Hendrix, a blue-and-yellow macaw, was recently surrendered to the Forever Paws Animal Shelter in Fall River, Massachusetts.

“We don’t know much but we do know that they had him for about 20 years,” Forever Paws wrote in a social media post earlier this month. “When he came to us, he was being fed a diet of human cereal, white bread, sunflower seeds and animal crackers.”

The lack of a proper diet is likely why he’s “mostly naked,” according to the animal shelter.

But it’s not Hendrix’s blatant nudity that’s raising eyebrows at Forever Paws.

“The thing is, if you adopt Hendrix, you’re basically adopting Samuel L. Jackson,” the animal shelter explained. “This bird is rated R, parental advisory required, a real sour patch kid if one side was sugar and the other side was arsenic.”

Forever Paws said Hendrix has a vocabulary that’s “not for the faint of heart.”

“He says ‘thank you’ when you give him snacks, but will also tell you to shut up,” Forever Paws noted. “He’ll be all sweet and affectionate and then turn around and call you a slur.”

“But we love him and he dances to music so we forgive him,” the animal shelter continued, emphasizing that Hendrix didn’t get his so-called “potty mouth” from them.

Though Hendrix is currently up for adoption, Forever Paws told Nexstar’s 12 News the animal shelter has received dozens of applications for him.

The goal is for Hendrix to find his forever home this weekend, according to the animal shelter. But Forever Paws plans to open up applications for him again should none of the potential adopters be the perfect fit.

Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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If the rollback survives court challenges, it will open up vast swaths of largely untouched land to logging and roadbuilding. By the Agriculture Department’s estimate, this would include about 30 percent of the land in the National Forest System, encompassing 92 percent of Tongass, one of the last remaining intact temperate rainforests in the world. In a news release, the department, which houses the U.S. Forest Service, criticized the roadless rule as “outdated,” saying it “goes against the mandate of the USDA Forest Service to sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of the nation’s forests and grasslands.”

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Environmental groups condemned the decision and vowed to take the administration to court.

“The roadless rule has protected 58 million acres of our wildest national forest lands from clear-cutting for more than a generation,” said Drew Caputo, vice president of litigation for lands, wildlife and oceans for the environmental firm Earthjustice. “The Trump administration now wants to throw these forest protections overboard so the timber industry can make huge money from unrestrained logging.”

The Roadless Area Conservation Rule dates to the late 1990s, when President Bill Clinton instructed the Forest Service to come up with ways to preserve increasingly scarce roadless areas in the national forests. Conservationists considered these lands essential for species whose habitats were being lost to encroaching development and large-scale timber harvests.

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The protections, which took effect in 2001, have been the subject of court battles and sparring between Democrats and Republicans ever since.

The logging industry welcomed the decision.

“Our forests are extremely overgrown, overly dense, unhealthy, dead, dying and burning,” said Scott Dane, executive director for the American Loggers Council, a timber industry group with members in 46 states.

He said federal forests on average have about 300 trunks per acre, while the optimal density should be about 75 trunks. Dane said President Donald Trump’s policies have been misconstrued as opening up national forests to unrestricted logging, while in fact the industry practices sustainable forestry management subject to extensive requirements.

“To allow access into these forests, like we used to do prior to 2001 and for 100 years prior to that, will enable the forest managers to practice sustainable forest management,” he said.

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Monday’s announcement follows Trump’s March 1 executive order instructing the Agriculture Department and the Interior Department to boost timber production, with an aim of reducing wildfire risk and reliance on foreign imports.

Because of its vast wilderness, environmental fragility and ancient trees, Alaska’s Tongass National Forest became the face of the issue. Democrats and environmentalists argued for keeping the roadless rule in place, saying it would protect critical habitat and prevent the carbon dioxide trapped in the forest’s trees from escaping into the atmosphere. Alaska’s governor and congressional delegation have countered that the rule hurts the timber industry and the state’s economy.

After court battles kept the rule in place, Trump stripped it out in 2020, during his first term, making it legal for logging companies to build roads and cut down trees in the Tongass. President Joe Biden restored the protections, restricting development on roughly 9.3 million acres throughout the forest.

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Trump officials have gone further this time, targeting not just the rule’s application in Alaska but its protections nationwide. In her comments Monday, Rollins framed the decision as an effort to reduce the threat of wildfires by encouraging more local management of the nation’s forests.

“This misguided rule prohibits the Forest Service from thinning and cutting trees to prevent wildfires,” Rollins said. “And when fires start, the rule limits our firefighters’ access to quickly put them out.”

The Forest Service manages nearly 200 million acres of land, and its emphasis on preventing wildfires from growing out of control has become more central to its mission as the blazes have become more frequent and intense because of climate change. Yet critics of the administration’s approach have said Trump officials have worsened the danger by firing several thousand Forest Service employees this year.

