(NEW YORK) — A convicted serial killer pleaded guilty Monday to murdering a dance teacher in 1968 outside a Long Island, New York, mall and admitted to killing four other women in the early 1970s.
DNA testing led to Richard Cottingham’s March indictment in the killing of Diane Cusick, a 23-year-old mother who went to buy dance shoes at the Green Acres Mall in Valley Stream, New York.
Cottingham, 76, currently an inmate at a Bridgeton, New Jersey, prison, is known as the “Torso Killer” because he dismembered some of his victims.
The South Woods State Prison inmate pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 25 years to life by a judge, the Nassau County district attorney’s office said in a news release.
Cottingham also admitted to the deaths of four other women — Mary Beth Heinz, Laverne Moye, Sheila Heiman and Maria Emerita Rosado Nieves — but won’t be prosecuted for their deaths since he’s already spending the rest of his life in prison because of prior murder convictions in New York and New Jersey, according to Nassau County District Attorney Anne T. Donnelly.
“Serial killer Richard Cottingham has caused irreparable harm to so many people and so many families,” Donnelly said. “Today, he took responsibility for the murder of five young women here in Nassau County between 1968 and 1973. He overpowered, assaulted and brutally murdered them to satisfy his craven desires. Thankfully he will spend the rest of his life in prison where he belongs.”
Cusick’s parents discovered her body in the backseat of her car in the Green Acres Mall parking lot after growing concerned about why she hadn’t returned home after leaving earlier in the evening of Feb. 15, 1968, to buy shoes, according to Donnelly.
A medical examiner determined Cusick was strangled to death, officials said.
The Nassau County Office of the Medical Examiner retested evidence related to the case in 2021. Earlier this year, DNA evidence matched Cottingham’s profile, according to the district attorney.
ABC News’ Aaron Katersky contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — Disgraced lawyer Michael Avenatti was sentenced on Monday to 14 years in federal prison for defrauding his clients and for obstructing IRS efforts to collect payroll taxes from his coffee business.
He was also ordered to pay $7 million in restitution.
The sentence will run consecutively with his combined five-year sentence in New York for stealing from Stormy Daniels and for extorting Nike.
The punishment, imposed by a federal judge in Los Angeles, is a few years shy of what prosecutors sought.
Avenatti pleaded guilty in June to stealing money from clients, including one who is a paraplegic, and one count of obstructing collection of federal payroll taxes from his coffee business.
Avenatti skyrocketed to celebrity status in 2018 alongside Daniels, his then-client and an adult film star, who filed multiple lawsuits — unsuccessfully — against then-President Donald Trump.
For a time, the brash lawyer was a fixture on cable news shows and the topic of flattering magazine pieces. Reporters asked him about his skin-care routine and Tom Ford suits while he and Daniels posed for photographer Annie Leibovitz.
Avenatti also briefly dipped his toe into the presidential candidacy pool, dining with potential donors and forming a political action group to accept donations.
Then a series of charges revealed a series of crimes — derailing his career and resulting in lengthy prison terms.
In the federal case carrying the 14-year sentence, “Mr. Avenatti received money on behalf of clients into client trust accounts, misappropriated the money and lied to the clients about receiving the money,” U.S. Attorney Nick Hanna said in 2019.
An indictment against Avenatti stated that he stole millions of dollars from clients after they received settlements in various cases. Those funds were supposed to only flow through Avenatti but stayed with him instead, according to prosecutors.
One of the clients who said he was never paid was Geoffrey Johnson, who is paraplegic. Johnson won a $4 million settlement against Los Angeles County in 2015. Prosecutors said that money was paid to Avenatti but was never given to Johnson.
Authorities said that Avenatti told Johnson the money was not yet available and that he was “advancing” Johnson money to pay rent. Yet the entire time, according to prosecutors, Avenatti had the $4 million and was using it for personal and business expenses.
“Mr. Johnson is the victim of an appalling fraud perpetrated by the one person who owned him loyalty and honest most of all: his own lawyer,” Johnson’s attorney Josh Robbins told ABC News in 2019.
ABC News’ Lucien Bruggeman, Stacy Chen, Kaitlyn Folmer, Josh Margolin and Alex Stone contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — The U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority on Monday appeared sympathetic with a wedding website designer challenging Colorado’s anti-discrimination law and its requirement that she provide services for same-sex couples or face a fine. At the same time, the justices seemed wary about the ramifications of a broad ruling in her favor, suggesting a desire to potentially resolve the case on narrow grounds.
Lorie Smith, a Denver-based designer who is Christian, says the state’s public accommodations law — mandating that businesses serve all customers regardless of their sex, gender, race, ethnicity or sexual orientation — forces her as an artist to create messages that violate her beliefs. She has not yet turned away any customers, but says the law preemptively prevents her from joining a lucrative line of work.
