(NEW YORK) — Hours before the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, pretrial proceedings in the case against the five accused orchestrators started and ended on Friday with none of them present in the courtroom for the final public session of the week – while multiple defense teams raised formal objections against the judge continuing to preside over the military commission.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the attacks, had been present during public sessions of the proceedings on Tuesday and Wednesday this week, even taking the rare moment out of his detention cell to wave at reporters in the public gallery in the courtroom. But he and his co-defendants surprised reporters Friday by skipping the final public portion of the commission before the world recognizes the solemn commemoration on Saturday.
An assistant staff judge advocate, identified only by a pseudonym “Pa,” testified to their absence and provided signatures acknowledging their “voluntary” decision not to attend. James Connell, defense counsel for Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, aka Ammar al-Baluchi, attempted to have the military witness identify himself, but the government objected, insisting the testimony should proceed anonymously and was within the regulations of the military commission and not a violation of the Sixth Amendment.
Connell’s complaint was less about identifying this particular witness on the record, and more about expressing his continuing objection to the government’s use of unnamed witnesses. The interaction illustrated not only the tedious nature of the pretrial proceedings where nearly every action warrants deliberation, but it also revealed another unusual aspect of this case: the defense does not have access to their own clients — even when the court is in session – unless the accused actually attend the hearings.
The assistant staff judge advocate testified that one 9/11 defendant, Ammar al-Baluchi was sleepy and chose to nap rather than attend Friday’s public session. No explanation was given for the absence of the other four defendants, though Connell was able to extract details that the condition worsened of another Gitmo detainee, Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi – who is charged in another case but shares communal living quarters with some of the 9/11 defendants.
Al-Iraqi now claims that he is paralyzed and has lost the function of his legs, so al-Baluchi apparently aided him throughout the past several nights after the detainees rejected the assistance of a female corpsman. (His lawyers say that her initial offer was an invasive exam as the reason al-Iraqi waved off care.) The assistant staff judge advocate rejected the claim that Al-Iraqi is paralyzed.
Col. Matt McCall, presiding over the proceedings, offered to make a change to the schedule to allow the defendants more time to sleep Friday morning and attend today’s proceedings in the afternoon, but the defense counsel ultimately refused the accommodation – rather than face the prospect that the codefendants would be dragged out of their cells and forced to attend in person.
After discussing the judge’s qualifications at length this week, Mohammed’s lawyer Gary Sowards surprised many in the courtroom by announcing he would seek to disqualify McCall from sitting on the bench, saying there is a reasonable question about the judge’s impartiality, given the “extra-judicial” nature of McCall’s removal from the case after he was initially assigned. (Sowards argues the decision was made without appropriate litigation and at the behest of the Pentagon.)
A second chief counsel argued not for McCall’s removal from the case, but that he needed more time to read in on the case at hand and capital law.
“You’re not familiar with the record,” defense counsel Cheryl T. Bormann told the judge. “You are not familiar with the law as it applies to capital cases. Being a judge in a trial courtroom requires you to rule spontaneously on objections.”
A third lead attorney echoed both Sowards and Bormann. Connell declared he had no objections with McCall and would not seek to disqualify him. The final team deferred for now.
McCall said he would consider the arguments and render a decision on his own position.
The teams then moved into arguing over discovery, one of the most contentious issues in this case. The defense teams argued in favor of a motion demanding the government turn over more detailed evidence from the CIA black sites where KSM and the other detainees were held. After pointing out that the government provided limited assessments of more than 800 interrogation sessions, the defense further pressed the government’s secrecy.
In step with this line of questioning, Connell also revealed to reporters after the session that he could now share that the prosecution had withheld evidence linking an FBI interrogator that was part of the so-called “clean team” that questioning the detainees after they arrived at Guantanamo and the CIA black site program, providing fresh scrutiny surrounding the 2008 testimony from the detainees that the government is expect to build much of its case upon.
This slow drip of information and lack of transparency creates a significant hurdle for each defense team, they argue. “We don’t know what we don’t know,” Corey Krzan, one of Ramzi bin al-Shibh’s lawyers, said before the judge.
After about three and a half hours of public session, the court recessed for lunch and a classified session. The public portion of the proceedings will resume on Monday.
(OSHKOSH, Wisc.) — Anissa Weier, one of the two 12-year-old girls who said they attacked a friend to please the fictional character “Slender Man,” will be released from a mental health institution on Monday. Weier is now 19.
In 2014, Weier and Morgan Geyser lured Payton Leutner, also 12, to the woods in Waukesha, Wisconsin, where Geyser stabbed Leutner 19 times while Weier watched. Leutner was rushed to the hospital with life-threatening injuries but survived.
