The Trump administration said Thursday that it has launched investigations into 13 states that require state-regulated health insurance plans to cover abortion.

The probes are the latest in a long-running dispute between the political parties on how to interpret a provision, known as the Weldon Amendment, that’s included in federal spending laws each year. It bars states from discriminating against health entities that don’t provide, cover or refer for abortion.

When Democrat Joe Biden was president, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ civil rights office said the provision didn’t pertain to employers or other health care sponsors. The Trump administration said this year that it does.

The administration says that potentially puts states with abortion coverage requirements in violation of the law, because they may not allow employers or other health care issuers to opt out. It said it was sending out letters to gather more information from those states.

The HHS civil rights office launched the investigations “to address certain states’ alleged disregard of, or confusion about, compliance with the Weldon Amendment,” office Director Paula M. Stannard said in a statement.

“Under the Weldon Amendment, health care entities, such as health insurance issuers and health plans, are protected from state discrimination for not paying for, or providing coverage of, abortion contrary to conscience. Period,” Stannard said.

The states with the coverage requirements are California, Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Vermont and Washington. All except Vermont have Democratic governors.

New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill said in a statement Thursday that she’ll defend her state’s policies.

“New Jersey requires health insurance plans to follow all applicable laws, including protecting women’s reproductive freedom. So Donald Trump’s latest ‘investigation’ is nothing but a fishing expedition wasting taxpayers’ money,” she said.

The Weldon Amendment is one of a series of provisions known as conscience laws, which provide legal protections for individuals and health care entities that choose not to provide abortions or other types of care because of religious or moral objections.

In the years since it was enacted in 2005, there’s been a “partisan swing” in how broadly or narrowly it is interpreted depending on which party is in office, according to Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis.

Ziegler said the fact that employers and plan sponsors are not mentioned among health care entities in the text of the Weldon Amendment could give Democrats an edge with their interpretation, but the question has yet to be resolved in court.

Elizabeth Sepper, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said the Heritage Foundation’s massive policy proposal known as Project 2025 called for an incoming Trump administration to withhold Medicaid funding for states found to violate the Weldon Amendment.

“What we’re seeing here is the fulfillment of a promise to the religious right,” she said.

President Donald Trump’s first administration in 2020 moved to withhold federal health care funding for California over what it interpreted as a Weldon Amendment violation, but the Biden administration entered office the next year and reversed the decision.

MIAMI (AP) — The Cuban Communist Party has shown an astonishing resilience over six decades in power.

Whether it’s the United States trade embargo to counter Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution, or the widespread starvation of the “special period” that followed the breakup of its Cold War patron, the Soviet Union, both U.S. hostilities and calamities of its own making have proven no match for the country’s leadership.

But perhaps none of those crises pose as grave a threat as the one triggered by an all-but-declared naval siege by the Trump administration as it seeks to force regime change in the wake of its successful ousting of Cuba’s longtime ally Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

Even as he fights a war with Iran, President Donald Trump this week said he believes he’ll have “the honor of taking Cuba” soon. While it wasn’t clear exactly what he meant, the U.S. is looking for President Miguel Díaz-Canel to leave power as part of ongoing talks with Havana that could avert some kind of U.S. military intervention.

Without declaring a formal blockade, Trump and his administration have already crippled trade with the island.

In March, supplies of oil, food and other goods to the island collapsed, with no foreign-originating tankers arriving to Cuba, according to shipping data analyzed by Windward, a maritime intelligence firm. The volume of port calls, which includes tankers moving from one Cuban port to another, averaged around 50 per month in 2025 but fell to just 11 in March – all of them arriving from domestic ports. It was the lowest since 2017. Moreover, little relief is in sight: with no tankers and only three container ships — originating in China, India and the Netherlands — listing Cuba as their intended harbor. On Thursday, The Associated Press reported that two vessels, one of them sanctioned by the U.S., could arrive in the coming days carrying Russian fuel.

The stranglehold is disrupting the lives of Cuba’s 11 million residents, who are enduring massive blackouts and a breakdown in medical care due to a lack of fuel to power ambulances and hospital generators. The country, one of the most heavily reliant in the world on oil to generate electricity, produces barely 40% of the oil needed to cover its energy needs.

