(ORLANDO, FL) — The world’s tallest tower drop ride will be taken down after a Missouri teenager fell to his death while riding it earlier this year, the operator of the Florida amusement park attraction announced Thursday.
Fourteen-year-old Tyre Sampson died after slipping out of his seat while on the Orlando FreeFall ride at ICON Park on March 24. The eighth grader was a star football player who was visiting the theme park with his team.
Orlando Slingshot, which operates the ride, said it has decided to take down the 430-foot-tall attraction in the wake of Sampson’s death.
“We are devastated by Tyre’s death. We have listened to the wishes of Tyre’s family and the community, and have made the decision to take down the FreeFall,” Ritchie Armstrong, an official with Orlando Slingshot, said in a statement.
The timeline for decommissioning the ride, which has been closed since the incident, will be determined pending approval from “all involved parties and regulatory entities,” the operator said.
Orlando Slingshot also plans to create a scholarship in Sampson’s name to honor his “legacy in the classroom and on the football field,” Armstrong said.
ICON Park said it supports the removal of the Orlando FreeFall.
“Tyre’s death is a tragedy that we will never forget. As the landlord, ICON Park welcomes and appreciates Orlando Slingshot’s decision to take down the ride,” ICON Park said in a statement.
An attorney representing Sampson’s mother, Nekia Dodd, said the ride should have been taken down “immediately” after the teen’s death.
“This is not a ride that can be operated safely, given the design defects,” the attorney, Bob Hilliard, said in a statement. “Dismantling the ride is the right move, though it should have been done immediately after Tyre’s death.”
Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who is representing Sampson’s father, Yarnell Sampson, called the announcement “long overdue” and one his father has been advocating for “since the day Tyre fell to his death.”
“The Orlando Free Fall ride never should have been permitted to operate under those faulty conditions,” Crump said in a joint statement with Hilliard. “Theme parks, their parent companies, and regulatory agencies must do better to prevent this kind of tragedy from happening to any other family.”
Operator error is suspected as the primary cause in Sampson’s death, according to a forensic engineer’s field investigation report released in April. The report showed that the individual operator of the FreeFall ride, who was not identified, “made manual adjustments to the ride resulting in it being unsafe.”
According to the report, manual manipulations were made to the seat Sampson was sitting in to allow the harness restraint opening to be loosened, apparently to accommodate the more than 300-pound teenager. The investigation found Sampson’s harness restraint opening was “almost double that of a normal restraint opening range.”
Sampson’s parents have filed a civil wrongful death lawsuit accusing ICON Park and other defendants of negligence.
(NEW YORK) — An alliance of oil-producing countries on Wednesday announced a dramatic cut in oil output with major implications for U.S. gas prices, industry analysts told ABC News.
The group of nations known as OPEC+, led by Saudi Arabia and Russia, agreed on Wednesday to cut oil production by two million barrels per day starting in November.
The decision to slash oil supply arrives as crude oil prices stand at $93, well below a high in June of $123. Many forecasters are anticipating a global economic slowdown.
The move will cause a spike in U.S. gasoline prices that will last for months, analysts told ABC News. President Joe Biden can reduce some of the immediate price hike but lacks an effective option to mitigate the overall cost increase for U.S. drivers, they said.
Here’s what the OPEC+ oil cut means for U.S. gas prices and how Biden has responded:
The OPEC+ oil cut will significantly raise U.S. gas prices
The OPEC+ oil cut will hike U.S. gas prices because the price depends on a balance between supply and demand.
A reduction of two million barrels of oil a day amounts to a roughly 2% loss from the oil market, since the world consumed nearly 100 million barrels of oil each day in August, the most recent month on record, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
The U.S. is set to produce an average of 11.8 million barrels oil per day in 2022, which stands 500,000 barrels short of a record set in 2019, according to the EIA. But oil prices are set on a global market, where the OPEC+ cuts cannot be offset by a comparable short-term increase in U.S. oil output.
“You’ll be looking at substantial upward pressure on gas prices,” Ramanan Krishnamoorti, a professor of petroleum engineering at the University of Houston, told ABC News.
The average price for a U.S. gallon of gas is $3.86, according to AAA data. That price marks a 2% rise from a month ago and a 20% rise from a year ago. In California, the state with the highest average gas price, a gallon costs $6.42.
After the OPEC+ oil cut, the price will rise even further. The price will increase as much as 40 cents, reaching as high as $4.26, analysts said. The price hike will begin within weeks and last for months, they said.