Judge Michael Bohren on Friday approved the conditions of Weier’s release from Winnebago Mental Health Institute. The full report on those conditions hasn’t been released to the public.
In 2017 Weier was sentenced to up to 25 years in a mental institution.
At a March court hearing, Bohren reviewed several medical reports and a letter written by Weier. “I have exhausted all the resources available to me at the Winnebago Mental Health Institute. If I am to become a productive member of society, I need to be a part of society,” Weier wrote.
Weier said she’s taken the responsibility that comes with “living with a mental illness, by communicating with total transparency to my treatment team members, participating wholeheartedly in all aspects of my treatment, and maintaining 100% medication adherence.”
“I am sorry and deeply regretful for the agony, pain, and fear I have caused,” Weier wrote, adding, “I take full responsibility for my actions.”
“I vowed after my crime that I would never become a weapon again, and I intend to keep that vow,” she said.
Geyser and Weier were charged in adult court with first-degree attempted intentional homicide. Weier pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and was found by a jury to be not guilty by mental disease or defect. Geyser pleaded guilty to the first-degree charges, and in 2018, as a part of her plea agreement, Geyser was convicted but found not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect.
Geyser was sentenced to up to 40 years in a mental institution. Last year a state appeals court upheld her sentence.
Geyser and Weier said they had intended to kill Leutner to appease the fictional character “Slender Man” — often depicted online as a horror figure who stalks children — and prove that he was real.
After Geyser stabbed Leutner, she and Weier left Leutner alone in the woods. Injured and bleeding, Leutner pulled herself out of the woods and into the open where someone could find her.
“If the knife had gone the width of a human hair further, she wouldn’t have lived,” Dr. John Kelemen, who operated on Leutner that day, told ABC News in 2014.
In a 2019 interview, Leutner told ABC News she was doing well and that her hope was to “put everything behind me and live my life normally.”
ABC News’ Jason Volack, Allie Yang and Sean Dooley contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — The sky was clear and blue. The gray towers stood, both guarding and welcoming, at the gateway to the nation. Out of nowhere came the impact, the blaze, the smoke — and then the towers were gone. When the dust and flames finally cleared, a new world had emerged.
The death and destruction defined that late summer day and remain seared in the minds of those who lived through Sept. 11, 2001. From the ashes and wreckage rose a new America: a society redefined by its scars and marked by a new wartime reality — a shadow darkened even more in recent days by the resurgence of fundamentalist Islamist rule in the far-off land that hatched the attacks.
Twenty years later — with more than 70 million Americans born since the crucible of the attacks — the legacy of 9/11 remains. From airport security to civilian policing to the most casual parts of daily life, it would be nearly impossible to identify something that remains untouched and unaffected by those terrifying hours in 2001.
This week, ABC News revisits the 9/11 attacks and unwinds their aftermath, taking a deep look at the America born in the wake of destruction. “9/11 Twenty Years Later: The Longest Shadow” is a five-part documentary series narrated by George Stephanopoulos. Episodes will air on ABC News Live each night leading up to the 20th anniversary of the attacks, from Sept. 6-10. The series will be rebroadcast in full following the commemoration ceremonies on Saturday, Sept. 11.
Part 5: A shadow so long, it covers all
The blue light may have been the strangest part.
On the streets of Baltimore, where crime proliferates in the poorest neighborhoods and economic desperation can run thick, the blue cast made it feel like one of those science-fiction movies set in a dark future of robots in control.
“I found it extremely oppressive and dystopian,” said Joanne Cavanaugh Simpson, a contributor to Baltimore magazine and a Pulitzer Center grantee.
The blue lights are meant to be seen. They are security cameras, and police want them to both solve crimes and deter them. In the city famed as the birthplace of America’s national anthem, the lights announce that the people are being watched.
Critics say these neighborhoods coated in blue also represent something else: the failures of an overzealous surveillance state, militarized and armed to the hilt in the years since terrorists attacked the nation on Sept. 11, 2001.
Despite the city’s high-tech efforts to curb crime, Baltimore still suffers from some of the highest homicide rates in the country. The city’s public image — shaped for many by the HBO crime drama “The Wire” — remains tethered to the fraught relationship between the police and the community.
For Baltimore and other major metropolitan areas, ubiquitous surveillance and a tragic cycle of police-involved killings continue to animate the debate over U.S. law enforcement. Many of the most controversial policing practices date to 9/11, when local governments were flooded with a surge of money, technology and new crime-fighting strategies — on top of a new mindset that assigned local cops to the front lines of the Global War on Terror. It was a time when many police departments re-fashioned themselves as paramilitary organizations, as their core mission was recalibrated from performing the traditional role of “protect and serve” to preventing the feared “second wave” of attacks for a terrorized and traumatized nation.
