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Israel Strikes Gaza, Accusing Hamas of Violating Ceasefire

admin - Latest News - October 29, 2025
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Less than three weeks into the ceasefire, Israel launched renewed airstrikes inside Gaza and is threatening more after accusing Hamas of violating their truce by failing to return the bodies of dead hostages and firing on its troops. NBC’s Matt Bradley reports for TODAY from Tel Aviv.



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Oct. 17, 2025, 5:00 AM EDTBy Frank Thorp V, Monica Alba, Julie Tsirkin and Carol E. LeeWASHINGTON — On Day 15 of the government shutdown, a U.S. senator hosted a well-attended birthday party for his bulldog.Dozens of Hill staffers lined up inside the Capitol on Wednesday to wish Republican Sen. Jim Justice’s pup a happy birthday as she sat under a balloon arch wearing a pink and white hat. They noshed on cakes and dozens of cake pops shaped in 6-year-old Babydog’s likeness.At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, President Donald Trump gathered some of the richest people in the country for dinner at the White House. There were beef Wellington, butterscotch ice cream and gold-rimmed china but no mention of the government shutdown during Trump’s 37-minute-long remarks thanking his guests for their donations for a new White House ballroom.Judge blocks Trump administration layoffs, calling them illegal as government shutdown continues04:01“This is really a knockout crowd,” Trump said Wednesday evening, noting that their collective donations have exceeded the ballroom’s $250 million price tag.And so it has been for the power brokers in Washington during a government shutdown that appears to have no end in sight. While thousands of federal workers are furloughed — or fired — and trying to stay afloat without paychecks, the ones responsible for the shutdown are literally, and figuratively, eating cake.The business-as-usual nature for elected officials in Washington, and some of their aides, is in contrast to the experience of others in the nation’s capital, where federal offices, as well as many parks, landmarks and museums, are closed, and of many people across the country. It also solidifies what now seems to be a bygone era of government shutdowns — one when elected officials wouldn’t want to be caught anywhere near parties or other nonessential indulgences.“Everything still seems to be the same, except it’s not. Except most of these people aren’t getting paid,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, told NBC News, noting that the Senate has continued its committee hearings, constituent meetings and normal voting schedules despite the shutdown. “I don’t think that’s right. I just don’t think that’s right. And so, yeah, it’s — and it just feels different than any other shutdown.”President Donald Trump boards Air Force One in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, to return to Washington on Monday.Evan Vucci / APThe federal government has been shut down since Oct. 1 after Democrats and Republicans in Congress, and the president, couldn’t agree on a spending bill to keep it funded.Lawmakers have since been working, to be sure. They’re delivering floor speeches blaming the opposing party for the shutdown and repeatedly casting votes on the same two resolutions to reopen the government that they know don’t have enough support. Some lawmakers have been having informal discussions about potential ways to break the logjam, but Sen. Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla., told NBC News on Thursday that while those talks had been “productive … they’re done.” Members of Congress also continue to get paid, as their pay is protected under the Constitution.But members of their staffs and the many people who keep the Capitol operating aren’t. A congressional staffer, who asked not to be named to protect their privacy, said that while Congress doesn’t seem to be in a big hurry to reopen the government, the shutdown is urgent for them and their family.“My husband is a federal worker too, so for us, this is definitely urgent. We have a family to support,” the staffer told NBC News.Like Congress, Trump has been busy with government business, holding an average of nearly an event a day since the shutdown began. He has traveled to the Middle East to mark a deal aimed at ending the war in Gaza. He’s hosting foreign leaders. Later this month, he is scheduled to take a multiday trip to Asia for world leader summits and meetings.Trump also went forward this week with a previously scheduled Rose Garden ceremony honoring conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated last month, on what would have been Kirk’s 32nd birthday. On Friday, he’ll meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House to discuss the war with Russia before he hops on a flight to Florida to spend the weekend at his Mar-a-Lago estate.The White House has called several aides who were initially furloughed back to work in