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(WASHINGTON) — Harvard University’s practice of legacy admissions is being probed by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, a spokesperson for the agency told ABC News.

The investigation comes a month following the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision on Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. Harvard that struck down race-based affirmative action for colleges and universities.

Lawyers for Civil Rights filed the complaint against Harvard earlier this month contending that preferential treatment is given to children of wealthy donors and alumni.

“Nearly 70% of Harvard’s donor-related and legacy applicants are white, and they receive a substantial boost based on their status. Donor-related applicants are nearly 7 times more likely to be admitted than non-donor-related applicants, and legacies are nearly 6 times more likely to be admitted,” the complaint alleged.

Lawyers for Civil Rights further contended 28% of Harvard’s 2019 graduating class were legacies.

“Qualified and highly deserving applicants of color are harmed as a result, as admissions slots are given instead to the overwhelmingly white applicants who benefit from Harvard’s legacy and donor preferences,” according to the complaint.

The Department of Education declined to give more information about their investigation but said it involved Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Title VI prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color or national origin.

Nicole Rura, a spokeswoman for Harvard, said in a statement that the school is reviewing “aspects” of its admissions policies following the Supreme Court decision.

“Our review includes examination of a range of data and information, along with learnings from Harvard’s efforts over the past decade to strengthen our ability to attract and support a diverse intellectual community that is fundamental to our pursuit of academic excellence,” she said in a statement.

Rura added that the school’s administration is “redoubling our efforts to encourage students from many different backgrounds to apply for admission.”

Last week, Wesleyan University’s president announced that he would be ending legacy admissions for the school.

“In the wake of this [Supreme Court] decision where the court said you can’t use the affiliation of an applicant with a racial group. Well, I don’t think you should be able to use it with affiliation with your alumni group,” Wesleyan University President Michael Roth told ABC News’ “Start Here.”

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(MIAMI) — Preliminary ocean temperature off the coast of South Florida reached triple digits, which could be a global record, according to experts.

A buoy in Manatee Bay, Florida, reported a preliminary high ocean temperature of 101.1 degrees Monday afternoon, according to meteorologists.

High water temperatures in the ocean are extremely uncommon, however, scientists have categorized the very significant marine heat wave in the region as unprecedented, experts said.

Neighboring buoys are not reporting the same triple-digit temperature. Those buoys are reading more in the mid to upper 90’s, according to meteorologists.

Ocean temperatures have a strong connection to climate change. The United Nations panel on climate change says it’s “virtually certain” the ocean has warmed unabated since 1970 and has absorbed more than 90% of excess heat from the climate system.

The last 10 years were the ocean’s warmest decade since at least the 1800s, according to NASA.

2022 was the ocean’s warmest recorded year on record and with the highest global sea level, experts said.

In addition to the preliminary reading in Florida that could be a global record, ocean temperature readings are also breaking records in the North Atlantic and Mediterranean this week.

Maritime heat wave conditions are forecasted to continue through September in the North Atlantic, and may last until the end of the year, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Oceans all over the world are experiencing warmer-than-normal temperatures, with 44% of the global ocean currently experiencing a maritime heat wave, according to NOAA.

For over a month, dangerous heat indexes have blanketed Florida. Miami hit a heat index, or the feels-like temperature, of 108 degrees on Tuesday, according to the National Weather Service.

Last week, triple-digit heat indexes extended a record that Miami had broken the week before, according to the National Weather Service.

“When you’re breaking records by such large margins, that’s what makes it alarming. We’re not even close to what the previous record was, let alone the average,” Brian McNaldy, senior research associate at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science, told ABC News last week.

While land temperatures were about 95 degrees in South Florida last week, ocean temperatures clocked in at about 94 degrees — up 7 degrees warmer than they should be this time of year. Water temperatures do not typically measure this high until late August or early September, according to experts.

ABC News’ Julia Jacobo and Ginger Zee contributed to this report.

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(MOSCOW, Idaho) — Lawyers for Bryan Kohberger, the man accused of killing four Idaho college students last year, are leaving the door open regarding whether they will offer an alibi defense at his upcoming capital murder trial, but are not committing to presenting one.

In a new court filing, the one-time Ph.D. student’s attorney suggests Kohberger, 28, may not have been at the home where Ethan Chapin and Xana Kernodle, both 20, and 21-year-olds Madison Mogen and Kaylee Goncalves were stabbed to death in the early-morning hours of November 13. The filing offered no additional details as to what Kohberger’s alternative whereabouts might have been.