Police departments across the country, eager to avoid the failures that led to 9/11, scrambled to equip officers with the latest in military equipment and technology — much of it made available by a federal government that would spend almost 20 years at war in Afghanistan and Iraq. And the police forces — always eager to hire military veterans — were being staffed by people trained to police populations under occupation, not communities on the home front who get to decide how they want to be governed. Critics charged that racial profiling proliferated in cities like Baltimore, where the blinking blue lights became a symbol of life under a surveillance state.
“Over-policing, the racial tension — it just exponentially grew for local policing,” said Chris Burbank, a former police chief in Salt Lake City, who’s now a vice president at the Center for Policing Equity.
From aerial surveillance in Baltimore to national terrorist watch lists, local police departments experimented with novel approaches to securing their streets in the years following 9/11. A scarred nation largely acquiesced.
Over time, critics of these methods say that the trauma suffered by heavily policed communities — and the toll on residents’ civil liberties — have done more harm than good. As protests erupted across the country in the wake of George Floyd’s death in 2020, the gap between police departments and the citizens they are sworn to protect had never seemed wider.
“This separation between policing and community, I think you have to view 9/11 as gasoline that was poured on that fire,” said Lawrence Grandpre, a Baltimore-based community activist and author.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, a wariness of Muslims swept the country. Hate crimes against Muslims skyrocketed. Mosques became inundated with threats.
“Anything that showed that you were an Arab or a Muslim caused everyone to be suspicious of you,” said Sahar Aziz, director of the Center for Security, Race and Rights at Rutgers University Law School.
In response to the terror attacks, police departments in some major cities compiled vast databases of alleged potential terrorists and undertook ambitious surveillance missions targeting Muslim communities.
“You had massive surveillance programs by the NYPD, and the LAPD, and the FBI,” said Aziz. “Muslim student organizations at universities, Muslim-owned businesses, mosques, anywhere where Muslims congregated was systematically surveilled … we were sitting ducks.”
At the time of the attacks, the conversation around law enforcement was trending toward stricter guidelines for equitable policing — including halting some of the most invasive tactics like stop-and-frisk. Years of advocacy and lobbying in Washington culminated in the End Racial Profiling Act — a bill incoming President George W. Bush supported on the campaign trail in 2000.
“And then 2001, 9/11 happened, and it was completely off the table,” Aziz said. “It was a nonstarter.”
Before the 2001 terror attacks, John Farmer was the New Jersey attorney general who led the push to reform a state police culture that had itself acknowledged racial profiling and had vowed to eliminate it. After the attacks, as Farmer served as senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission, he said he had to watch as 9/11 “had the effect of deferring the debate on racial profiling.”
“Suddenly,” Farmer said, “no one wanted to talk about it anymore.”
Over the next decade, as American military forces engaged terrorists abroad, veterans of war returned home to continue their service as police officers. Together, with the influx of weapons of war, police throughout the U.S. began to look more and more like they were deployed on a forward operating military base.
“Police departments all over the country have acquired a pretty significant amount of military-grade weapons and equipment since 9/11,” said Loren Crowe, an Army officer who served two deployments overseas. “My local police department would be well-equipped to go fight in the mountains in Afghanistan.”
It all amounted to a post-9/11 “over-policing” that has had debilitating effects on police-community relations, according to many who have spent their careers in law enforcement.
“At that time there was so much fear in communities because of 9/11,” said Baltimore Police Commissioner Michael Harrison, who experienced the changes as he worked his way up through the ranks in the New Orleans Police Department. “And it became a concept of more police — and do more with more police.”
In Baltimore, where the death of Freddie Gray in 2016 ignited nationwide protests and added new urgency to the debate over post-9/11 policing, the local police department led the charge in advancing novel and controversial police tactics.
Blue-light cameras flooded crime-prone streets. Facial recognition software and phone data collection were employed to fight crime.
Perhaps the most jarring to residents were the so-called “spy planes” deployed to surveil large swaths of the city. Launched in 2016, the nation’s first-ever aerial surveillance experiment was meant to be secret. The manned airplanes’ immense capabilities allowed them to record the outdoor movements of an entire city. An independent audit later found that nearly all of the spy planes’ flights tracked over majority Black communities.
The police department has since suspended the program, and Harrison, the new commissioner, is focused on mending the strained relationship between the police and the community.
“Let’s try to tamper down the militaristic look and mindset, and move away from the warrior model into the guardian model, where we’re guardians of our community, not necessarily warriors of the community,” says Harrison.
Still, wounds run deep.
“Baltimore is one of the cities that is a pioneer in surveilling its own citizens,” said Simpson, who has reported on the city’s surveillance programs for Baltimore magazine. “There’s a lot of desperation to get a handle on the crime … so Baltimore has become a destination for police surveillance technology companies, to try out their wares.”
