GUATIRE, Venezuela (AP) — The United States and Venezuelan governments said Friday they were exploring the possibility of restoring diplomatic relations between the two countries, and that an delegation from the Trump administration arrived to the South American nation on Friday.

The small team of U.S. diplomats and diplomatic security officials traveled to Venezuela to make a preliminary assessment about the potential re-opening of the U.S. Embassy in Caracas, the State Department said in a statement.

Venezuela’s government on Friday acknowledged that U.S. diplomats had traveled to the South American country and announced that it will send a delegation to the U.S. but it did not say when.

In a statement, Delcy Rodríguez’s government said it “has decided to initiate an exploratory process of a diplomatic nature with the Government of the United States of America, aimed at the re-establishment of diplomatic missions in both countries.”

Follow AP’s coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean at https://apnews.com/hub/latin-america

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By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the entire United Nations climate-fighting apparatus takes America’s environmental isolation to another level and is likely to damage both the United States and the world as the planet flirts with ecological tipping points, experts say.

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Leaders from around the world say the United States will be left behind as more than 190 other nations join in what they call a blossoming green economy that is transitioning from polluting coal, oil and gas to cleaner and cheaper solar, wind and other renewable energies.

Wednesday’s action starts the process to pull the U.S. out of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). It’s the main way nations negotiate, monitor and enforce agreements to curb worsening climate change, and is a bigger step than Trump’s 2017 and 2025 withdrawals from the bedrock 2015 Paris Agreement aimed at limiting warming.

The framework was negotiated in Brazil in 1992, championed by Republican U.S. President George H.W. Bush and ratified unanimously by the U.S. Senate. It’s what Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden used to justify signing and reactivating the Paris deal without needing Senate approval. The Trump administration also withdrew Wednesday from a United Nations climate science panel, a biodiversity-saving effort and the Green Climate Fund to help poor nations as well as many other international collaborations.

“It is a more serious step definitely. The world loses a lot and it is very damaging,” said Johan Rockstrom, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “The U.S. turns its back against science, against global collaboration, against any kind of action on climate change. So, yes, in that sense, it’s more fundamental and more damaging” than earlier efforts.

“This is the gateway to the preeminent international forum for combatting climate change,” said University of Pennsylvania law professor Jean Galbraith, an expert on international treaties.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in announcing the U.S. withdrawal, said the Trump administration “has found these institutions to be redundant in their scope, mismanaged, unnecessary, wasteful, poorly run, captured by the interests of actors advancing their own agendas contrary to our own, or a threat to our nation’s sovereignty, freedoms, and general prosperity.”

Since 1850, the United States has put more than 480 billion tons (440 billion metric tons) of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the air through the burning of coal, oil and natural gas. That accounts for nearly one-quarter of the world’s historic emissions of a gas that stays in the atmosphere for more than a century, according to the scientists at the Global Carbon Project.

The Jeffrey Energy Center coal-fired power plant operates at sunset near Emmett, Kan., Saturday, Jan. 3, 2026, in Topeka, Kan. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)

Emissions keep rising despite Paris agreement

Under the Paris agreement, countries voluntarily pledge to curb emissions by various amounts, but each year global emissions continue to rise. The United States, under the Biden administration, had promised to cut its emissions by 61% to 66% by 2035.

“It will mean more warming because the U.S. is not going to be fulfilling its obligations of reducing their emissions,” said Adelle Thomas, climate adaptation director of the Natural Resources Defense Council and also a vice chair of the U.N. climate science panel that Trump is quitting.

And it comes at a critical time as Earth is approaching 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming since pre-industrial times — the internationally agreed warming threshold established in Paris, Thomas and Rockstrom said.

“We need to start reducing emissions globally by 5% per year,” Rockstrom said. “It’s our last chance. And exactly at that moment, the biggest player in the world steps out of the game.”

The world is perilously close to several “tipping points’ of irreversible change, such as coral reef loss, said former Ireland president Mary Robinson, a tireless climate change advocate for the group of retired leaders called The Elders.

”We really have no time and it is so unbelievably stupid at one level and reckless for the Trump administration to be taking the steps that they are taking,” she said.

FILE – Workers install panels for a solar energy project Wednesday, May 21, 2025, in Galena, Alaska. (AP Photo/John Locher, File)

Another step in U.S. shift away from leading on climate

In past international climate negotiations, especially when Democrat John Kerry was secretary of state or America’s top climate envoy, the United States kept oil countries, such as Saudi Arabia, from watering down deals too much, experts said. But that was missing last November in Brazil’s negotiations, which the U.S. skipped under Trump.

