(NEW YORK) — An estimated $1.9 billion is up for grabs in Powerball’s drawing on Monday night, lottery officials said.
Monday’s jackpot is the world’s largest lottery prize ever offered, according to a press release from Powerball. The cash value is $929.1 million.
The jackpot grows based on game sales and interest. But the odds of winning the big prize stays the same — 1 in 292.2 million, Powerball said.
Monday’s Powerball drawing will be the 41st since the jackpot was last won on Aug. 3, tying the game record for the number of consecutive drawings without a grand prize winner, according to Powerball.
Despite there being no jackpot winner, more than 10.9 million tickets won cash prizes totaling $102.2 million in the latest drawing on Saturday night. The overall odds of winning a prize are 1 in 24.9, Powerball said.
Jackpot winners can either take the money as an immediate cash lump sum or in 30 annual payments over 29 years. Both advertised prize options do not include federal and jurisdictional taxes, according to Powerball.
Tickets cost $2 and are sold in 45 U.S. states as well as Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. More than half of all proceeds remain in the jurisdiction where the ticket was purchased, Powerball said.
Powerball drawings are broadcast live every Monday, Wednesday and Saturday at 10:59 p.m. ET from the Florida Lottery draw studio in Tallahassee. The drawings are also livestreamed online at Powerball.com.
(ORLANDO, Fla.) — While a distinctive “H” tattooed on his neck may not stand for happiness, a fugitive on the run for a year was captured in the “Happiest Place on Earth,” according to authorities.
The wanted man, Quashon Burton, 32, of Brooklyn, New York, charged with scamming the government out of COVID-19 relief funds, was on a family vacation at Disney World when he caught the eye of another park visitor — the federal agent who signed his arrest warrant, officials said.
While strolling around the park’s Animal Kingdom, U.S. Postal inspector Jeff Andre spotted the familiar inked letter on Burton’s neck and alerted Disney World security and the Orange County Sheriff’s Office, who arrested Burton, according to the sheriff’s office.
Andre was involved in the investigation of Burton and had signed Burton’s arrest warrant, officials said.
The stroke of luck at the Orlando, Florida, park occurred on Oct. 20, according to the sheriff’s office. After Burton left the park, sheriff’s deputies confronted him at a bus stop with two family members and took him into custody when he allegedly tried to resist arrest and gave them a fake name, the sheriff’s office said.
Burton was charged last year with stealing the identities of at least four people to fraudulently obtain almost $150,000 in coronavirus relief loan applications, according to federal authorities.
An arrest warrant was issued for Burton last November after federal agents went to his home in Brooklyn several times and his mother told them he was not planning to surrender, officials said.
The Walt Disney Company is the parent company of ABC News.
(NEW YORK) — The Powerball jackpot has risen to an estimated $1.9 billion for Monday’s drawing after no ticket won the world-record pot on Saturday, Powerball said.
Monday’s drawing has a cash option of $929.1 million, the lottery said.
The winning Powerball numbers drawn Saturday night for the estimated $1.6 billion prize were 28, 45, 53, 56, 69 and the Powerball was 20. The Powerplay was 3X.
“Like the rest of America, and the world, I think we’re all eager to find out when this historic jackpot will eventually be won,” Drew Svitko, Powerball Product Group Chair and Pennsylvania Lottery Executive Director, said in a statement.
Powerball said 16 tickets, including three sold in California, two in Colorado and Pennsylvania and one each Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, New York and South Dakota, won $1 million by matching all five white balls.
The Powerball jackpot reached an estimated $1.6 billion on Friday, making it the largest jackpot ever, lottery officials said.
The record-setting jackpot has ballooned after 39 consecutive drawings yielded no grand prize winner, lottery officials said.
The Saturday drawing marked the 40th Powerball drawing since the jackpot was last won in Pennsylvania on Aug. 3. The cash value of Saturday’s jackpot would have been $782.4 million, according to the latest figures.
If a player’s ticket had matched all six numbers drawn on Saturday night, it would have been the largest jackpot won in U.S. lottery history — surpassing the previous world-record-setting $1.586 billion Powerball jackpot in 2016.
