(NEW YORK) — The family of Emmett Till is expected to address the final report from the FBI and Justice Department’s investigation into Till’s 1955 murder at a press conference on Monday.
Till, 14, was killed while visiting family in Mississippi after he was accused of whistling at and making sexual advances toward a white woman, Carolyn Bryant. He was kidnapped, badly beaten and found in the Tallahatchie River several days later.
Carolyn Bryant’s husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother J.W. Milam were charged with Till’s murder and acquitted by an all-white jury. The two men later confessed to the killing in a paid magazine interview months later.
Rev. Wheeler Parker, Till’s cousin — who was 16 at the time — was in the house when Roy Bryant and Milam came looking for Till.
“I’m waiting to be shot, and I close my eyes,” Parker recalled in an interview with ABC News for an upcoming documentary series “Let the World See.” “I wasn’t shot, I opened my eyes and they’re passing by me. The guy said we’re looking for fat boy, the fat boy from Chicago.”
“They left with him, and that’s the last time we saw him alive,” he added.
Till’s murder came at a time of intense racial unrest and animosity. When his mother, Mamie Till Mobley, demanded an open casket at his funeral, it helped spark the civil rights movement.
The Justice Department opened an investigation into Till’s killing in 2004 but determined that there was no federal jurisdiction due to the statute of limitations. The investigation was originally closed in 2007 after a local grand jury declined to indict anyone on state charges.
It was reopened in 2018, following the publication of Timothy Tyson’s book “The Blood of Emmett Till,” in which Carolyn Bryant revealed she had not been telling the truth when she testified that Till had grabbed her and uttered obscenities. The Bryant family now deny that she had recanted her allegations.
This story is developing. Please check back for updates.
(NEW YORK) — Billionaire investor and philanthropist Michael Steinhardt was forced to surrender $70 million worth of stolen antiquities and comply with a lifetime ban on collecting antiquities on Monday, the Manhattan District Attorney’s office said.
Steinhardt had to give up 180 stolen antiquities, which court records said were looted and illegally smuggled out of 11 countries, trafficked by 12 criminal smuggling networks, and lacked verifiable provenance prior to appearing on the international art market.
The Larnax, a small coffin from the islands of Crete, Greece, dating back to 1400 BCE, was among the surrendered pieces.
The Larnax is valued at $1 million and was bought by Steinhardt for $575,000 in October 2016 from known antiquities trafficker Eugene Alexander, the DA said.
Payments for the piece were made using Seychelles-headquartered FAM Services and Satabank, a Malta-based financial institution that was suspended for money laundering, according to the DA’s office.
While complaining about a subpoena requesting provenance documentation for another stolen antiquity, Steinhardt pointed to the Larnax and said to an Antiquities Trafficking Unit investigator, “You see this piece? There’s no provenance for it. If I see a piece and I like it, then I buy it.”
The 180 pieces will now be returned expeditiously to their rightful owners in 11 countries: Bulgaria, Egypt, Greece, Iraq, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Syria and Turkey.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s office conducted a multi-year, multi-national investigation into Steinhardt’s criminal conduct beginning in February 2017.
“For decades, Michael Steinhardt displayed a rapacious appetite for plundered artifacts without concern for the legality of his actions, the legitimacy of the pieces he bought and sold, or the grievous cultural damage he wrought across the globe,” Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance said Monday.
“His pursuit of ‘new’ additions to showcase and sell knew no geographic or moral boundaries, as reflected in the sprawling underworld of antiquities traffickers, crime bosses, money launderers, and tomb raiders he relied upon to expand his collection,” Vance added.
Investigators from the DA’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit learned that Steinhardt possessed looted antiquities at his apartment and office.
They initiated a grand jury criminal investigation into his acquisition, possession and sale of more than 1,000 antiquities since at least 1987.
There were 17 judicially-ordered search warrants and they conducted joint investigations with law enforcement authorities in the 11 countries mentioned above.
Vance said the investigation developed compelling evidence that 180 were stolen from their country of origin and “exhibited numerous other evidentiary indicators of looting.”
“Mr. Steinhardt is pleased that the District Attorney’s years-long investigation has concluded without any charges, and that items wrongfully taken by others will be returned to their native countries,” Steinhardt’s lawyers said in a statement Monday. “Many of the dealers from whom Mr. Steinhardt bought these items made specific representations as to the dealers’ lawful title to the items, and to their alleged provenance. To the extent these representations were false, Mr. Steinhardt has reserved his rights to seek recompense from the dealers involved.”
Most of the 180 seized antiquities first surfaced in the possession of individuals who law-enforcement authorities later determined to be antiquities traffickers — some of whom have been convicted of antiquities trafficking, and many of the seized antiquities were trafficked following civil unrest or looting.
Other items that were surrendered included the Stag’s Head Rhyton, valued currently at $3.5 million and the Ercolano Fresco, valued at $1 million.
(ATLANTA) — With the omicron variant now detected in at least 16 states in the U.S., Centers for Disease Control Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said the agency is “following them closely” and that the number is “likely to rise.”
Walensky told This Week co-anchor Martha Raddatz that the CDC is still uncertain how transmissible the new variant is and how effective approved COVID-19 vaccines will work against it.
“We know it has many mutations, more mutations than prior variants,” she said. “Many of those mutations have been associated with more transmissible variants, with evasion of some of our therapeutics, and potentially evasion of some of our immunity, and that’s what we’re watching really carefully.”
The main concern right now, according to Walensky, is the dominant delta variant in the U.S. and the thousands of cases being diagnosed each day.
“We have about 90 to 100,000 cases a day right now in the United States, and 99.9% of them are the delta variant,” she said.
But South African studies have so far shown that omicron is about twice as transmissible as delta, and when pressed by Raddatz on what that means for the next six months in the U.S., Walensky said it depends on how the public mobilizes together.