The move will impose a uniform impact on gas prices across all regions of the U.S., according to Krishnamoorti and Peter McNally, a global sector leader for industrial materials and energy at Third Bridge.
Patrick de Haan, the head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, disagreed. Prices have already begun to increase in the South and Northeast, where prices had been stable in recent weeks, he said.
Areas on the West Coast and some of the Great Lakes states, however, which have experienced massive price spikes over the last few weeks due to refinery issues, will likely continue to see prices drop, though by not as much as originally anticipated, he added.
The Biden administration response
The Biden administration sharply criticized the OPEC+ oil cut on Wednesday. In a statement, the White House said Biden “is disappointed by the shortsighted decision by OPEC+ to cut production quotas while the global economy is dealing with the continued negative impact of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.”
The Biden administration ordered the Department of Energy to release another 10 million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in November.
The move continues an effort launched by the administration in March. The U.S. and its allies announced the collective release of 60 million barrels of oil from their strategic reserves over the following months, seeking to alleviate some of the supply shortage and blunt price increases.
The additional release next month from the strategic reserve could blunt some of the price increase in November but cannot mitigate the overall impact, analysts said. The administration lacks an effective tool to dial back the extended price hike, they added.
“There is no operation warp speed for the energy industry,” said McNally.
(PHOENIX) — Kicking off a season of senatorial debates in key battleground states, Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly and his Republican challenger Blake Masters will face off Thursday in Phoenix for their only debate — one week before early ballots go out in the state. Libertarian candidate Marc Victor will also participate.
The one-hour debate, hosted by the Citizens Clean Elections Commission at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, will air live on Arizona PBS at 9 p.m. ET/6 p.m. local time.
Gina Roberts, the voter education director at the Citizens Clean Elections Commission, the leading debate organizer for the last 20 years in Arizona, told ABC News that her team has been working on the midterm debates for more than year, “So it takes a lot to bring this to life, to bring this to voters — it’s quite a bit in terms of production.”
Her group outsources debate questions from Arizona voters, which they then share with the debate moderators, Ted Simons of Arizona PBS and an alternating reporter from the Arizona Republic, who go over the voter-submitted questions together and come up with the discussion topics.
“Bringing these debates to voters from a nonpartisan entity that only has the goal to educate, not influence, is a really great resource for voters,” Roberts added, “Because it gets all the candidates together on the same stage where Arizonans can hear directly from them on the issues that matter most.”
Masters, a 36-year-old venture capitalist from Tucson in his first run for public office, has gone after the junior senator on southern border security and high inflation, while Kelly is expected to raise Democrats’ concerns that Masters would support a federal abortion ban and spread baseless doubts about American elections since he has alleged, without evidence, that the 2020 presidential race was corrupt.
With former President Donald Trump’s endorsement, Masters beat out five other Republican candidates in the August primary, but after swinging far-right to stand out in the bunch, he’s faced criticism for an apparent post-primary pivot to being the “commonsense” candidate.
His campaign website was scrubbed in August to soften his views on abortion and the 2020 election and removed language about how Democrats “want to import a new electorate,” which appeared to echo the right-wing “replacement theory” that white people are being strategically diminished. (Masters has denied any pivot in his message and likened the website scrub to a run-of-the-mill update.)
Kelly, a former astronaut and Navy combat pilot who often flies himself in a two-seater plane to events across the state, is running on bipartisan wins in the Senate, such as a bipartisan infrastructure package, the CHIPS and Science Act investing in domestic manufacturing and measures in the Inflation Reduction Act to fund drought and Colorado River relief measures and lower prescription drug costs for Arizona’s seniors.
While Kelly won his 2020 race by earning more votes in the battleground than now-President Joe Biden, it’s unclear if Arizona will maintain its purple hue given that southern border encounters are at an all-time high and inflation is the steepest in the country in the Phoenix-metro area, home to most of the state’s voters.
Abortion access has also taken on new significance in the swing state after a judge lifted an injunction on a territorial-era, near-total ban on the procedure, with prison time for doctors, which the Republican attorney general revived in the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade.
Kelly has said he supports codifying the right to an abortion with “some limits” late in pregnancy, while Masters supports the procedure only to save a mother’s life. Masters told ABC News last month that he would support Sen. Lindsey Graham’s proposal for a federal ban on most abortions after 15 weeks but also said a federal “personhood law” banning all third-trimester abortions could garner more support.