Smith is “an individual who says she will sell and does sell to everyone, all manner of websites. But she won’t sell a website that requires her to express a view about marriage that she finds offensive to her religious beliefs,” Justice Neil Gorsuch said favorably of Smith.
“One can view these websites — or, last time around we had cakes — as either expressing the makers’ point of view or the couple’s point of view,” Gorsuch said, alluding to a related 2018 case involving cakes for same-sex weddings. “And that’s really at the heart of a lot of this.”
Justice Brett Kavanaugh said the case boils down to a simple question: “How do you characterize website designers? Are they more like the restaurants and the jewelers and the tailors, or are they more like, you know, the publishing houses and other free speech analogues?” The latter are given broad discretion under the First Amendment’s freedom of speech.
“They are creating speech,” Kristen Waggoner, Smith’s attorney said. “In those other examples, speech is not at issue.”
Colorado argued its law is neutrally applied to all public businesses and does not compel speech, instead simply requiring a business owner to offer the same goods and services to all customers, regardless of their status.
“Impact on expression is incidental,” Colorado Solicitor General Eric Olson told the justices.
“Granting such a license to discriminate would empower all businesses that offer what they believe to be expressive services, from architects to photographers to consultants, to refuse service to customers because of their disability, sexual orientation, religion, or race,” Olson said. “This rule would allow another web design company to say no to interracial couples served.”
Olson explained that a Jewish deli could lawfully choose to only sell Jewish foods, or that a Muslim printer could only agree to print Quran verses, but that both would need to provide that same service to anyone who sought it, regardless of the customer’s identity. “If they offer a general service to the public, then they need to offer that regardless of the customer’s religion,” he said.
The court’s liberal justices, in repeated succession, echoed Colorado’s concerns about a slippery slope.
“What’s the limiting line?” said Justice Sonia Sotomayor. “How about people who don’t believe in interracial marriage, or about people who don’t believe that disabled people should get married?”
Sotomayor also questioned whether the act of creating a website for a customer can itself fairly be considered the protected speech of the designer.
“How is this your story? It’s their story,” Sotomayor said of a couple to be married.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson raised a hypothetical scenario of a mall Santa who sold artistic photos with children meant to be evocative of the 1940s and 50s — and would only appear with white children as a matter of belief.
“Their policy is that only white children can be photographed with Santa in this way, because that’s how they view the scenes with Santa that they’re trying to depict,” Jackson said. “Why isn’t your argument that they shouldn’t be able to do that? And maybe it is?”
“This court has protected vile, awful, reprehensible, violent speech in the past,” replied Waggoner, Smith’s attorney. “No one should be compelled to speak a message.”
“Ms. Smith believes opposite-sex marriage honors scripture and same-sex marriage contradicts it,” Waggoner told the justices.
Arguments in the case ran nearly double their scheduled length, stretching two and a half hours.
The Biden administration joined the debate on the side of Colorado, warning against a decision that would undermine the government’s compelling interest in rooting out discrimination nationwide. More than a dozen states have laws similar to Colorado’s Anti-Discrimination Act at issue in this case.
Deputy U.S. Solicitor General Brian Fletcher argued that the status of LGBTQ people and the nature of a same-sex marriage are intertwined, and that refusing to offer a wedding website to a same-sex couple is akin to turning away people for who they are.
“I do not mean to equate those who have different views about marriage to racists,” Fletcher said, but “the same principles apply in both cases.”
Several of the justices on both sides seemed eager to try to find common ground, presenting a flurry of hypothetical situations to test various proposals.
Chief Justice John Roberts questioned whether a web designer could simply affix a “tagline” stating his or her beliefs about marriage that would appear on all wedding websites sold.
Justice Elena Kagan, while broadly supportive of Colorado’s case, suggested some elements of an artists’ design might more clearly qualify for free speech protection than others. “A statement of opinion about the nature of this marriage,” she said, “I have difficulty with that hypothetical.”
Justice Jackson probed whether the court could draw a line between explicit and implicit speech, positing that a website designer might not have to write clear statements which violate a particular personal belief but that the mere act of making a website for a wedding would itself be a lesser-protected form of speech.
“This would be the first time in the court’s history, correct, that a business open to the public … serving the public, that it could refuse to serve a customer based on race, sex religion, or sexual orientation, correct?” Sotomayor asked, highlighting opponents’ view of the stakes.
“Yes,” replied Olson.
Gorsuch later countered: “No, what they say is we will not sell to anyone a message that I disagree with as a matter of religious faith, just as a speech writer says or a press release writer, the freelance writer, says I will not sell to anyone a speech that offends my religious belief.”
(NEW YORK) — A Manhattan jury began deliberations Monday on whether to convict former President Donald Trump’s namesake real estate company of criminal tax fraud.
The deliberations began Monday morning following lengthy instructions on the law by Judge Juan Merchan, who reminded jurors that they pledged to set aside their personal opinions about Trump himself.
