USA news live: US to offer Covid-19 vaccine booster doses starting September 20

President Joe Biden's administration will unveil a major overhaul of the US asylum system on Wednesday, including a plan to double staff, in an effort to speed processing at the US-Mexico border where migrant arrests have soared to 20-year highs this year. The new proposed rule would authorize asylum officers to decide whether or not to approve a claim for protection at the Mexico border, bypassing backlogged immigration courts where cases can often take years to be resolved by judges, according to a summary of the regulation and Reuters interviews with US officials.

California's wildfire crisis escalated on Tuesday as resurgent strong winds fanned the state's biggest conflagration, drove flames from a separate, smaller blaze into a rural mountain community and prompted widespread precautionary power shutoffs. Already the second-largest California wildfire on record, the Dixie fire raging since mid-July in the rugged Sierra Nevada range northeast of San Francisco had charred 604,000 acres of drought-parched timber and brush as of Tuesday morning, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire).

US Democrats said Tuesday they would seek to advance another voting rights measure in the House of Representatives with the hopes of breaking a Senate logjam on the issue, but the odds of doing so remained long. Democrats want to pass federal voting rights legislation to try to counteract a wave of voting restrictions passed by Republican-led state legislatures. But Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell has said voting rules should be left to the states.