Ian Ralby, head of I.R. Consilium, a U.S.-based consultancy focused on maritime security, said the United States’ aggressiveness will not endear Trump to Cubans long eager for change.

“Every Cuban resident is suffering the acute inaccessibility to fuel and all the knock-on consequences in terms of access to food, hospitals and free movement,” he said.

The sudden halt in trade has taken place without the White House reapplying restrictions on exports to Cuba that were last loosened during the Biden administration. Indeed, shipments of U.S.-produced poultry, pork and other foodstuffs to Cuba — which account for the vast majority of U.S. exports to the country — last year soared to $490 million, the most since 2009. Non-agricultural exports and humanitarian donations, much of it to Cuba’s emerging private sector, more than doubled.

But emboldened by the U.S. capture of Maduro, Trump has gradually escalated his rhetoric on Cuba, first suggesting he would pursue “a friendly takeover” of the country and more recently telling conservative allies from Latin America that he would “take care” of Cuba once the war with Iran winds down.

While neither he nor the administration has articulated what exactly the pledge meansthe continued presence in the Caribbean of U.S. warships used in the strike against Maduro has led companies and countries that do business with Cuba to self-police.

“Nobody wants to be on the radar of Trump’s Truth Social account,” said John Kavulich, president of the New York-based U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council.

In the run-up to the U.S. military’s ousting of Maduro during a nighttime raid on Jan. 3, Trump declared that the U.S. would block all Venezuelan oil shipments to Cuba and even seized a few tankers to enforce what it called a “quarantine,” borrowing a term used by President John F. Kennedy during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Later in the month, Trump signed an executive order threatening tariffs on any country that supplies oil to Cuba. The warning alarmed officials in Mexico, who have long opposed U.S. policy toward Cuba and where state-run oil company Pemex emerged as a valuable lifeline last year as Venezuelan oil exports declined.

Cuba has upped its rhetoric against what it calls a “fuel blockade” by the U.S. But the Trump administration has disputed that characterization, no doubt aware that according to international law any naval operation seen as punishing civilians is considered an illegal act of aggression outside wartime.

“Cuba is a free, independent and sovereign state — nobody dictates what we do,” Díaz-Canel said in a social media post in January. “Cuba does not attack; we are the victims of U.S. attacks for 66 years and we will prepare ourselves to defend the homeland with our last drop of blood.”

Amid mounting criticism that U.S. actions are starving Cuba, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has started to walk back some of the administration’s threats. In January, the State Department sent $3 million in food kits, water purification tablets and other humanitarian assistance items to the island. Then last month, the White House said it would allow U.S. companies to send fuel — including Venezuelan oil — to private businesses in Cuba.

The goal, said Rubio, is to encourage the development of the nation’s small private sector.

“The reason why those industries have not flourished in Cuba is because the regime has not allowed them to flourish,” Rubio said when announcing the private sales.

But it’s unclear if any companies have started fuel shipments and critics say the strategy is unrealistic as most Cuban companies lack capital and the Cuban government has a monopoly on gasoline distribution.

John Felder, owner of Premier Automotive Export, a Maryland-based business that has been selling electric cars and scooters to Cuba since 2012, said most Cubans, even in their current anguish, are fearful of what lies ahead.

“U.S. policies have created the most resilient people in the world and yet all they want to do is buy things in Miami like you and me,” said Felder, who just returned from a four-day business trip to Havana and says he’s never seen conditions worse. “They want change but they don’t want to be controlled by the United States.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. government’s top intelligence official told lawmakers Wednesday that Iran’s government “appears to be intact but largely degraded” yet repeatedly dodged questions about whether President Donald Trump had been warned about the fallout from the weeks-old war, including Iran’s attacks on Gulf nations and its effective closure of the vital Strait of Hormuz.

Tulsi Gabbardthe director of national intelligence, also stated in prepared remarks to the Senate Intelligence Committee that U.S. attacks on Iran last year had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program and that there had been no effort since then to rebuild that capability.

The statement was notable given Trump’s repeated assertions that a war with Iran was necessary to head off what he said was an imminent threat from the Islamic Republic. Gabbard pointedly said that conclusion was the president’s alone to draw as she declined to directly answer whether the intelligence community had likewise assessed that Iran’s nuclear system presented an imminent risk to the United States.

