Unbiased headline for Thursday April 25, 2024 – The United Nations is demanding an independent probe into alleged mass graves found at two hospitals in Gaza that had been besieged by Israeli forces.

U.N. Human Rights Chief Volker Türk issued the call, stating that “independent, effective and transparent investigations into the deaths” should be conducted. The hospitals in question are An Nasser Medical Complex, in Southern Gaza, and Al-Shifa Medical Complex, in Northern Gaza. They were surrounded earlier this year by Israeli soldiers searching for militants.

Hamas has released a video of injured Israeli-American hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin. The footage showed him delivering a lengthy statement that appeared to have been scripted by Hamas.

In a Wednesday statement, Goldberg-Polin’s parents, through the Hostage Families Forum, said, “Hersh’s cry is the collective cry of all the hostages — their time is rapidly running out. With each passing day, the fear of losing more innocent lives grows stronger.”

The U.S. Department of State has called for an immediate cessation of fighting between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the breakaway Rapid Support Forces that endangers millions in Sudan.

“We are alarmed by indications of an imminent offensive by the Rapid Support Forces and its affiliated militias,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said Wednesday in a press statement.

The Transportation Department has issued a final rule mandating airline carriers to promptly provide cash refunds to passengers when owed for scenarios like canceled or significantly delayed flights and delayed or lost baggage among other issues.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said the new final rule was necessary to ensure passengers were made whole for flight disruptions at or near real-time so it can still be meaningful for them in their travels. The White House also announced that it will also target “junk fees” charged by airlines.

Michigan prosecutors have charged a father for violating the state’s newly enacted safe storage law after his son allegedly got access to a firearm and shot himself in the face in their home.

Theo Nichols’ 8-year-old son was in “extremely critical condition,” at a Detroit hospital following the April 19 incident, police in Warren, Michigan, said at a news conference Wednesday. Investigators said the boy used a chair to access the handgun which was “unsafely” and insecurely stored on top of a kitchen cabinet.

About one-quarter of U.S. adults age 50 and older who are not yet retired say they expect to never retire and 70% are concerned about prices rising faster than their income, an AARP survey finds.

About 1 in 4 have no retirement savings, according to research released Wednesday by the organization that shows how a graying America is worrying more and more about how to make ends meet even as economists and policymakers say the U.S. economy has all but achieved a soft landing after two years of record inflation.

As federal agencies and state partners continue investigating outbreaks of highly pathogenic avian influenza, more commonly referred to as bird flu, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration says it discovered fragments of the virus in some samples of milk.

In an update from the FDA, the agency said it tested milk samples by polymerase chain reaction and found the presence of fragments of the virus, which is not the same as infectious virus and currently poses no increased risk to human health.

In a first-of-its-kind procedure, a terminally ill patient has become the first person in the world to undergo a gene-edited pig kidney transplant and also have a mechanical heart pump surgically implanted.

Surgeons at NYU Langone Health, in New York City, performed the operation in two steps, the first being the implantation of the heart pump. The second took place days later, with the transplant of a genetically modified pig kidney and the pig’s thymus gland.

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