TV News LIES

In a massive victory for abortion rights supporters, a Missouri judge on Friday blocked a licensing requirement for abortion clinics that providers said prevented them from offering the procedure.

Planned Parenthood announced shortly after the judge’s ruling that its clinics would once again perform abortions in Missouri.

“Abortion services are resuming in Missouri!” Planned Parenthood Great Plains, an affiliate that operates in Missouri, announced on Facebook. “We are excited to soon offer care at select Missouri health centers, ensuring safe, compassionate and essential reproductive healthcare for those who need it.”

The Trump administration fired 20 immigration judges without explanation, a union official said on Saturday amid sweeping moves to shrink the size of the federal government.

On Friday, 13 judges who had yet to be sworn in and five assistant chief immigration judges were dismissed without notice, said Matthew Biggs, president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, which represents federal workers. Two other judges were fired under similar circumstances in the last week.

It was unclear whether they would be replaced. The US Department of Justice’s executive office for immigration review, which runs the courts and oversees its roughly 700 judges, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday.

Immigration courts are backlogged with more than 3.7m cases, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, and it takes years to decide asylum cases. There is support across the political spectrum for more judges and support staff, though the first Trump administration also put pressure on some judges to decide cases more quickly.

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Infant mortality rates have increased in states that adopted abortion bans after the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade, according to a new study.

Researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the University of California, Berkeley, and two other academic institutions looked at live birth data across all 50 states from 2013 until 2023.

They then determined there were 478 infant deaths across 14 states with complete abortion bans or bans after six weeks of pregnancy that they say wouldn’t have happened if the bans were not in place.

Abortion is almost completely banned in 12 states including Texas, Louisiana, Kentucky, Alabama, Idaho, Oklahoma, Tennessee and West Virginia with some exceptions for rape, incest, or when continuing a pregnancy endangers the life of the mother.

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Multiple measles outbreaks have been reported already this year, with one in Texas ballooning from six cases to 48 in just over a week.

“Due to the highly contagious nature of this disease, additional cases are likely to occur in Gaines County and the surrounding communities,” the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS) said on Friday.

The majority of cases in Texas involve children under the age of 17, the Texas DSHS said. Thirteen have been hospitalized.

A teen from Lea County, New Mexico — just over the border from Gaines County, Texas — was also infected, though the patient has had no known contact with any of the Texas patients, the New Mexico Department of Health said Tuesday.

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The semi-autonomous agency that oversees U.S. nuclear weapons production and stockpiling dismissed dozens of employees Thursday after the Trump administration denied a request for a national security exemption to stop the layoffs.

Former NNSA administrator Jill Hruby, who led the organization from July 2021 through her Jan. 20 resignation, said the cuts originally impacted "over 300" of National Nuclear Security Administration's approximately 1,900 federal employees before the agency began reversing layoffs.

In a Friday evening statement, Department of Energy press secretary Ben Dietderich said, "Less than 50 employees were dismissed from the NNSA." The targeted workers were relatively new employees in their probationary period, during which they don't have civil service firing protections.

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The U.S. Navy has released an image showing damage to the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman following the collision with the cargo ship M/V Besiktas-M off the coast of Egypt in the Mediterranean Sea on Tuesday. Readers can first get up to speed on what had previously been known about the incident in our initial report here.

The official caption for the picture is as follows:

“Exterior damage of USS Harry S. Truman (CVN 75) viewed from a ship’s rigid-hull inflatable boat following a collision with merchant vessel Besiktas-M, Feb. 12, while operating in the vicinity of Port Said, Egypt. USS Harry S. Truman, the flagship of the Harry S. Truman Carrier Strike Group (HSTCSG), is on a scheduled deployment in the U.S. 6th Fleet area of operations supporting U.S. Naval Forces Europe-Africa to defend U.S., Allied and partner interests.”

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Some federal employees who have been laid off were reportedly given only 30 minutes to pack their belongings and vacate federal offices. Federal agencies were ordered by Donald Trump to fire mostly probationary staff, with as many as 200,000 workers set to be affected and some made to rush off the premises, the Washington Post reported.

More mass layoffs came on Friday as approximately 2,300 employees have been fired from the US interior department.

The interior department oversees the US’s natural resources and manages 500m acres of public land, including national parks. The widespread layoffs were confirmed by three sources with knowledge on the subject, who spoke to Reuters anonymously.

Probationary employees at two US agriculture department research agencies were also fired, Reuters reported, citing two anonymous sources. The exact number of terminated workers has not been confirmed, but layoffs reportedly happened overnight.

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