Grandpre, the community organizer, said this experimentation with electronic surveillance “just exacerbates the notion of a divide between the police force and the community.”
“After 9/11 and with Baltimore’s high crime rate, there’s a notion that anything is acceptable,” Grandpre said.
Now, two decades on, Americans are finally returning to pre-9/11 conversations about policing and what it really means for a nation to govern itself.
“Absolutely there’s bias. Absolutely there’s racism. And we can start to talk about some of these things,” said Burbank.
Supporters of these police programs stress the need to try something new and different. “What we’ve been doing has not been working,” said Joyous Jones, a retired nurse and proponent of police surveillance in Baltimore, who decided to start working for the surveillance company running the planes after the program became public.
“The [American Civil Liberties Union] and all those people that really complain about their civil liberties — I don’t have that because when I walk outside, I have to look and dodge bullets,” Jones said.
Jones is not alone in her support for the programs. “There was public support for it,” Commissioner Harrison said. “There were community surveys that were in high percentage in favor of it … and we looked at all of that.”
But after a year of high-profile police-involved killings and a spike in violent crime in many cities, reformers continue to ask: Are these police practices even working?
“People talk about the dichotomy: Do we want security, or do we want liberty? But some of the experts I spoke with say that’s sort of a false dichotomy,” Simpson said. “Are you getting more security with this technology? Is the crime rate in Baltimore getting better? No.”
“All these technologies have been added, a lot of them since 9/11,” Simpson said. “And what are you losing by deploying all this?”
ABC News’ Sarah Kate Caliguire, Alexandra Myers, Abigail Roberts and Tom Sampson contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — Vaughn Allex will never forget the faces of two of the 9/11 hijackers. He looked them in the eye that morning and asked who packed their luggage.
Allex was an American Airlines ticket agent at Dulles International Airport on Sept. 11, 2001 when two men ran into the terminal — appearing lost — and approached his counter.
Brothers Salem and Nawaf Al-Hazmi arrived late that day, but with two full-fare, first-class passengers standing in front of him, instead of rebooking them, Allex ensured they made flight 77.
Allex has lived with that decision for the last 20 years.
“The check-in was odd. The two that I checked in, two brothers, one was kind of gruff and the other one was standing a couple of paces behind him. And this sounds odd, but this is what caught my attention. He was almost dancing, he was moving from foot to foot and grinning and looking around, and my thought was, here’s somebody that’s never been on an airplane and boy is this guy excited,” Allex recently recalled in an interview at Dulles airport in Virginia.
“And I kind of watched him for a couple of minutes as we went through the whole check. And he was totally unresponsive as far as whatever we asked him to read, to look verbally. He just smiled and danced and was oblivious to what was going on,” he continued. “That’s the image I have, is the two of them standing there and the one just dancing, it was the oddest thing.”
When the pair couldn’t answer basic security check-in questions, Allex marked their tickets for additional security.
There’s more Allex has had to live with — 24 hours before Allex checked-in the brothers, his longtime co-worker and close friend MJ Booth asked for advice on a trip to Las Vegas. She considered flying to Chicago or Dallas to connect to Las Vegas, but Allex encouraged her to take flight 77 instead and connect through Los Angeles.
“I said, first of all, it’s a better flight. It’s a transcontinental flight. You get a meal and a movie and it’s relaxing.” Allex recalls. “She said that sounded good, but that she’d never written a ticket that way and we were just transitioning to electronic tickets. Could I help her? So I wrote her ticket from Dulles to Los Angeles with a connecting flight back to Las Vegas. And then the following day, I saw that she had gotten on the flight on the ticket I’d written.”
Allex left Dulles on Sept. 11 grieving, but had no idea it was about to get so much worse.
“I didn’t know on September 11th, on that night and the morning of September 12th, I was dealing like everybody else was with what happened with losing friends, losing passengers, losing the crew. I knew all of the crew on the flight deck and I knew all of the cabin crew, I’d worked with them for years. What I didn’t know until about mid-morning (Sept. 12) when the FBI was talking to me was that those last two passengers that I checked in were actually two of the hijackers. I had no idea until that moment that I had been involved in it,” Allex said.
On Sept. 12, Allex was summoned to his boss’ office. There, a woman introduced herself as an attorney for American Airlines, adding “I am not your attorney.”
Allex recalls the chill that went through his body. That’s when he says two FBI agents walked in, handing him a passenger manifest.
