During a meeting of President Trump's top national security aides last week, Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan shared a revised military plan that includes sending up to 120,000 troops to the Middle East if Iran attacks U.S. forces or speeds up its work on nuclear weapons, administration officials told The New York Times on Monday.
National Security Adviser John Bolton, an Iran hawk, ordered the updated plan for the meeting, which took place after the administration claimed Iran was organizing proxy groups to attack American forces in Syria and Iraq. It is unclear whether Trump, who has said he wants to remove troops from Afghanistan and Syria, has been briefed on the matter, or if he would agree to send so many troops to the Middle East.
Officials told the Times there is a divide in Trump's team when it comes to the Iran plan: Some believe it is proof Iran is a major threat to the U.S., while others say this is just a way to scare Iran out of trying anything. The plan does not call for a land invasion of Iran, the Times reports, as many more troops would be needed for such a mission. Catherine Garcia
Before they were forced out in April, former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and former acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Director Ronald Vitiello pushed back against the White House's secret plan to arrest thousands of migrant parents and children in 10 cities across the United States, several current and former Department of Homeland Security officials told The Washington Post.
The operation involved fast-tracking immigration court cases, giving the government permission to instantly deport those who did not show up for their hearings, the Post reports. During coordinated raids in Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, and other major cities, about 2,500 migrants were set to be arrested and then deported.
Nielsen and Vitiello cautioned against the plan, concerned that ICE agents weren't prepared for such a task and that it would take resources from the border, officials told the Post, adding that while Nielsen and Vitiello blocked the plan at the time, it is still being considered.
The plan has two outspoken supporters, officials said: Senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller and ICE Deputy Director Matthew Albence, who reportedly liked the idea of dramatic, high-profile arrests that showed the government was willing to arrest entire families. Read more about the plan, and how it factored into Trump's decision to push out Nielsen and Vitiello, at The Washington Post. Catherine Garcia
Former Vice President Joe Biden believes "we should take a really hard look at" breaking up large tech companies like Facebook, he revealed during an interview Monday with The Associated Press.
He is the latest 2020 Democratic presidential candidate to weigh in on the issue, with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) leading the charge for more regulations. Warren has shown there's a "very strong case to be made for" cracking down on such companies, Biden said, adding that President Trump isn't doing much to enforce antitrust laws.
Regarding trade, Biden said he doesn't regret backing the North American Free Trade Agreement while he was a senator. "Fair trade is important," he said. "Not free trade. Fair trade. And I think that back in the time during the Clinton administration, it made sense at the moment."
He also told AP that should he get the nomination, when it comes time to pick a running mate, it has to be someone who shares "the same basic philosophic view of the world." If he doesn't receive the nomination but a Democrat wins the election, he wouldn't say no to working in their administration. "I learned a long time ago, don't rule out anything," Biden said. "If I can be helpful if I weren't the nominee, I would do whatever I could." Catherine Garcia
Former President Jimmy Carter broke his hip in a fall Monday morning, but he's more worried about something else.
The Carter Center shared on Monday afternoon that the 94-year-old fell inside his home in Plains, Georgia, as he was leaving to go turkey hunting. Following a successful surgery at Phoebe Sumter Medical Center in Americus, Georgia, Carter is now resting at home with his wife, former first lady Rosalynn Carter.
His main concern now isn't his recovery, but rather that "turkey season ends this week, and he has not reached his limit," the Carter Center said in a statement. "He hopes the state of Georgia will allow him to rollover the unused limit to next year." Catherine Garcia
A Northern California jury on Monday awarded $2.055 billion to a Bay Area couple who say Bayer's Roundup weedkiller caused their cancer.
Alva and Alberta Pilliod are in their 70s, and said that after using Roundup for more than 35 years, they were diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 2011 and 2015; both are now in remission. Their attorneys argued that scientific studies show glyphosate, the primary ingredient in Roundup, is a carcinogen. Bayer's lawyers noted that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and other regulators have approved the product for use.
This is the third court loss in a row for Bayer due to Roundup, which it acquired when the company purchased Monsanto in 2018; a groundskeeper who said the weedkiller gave him cancer was awarded $78.5 million in August, and another man who also said it caused his cancer was awarded $80 million in March. Bayer is appealing the August ruling, and said it plans to appeal the March one as well.
Roundup is still on the market, and it does not come with a warning label. Costco no longer sells the product, but overall, sales are not down, The Wall Street Journal reports. Catherine Garcia
Hospitals, like much anything else in the modern world, run on machines. Besides the computers that schedule appointments and keep track of occupied rooms, there are a vast array of monitoring devices that read out patients' vital signs — blood pressure, heart rate, body temperature, breathing rate, and countless other factors. When something goes wrong with any of those vital signs, an alarm goes off. Ideally, this would lead to a doctor or nurse coming around to assess the problem — but in many hospitals, these devices lead to "tens of thousands of alarms" every day, Stat News reports.
So hospitals are turning to artificial intelligence in order to provide the most patients with the most efficient care.
Many hospitals have a command center, which enables a few technicians to monitor patients' alarms and let hospital staff know when something serious is going wrong. But with hundreds or thousands of patients to keep track of, computers are able to do a much better job at predicting who needs the most immediate care. So by training an AI to pinpoint the warning signs in somebody's vitals, a hospital's command center can become much more effective.
Hospitals around the country are already experimenting with training machines to do this life-saving work: At one Cleveland hospital, workers made a breathtaking 77,000 calls to doctors and nurses over the course of just a month. While "most calls are routine," Stat News explained, some are an indicator of a serious emergency, one where that phone call makes the difference between life and death.
The eventual goal is to give hospital workers more than a few moments' notice for problems ranging from infections to "serious cardiac events." But the difference being made already by learning AIs is a promising start.
Read more about the way hospitals are implementing machine learning at Stat News. Shivani Ishwar