Pretentious Word Nonsense

Focusing on the Morag corridor is also “a kind of a political decision in order to give the right-wing extremists in the government, a kind of hope that maybe we will be back in some areas (settlements) as before,” Dangot added. “When you say ‘Morag’ out loud, it means going back to the disengagement of Gush Katif.” Gush Katif was a bloc of several Israeli settlements, including the agricultural settlement of Morag, in the southern Gaza Strip. When Israel disengaged from the Gaza Strip in 2005, then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon dismantled Gush Katif and expelled some 8,000 Jewish residents living there. Some Israeli settlers have since October 7 called for a return to Gush Katif and for the re-settlement of Gaza, a movement emboldened by Israel’s right-wing politicians who have openly called for the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza.

Humanitarian organisations have unanimously rejected Israel’s plan to establish a limited number of aid distribution hubs run by private contractors and guarded by the IDF in southern Gaza. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) on Sunday accused Israel of trying to shut down the existing aid distribution system run by the UN and its humanitarian partners in order to impose its own supply system.

The Associated Press has not been able to reach Smith’s mother, April Newkirk. But Newkirk told Atlanta TV station WXIA that her daughter went to a hospital complaining of headaches and was given medication and released. Then, her boyfriend awoke to her gasping for air and called 911. Emory University Hospital determined she had blood clots in her brain and she was declared brain dead.

Although Schmidt has no ongoing legal issues, according to his family, he previously had a misdemeanor charge for having marijuana in his vehicle in 2015. That charge was dismissed after laws about cannabis changed. His mother said he missed a hearing about the case in 2022 because the notice was not forwarded to his correct address. He also had a DUI about a decade ago.

Schmidt eventually fainted going to the bathroom and remembers collapsing and hitting the ground hard. When he woke up, he told an agent he needed to go to the hospital. “He said, 'Oh, you’re just gonna med out like everybody, huh?’ That’s the verbatim words. I was like, 'Med out? I don’t even know what that means,'” Schmidt recounted, finding out later it meant someone who physically breaks down under stress. He was taken to Massachusetts General Hospital, handcuffed to the bed, and treated for the flu and a high fever for six hours. Schmidt described being given a medical assessment that would have warranted privacy, but CBP officers wouldn’t leave the room. A doctor said he needed rest and a place to recuperate. Instead he was brought back to the Logan Airport holding area.

To be eligible for Medicaid, there would be new “community engagement requirements” of at least 80 hours per month of work, education or service for able-bodied adults without dependents. The new requirement would not kick in until Jan. 1, 2029, after Trump leaves office. People would also have to verify their eligibility for the program twice a year, rather than just once.

Most of these detections weren’t enough to trigger action under the now-abandoned rule, but dozens of utilities providing water to a total of 4 million Americans reported measurements that would have required them to install advanced filtration or find other sources of water.

The Ludwig Institute also says that the nation's official unemployment rate of 4.2% greatly understates the level of economic distress around the U.S. Factoring in workers who are stuck in poverty-wage jobs and people who are unable to find full-time employment, the U.S. jobless rate now tops 24%, according to LISEP, which defines these groups as "functionally unemployed."

Time and again, the U.S. Department of Education has been the last resort for parents who say the state of Idaho has failed to educate their children. The federal agency in 2023 ordered Idaho to stop blocking some students with learning disabilities, like dyslexia, from special education. That same year, it flagged that the state’s own reviews of districts and charters obscured the fact that just 20% were fully complying with the federal disability law. Last year, it told the state it must end long delays in services for infants and toddlers with disabilities, which could include speech or physical therapy. Now President Donald Trump has pledged to dismantle the department.

NOAA announced Thursday that it is decommissioning several databases, including its widely reported annual compilation of billion-dollar weather and climate disasters. The announcement was made on NOAA's website under "notice of change," which said it would no longer be updated due to "evolving priorities, statutory mandates, and staffing changes."

Trump's requested federal budget cuts to the Education Department for fiscal year 2026 total about $12 billion, or some 15% of its current funding. The biggest portion of those cuts would be a reduction in K-12 funding by more than $4.5 billion.

The controller said the team that handles Newark air traffic is working stressful 10-hour days, six days a week, with unreliable equipment.

Trump’s order instructs the CPB and other government agencies to “cease Federal funding” for PBS and National Public Radio and further requires that they work to root out indirect sources of public financing. Separate from the CPB grant, for example, PBS gets a grant from the U.S. Department of Education for programming that helps build the reading, math and science skills for children age 2 to 8, particularly in poor areas.

His administration in April said it is freezing more than $2 billion in federal funding for the Ivy League school after Harvard leaders said they would not agree to a list of Trump administration demands, which included a mask ban and removal of diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

Rather than focusing on enforcing federal laws against discrimination, the division is now charged with pursuing priorities laid out in a series of Trump’s executive orders, including “Keeping Men out of Women's Sports” and “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” according to the memos, which were issued by division head Harmeet Dhillon and obtained by NBC News.

