. During a two-day hearing last month in Missoula, the activists and experts who testified on their behalf described Trump’s actions to boost drilling and mining and discourage renewable energy as a growing danger to children and the planet.
A United Nations agency said on Wednesday that heat-trapping carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere jumped by the highest amount on record last year, “turbo-charging” the climate and making weather more extreme.
Legal experts said the young activists and their lawyers from the environmental group Our Children’s Trust faced long odds in the federal case. The Montana state constitution declares that people have a “right to a clean and healthful environment,” but that language is absent from the U.S. Constitution.
White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said Wednesday’s ruling marked a victory for the administration and voters who supported its agenda to create American “energy dominance” by producing more fossil fuels.
“President Trump saved our country from Joe Biden’s wildly unpopular Green Energy Scam and he will continue to ‘DRILL, BABY, DRILL’,” Rogers said in an e-mailed statement.
Christensen said in a 31-page ruling that injunction sought by the activists would have effectively meant reverting to the environmental policies of the Biden administration. Enforcing it would have required scrutiny of every climate-related action taken since Trump took office in January, the judge added.
That would mean monitoring “an untold number of federal agency actions to determine whether they contravene its injunction,” Christensen wrote. “This is, quite simply, an unworkable request.”
The climate activists will appeal Wednesday’s ruling, said Julia Olson, chief legal counsel at Our Children’s Trust.
“Every day these executive orders remain in effect, these 22 young Americans suffer irreparable harm to their health, safety, and future,” Olson said. “The judge recognized that the government’s fossil fuel directives are injuring these youth, but said his hands were tied.”
A previous federal climate lawsuit in Oregon from Our Children’s Trust went on for a decade before the U.S. Supreme Court declined to consider their final appeal this year. Christensen cited that case in concluding that the plaintiffs in Montana lacked standing to sue the government.
“This Court is certainly troubled by the very real harms presented by climate change,” he wrote. “This concern does not automatically confer upon it the power to act.”
Attorneys for the U.S. Department of Justice and more than a dozen states led by Montana had urged Christensen to dismiss the case.
Acting Assistant Attorney General Adam Gustafson said in a statement that the lawsuit was a sweeping and baseless challenge to Trump’s energy agenda that the court correctly threw out.
Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen said the rule of law had prevailed.
“Our suspicions were confirmed – this was just another show trial contrived by climate activists who wasted the taxpayer’s money,” he said.
Only a few states, including Montana, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and New York, have environmental protections enshrined in their constitutions.
Montana’s Supreme Court upheld the 2023 trial outcome last year, requiring officials to more closely analyze climate-warming emissions. To date, that has yielded few meaningful changes in a state dominated by Republicans.
Ohio
Jury finds woman guilty in the fatal stabbing of 3-year-old outside store
CLEVELAND (AP) — A jury has found an Ohio woman guilty in the fatal stabbing of a 3-year-old boy as he sat in a grocery cart outside a supermarket in suburban Cleveland.
Bionca Ellis, 34, of Cleveland, will be sentenced Oct. 27. She has been held in jail on a $5 million bond since being indicted by a grand jury last year.
Ellis was found guilty Wednesday — after a weeklong trial — on nine criminal counts, including aggravated murder, felonious assault, child endangering and aggravated theft, for the June 3, 2024, attack that killed Julian Wood and left his mother injured, according to Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Michael C. O’Malley’s office.
Authorities said Ellis entered the Giant Eagle grocery store in North Olmsted armed with two knives that she had stolen from the Volunteers of America Thrift Store next door. They said she spotted Julian and his mother, Margot Wood, near the front and followed them into the parking lot.
The mother was about to load her groceries into her vehicle when Ellis ran at them with a knife, stabbing the toddler twice, in an attack that took less than five seconds, before walking away. The boy died at a hospital while Margot Wood was treated for a stab wound to her shoulder. Prosecutors said she suffered that injury as she tried to pull the boy out of the cart during the attack.
Ellis’ defense attorneys had entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity.
Margot Wood and Jared Wood, the toddler’s father, delivered a statement to reporters after the verdict thanking the community for its support.
“Everybody that’s visited him, commented, sent love, we appreciate you guys so much,” Margot Wood said. “This was for him today.”
California
Graduate student charged with drugging, raping multiple women
LOS ANGELES (AP) — A University of Southern California graduate student who police say is a serial sexual predator has been charged with drugging and raping multiple women as investigators look for additional victims, Los Angeles authorities said.