On the campaign trail, Masters has tried to keep the conversation on Democrats’ spending in Washington and on Kelly voting with Biden 94% of the time, according to FiveThirtyEight, with Masters contrasting that record with Arizona’s other Democratic senator, Kyrsten Sinema.
Still, Kelly has consistently polled ahead of Masters since the summer, according to FiveThirtyEight.
The Arizona Senate race has already surpassed $120 million in funding and is expected to reach more than $240 million, according to AdImpact, as the midterm elections are poised to be the second most expensive cycle in history after the 2020 election.
Two years ago, Kelly flipped his Senate seat for Democrats in a special election triggered by the death of the late Sen. John McCain. Kelly defeated Sen. Martha McSally, who was appointed by Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, by more than 78,000 votes to serve out the remainder of McCain’s term through January 2023.
Kelly became a strong advocate for gun restrictions in the aftermath of a failed assassination attempt on his wife, former Rep. Gabby Giffords, and he won his last election by pitching himself as an independent-minded candidate who would work across the aisle — a strategy he’s deployed in 2022 as well.
Masters, betting that Arizona is still a red state, joined former President Trump for a rally in Prescott in July after gaining his endorsement and will do so again on Sunday in Mesa.
Thursday marks Kelly’s second debate but his first as a senator. While Masters participated in a GOP primary forum in June, Thursday is his first senatorial debate as a nominee.
“Senator Kelly looks forward to the upcoming debate where Arizonans will have a chance to see the stark choice in front of them this November,” Kelly’s campaign spokesperson Sarah Guggenheimer told ABC News. “While Masters will have to answer for his dangerous support of a national abortion ban and privatizing Social Security, Senator Kelly will speak directly to Arizonans about his work with Republicans and Democrats to lower costs, create jobs, and get our economy back on track.”
Masters’ campaign declined to comment to ABC News for this story.
(NEW YORK) — As Hurricane Ian pounded the West Coast of Florida, Tiffani Henning watched the Category 4 storm from the third floor of Golisano Children’s Hospital in Fort Myers.
Henning huddled with about two dozen other moms last week as they watched their cars float away from the hospital’s parking garage, boats float down what were once roads in front of the hospital and trees sway sideways and completely uproot from the ground.
Behind them through it all laid their newborn children, some of them critically ill, in the hospital’s neo-natal intensive care unit, or NICU.
“We were right in the eye, right in the path of destruction,” Henning told ABC News of the hospital, which is located less than nine miles from Sanibel Island, which suffered much of the storm’s most devastating damage. “You’re already in a situation of being a NICU mom and now you’re in the position of being a NICU mom in the middle of a hurricane.”
Less than 48 hours before, Henning said she barely made it to the hospital to be able to ride out the storm with her twin sons, Paxton and Kamden, who were born in August, around three months premature.
Henning was preparing her Bonita Springs home for the hurricane on Monday, when she made a last-minute decision to drive the 35 minutes back to Golisano Children’s Hospital that same day. She made it just in time before a state of emergency was declared in Lee County and the hospital was locked down to visitors.
During the storm, Henning said she and fellow moms of NICU patients became worried as the hospital’s first floor took on water and a call came over the loudspeaker for people on that floor to find higher ground.
“I’m like, if this water keeps rising, how are we getting the babies, because there were so many babies that were in the NICU,” recalled Henning. “If the water keeps going up, there’s only so many floors we can go up to before there are no more floors.”
Inside the same NICU, Jennifer Morales Uparela spent much of the hurricane in a chair next to the isolette where her 1-month-old daughter, Allison, slept.
Morales Uparela said she tried to sleep too in order to help pass the time quickly. A native of Colombia, she was experiencing her first hurricane and doing so alone in a foreign country.
“I’ve never experienced something like this, and this is my first baby,” Morales Uparela told ABC News through a translator. “What kept me going is I know that my baby needs me.”
Morales Uparela, who had a high-risk pregnancy, was staying with family members in Cape Coral, Florida, when she was induced at 37 weeks on Sept. 4. Allison weighed 3 pounds, 13 ounces, at birth and was taken immediately to the NICU, where doctors have monitored her ever since.
On Sept. 28, the day of the hurricane, Morales Uparela said she went downstairs to get something to eat, and saw the flooding on the hospital’s first floor.
“People did a good job of staying calm and the staff did a great job of keeping everyone under control,” she said. “But I went back to the unit, and that’s when everything started going downhill.”
