A federal judge in Louisiana ruled that the Food and Drug Administration must provide a status report on its safety review of the abortion pill within six months. The judge also found that a challenge to the policy of allowing abortion pills to be shipped through the mail has standing and is likely to succeed on the merits. “FDA has an obligation to act with all deliberate speed to review its past actions and complete a thorough analysis that addresses the deficiencies it has acknowledged,” District Judge David C. Joseph wrote. “The parties and the American public deserve nothing less.” The state of Louisiana filed the lawsuit against the administration, challenging the Biden-era policy of allowing abortion drugs to be sent through the mail, including into states where abortion is illegal. Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill and Alliance Defending Freedom filed the lawsuit on behalf of Rosalie Markezich, a Louisiana resident whose boyfriend ordered abortion pills from California and drugged her against her will, leading to the loss of her unborn baby. Murrill argued that the ruling means Louisiana is likely to succeed in showing the danger posed by the lack of safeguards on the abortion pill. “He [Judge Joseph] also concluded that Louisiana suffers irreparable harm every day that the 2023 REMS remains in effect,” Murrill said, referring to the Biden administration’s loosening of safeguards. “Accordingly, under binding 5th Circuit precedent, the only thing left to do is vacate the 2023 REMS pending the outcome of this litigation. We will ask the 5th Circuit to do so.” Pro-life groups have criticized FDA Commissioner Marty Makary for “slow walking the abortion pill review.” Makary has responded that the administration is “engaging in a robust study” of the effects of abortion pills on women’s health. “We hope to see justice delivered swiftly for countless women like Rosalie, coerced into abortions they didn’t want because their abusive partners were able to order abortion drugs online,” Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America President Marjorie Dannenfelser said. “It is urgent that the FDA complete its promised safety study on these drugs, but this study also should not delay commonsense action: Deadly abortion drugs do not belong in the mail with no in-person doctor visit, no ultrasound, no meaningful medical oversight and no accountability.” Joseph said the case must be paused to give FDA time to finish the review, but the pause will be revisited if the FDA doesn’t act within a “reasonable timeframe.” The court ordered the FDA to provide a status update on the review within six months. “Should the agency fail to complete its review and make any necessary revisions to the REMS within a reasonable timeframe, the Court’s analysis – and the weight accorded to these factors – will inevitably change,” he continued. The FDA requested a stay until the safety review is complete. The agency has not given a clear update on the status of the study. The court found that the harm to Markezich by abortion pills was directly caused by the lack of safeguards. “There is evidence that the consequences of this action were predictable – out-of-state providers and related entities would expand access to mifepristone in ways designed to reach into jurisdictions like Louisiana,” Joseph wrote. Alliance Defending Freedom President Kristen Waggoner said she is grateful that the court determined Louisiana is likely to win on the merits, but disappointed that the court granted FDA’s request to stay the case. “ADF Legal is grateful for the significant wins on standing and the merits of our case,” she said. “But with women’s health and babies’ lives at stake, we are disappointed by the delay in accountability.” The post Court Upholds Lawsuit Against Abortion Pill—What It Means for the Safety Review appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The Artemis II crew are on their way home after completing a record-breaking mission around the moon, but their ship’s re-entry to Earth’s atmosphere will be the most dangerous part yet. The Orion spacecraft is set to splash down in the Pacific Ocean at approximately 8:07 p.m. EDT on Friday, just off the coast of San Diego. The spacecraft will re-enter Earth’s atmosphere at approximately 25,000 mph using a “free return” system, meaning the crew are using the gravitational forces from the moon and Earth’s orbit to slingshot back to Earth. Although travel at that speed can bring temperatures reaching several thousand degrees Fahrenheit, Earth’s atmosphere also helps slow down the high-speed spacecraft, making the landing somewhat softer. Artemis II is just a couple of days away from splashdown—and as Earth grows larger in the mission's sights, the crew woke up this morning to "Under Pressure," by Queen and David Bowie, and greetings from our colleagues at @csa_asc. pic.twitter.com/9IOHJQHEzi— NASA (@NASA) April 8, 2026 Eleven parachutes will deploy to further slow the capsule as it lands in the ocean about 60 miles off the California coast. NASA plans to rescue the astronauts with help from the U.S. Navy. The USS John P. Murtha, a San Diego-based Navy ship, will pick up the crew members out at sea, and the spacecraft will be tracked by a Navy helicopter. During the first Artemis mission, an uncrewed test flight in 2022, the Orion spacecraft’s heat shield cracked during its re-entry. Instead of redesigning the heat shield, engineers adjusted Artemis II’s re-entry trajectory to reduce the stress on the capsule. ?? #USNAVY UPDATE: USS John P. Murtha to support NASA's Artemis II missionSAN DIEGO – Amphibious transport dock ship USS John P. Murtha (LPD 26) is slated to serve as the recovery ship for the Orion spacecraft and its crew upon their return from the historic Artemis II… pic.twitter.com/eMUDr04rhP— U.S. Navy (@USNavy) April 8, 2026 