(LONDON) — The Pacific island nation of Kiribati was the first country to ring in 2025, with its 133,500 citizens celebrating the new year at 5 a.m. ET on Tuesday.
The Micronesian nation was soon followed into 2025 by the Chatham Islands in New Zealand at 5:15 a.m. ET.
Most of the rest of New Zealand crossed the International Date Line at 6 a.m. The islands of Tokelau, Samoa, Tonga and parts of Antarctica were among those joining the party shortly after.
Auckland, New Zealand
New Zealand’s capital Wellington and its largest city of Auckland — both located on the country’s North Island — welcomed 2025 at 6 a.m. ET. Fireworks lit up the Auckland skyline as massed crowds watched.
Sydney, Australia
Residents of the western Australian city of Sydney enjoyed a fireworks display three hours ahead of midnight local time, which will be at 8 a.m. ET.
The famed Sydney Harbour Bridge and Sydney Opera House provided a familiar backdrop for New Year revellers in the country’s largest city.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(WASHINGTON) — As world leaders mourn the death of former President Jimmy Carter and remark on his political and policy legacy, doctors are remembering his efforts to prevent disease, and his legacy in furthering global public health.
The 39th president spent five decades working to eradicate a parasitic disease, helped organize a major-drug donation program, and made advancements addressing the mental health crisis in the U.S.
Dr. Julie Jacobson, currently a managing partner of the nonprofit Bridges to Development, helped to provide funding for the Carter Center’s work in the Americas, Nigeria and Ethiopia while she worked for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for over a decade.
“He was hugely influential, I think particularly for the diseases that most of the world doesn’t appreciate even exist,” Jacobson told ABC News of Jimmy Carter’s work. “He was a true champion for the neglected tropical diseases, which are some of the most common infections of people who live with the least resources. And he found these diseases and then really wanted to do something about them, and used his voice, his influence, his passion, to continue to push forward where others were really not interested.”
Near-eradication of Guinea worm disease
Following his loss to Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential election, Carter founded the Carter Center in 1982, a non-profit organization that “seeks to prevent and resolve conflicts, enhance freedom and democracy, and improve health,” according to the Center’s website.
Among the organization’s many efforts, the Carter Center helped spearhead a successful international campaign with the goal of eradicating dracunculiasis, also known as Guinea worm disease, a parasitic infection caused by consuming contaminated drinking water.
Water from ponds or other stagnant bodies of water can contain tiny crustaceans commonly known as water fleas, which in turn can be infected with Guinea worm larvae, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
About one year after infecting a human host, the Guinea worm creates a blister on the skin and emerges from it, which can cause burning pain, fever and swelling, according to the CDC and the World Health Organization.
“Nobody else wanted to take it on,” Jimmy Carter told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos during a 2015 interview on “Good Morning America”. “So, I decided to take it on.”
In 1986, Guinea worm disease afflicted 3.5 million people every year in 21 African and Asian countries. Disease incidence has since been reduced by 99.99%, to just 14 “provisional” human cases in 2023, according to the Carter Center.
Jacobson said that success is even more remarkable because there are no vaccines available to prevent Guinea worm disease and no drugs to treat it. Tracking Guinea worm disease, according to Jacobson, involves following possible cases for a year to determine if they are infected, checking to see if infected humans have any infected water sources near them, and monitoring the community as a whole.
“To think that you could eradicate a disease without any tools is really still just a crazy idea, but he did it with perseverance and working with people in the grassroots within communities and putting together teams of people to go and work with people in those communities and empower the communities,” Jacobson said.
The Carter Center says if efforts are successful, Guinea worm disease could become the second human disease in history to be completely eradicated, after smallpox, and the first to be done without the use of a vaccine or medicine.
Carter told ABC News during the 2015 interview that eradicating the disease entirely was his goal: “I think this is going to be a great achievement for, not for me, but for the people that have been afflicted and for the entire world to see diseases like this eradicated.”
Mass drug distribution for river blindness
The Carter Center also works to fight other preventable diseases, including the parasitic infections schistosomiasis and lymphatic filariasis – more commonly known as snail fever and elephantiasis, respectively – as well as trachoma, which is one of the world’s leading causes of preventable blindness. It’s also working with the governments of Haiti and the Dominican Republic to eliminate lymphatic filariasis and malaria from the island of Hispaniola, which both countries share and which is “the last reservoir in the Caribbean for both diseases,” according to the Carter Center.
