(NEW YORK) — Hurricane Lee, now churning over the Atlantic Ocean, has become a Category 5.
As a Category 5, hurricane Lee is expected to have winds of 160 mph.
The National Hurricane Center (NHC) sent out an advisory notice after Lee became a Category 5, warning that dangerous beach conditions were expected to develop around the Western Atlantic through early next week.
“Lee is a dangerous Category 5 hurricane, and further strengthening is possible,” the NHC said in an advisory notice at 5 a.m. on Friday morning. “Lee’s core is expected to move well north of the northern Leeward Islands, the Virgin Island, and Puerto Rico this weekend and early next week.”
On Thursday, Lee strengthened from a Category 2 hurricane to a Category 4, and finally to a Category 5 by 11 p.m. ET.
Lee is expected to move north of the Caribbean islands over the weekend, sparing them any direct impacts other than rough surf and rip currents.
By next week, the spaghetti models show the storm turning north before reaching Turks and Caicos. Bermuda may be in Lee’s path.
Long-range models can change over the next week, but they currently show Lee moving parallel to the eastern United States coastline. If Lee stays on that course, the East Coast would be hit with large surf and rip currents by late next week.
It is too early to predict whether Lee will impact the U.S., but some models show the storm hitting the Maine/Canada border around Sept. 16. By that time, Lee will be weaker, and likely won’t be a major hurricane.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has pre-deployed assets to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, according to the White House.
President Joe Biden was briefed Thursday on the latest trajectory and FEMA’s preparations, the White House said.
(WASHINGTON) — The Justice Department is likely to succeed on its claim that floating barriers Texas deployed in the Rio Grande to prevent migrants from crossing were illegally installed, a federal judge in Austin ruled — adding the arguments used to justify the buoys are “unconvincing” and, in at least one instance, unconstitutional.
Judge David Alan Ezra ordered the Lonestar state to move its buoys on Wednesday and said the Justice Department is likely to prevail on its claim that Texas lacked proper authority to install them in the first place and that the state had employed “unconvincing” and conflicting rationale in doing so.
The ruling grants a preliminary injunction to the Department of Justice, which sued Texas for placing the buoys in the Rio Grande in July.
“Governor Abbott announced that he was not ‘asking for permission’ for Operation Lone Star, the anti-immigration program under which Texas constructed the floating barrier,” Ezra wrote. “Unfortunately for Texas, permission is exactly what federal law requires before installing obstructions in the nation’s navigable waters.”
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has said the state will appeal the ruling, calling it “incorrect.”
Judge Ezra’s order gave the state until Sept. 15 to coordinate with the Army Corps of Engineers to move the buoys — but Thursday, a U.S. Appeals Court granted a temporary stay allowing Texas to keep the buoys in place — at least for now.
“We will continue to utilize every strategy to secure the border, including deploying Texas National Guard soldiers and Department of Public Safety troopers and installing strategic barriers,” Abbott said in a statement Wednesday. “Our battle to defend Texas’ sovereign authority to protect lives from the chaos caused by President Biden’s open border policies has only begun.”
In court filings, Texas has said the buoy system was deployed as part of that strategy to protect against a surge of “[t]housands of aliens … including members of cartels that traffic in people, weapons, and vast quantities of drugs like fentanyl.”
“By any account, this amounts to ‘ent[ry] in a hostile manner.’ And the State has the constitutional power to repel that invasion,” the state said.
But the judge ruled Texas’ “‘invasion’ defense” is a political question — not a legal one — and that even if there were an “invasion” at the Southern border, as they’ve claimed, then protecting American shores would be the province of the federal government, not Texas.
Ezra, appointed by President Ronald Reagan and serving since 1988, said there are “several constitutional provisions” which “assign the federal government—not states—the authority to recognize and respond to invasions,” and “the political question doctrine bars consideration of Texas’s ‘invasion’ defense.”
“Texas’s self defense argument is unconvincing,” the judge wrote.
Though the Lonestar State has repeatedly asserted its sovereignty to defend the border, federal “power to prevent unauthorized obstacles in the nation’s navigable waters trumps state policy preferences,” the judge said.
The judge rejected not only Texas’ claims of authority to install the 1,000-foot-long, four-foot-wide chain of interconnected buoys in the Rio Grande — but also the way they attempted to characterize that buoy system.