There may be “evidence corroborating Mr. Kohberger being at a location other than the King Road address,” Kohberger attorney Anne Taylor writes in the filing, evidence that “will be disclosed pursuant to discovery and evidentiary rules as well as statutory requirements.”

Taylor notes Kohberger’s team “continues investigating and [preparing] his case,” adding “it is anticipated this evidence may be offered by way of cross-examination of witnesses produced by the State as well as calling expert witnesses.”

The filing came just before the Monday, July 24 deadline for Kohberger to decide whether to offer an alibi defense, and to inform the prosecution. That deadline was already an extension, following a June request from Kohberger’s team for more time to decide whether to offer an alibi defense.

Late Monday evening, the court received that filing, which was forwarded on Tuesday morning for public posting.

The defense move leaves the door open for Kohberger to present an alibi defense later, legal experts say.

“Idaho law requires that the defense notify the prosecution of the possibility of an alibi defense. Here they are preserving that right, without committing,” said Matt Murphy, former Orange County prosecutor and ABC News legal contributor. “And as they note, the investigation is ongoing.”

“An alibi defense could be within the realm of possibility here, but there can also be corroborating evidence for conflicting facts. And if the state did their due diligence there can’t be an alibi,” David Calviello, former New Jersey prosecutor who is now a criminal defense attorney, told ABC News. “Proving he did it and proving he was somewhere else both can’t be true.”

“They may not have all the answers yet. It remains to be seen. And for now, the defense has a right to keep investigating their case, and [Kohberger] has a constitutional right to remain silent,” Calviello added. “They’re showing good faith to the court by meeting the deadline while protecting their client’s case as they choose their best defense.”

Kohberger was indicted in May and charged with four counts of first-degree murder and one count of burglary. He declined to offer a plea at his arraignment, so the judge entered a not guilty plea on his behalf.

A trial date in the quadruple homicide has been set for Oct. 2, though that could be delayed. Prosecutors have said they will seek the death penalty against Kohberger.

Prosecutors allege that in the early-morning hours of Nov. 13, 2022, Kohberger, a criminology Ph.D. student at nearby Washington State University, broke into an off-campus home and stabbed the four University of Idaho students to death.

After a six-week hunt, police zeroed in on Kohberger as a suspect, saying they tracked his white Hyundai Elantra and cellphone signal data, and recovered what authorities said was his DNA on a knife sheath found next to one of the victims’ bodies.

Kohberger was arrested on Dec. 30, 2022, at his family’s home in Pennsylvania, after driving cross-country to spend the holidays in Albrightsville.

Authorities have said that the DNA evidence taken from the knife sheath at the crime scene “showed a statistical match” with a cheek swab taken directly from Kohberger after his arrest, according to court filings.

But Kohberger’s attorneys pushed back on that analysis in several court filings, saying the “statistical probability is not an absolute,” and pointing to what they called a “total lack of DNA evidence” from the victims in Kohberger’s home or car.

This latest alibi filing comes amid Kohberger’s defense attempting to cast doubt on the strength of investigators’ evidence and whether it pointed irrefutably to their client alone, instead suggesting that Kohberger’s DNA could have been planted at the scene, and pointing to three additional males’ DNA they say was found in and around the scene after the killings.

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(LOS ANGELES) — First responders in Los Angeles County say they were able to rescue a man who drove off a 400-foot cliff on Friday after receiving an alert triggered by his phone.

The driver, who rescuers found at the bottom of a ravine, was “bleeding profusely” but survived the incident, according to Mike Leum, a search and rescue group leader for the LA County Sheriff’s Department.

“The majority of calls we get there over the sides usually are fatal,” Leum told ABC News about the crash site, which was off a windy road along Mount Wilson.

Volunteer search and rescue responders with the LA County Sheriff’s Department first received a report about the crash around 11 p.m. on Friday.

Leum said dispatchers learned about the incident due to the driver’s iPhone 14 crash detection program. Recent iPhones and Apple Watches have a program that automatically alerts authorities if the phone’s sensors suggest the device’s owner might be in a crash or hard fall.

“We’re talking about hundreds of miles of mountain roads where these people could have gone over the side,” Leum said about the incident on Friday and other similar incidents involving the crash detection program. “So I’m not convinced that they would have ever been found.”

Locating the car’s skid marks and a damaged guardrail, rescuers were eventually able to make audio contact with the driver, according to Leum. Once they located him at the bottom of the 400-foot cliff, rescuers used an airlift to send the driver to a local trauma center.

The driver’s car, found pancaked at the bottom of the ravine, was unrecognizable, according to Leum. Apart from the head laceration, the driver had no other major injuries such as broken bones, he said.

The California Highway Patrol could not be immediately reached about the cause of the crash.