These incidents are part of what appears to be mass targeting of international students by Trump's administration over alleged violations of their visa or green card conditions, ranging from minor legal infractions to participating in demonstrations. In other cases, the reason for the revocation is unknown or has not been provided by the administration. Since the beginning of Trump's second term, the State Department has revoked over 300 student visas nationwide, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters on March 27.

Simone Collins and her husband, Malcolm Collins, are pro-natalists who have advocated actions to make it less difficult for families to have children and ultimately reverse declining birth and marriage rates. Simone Collins told ABC News that she and her husband have submitted several draft executive orders to the White House Domestic Policy Council, including bestowing a "National Medal of Motherhood" to mothers with six or more children. They also proposed that couples should not face a tax penalty for getting married.

THHS also laid off staff overseeing other hotlines that help people who want to quit smoking and new mothers with postpartum depression, per Stat.

President Trump has said his administration is going to move "special needs" to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), an agency that recently announced its own drastic cuts. His administration hasn't specified exactly which programs will be moved, and whether IDEA is among them, but the conservative policy playbook Project 2025 does propose moving IDEA to HHS.

Last month, the EPA announced it will roll back or change 31 environmental rules and regulations, including revisions of national air quality standards for particulate matter, emission standards for industrial air pollutants and regulations restricting vehicle emissions. The proposed cuts are putting more than five decades of progress at risk, Kate Bender said.

The court did not rule on whether Trump can use the Alien Enemies Act to deport immigrants it says are members of a Venezuelan crime gang. And the majority said the immigrants should get a chance to contest their deportation. But the ruling says the immigrants brought their challenge − which was filed in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia − in the wrong court.

That morning over Mexico, Lala said, the girl’s oxygen saturation level was 70% — perilously low compared with a healthy person’s 95% or higher. Her temperature was 102.3 degrees. The flight had a nurse on contract who worked alongside its security guards. But beyond giving the girl Tylenol, the nurse left the situation in Lala’s hands, she recalled.

Facing financial headwinds, Avelo struck a long-term deal to work with ICE. The company says three of its planes will begin operating charter flights for ICE based out of Mesa, Ariz., starting May 12.

“I think it’s going very well. We have an operation, like when a patient gets operated on and it’s a big thing. I said this would exactly be the way it is,” he said, an apparent reference to the selloff.

After more market losses this week, and with pressure mounting from Republicans on Capitol Hill, Trump began having second thoughts. In his first term, he often viewed the ups and downs of the stock market as a kind of report card on his presidency, celebrating its rise. The downturn had gotten his attention.

New York-based Undue Medical Debt, which buys patient debt, is paying off $30 billion worth of unpaid bills in a single transaction with Pendrick Capital Partners, a Virginia-based debt trading company. The average patient debt being retired is $1,100, according to Undue Medical Debt, with some reaching the hundreds of thousands of dollars. The deal will prevent the debt being sold and protect millions of people nationwide from being targeted by collectors, though this will overwhelmingly benefit residents of Texas and Florida, who account for about half of the debts being retired.

The nation's stricter border enforcement has recently led to the detention of Canadian and European tourists, prompting Germany, the UK, Denmark, Finland and Portugal to issue travel warnings and advisories for the country. Now, it appears that a growing number of voices are advocating for an all-out boycott of travel to the US.

A unanimous state Supreme Court on Sunday refused to hear a last-minute attempt by the state’s Democratic attorney general to stop Musk from handing over the checks to two voters, a ruling that came just minutes before the planned start of the rally. Two lower courts had already rejected the legal challenge by Democrat Josh Kaul, who argues that Musk’s offer violates a state law. “Wisconsin law prohibits offering anything of value to induce anyone to vote,” Kaul argued in his filing. “Yet, Elon Musk did just that.” But the state Supreme Court, which is currently controlled 4-3 by liberal justices, declined to take the case as an original action. The court gave no rationale for its decision.

Travelers can also present a valid passport, passport card, or Enhanced Driver’s License. Other forms of valid identification are listed on the TSA site. Passengers traveling without a REAL ID or another acceptable alternative ID may experience delays as they’re traveling, as they may be directed to a separate area and undergo further screening, according to TSA.

House GOP leaders are pursuing one potential off-ramp for a vote that would be less politically precarious: Johnson backed a bill from Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., that would seek to limit district court judges from issuing nationwide injunctions, the sort of rulings that have hampered Trump from fully enacting his plans on issues from deportation to federal agency cuts.

The only warrants for them, the attorneys said, were written up after they were detained. “The creation of a warrant after the fact does not cure the warrantless nature of these incidents,” attorneys for the plaintiffs wrote, “and the Settlement’s training material specifically forbid reliance on post hoc administrative warrants to avoid warrantless arrest requirements.”

The president told reporters on Air Force One that it was customary to let go of “people that we don’t like, or people that we don’t think do the job, or people that may have loyalty to somebody else.” He said he wasn't sure how many officials had been fired.