Monday’s drawing will tie the game record for the number of drawings in a row without a grand prize winner, Powerball said.
The jackpot grows based on game sales and interest. But the odds of winning the big prize stays the same — 1 in 292.2 million, Powerball said.
Jackpot winners can either take the money as an immediate cash lump sum or in 30 annual payments over 29 years. Both advertised prize options do not include federal and jurisdictional taxes, Powerball said.
Tickets cost $2 and are sold in 45 U.S. states as well as Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. More than half of all proceeds remain in the jurisdiction where the ticket was purchased, according to Powerball.
Powerball drawings are broadcast live every Monday, Wednesday and Saturday at 10:59 p.m. ET from the Florida Lottery draw studio in Tallahassee. The drawings are also livestreamed online at Powerball.com.
(PHILADELPHIA) — Nine people were wounded, two critically, when multiple gunmen fired a barrage of at least 40 shots at a crowd gathered on a sidewalk outside a Philadelphia bar Saturday night, authorities said.
The assailants fled the chaotic scene in the Kensington section of the city in a vehicle and remained at large Sunday morning.
Asked at a news conference whether the gunmen posed a threat to the community, Deputy Commissioner John Stanford noted the number injured and shell casings littering the street outside Jack’s Famous Bar and said, “I think that’s a public safety threat.”
The shooting unfolded around 10:45 p.m. as the neighborhood was bustling with more people than usual out enjoying an unseasonably warm November night, Stanford said.
He said a group was mingling on the sidewalk outside the bar when multiple gunmen exited a black vehicle sitting in the middle of East Allegheny Avenue, near Kensington Avenue, and opened fire on the crowd without warning.
“At this point in time, it just looks like these individuals may have spotted someone they wanted to shoot at, exited the vehicle and just began firing,” Stanford said, adding investigators don’t yet know who was targeted or a motive for the attack.
Stanford said the shooting occurred despite a heavy police presence already in the area. He said officers walking a beat heard the gunfire and rushed to help the men and women injured as the shooters ran back to the dark vehicle and fled. He also noted that a narcotics task force was conducting an investigation a half-block from where the shooting occurred.
“We have some brazen individuals in this city that don’t care. They don’t care how many police officers are out here and some don’t care in terms of how many people are out here,” Stanford said.
He said investigators recovered at least 40 pieces of ballistic evidence from the scene and plan to comb through surveillance video from businesses in the area in hopes of identifying the assailants.
He said seven of the victims were in stable condition and two were critical.
The shooting came amid 5% drops in both homicides and aggravated gun assaults in Philadelphia in the first 10 months of this year, compared to the same time period in 2021, according to the lasted police department crime statistics. Philadelphia surpassed its annual homicide record in 2021, recording of 562 slayings.
ABC News’ Victoria Arancio contributed to this story.
Lokman Vural Elibol/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
(NEW YORK) — When the FBI alerted New Jersey synagogues to a “broad threat” against their houses of worship, Jewish community centers and synagogues across the country heeded the warning.
On the other side of the nation, Los Angeles areas worked with law enforcement to send extra patrols to their synagogues, though there was no known threat to the community at the time.
“We know that hate speech often leads to acts of hate and violence and are very concerned by the growing amount of antisemitic rhetoric,” Rabbi Noah Farkas, president of the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles, told ABC News. “We are committed to fighting this rising scourge locally and globally and know that in the end, there is more that unites us than divides us.”
The threat follows antisemitic rhetoric from celebrities like Kanye West and Kyrie Irving, as well as the ongoing hate speech promoted by white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups online.
As antisemitism and other forms of hate continue to spotlight discrimination in the U.S., some researchers say addressing hate and extremism needs to be a priority.
Preventing hate should also be community-based, researchers say
Researchers from Harvard University recently found an important detail in how hate and prejudice manifest in different communities.
Based on hate crime data from the FBI for 20 years, researchers found that when a marginalized group grew in size relative to another group in a community, it was more likely to be the target of discrimination.
When different neighborhoods, cities and regions have different demographics, it can affect what marginalized groups are receiving hate and how they’re receiving it, experts say. This insight could help policy makers address the specific needs, and tailor messaging to what’s being seen in their community.
