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HOUSTON (AP) — An armed suspect stole an ambulance early Friday while a patient and a firefighter were inside, Houston police said.

The suspect is accused of running the ambulance off the road, the department said in a series of tweets. Then, a firefighter behind the wheel was forced out of the ambulance at gunpoint and left on the side of the road.

A patient and another firefighter were in the back of the vehicle.

Authorities said they used a GPS to track down the ambulance. The armed suspect was taken into custody without incident, police said.

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NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — In his first interview in six months, disgraced country star Morgan Wallen said it was ignorant of him to use a racial slur.

During an interview with Michael Strahan on ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Friday, Wallen said he didn’t use it in a derogatory manner, but it was still wrong.

Wallen was already one of the genre’s biggest stars, with crossover hits like “Whiskey Glasses,” when the video was posted on TMZ in February. Wallen previously apologized for using the slur and radio stations and streaming services temporarily dropped him from playlists, but his album sales surged.

He was disqualified from the Academy of Country Music Awards, but remains eligible for several awards at the upcoming Country Music Association Awards. He has since returned to Billboard’s country airplay chart with his first single since the incident and his album, “Dangerous: The Double Album,” remains the most popular album released this year across all genres.

Wallen told Strahan that he had been drinking all weekend leading up to the night in February.

“I was around some of my friends, and we say dumb stuff together,” said Wallen. “In our minds, it’s playful. That’s sounds ignorant but that’s really where it came from. And it’s wrong.”

He denied using the term frequently and said he only used it around a certain group of friends.

After Strahan explained some of the historical context behind the term, Strahan asked Wallen directly whether he understood why it makes Black people so upset.

“I don’t know how to put myself in their shoes because I’m not, you know, but I do understand,” Wallen said. “Especially when I say that I’m using it playfully, or whatever, ignorantly, I understand that must sound like ‘He doesn’t understand.’”

Wallen said since the incident he took time off and went to rehab. When album sales spiked following the industry’s condemnation of him, he decided to donate around $500,000 to organizations including Black Music Action Coalition.

Country music has been grappling with addressing diversity in a genre that has long been dominated by white male artists, but Wallen’s actions have brought the issue to the forefront. This year, another top country star Luke Combs apologized for his past use of the Confederate flag.

When asked if country music overall had a problem with race, Wallen responded, “It would seem that way, yeah. I haven’t really sat and thought about that.”

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DETROIT (AP) — General Motors is recalling some older Chevrolet Bolts for a second time to fix persistent battery problems that can set the electric cars ablaze.

Until repairs are done, GM says owners should park the cars outdoors, limit charging to 90% of battery capacity, and not deplete batteries below 70 miles of range. The company says the Bolts should not be charged overnight, and should be parked outside immediately after they are charged.

The second recall comes after two Bolts that had been fixed under a previous recall caught fire, one in Vermont and the other in New Jersey. It covers about 69,000 Bolts worldwide from 2017, 2018 and part of the 2019 model year. All have batteries made by LG Chem in South Korea.

The recall is another bug in a growing global rollout of electric vehicles by all automakers to replace internal combustion vehicles to cut emissions and fight climate change. Ford, BMW and Hyundai all have recalled batteries recently. Also, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board investigated a series of fires in Tesla vehicles and earlier this year said the high-voltage lithium-ion batteries pose safety risks to first responders after crashes.

GM says in a statement Friday that the faulty Bolt batteries can have two rare manufacturing defects in the same cell at the same time. So GM will now replace any defective battery modules and possibly the whole battery pack.

Spokesman Dan Flores says engineers are still working around the clock on how to find the battery defect and what the repairs will be. He said GM doesn’t know how long it will take to develop the fix. The number of Bolts with the defect is likely to be small, Flores said.

The previous recall announced in April didn’t fully fix the problem. It was diagnostic software designed to look for battery anomalies. If one was found, GM said it would replace faulty parts.

Some 2019 Bolts and those from the 2020 and 2021 model years are not affected. Their batteries were made by LG in Holland, Michigan.

“We understand that the previous recall and this recall significantly inconvenience our customers,” Flores said. “We appreciate their patience and we understand their frustration.”

GM will handle customer complaints about the inconvenience and lower travel range on a case-by-case basis, he said.

