(HOUSTON) — The remains of a 9-year-old boy have been discovered in a Houston home along with three abandoned children, authorities said.
One of the children, a 15-year-old, said his 9-year-old brother had been dead for one year and his body was in the room next to his, Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez said Monday.
The 15-year-old and the other two children — boys under the age of 10 — were found home alone on Sunday, the sheriff said.
Both younger kids “appeared malnourished and showed signs of physical injury,” he tweeted.
Deputies also “found skeletal remains of a small child,” the sheriff said.
All three children were taken to the hospital, he said. Their conditions were not released.
Authorities believe the parents hadn’t lived in the home for several months, Gonzalez said.
The children’s mother and her boyfriend were found late Sunday night, he said.
At a news conference Sunday Gonzalez called it a “horrific situation.”
“I have been in this business for a long time and I had never heard of a scenario like this,” he said.
(WASHINGTON) — The day of the Jan. 6 insurrection, Facebook noticed a rise in social media posts calling for violence and incitement around the certification of the U.S. presidential election result and the storming of the Capitol.
How the social media giant prepared for that day, and how it responded to the sudden onslaught of misleading information and violent rhetoric on both Facebook and Instagram is detailed in internal documents obtained by ABC News and a group of news organizations.
The documents were disclosed to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, a former employee, and provided to Congress in redacted form by Haugen’s legal counsel. It was provided to ABC News by a congressional staffer.
In her filing, Haugen alleged that Facebook had misled investors and the public about potential harms associated with the platform.
In response to a series of Wall Street Journal articles based largely on the documents provided by Haugen, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, in a statement rejected the idea that Facebook “systematically and willfully ignores” research that is “inconvenient for the company.”
One of the documents, updated on Jan. 7, shows that Facebook analyzed some of the Capitol riot’s impact on its platforms.
The document shows there was a spike in the volume of reports from Facebook and Instagram users complaining about posts inciting violence on Jan. 6. There were around seven times as many hourly reports about posts containing incitement to violence as in the previous week, according to the document.
Another set of documents created during the events of Jan. 6 show a wider range of restrictions explored by Facebook to limit potentially harmful content and mitigate violence and incitement. The documents indicate that more severe restrictions, known internally as “break glass” measures, had been active earlier, in 2020, and then removed or rolled back. Several of the restrictions listed as having been previously rolled back focused on groups, such as freezing commenting on some group posts or preventing groups from changing their names to include terms that aimed to delegitimize the election result.
Ciaran O’Connor, a disinformation analyst with the London-based think tank Institute for Strategic Dialogue, said keeping these type of measures in place may have prevented extremism on Jan. 6 that was inflamed by a “dangerous mix of disinformation and conspiracy theories.”
“This action was entirely irresponsible and illustrative of wider failings in Facebook in wrongly prioritizing platform growth over safety,” he said.
When asked about the rollback of the measures, a Facebook official stressed that they were only part of Facebook’s preparations for the election, and that specific metrics were used to determine whether or not to disable them. Measures that were disabled, the official said, were done so gradually.
During the chaos of Jan. 6, Facebook considered re-enabling some of its old strategies and implementing new ones, according to the documents, to respond to the risk of “violence and incitement” in connection with the day’s events.
Some of the proposed restrictions, such as demoting content promoting the storming of the capitol, were described in the documents as a “first line of reactive defense” on the day.
A Jan. 19 report by the Tech Transparency Project linked Facebook’s groups feature to the growth of the “Stop The Steal” movement after the 2020 election. Some members of those groups made calls to overthrow the U.S. government by force to reverse the election result. Facebook removed the first large “Stop The Steal” group, but copycats and similar groups by other names remained on the platform through the Jan. 6 insurrection, according to the report.
In another document, which BuzzFeed News obtained and published in April, Facebook researchers said that harmful movements, such as Stop the Steal, were coordinated efforts that ultimately “helped incite the Capitol Insurrection.”
O’Connor suggested there are potential dangers with Facebook’s groups feature. “Groups have proven to be hubs for misinformation and harmful content, where there often [are] no gatekeepers and false information is allowed to flourish,” O’Connor said.
When asked for comment on the potential harms of groups, a Facebook official pointed to an Oct. 20 update to the feature, as well as previous measures including changes to group recommendations and using independent fact-checkers to flag misinformation in groups.