“We know from a vaccine standpoint that the more mutations a single variant has, the more immunity you really need to have in order to combat that variant, which is why right now we’re really pushing to get more people vaccinated and more people boosted to really boost that immunity in every single individual,” Walensky said.
She said the CDC is “hopeful” that current vaccines will work to at least prevent severe disease and keep people out of the hospital.
Moderna is currently working on an omicron-specific booster should it be needed and Stephen Hoge, president of Moderna, said it could be ready early next year.
In an exclusive interview with Raddatz last week, Hoge said that a new variant-specific vaccine would be needed if the level of efficacy dropped below 50%.
Efficacy is a “really interesting, important question, but efficacy is sort of in itself on a spectrum,” Walensky said.
“Is it efficacy of preventing disease entirely? Preventing infection entirely, even if it just leads to a runny nose? Or is it efficacy of making sure people stay out of the hospital and prevent death?” Walensky questioned. “Certainly, we want to do the latter, absolutely first. And we’d really like to do the former as well.”
Walensky also said that the Food and Drug Administration is already in “conversations” with vaccine makers to streamline the authorization process of an omicron-specific booster and that the CDC would be moving “swiftly” after that approval.
When Raddatz asked how the U.S. can help to get even more shots into arms around the world and whether the omicron variant would have even appeared if more people in South Africa were vaccinated, Walensky touted U.S. donation efforts.
The Biden administration has pledged to donate more than 1 billion vaccine doses. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, as of Dec. 5, over 237 million doses have been delivered, 45 million have been shipped, leaving nearly 817 million pledged doses yet to be distributed. The White House has pledged to deliver 200 million more doses in the next 100 days to countries in need.
“We’re not only donating the vaccines for free and providing more vaccines to the globe than any — than every other country combined, but we at CDC work in 60 other countries providing on the ground assistance in vaccine safety and vaccine delivery and vaccine confidence, in vaccine effectiveness studies.”
Pressed by Raddatz if she fears a worst case scenario is possible with the omicron variant, Walensky said health experts are better situated to tackle the virus now than when it first appeared.
“We have so many more tools now than we did a year ago,” she said. “We know so many things that work against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, regardless of the variant that we’ve seen before.”
Walensky said getting immunity from the COVID-19 right now is “critically important” and continued to stress the importance of CDC regulations such as masking up in areas with high or substantial transmission.
The CDC director dismissed the idea of a nationwide mask mandate when Raddatz asked and said she’d “rather see people get vaccinated, boosted and follow our recommendations.”
“I’d rather not have requirements in order to do so,” she said. “People should do this for themselves.”
(NEW YORK) — As the COVID-19 pandemic has swept the globe, more than 5.2 million people have died from the disease worldwide, including over 788,000 Americans, according to real-time data compiled by Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Systems Science and Engineering.
Just 59.6% of the population in the United States is fully vaccinated against COVID-19, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Here’s how the news is developing. All times Eastern:
Dec 06, 8:42 am
NYC mandating vaccines for all private sector employees
New York City Bill de Blasio on Monday announced a vaccine mandate for all private sector employees.
On the talk show Morning Joe, the mayor called the mandate, which goes into effective Dec. 27, a “preemptive strike.”
Dec 06, 8:01 am
Man who became one of the 1st omicron cases in US speaks out
Peter McGinn was one of the first known people in the United States to contract the omicron variant.
The 30-year-old Minnesota resident, who is fully vaccinated against COVID-19 and has received a booster shot, said he believes he became infected after attending a massive anime convention in New York City in late November. McGinn said he and several other attendees, who are also fully vaccinated, went out together after the event. Half of that group has since tested positive for COVID-19, according to McGinn.
McGinn said he tested positive after returning home to Minnesota and learning that a friend with whom he attended the convention had contracted the virus.
“I felt perfectly safe with the people that I was with, and so it never really crossed my mind to think that I had COVID,” McGinn told ABC News on Sunday. “I was just a little taken aback.”
Several dozen cases of omicron, a newly discovered variant of the novel coronavirus, have now been reported in at least 17 states across the country, according to Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Dec 06, 6:12 am
17 people test positive for COVID-19 on cruise ship in New Orleans
At least 17 people aboard a Norwegian Cruise Lines ship docked in New Orleans have tested positive for COVID-19, officials said Sunday.
The cases were found among both passengers and crew members on the Norwegian Breakaway cruise ship. A probable case of the omicron variant was also identified among a member of the crew, who is not a Louisiana resident and did not leave the ship, according to the Louisiana Department of Health.
Earlier Sunday, Louisiana confirmed its first case of omicron, which the health department said did not include any of the passengers or crew members from the Norwegian Breakaway.
The Norwegian Breakaway had departed New Orleans on Nov. 28 and returned this weekend as scheduled. Over the past week, the cruise ship made stops in Belize, Honduras and Mexico.
The ship docked in New Orleans on Sunday and all individuals on board were tested prior to disembarkation, according to a spokesperson for Norwegian Cruise Lines.
“In addition to requiring that 100% of guests and crew are fully vaccinated, per the Company’s comprehensive health and safety protocols, we have implemented quarantine, isolation and contact tracing procedures for identified cases,” the spokesperson told ABC News in a statement Sunday. “Any guests who have tested positive for COVID-19 will travel by personal vehicle to their personal residence or self-isolate in accommodations provided by the Company according to CDC guidelines.”
All of the identified cases on board were asymptomatic, according to the spokesperson.
“We take this matter extremely seriously and will continue to work closely with the CDC, the office of Governor John Bel Edwards, the Louisiana Department of Health as well as the city and port of New Orleans,” the spokesperson added.
(NEW YORK) — Charging an electric vehicle is simple and painless — if you have a charger installed at home.
