An Iowa judge ruled Tuesday that the “fetal heartbeat” law, the most restrictive ban on abortion in the United States, violated the state’s constitution. The law prohibits abortion once a fetal heartbeat is detected, often as early as six weeks. It was passed by Iowa’s Republican-controlled legislature in May 2018. Many women do not even realize they are pregnant that early in the gestation cycle. The ruling judge, District Court Judge Michael Huppert, posted his finding online: “It is undisputed that such cardiac activity is detectable well in advance of the fetus becoming viable.” Most fetuses are potentially viable outside the womb at 24 weeks, which is traditionally held as the soonest cut-off date for legal abortion. Those supporting the law vow to take the case to Iowa’s appellate court with an eye on challenging Roe v. Wade before the conservative-majority U.S. Supreme Court. “The extreme law should have been overturned, because it restricted the freedom of Iowa women and girls to care for their bodies, and it forced motherhood on them,” Iowa’s top Democrat, State Senator Janet Petersen, told the Des Moines Register. “The governor and legislative Republicans should stop attacking women’s health care.”

Only 7 percent of American voters surveyed support giving Donald Trump funding for his Mexico border wall to end the U.S. government shutdown, according to a new poll. The results of poll, carried out for Politico and Morning Consult, reveal a series of damning numbers for the president, including those that show his disapproval rating at an all-time-high. Fifty-seven percent said they disapprove of Trump’s job performance, while 54 percent of voters blame Trump and Republicans on Capitol Hill for the government shutdown. While 43 percent of voters support the border wall, just 7 percent of voters said that they support dedicating funding to a border wall if it was the only way to end the government shutdown. And further bad news for the White House: The poll also shows that a majority of the respondents, 57 percent, believe it’s likely that Russia “has compromising information“ on Trump.

The Federal Reserve is investigating Deutsche Bank’s involvement in billions of dollars of suspicious transactions from Denmark’s leading lender, Bloomberg News reports. The U.S. central bank is examining whether Deutsche Bank in New York properly scrutinized the transfer of billions of dollars that it carried out on behalf of Danske Bank’s Estonia branch, the report says. Danske has already admitted that much of some $230 billion that flowed through the Estonian outpost may have been laundered from clients across the former Soviet Union. Correspondent banks such as Deutsche were used to move money abroad. “There are no probes,” Deutsche Bank told Bloomberg News, but a spokesman said it has “received several requests for information from regulators and law-enforcement agencies around the world. It is not surprising at all that the investigating authorities and banks themselves have an interest in the Danske case and the lessons to be learned from it.” In 2017, the Fed was among regulators that fined Deutsche Bank nearly $700 million for allowing money laundering from Russia. A Department of Justice investigation is continuing.

A religious zealot from Brooklyn claims he sparked the contentious face-off Friday between a group of Catholic high-school students and activists at the Indigenous Peoples March in Washington, D.C., the New York Post reports. The man, who calls himself “Chief Ephraim Israel,” was caught on video berating both the Covington Catholic High School students from Kentucky and the Native American activists for more than an hour before student Nick Sandmann stared down activist Nathan Phillips in an exchange that quickly went viral. “They started doing their chants, so I was cutting into them,” said Israel, 36, claiming the students were making a futile attempt to keep him quiet. “I called them dogs. They sounded like dogs,” he told the Post. He told the Post his “words of God” had “ripped” the “souls” from the students before Phillips came along and tried to “de-escalate the situation.”

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Pete Buttigieg, the Democratic mayor of South Bend, Indiana, is forming an exploratory committee for a 2020 presidential bid, the Associated Press reports. Buttigieg, 37, says in an announcement video: “The reality is there’s no going back, and there’s no such thing as ‘again’ in the real world. We can’t look for greatness in the past.” The local politician gained a national profile when he unsuccessfully ran for Democratic National Committee chairman in 2017, saying the party needed a new start. His message for 2020 seems similar, saying that Democrats need to look to a new generation of leaders to unseat President Donald Trump. If the long-shot candidate were to win the Democratic nomination, he would become the first openly gay presidential nominee from a major political party.

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The English Premier League soccer player who has been missing since his plane disappeared from radars Monday reportedly sent messages to his family telling them that he was “really scared” and that his aircraft was “falling apart.” Emiliano Sala, 28, signed for Cardiff City from French team Nice last week—his plane was believed to be taking him from Nice to Cardiff when it lost contact off Alderney in the southern Channel Islands on Monday night. The soccer star, 28, reportedly sent a WhatsApp voice message to his family in Argentina that said: “I’m on a plane that looks like it’s going to fall apart.” The search for Sala resumed Wednesday morning but officials admitted the outlook was looking bleak. John Fitzgerald, chief officer of Channel Islands Air Search, said: “Sadly, I really don’t think, personally, there is any hope. I think even the most fit person if they are in the water would not last longer more than a very few hours. At this time of year, the conditions out there are pretty horrendous if you are actually in the water.”

The Covington Catholic high-school student whose face-off with a Native American drummer sparked outrage and debate says he had “every right” to stand his ground, but, in retrospect, wishes he and his classmates had avoided the entire situation. Nicholas Sandmann told NBC News he doesn’t feel like he was disrespectful to tribal elder Nathan Phillips during the encounter at the Lincoln Memorial, where the March for Life and the Indigenous Peoples March intersected. “I respect him, I would like to talk to him,” Sandmann said in an interview that will air Wednesday on Today. Initial snippets of video of the encounter drew widespread condemnation, including an apology from Sandmann’s school. A longer video that emerged later showed Phillips had approached the school group and triggered criticism that the media and social-media commentators had jumped to conclusions about who, if anyone, was at fault. Asked if he was to blame, Sandmann said: “As far as standing there, I had every right to do so.” He added, “I mean, in hindsight, I wish we could’ve walked away and avoided the whole thing.”

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Serena Williams was just one point away from a comeback victory in the Australian Open quarterfinals Wednesday when she twisted her left ankle and subsequently lost to Czech star Karolina Pliskova. After a promising start, Williams squandered four match points along the way to dropping the last six games of a 6-4, 4-6, 7-5 loss to No. 7 seed Pliskova at Melbourne Park. Instead of Williams moving one match closer to an eighth championship at the Australian Open—and record-tying 24th Grand Slam title overall—Pliskova will advance to the semifinals in the pursuit of her first major trophy. “I was almost in the locker room,” said Pliskova, who trailed 5-1 in the third set, “but now I’m standing here as the winner.” She will face No. 4-seeded Naomi Osaka, who beat No. 6 Elina Svitolina 6-4, 6-1 earlier Wednesday.

Russell Baker, the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning writer whose celebrated New York Times “Observer” column appeared in hundreds of newspapers nationwide, died Monday at his home in Lessburg, Virginia, due to complications from a fall, The New York Times reports. Baker, 93, was one of the country’s best-known newspaper humorists. He began his career in the 1940s, working as a police reporter and London correspondent for The Baltimore Sun before going onto work in Washington, D.C. for The Times, covering the White House, Congress, and the presidential campaigns of 1956 and 1960. Two years later, he became a columnist for the paper and its news service. Baker wrote nearly 5,000 “Observer” commentaries on news of the day, totaling 3.7 million words. He won the 1979 Pulitzer for distinguished commentary and the 1983 Pulitzer for biography with Growing Up, a memoir of his Depression-era youth. Baker also was the host of Masterpiece Theater on PBS from 1993 to 2004. He retired from the Times in 1998 and published a total of 15 books. Baker went on to write about politics, history and journalism for The New York Review of Books. A collection of those essays was published in 2002 under the title Looking Back.