“You promised the attorneys for the defendants, the prosecution, and this court that you would set aside any personal opinions you may have about Donald Trump and his family,” Merchan said. “You also stated that you understood that Donald Trump and his family are not on trial here.”
Two entities of the Trump Organization — the Trump Corporation and the Trump Payroll Corporation — are on trial for paying the personal expenses of some executives without reporting them as income, and for compensating them as independent contractors instead of full-time employees.
The jury sent one note to the judge asking about the elements required to prove conspiracy, before deliberations ended for the day. The jury is scheduled to reconvene on Tuesday.
Although Trump is not a defendant, his name came up repeatedly during the trial, and the jury saw checks he signed and memos he endorsed. The former president has publicly denied any wrongdoing.
Defense attorneys asked witnesses roughly 60 times about Trump’s knowledge of the tax scheme that his company is charged with, as they sought to show that Trump was in the dark about the fraud being committed by his top executives, primarily Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization’s longtime chief financial officer who pleaded guilty in August to charges that he skirted taxes on nearly $2 million in company-provided perks that included the rent on his Manhattan apartment, the leases on cars for himself and his wife, and tuition for his grandchildren.
Defense attorney Michael van der Veen said in his closing statement Friday that jurors “heard no evidence in this case that Mr. Trump or any of his children were aware of anything improper.”
But prosecutors contended that Trump explicitly sanctioned tax fraud when he signed off on part of the scheme.
“This whole narrative that Donald Trump is blissfully ignorant is just not true,” assistant district attorney Josh Steinglass said during his closing statement.
Prosecutors believe the Trump Organization is guilty because the arrangements that Weisselberg and other company executives made to evade taxes included some intent to help the company pay less in salaries, bonuses and payroll taxes.
The defense argued the executives never intended to benefit the company and that the scheme the executives hatched was motivated solely by personal greed.
The distinction is important because the judge told jurors that the Trump Organization is only guilty if a high managerial agent of the company acted in behalf of the company and within the scope of his employment.
“An agent’s acts are not in behalf of the corporation if they were undertaken solely to advance the agent’s own interests,” Merchan said. “If the agent’s acts were taken merely for personal gain, they were not in behalf of the corporation.”
The Trump Corporation and the Trump Payroll Corporation are each charged with scheme to defraud, conspiracy, criminal tax fraud and falsifying business records.
A conviction would carry fines of up to $1.7 million. But collateral consequences of a conviction may be more significant to Trump, who is seeking a second term in the White House. Banks could call in loans and business partners could cancel contracts if their internal policies prevent them from doing business with felons.
Even absent a conviction, the trial revealed potentially embarrassing details about Trump, including that he reported nearly $1 billion in operating losses over a two-year period in 2009 and 2010.
Trump’s outside accountant also testified that Trump reported losses each year for eight years from 2009 to 2018, some of the same years Trump was touting his business acumen on reality television and on the campaign trail.
(WASHINGTON) — In the summer, Democrats were privately debating how to handle a jolt that had been sent to the more than 1 million U.S. households with same-sex couples.
The Supreme Court had just overturned its own rulings on abortion rights, and conservative Justice Clarence Thomas openly mused in his concurring opinion whether the court’s landmark 2015 decision on gay marriage — which he said was based on “legal fiction” — should be next.
According to several aides on Capitol Hill, a top staffer to New York Rep. Jerry Nadler, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, approached the office of Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin, the first openly gay senator and a longtime LGBTQ rights advocate.
Should the House push through a party-line gay rights bill to send a political message ahead of the midterm elections? Nadler’s staff asked. Or was there a chance Democrats could peel off enough Republican support for a bill that would guarantee same-sex marriage?
According to several aides familiar with the account, Baldwin had already told her staff she thought such a bill was doable.
“Let’s do this for real,” responded Baldwin’s chief of staff, Ken Reidy, kicking off a monthslong negotiation on what would become the biggest civil rights deal to pass Congress in years.
On Tuesday, the House is expected to finalize the Respect for Marriage Act, approving the Senate version that passed last week by a 61-35 vote. An earlier House vote on the proposal drew 47 Republican yeses. President Joe Biden could sign the bill into law within days.
Douglas Laycock, a top religious liberty scholar who supports the legislation, said he never thought it would happen in his lifetime.
“This is the first significant compromise between gay rights groups and religious liberty groups,” said Laycock, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Virginia. “Both sides killed every previous attempted compromise.”
Laying down a ‘yellow brick road’
Onlookers have been quick to credit the bill’s success — drawing Republicans as well as Democrats — to changing public opinion. Indeed, according to a Gallup poll in May, 71% of Americans say they support legal same-sex marriage. That is more than 40 points higher than in 1996, when the question was first asked.