“This guy on Friday would have bled out,” Leum said about the severity of his injuries.

Apple released its crash detection feature in September 2022, though its rollout was followed by some reports about false positive alerts issued by the device. While users can cancel the alert within 20 seconds of the perceived crash, some alerts were reported to have accidentally contacted authorities while users were riding roller coasters or skiing.

An Apple representative told ABC News that the company is aware of the reported issues and have rolled out multiple software updates to reduce the number of false positives. Leum added that his department has worked with the company to prevent such instances.

Leum cited at least four victims he believes rescuers would not have been able to reach in time but for the crash detection program.

“Nobody saw the crashes, so who knows how long it would have taken for someone to file a missing person report and for some agency to backtrack and try and locate these people,” he said.

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(MASSAPEQUA, N.Y.) — Authorities have concluded their search at the “cluttered” house belonging to Gilgo Beach, New York, murder suspect Rex Heuermann, authorities said Tuesday.

Investigators “obtained a massive amount of material” at the suburban Massapequa Park, Long Island, home and will now sift through the evidence, Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney said, though he did not elaborate on what was seized.

Authorities have still not ruled in or ruled out whether any alleged victims were killed at Heuermann’s house, Tierney said at a news conference.

Investigators dug up the backyard this week as they searched for evidence, and Tierney said “there was nothing of note taken from the backyard as far as remains.”

Approximately 279 guns were recovered at Heuermann’s house, including long guns, Tierney said.

Some of the guns were kept inside a walk-in vault in the basement, according to authorities. Tierney would not say if any other items were recovered from the vault.

Heuermann, a New York City architect and father of two, was arrested on July 13 for the murders of three sex workers — Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman and Amber Costello — whose bodies were found covered in burlap on Long Island’s South Shore in 2010. The young women disappeared in 2009 and 2010.

Heuermann’s attorney entered a not guilty plea on his behalf. His next court date is Aug. 1.

Heuermann is also the prime suspect in the death of a fourth victim, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, who vanished in 2007, though he has not been charged in that case.

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(NEW YORK) — The Mega Millions jackpot has ballooned to an estimated $820 million ahead of Tuesday night’s drawing, marking the eighth-largest top prize in U.S. lotto history.

The jackpot has grown by $100 million after Friday’s drawing saw no ticket claim the top prize.

There have been no Mega Millions jackpot winners in 27 consecutive drawings, since the grand prize was last won on April 18. Players must match all five numbers plus the Mega Ball number to claim the jackpot.

The cash option of the jackpot is an estimated $422 million — offered as a one-time, lump-sum payment. Otherwise the winnings can be paid out as one immediate payment followed by 29 annual payments, with the annuity option.

The estimated $820 million prize is the fifth-largest jackpot in Mega Millions history, and eighth largest in U.S. lotto history when also factoring in Powerball jackpots.

The previous four times the Mega Millions jackpot crossed $700 million, it grew to over $1 billion, with winners in 2018, 2021, 2022 and January 2023.

The odds of winning the top prize are 1 in 302.6 million, while the odds of winning any Mega Millions prize is 1 in 24.

Mega Millions is played in 45 states, Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Tickets are $2 for one play. Tuesday’s drawing is at 11 p.m. ET.

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(WASHINGTON) — A former close business associate of Hunter Biden is expected to sit for closed-door testimony with the House Oversight committee next week, sources confirm to ABC News, as Republicans continue their investigations into President Joe Biden and his family.

Devon Archer is set to speak to GOP lawmakers behind closed doors on Monday, and will provide details related to the president’s sons’ business dealings in Ukraine, a source said.

In June, the committee subpoenaed Archer to appear for a deposition because he “played a significant role in the Biden family’s business deals abroad, including but not limited to China, Russia, and Ukraine,” according to the subpoena.

Republicans on the committee have long claimed that President Biden was more involved in his son’s business dealings than he has disclosed — and Monday’s interview with Archer will likely be the latest attempt for Republicans to back up those claims.

During his 2020 campaign Biden told reporters, “I have never discussed with my son or my brother or anyone else, anything having to do with their businesses.”

In a statement on Monday, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., said, “The Oversight Committee will continue to follow the facts to provide the transparency and accountability that the American people demand and deserve. We look forward to speaking soon with Devon Archer about Joe Biden’s involvement in his family’s business affairs.”

Asked Monday about a New York Post report claiming that Hunter Biden had put his father on speakerphone with business associates during the elder Biden’s time as vice president, White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre reiterated that the president “was never in business with his son.”