Mission Updates On day six of the Artemis II 10-day mission, the astronauts set a record for human spaceflight, traveling 252,756 miles from Earth around the far side of the moon. At one point, the spacecraft was prepared to lose connection to Earth and experienced a communications outage that lasted roughly 45 minutes. Shortly after, the astronauts received a surprise phone call from President Donald Trump. The president called them “modern-day pioneers,” adding, “We’re going all out. We’ll plant our flag once again, and this time we won’t just leave footprints.” A Heartfelt Moment While the crew was on the far side of the moon—which never faces Earth—they took high-resolution images of the surface in daylight and identified new craters and formations. The camera captured an emotional moment for the crew when mission specialist Jeremy Hansen announced that one newly identified crater should be named “Carroll” — after Carroll Wiseman, the spouse of Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman. Carroll Wiseman died of cancer in 2020 at age 46. The Artemis II crew named a lunar crater after Commander Reid Wiseman's late wife, Carroll. What a beautiful and touching moment.I'm not crying, you're crying ? pic.twitter.com/3D1qgxK0jB— Jenny Hautmann (@JennyHPhoto) April 6, 2026 “A number of years ago, we started this journey in our close-knit astronaut family, and we lost a loved one … her name was Carroll, the spouse of Reid, the mother of Katie and Ellie,” Hansen said over the radio. The post Dangerous Test Still Ahead for Artemis II Crew appeared first on The Daily Signal.

It’s been more than a decade and a half since I first wrote that the California bullet train to nowhere would be a disaster. I write that not just to toot my own horn. It was an easy prediction to make, even for my much younger and less cynical self. No, I’m noting the timeline because after so many years of failure, California’s leaders still refuse to pull the plug on what is one of the most blatant boondoggles in American politics. On Sunday, CBS News’ “60 Minutes” put a spotlight on the disastrous California High Speed Rail project, which both massively overshot initial budget projections (who could have guessed that, right?) and has made little progress since it officially began in 2015. I’m pleasantly surprised that CBS News bothered to cover this issue. It seems the new management is making some positive changes there. Their report about California’s “ghost train” was damning. “America’s hopes for its first high-speed rail were kindled in 2008, when California voters approved a ballot measure for a train connecting Los Angeles to San Francisco in less than three hours,” a write up of the show said. “The estimated price tag: $33 billion. Completion date: 2020. It would cut pollution; revitalize local economies, clear gridlock.” It’s now 2026. No track has been laid. The theoretical route is planned to connect Bakersfield to Merced—I don’t blame you if those names only seem vaguely familiar—and the projected cost is $126 billion. The report noted that the cost is higher than the amount of money Amtrak has received from the government since it was launched in 1971. And our national train service has hardly been known for its fiscal prudence. As more than a few noted on X, this staggering amount of money could subsidize air travel between San Francisco and Los Angeles for a very long time. If you gave away $126 billion to subsidize free flights between LA and San Francisco at current demand levels, you could fund roughly 150 to 200 years of travel before the money runs out. https://t.co/8ro72lJIfc— Hans Mahncke (@HansMahncke) April 8, 2026 This gets to one of the early warning signs for the entire project. Air travel between the two metropolises was already possible and reasonably inexpensive. The bullet train, even if it magically apparated tomorrow, would still be slower and wouldn’t be much cheaper unless it was heavily subsidized by the state. The bullet train was a redundancy of luxury from the beginning. It was sold in a way to tickle the fancy of your average California progressive who dreamed of a beautiful, green, carless future where the seas would stop rising and carbon emissions would be a thing of the past. It married that pie-in-the sky outlook with the grubbier and more consequential side of Democrat machine politics. It promised to be a bonanza for highly-paid bureaucrats, public-sector union workers, and well-connected contractors. And so, it was. In that sense, the “ghost train” has been a tremendous success. Rep. Vince Fong, a Republican from Bakersfield who is on the House Transportation Committee, said in his interview with 60 Minutes that the project needs to stop. “I think that the California high-speed rail nightmare is the probably quintessential example of government waste and mismanagement,” says Rep. Vince Fong, a Republican whose district sits in California’s Central Valley, through which the project is supposed to run.… pic.twitter.com/H7ejfV2wkR— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) April 5, 2026 “I think that the California High-Speed Rail nightmare is the probably quintessential example of government waste and mismanagement,” he said. I agree. And at one point California Gov. Gavin Newsom also agreed. “We were selling a $32 billion project then, and we were going to get roughly one-third from the federal government and the private sector,” Newsom said in 2014 when he was still the lieutenant governor. “We’re not even close to the timeline (for the project), we’re not close to the total cost estimates, and the private sector money and the federal dollars are questionable.” He concluded that the facts appeared “overwhelming that this project is not going to materialize in our lifetime.” In 2019, Newsom scaled the project back but has done little to halt it. He even sued