Besides purging "improper ideology" from Smithsonian facilities, Trump directed the Department of the Interior to determine whether "public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties" in its jurisdiction have been removed or changed "to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history." The order directs the agency to reinstate those monuments and ensure they do not contain descriptions that "inappropriately disparage Americans past or living."

That puts the total employees at around 62,000 people -- down from 82,000 at the start of the Trump administration. The agency oversees the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services -- among other divisions.

Kennedy, a longtime anti-vaccine activist with a well-documented history of promoting misinformation, promised ahead of his confirmation as HHS secretary that he would not take away vaccines. Since taking office, however, he has repeatedly downplayed the severity of measles currently sweeping the country — outbreaks that have hospitalized scores of children and left at least two dead. He has publicly pushed unproven treatments, including vitamin A regimens that have reportedly sickened children, and offered limp public support for vaccines themselves — despite vaccines offering the safest, most effective way to prevent many infectious diseases. Under his leadership, HHS has overseen mass firings across federal health agencies, including staff responsible for outbreak response and vaccine access; canceled or postponed meetings of independent vaccine advisory committees; and ended vaccine education campaigns.

The mere possibility that Trump could erode the Federal Reserve's independence has been enough to unnerve investors and tank the stock market. Trump risks plunging the global financial system into crisis if that threat becomes a reality and he attempts to remove Fed chair Jerome Powell or undermine his authority.

And while the suit only names OpenAI and its financial backer, Microsoft, other AI companies also scrape the web for content to train their models. For the most part, the AI industry has followed OpenAI's lead when it comes to training chatbot and other AI services, operating under the premise that processing data found on the open web into chatbot answers is legally protected by copyright law.

Dugan and another judge entered the hallway and confronted the arrest team, telling one deportation officer that he needed a judicial warrant to make an arrest instead of an “administrative warrant,” the affidavit said. Dugan then ordered them to go to the chief judge’s office, it said.

A “type-C municipal corporation,” Starbase was officially formed earlier this month after Musk’s aerospace and defense contractor prevailed in a local election. It is now run by officials who are SpaceX employees and former employees. As of early this year, the population of Starbase stood at around 500 people, with around 260 directly employed by SpaceX, the Texas Tribune reported. Most other residents of Starbase are relatives of SpaceX employees.

Tesla shares have lost more than a quarter of their value since the beginning of this year, as of 13:51 EDT (18:51 BST) on Wednesday.

The South African government did pass a land reform law earlier this year, allowing in rare circumstances for expropriation without compensation, but zero land has been seized. In fact, while whites in South Africa account for some 7 percent of the population, they still own about 70% of commercial farmland.

The transfer of Ozturk first appeared to violate a federal court order from Tuesday, which directed the DHS and Ice to give the court 48 hours’ notice before attempting to take her out of Massachusetts. But on Thursday, government lawyers said her transfer took place before the court’s order.

Mr. Kennedy’s ideas for containing bird flu are unorthodox. He has suggested that instead of culling birds when the infection is discovered, farmers should let the virus run through the flocks. Then, he has said, farmers should identify birds that survive the illness and study them to identify the source of their immunity. Many scientists assert that would be inhumane and dangerous. Last week, Mr. Kennedy urged the Canadian authorities not to kill 400 ostriches that had been exposed to H5N1, and Dr. Mehmet Oz, who oversees Medicare and Medicaid, offered to relocate the birds to his ranch in Florida.

The underlying machine learning model that powers ChatGPT, like all so-called Large Language Models (LLMs), was trained on massive amounts of data scraped from the internet. With training and reinforcement from humans, the program ideally generates new strings of texts without churning out any of the original text it ingested. Previous work has already shown that image generators can be forced to generate examples from their training data—including copyrighted works—and an early OpenAI LLM produced contact information belonging to a researcher. But Google’s new research shows that ChatGPT, which is a massively popular consumer app with millions of users, can also be made to do this. Worryingly, some of the extracted training data contained identifying information from real people, including names, email addresses, and phone numbers.

Much like human memory, GPT-3.5 Turbo’s recall was not perfect. The output that the researchers were able to extract was still subject to hallucination — a tendency to produce false information. In the example output they provided for Times employees, many of the personal email addresses were either off by a few characters or entirely wrong. But 80 percent of the work addresses the model returned were correct.

Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he will ban government scientists from publishing in leading medical journals and proposed creating an “in-house” publication by the department. “We are probably going to stop publishing in the Lancet, the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA and those other journals because they are all corrupt,” Kennedy said during an episode of “The Ultimate Human” podcast. Kennedy said such publications are “vessels” for pharmaceutical companies.

Over the last four years, the office prosecuted more than 1,500 people as part of the massive investigation into the violence at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. While Trump has pardoned the Jan. 6 defendants, Martin has taken action against the prosecutors who brought those cases. In just three months, he has overseen the dismissal of outstanding Jan. 6-related cases, fired more than a dozen prosecutors and opened an investigation into the charging decisions made in those riot cases. Martin has also investigated Democratic lawmakers and members of the Biden family; forced out the chief of the criminal division after she refused to initiate an investigation desired by Trump appointees citing a lack of evidence, according to her resignation letter; threatened Georgetown University’s law school over its diversity, equity and inclusion policies; and vowed to investigate threats against Department of Government Efficiency employees or “chase” people in the federal government "discovered to have broken the law or even acted simply unethically.”

