Hasta La Gadget!

A Twitter account used last year by the Hillary Clinton campaign sent out its first tweet in more than seven months on Thursday.

The message? A meme fired off in response to President Donald Trump’s renewed attacks on Clinton. 

As reports of growing investigations around Trump continue to emerge, the president took to Twitter to attack his 2016 campaign opponent.

The Briefing fired back with a timeless meme:

It’s not clear who’s operating the account. But it still has nearly 75,000 followers, and at least some of them were happy with the new activity: 

Prior to Thursday’s meme, The Briefing’s last tweet had been on Nov. 7, one day before Trump’s surprise election win. 

(h/t The Hill) 

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

June 15 (Reuters) – Two inmates who are accused of shooting to death a pair of armed guards during an escape from a prison bus in Georgia were captured on Thursday in Tennessee, Georgia officials said on Twitter.

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation confirmed the capture of Donnie Rowe, 43, and Ricky Dubose, 24, in a statement on Twitter but provided no further information.

The inmates were caught following a car chase in Tennessee, Georgia Governor Nathan Deal said on Twitter. Deal said more details would be forthcoming.

The two men, who were serving time for armed robbery, escaped on Tuesday in rural Putnam County, about 70 miles (110 km) southeast of Atlanta, as they were being transported between two prison facilities with 31 other inmates.

A spokeswoman for the Rutherford County Sheriff’s Office, where the two fugitives were said to have been found according to a local media report, did not immediately return calls or an email.

(Reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis in Los Angeles and Eric Johnson in Seattle; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Babies born to women who are overweight or obese face a greater risk of major congenital malformations such as heart defects, according to a new study from the medical journal BMJ.

The risks, which increase progressively with weight status, range from 5 percent higher in women who are overweight (defined by the study as having a body mass index of 25 to 29), to 37 percent higher in women who are severely obese (defined as a BMI of 40 or over). Approximately half of women in the U.S. who become pregnant are overweight or obese.

The study also stressed that the risks of congenital heart defects, malformations of the nervous system, and limb defects also increased with the mother’s weight.

“We demonstrate increased risks of major malformations also in offspring of mothers with overweight and risks progressively increase with a mother’s overweight and obesity severity,” Martina Persson, a researcher in the clinical epidemiology unit at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm who led the study, told CNN.

For Dr. Catherine Spong, the deputy director of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and a privately practicing OB-GYN, this study allows physicians to further explain and quantify for their patients the risks involved in pregnancy.

“Pregnancy itself is associated with risks just by being pregnant ― you double your blood volume, you change your binding protein, you have a higher tendency to clotting,” Spong said. “If you have other medical conditions on top of that you enhance those risks.”

Spong referenced pre-eclampsia and gestational diabetes as conditions for which overweight and obese mothers have higher risk factors. 

She complimented this study, which she was not involved with, for its comprehensive duration and numbers. The study was performed in Sweden, where researchers tracked more than 1.2 million live births between 2001 and 2014 using the Swedish medical registry. Prenatal and delivery care is publicly funded in Sweden, and the “Swedish medical birth register includes information on close to 100% of all births in Sweden since 1973,” according to the study.

Persson told CNN that while the advice for pregnant women to be at a healthy weight may not be new, this quantification of risk helps “expand on previous knowledge.” 

For Spong, one salient point is the progressive relationship between weight and risk. 

“Were you even to just come down from being morbidly obese to obese you would reduce your risk to some degree,” she said. 

For Lucy Sullivan, the executive director of the nonprofit 1,000 Days, which stresses the importance of good nutrition in a child’s first 1,000 days from conception to his or her second birthday, this study affirms the importance of a healthy foundation for both mother and child.

“If we want healthy babies, we need to start with healthy mothers. And this means making sure that women enter pregnancy at a healthy weight, eat a nutritious diet during pregnancy and have access to good quality prenatal care,” Sullivan told HuffPost in an email. 

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

WASHINGTON ― To the list of things former President Barack Obama did that President Donald Trump is undoing, go ahead and add Cuba.

Two and a half years ago, Obama, with great fanfare, announced an easing of the decades-long travel and trade restrictions on the island nation’s authoritarian regime, arguing that the policies had not worked and were only punishing ordinary Cubans.

At a speech Friday afternoon in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood, Trump is expected to reverse at least some of Obama’s changes, despite public opinion nationally and even among Cuban-Americans that shows support for more ties with Cuba, not fewer.

“I’ve never seen a coalition this broad and it have no influence,” said Marguerite Rose Jiménez, who helped craft the Obama policy at his Department of Commerce and is now with the Washington Office on Latin America advocacy group. “This is not a move that’s supported by a majority of the Cuban-American community.” 

But it is supported by the veterans of the failed 1961 CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion to overthrow Fidel Castro. The group endorsed Trump last fall, becoming one of the few Latino organizations to support the Republican nominee.

“The president was honored and humbled,” said a senior administration official who, along with two other officials, explained the coming policy Thursday on the condition that their names would not be used. The official said that Trump promised the group he would restore tougher restrictions and that his actions fulfill that promise.

Specifically, the changes to be announced Friday would eliminate a provision that Americans have used to visit Cuba on their own. They would also make it illegal for Americans to do business with entities controlled by the Cuban military or intelligence services. This would prohibit individuals from staying at state-owned hotels and would ban U.S. businesses from trading with state-controlled enterprises.

