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(CHICAGO) — A 28-year-old man accused of shooting three law enforcement officers on Chicago’s South Side has been arrested.

Eugene McLaurin, a Chicago resident, has been federally charged with one count of using a dangerous and deadly weapon to assault an ATF agent, punishable by a maximum sentence of 20 years in federal prison, in connection with the shooting, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Thursday.

McLaurin was expected to appear in court later on Thursday.

Two ATF Chicago agents and one Chicago Police Department officer were shot Wednesday morning on the heels of a violent holiday weekend where shootings in the city reached triple digits.

The officers were driving in the Morgan Park neighborhood, near an on-ramp to Interstate 57, just before 6 a.m. when they were fired upon by another vehicle, Chicago Police Superintendent David O’Neal Brown told reporters Wednesday morning. The officers were undercover and in an unmarked car.

The officers were participating in a federal investigation when they noticed that a white Chevrolet Malibu was following them, according to the Justice Department. After the officer took note of the license plate, the driver in the Malibu pulled alongside the vehicle, rolled the windows down and opened fire, officials said.

The Malibu was later found parked on a street in Chicago, and McLaurin was taken into custody later on Wednesday, according to the justice department. The investigation into the shooting continues.

The officers’ injuries were not life-threatening. One of the ATF agents was struck in the hand, the other was hit on the side of the torso and the police officer was grazed in the back of the head, Brown said. They were taken to Christ Medical Center and were last reported in stable condition, said Tom Ahern, deputy director of the police department’s news affairs and communications,

One of the ATF agents is female, while the other two officers are male, and all three are senior officers, he added.

Brown declined to provide details on the case the officers were working to avoid compromising the investigation.

The attack marks brings the tally of officers shot in Chicago this year to 36, Brown said. The shooting comes after a deadly Fourth of July weekend in the city, when 100 people were shot, 18 of whom died, including a 15-year-old boy, ABC Chicago station WLS reported. Two Chicago Police officers and five children 13 and younger were among the injured.

Brown said Tuesday that Chicago officers were “performing at the highest level” and are “risking everything to protect the people of Chicago.”

“They are doing their part, and no one would do what these officers are doing right now,” Brown said. “This is a very challenging time to be in law enforcement right now. They are rising to the challenge, doing all they can. The work they do is extremely dangerous.”

Speaking from outside the hospital, Chicago Alderman Matt O’Shea urged President Joe Biden to come to Chicago and offer additional assistance to the city, saying that 100,000 armed gang members who “have absolutely no fear, no respect for life” are wreaking havoc on the city. Residents are scared to let their children play outside, he said.

“Our communities are under siege,” he said. “Our police officers are under siege. They’re outmanned and they’re outgunned.”

Biden was met by Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot upon landing in Chicago Wednesday afternoon. During the greeting, Biden expressed his personal support for the law enforcement officers that were injured and reiterated his commitment to working with the city in the fight against gun violence, said White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki.

Biden was scheduled to visit Crystal Lake, a city about 45 miles northwest of Chicago, Wednesday afternoon.

ABC News’ Cheryl Gendron, Rachel Katz and Alex Perez contributed to this report.

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(NEW YORK) — Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones was offered tenure at the journalism school of her alma mater, the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, but she won’t be taking it.

Instead, she will go to Howard University after her tenure was initially blocked for months at North Carolina. The school’s board of trustees declined to vote twice in November and January on her tenure but finally voted in favor of it just last week.

Hannah-Jones would’ve been the first Black Knight Chair at the school and the first not to have been granted tenure.

“I think it showed that there was not a respect for what Black faculty go through on campus. We know that the University of North Carolina lost some recruits over this, other Black faculty are considering leaving the university,” she told ABC News Wednesday. “If they were able to do this to me — I work at the New York Times. I have a huge megaphone, I have a huge platform — what do they think they could get away with when it came to lesser-known scholars?”

Reports swirled in May that her application for tenure had been blocked at the last minute by several politically conservative trustees.