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Advocates for the roadless rule said ending it would do little to reduce the threat of wildfires, noting that the regulation already contains an exception for removing dangerous fuels that the Forest Service has used for years.

Chris Wood, chief executive of the conservation group Trout Unlimited, said the administration’s decision “feels a little bit like a solution in search of a problem.”

As Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) declared a state of emergency in eight heavily populated counties across Southern California, rescue workers pulled 19 people off a 40-foot sailboat with a snapped mast and extracted drivers from swamped cars. At least two people were killed by falling trees farther north in the state. By Monday afternoon, around half a million people in California remained without power.

The deluge is part of a growing pattern of supercharged storms feeding off unusually warm waters in the Pacific Ocean driven by climate change and the periodic pattern known as El Niño that returned last year. The storm dropped up to 10 inches of rain across the Los Angeles area since Sunday, more than falls in some years, and the Weather Service warned that the already significant flooding was expected to worsen.

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The storm unleashed torrents of water across the state. Retaining walls collapsed, boulders and trees crashed down on roadways, mudslides damaged homes, and flash floods closed down portions of Interstate 5 and other major highways.

“Stay safe and off the roads,” Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass told residents during a news conference Monday from the city’s emergency operations center. “Only leave your house if it is absolutely necessary.”

City firefighters rescued a man and his dog from the flooded Los Angeles River during an atmospheric river storm on Feb. 5. (Video: LAPD)

In the rural mountain community of Boulder Creek, Calif., southwest of San Jose, one person was killed when a tree fell onto their home Sunday afternoon, Ashley Keehn, a spokesperson for the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office, told The Washington Post. The victim is not being identified pending notification of family. A second man was killed by a downed redwood tree in his backyard in Yuba City, north of Sacramento, the local police department said in a statement early Monday.

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Four people who were reported missing after a possible avalanche in the mountains near Las Vegas were found, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said.

But emergency personnel in the Los Angeles area — among the hardest-hit areas — said the storm hasn’t been particularly destructive so far compared with past disasters.

“We aren’t seeing major, major impacts,” Emily Montanez, associate director of the Los Angeles County Office of Emergency Management, said in an interview. She attributed that in part to early warnings and encouraging people not to be out on the roads. “People stayed home.”

Montanez said that the county was “not completely out of the woods” and that pockets of heavy rain could still fall, but more intermittently.

Up among the peaks of the Sierra Nevada, the deluge draped the mountains in a thick blanket of snow, a welcome sign for the state’s water supply as the snowpack has been running below average this year. The Central Sierra Snow Laboratory in the mountain town of Soda Springs recorded nearly 2 feet of snow over the past two days, and other spots have seen more.

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But the storm brought a swampy mess for millions of people in the Los Angeles area, who endured Sunday what was the 10th-wettest day in the history of the city dating back nearly 150 years, according to Bass. The downpour of more than 4 inches downtown easily surpassed the city’s monthly average.

Across Los Angeles, the city’s police, firefighters and other emergency personnel responded to more than 130 flooding incidents, 49 mud and debris flows, and drivers stuck in floodwaters, Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Kristin Crowley said at the news conference.

In one incident, a mudslide crashed into two homes in Fryman Canyon, a forested neighborhood in Studio City surrounded by hills and trails. At about 10 p.m. Sunday, the river of mud coursed into Jessica Rouse’s living room. She and her father, stepmother, and brother sprinted out the door, over a fence and onto the neighbor’s sloping driveway.

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Rouse said they weren’t able to grab anything before leaving, not even the family’s pet turtle, who was swept away by the mud.

“It all happened so fast,” Rouse said. “He was floating away, and they were trying to catch him and couldn’t.”

Los Angeles authorities evacuated 16 people from the area, where some homes flooded and others were hit by falling trees.

Firefighters were also responding Monday to a mudslide on Beverly Drive in the Hollywood Hills.

“The hazards of this storm have not passed,” Crowley said during the midday news conference. “We anticipate another wave of heavy rains later on this afternoon.”

During the downpour Sunday night, Karen Moureaux left her Ventura County home when she heard the scraping of heavy machinery. Her neighbors amid the citrus and avocado farms in Fillmore had taken an excavator and worked for hours dredging up mud to try to dislodge a blocked culvert that was flooding the road.

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Ever since the 2017 Thomas Fire burned through the area, flooding has worsened, Moureaux said, including last year when floodwaters from Sespe Creek reached her farm.

“You always worry about that road because you know it’s going to flood,” said Moureaux, who grows Valencia oranges and operates a dog-boarding kennel. “It’s not really a creek; it’s a raging river when we get water.”

