Hegseth will skip meeting on organizing military aid to Ukraine

For the first time since the U.S. created an international group to coordinate military aid to Ukraine three years ago, America’s Pentagon chief will not be in attendance when more than 50 other defense leaders meet Wednesday.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who returned from a national security conference in Singapore on Sunday, will not arrive in Brussels until Wednesday evening, after the Ukraine Defense Contact Group’s meeting is over.

It is the latest in a series of steps that the U.S. has taken to distance itself from the Ukraine war effort. And it comes on the heels of French President Emmanuel Macron’s warning at the security conference last weekend that the U.S. and others risk a dangerous double standard if their concentration on a potential conflict with China is done at the cost of abandoning Ukraine.

U.S. revokes guidance requiring hospitals to provide abortions

The Trump administration announced on Tuesday that it would revoke guidance to the nation’s hospitals that directed them to provide emergency abortions for women when they are necessary to stabilize their medical condition.

That guidance was issued to hospitals in 2022, weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court upended national abortion rights in the U.S. It was an effort by the Biden administration to preserve abortion access for extreme cases in which women were experiencing medical emergencies and needed an abortion to prevent organ loss or severe hemorrhaging, among other serious complications.

The Biden administration had argued that hospitals — including states with near-total bans — needed to provide emergency abortions under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act. That law requires emergency rooms that receive Medicare dollars to provide an exam and stabilizing treatment for all patients. Nearly all emergency rooms in the U.S. rely on Medicare funds.

Prisons must provide hormone therapy to transgender inmates

The federal Bureau of Prisons must continue providing hormone therapy and social accommodations to hundreds of transgender inmates after an executive order signed by President Donald Trump that led to a disruption in medical treatment, a federal judge ruled Tuesday.

U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth said in his ruling a federal law prohibits prison officials from arbitrarily depriving inmates of medications and other lifestyle accommodations that the bureau’s own medical staff has deemed appropriate.

The judge said the transgender inmates who sued to block Trump’s executive order are trying to lessen the personal anguish caused by their gender dysphoria, the distress that a person feels because their assigned gender and gender identity don’t match.

Mayor sues New Jersey’s top federal prosecutor after arrest

Newark Mayor Ras Baraka sued New Jersey’s top federal prosecutor on Tuesday over his arrest on a trespassing charge at a federal immigration detention facility, saying the President Donald Trump-appointed attorney had pursued the case out of political spite.

Baraka, who leads New Jersey’s biggest city, is a candidate in a crowded primary field for the Democratic nomination for governor on Tuesday. The lawsuit against interim U.S. Attorney for New Jersey Alina Habba coincided with the day early in-person voting began.

The lawsuit seeks damages for “false arrest and malicious prosecution” and accuses Habba of defamation for comments she made about his case, which was later dropped.

Citing a post on X in which Habba said Baraka “committed trespass,” the lawsuit says Habba issued a “defamatory statement” and authorized his “false arrest” despite “clear evidence that Mayor Baraka had not committed the petty offense of ‘defiant trespass.’ ”

The lawsuit also names Ricky Patel, the Homeland Security Investigations agent in charge in Newark. Baraka’s attorney, Nancy Erika Smith, said they also expect to sue Trump’s administration but are required to wait six months.

Lawmaker Wilders throws country’s politics into turmoil

Populist far-right lawmaker Geert Wilders plunged Dutch politics into turmoil Tuesday by withdrawing his party’s ministers from the ruling coalition in a dispute over a crackdown on migration.

The remaining ministers will run a caretaker administration until new elections can be organized.

The decision means the Netherlands will have a caretaker government when it hosts a summit of NATO leaders in three weeks.

Prime Minister Dick Schoof held an emergency Cabinet meeting to discuss the crisis and visited King Willem-Alexander to offer him the resignations of ministers from Wilders’ Party for Freedom.

Ruling party headed toward control of Supreme Court

Mexico’s ruling Morena party appeared to be heading toward control over the Supreme Court, preliminary vote tallies of the country’s first judicial election indicated.

Although votes were being counted Tuesday for the majority of the 2,600 federal, state and local judge positions up for grabs in Sunday’s elections, results rolled in for the nine Supreme Court positions.

The majority of the newly elected justices share strong ties and ideological alignments with the ruling party, shifting a once fairly balanced high court into the hands of the very party that overhauled the judicial system to elect judges for the first time.

U.S. says it broke up effort to bring toxic fungus to Mich. lab

A Chinese scientist entered the U.S. last year with a toxic fungus stashed in his backpack, federal authorities said Tuesday as they filed charges against him and a girlfriend who worked in a lab at the University of Michigan.

The pathogen is known as Fusarium graminearum, which can attack wheat, barley, maize and rice and sicken livestock and people, the FBI said in a court filing in Detroit.

The FBI said a scientific journal describes it as a “potential agroterrorism weapon.”

Yunqing Jian, 33, and Zunyong Liu, 34, were charged with conspiracy, smuggling, making false statements and visa fraud.

— Denver Post wire services