A ‘Herculean effort’ to evacuate dozens of babies
Hurricane Ian, which devastated parts of Fort Myers and the surrounding area, killing over 100 people, caused Golisano Children’s Hospital to lose both power and water.
The hospital had a generator that kicked in at the time of the power outage, but lacking water, it began the process of evacuating its NICU patients.
Directly across the state, in the cities of Miami and Hollywood, two children’s hospitals went into overdrive, activating their plans to begin treating the evacuated babies.
The hospitals — Nicklaus Children’s Hospital in Miami and Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital in Hollywood — had been planning for the past week as Ian’s path was formed, working with hospital leaders across the state to figure out who could accept patients.
“We started to hear that they were going to evacuate due to infrastructure issues and that is the point where we started thinking, okay, this is real. They’re really going to need those patients out,” said Caitlin Beck Stella, CEO of Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital. “As soon as the hospital said, ‘It’s time to evacuate. It’s unsafe,’ everyone just jumped into motion.”
In addition to figuring out where the babies would go, hospital officials had to figure out how the babies would get there.
One obstacle was that some roads and helicopter landing areas were unusable due to the storm. A second obstacle was that patients as small and critical as NICU babies are considered “complex transports,” explained Dr. Marcos Mestre, vice president and chief medical officer of Nicklaus Children’s Hospital.
“They are essentially mini-ICUs that travel with the patients,” Mestre said of the hospital’s two helicopters and six ambulances that were used to transfer NICU babies.
In addition to the medical equipment, each patient travels with a transport team that consists of nursing staff and a medical coordinator.
“Every single case is unique,” said Beck Stella. “Some of them are singletons. Some of them are multiples, so you have to think of how do you keep families together. You can’t send one twin to Tampa and one twin to Joe DiMaggio.”
Early Thursday, hospital officials said they got the green light that the roads and helicopter landing pads were safe.
That began a 48-hour effort of helicopters and ambulances flying and driving back and forth across the state of Florida to transport patients, according to Mestre and Beck Stella.
While the roads were safe, the ambulances were often dodging debris on the ground from the storm, both officials said.
“I think our ambulance drove back and forth across the state 10 times, just back and forth,” said Beck Stella, whose hospital is located about 150 miles away from Golisano Children’s Hospital. “We even had people from other parts of the state and from outside the state that started jumping in and being able to transport these babies safely.”
She continued, “It was a Herculean effort.”
In total, 61 NICU patients were transferred from Golisano Children’s Hospital to hospitals in other parts of the state, a hospital spokesperson told ABC News.
Nicklaus Children’s Hospital in Miami admitted six of the hospital’s NICU patients, and participated in five transfers to other hospitals, according Mestre.
Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital took in nearly two dozen NICU patients from Golisano Children’s Hospital, according to Beck Stella.
‘It could have been so much worse’
The evacuations to different hospitals meant more stress for parents like Morales Uparela, who had just survived her first hurricane as a first-time mom.
Morales Uparela learned on Thursday that her daughter would be evacuated to Nicklaus Children’s Hospital, but had no way to get there herself as she was told the ambulance would not have space.
It was only when the ambulance arrived at midnight to transport Allison, that the transport team told her to jump in, saying they would make room, according to Morales Uparela.
With Morales Uparela sitting in the front and nurses taking care of Allison in the back of the ambulance, the team made the drive to Miami, which Morales Uparela described as treacherous.
“There was a lot of debris in the highway,” she said. “They had to go carefully with lots of debris and trees down.”
Henning, the mom of twins, navigated the drive across Florida herself on Friday, after her sons were airlifted to Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital earlier that morning.
Facing a city-wide curfew, Henning said she had gone home from Golisano Children’s Hospital Thursday afternoon.
She said she was woken up by a phone call early Friday morning from the hospital, letting her know the twins would be evacuated but they weren’t yet sure to where or whether they would stay together.
Kamden was eventually evacuated first, followed by Paxton, on separate helicopters.
Henning said she and her husband made the nearly two-hour drive to Hollywood on Friday, and were able to reunite with their sons.
“There were lots of tears,” she said. “I got to hold both of them and cuddle them and knowing that they were at another place and safe was just the best peace of mind.”
Henning’s sons continue to be treated at Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital, but she said she is hopeful they can soon return to Golisano Children’s Hospital, which has since reopened.
The family lost a car in the storm and lost power and water at their home, but feel thankful to be alive and together.
“It could have been so much worse,” said Henning, who said she is most grateful for the medical staff that cared for her sons while their own homes and families were affected by the hurricane.
