Approximately seven mortar rounds landed in the U.S. Embassy compound in Baghdad during an attack early on Friday, a U.S. military official told Reuters, in what appears to be one of the largest attacks against the embassy in recent memory.

It also marked the first time the U.S. embassy had been fired on in more than a year, apparently widening the range of targets after dozens of attacks on military bases housing U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria since mid-October amid fears of broadening conflict in the region.

No group claimed responsibility, but previous attack against U.S. forces have been carried out by Iran-aligned militias which have targeted U.S. interests in Syria and Iraq over Washington's backing for Israel in its Gaza war.

One in five patients crossed state lines to obtain an abortion in 2023, compared with one in 10 patients in 2020

Abortion providers witnessed a record surge in out-of-state patients since Roe v Wade was overturned last year, according to newly released data from the Guttmacher Institute. The report, offering the first analysis of abortion-related travel since the supreme court decision, revealed that one in five patients crossed state lines to obtain an abortion in 2023, compared with one in 10 patients in 2020.

As abortion bans have rippled across the country, providers in the states such as Illinois – where the procedure is protected by the state constitution – have been inundated with appointment requests. Illinois’s clinics doubled the proportion of abortions provided to out-of-state patients, according to the Guttmacher report – in 2020, 21% of the patients who received abortion care in Illinois came from out of state; in 2023, the figure jumps to 42%.

One in five patients crossed state lines to obtain an abortion in 2023, compared with one in 10 patients in 2020

Abortion providers witnessed a record surge in out-of-state patients since Roe v Wade was overturned last year, according to newly released data from the Guttmacher Institute. The report, offering the first analysis of abortion-related travel since the supreme court decision, revealed that one in five patients crossed state lines to obtain an abortion in 2023, compared with one in 10 patients in 2020.

As abortion bans have rippled across the country, providers in the states such as Illinois – where the procedure is protected by the state constitution – have been inundated with appointment requests. Illinois’s clinics doubled the proportion of abortions provided to out-of-state patients, according to the Guttmacher report – in 2020, 21% of the patients who received abortion care in Illinois came from out of state; in 2023, the figure jumps to 42%.

President Joe Biden is heading to Las Vegas to showcase $8.2 billion in funding for 10 major passenger rail projects across the country, including to spur work on high-speed, electric train routes that could one day link Nevada and California, as well as Los Angeles and San Francisco.

The administration says the 218-mile (350.8-kilometer) train route linking Las Vegas and Rancho Cucamonga, California, about 40 miles (65 kilometers) east of downtown Los Angeles, may one day serve more than 11 million passengers annually.

The administration hopes the investment through federal and state partnership programs will help to boost prospects for the long-discussed project, which supporters say could revitalize travel in the American West and critics argue is too costly.

Annual mammograms are recommended indefinitely for breast cancer survivors in many countries, including the U.S., but a large British study finds that less frequent screening is just as good.

Yearly screening is meant to monitor whether cancer has come back. All that testing causes anxiety for patients and costs money.

Until now, there wasn’t solid evidence for when women could ease back on yearly mammograms, said Janet Dunn of the University of Warwick, who led the study funded by the research arm of the U.K.’s National Health Service.

The study showed less frequent mammograms are just as good as a yearly schedule for breast cancer survivors 50 and older.

As more Chinese money flows into Mexico, the United States and Mexico on Thursday agreed to monitor foreign investments and regularly share information about the screening process.

The U.S. is becoming “more deeply integrated with Mexico,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said at a news conference in Mexico City. “We want to see further deepening of our economic relationship with respect to our supply chains, supply chain resilience, and we think it’s important to be somewhat more coordinated than we have been when it comes to investment screening.”

The U.S. wants to prevent Chinese purchases of sensitive American technology that could be accessed through other U.S. trading partners. The U.S.-Mexico agreement may help achieve that goal.