The company says owners who haven’t had the first recall repairs done should still take their cars to dealers to get the fixes.

The first recall came after the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened an investigation into the fires last year. The agency said in a statement Friday that it is evaluating GM’s recall repairs and the fires.

GM says it has confirmed battery fires in nine Bolts. NHTSA said two people suffered smoke inhalation and the battery fire spread to one house.

Once the final recall repairs are made, the Bolts’ full range will be restored. Older Bolts can go about 238 miles (383 kilometers) per charge.

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SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — As drought- and wind-driven wildfires have become more dangerous across the American West in recent years, firefighters have tried to become smarter in how they prepare.

They’re using new technology and better positioning of resources in a bid to keep small blazes from erupting into mega-fires like the ones that torched a record 4% of California last year, or the nation’s biggest wildfire this year that has charred a section of Oregon half the size of Rhode Island.

There have been 730 more wildfires in California so far this year than last, an increase of about 16%. But nearly triple the area has burned — 470 square miles (1,200 square kilometers).

Catching fires more quickly gives firefighters a better chance of keeping them small.

That includes using new fire behavior computer modeling that can help assess risks before fires start, then project their path and growth.

When “critical weather” is predicted — hot, dry winds or lightning storms — the technology, on top of hard-earned experience, allows California planners to pre-position fire engines, bulldozers, aircraft and hand crews armed with shovels and chain saws in areas where they can respond more quickly.

With the computer modeling, “they can do a daily risk forecast across the state, so they use that for planning,” said Lynne Tolmachoff, spokeswoman for Cal Fire, California’s firefighting agency.

That’s helped Cal Fire hold an average 95% of blazes to 10 acres (4 hectares) or less even in poor conditions driven by drought or climate change, she said. So far this year it’s held 96.5% of fires below 10 acres (4 hectares).

Federal firefighters similarly track how dry vegetation has become in certain areas, then station crews and equipment ahead of lightning storms or in areas where people gather during holidays, said Stanton Florea, a U.S. Forest Service spokesman at the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho.

In another effort to catch fires quickly, what once were fire lookout towers staffed by humans have largely been replaced with cameras in remote areas, many of them in high-definition and armed with artificial intelligence to discern a smoke plume from morning fog. There are 800 such cameras scattered across California, Nevada and Oregon, and even casual viewers can remotely watch wildfires in real time.

Fire managers can then “start making tactical decisions based on what they can see,” even before firefighters reach the scene, Tolmachoff said.

Fire managers also routinely summon military drones from the National Guard or Air Force to fly over fires at night, using heat imaging to map their boundaries and hot spots. They can use satellite imagery to plot the course of smoke and ash.

“Your job is to manage the fire, and these are tools that will help you do so” with a degree of accuracy unheard of even five years ago, said Char Miller, a professor at Pomona College in California and a widely recognized wildfire policy expert.

In California, fire managers can overlay all that information on high-quality Light Detection and Ranging topography maps that can aid decisions on forest management, infrastructure planning and preparation for wildfires, floods, tsunamis and landslides. Then they add the fire behavior computer simulation based on weather and other variables.

Other mapping software can show active fires, fuel breaks designed to slow their spread, prescribed burns, defensible space cleared around homes, destroyed homes and other wildfire damage.

“It’s all still new, but we can see where it’s going to take us in the future when it comes to planning for people building homes on the wildland area, but also wildland firefighting,” Tolmachoff said.

Cal Fire and other fire agencies have been early adopters of remote imaging and other technologies that can be key in early wildfire detection, said John Bailey, a former firefighter and now professor at Oregon State University.

Some experts argue it’s a losing battle against wildfires worsened by global warming, a century of reflexive wildfire suppression and overgrown forests, and communities creeping into what once were sparsely populated areas. Climate change has made the West hotter and drier in the past 30 years, and scientists have long warned the weather will get more extreme as the world warms.

Yet, firefighters’ goal is to replicate the outcome of a fire that started Monday in the canyon community of Topanga, between Los Angeles and Malibu.

It had the potential to swiftly spread through dry brush but was held to about 7 acres (3 hectares) after water-dropping aircraft were scrambled within minutes from LA and neighboring Ventura County.