(NEW YORK) — The Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays are shaping up to be the most expensive for travelers in recent years, and experts say the clock is ticking to find last minute deals on flights.
Domestic airfare for Thanksgiving is averaging $281 roundtrip — up 25% from last year, according to Hopper. Christmas will be even more expensive, with prices averaging $435 roundtrip, 55% more than what tickets cost during the 2021 holiday.
The jump in prices is fallout from the pandemic, as airlines continue to scale up their schedules.
“Airlines have not built back their networks to the size they were in 2019. So, over the holidays right now we’re going to see about 5,000 less flights scheduled per day headed into Thanksgiving and Christmas,” Haley Berg, economist at Hopper, said in an interview with ABC News. “Both of these factors are going to mean there are fewer flights available to book and higher prices for each of those flights.”
The best times to book flights for the holidays is typically four months before travel — but consumers can still lock in a good prices over the coming weeks, according to Scott Keyes, founder of Scott’s Cheap Flights.
“If you’re hoping to travel this upcoming winter holidays, you’re going to want to try to get those flights here booked here in the next couple weeks,” Keyes told ABC News. “In the second half of October and November, flights are likely to get significantly more expensive than they are today.”
Using tools such as Google Flights to track prices can be helpful, Keyes said. Also taking advantage of the lack of change fees among airlines can help save money if you’ve already bought your tickets.
“If the price goes down, that lets you again cancel your original ticket, get your full travel credit for whatever you’d paid, and then turn around and rebook the same flight using that travel credit and have some left over that for future for a future trip,” Keyes said.
The holidays can also be a good time to use points and miles accrued over the year, but Keyes says it’s important to make sure you’re using them wisely.
“If it’s at least $0.02 per point, you’ve got the green light for me. If it’s less than that, then it’s really kind of up to you,” Keyes said. “The best value is going to be getting at least $0.02 per point.”
(NEW YORK) — Sexual violence survivors may often face overwhelming medical bills when seeking emergency care, a factor that could discourage many people from seeking treatment, experts say.
Survivors of sexual violence are charged nearly $4,000 in medical bills, on average, after seeking emergency care following an assault, according to a recent study published in The New England Journal of Medicine.
Only one in five victims of sexual violence seek medical care in the United States. The study’s authors conclude that medical bills may deter victims from seeking treatment.
People without health insurance pay an average of $3,673 out of pocket while those with insurance still pay around 14% of total costs billed, an average of $497.
Pregnant women that experience sexual assault and seek emergency medical care experience the highest charges at $4,553 on average, for their visit.
These bills may particularly burden low-income women and girls, disproportionately victims of sexual assault.
“We’re discouraging people from seeking medical care when we charge them a huge amount of money for that care,” study author Dr. Stephanie Woolhandler, MD, a distinguished professor of public health at CUNY’s Hunter College, and a lecturer of medicine at Harvard Medical School, told ABC News.
“I saw a rape victim who told me that she hadn’t gone to the emergency room because she knew she wouldn’t be able to afford it,” said study author Dr. Samuel Dickman, healthcare policy researcher and primary care physician at Planned Parenthood of Montana.
Dickman tells ABC News, “the patients I’ve seen and who’ve described to me the feeling that they are completely unsupported by the healthcare system. They know they can’t access affordable care after being assaulted. For many survivors, that feels like adding an additional layer of trauma.”
Woolhandler says that people should ask for financial assistance when seeking treatment in the emergency department.
“Depending on your income, you may be eligible for financial assistance, and you often have to ask for it,” she said. Another tip from Woolhandler is “for people who are veterans to check and see if they’re eligible for care at the Veterans Administration hospitals because that care comes with very minimal copayments and deductibles.”
In this post-Roe era, women are even less protected by the healthcare system when they experience sexual assault. As of September 2022, 11 states have banned abortions, including abortions of pregnancies that resulted from rape.
“Under laws that say that rape survivors need to prove that they got medical care to qualify for an exemption to get an abortion. That means you’re asking the survivors to go to the emergency room, potentially incurring thousands of medical debt to access abortion. It’s totally inhumane,” said Dickman.
“We need to reform the Violence Against Women Act to cover medical care, comprehensively, not just for the forensic exam,” Dickman said.
The Violence Against Women Act is a federal law that pays for evidence gathering but leaves people responsible for additional bills associated with emergency care following an assault. Broadening provisions of the Violence Against Women Act to include payment for other services, not just evidence collection, could help survivors avoid financial hardship and further trauma.