“Effects seem to be really local,” said Mina Cikara, associate professor of psychology at Harvard University, to ABC News. “While we do have countrywide statistics on which groups are most likely to be targeted … The people you think are most likely to get victimized may not actually be the people who are.”
Standing up for community
Researchers also called on communities to form local, interfaith and multicultural forces, coalitions and strategies to fight back against hate.
Activists found that comradery between neighbors in the aftermath of past bias incidents may have deterred more hate incidents through sheer support. Filmmaker Patrice O’Neill created the advocacy group Not In Our Town after documenting the growth of hate groups in Billings, Montana, in the early 1990s.
The town became a symbol for community togetherness – and the Billings Coalition for Human Rights was born.
When neighbors banded together with victims of racist and antisemitic violence, they found it as an effective tactic in reducing hate incidents.
“The town started learning what can happen if they work together,” said O’Neill to ABC News. “People in the community started seeing what could happen if they could work together so that when there was an attack on Black church members, other denominations showed up and the attacks stopped.”
She continued, “When a Native American woman’s home is plastered with racist graffiti, 30 members of the painters union showed up to painted over it and 100 neighbors were there to watch.”
Targeting radicalization online
According to Susan Corke, the director of legal advocacy organization Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, researchers say the internet can be a dangerous rabbit hole for people vulnerable to radicalization.
Conspiracies, misinformation, disinformation – research has shown that in 2016, social media played a role in the radicalization process of nearly 90% of extremists in the University of Maryland’s National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism.
The ease in which hate can move through social media was highlighted when Brooklyn Nets star Irving tweeted a link to a film that critics say promotes antisemitic tropes to his millions of followers. He later stated that he meant no harm by it.
“A number of these far-right actors are enriching themselves online,” Corke said to ABC News. “The impact of that has been that group affiliation is less important, there is this wider spread and embrace of conspiratorial violent ideology and rhetoric, and that’s very mainstreamed within the Republican Party.”
The SPLC has focused its efforts on youth – creating guides to understanding how youth is radicalized and how to prevent or fight against it.
These guides discuss media literacy opportunities children can learn from, talking about the news in age-appropriate ways, and how to speak to children and help them navigate away from extremist online materials, and more.
“What we found is that people don’t need a huge amount of tools or background than just reading the guide for seven minutes,” said Corke. “More than 80% of parents and caregivers felt better equipped to entertain, intervene and engage with young people for becoming susceptible to manipulative hate-fueled violence.”
Similar educational opportunities and campaigns for people of all ages can better prepare the general public against bad-faith actors of extremist hate, Corke said.
The SPLC found that focusing on community investment and prevention may be more important than investing solely in a law enforcement-forward approach, which is more of a reactionary tactic to hate crimes and bias incidents.
(UVALDE, Texas) — A white tent looms over the grounds of the Uvalde County Fairplex, a sparse multipurpose venue that previously hosted rodeos, quinceañeras and the annual firemen’s ball, now home to Texas’s newest trauma center and Gov. Greg Abbott’s latest self-declared success.
The Uvalde Together Resiliency Center was created in response to the shooting at Robb Elementary School, which left 19 children and two adults dead. The Republican governor authorized $5 million for its construction the same week, the symbolic centerpiece of his administration’s response to longstanding mental health care failings locally and statewide.
In the wake of the massacre, Abbott has repeatedly insisted the mass shooting – one of 574 across the country so far in 2022 and one of 42 in Texas alone – was not a symptom of the country’s (and his state’s) obsession with guns but rather the result of the country’s (and his state’s) failure to adequately invest in mental health care.
“We as a state, we as a society need to do a better job with mental health,” Abbott said in a news conference days after the shooting. “Anybody who shoots somebody else has a mental health challenge. Period. We as a government need to find a way to target that mental health challenge and to do something about it.”
Since then, Abbott, who is currently running for reelection, has appeared to make access to mental health care a political priority.
