(HENRY COUNTY, Ga.) — Investigators in Georgia and NBA Hall of Famer Shaquille O’Neal are offering a $30,000 reward for any information regarding a suspect who shot and wounded a police officer last week.
Henry County Police Officer Paramhans Desai, 38, was responding to a domestic disturbance on Thursday and was attempting to make an arrest, the Henry County Police Department said in a statement. Jordan Jackson, 22, of McDonough, Georgia, allegedly shot Desai and fled the scene in a 2016 Honda Civic, according to the police.
Desai was taken to Grady Medical Center and was listed in critical, but stable condition Sunday, the police said. Desai, who is married and has two children, has been with the Henry County PD for two years and previously worked for the Georgia Department of Corrections and DeKalb County Police, the police said.
On Sunday, a reward for information on Jackson’s whereabouts was announced and the money came from several sources.
The Harris County Sheriff’s office and the U.S. Marshals Office each offered $10,000, Crime Stoppers Atlanta offered $5,000, the Henry County PD said.
O’Neal, who lives in Henry County and is an honorary deputy in Clayton County, Georgia, also offered $5,000.
Anyone with tips can call Crime Stoppers Atlanta at 800-597-TIPS (8477).
(LAS VEGAS) — With an eye on both the midterm elections and 2024, a host of Republican lawmakers — including many potential presidential contenders — spoke in Las Vegas at the Republican Jewish Coalition Annual Leadership Meeting this weekend. Most called this past week’s election outcomes a signifier of things to come during midterms.
“As we move forward, the signs are clear and the trends are unmistakable,” House Minority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy said Saturday. “A Republican wave is underway.”
Attendees aim to ensure that GOP gains continue through 2024’s presidential election, with possible candidates making their case without explicitly stating their intentions.
“A lot of people have come here to audition,” said Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., Saturday night.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, former Ambassador Nikki Haley, Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and former Vice President Mike Pence all spoke at the event. The conference also featured a video message from former President Donald Trump.
“We will win back the House. We will win back the Senate,” Trump said in his video address. “And we will win back in 2024 that beautiful white building sometimes referred to as the White House.”
While there has been no shortage of commentary on the fact that Virginia Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin kept Trump at an arm’s length, most of the speakers in Las Vegas leaned hard into their support of Trump.
“President Trump’s single most redeeming characteristic — the man has a steel backbone and he doesn’t back down,” Cruz said Friday to boisterous applause. “After years of Republicans scared of their own shadows, there’s a reason we celebrate a leader who’s willing to stand up and fight.”
“Who’s going to be the nominee [in 2024]? I don’t know, but I do know this, that Donald Trump was a hell of a president,” said Graham.
On Friday night, Scott, who is the chair of the National Republican Senate Committee, told ABC News that Trump will do “whatever he can” to help Republicans take control of both chambers of Congress in 2022. Depending on the race, it could mean standing back.
“You should listen to the candidate because they know their state and they know their race,” Scott said. “And so you should let them figure out how involved you should be and that’s anybody, including the NRSC.”
On Saturday, Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel told attendees that connecting voters on issues they care about and presenting a united party to the electorate are the keys to winning more elections.
The Republican Jewish Coalition meeting typically centers on foreign policy, like relations with Israel and with other nations in the region. Former Vice President Mike Pence largely touted the accomplishments of the Trump administration as it pertains to Israel, including moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem.
“Under the Trump-Pence administration, if the world knew nothing else the world knew this. America stands with Israel,” said Pence. “Our administration was able to take historic steps to strengthen the ties in the American people and the Jewish state of Israel.”
In addition to U.S.-Israeli relations, this time around at the annual meeting there was a great deal of attention paid to domestic issues.
Among the most talked-about issues was teaching so-called critical race theory in schools, a topic that has emerged as a flashpoint in conservative circles. Every speaker referred to critical race theory during their remarks, with some, like Haley, calling it “liberal indoctrination.”
“We’ve got the midterm elections next year where the stakes couldn’t be higher,” she said Saturday. “Those elections are about whether we stop socialism, defend our borders, return on fiscal sanity and get the liberal indoctrination out of our schools.”
“We’re watching critical race theory and during the woke curriculum infiltrate our school districts,” Noem said.