“Tragically, our political system continues to fail survivors of rape and sexual assault,” said Dickman.
(NEW YORK) — A surge of women in the manufacturing industry in recent years has punctured the stereotypes of who is working in American factories, data shows.
During the 2010s, the share of women in the manufacturing industry grew among all age groups, according to a Census Bureau analysis released on Monday. The representation of women dipped during the early months of the pandemic but rose back up toward pre-pandemic levels last year, the analysis showed.
Despite their progress, women make up only about 30% of manufacturing workers, according to Census Data.
The surge of women in the field has coincided with a revival for the industry overall. As of August, the manufacturing sector had added 461,000 jobs in 2022, putting the industry hundreds of thousands of jobs above where it stood before the pandemic-induced recession.
The inroads for women in the industry can partly be attributed to the attractive pay and benefits in manufacturing as well as the industry’s shift toward automation, which has generated jobs that require more education and less heavy lifting, experts told ABC News. But the industry’s male-dominated culture remains a barrier to women, they said.
Here are two reasons why the share of women in the manufacturing industry has grown, according to experts:
Manufacturing jobs pay well
A key reason for the growth of women in manufacturing stems from strong compensation in the industry, especially when compared with sectors typically associated with women, such as care and service work, said Tameshia Bridges-Manfield, vice president of Workforce Innovation at Jobs for the Future, a nonprofit organization focused on equitable economic advancement.
“Wages are significantly higher,” Bridges-Manfield told ABC News. “Women are looking at their options and what’s available.”
The average annual wage in production occupations, which range from auto manufacturing to oil and gas extraction, stands at $43,070, according to Bureau of Labor statistics data. By comparison, the average yearly wage for waiters and waitresses is $29,010, the data showed.
Jessica Deming, an organizer with The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, a labor union, spent seven years working at a Boeing plant in Portland, Oregon before leaving in June.
Prior to joining Boeing, Deming worked as both a bartender and a front desk manager at a hotel, earning a total of roughly $40,000 a year, she said. Within a year of working at Boeing, Deming made $30 per hour, which amounts to about $62,000 per year, she said. At the end of her tenure at Boeing, she made $47 per hour or nearly $100,000 per year, she said.
“As women in manufacturing, we were told a lie and a truth,” Deming told ABC News. “We were told being a machinist is really, really hard and women can’t do it. The truth is it’s really hard and the lie is women can’t do it.”
“As women are being more empowered, they realize they are being sold a bill of goods,” she added. “They realize the opportunities that lay before them.”
Shift to skilled manufacturing
Another reason behind the growth of women in manufacturing is the growth of automation in the industry, which has given rise to some jobs that require higher education and incur less physical strain, experts said.
“Too many Americans think of manufacturing as something of yesteryear,” Carolyn Lee, the president and executive director of the Manufacturing Institute, told ABC News. “It’s not dingy, dark and dangerous. It’s full of technology and opportunities for collaboration.”
Perception of the manufacturing industry is catching up to the changes, studies show. Sixty-four percent of consumers view manufacturing as innovative, an increase from 39% of respondents five years ago, according to a study released by Deloitte in March.
A further revival of the manufacturing sector could add $1.5 million jobs to the economy, with most of those jobs concentrated at the middle-skill level, a McKinsey study in August found
“Manufacturing jobs look different – it’s not the dirty, dark shop floor,” Bridges-Manfield said. “The exposure to manufacturing and what it is in 2022 may make it more appealing to women and girls in the long term.”
(NEW YORK) — Students at more than 60 high schools and universities across at least 29 states are holding student strikes and events on Thursday to fight for reproductive justice.
The self-dubbed “Day of Student Action” is organized by the Graduate Student Action Network, a group formed in response to the U.S. Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade ending federal protections for abortion rights, and the Young Democratic Socialists of America.
Students plan to demand that their school step in and defend their reproductive rights and freedom of gender expression in the absence of action from elected leaders, CalTech graduate student and founder of GSAN, Rachael Kuintzle told ABC News in an interview.
GSAN was born over the summer when Kuintzle started emailing student leaders including grad student government leaders, union reps and advocacy club officers.
“Right after the Supreme Court decision in June, I felt really helpless and I started reaching out to grad students across the country … emailing them, and asking if they wanted to meet together and figure out what we can do to get health into the hands of our students as soon as possible. And so what came out of that was this day of action,” Kuintzle said in an interview with ABC News.