“It is not the intelligence community’s responsibility to determine what is and is not an imminent threat,” she said at one point.

Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia shot back: “It is precisely your responsibility to determine what constitutes a threat to the United States.”

The testimony came at the first of two congressional hearings held each year to offer the public a glimpse into the largely secret operations of the government’s intelligence agencies and the threats they confront.

The hearings this week take place at a time of scrutiny over the war with Iran and heightened concerns about terrorism at home after recent attacks at a Michigan synagogue and a Virginia university. Wednesday’s hearing also came a day after the resignation of Joe Kent as director of the National Counterterrorism Center. Kent said he could not “in good conscience” back the war and did not agree that Iran posed an imminent threat.

But the hours-long hearing offered few revelations from Gabbard, who repeatedly declined to discuss conversations with Trump, or other senior intelligence officials who testified.

“I am very disappointed,” said an exasperated Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. “It’s the only one time of year the public gets to hear from you guys in this kind of setting.”

Gabbard deflected questions about intelligence given to Trump

A frequent line of questioning for Democrats: What intelligence, if any, had been given to Trump about the war’s potential consequences? Trump, for instance, has said he was surprised that Iran responded to strikes from the United States by attacking Arab nations and has been contending with the economic impact of the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a body of water connecting the Persian Gulf to the world’s oceans and a vital passageway for oil and gas.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a post on X that Trump was “fully briefed” on the possibility of Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz and that the Pentagon has been planning for the possibility of Iran closing it “for DECADES.”

But Trump’s plan to secure the waterway is unclear, especially after he said this week that NATO and most other allies had rejected his calls to help secure it. Iran has said the strait is open except to the U.S. and its allies.

Democrats got few direct answers when they pressed administration officials on what Trump understood about that possibility, with Gabbard saying she would not divulge her conversations with him and CIA Director John Ratcliffe observing that he had been in countless briefings with the president.

“We’re trying to figure out if the president knew what the downside was of the Strait of Hormuz being closed,” said Sen. Mark Kelly, an Arizona Democrat. “Did he know this was going to happen or did he just disregard it?”

Gabbard appeared to try to thread a needle between emphasizing the intelligence community’s views of Iran’s risks — she said, for instance, that internal tensions would continue to increase even if the regime’s leadership remained intact — and not completely echoing the president’s arguments of an imminent threat.

At one point, Warner noted that Gabbard, in her prepared written statement submitted to the committee, said Iran’s nuclear enrichment program had been obliterated in strikes last year, but her opening remarks on Wednesday did not use that language.

He asked whether she had omitted that reference to conform to Trump’s claims of an imminent threat. Gabbard insisted that she had skipped some of her written statement in the interest of time.

Trump has sought to distance himself from Kent. Ratcliffe tried to do the same Wednesday when he was asked whether intelligence supported Kent’s assessment that Iran was not an imminent threat. “The intelligence reflects the contrary,” Ratcliffe said.

Questions about other attacks and Gabbard’s presence at an FBI search

Gabbard and Ratcliffe fielded the majority of questions, but other witnesses included the heads of the National Security Agency and Defense Intelligence Agency, as well as FBI Director Kash Patel, who was pressed about the terrorism threat amid a spate of attacks this month. Those include a man with a past terrorism conviction who opened fire inside an Old Dominion University classroom in Virginia and a Lebanese-born man in Michigan who drove his car into a synagogue.

One subject that did not receive attention: a deadly missile strike on an elementary school in Iran, which people familiar with the matter have said the U.S. likely carried out as a result of outdated intelligence.

Apart from Iran, Gabbard was pressed on her presence at an FBI search in January of the main election hub in Fulton County, Georgia, where agents seized voter data related to the 2020 presidential election. Her appearance at a domestic law enforcement operation raised eyebrows given that Gabbard’s office is meant to focus squarely on foreign threats.

Warner described her appearance there as part of an “organized effort to misuse her national security powers to interfere in domestic politics and potentially provide a pretext for the president’s unconstitutional efforts to seize control of the upcoming elections.”

Gabbard responded that she was present for the search at the request of the president but did not participate, though she later said she helped to oversee it.

The House Intelligence Committee will hold its own threats hearing on Thursday.

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Associated Press writers Mike Catalini, Ben Finley and Michelle L. Price contributed to this report.