In response to questions from ABC News, his office pointed to Uvalde Resiliency as “a hub for community services … being run by the Uvalde community.” They pointed to a $105 million investment “to make schools safer and support the mental health of children, teachers, and families in Uvalde and across Texas.” And they claimed that his administration spent billions on mental health care services during his governorship.
“Throughout his time in office,” an administration spokesperson told ABC News, “Governor Abbott has worked closely with the Texas Legislature to appropriate over $25 billion to address mental and behavioral health issues and pass a variety of bills expanding access to mental health services.”
‘Lack of cooperation’
But local leaders and mental health care professionals told ABC News that the work of Uvalde Resiliency has been hampered by a lack of cooperation with existing institutions with established relationships in the community. And an ABC News review found that only a small fraction of the money touted by the governor’s office has actually gone to fund state mental health care programs.
Experts say the patchwork mental health care system leaves millions of rural Texans without access to medical care and that “stopgap” funding won’t fix the systemic issues plaguing the Lonestar State.
Immediately after the shooting, Uvalde District Attorney Christina Mitchell Busbee applied for and received $5 million from the state-funded Texas Crime Victims Assistance Grant Program to build and run the Uvalde Together Resiliency Center.
Soon after, Abbott also allocated $1.25 million to the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District to provide trauma-informed counseling to students and $5 million to the Hill Country Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities Center, an existing mental health care facility in the Uvalde area that, at the time of the tragedy, had a staff of just 13 people.
Taken together, the money represented an unprecedented investment in access to mental health care for the Uvalde community, but Busbee soon learned that it was hardly enough to address the complex challenge its citizens faced.
“Five million dollars sounds like a lot of money,” Busbee told ABC News, “but once you start trying to assist these agencies with recruiting counselors to come to Uvalde, you want to be able to pay them a decent salary to come here and plant roots in our community, it does not go very far.”
The center, with help from various partnering organizations, has offered a menu of services to the grieving town and its citizens, including “psychological first aid, crisis counseling, and behavioral health services for survivors, first responders, and those in the community experiencing vicarious trauma.”
According to the Resiliency Center’s interim executive director Mary Beth Fisk, the center has so far provided over 3,800 contacts in the community, with over 1,900 clinical visits serving more than 700 individuals.
“We have organizations that are bringing mental and behavioral health counseling and subspecialties,” Fisk told ABC News, “to include really intensive trauma therapies that are readily available at no cost to all community members.”
But Fisk did not respond to questions about whether these numbers include the pre-existing clients of the resiliency center’s private practice partners, and some community members say they won’t seek care at the center because of a longstanding distrust of their state government.
“It’s run by our state government, which they couldn’t give a s— less,” Brett Cross, guardian to 10-year-old victim Uziyah Garcia, told ABC News. “Everybody in this town has profited off our kids’ deaths. The resiliency center’s a joke and it’s been that way since day one.”
Local practitioners say they have received negative feedback from community members regarding the quality of care, the therapeutic environment, and the long wait times at the center, all exacerbated by cultural taboos stigmatizing mental health care and poor insurance coverage in the largely Latino community.
Jaclyn Gonzalez, a licensed professional counselor who has practiced in Uvalde since 2015, told ABC News the center’s leadership failed to seek advice and cooperation from local providers in Uvalde’s established mental health care network who could have shed light on the community’s unique needs.
“I think that was the hardest thing for me was that they wouldn’t allow me to help,” Gonzalez told ABC News. “Day one, they’re like, ‘We’ve got it covered. We don’t need anybody.'”
Alejandra Castro, director of rural services at Family Service Association, a Texas-based human service organization which has assisted the community for 22 years, says she was also turned away by the center’s leaders.
“I had hoped that being here in the community, the outsiders would want to partner with us and say, ‘How can we best support the community that you have been in, like your community for the last 20 something years?'” Castro told ABC News. “And it was the total opposite of that, unfortunately.”
When asked about frustrations some members of the Uvalde community have expressed about accessing various resources, Fisk defended the work of the Resiliency Center, emphasizing how quickly the center took over the role of its predecessor, the Family Assistance Center, to provide mental and behavioral health services, as well as the role it has served as a lending hand for victims and survivors seeking financial aid.
