First lady Melania Trump hasn't been seen in public in 15 days, The Washington Post reported Friday, but President Trump says his wife's White House life is business as usual.

Reporters asked Trump about the first lady's absence on Friday, and the president pointed at a White House window, responding that "she's doing great. She's looking at us right there." But Melania was nowhere to be seen.

Melania's unusually long disappearance from public life follows a five-night stay in the hospital for a kidney operation on May 14. She was last seen on May 10. The first lady has had "several internal staff meetings in the past week around a variety of topics, including her initiatives," her spokesperson told the Post, but her office didn't say when Melania would next venture into the public eye.

The first lady hasn't attended several other recent events where she would ordinarily be expected, but according to the president, she's just "doing great" in private, watching her husband interact with reporters from on high in the White House. Summer Meza

Of the more than 2,300 migrant children the Trump administration separated from their families since May, about 500 have been reunited with their parents, a senior Trump administration official told The Associated Press Thursday. Federal agencies are working to set up a centralized family-reunification center in Port Isabel, Texas, the official said, and it isn't clear how many of the 500 children are still being detained with their families. In fact, while President Trump says his "zero tolerance" policy remains in effect, there's widespread confusion over what that means.

In McAllen, Texas, for example, federal prosecutors unexpectedly declined to charge 17 parent immigrants on Thursday, with one saying "there was no prosecution sought" due to Trump's executive order aimed at keeping families together. West of McAllen, federal public defender Maureen Scott Franco said in a Thursday email seen by AP that going forward, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Western District of Texas "will no longer bring criminal charges against a parent or parents entering the United States if they have their child with them."

Deportees who arrived in Honduras on Thursday told Reuters that before their flight left from Texas, U.S. officials asked if any of them had children in detention, and the four who raised their hands were not put o the flight.

Reuniting families is "the ultimate goal," but "it is still very early and we are awaiting further guidance on the matter," said a spokesman for the Health and Human Services Department, which takes care of child migrants. At the same time, the Pentagon agreed Thursday to accommodate 20,000 immigrants on military bases in Texas and Arkansas, and the Trump administration went to federal court to seek permission to hold child migrants for more than 20 days, end state licensing requirements, and scrap other restrictions on detaining families. U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee, who oversees the so-called Flores settlement, rejected a similar request from the Obama administration in 2015. Peter Weber

Skye Savren-McCormick was a very important part of Hayden Hatfield Ryals' wedding, despite meeting each other for the first time just 48 hours before the big day.

Savren-McCormick, 3, lives in Ventura, California, and right before her first birthday, she was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia. She needed a bone marrow transplant, and it turned out Ryals, then a 22-year-old Auburn University student, was a perfect match. Donors must remain anonymous for the first year after a transplant, and Ryals and Savren-McCormick's parents started sending letters and emails back and forth in 2017.

Ryals surprised the family when she asked Savren-McCormick to be her flower girl, but it almost didn't happen; the toddler was still on oxygen two months before Ryals' June 9 wedding. In May, the family received good news: she could go off the oxygen and received medical clearance to fly to Alabama. There, Ryals and the Savren-McCormicks met face-to-face for the first time. "I feel so connected to them, they're like family now," she said. Catherine Garcia

Is Tom Arnold filling a President Trump–shaped hole in Michael Cohen's life?



Probably not, but Arnold and Cohen, Trump's longtime personal attorney, did hang out on Thursday, and their get-together was documented on — where else? — Twitter. "I love New York," Arnold captioned the photo showing him next to a smiling Cohen. Arnold, a Trump critic, is working on a show for Vice called The Hunt for the Trump Tapes, using his show-business connections to try to find video evidence of Trump engaging in bad behavior. NBC News asked Cohen, who retweeted the photo, about the meeting, but he referred inquiries to Arnold.