One month after Mississippi’s November statewide election, voting rights groups say election officials in the state’s largest county have failed to provide enough information about the problems that led to polling precincts running out of ballots.

The coalition of statewide and national civil rights organizations has requested meetings and more details about why Hinds County Election Commissioners ordered the wrong ballots, leading to shortages at several polling locations on the day the state was deciding a competitive governor’s race and a full slate of down-ballot races. Those queries have largely been met with silence, the groups said at a joint news conference Thursday.

“While we recognize and respect the commissioners have taken responsibility for the ballot shortages, Hinds County voters still have questions,” said Amir Badat, an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

U.S. businesses and other employers added a healthy 199,000 jobs last month and the unemployment rate fell, fresh signs that the economy could achieve an elusive “soft landing,” in which inflation would return to the Federal Reserve’s 2% target without causing a steep recession.

Friday’s report from the Labor Department showed that the unemployment rate dropped from 3.9% to 3.7%, not far above a five-decade low of 3.4% in April. The jobless rate has now remained below 4% for nearly two years, the longest such streak since the late 1960s.

Last month’s increase was inflated by the return of about 40,000 formerly striking auto workers and actors, who were not at work in October but were back on the job in November.

Vladimir Putin has said he will run for president in the March 2024 election, moving the longtime Russian leader a step closer to a fifth term in office.

The announcement on Friday was widely expected and there is little question about the outcome.

Putin has dominated Russia’s political system and the media for the past two decades, jailing prominent opposition politicians, such as Alexei Navalny and Ilya Yashin, who could challenge him on the ballot. Putin has won previous elections by a landslide, but independent election watchdogs say they were marred by widespread fraud.

Putin’s long-term spokesperson in a previous interview said: “Putin will be re-elected next year with more than 90% of the vote”.

A federal lawsuit filed by a group of states alleges the NCAA’s transfer rule for college athletes violates antitrust law.

The lawsuit, filed in West Virginia’s northern district, challenges the NCAA’s authority to impose a one-year delay in the eligibility of certain athletes who transfer between schools. The suit said the rule “unjustifiably restrains the ability of these college athletes to engage in the market for their labor as NCAA Division I college athletes.”

The lawsuit filed by West Virginia and six other states alleges violations of the Sherman Act.

NCAA rules allow underclassmen to transfer once without having to sit out a year. But an additional transfer as an undergraduate generally requires the NCAA to grant a waiver allowing the athlete to compete immediately. Without it, the athlete would have to sit out for a year at the new school.

The groundbreaking approval has been eagerly anticipated by patients and doctors alike. The treatment is expected to be extremely expensive.

The Food and Drug Administration on Friday approved a powerful treatment for sickle cell disease, a devastating illness that affects more than 100,000 Americans, the majority of whom are Black.

The therapy, called Casgevy, from Vertex Pharmaceuticals and CRISPR Therapeutics, is the first medicine to be approved in the United States that uses the gene-editing tool CRISPR, which won its inventors the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2020.

“I think this is a pivotal moment in the field,” said Dr. Alexis Thompson, chief of the division of hematology at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, who has previously consulted for Vertex. “It’s been really remarkable how quickly we went from the actual discovery of CRISPR, the awarding of a Nobel Prize, and now actually seeing it being an approved product.”

At a time when abortion access can vary widely across the U.S., many reproductive health advocates are concerned about the impact of data sharing systems that automatically transmit patients’ electronic health records across institutions and state lines. The Biden administration is looking to introduce new regulations to bolster patients’ privacy — but the proposed rules are getting pushback from companies like UnitedHealth Group and Epic, which argue that they would make data sharing harder overall, contrary to the overarching goals of the health care system.

In April 2023, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) proposed regulations that aim to bolster patient confidentiality by forcing software makers to ensure that health care providers can easily segment and protect specific information from disclosure when requested by patients.

According to the proposal, health records systems will be required to comply with a new privacy and security framework by January 2026.