Terminal Illness: Lacking the votes in their own party to pass their health care bill, Senate Republican leaders yesterday delayed bringing the bill to the floor. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was planning to get a vote before July 4^th but now faces opposition or reluctance from Republican moderates as well as conservatives.

McConnell said he’ll be trying to tailor the bill to please at least 50 senators, but Maine Republican Susan Collins, for example, said, “It’s hard to see how tinkering is going to satisfy my personal concerns.”

McConnell said, “No action is just not an option.”

In negotiations, conservatives were pushing to force sicker people to pay more for insurance and to allow for more money to be put in health care savings accounts. The moderates are defending insurance for people with pre-existing conditions — a requirement of Obamacare — as well as mental health and addiction treatment.

The bill was dealt a serious blow Monday when the Congressional Budget Office estimated that it would shed 22 million people from the ranks of the insured within 10 years.

Some of the biggest opponents have been Republican governors. Ohio Gov. John Kasich said in Washington, “Who would lose this coverage? The mentally ill, the drug addicted, the chronically ill. I believe these are people that need to have coverage.”

Black Lives: Three current and former Chicago police officers have been indicted on charges that they helped cover up the unjustified shooting of Laquan McDonald, a black teenager killed by an officer in 2014. McDonald, 17, could be seen on a video moving away from the cops when Off. Jason Van Dyke fired 16 shots, dropping McDonald to the pavement. Van Dyke was charged with murder.

Special Prosecutor Patricia Brown Holmes said in a statement about the latest charges, “The indictment makes clear that these defendants did more than merely obey an unofficial ‘code of silence,’ rather it alleges that they lied about what occurred to prevent independent criminal investigators from learning the truth.”

Cyberworld: A ransomware attack hit countries yesterday from Russia to Europe and England. The malware demanding $300 from each victim hit government agencies, electric grids, stores, and banks. The program called Petya also spread to the US, possibly rivaling the size of the WannaCry ransomware attack in May.

The Obit Page: Swedish actor Michael Nyqvist, who starred in the original version of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” died Tuesday in Stockholm of lung cancer. He was 56.

 Free Press, Fake News: Tensions between the press and the Trump administration are ratcheting up in the wake of CNN’s retraction of a story about a Trump associate and the resignation of three employees.

President Trump tweeted, “So they caught Fake News CNN cold, but what about NBC, CBS & ABC? What about the failing @nytimes & @washingtonpost? They are all Fake News!”

A primary complaint is stories about Russian election hacking and possible collusion with the Trump campaign. Spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said at yesterday’s briefing, “We’ve been going on this Russia Trump hoax for the better part of a year now with no evidence of anything. America is frankly looking for something better.”

Sanders cited as an example of good journalism a video by sting artist James O’Keefe, who has misrepresented himself while shooting his stories and has been accused of deceptive editing. He is not a journalist by any definition.

The latest O’Keefe effort portrays a CNN producer complaining about his own organization’s Russia coverage. “Whether it’s accurate or not, I don’t know — but I would encourage everyone in this room and, frankly, everybody across the country to take a look at it,” Sanders said. “I think if it is accurate, I think it’s a disgrace to all of media, to all of journalism.”

Wait one. Did she say, “Whether it’s accurate or not, I don’t know”? Well, at least it’s not “Fake News!”

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