Opposition to vaccine mandates was also a frequently mentioned topic.
DeSantis spoke of his opposition to voting reform, framing changes as a danger to Republican ability to wield power.
“They want to make conservative Americans second-class citizens,” said DeSantis. “They want to lock us out from being able to exercise power to be able to exercise policy.”
President Joe Biden’s agenda, including his newly passed infrastructure plan, also made waves. Most framed Biden’s agenda as being hijacked by progressives in comparison to how he campaigned. The word “socialism” was used freely to describe the Democratic agenda throughout the event.
During Christie’s remarks Saturday, he cited his record of supporting Trump, but implored the crowd to give up on trying to relitigate the 2020 election. The response from the crowd to Christie, an ABC News contributor, was tepid.
“We can no longer talk about the past and past elections. No matter where you stand on that issue, no matter where you stand, it is over,” said Christie.
(NEW YORK) — “Everything bad that you think of was there,” Sarina told ABC News in a video call, wiping away tears. “I was feeling like, ‘I’m gonna die. Why?'”
She said she came to terms with dying during her first attempt to get inside Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul on Aug. 19, surrounded by shouting, gunshots and beatings in a sea of thousands of people desperate to flee — but she said she told herself if she could just get her two-year-old daughter out of the Taliban’s Afghanistan, it would be OK.
“It was not easy that night,” said Sarina, whose name ABC News has changed for the safety of her family still in Afghanistan. “One second I thought I lost my daughter forever. I thought, ‘This is not the life I wanted…I will remain under Taliban, and they will kill me. At least my daughter will be safe.”
After waiting outside the airport for more than 10 hours, where she said they were treated like “animals,” her family returned to their shelter in Kabul, saying her daughter had seen enough.
It’s a day Sarina said is seared in her memory as a “nightmare” and one she hopes her 2-year-old will forget — although bruises on her “tiny face,” as Sarina called it, pointing to her cheeks and explaining their shoulders pushed into their child in the crowd, would serve as a painful reminder of what they had endured.
“My eyes begin, like, filled with tears,” she said, when she’s asked about their journey. “I think it’s not possible to forget those moments that much soon.”
Her husband also came out with bruises, she said, after Taliban fighters whipped him with strands of rubber. Thousands queued outside the airport, and thousands, like Sarina, didn’t make it out of Afghanistan that day.
“The entire night, I cried. I thought ‘Why why? Why did this happen to my daughter?’ She is my everything. She’s a little angel,” she said, through tears. “She was crying. and she told me, ‘Mommy, Mommy, home? Home? Home?'”
Surrounded by chaos, Sarina said she thought to herself, too, “Where is home?”
Fighting for women of Afghanistan — and her life
Sarina spent nine years studying in India, but returned to Afghanistan after completing her Bachelor’s Degree to work in women’s activism.
“There were job opportunities in India for me, but I let them, I let them out. I wanted to be in my country, feel the pain of those poor people, those women, that I really need — I really need to help them,” she said.
She said she worked on USAID projects and in a legal clinic for nearly three years, helping women divorce their husbands after domestic violence, before taking her “dream job” at the relief and development organization, Cordaid.
“Millions of girls, they want education. They want to study in universities. They want jobs. Even if you go to the villages of Afghanistan, you can see that desire in their eyes — how much the Afghan woman wants education,” she said.
But her work — and her life — became at risk when the Taliban seized power, she said. She was called to be evacuated because she was a target.
After the failed first attempt, which she called “traumatic,” Sarina bunkered back down with her family and seven other women in Cordaid — a Dutch development organization she worked for since 2019 which campaigns for women’s rights and independence. When she said she was feeling the lowest, she received a text from a stranger in the U.S. asking how she could help.
“That moment I needed some good words,” she told ABC News, choking up. “Someone telling me that ‘You’re okay, we are with you.’ And that was the moment Cori told me that, ‘Don’t worry Sarina, now I’m with you, many other people are behind you. You’re not alone. We are trying to help you.'”
Cori Shepherd Stern, an Oscar-nominated filmmaker who has an adopted refugee daughter, reached out to Sarina after learning of her situation through a mutual friend. It gave her the motivation she needed for a second attempt two days later.
Shepherd Stern told ABC News it was one of the most “emotionally intense” moments of her life.