Carter and his organization also played a part in organizing a major drug-donation program to help eliminate onchocerciasis, also known as river blindness, which is transmitted to human through repeated bites of infected blackflies, according to the CDC.
Pharmaceutical company Merck & Co. had been implementing field studies in Africa which showed that the drug ivermectin was effective at treating river blindness in humans. The Carter Center partnered with Merck to mass-distribute ivermectin, brand name Mectizan, “as much as needed for as long as needed” in Africa and Latin America. To date, the Carter Center has assisted in distributing more than 500 million treatments of Mectizan, according to Merck.
In 1995, Carter negotiated a two-month cease-fire in Sudan to allow health care workers there to more safely help eradicate Guinea worm disease, prevent river blindness, and vaccinate children against polio.
“When we have known solutions, it is ethical to make sure they’re available to the people who need it most,” Dr. Usha Ramakrishnan, chair of the Department of Global Health at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health, told ABC News. “And that’s where we were with river blindness. There was a treatment, but improving access to medications, making it affordable, reaching the people they need was very much along the lines of the work [the Carter Center] was doing.”
Addressing mental health
Carter was also committed to tackling mental health issues. During his presidency, he created the Presidential Commission on Mental Health, which recommended a national plan to care for people with chronic mental illness.
Although it was never adopted as policy by the Reagan administration, the plan’s recommended strategies were adopted by some mental health advocacy groups to “make gains in the 1980s,” according to one study.
Carter also signed into law the Mental Health Systems Act of 1980, which provided funding to community mental health centers.
After his presidency, Carter and former first lady Rosalynn Carter continued working to improve access to mental health.
Ramakrishnan said the Carters’ work helped to reduce some of the stigma associated with mental health.
“There continues to be a lot of stigma, but they truly got it out [in] the conversation and mainstreaming mental health as an important aspect of health and well-being,” Ramakrishnan said. “There’s still a lot of challenges, and there are many capable people that they have mentored and trained who are carrying that mantle forward.”
(MEMPHIS, TN) — The gatekeepers of Elvis Presley’s estate are trying to recover a potential trove of records and memorabilia left behind by the King of Rock and Roll, according to a lawsuit filed in California.
The lawsuit, filed just before 6 p.m. on Dec. 24, is a fitting coda to a year that saw Presley’s iconic Memphis home nearly auctioned off as part of what federal authorities now call an attempt to defraud both Presley’s family and Elvis Presley Enterprises.
Now, the operators of Graceland allege “irreplaceable” items they bought more than three decades ago from Presley’s longtime manager, Col. Tom Parker, have fallen into the hands of people who have no right to them and are now trying to sell them in an online auction.
“It is now clear that some of the material that the parties to the Parker Acquisition intended to be transferred to [Elvis Presley Enterprises], never was,” the lawsuit claims. Despite “clear and repeated demands” that the defendants stop hawking what was not theirs to sell, those demands were “ignored,” according to the filing.
At issue is a collection that allegedly includes everything from contracts and agreements signed by Presley, to a telegram from associates congratulating Elvis and his then-wife Priscilla on the birth of their daughter, Lisa Marie. Elvis Presley Enterprises contends the cache of memorabilia is valued at upwards of $2 million, though the “unique” artifacts are “priceless.”
The items were listed on the website of GWS Auctions, a California company that boasts sales of “celebrity” items from the likes of Elvis, Marilyn Monroe and Johnny Cash. The Presley items listed in the lawsuit appeared as available online in mid-November under the heading “The Lost Collection of Elvis, Col. Tom Parker & More.” Elvis Presley Enterprises alleges the auctioneeing company advertised while knowing the sellers had no legal right to the items, which the company denies.
The origin of the dispute dates back to 1990, when Col. Parker, “known as a meticulous record keeper and a real pack rat who held onto everything,” directly sold EPE “perhaps the greatest collection of Elvis-related documents and memorabilia ever held by anyone other than Elvis himself,” the suit alleged, adding it is the “entire collection” as it pertained to “Elvis and Elvis related memorabilia, irrespective of where such material was located.”
EPE acquired the collection as part of its ongoing effort to catalogue, preserve and showcase artifacts connected to the life and career of one of rock and roll’s first global superstars. One of the company’s executives, Jack Soden, “had dealt with and known Col. Parker for many years” and said he “was acting with the authority of Elvis’s widow Priscilla Presley, was intent on acquiring from Parker every scrap of Elvis-related material Parker owned.”