Kerry called Trump’s action “a gift to China and a get-out-of-jail free card to countries and polluters who want to avoid responsibility.”

Tom Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance, which represents industries that emit much of the heat-trapping gases, said “removing the U.S. from the U.N. climate framework will accelerate a positive shift towards abandoning the destructive global climate framework.”

Thomas, Rockstrom and Christiana Figueres, the Costa Rican diplomat who helped fashion the Paris agreement, said the United States is leaving itself behind in a new, cleaner world of cheaper energy and more jobs.

UNFCCC Executive Secretary Simon Stiell said Trump’s move will hurt the U.S.

“It will mean less affordable energy, food, transport and insurance for American households and businesses, as renewables keep getting cheaper than fossil fuels, as climate-driven disasters hit American crops, businesses and infrastructure harder each year,” he said.

Some environmental advocates have feared that future presidents won’t be able to easily reinstate the U.S. to the climate convention in an era when Senate approval would likely be far harder.

But Sue Biniaz, a former State Department lawyer and deputy chief negotiator who now teaches at Yale, said the next president would have the power to undo Trump’s action.

“I wouldn’t want to say any sort of damaging action or inaction is irreversible,” Biniaz said. “I imagine a future U.S. government would work with other countries to revive as much as possible. We did that in 2021 after the first Trump administration.’’

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

By Anna Claire Vollers and Nada Hassanein, Stateline.org

Dr. Heather Skanes opened Alabama’s first freestanding birth center in 2022 in her hometown of Birmingham. Skanes, an OB-GYN, wanted to improve access to maternal health care in a state that’s long had one of the nation’s highest rates of maternal and infant mortality.

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Those rates are especially high among Black women and infants. Skanes’ Oasis Family Birthing Center opened in a majority-Black neighborhood, offering midwifery services as well as medical care.

But about six months after the center’s first delivery — a girl who was Alabama’s first baby born in a freestanding birth center — the state health department ordered Skanes to shut it down. A department representative informed her that by holding deliveries at the birth center, she was operating an “unlicensed hospital,” she said.

Hospital labor and delivery units are shuttering across the nation — including more than two dozen in 2025 alone. Freestanding birth centers like Skanes’ could help fill the gaps, but they too are struggling to stay open.

They face some of the same financial pressures that bedevil hospitals’ labor and delivery units, including payments from insurers that don’t cover the full cost of providing maternity care.

Birth center owners also must contend with arcane state rules and antipathy from politically powerful hospitals that view them as competition, especially in rural areas with few births.

Nationwide, the number of freestanding birth centers doubled between 2012 and 2022, but more recently the pressures have taken a toll: About two dozen centers have closed since 2023, bringing the total number down to about 395, according to the most recent data from the American Association of Birth Centers.

In November, Pennsylvania Lifecycle Wellness and Birth Center announced it would shut down birth center services, citing pressure from regulatory challenges and sharp surges in malpractice premiums. It had served Philadelphia for 47 years. And New Mexico’s longest-operating freestanding birth center stopped delivering babies in December.

“When a new business opens, within the first three to five years you expect a certain number will close,” said Kate Bauer, executive director of the American Association of Birth Centers. “But we’ve had several long-standing birth centers close [in 2025] and that hits particularly hard.”

In California, which has some of the strictest birth center licensing rules in the country, concern over the closure of at least 19 birth centers between 2020 and 2024 prompted the state legislature to pass a law in October to streamline birth center licensure.

An appealing alternative

Freestanding birth centers are not attached to hospitals and aim to provide a more homelike, less traditional medical setting. They employ midwives and focus on low-risk pregnancies and births. Some also have an OB-GYN or family medicine doctor on staff, and they often have partnerships with nearby hospitals and doctors if more specialized care is required.

Some Black and Indigenous midwives and doulas say birth centers can be helpful alternatives to their community members, many of whom have had experiences in more medicalized settings that left them feeling marginalized, dismissed or unsafe.

Midwife Jamarah Amani, executive director of Southern Birth Justice Network, runs a mobile midwifery clinic serving majority-Black and Latino neighborhoods in Miami-Dade County, Florida. The nonprofit, which aims to make midwife and doula care more accessible, recently bought a building for a freestanding birth center it aims to open in 2027.

“[Midwifery] presents like a luxury concierge-type of service, and our goal is to really change that and to bring it back to the community in a very grassroots way,” Amani said. She added that expanding access to prenatal care could help address inequities in maternal health, as maternal death rates among Black women are three times higher than those among white women.

Freestanding birth centers also can be a solution for communities without a hospital nearby.