The strategy used by the Trump administration to reduce the size of government has been indiscriminate and far-reaching, meant to oust civil servants as fast as possible in as many agencies as possible while demoralizing the workers that remain on the job. As Russell Vought, director of the Trump White House’s Office of Management and Budget and an architect of Project 2025, put it in a speech first reported by ProPublica and Documented: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”

Another standard step in the search for WFA is a dive into reports by an agency’s inspector general or the General Accountability Office, an arm of Congress with deep expertise in examining federal agencies. The inspectors are independent, and their reports can be a rich source of reporting avenues to pursue. President Donald Trump complicated any prospects DOGE had of using this knowledge by firing 17 inspectors general who were responsible for some of the biggest budgets in the federal government, including the Pentagon and Social Security Administration. As for the GAO, the head of the organization told Congress that his analysts have had little contact with DOGE. Gene Dodaro, the comptroller general, said the GAO has a list of reforms that could save the federal government $200 billion without laying off massive numbers of federal workers. Dodaro said staff cuts were an inefficient way to cut the budget since payroll costs are less than 10% of total spending.

Von Massow suggests a number of explanations for that. It gets colder in Canada, so barns are more tightly sealed, which helps keep flu virus carried by wild birds out. Canada also has fewer free-range chickens, which are more susceptible to getting infected. But perhaps the biggest difference is that egg farms in Canada are much smaller, so when one farm does suffer a flu outbreak, the effects are less far-reaching. The typical egg farm in Canada has about 25,000 laying hens, whereas many farms in the U.S. have well over a million. In effect, American farmers have put a lot more of their eggs in a relatively small number of baskets.

Those accused of housing discrimination seem to have taken notice. HUD officials described an increase in defendants ignoring correspondence from investigators or even copying Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency in their communication with HUD, seemingly in hopes the cost-cutting department will take their side. “For them to face a consequence, they will need to be brought through a litigation process, which requires expenditure of litigation from the department, and they know that we don’t have those resources anymore,” one HUD official said. “They also feel emboldened that this administration will not consider the things that they are doing to be illegal.” Some defendants have been more explicit about this. In one case, a midwestern city — which had allegedly allowed local politicians to block affordable housing in white neighborhoods — asked HUD officials if the agency still had the backing to pursue the case if the city walked away from the negotiating table, one official said. In another case, a public housing authority, also in the Midwest, rescinded a six-figure settlement it had offered two days prior, citing Trump’s newly issued executive order attacking “disparate-impact liability.” The housing authority had allegedly favored white applicants and denied applicants with even modest criminal records. HUD spent years building the case; it crumbled in 48 hours.

The Trump administration will be revoking the legal status of hundreds of thousands of Latin American and Haitian migrants welcomed into the U.S. under a Biden-era sponsorship process, urging them to self-deport or face arrest and removal by deportation agents.

Nearly a dozen states have launched specialized websites promoting open government positions to unemployed federal workers, with many hosting job fairs aimed at them. A handful are expediting hiring practices to overcome bureaucratic slog. Others are developing advertising campaigns, across social media and public-transit facilities, with a shared theme: the federal government under President Donald Trump doesn’t care about you — but we do.

Waltz appears to change the settings so messages will automatically disappear after one week. In theory, this is something that is considered best practice to keep private information secure from prying eyes — but in this case, it raises federal record-keeping concerns. Under the Presidential Records Act, conversations of this nature must be memorialized in accordance with US law. It remains unclear if any official record of this conversation exists. Later in the conversation, Waltz extends the timer to four weeks.

In the benchmark survey, known as Bright Line Watch, U.S.-based professors rate the performance of American democracy on a scale from zero (complete dictatorship) to 100 (perfect democracy). After President Trump's election in November, scholars gave American democracy a rating of 67. Several weeks into Trump's second term, that figure plummeted to 55.

Susan Lanzoni, a historian of psychology and author of Empathy: A History, said by email that through all her research into the intellectual history of empathy, she had “never seen empathy vilified in the way it has been in these current sources." "The disparagement of empathy is the flip side, I believe, of a deliberate effort to set up a permission structure to dehumanize others, and to narrow the definition of who should be included in a democratic state, or in a Christian community,” she said. “To me, this disparagement marks a step in the destruction of our multicultural democracy, and provides a path from the verbal dehumanization of others to open discrimination and maltreatment.”

Taal, a British-Gambian doctoral student at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, sued the administration on February 15 to challenge Trump’s executive orders curtailing free speech and seeking to deport pro-Palestinian activists, which have been paired with a wave of attacks by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers—in some cases masked and hooded—on graduate and undergraduate students. At 12:52 a.m. on Friday—within five days of Taal’s lawsuit—Taal’s lawyers received an email “inviting” their client to “surrender to ICE custody.” At 7:00 p.m. the following day, Trump’s lawyers filed a brief informing Taal that the State Department had already revoked his visa, without his knowledge, on March 14—the day before Taal filed his lawsuit. Days later, ICE agents arrived on Cornell’s campus attempting to find and seize him.

