Judge: Texas can’t cut Medicaid to Planned Parenthood

Judge: Texas can’t cut Medicaid to Planned Parenthood

AUSTIN, Texas

A federal judge ruled Tuesday that Texas can’t cut off Medicaid dollars to Planned Parenthood over secretly recorded videos taken by anti-abortion activists in 2015 that launched Republican efforts across the U.S. to defund the nation’s largest abortion provider.

An injunction issued by U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks of Austin comes after he delayed making a decision in January and essentially bought Planned Parenthood an extra month in the state’s Medicaid program.

Texas is now at least the sixth state where federal courts have kept Planned Parenthood eligible for Medicaid reimbursements for non-abortion services, although a bigger question remains over whether President Donald Trump will federally defund the organization.

More tests needed in Russian UN ambassador’s death

NEW YORK

Medical examiners who performed an autopsy on Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations said Tuesday that more tests are needed to determine how and why he fell ill in his office and later died.

Vitaly Churkin, who died Monday at a hospital at age 64, had been Russia’s envoy at the U.N. since 2006. He was the longest-serving ambassador on the Security Council, the U.N.’s most powerful body.

City medical examiners concluded Churkin’s death needed further study, which usually includes toxicology and other screenings. Those can take weeks.

Suspicious package causes evacuations in New Jersey

LINDEN, N.J.

A bomb squad has dismantled a suspicious package that led to the evacuation of two apartment buildings in New Jersey.

The package was found near a pay phone outside a convenience store Tuesday evening in Linden.

Police say officers immediately began clearing the area and shutting down streets. Two apartment buildings were evacuated in the process.

Linden Mayor Derek Armstead told WNBC-TV in New York City that photos of the package showed objects that looked like dynamite tied together with tape, with a device attached.

Police said the Union County bomb squad used a robot to “disrupt” the package as a precaution.

Teens accused of plot to rob, kill girl found shot in ditch

LOGAN, Utah

Two teenage boys charged with shooting a 14-year-old girl in the back of the head and leaving her wounded in a ditch lured her to the spot in a small Utah town with a plan to rob and kill her, prosecutors said Tuesday.

The 16-year-old boys set up a meeting by promising to sell her a knife and originally planned to stab her with knives of their own, according to newly filed charging documents.

After they arrived, one boy decided instead to use a gun he had brought and shot the girl, prosecutors said.

They took $55 from her purse, tossed her backpack in a trash bin and destroyed her cellphone and iPod, prosecutors wrote. The girl is in critical condition in a medically induced coma.

Associated Press