But people involved in the bill’s passage said it also was the product of a hard-fought negotiation years in the making.
“This shows there was a bipartisan way for LGBTQ freedom and religious freedom,” said Tim Schultz, president of the 1st Amendment Partnership, who worked on the bill representing faith-based groups.
“Lawmakers do want to find a way forward on these issues. And I hope that this breaks the ice for bigger things,” he added.
To understand that breakthrough, ABC News interviewed Hill staffers and lobbyists, several of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to be candid on how such a bill survived.
According to those involved, much of the compromise unfolded behind closed doors, including private phone calls by wealthy GOP donors who wanted Congress to resolve the issue.
Of particular concern, some Republicans said, was that any moves by the Supreme Court could alienate independent and moderate voters ahead of the 2024 election — much as the debate on abortion rights hurt Republicans in the midterms.
There also were unexpected alliances. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which considers same-sex relationships against God’s commandments, emerged as an early architect of the bill and worked closely with Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, the first openly bisexual member of the chamber, who grew up Mormon.
Under an amendment backed by the church, the Respect for Marriage Act guaranteed that faith-based groups wouldn’t lose their tax-exempt status or risk federal grant money because of their objections to same-sex marriages.
In exchange, the Mormon church publicly endorsed the proposal as one that protects “religious freedom,” paving the way for a dozen Senate Republicans to swing behind it.
“We knew who we could get to ‘yes,'” said one GOP lobbyist. “But we needed to lay down a yellow brick road they could walk on.”
What the marriage bill does and doesn’t do
The Respect for Marriage Act is intended as kind of an insurance policy in case the Supreme Court were to overturn its own landmark ruling Obergefell v. Hodges, which requires every state to allow same-sex marriage.
If that ruling is reversed by the court, as Justice Thomas suggested it could be, the Respect for Marriage Act would kick in to require that all states recognize unions legally performed elsewhere in the country.
The bill is narrow in scope, disappointing many progressives. It wouldn’t force states to issue same-sex marriage licenses, for example, as is required now under the Obergefell ruling.
The bill also doesn’t say whether businesses or faith-based organization can deny working with same-sex couples, citing either freedom of religion or speech. Such a case is being considered this week in the Supreme Court.
Still, LGTBQ advocates who worked on the bill said the compromise is a historic step forward that provides legal certainty to the 710,000 households in the U.S. with married same-sex couples.
“It’s not easy to sit down and actually have a conversation. I would say there is skepticism on both sides,” said Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, who was involved in negotiations on the bill.
“But I think by the end of the process, there was a recognition that people were actually negotiating in good faith there,” Minter said.
Congressional aides said the legislation was closely negotiated by Democratic Sens. Baldwin and Sinema along with three Republicans: Susan Collins of Maine, who was known to cross party lines; Rob Portman of Ohio, who a decade ago changed his mind on same-sex marriage after learning his son was gay; and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who had backed this year’s bipartisan package on gun safety.
Several people said the job fell to Tillis to convince enough Republican colleagues to vote in favor of the bill so no one person had to be the final deciding vote. Under Senate rules, 60 votes are needed to advance most legislation.
Other key moments included a decision by Democrats to hold off on a Senate vote until after the midterm elections were settled and a decision by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell and other prominent GOP senators not to speak out against the bill even though they personally voted against it.
The Catholic Church and several conservatives publicly criticized the legislation, including Sens. Mike Lee of Utah and James Lankford of Oklahoma, who contended it would set a national policy on gay marriage that uniquely exposes churches and organizations to lawsuits.
But after the Church of Jesus Christ and several religious liberty scholars publicly signed on, the dozen Senate Republicans joined in support and guaranteed its passage.
In the end, both LGBTQ rights groups and religious freedom advocates claimed victory — an achievement Sinema noted at a news conference celebrating the bill’s passage in the Senate.
“What could fundamentally be more American than balancing those two issues?” she asked.
ABC News’ Allison Pecorin and Trish Turner contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — A North Carolina couple are calling a state trooper their “angel” and a hero for helping save their daughter’s life when she stopped breathing due to RSV.
Victoria O’Neal told “Good Morning America” her 9-week-old triplet daughters first started to get sick last Sunday, and by Tuesday, her daughter Amelia’s condition had grown worse.
“At 1:00 when I went to feed them, she just sounded so weak and sick and it freaked me out,” O’Neal recounted. “So I called [my fiancé] Derrick, told him to come home, asked him to take her to the hospital.”
O’Neal said she asked her fiancé Derrick Stroud to take Amelia to the children’s hospital in Greenville, North Carolina, about 34 miles northeast of their home in Kinston. “It’s where they were born,” O’Neal said.
When Stroud got the call at work, he rushed home and wasted no time getting his daughter out the door. However, he was stopped on the way to the hospital after being pulled over for speeding.
Stroud described that moment as divine intervention.