Searches of federal court dockets turned up no documents related to Wang, Ma, or any searches of their residences. The FBI spokeswoman didn't answer questions seeking which US district court issued the warrant and when, and whether either Wang or Ma is being detained by authorities. Justice Department representatives didn't return an email seeking the same information. An email sent to a personal email address belonging to Wang went unanswered at the time this post went live. Their resident status (e.g. US citizens or green card holders) is currently unknown.

In exchange for detaining the deportees in what one judge has called "one of the most dangerous prisons in the Western Hemisphere," the Salvadoran government is receiving $6 million from the U.S. government.

President Donald Trump on Monday doubled down on his idea of sending U.S. citizens to foreign prisons, telling El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele he wanted to send "homegrown criminals" to his country next, according to a video posted by Bukele's office on X.

Not everyone is voicing opposition to Trump's concept of detaining U.S. citizens and sending them overseas. NPR contacted three prominent conservative legal scholars. All declined to comment. We also contacted three conservative legal think tanks. One declined to comment; two others didn't respond. NPR could also find no instances of Republican lawmakers in the House or Senate commenting on the idea.

A House Democrat who spoke on the condition of anonymity told Axios: "With all due respect to some of those folks, I know it's an important issue, but should it be the big issue for Democrats? Probably not." "I think we ought to focus on the basic things that affect people on a day-to-day basis — I'm sure in Maryland it's a big issue," the lawmaker said, citing DOGE cuts, tariffs and Social Security as issues to home in on. Another House Democrat previously told Axios the issue is a "soup du jour" and a "trap" for their party, saying their colleagues should not "take the bait for one hairdresser."

In court papers filed in Vermont district court late Wednesday, Öztürk's lawyers said the immigration judge in Louisiana denied the request for bond after Department of Homeland Security attorneys argued that she was a flight risk. The court papers say that the government attorneys presented one document — a one-paragraph State Department memo revoking her visa — to support their opposition to the bond.

On Feb. 10, more than a dozen Department of Homeland Security officials joined a video conference to discuss an obscure, sparsely funded program overseen by its Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. The office, charged with investigating when the national security agency is accused of violating the rights of both immigrants and U.S. citizens, had found itself in the crosshairs of Elon Musk’s secretive Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

President Donald Trump delivered another jarring reversal in American trade policy Wednesday, suspending for 90 days import taxes he’d imposed barely 13 hours earlier on dozens of countries while escalating his trade war with China. The moves triggered a powerful stock market rally on Wall Street but left businesses, investors and America’s trading partners bewildered about what the president is attempting to achieve. The U-turn came after the sweeping global tariffs Trump announced last week set off a four-day rout in global financial markets, paralyzed businesses and raised fears the U.S. and world economies would tumble into recession.

“The revolving door is insulting,” Landry told state lawmakers last year as he kicked off a special legislative session on crime during which he blamed the state’s high violent crime rate on lenient sentences and “misguided post-conviction programs” that fail to rehabilitate prisoners. (In fact, Louisiana’s recidivism rate has declined over the past decade, according to a 2024 department of corrections report.) The Legislature eliminated parole for nearly everyone imprisoned for crimes committed after Aug. 1, making Louisiana the 17th state in a half-century to abolish parole altogether and the first in 24 years to do so. For the vast majority of prisoners who were already behind bars, like Alexander, another law put an algorithm in charge of determining whether they have a shot at early release; only prisoners rated low risk qualify for parole.

Before the US launched military strikes on Yemen in March, Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, sent detailed information about the planned attacks to a private Signal group chat that he created himself, which included his wife, his brother and about a dozen other people, the New York Times reported on Sunday.

The New York Times reported Tuesday that two of its journalists and one at another outlet had received responses from administration officials to email queries that declined to engage with them over the presence of the pronouns. In one case, a reporter asking about the closure of a research observatory received an email reply from Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, saying, “As a matter of policy, we do not respond to reporters with pronouns in their bios.”

Among the most notable changes outlined in the bill is the requirement to prove U.S. citizenship before registering to vote. Acceptable documents will include a birth certificate, U.S. passport, naturalization paperwork and certain versions of the Real ID that indicate citizenship. But for as many as 69 million American women who have taken on their spouse's name, their birth certificates no longer match the names they use today, according to an analysis by the progressive Center for American Progress. Meanwhile, more than half of all Americans do not have a passport, according to a 2023 YouGov survey.

The Federal Trade Commission's blockbuster antitrust case against Meta kicks off on Monday in a courtroom in Washington, D.C. It's the culmination of a nearly six-year investigation into whether the social media giant broke competition laws in acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp.

