Judge blocks Trump administration's ending of legal protections for 1.1M Venezuelans and Haitians
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A federal judge on Friday blocked the Trump administration from ending temporary legal protections that have granted more than 1 million people from Haiti and Venezuela the right to live and work in the United States.
The ruling by U.S. District Judge Edward Chen of San Francisco for the plaintiffs means 600,000 Venezuelans whose temporary protections expired in April or whose protections were about to expire Sept. 10 have status to stay and work in the United States. It also keeps protections for about 500,000 Haitians.
Chen scolded Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem for revoking protections for Venezuelans and Haitians that the judge said would send them “back to conditions that are so dangerous that even the State Department advises against travel to their home countries.”
He said Noem's actions were arbitrary and capricious, and she exceeded her authority in ending protections that were extended by the Biden administration.
Presidential administrations have executed the law for 35 years based on the best available information and in consultation with other agencies, “a process that involves careful study and analysis. Until now," Chen wrote.
AP reporting calls into question why and how Israel attacked a Gaza hospital
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — Associated Press reporting into an Israeli attack on a Gaza Strip hospital that killed 22 people, including five journalists, raises serious questions about Israel’s rationale for the strikes and the way they were carried out. Among those killed was Mariam Dagga, who worked for AP and other news organizations.
Israeli forces struck a position well known as a journalists’ gathering point, because — a military official said — they believed a camera on the roof was being used by Hamas to observe troops. The official cited “suspicious behavior” and unspecified intelligence, but the only detail given was that there was a towel on the camera and the person with it — which the army interpreted as an effort to avoid identification.
AP has gathered new evidence indicating the camera in question actually belonged to a Reuters video journalist who routinely covered his equipment with a white cloth to protect it from the scorching sun and dust. The journalist, Hussam al-Masri, was killed in the initial strike.
The evidence calls into question why Israeli forces went through with the strike. Witnesses say Israel frequently observed the position by drone, including about 40 minutes before the attack, giving an opportunity to correctly identify al-Masri.
AP's findings also reveal other troubling decisions from the Aug. 25 attack:
Israel calls on famine-stricken Gaza City residents to move to safe zone as it expands operations
DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — Israel's army called Saturday on Palestinians in Gaza City to move to a humanitarian area it designated in the south as it expanded its operations in preparation for seizing the famine-stricken city.
Parts of the city, home to nearly 1 million people, are already considered “red zones,” where evacuation orders have been issued ahead of expected heavy fighting.
Aid groups have repeatedly warned that a large-scale evacuation of Gaza City would exacerbate the dire humanitarian crisis. Palestinians have been uprooted and displaced multiple times during the nearly two-year-long war, with many being too weak to move and having nowhere to go.
Israeli military spokesperson Avichay Adraee wrote in X that the army declared Muwasi — a makeshift tent camp in southern Gaza Strip — a humanitarian area and urged everyone in the city, which it called a Hamas stronghold and specified as a combat zone, to leave. The army said they could travel in cars down a designated road without being searched.
The military, in a statement, provided a map showing the area in Khan Younis that the humanitarian area encompasses, which includes the block where Nasser Hospital is located. The area around the hospital has been considered a red zone, though not the medical facility itself. Last week, Israel struck the hospital, killing 22 people, including Mariam Dagga, who worked for The Associated Press and other media outlets. The Hospital was not under evacuation.
Toddler evacuated from Gaza with rare disease recovers from malnutrition in Italian hospital
NAPLES, Italy (AP) — Since arriving emaciated in Italy from Gaza, little Shamm Qudeih has celebrated her second birthday and gained weight on a new diet that includes a special porridge — progress welcomed by doctors treating her for severe malnutrition worsened by a genetic metabolic disease.
Just weeks ago, the toddler was all skin and bones as she clung to her mother in a hospital in southern Gaza, after months of being unable to get the food and treatment she needed because of an Israeli blockade aimed at pressuring the Hamas militant group to release hostages. Then she was evacuated to Italy for medical treatment, along with six other Palestinian children.
A striking photo of Shamm wincing in her mother’s arms, with her hair matted and ribs protruding from her chest, was taken by Associated Press freelance journalist Mariam Dagga just days before the child left Gaza on Aug. 13. It was one of Dagga’s last images. She was among 22 people killed in an Aug. 25 Israeli strike on the same hospital in southern Gaza.
More than half a million people in Gaza, a quarter of the population, are experiencing catastrophic levels of hunger because of the blockade and ongoing military operations, the world's leading authority on hunger crises said last month. Gaza City, in the north, is experiencing famine, it said.
By this week, Shamm was sitting up, alert in a hospital crib in Naples, her fine blonde hair pulled into a high ponytail. She wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the word “cute.” Her wide eyes gleamed as her older sister and mother called her name from across the room, and she broke into a smile.
States move to protect vaccines in the face of attempts to remove mandates
Now that Florida is taking steps to be the first state to get rid of school vaccine mandates, some states are looking at following its lead while others are promising to protect vaccines for children and adults.
Florida's announcement Wednesday along with U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy's attempts to advance anti-vaccine policies have widened the debate over vaccine mandates — long a centerpiece of fighting infectious diseases.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said roughly 4 million deaths are prevented annually worldwide by childhood vaccinations.
While most Americans say kids should be vaccinated to attend school, adults nationwide are now less likely to think those immunizations are important. At the same time, routine childhood vaccine rates are falling.