“The sheer terror she was feeling, the horrified shock from what she was witnessing was very, very clear and immediate to me,” she said. “I took steps to logistically help her but more than anything, I tried to call out to her from a safe place and stay with her until she and her daughter were safe, too.”
Using Google Maps and communicating with volunteers outside Kabul, Sarina said she and her team were able to find the Dutch army behind the Baron Hotel on Aug. 26, and yelled out, ‘”Holland, Holland!'” The Dutch government had agreed to take the women of Cordaid and their families to safety.
“Finally, that was,” she said, stopping to cry. “That was the moment of victory — but I’m not happy. My family, my mom, my dad, my sisters, I immediately called my dad and told him that I am not happy. I don’t have you in here. I’m not happy. He said ‘don’t worry about that.’ I thought, ‘No.’ Because I know that my dad has done a lot for us.”
Turning to help get her family out
Acknowledging how far she’d come in days alone — from Kabul to Pakistan and from Pakistan to Turkey and from Turkey to Amsterdam — where she’s been at a military base for Afghan refugees for the last 10 weeks — she’s extremely distressed because her family is behind.
“How can I be safe, and they are all miserable?” she said. “They are not safe,” she continued, adding that she’s particularly concerned for her father.
“He is, right now, in depression,” she said, then recalling the version of her father she is used to, bringing a smile to her face. “He is a legend. He is like a hero. He studied at all times of his life,” she said, listing all the places where he has taught and spoken.
Shepherd Stern, who helped Sarina with moral support, and a small team of volunteers are now helping her family with paperwork to get them out. The options they’re looking into include a P-2 visa for her father or individual humanitarian parole for each family member.
But an unprecedented 20,000 Afghan nationals like Sarina’s family have requested parole since August — more than 10 times the number of applications received from around the world in a typical year, USCIS confirmed to ABC News in a statement.
The agency said they are surging resources and training personnel in response — but activists say it isn’t coming soon enough.
“This family needs to get out now,” Shepherd Stern said.
Sarina talks with her dad on the phone every day, multiple times a day, and she said he tells her, “‘My dearest daughter. You should follow your education. You should keep it up.'”
“He was always telling me that you should stand on your feet. ‘I am educating you to be a strong woman,’ and I’m a strong woman, but I am feeling bad that he is not here,” she cried. “He does not deserve to be over there while these people rule over him.”
Because of his devotion to educating women, she said she expects more from the U.S. and international aid agencies to help get her family out.
“It’s a matter of saving the lives of five people,” she said.
Sarina said she refuses to think what she considers unthinkable — that they may not get out.
“Life ends for them — because there is nothing left over here. What should my dad do? What should my sisters do? You tell me — what’s left? It’s mean — it’s life-ending for them,” she said.
“I just don’t want to think about that,” she added, with optimism in her voice. “They will get out soon.”
Sarina’s future
The Netherlands managed to evacuate around 2,000 people like Sarina from Afghanistan.
She has a permit for residency for five years — but it’s unclear when she’ll get settled in a home. To prepare herself, she watches Dutch language lessons on YouTube every day and is now taking classes at a local university offered to refugees. She plans to pursue a Master’s in gender and sexuality studies and become a professor — like her father.
While her time at the camp in the Netherlands has presented new challenges, it has also brought new blessings: Sarina learned on Tuesday that she is approximately eight weeks pregnant.
It’s all the more reason she wants her family out.
“Please help my family. Get them out of Afghanistan, please. That’s a request. That’s a humble request,” she said, with special devotion to her father. “I am everything I am today because of him.”
(NEW YORK) — Three Ivy League school campuses issued temporary evacuations Sunday afternoon after receiving bomb threats.
The incidents at Cornell, Columbia and Brown universities came two days after a similar threat took place at Yale University Friday.
The New York Police Department was called to Columbia’s campus around 2:30 p.m. and students and visitors were told to avoid the area, the school said on Twitter. About two hours later, the school announced that the threats “were deemed not credible by the NYPD and the campus buildings have been cleared for reoccupancy.”
Brown University’s officials said in a statement that officers were called in after a bomb threat was made over the phone. Then, at around 5:45 p.m., the school announced that investigators found no evidence of a credible threat.