“I started to run my hand down the list and I saw the names of the two people I checked-in, and in that moment and that instant, that’s when I looked at him and I said, ‘I did it, didn’t I?’ And they said, ‘what did you do?’ And I go, ‘these were the two that I put in,'” Allex said. “I think they, they knew exactly who they were looking for, but they wanted me to come to that conclusion. And once we did, the interview strictly focused on these two individuals. And the rest is history, that the whole transaction came back, I didn’t know all of September 11th until that moment on September 12th — I did not realize that I had checked-in two of the hijackers.”
Guilt tortured Allex for years to come. Twenty years later, there are still some things he’d rather not discuss.
“I blame myself, I thought, you know, if I had done something different, if I’d not let them on, if I just said to the agents, these two guys are late, let them get the next flight. We have one at noon. It’s no big deal,” Allex said.
Over the years, friends and professionals told Allex that he was just doing his job.
“That’s what they tell me, that’s what they tell me, but, what you do, what your — your own mind does is, is crazy sometimes,” Allex said.
“I realize that there’s probably nothing I could’ve done to prevent what happened. I’ve come to terms with that.”
His mind continued to play games with him for years. It wouldn’t be until 2004, with the purchase of a book that everything turned around.
“The turning point for me, I had been interviewed by the 9/11 Commission. And it wasn’t until the 9/11 Commission report came out and I bought the book and here is this book with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages, and I’m on page three. I have a little paragraph and a footnote, footnote number 12.”
Allex explained that single footnote — his name next to so many others — is what finally set him free of guilt and the feeling of responsibility years after the attacks.
“That’s when it started to get better. That’s when I went — oh my gosh. There were so many other people involved, there were so many innocent people that just touched on this. And I had just such a small, tiny five-minute part of it. But before that, it was — it was terrible.”
Allex retired from American Airlines in 2008. He now works for TSA.
“I joined the Department of Homeland Security working for the Transportation Security Administration and ever since I’ve been with them, it’s been great. I feel like the work that they do is so important to keep everybody safe. And the fact that I have just such a small little part there, I’m like the happiest person at TSA. And I’ll tell anybody that,” Allex said with a smile.
On Aug. 23, Allex walked with ABC News through the doors he saw the two hijackers run through that fateful morning. As he stood there, recalling the memory of the men responsible for starting the war in Afghanistan, Afghan refugees had just arrived from evacuation flights. They filed past the American Airlines ticket counter and through the very doors that the hijackers walked in 20 years earlier — grateful to start a new life in America.
(NEW YORK) — The United States is facing a COVID-19 surge this summer as the more contagious delta variant spreads.
More than 654,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 while over 4.6 million people have died from the disease worldwide, according to real-time data compiled by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.
Just 62.5% of Americans ages 12 and up are fully vaccinated against COVID-19, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Here’s how the news is developing. All times Eastern:
Sep 10, 1:48 pm
Florida governor’s school mask mandate ban is reinstated
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ school mask mandate ban was reinstated by an appeals court Friday.
This overrules a Tallahassee judge’s decision on Wednesday to lift the stay, preventing the state from enforcing the ban. (The appeals court still needs to rule on the legality of the order, but the reinstatement of the stay means that until then, the state can continue sanctioning school districts.)
DeSantis has struggled to rein in the state’s largest school systems as they implement mask mandates in defiance of state law. At least 13 districts, including Florida’s six largest, have mask requirements in place. The Florida Department of Education has threatened to withhold the salaries of school board members in most of these districts and has begun doing so in at least two cases.
-ABC News’ Will McDuffie
Sep 10, 1:00 pm
CDC studies: Vaccines still dramatically reduce risk of hospitalization, death amid delta
The unvaccinated “are 10 times more likely to be hospitalized and 11 times more likely to die,” CDC director Rochelle Walensky said at Friday’s White House COVID briefing.
Three new studies from the CDC show vaccines still dramatically reduce the risk of hospitalization and death amid the delta surge.
A study of U.S. veterans fully vaccinated with Pfizer and Moderna found no real change in vaccine effectiveness against hospitalization pre-delta to post-delta. A second study of all three vaccines across nine states found vaccine effectiveness against hospitalization was 86% for all age groups. A third study of all three vaccines across 13 jurisdictions found vaccines performed roughly equally well protecting against hospitalization and death during the delta surge compared to pre-delta.
Across the studies, vaccines remained 86-87% effective against preventing hospitalizations.
But effectiveness dropped more for people ages 65 and older in recent months compared to before delta, likely due a combination of vaccine effectiveness fading over time and the slight impact of the delta variant on vaccine efficacy.
Vaccines are losing some of their effectiveness when it comes to preventing mild infections among the vaccinated.
-ABC News’ Sony Salzman
Sep 10, 11:28 am
Kentucky deploys more National Guard members to help strained hospitals
In hard-hit Kentucky, over 300 more National Guard members will be sent to help at 21 strained hospitals, Gov. Andy Beshear said.