When asked by LaPook if he personally approved the more than $11 billion in cuts to local and state public health programs — funding that helps states address infectious disease, mental health, addiction and childhood vaccination — Kennedy said, "No, I'm not familiar with those cuts." The cuts have been temporarily blocked by a federal judge. "The cuts were mainly DEI cuts, which the president ordered," Kennedy said, but the $11 billion in public health funding was not DEI-related.

A controversial bill seeking to reinterpret New Zealand's founding document, which established the rights of both Māori and non-Māori in the country, has been defeated at its second reading. The Treaty Principles Bill was voted down 112 votes to 11, days after a government committee recommended that it should not proceed.

In February, after Donald Trump returned to office, Army veteran Mark Puhl’s medical requests to the Department of Veterans Affairs—for surgery and a chemotherapy port, both related to cancer for which he had already received care through the VA—were denied. Puhl, who lives in Phoenix, Arizona, holds the cost-cutting efforts of Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” responsible. “They approved me to see the surgeon who would do the surgery,” Puhl, 37, said. “They approved an MRI on top of that, to make sure that there were no vessels wrapped around the lumps they wanted to cut out to test for cancer. But then they denied the surgery itself.”

In a memo obtained by NPR, regional leadership at one VA facility offered a script for its therapists to read to patients. "Before we begin our session, I want to inform you that I am currently in a shared office space," reads the script. "While I will do my utmost to maintain your privacy, I cannot guarantee complete confidentiality."

Medication records from pharmacy chains, lab testing and genomics data from patients treated by the Department of Veterans Affairs and Indian Health Service, claims from private insurers and data from smartwatches and fitness trackers will all be linked together, he said.

A senior Department of Homeland Security official told CNN Lopez-Gomez was detained because he said he was in the US illegally, but Lopez-Gomez’s attorney said his client never said that... Lopez-Gomez, who speaks an indigenous language and is not fluent in English or Spanish, was arrested with two men under a Florida law that took effect in February and was temporarily blocked April 4 by a federal judge, who barred its enforcement until Friday, court records show. It was not immediately clear why the suspended law was in play.

“I feel fine leaving that place, I felt bad in there. They didn’t give us anything to eat all day yesterday,” he told the Florida Phoenix in Spanish. He added that he had asked the trooper who made the arrest why he was being taken into custody, because he was a U.S. citizen.

“When they do the inmate count we are threatened to not leave our beds or we will lose privileges, which means that we are often stuck waiting in our beds for hours,” she said. “At mealtimes, there is so much anxiety because there is no schedule when it comes. … They threaten to close the door if we don’t leave the room in time, meaning we won’t get a meal.”

The questionnaire, sent by text to their personal cellphones, linked to a Microsoft form bearing the logo of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. After instructing respondents to check a box indicating whether they were Jewish or Israeli, and whether they practiced Judaism, it asked if they had experienced harassment as a result, including “unwelcome comments, jokes or discussions.”

After voting to confirm Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, Schumer told his members Tuesday he will vote against any remaining Cabinet nominees and urged his colleagues to do the same, an aide to the New York Democrat said. Just hours later, Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) voted for Pam Bondi’s attorney general nomination, and on Wednesday Fetterman and Welch voted for HUD’s Scott Turner.

Federal health workers are expressing fear and alarm after a website called “DEI Watch List” published the photos, names and public information of a number of workers across health agencies, describing them at one point as “targets.” It’s unclear when the website, which lists mostly Black employees who work in agencies primarily within the Department of Health and Human Services, first appeared. “Offenses” for the workers listed on the website include working on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, donating to Democrats and using pronouns in their bios.

Months before his remains were discovered last week, his family requested two wellness checks with police in Canandaigua, New York, his mother, Linda Nordquist, told NBC News in a phone call. She added that her son expressed that he was in danger to local social services and she questioned if more could have been done to intervene before his killing. "Sam may be alive today if they would have done their jobs," she said through tears. The Canandaigua Police Department's chief of police, Mathew Nielsen, said in a phone call that none of his roughly 30 officers spoke with the family prior to Sam's death. He suggested that the family is confused about which law enforcement agency they called to perform the wellness checks. The phone number the family said they called matched the number of CPD's office. The family also shared a screenshot of their call log with NBC News.

According to the Post, since shortly after the election, Musk’s DOGE team has been requesting access to payment systems under the Bureau of the Fiscal Service that control the distribution of more than $6 trillion in annual funds. Some of the payments that run through the bureau include Social Security and Medicare benefits, tax refunds, and federal salaries.

As of Jan. 24, 67 people are being treated for active TB, most of them in Wyandotte County, Bronaugh said. Another 79 have latent TB. The state’s provisional 2024 count shows 79 active TB cases and 213 latent cases in the two counties where the outbreak is happening, Wyandotte and Johnson. Not all of those are linked to the outbreak and Bronaugh did not respond to requests for clarification.

A performer in Kendrick Lamar's Super Bowl halftime show was detained on the field and could face charges after unfurling a combination Sudanese-Palestinian flag with “Sudan” and “Gaza” written on it. The NFL confirmed the person was part of the 400-member field cast. The New Orleans Police Department said in a statement that “law enforcement is working to determine applicable charges in this incident.” “The individual will (be) banned for life from all NFL stadiums and events,” NFL spokesperson Brian McCarthy said in an emailed statement.

