Speaker Mike Johnson has reached an agreement with Republican holdouts that will effectively kill a bipartisan effort to change House rules so that lawmakers could temporarily vote remotely immediately after the birth of a child.

Instead, Johnson has committed to allowing a convoluted arrangement to give a narrow group of lawmakers — women who face medical complications after childbirth that prevent them from being present in Washington — a way of registering their position on some legislation in their absence without actually being able to vote.

The maneuver, known as “vote pairing,” would not require a rule change and is a far cry from allowing new parents in Congress to fully participate in legislating. But it will allow Johnson to dispense with an issue that had exposed a deep cultural rift among House Republicans and temporarily paralyzed President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda.

The agreement came after Johnson persuaded Trump, who initially said he supported proxy voting for new mothers, to back him in opposition to the practice, which was vehemently opposed by the speaker and a sizable contingent of hard-right Republicans.

Republicans have long asserted that proxy voting — when lawmakers who are not at the Capitol can designate a colleague to cast a vote on their behalf — is unconstitutional and destroys the fabric of the institution of Congress, which requires lawmakers to convene in person.

Red Crescent alleges targeting by Israelis

The Palestine Red Crescent Society on Monday gave new details of the Israeli attack on its paramedics and other emergency responders in the Gaza Strip that killed at least 15 people last month, saying Israeli forces had targeted them in a “series of deliberate attacks.”

Speaking at a news conference in the West Bank, Red Crescent officials said Israeli troops shot at the rescue workers in waves over a two-hour period before dawn on March 23. They termed the killings “a full-fledged war crime” and called on the United Nations Security Council and the international community to demand accountability and an independent investigation.

The Israeli military, which has admitted to killing the 15 men, said Monday that a “preliminary inquiry indicated that the troops opened fire due to a perceived threat following a previous encounter in the area,” and it would continue investigating. It said that six of those killed “were identified as Hamas terrorists,” but cited no evidence.

The Red Crescent and the United Nations have said that the dead were unarmed aid workers who posed no threat. They said the men were wearing their uniforms and riding in clearly marked emergency vehicles, flashing their emergency lights.

An Israeli military official who briefed reporters on the incident Saturday declined to say whether the men were armed.

Trans woman arrested in Fla. Capitol restroom

A transgender woman was arrested at the Florida state Capitol last month after she used a bathroom there to protest a state law that blocks transgender people from using a restroom that aligns with their gender identity.

The woman, Marcy Rheintgen, 20, said Sunday that she had intentionally broken the law. Civil rights experts said that this was the first known case of someone being arrested for challenging a law that bans transgender people from using bathrooms in government buildings that do not align with their gender assigned at birth.

Rheintgen said she sent 160 letters to state representatives, the attorney general and governor to tell them when she would use the bathroom and asked that she not be arrested.

She arrived at the bathroom in the House office building of the Capitol in Tallahassee on March 19 and was eventually arrested.

N.C. justices block voter eligibility order

The North Carolina Supreme Court temporarily blocked a lower court’s order from taking effect on Monday that would have required tens of thousands of people who voted in 2024 to verify their eligibility. The higher court stayed that order while it considers an appeal in a long-running dispute over the election.

The ruling Monday is the latest twist in a five-month battle over a seat on the very same state Supreme Court. Justice Allison Riggs, the Democratic incumbent, won the election in November over Judge Jefferson Griffin, the Republican challenger, by 734 votes.

Griffin has challenged the result, seeking to dismiss the ballots cast by roughly 65,000 people. He has argued that a majority of them were ineligible to vote because they did not supply certain required identification data when they registered — though the omission was because of administrative errors and no fault of the voters.

Bayer seeks high court review of weedkiller

Global agrochemical manufacturer Bayer has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to decide whether federal law preempts thousands of state lawsuits alleging it failed to warn people that its popular weedkiller could cause cancer.

Bayer’s new request to the nation’s highest court comes as it is simultaneously pursing legislation in several states seeking to erect a legal shield against lawsuits targeting Roundup, a commonly used weedkiller for both farms and homes. Bayer disputes the cancer claims but has set aside $16 billion to settle cases and asserted Monday that the future of American agriculture is at stake.

In a court filing Friday, Bayer urged the Supreme Court to take up a Missouri case that awarded $1.25 million to a man who developed non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma after spraying Roundup on a community garden in St. Louis. The federally approved label for Roundup includes no warning of cancer. Bayer contends federal pesticide laws preempt states from adopting additional labeling for products and thus prohibits failure-to-warn lawsuits brought under state laws.

The Supreme Court in 2022 declined to hear a similar claim from Bayer in a California case that awarded more than $86 million to a married couple.

Texas delays House election until November

An election to fill a vacant House seat in a heavily Democratic district in Texas will take place in November, Gov. Greg Abbott said Monday, ensuring that the seat will remain unoccupied for most of the year as Republican leaders try to secure President Donald Trump’s agenda.

Democrats have complained that Abbott did not act faster to fill the seat in Houston after the death of Rep. Sylvester Turner last month so that Republicans could pass a contentious budget through the narrowly divided House. They accused the governor of deliberately delaying the announcement of a special election until after a deadline had passed to set the election for May.

But Abbott said his decision to wait had been based on what he said was a desire to give election officials in Harris County, where the district is, more time to prepare. “No county in Texas does a worse job of conducting elections than Harris County,” Abbott said in a statement.

‘Dennis the Menace’ star dies at age 73

Jay North, who starred as the towheaded mischief maker on TV’s “Dennis the Menace” for four seasons starting in 1959, has died. He was 73.

North died Sunday at his home in Lake Butler, Florida, and had colon cancer, said Laurie Jacobson, a longtime friend, and Bonnie Vent, who was his booking agent.

“He had a heart as big as a mountain, loved his friends deeply. He called us frequently and ended every conversation with ‘I love you with all my heart,’” Jacobson wrote in a tribute on Facebook.

North was 6 when he was cast as the smiling troublemaker in the CBS sitcom adaptation of Hank Ketcham’s popular comic strip that took place in an idyllic American suburb.

— News service reports