AP News in Brief at 11:04 p.m. EST

Biden authorizes Ukraine to use US-supplied long-range missiles for deeper strikes inside Russia

MANAUS, Brazil (AP) — President Joe Biden has authorized Ukraine to use U.S.-supplied long-range missiles to strike deeper inside Russia, easing limitations on the weapons as Russia deploys thousands of North Korean troops to reinforce its war, according to a U.S. official and three other people familiar with the matter.

The decision allowing Kyiv to use the Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMs, for attacks farther inside Russia comes as President Vladimir Putin positions North Korean troops along Ukraine's northern border to try to reclaim hundreds of miles of territory seized by Ukrainian forces.

Biden's move also follows the presidential election victory of Donald Trump, who has said he would bring about a swift end to the war and raised uncertainty about whether his administration would continue the United States' vital military support for Ukraine.

The official and the others knowledgeable about the matter were not authorized to discuss the U.S. decision publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's reaction Sunday was notably restrained.

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Russia launches one of its fiercest missile and drone attacks at Ukraine's infrastructure

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — A Russian strike on a nine-story building in the city of Sumy in northern Ukraine killed eight people and wounded dozens, an official said Sunday, as Russia launched a massive drone and missile attack described by officials as the largest in recent months.

Among the eight killed in Sumy, 40 kilometers (24 miles) from the border with Russia, were two children, said Ukraine’s Minister of Internal Affairs Ihor Klymenko. More than 400 people were evacuated from the building.

The rescuers were checking every apartment looking for people who might be still in the damaged building.

“Every life destroyed by Russia is a big tragedy,” said Klymenko.

The drone and missile attack, which targeted Ukraine's energy infrastructure, came as fears are mounting about Moscow’s intentions to devastate Ukraine's power generation capacity ahead of the winter.

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Donald Trump Jr. says pushback against Cabinet picks proves they're the disrupters voters wanted

PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — Donald Trump Jr. said Sunday that any pushback from the Washington establishment around his father's unconventional choices for Cabinet proves they are just the kind of disruptors that voters are demanding.

The younger Trump insisted the team now around the president-elect knows how to build out an administration, unlike when his father first took office.

“The reality this time is, we actually know what we’re doing. We actually know who the good guys and the bad guys are,” he told Fox News Channel’s "Sunday Morning Futures. “And it’s about surrounding my father with people who are both competent and loyal. They will deliver on his promises. They will deliver on his message. They are not people who think they know better, as unelected bureaucrats.”

After Donald Trump was elected in 2016, he stocked his early administration with choices from traditional Republican and business circles, tapping figures such as former Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson, who was his first as secretary of state.

Today, Trump is valuing personal allegiance above political experience.

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Trump names Brendan Carr, senior GOP leader at FCC, to lead the agency

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — President-elect Donald Trump on Sunday named Brendan Carr, the senior Republican on the Federal Communications Commission, as the new chairman of the agency tasked with regulating broadcasting, telecommunications and broadband.

Carr is a longtime member of the commission and served previously as the FCC's general counsel. He has been unanimously confirmed by the Senate three times and was nominated by both Trump and President Joe Biden to the commission.

The FCC is an independent agency that is overseen by Congress, but Trump has suggested he wanted to bring it under tighter White House control, in part to use the agency to punish TV networks that cover him in a way he doesn’t like.

Carr has of late embraced Trump's ideas about social media and tech. Carr wrote a section devoted to the FCC in “ Project 2025,” a sweeping blueprint for gutting the federal workforce and dismantling federal agencies in a second Trump administration produced by the conservative Heritage Foundation.

Trump has claimed he doesn’t know anything about Project 2025, but many of its themes have aligned with his statements.

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An Israeli strike in Beirut kills Hezbollah's spokesman, while a strike in Gaza kills at least 30

BEIRUT (AP) — A rare Israeli strike in central Beirut killed the Hezbollah militant group's chief spokesman on Sunday, while an Israeli strike in northern Gaza ’s Beit Lahiya killed at least 30 people, a hospital director there told The Associated Press.

Mohammed Afif al-Naboulsi was killed in a strike on the Arab socialist Baath party’s office in Beirut, Hezbollah confirmed in a statement. He had been especially visible after all-out war erupted between Israel and Hezbollah in September.

Israel's military in a statement said he “wielded significant influence over Hezbollah’s military operations” and “glorified and incited” attacks on Israel.

It was the latest targeted killing of a senior Hezbollah official. On Sunday night, another strike in central Beirut hit a computer shop, killing two people and wounding 22, Lebanon's Health Ministry said. There was no immediate comment from Israel's military.

The strikes happened as Lebanese officials considered a United States-led cease-fire proposal. “This confirms the crimes of the Israeli enemy, and that it wants to negotiate under fire and is expanding and targeting safe and safer areas,” said a Lebanese member of parliament, Faisal Al Sayegh.

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From the Amazon rainforest, Biden declares nobody can reverse US progress on clean energy

MANAUS, Brazil (AP) — Speaking from the Amazon rainforest, President Joe Biden declared Sunday that there’s no going back in America’s “clean energy revolution” even as the incoming Trump administration vows to spur fossil fuel production and scale back efforts against climate change.

Biden, the first sitting U.S. president to visit the world’s largest tropical rainforest, saw up close the ravages of deforestation. The Amazon, which is about the size of Australia, stores huge amounts of the world’s carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas driving climate change. But development is rapidly depleting the long-verdant region, where rivers have been running dry.