More than 300 additional @KentuckyGuard members will be deployed to 21 strained hospitals. This is the largest deployment of the Guard for a health crisis in our history. We’ve asked a lot of these heroes, but every time we’ve asked, they’ve stepped up and served us proudly. pic.twitter.com/gu4rBO4Whw
Kentucky’s positivity rate was above 14% Thursday as the state set new records for hospitalizations and patients on ventilators, the governor said.
-ABC News’ Will Gretsky
Sep 10, 9:54 am
FDA says it won’t cut corners for vaccine for young kids
While awaiting Pfizer trial data for kids ages 5 to 11, the Food and Drug Administration is vowing not to cut corners.
The FDA said, “it’s critical that thorough and robust clinical trials of adequate size are completed to evaluate the safety and the immune response.”
“Children are not small adults — and issues that may be addressed in pediatric vaccine trials can include whether there is a need for different doses or different strength formulations of vaccines already used for adults,” the FDA said.
When the FDA receives a completed emergency use authorization request, “the agency will carefully, thoroughly and independently examine the data to evaluate benefits and risks and be prepared to complete its review as quickly as possible, likely in a matter of weeks rather than months.”
“However, the agency’s ability to review these submissions rapidly will depend in part on the quality and timeliness of the submissions by manufacturers,” the FDA added.
Sep 10, 5:43 am
Milwaukee Public Schools to require COVID-19 vaccination for staff
All employees of Milwaukee Public Schools must provide proof of COVID-19 vaccination by Nov. 1, unless they qualify for a medical or religious exemption, school board members voted unanimously on Thursday night.
The board also decided that staff who qualify for an exemption must take COVID-19 tests twice weekly. Anyone who does not comply with the new vaccine mandate or is not exempt would be placed on unpaid leave and ultimately could lose their job.
Students are not required to get vaccinated, but the board approved monetary incentives of $100 for those who are 12 and older and can provide proof of vaccination by the Nov. 1 deadline.
Sep 09, 7:33 pm
LA school district to mandate vaccine for students
The Los Angeles Unified School District’s Board of Education unanimously voted Thursday to require the COVID-19 vaccine for all eligible students.
All students ages 12 and up will be required to be fully vaccinated by Jan. 10, 2022, unless they have a “medical or other exemption,” said the district, which is the second-largest in the nation with over 600,000 students.
All teachers and staff are already required to be vaccinated by Oct. 15.
“Today’s decision furthers our longstanding commitment to ensure the safety of our students, families, and staff,” Board President Kelly Gonez said in a statement. “The vaccine is the single best way to protect students and schools from COVID-19.”
(MILWAUKEE) — Milwaukee Public Schools, the largest school district in Wisconsin, will give $100 to students who get the COVID-19 vaccine.
The district’s school board voted unanimously Thursday night to mandate vaccinations for staff by Nov. 1, with exceptions for religious or medical reasons.
The board considered a vaccine mandate for students but ended up unanimously approving a $100 incentive for MPS students 12 and older who provide proof of vaccination by Nov. 1., including those who already got their shots.
The district has about 31,205 students who are eligible for the vaccine, meaning the district could shell out as much as $3.12 million, administrators said during the meeting, the Milwaukee Sentinel Journal reported. Money from the district’s $500 million federal stimulus installment will be used to fund the effort.
The school already has other COVID-19 safety measures in place, such as required face masks, HEPA filtration units and physical distancing.
“The COVID-19 vaccine is one of the most effective strategies to mitigate the spread of the virus,” Superintendent Dr. Keith P. Posley said in a statement. “We owe it to our students, teachers, staff, and community to take all possible steps to ensure safe schools.”
The district’s COVID-19 dashboard reports a total of 525 cases among students and staff since July 1, with 115 students testing positive the week of Aug. 30 to Sept. 3.
Over the last 14 days, there have been 448 cases among children under the age of 12 and 406 cases among 12 to 17-year-olds in Milwaukee, according to the city’s dashboard.
Nationwide, pediatric hospitalizations are a rising concern. Pediatric hospital admissions are at one of their highest points of the pandemic, with more than 2,355 children receiving care across the country for confirmed or suspected COVID-19 infections.
Debates over vaccine mandates continue to unfold in school districts across the nation.
On Thursday, the Los Angeles Unified School District became the first large scale system to require eligible students to get the vaccine. All students ages 12 and up will be required to be fully vaccinated by Jan. 10, 2022, unless they have a “medical or other exemption,” the school district said.
President Joe Biden also announced that private businesses with 100 or more employees must require their employees to be vaccinated or undergo weekly testing.
(WASHINGTON) — Fencing outside U.S. Capitol is expected to return ahead of the “Justice for J6” rally, a source familiar with the plans confirmed to ABC News.