After the events of Jan. 6, Facebook took further safety measures, according to O’Connor, including limiting the amount of political content shown to some users, including in the U.S., the suspension of Trump’s page, and tools for group administrators to limit toxic or harmful conversations.
Facebook said on Oct. 20 that it will start “demoting” content posted in groups by people who have broken community guidelines anywhere on the platform. The announcement was made with the aim to keep rule breakers from reaching others in their community, according to Facebook’s update.
Another internal Facebook document provides insight into how “demotion” — a way of limiting the exposure of content thought likely to break the platform’s rules — was used in an effort to minimize the spread of potentially harmful information in connection with the events of Jan. 6. The document was posted on Feb. 19.
According to Facebook’s Transparency Center, “problematic or low quality content” may be “demoted” in an effort to reduce the number of users who see it.
The practice of demotion was aided by custom-built algorithmic “pipelines.” Two of those pipelines on Jan. 6 tracked false claims that circulated widely on Facebook amid the storming of the Capitol: that Antifa protesters were responsible, and that then-President Donald Trump had invoked the Insurrection Act, according to the document.
The Insurrection Act, passed in 1807, allows the president to deploy military troops to respond to domestic unrest and disasters. It was last invoked in 1992 by the George H.W. Bush administration during the Los Angeles riots. Trump threatened to invoke the Act in 2020 amid protests over the police killing of George Floyd.
The team responsible for these anti-misinformation pipelines encountered challenges, according to the document, including questions about which posts constituted misinformation.
Employees involved in this effort aimed to avoid “false positives” that did not contain misinformation, using “exclusion terms” like “MAGA losers” to rule out posts that criticized, rather than promoted, the storming of the Capitol.
The document says employees sought guidance from colleagues to resolve “ambiguities,” such as whether a claim that former President Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act was misinformation.
Facebook’s employees, according to the document, judged that claims that Trump would invoke the Act around Jan. 6 were valid, while false claims that he had already done so were considered misinformation.
“In close collaboration with Misinfo Policy, we determined that statements in the future are not considered misinfo. However, users posting the phrase “he signed the Insurrection Act” was considered unambiguous enough and judged as misinfo,” wrote the author of the document, who has not been identified.
In a statement issued on the evening of Jan. 6, the company said that in addition to demoting content that likely violated its rules, it had begun removing certain types of posts, including those that praised the storming of the Capitol or that called for further violence.
Facebook later said in a Jan. 11 statement that it would remove content containing the phrase “stop the steal.”
Haugen told the SEC that the company elects to demote content despite knowing it is “an ineffective response” due to concerns about being criticized over accidentally removing “false positives,” or posts that do not violate its rules.
Facebook executives frequently cite the protection of free speech on the platform as a bedrock principle, such as in an October 2019 speech by CEO Mark Zuckerberg that called for its protection despite its “messiness.”
During Haugen’s Oct. 5 Senate testimony, she criticized Facebook’s “closed design” which she alleged hides information from researchers and regulators.
“As long as Facebook is operating in the shadows, hiding its research from public scrutiny, it is unaccountable,” Haugen said to a Senate Commerce subcommittee.
O’Connor said that despite the changes it implemented after Jan. 6, the company still has work to do.
“Facebook, and other online companies, must do better and take action to limit the dangers of falsified information and extremist actors on their platforms,” he said.
Facebook’s Oversight Board said on Oct. 11 that it would meet with Haugen “over the coming weeks” to discuss the claims she made about the platform’s content-moderation decisions.
Facebook, along with other social media companies like Twitter and Snapchat, was the subject of a request for records announced on Aug. 27 by the House Select Committee on the Jan. 6 attack.
On Oct. 22, another former Facebook employee, who has not been identified, was revealed to have submitted whistleblower documents to the SEC. The former employee told the Washington Post that Facebook prioritizes profit over safety on its platforms, and failed to take adequate action to address issues including illegal activity like drug dealing and antiquities trafficking.
A Facebook spokesperson said in response to the Washington Post’s report that the story was “beneath” the newspaper and set a “dangerous precedent” by relying on a single source, but did not deny the second whistleblower’s claims.
(ATLANTA) — With the lowest COVID-19 infection rate among all states as of Friday, California, which has some of the strictest mask and vaccination mandates in the country, has managed to flip the script as the former U.S. epicenter of the pandemic.