What firefighters don’t want is another wildfire like the one that ravaged the Malibu area in 2018. It destroyed more than 1,600 structures, killed three people and forced thousands to flee.

In another bid to gain an early advantage, California is buying a dozen new Sikorsky Firehawk helicopters — at $24 million each — that can operate at night, fly faster, drop more water and carry more firefighters than the Vietnam War-era Bell UH-1H “Hueys” they will eventually replace.

It will also soon receive seven military surplus C-130 transport aircraft retrofitted to carry 4,000 gallons (15,140 litres) of fire retardant, more than three times as much as Cal Fire’s workhorse S-2 airtankers.

For all that, firefighters’ efforts to outsmart and suppress wildfires is counterproductive if all it does is postpone fires in areas that will eventually burn, argued Richard Minnich, a professor in Riverside who studies fire ecology.

“No matter how sophisticated the technology may be, the areas they can manage or physically impact things is small,” he said. “We’re in over our heads. You can have all the technology in the world — fire control is impossible.”

Working with wildfires is more realistic, he said, by taking advantage of patches that previously burned to channel the spread of new blazes.

Timothy Ingalsbee, a former federal firefighter who now heads Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, also said firefighters need to adopt a new approach when confronting the most dangerous wind-driven wildfires that leapfrog containment lines by showering flaming embers a mile or more ahead of the main inferno.

It’s better to build more fire-resistant homes and devote scarce resources to protecting threatened communities while letting the fires burn around them, he said.

“We have these amazing tools that allow us to map fire spread in real time and model it better than weather predictions,” Ingalsbee said. “Using that technology, we can start being more strategic and working with fire to keep people safe, keep homes safe, but let fire do the work it needs to do — which is recycle all the dead stuff into soil.”

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Associated Press writers Keith Ridler in Boise, Idaho, and Christopher Weber in Los Angeles contributed to this story.

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MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) — A Tennessee man was sentenced to five years in prison this week for his role in an international “swatting” scheme that led to a person’s death, The Commercial Appeal reported.

Authorities said Shane Sonderman, of Lauderdale County, worked with others, including a minor in Great Britain, to try to force people to hand over control of desirable social media usernames through harassment, including swatting. Swatting is an illegal practice of falsely reporting life-threatening emergencies at a person’s home, causing heavily armed police, and sometimes SWAT teams, to rush to the scene.

In this case, Sonderman, 20, provided contact information to a co-conspirator about Mark Herring, of Sumner County, who controlled the Twitter handle @Tennessee, according to court documents.

On April 27, 2020, that co-conspirator called Sumner County police to say “that he had shot a female in the back of a head and she was dead, and that he would use pipe bombs placed at the front and back doors if police responded,” according to a statement signed by federal prosecutors. The address the caller gave was Herring’s home.

“Emergency responders were dispatched, and when they arrived at Herring’s home, guns drawn, they called for Herring to walk toward them, keeping his hands visible. As he did so, Herring, 60, appeared to lose his balance and fell to the ground, unresponsive. He was pronounced dead at a local hospital; cause of death was determined to be a heart attack,” court records state.

Sonderman entered a guilty plea to conspiracy in March.

Herring’s relatives told WKRN-TV in Nashville in a recent interview that Herring was a tech-savvy grandfather who joined Twitter in the early days when many handles were still readily available. They said an anonymous caller contacted Herring on the day he died, demanding he hand over control of the @Tennessee handle, but he refused.

“He just wanted to be @Tennessee because he loved the Vols,” daughter Corinna Fitch told the station, referring to the University of Tennessee football team.

Sonderman and his co-conspirators are accused of using similar harassment tactics with other people, including a victim in Oregon called K.G. in court papers. They are accused of harassing K.G.’s parents in Ohio by sending unwanted deliveries of food and by falsely reporting a fire at their house on April 14, 2020.

They then sent K.G. a message reading, “did your parent’s enjoy the firetrucks?” followed by “i plan on killing your parents next if you do not hand the username on instrgam over to me,” according to the indictment. Federal documents list other victims in New York, Virginia and Michigan.

U.S. District Judge Mark S. Norris declined a defense attorney’s plea for leniency on Wednesday, sentencing Sonderman to five years in prison with limited Internet access and requiring him to receive mental health treatment.

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