‘Not equipped mentally’: Trump rips Mitch McConnell after votes against Cabinet picks

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump laced into Mitch McConnell for his mental acuity and accused him of letting the Republican Party “go to hell,” unleashing a rhetorical tirade against the Kentucky senator hours after he voted against Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the nation’s health department.

“I feel sorry for Mitch ... He wanted to go to the end and he wanted to stay leader. He’s not equipped mentally, he wasn’t equipped 10 years ago mentally in my opinion,” Trump said seated from his desk in the Oval Office.

“I was the one that got him to drop out of the leadership position, so he can’t love me ... I don’t know anything about he had polio,” Trump added.

McConnell is well-known to have survived polio as a child, even citing its “lingering effects” as the reason for a fall last week. The verbal assault came in response to McConnell’s string of votes against Trump and his party.

—Lexington Herald-Leader

Republicans, Democrats debate right age to teach gender, sexual orientation in schools

BALTIMORE — State Republican lawmakers pushed Wednesday to give parents a bigger say in sex education curriculum in their children’s schools, but their efforts were defeated along party lines.

At the heart of the conflict are questions: What is the right age to teach students about gender and sexual orientation, and do parents have a right to restrict their kids from that curriculum?

“Overall, honoring what parents would like to do, I think, is extremely important,” Del. April Rose, a Republican representing Carroll and Frederick counties, said.

Republicans want to remove a measure from a bill that would require public schools to teach age-appropriate gender and sexual orientation health education without the ability for parents to opt out.

—The Baltimore Sun

Bird flu infections in dairy cows are more widespread than we thought, according to a new CDC study

LOS ANGELES — A new study published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that the H5N1 bird flu virus is likely circulating undetected in livestock in many parts of the country and may be infecting unaware veterinarians.

In the health agency’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, a group of researchers from the CDC, the Ohio Department of Health and the American Assn. of Bovine Practitioners, reported the results of an analysis they conducted on 150 bovine, or cow, veterinarians from 46 states and Canada.

They found that three of them had antibodies for the H5N1 bird flu virus in their blood. However, none of the infected vets recalled having any symptoms — including conjunctivitis, or pink eye, the most commonly reported symptom in human cases.

The three vets also reported to investigators that they had not worked with cattle or poultry known to be infected with the virus. In one case, a vet reported only having practiced in Georgia (on dairy cows) and South Carolina (on poultry) — two states that have not reported H5N1 infections in dairy cows.

—Los Angeles Times

Hamas to free hostages on schedule, preserving ceasefire

Hamas said it would free hostages on Saturday as scheduled, backing down from a threatened indefinite delay that had cast doubt on the durability of the initial six-week Gaza ceasefire.

At least three Israelis held by the Iran-backed group are due to be released in the next round of a phased exchange for hundreds of jailed Palestinians. Hamas had on Monday cited a series of Israeli truce violations, including a failure to deliver on humanitarian-relief pledges, as a reason to suspend the staggered swap.

Israel responded by putting the military on high alert, and U.S. President Donald Trump said his ally should “let hell break out” if Hamas made good on the threat. The U.S. terror-designated organization then recast the move as a warning.

After conferring with Qatari and Egyptian mediators, Hamas said Thursday it had reaffirmed its “commitment to implementing the agreement as signed, including the exchange of prisoners according to the scheduled timeline.”

—Bloomberg News