News of the scheduled interview comes as Republicans have ramped up their probe into the Biden family in recent weeks. During congressional testimony last week, two IRS whistleblowers claimed the Justice Department slow-walked the investigation into the president’s son.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, also released a confidential FBI informant’s unverified claim that, years ago, the Biden family “pushed” a Ukrainian oligarch to pay them $10 million.

In a memo to House Democrats obtained by ABC News, Democrats on the House Oversight committee blasted Grassley and Comer over the release of the FBI form and called it an attempt to “breathe new life into years-old conspiracy theories.”

“Chairman Comer’s and Sen. Grassley’s decision to publicly release the form is in brazen disregard of the safety of FBI human sources and the integrity of its investigations,” read the memo. “Contrary to Republican messaging, the form provides no new or additional support for their corruption allegations against the President or Hunter Biden.”

“Instead, its release merely seeks to breathe new life into years-old conspiracy theories, initially peddled by Rudy Giuliani, that have been thoroughly debunked,” the memo said.

On Wednesday, Hunter Biden will appear in a Delaware courthouse to formally agree to the plea deal he negotiated last month with federal prosecutors who have been probing his business dealings.

The younger Biden in June agreed to plead guilty to a pair of misdemeanor tax charges and enter into a pretrial diversion program that will allow him to avoid prosecution on a separate felony gun charge.

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(NEW YORK) — A relentless heat wave that has had a swath of the southwestern United States in its chokehold is stretching into the Midwest on its way to the Northeast this week.

The National Weather Service has issued heat alerts that are in effect on Tuesday for 45 million Americans across a dozen states, from Southern California to Montana, through the Great Plains and back down to South Florida.

The weather forecast for Tuesday shows temperatures will reach or exceed 110 degrees in cities like Palm Springs, California; Phoenix, Arizona; and Las Vegas, Nevada. Temperatures in the 100s are expected from Texas to Nebraska.

Heat index values — a measure of how hot it really feels when relative humidity is combined with the air temperature — are forecast to be in the 100s for even more places, including Kansas City, Missouri. It’s the hottest time of the year for this area and these high temperatures aren’t too out of the ordinary there.

Arizona’s capital is on a record stretch of 25 consecutive days with temperatures at or above 110 degrees. Overnight temperatures in Phoenix have also not dropped below 90 degrees for at least 15 days.

Staff at Valleywise Health Medical Center in Phoenix told ABC News on Monday that the burn unit has been consistently full amid the brutal heat. They said about a third of the burn patients they are currently treating are people who have contact burns from falling and getting burned from the hot ground. The Arizona Burn Center is a standalone facility within Valleywise Health Medical Center and is the state’s only nationally-verified burn center.

Doctors there told ABC News that a majority of the weather-related contact burns they are seeing are to homeless people who have been outside for a prolonged period of time or, in some cases, are on drugs or alcohol, which is extremely dangerous in scorching temperatures. Valleywise Health Medical Center has taken a portion of its emergency room — previously used as an overflow unit for COVID-19 patients during the peak of the pandemic — and converted it into an area to treat the most severe or near death cases of heat exhaustion. About a handful of people a day meet that criteria, doctors said.

Meanwhile, Tucson, Arizona, has been at or above 100 degrees for 39 days, tying its record set in 2013. The city is expected to break that record on Tuesday.

El Paso, Texas, has been on a record-smashing stretch of 39 straight days with temperatures at or above 100 degrees. This is expected to continue this week and may finally come to an end over the weekend. The city’s previous record of 23 consecutive days was set in 1994.

Miami, Florida, has had a heat index high of 100 degrees for a record 44 days in a row, well past the previous record of 32 days set in 2020.

Marathon, Florida, hit 99 degrees on Monday, tying its record set earlier this month for the hottest temperature ever recorded in the city.

For many Americans, temperatures will only get hotter as the week goes on. By Thursday, heat index values are forecast to top 100 degrees in Kansas City, Missouri; reach 100 in Minneapolis, Minnesota; and be near 100 along the Interstate 95 travel corridor from Richmond, Virginia, to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and New York, New York. It could be the first heat wave of the summer in the Northeast with three days in the 90s, though it will be short-lived.

The weather forecast for next week shows temperatures will remain hot in the South and West, while the Midwest and Northeast get a reprieve from the extreme heat.

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(NEW YORK) — The dangerous heat waves currently plaguing North America and Europe would be “virtually impossible” without anthropogenic, or human-caused, climate change, according to a new report.

Intense weeks-long heat waves have been continuously breaking heat records on both continents, with no relief in sight. In Europe, prolonged sizzling temperatures are expected in countries like Italy, Spain, France, Germany and Poland, the European Space Agency announced last week. Regions in the U.S. that have been experiencing record-breaking heat, including the Southwest and Southeast, will continue to experience scorching temperatures for the foreseeable future, forecasts show.