The fencing, erected after the Jan. 6 riot, was removed in July.
“Justice for J6” is being billed by organizers as a protest for defendants who are being detained by the government in connection to the January insurrection at the Capitol.
The fencing is just the latest security measure for a rally that has some in law enforcement on high alert.
Federal law enforcement agencies have become concerned that far-right extremists, including the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys could come to Washington for the protest.
U.S. Capitol Police is the leading agency for the event.
“We are closely monitoring Sept. 18 and we are planning accordingly,” said Capitol Police Chief Tom Manger. “After Jan. 6, we made department-wide changes to the way we gather and share intelligence internally and externally. I am confident the work we are doing now will make sure our officers have what they need to keep everyone safe.”
Every available Capitol Police officer will be working and the Washington Metropolitan Police Department said they are also “fully prepared” for the protest.
“As with all First Amendment demonstrations, MPD will be monitoring and assessing the activities and planning accordingly with our federal law enforcement partners,” an MPD spokesperson said in a statement to ABC News. “MPD will have an increased presence around the city where demonstrations will be taking place and will be prepared to make street closures for public safety.”
Additionally, the FBI Washington Field Office said they are working closely with state local and federal partners.
Javed Ali, a former national counterterrorism director on the National Security Council said agencies have cause for concern.
“While the government has not yet issued threat bulletins about specific and credible plots on that day, like 6 January there may be people who attend in a highly agitated mindset and then switch quickly to violent action with little-to-no warning,” Ali said.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told reporters on Wednesday that information sharing is key to avoiding another incident like Jan. 6.
He said the Department of Homeland Security has increased information sharing efforts throughout the country.
(NEW YORK) — The United States is facing a COVID-19 surge this summer as the more contagious delta variant spreads.
More than 654,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 while over 4.6 million people have died from the disease worldwide, according to real-time data compiled by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.
Just 62.5% of Americans ages 12 and up are fully vaccinated against COVID-19, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Here’s how the news is developing. All times Eastern:
Sep 10, 5:43 am
Milwaukee Public Schools to require COVID-19 vaccination for staff
All employees of Milwaukee Public Schools must provide proof of COVID-19 vaccination by Nov. 1, unless they qualify for a medical or religious exemption, school board members voted unanimously on Thursday night.
The board also decided that staff who qualify for an exemption must take COVID-19 tests twice weekly. Anyone who does not comply with the new vaccine mandate or is not exempt would be placed on unpaid leave and ultimately could lose their job.
Students are not required to get vaccinated, but the board approved monetary incentives of $100 for those who are 12 and older and can provide proof of vaccination by the Nov. 1 deadline.
Sep 09, 7:33 pm
LA school district to mandate vaccine for students
The Los Angeles Unified School District’s Board of Education unanimously voted Thursday to require the COVID-19 vaccine for all eligible students.
All students ages 12 and up will be required to be fully vaccinated by Jan. 10, 2022, unless they have a “medical or other exemption,” said the district, which is the second-largest in the nation with over 600,000 students.
All teachers and staff are already required to be vaccinated by Oct. 15.
“Today’s decision furthers our longstanding commitment to ensure the safety of our students, families, and staff,” Board President Kelly Gonez said in a statement. “The vaccine is the single best way to protect students and schools from COVID-19.”
(RENO, Nev.) — Animal advocates are urging Nevada state officials to call off this year’s annual bear hunt as wildfires continue to rage across the West.
Wildlife advocates say hunting season should be canceled as the wildfire situation is so dire that bears are undergoing forced migration, potentially throwing the social dynamics of the territorial animals off balance. Several organizations penned a letter to the Nevada Department of Wildlife Wednesday following the emergence of several “heartbreaking photographs” showing bears either injured by the fires or searching for food and water in fire-ravaged areas.
“We need to give our bears a break,” Patrick Donnelly, Nevada state director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement. “Climate-fueled catastrophic fire isn’t just hard on us, it’s also hard on wildlife. Bears are struggling to survive and recover from the most difficult summer of their lives, and now they’re going to be chased by dogs and shot to death. It’s unacceptable.”
The annual bear hunt in the state typically involves packs of hounds with GPS collars that chase the bear up trees. The season is scheduled to begin on Wednesday, but eight of the 10 locations where bear hunting is permitted are in regions that have burned or are still burning, or are immediately adjacent to those areas, according to the organizations.
State law gives both the Nevada Department of Wildlife and the Nevada Board of Wildlife Commissioners emergency powers to stop hunting in units where an emergency has been declared.
“Our black bears are iconic animals, and at a time of dire need the fate of individual bears is just as important as the fate of the population,” said Don Molde of the Nevada Wildlife Alliance. “Now is not the time to add additional harassment to what they’ve already suffered.”