As waters rose in Santa Barbara on Sunday afternoon, residents said they had been hit so hard before by megastorms that they were getting used to it.

As Bath Street filled with murky water, one woman paced on her porch, hoping she would get lucky like she did last year, when the flood stopped at her front door. Standing on his steps in Crocs, Bix Kaufman and his roommate, Alex Clark, who was drinking a beer, pointed out neighbors who got “rocked” last year. Kaufman said watching his street fill with enough water to canoe down now seems normal.

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“I think we’re a little desensitized from it from last time because it was so intense,” he said. “There’s no flood insurance around here, and it’s probably impossible to get.”

Santa Barbara has been a microcosm of extreme climate events, notes Thomas Tighe, the CEO of Direct Relief, an aid nonprofit headquartered in the city. In the last six years, the coastal county endured what was the largest wildfire in state history at the time and the 2018 Montecito mudslides, which killed 23 people. Tighe lost his home in that disaster and just finished rebuilding.

“It’s just the way it is now,” said Tighe, adding that his organization is seeing these trends everywhere. “It’s clear that we all need to adapt, adjust, and take care of each other as the public officials adapt rapidly, too.”

Despite the downpour, Los Angeles public schools, the second-largest public school district in the country, with more than 400,000 students, planned to remain open for the day, as of Monday morning, with the exception of two schools.

In the center of this storm, the air pressure dropped quickly and drastically, strengthening into what is known as a “bomb cyclone.” Such low-pressure systems can spin up fierce winds, and this one tied for California’s strongest bomb cyclone in the past 14 years. The powerful low-pressure system dragged a large plume of water vapor from Hawaii to the West Coast.

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Such atmospheric rivers provide critical snow and rain to the West Coast’s annual water supply, but too much rain in a short amount of time can be devastating.

The amount of snow in California’s mountains has been below average so far this winter. The state’s average snowpack was only 57 percent of normal as of Friday. This storm system will push up that number.

Over the next day or so, the storm is expected to weaken near the California-Oregon border, but the atmospheric river will remain parked around Southern California. Heavy rain will probably continue from Los Angeles down to San Diego, with an additional 2 to 4 inches possible through Tuesday morning.

The storm system will travel eastward midweek, spreading rain and snow into Arizona, Nevada and further toward the Rocky Mountain front. In Phoenix, the additional rain could cause flooding across the already saturated soil.

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Desert locations on the southwestern Nevada-California border also could be prone to flooding, as an additional 1 to 2 inches of rain are forecast. Mountains in Nevada, Utah, Colorado and surrounding regions may also see a foot or more of snow midweek.

Radar courtesy MyRadar | © OpenStreetMap contributors 11:25 p.m. — Warnings discontinued as storms push south of the Beltway leaving downed trees and wires, and power outages; final update The heaviest storms are now pushing south of Fairfax County into eastern Prince William and western Charles Counties. They are no longer severe, according to the National Weather Service, but are still producing heavy rain and lightning and could still let out some strong wind gusts.

As the storms swept through Montgomery and Fairfax counties, they produced several reports of damaging winds that toppled trees and wires, including in: Potomac, Bethesda, Great Falls, McLean, Arlington and Falls Church. In addition, there were several reports of hail. Dominion Power currently reports about 17,000 customers without electricity in Fairfax County, according to PowerOutage.US.

This will be our last update for tonight. Scroll down for the forecast for tomorrow, which includes another chance of strong to severe storms. We’ll also plan to write a detailed briefing with more details on tomorrow’s storm potential in the morning.

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11:05 p.m. — Most intense storms shift into southern Fairfax County from Franconia to Mount Vernon

Severe weather has exited the Beltway area but is progressing through Washington’s southwestern and southern suburbs from Burke to Franconia and Mount Vernon, where storms are most intense, and a severe thunderstorm warning remains in effect until 11:15 p.m.

The National Weather Service has received damage reports from these storms as they tracked from Montgomery County into northern Fairfax County, including several instances of downed trees and wires. We’ve also heard about some power outages in Arlington and McLean.

The lightning, meanwhile, has put on a show. Here are a few images/scenes:

Taking pictures from Arlington tonight of the lightning in the storm approaching from the north. Got pretty intense, but captured this one just as I was about to pack up and head inside! @capitalweather @7NewsAlex @dougkammerer #dcwx pic.twitter.com/ikVJIAY6oy — Richard Barnhill (@wolfpackwx) July 29, 2021

Lightning ripping across the northern horizon right now #dcwx pic.twitter.com/r8WOdi1Z0C — Dave Dildine (@DildineWTOP) July 29, 2021

I was watching our cameras and moved one of them and then BOOM!! This Lightning bolt looks to have hit near River Rd around the Kenwood area. pic.twitter.com/J97CQgVtyg — Doug Kammerer (@dougkammerer) July 29, 2021

10:35 p.m. — Storm warning discontinued for District but warnings cover much of Fairfax County until between 11 and 11:15 p.m.