Here is a rundown of what states are saying about vaccine mandates:
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An earthquake in Afghanistan’s east wipes out homes, generations and livelihoods
JALALABAD, Afghanistan (AP) — Ahmad Khan Safi had a good life in Afghanistan. The farmer raised livestock in the Dewagal Valley of Kunar Province, and people traveled from across the country to visit the area. Tourists marveled at its verdant landscape, winding paths and formidable slopes. The valley appeared untouched.
It was hard to reach, so inaccessible that people had to change cars four times from the city of Jalalabad, in neighboring Nangarhar province, and walk the rest of the way for several hours or ride a mule.
Safi had built a 10-room house from mud and stone because wood and cement were too expensive and impractical to transport. The home collapsed as soon as a major earthquake that killed at least 2,000 people struck on Aug. 31. His shock was quickly replaced by fear and panic.
“I was trapped in the mud and couldn’t breathe,” he told The Associated Press from a Jalalabad hospital. “I struggled a lot to get out, but was hit by rocks and fell so hard that my leg was injured.” He spent the night under the rubble, not knowing if his family was alive or dead.
Help came the following morning, around 10 a.m., when people arrived on foot from other districts.
Trump's job market promises fall flat as hiring collapses and inflation ticks up
WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. job market has gone from healthy to lethargic during President Donald Trump’s first seven months back in the White House, as hiring has collapsed and inflation has started to climb once again as his tariffs take hold.
Friday's jobs report showed employers added a mere 22,000 jobs in August, as the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.3%. Factories and construction firms shed workers. Revisions showed the economy lost 13,000 jobs in June, the first monthly losses since December 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The new data exposed the widening gap between the booming economy Trump promised and the more anemic reality of what he’s managed to deliver so far. The White House prides itself on operating at a breakneck speed, but it’s now asking the American people for patience, with Trump saying better job numbers might be a year away.
“We’re going to win like you’ve never seen,” Trump said Friday. “Wait until these factories start to open up that are being built all over the country, you’re going to see things happen in this country that nobody expects.”
The plea for patience has done little to comfort Americans, as economic issues that had been a strength for Trump for a decade have evolved into a persistent weakness. Approval of Trump’s economic leadership hit 56% in early 2020 during his first term, but that figure was 38% in July of this year, according to polling by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
Trump executive order aims to rename the Department of Defense as the Department of War
WASHINGTON (AP) — After months of campaigning for the Nobel Peace Prize, President Donald Trump sent a sharply different message on Friday when he signed an executive order aimed at rebranding the Department of Defense as the Department of War.
Trump said the switch was intended to signal to the world that the United States was a force to be reckoned with, and he complained that the Department of Defense’s name was “woke.”
“I think it sends a message of victory. I think it sends, really, a message of strength,” Trump said of the change as he authorized the Department of War as a secondary title for the Pentagon.
Congress has to formally authorize a new name, and several of Trump’s closest supporters on Capitol Hill proposed legislation earlier Friday to codify the new name into law.
But already there were cosmetic shifts. The Pentagon’s website went from “defense.gov” to “war.gov.” Signs were swapped around Hegseth’s office while more than a dozen employees watched. Trump said there would be new stationery, too.
Trump says US will host next year’s G20 summit at his Florida golf club but he won't make money
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump said Friday that the U.S. will host next year’s Group of 20 summit at his golf club in Doral, Florida, arguing it was “the best location” for the high-stakes international gathering but insisting his family's business "will not make any money on it.”
In his first term, Trump tried to host a separate global summit at the club, but backed down after criticism from his own party about the propriety of doing so. Now, though, Trump rarely travels domestically without golfing at or staying in properties bearing his name and has faced very little political blowback.
Trump's sons have taken over running the Trump Organization while their father is in the White House. But the president has nonetheless prided himself in blurring the line between domestic and global policy and generating profits for the Trump brand.
He's actively promoted his $TRUMP meme coin and even hosted the top 220 investors in it for a swanky dinner in May at his golf property in Virginia. The president made his first foreign trip to Saudi Arabia, after his sons crisscrossed the region drumming up business for the family's other cryptocurrency ventures. Trump also went to Scotland to inaugurate his new golf course there.
The G20 is made up of some of the world’s major economies, the European Union and the African Union. Hosting the G20 at Doral would be an especially striking example of using the presidency to enrich his family, but Trump wasted little time defending it.
Homeland security official says 475 people were detained during an immigration raid in Georgia
ELLABELL, Ga. (AP) — Immigration authorities said Friday they detained 475 people, most of them South Korean nationals, when hundreds of federal agents raided the sprawling manufacturing site in Georgia where Korean automaker Hyundai makes electric vehicles.
Steven Schrank, the lead Georgia agent of Homeland Security Investigations, said during a news conference Friday that the raid resulted from a monthslong investigation into allegations of illegal hiring at the site and was the “largest single site enforcement operation” in the agency's two-decade history.
The Thursday raid targeted one of Georgia’s largest and most high-profile manufacturing sites, where Hyundai Motor Group a year ago began manufacturing electric vehicles at a $7.6 billion plant. The site employs about 1,200 people in an area about 25 miles (40 kilometers) west of Savannah where bedroom communities bleed into farms. Gov. Brian Kemp and other officials have touted it as the state's largest economic development project.
Agents focused their operation on an adjacent plant that is still under construction at which Hyundai has partnered with LG Energy Solution to produce batteries that power EVs.
Court records filed this week indicated that prosecutors do not know who hired what it called “hundreds of illegal aliens.” The identity of the “actual company or contractor hiring the illegal aliens is currently unknown,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office wrote in a Thursday court filing.
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