“Buildings that had been evacuated are now reopened, and university operations have resumed as normal,” the school said in a statement.
Cornell University officials said a security perimeter was put into place around 4:10 p.m. as officers investigated the threats. Around 7:34, the school said there was no credible threat and reopened the campus.
“We are relieved to report that this threat appears to have been a hoax. A cruel hoax; but, thankfully, just a hoax,” Cornell representatives said in a statement.
Police closed down Yale’s campus and some local businesses for over four hours before they gave an all clear, ABC affiliate WTNH reported.
Police officers were still investigated the threats at Cornell and Brown Sunday evening.
Later Sunday night, the NYPD tweeted that the ordeal at Columbia was a “swatting incident,” and they will continue to investigate.
No devices have been found at any of the schools and investigators have not made any arrests.
(WASHINGTON) — In an angry conversation on his final day as president, Donald Trump told the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee he was leaving the GOP and creating his own political party — and that he didn’t care if the move would destroy the Republican Party, according to a new book by ABC News Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl.
Trump only backed down when Republican leaders threatened to take actions that would have cost Trump millions of dollars, Karl writes his upcoming book, Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show.
The book gives a detailed account of Trump’s stated intention to reject the party that elected him president and the aggressive actions taken by party leaders to force him to back down.
The standoff started on Jan. 20, just after Trump boarded Air Force One for his last flight as president.
“[RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel] called to wish him farewell. It was a very un-pleasant conversation,” Karl writes in “Betrayal,” set to be released on Nov. 16.
“Donald Trump was in no mood for small talk or nostalgic goodbyes,” Karl writes. “He got right to the point. He told her he was leaving the Republican Party and would be creating his own political party. The president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., was also on the phone. The younger Trump had been relentlessly denigrating the RNC for being insufficiently loyal to Trump. In fact, at the January 6 rally before the Capitol Riot, the younger Trump all but declared that the old Republican Party didn’t exist anymore.”
With just hours left in his presidency, Trump was telling the Republican Party chairwoman that he was leaving the party entirely. The description of this conversation and the discussions that followed come from two sources with direct knowledge of these events.
“I’m done,” Trump told McDaniel. “I’m starting my own party.”
“You cannot do that,” McDaniel told Trump. “If you do, we will lose forever.”
“Exactly. You lose forever without me,” Trump responded. “I don’t care.”
Trump’s attitude was that if he had lost, he wanted everybody around him to lose as well, Karl writes. According to a source who witnessed the conversation, Trump was talking as if he viewed the destruction of the Republican Party as a punishment to those party leaders who had betrayed him — including those few who voted to impeach him and the much larger group he believed didn’t fight hard enough to overturn the election in his favor.
“This is what Republicans deserve for not sticking up for me,” Trump told McDaniel, according to the book.
In response, McDaniel tried to convince Trump that creating his own party wouldn’t just destroy the Republican Party, it would also destroy him.
“This isn’t what the people who depended on you deserve, the people who believed in you,” McDaniel said. “You’ll ruin your legacy. You’ll be done.”
But Trump said he didn’t care, Karl writes.
“[Trump] wasn’t simply floating an idea,” Karl writes in the book. “He was putting the party chairwoman on notice that he had decided to start his own party. It was a done deal. He had made up his mind. ‘He was very adamant that he was going to do it,’ a source who heard the president’s comments later told me.”
Following the tense conversion, McDaniel informed RNC leadership about Trump’s plans, spurring a tense standoff between Trump and his own party over the course of the next four days.
While Trump, “morose in defeat and eager for revenge, plotted the destruction of the Republican Party … the RNC played hardball,” according to the book.
“We told them there were a lot of things they still depended on the RNC for, and that if this were to move forward, all of it would go away,” an RNC official told Karl.
According to the book, “McDaniel and her leadership team made it clear that if Trump left, the party would immediately stop paying legal bills incurred during post-election challenges.”
“But, more significant, the RNC threatened to render Trump’s most valuable political asset worthless,” Karl writes, referring to “the campaign’s list of the email addresses of forty million Trump supporters.”
“It’s a list Trump had used to generate money by renting it to candidates at a steep cost,” says the book. “The list generated so much money that party officials estimated that it was worth about $100 million.”
