Michelle Trachtenberg, who starred in “Gossip Girl” and “Harriet the Spy,” was found dead in her luxury Midtown Manhattan apartment early Wednesday, police sources said.

Trachtenberg, 39, was found unconscious by her mother inside her Columbus Place apartment at 8 a.m. and died a short time later, the sources said.

Her death is not considered suspicious, sources said.

Trachtenberg was a child actress who starred in “Harriet the Spy” and also starred in “Gossip Girl.”

The young actress earned cult status by playing Buffy’s sister in the last few seasons of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

By LEA SKENE

BALTIMORE (AP) — Despite documented problems with the evidence against him and an earlier request from prosecutors to clear his record, Adnan Syed will remain convicted of murder, according to court papers filed Tuesday night.

The decision from Baltimore prosecutors comes ahead of a scheduled hearing Wednesday morning where a judge will consider whether to reduce Syed’s sentence, but this means the conviction itself is no longer in question.

It’s the latest wrinkle in an ongoing legal odyssey that garnered a massive following after being featured in the “Serial” podcast over a decade ago.

Syed’s attorneys recently filed the request for a sentence reduction under Maryland’s Juvenile Restoration Act, a relatively new state law that provides a potential pathway to release for people serving long prison terms for crimes committed when they were minors. That request is supported by prosecutors.

Meanwhile, Baltimore State’s Attorney Ivan Bates announced Tuesday that his office is withdrawing a previously filed motion to vacate Syed’s conviction in the 1999 killing of his high school ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee, who was found strangled to death and buried in a makeshift grave.

“I did not make this decision lightly, but it is necessary to preserve the credibility of our office and maintain public trust in the justice system,” Bates said in a statement.

Syed’s attorney Erica Suter issued a statement late Tuesday, criticizing the move and reasserting Syed’s innocence.

“Tonight, the state’s attorney got it wrong,” Suter said. “His decision to withdraw his office’s motion to vacate Adnan’s conviction ignores the injustices on which this conviction was founded. We will continue to fight to clear his name through all legal avenues available to him.”

The original motion to vacate — which was filed by Bates’ predecessor Marilyn Mosby — won Syed his freedom in 2022. But his conviction was reinstated following a procedural challenge from Lee’s family. The Maryland Supreme Court ordered a redo of the conviction vacatur hearing after finding that the family didn’t receive adequate notice to attend in person.

Since the prosecutor’s office changed hands in the meantime, the decision of whether to withdraw the motion fell to Bates.

Instead of asking a judge to again consider Syed’s guilt or innocence, Bates chose a different path. He supported Syed’s motion for a reduced sentence — without addressing the underlying conviction.

Bates said that since his release in 2022, Syed has demonstrated he is a productive member of society whose continued freedom is “in the interest of justice.” He said the case “is precisely what legislators envisioned when they crafted the Juvenile Restoration Act.”

The legislation was passed amid growing consensus that such defendants are especially open to rehabilitation, partly because brain science shows cognitive development continues well beyond the teenage years. Syed was 17 when Lee was killed.

Now 43, he has been working at Georgetown University’s Prisons and Justice Initiative and caring for aging relatives since his release, according to court filings. His father died in October after a long illness.

Bates was facing a Friday deadline to decide on the motion to vacate.

After reviewing the motion filed by his predecessor, Bates concluded that it contained “false and misleading statements that undermine the integrity of the judicial process,” he said in a statement Tuesday.

Bates wrote in an executive summary released Tuesday that his decision “does not preclude Mr. Syed from raising any new issues that he believes will support his innocence in the proper post-trial pleadings.”

“However, properly shifting this burden back to Mr. Syed will re-instill the adversarial nature of proceedings that are the hallmark of the truth-seeking function of our criminal justice system,” the summary says.

Attorneys for the victim’s family had argued that prosecutors should address the integrity of Syed’s conviction before the court considered reducing his sentence. Prosecutors “should not be allowed to duck the issue by hiding behind” his motion for a reduced sentence, attorneys wrote in a recent filing.