The closest hospital to the Colville Indian Reservation, located in northern Washington state, is half an hour away, said Faith Zacherle-Tonasket, founder of the nonprofit xa?xa? Indigenous Birth Justice.

So far, the group has trained nearly a dozen tribal doulas and midwives to serve the area. In the next few years, it plans to open a freestanding birth center. Zacherle-Tonasket said Indigenous-run birth centers are crucial alternatives for tribal women, who also have some of the highest maternal mortality rates in the nation and often face prejudice in clinical settings.

“They don’t feel safe. So a lot of them just don’t get prenatal care,” said Zacherle-Tonasket. “Bringing traditional midwives that are from our own communities, that were born and raised in our communities, that know the families — we know that those babies will be birthed with love.”

Regulatory hurdles

When the Georgia legislature relaxed state health care regulations in 2024, it felt like a long-awaited win for Katie Chubb. A registered nurse and mother of three who’s worked in health and nonprofits, Chubb has spent years trying to open a birth center in Augusta.

The state denied her application to open the center in 2021. Georgia, like many states, requires health care providers to get state approval, called a certificate of need, before they can build a new facility or expand services. Rival providers, like other hospitals, can challenge an application, effectively vetoing their local competition.

That happened in Chubb’s case: Two local hospitals filed letters of opposition against her and refused to say they’d accept emergency transfers from her birth center, another requirement for opening.

Georgia currently has three freestanding birth centers, a fraction of the more than two dozen that operate in neighboring Florida.

“We’re seeing women giving birth in hospital hallways or at home unassisted, because there’s no in-between option like a birth center,” Chubb said. In October, Georgia lost another labor and delivery unit at a rural hospital two hours north of Augusta.

“Women are just left to figure things out.”

In Kentucky, the Republican-controlled legislature passed a bill in March that aimed to clear the way for freestanding birth centers by exempting them from the certificate of need process.

But Republican lawmakers attached a last-minute anti-abortion amendment to the bill, prompting Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear to veto it. The legislature eventually overrode his veto. Midwifery advocates hope the new law will help make it easier to open a birth center in the state.

Georgia legislators similarly revised Georgia’s certificate of need rules in 2024, exempting freestanding birth centers. Chubb, who championed the new law, hoped it would clear the path for herself and others.

But they hit another roadblock. The state still requires birth centers to secure a written agreement with a local hospital to accept transfers of clients in emergencies. Chubb and at least one other prospective birth center owner have been unable to get their local hospitals to sign such transfer agreements.

“We’re still fighting,” Chubb said. “Behind closed doors we’re still working very hard on getting legislation and regulations changed to make opening birth centers more equitable.”

Some hospitals view birth centers as a threat to the viability of their labor and delivery units, siphoning off patients and revenue from a service that’s already unprofitable for most hospitals.

Daniel Grigg, CEO of Wallowa Memorial Hospital, a 25-bed critical access hospital in northeast Oregon, said there aren’t enough births in the area for both hospitals and birth centers.

“When you’ve got a small-volume community like we have, every birth helps the providers keep their skills up and their competency,” he said. “When you’ve got a midwife taking, say, 10 patients out of that pool,” it can have an impact on physicians and hospitals.

Alabama lawsuit

After the Alabama Department of Public Health shut down Skanes’ birth center in 2023, she joined with two other women who had also been attempting to open birth centers in Alabama: Dr. Yashica Robinson, an OB-GYN in North Alabama, and Stephanie Mitchell, a licensed midwife in Alabama’s rural and economically disadvantaged Black Belt region. Together they sued the Alabama Department of Public Health over what they called a de facto ban on birth centers.

The state insisted its tighter regulations would ensure that birth center facilities are safe. The birth center owners said the state’s rules were overly burdensome and clinically unnecessary for the low-risk, nonsurgical births that are attended by midwives. And, they said, the rules prevented more families from accessing care where it’s desperately needed. The state has lost at least three hospital labor and delivery units since 2020.

“Entire swaths of the state are maternity care deserts without access to essential health care,” said Whitney White, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing the birth center owners and their co-plaintiff, the Alabama affiliate of the American College of Nurse-Midwives.

“Hospital labor and delivery units are closing, and pregnant folks are reporting they’re really struggling to access the care they need, struggling to get appointments, struggling to find a provider,” White said.

Last May, an Alabama trial court permanently blocked the state from regulating freestanding birth centers as hospitals. Birth center staff are still overseen by state boards of midwifery and nursing.

All three Alabama centers are now open. But their licensed midwives are delivering babies under a cloud of uncertainty about the future.

The state appealed the ruling in November. The case is ongoing.