“As I’m rushing to the hospital, it’s almost like God placed the trooper and the ambulance within 2 miles of us when we got pulled because as I was going to the hospital, the trooper pulled me at about 100 miles an hour,” Stroud told “GMA.” “When he pulled me over, I was frantically hanging out the window, letting him know that my baby was having problems at that time breathing.”
That person who pulled Stroud over was Trooper Matthew Brown of the North Carolina State Highway Patrol, who recounted the unusual sight to “GMA.”
“I had an SUV coming up behind me at a really high rate of speed, four-way flashers going, which I knew was kind of odd because most folks, if they’re gonna be speeding like that are trying not to get attention rather than having their four ways on,” Brown recalled. “When I got up to the driver … he was visibly distraught and upset. He said he was on his way to the hospital, which confused me because he had already passed the exit to go to the local hospital, which would be the hospital in Kinston. And when I asked him that, he said his daughter was having trouble breathing and he was taking her to the hospital in Greenville, which was about another 30 minutes away from where we were at.”
Brown, a state trooper since 2017 and a twin himself, told “GMA” he was previously a firefighter EMT and trained in emergency medical services.
“I opened the door and turned her towards me, I realized that she was having extreme difficulty breathing, had paradoxical breathing going on, which is basically where the chest and the stomach are actually going off each other. It’s just the obvious sign of infants struggling to breathe and her lips and face were starting to get some cyanosis, which is that blue color,” Brown said.
Brown said he got Amelia out of her car seat, started taking her vital signs and patting her on the back to wake her back up, which Stroud said he observed.
“I was just trying to get something out of her and she finally did come out and open her eyes and start interacting and I could tell whenever she started breathing more normally that she was still having some kind of, something going on with her lungs because her lung sounds weren’t very clear,” Brown said. “I knew RSV has been a really prevalent thing going on and actually told the father … ‘I would be surprised if she doesn’t have RSV.’ “
Brown then called in a medical unit backup and an ambulance quickly arrived on scene to transport Amelia to the local hospital in Kinston.
According to her parents, Amelia was later transferred to Maynard Children’s Hospital in Greenville. Doctors confirmed Amelia did have RSV and treated her with additional oxygen. After three days, Amelia was well enough to be discharged while her sisters took their turns getting checked out at the hospital for their RSV symptoms as well.
O’Neal and Stroud told “GMA” they’re grateful for Brown’s quick actions and help.
“It’s very crazy how everything works because like I say, for him to pull us over with triplets, and he’s a twin himself expecting twins and everybody was just in the right spot at the right time. It’s just really a blessing and I just wanted everybody to know that he is the reason that [we] still have Amelia,” Stroud said.
“He was an angel or a hero,” O’Neal added. “I don’t want to imagine the level of panic I would have had if that had been me, if I had been the trooper and I had pulled someone over and there was a little baby turning blue in the backseat, like to have been able to keep a level head and do what he needed to do to help her, it’s just amazing and I’m so grateful to him.”
Brown said he was just doing his job that day. “Part of the reason that I joined the highway patrol was so I would be able to be out there and have access to do this kind of stuff and help people,” he said.
“I’m a father myself and I can understand what he was trying to do. He was just not going about it necessarily the right way. But I mean, anybody who has a kid is going to do what they think they need to do to try to get it taken care of,” Brown added. “So I wasn’t going to penalize him for that. Plus, I wanted him to go to the hospital with the baby so I had him go with the medical unit.”
(LUMAJANG REGENCY, Indonesia) — Several villages surrounding Mount Semeru, Indonesia’s tallest volcano, have been blanketed in ash and soot following its latest eruption.
Evacuations were announced Sunday as the 12,060-foot volcano, located in East Java in Indonesia, about 300 miles southeast of the capital Jakarta, began to spew lava and ash into the densely populated island on Sunday just before 3 a.m. local time, according to local authorities.
Thick ash was blasted more than 4,000 feet into the air while lava flowed down the slopes toward the Besuk Kobokan river, about 8 miles from the crater, the country’s National Disaster Management Agency announced.
At one point, the volcanic activity level had been raised to Level 4, the highest status, according to Indonesia’s Center for Volcanology and Geological Hazard Mitigation.
While monsoon rains eventually eroded and collapsed the lava dome on top of Mount Semeru, nearby villages were advised to stay more than 3 miles away from the crater’s mouth and prompted evacuations for thousands of people, officials said.
Hundreds of people were moved to temporary shelters or evacuated the area, The Associated Press reported, citing the disaster management agency in Lumajang in the East Java province.
Prior to Sunday, Mount Semeru erupted from Nov. 23 to Nov. 29, with daily explosions at the summit that sent ash plumes nearly 3,000 feet into the sky, according to the Global Volcanism Program at the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of Natural History.
