News Reporter: January 2025

Friday, 31 January 2025

U.S. News Alert: N.Y. doctor charged after prescribing abortion pills to Louisiana girl

U.S. News Alert

Jan. 31, 6:37 p.m. EST

N.Y. doctor charged after prescribing abortion pills to Louisiana girl

The indictment sets up one of the first major challenges to the "shield laws" enacted by some Democratic-led states to protect doctors providing abortion access since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022.

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Fact Checker: $50 million for condoms in Gaza? Nope

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The truth behind the rhetoric.

By Glenn Kessler

After the White House imposed a government-wide spending freeze — later rescinded — White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt provided justification: "DOGE and OMB also found that there was about to be 50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza. That is a preposterous waste of taxpayer money."

Regular readers know that we have a high bar for fact-checking flacks, as they are paid to mislead and dissemble. We prefer to keep our scrutiny on policymakers and people with authority. But this was Leavitt's first news conference, and she made an astonishing claim that spread rapidly on social media.

But this is one of those moments when people tweet and retweet without pausing to think. The U.S. government distributes condoms overseas to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS. From fiscal 2016 to 2022, the U.S. Agency for International Development, spent $118.6 million to buy 3.6 billion male condoms for 60 countries. That's an average of $17 million a year for the entire world — one-third of the amount Leavitt said would be spent just on Gaza.

In fact, the government pays an average price per condom of 3.3 cents — which means the White House somehow believed that 1.5 billion condoms were being sent to a war zone roughly twice the size of Washington, D.C. Not only did the math make no make sense, but we could identify no contract of this magnitude. Please click this link to read the fact check and learn the Pinocchio rating.

Read the full fact check

Also (click the link): Speaker Johnson's misleading claim that conditions were placed on Katrina, Sandy aid

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Trump's misleading claim about DEI and the DC plane crash

In the aftermath of the deadly collision between a jetliner and a Black Hawk helicopter at Reagan National Airport, Trump held an extraordinary news conference during which he speculated on the cause of the accident. At length, he attacked former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden for imposing what he called "a big push to put diversity" that he said weakened the Federal Aviation Administration.

Reading from a 2024 Fox News report — which he incorrectly identified as being two weeks old — Trump listed conditions that he suggested disqualify people from being air traffic controllers: "hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability, and dwarfism."

But here's the rub: During Trump's first term, the FAA began a program to hire air traffic controllers with the conditions that Trump decried. To read the full fact check and learn the Pinocchio rating, please click the link below.

Read the full fact check

About the cats: It's a Friday and sometimes our fact checks deal with heavy subjects. So we hope to bring a smile to your face.

Scroll down to read other Gaza-related fact checks

Analysis

Biden's dismissal of the reported Palestinian death toll

Analysis Glenn Kessler

Biden yet again says Hamas beheaded babies. Has new evidence emerged?

The dueling histories in the debate over 'historic Palestine'

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Tuesday, 28 January 2025

Trending Now: RFK Jr. disparaged vaccines dozens of times in recent years and made baseless claims on race

Must-read stories around major news events

Trending Now

Jan. 28, 8:25 p.m. EST

RFK Jr. disparaged vaccines dozens of times in recent years and made baseless claims on race

A Washington Post review found that Kennedy, whose Senate confirmation hearings for health secretary start Wednesday, criticized vaccines in at least 114 podcast appearances, interviews and public speeches since 2020. In at least 36 of those cases, Kennedy, who did not respond to requests for comment, falsely linked autism to vaccines. He also has said that White and Black people should have separate vaccination schedules.

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