The lawsuit alleges company leaders believed all the items covered in the agreement “had been collected,” only now to find otherwise. Some of those items “ended up in the possession” of one of Parker’s former longtime employees after Parker’s death in 1997, according to the filing.
Then in December 2021, the lawsuit says, the co-founder of GWS Auctions, Brigitte Kruse, reached out to both Priscilla Presley and Graceland’s chief archivist to tell them she knew that the employee had items that should be in EPE’s custody. Kruse allegedly even shared videos of her discussions with him acknowledging who owned what.
Kruse allegedly told Graceland’s archivist Angela Marchese “that she knew these materials were involved in ‘theft’ and rightfully belonged to EPE,” according to a signed declaration by Marchese obtained by ABC News.
When a Presley executive confronted the employee directly, he backtracked, saying it had all been “a misunderstanding,” and he only had “photocopies,” not originals, the suit says.
“Some of the very documents and memorabilia Kruse claimed [the employee] possessed have now been listed for sale,” the suit alleges, adding “it is apparent” how those items “made their way” to the auction house.
“Kruse listed the Property for sale despite knowing, as she made clear in her email to Marchese and contemporaneous conversations with Marchese, that Kruse knew these items to be stolen Property rightfully belonging to [EPE],” the suit said.
EPE sent a cease-and-desist letter to Kruse earlier this month.
In response, a lawyer for GWS said the company “denies any wrongdoing whatsoever,” and denies that the “characterizations of the communications between” Kruse and Marchese “are accurate or complete.” GWS also denied EPE’s property interest and said that they would “proceed with the auction,” according to the suit and appended exhibits.
In a statement to ABC News, Kruse pushed back on the allegations against her and her company, saying that the assertions are “unfounded and without merit.”
“EPE and Graceland’s assertions are unfounded and without merit. This is merely another attempt to discredit our founder and the company. Under no circumstances would we engage in the sale of “stolen” items, and this collection was sought after by auction houses globally,” Kruse said.
“The items in question successfully passed our auction house’s due diligence process and were subsequently offered for public sale. Furthermore, no police report has ever been filed by EPE/Graceland, and the owner has possessed this collection for several decades,” Kruse added.
As of Monday night, the auction site is still up, though bidding is closed.
The keepers of the Presley legacy say the decades-long story of Elvis is one of people trying to profit off of the King – and often at the expense of him and his family.
In May, Elvis’ idyllic Graceland retreat was mysteriously announced for auction by an unknown company calling itself “Naussany Investments,” which claimed that Lisa Marie used Graceland as collateral to take out a $3.8 million loan and had not repaid it.
The ensuing investigation stretched all the way from Memphis to Florida, where the notary whose fake seal was used for the alleged fraud spoke up — and Presley’s granddaughter countersued, stopping a possible sale. In August, the alleged perpetrator behind that alleged fraud was arrested in the Ozarks: Lisa Findley was apprehended on Aug. 16, the 47th anniversary of Elvis’ death. Federal prosecutors charged the Missouri woman with mail fraud and aggravated identity theft. The case is still pending, and Findley is last listed in custody in Tennessee.
“People have been trying to take from Elvis since Elvis was Elvis,” Joel Weinshanker, managing partner of Elvis Presley Enterprises, told ABC News this fall. “Elvis was a human being. He was a really good human being,” he said. “Pick on somebody else. Have a heart, have a conscience. And even if you don’t have a heart or have a conscience — know that you won’t get away with it.”
(SEOUL) — A team of U.S. investigators arrived in South Korea to assist local aviation officials as they comb the wreckage of the Jeju Air Boeing 737-800 aircraft that crashed Sunday, killing 179 people.
Three members of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board are leading the U.S. team, which also includes advisers from the Federal Aviation Administration, Boeing and CFM International, a jet-engine manufacturer. Some of those advisers will be on site and others will remain in the U.S., the NTSB said.
“Additional NTSB investigative staff are standing by to assist if needed, including specialists in recorders, powerplants, and survival factors, among other specialties,” the board said in a statement.
In the wake of the deadly plane crash at Muan International Airport, local officials are also now investigating similar aircraft models that are operating in airports around the country.