“They’ve been very much forward-thinking in terms of policies around vaccination requirements and mandates,” said epidemiologist Dr. John Brownstein, chief innovation officer at Boston Children’s Hospital and an ABC News contributor.
As of Friday evening, California had an infection rate of 61.1 cases per 100,000 over the past week, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The state was briefly the only to be classified with a “moderate” rate of transmission — 10 to 49.99 cases per 100,000 over seven days — before it went back up to “substantial,” meaning 50 to 99.99 cases per 100,000 over seven days.
Over the previous week, Hawaii, Florida, Louisiana, Connecticut, New Jersey, Mississippi, Maryland, Georgia and Washington, D.C., each also reported “substantial” rates.
A rate of at least 100 cases per 100,000 is labeled as “high.” Montana, Wyoming, Idaho and Alaska, as of Friday, had the highest rates over the previous seven days, with each above 450 cases per 100,000 people. The U.S. average over that span was 150.9.
Experts said California’s journey from worst to first is likely due to a combination of things.
“We can’t know for sure which factors are responsible,” Brownstein added, “but we know that the combination of interventions and policies can play a really strong role in driving transmission.”
‘Ending this pandemic’
More than 70% of California’s population has received at least one dose of vaccine, according to the CDC, and the state also leads in total vaccinations administered, roughly 53 million doses. As of Friday, the national average rate was 66.2%.
Being the first state to announce a COVID-19 vaccine requirement for schools, California has some of the strictest mandates in the U.S. The state has mandated vaccines for state employees, health care workers, teachers and at large indoor gatherings.
“The more aggressive the vaccination campaign, the better,” Dr. Todd Ellerin, director of infectious diseases at South Shore Health, told ABC News.
Given that vaccines are the most powerful tool we have in curbing the spread of COVID-19, experts said they believe California’s emphasis on immunizations has provided big dividends.
“These results show quite clearly that vaccines offer protection for individuals who lack immunity, with important implications for finally ending this pandemic,” Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, wrote in a blog post Tuesday.
Idaho and Wyoming have some of the lowest vaccination rates and the highest transmission rates.
All three COVID-19 vaccines available in the U.S. have since shown high effectiveness in preventing death due to COVID-19, and as of Friday, California boasted the lowest death rate in the country, with 0.3 per 100,000 over the previous week. The U.S. average over that span was 2.7 per 100,000.
Additionally, experts told ABC News, having endured the harshest waves of infections last winter and the delta surge in July, formerly infected Californians may have acquired antibodies and more of a natural immunity to COVID-19 — both factors that, in concert with vaccines, could be driving down case numbers.
‘More work to do’
In addition to strict vaccine mandates, California has been unwavering on face-coverings, testing and social distancing policies.
“While California has administered more vaccines than any other state, we have more work to do,” the California Department of Public Health said in a statement to ABC News.
Everyone, regardless of vaccination status, is required to wear a mask on public transit, in health care settings and at educational and correctional facilities. Masks are required for all unvaccinated people and recommended for vaccinated people in settings such as theaters, retail stores, restaurants and bars.
Despite having a higher vaccination rate than California, states like Vermont are still falling behind on transmission rate rankings, which experts said points to the importance of distancing and masking. Breakthrough cases seen in Vermont can be further explained by its higher proportion of residents 65 and older.
Mobility
Research shows mobility, or movement in populations, can be a predictor of disease spread, especially via air travel or mass transit. This became evident through the surge of COVID-19 cases the U.S. saw during holiday season.
Gov. Gavin Newsom pleaded with California residents on Christmas Eve to avoid holiday gatherings at a time when hospitals in the state were under “unprecedented pressure.”
Californian cities experienced a huge surge of cases and hospitalizations following the holidays, although rates have since declined.
No stranger to stay-at-home orders, the California government imposed several lockdowns and restrictions to curb the spread of the virus. It celebrated its most recent reopening in mid-June, which replaced 15-month-long public health restrictions with conditions more akin to “business as usual.”
“In the height of the pandemic, people were locked down, they weren’t moving at all, they were staying at home,” Brownstein told ABC News. “The more people move around, that’s usually an indicator for increased transmission.”
The great outdoors
The virus has been shown to spread more indoors and with people in close proximity to one another. California’s sunny climate means more people spend more time outside.
“When we spend most of our time indoors, that’s when transmission is greatest,” Ellerin said.
Added Brownstein: “More close contacts with people outside your household indoors is what creates additional risk.”