The heat waves occurring in Europe, North America and China throughout July would not have been possible without global warming, according to a rapid attribution analysis by World Weather Attribution, an academic collaboration that uses weather observations and climate models to calculate how climate change influences the intensity and likelihood of extreme weather events.

Temperatures have skyrocketed to 45 degrees Celsius — or 113 degrees Fahrenheit — in some regions, prompting heat alerts, wildfires and heat-related hospital admissions and deaths, the researchers said.

The recent heat waves are no longer considered “unusual,” as the continued warming from greenhouse gas emissions will cause future heat waves to be even hotter unless emissions are drastically cut, according to the report.

Climate change has made heatwaves hotter, longer and more frequent, evidence shows. The researchers studied the periods of most dangerous heat in each of the regions, and found that these heat waves are no longer rare due to warming caused by burning fossils and other human activities, the report found.

The study also found that climate change made the current heatwave in China at least 50 times more likely and that current temperatures in Europe and North America would not have been impossible without the effects of burning coal, oil and gas, deforestation and other human activities.

Temperatures in Europe have measured about 2.5 degrees Celsius — or 36.5 degrees Fahrenheit — more than normal, while the heat wave in North America was about 2 degrees Celsius — or 35.6 degrees Fahrenheit — higher, the analysis found. China was also at 1 degree Celsius — or 33.8 degrees Fahrenheit — higher, according to the report.

Events like these now have a 10% chance of occurring any given year in Europe and about a 6.7% chance of occurring in any given year in the U.S., the analysis found. Without human-induced climate change, extreme heat would likely be limited to just once every 250 years, while heat waves of the magnitude of what has been experienced in July would have been virtually impossible.

Because these heat events are expected to become more frequent, the need for humans to adapt and increase greenhouse gas mitigation efforts is vital, the researchers said.

“Our adaptation to that rapid change hasn’t occurred fast enough that we are able to see them as common events at this point,” Julie Arrighi, manager of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre in The Netherlands, told reporters during a news conference on Monday. “And so it underscores the need for our systems to adapt much faster, because the risks are rising faster than we are adapting.”

If global temperatures reach a 2-degree Celsius rise in temperatures since the 1800s, the heat waves will become even more frequent and extreme and occur every two to five years, according to the report. Temperatures have already risen about 1.2 Celsius since the late 1800s, according to climate scientists.

“In the past, these events would have been extremely rare,” Friederike Otto, senior lecturer in climate science at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at Imperial College London, told reporters in a news conference on Monday. “So it would have been basically impossible that they would happen at the same time.”

It is unclear how long the record-smashing temperatures will last, as the accuracy for forecasts decreases after a week. While the El Nino event is likely contributing somewhat to the additional heat, increased global temperatures from burning fossil fuels is the main reason the heatwaves are so severe, the researchers said.

However, the heat waves are not evidence of “runaway warming” or climate collapse, Otto said, adding that there is still time to move the needle on greenhouse gas mitigation.

“We still have time to secure a safe and healthy future, but we urgently need to stop burning fossil fuels and invest in decreasing vulnerability,” Otto said. “If we do not, tens of thousands of people will keep dying from heat-related causes each year.”

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(NEW YORK) — Human remains were found inside three separate suitcases on Friday in Florida, according to law enforcement officials seeking information related to the gruesome discovery.

The Delray Beach Police Department responded to a 911 call from a person who said they saw something strange in the Intracoastal Waterway, police said.

Detectives discovered a suitcase that had human remains inside, according to Delray Beach Police Department.

The remains are that of “a white or Hispanic middle-aged woman with brown hair and approximately 5’4″ tall,” according to a statement from police.

Shortly after discovering the remains, police discovered additional human remains inside two other suitcases near the Intracoastal Waterway.

The remains in all three suitcases are that of the same woman, according to police.

Delray Beach Police said the victim was wearing a floral tank top with a black undershirt and black mid-thigh shorts.

In a brief update Monday afternoon, Delray police asked for the public’s help in reviewing any possible surveillance video from the time frame of July 17 through July 20.

The woman, believed to be between 35-55 years of age, was placed into the water during that timeframe, based on her condition, police said.

The area of interest is about one mile long, with police telling the public to look for any unusual vehicles, people, or anyone carrying or moving luggage during that time.

It’s believed to be an isolated incident, according to police.

Anyone with information about the incident is asked to call Delray Beach Police Detective Mike Liberta at 561-243-7874.

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