By WAFAA SHURAFA and SAMY MAGDY Associated Press

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — The Israeli military ordered more evacuations in southern Gaza early Sunday, a day after a deadly airstrike on a school-turned-shelter in the north killed at least 80 Palestinians, according to local health authorities. The airstrike was one of the deadliest attacks in the 10-month war.

Hamas appeared to push back against resuming negotiations on Thursday on any new cease-fire proposals. In a statement, it urged mediators United States, Egypt and Qatar to submit a plan to implement what was agreed on last month, based on U.S. President Joe Biden’s proposal, “instead of going to more rounds of negotiations or new proposals that provide cover for the occupation’s aggression.”

Hamas has been designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, Canada and the European Union.

Israel has repeatedly ordered mass evacuations as its troops return to heavily destroyed areas where they previously battled Palestinian militants. The vast majority of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million people have been displaced, often multiple times, in the besieged territory 25 miles (40 kilometers) long by about 7 miles (11 kilometers) wide.

The latest evacuation orders apply to areas of Khan Younis, Gaza’s second-largest city, including part of an Israeli-declared humanitarian zone from which the military said rockets had been fired. Israel accuses Hamas and other militants of hiding among civilians and launching attacks from residential areas.

The humanitarian zone has steadily shrunk during the war with the various evacuation orders. Hundreds of thousands of people have crammed into squalid tent camps with few public services or sought shelter in schools, though the United Nations says hundreds of those have been directly hit or damaged.

Khan Younis suffered widespread destruction during an air and ground offensive earlier this year. Tens of thousands fled again last week after an evacuation order.

The new order came in leaflets dropped from the sky. As smoke rose on the horizon, hundreds of families carrying belongings in their arms left homes and shelters, seeking elusive refuge. One child carried a stuffed Hello Kitty doll as others walked through rubble-filled streets.

“We don’t know where to go,” said Amal Abu Yahia, a mother of three, who had returned to Khan Younis in June to shelter in their severely damaged home. It was the fourth displacement for the 42-year-old widow, whose husband was killed when an Israeli airstrike hit their neighbors’ house in March.

She said they went to Muwasi, a sprawling tent camp along the coast, but couldn’t find space.

Ramadan Issa, a father of five in his 50s, fled Khan Younis with 17 members of his extended family, joining hundreds of people walking toward central Gaza.

“Every time we settle in one place and build tents for women and children, the occupation comes and bombs the area,” he said, referring to Israel. “This situation is unbearable.”

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Gaza’s Health Ministry, which doesn’t distinguish between civilians and combatants, says the Palestinian death toll from the war is approaching 40,000. Aid groups have struggled to address the staggering humanitarian crisis, while international experts have warned of famine.

The war began when Hamas-led terrorists burst through Israel’s defenses on Oct. 7 and rampaged through farming communities and army bases near the border, killing around 1,200 people — mostly civilians — and abducting around 250 people. Of the roughly 110 remaining hostages, Israeli authorities believe around a third are dead.

The conflict has threatened to trigger a regional war, as Israel has traded fire with Iran and its militant allies across the region. “I hope that they will think this through and won’t get to a point where they will force us to cause significant damage and increase the chances of war breaking out on additional fronts,” Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Sunday.

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin spoke to Gallant on Sunday, reiterating America’s commitment to defend Israel and noting the strengthening of the U.S. military force posture and capabilities in the region, according to the Defense Department. It noted Austin has ordered a guided missile submarine to the Middle East and is telling the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier strike group to sail more quickly to the area. The Lincoln was expected in the region by month’s end.

In Lebanon, the Health Ministry said an Israeli strike near the southern town of Taybeh killed two people, without giving details. Israel’s military said it struck a cell of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. Hezbollah announced the deaths of three militants, without details, and said it conducted rocket and artillery attacks on Israeli military positions.

In the Israeli-occupied West Bank, which has seen increased violence since the war began, Israel’s military said that an Israeli civilian was killed and another was wounded in a drive-by shooting. Hamas claimed the attack, saying it was a response to the strike on the school in Gaza.

Israel’s airstrike on Saturday hit a mosque inside a school in Gaza City where thousands of people were sheltering. The Israeli military said it killed 19 Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants. Hamas and Palestinian activists disputed that, saying two of the 19 were killed in earlier strikes and others were known to be civilians or opponents of Hamas.

Northern Gaza has been surrounded by Israeli forces and largely cut off from the world, and it wasn’t possible to independently confirm accounts from either side. European leaders and neighbors of Israel condemned the strike.

