Flowers are seen placed around portraits of late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died in a Russian Arctic prison, at a makeshift memorial in front of the former Russian consulate in Frankfurt am Main, western Germany, on Feb. 20, 2024. (AFP via Getty Images)
(LONDON) — Kremlin officials rejected on Tuesday a call for an independent postmortem examination on the remains of opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
The Council of the European Union had on Monday called for the independent review, saying Russia “must allow an independent and transparent international investigation into circumstances of his sudden death.”
“Mr Navalny’s unexpected and shocking death is yet another sign of the accelerating and systematic repression in Russia,” the council said in a statement.
A spokesperson for Russian President Vladimir Putin rejected the body’s request on Tuesday, saying “Moscow does not accept such demands” from the European Union.
Members of Navalny’s inner circle said they were continuing on Tuesday to seek access to the opposition leader’s remains.
(NEW YORK) — A flood watch remains in effect Tuesday across California, from San Diego in the south to Redding in the north, as a powerful storm continues to unleash rain, snow and wind on much of the West Coast.
The south-central California counties of Santa Barabara and Ventura have seen the most rainfall so far, with 8 to 11 inches accumulating over the past three days. Areas further south in the Golden State have been somewhat spared but are expected to get heavy rain Tuesday morning, with local amounts of 1 to 3 inches possible from Los Angeles to San Diego.
The mountains in Los Angeles County already got up to 6 inches of rain, while downtown Los Angeles saw about 1 inch. The city of Los Angeles is just 2 inches of rainfall away from having its wettest February on record.
In addition to rain, strong winds of 50 to 60 miles per hour were reported in spots from San Francisco to Los Angeles.
In parts of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, gusts were over 100 mph and 2 feet of snow had fallen.
The winds are forecast to ease Tuesday but, with an atmospheric river affecting the area, thunderstorms could form and bring gusts to southern California.
Winter storm warnings and snow alerts are in effect Tuesday from Southern California to Utah and Colorado, where an additional 1 to 2 feet of snow is possible.
The storm is expected to continue feeding moisture from the Pacific Ocean into California through Wednesday before moving out of the region by the evening.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis testifies during a hearing in the case of the State of Georgia v. Donald John Trump at the Fulton County Courthouse on Feb. 15, 2024 in Atlanta, Georgia. (Alyssa Pointer-Pool/Getty Images)
(NEW YORK) — Over the last few weeks, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who is leading the prosecution against former President Donald Trump and his allies over alleged election interference in Georgia, has been put on the hot seat after she was accused by multiple defendants’ attorneys of a conflict of interest with a fellow prosecutor.
Willis and Nathan Wade admitted in court to having a romantic relationship but have contended their relationship “has never involved direct or indirect financial benefit” to the DA.
Legal experts told ABC News that the extra court drama will reverberate long in the court of public opinion after the judge makes his decision and will impact how the prosecution and defense present their cases.
“I don’t think there is any scenario where this is a bad situation for the prosecutor. At the minimum, it will distract from the core information of the case and delay the trial,” Scott Cummings, the Robert Henigson Professor of Legal Ethics at the UCLA School of Law, told ABC News.
Cummings said the biggest problem with the ethics violation allegations is that it’s adding another distraction to the high-profile case.
Even if the judge dismisses Trump co-defendant Michael Roman’s motion to remove Willis from the case, Cummings predicted the former president and co-defendants’ attorneys will constantly bring up her relationship with Wade to sow distrust.
“In the near term, when it comes to optics and public perception, it does unfortunately interfere with the perception of integrity. I think it’s unfortunate because there is no underlying basis for the questioning of whether or not the prosecution was legitimate,” Cummings said.
John Acevedo, a visiting associate professor at Emory School of Law, told ABC News that motions of attorney conflict of interest are common in criminal cases, but Willis’ situation is one of the rare times where an accusation has been made against two prosecutors.
Most conflict motions are made because of relationships or past issues between a prosecutor and defense attorney, Acevedo said.
“This does not fit the normal pattern that attorneys are looking for, so it’s not surprising that [Willis’] office didn’t think it could be a problem,” he said.