Automakers are producing EVs at a feverish pace with government backing. Yet the number of public charging stations, critical for mass EV adoption, is lacking.
There are fewer than 46,000 EV public charging sites currently in the U.S., according to Department of Energy data. In comparison, the number of gasoline fueling stations in the country totals more than 150,000.
There are several EV-charging network providers currently in the market: EVgo, Blink, ChargePoint, Volta, Wallbox and Electrify America, which is owned by Volkswagen. These companies maintain, build, operate or lease their equipment to businesses, individuals and governments and offer subscription services to members.
The Biden administration has targeted half of all new car sales in the U.S. to be electric in less than 10 years. To reach this goal, at least 1 million fast-charging stations will be required, according to Cathy Zoi, the CEO of EVgo. There are currently 5,627 fast-charging sites in the nation.
At-home EV charging allows drivers to plug in their vehicles at night and wake up in the morning to a full battery charge. Many apartment and condo dwellers though are dependent on public charging stations to juice their emissions-free vehicles, a scenario that can mean long wait and charging times.
“Thirty percent of Americans do not have access to home chargers,” Zoi told ABC News. “We need the infrastructure to get the consumer confidence.”
EVgo has been partnering with major retailers like Safeway, Albertsons, Whole Foods and Kroger to install charging stations in their shopping parking lots. The company also teamed up with General Motors in 2020 to build 2,700 new fast stations over the next five years.
“We’ve identified 40 metro areas in America’s heartland that are part of this program,” Zoi explained. “The Biden infrastructure money can get us into places even farther afield in rural America.”
President Joe Biden’s $1 trillion infrastructure package, which was recently passed by Congress, includes $7.5 billion toward a nationwide network of 500,000 EV charging stations by 2030.
Michael Farkas, CEO of EV charging operator and provider Blink, said the $7.5 billion — half of Biden’s $15 billion proposal as presidential candidate — will not be enough to accomplish the electrification goals cited by automakers and government officials.
“It will push things along but it will take substantially more [money] than that,” he told ABC News. “Every state is lacking in infrastructure — even California. We have a massive need for chargers both in the U.S. and globally.”
Construction of an EV station can take four to eight weeks, according to Zoi, and the cost depends on the type of charger. A Level 2 charger, commonly found in residential and commercial/workplace settings, costs between $3,000 and $5,000 to install. DC fast chargers, which allow drivers to recharge 80% of a vehicle’s battery in 30 minutes, start at $125,000 but can top out at $300,000.
The bigger challenge to installing charging networks may not be the cost. Getting approvals from local officials and municipalities can often be a complicated process that lasts weeks or even months, said Zoi. Plus, connecting to the grid presents its own hiccups.
“We’re working with the electric utilities to make sure the local power infrastructure can support fast charging,” Zoi said.
Even in California, which has the highest share of EVs of any U.S. state, public charging stations are far from ubiquitous, said Karl Brauer, executive analyst of iSeeCars.com and a longtime California resident.
“EVs still take a whole lot of planning. You have to know how long your trip is and carefully plan your charging schedule and locations,” he told ABC News. “The infrastructure is terrible. The good news is that there are not many EVs on the roads.”
The ability to charge on the go and travel long distances will move the needle on EV adoption and sales, Brauer said. Yet installing and deploying chargers is a risky business right now.
“There doesn’t seem to be any money being made in EV charging stations,” he said. “What’s the incentive to buy an EV station when there isn’t a profit motive?”
Not enough public EV chargers could dissuade some Americans from swapping their gas-powered conveyances for green vehicles, according to Mark Wakefield, managing director of consulting firm AlixPartners.
“The charging infrastructure is tricky. There are a lot of stakeholders involved and an awful lot of players to coordinate, government included,” he told ABC News. “Range is the No. 1 reason [among Americans] not to buy an EV. The No. 2 reason? Not enough places to charge.”
He added, “Consumers want automakers to curate their charging experience. They want it to be seamless.”
Only 93 U.S. airport locations have charging infrastructure in place, with as few as two stations, according to AlixPartners. EV public infrastructure coverage continues to grow steadily though “most of the growth has been driven by Level 2 chargers,” the firm said in a recent report. DC fast chargers, however, are largely seen as the solution to revolutionizing EV ownership.
Federal tax incentives and subsides from states and and local ordinances can help offset the costs of these networks, said Wakefield. But the U.S. needs to invest $50 billion to accommodate EV growth, he noted.
John Voelcker, contributing editor to Car and Driver magazine who has covered EVs extensively, said part of Tesla’s sweeping success was its ability to create a supercharging network exclusive to its vehicles from the very beginning.
“I don’t think Tesla would have sold so many expensive EVs as it did without the ability to drive cross country. The company publicized the existence of this Tesla-branded network,” he told ABC News. “I am not seeing carmakers except for Tesla putting in big efforts to build these stations.”
He went on, “It says a lot about carmakers’ reliance on the free market to solve everything and their lack of understanding in EVs beyond the vehicle itself.”
EV stations in city streets and parking garages will also multiply to placate urban drivers, said Voelcker, noting that public charging stations in London have become part of the city landscape, with EV owners hooking up their vehicles to stations built curbside.
EVgo has big plans to expand its charging network from 1,600 DC fast chargers to 10,000 by 2025. Zoi’s team of site developers are actively scouring the country, looking for opportunities to service new EV owners.
“Chargers will become commonplace,” Zoi said reassuringly. “The arrival of EVs can create more car enthusiasts.”
(DETROIT) — The parents of Ethan Crumbley, the 15-year-old who authorities said killed four classmates at his Michigan high school, are still in jail after a judge assigned them each a $500,000 bond on manslaughter charges related to the shooting.
