By MEAD GRUVER, Associated Press

FORT COLLINS, Colo. (AP) — Abortion will remain legal in Wyoming after the state Supreme Court struck down laws including the country’s first explicit ban on abortion pills, ruling Tuesday that they violate the state constitution.

The justices sided with the state’s only abortion clinic and others who had sued over the bans passed since 2022, the year that the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade decision.

Wellspring Health Access in Casper, the abortion access advocacy group Chelsea’s Fund and four women, including two obstetricians, argued that the laws violated a state constitutional amendment. They told the court that competent adults have the right to make their own health care decisions.

Attorneys for the state, however, argued that abortion can’t violate the Wyoming constitution because it is not health care.

One law sought to ban abortion except to protect a pregnant woman’s life or in cases involving rape or incest. The other law would have made Wyoming the only state to explicitly ban abortion pills, though other states have instituted de facto bans on abortion medication by broadly prohibiting abortion.

Abortion has remained legal in this conservative state since Teton County District Judge Melissa Owens in Jackson blocked the bans while the lawsuit challenging them went ahead. Owens struck down the laws as unconstitutional in November.

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By MATTHEW LEE, AP Diplomatic Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump has made broad but vague assertions that the United States is going to “run” Venezuela after the ouster of Nicolás Maduro but has offered almost no details about how it will do so, raising questions among some lawmakers and former officials about the administration’s level of planning for the country after Maduro was gone.

Seemingly contradictory statements from Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have suggested at once that the U.S. now controls the levers of Venezuelan power or that the U.S. has no intention of assuming day-to-day governance and will allow Maduro’s subordinates to remain in leadership positions for now.

Rubio said the U.S. would rely on existing sanctions on Venezuela’s oil sector and criminal gangs to wield leverage with Maduro’s successors.

The uncertainty on definitive next steps in Venezuela contrasts with the years of discussions and planning that went into U.S. military interventions that deposed other autocratic leaders, notably in Iraq in 2003, which still did not often lead to the hoped-for outcomes.

‘Disagreement about how to proceed’

The discrepancy between what Trump and Rubio have said publicly has not sat well with some former diplomats.

“It strikes me that we have no idea whatsoever as to what’s next,” said Dan Fried, a retired career diplomat, former assistant secretary of state and sanctions coordinator who served under both Democratic and Republican administrations.

“For good operational reasons, there were very few people who knew about the raid, but Trump’s remarks about running the country and Rubio’s uncomfortable walk back suggests that even within that small group of people, there is disagreement about how to proceed,” said Fried who is now with the Atlantic Council think tank.

Supporters of the operation, meanwhile, believe there is little confusion over the U.S. goal.

“The president speaks in big headlines and euphemisms,” said Rich Goldberg, a sanctions proponent who worked in the National Energy Dominance Council at the White House until last year and is now a senior adviser to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a hawkish think tank.

Goldberg does not see Rubio becoming “the superintendent of schools” but “effectively, the U.S. will be calling the shots.”

“There are people at the top who can make what we want happen or not, and we right now control their purse strings and their lives,” he said. “The president thinks it’s enough and the secretary thinks it’s enough, and if it’s not enough, we’ll know very soon and we’ll deal with it.”

If planning for the U.S. “to run” Venezuela existed prior to Maduro’s arrest and extradition to face federal drug charges, it was confined to a small group of Trump political allies, according to current U.S. officials, who note that Trump relies on a very small circle of advisers and has tossed aside much of the traditional decision-making apparatus.

These officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss their understanding of internal deliberations, said they were not aware of any preparations for either a military occupation or an interim civilian governing authority, which has been a priority for previous administrations when they contemplated going to war to oust a specific leader or government. The White House and the State Department’s press office did not return messages seeking comment.

Long discussion among agencies in previous interventions

Previous military actions that deposed autocratic leaders, notably in Panama in 1989 and Iraq in 2003, were preceded by months, if not years, of interagency discussion and debate over how best to deal with power vacuums caused by the ousters of their leaders. The State Department, White House National Security Council, the Pentagon and the intelligence community all participated in that planning.

In Panama, the George H.W. Bush administration had nearly a full year of preparations to launch the invasion that ousted Panama’s leader Manuel Noriega. Panama, however, is exponentially smaller than Venezuela, it had long experience as a de facto American territory, and the U.S. occupation was never intended to retake territory or natural resources.

By contrast, Venezuela is vastly larger in size and population and has a decadeslong history of animosity toward the United States.

“Panama was not successful because it was supported internationally because it wasn’t,” Fried said. “It was a success because it led to a quick, smooth transfer to a democratic government. That would be a success here, but on the first day out, we trashed someone who had those credentials, and that strikes me as daft.”

He was referring to Trump’s apparent dismissal of opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, whose party is widely believed to have won elections in 2024, results that Maduro refused to accept. Trump said Saturday that Machado “doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country” to be a credible leader and suggested he would be OK with Maduro’s No. 2, Delcy Rodríguez, remaining in power as long as she works with the U.S.

Hoped-for outcomes didn’t happen in Iraq and Afghanistan

Meanwhile, best-case scenarios like those predicted by the George W. Bush administration for a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq that it would be a beacon of democracy in the Middle East and hopes for a democratic and stable Afghanistan following the ouster of the Taliban died painfully slow deaths at the tremendous expense of American money and lives after initial euphoria over military victories.

“Venezuela looks nothing like Libya, it looks nothing like Iraq, it looks nothing like Afghanistan. It looks nothing like the Middle East,” Rubio said this weekend of Venezuela and its neighbors. “These are Western countries with long traditions at a people-to-people and cultural level, and ties to the United States, so it’s nothing like that.”