Acevedo said from the testimony he’s seen so far in the hearings, the matter was a “slip up,” and said Willis, Wade and others have so far shown good counterarguments to the defense’s claims.
Last week, Willis took the stand in the court hearings over the motion and pushed back against the accusations, telling defense attorney Ashleigh Merchant, who filed the motion, “You lied.”
“You think I’m on trial. These people are on trial for trying to steal an election in 2020. I’m not on trial, no matter how hard you try to put me on trial,” Willis testified Thursday.
The testimony got heated with Steve Sadow, Trump’s attorney, and Merchant objecting to Willis’ accusations before being broken up by the judge.
Willis also contended that she and Wade did not start dating until 2022, after he was hired by the Fulton County DA’s office.
Cummings said the DA was wise in taking the stand to tell her side of the story and respond to the allegations even if it meant she was thrust further into the spotlight. He said from the testimony he’s seen so far, Willis and the DA’s office have a solid job of countering the defense’s claims of a conflict of interest.
“The key question is financial benefit and I don’t see any evidence that contradicted her claim,” he said.
Acevedo said if the judge does remove Willis from the case, it would lead to a legal procedure to determine which Georgia prosecutorial office would take over the case, which would cause a lengthy delay.
“It could possibly end the case officially but practically,” he said.
If the judge dismisses the motion, Acevedo said there is a chance that the issue over Willis’ and Wade’s relationship could blow over because of the ever-changing media cycle, but he predicted Trump and the co-defendants’ attorneys will keep bringing it up in news conferences, interviews and other media appearances.
Acevedo noted that the ethics violation allegations and the court hearings surrounding it will come into play during jury selection for the Trump trial.
“You’re going to have to screen people over a few new issues. You’ll need to screen people over whether or not they think less of the prosecution because of the allegations, but also screen people over whether or not they think less of the defense because of the way they questioned Willis,” Acevedo said.
Moving forward, Acevedo said Willis’ ethics case will prompt the Fulton County DA’s office and other prosecuting offices to expand their scope of potential conflicts of interest.
“At the end of the day, it’s up to district attorney offices to make sure that there are no distractions,” he said.
(DETROIT) — A man who was wrongfully convicted and incarcerated for over six years was awarded $10 million in damages by a jury in Detroit.
Alexandre Ansari, who was awarded last Friday, was wrongfully serving a life sentence over claims that in 2012 he shot and killed Ileana Cuevas, a 15-year-old girl, and wounded two others in Detroit, according to a lawsuit filed by Ansari in the United States District Court, Eastern District of Michigan Southern Division.
“Once I got the verdict back, my heart dropped. And I’m like, ‘Dang, I got to spend the rest of my life in here for something I didn’t do.’ And you know, I tried to kill myself,” Ansari told Linsey Davis on “ABC News Live Prime.” “It felt like nobody didn’t put all the evidence together to see that I wasn’t the person in the first place. So things started getting overwhelming for me.”
Ansari, 39, was exonerated in 2019 by the Wayne County Circuit Court after it determined that Moises Jimenez, a former Detroit police detective, withheld evidence for Ansari’s trial that would have implicated someone else as the shooter, according to the County of Wayne Office of the Prosecuting Attorney.
“Mr. Ansari’s criminal conviction was dismissed in Wayne County Circuit Court by Judge Thomas Hathaway in 2019,” the county prosecutor told ABC News in a statement. “The jury found that Alexandre Ansari’s constitutional rights were violated by a Detroit police detective by concealing evidence in the fatal shooting of a 15-year-old girl.”
Jimenez received an anonymous tip that linked the shooter to the Mexican Drug Cartel, according to the complaint that released Ansari. He withheld the evidence from Ansari’s 2013 trial, according to the lawsuit. Jimenez’s attorneys told ABC News that the former detective claims that he provided all evidence he uncovered during his investigation and plans to appeal the $10 million lawsuit verdict.