James and Jennifer Crumbley were taken into custody early Saturday after they failed to turn themselves in Friday afternoon for a scheduled arraignment, prompting an hourslong search for the couple. They remained in the Oakland County jail on Sunday and have not posted bail, online jail records show.
The couple was captured in Detroit after a business owner called 911 after spotting the suspects’ car in their parking lot and Jennifer Crumbley standing next to it, according to the Oakland County Sheriff’s Office. She fled the area on foot, but the couple was located in a commercial building in an art studio after an extensive search of the area.
They were “aided in getting into the building,” Detroit Police Chief James White told reporters at a 3 a.m. press conference Saturday, adding that it was “very likely” they were trying to flee to Canada. Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard said his office would be presenting potential charges to the prosecutor’s office against the person who allegedly helped them gain access to the building.
The 65-year-old Detroit artist whose studio Jennifer and James Crumbley used to hide as they allegedly fled authorities on Friday is maintaining his innocence in their movements that day, his attorney, Clarence Dass, told ABC News.
The lawyer for Andzrej Sikora told ABC News on Sunday that the Crumbleys came to Sikora on Friday morning, the day the county leveled charges of involuntary manslaughter against the couple in the Oxford school shooting. The Crumbleys knew Sikora through a ski club, Dass said.
Dass declined to describe the interaction Friday morning and would not say whether Sikora gave the couple keys to the Detroit building that houses his studio. Sikora was not aware the couple was facing charges in the shooting, saying that he “knew what was going on” but wasn’t following the news closely, Dass said.
When Sikora woke up on Saturday and saw the news of the Crumbleys’ overnight arrest, he went to the Detroit Police Department and told them he was the owner of the studio, Dass said. Authorities then directed him to the Oakland County Sheriff’s Office, where he provided information about what he knew, before hiring Dass as counsel.
Sikora has not been arrested and no charges have been filed against his client, Dass said, but he did not rule out the possibility that authorities could charge the artist this week.
Each parent is facing four counts of involuntary manslaughter for what authorities are saying was a failure to properly secure the firearm that was used in the shooting. They have both pleaded not guilty to the charges.
On Tuesday, the morning of the shooting, a teacher at Oxford High School saw a note on Ethan Crumbley’s desk with a drawing of a semi-automatic handgun pointing at the words, “The thoughts won’t stop, help me,” prosecutors said. Another drawing depicted a bullet with the words “Blood everywhere” above it and a drawing of a bleeding person who appeared to have been shot twice, according to prosecutors.
Ethan Crumbley was then removed from class, and his parents, who school officials said were “difficult to reach,” were called to the school.
Ethan Crumbley told school guidance counselors that the drawings were for a video game he was designing, Oxford Community Schools Superintendent Tim Throne said in a statement Saturday. His parents did not indicate that they had recently purchased a firearm for him and led the counselors to believe there was no threat of violence, to himself or to others, Throne said.
It is not clear whether the gun was in Ethan Crumbley’s backpack at the time, Throne added. Due to his lack of disciplinary record, they sent him back to class instead of home, Throne said. His parents were then told that they were required to get their son into counseling within 48 hours.
Hours later, Ethan Crumbley was armed with a 9 mm Sig Sauer pistol his father bought on Nov. 26 as he walked down the hallway, aiming into classrooms, Oakland County Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Marc Keast said during Wednesday’s arraignment. There were 18 live rounds left in the firearm when he was apprehended in the hallway, Bouchard told reporters Wednesday.
Ethan Crumbley has been charged as an adult with four counts of first-degree murder and seven counts of assault with intent to murder — actions that prosecutors allege were premeditated.
Throne has requested a third-party probe to investigate how the school handled the events leading up to the shooting.
“I have personally asked for a third-party review of all the events of the past week because our community and our families deserve a full, transparent accounting of what occurred,” Throne said.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel has also reached out to the Oxford Community Schools to offer help in investiating the shooting and events leading up to it.
“Our attorneys and special agents are uniquely qualified to perform an investigation of this magnitude,” Nessel tweeted.
ABC News’ Meredith Deliso, Ahmad Hemingway, Will McDuffie and Emily Shapiro contributed to this report.
(MINNEAPOLIS) — A man was arrested for allegedly harassing the judge overseeing the trial of Kim Potter, the former Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, officer who shot Daunte Wright during a traffic stop in April.
A group protested Judge Regina Chu last month for her decision to ban cameras inside the courtroom during the trial and rallied outside an apartment building in Minneapolis, where they believed the judge lived, according to court documents.
Cortez Rice, 32, was among the protesters and went inside the building while others remained outside, investigators said. Rice allegedly made his way to the 12th floor, live streaming his actions on YouTube, according to the complaint.
“I think this is her crib right here,” Rice was allegedly filmed saying outside a door, according to the complaint.
The defendant walked down to the lobby where other protesters asked him if the building was the right location, the complaint said.
“That’s her window on the 12th floor,” Rice said, according to the complaint.
Rice was also heard yelling to Chu, “We demand transparency. We’d hate you to get kicked out of your apartment,” the complaint said.
Judge Chu spoke with investigators and said she “believed she was the target of Rice and the other protestors,” and “it was her belief the intention was to intimidate her and to interfere with the judicial process.”
Rice was arrested last week and charged with felony harassment with aggravated violations — tampering with a juror or retaliating against a judicial officer, the complaint said. The defendant is currently being held at the Waukesha County Jail in Wisconsin and is awaiting extradition, court papers show.
Rice’s attorney didn’t immediately respond to messages from ABC News for comment.
Opening arguments in Potter’s criminal trial are slated to begin on Wednesday.
Potter has been charged with first- and second-degree manslaughter in the death of Wright, a 20-year-old Black man. In April, Potter stopped Wright’s car over for an expired registration tag.
She then determined he had an outstanding warrant for a gross misdemeanor weapons charge and tried to detain him, according to former Brooklyn Center Police Chief Tim Gannon, who resigned after the incident.