Struggles and solutions

Bauer, of the American Association of Birth Centers, said many centers face the same financial barriers. Uncomplicated births at freestanding birth centers cost less than they do at hospitals, but research has shown that insurers, including Medicaid, reimburse centers at lower rates. Some state Medicaid programs don’t cover some of the nonclinical services, such as lactation consultants and doulas, that birth centers may provide. And malpractice premiums are rising.

“We’re volunteering our time, essentially, to keep the birth center open as a service to the community,” said Sarah Simmons, co-owner of Maple Street Birth Center in rural Okanogan County, Washington. The center can’t afford to hire a front-desk staffer or another midwife, Simmons said. She added that on average, the center makes less than a third of what the local hospital makes for providing the same obstetric service.

But there may be solutions to some of these financial problems. For example, the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform, a national health care policy center, has recommended that health insurance plans, both Medicaid and commercial, pay hospitals and birth centers monthly or quarterly “standby capacity payments” per woman of childbearing age covered by that health plan in the facility’s service area. It also recommends that plans pay a separate delivery fee for each birth.

In 2024, Democratic U.S. senators proposed a bill to allow for a similar payment model.

Standby payments could help freestanding birth centers, especially those that fill gaps in maternity care deserts — but not unless centers receive payments that are comparable to those that hospitals get, said Simmons, whose center serves four sparsely populated counties along with the Colville tribal communities.

“This would be most beneficial to freestanding birth centers if pay parity laws were enforced, so rural freestanding birth centers were paid the same rates for the same services as rural hospitals, ” she said.

State grants also can help, but birth centers say a one-time infusion won’t be enough. In 2024, Washington opened grant applications for distressed hospital labor and delivery units and freestanding birth centers.

Ashley Jones, of True North Birth Center and president of the Washington chapter of the American Association of Birth Centers, said the grant has helped keep their doors open.

Meanwhile, Chubb, the Georgia nurse, recently had to take another job to support her family while her birth center remains in legal limbo.

“I’m just waiting until the government figures out what they’re doing.”

Stateline reporter Anna Claire Vollers can be reached at avollers@stateline.org. Stateline reporter Nada Hassanein can be reached at nhassanein@stateline.org.

©2026 States Newsroom. Visit at stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By JACK BROOK, Associated Press/Report for America

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Federal immigration officers are pulling out of a Louisiana crackdown and heading to Minneapolis in an abrupt pivot from an operation that drew protests around New Orleans and aimed to make thousands of arrests, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.

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The shift appeared to signal a wind-down of the Louisiana deployment that was dubbed “Catahoula Crunch” and began in December with the arrival of more than 200 officers. The operation had been expected to last into February and swiftly raised fears in immigrant communities.

The Trump administration has been surging thousands of federal officers to Minnesota under a sweeping new crackdown tied in part to allegations of fraud involving Somali residents. More than 2,000 officers are taking part in what the Department of Homeland Security has called the biggest immigration enforcement operation ever.

The officers in Minneapolis have been met with demonstrations and anger after an ICE officer fatally shot a woman on Wednesday.

Documents obtained by the AP indicated that federal officers stationed in Louisiana were continuing to depart for Minneapolis late this week.

“For the safety of our law enforcement, we do not disclose operational details while they are underway,” DHS said Friday in response to questions about whether the Louisiana deployment was ending in order to send officers to Minnesota.

In December, DHS deployed more than 200 federal officers to New Orleans to carry out a monthslong sweep in and around the city under Border Patrol Cmdr. Gregory Bovino, who was also the face of aggressive operations in Chicago, Los Angeles and Charlotte, North Carolina. Bovino has been seen in Minneapolis this past week.

“Catahoula Crunch” began with a target of 5,000 arrests, the AP first reported. The operation had resulted in about 370 arrests as of Dec. 18, according to DHS.

The operation heavily targeted the Hispanic enclave of Kenner just outside New Orleans, leading immigrant-run businesses to close down to protect customers and out of a fear of harassment.

Documents previously reviewed by AP showed the majority of people arrested in the Louisiana crackdown’s first days lacked criminal records and that authorities tracked online criticism and protests against the deployment.

Republican Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry welcomed the crackdown. But New Orleans’ Democratic leaders called the 5,000-arrest target unrealistic and criticized videos that showed agents arresting or trying to detain residents, including a clip of a U.S. citizen being chased down the street by masked men near her house.

New Orleans’ Democratic leaders have been more welcoming of a National Guard deployment that President Donald Trump authorized after Landry asked for help fighting crime. The troops arrived just before the New Year’s Day anniversary of a truck attack on Bourbon Street that killed 14 people.

Associated Press writer Rebecca Santana contributed to this report from Minneapolis.

Brook is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.