“Additionally, there was an ‘Internal Memorandum’ in the trial prosecutor’s file which confirmed that she had received the information which was the subject of the litigation,” Jerry Ashford, chief of litigation for the City of Detroit Law Department, who is representing Jimenez, told ABC News in a statement. “This was always a witness identification case where two witnesses identified Plaintiff [Ansari] as the shooter. The witnesses never recanted.”
There have been no reported arrests connected to the shooting since Ansari’s exoneration. Ansari was wrongfully arrested for the crime when he was 27 years old, according to Wolf Mueller, Ansari’s attorney. Mueller told ABC News that Jimenez’s appeal will go nowhere.
“If he put the cartel leader away for murder, he would be sentenced, just like Alex, to life without parole,” Mueller told Linsey Davis on “ABC News Live Prime.” “And he feared retaliation from the cartel, so he hid the evidence and purposely directed the investigation away from the cartel leader.”
Ansari told ABC News that he looks forward to enjoying his life of freedom.
“Live a life that I missed,” Ansari said. “Just invest and try to give back to the universe.”
(WASHINGTON) — The U.S. conducted what it called self-defense strikes on five targets in the Houthi-controlled area of Yemen after the Houthis employed an unmanned submarine for the first time since attacks in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden began, the Pentagon said.
The submarine, an unmanned underwater vessel, or UUV, shows advancing Houthi capability and a shifting strategy, ABC News national security and defense analyst Mick Mulroy, a former Pentagon official and CIA agent, said.
“Unmanned surface and subsurface vessels are likely more difficult to detect and destroy than aerial drones and anti-ship missiles. The Houthis are not likely capable of manufacturing these weapons on their own, so they are probably coming from Iran,” Mulroy said.
In addition to the unmanned submarine hit Sunday, the U.S.military said it struck an unmanned vessel that moves on the surface, as well as anti-ship cruise missiles which have made up the bulk of U.S. targets in the Houthi arsenal.
The Houthis, which the U.S. designates a global terrorist group with Iran’s backing, operate out of parts of Yemen they control after a cease-fire in the Yemeni civil war. The International Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Quds Force, an arm of the Iranian regime’s military forces that coordinates operations outside Iran’s borders, supports the Houthis and other armed groups with weapons and financing, the U.S. says.
“The Houthis and the IRGC are adjusting their strategy, apparently because they haven’t been successful in striking a U.S. naval vessel,” Mulroy said.
The Houthis have targeted American ships to no avail, while the U.S. has been increasing defensive strikes since a separate militia group, also backed by Iran, struck the U.S. base in Jordan and killed three servicemembers.
“If one or more of these weapons get through and kill U.S. sailors, Iran should expect to be held directly responsible,” said Mulroy.
The unmanned weapons systems are an acute threat, Mulroy said, since they could “overwhelm the ship’s defenses” by attacking from multiple dimensions, a so-called “swarm attack.”
The U.S. Coast Guard said it intercepted a cache of weapons aboard a ship heading from Iran to Houthi-controlled Yemen on Jan. 15. Among military equipment intercepted were components for the unmanned vessels, the U.S. said — the sort of vessels hit in two of Sunday’s U.S. strikes.
As a part of U.S. preemptive offensives to Houthi aggression, a U.S. official told ABC News the U.S. conducted a cyberattack against an Iranian spy vessel, the MV Behshad, which has cruised the Red Sea and passed targeting information to the Houthis. The cyberattack was a part of the U.S. promised multi-tiered response in the days after the Jan. 28 militia attack in Jordan.
The Houthis on Monday said they conducted five strikes in the past 24 hours. Two targeted American ships in the Gulf of Aden and another targeted and sunk a British ship, the Houthis said in a statement.
(NEW YORK) — More than four months since Hamas terrorists invaded Israel on Oct. 7, the Israeli military continues its bombardment of the neighboring Gaza Strip.
The conflict, now the deadliest between the warring sides since Israel’s founding in 1948, shows no signs of letting up soon and the brief cease-fire that allowed for over 100 hostages to be freed from Gaza remains a distant memory.