As officers tried to arrest him, Wright freed himself and tried to get back in his vehicle. That’s when, according to Potter’s attorneys, she accidentally grabbed her firearm instead of her stun gun and shot him.
The incident, which was captured on body worn cameras, set off more protests against police violence and racial profiling in Minnesota.
(NEW YORK) — Former U.S. Sen. Bob Dole, who will be remembered for the tenacity that defined his career and his work on behalf of fellow military veterans, died in his sleep Sunday morning. He was 98.
“Thank you for the outpouring of love over the last year, it continues to sustain us as we grieve the loss of the precious man we knew as husband and father,” the Dole family said in a statement Sunday. “Bob Dole was never only ours – we shared him with Americans from every walk of life and every political persuasion. He dedicated his life to serving you, and so it is heartwarming that so many honor him at his passing.
In his memoir, One Soldier’s Story, Dole wrote that his experiences in World War II defined his life.
“Adversity can be a harsh teacher,” he wrote. “But its lessons often define our lives. As much as we may wish that we could go back and relive them, do things differently, make better, wiser decisions, we can’t change history. War is like that. You can rewrite it, attempt to infuse it with your own personal opinions, twist or spin it to make it more palatable, but eventually the truth will come out.”
As an Army officer in World War II, he was wounded and there were doubts he’d survive. His right arm was permanently disabled, but he adapted.
“If unable to reach voters with my right hand, I could always reach out with my left,” he wrote in The Doles: Unlimited Partners, a book he co-authored with his wife, Elizabeth, and Richard Norton Smith.
He went on to graduate from college, and, while still in law school, won a seat in the Kansas state legislature. He won a seat in Congress in 1960 and went on to serve in the House until he was elected to the Senate in 1968.
Dole ran three times for president. He lost in primaries in 1980 to Ronald Reagan and in 1988 to George H.W. Bush. He won the Republican party nomination in 1996, but lost the general election to Bill Clinton.
“Those pivotal moments remain indelibly impressed in your heart and mind,” he wrote in One Soldier’s Story. “For me, the defining period in my life was not running for the highest office in the land. It started years earlier, in a foreign country, where hardly anyone knew my name.”
‘An All American Boy,’ wartime service and wounds
Robert Dole was born in the small town of Russell, Kansas, on July 22, 1923.
His father, Doran, ran a local creamery, and his mother, Bina, occasionally sold Singer sewing machines door-to-door to make ends meet. He grew up with three siblings and, according to a timeline on the Dole Institute website, the four children shared a room, a bike and a pair of roller skates.
His neighbors recalled him growing up as “an all-American boy,” according to his 1996 presidential campaign website. In school, he was an honor student, sports editor of his school newspaper and he lettered in football, basketball and track.
In 1941, he graduated from Russell High School and enrolled at the University of Kansas, becoming the first in his family to go to college — thanks to a $300 loan from a Russell banker.
A year into college, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Dole left the university in 1943 to enroll in the Army. He had hoped to become a doctor and trained in the medical corps at Camp Barkley in Texas, according to a Dole Institute timeline. He later attended Army Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning in Georgia and, by the end of 1944, graduated as a second lieutenant in the Army infantry.
In 1945, Dole was assigned to the 85th Regime, 10th Mountain Division. It was originally intended to be a group of “skiing soldiers” to fight the Germans in the snow and mountains. But Dole was wounded during “Operation Craftsmen,” a spring offensive in Italy that was meant to overtake German troops scattered in the hills and valleys of the Apennine Mountains and gain control of northern Italy.
Dole’s platoon was to take Hill 913. His fellow soldiers later described it as a “suicide mission.”
It was April, and a stone wall and a field of landmines trapped the Americans in an exposed area. A Nazi sniper, perched in a farmhouse, began firing at the battalion, according to Dole’s 1996 campaign website. The platoon leader was ordered to take out the sniper and gunners. But as Dole climbed a rocky field, his radio man was hit.
Dole crawled across the battlefield on his stomach and then pulled the wounded soldier into a foxhole. Seconds later, an exploding shell ripped into Dole’s right shoulder and back. His collarbone was shattered, part of his spine was smashed and his right arm was dangling from his side.
Lying facedown in the dirt, Dole recalled being unable to see or move his arms.
“I thought they were missing,” he said on his campaign website. He called for help, and two medics who tried to rescue him were gunned down. A sergeant eventually dragged him to safety.
Dole earned two Purple Hearts and was awarded the Bronze Star, but doctors weren’t sure he’d survive. He was hospitalized for three years. He suffered infections, grueling therapy, several operations and in one instance developed a blood clot that nearly killed him.
Good Samaritans helped him. A surgeon performed several of Dole’s surgeries at no charge. Back home in Russell, the community collected money in a cigar box at the local drug store to help pay for his medical bills. Dole kept that cigar box, decades later, in his Senate office desk drawer.
He recovered sensation in most of his body and was able to walk, but his right arm was permanently disabled. He would often carry a pen in his right hand to prevent his fingers from splaying. He usually avoided shaking hands with his right hand.
“Coming back from a war is a longer journey than any plane flight home,” Dole wrote in a 2006 forward to Courage After Fire: Coping Strategies for Troops Returning from Iraq and Afghanistan and Their Families. “I sustained my own injuries in World War II; some of my wounds were obvious, some were not. Some wounds were healed more quickly than others. And though I was lucky to be surrounded by great doctors, wonderful family, and a more supportive community than anyone could reasonably ask for, that mental readjustment was no small task.”
In 1948, while still recovering, he married Phyllis Holden, an occupational therapist from New Hampshire. They met during his last months of treatment at a hospital dance and married three months later.
His hopes of becoming a physician dashed, he set his sights on becoming a lawyer.