“I think we’ve been blessed to be able to bring a collective resources together along with other community partners that are willing to work with one another,” Fisk said. “We all have a common goal, and that is to walk alongside this journey of healing when so many of this community are currently finding themselves in a place of true despair.”
Fisk did not respond to requests for a follow-up interview about the work of the Resiliency Center.
At the state level, experts described a similar landscape regarding mental health care access.
Millions spent after Uvalde massacre
Abbott’s oft-cited $105.5M spending response to the mass shooting includes $5.8 million to fund the Texas Child Health Access Through Telemedicine, $4.7 million for the Health and Human Services Commission to include multi-system therapy across the state and $950,000 to the HHSC to expand Coordinate Specialty Care, directives that have been widely celebrated by health care experts.
But it comes after a $210 million cut to the HHSC, which oversees mental health services in the state, over the past two years in order to finance Operation Lonestar, the border security initiative launched in March of 2021.
“Mental health stakeholders have seen positive improvement over the past few years,” Boleware said. “But we were already at such a deficit in our state that a lot more is needed to catch up.”
And a closer look at the governor’s published breakdown of the budget shows that only $16.5 million out of the $105.5 million — about 15% of the total that the Abbott administration has touted — went to expand statewide mental health resources, while the other 85% has been allocated toward police training, personnel travel, and security upgrades for classrooms, including $50 million for bullet-resistant shields.
During the only Texas gubernatorial debate in September, Abbott brought up a perplexing figure—$25 billion in mental health care spending—in response to the Uvalde shooting.
Several experts, Alison Mohr Boleware, Director of Policy at the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health, a research and grantmaking institute out of the University of Texas at Austin, told ABC News they were unsure how the governor could have arrived at such a figure.
“I had never heard that before,” Boleware said of the governor’s accounting.
The governor’s office did not respond to ABC News’ request for information about this claim.
The most likely source for this figure is a $25 billion Medicaid expansion grant in 2017—$15 billion of which was federal funding from the Department of Health and Human Services—a program established by the Obama administration and which Gov. Abbott actively fought against.
But this funding, known as the Texas Healthcare Transformation and Quality Improvement Program, went to expand statewide Medicaid under the 1115 Medicaid waiver authority and cannot be accurately described as funding for mental health services, considering that only 1 in 5 Texas psychiatrists accept Medicaid patients.
Boleware went on to say that even with proper funding, not all issues can be addressed by spending increases.
“There’s a big difference between mental health spending and mental health access,” Boleware said.”We’re a huge state and we may be spending a lot on mental health, but that doesn’t mean access is the same in every community.”
Some of the systemic issues troubling mental health care access include a worsening workforce shortage and lingering cultural stigmas surrounding mental health care.
Dr. Andy Keller, a licensed psychologist who sits on the Texas Child Mental Health Care Consortium and is president and chief executive officer of the Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute, called the governor’s statewide spending plan in response to the Uvalde shooting a hurried “stopgap.”
“This is a really complicated issue,” Keller said, “and when the legislature and the governor and the lieutenant governor were trying to come up with a plan … I don’t think this really sunk in, how important this was.”
(NEW YORK) — With Election Day around the corner, some national Jewish advocacy organizations are calling on the Republican Party to take a harder line on condemning antisemitism from several GOP candidates or their supporters.
Their calls come on the heels of several high-profile controversies over remarks made by celebrities and political candidates vying to win their midterm races.
Pennsylvania GOP gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano, for example, has made headlines with his statements about his Jewish opponent, state Attorney General Josh Shapiro.
He accused Shapiro in September of having “disdain for people like us,” because Shapiro attended and sent his children to a “privileged, exclusive, elite” Jewish institution. His comments have been widely condemned as evoking common antisemitic tropes.
At a campaign event last month, Mastriano doubled down on his statements.
“Apparently now it’s some kind of racist thing if I talk about the school,” he said reiterating that “it’s a very expensive, elite school.”
Mastriano’s campaign did not immediately respond to ABC News’ request for comment.
Ohio GOP Senate candidate J.D. Vance has also been accused of echoing antisemitic tropes after suggesting in January that if Ohio prohibited abortion, “then every day, George Soros sends a 747 to Columbus to load up disproportionately Black women to get them to go have abortions in California.”
