Former President Donald Trump says that, if he wins a second term, he wants to make IVF treatment free for women, but did not detail how he would fund his plan or how it would work. “I’m announcing today in a major statement that under the Trump administration, your government will pay for — or your insurance company will be mandated to pay for — all costs associated with IVF treatment,” he said at an event in Michigan. “Because we want more babies, to put it nicely.” IVF treatments are notoriously expensive, and can cost tens of thousands of dollars for a single round. Many women require multiple rounds and there is no guarantee of success. In his speech, Trump also said that, if he wins, families will be able to deduct expenses for caring for newborns from their taxes.

As Labor Day approaches and the 2024 presidential campaign enters its final stretch, FiveThirtyEight founder and elections analyst Nate Silver says that former President Donald Trump holds a slight edge over Vice President Kamala Harris in the upcoming election. According to Silver’s updated model, Trump has a 52.4% chance of winning the Electoral College, while Harris has a 47.3% chance, marking Trump as the favored candidate for the first time since August 3. Silver attributed Trump’s advantage largely to the state of Pennsylvania, which he described as “the tipping-point state more than one-third of the time” in his model. He noted that recent polls have not shown Harris leading in Pennsylvania, including two new polls released Thursday.

More details were revealed on Thursday evening from the testimony of three of the hostages rescued in Operation Arnon in June. Andrey Kozlov, Shlomi Ziv, and Almog Meir Jan were interviewed as part of “Voices from Captivity,” a project launched by the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) and Government Press Office (GPO.) Almog said about their main guard Mohammed: “He would take this kind of pen and tie our mouths around it. We would have cuts in our mouths for days. Sometimes we were bound in chains. After a while, rust would wash off of us when we washed our hands or showered. We had wounds on our hands and the lock on the chains cut us to the bone.” Andrey said that the last month that they were held captive was the hardest. “Our guard was losing it.

The Operation Summer Camps counterterrorism operation was launched in northern Shomron due to serious intelligence warning of an October 7 infiltration attack or raid on an Israeli yishuv from Tulkarm, Kan News reported on Thursday evening. According to the report, a terrorist squad planned to infiltrate an Israeli yishuv in the Shomron and carry out a large-scale attack. Security officials said that some of the terrorists planning the attack were eliminated in the operation but the ongoing terror threat from the area remains and is rapidly increasing.

Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday defended shifting away from her some of her more liberal positions in her first major television interview of her presidential campaign, but insisted her “values have not changed” even as she is “seeking consensus.” Sitting with her running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Harris was asked about changes in her policies over the years, specifically her reversals on fracking and decriminalizing illegal border crossings. “I think the most important and most significant aspect of my policy perspective and decisions is my values have not changed,” Harris replied.

Israeli military sources have confirmed that Hamas’s Rafah Brigade has effectively “collapsed” under the intense pressure of the IDF’s ongoing offensive in the southern Gaza Strip city of Rafah. This new assessment comes a week after Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declared the brigade defeated. Moreover, the IDF has made significant gains in the area, neutralizing around 80% of Hamas’s tunnels along the Philadelphi Corridor, a strategic area bordering Egypt. As the military tightens its grip, Hamas operatives are increasingly attempting to flee north to the Israeli-designated humanitarian zone. However, the IDF has successfully ambushed and targeted these fleeing gunmen, further weakening Hamas’s grip on the area. (YWN World Headquarters – NYC)

The World Health Organization (WHO) has obtained a preliminary commitment for area-specific humanitarian pauses in the Gaza Strip to facilitate a polio vaccination campaign, according to a senior WHO official. The campaign aims to vaccinate an estimated 640,000 children in Gaza, where a 25-year absence of polio was recently disrupted by a confirmed case of type 2 polio virus paralysis in a baby. The three-day “humanitarian pauses” will enable the vaccination campaign to commence on Sunday in central Gaza, said Rik Peeperkorn, WHO representative in the Palestinian territories. Earlier this week, Israel delivered 25,100 vials of the polio vaccine to Gaza, sufficient to inoculate over half of the Strip’s population.

In her first sit-down interview since taking over as the Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris faced at least one pointed questions from CNN anchor Dana Bash about her flip-flopping policies throughout her political career. The interview marks Harris’s first major media appearance since becoming the top candidate on the Democratic ticket, after having drawn widespread criticism for her relative media silence. During the conversation, Bash pressed Harris on her apparent policy reversals, particularly concerning fracking and the decriminalization of illegal border crossings. When asked how voters should interpret these changes, Harris insisted that while specific policies may have evolved, her core values have remained steadfast.

Talks aimed at achieving a Gaza ceasefire and securing a hostage-release deal have made significant progress, according to US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan. Speaking to reporters in Beijing, where he met with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Sullivan provided an update on the ongoing negotiations, emphasizing that the discussions have entered a critical phase. “The negotiators are bearing down on the details, meaning that we have advanced the discussions to a point where it’s in the nitty-gritty, and that is a positive sign of progress,” Sullivan said. The discussions, involving officials from the United States, Egypt, Qatar, and Israel, took place in Doha on Wednesday, following a weekend of high-level talks in Cairo.