The last major eruption occurred in December 2021, which killed 51 people in nearby villages, according to the AP. More than 10,000 villagers were evacuated, and hundreds of people were severely burned by the hot ash and lava expelled from the volcano.
There are 129 active volcanoes within the Indonesian archipelago, and tens of thousands of people continue to live downslope from the summits.
Indonesia sits along the “Ring of Fire” in the Pacific, a series of fault lines prone to earthquakes and volcanic activity.
(NEW YORK) — More than six months after Russian President Vladimir Putin launched an invasion into neighboring Ukraine, the two countries are engaged in a struggle for control of areas throughout eastern and southern Ukraine.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whose forces began an offensive in August, has vowed to take back all Russian-occupied territory. But Putin in September announced a mobilization of reservists, which is expected to call up as many as 300,000 additional troops.
Here’s how the news is developing. All times Eastern:
Dec 05, 10:36 AM EST
Missiles rain on Ukraine after purported drone strikes in Russia
A new barrage of missiles strikes was launched against Ukraine on Monday, hitting targets across the country, including the capital city of Kyiv, officials said.
Casualties and damage from the attacks were being assessed, Ukrainian officials said.
The majority of the missiles were shot down by air defense forces, Ukrainian officials said.
Ukrainian air force spokesman Yuriy Ihnat said the Russians launched missiles from the Volgodonsk, Caspian and Black seas.
The strikes damaged two infrastructure objects in the Odesa region, leaving the area without electricity and running water, officials said. One person was hospitalized, according to Ukrainian officials.
Odesa Mayor Gennadiy Trukhanov said a missile hit a substation that supplies the city of Belvaevska’s pumping station with electricity.
According to the office of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, missile strikes in the Zaporizhzhia region killed two people and injured three others, including a toddler, in the village of Novosofiyivka.
Explosion were also heard in Cherkasy, Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Vinnytsia, Khmelnytskyi, Kherson and Cherkasy, officials said.
The missile strikes followed reports from Russian media outlets that drones were used to bomb two military air bases in Russia, hundreds of miles from the Ukrainian border.
Ukrainian officials have not claimed responsibility for the drone attacks, but Mykhailo Podolyak, a top adviser to Ukraine’s president, posted a cryptic tweet, saying “if you launch something very often into the airspace of other countries, sooner or later the unknown flying objects will return to the place of departure.”
Dec 02, 2:18 PM EST
No peace talks till Russian soldiers leave, Ukraine says
Ukraine said it would not consider peace talks before the last Russian soldier leaves Ukrainian territory. This comes after President Joe Biden indicating he would be willing to speak with Russian President Vladimir Putin if he has legitimate interest in peace negotiations.
Ukraine also said that there must not be any peace negotiations without Ukraine, reiterating that Biden has been clear that there won’t be any talks happening without the participation of U.S. allies and Ukraine.
-ABC News’ Will Gretsky
Dec 02, 2:17 PM EST
IAEA expresses optimism over creation of protection zone around Zaporizhzhia
The International Atomic Energy Agency expressed optimism over possibly creating a safe zone around the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant before the end of the year.
“I know that President Putin is following the process, and I do not rule out another meeting with him soon, as well as with Ukrainian President Zelensky,” IAEA Director General Rafael Rossi said in an interview with Italian newspaper La Repubblica.
“There is a concrete proposal on securing Zaporizhzhia and important progress has been made. …The two sides now agree on some basic principles. The first is that of protection: it means accepting that you don’t shoot ‘on’ the plant and ‘from’ the plant. The second is the recognition that the IAEA is the only possible way forward: that was the heart of my meeting with President Putin in St. Petersburg on October 11,” Rossi added.
-ABC News’ Will Gretsky
Dec 02, 12:27 PM EST
Bloody packages with animal eyes sent to Ukrainian embassies
Packages believed to be blood-soaked and containing the eyes of animals, were sent to Ukrainian embassies worldwide, including in Hungary, Netherlands, Poland, Croatia and Italy, the Ukrainian ministry of foreign affairs said Friday.
The entrance to the ambassador’s residence in the Vatican was also vandalized, according to the Ukrainian ministry of foreign affairs.
The Ukrainian embassy in the U.S. received a letter with a photocopy of a critical article about Ukraine. Like most other envelopes, the letter arrived along with others from the territory of an unnamed European country.
“We have reason to believe that a well-planned campaign of terror and intimidation of Ukrainian embassies and consulates is taking place. Not being able to stop Ukraine on the diplomatic front, they are trying to intimidate us. However, I can immediately say that these attempts are useless. We will continue to work effectively for the victory of Ukraine,” the Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Dmytro Kuleba said in a statement.
The Ukrainian embassy in Spain received a letter-bomb on Wednesday which was opened and ignited, resulting in one slight injury.
A similar envelope was sent to the U.S. embassy in Madrid, but it was detected before going off, according to Spanish officials.