Syed has maintained his innocence from the beginning, but many questions remain unanswered even after the “Serial” podcast combed through the evidence, reexamined legal arguments and interviewed witnesses. The series debuted in 2014 and drew millions of listeners who became armchair detectives.

Rife with legal twists and turns, the case has recently pitted criminal justice reform efforts against the rights of crime victims and their families, whose voices are often at odds with a growing movement to acknowledge and correct systemic racism, police misconduct and prosecutorial missteps.

When prosecutors sought to vacate Syed’s conviction in 2022, they cited numerous problems with the case, including alternative suspects and unreliable evidence presented at trial. A judge agreed to vacate the conviction and free Syed. Prosecutors in Mosby’s office later chose not to refile charges after they said DNA testing excluded Syed as a suspect.

Even though the appellate courts reinstated his conviction, they allowed Syed to remain free while the case continued.

By MICHAEL PHILLIS and JENNIFER McDERMOTT

President Donald Trump began dismantling his predecessor’s climate change and renewable energy policies on his first day in office, declaring a national energy emergency to speed up fossil fuel development – a policy he has summed up as “drill, baby, drill.”

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The declaration calls on the federal government to make it easier for companies to build oil and gas projects, in part by weakening environmental reviews, with the goal of lowering prices and selling to international markets.

Democrats say that’s a sham. They point out that the U.S. is producing more oil and natural gas than any other country and the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act boosted renewable energy at a critical time, creating jobs and addressing the climate change threat – 2024 was Earth’s hottest year on record amid the hottest 10-year stretch on record.

Democrats were expected to offer a resolution in the Senate on Wednesday to terminate Trump’s declaration, a move likely to be only symbolic given their minority status. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has already made the U.S. an even friendlier environment for fossil fuels. Congress is helping, too, with the House set to vote on a measure to repeal a Biden administration-era methane fee on oil and gas producers.

Here are some ways the Trump administration has done so:

Lifting a pause on LNG exports

The Biden administration last year paused evaluations of new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals. That pleased environmentalists concerned that a big surge in exports would contribute to planet-warming emissions. The pause didn’t stop projects already under construction, but it delayed consideration of new projects.

Trump reversed that pause.

On Tuesday, oil and gas giant Shell said global LNG demand is forecast to rise by around 60% by 2040.

The United States is expected to play a major role in meeting that demand, with its export capacity expected to double before 2030, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

“I think investors have become much more comfortable that they can move towards final investment decisions without the concerns that they had over the last four years about potential roadblocks,” said Christopher Treanor, an energy and environmental attorney at the law firm Akin.

Drilling expansion

Trump has opened more land for oil and gas lease sales, shifting away from Biden’s efforts to protect environmentally sensitive areas like Alaska’s National Wildlife Refuge and to prevent large swaths of ocean from being available for offshore drilling, including major areas off coasts in the Pacific, Atlantic and parts of Alaska.

Environmental groups are suing to stop Trump’s moves.

Expanding the area available for companies to lease and drill doesn’t necessarily mean that more oil and gas will be produced. When leases were made available in the Artic National Wildlife Refuge, for example, only smaller companies bid and there were no buyers for a second lease sale.

Army Corps appears ready to help projects sidestep the Clean Water Act

The Army Corps of Engineers marked hundreds of Clean Water Act permits for fast-tracking, citing Trump’s order on energy, then removed that notation in its database. The agency said it needed to review active permit applications before publishing which ones will be fast-tracked.

“They don’t seem to be backing off,” said Tom Pelton, spokesman with the Environmental Integrity Project. “They are just going to refine the list.”

Many of the permit applications that had been listed for expediting are for fossil fuel projects, but some others have nothing to do with energy, including a housing subdivision proposed by Chevron in southern California, according to the Environmental Integrity Project.