This effect is also compounded by the rise in the virus’ effective reproductive number during the winter season with research suggesting that a drop in temperature encourages virus growth.
Compared to many other states, especially as winter draws nearer, California is in “quite a good spot,” Brownstein said. “In all likelihood, the trends that we’re seeing are realistic and very much driven by compliance with masking and other interventions, plus the well-covered vaccination strategy in the state.”
(CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va.) — A dark moment in U.S. history is set to be revisited when a federal civil trial begins in Charlottesville, Virginia, over a violent 2017 white nationalist rally that ended with an alleged neo-Nazi ramming his car into counterprotesters, killing one and injuring more than 30.
Jury selection is scheduled to get underway on Monday in the high-profile civil case in the U.S. district court in Charlottesville against organizers and certain participants of the “Unite the Right” rally. Nine people injured over the two-day event are accusing promoters of exhorting followers to “defend the South and Western civilization” from non-white people and their allies, according to the lawsuit.
“There is one thing about this case that should be made crystal-clear at the outset — the violence in Charlottesville was no accident,” contends the suit that is seeking unspecified damages from 24 defendants, including James Alex Fields Jr., the Ohio man who plowed his Dodge Challenger into a group of counterprotesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer.
Fields, now 24, was convicted in 2018 of murder and multiple counts of aggravated malicious wounding, malicious wounding and hit and run. He was later sentenced to life in prison.
Fields also pleaded guilty to 29 federal hate crimes in a deal his attorneys worked out with prosecutors to spare him the death penalty.
Among the other defendants named in the civil suit are the alleged key organizers of the 2017 rally; Jason Kessler — who took out the permit for the rally — and Richard Spencer, president of the National Policy Institute, which the plaintiffs have described in court documents as a white nationalist think tank.
Also named as defendants in the suit are the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina, the East Coast Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and Andrew Anglin of Ohio, founder of the far-right website the Daily Stormer.
The trial will mark the first major civil suit to be tried under the Enforcement Act of 1871, which is also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act and passed by Congress in response to a wave of terrorist violence against African Americans in the South.
“These defendants planned violence on social media and on other communication forums and even in-person conversations. They went to Charlottesville, committed that violence and then celebrated that violence,” Amy Spitalnick, executive director of Integrity First for America, a nonprofit supporting the plaintiffs, told ABC affiliate WRIC in Richmond, Virginia.
The defense
The defendants claim they were exercising their First Amendment right to free speech and their right to self-defense, claiming counterprotesters initially turned violent.
“Plaintiffs complaint is long on coarse internet language regarding non-whites and short on allegations of racial violence perpetrated by any moving defendant,” defense attorneys argued in a motion to dismiss the case that was denied.
The defendants also said the lawsuit fails to demonstrate that they conspired to incite violence.
“Plaintiffs have failed to make any credible allegation that any moving defendant came to any agreement with anybody, to do anything, other than march and chant in Charlottesville,” defense attorneys said in a filing.
Kessler and Spencer both denied the allegations that they helped instigate the violence in their responses to the lawsuit.
Immediately after the Charlottesville rally ended in the deadly hit and run, Kessler released a statement blaming local police for the mayhem.
“The blame for today’s violence is primarily the result of the Charlottesville government officials and the law enforcement officers which failed to maintain law and order by protecting the First Amendment rights of the participants of the ‘Unite the Right’ rally,” Kessler said in a statement to WVIR-TV, the NBC affiliate station in Charlottesville.
The “Unite the Right” rally was organized in response to a February 2017 decision by the Charlottesville City Council to consider a petition to remove a statue honoring Civil War Confederate General Robert E. Lee from a city park.
Far-right demonstrators from across the country descended on the University of Virginia campus in Charlottesville on Aug. 11, 2017, where many were seen marching with tiki torches, giving Nazi salutes, and chanting “white lives matter” and “you will not replace us.”
Broken legs and emotional distress
Several of the plaintiffs were marching on Aug. 12, 2017, with a group of counterprotesters on Fourth Street in downtown Charlottesville when Fields’ was recorded driving his car into the protesters at high speed.
Marcus Martin, one of the plaintiffs, was peacefully protesting when he saw Fields’ car bearing down on him and pushed his fiancee out of the way right before he was struck by the vehicle, suffering a broken leg and ankle, according to the lawsuit.
