TV News LIES

The Supreme Court on Monday took up a counselor’s challenge to Colorado’s ban on “conversion therapy” for LGBTQ+ minors, agreeing to decide if the ban violates her First Amendment rights.

The court has declined to hear similar challenges in the past, including as recently as 2023 when three of the conservative justices disagreed with that decision.

The increased interest in the bans – which have been enacted in more than 20 Democratic-led states – comes as the court is expected to give a green light to GOP-led states’ efforts to ban gender-affirming care for minors.

Alliance Defending Freedom, which represents the Christian counselor who challenged the law, argues it violates First Amendment rights by “censoring” her conversations with clients.

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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is planning a large study into potential connections between vaccines and autism, two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters, despite extensive scientific research that has disproved or failed to find evidence of such links.

It is unclear whether the health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, who has long promoted anti-vaccine views, is involved in the planned CDC study or how it would be carried out. The CDC and the Department of Health and Human Services were not immediately available for comment.

The CDC’s move comes amid one of the largest measles outbreaks the US has seen in the past decade, with more than 150 cases and two deaths in Texas and New Mexico. The outbreak has been fueled by declining vaccination rates in parts of the United States where parents have been falsely persuaded that such shots do more harm than good.

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A bill that would have required women seeking medication abortions to get ultrasounds has been vetoed by Wyoming’s Republican governor, who questioned whether it was reasonable and necessary especially for victims of rape and incest.

“Mandating this intimate, personally invasive, and often medically unnecessary procedure goes too far,” Mark Gordon wrote in a letter explaining his veto late on Monday.

Groups working to maintain abortion access in Wyoming – the first state to attempt to explicitly outlaw medication abortions – praised the veto even though Gordon over the past three years has signed into law several bills seeking to ban the procedure.

“It’s important that women are able to access this healthcare without undue and unnecessary burden,” Christine Lichtenfels, executive director of the abortion access advocate Chelsea’s Fund, said on Tuesday.

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Australia's most prolific blood and plasma donor, James Harrison, has died at age 88. Known as the "Man with the Golden Arm," Harrison is credited with saving the lives of 2.4 million babies over the course of more than half a century.

Harrison died "peacefully in his sleep" at a nursing home on Feb. 17, Lifeblood — the Australian Red Cross branch responsible for blood donations — announced on Saturday.

Harrison donated blood and plasma a whopping 1,173 times, according to Lifeblood, every two weeks between 1954 and 2018. All but 10 were from his right arm, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.

The Philadelphia school district will reportedly ignore a rule directing schools to ban transgender athletes from participating in sports that match their gender identities, according to reporting from the Philadelphia Inquirer.

The school district “strives to ensure safety, equity and justice for all students regardless of gender identity or gender expression so that they can imagine and realize any future they desire”, a spokesperson, Christina Clark, said in a statement on Tuesday to the Inquirer.

The Supreme Court on Monday passed on the chance to get rid of protest-free zones at abortion clinics, frustrating activists who say they need to get close enough to patients to make eye contact.

The court declined to hear challenges to a law in southern Illinois and to a 2014 ordinance in Englewood, New Jersey, that created a protest-free buffer zone around certain health care facilities.

Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito said they would have taken the cases.

Anti-abortion groups, as well as a number of Republican attorneys general, wanted the justices to use the challenges to overturn a 2000 decision − Hill v. Colorado − that upheld protest restrictions around abortion clinics.

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