“That would be our guiding principle,” said a second administration official, who added that the policy would be lifted if Cuban President Raúl Castro institutes reforms including free elections and the release of political prisoners.

Trump’s new policy will not prevent U.S. travelers from bringing back Cuban rum and cigars or stop airlines and cruise ships from offering routine service. It would also not end the immigration advantage Cuban refugees have had for decades if they managed to reach dry land in the United States ― the “wet foot, dry foot” policy.

Nor will Trump’s policy restrict visits by Cuban-Americans to their relatives or reverse the reopening of formal diplomatic ties, the second official said. “You can’t put the genie back in the bottle 100 percent,” the official said.

The crackdown on travel will end what had become an easy way for Americans to visit Cuba: Declare an individual “people-to-people” exchange. A third administration official said group trips will still be permitted for cultural visits and charitable efforts but that the crackdown would make sure visitors are actually fostering closer ties with the Cuban people “and not just drinking daiquiris on the beach.”

Supporters of Obama’s changes, while grateful Trump does not plan to reverse everything Obama did, nevertheless criticized the policy as a step in the wrong direction. Jiménez said that the way the Cuban economy is structured, with so many enterprises tied to the military, blocking trade with entities connected to the Cuban military would basically block trade, period.

“That’s a backdoor way of effectively stifling all commerce,” she said.

Toward the end of his campaign last year, Trump promised to help the people of Cuba stand up to their government and to make a “good deal” with Castro to replace the bad one he said Obama had made. 

We’re on the wrong side of history when it comes to this.
Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.)

Little Havana is home to much of the one constituency that continues to favor a hard line toward Cuba: the older generation of refugees who left in the 1960s and ’70s following Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution overthrowing the U.S.-backed dictator.

That generation’s children and grandchildren are much more inclined to support Obama’s moves to increase tourism and trade opportunities with the island as a way of building a society that will bring democratic and human rights reforms.

A national poll of Cuban-Americans at the time Obama’s policies were announced in December 2014 showed 47 percent to 39 percent support for easing sanctions. Four months later, support had grown to 56 percent to 35 percent.

One prominent Cuban dissident, though, argued that, while he had initially supported Obama’s new policy, he has concluded that it is not working.

“Reality has proved otherwise,” wrote José Daniel Ferrer García, general coordinator of the Cuban Patriotic Union, in an open letter to Trump. “Castro’s tyranny has been benefiting from the good will of the US government without giving up a bit in their repressive attitude.”

Arrayed against Ferrer and Little Havana’s community of hard-line emigres are a host of human rights and pro-engagement groups. The U.S. business community has also long supported ending the sanctions because of the opportunities presented by a new commercial market so close to Miami.

“All the business entities have made their views known to the administration,” said Pedro Freyre, a Miami lawyer who has worked with a number of clients with interests in Cuba, including a handful of cruise lines.

Polling also shows overwhelming support in the general public for easing the restrictions. In a recent Morning Consult poll conducted for Engage Cuba, 65 percent of voters nationally support the Obama policy, while only 18 percent oppose it.

Engage Cuba’s Madeleine Russak acknowledged an enthusiasm gap in those numbers, however. Those who support the more relaxed rules don’t feel that strongly about it, while the pro-embargo side is passionate, she said.

Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.), who like many Republicans from rural states supports lifting restrictions that make it harder to export agricultural products to Cuba, said Trump has not been well-served by listening to a small group of pro-embargo lawmakers.

“We’re on the wrong side of history when it comes to this,” Emmer said.

Trump, like many Republicans, promised his supporters to undo much of what Obama was able to accomplish over two terms. Trump is pushing legislation to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Obama’s signature achievement. He is working to scrap Obama’s Clean Power Plan to restrict carbon emissions, trying to undo workplace rules, repeal banking regulations and is withdrawing the United States from a near-unanimous international agreement to combat climate change.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

In a major victory for people who identify as neither male nor female, Oregon on Thursday became the first U.S. state to offer a third gender option on state-issued identifications. 

The change approved by the state Transportation Commission allows Oregonians to select “X” for “not specified” as their gender, as it appears on state IDs, driver licenses and driver permits. 

The new rule is set to take effect July 3.

“Our lives are so gendered, which is why it’s important that driver licenses and other forms of IDs recognize people who are non-binary,” said Basic Rights Oregon co-executive director Nancy Haque, whose organization campaigned for the change. “Removing barriers for people is critical to helping all of us live healthy, productive lives.”

The change comes almost exactly one year after the court decision that prompted it. Last June, an Oregon judge granted Jamie Shupe, a retired Army tank mechanic, the right to legally identify as non-binary. The decision marked the first legal recognition of someone being neither female nor male.  

“In order to comply with the order, [the Department of Motor Vehicles] needed about a year to implement the change,” the department said in a statement Thursday. “Time was required to study state laws, update computer systems, work with business partners such as law enforcement and courts, and change administrative rules.”

Thursday’s decision is the latest in Oregon’s progressive track record on LGBTQ issues. In November, the state became the first in the country to elect an openly LGBTQ governor ― Kate Brown, a bisexual woman who first began serving as governor in 2015 following Gov. John Kitzhaber’s resignation. 

While Oregon is the first U.S. state to offer the option, the “X” is also in use in Australia, New Zealand and the Canadian province Ontario. 

California could be next. The state Senate is considering a bill that would allow residents to identify as non-binary on all official state issued documents, including birth certificates.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.