Jeju Air Flight 2216 was landing just before 9 a.m. when the plane went off the runway and crashed into a wall. There were a total of 175 passengers and six crew members aboard the Boeing 737, which had taken off from Bangkok, Thailand.
A total of 179 people aboard the flight were killed, with two flight attendants — a man and a woman — being the only survivors of the crash.
Officials were continuing to identify the victims of the crash. Five of the remains were still unidentified as of Tuesday, local officials said. The remains of four individuals being transported to their respective families for funeral.
Authorities are conducting a full investigation into over 100 aircraft that are the same model, B737-800. The planes are currently operating in six local airlines, officials said.
The investigation includes reviewing the maintenance history of the engines, landing gears and the aircraft’s operation records.
“There are no plans to suspend operations, but they will examine those parts once more and check them thoroughly during the inspection process,” said Song Kyung-hoon, head of Jeju Air’s Management Support Division.
The Muan International Airport runway will be closed for the investigation until Jan. 7, officials said.
The two flight attendants who survived the crash were recovering at separate hospitals in Seoul on Monday, according to the Korean Ministry of Land Infrastructure and Transport.
Neither survivor had life-threatening injuries, the ministry said, adding that both had awoken in the hospital without a clear recollection of what had happened after they heard a blast during the landing.
The man, who was identified only by his surname Lee, was receiving treatment for fractures in an intensive care unit. He was alert and speaking with medical staff, Ju Woong, director of the Ewha Womans University Seoul Hospital, said at a press conference on Monday.
“[Lee is] fully able to communicate,” Woong added. “There’s no indication yet of memory loss or such.”
The woman, a 25-year-old flight attendant named Koo, was also recovering, though not in intensive care, according to hospital staff and officials, as well as the Korean Ministry of Land Infrastructure and Transport.
ABC News’ Sam Sweeney and Joe Simonetti contributed to this report.
(SEOUL) — A team of U.S. investigators arrived in South Korea to assist local aviation officials as they comb the wreckage of the Jeju Air Boeing 737-800 aircraft that crashed Sunday, killing 179 people.
Three members of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board are leading the U.S. team, which also includes advisers from the Federal Aviation Administration, Boeing and CFM International, a jet-engine manufacturer. Some of those advisers will be on site and others will remain in the U.S., the NTSB said.
“Additional NTSB investigative staff are standing by to assist if needed, including specialists in recorders, powerplants, and survival factors, among other specialties,” the board said in a statement.
In the wake of the deadly plane crash at Muan International Airport, local officials are also now investigating similar aircraft models that are operating in airports around the country.
Jeju Air Flight 2216 was landing just before 9 a.m. when the plane went off the runway and crashed into a wall. There were a total of 175 passengers and six crew members aboard the Boeing 737, which had taken off from Bangkok, Thailand.
A total of 179 people aboard the flight were killed, with two flight attendants — a man and a woman — being the only survivors of the crash.
Officials were continuing to identify the victims of the crash. Five of the remains were still unidentified as of Tuesday, local officials said. The remains of four individuals being transported to their respective families for funeral.
Authorities are conducting a full investigation into over 100 aircraft that are the same model, B737-800. The planes are currently operating in six local airlines, officials said.
The investigation includes reviewing the maintenance history of the engines, landing gears and the aircraft’s operation records.
“There are no plans to suspend operations, but they will examine those parts once more and check them thoroughly during the inspection process,” said Song Kyung-hoon, head of Jeju Air’s Management Support Division.
The Muan International Airport runway will be closed for the investigation until Jan. 7, officials said.
The two flight attendants who survived the crash were recovering at separate hospitals in Seoul on Monday, according to the Korean Ministry of Land Infrastructure and Transport.
Neither survivor had life-threatening injuries, the ministry said, adding that both had awoken in the hospital without a clear recollection of what had happened after they heard a blast during the landing.
The man, who was identified only by his surname Lee, was receiving treatment for fractures in an intensive care unit. He was alert and speaking with medical staff, Ju Woong, director of the Ewha Womans University Seoul Hospital, said at a press conference on Monday.
“[Lee is] fully able to communicate,” Woong added. “There’s no indication yet of memory loss or such.”
The woman, a 25-year-old flight attendant named Koo, was also recovering, though not in intensive care, according to hospital staff and officials, as well as the Korean Ministry of Land Infrastructure and Transport.