Here’s how the news is developing:
Feb 20, 5:26 AM Aid groups warn of potential ‘explosion in preventable child deaths’ in Gaza
A new analysis by the Global Nutrition Cluster, a humanitarian aid partnership led by the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, found that 90% of children under the age of 2 in the war-torn Gaza Strip face severe food poverty, meaning they eat two or fewer food groups a day.
The same was true for 95% of pregnant and breastfeeding women in Gaza, according to the report released Monday. And at least 90% of children under 5 are affected by one or more infectious disease, with 70% experiencing diarrhea in the past two weeks, the report said.
In Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah, where most humanitarian aid enters, 5% of children under 2 are acutely malnourished, compared to more than 15% in northern Gaza, which has been isolated by the Israeli military and almost completely cut off from aid for weeks, the report said. Before war broke out last October between Israel and Gaza’s militant rulers, Hamas, the acute malnutrition rate across the coastal enclave was less than 1%, according to the report.
The report also found that more than 80% of homes in Gaza lack clean and safe water, with the average household having one liter per person per day.
“The Gaza Strip is poised to witness an explosion in preventable child deaths which would compound the already unbearable level of child deaths in Gaza,” Ted Chaiban, deputy executive director for humanitarian action and supply operations at UNICEF, said in a statement. “We’ve been warning for weeks that the Gaza Strip is on the brink of a nutrition crisis. If the conflict doesn’t end now, children’s nutrition will continue to plummet, leading to preventable deaths or health issues which will affect the children of Gaza for the rest of their lives and have potential intergenerational consequences.”
Feb 19, 12:31 PM Gaza’s health ministry accuses IDF of turning Nasser Hospital into ‘military barracks’
Israeli troops have turned Nasser Hospital, the main medical center serving the southern Gaza Strip, into a “military barracks” and are “endangering the lives of patients and medical staff,” according to Gaza’s Hamas-run Ministry of Health.
The health ministry said Monday that patients and medical staff inside Nasser Hospital are now without electricity, water, food, oxygen and treatment capabilities for difficult cases since Israeli ground troops raided the facility in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis last week.
The World Health Organization, which warned on Sunday that Nasser Hospital “is not functional anymore,” said more than 180 patients and 15 doctors and nurses remain inside the hospital.
The WHO said it has evacuated 14 critical patients from the hospital to receive treatment elsewhere.
The Israel Defense Forces alleges that Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that governs Gaza, has been conducting military operations out of Nasser Hospital and other medical centers in the war-torn enclave — claims which Hamas denies.
(NEW YORK) — An 83-year-old man imprisoned for more than three decades for a string of 1980s bank robberies is back behind bars, according to federal officials.
Donald “Doc” Bennett, once dubbed by the FBI as the “leaping bandit” for jumping over counters in his younger days during bank robberies, was arrested hours after allegedly holding up Chase bank in Hickory Hills, Illinois, on Valentine’s Day with an accomplice identified as 55-year-old Edward Binert, according to a federal criminal complaint filed against the pair.
Both Bennett of Campbellsville, Kentucky, and Binert of Oak Lawn, Illinois, are both charged with armed robbery. The men are expected to appear at a detention hearing in U.S. District Court in Chicago on Thursday.
Bennett was released from prison in 2020 having served 31 years of a 50-year sentence after being convicted in 1989 of multiple bank robberies committed in the Chicago area, according to the FBI.
Following his arrest, Binert reportedly confessed to FBI investigators in a video-recorded interview that he was involved in the Feb. 14 robbery of the Chase branch in Hickory Hill, according to the criminal complaint.
Binert told investigators that he first met Bennett in 2006 while they were both serving time in a federal penitentiary in Michigan, according to the complaint.
Binert and Bennett were both arrested at Binert’s home in Oak Lawn, Illinois, where investigators seized evidence linking the men to the robbery, including weapons, a brown wig, two sets of Illinois license plates and a stack of shrink-wrapped U.S. currency believed to be loot from one of the holdups, according to the complaint. Nearly $7,000 was taken in the Valentine’s Day robbery, according to the complaint.