Chickens raised for meat — known as "broilers" — live on different farms than those that produce eggs. And while broilers are not immune from avian flu, they haven't been hit nearly as hard as their egg-laying cousins. "They're younger typically, and older birds are more susceptible to the virus," says Tom Super of the National Chicken Council. "And broiler chickens are also not on the farm as long — only about seven weeks."

Starting on February 26th, 2025, Amazon is removing a feature from its website allowing you to download purchased books to a computer and then copy them manually to a Kindle over USB. It’s a feature that a lot of Kindle users are probably not aware of, given books can be more easily sent to devices over Wi-Fi, but it’s especially useful for backing up purchases or converting them to other formats compatible with non-Kindle e-readers.

The apex of Musk’s work so far came on Monday at the Washington headquarters for the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, where yellow police tape blocked access to the lobby and hundreds of employees were locked out of computer systems. Musk said Trump had agreed to let him shutter the agency. “It’s not an apple with a worm in it, what we have is just a ball of worms,” Musk said of the world’s largest provider of humanitarian, development and security assistance. “You’ve got to basically get rid of the whole thing. It’s beyond repair.”

The prosecutors resigned after Emil Bove, the acting U.S. deputy attorney general, issued a memo Monday ordering federal prosecutors in New York to drop the case against Adams, arguing, in part, that it hampered his ability to tackle “illegal immigration and violent crime.”

That weekend, she made her decision. She replied to the original email with the word "Resign" and hit send. The following week, in an effort to be transparent, Goggin emailed her supervisor about her decision. But a few days later, she got another surprise in her inbox: an email from the VA, exempting scores of positions from the resignation offer, including social workers.

In a move that has shaken arts organizations, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) said on its website that it is eliminating a funding program that supports diversity, equity and inclusion and underserved communities. Instead, the federal agency will prioritize programs that celebrate the 250th anniversary of the United States.

President Trump announced in a memorandum late last month plans to house at Guantánamo Bay up to 30,000 immigrants suspected of being in the U.S. illegally as part of his immigration crackdown. The White House directed the secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security "to take all appropriate actions to expand the Migrant Operations Center at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay to full capacity."

Hegseth told almost 50 of Ukraine ’s Western backers on Wednesday that he had joined their meeting “to directly and unambiguously express that stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe.” “The United States faces consequential threats to our homeland. We must — and we are — focusing on security of our own borders,” he said. Reading the riot act to U.S. allies, Hegseth said that Ukraine will not get all its territory back from Russia and will not be allowed to join NATO, which would provide the ultimate security guarantee to ensure that Russian President Vladimir Putin never attacks it again.

An NNSA nuclear safety specialist fired Thursday because she was a two-year probationary employee told NBC News she was still locked out of her email, but her manager had called to inform her that her “termination was rescinded” and to report to work on Tuesday. “I will be honest, I intend to keep looking for work,” the employee said. “I will go back, but as soon as I find another role, I’ll be leaving.” Asked why she will still look for employment elsewhere, she said that she has “no faith I will keep my job.”

53% of Americans approve of Trump so far, according to a newly released CBS News/YouGov poll conducted Feb. 5 to 7, while 47% disapproved.

The backpack recovered by the NYPD that allegedly belonged to the suspect wanted in the shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, only had two items inside: a Tommy Hilfiger jacket and Monopoly money, sources with knowledge of the ongoing investigation told ABC News Saturday.

Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. is testing a technology that embeds cameras, sensors and digital screens in the cooler doors in its stores, a new network of “smart” displays that marketers can use to target ads for specific types of shoppers. The refrigerator and freezer doors act as a digital merchandising platform that depicts the food and drinks inside in their best light, but also as an in-store billboard that can serve ads to consumers who approach, based on variables such as the approximate age the technology believes they are, their gender and the weather.

Following the set-up of the encampments, multiple Emory and Atlanta police officers, as well as Georgia state patrol officers, arrived on campus, with videos showing the officers forcefully arresting people. One video appeared to show multiple officers holding down a restrained person as they tased them. Another video showed an officer arresting Noelle McAfee, chair of the university’s philosophy department.

Participants in the chemical weapons discoveries said the United States suppressed knowledge of finds for multiple reasons, including that the government bristled at further acknowledgment it had been wrong. “They needed something to say that after Sept. 11 Saddam used chemical rounds,” Mr. Lampier said. “And all of this was from the pre-1991 era.” Others pointed to another embarrassment. In five of six incidents in which troops were wounded by chemical agents, the munitions appeared to have been designed in the United States, manufactured in Europe and filled in chemical agent production lines built in Iraq by Western companies.