All Ukrainian embassies and consulates have been placed under heightened security. The Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs called on foreign governments to guarantee maximum protection of Ukraine’s diplomatic institutions.
Dec 01, 3:28 PM EST
Biden ‘prepared to speak with Putin’ if he wants to end war
Speaking at a joint press conference with France’s Emmanuel Macron, President Joe Biden said he would be open to speaking with Vladimir Putin if the Russian leader has legitimate interest in peace negotiations. Biden, however, said he has “no immediate plans to contact Mr. Putin.”
Biden also noted that Putin has “miscalculated every single thing” when it comes to this war.
“So the question is what is his — how does he get himself out of the circumstance he’s in? I’m prepared if he’s willing to talk to find out what he’s willing to do, but I’ll only do it in consultation with my NATO. I’m not going to do it on my own,” Biden said.
Meanwhile, President Macron, who has continued speaking with Putin, said it’s up to Ukraine to come to the negotiating table.
“So it’s only legitimate that President Zelenskyy sets some conditions to talk. We need to work on what could lead to a peace agreement. But it’s for him to tell us when the time comes and what the choices of the Ukrainians are,” Macron said.
-ABC News’ Sarah Kolinovsky
Dec 01, 1:46 PM EST
Shelling in Kherson damages power lines as energy company works to finish repairs
Electricity was back for 60% of customers in the Ukrainian city of Kherson, but shelling overnight damaged power lines, according to the head of Ukraine’s regional energy company.
Workers are hoping to finish the repairs by the end of Thursday.
In Kyiv, 652,000 residents were subject to power outages throughout Thursday, according to the director of YASNO energy company, Serhiy Kovalenko. Kyiv’s main power grid is operating at less than 70% capacity and 20% of residents are still without power or heat.
-ABC News’ Will Gretsky
Dec 01, 12:20 PM EST
Russia accuses US, NATO of direct involvement in war
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accused the West of being directly involved in the war in Ukraine by supplying the country with weapons and training its soldiers.
“You are training their military on your territory, on the territories of Britain, Germany, Italy and other countries,” Lavrov said at a press conference Thursday.
Lavrov also claimed that Russian missile strikes on Ukrainian energy facilities and other key infrastructure were intended to weaken Ukraine’s military potential and derail the shipments of weapons from the West.
Lavrov also said Moscow is open to peace talks to end the conflict.
-ABC News’ Will Gretsky
Nov 29, 11:47 AM EST
US to send $53M in energy aid to help Ukraine through winter
The U.S. will provide Ukraine with more than $53 million to acquire critical electric grid equipment to help its citizens get through the winter, the State Department announced Tuesday.
The announcement comes amid Russia’s continued attacks against Ukraine’s energy infrastructure.
“This new assistance is in addition to $55 million in emergency energy sector support for generators and other equipment to help restore emergency power and heat to local municipalities impacted by Russia’s attacks on Ukraine’s power system,” the State Department said in a release.
-ABC News’ Matt Seyler
Nov 28, 4:36 PM EST
UN lays out ‘dire’ situation in southern Ukraine
Denise Brown, the United Nations Resident Coordinator in Ukraine, traveled to the Ukrainian cities of Kherson and Mykolaiv over the weekend to get an update on the humanitarian issues affecting the southern part of the country, according to the U.N.
Although repairs to the area’s water system are finally able to commence, there is still a lot of work to be done to help the people in those cities, the U.N said.
“We continue to be concerned about the plight of civilians in Ukraine especially as winter sets in,” a U.N. spokesperson said in a statement.
Some heating points have already been established in Mykolaiv to help people who cannot heat their homes, according to the U.N.
“Aid workers are providing supplies and generators to make these places functional,” the U.N. said in a statement.
The agency added that donations and funding for humanitarian efforts are critical as the cold weather sets in.
Nov 25, 1:13 PM EST
Power restored in all regions, Ukraine grid operator says
All of Ukraine’s regions are now connected to the European Union’s energy system and all three nuclear power plants located in the Kyiv-controlled area are working, CEO of Ukrenergo grid operator Volodymyr Kudrytskyi announced.
“In one to two days, they will reach their normal planned capacity, and we expect to introduce planned rolling blackouts instead of emergency outages,” Kudrytskyi said.
Power is slowly returning to all Ukrainian cities, but blackouts and emergency shutdowns continue. Power issues are the worst in Kyiv, Kirivigrad, Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv, Poltava and Lviv, according to Kudrytskyi.
Kyiv’s critical infrastructure receives electricity, the water supply is fully restored and heating is being restored, but 50% of residential houses remain without power. Only one-third of houses currently have heating, according to the mayor.
(NEW YORK) — Women in Iran will still be required to wear the hijab under Islamic Republic law, even if the country’s government decides to abolish the religious police who were in charge of enforcing the dress code.