Flanked by giant ferns in the forest, Biden said the fight against climate change has been a defining cause of his presidency — he’s pushed for cleaner air, water and energy and achieved legislation that steered unprecedented federal spending to the fight against global warming.

But he's about to hand off to Republican President-elect Donald Trump, who is highly unlikely to prioritize the Amazon or anything related to climate change, which he's cast as a “hoax."

Trump has pledged to again pull out of the Paris agreement, a global pact forged to avert the threat of catastrophic climate change, and he says he'll rescind unspent money in energy efficiency legislation.

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45 pro-democracy activists face sentencing in Hong Kong. Here's who some of them are

HONG KONG (AP) — Dozens of prominent Hong Kong pro-democracy activists are scheduled to be sentenced Tuesday in the largest case under a national security law that critics say crushed political activism in the semi-autonomous Chinese city.

The convictions of the 45 activists under the Beijing-imposed law are widely seen as part of a crackdown by China that destroyed hopes for a more democratic Hong Kong. They face sentences of up to life imprisonment.

The activists were among 47 people charged with conspiracy to commit subversion in 2021 for their involvement in an unofficial primary election to pick opposition candidates. They were accused of agreeing to veto government-proposed budgets indiscriminately after securing a legislative majority to force a dissolution of the legislature and then the ouster of the city's leader.

Three government-approved judges ruled that the plan to achieve political change through the unofficial primary in 2020 would have undermined the government’s authority and created a constitutional crisis.

Thirty-one of the activists pleaded guilty and 14 others were found guilty in May following a trial. Two were acquitted. Those who entered guilty pleas have a better chance of shorter prison terms.

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Big voter turnout this year benefited Republicans, contradicting conventional political wisdom

The 2024 presidential election featured sky-high turnout, approaching the historic levels of the 2020 contest and contradicting long-held conventional political wisdom that Republicans struggle to win races in which many people vote.

According to Associated Press elections data, more than 153 million ballots were cast in this year's race between Republican Donald Trump, now the president-elect, and Democrat Kamala Harris, the vice president, with hundreds of thousands of more still being tallied in slower-counting states such as California. When those ballots are fully tabulated, the number of votes will come even closer to the 158 million in the 2020 presidential contest, which was the highest turnout election since women were given the right to vote more than a century ago.

“Trump is great for voter turnout in both parties,” said Eitan Hersh, a political scientist at Tufts University.

The former president's victory in both the Electoral College and popular vote — Trump currently leads Harris by nearly 2.5 million votes nationwide — also contradicts the belief in politics that Democrats, not Republicans, benefit from high-turnout elections.

Trump himself voiced it in 2020 when he warned that a Democratic bill to expand mail balloting would lead to “levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” That warning came as Trump began to sow conspiracy theories about using mail voting during the coronavirus pandemic, which he then used to falsely claim his 2020 loss was due to fraud.

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Wildfire threat continues in much of the US Northeast as dry conditions persist

Firefighters in New York said Sunday that a voluntary evacuation overnight helped them protect more than 160 homes from a stubborn wildfire near the New Jersey border as officials in much of the Northeast coped with hundreds of brush fires in tinder-dry and windy conditions.

Communities in New England dealt with a similar surge in late fall fires, and many parts of the Northeast remained under red flag alerts this weekend. Across the country, California made good progress against a 32-square-mile (83-square-kilometer) fire in Ventura County that has destroyed more than 245 structures, most of them houses. The Mountain fire was 95% contained.

Windy conditions renewed a wildfire Saturday that escaped a containment line and prompted emergency officials to enact the voluntary evacuation plan affecting about 165 houses in Warwick, New York, near the New Jersey border. No structures were in danger as of Sunday afternoon as firefighters worked to tame the Jennings Creek blaze, New York Parks Department spokesman Jeff Wernick said. The voluntary evacuation will remain in place at least until Monday, Wernick said.

The wildfire had burned 7 1/2 square miles (19.4 square kilometers) across the two states as of Friday and was burning primarily in New York's Sterling Forest State Park, where the visitor center, the lakefront area at Greenwood Lake and a historic furnace area remained open. Woodland activities including hunting were halted, Wernick said.

It was 90% contained on the Passaic County, New Jersey, side of the border, and about 88% contained in Orange County, New York, where a state of emergency was extended on Sunday, officials said. New York Army National Guard and state police helicopters dropped water on the blaze to support ground crews' efforts.

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2 killed, 10 wounded in shootings near New Orleans parade route

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Two people were killed and 10 others were wounded in two separate shootings along a New Orleans parade route and celebration attended by thousands on Sunday, authorities said. There were no immediate arrests.

Officers responding to reports of gunfire shortly after 3:30 p.m. on an avenue in the city's St. Roch neighborhood found eight victims with gunshot wounds, according to a news release from the New Orleans Police Department. All eight were taken to hospitals in unknown condition. Police later said a ninth wounded person arrived at a hospital via a private car.

About 45 minutes later, police received another report of gunfire as revelers were crossing the Almonaster Avenue Bridge, just over half a mile (.8 km) to the north. One person died at the scene and another died at a hospital, police said. A third victim was driven to a hospital in a private vehicle and is in stable condition, police said.

No arrests were announced and no suspect information was released. The St. Roch neighborhood is outside the city's French Quarter that is popular with tourists, located several blocks northeast of the quarter.

The Almonaster Bridge was closed in both directions during the investigation.

The Associated Press