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Concerns about an extended conflict, the mounting U.S. death toll and a perceived lack of clarity about the mission’s purpose are percolating among President Donald Trump’s MAGA base as the military operation in Iran puts the president at odds with some of his most ardent supporters.

Hanging over the debate is the memory of previous Middle Eastern conflicts, which stretched for years and claimed the lives of thousands of U.S. soldiers.

Trump's presidential campaigns tapped into the American public’s disenchantment with the long and costly conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. He described the Iraq war as a "disaster" and "one of the worst decisions ever made in the history of our country."

But Trump’s second attack on Iran has already resulted in the deaths of six American service members, and the president is warning that more lives could be lost in a conflict with an uncertain timeline.

The president has launched a series of dramatic military operations in his second term, though. The first two in Iran and Venezuela were quick, and no U.S. soldiers died, limiting the blowback from his political base.

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The Supreme Court on March 2 backed parents' right to be told if their child changes their name, or pronouns they're using in school, blocking California rules aimed at preventing teachers from outing transgender students to their parents.

"Under long-established precedent, parents − not the State − have primary authority with respect to 'the upbringing and education of children,'" the majority said in an unsigned opinion. "The right protected by these precedents includes the right not to be shut out of participation in decisions regarding their children’s mental health."

The court’s three liberal justices dissented from the decision to grant the parents' emergency request.

Justice Elena Kagan criticized the conservative majority for making a rushed decision about a case "raising novel legal questions and arousing strong views" that is at an early stage of litigation.

"The Court is impatient: It already knows what it thinks, and insists on getting everything over quickly," she wrote of the decision that came without the full rounds of briefing and oral arguments for cases.

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Protests sparked up in New York City and across the country Saturday in response to the military strikes in Iran.

One that started in Times Square saw a massive turnout.
"It's one appalling thing after another"

At its peak Saturday afternoon, the protest ballooned to nearly 1,000 people. Hundreds of demonstrators from all walks of life mobilized just hours after the United States and Israel launched a military operation against Iran.

Protesters say it was not only unwarranted, but also the last thing the U.S. should be involved in.

"There is a broad base of society that is against all these things, whether it's the attacks on Minneapolis from ICE or the attacks today in Iran," protest organizer Mike Chrisemer said.

"It's one appalling thing after another, but now a war without consulting Congress?" protester Betsy Robinson said.

"People in Iran have the right to determine for themselves their own future, and it's not up to us to meddle in the affairs of another country's," protest organizer Carla Reyes said.

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Events are still unfolding rapidly across the Middle East, so here's a quick recap:

The death toll from the US-Israeli strike on a girls’ school in Minab has climbed to 165, according to the city’s prosecutor.

At least 20 people have been killed in a US-Israeli attack on the Iranian capital, according to Iranian state-linked media, marking another deadly attack in the widening assault on the country.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has dismissed US President Donald Trump’s warning against retaliation, vowing that Tehran will place “no limit” on its right to defend itself after what he described as massive US-Israeli bombardment.

The US military says it has hit more than 1,000 targets across Iran since launching its war on Saturday.

The US military says it has destroyed the headquarters of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in a large-scale strike.

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Dozens of teenage girls were attending their regular training sessions of volleyball, basketball, and gymnastics in the main sports hall in Lamerd, a city near the Persian coast, when a missile slammed into the building at 5 p.m. on Saturday. Additional strikes hit two nearby residential areas and a hall adjacent to a school, as the U.S. and Israel pounded targets across Iran on the first day of what President Donald Trump declared as a regime change war. According to local officials cited in Iranian state media, the strikes on Lamerd killed at least 18 civilians and wounded scores more.

“Within seconds of the missile strike, the windows shattered into thousands of fragments. Sports equipment, balls, tables, barriers flew through the air. Black smoke filled the space. The smell of gunpowder made breathing almost impossible. The screaming began immediately, layered with the sound of debris collapsing and concrete falling from the ceiling,” Mohammed Saed Khorshedy, a 29-year-old worker at the gym who witnessed the attack, told Drop Site News.

The facility sits on the outskirts of Lamerd, a quiet city in Fars province, near the surrounding Zagros mountain range, giving the natural landscape an uneven, rugged character. The rectangular building is at a crossroads connecting the city center to Bandar Assaluyeh, an industrial port and energy hub on the Persian Gulf.

The sports hall was poorly maintained, with deteriorating walls surrounded by a low perimeter fence. A high arched metal roof sat atop a reinforced concrete frame and a rubber floor for volleyball and other sports. The missile struck the middle of the roof, destroying a large part of the building. The main court, small spectator stands, changing rooms, and coach’s office were all reduced to rubble.

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Explosions were reported in the Russian port city of Novorossiysk overnight between Sunday and Monday.

Novorossiysk hosts Russia’s second-largest oil export facilities and the bulk of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet after Ukrainian drones rendered naval bases in occupied Crimea unsafe for the fleet.

Between Sunday and Monday, Novorossiysk Mayor Andrey Kravchenko reported ongoing Ukrainian drone strikes and damage to buildings, while videos from locals show fire erupting on the horizon and explosions ringing across the city.

Russia’s independent outlet Astra, citing local reports, reported a fire at an oil terminal in Novorossiysk, with flames illuminating an orange glow against the dark skyline.

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In the middle of the 7th century, a plague swept through the walled city of Jerash, in what is now modern-day Jordan.

Ceramicists abandoned their workshops under the Hippodrome, leaving unfired pottery in their haste. Young and old alike succumbed to a bacteria called Yersinia Pestis, the same microbe responsible for the Black Death seven centuries later.

The city, unable to manage the dead and dying, converted those workshops into a mass grave.

"It was filled within days — hundreds of bodies," says Rays Jiang, a University of South Florida geneticist and lead author of a new study in the Journal of Archeological Science, highlighting the plague victims of Jerash. "There's no ceremony, there's no grave goods. It's a bare minimum to get the bodies disposed of and away from the city."

To understand the lives of the people who died at Jerash, Jiang gathered a team of eight experts from various specialties: archeology, molecular genetics, anthropology and chemistry. Their work helps illustrate the devastation of what is believed to be the first historically recorded pandemic, which began with the Plague of Justinian and killed tens of millions of people across the Mediterranean Basin, West Asia and Northern Europe from roughly 541 to 750.

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All unaccompanied immigrant children who are pregnant, many by rape, are being moved to a single facility in Texas in order to avoid providing abortion services in a significant human rights violation, critics say.

As detainees are frequently moved across state lines quickly, often to red states like Texas, pregnant people are facing challenges accessing reproductive health care in detention centers.

Unaccompanied minors who lack immigration documentation are at high risk for trafficking and other forms of harm, so they fall under the care of the office of refugee resettlement (ORR), which previously had facilities across the country capable of caring for children under the age of 18 who are pregnant.

Since July, more than a dozen pregnant children have been moved to a single facility in the small town of San Benito, along the south Texas border. The children kept in Texas are as young as 13, and about half are pregnant because of rape, according to a joint investigation by the Texas Newsroom and the California Newsroom. In Texas, abortion is banned in nearly all circumstances, including rape and incest.

“It’s a choice to ensure zero abortions,” said Jonathan White, a former top official working with children’s programs in the ORR under the Obama and Trump administrations. When a pregnant child is moved to Texas, “as long as she is in Texas, she can’t access an abortion – without a federal official needing to deny her an abortion”, he said.

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