Reuters US Domestic News Summary

And they're killing people," Biden told reporters at the White House when asked about misinformation and what his message was to social media platforms such as Facebook Inc's. U.S. judge rules DACA program illegal, suspends new applications A U.S. federal judge in Texas on Friday blocked new applications to a program that protects immigrants who were brought to the United States as children from deportation, but said the hundreds of thousands of people already enrolled would not be affected until further court rulings.

Following is a summary of current US domestic news briefs.

Biden digs in on U.S. public lands nominee as Republican opposition mounts

The White House on Friday backed President Joe Biden's nominee to lead the nation's public lands bureau, pushing back against growing calls to withdraw the nomination from key Republican lawmakers. Earlier, U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell joined calls by several Republican Senate colleagues for Biden to withdraw the nomination of Montana conservationist Tracy Stone-Manning to run the Bureau of Land Management due to her ties to a decades-old tree-spiking incident. Tree spiking involves hammering a metal rod into a tree to prevent logging.

Biden says Facebook, others 'killing people' by carrying COVID misinformation

U.S. President Joe Biden on Friday said social media platforms like Facebook "are killing people" for allowing misinformation about coronavirus vaccines to be posted on its platform, as the administration continued criticizing the company. "They're killing people. ... Look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated. And they're killing people," Biden told reporters at the White House when asked about misinformation and what his message was to social media platforms such as Facebook Inc's.

U.S. judge rules DACA program illegal, suspends new applications

A U.S. federal judge in Texas on Friday blocked new applications to a program that protects immigrants who were brought to the United States as children from deportation, but said the hundreds of thousands of people already enrolled would not be affected until further court rulings. U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen sided with a group of states suing to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, arguing that it was illegally created by former President Barack Obama in 2012.

The Warthog and the senator: The politics of retiring a warplane

The U.S. Air Force is desperate to get rid of some of its fleet of expensive, slow and outdated A-10 Warthog airplanes, but politicians have blocked the move, aiming to keep the local dollars flowing. President Joe Biden wants to retire dozens of the 40-year-old warplanes to free up funding to modernize the military. But within weeks of the release of his proposed defense budget, Democrats drafted a law to keep the planes, many of which are based in Arizona, where Senator Mark Kelly is up for re-election in 2022.

Three charged with manslaughter for 2018 boat accident in Missouri

Missouri prosecutors filed state charges on Friday against three employees involved in a 2018 boat accident on a lake in the tourist town of Branson in which 17 people were killed. Kenneth McKee, the boat's captain, and managers Curtis Lanham and Charles Baltzell each face 17 counts of first-degree involuntary manslaughter for taking the World War Two-style duck boat out in stormy weather.

The Tenacious Unicorn Ranch made a transgender haven. Then the violent threats began

The ranch hand walks along rocky ground, the beam of her flashlight cutting through the moonlit night. She holds a shotgun loosely at her side during her patrol of an alpaca ranch founded as a haven for transgender and non-binary people. Penny Logue, who grew up on a farm, started the Tenacious Unicorn Ranch in Colorado in 2018. It had been two years since Logue had begun her transition and the U.S. Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ advocacy group, had just declared 2017 the deadliest documented year so far for members of the trans and gender non-conforming community, with 31 people killed.

Biden taps former senator Udall as U.S. ambassador to New Zealand

President Joe Biden will nominate Tom Udall, a former U.S. senator who represented New Mexico, to be his ambassador to New Zealand, the White House said on Friday. The decision comes as Biden works to shore up alliances in the Asia-Pacific to present a united front on what he has described as Washington's key foreign policy challenge: China.

Sprawling Oregon wildfire, largest of dozens in U.S., continues to grow

A sprawling wildfire raging mostly unchecked for over a week in southern Oregon forced firefighters into retreat for a fourth straight day as it expanded into the state's fifth-largest blaze in more than a century, forestry officials said on Friday. The Bootleg fire, the biggest among dozens of wildfires across the tinder-dry landscape of the Western United States in recent days, has scorched more than 241,000 acres - an area well exceeding the land mass of New York City.

'Cuba Libre' message painted outside Cuba's U.S. embassy in Washington

"Cuba Libre" was painted in giant block letters on the street directly in front of the Cuban embassy in Washington on Friday following unprecedented protests on the Communist-led island last weekend. The phrase - which literally means 'free Cuba' - has long been associated with both Cuban independence from Spain and later its 1959 revolution.

First case of monkeypox detected in Texas resident

A rare case of human monkeypox was detected in Texas, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said on Friday, making it the first case of the virus seen in the state.

The viral illness was found in a U.S. resident, who recently traveled from Nigeria to the United States and is currently hospitalized in Dallas.