“Maybe I couldn’t use my hand, I told myself, but I could develop my mind,” he wrote in The Doles: Unlimited Partners.
He first enrolled at the University of Arizona in Tucson on the GI Bill, and a year later transferred to Washburn University in his home state of Kansas. He graduated in 1952.
Senate leadership, presidential aspirations, a political power couple
Still in law school, Dole won his first election, claiming a seat in the Kansas House of Representatives. He served from 1951 to 1953, until he was elected Russell County Attorney.
His daughter, Robin, was born in 1954.
He served as county attorney until 1961, when he was first elected as a Republican to the 87th Congress.
His campaign events featured singers playing the ukulele and women referred to as “Dolls for Dole,” who handed out cups of Dole pineapple juice, according to the Dole Institute. He served on the House Agriculture Committee after having pledged to support farmers’ interests, such as promoting rural electricity and soil conservation.
In 1964, he voted in favor of the Civil Rights Act, and in 1965 voted in favor of the Voting Rights Act. He considered them to be the most important votes of his career.
He was elected to the U.S. Senate, defeating former Kansas Gov. Bill Avery, and served for 28 years, garnering national attention.
In the early 1970s, he served as the chairman of the Republican National Committee, including during the 1972 election and Watergate break-in. He lived at the Watergate at the time, and a hometown reporter asked whether he had hidden the break-in tools in his one-bedroom apartment, according to The New York Times. He said he did not.
Dole and Phyllis divorced in 1972. In 1976, she told an interviewer that much of what her former husband had achieved since the war was an effort to prove that he could do it in spite of his handicap, according to a 1982 profile in The New York Times.
He married Elizabeth Hanford in December 1975 in a ceremony at the Washington National Cathedral.
In 1976, then-President Gerald Ford selected Dole as his running mate at the Republican National Convention. And at the end of the decade, Dole made a brief run for president in the Republican primary, but withdrew after a lackluster showing in New Hampshire.
Dole went on to serve as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee from 1981 to 1985. He served as the Republican leader from 1985 to 1996. In the midst of his leadership role, he ran for president again. This time, he scored an upset over then-Vice President George H.W. Bush in Iowa, but fell short again in New Hampshire in 1988, withdrawing from the race.
Elizabeth Dole became labor secretary under Bush. In 1991, she left her Cabinet position to become the president of the American Red Cross. From 1983 to 1987, Elizabeth Dole, under President Ronald Reagan, had become the first woman to serve as secretary for the Department of Transportation and the first woman to lead a branch of the armed services, the Coast Guard.
In 1996, Dole retired from the Senate to fully pursue the presidency. This time, he secured the Republican nomination and, with former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and U.S. Rep. Jack Kemp, challenged President Bill Clinton.
“When I delivered my concession speech that evening, I meant it when I said, ‘Tomorrow is the first day of my life when I have nothing to do,'” Dole wrote in Great Political Wit: Laughing (Almost) All the Way to the White House.
He was wrong. He went to his Washington campaign office to personally thank his staff and volunteers. While there, he got a call from the producers of The Late Show with David Letterman asking if he’d be a guest on their show while they broadcasted from Washington.
Two nights later, he recalled trading quips with Letterman when he asked Dole about Clinton’s weight.
“‘I don’t know,’ was my comeback. ‘I never tried to lift him. I just tried to beat him,'” Dole wrote, then describing the audience’s laughter. “Pundits, ever quick to grasp the obvious, claimed to have discovered a New Dole.”
He was no longer the “glowering, Social Security-devouring sourpuss they’d come to know,” he wrote. He made appearances on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Saturday Night Live and filmed a Visa commercial that premiered during the 1997 Super Bowl. In it, he returned to his hometown to be asked by the diner’s waitress for identification before he could cash a check.
“I just can’t win,” he said in the advertisement.
In his book, he wrote, “Over the years I’ve grown ever more convinced that my hero, Dwight Eisenhower, was absolutely right when he said, ‘A sense of humor is part of the art of leadership, of getting along with people, of getting things done.'”
As Dole settled into a post-political life, Elizabeth Dole returned to politics.
She sought the Republican nomination for president before exiting the race in October 1999. Then in 2002, when longtime Sen. Jesse Helms announced his retirement, she decided to run for his seat and became the state’s first female senator. She served one term before being defeated in her reelection bid in 2008.
Post-political life, continued service to veterans
In 1997, months after losing the presidential election, Clinton presented Dole with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
“Through it, we honor not just his individual achievement but his clear embodiment in the common values and beliefs that join us as a people,” Clinton said ahead of placing the medal around his neck. “Values and beliefs that he has spent his life advancing. Sen. Dole, a grateful nation presents this award, with respect for the example you have set for Americans today and for Americans and generations yet to come.”
After accepting the medal, Dole said, “No one can claim to be equal to this honor, but I will cherish it as long as I live because this occasion allows me to honor others who are more entitled.”
Dole went on to lead the World War II Memorial Commission. As national chairman, he helped to raise more than $197 million to construct a national memorial to honor the 16 million Americans who served in the armed forces during the war. Construction began in September 2001 and was completed in April 2004.
At the dedication ceremony, Dole spoke about the importance of remembering the sacrifices made to uphold democracy.
“It is only fitting when this memorial was opened to the public about a month ago the very first visitors were school children,” Dole said. “For them, our war is ancient history and those who fought it are slightly ancient themselves. Yet, in the end, they are the ones for whom we built this shrine and to whom we now hand the baton in the unending relay of human possibility.”
In addition to his Visa commercial, Dole went on to pitch for Dunkin’ Donuts, Pepsi and Viagra. His good humor also won him a place on Comedy Central, where he supplied commentary on The Daily Show during the 2000 election. And ground was broken for the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas in Lawrence in 1997 and dedicated in 2003.
