National News

Severe storms are tearing through the central and southeast U.S., spawning damaging tornadoes, producing massive hail, and killing two people in Tennessee and another in North Carolina. Wednesday afternoon, a tornado emergency was issued for an area south of Nashville. That is the National Weather Service's highest alert level. The weather service says at least eight tornadoes touched down Tuesday in Ohio, including five in the state’s southwest region. Weather service meteorologist in Michigan Nathan Jeruzal says that the three confirmed tornadoes there had touched down in the southwestern part of the state.

A northern Idaho prosecutor won’t bring hate crime charges against an 18-year-old accused of shouting a racist slur at members of the Utah women’s basketball team while the team was in Idaho to attend the NCAA Tournament. The deputy attorney for the city of Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, in a document called the use of the slur detestable and incredibly offensive. Still, he said there wasn’t evidence suggesting that the man was threatening physical harm to the women or their property. He decided the conduct is protected by the First Amendment and can’t be charged under Idaho’s hate crime law.

Republicans are welcoming a police crackdown that cleared a pro-Palestinian tent encampment at George Washington University and led to the arrests of 33 protesters. But one of the students arrested in Washington, Moataz Salim, says authorities merely “destroyed a beautiful community space that was all about love." Police broke up the gathering Wednesday. House Speaker Mike Johnson said it should not have required “threatening to haul D.C.’s mayor before Congress" for police to end the protest. Mayor Muriel Bowser says city officials acted because the situation was becoming more volatile. She was to testify to a House panel about her handling of the protest but the hearing was canceled after the crackdown.

Hardline Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has tried and failed to oust House Speaker Mike Johnson. Her long-shot effort was swiftly and resoundingly rejected Wednesday by Democrats and Republicans tired of the political chaos. One of Donald Trump’s biggest supporters in Congress, Greene stood on the House floor and read a long list of “transgressions” she said Johnson had committed as speaker. Colleagues booed in protest, and Republican Majority Leader Steve Scalise quickly countered by calling for a vote to table Greene's motion. An overwhelming majority, 359-43, kept Johnson in his job, for now. Johnson said he hoped it “is the end of the personality politics.”

The mayor of Houston has replaced the city's police chief. Mayor John Whitmire said Wednesday he accepted the retirement of Police Chief Troy Finner and appointed an assistant as acting chief. Finner's retirement comes amid police and independent investigations into why more than 4,000 sexual assault cases were dropped. Whitmire thanked Finner, saying investigations into the dropped cases had become a distraction for the department. The dropped sexual assault cases are among more than 264,000 incident reports officers never submitted for investigation during the past eight years, using a code that cited a lack of available staff. Acting Chief Larry Satterwhite says he's going to do his best to make the situation better.

A civil rights attorney says deputies responding to a disturbance call at a Florida apartment complex burst into the wrong unit and fatally shot a Black U.S. Air Force airman. Attorney Ben Crump says Senior Airman Roger Fortson was home alone Friday when deputies saw he was armed with a gun. Fortson died after the shooting at his off-base residence in Fort Walton Beach. The Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office says a deputy responding to a disturbance call fired in self-defense after encountering an armed man. Crump said Wednesday that a woman who was on a Facetime call with Fortson at the time of the encounter believes deputies must have entered the wrong apartment.