David Bookbinder, the organization’s director of law and policy, said the Trump administration is using the “pretext of a national energy emergency” to ask a federal agency to circumvent environmental protections to justify building more fossil fuel power plants. Bookbinder said there’s no shortage of energy.

Slashing the federal workforce

Pat Parenteau, professor emeritus at Vermont Law & Graduate School, said Trump’s policy changes aren’t nearly as important as the deep cuts to the federal government that eliminate vital expertise.

“I think they are going to accomplish what no other administration has been able to do in terms of crippling the institutional capacity of the federal government to protect public health, to conserve national resources to save endangered species,” he said. “That is where we are going to see long-term, permanent damage.”

Trump’s energy emergency calls, for example, for undermining Endangered Species Act protections to ensure fast energy development, even assembling a rarely used committee — the so-called “God Squad” — that could have authority to dismiss significant threats to species. That move was coupled with recent deep cuts to the Fish & Wildlife Service, which administers the law.

Parenteau said some species are likely to go extinct.

Executive orders take aim at renewables

Trump also targeted wind energy with an order to temporarily halt offshore wind lease sales in federal waters and pause federal approvals, permits and loans for projects both onshore and offshore.

In another order, he listed domestic energy resources that could help ensure a reliable, diversified and affordable supply of energy. Solar, wind and battery storage were omitted, though solar is the fastest-growing source of electricity generation in the United States. Trump has vowed to end tax credits for renewables as well, which would push up prices.

Substantially slowing renewables could leave the U.S. wedded to coal and gas for far longer as coal plants are extended and new gas plants are built, said David Shepheard, partner and energy expert at the global consultant Baringa.

Shepheard said the U.S. is facing unprecedented growth in electricity demand largely to meet needs from data centers and artificial intelligence, and increasingly the deck is stacked against renewables to meet it.

A Baringa analysis found Trump’s policies will drive up emissions and put the agreed-upon international climate threshold further out of reach.

Associated Press writers Matthew Daly and Patrick Whittle contributed reporting.

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 MATTHEW BROWN

BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — A Montana man faces years in prison at his Wednesday sentencing for threatening to assault former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy after becoming upset with the government for not shooting down a Chinese spy balloon that floated over the defendant’s home city.

Richard Rogers, 45, of Billings, will appear before U.S. District Judge Susan Watters after a jury convicted him last year for threatening a member of Congress and making harassing phone calls to the FBI and congressional staff in which he routinely made vulgar and obscene comments.

The threat against McCarthy carries a maximum penalty of six years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Because Rogers has no criminal history, federal sentencing guidelines call for a shorter term, and his attorneys requested a sentence of probation.

Rogers, a former phone customer service representative, delivered the threat to a McCarthy staffer during a series of more than 100 calls to the Republican speaker’s office in just 75 minutes on Feb. 3, 2023, prosecutors said. That was one day after the Pentagon acknowledged it was tracking the spy balloon, which was later shot down off the Atlantic Coast.

Rogers testified at trial that his outraged calls to the FBI and McCarthy’s office were a form of civil disobedience. One of his lawyers said during the trial that Rogers “just wanted to be heard.”

Prosecutors asked the court to send a “strong deterrent message” that threats against public officials are not protected by the First Amendment. They asked for a sentence of two years in prison.

“Rogers’ conduct in this case contributes to a rising and concerning myth that the First Amendment somehow gives a person complete immunity from all consequences as long as their speech or conduct is framed as ‘political protest,’” prosecutors wrote in a court filing.

Defense attorney Daniel Ball asked for Rogers to be spared prison and sentenced to supervised release.

Threats against public officials in the U.S. have risen sharply in recent years, including against members of Congress, their spouses, election workers and local officials. Rogers’ case was among more than 8,000 threats to lawmakers investigated by the U.S. Capitol Police in 2023.

A 30-year-old Billings man was sentenced last year to 2 1/2 years in federal prison after leaving voicemail messages threatening to kill former Democratic U.S. Sen. Jon Tester and his family. Another Montana man was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in 2023 for threats against Tester.