Another student group, the Young Democratic Socialists of America, was also separately running a reproductive justice group looking into how they could make a difference and so the two groups teamed up, organizing protests and events jointly, Kuintzle said.
GSAN plans to send letters to Congress and President Joe Biden on Thursday listing their demands.
In the group’s letter to Congress, they are demanding safe, legal and accessible abortion; gender-affirming healthcare; free contraception of all varieties; and federally mandated sex education, including standardized curriculum on sexually transmitted infections, pregnancy prevention and consent.
GSAN is asking Biden to declare a public health emergency over abortion to ensure that abortion pills can be provided by mail for free in all states and implement a program to mail free at-home pregnancy tests on demand to U.S. households to enable early detection of pregnancies.
The letters will be sent from the group of student leaders, but students at some campuses are also gathering signatures for petitions listing demands specific to their school.
Some of the campuses organizing protests or events Thursday include the University of Arkansas, the University of South Dakota, multiple CUNY system campuses, University of Texas at Austin, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard Law School.
Nikole Schneider and Danielle Galvin, students at at the University of South Dakota, told ABC News they will also be fighting for health insurance, which they do not currently have. They plan to set up several booths on Thursday for voter registration, the student health center, the school’s mental health services, Planned Parenthood and a fundraising booth for a student-run group that offers free healthcare services for those without insurance.
Schneider and Galvin said being in contact with students from around the country has allowed them to feel like they are making a difference, despite initially feeling lonely and helpless after Roe was overturned.
“It’s definitely changed how I think that I can affect what’s happening in the country, especially now, just like being a part of something bigger,” Schneider said.
Galvin said it has been eye-opening to hear the support other students around the country are getting from their schools, with those students giving them advice on how to advocate for themselves with their university’s administration.
A trigger ban in South Dakota prohibits abortions entirely, “unless there is appropriate and reasonable medical judgment that performance of an abortion is necessary to preserve the life of the pregnant female,” according to the law.
The law, which went into effect when Roe was overturned, makes it a class 6 felony to provide abortion care in the state.
Students at the University of Arkansas have already had a few protests since Roe was overturned, but they are hoping this day of action would give them momentum going into the midterms, specifically because of the tight restrictions on abortion in the state and attacks on transgender individuals, organizer and graduate student Katy Dupree told ABC News.
A state law in Arkansas bans all abortions except to save the life of the mother, making it a felony for anyone to perform a non-approved abortion, punishable with up to 10 years in prison.
Dupree said they are organizing a comprehensive resource fair with a voter registration booth and speakers along with their student walkout and protest.
“This organization kind of fell into my lap. And it has been a very serendipitous and beneficial kind of happenstance for me, I struggled a lot through the pandemic with figuring out if graduate school is something that I really wanted to continue to pursue. And if I was happy with what I was studying, and really found that advocating for others helped me pull myself kind of up and out,” Dupree said.
The student leaders all agreed that the Oct. 6 protest is just a starting point. What started out as Kuintzle emailing students around the country has since grown into a more organized graduate student group.
“We have a structure, we voted on a name together, we meet regularly, we have rules of operation, we’re over 50 grad leaders in over 30 states,” Kuintzle said.
Only 59 campuses opted to publicly list their name on the GSAN website, saying they will participate in the protests, but Kuintzle said there will be events at seven other schools.
The group plans to continue organizing events and advocating for students in the future.
“We’re committed to fighting for our students rights, not just in reproductive justice, but beyond. We’re looking for future actions and climate justice and indigenous sovereignty, we’re going to be taking some action to fight for higher stipends and better health care coverage for graduate students in the near future as well,” Kuintzle said.
(UVALDE, Texas) — ABC News has confirmed that a former Texas state trooper now under investigation for her conduct in responding to the May 24 Uvalde school shooting rampage is among the new officers hired for the Uvalde school district police department — the same force that has come under fire for the bungled response to the massacre.
The news was first reported by CNN.
CNN reported Wednesday night that the former trooper is Crimson Elizondo, the first member of the Texas Department of Public Safety to enter the hallway at Robb Elementary School after the shooter gained entry. A law enforcement official briefed on the investigation confirmed CNN’s report.
The trooper did not bring her rifle or vest into the school, according to the results of an internal review by DPS that was detailed to ABC News. As a result of potential failure to follow standard procedures, the trooper was among five DPS personnel whose conduct is now being investigated by the agency’s inspector general. The five have been suspended; the trooper in question resigned from DPS and went to work for the Uvalde schools.