“Hopefully we get to a point where Ohio bans abortion and California and the Soroses of the world respect it,” he continued.
The Anti-Defamation League has reported that references to Soros — a Hungarian Jewish billionaire, philanthropist and Holocaust survivor known for funding progressive causes — have become a right-wing dog whistle for conspiracy theories about wealthy Jewish people controlling and manipulating societies to further their own interests.
Vance’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
GOP party leaders have strongly condemned antisemitism in several cases.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell spoke out against Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., who attended the America First Political Action Conference in March, run by Nick Fuentes, a prominent white nationalist, saying, “There’s no place in the Republican Party for white supremacists or antisemitism.”
Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel has also previously spoken out against antisemitism, stating that “white supremacy, neo-Nazism, hate speech and bigotry are disgusting and do not have a home in the Republican Party.”
Politicians need to respond like businesses to antisemitism, some say
But some Jewish organization leaders say statements are not enough.
Jack Rosen, president of the American Jewish Congress, said candidates must also face material repercussions for their comments, arguing the party should go as far as cutting off their support and funding.
“They need to make sure that these [candidates] are not accepted and not given good assignments, are not supported financially,” Rosen told ABC News.
As a model, he cited the example of Adidas severing ties with Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, after he made a slew of incendiary comments attacking Jewish people in recent weeks, including a tweet threatening he would go “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE.”
“We’ve learned that when a powerful force like the business community comes out and stops doing business with you and boycotts your lines, that does have an impact,” Rosen said.
Jacob Isaacson, the American Jewish Committee’s chief policy and political affairs officer, said the party and its candidates also have a responsibility to repudiate supporters and associates who have expressed antisemitic sentiments.
Mastriano came under fire after paying $5,000 for campaign consulting to the far-right site Gab — where a man allegedly made antisemitic posts before killing 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018.
Gab chief executive Andrew Torba said both he and Mastriano have a policy of speaking only to Christian journalists, the Jerusalem Post reported.
After significant public pressure, Mastriano put out a statement saying Torba does not “speak for me or my campaign” and that “I reject antisemitism in any form.” But in July, Mastriano still accepted a $500 donation from Torba, according to a September campaign finance report.
In Georgia, Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker has also faced criticism for not publicly refusing a show of support from Ye on Instagram.
“What I would like to see is the rejection of endorsement from blatant antisemites and that needs to be kind of a universal principle,” Isaacson told ABC News.
Walker’s campaign did not immediately return a request for comment.
Economic uncertainty, culture wars give rise to antisemitic conspiracies
With the issue of inflation driving many voters this midterm election, several Jewish organization leaders said Americans’ economic anxieties have also provided a platform for antisemitic conspiracy theories.
Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said the scapegoating of Jewish people has historically peaked during periods of economic stress, such as the country’s current “recessionary environment.”
“When systems fail, when markets fail, when policy fails, people look for someone to blame,” he told ABC News.
For example, the ADL reported a spike in antisemitic internet activity during the Great Recession in 2008, including articles and posts blaming Jewish people for the financial crisis.
Some candidates have also used antisemitic tropes to appeal to voters’ concerns about ongoing culture wars over abortion, critical race theory and LGBTQ rights, for example.
Arizona GOP House candidate Eli Crane has said repeatedly that he would fight critical race theory, alleging its roots in “Cultural Marxism,” which has been described as a baseless conspiracy theory with antisemitic origins.
Crane’s campaign did not immediately respond to ABC News’ request for comment.
Antisemitism reaches all-time high in U.S.
Halie Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, said the alleged normalization and amplification of antisemitic rhetoric within the Republican Party has emboldened its supporters, including white supremacist and right-wing extremist groups, to perpetrate violence against Jewish people.
The ADL reported that antisemitic incidents in the U.S. reached an all-time high in the U.S. in 2021.
Soifer said the upsurge of white nationalism during the Trump administration remains a problem in the midterms.