But his work with and for veterans is something he notably continued into his later years. Elizabeth Dole began to work in support of military caregivers.
He served as honorary adviser of the Honor Flight Network, which works to provide veterans the opportunity to visit the World War II Memorial in Washington for free. Dole would often spend Saturdays at the memorial, greeting veterans, swapping stories and posting for photos.
In 2007, President George W. Bush appointed Dole to help lead a bipartisan commission to investigate a neglect scandal at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Elizabeth Dole, in 2012, established the Elizabeth Dole Foundation, which was designed to empower, support and honor the nation’s 5.5 million military caregivers.
Dole embarked on a reunion tour of his home state, visiting all 105 counties, in his early 1990s. And in 2017, at the age of 94, he returned to Fort Benning, from which he’d graduated from Army Officer Candidate School in 1944.
On his Twitter account, he posted that he hadn’t been there since he graduated. “Jiminy!” he wrote, posting a photo of him sitting on a plane.
On Dec. 4, 2018, Dole made headlines celebrating a fellow veteran. He visited the U.S. Capitol Rotunda and was helped out of his wheelchair so that he could stand and salute the casket of George H.W. Bush.
Two days later, the Doles celebrated their 43rd wedding anniversary.
In April 2019, President Donald Trump signed into law a bill authorizing Dole’s honorary promotion to colonel.
“He turned adversity into action as he healed from the grave wounds sustained while risking his life for a fellow soldier, and decided to come to Congress and to serve the people of Kansas,” Rep. Nancy Pelosi said in January 2018 at a ceremony granting Dole the Congressional Gold Medal. “Sen. Bob Dole, for a lifetime spent defending, advancing and exemplifying our proudest American ideals, we thank you.”
Dole announced in February 2021 that he was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer.
“While I certainly have some hurdles ahead, I also know that I join millions of Americans who face significant health challenges of their own,” Dole said.
(LOS ANGELES) — When passengers board an Alaska Airlines flight, most don’t know it but that plane is lighter than other Boeing 737s or Airbus A320s, according to the airline.
That’s because during the COVID-19 pandemic, the airline used the slowdown in travel to develop, test and introduce new products to replace plastics on board.
Gone are plastic water bottles and plastic cups. Lighter alternatives are being used. Food containers have been redesigned. It not only allows the airline to cut the use of plastics, which can take over 400 years to decompose in the environment, but the airline says less weight onboard means it is burning less fuel, saving money and reducing carbon output.
Airlines and plane manufacturers have a fairly new and very honed focus on going green. United Airlines is promising to go carbon neutral by 2050. Alaska Airlines says it will go carbon neutral by 2040. Other airlines promise to pay to offset their carbon output.
Last week, United flew the first commercial airliner with passengers onboard using 100% sustainable fuels made of sugar water and corn. The fuels output far less carbon but cost much more than traditional fuels. United’s Boeing 737-Max 8 demonstration flight flew from Chicago to Washington D.C.
Onboard efforts like those at the airlines combined with attempts from plane maker Boeing are leading to a seismic shift in the airline industry. It wasn’t that long ago that the smell of jet fuel was just a normal part of the airport experience. Between utilizing sustainable fuels, electric and hydrogen airplanes that are in development and reducing overall fuel use, the industry vows it is trying to cut the exhaust that comes out of a plane’s engines and goes into the environment.
Boeing’s flying laboratory
ABC News recently got access to a flying laboratory that Boeing calls the ecoDemonstrator. Boeing borrows brand new airliners before they are delivered to a carrier. It strips each plane of its normal interior and sets up a flying testbed with racks of computers, cables and wires running all over, and sensors all around the plane. For at least a few more weeks, the current ecoDemonstrator is on board a new Boeing 737-Max that will soon have the regular interior installed and will be delivered to the airline that ordered it. But for now, engineers and scientists are able to test all kinds of technology that could soon make flying greener.
“The ecoDemonstrator program has been around for about a decade,” program manager Rae Lutters explained to ABC News while on board the aircraft. “We take innovative technologies out of the lab, put them on an airplane and fly them around to really help explore our learning and understanding of sustainable technologies.”
The special wingtips now seen on Boeing aircraft, called split scimitar winglets — those V-shaped ends of wings on newer planes — are a direct result of an idea that was tested on a previous ecoDemonstrator and showed to save fuel and improve performance. The winglets are now part of planes flying all over the world.
On the current ecoDemonstrator, Boeing’s teams are testing items like wall panels made out of excess carbon fiber from the Boeing 777, which they hope will be lighter and quieter. They are also testing new lower profile warning lights that will cause less drag on the plane and, in return, burn less fuel. And they are working on new touchscreens in the cockpit and air sensor equipment to test the air quality at airports globally when a plane lands.
The current ecoDemonstrator has been flying all over the world with sensors and computers analyzing all of the experiments on board to determine if they will help make the aircraft greener.
“We’re trying to get the airplane to operate as efficiently as possible,” said Lutters.
Getting rid of plastics onboard
Down the road from Boeing Field in its new high-tech headquarters overlooking Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, Alaska Airlines is also trying new ideas to cut down on weight and fuel burn. By ditching plastic water bottles and cups in November, the airline said it will save 18 Boeing 737 worth of weight every year. It’s a feat no other large airline in the U.S. has accomplished. Alaska is the first airline to team up with premium brand Boxed Water to serve water from milk carton-like containers rather than plastic bottles.
“The biggest issue we were having was single-use plastic,” Alaska Airlines manager of guest products Todd Traynor-Corey said. “Even if you have the best recycling program possible, a percentage of that plastic is going to end up in the landfills and even into the ocean. Being based on the West Coast, ocean life and sustainability are really important to us.”
During the pandemic, the airline carried out a long process of recruiting alternatives to plastic bottles. They did taste tests and asked for feedback from staff and passengers. Eventually, they settled on Boxed Water.
