.Tuesday’s Briefing: Trump Ends DACA; Humpback Whales Rebound

Plus, Hurricane Irma reaches monster Category 5 status.

Stories you shouldn’t miss for Sept. 5, 2017:

1. President Donald Trump ended the DACA program for about 800,000 young undocumented immigrant “Dreamers” in the United States, The New York Times$ reports. The federal government “will no longer accept new applications from undocumented immigrants to shield them from deportation under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.” The Obama-era program will officially end on March 5, 2018.

2. Humpback whales have rebounded from the brink of extinction “thanks to an international whaling ban, intense conservation, and protection of their breeding grounds,” reports Peter Fimrite of the San Francisco Chronicle$. Humpbacks have been sighted throughout the summer in San Francisco Bay and outside the Golden Gate. Experts say the whales have returned to numbers equal to their historic population.

3. Hurricane Irma has grown into a monster Category 5 storm and is on track to slam into South Florida this weekend, the Washington Post$ reports. “With maximum winds of 180 mph, Irma is the strongest hurricane in the Atlantic Ocean outside the Caribbean or the Gulf of Mexico. … If Irma makes landfall as a Category 4 or higher in the United States, joining Hurricane Harvey, it will become the first time two storms so strong struck the United States in the same season.”

4. Cooler weather in the past few days has helped firefighters gain ground on the massive La Tuna Fire—the largest wildfire in Los Angeles city history, the LA Times$ reports. The 7,000-acre blaze “destroyed four homes, shut down the 210 Freeway and led to evacuations in Burbank, Glendale, and the Sunland-Tujunga area.”

5. And President Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency now requires a political operative to approve “hundreds of millions of dollars in grants the EPA distributes annually,” the Washington Post$ reports.

$ = news stories that may require payment to read.

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