Texas takes the “confusing stance” that the buoys can’t be a “structure” (which, in navigable U.S. water, would require an Army Corps of Engineers permit) because buoys “aid navigation,” the judge wrote, quoting the state’s arguments.
But this is a “convenient” claim from Texas that “contradicts its own description,” the judge wrote — since the state had said the buoys were designed as a “physical barrier” created “to deter illegal crossing in hotspots along the Rio Grande.”
“Texas strains credulity with its argument that the floating barrier is not permanent enough to constitute a structure,” the judge wrote.
Questions also remain as to how the vast majority of Texas’ buoy barriers wound up on Mexico’s side of the river, the judge said.
In August, the Justice Department submitted a binational topographic survey, conducted in late July, which found that nearly 80 percent of the barrier was positioned in Mexican waters. A few days later, Texas was “observed seemingly ‘repositioning the Floating Barrier’ closer to the United States bank,” a footnote in the judge’s ruling says.
At a hearing, “testimony was elicited that the buoys were moved back into Texas waters. Testimony was also elicited that the buoys could not have drifted,” the judge wrote. “But in a statement on August 21, 2023, Governor Abbott indicated that they had drifted.”
“There is still some ambiguity as to whether 80% of the buoys ended up in Mexican waters by drifting or by being originally, incorrectly installed there,” the judge wrote.
Mother allegedly confined 9-year-old daughter to home since 2017, had to ‘beg to eat’: Police
Nadine El-Bawab, ABC News
(MIAMI) — A Florida mother has been arrested and charged with felony child neglect after not allowing her 9-year-old daughter to leave their house since 2017, according to the Miami-Dade Police Department.
Kelli McGriff-Williams, 42, did not allow her daughter to leave the home from 2017 to 2023, confining her “the majority of the time to a bedroom,” according to the arrest report.
McGriff-Williams is accused of not enrolling her daughter in school, with the report saying she was never provided with an education.
“The victim is unable to read and write,” Miami-Dade police wrote in the report. “The defendant has never taken the victim to a doctor even when she has been very ill.”
“The victim would have to beg to eat, and the defendant would not always provide food to the victim,” police wrote in an arrest report.
An officer responded to a home after a Florida Department of Children and Families investigation into the allegations. McGriff-Williams was involuntarily admitted under the Baker Act criteria at Jackson South Hospital on Aug. 26 due to her “altered mental state,” according to the arrest report.
Police interviewed the victim at her father’s residence on Aug. 30 and she confirmed the allegations.
The victim’s father told police he had been trying to gain custody of his daughter through the court system since 2017 and he told police that the allegations were correct, according to the arrest report.
McGriff-Williams was taken into custody on Sept. 1 when she was discharged from the hospital.
She was booked on Sept. 3 and is being held on a $5,000 bond, according to Miami-Dade County records.
McGriff-Williams pleaded not guilty in court Thursday. She was assigned a public defender. ABC News has reached out to her lawyer for comment.
(WEST YELLOWSTONE, Mont.) — Montana wildlife officers and law enforcement euthanized a bear that was involved in a fatal attack on a woman over the summer after the grizzly was caught trying to break into a home, officials said.
A West Yellowstone homeowner reported a bear with a cub broke through a kitchen window Saturday morning and removed a container of dog food from inside the house, according to the office of Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks (FWP).
The agency said in a release it sent staff and local officers to the scene and, with the authorization of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, shot the 10-year-old female grizzly “due to an immediate public safety threat from the bear’s food-conditioned behavior.”
The cub, who was right next to its mother when it was shot, was taken to the FWP’s wildlife rehabilitation center in Helena and is awaiting a transfer to a zoo, according to the agency.
Through genetic analysis and “other identifying characteristics,” FWP said it confirmed the slain grizzly is the same one that killed Amie Adamson, 47, of Derby, Kansas, in July.
Adamson’s body was found on July 24 on Buttermilk Trail west of West Yellowstone, according to officials. Adamson worked at Yellowstone for the summer and was on a morning hike when the attack happened, her mother said in a statement.
The bear, which was captured in 2017 by Montana wildlife officials for research purposes, was also linked to an encounter in Idaho that injured a person near Henrys Lake State Park in 2020, FWP said.
“Both incidents were evaluated carefully at the time and deemed to be defensive responses by the bear,” the agency said in a statement.
FWP said that multiple efforts to trap and remove the bear were made after the July attack but were unsuccessful.