ABC News’ Sam Sweeney and Joe Simonetti contributed to this report.
Police investigate a mass shooting that erupted on June 2, 2024, that left one man dead and 28 people injured at a large street party in Akron, Ohio. (ABC News/WEWS)
(NEW YORK) — Homicides across the United States are poised to plummet for the third straight year as 2024 winds down, driving the nation’s annual murder toll down to levels not seen since before the pandemic, according to preliminary data from cities both large and small.
Based on available crime statistics from U.S. law enforcement agencies, the year is expected to end with a nearly 16% drop in homicides nationwide and a 3.3% decline in overall violent crime, Jeff Asher, a national crime analyst, told ABC News.
The dramatic drop in homicides surpasses a 13% decline in 2023, then the largest decrease on record until now. In 2022, the number of murders across the country fell 6%, according to the FBI.
The three consecutive years of declining homicides come in the wake of 30% jump in murders between 2019 and 2020, the largest single-year increase in more than a century.
“Considering where we were just three or four years ago, we’re basically looking at 5,000 fewer murder victims than in 2020, 2021 and 2022 having occurred in 2024,” said Asher, co-founder of AH Datalytics and a former crime analyst for the CIA and the New Orleans Police Department.
In contrast, a dozen major U.S. cities broke annual homicide records in 2021.
Philadelphia — which recorded an all-time high of 562 homicides in 2021, 516 in 2022 and 410 last year — has seen a 40% drop in homicides in 2024.
Other major cities seeing precipitous reductions in homicides this year are New Orleans, down 38%; Washington, D.C., down 29%; Memphis, Tennessee, down 23%; Baltimore, down 24%; Kansas City, Missouri, down 20%; and Los Angeles, down 15%.
New York City, the nation’s largest city, had recorded 357 homicides through Dec. 15, a 7.3% drop from 2023, according to New York Police Department crime statistics. The city — which tallied 442 murders in 2020, a 45% jump from 2019 — has seen homicides fall 15% over the past two years.
Chicago has recorded a 7% decline in homicides as of Dec. 15, down from 603 murders at this time last year, according to the Chicago Police Department’s crime data. Over the past three years, homicides in Chicago have fallen 29% after skyrocketing 55% between 2019 and 2020 to 769 murders.
Homicides this year in 63 cities with populations of more than 250,000 declined by at least 15% and murders were down at least 19% in 246 cities with populations under 250,000, Asher’s research found.
“It’s a tremendous achievement in terms of how far murder has fallen in just really two straight years,” Asher said.
Property crime plummets
In addition to violent crime falling, property crime is also poised to finish the year down 8.6% nationwide, mostly due to a 21.4% decrease in motor vehicle theft, Asher said.
“Auto thefts went up 12% last year. They’re coming down more than 20% this year,” said Asher, who added that the 2023 spike in car thefts appears to be tied to social media instruction videos on how to steal certain models of Kias and Hyundais.
Crunching the numbers
Since 2016, Asher has crunched the numbers for an end-of-the-year report on crime trends. This year, his report is based on preliminary crime statistics from 309 U.S. law enforcement agencies, the most data he has ever received.
Asher’s analysis aligns closely with data released in May by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing murders down 14%. The Gun Violence Archive, a website that tracks all shootings across the nation, shows homicides are down around 11%.
“We kind of put all those together and we see a very large decline in murder, a very large decline in gun violence happening in the U.S. in 2024 on top of what was a very large decline in murder and a very large decline in gun violence in 2023,” Asher said.
Referring to overall violent crime, Asher said, “You’re probably looking at, if not the lowest violent crime rate since 1970, certainly at or around where we were pre-pandemic.”
Besides homicide, rape was down 4.5% from 2023, robberies fell 1.1% and aggravated assaults declined 3.7%, according to Asher.
The falling numbers come amid a backdrop of high-profile violent crimes in 2024, including more than 400 mass shootings, two assassination attempts on President-elect Donald Trump and the fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson allegedly by 26-year-old Ivy League graduate Luigi Mangione, who police suspect was out to strike fear in the insurance industry.
The numbers also come just days after a 15-year-old girl allegedly carried out a shooting rampage at her Christian school in Madison, Wisconsin, killing a teacher and a classmate, and injured six other students before dying from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, police said.