Samy Magdy reported from Cairo. AP journalists Lolita C. Baldor in Washington and Kareem Chehayeb in Beirut contributed to this report.

By AMANDA SEITZ Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Bleeding and in pain, Kyleigh Thurman didn’t know her doomed pregnancy could kill her.

Emergency room doctors at Ascension Seton Williamson in Texas handed her a pamphlet on miscarriage and told her to “let nature take its course” before discharging her without treatment for her ectopic pregnancy.

When the 25-year-old returned three days later, still bleeding, doctors finally agreed to give her an injection intended to end the pregnancy. But it was too late. The fertilized egg growing on Thurman’s fallopian tube would rupture it, destroying part of her reproductive system.

That’s according to a complaint Thurman and the Center for Reproductive Rights filed last week asking the government to investigate whether the hospital violated a federal law when staff failed to treat her initially in February 2023.

“I was left to flail,” Thurman said. “It was nothing short of being misled.”

Even as the Biden administration publicly warned hospitals to treat pregnant patients in emergencies, facilities continue to violate the federal law. The issue became a focus for the administration following reports of women being improperly treated in emergency rooms after the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the constitutional right to an abortion more than two years ago.

More than 100 pregnant women in medical distress who sought help from emergency rooms were turned away or negligently treated since 2022, an Associated Press analysis of federal hospital investigations has found.

Two women – one in Florida and one in Texas – were left to miscarry in public restrooms. In Arkansas, a woman went into septic shock and her fetus died after an emergency room sent her home. At least four other women with ectopic pregnancies had trouble getting any treatment, including one California woman who needed a blood transfusion after she sat for nine hours in an emergency waiting room.

The White House says hospitals must offer abortions when needed to save a woman’s health, despite state bans. Texas is challenging that guidance and, earlier this summer, the Supreme Court declined to resolve the issue.

Abortion bans complicate risky pregnancy care

In Texas, where doctors face up to 99 years of prison if convicted of performing an illegal abortion, medical and legal experts say the law is complicating decision-making around emergency pregnancy care.

Although the state law says termination of ectopic pregnancies is not considered abortion, the draconian penalties scare Texas doctors from treating those patients, the Center for Reproductive Rights argues.

“As fearful as hospitals and doctors are of running afoul of these state abortion bans, they also need to be concerned about running afoul of federal law,” said Marc Hearron, a center attorney. Hospitals face a federal investigation, hefty penalties and threats to their Medicare funding if they break the federal law.

The organization filed two complaints last week with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Service alleging that different Texas emergency rooms failed to treat two patients, including Thurman, with ectopic pregnancies.

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Another complaint says Kelsie Norris-De La Cruz, 25, lost a fallopian tube and most of an ovary after an Arlington, Texas, hospital sent her home without treating her ectopic pregnancy, even after a doctor said discharge was “not in her best interest.”

“The doctors knew I needed an abortion, but these bans are making it nearly impossible to get basic emergency healthcare,” she said in a statement. “I’m filing this complaint because women like me deserve justice and accountability from those that hurt us.”

Conclusively diagnosing an ectopic pregnancy can be difficult. Doctors cannot always find the pregnancy’s location on an ultrasound, three separate doctors consulted for this article explained. Hormone levels, bleeding, a positive pregnancy test and ultrasound of an empty uterus all indicate an ectopic pregnancy.

“You can’t be 100% — that’s the tricky part,” said Kate Arnold, an OB-GYN in Washington. “They’re literally time bombs. It’s a pregnancy growing in this thing that can only grow so much.”

Texas Right to Life Director John Seago said the state law clearly protects doctors from prosecution if they terminate ectopic pregnancies, even if a doctor “makes a mistake” in diagnosing it.

“Sending a woman back home is completely unnecessary, completely dangerous,” Seago said.

But the state law has “absolutely” made doctors afraid of treating pregnant patients, said Hannah Gordon, an emergency medicine physician who worked in a Dallas hospital until last year.

“It’s going to force doctors to start creating questionable scenarios for patients, even if it’s very dangerous,” said Gordon. She left Texas hoping to become pregnant and worried about the care she’d get there.

Gordon recalled a pregnant patient at her Dallas emergency room who had signs of an ectopic pregnancy. Because OB-GYNs said they couldn’t definitively diagnose the problem, they waited to end the pregnancy until she came back the next day.

“It left a bad taste in my mouth,” Gordon said.

“Oh my God, I’m dying.”