Five days after revealing plans that could have destroyed his own political party on that last flight aboard Air Force One, Karl writes, Trump backed down, saying he would remain a Republican after all.
Asked this week to respond to Karl’s book, both Trump and McDaniel denied the story.
“This is false, I have never threatened President Trump with anything,” McDaniel told ABC News. “He and I have a great relationship. We have worked tirelessly together to elect Republicans up and down the ballot, and will continue to do so.”
Trump, responding to the story, said, “ABC Non News and 3rd rate reporter Jonathan Karl have been writing fake news about me from the beginning of my political career. Just look at what has now been revealed about the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax. It was a made up and totally fabricated scam and the lamestream media knew it. It just never ends!”
Trump has long denounced news reports that he had considered starting his own party as “fake news.” In Karl’s final interview with the former president for his book, Trump claimed to not recall his conversation with McDaniel on Jan. 20, saying, “a lot of people suggested a third party, many people” — but that he himself had never even thought about leaving the GOP.
“You mean I was going to form another party or something?” Trump asked Karl incredulously. “Oh, that is bulls**t. It never happened.”
(WASHINGTON) — Three Muslim Americans subjected to FBI surveillance inside their places of worship will ask the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday to allow a religious discrimination lawsuit against the agency to move forward despite government concern about national security.
Yassir Fazaga, a former imam at the Orange County Islamic Foundation, and Ali Uddin Malik and Yasser AbdelRahim, both members of the Islamic Center of Irvine, allege the government and its agents illegally targeted members of the faith communities solely because of their religion.
The FBI has acknowledged running a surveillance program at several Southern California mosques between 2006 and 2007 in a hunt for potential terrorists, but the Bureau has not publicly revealed the basis for its covert operation or directly addressed claims of religious bias.
“Can you be spied on because of where you worship?” said Hussam Ayhoush, executive director of the Los Angeles chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which is backing the plaintiffs. Muslims “deserve to feel comfortable practicing their faith with friends in the safety of mosques.”
The men say that the presence of an undercover government informant, who was asking about jihad and recording conversations, breached a sacred trust all Americans deserve when exercising religious freedom.
“I’m very angry. Privacy is very important,” said Fazaga. “To know the government is doing this makes me not just angry, but humiliated.”
None of the plaintiffs or the places of worship have been implicated in any known criminal activity or federal charges.
“We are hoping to shed light on the agency that continues to treat Muslims as second-class citizens … unlawfully targeting Americans on the basis of their religion,” Ayhoush said.
When the men sued the FBI in 2011, the agency invoked state secrets privilege to block the lawsuit from proceeding, insisting a trial would require the disclosure of sensitive evidence that could threaten national security.
The privilege shields information whenever the government believes “there is a reasonable danger that compulsion of the evidence will expose military [or other] matters which, in the interest of national security, should not be divulged,” it says in court documents.
A federal district court sided with the FBI, but a panel of judges reversed that decision on appeal in favor of the Muslim men.
The appeals court said that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 allows a judge to evaluate secret evidence and determine whether the government can keep some or all of it secret.
The FBI rejects that view.
“The Executive Branch has the critical responsibility to protect the national security of the United States,” the Biden administration wrote in Supreme Court documents, defending the FBI. “The state-secrets privilege helps enable the Executive to meet that constitutional duty.”
Ahilan Arulanantham, a UCLA Law School professor who is arguing the plaintiffs’ case before the Supreme Court, said he hopes the justices will set limits on the government’s ability to keep secrets.
“The question is very simple: Will these people ever get a day in court, or can the government slam the door shut whenever they say they’re acting in the interest of national security?” Arulanantham said.
Ali Malik, who helped mentor the FBI informant in matters of Islamic faith — not knowing his true identity — said he was outraged after later learning about the government operation.
“When I found out my government spied on me because of my faith, I felt betrayed … by the very institution meant to defend the Constitution of the U.S.,” Malik said. “I’m suing the FBI to protect them and their children. The government must be held accountable for violating our religious freedom.”
The Supreme Court is expected to hand down a decision in the case by the end of June 2022.
(LONDON) — The U.S. is reopening borders to vaccinated travelers on Monday after 20 months of being closed to many countries, including the United Kingdom, Brazil, China, India, South Africa and most of Europe.