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Radar shows storm activity has eased over the District some but is intense around McLean and Arlington as well as around Oakton. The National Weather Service discontinued the warning in effect for the District but warnings are active over much of Fairfax County as the storms from Oakton to Alexandria push south-toward Burke and Springfield. We have received reports of hail and strong winds in Falls Church, Arlington and McLean.

Severe Thunderstorm Warning including Burke VA, Annandale VA, Springfield VA until 11:15 PM EDT pic.twitter.com/d0Vt9zQMIh — NWS Severe Tstorm (@NWSSevereTstorm) July 29, 2021

10:20 p.m. — Storms expand westward into northwest Fairfax County; severe storm warning there until 11 p.m.

Storm cells have multiplied over the last 20 minutes and now stretch from near downtown Washington west to northwest Fairfax County, where a new severe thunderstorm has been issued until 11 p.m. and includes Reston, Oakton, Vienna and Chantilly. Downpours, frequent lightning, pockets of strong-damaging winds and some small hail are possible. All of this activity is pointed south toward Burke, Annandale, Springfield and Alexandria.

Severe Thunderstorm Warning including Reston VA, Oakton VA, Fair Oaks VA until 11:00 PM EDT pic.twitter.com/Au2tLUkRKC — NWS Severe Tstorm (@NWSSevereTstorm) July 29, 2021

9:50 p.m. — Intense storm has erupted in Montgomery County and is pushing south into District; severe thunderstorm warning until 10:30 p.m.

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A severe storm has flared up Montgomery County along and east of Interstate 270. The most intense activity is currently between Aspen Hill and Wheaton. The storm is rapidly pushing south-southeast (at around 20 mph) toward Bethesda and Silver Spring and should also enter the District and eastern Fairfax County by 10 p.m. or shortly thereafter. In addition to torrential rain and frequent lightning, the storm may produce damaging wind gusts to 60 mph as well as some hail. It has history of producing hail to one-inch in diameter north of Rockville.

Severe Thunderstorm Warning including Washington DC, Arlington VA, Alexandria VA until 10:30 PM EDT pic.twitter.com/Ndvexhr6D6 — NWS Severe Tstorm (@NWSSevereTstorm) July 29, 2021

Original article from 5 p.m.

Temperatures were down somewhat Wednesday compared to recent days. Even so, highs in the low to mid-90s were still hard to stomach for more than a short period. A couple of showers and storms have fired up in the heat of the day. They could be strong, and there’s potentially much more where that comes from on Thursday.

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Through tonight: We continue to run the risk of a storm popping up and growing intense. Activity should be isolated to widely scattered, but anything that lasts could become intense, dropping hail and producing some damaging wind gusts. Otherwise, partly cloudy skies are the rule overnight. Temperatures dip to the upper 60s and lower 70s for lows, with winds turning to come from the south, and humidity levels rise.

View the current weather at The Washington Post.

Tomorrow (Thursday): One more day of heat as a cold front approaches. We’ll see more and thicker clouds than recent days, which might help keep temperatures closer to 90 for highs. Low 90s wouldn’t be surprising. The risk of showers and storms — see below for more — grows heading deeper into the afternoon, with the best chances perhaps in a 2 to 10 p.m. window. There is also a risk for relatively widespread severe weather. Higher humidity makes it feel more like mid-90s before the storms, so it’s no treat as we wait.

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See Dan Stillman’s forecast through the weekend. And if you haven’t already, join us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter and Instagram. For related traffic news, check out Gridlock.

Thursday storms: We still appear to expect thunderstorms that could be more widespread Thursday. It’s the same general pattern supporting the potential d-word (derecho) today in the Upper Midwest. Conditions appear quite supportive for severe storms, with most of the questions centering on how and when it all evolves. Below is a quick summary from key voices.

The local National Weather Service office writes, “If we were to destabilize and storms were to form in that type of environment, the potential is there for a significant severe weather event, with very high winds, large hail, and tornadoes all possible. However, there`s considerable disagreement among the various models as to if and where storms will form in the wake of what`s left of today`s Upper Midwest system.

Per the Storm Prediction Center, “Damaging gusts and tornadoes are possible with the more intense thunderstorms.”

CWG’s severe-weather expert, Jeff Halverson, agrees, noting that Thursday could be “a more widespread threat” given relatively high wind shear and potentially favorable instability.