recent days. While those staffers are working without pay, military personnel who service the presidency, such as the pilots, flight attendants and other staff members on Air Force One, are expected to continue receiving paychecks. The Defense Department shifted funding from elsewhere in its budget to ensure members of the military are paid during the shutdown.The White House also said Thursday that federal law enforcement officers, including those from Customs and Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Secret Service and the Drug Enforcement Administration, will be paid during the shutdown.Trump, too, will continue getting his paycheck under federal law, though he has said he donates his salary.At the same time, the White House has used the shutdown as cover to fire some federal workers. The Trump administration has already issued layoff notices to more than 4,000 government employees, though a federal judge blocked the move for now. The White House has said it plans to appeal.If the firings are allowed to go forward, White House budget chief Russell Vought said, the total could “grow higher” and “probably end up being north of 10,000.”Millions of tourists visit the U.S. Capitol every year, but tours are closed to the public because of the shutdown. Private tour groups arranged by senators and House members, however, have continued in abundance. Unlike in past shutdowns, cafeterias in the Capitol are open, trash is being picked up, grandfather clocks are still being wound, and some lawmakers have yet to furlough a single staff member.A “Closed to all tours” sign in the Capitol rotunda on Oct. 9, the ninth day of the government shutdown.Allison Robbert / APPast shutdowns have led members of Congress to frantically work weekend legislative sessions and hold late-night working pizza dinners to try to end the impasses. But this time, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has kept his members out of Washington since the shutdown began, and senators have consistently taken three-day weekends.Asked about the Senate’s weekend breaks, Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., told NBC News he will continue to allow senators to go home at the end of the week until there’s actual movement in negotiations.“If it looks like there’s productive reason for doing it, of course I’ll do it,” Thune said of keeping members in session over a weekend. “But if, you know, if it’s just no, no, no, no, no and we’re not making any headway, then I’m not sure what the point would be. But you know, I’m open to any suggestion that would help get the government back open.”Once the government reopens, federal workers will receive back pay to cover the shutdown, whether they worked or not. But that wasn’t always the case. In 2019, Congress passed a law that guaranteed back pay to federal workers furloughed during shutdowns. That guarantee seems to have led lawmakers and the executive branch to furlough fewer staff members this time, senators said.“I think the vibe is a little bit different this time because of the back pay guarantee,” Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., said in an interview this week.Some Republicans, who were around for the 16-day government shutdown in 2013, said they believe that then-President Barack Obama and then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., purposefully made the Capitol complex and federal agencies less hospitable during that funding crisis, hoping the pain would lead lawmakers to end that shutdown.“I think it was intentionally,” said Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., who told NBC News he hasn’t furloughed anyone on his staff for this shutdown. Obama, he said, was focused on shutting down “as many things you can, make it as hard on everybody as you can, and Harry Reid did the same thing here in the Senate.”A staff member brings Sen. Jim Justice’s bulldog, Babydog, to Justice’s office Wednesday for a birthday celebration.Anna Moneymaker / Getty ImagesAnd while lawmakers continue to be paid during the shutdown, Justice, R-W.Va., Babydog’s owner, said he is donating his paycheck to his state’s National Guard.“There are people out there depending on us, and right now, it’s a dog’s mess,” Justice said in an interview Wednesday. “A government shutdown is the most ridiculous thing on the planet, and really, truly, we need to be working together and get across the finish line.”Babydog had no better answer than the humans in the Capitol have had about when the shutdown might end.“Snort,” she replied when she was asked at her birthday party how Congress and the White House might reach a resolution to reopen the government.Frank Thorp VFrank Thorp V is a producer and off-air reporter covering Congress for NBC News, managing coverage of the Senate.Monica AlbaMonica Alba is a White House correspondent for NBC News.Julie TsirkinJulie Tsirkin is a correspondent covering Capitol Hill.Carol E. LeeCarol E. Lee is the Washington managing editor.Brennan Leach, Melanie Zanona and Caroline Kenny contributed.