Martin’s now-wife, Marissa Blair, who is also a plaintiff, was a co-worker and friend of Heyer, the woman killed in the incident. Both Martin and Blair suffered not only physical injuries but also emotional distress from the incident, according to the lawsuit.
Another plaintiff, referred to in court papers as Jane Doe 1, said she was marching with her mother and sister when Field’s car plowed into her, breaking both her legs and a knee.
‘Very fine people on both sides’
In the aftermath of the violence, then-President Donald Trump came under fire from Democrats — and many Republicans — for failing to strongly condemn the white supremacists and said during a news conference that there were “very fine people on both sides.”
President Joe Biden has said the turmoil in Charlottesville is the reason he ran for president.
“In that moment, I knew that the threat to this nation was unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime. I wrote at the time that we’re in a battle for the soul of this nation,” Biden said in his 2019 campaign launch video.
The civil trial is expected to last at least four weeks, and the aim of the litigation, according to the lawsuit, is to get justice for the plaintiffs and “to ensure that nothing like this will happen again at the hands of (the) Defendants, not on the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, and not anywhere else in the United States of America.”
(WASHINGTON) — Hate crimes against people of Asian descent rose by 76% in 2020, according to newly republished data by the FBI.
The FBI previously issued hate crime data in August, but due to an error in reporting Ohio’s statistics, the data was incomplete. The FBI has now corrected the technical problem in Ohio’s reporting system.
In 2020, 279 hate crime incidents against individuals of Asian descent were reported, compared to 158 incidents reported in 2019.
More than 60% of hate crimes in the United States were carried out on the basis of an individual’s race, according to FBI data released Monday.
“Every hate crime is an attack on the community,” Jay Greenberg, deputy assistant director of the FBI’s criminal division, told ABC News’ Chief Justice Correspondent Pierre Thomas.
Greenberg said most hate crimes are directed at African Americans, but acknowledged there was an uptick in anti-Asian hate crimes due to COVID-19.
In total, there were 8,052 single-bias incidents — crimes motivated by one type of bias — involving 11,126 victims. Comparatively, there were 7,103 single-bias incidents involving 8,552 victims in 2019.
The FBI said 20% of the hate crimes targeted a person’s sexual orientation and 13% of the hate crimes that occurred in 2020 were due to religious bias.
More than half of the offenders were white, and 21% of the offenders were African American.
Greenberg said they are working to make sure there is trust not only in the FBI, but in local communities as well.
“Because a hate crime is defined as a violent or property crime with a bias motivation, that crime could be categorized a number of different ways,” he explained. “We would like the public to reach out to us if they believe that they are a victim of a hate crime. It’s not for the public to make that determination; we will work with our state and local partners and help determine how best to investigate that.”
When someone is a victim of a hate crime, people have different reactions, according to Regina Thompson, the head of the FBI’s victim services unit.
“Everybody has their own way of reacting and on their own timeline, so sometimes people will react immediately in the aftermath of a crime,” said Thompson, who was named head of the unit last year. “Sometimes they’ll go immediately into crisis and crisis intervention will be needed. Sometimes the full impact isn’t felt for hours, days, weeks, sometimes even months after the criminal event and the way that they react, there’s absolutely no normal.”
Greenberg said that while they don’t discuss the number of cases they are currently investigating, leaders at the FBI “have brought a renewed focus to enforcing the civil rights program consistently across all our offices, and we have seen the number of cases rise in the last year.”
The bureau takes a victim-centered approach to hate crimes, the two senior FBI officials explained.
“The FBI does have a victim services division that is focused on assisting and supporting the victims of federal crime and that when they are a victim of a federal crime, we are there to assist them and they can expect us to do that with understanding, dignity, fairness and respect,” Thompson said.
Thompson said that hate crimes are especially unique because it is a direct assault on someone’s identity and individuality.
“It really strikes at the fundamental core of who the person is, which makes it very different from some of the other violent crimes,” she explained. “It is an attack on something that is within the person’s identity, something that’s very immutable about them and often something that they can’t even change. So that has a very deep psychological effect.”
(NEW YORK) — Vaccines for children will “very likely” be available the first or second week of November, White House Chief Medical Adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci said Sunday.
“If all goes well, and we get the regulatory approval and the recommendation from the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention], it’s entirely possible if not very likely that vaccines will be available for children from 5 to 11 within the first week or two of November,” Fauci told ABC This Week anchor George Stephanopoulos.
Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine is nearly 91% effective against symptomatic illness in children ages 5-11, according to new data. A Food and Drug Administration advisory panel will meet Tuesday to discuss authorizing the vaccine for children, which is currently only available to those ages 12 and older.
The CDC issued recommendations for both Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccine boosters for certain populations on Thursday evening, clearing the way for millions of Americans to receive additional shots. The CDC’s authorization followed the FDA’s, which it issued Wednesday.
The CDC is also permitting mix-and-match booster doses — allowing people to get a different booster brand than was used for a primary vaccination.
Fauci said Sunday the new recommendations should not cause confusion, as they allow for flexibility in booster selection.
“We would hope that people, if available, would get the boost from the original product,” Fauci said. “But if not, there’s the flexibility of what we’re calling ‘mixing and matching.'”
Stephanopoulos pressed Fauci on whether receiving a different brand shot from the original dose yields better protection.
“I have read some studies that suggest that it’s actually better to mix. Like, say, if you got the Johnson & Johnson the first time around, it’s better to get Moderna the second time,” Stephanopoulos asked.
“If you look at the level of antibodies that are induced — if you originally had J&J, and you get, for example, a Moderna or a Pfizer, the level of antibodies, namely, the proteins that you would predict would protect you, those levels go up higher with the Moderna boost to J&J than the J&J boost,” Fauci responded. “However, it’s a little bit more complicated, because, in the clinical trial that J&J did, the clinical effect of the second dose of J&J was quite substantial.”
“So, it really becomes an issue of, what’s the most convenient? What do you feel is best for you?” Fauci added, recommending that people consult their physician.
Stephanopoulos also pressed Fauci on the controversy over to what extent the U.S. was funding bat coronavirus research in Wuhan after the NIH released a letter this week about a New York City-based nonprofit’s research on bat coronavirus spike proteins. The letter states that the subcontractor had not disclosed some results in a timely manner.
“Now, some critics and analysts have seized on that to say you and others have misled the public about U.S. funding of this so-called gain-of-function research. The NIH says that’s false. Our medical unit backs that up,” Stephanopoulos said. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has called for Fauci’s firing over the controversy.
“Well, I obviously totally disagree with Senator Paul. He’s absolutely incorrect. Neither I nor Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the NIH lied or misled about what we’ve done,” Fauci responded.
“What did we learn from the letter? Does it show that some of the research we were finding was riskier than we know?” Stephanopoulos pressed.
Fauci said they knew what the risk was and there’s “no denial” that they should have put their progress report in a timely manner, but that the implication that the research led to COVID-19 is “unconscionable” and “molecularly impossible.”
“There’s all of this concern about what’s gain-of-function or what’s not, with the implication that that research led to SARS-CoV-2, and COVID-19, which, George, unequivocally anybody that knows anything about viral biology and phylogeny of viruses know that it is molecularly impossible for those viruses that were worked on to turn into SARS-CoV-2 because they were distant enough molecularly that no matter what you did to them, they could never, ever become SARS-CoV-2,” Fauci explained.
“And yet when people talk about gain-of-function, they make that implication which I think is unconscionable to do, to say, ‘Well, maybe that research led to SARS-CoV-2’,” Fauci added. “You can ask any person of good faith who’s a virologist, and they will tell you, absolutely clearly, that that would be molecularly impossible.”
(VICTORIA, British Columbia) — Sixteen people have been evacuated from a container ship that caught fire off the coast of Canada, according to officials.
A fire broke out in 10 containers on the MV Zim Kingston near Victoria, British Columbia, on Saturday, according to the Canadian Coast Guard.
Crews mobilized to the location to rescue crew members and contain the fire. An emergency zone was set up for 2 nautical miles surrounding the ship, and rescue efforts continued into Sunday.
A navigational warning was issued overnight by the Canadian government reporting that the ship was on fire and expelling toxic gas. Two fallen containers are floating in the vicinity of the vessel.
Overnight, the tug Seaspan Raven cooled the hull of the MV Zim Kingston by spraying the hull with cold water. Due to the nature of chemicals on board the container ship, applying water directly to the fire is not an option.
Photos showed smoke billowing from a row of stacked containers that had collapsed.
There was no safety risk to people on land, according to the Canadian Coast Guard. No injuries were reported, according to a statement from Danaos Shipping Co, the company that manages the ship.