“We saw this during Donald Trump’s candidacy in 2016, throughout his presidency, and in 2020, when he echoed antisemitic conspiracy theory and other hateful views shared by white supremacists and refused to condemn white supremacy,” Soifer told ABC News. “Now it has proliferated, and it is viewed as accepted among candidates, and some of them may even get elected in a week.”
As recently as last month, Trump shared a post on his Truth social media platform telling American Jews to “get their act together” by expressing more support for Israel.
Some Democratic candidates and lawmakers have also faced allegations of antisemitism, primarily for their comments criticizing Israel and promoting the boycott, divest, sanctions movement.
Responding to a request for comment, an RNC spokesperson referred ABC News to several of these statements — for example, Rep. Ilhan Omar’s 2012 tweet saying Israel “has hypnotized the world,” which was widely denounced as antisemitic.
Omar has since expressed regret for the comment but maintains it was directed at the country’s government and military action, not “people of a particular faith.”
Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., have also been consistently criticized, often by Republicans, for their support of the BDS movement.
(NEW YORK) — Dozens of people were injured in a fire at a residential building in New York City on Saturday morning, authorities said.
The three-alarm fire broke out on the 20th floor of a midtown Manhattan high-rise, with a “heavy fire condition,” according to the New York City Fire Department.
Thirty-eight people were hospitalized due to the fire, including two critically due to smoke inhalation, officials said. Five were in serious condition and the rest were minor injuries, according to FDNY Commissioner Laura Kavanagh.
Five members of the FDNY are among the patients, officials said.
“There’s likely to be an increase in the number of patients as more and more families come down and are evaluated by EMS,” EMS Academy Chief Joseph Pataky told reporters.
The fire was reported around 10:30 a.m. and was under control within an hour, the FDNY said.
Bystander footage captured a dramatic rescue, as a firefighter rappelled with a woman down to a floor below and went safely inside the building while smoke billowed out of windows above.
“Fire EMS and dispatch did an extraordinary job rescuing a number of civilians,” Kavanagh said during a press briefing, referencing that rescue in particular. “I cannot emphasize enough the extraordinary work of our members this morning in unbelievably dangerous conditions.”
Two people were rescued from the apartment where the fire originated via life-saving rope, according to FDNY Deputy Assistant Chief Frank Leeb.
The cause of the fire was determined to be a lithium-ion battery “connected to a micro-mobility device,” Kavanagh said.
“The lithium-ion battery adds a different degree when we talk about the fire dynamics of it,” Leeb said. “These rooms flash over in just a mere matter of seconds.”
There have been nearly 200 fires so far this year in NYC caused by lithium-ion batteries for a micro-mobility device, such as an electric bike or scooter, according to Chief Fire Marshal Dan Flynn.
Authorities believe an occupant was repairing electric bikes and the fire originated directly behind the front door, he said. FDNY has recovered at least five bikes from the apartment, he said.
Kavanagh emphasized the “rising cause of fires” from e-bikes and urged people to follow the “safest possible way to use these,” including not charging them overnight when they are asleep and making sure they are certified and the batteries are not damaged.
In August, a fire in a Harlem apartment sparked by a lithium-ion battery from an e-bike or scooter killed two people, including a 5-year-old girl.
(MCCURTAIN COUNTY, Okla.) — One person died in McCurtain County, Oklahoma, and several others were injured after tornadoes impacted the state Friday, an official confirmed to ABC News.
Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt said he was “praying for Oklahomans impacted by today’s tornadoes,” in a tweet Friday night.
He added that search and rescue teams and generators were being sent to the area.
Praying for Oklahomans impacted by today’s tornadoes.
Storms hit in Bryan, Choctaw, and Le Flore counties, among others. Additional flash flooding in some areas.
Search & rescue teams and generators forwarded to the Idabel area.
In the Dallas/Fort Worth region, multiple tornado warnings had been in effect on Friday, with people advised to seek shelter immediately due to life-threatening conditions.
“Atmospheric conditions are favorable for severe storms,” the National Weather Service for Fort Worth, said.
At least 10 people were injured after a confirmed tornado swept through Lamar County, Texas, the sheriff’s office said. They were being treated at a local hospital. Two people were in critical condition as of Friday night.