Iranian Attorney General Mohammad Jafar Montazeri announced on Saturday the country’s morality police had been dismantled, adding that the judicial system will keep monitoring people’s behavior in the country.
But on Sunday, Alalam News, the Arabic outlet of the Iranian state media, denied the attorney general’s comment on ending the morality police in a short piece on Sunday.
In addition, Iran’s parliament and the Supreme Council of Cultural Revolution are studying the topic of hijab, and the result will be announced in 15 days, Montazeri announced on Thursday.
However, it is unclear how things will change as a result of these moves by the government. The announcements do not indicate that the mandatory hijab rule in Iran is over, as wearing the hijab is still mandatory under Islamic Republic law.
Morality police were just one of the enforcement arms for the regime to implement the law of mandatory hijab for women. There are “security” offices in all state organizations and malls, as well as parks and other public places, that are manned and managed by the intelligence ministry. One of the major tasks of these offices is to monitor women’s hijabs. Morality police was the name of the patrolling vans that would arrest women on the streets.
Even if the religious police were to be abolished, protesters and activists have been warning that it’s very likely authorities will rebrand the morality police and the mission will be back in no time under another name — as the morality police was itself a rebranded mission of a former police division name “Sar-allah Patrol.”
Women are controlled in many other ways to abide with this law. Girls — from the age of 7 — are not admitted at school if they do not wear clothes that are deemed proper. Women patients are not admitted at the hospitals if they do not wear a hijab. Women do not receive any service at the banks or any other organizations if they don’t follow the hijab laws.
The announcement to eliminate the religious police comes three months after deadly demonstrations in Iran — as well as protests all over the world — which could be an indication that the government is bowing down to global pressure.
On Sept. 16, Iranian woman Mahsa Amini died in the hospital days after she was arrested for allegedly not adhering to the dress code correctly.
Amini’s death ignited protests among women who risked their lives by ripping off their hijabs and cutting their hair in public.
At least 448 people, including 60 children, have been killed since the protests began, though the true number is believed to be higher because of the difficulty in accessing death certificates, according to NGO Iran Human Rights.
The protests are also targeting the head of the regime, Supreme Leader of Iran Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, with slogans such as “Death to dictator” and “Death to Khamenei.”
An estimated 14,000 people across the country, including many journalists and school children, have been arrested on charges related to demonstrations, the United Nations announced last month.
(NEW YORK) — Many Taylor Swift fans expressed outrage online over the presale ticket disaster, but now some of those fans are taking it a step further and claiming the ordeal was illegal.
Nearly two dozen Taylor Swift fans filed a complaint Friday in Los Angeles County Superior Court against Ticketmaster, alleging intentional deception, following major issues with the Taylor Swift: Eras Tour presale tickets, which left many fans unable to buy tickets for the singer’s upcoming tour.
“There is a problem with the way they’re doing business, but they’re really hurting the fans in how they’re doing it,” said Julie Barfuss, a plaintiff in the suit.
The complaint asks for Ticketmaster to be fined $2,500 per violation, theoretically meaning that a violation could be counted on every one of the two million tickets sold, according to the lawsuit.
ABC News reached out to both Ticketmaster as well as LiveNation, the parent company of Ticketmaster, for comment on the lawsuit but has not yet heard back.
In a recent statement, LiveNation denied allegations of price-hiking and said Ticketmaster “does not set or control ticket prices” and “does not embrace deceptive and questionable secondary ticketing practices.”
Barfuss is one of more than two dozen fans suing Ticketmaster and Live Nation alleging “fraud, price fixing and antitrust violations.”
“Ticketmaster is a monopoly that is only interested in taking every dollar it can from a captive public,” the complaint states.
The highly anticipated Eras Tour will be the first time Swift is on tour in nearly five years, performing new songs off her record-breaking Midnight album released in October.
Presale tickets for the tour went live on Ticketmaster on Nov. 15. At that time, tickets were reserved only for “verified” Swift fans, who had registered to a Ticketmaster program prior to the release of the tickets. But, due to the overwhelming surge in demand, many fans reportedly waited for hours in online waiting rooms for access to the tickets, and many reportedly never got the chance to even buy one.
Those who were able to purchase tickets reported exorbitant prices and up-charges. The debacle led Ticketmaster to cancel general ticket sales due to “insufficient” inventory.
Fans took to social media to accuse Ticketmaster of hiking ticket prices and selling most of the tickets to scalpers, who they say often charge even more fees in the resale market.
Swift broke her silence on social media and shared a statement that expressed her disappointment, saying “I’m extremely protective of my fans” and it’s “excruciating for me to just watch mistakes happen with no recourse.”
Some fans still think that it was more than just a mistake.
“They messed with the wrong fan base,” said Jennifer Kinder, an attorney for the plaintiffs. “If Ticketmaster can do this to hardworking Americans that are trying to buy a ticket, they can do it to anybody.”