The Wisconsin shooting came three months after a 14-year-old boy allegedly killed two students and two teachers, and injured nine others at his high school in Winder, Georgia, with an AR-style weapon police alleged his father gave him as a Chrismas present.
‘We have turned the tide against violent crime’
During a Dec. 10 briefing of the Justice Department’s Violence Crime Reduction Steering Committee meeting, Attorney General Merrick Garland said preliminary crime data showed significant declines in violent crime in 85 cities in 2024, including a 17.5% drop in homicides nationwide.
“Over the past two years, we have turned the tide against the violent crime that spiked during the pandemic,” Garland said.
He said the numbers build on the historic drop in homicides nationwide last year, which he said was the lowest level of violent crime in 50 years.
Merrick attributed the tumbling violent crime rate partly to the DOJ’s Violent Crime Reduction Roadmap, a one-stop-shop created to assist local jurisdictions in developing, implementing and evaluating the strategies to prevent, intervene and respond to acts of community gun violence.
President Joe Biden’s administration has also sought to curb gun violence in recent years through executive actions and signing into law in 2022 the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which enhanced background checks for gun buyers under the age of 21, allocated $750 million to help states implement “red flag laws” to remove firearms from people deemed dangerous to themselves and others.
Biden also established the in 2023 the first-ever White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention to focus on ways to assist states and cities reduce the nation’s epidemic of gun violence.
Some cities such as Philadelphia have credited the work of violence interrupter programs, community-based initiatives that use peacebuilding methods to head off incidents of violence before they occur.
In Philadelphia, city leaders also pointed to a $184 million investment in gun violence initiatives in 2022, including one that attempts to identify people who are at risk of being involved in violence to provide them with mental health services or job placement. While the city also boosted the Philadelphia Police Department’s budget that year by $30 million, it instituted a violence prevention plan that emphasizes a combination of law enforcement strategies, environmental improvements and youth programs to reduce its homicide numbers.
“We need to continue pressing forward with our comprehensive approach, which is prevention, intervention and enforcement,” Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker said at a Nov. 1 news conference on the city’s falling homicide numbers.
In October, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed six bills to strengthen New York’s gun laws, including one requiring gun sellers to post tobacco-style safety warnings and another that cracks down on illegal devices called “switches” that convert semiautomatic handguns into automatic weapons.
Asher said that in 2020 and 2021 when violent crime rose to alarming levels, programs such as community violence interruptors didn’t exist and the budgets of many police departments were getting slashed in the defund-the-police movement stemming from nationwide protests over the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Asher said states and local governments, as well as philanthropies, are pumping money into programs to bring down violent crime.
“Some of that is undoubtedly contributing to what we’re seeing now,” Asher said. “I’m not naïve enough to suggest that that’s the entire explanation. There are undoubtedly a multitude of factors that help to explain this complex problem.”
ABC News’ Calvin Milliner contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — The Treasury Department was breached by a China-sponsored actor earlier this month, officials told Congress in a letter on Monday.
The “major” breach was achieved by gaining access to a third-party cybersecurity service Treasury used, called BeyondTrust, they said.
The actor then accessed Treasury workstations and “certain unclassified documents” on them, department officials said in a letter to the Senate Banking Committee.
The threat actor was able to “override the service’s security, remotely access certain Treasury DO user workstations, and access certain unclassified documents maintained by those users,” the letter said.
Treasury has ceased use of BeyondTrust since discovering the incident.
“The compromised BeyondTrust service has been taken offline and there is no evidence indicating the threat actor has continued access to Treasury systems or information,” according to a Treasury Department spokesperson.
The department has been working with the FBI and THE Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) as well as the intelligence community to “fully characterize the incident and determine its overall impact,” the official said.
More information will be available on the hack in a supplemental notice to Congress within 30 days, according to the Treasury Department.
Treasury is mandated by policy to notify Congress of such breaches.
China is one of America’s most pernicious cyberactors, experts and officials say. Last month, officials said a Chinese-backed group hacked into nine telecommunications companies and was able to gain access to certain high-profile individuals cellphones as a result of the hack.
It is unclear if this breach is related to those actions.
(WASHINGTON) — Special counsel Jack Smith’s team has withdrawn from their appeal of the classified documents case against President-elect Donald Trump’s co-defendants and referred the case to the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida, according to a court filing Monday afternoon.