Elizondo is the second officer listed on the district’s police webpage.
The official said DPS was not contacted by Uvalde’s school personnel prior to hiring the former trooper.
DPS declined to comment. The Uvalde school district has not responded to a request for comment. The trooper declined to comment to CNN.
Nineteen students and two teachers were killed during the massacre in May. Some families of the dead have joined to form a group called Lives Robbed.
In a statement Wednesday night, the group said: “We are disgusted and angry at Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District’s (UCISD) decision to hire Officer Crimson Elizondo. Her hiring puts into question the credibility and thoroughness of UCISD’s HR and vetting practices. And it confirms what we have been saying all along: UCISD has not and is not in the business of ensuring the safety of our children at school.”
The statement continues: “We cannot trust the decisions that have been made in regard to the safety of our schools. Therefore, we are calling for all UCISD officers to be suspended, pending the conclusion of the investigation by JPPI Investigations LLC. The results of this investigation must be released to the families of the victims of the Robb Elementary shooting, as well as to the public. Our families have been calling for accountability, and we deserve transparency and justice at the state, local and federal levels. Our children have been taken from us. We will not stop fighting until we have answers and we ensure the safety of the children in our community is the top priority.”
Questions were also raised about the district’s pre-hiring vetting of Pete Arredondo, the former district police chief who has been blamed for much of the bungled shooting response and has been fired because of it. He had been demoted in a previous job, and critics contend that work history was not taken into account when the district hired him to run its police force.
The practice of police officers switching jobs and jurisdictions despite concerns raised in prior posts has become a concern nationally. Some have called for the creation of national standards and databases that would enable prospective employers to learn quickly whether a cop has anything potentially disqualifying in their employment history.
(NEW YORK) — Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones declined to take the stand in his own defense Wednesday in the Infowars host’s second defamation trial over his Sandy Hook comments, as jurors are slated to begin deliberating the damages this week.
Standing outside the Connecticut courthouse on Tuesday, Jones called the trial a “fraud” and told reporters he was likely not going to testify again because he could be held in contempt if he says he is “innocent.”
“I’m being ordered to perjure myself when they ask me questions, or I’ll be arrested if I tell the truth,” he said.
His attorney, Norm Pattis, told the court Wednesday that Jones is “boycotting” the trial because he would commit perjury if he testifies under the court’s orders.
Pattis did not call any witnesses for the defense, which is aiming to limit the amount of damages Jones must pay for calling the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School a hoax.
The six-member jury is expected to begin deliberating on Thursday after hearing closing arguments.
The judge last year found Jones and Infowars’ parent company, Free Speech Systems, liable in the defamation lawsuit, whose plaintiffs include an FBI agent who responded to the scene and eight families of victims that Jones called actors.
Parents of some of the 20 children killed in the massacre have testified during the weeks-long trial, detailing how they have faced years of death threats, rape threats and confrontations outside their homes from people who believed Jones’ lies.
Jones did testify last month after called to the stand by the plaintiff’s attorney. During the tempestuous testimony, Jones suggested the families who sued him have a political agenda because they are advocates for gun safety.
After the plaintiffs’ attorney, Chris Mattei, at one point told Jones to “show a little respect” to the families of victims in the courtroom, Jones responded, “I’ve already said I’m sorry hundreds of times and I’m done saying I’m sorry.”
During the trial, Mattei accused Jones of putting a target on the backs of families through his repeated lies about the massacre being a government-staged hoax and the families of victims being crisis actors.
Prior to testifying, Jones has spoken out amid the trial outside the Waterbury courthouse, calling the judge a “tyrant” and the trial a “political hit job.”
The Connecticut trial is the latest legal battle for Jones involving his comments on the Sandy Hook shooting, in which 20 children and six adults were killed.
In August, a Texas jury ordered Jones to pay nearly $50 million in damages to the parents of one of the victims — including $4.1 million in compensatory damages for the suffering he put them through and $45.2 million in punitive damages.
The judge in the case has yet to rule on whether to apply state caps for punitive damages to the amount awarded to the plaintiffs — Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, whose son Jesse was killed.
In both the Texas and Connecticut cases, the judges issued default judgments against Jones because he failed to turn over court-ordered documents.
A similar decision was issued in a second Texas defamation case last year involving Leonard Pozner and Veronique De La Rosa, whose son Noah was killed in the shooting. A trial to determine those damages has not yet started.
Amid the lawsuits, Infowar’s parent company, Free Speech Systems, filed for bankruptcy protection.