There are a few links between the two — Cohen, now under investigation by federal prosecutors for his business dealings, served as Trump's fixer for years. Arnold's ex-wife, Roseanne Barr, is a vocal Trump fan, and it's a mutual thing, with Trump expressing his support for her. Maybe the latest connection will turn into a collaboration between Cohen and Arnold. Catherine Garcia

Trevor Noah devoted an appropriate amount of Thursday's Daily Show to first lady Melania Trump's bizarre "wardrobe malfunction" — about 50 seconds — and he was confused about the message Trump was sending, too "'I REALLY DON'T CARE, DO U?' Wow," he said. "It looks like when Melania was in the hospital, she had her last f--k removed." At the same time, he added, "it is kind of sweet that she made a jacket out of her and Donald's wedding vows."

"Look, we could spend forever talking about how out-of-touch this makes Melania seem, but I don't really care, do you?" Noah said, moving on to some jokes about a Phillies fan hit in the head with a hot dog. Noah also touched on Burger King's strange offer to Russia women, Argentina's shocking World Cup elimination, and the new protest the "Charlottesville Nazis" are planning to demand white civil rights. "Yeah, that's right, they're demanding better treatment for white people in America — which, I'm just gonna put it out there, is gonna make this the most successful protest march in history," he said. "It's going to be, like, 'We demand civil ri...! Oh hey, we got them. Good march everyone.'" Watch below. Peter Weber

CNN's Chris Cuomo interviewed President Trump's former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski Thursday night, and tried multiple times to get him to answer a very specific question about Trump's immigration policy.

Cuomo said people are very confused by Trump's executive order regarding family separations at the border, and what happens now to children who are not with their parents. Lewandowski said "there's one problem at a time to solve," which set Cuomo off. "But he created the problem, Corey," the host said. "He came with the gasoline, he threw it on the house, he tossed the match, and he said 'let me grab a hose.'"

Cuomo then moved on to his next question: What is the Trump administration going to do to the employers who hire undocumented workers? Illegal immigrants looking for jobs "get treated like a dog and thrown in a cage," Cuomo said, while the employers keep hiring them with no consequences. Lewandowski dodged the question, and started listing off the names of people who are "dead because [of] illegal aliens." Cuomo continued to press Lewandowski for an actual answer to his question — watch the video below to find out if he ever succeeded. Catherine Garcia

Sure, Fox News goes out of its way to show its fealty and love to President Trump — it's Trump's No. 1 cable news channel, not just America's, after all. But is it really fair to compare Fox News to the state-run TV broadcaster of a murderous totalitarian regime that strictly prohibits outside news sources to the point that it created its own insular internet? The Daily Show did a little comparison shopping, creating a North Korea-Fox News "progagnda-off."

The main difference, you might conclude from these clips, is production quality and tone — the North Korea state broadcaster is perhaps a little manic-sounding for U.S. sensibilities. But Fox News has an actual news division, too, and unless North Korean state TV has its own Shep Smith, the comparison seems a little unfair. At the same time, two people familiar with preparations for the Trump-Kim Jong Un summit told The Washington Post, after watching some North Korean TV, Trump "talked about how positive the female North Korean news anchor was toward Kim" and "joked that even the administration-friendly Fox News was not as lavish in its praise as the state TV anchor." So stay tuned. Peter Weber

Throughout the 2016 campaign and even after the inauguration, President Trump's lawyer Michael Cohen would regularly receive digital copies of National Enquirer articles and cover images related to Trump and his political opponents before they went to press, three people with knowledge of the matter told The Washington Post.

Trump is close to David Pecker, the CEO of American Media Inc., the parent company of the National Enquirer. The stories passed along about Trump were always positive, the Post reports, and if Cohen made any changes, it was to pick a more flattering photo. Trump, several people said, would pitch stories to Pecker and also saw them before they went to print, including an article about Hillary Clinton's health and another about former GOP presidential primary rival Dr. Ben Carson allegedly botching operations.

Sam Nunberg, a former Trump campaign adviser, told the Post that the Enquirer was "such a help to Trump during the primary and even the general" that is was basically free advertising. The company's chief content officer, Dylan Howard, denied that the Trump camp had a say in the articles, adding that if the stories ever were shared, "it was not at the behest of me or David."

In April, FBI agents raided the office and home of Cohen, and people with knowledge of the matter say they took his records related to AMI, Pecker, Howard, and payments made to women who say they had affairs with Trump. Catherine Garcia