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Oct. 26, 2025, 5:00 AM EDTBy Berkeley Lovelace Jr.With the cost of health insurance set to rise, some Americans are asking a surprising question: Is it actually cheaper to get medical care without it?The short answer: Sometimes. But not often. And it may require a little — or a lot — of homework. Some hospitals and clinics offer self-pay or cash only discounts for patients who pay without insurance, skipping the paperwork and administrative fees that come with having coverage. Hospitals are required by federal law to make their discounted cash prices publicly available online. An allergy test or an X-ray, for example, may be a few hundred dollars cheaper this way, especially for people with high deductible plans. Nonprofit hospitals must provide charity care, which is free or discounted, to people who can’t afford it, even for those with insurance.But paying outside of health insurance means that cost doesn’t count toward your deductible or out-of-pocket limit — and if you end up needing more medical visits than expected, you could wind up worse off financially.“You have to be really careful,” said Stacie Dusetzina, a health policy professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. “The price that you pay with cash, even if they give you some sort of advertised discount, can be more than what you might actually pay through health insurance overall.”The question of whether to opt out of insurance and pay in cash is surfacing as many Americans are expected to face higher premiums next year. Enhanced subsidies, which kept Affordable Care Act premiums lower for many middle-class people, are set to expire at the end of the year without action from Congress. Premiums for people who get their health insurance through their jobs or outside the ACA are also expected to rise next year. Some ACA enrollees are debating whether to drop their coverage entirely — a decision that experts warn could leave them exposed to major medical bills if an unexpected emergency hits. “If you like Russian roulette, then you’ll like to approach health care this way,” said Michele Johnson, executive director of the Tennessee Justice Center, a law firm and nonprofit advocacy group that helps people dispute medical bills. Johnson said “part of the fallacy is that as American consumers, we’re all about, ‘How do I bargain the best deal?’”“Health care is not this way,” she said. “If you’re healthy, you’re basically pushing all the chips out onto the table in hopes that you basically will mostly be healthy.”Losing benefitsInsurance, for all its frustrations, can provide crucial protections: caps on out-of-pocket costs, access to negotiated rates and free preventive care, such as cancer screenings, annual physicals and routine vaccinations.For non-emergency care, a doctor or hospital may require the patient who isn’t using insurance to pay the entire cost upfront or see a different provider, said Erin Duffy, director of research training at the USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics.“It does seem risky,” Duffy said. “If you were thinking that you could keep going to the primary care doctor that you’d go to when you were insured, you might find that there’s different financial obstacles.”For those who are healthy, paying in cash can be a smart move for predictable, lower cost-services — such as an X-ray or CT scan, Dusetzina said.“This comes up all the time in the prescription drug world,” Dusetzina said. “People will often fill generic drugs out of pocket because it happens for them to be cheaper to do that than paying with health insurance in some cases.”But patients wouldn’t have access to their insurer’s negotiated rate — the amount an insurance company agrees to pay for a medical service, Dusetzina said. Even if people haven’t reached their deductibles, they still get the negotiated rate, which might be cheaper than paying cash. And whatever they pay wouldn’t go toward their deductible or out-of-pocket limit. “What has historically happened is, if you went to a medical site and you wanted to pay in cash, the price that they start with is often twice as high or more than what the health insurance price would be,” she said. “So, you do lose the benefit of having a negotiated rate going without health insurance.”A person’s savings can disappear fast if something unexpected happens, Johnson said. Emergency room visits, hospital stays or surgeries — even at discounted rates — can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Uninsured patients are billed the full amount. It’s generally not possible to sign up for health coverage after an emergency has already happened, she said. There’s also a narrow period to enroll; in most states, ACA enrollment is Nov. 1 through Jan. 15. Open enrollment for people who get health insurance through their jobs is generally around the same time.“That’s the only time you can sign up until the next year, so essentially, you’re left holding the bag, not just for emergency visits, but for all the follow-up care,” she said. Johnson said that before people even think about negotiating care with a doctor or provider, they must first check if they have a federally qualified health center nearby. The health clinics receive federal grants to provide low-cost care to underserved populations, including the underinsured and the uninsured. “If you need primary care, you can often get primary care at a federally qualified health center,” she said. If specialty care is needed, doctors may negotiate, but they often require people to pay the full amount upfront, Johnson said. If you want to get an idea of how much you could pay, websites like Turquoise Health show the average cash price hospitals may charge for certain medical procedures. If you do get a lower rate from a doctor, the process might not end there, Johnson said. Depending on how complicated the medical procedure is, you may need to get an agreement with the entire health care team involved.“Even if you have a doctor who says, ‘I will do this for you,’ then somehow you have to get an anesthesiologist to do it, and you have to get labs to do it, and you have to get nurses doing it as well,” she said.Duffy said to call the billing office and “ask really specific questions about when you would have to pay, what are the full range of options for both assistance and payment plans that could be helpful to someone who’s uninsured or lower income or just facing a bill you might not be able to pay all at once.”For those in need of emergency care or hospital care, Duffy noted, there is a federal law — the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act — which requires Medicare-participating hospitals to provide care to anyone who comes to the emergency department, regardless of their ability to pay. After that, the person may be able to negotiate with the hospital or provider, or get a payment plan. None of these strategies are particularly useful for people who are not healthy and are likely to use a high amount of health care, said Lawrence Gostin, director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University.“The self-pay option will be most attractive to the healthy and well-off patient, who may forgo adequate health insurance,” he said.Berkeley Lovelace Jr.Berkeley Lovelace Jr. is a health and medical reporter for NBC News. He covers the Food and Drug Administration, with a special focus on Covid vaccines, prescription drug pricing and health care. He previously covered the biotech and pharmaceutical industry with CNBC.
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