But several labor unions say employers should be doing more to fill the persistent vacancies, like raising wages or improving working conditions to attract new workers, rather than placing the burden on their existing employees. In some cases, labor groups say employers are using overtime as a cost-saving measure. “What we have seen is an aggressive normalization of understaffing,” said Michelle Mahon, assistant director of nursing practice for the union National Nurses United. “The hospital industry has been capitalizing on this narrative that there’s a nursing shortage, when in fact there is not. There are a million nurses who are licensed to practice in this country who are not working in nursing largely because of understaffing and poor working conditions.”

In fact, more such households and many others also now struggle to pay rent, according to a newly released report from the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. It finds that in 2022, as rents spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic, a record half of U.S. renters paid more than 30% of their income for rent and utilities. Nearly half of those people were severely cost-burdened, paying more than 50% of their income.

What they are seeing is a lot more insidious and a lot more homegrown. A report released in 2018 by the State Department ranked the U.S. as one of the worst countries in the world for human trafficking. While the Department of Justice has estimated that between 14,500 and 17,500 foreign nationals are trafficked into this country every year, this number pales in comparison to the number of American minors who are trafficked within it: A 2009 Department of Health and Human Services review of human trafficking into and within the United States found that roughly 199,000 American minors are sexually exploited each year, and that between 244,000 and 325,000 American youths are considered to be at risk of being trafficked specifically in the sex industry. Heartbreakingly, many of these children are victimized not by strangers who’ve abducted them from mall parking lots but rather by people they know and trust: Studies have found that as much as 44 percent of victims are trafficked by family members, most often parents (and not infrequently parents who were trafficked themselves). Between 2011 and 2020, there was an 84 percent increase in the number of people prosecuted for a federal human-trafficking offense. Of the defendants charged in 2020, 92 percent were male, 63 percent were white, 66 percent had no prior convictions, and 95 percent were U.S. citizens.

Some county mental health departments and non-profit organizations like Mental Health America provide free and low-cost therapy for people on Medicaid, people who receive social security for disability, and those without insurance. That's what's called "community mental health, as opposed to traditional outpatient or inpatient treatment," Nguyen explains. Some health centers that receive funding from the federal government also offer low-cost or free mental health care. Find federally-funded health centers in your zip code using this searchable directory.

The Wisconsin Institute filed another lawsuit in October, this one on behalf of two construction firms. The lawsuit seeks to dismantle the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Disadvantaged Business Enterprise program, which dates back to the Reagan administration and requires that 10% of funds authorized for highway and transit federal assistance programs be expended with small businesses owned by women, minorities or other socially and economically disadvantaged people.

DeSantis announced his departure in a post on X, in which he also endorsed Trump. "They have had obvious huge policy differences, but he sees Nikki as a corporate sellout and globalist and, outside of Covid, philosophically agrees with Trump,” the adviser said. “That decision needed to be made, as far as he is concerned.”

Kala Shankle, policy and regulatory affairs director for the National Community Pharmacists Association, which represents 22,000 independent pharmacies, says insurers have punished pharmacists who violate gag orders by dropping them from the plan's network.

Kasey Meehan of the free speech advocacy group PEN America says she's watched things in Texas escalate. She points to a teacher fired last year for sharing a graphic novel with her students that showed Anne Frank having a romantic daydream about another girl. Another teacher featured on an NBC podcast left her job under pressure after making literature available to students featuring a positive transgender character.

In January, DeSantis and his allies overhauled the 13-member Board of Trustees and installed a majority of conservative figures. The new trustees promptly fired the college president and replaced her with a Republican politician, the first of several administrators to lose their jobs. Next, they dismantled the office of diversity and equity. They have not revealed future plans but trustees have posted vague warnings on social media like: “You will see changes in 120 days.” Changes so far have come in tandem with a new bill DeSantis unveiled Jan. 31 aimed at overhauling higher education in Florida. The bill would ban gender studies majors and minors, eliminate diversity programs and any hiring based on diversity, weaken tenure protections and put all hiring decisions in the hands of each university’s board of trustees.

During the protest, which she says swelled to about 40 students and faculty members, Harrity — then the president of New College's student senate — felt obligated to act as “the voice of the student body.” She approached Rufo: “I tell him my full name, my title, and I say, ‘You must listen to us.’” As the police dragged her back, Harrity says, she spat on the ground twice, once near Rufo’s feet. Two months later, Harrity learned from a Tampa Bay Times reporter that Rufo had posted a document with her name and birthdate on it to his over 500,000 followers on X, formerly Twitter, pressing charges of battery, alleging Harrity spit on him. Harrity says she got a lawyer, who was able to strike a deal: If Harrity left New College and left Rufo alone, he would drop the charges.

QTPOC also face additional challenges. Homophobia, transphobia, and racism are all interrelated, and when marginalized identities are combined, people at the intersection of these identities are subject to unique forms of discrimination. One student told me that being trans and Latinx was so difficult in his animal science department that he dropped out. “Many of my peers in animal science came from farming backgrounds and I don’t think it was healthy for me to hear people talk about Mexicans like they are property,” he said. “One time my friends and I were attacked… and it felt like a pretty charged incident since all of us were Latinx or Black and visibly gay.”