The Trump administration released about 150 National Guard troops on Tuesday in the first pullback since it dispatched a military force to the Los Angeles area last month, allowing the soldiers to return to regular duty fighting wildfires in California.

President Donald Trump began deploying thousands of troops on June 7 to respond to protests against federal immigration raids in the region. Almost 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines remain under his control for domestic responsibilities in Los Angeles.

The drawdown announcement by the U.S. Northern Command, which is overseeing the president’s military response in California, came two weeks after Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles ended a nighttime curfew because the most vigorous, and sometimes violent, protests had ended in the downtown core.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has for weeks condemned the Trump administration’s commandeering of thousands of state troops in response to a handful of demonstrations, a move that the governor said was based on politics, not public safety. Bass, in a separate news conference Tuesday, called the president’s actions “an all-out assault on Los Angeles.”

After a series of immigration raids in early June drew protests, the Republican president federalized about 4,000 members of the California National Guard without the permission of the Democratic governor, a high-profile critic, and dispatched more than 700 active-duty Marines to the region.

The governor has called on Trump to end the entire mission, and the state has taken legal action against the administration, saying that the deployment has misused thousands of emergency personnel, law enforcement officers, teachers and other critical workers who are needed in other capacities, both in the labor force and by the California National Guard.

The small but significant pullback announced Tuesday involved specialized California National Guard troops who would ordinarily be working on wildfire prevention at this time of year.

California weakens law crimping new housing

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law an overhaul of California’s landmark environmental protection rules that he says is essential to address the state’s critical housing shortage and long-running homeless crisis.

The Democratic governor widely seen as a potential 2028 presidential candidate called the two-bill package a historic reshaping of environmental rules that, while initially well intentioned, too often resulted in tangles of litigation and costly delays that strangled much-needed development.

Newsom said the bills, which he signed Monday night in Sacramento, represent the most consequential housing reform in recent California history. In general, the idea is to hasten reviews of housing projects under certain conditions, such as in dense urban communities.

“We have too much demand chasing too little supply,” Newsom said at a news conference. “So many of the challenges that ail us can be connected back to this issue.”

The approval of the package comes at a time when billions of taxpayer dollars have been spent on homelessness, but the crisis remains on open display in the state’s major cities. Last year, the median single-family home price in the San Jose metro area surpassed $2 million, underscoring skyrocketing prices across the state.

Yale law dean will lead Ford Foundation

Heather K. Gerken, the dean of Yale Law School, will become the president of the Ford Foundation later this year, the group said Tuesday.

Gerken, who was seen last year as a contender for the Yale University presidency, will take over one of the country’s wealthiest and most influential philanthropies at a time of especially fraught debate about social justice and inequality, two of the foundation’s touchstones.

In a statement Tuesday, Gerken said she was looking forward to working at the foundation “to protect democracy and the rule of law and further our mission to create a more just and fair world for everyone.”

Gerken will succeed Darren Walker, who announced last summer that he would conclude a 12-year tenure in 2025. About a decade ago, he began to redirect Ford’s philanthropy toward combating inequality, writing then that the foundation would work on “not just wealth disparities, but injustices in politics, culture and society that compound inequality and limit opportunity.”

It was a shift in focus for the philanthropy, which was founded in 1936 by Edsel Ford, the only child of Henry Ford, the auto magnate. For many decades, the foundation’s giving was wide-ranging.

AP: Mamdani won his NYC mayoral primary

Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist whose blend of populist ideas and personal magnetism catapulted his upstart candidacy, won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City by a significant margin, according to The Associated Press.

The race was called for Mamdani on Tuesday afternoon, shortly after New York City’s Board of Elections released its tabulation of ranked-choice ballots.

Mamdani, a state Assembly member from Queens, won with 56% of the vote. Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo came in second with 44%. The board will certify the final vote in mid-July.

Mamdani, 33, now moves on to a contested general election in November, where he will face Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat who opted out of the primary to run as an independent; Curtis Sliwa, the Guardian Angels founder running on the Republican line; and Jim Walden, a lawyer also running as an independent.

Cuomo, for now, is also running on an independent line, but he has not yet decided whether he intends to continue campaigning. Mamdani is expected to be the favorite in a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans by 6 to 1.

FBI headquarters will remain in Washington

The FBI announced Tuesday that it planned to move its Washington headquarters several blocks away from its current five-decade-old home.

The bureau and the General Services Administration said the Ronald Reagan Building complex had been selected as the new location, the latest development in a yearslong back-and-forth over where the nation’s premier federal law enforcement agency should have its headquarters.

It was not immediately clear when such a move might take place or what sort of logistical hurdles might need to be cleared in order to accomplish it.

The decision represents a turnabout from plans announced during the Biden administration to move the FBI to a site in Greenbelt, Md. The suburban Washington location was selected over nearby Virginia following a sharp competition between the two states.

The FBI’s current Pennsylvania Avenue headquarters, the J. Edgar Hoover Building, was dedicated in 1975. Proponents of moving the headquarters have said the Brutalist-style building, where nets surround the facility to protect pedestrians from falling debris, has fallen into disrepair. Discussions have been underway for years to relocate it.

Top Iranian presumed killed is seen alive

A senior Iranian official and adviser to Iran’s supreme leader who had been presumed killed in an Israeli attack last month was seen walking with a cane at a funeral service for military commanders over the weekend in Tehran, the capital.

Israel had attacked the penthouse duplex apartment of the official, Rear Adm. Ali Shamkhani, with a missile when it launched military strikes against Iran on June 13, beginning a 12-day war that was later joined by the United States.

The apartment, in a high-rise building in the affluent northern part of Tehran, sustained severe damage, photographs and videos on Iran’s state media showed. The ceiling and floors collapsed in a pile of mangled debris. State media reports said at the time that the admiral had been severely injured and hospitalized. The New York Times, citing a person close to his family and Iranian officials, reported that he had not survived the attack.

2 Chinese citizens accused of espionage

The Justice Department announced charges Tuesday against two Chinese citizens accused of trying to gather military information and help recruit sources from within the U.S. Navy.

Yuance Chen, 38, of Oregon, and Liren Lai, 39, a Chinese citizen in the United States on a tourist visa, were charged with working for years to help the Chinese foreign intelligence service, the Ministry of State Security.

The two men were arrested Friday as part of a sprawling counterintelligence investigation by the FBI. They face charges of acting as undeclared agents of the Chinese government.

36 killed as Indian factory explosion

At least 36 people were killed and another three dozen seriously injured, officials said Tuesday, after a large explosion at a pharmaceutical factory set off a fire in the southern Indian state of Telangana.

A day after the explosion, which occurred Monday, firefighters had quenched the fire and were sifting through the burned wreckage of the plant at an industrial park about 30 miles from the state capital, Hyderabad, according to G.V. Narayana Rao, the state’s fire services director.

Emergency workers toured a scene of twisted metal and charred concrete as excavators worked their way between heaping piles of wires, pipes and other debris.

— News service reports