In Thurman’s case, when she returned to Ascension Seton Williamson a third time, her OB-GYN told her she’d need surgery to remove the fallopian tube, which had ruptured. Thurman, still heavily bleeding, balked. Losing the tube would jeopardize her fertility.

But her doctor told her she risked death if she waited any longer.

“She came in and she’s like, you’re either going to have to have a blood transfusion, or you’re going to have to have surgery or you’re going to bleed out,” Thurman said, through tears. “That’s when I just kind of was like, “oh my God, I’m, I’m dying.”

Ascension Seton Williamson declined to comment on Thurman’s case, but said in a statement the hospital “is committed to providing high-quality care to all who seek our services.”

In Florida, a 15-week pregnant woman leaked amniotic fluid for an hour in Broward Health Coral Springs’ emergency wait room, according to federal documents. An ultrasound revealed the patient had no amniotic fluid surrounding the fetus, a dangerous situation that can cause serious infection.

The woman miscarried in a public bathroom that day, after the emergency room doctor listed her condition as “improved” and discharged her, without consulting the hospital’s OB-GYN.

Emergency crews rushed her to another hospital, where she was placed on a ventilator and discharged after six days.

Abortions after 15 weeks were banned in Florida at the time. Broward Health Coral Springs’ obstetrics medical director told an investigator that inducing labor for anyone who presents with pre-viable premature rupture of membranes is “the standard of care, has been a while, regardless of heartbeat, due to the risk to the mother.”

The hospital declined to comment or share its policies with the AP.

In another Florida case, a doctor admitted state law had complicated emergency pregnancy care.

“Because of the new laws … staff cannot intervene unless there is a danger to the patient’s health,” a doctor at Memorial Regional Hospital in Hollywood, Florida, told an investigator who was probing the hospital’s failure to offer an abortion to a pregnant woman whose water broke at 15 weeks, well before the fetus could survive.

Troubles extend beyond abortion ban states

Serious violations that jeopardized a mother or her fetus’ health occurred in states with and without abortion bans, the AP’s review found.

In interviews with investigators, two short-staffed hospitals – in Idaho and Washington – admitted to routinely directing pregnant patients to drive to other hospitals.

A pregnant patient at a Bakersfield, California, emergency room was quickly triaged, but staff failed to realize the urgency of her condition, a uterine rupture. The delay, an investigator concluded, may have contributed to the baby’s death.

Doctors at emergency rooms in California, Nebraska, Arkansas and South Carolina failed to check for fetal heartbeats or discharged patients who were in active labor, leaving them to deliver at home or in ambulances, according to the documents.

Nursing and doctor shortages that have plagued hospitals since the onset of COVID-19, trouble staffing ultrasounds around-the-clock, and new abortion laws are making the emergency room a dangerous place for pregnant women, warned Dara Kass, an emergency medicine doctor and former U.S. Health and Human Services official.

“It is increasingly less safe to be pregnant and seeking emergency care in an emergency department,” she said.

The Twins have to make a couple of pitching moves for the Royals series that starts Monday night. One of them will be calling up prospect Zebby Matthews to make his major league debut.

A major league source said Matthews, the Twins’ second-ranked pitching prospect behind David Festa — already with the club — will be called up Tuesday. Whether that’s to start that night or in Wednesday’s series finale is unclear.

Pablo Lopez will start a 6:40 p.m. game Monday at Target Field. After that, it’s TBA and TBA.

The Twins also have to make room on the active roster for left-hander Steven Okert, who has returned from bereavement leave. The likely candidate is veteran Randy Dobnak, who ate three innings of Sunday’s game and kept the Twins in a 5-3 loss to Cleveland.

Matthews, 24, was an eighth-round pick out of Western Carolina in the 2022 amateur draft. He’s a 6-foot-5, 225-pound right-hander with a fastball that sits between 94 and 97 mph, according to mlb.com’s Statcast.

He finished last season at High-A Cedar Rapids and has pitched this season for Class AA Wichita, where he was 1-2 with a 1.95 earned-run average and 63 strikeouts against just six walks in 55⅓ innings, and Class AAA St. Paul. He has made two starts with the Saints, one rough, one good.

In his first start with the Saints, Matthews gave up five earned runs on nine hits while striking out eight. In the second, last Thursday, he gave up a run on two hits and a walk and fanned five.

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Which Samsung smart TVs are best?

Samsung is a reliable and quality brand if you are looking for a smart TV to add to your home. Depending on the model, they come with many different features (some of which are better than others); however, additional features usually mean a higher price tag.