After a number of stops and starts, President Joe Biden announced the date for the resumption on Oct. 25.
“I have determined that it is in the interests of the United States to move away from the country-by-country restrictions previously applied during the COVID-19 pandemic,” the White House said in a statement.
Many travelers communicated their excitement at the news, some prepping for their big trip back weeks in advance. A group of Twitter users is even planning on celebrating together in London’s Heathrow Airport Monday morning before their flight.
The travel ban was first put into place by former President Donald Trump in March 2020, briefly lifted when he left office, then reinstated by Biden.
Many couples communicated their frustration and despair online, rallying around the Twitter hashtag #LoveIsNotTourism.
Christin Bell and Josh Hague met in the summer of 2019, when Bell was traveling from her hometown of Fort Wayne, Indiana, to England. They would travel back and forth across the Atlantic every six weeks to see each other, but found themselves separated by the travel ban.
“[Initially we thought] this is just temporary, because at first it was,” Bell told ABC News. “This is going to be 60 days and then we’ll be through it. Well, 60 days quickly turned into two years and we struggled.”
As the U.K. relaxed its travel restrictions, Bell was allowed to visit Hague six months later, but he was still forbidden from coming to the U.S., unless he spent two weeks quarantining in a country not included in the travel ban, such as Turkey or Mexico, something that was not possible for them financially.
“Americans could travel pretty much wherever they wanted. Yet, family members of Americans could not travel, and that was extremely frustrating,” said Bell.
In January, as the COVID vaccine was distributed on both sides of the Atlantic, the ban was kept in place, with the Biden administration stating concerns about the delta variant.
“With the pandemic worsening and more contagious variants spreading, this isn’t the time to be lifting restrictions on international travel,” White House press secretary Jen Paski said in January.
Many speculated that Biden might lift the ban after the G-7 conference during the summer, but the White House reiterated their position in July 2021, despite mounting international pressure.
“The American travel ban on Europeans felt much more arbitrary and also allowed for much less exceptions. … It reinforced the feeling that the American passport is stronger than the European passports,” Celia Belin, a visiting fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe at Brookings Institution, told ABC News.
On Oct. 20, in the midst of a spat with France over a submarine contract with Australia, the Biden administration announced it was lifting the ban on vaccinated travelers.
“[The announcement] came on the back of a very difficult summer transatlantically for Joe Biden,” Belin told ABC News.
Belin added that lifting the ban, which only applies to vaccinated travelers, still excludes many countries where the vaccine is not yet easily available or recognized by the U.S. The administration is also working through a backlog of visas, which were halted during the ban.
“The day that the ban lift was announced … we just looked at each other and cried with joy that it was finally ending,” said Bell.
Bell and Hague got engaged the day before the ban was lifted, and are now planning their wedding in the U.S.
“We can actually go forward and plan our life together instead of sitting in this excruciating limbo,” Bell said.
(NEW YORK) — As the COVID-19 pandemic has swept the globe, more than 5 million people have died from the disease worldwide, including over 754,000 Americans, according to real-time data compiled by Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Systems Science and Engineering.
Just 68.3% of Americans ages 12 and up are fully vaccinated against COVID-19, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Here’s how the news is developing. All times Eastern:
Nov 08, 8:52 am
US reopens borders to vaccinated travelers
The U.S. reopened borders to vaccinated travelers on Monday after 20 months of being closed to many countries, including the United Kingdom, Brazil, China, India, South Africa and most of Europe.
In January, as the vaccine was distributed on both sides of the Atlantic, the ban was kept in place, with the Biden administration stating concerns about the delta variant.
On Oct. 20, the Biden administration announced it was lifting the ban on vaccinated travelers.
The ban, which only applies to vaccinated travelers, still excludes many countries where the vaccine is not yet easily available or recognized by the U.S.
Nov 08, 8:04 am
Global COVID-19 cases top 250 million in under 2 years
The worldwide number of people who have been diagnosed with COVID-19 surpassed 250 million on Monday, according to a count kept by Johns Hopkins University.
The United States, India and Brazil account for about a third of the recorded cases, Johns Hopkins data shows.
The grim milestone came as some countries in Eastern Europe, including Russia, Ukraine and Greece, grapple with record levels of newly reported cases.
The pandemic began less than two years ago after the virus was first detected in Wuhan, China, in December 2019.