“This is a very visible change. It’s not a free change. There’s a cost that comes with it. We are a premium water that’s out in the industry and Alaska saw that we are doing better. Our lifecycle analysis shows that. Super big kudos to Alaska for stepping up and making the change away from plastic and to cartons,” said Boxed Water founder and CEO Daryn Kuipers.
The iconic plastic cup that used to sit on passengers’ tray tables is now gone from Alaska Airlines. It has been quite a ride trying to find a simple paper cup that fits the needs of the airline as its planes fly around North America.
“We partnered to really find a more sustainable cup and we just sourced a simple paper cup that is meant cold and hot liquids,” Traynor-Corey said, showing the cup.
For months, different paper cups were tested with different liquids. Most passengers would have no idea so much work went into changing to a paper cup. The work is still underway. They have yet to find a biodegradable plastic cup that can hold hard alcohol.
Many alcohols eat through paper, which they found was an issue aboard their planes.
Using artificial intelligence to guide planes
Alaska Airlines’ efforts are not stopping with what flight attendants are serving on board. The airline is now employing an artificial intelligence (A.I.) program called Flyways to suggest routes that can get passengers to their destinations faster, smoother and while burning less fuel.
“Flyways is probably the most exciting thing that I’ve come across in airline technology since I can remember,” said Pasha Saleh, who is head of corporate development at Alaska Airlines.
Saleh is also a pilot for Alaska.
Alaska Airlines has uniquely teamed up with a Silicon Valley startup to develop Flyways using A.I. to better suggest the best way to route aircraft. Airline dispatchers are given suggestions on how and where to fly planes. They can accept or reject what the A.I. is suggesting. As the weeks and months go on using Flyways the platform is getting better at its suggestions due to machine learning in the A.I.
“We found this company called Airspace Intelligence and at the time that we met them it was only two guys. Two guys backed by Google,” explained Saleh. At that time, Airspace Intelligence was developing software to better route vehicles on the ground. There was a realization that technology could work in the air.
By analyzing numerous sources, the platform can predict what the weather, air traffic, and other aspects impacting the flight will be when a plane reaches any area of the country. It might, for instance, choose to delay a flight by two or three minutes knowing that will help avoid a thunderstorm over Oklahoma in three hours or help the flight avoid gridlock in the landing pattern in New York, which would waste time and fuel.
“Flyways will, in many cases, reduce the length of a flight therefore reducing the fuel burn, and reducing the emissions,” said Diana Birkett Rakow, senior vice president of sustainability at Alaska Airlines.
During a six-month pilot program at Alaska Airlines, Flyways shaved off, on average, five minutes from flights and saved 480-thousand gallons of jet fuel.
“If you went a teeny bit slower, you were on time, you had a gate, and because you went a teeny bit slower the airplane actually burned less fuel, that might be a win/win combination for both the guest and the operation and sustainability impact,” said Rakow.
The airline said Flyways is also quite good at helping flights avoid turbulence by analyzing lots of weather data and providing smoother flights.
“This is what machines are really good at, taking huge data sets and putting them together,” according to Saleh.
The team at Alaska Airlines says the benefits are enormous and they would like other airlines to get onboard with Flyways because it would help make the aviation system safer, faster and more environmentally friendly.
Mixed reaction from environmental groups
Yet environmental groups are mixed on the efforts.
The Environmental Defense Fund has teamed up with the Rocky Mountain Institute to create the Sustainable Fuels Aviation Buyers Alliance. Some of the world’s largest companies have agreed to join the EDF’s initiative to help make sustainable fuels more available and cost effective for airlines to buy.
“Airlines are definitely going in the right direction,” Kim Carnahan, secretariat lead of the Sustainable Fuels Aviation Buyers Alliance told ABC News.
Carnahan, who is former U.S. chief negotiator for climate change, said airlines are in a tough position with the cost of sustainable products being so much higher than traditional fuels.
“They compete fiercely with one another and have very slim margins. Sustainable aviation fuel which is really the only option they have to fully decarbonize is anywhere between two and four times the cost of fossil jet fuel,” according to Carnahan.
But at Greenpeace, the organization believes much of what the industry is doing is so-called “greenwashing.” It doesn’t believe such solutions are viable long term and that the changes being made are minor cosmetic measures distracting from a bigger problem of rising emissions in the air travel sector. The group says the aviation industry is a major polluter that needs to be completely revamped by reducing the number of flights to truly become carbon-neutral.
“That’s why Greenpeace is calling for a phase-out of short-haul flights in Europe, when a train or ferry alternative under six hours exists,” said Herwig Schuster, Greenpeace in Europe’s transport campaigner.
The group is calling on governments globally to invest in better rail service.
“Airlines have introduced a number of alleged ‘green’ measures based on excessive optimism on so-called ‘sustainable aviation fuels,’ carbon offsetting and future aircraft designs,” said Schuster. “But these technologies are not the answer to tackling the rising emissions in this sector and will largely not be marketable solutions.”
But the airlines and plane makers say they are investing huge amounts of money to make a true change and that they have to work within the confines of current technology while they plan for the decades ahead.
(VISALIA, Calif.) — All four people on board a small plane that crashed in California Saturday are dead, according to the Tulare County Sheriff’s Office.
The identities of the victims have not been confirmed. It is unknown what led to the crash.
Around 6:35 p.m. Saturday, deputies were called to the area of Road 68 and Avenue 288 near the Visalia Airport in Visalia, California, for a possible downed plane, authorities said.
When deputies arrived, they found a single-engine Beechcraft Bonanza had crashed, killing all on board.
The National Transportation Safety Board said Sunday it is investigating the crash.
ABC News California affiliate KFSN reported the plane crashed just a few seconds after taking off.