The top choice for a Samsung smart TV that gives a large audience a 4K view is the Samsung Neo QLED QN85A Series 4K. Consider it if you want a high-quality display for your home theater.

What to know before you buy a Samsung smart TV

Where the TV will be mounted

The space of the room you have in mind and personal preference determines the size of the screen you may want. Consider other decor and how the TV fits in the overall environment. Samsung has a line of Frame series TVs designed to be low profile and blend in as if they were framed pieces of artwork on your wall.

Resolution

The newest resolution is 8K, so there is not much native 8K resolution content out there yet. There is plenty of 4K Ultra HD content and full HD, though. Depending on what you plan to view on the screen, you may not need the highest resolution available.

Smart TV apps

Older smart TVs may not have access to all the newest streaming services and applications, while newer models have access out of the box. If you use newer apps such as those from HBO or Disney, you may prefer a newer Samsung model.

What to look for in a quality Samsung smart TV

Display

Beyond screen-resolution classes, smart TVs do not always display light the same way. Crystal processors for 4K optimize color and details. Samsung’s high-quality QLED models have brighter colors and contrast than OLED. The best options are the Neo QLED TVs, which use faster AI processors to optimize visuals.

Sound

If you are setting up a home theater or already have one, your sound system may be separate from the screen. Some Samsung smart TVs are designed to work well with 3D sound setups, and they usually have good-quality sound on their own. Newer smart TVs have object-tracking sound to provide an immersive experience, but if you want the best possible sound, invest in speakers beyond those built into the TV.

Additional features

Samsung’s smart TVs give users access to many apps and quality-of-life conveniences, but there are more features to consider. The Frame series blends in and displays a piece of artwork on the screen when you are not using it. Serif models are freestanding, very thin and do not need to be near a wall. Some smart TVs are optimized for screencasting from a mobile device if that is an important feature for you.

How much you can expect to spend on a Samsung smart TV

Pricing varies based on the size and resolution of the screen. full HD screens cost less than $1,000, and 4K TVs are about $1,000-$3,000, depending on the size and model. New 8K TVs and the like run more than $3,000, and sometimes, they stretch beyond a $10,000 price tag.

Samsung smart TV FAQ

Do the apps and smart features of a smart TV come with additional costs?

A. That depends on which applications you use. Many popular streaming services, such as Netflix or Amazon Prime Video, have paid subscriptions, but you can use all the apps on the smart TV without paying anything as long as you have access to the content. If you could access an app through your computer or other current devices, the smart TV can do the same thing.

Do you need a smart TV to watch streaming services?

A. You can use older TVs or screens that do not have built-in smart functions to view your favorite streaming platforms. Devices such as Roku TV, Fire TV and others plug into any TV display. Gaming consoles and computers can also display content on a TV that does not have smart functions. A smart TV has the benefit of convenience, especially when it provides a high-quality experience.

What’s the best Samsung smart TV to buy?

Top Samsung smart TV

Samsung Neo QLED QN85A Series 4K

What you need to know: These 4K Ultra HD screens are great for large households because they come with a variety of popular apps.

What you’ll love: This model has a very user-friendly interface. The QLED display provides high-quality 4K pictures and a built-in gaming mode to optimize the 4K gaming experience. It supports more than 150 live TV channels and major streaming applications. The TV has a wide viewing angle and supports 3D sound for a home theater.

What you should consider: The mobile screen-sharing function of these TVs does not work with iOS mobile devices.

Top Samsung smart TV for the money

Samsung Frame Series 4K

What you need to know: These stylish and decorative art-frame TVs allow users to display artwork or images on the wall when the TV is not in use.

What you’ll love: The picture is high-quality 4K. It has many popular applications available and a large selection of artwork to display. It hangs neatly on the wall as if it was a regular picture frame, blending into other pieces of home decor.

What you should consider: Users need to subscribe to access additional art gallery images beyond what is readily available out of the box.

Worth checking out

Samsung Neo QLED 8K QN900A series

What you need to know: This is an 8K smart TV that upscales lower-resolution images to create the best cinematic viewing experience available.

What you’ll love: The QLED display is very bright and features high contrast between light and dark tones. The AI neural networks process video and upscale it to 8K quality without glare. Users can use 3D sound for their home theater with this screen and control the TV with AI voice commands.

What you should consider: This model is not available in as many sizes, and even the smallest scale costs more than $3,000.

Prices listed reflect time and date of publication and are subject to change.

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