Nov 08, 6:46 am
Biden administration urges schools to provide COVID-19 shots, info
The Biden administration sent letters to superintendents and principals across the United States on Monday, urging them to set up COVID-19 vaccination clinics inside their elementary schools.
“Parents rely on their children’s teachers, principals, school nurses, and other school personnel to help keep their students safe and healthy every school year,” U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra and U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona wrote in the letters. “We need your help now more than ever to continue to protect our communities and our children.”
They also asked the school leaders to distribute information “from trusted sources” about COVID-19 vaccines to all families with children ages 5 to 11, and to host community engagements with parents in partnership with local pediatricians and “other trusted medical voices” in the community.
“The communications you issue — in languages accessible to your parents — will be critical in helping families learn more about the vaccine,” Becerra and Cardona wrote.
The letters went out on the same day that first lady Jill Biden and U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy plan to visit an elementary school in McLean, Virginia, that was used as one of the first sites in the country to begin administering the polio vaccine in 1954.
School officials would not be responsible for handling COVID-19 vaccines or giving shots to students. Instead, they would partner with a local vaccine provider already administering shots, such as a pharmacy or community health clinic.
The schools would be allowed to use federal dollars through the American Rescue Plan to offset any costs with providing the space and organizing the vaccine drive.
(HOUSTON) — At least eight people are dead, including two teenagers, after a crowd surged toward the stage at a massive Houston concert, causing panic and chaos, authorities said.
Over 50,000 people were at the first night of this weekend’s sold-out Astroworld music festival at NRG Stadium when, around 9:30 p.m. local time, “the crowd began to compress toward the front of the stage,” Houston Fire Chief Sam Pena told reporters Friday night.
“That caused some panic, and it started causing some injuries,” Pena said.
Twenty-five people, including one as young as 10, were transported to the hospital, authorities said. Eleven people were transported in cardiac arrest, Pena added.
As of Saturday afternoon,13 people were still hospitalized, including five under the age of 18, Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner told reporters during a briefing.
Those who died ranged in age from 14 to 27. One was 14, another 16, two were 21, two were 23 and one was 27, the mayor said. One has yet to be identified.
“Nothing of this magnitude that any of us can recall, and certainly that I can recall, has taken place in this city,” Turner said.
The cause of death of the eight individuals won’t be known until the medical examiner completes the investigation, Pena said.
Some of the deceased individuals didn’t have identification on them, Houston Police Chief Troy Finner told reporters Friday.
A command post for information on missing persons was set up at a nearby hotel. As of Saturday afternoon, no one has been reported missing, officials said.
The festival ended early Friday night and has been canceled for Saturday.
Pena described the chaotic scene in an interview with ABC News’ Gio Benitez on “Good Morning America” Saturday.
“As soon as the crowd began to surge … those people began to be trapped, essentially up at the front, and they began to be trampled and they actually had people falling down and passing out,” Pena said.
One concertgoer said she was pushed “very aggressively.”
“It was intense, it was intense,” the concertgoer told “Good Morning America.” “We were seeing people getting pulled out of the crowd, and we would see some of these people unconscious.”
Madeline Eskins, who attended the concert with her boyfriend, told ABC News they tried to leave when they started getting pushed from all sides toward the front of the stage but couldn’t move.
“I remember I was about to tell him to tell my son that I love him because at that point I was like, ‘I’m going to die,'” Eskins said. “I really didn’t think I was going to see him again. And then I fainted.”
Amid the chaotic scene and mass of people it was difficult to disperse the crowd and reach those who needed medical attention, Pena said. The festival organizer, Live Nation, had set up a field hospital of sorts to treat minor injuries during the festival, but that was “quickly overwhelmed.”
Eskins, an ICU nurse, said once she recovered she started helping the on-site medical staff treat unconscious concertgoers and delegate tasks, though medical supplies, including defibrillators, were limited.
“I was trying to control the chaos as much as I can,” she said. “Nothing could have prepared them for this.”
The cause of the incident is currently unknown, according to Finner, who said Live Nation is cooperating with police in reviewing video footage of the concert.
“Nobody has all the answers tonight,” he said Friday. “There’s a lot of rumors going around. We don’t have facts, we don’t have evidence.