At least 50 homes were damaged or destroyed in the county, according to the sheriff’s office. A disaster has been declared in the county.
“If you do not live in the storm affected areas of Lamar County, please stay away. If you don’t have to leave home, please stay home,” the Lamar County Sheriff’s Office advised residents on social media Friday night.
A tornado was also observed near Sulphur Springs in Hopkins County, Texas.
The Hopkins County Sheriff’s Office said four homes were damaged following reports of a tornado in the southwestern region of the county. No injuries have been reported at this time.
(NEW YORK) — Election security is on the minds of many Americans in the run-up to the 2022 midterm elections. The aftermath of the 2020 elections coupled with an increased threat of foreign interference through election tampering, fraud, and intimidation have forced the federal government to create an election security umbrella that never existed before.
That umbrella is, in large measure, coordinated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) with support from the Department of Homeland Security’s Critical Security and Infrastructure Agency as well as the National Security Agency (NSA) and U.S. military Cyber Command.
For the FBI, the threats can be in person, in writing, via phone, or made online. They can include:
– Voter suppression, where bad actors spread disinformation about voting using various methods such as social media platforms, texting, or peer-to-peer messaging applications on smartphones. They may provide misleading information about the time, manner, or place of voting. This can include inaccurate election dates or false claims about voting qualifications or methods, such as false information suggesting that one may vote by text, which is not allowed in any U.S. jurisdiction.
– Threats against election workers, which includes any threat to an election worker or volunteer that causes fear, danger or intimidation.
– Voter fraud, by giving false information when registering to vote (such as false citizenship claims), by voting when ineligible to vote, and by voting more than once or using someone else’s name to vote.
– Election fraud, which includes changing a ballot tally or engaging in other corrupt behavior as an elections official; providing a voter with money or something of value in exchange for voting for a specific candidate or party in a federal election; threatening a voter with physical or financial harm if they don’t vote or don’t vote a certain way; and trying to prevent qualified voters from voting by lying about the time, date, or place of an election, i.e., voter suppression.
– Campaign fraud, which includes excessive campaign contributions above the legal limit, conduit contributions or straw donor schemes, contributions from prohibited sources, cording between Super PACs and independent expenditure organizations and a candidate’s campaign, and using campaign funds for personal or unauthorized use.
The threats can emanate from domestic and foreign sources, including state and non-state actors and radical U.S.-based groups. In every case, these attempts are meant to sway voters and the election process in one direction or another.
In August of 2020, then-Counterintelligence and Security Center Director William Evanna warned that China, Russia and Iran were attempting to sway American voters and influence the election. The same holds true today as these same state actors, once again, are trying to usurp the U.S. election process.
To combat this, in addition to its broad partnerships, the FBI has created a robust and expansive election intelligence effort aimed at identifying and mitigating any threat to the election process. This includes the creation of the Foreign Influence Task Forces, which brought the FBI’s national security and traditional criminal investigative expertise under one umbrella to prevent foreign influence in our elections.
Additionally, as has been done in the past, on Election Day the FBI will spin up command posts across the nation that will monitor and respond to investigative tips as well as real time election issues.
These command posts are staffed by investigators and analysts from the FBI and its partners, including local, state and federal law enforcement agencies, that coordinate and work together to thwart any evidence of election tampering, fraud or abuse.
Since all alleged Election Day offenses get referred to the FBI for investigation and potential prosecution by the Department of Justice, the Justice Department will run a nationwide Election Day Program, where an assistant U.S. attorney is appointed by the United States attorney in that district as the election coordinator.
All of this is in an effort to ensure that the election is safe and that any nefarious actors are identified and stopped, in order to protect the voting process.
Donald J. Mihalek is an ABC News contributor, retired senior Secret Service agent and regional field training instructor who served during two presidential transitions and multiple campaigns. He was also a police officer and served in the U.S. Coast Guard Reserves.
Richard Frankel is an ABC News contributor and retired FBI special agent who was the Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Newark Division and prior to that, the FBI’s New York Joint Terrorism Task Force. He was also the Associate Director of a National Intelligence / Senior FBI Detailee to the Office of the Director National intelligence.