Those who publicly voiced their disapproval at her tenure included a donor for whom the university’s school of journalism is named. However, the donor, Walter Hussman, insists he “never pressured anybody.”

Hussman has spoken out against Hannah-Jones’ landmark work with the New York Times, “The 1619 Project,” for which she won a Pulitzer Prize. The project examines the role of slavery in the birth of the United States. Critics, including prominent historians, took issue with the portrayal of the American Revolution and requested corrections be made.

The project was backed by support from the New York Times’ executive editor, publisher and magazine editor. She said in a statement her tenure controversy was tied to “the political firestorm that has dogged me since The 1619 Project published” two years ago.

“Tenure matters for exactly the reason that I didn’t initially receive it. …oftentimes, academics are doing research and producing work that could be seen as controversial, or that challenges the status quo, and this protects the ability to pursue work that may not be popular with people who are politically powerful,” Hannah-Jones told ABC News. “The fact that initially I was denied tenure, largely because of the nature of my works, specifically around conservative objections to The 1619 Project speaks to why I could not come to the university without it.”

UNC Chancellor Kevin M. Guskiewicz said he is “disappointed” that Hannah-Jones won’t be joining the faculty.

“We wish her the best,” he said in a statement. “I remain committed to recruiting and retaining the world-class faculty that our students deserve at Carolina. Members of my leadership team and I are actively engaged with student, faculty and staff leaders to continue working together toward a more inclusive and equitable campus living, learning and working environment where everyone knows they belong.”

Hannah-Jones admonished Guskiewicz and other leaders at the school for not addressing the deadlock of her tenure.

“The Board of Trustees not voting was one thing. But to also have the chancellor and the provost of the university fail to speak out publicly, fail to say that the board of trustees should’ve treated me like every other professor who came in under the Knight Chair, I think that sent the message to other faculty on campus that they would not have the protection and the support of the administration if it came down to a fight with political appointees,” she said.

Hannah-Jones will be the inaugural Knight Chair in Race and Reporting at Howard University, a historically Black institution of higher education (HBCU). The Knight Foundation’s $5 million investment in the university includes $500,000 for the Knight Chair to help strengthen journalism teaching across HBCUs.

“Instead of fighting to prove I belong at an institution that until 1955 prohibited Black Americans from attending, I am instead going to work in the legacy of a university not built by the enslaved but for those who once were,” she said in her statement.

Hannah-Jones said she was approached by the dean of UNC’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media, Susan King, to become the school’s Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Reporting. Hannah-Jones said the request came during last year’s racial reckoning, and she saw a need for “journalists to have the knowledge, training, historical understanding and depth of reporting to cover the changing country and its challenges.”

She said she accepted, underwent a rigorous tenure process, and passed two votes, first by all professors, then the Promotion and Tenure Committee, which both overwhelmingly approved her tenure.

UNC’s Board of Trustees were meant to vote in November for her start in January 2021.

Then, “we learned that my tenure application had been pulled but received no explanation as to why. The same thing happened again in January,” Hannah-Jones said. “Both the university’s Chancellor and its Provost refused to fully explain why my tenure package had failed twice to come to a vote, or exactly what transpired.”

She said she was told they would not consider her tenure at that time, and offered her a five-year contract for tenure consideration at a later, unspecified date. She reluctantly agreed, becoming both the first Black Knight Chair at the school, and the first not to have been granted tenure.

After a report from NC Policy Watch about her tenure process and ensuing student protests, the board of trustees finally voted on Hannah-Jones’ tenure, and approved it in a split vote.

“I cannot imagine working at and advancing a school named for a man who lobbied against me, who used his wealth to influence the hires and ideology of the journalism school, who ignored my 20 years of journalism experience, all of my credentials, all of my work, because he believed a project that centered Black Americans equaled denigration of white Americans,” she said of Hussman. “Nor can I work at an institution whose leadership permitted this conduct and has done nothing to disavow it.”

Hussman told Poynter this week that he hoped to meet with Hannah-Jones and Dean Susan King, but the meeting never came together. After reading The 1619 Project, Hussman said he voiced concerns about his belief that the report exaggerated the role of slavery as a possible cause for the American Revolution, and insisted his objections were with the scholarship, not Hannah-Jones.

