What happened
A federal judge in Washington, D.C., early this morning ordered President Donald Trump to immediately restore White House access to Politico, CNN and MS NOW. U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly’s 14-day restraining order is a “temporary reprieve for the three outlets” while their litigation over Trump’s press ban proceeds, The New York Times said. But Kelly said the outlets were likely to successfully show Trump denied them “constitutionally adequate due process.“ 

Who said what
The White House argued in a letter Tuesday and in court yesterday that the outlets’ reporting violated national security and “widely known” journalism standards. The objection about journalistic professionalism was “so vague it hardly does the trick,” Kelly wrote, and “the court is skeptical” that Trump’s “interest in safeguarding national security is the actual motivation for, or is even advanced by,” revoking the press passes. 

The examples cited by the White House to shore up its case included Politico’s use of anonymous sources in an article “based on a press call the White House hosted,” The Washington Post said. “In the call, reporters were instructed to cite an anonymous ‘senior administration official,’” The Washington Post said. That official, Status reported, was Vice President JD Vance.

What next?
Many news organizations scaled back their “routine coverage of presidential events in solidarity with the three outlets,” the Times said. It wasn’t clear “how quickly the press corps would resume its usual coverage.”

What happened
China’s government has taken possession of “potentially sensitive” F-35 stealth fighter jet parts “inexplicably diverted” to Hong Kong while being sent to the U.S. from Australia via UPS, Bloomberg reported yesterday, citing people familiar with the incident. The Pentagon’s F-35 Joint Program Office told Politico last week it was “aware of a shipment issue” involving F-35 parts and was “actively working” to retrieve them. 

Who said what
The diverted cockpit canopy and weapons-bay door contain “stealth technology that only the U.S. and its allies have access to,” Politico said, citing sources, and the late May reroute “triggered an ongoing series of briefings” for congressional national security staff. The F-35 is “widely recognized as America’s best and most advanced fighter jet,” Bradley Bowman of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies said to The Associated Press. China has been “aggressively trying to get F-35 data through electronic espionage,” former congressional military analyst J.J. Gertler told Politico. But studying a part’s schematics is different than “possessing a real one.”

Lockheed Martin manages the F-35 supply chain and “uses commercial shipping providers to transport parts,” Politico said. The Government Accountability Office reported in 2023 that more than 1 million F-35 parts had gone missing over the previous five years. 

What next?
The F-35 Joint Progress Office said it was working with “industry partners” to investigate the Hong Kong diversion and “place safeguards to avoid a future occurrence.” 

Because of the FDA’s black-box warning for estrogen products, menopausal women spent years unable to get relief from the potentially deadly but often preventable effects of recurrent urinary tract infections. And despite growing evidence supporting safety and efficacy, as well as the lifting of the warning, a lingering stigma is still keeping women from life-saving care.

For years, major medical groups have recommended a low dose of vaginal estrogen to help prevent recurrent urinary tract infections in menopausal women. But a “misinterpretation” in 2002 of a landmark research study by the Women’s Health Initiative prompted the FDA to “slap its strongest warning” on all estrogen products, said USA Today.

The study suggested that some forms of hormone therapy that included estrogen and progesterone could “increase the risks of cardiovascular problems, breast cancer, endometrial cancer and possibly dementia,” said Harvard Medical School. But low-dose vaginal estrogen was never studied in the associated trial. Last November, the FDA lifted the black-box warning.

Vaginal estrogen has been shown to be an effective treatment for menopausal women with frequent UTIs. In a recent study of recurrent UTSs published in the Urology Journal, “women 55 and older who were prescribed vaginal estrogen were about half as likely to be hospitalized with a UTI as those who were not,” said USA Today. Their recorded rates of sepsis and death were “roughly one-fifth as high.” 

Despite that evidence, treatment “still isn’t widespread” because of the continuing stigma, said USA Today. And unlike “widely prescribed” menopause hormone therapy, vaginal estrogen also suffers from a “public relations problem,” said The Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, with “few women knowing what it is.”