The FBI suspects Bennett was involved in at least seven bank robberies that have occurred in the Chicago suburbs since June 27, when a bandit got away with $11,400 from a Chase bank in Oak Lawn, the complaint alleges.
“Based on my personal involvement in this investigation, including my review of police reports and other evidence, I know that six of the seven bank robberies have the following similarities: the robber was a single older white male wearing a face covering, who brandished a handgun; the robber demanded bank funds from a teller; and a rental vehicle was used as the getaway vehicle,” FBI special agent Cassandra Johnson wrote in the complaint.
Among the other robberies Bennett is suspected of committing was one that occurred on Aug. 25 at a different Chase bank in Oak Lawn in which $30,886 was taken.
Investigators managed to identify both Bennett and Binert as suspects because they used their real names and identification to rent getaway cars used in the robberies, including the Valentine’s Day heist, according to the complaint.
Bennett’s arrest comes about a month after 71-year-old bank robbery suspect Bruce Edward Bell, who had spent 40 years in federal prison for a series of bank robberies, was nabbed on suspicion of holding up a bank in Sun Valley, California, according to police. Bell had been released from prison in July 2021.
The nation’s oldest convicted bank robber is J.L. Hunter “Red” Rountree, who pleaded guilty to robbing an Abilene, Texas, bank in August 2003 at the age of 91. Roundtree was sentence to 151 months in prison and died in October 2004 at the U.S. Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri.
(NEW YORK) — After Speaker Mike Johnson rejected the Senate-passed national security supplemental, a bipartisan group of House lawmakers unveiled a new proposal late last week to provide defense-only aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan and funds for the U.S. southern border — however, it’s not yet clear if GOP leadership will consider it.
The $66.3 billion bipartisan package, titled the “Defending Borders, Defending Democracies Act,” would provide the aid for one year after enactment. The biggest chunk of the money — $47.69 billion — would go to supporting the defense of Ukraine.
To address the surge of migrants at the southern border, the legislation would require the suspension of entry of inadmissible aliens and require immigration officers to detain and immediately expel inadmissible aliens.
“Securing one’s borders is necessary to preserving one’s democracy and, therefore, necessary to maintaining world order and world peace,” Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania said in a news release about the proposal.
“As the world’s oldest and strongest democracy, the United States’ primary responsibility must be to secure its own borders. But we also have an obligation to assist our allies in securing their borders, especially when they come under assault by dictators, terrorists, and totalitarians. Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan are all freedom-loving democracies, they are our allies, and we must assist them in protecting their borders just as we must protect our own. We can, and must, achieve all of the above.”
Fitzpatrick told ABC New last week that House members “all have the ability to find a way to navigate a bill to get to the floor and you know, all options are on the table but there are plenty of us that are not going to allow Ukraine to fail on our watch. It’s too existential.” He worked with several other lawmakers — fellow Republicans as well as Democrats — to craft the proposal.
This proposal will certainly put pressure on Johnson, but it’s not yet clear if GOP leadership would consider it. Fitzpatrick said he is going to try to push the proposal forward.
“We’re going to talk to [Johnson] about it. You know, our job is to legislate … Hopefully … we can win this support,” Fitzpatrick said.
Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries made it clear last week that he wants a vote only on the Senate-passed supplemental that Johnson said he was opposed to because it didn’t include any border changes.
“Mike Johnson simply needs to put the bipartisan national security bill on the House floor for an up-or-down vote, and it will pass,” Jeffries said last week at a news conference.
ABC News reached out to Johnson’s office for comment, but hadn’t heard back by the time of publication.
The proposal may lose some momentum given the timing of its release — just before the House embarked on a nearly two-week recess. The House returns to session on Feb. 28.
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said he could support the new bipartisan proposal out of the House.
“Yes, I’m saying that the House proposal, it depends on how it’s written, makes perfect sense to me,” Graham said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday.
Graham said he has not spoken to former President Donald Trump about this new House proposal, but said border funding cannot wait. Previously, Trump had called on Republicans to oppose the Senate’s bipartisan national security package — contributing to its tanking.
“President Trump says let’s wait on the border. With all due respect, we cannot wait,” Graham said. “It’s a national security nightmare.”