“I don’t have any judgment about her (personally) — I’ve never met her,” Hussman told Poynter. “I feel certain I did what I should appropriately have done. I didn’t lobby against her appointment.” He added that he had no objection to the latest UNC vote to offer Hannah-Jones tenure.

She said she still has not received answers about what happened in her tenure process. She called on UNC to provide transparency, apologize to student protestors, and address demands for recruiting, supporting and retaining Black faculty.

Hannah-Jones told ABC News the lack of Black tenured faculty in schools across the country can be traced back to a system where previously-tenured professors, often white, offer tenure to others and can be “self-replicating.” Also, she said Black scholars are studying issues of inequality and race, which are “not often valued as other types of scholarship.”

“I hope that other universities who might find it easy to point at the board of trustees in North Carolina and say ‘They’re just backwards,’ will do some real, internal introspection on the way that they are also blocking so many other talented Black faculty who dedicated their life to academia.”

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(SURFSIDE, Fla.) — At least 60 people have now been confirmed dead and 80 others remain potentially unaccounted for since a 12-story residential building partially collapsed in South Florida’s Miami-Dade County last month.

The disaster occurred on June 24 around 1:15 a.m. local time at the Champlain Towers South condominium in the small, beachside town of Surfside, about 6 miles north of Miami Beach. Approximately 55 of the oceanfront complex’s 136 units were destroyed, according to officials. The rest of the building was demolished on Sunday night, due to concerns about its structural integrity and an incoming tropical storm.

For two weeks, hundreds of first responders carefully combed through the pancaked piles of debris in hopes of finding survivors. But no one has been found alive in the wreckage of the building since the morning it partially collapse, and officials announced Wednesday evening that the search and rescue operation, in its 14th day, would shift to a recovery mission.

Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett told reporters that the decision was “a result of a consensus by those closest to the rescue efforts that the possibility of someone still alive is near zero.”

“And while there seems to be no chance of finding life in the rubble, a miracle is still possible,” Burkett said during a press conference Wednesday evening.

To mark the somber move, a moment of silence was held in honor of all the victims, of whom 35 have been identified thus far. A candlelight vigil was held later that night at the memorial site for the victims.

Reflecting on the transition the next day, U.S. Rep. Deborah Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., told reporters: “When that happened, it took a little piece of the hearts of this community.”

Crews paused their work atop the piles early Thursday “for a brief moment of silence to honor the two-week mark since the collapse,” according to Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava.

“We have now officially transitioned from search and rescue to search and recovery,” Levine Cava said during a press conference Thursday morning. “The work continues with all speed and urgency. We are working around the clock to recover victims and bring closure to the families as fast as we possibly can.”

“We are taking as much care as ever to proceed to find victims in the rubble,” she added.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis told reporters that crews “will identify every single person” who is found. Officials will also continue to help the survivors and the families of the victims get back “on their feet as best as we possibly can,” even after the media attention wanes, DeSantis said.

Meanwhile, 200 people who were living or staying in the condominium at the time of the disaster have been accounted for and are safe, according to Levine Cava, who has repeatedly stressed that the figures are “very fluid” and “continue to change.”

Crews have hauled away more than 7 million pounds of debris from the vast scene, but large piles of rubble still remain. Officials said it could take several weeks to get to the bottom of the wreckage. Crews have been working virtually nonstop, with help from teams who came from across Florida and elsewhere in the United States as well as from abroad. However, their efforts were halted for almost an entire day last week due to safety concerns regarding the still-standing structure, prior to the demolition. Poor weather conditions have also forced them to temporarily pause working.

The cause of the partial collapse to a building that has withstood decades of hurricanes remains unknown and is under investigation. Built in the 1980s, the Champlain Towers South was up for its 40-year recertification and had been undergoing roof work — with more renovations planned — when it partially collapsed, according to officials.

“This tragedy shook our community and the world,” Levine Cava told reporters Thursday.

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