Sizhe Weng, a 30-year-old Chinese national also known as Steven Weng, was arrested Aug. 28, though the district attorney and police just released statements about the case on Wednesday.
Weng has pleaded not guilty to eight felony counts including forcible rape and sodomy by controlled substance or anesthesia, according to the LA County District Attorney’s Office.
Weng was held without bail and could not be reached for comment. A lawyer for him could not be found, and the LA Public Defender’s Office didn’t respond to an email asking if one of its attorneys is representing Weng.
USC said in a statement Wednesday that it is cooperating fully with police and has taken steps to bar Weng from campus.
“Providing a safe environment for learning, teaching, and research is our top priority,” the statement said.
Detectives began investigating in January after receiving information from authorities about a potential suspect who plied women with drugs before raping them in Los Angeles, police said in a statement.
“Evidence was recovered at Weng’s residence that corroborated his involvement in drug facilitated sexual assaults of multiple victims dating back to 2021 and continuing into 2025,” the police statement said. Investigators said Weng put unspecified incapacitating drugs in his victims’ food or drinks.
Weng first enrolled as a doctoral student at USC in 2021, prosecutors said.
District Attorney Nathan Hochman urged any other potential victims to contact the police department’s Robbery-Homicide Division.
If convicted as charged, Weng faces 25 years to life plus 56 years in state prison, the DA’s office said.
New York
A discarded straw leads to murder charges in 1984 killing of teen
MINEOLA, N.Y. (AP) — Four decades after prosecutors sent the wrong men to prison for the rape and murder of a 16-year-old Long Island girl, DNA obtained from a discarded straw has led to the indictment of a new suspect.
Richard Bilodeau, 63, of Center Moriches, was arraigned Wednesday on two counts of murder in the death of Theresa Fusco.
The high school junior disappeared after leaving her part-time job at a Lynbrook roller-skating rink in November 1984. Her nude body was found weeks after the assault, buried under leaves in a wooded area near the rink.
Three men were convicted in the killing and served several years in prison before they were exonerated by DNA evidence in 2003. They sued for wrongful imprisonment, and two were each awarded $18 million.
Fusco’s father, Thomas, was among those in the Mineola court as Bilodeau pleaded not guilty and was remanded to the county jail.
After the hearing, he said it was “heartbreaking” to relive her daughter’s death “over and over again” but expressed hope that the arrest was a “finalization” in the ordeal.
“I loved her and I miss her. She lives in my heart, as you can see,” Fusco said as he produced a photo of Theresa from his jacket pocket during a news conference with prosecutors. “I never gave up hope. I’ve always had faith in the system.”
Bilodeau’s lawyer, Jason Russo, declined comment, saying he had just met Bilodeau shortly before the court hearing.
Bilodeau was 23 and living with his grandparents when Fusco was killed, prosecutors said. If convicted, he faces up to 25 years to life in prison.
County authorities started watching Bilodeau last year after developing what they said were “multiple investigative leads.”
In February 2024, investigators recovered a cup and straw they said Bilodeau had used and discarded at a smoothie café in neighboring Suffolk County. DNA extracted from the straw matched a sample taken from Fusco’s body in 1984.
“The past has not been forgotten,” Nassau County District Attorney Anne Donnelly said at a press conference after the hearing. “We will never stop fighting for victims. My office is determined to see justice for Theresa and her family.”
During the arraignment, Assistant District Attorney Jared Rosenblatt said investigators went to speak with Bilodeau at his workplace after matching his DNA with the crime scene evidence.
At the time, he said, Bilodeau told investigators: “Yeah, people got away with murder, back then.”
“Well, Mr. Bilodeau, it’s 2025, and your day of reckoning is now,” Rosenblatt said in court.
Fusco’s killing drew wide attention in 1984, partly because she disappeared around the same time and area as two other teenage girls, one of whom was a friend of Fusco.
Kelly Morrissey, 15, went missing earlier in 1984 and was never found.
The body of Jacqueline Martarella, 19, of Oceanside, turned up the following year at a nearby country club golf course.
The three men who were wrongfully convicted of killing Fusco worked together as movers and one of them had dated Morrissey. DNA testing that was not available in the 1980s later proved someone else raped and killed her.
Attorneys for two of the men, in a lawsuit seeking compensation, argued they were victims of police misconduct.
A federal jury agreed, finding the lead detective in the case, who by then had died, had both fabricated hair evidence and hid other evidence from prosecutors.
