TV News LIES

Israel and Hamas completed the sixth exchange of hostages and Palestinian prisoners on Saturday with just over two weeks remaining in their fragile Gaza ceasefire’s initial phase, and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio landed in Israel to begin a Mideast tour.

Israelis expressed relief as the three hostages — Argentinian-Israeli Iair Horn, 46; American-Israeli Sagui Dekel Chen, 36; and Russian-Israeli Alexander Troufanov, 29 — seemed in better condition than the emaciated ones freed a week ago.

Troufanov was informed of his father’s death in the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack that sparked the 16-month war. Chen was meeting his youngest daughter for the first time. Horn’s brother, Eitan, remains in captivity.

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Mykola Vashchuk may be thousands of miles from Kyiv, his home town, but life has never been busier.

He runs pierogi food businesses here in Cleveland and back in Ukraine, works part-time for a local charity, while studying for a law degree at Cleveland State University. His wife works at a daycare and the couple is raising two sons. He and his family have built a new life on the shores of Lake Erie, having fled Ukraine after a Russian bomb blew out two windows of their Kyiv apartment in December 2022.

“There was no electricity, no water, so we decided to come to the US,” he says.

The US agency charged with overseeing nuclear weapons is looking to contact workers who were fired on Thursday as part of the Trump administration’s federal cost-cutting measures, but are now needed back.

Officials with the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) attempted to notify some probationary employees who had been let go that they are due to be reinstated – but they struggled to find them because their contact information was missing.

“The termination letters for some NNSA probationary employees are being rescinded, but we do not have a good way to get in touch with those personnel,” the agency said in an email, obtained by NBC News.

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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