Smith last month dropped his appeal against Trump due to a longstanding Department of Justice policy prohibiting the prosecution of a sitting president, but his team continued to pursue their appeal against Trump’s two co-defendants in the case, longtime Trump aide Walt Nauta and Mar-a-Lago employee Carlos De Oliveira.
Trump pleaded not guilty last June to 37 criminal counts related to his handling of classified materials, after prosecutors said he repeatedly refused to return hundreds of documents containing classified information ranging from U.S. nuclear secrets to the nation’s defense capabilities, and took steps to thwart the government’s efforts to get the documents back.
The former president, along with Nauta and De Oliveira, also pleaded not guilty to allegedly attempting to delete surveillance footage at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.
Smith’s appeal, to the Atlanta-based Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, came after U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed Smith’s case in July, citing the constitutionality of his appointment as special counsel.
With the appeal ongoing, Smith’s team on Monday withdrew from the case and passed the case to federal prosecutors in Florida. In a separate filing, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, Markenzy Lapointe, entered his appearance in the case.
A representative for the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida did not immediately respond to a request for comment from ABC News.
Smith has also been winding down his federal election interference case against Trump following Trump’s reelection, and is expected to issue a report on his investigations to Attorney General Merrick Garland in the coming weeks.
(NEW YORK) — Respiratory illness activity – a measure of how often conditions like the common cold, flu, COVID-19, and respiratory syncytial virus are diagnosed – is currently “high” in the United States, according to an update from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Currently, New Hampshire is listed as having “very high” respiratory virus activity, and 11 states – Arizona, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin – are listed as having “high” activity, CDC data shows.
Meanwhile, 29 states are listed as having “moderate” activity, and the remaining states are listed as having “low” activity.
Particularly, COVID-19, seasonal flu and RSV activity are increasing across the country with a rising number of people visiting emergency departments and the number of tests coming back positive for one of the three conditions, the CDC said.
The CDC estimates that there have been at least 3.1 million illnesses, 37,000 hospitalizations and 1,500 deaths from flu so far this season; these figures are based on the latest date for which data is available, which is the week ending Dec. 21.
Five pediatric deaths were reported during the week of Dec. 21, bringing the total number to nine so far during the 2024-25 season.
The CDC says levels of the COVID-19 virus being detected in wastewater are increasing, as are the number of emergency department visits and laboratory test positivity rates.
“Based on CDC modeled estimates of epidemic growth, we predict COVID-19 illness will continue to increase in the coming weeks as it usually does in the winter,” the CDC said in a statement.
For RSV, the CDC said emergency department visits and hospitalizations are increasing among children and hospitalizations are increasing among older adults in some areas.
Flu and COVID-19 vaccines are available for both children and adults, and RSV vaccines are available for certain groups of adults. However, vaccination coverage remains low, meaning “many children and adults lack protection from respiratory virus infections provided by vaccines,” according to the CDC.
As of Dec. 21, only 41.9% of adults were vaccinated against the flu and 21.4% were vaccinated with the updated 2024-25 COVID-19 vaccine. Additionally, just 43.7% of adults ages 75 and older have received the RSV vaccine, according to CDC data.
Nearly half of all children are vaccinated against the flu at 42.5%, but just 10.3% have received the updated COVID-19 vaccine.
(NEW YORK) — The fund disbursing money to the victims of Bernie Madoff’s legendary Ponzi scheme began its 10th and final distribution on Monday, putting another $131 million in the pockets of swindled investors.
Twenty-three thousand victims worldwide are receiving payments, bringing their total recoveries to 94% of their losses. Most of these victims were small investors who lost less than $500,000 in the fraud, according to federal prosecutors.
Since the collapse of Madoff’s investment house and his 2009 guilty plea, the Madoff Victim Fund has paid more than $4 billion to nearly 41,000 victims in 127 countries.
“This office has never stopped pursuing justice for victims of history’s largest Ponzi scheme,” acting U.S. Attorney Edward Y. Kim said.
For decades, Madoff used the investment advisory business he founded in 1960 to steal billions from his clients, turning his wealth management firm into the world’s largest Ponzi scheme to benefit himself, his family and select members of his inner circle.
He was sentenced to 150 years in prison, where he died in 2021.
“The unprecedented scope and complexity of the Madoff remission process shows the power of forfeiture to recover assets and to compensate victims,” Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brent Wible said in a statement on Monday.