The agency warned that the grizzly population in the state is increasing and becoming more dense which is leading to more encounters with humans. It urged residents and visitors to take precautions and carry bear spray in the wild.
“This time of year is when bears are active for longer periods as they consume more food in preparation for hibernation,” FWP said in a statement.
ABC News’ Teddy Grant and Peter Charalambous contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — A jury has found former Trump adviser Peter Navarro guilty of contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena issued in February 2022 by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.
Navarro, who under Donald Trump was director of the White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, was convicted on one count over his refusal to appear for a deposition in front of the committee, and on a second count for refusing to produce documents.
He was indicted on contempt charges by a grand jury in June.
Prosecutors said during closing arguments Thursday that Navarro’s failure to submit documents and testify before the committee was intentional, while the defense argued that Navarro was “communicative” with the committee despite not testifying or submitting documents.
Navarro’s attorney, Stanley Woodward, said that Navarro told the committee that “his hands were tied” and claimed executive privilege.
During testimony Wednesday, David Buckley, a former staff director for the Jan. 6 committee, told jurors the committee had been seeking to question Navarro about efforts to delay Congress’ certification of the 2020 election, a plan Navarro dubbed the “Green Bay Sweep” in his book, “In Trump Time.”
Woodward agreed with prosecutors that Navarro did not submit documents or show up for testimony — but, he said, the Jan. 6 committee failed to contact Trump to find out if he had asserted executive privilege over Navarro’s testimony and document production.
Prosecutors argued that Navarro still “had to show up to his deposition.”
“To cite the privilege, he had to do it on a question-by-question basis,” lead prosecutor John Crabb said. “That was made clear to Mr. Navarro. He didn’t show up.”
Navarro could face a maximum of two years in prison and fines up to $200,000.
(WASHINGTON) — Jury deliberations are underway Thursday in the trial of former Trump adviser Peter Navarro on charges of defying a subpoena issued in February 2022 by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.
Navarro, who under Donald Trump was director of the White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, is being tried on contempt of Congress charges after he was indicted by a grand jury in June.
Prosecutors argued during closing arguments that Navarro’s failure to submit documents and testify before the committee was intentional, while the defense argued that Navarro was “communicative” with the committee despite not testifying or submitting documents.
Navarro’s attorney, Stanley Woodward, said that Navarro told the committee that “his hands were tied” and claimed executive privilege.
During testimony Wednesday, David Buckley, a former staff director for the Jan. 6 committee, told jurors the committee had been seeking to question Navarro about efforts to delay Congress’ certification of the 2020 election, a plan Navarro dubbed the “Green Bay Sweep” in his book, In Trump Time.
Woodward agreed with prosecutors that Navarro did not submit documents or show up for testimony — but, he said, the Jan. 6 committee failed to contact Trump to find out if he had asserted executive privilege over Navarro’s testimony and document production.
Prosecutors argued that Navarro still “had to show up to his deposition.”
“To cite the privilege, he had to do it on a question-by-question basis,” lead prosecutor John Crabb said. “That was made clear to Mr. Navarro. He didn’t show up.”
Navarro faces one count over his refusal to appear for a deposition in front of the committee, and another count for refusing to produce documents. If convicted on both counts, he could face a maximum of two years in prison and fines up to $200,000.
A verdict in the case could come as soon as Thursday afternoon.
(NEW YORK) — As a dangerous heat wave hits the nation, Phoenix is poised to break its record for most 110-degree days.
Phoenix has seen 52 days this year with a high temperature of at least 110 degrees. The city’s record is 53 days, which was set in 2020.
With highs forecast to be at least 110 degrees on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, Phoenix will most likely set a new record this weekend.
This year marked Phoenix’s hottest meteorological summer on record.
Earlier this summer, the city set a record stretch of 31 days in a row with temperatures above 110 degrees, smashing the old record of 18 days in a row from 1974.
Phoenix even saw its hottest ever overnight temperature of 97 degrees in July.
Phoenix is under an excessive heat warning from Saturday morning to Sunday night. Click here for tips to stay safe in the heat.
(NEW YORK) — Hurricane Lee, now churning over the Atlantic Ocean, is forecast to rapidly intensify to an extremely dangerous major hurricane.
Lee, which strengthened from a tropical storm to a hurricane on Wednesday, could become a major Category 3 hurricane by Friday and a high-end Category 4 hurricane with winds up to 155 mph by Saturday.
The storm is currently headed west, located east of the Leeward Islands.