ABC News’ Fritz Farrow contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — Patients are being evacuated from Gaza’s second-largest hospital, which has been under attack from Israel Defense Forces (IDF) troops, amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas war.
At least 14 patients have been moved from Nasser Hospital — located in the southern city of Khan Younis — with the help of the World Health Organization (WHO), the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry said Monday.
Nine patients are currently receiving care in European Gaza, International Medical Corps, UAE and Indonesia field hospitals, and five patients are in Al-Aqsa hospital in the south, the WHO said in a Monday release.
Among the evacuated patients were two who needed continuous manual ventilation throughout their journey, according to the WHO.
Prior to the evacuation, the WHO said it and its partners had been denied entry into Nasser Hospital for two days.
“There are still more than 180 patients and 15 doctors and nurses inside Nasser,” WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement. “The hospital is still experiencing an acute shortage of food, basic medical supplies, and oxygen. There is no tap water and no electricity, except a backup generator maintaining some lifesaving machines.”
Additionally, the ministry claims at least five people have died since the hospital lost power and that Israeli forces have arrested medical staff, including the director of the hospital and the only doctor responsible for caring for patients in the ICU.
Ghebreyesus previously stated in a post on the social platform X, formerly known as Twitter, on Sunday that the hospital was “not functioning anymore.”
Israel has disputed the hospital is no longer functional. According to a post on Monday on X by Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), which coordinates humanitarian aid for Gaza, supplies have been delivered to Nasser Hospital.
Among the aid includes a tanker carrying diesel fuel, water bottles, bread loaves, a replacement generator and medicine donated by the WHO, COGAT said.
“The Nasser hospital was operational during the entire IDF activity,” COGAT posted. “We facilitated humanitarian aid and supplies to the hospital and coordinated a UN team to evacuate the patients.”
In addition, the IDF claimed it found medicine meant for the Israeli hostages as well as weapons and terrorists, some of whom were allegedly posing as medical staff.
“Boxes of medicine were found with the names of Israeli hostages on them,” the IDF said in a statement on Sunday. “The packages of medicine that were found were sealed and had not been transferred to the hostages.”
The IDF said Monday it has arrested 200 people at the Nasser Hospital complex suspected of being terrorists.
Since Hamas’ surprise terrorist attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, nearly 29,000 people in Gaza have been killed and more than 68,800 have been injured, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry. About 1,200 have been killed in Israel, according to the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office.
The IDF said 573 soldiers have been killed since the war began and 235 have been killed since the ground invasion began.
Additionally, there are about 134 hostages still believed to be in captivity in Gaza, 130 of them related to the current war and four related to the 2014 conflict. Of the 134, at least 32 are believed to be dead, according to the IDF and the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office.
(NEW YORK) — A flood watch is in effect from Redding in Northern California to San Diego in Southern California as a storm slams the state with rain and wind.
Two to 5 inches of rain is forecast in lower elevations, while up to 8 inches of rain is possible in California’s foothills and mountains. Wind gusts could reach 60 mph.
The Santa Barbara Airport closed Monday morning due to flooding.
Flash flooding and mudslides are ongoing Monday, and the flood watch will last through Wednesday.
At the biggest risk for flash flooding Monday is the area between Santa Barbara and Los Angeles. More than 6 inches of rain has already fallen and mudslides have closed roads.
Downtown Los Angeles needs only 3 inches of rain to have its rainiest February on record.
In Northern California, the cities of Yuba City, Sacramento and Stockton could also face heavy rain and flooding on Monday. Sacramento could even see tornadoes and hail.
In the Sierra Nevada mountains, winter storm warnings were issued as several feet of snow is expected to pile up over the next few days.
Along the coast, high surf advisories are in effect for waves up to 28 feet.
By Monday evening, the rain will let up for most of the state.
On Tuesday, more rounds of rain are possible from San Francisco to Los Angeles to San Diego, and pockets of heavy rain could cause more flooding, mudslides and rockslides.
The rain will move out on Wednesday, but heavy snow will continue in the mountains.