(NEW YORK) — Princess Mako, niece to Japan’s enthroned emperor, Naruhito, is planning to leave the imperial family, moving out of her family’s estate on Oct. 26 when her marriage to Fordham-educated Kei Komuro is officially registered.
Female members of Japan’s imperial family must renounce their royalty when marrying a commoner. After the high-profile scandal surrounding their courtship, Japanese royalty is being forced to consider not just its dwindling numbers but its future.
Komuro’s mother, involved in an unresolved financial dispute, has been portrayed as a gold digger in tabloids, which have harshly criticized the couple. Princess Mako, an imperial household spokesperson told ABC News, is now suffering from PTSD because of the scrutiny.
Some among the nation’s citizenry are questioning whether maintaining an emperor as a living symbol of the state is still necessary. In 2019, the aging but popular Emperor Akihito abdicated, citing his age and declining health. His son, Naruhito, assumed the throne to reserved fanfare.
The latest scandal surrounding the princess’ fiance has left a bad taste in the mouths of many. Naotaka Kimizuka, a professor at Kanto Gakuin University who specializes in modern British and European political diplomatic history, said the Princess Mako courtship kerfuffle will take a historic toll on the Chrysanthemum Throne, adding: “The pair have already disgraced the heritage of Japan’s imperial household.”
Although Princess Mako has pledged to make a clean break from royalty, refusing the taxpayer-funded, one-time entitlement of 150 million yen (about $1.35 million), distrust remains. Many citizens aren’t convinced they won’t still be on the hook, even after the princess and her husband move to New York.
“The taxpayers will be paying for this in one way or expected to another,” one Tokyo resident told ABC News. “If one is in the imperial family, they’ll always be in the imperial family.”
Japan’s royal family, believed to be the world’s oldest continuous hereditary monarchy, has seen its numbers dwindle. Currently, women can’t ascend to the throne, so royal women marry commoners due to a lack of viable imperial suitors. Children from those marriages are then excluded from the imperial family line.
Hirokazu Matsuno, a government spokesperson, said in response to the question of dwindling numbers among Japanese royals: “The marriage of Princess Mako is scheduled for the 26th of this month. We wish her happiness, and prosperity for the imperial family. An expert panel has been established to address the issue [of dwindling numbers] in the imperial family. Detailed discussions are ongoing.”
More than 80% of Japanese citizens, according to a Kyodo poll, said they’d readily accept either a male or female ascending to the throne, or even a male who descended just from a female member of the imperial family. Most conservatives, including Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, disagree. The question of female ascension is a common clash in Japan of liberal vs. conservative values.
Japan ranked 120th in a global gender-equality ranking of 156 countries, according to a 2021 World Economic Forum report. Attorney Kazuko Ito, secretary general of Human Rights Now, said she believes living human beings can never be a symbol.
“I think the treatment toward the royal family and system as a whole is inhuman,” she added. “Exclusion from the royal family might be a good thing for female family members since they will get freedom for the first time as a human being, not as a restricted virtual role model.”
Hideya Kawanishi, an associate professor of Japanese history at Nagoya University, believes that keeping together the imperial family helps keep together Japan.
“There is no doubt that the emperor of Japan is a symbol of Japan’s unity as a nation,” he said. “In fact, it can be said that the emperor is somehow holding together the fragmented Japanese society. I believe that the same phenomenon is occurring in the royal families of Europe, and that a monarchy is needed in the 21st century world and in Japan.”
(NEW YORK) — The supply chain issues the U.S. economy is currently facing are not only affecting consumers during the peak shopping season, but small businesses have also started to feel the effects of these shortages.
According to the most recent U.S. Census Small Business Pulse Survey, conducted between Oct. 11 and Oct. 17, 45% of businesses said they are having domestic supplier delays. The number is up from 26.7% during the first week of the year.
Supplies that small businesses rely on are becoming harder to find, especially since owners cannot always order in bulk or in advance like larger companies.
Rene Kirby, the owner of Marie’s Cafe in Baltimore, works to provide baked goods from her home and in pop-up shops in her community. With essential products not available on shelves, Kirby has been left searching for answers.
“We just can’t serve the same size beverages, or sometimes any beverages, because they don’t have the cups we need in stock,” said Kirby, adding that buying these essential products from other suppliers increases the price, making it “difficult for the consumer to buy these products.”