“We’ve got to do an investigation and find out because it’s not fair to the producers, to anybody else involved, until we determine what happened, what caused the surge. We don’t know. We will find out.”
Concertgoers knew something was amiss during a set by headliner Travis Scott. During the middle of his performance, the rapper stopped and told the crowd, “Somebody passed out right here,” as captured by an Apple Music livestream of the event.
“I’m absolutely devastated by what took place last night,” Scott, a Houston native, said in a statement on Twitter Saturday. “My prayers go out to the families and all those impacted by what happened at Astroworld Festival.”
Scott said the Houston Police Department has his “total support” during the investigation, and that he is “committed to working together with the Houston community to heal and support the families in need.”
Festival organizers also said they are “focused on supporting local officials,” and urged anyone with information to contact the police.
Live Nation also released a statement Friday saying it was “heartbroken for those lost and impacted at Astroworld last night,” and is “working to provide as much information and assistance as possible” to local authorities.
Investigations will be speaking with concert promoters and witnesses and reviewing videos from the event and venue on Saturday, according to Turner.
“I have called for a detailed briefing from all stakeholders, including Live Nation, Harris County, NRG Park, Police, Fire, Office of Emergency Management, and other agencies, explaining how the event got out of control leading to the deaths and injuries of several attendees,” he said in an earlier statement.
Gov. Greg Abbott said he has ordered the Texas Department of Public Safety to make state resources available to support the investigation.
“What happened at Astroworld Festival last night was tragic, and our hearts are with those who lost their lives and those who were injured in the terrifying crowd surge,” Abbott said in a statement. “Thank you to the first responders and good Samaritans who were on site and immediately tended to those who were injured in the crowd.”
This isn’t the first time there have been crowd control issues at Astroworld. There was a “similar incident” at the 2019 festival, where there was a “breaching of barricades,” according to Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo.
“Actions were taken after that experience. There were stronger fencing more and more robust barricades, more personnel and more security personnel,” Hidalgo told reporters Saturday.
The number of Houston Police Department officers on hand increased from 47 in 2019 to 76 at this year’s festival, she said. There was also additional space for crowd control, she said.
“But I want to know, the community deserves to know, if more needed to have been done,” she said, calling for an independent investigation into the tragedy. “The public has a role here, too. If you have any information as to what took place, let us know.”
ABC News’ Frank Elaridi contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — Pete and Chasten Buttigieg tweeted about their son’s return home after a three-week hospitalization Saturday, including a week on a ventilator.
“Thankful, relieved, and reflecting a great deal on the mixture of joy, terror, and love that is parenting,” Pete Buttigieg, U.S. Secretary of Transportation, said in a tweet responding to his husband.
Chasten Buttigieg first tweeted about his son’s hospitalization on Halloween saying, “Gus has been having a rough go of it but we’re headed in the right direction.” The transportation secretary retweeted the message.
The baby also traveled 125 miles in an ambulance, but the family is grateful for the medical professionals’ care, according to Chasten Buttigieg’s Twitter post.
“We’re so relieved, thankful, and excited for him and Penelope to take DC by storm! Thank you so much for all of the love and prayers,” tweeted Chasten Buttigieg.
The infant, Joseph “Gus” August Buttigieg, and his twin, Penelope Rose, were adopted by the political couple earlier this year, and Pete Buttigieg previously said they were born prematurely.
“The work that we are doing is joyful, fulfilling, wonderful work. It’s important work. And it’s work that every American ought to be able to do when they welcome a new child into their family,” said Pete Buttigieg to Jake Tapper on CNN, responding to criticism that he was taking too much time off for paid family leave.
“The Secretary feels fortunate and grateful to be able to take time to focus on his responsibilities as a father, and believes all American parents deserve the same,” the spokesperson said via a statement in late October.
Chasten Buttigieg also tweeted his thanks for everyone who shared their stories of Gus in the neo-natal intensive care unit.
“Those were so comforting during such a scary time. Thank you for helping us feel less-alone amidst all of the anxiety and uncertainty,” tweeted Chasten Buttigieg.
One out of every ten infants were born prematurely in 2020, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Complications related to preterm birth complications are the leading cause of death among children and were responsible for around 1 million deaths in 2015, according to the World Health Organization.