the Trump administration in 2025 to keep billions of dollars in federal aid flowing to the doomed project. “Trump’s termination of federal grants for California high-speed rail reeks of politics. It’s yet another political stunt to punish California,” he said in a statement about the lawsuit. “In reality, this is just a heartless attack on the Central Valley that will put real jobs and livelihoods on the line. We’re suing to stop Trump from derailing America’s only high-speed rail actively under construction.” There’s a lot to parse out there. Apparently, pulling the plug on funding for something that is more than five years past its deadline is “politics.” Even more infuriating is how Newsom framed this in terms of jobs in the Central Valley. It apparently doesn’t matter what those jobs are or if they are accomplishing anything. Are you seeing why Democrats mostly shrug when they hear about, for instance, the massive Somali fraud ring in Minnesota and the even more massive scams currently being uncovered in California? Whatever sticker they put on a program to sell it to the public means a lot less than the spoils delivered to their loyal supporters. So, keep the money flowing and the questions at a minimum. I actually appreciated this statement by Ray LaHood, the former transportation secretary under President Barack Obama who is now the co-chair of the U.S. High Speed Rail Commission. He said that while the bullet train’s problems have been covered “extensively,” what’s new “is that the California State Legislature and Governor Gavin Newsom passed a $20 billion investment in the project last fall. This steady, long-term funding—delivered in $1 billion a year allocations—is a gamechanger.” The answer to this mess is to just keep throwing money into the pit, but do it faster. I’ll let the reader decide if that sounds like a recipe for success. The post California’s High-Speed Rail Still Isn’t Running—But the Spending Never Stops appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Champions for abortion pill access claim that abortion drugs are medical care, that it is a “simple healthcare intervention,” and that we do not need to worry about the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) rolling back safety protocols.  But the truth is, it’s become nothing more than online commerce—not telemedicine. An April 7 ruling granted the FDA’s request to pause a case challenging access to mifepristone, which is used in abortions while acknowledging the harm these drugs cause.  As a board-certified OB-GYN, I know what good telemedicine looks like and how it can fill gaps, especially in healthcare deserts. Both pro-life and pro-abortion physicians should be able to agree that access cannot trump all other stipulations for care, especially for a drug that assumes (and requires) clinician interface of some kind.  In real telemedicine, the patient is still seeing a clinician. One of the upsides of it is that it lets you see your healthcare professional without going to their office. For many patients, this can eliminate barriers to care.  But this only works if actual medical oversight occurs and if the condition being treated is not something that requires an in-person evaluation to fully assess the status of the patient. At a minimum, if abortion drugs are to be dispensed via telemedicine, we assume many givens. First, a live clinician interface (or at a bare minimum, review of a patient’s clinical information by a qualified medical professional before the drugs are dispensed).  Second, confirmation via ID of patient identity and age. Finally, appropriate screening for potentially life-threatening contraindications, accurate knowledge of the patient’s last menstrual period with gestational age confirmed and counseling provided specific to her situation. All of these assumptions are crucial to minimize the risk of harm to women. These assumptions align with guidance regarding abortion drug use from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), which recommends confirmation of “pregnancy and estimate gestational age,” “discussion of when patients should contact their clinician in the case of heavy bleeding” and counseling “in the event of an unsuccessful medication abortion.” These are life or death assumptions—always for one of my patients and sometimes for both. Recognizing this, an investigation has been launched into the companies that produce these drugs, and a bill has been introduced to protect women from them as well.  Abortion pill providers specifically state that a medical professional will look at any patient’s information before the patient is given a prescription. To test this theory, I recently visited a “Plan C” website to confirm that ACOG’s guidelines and the site’s own promise were employed while accessing abortion drugs via “telemedicine.” In my request, I claimed to be a 13-year-old with an IUD in place who was on blood thinning medications, suffered from anemia, had undergone three previous C-sections, and had a prior history of ectopic pregnancy.  This was a purposefully ridiculous combination of conditions, any one of which should have set off warning flags. Despite the life-threatening risks of taking mifepristone with these conditions, I received an email requesting payment and confirmation of my address for the pills to be shipped within two minutes of submitting the form. This was despite the fact that the website promised I would not receive this until a healthcare professional had reviewed all of my information.  The screening required no steps to verify if I was even ordering the pills for myself and no basic identification of any kind. I was allowed to continue after merely acknowledging I’d read the associated warnings, and the website also let me change my answers and proceed immediately to order after I received warnings on different responses.  