Jeremy Plemons, the owner of County Manners, a food truck based in southern Maryland, said he has been going to the same businesses for the past six years and has been shocked recently by the lack of products at his local stores. He said he has had trouble finding to-go boxes and forks, essential for his food truck business.
“It would be one thing if I couldn’t find french fries, we can change that, but when we got nothing to put it in, it’s heartbreaking and stressful,” Plemons said.
Plemons said he is looking to his community of restaurant owners to find a short-term solution for the most essential items he needs.
“We have been supporting each other a lot. If anyone needs anything, they know to call me, and I can always call them,” said Plemons, mentioning be might buy a shipping container with a fellow small business owner to stock up on essential, single-use items.
The Biden administration has worked on ways to mend issues with the supply chain, including expanding work hours to 24/7 at Los Angeles and Long Beach ports and agreeing with large private companies to expand their hours as well.
Easing the supply chain bottleneck is one step in the right direction, according to Ayman Omar, an associate professor of supply chain management at American University’s Kogod School of Business.
Omar describes the current situation as a “perfect storm.” Adding that “there is no one single point in time where the delays or disruptions started, it just exacerbated significantly because the volume of disruption is much higher,” pointing to the disruptions in multiple fronts, including the current shortage of truck drivers, stocking up on products, and delays in the shipping industry.
“The worst thing for a supply chain manager is inconsistency, getting 10 units one day 100 units the other day, drives supply chain managers insane,” adding that stocking up is also hurting small businesses “because a business is now ordering more of a product, another business might not get their product, it’s just a big domino effect.”
The outlook for small businesses is improving after many were forced to close during the COVID surge last winter. According to a survey conducted by Facebook and Small Business Roundtable, 16% of small to medium businesses in the U.S. remained close in July 2021, down from 22% in February. However, the speed of supply has not improved during the reopening phase of COVID, according to Omar.
“The infrastructure is at its breaking point, in terms of being able to deal with demand and distribution of supply,” said Omar. “The massive amount of demand that has shot up over the last five to 10 years, capacity has not kept up.”
Omar said he is optimistic about the short-term solution put forward by the Biden administration but added that in the long term, the answer could be “a partnership between private and public sectors” to share supply chain information to pinpoint the issue early on.
Karen Keating, president and CEO of the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council, said the issues have been ongoing since the beginning of the pandemic. However, she said small businesses are trying to be proactive to stay competitive.
“Small businesses may have less sophisticated purchasing options, but they do have more flexibility due to their size,” Keating said. She added that small businesses “communicate with customers and clients about the situation” and “stay in contact with their customers about possible disruptions and delays in their products and services” to keep up with current issues.
Kandace Loge, who owns Pidcock Glass, a four-employee business in Nelsonville, Ohio, said she has had trouble finding screen metal, an essential part of her work, since May, saying she’s often had to wait several months before being delivered her orders.
Loge, who has managed the company for almost 20 years, said her solution has been to be upfront with her customers.
“You have to be very honest with your customer; when they know that you are honest, they are usually very nice about it,” said Loge.
Loge has changed her supplier, which has also meant a change in product sizes and changes to the company’s usual workflow and equipment.
“I am now starting to adjust our budget and change the pricing on products,” said Loge.
For many business owners, the concern remains the same: Will they be able to find the products they need, and will it affect their cost of production?
Plemons said he has the same thought every time he goes shopping for his business: “What am I not going to be able to find today?”
(GEORGIA) — One person is dead and seven others injured after a shooting at an off-campus party near a Georgia university.
The incident occurred early Saturday morning in Fort Valley, near Fort Valley State University, authorities said.
Several students suffered non-life-threatening injuries, the university said.
Georgia Bureau of Investigation, which is investigating the shooting, shared a photo from the “active scene” on Twitter Saturday morning, showing a house located several blocks from the campus.
GBI also confirmed the deceased was not a Fort Valley State University student, though did not share further details.
The university’s campus was temporarily placed on lockdown “until campus police determined there was no threat to the campus community,” school officials said.
The lockdown has since been lifted.
The shooting occurred during the state university’s homecoming weekend.
School officials announced that its Saturday morning alumni breakfast and homecoming parade had been canceled. There will be “increased security protocols” at the homecoming game, scheduled for 2 p.m. Saturday, it said.
“Our thoughts are with the students and their families as they recover,” the university said.