Lee is expected to move north of the Caribbean Islands over the weekend, sparing the islands any direct impacts other than rough surf and rip currents.
By next week, the spaghetti models show the storm turning north before reaching Turks and Caicos. Bermuda may be in Lee’s path.
Long-range models can change over the next week, but they currently show Lee moving parallel to the eastern United States coastline. If Lee stays on that course, the East Coast wouldn’t see direct impacts, but would be hit with large surf and rip currents by late next week.
(ATLANTA) — Another inmate died at Atlanta’s notorious Fulton County Jail after being found unresponsive by a jail official, the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office said Wednesday.
The incident marks the 10th inmate death at the jail this year.
Shawndre Delmore, 24, was found unresponsive in his cell on Aug. 31 and was taken to Grady Memorial Hospital after jail staff attempted “lifesaving measures” to revive him, officials said. He died on Sunday at the hospital.
The Atlanta Police Department arrested Delmore in April for burglary in the second degree and willful obstruction of a law enforcement officer, according to the sheriff’s office. He was being held on a $2,500 bond on the burglary charge, officials said.
The Fulton County Jail is where former President Donald Trump and 18 other defendants surrendered last month after being charged in a sweeping racketeering indictment for alleged efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.
The U.S. Department of Justice announced in July that it launched a civil investigation into the Fulton County, Georgia, jail system following a series of reports of inmate abuse and neglect, including the Sept. 13, 2022, death of LaShawn Thompson, whose family claimed he was “eaten alive by insects and bed bugs” in the jail.
An independent autopsy report, which was obtained by ABC News, lists “dehydration, malnutrition, severe body insect infestation,” as well as “untreated decompensated schizophrenia,” as the conditions that led to Thompson’s death.
Several others have died in the jail this year.
Samuel Lawrence, 34, was found unresponsive in his cell on Aug. 26 during dinner rounds at the jail, authorities said. He was taken to Grady Memorial Hospital where he was pronounced dead, officials said.
An Aug. 31 stabbing at the jail resulted in the death of one inmate, the sheriff’s office said in a previous press release.
Dayvion Blake, 23, died Thursday after he and three other inmates sustained stab wounds, the sheriff’s office said. They were all taken to Grady Memorial Hospital, authorities said.
Christopher Smith, 34, died inside the jail last month after waiting nearly four years for his trial to start. Another inmate in a mental health unit was found dead in October with his wrists and ankles tied, according to Atlanta ABC affiliate WSB-TV.
Others have died while incarcerated because they couldn’t afford bail.
Alexander Hawkins, 66, was pronounced dead last month after being found unresponsive in a medical unit cell while awaiting trial. He was being held on a $5,000 bond for a shoplifting charge.
(NEW YORK) — The New York Attorney General’s Office of Special Investigation has launched an inquiry into the death of two teens after an incident with an Onondaga County Sheriff’s Office (OCSO) official early Wednesday morning, according to state officials.
A sheriff’s deputy responded to a report of “suspicious vehicles” at an intersection in DeWitt, New York, according to a press release from the New York State Attorney General’s Office.
Onondaga Sheriff Tobias Shelley said at a press conference on Wednesday that the vehicles were the same ones allegedly connected to two smoke shop burglaries in Oneida, New York, and there were three people inside each vehicle.
Once the deputy arrived on the scene and discovered the two vehicles, one of them fled, the attorney general’s office said.
The OCSO deputy fired his gun as the other vehicle drove away, according to the attorney general’s office. Shelley said the vehicle had attempted to run the deputy over.
The deputy was not injured during the incident, Shelley said.
That vehicle was later found in Syracuse, New York, after fleeing the area, with two people inside, the attorney general’s office said. One person was pronounced dead on the scene, while the other individual was sent to a local hospital where he was pronounced dead, according to the New York State Attorney General’s Office.
The two people who died were teenagers, according to Shelley. He did not identify the teens nor provide their specific ages. The sheriff’s deputy was wearing a body camera but it wasn’t turned on, Shelley said, adding that the deputy did not have time to turn on the device. The person who called authorities about the suspicious vehicles took a video of the incident, according to Shelley.
The third person inside the vehicle hasn’t been found, as well as the three other people in the first vehicle that fled the scene, according to Shelley. An investigation into the incident is ongoing. Under New York state law, any death caused by a law enforcement official, whether on-duty or off-duty, must be investigated by the state’s office of special investigation.