The lack of clarity on Venezuela has been even more pronounced because Trump campaigned on a platform of extricating the U.S. from foreign wars and entanglements, a position backed by his “Make America Great Again” supporters, many of whom are seeking explanations about what the president has in mind for Venezuela.

“Wake up MAGA,” Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who has bucked much of his party’s lockstep agreement with Trump, posted on X after the operation. “VENEZUELA is not about drugs; it’s about OIL and REGIME CHANGE. This is not what we voted for.”

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Sen. Rand Paul, also a Kentucky Republican, who often criticizes military interventions, said “time will tell if regime change in Venezuela is successful without significant monetary or human cost.”

“Easy enough to argue such policy when the action is short, swift and effective but glaringly less so when that unitary power drains of us trillions of dollars and thousands of lives, such as occurred in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam,” he wrote on social media.

In addition to the Venezuela operation, Trump is preparing to take the helm of an as-yet unformed Board of Peace to run postwar Gaza, involving the United States in yet another Mideast engagement for possibly decades to come.

And yet, as both the Iraq and Afghanistan experiences ultimately proved, no amount of planning guarantees success.

By ISABELLA VOLMERT

Indiana U.S. Rep. Jim Baird is expected to make a full recovery after his vehicle was struck in a car crash that hospitalized him, the Republican’s office said Tuesday.

“He is extraordinarily grateful for everyone’s prayers during this time,” Baird’s congressional office said in a statement.

The statement did not include further details about the crash. President Donald Trump said Tuesday that the congressman’s wife was also hospitalized.

“They’re going to be okay, but they had a pretty bad accident, and we’re praying that they get out of that hospital very quickly,” Trump said while speaking to House GOP members at a retreat at the Kennedy Center. “He’s going to be fine. She’s going to be fine.”

Baird, who represents the 4th Congressional District in west central Indiana, was first elected to congress in 2019. He is 80 years old.

News of the crash came as Republicans in D.C. mourn the death of Republican Doug LaMalfa, a seven-term U.S. representative from California. His death, along with the resignation of Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene, narrows the party’s control of the House to 218 seats to Democrats’ 213.

In 2022, Indiana U.S. Rep. Jackie Walorski, a Republican, was killed in a head-on vehicle collision in her northern Indiana district. Two of her staffers traveling with her and the woman driving the other vehicle also died.

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By LAURAN NEERGAARD, AP Medical Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. health officials made broad changes to childhood vaccine recommendations Monday, alarming pediatricians and other medical experts who say they will sow confusion and undermine children’s health.

The overhaul is effective immediately, meaning that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will now recommend that all children get vaccinated against 11 diseases, down from 18 a year ago.

The changes comes as U.S. vaccination rates have been slipping and the share of children with exemptions has reached an all-time high, according to federal data. At the same time, rates of diseases that can be protected against with vaccines, such as measles and whooping cough, are rising.

Here’s what to know about the changes:

Here’s what federal vaccine recommendations have changed

Once broadly recommended, the federal government now only recommends protection against these diseases for certain children at high risk or based on individual doctor advice in what’s called “shared decision-making.”

— Flu

— Hepatitis A

— Hepatitis B

— Meningococcal disease

— Rotavirus

— RSV

— COVID-19, a change made in 2025

Here’s what federal vaccine recommendations stayed the same

The following vaccines were left on the recommended-for-all list:

— Measles, mumps and rubella (MMR)

— Diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis or whooping cough (DTaP)

— Polio

— Chickenpox

— Human papillomavirus, or HPV. But in a surprise, the guidance reduces the number of recommended vaccine doses against HPV from two or three shots to just one.

— Hib, or Haemophilus influenzae type B, bacteria that despite the name isn’t related to flu

— PCV or pneumococcal conjugate vaccine

Why were the vaccine recommendations changed?

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said the overhaul was in response to a request from President Donald Trump in December. Trump asked the agency to review how peer nations approach vaccine recommendations and consider revising U.S. guidance accordingly.

HHS said its comparison to 20 peer nations found that the U.S. was an “outlier” in both the number of vaccinations and the number of doses it recommended to all children. Officials with the agency framed the change as a way to increase public trust by recommending only the most important vaccinations for children to receive.

However, many European countries recommend some of the vaccines the U.S. removed from its list.

What do doctors and pediatricians say?

The nation’s large doctors’ groups, including the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, say they will continue to recommend the vaccines that the Trump administration has now demoted. They said there was no new science that warranted the changes, including no signs that the former U.S. vaccine schedule harmed children.

Dr. Sean O’Leary of the AAP said the changes could increase child illness and death from preventable disease. He voiced special concern that the U.S. would no longer recommend flu vaccine for children, just as the flu season is becoming severe and after last winter’s particularly harsh season.

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The pediatricians’ group has issued its own child vaccine recommendations. Also, states, not the federal government, have the authority to require vaccinations for schoolchildren. While CDC requirements often influence those state regulations, some states have begun creating their own alliances to counter the Trump administration’s guidance on vaccines.

What will change for families?

It’s not yet clear. Because of the countering recommendations from pediatricians, doctor visits may not change. However, medical specialists say when the U.S. government doesn’t explicitly recommend a shot, it will raise questions among parents, leading to more difficult conversations at the doctor’s office.

If the changes mean fewer children are vaccinated, outbreaks that have historically been prevented by high vaccination rates could spread more widely, leading to more disease and more missed school and work.

Will insurance continue to cover vaccines?

The Trump administration said coverage will continue for families that still want the shots. Health insurers generally find vaccination a good deal, as shots are cheaper than hospitalizations, and many had previously said they’d planned to cover what was recommended last year through 2026.

AP writers Ali Swenson and Mike Stobbe contributed to this report from New York.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.