At the end of the process, I was asked to sign a patient agreement acknowledging I was aware of potential side effects that hadn’t been mentioned previously, including the risk of infection and to check a box saying I’d discussed them with my medical provider.  Throughout the process, I hadn’t talked to anyone, much less a physician I could contact if something went wrong. Furthermore, the website didn’t require a doctor’s note or even the name of my physician.  It was as if the FDA and ACOG’s safety guidelines suddenly stopped applying once abortion pills were available online. Patients deserve better.  Permitting an anonymous person to run a website with no liability for distributing these drugs to someone they clearly shouldn’t is not just negligent—it’s criminal. All due diligence falls on the girl or woman who assumes that institutions like the FDA, ACOG and the World Health Organization are promoting safe, accessible care. Normally this due diligence is provided by a physician who is there to have thorough discussions with patients about their individual risks, answering questions and providing ongoing care. Removing physicians and safety protocols from the equation is a far cry from healthcare in any sense. Women and girls across all 50 states in difficult circumstances aren’t getting healthcare through telemedicine. All they’re getting is a bill.  We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post I Went Undercover as a 13-Year-Old Anemic Looking for Abortion Pills appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The White House says that President Donald Trump will preserve his administration’s records, despite the legal opinion of his Justice Department that he doesn’t need to comply with the Presidential Records Act. The Justice Department’s opinion last week stated the “president need not further comply” with the 1978 law requiring a president to preserve all records, prompting a lawsuit in federal court this week. “President Trump is committed to preserving records from his historic administration, and he will maintain a rigorous records retention program,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in an email response to The Daily Signal regarding the lawsuit over the Justice Department memo. The FBI raided Trump’s private Mar-a-Lago home in 2022 over a dispute between the then-former president and the National Archives and Records Administration over the rightful keeper of records from his first administration. Special counsel Jack Smith secured a federal grand jury indictment against Trump, alleging he mishandled classified documents. The case was dismissed on procedural grounds. In a 52-page opinion on April 1, Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel T. Elliott Gaiser wrote that the Presidential Records Act violates the separation of powers and “establishes a permanent and burdensome regime of congressional regulation of the presidency untethered from any valid and identifiable legislative purpose.” Jackson stated that the White House will maintain its own policy of record preservation. Staff with the White House Executive Office of the President “undertake records training so they properly preserve all materials related to: the performance of their duties for historical value, the administrative record of policy decisions and actions, and litigation needs,” Jackson said. “The president will also retain the program currently in place for electronic records—emails and documents cannot be deleted from the White House system,” Jackson added. However, the American Historical Association, a group of historians, and American Oversight, a liberal watchdog group, don’t want the Trump administration to set its own standards for recordkeeping. The two groups sued on Monday in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to require the administration to continue enforcing the law. “Presidential records are essential for transparency and accountability in our democracy; they are also essential sources for researching and understanding the American past,” said Dr. Sarah Weicksel, executive director of the American Historical Association. “Those records and the history they tell belong not to any individual, but to the American people.” U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell, a Barack Obama appointee, was assigned to the case, according to Pacer, which monitors federal court cases. Howell has ruled against the Trump administration in previous cases. Congress passed the Presidential Records Act four years after the resignation of President Richard Nixon, in response to Watergate. The law established that presidential records are the property of the public, not the president. While the Supreme Court hasn’t determined the constitutionality of the specific law, plaintiffs assert in their complaint that “the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a materially identical law 50 years ago in Nixon v. Administrator of General Services.” The Justice Department’s opinion ”makes no serious effort to distinguish the Presidential Records Act from the prior law that the Supreme Court upheld, the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act. Nor could it,” the complaint says. In his legal opinion, Gaiser invoked the Supreme Court’s 2020 case of Trump v. Mazars USA that imposed increased scrutiny on congressional subpoenas for presidential papers. Perhaps eying a high court showdown, he appeared to make an appeal to the justices in the memo. “Just as Congress could not constitutionally invade the independence of the Supreme Court and expropriate the papers of the chief justice or associate justices, Congress cannot invade the independence of the president and expropriate the papers of the chief executive,” the memo says. The post Trump White House to Preserve Records Despite DOJ Opinion appeared first on The Daily Signal.