Bears in the state are also suffering from the effects of climate change, as record heat and and drought are also placing significant stress on populations. Researchers are already seeing climate change have a direct effect on mortality and reproductive failure in bears in the West, the advocates said.
“Not only should the bear hunt be suspended in fire-affected areas — the agency and commission need to take disasters into account when setting their quotas going forward,” said Jeff Dixon of the Humane Society of the United States. “For wildlife policy to be science-based, wildlife management professionals need to factor in global warming’s impact on ecosystems when setting those policies.”
Critical fire threats were plaguing the West on Wednesday, posing the threat of new blazes to spark just as firefighters start to make significant progress in containing the existing wildfires.
Red flag warnings have been posted in several regions across the Northwest Thursday due to dry heat and gusty winds, especially over parts of the Northern Rockies and Northern California, where the Dixie and Caldor fires continue to rage.
Lightning from widely scattered thunderstorms expected in the Northwest could also combine with very dry fuels to ignite more fires in places like Oregon and Idaho.
In addition to the heavy fire conditions, 29 cities were expected to break or tie their daily record high temperatures Thursday. Excessive heat warnings are in effect for parts of the Southwest, from Las Vegas to Phoenix and the California deserts, where temperatures were forecast to hit dangerous temperatures up to 115 degrees, or even 120 degrees in Death Valley.
The heat will then shift over parts of the central Rockies on Friday. Air quality alerts are also in effect over parts of the Pacific Northwest and Rockies due to the wildfire smoke.
ABC News’ Brittany Borer and Melissa Griffin contributed to this report.
(POLK COUNTY, Fla.)A young girl who was “tortured” and shot multiple times when a former Marine sharpshooter allegedly invaded her home and killed four members of her family, including her baby brother, told investigators she survived by playing dead, authorities said on Thursday.
The 11-year-old is expected to recover from her injuries, but authorities said what she experienced may haunt her for the rest of her life.
Polk County, Florida, authorities said the girl witnessed Bryan Riley, 33, allegedly shoot her father, Justice Gleason, 40; her dad’s girlfriend, Theresa Lanham, 33; and her 3-month-old brother in the Sunday morning massacre near Lakeland, 35 miles east of Tampa. Riley is also accused of killing Lanham’s 62-year-old mother, Catherine Delgado.
Riley allegedly shot and killed the family’s dog, too, officials said.
Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said Gleason’s daughter, the sole survivor of the attack, told investigators how she avoided being killed, after allegedly being tortured and shot by the stranger who had zero connection to her family.
“This 11-year-old was very brave and very smart, and she out-thought him. She said, ‘I played dead and I prayed,'” Judd said at a news conference Thursday.
Riley is charged with four counts of first-degree murder, one count of attempted first-degree murder, seven counts of attempted first-degree murder on a law enforcement officer, shooting into an occupied dwelling, two counts of armed burglary with battery, arson and cruelty to an animal. He is being held without bond.
The sheriff said Riley has shown no remorse. “He’s evil,” Judd said.
Judd said Riley first showed up at the home around 7 p.m. Saturday after picking up a first-aid kit from a friend who lives nearby, which he claimed he planned to donate to a Hurricane Ida relief organization.
Upon leaving his friend’s home, he saw Gleason mowing his front yard and stopped. He allegedly told Gleason that God sent him to speak to a girl named Amber, who he claimed was suicidal and being held as a sex-trafficking victim, Judd said. He was told no one by that name lived at the address and was ordered to leave.
The family called deputies, but they could not find Riley, Judd said. He said Riley returned to the home about 4:30 a.m. Sunday armed with three guns and in full-body armor.
Judd said Riley, who as a Marine was deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, allegedly told investigators that he “created an ops plan.'”
“In his confession, he said, ‘You know what that means? You have to kill everybody,'” said Judd, adding that Riley’s girlfriend told investigators he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.
He said the suspect broke into an in-law unit behind the main house and killed Delgado. Riley allegedly shot his way into the main house and found Gleason, Lanham, her baby and the girl hiding in a bathroom, according to the sheriff.
After allegedly killing Gleason, Lanham and the baby, Judd said, Riley took the girl into the living room and questioned her about the whereabouts of Amber, Judd said. When the girl told him she didn’t know Amber, he allegedly counted down, “three, two, one” and shot her in the stomach, Judd said. When she again denied knowing Amber, Riley allegedly shot her in the hand and legs before firing what he wrongly believed to be the fatal shot, Judd said.
When deputies arrived, a shootout ensued. Riley was hit in the stomach and surrendered, Judd said.
Judd said the sheriff’s department is collecting donations to help the family with funeral costs and the young survivor’s hospital bills. He said his agency has established an online page to accept contributions.
