(NEW YORK) — Good Morning America co-anchor Michael Strahan will fly to space on Blue Origin’s next space flight.
The Dec. 9 mission will be the New Shepard rocket’s third human flight this year and marks the first with a full astronaut manifest of six crew members in the capsule, according to Blue Origin.
Liftoff is targeted for 9:00 am CT on Thursday, Dec. 9 from the company’s “Launch Site One” facility in a remote area in the West Texas desert.
Strahan joins Laura Shepard Churchley, the eldest daughter of Alan Shepard, the first American to fly to space and the namesake of New Shepard, and four others on the space flight.
Space industry executive and philanthropist Dylan Taylor, investor Evan Dick, and Bess Ventures founder Lane Bess and his child, Cameron, will also be part of the crew for New Shepard’s 19th mission. Lane and Cameron Bess will become the first parent-child pair to fly in space.
Blue Origin invited Strahan to join the crew of this flight. As a crew member, Strahan will receive a stipend, which is being donated to The Boys & Girls Club.
On July 20, 2021, Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos was among the history-making crew aboard Blue Origin’s first human flight along with his brother, Mark Bezos, as well as the oldest and youngest people ever to go to space, pioneering female pilot Wally Funk, 82, and Oliver Daemon, 18.
On Blue Origin’s second crewed mission in October 2021, actor William Shatner, 90, set a new record as the oldest person ever to go to space.
Malcolm X’s daughters Ilyasah (L) and Malikah (R) gives a speech during the 90th birthday commemoration of Malcolm X in 2015. – Bilgin S Sasmaz/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
(NEW YORK) — Malikah Shabazz, a daughter of Malcolm X, was found dead in her Brooklyn, New York, home Monday, police told ABC News.
Shabazz, 56, was found by her daughter just before 5 p.m. ET, police said.
The death does not appear suspicious.
The news comes as two men found guilty in Malcolm X’s assassination are expected to have their convictions thrown out.
Minister and human rights activist Malcom X was killed 57 years ago in the New York City neighborhood of Washington Heights.
Shabazz was one of Malcolm X’s six daughters.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(MOSCOW) — At least 45 people, including a dozen children, were killed after a tourist bus from North Macedonia crashed and caught fire in Bulgaria early Tuesday, officials said.
The accident occurred on the Struma highway near the village of Bosnek in western Bulgaria at around 2 a.m. local time. Emergency teams rushed to the scene, where 45 people were confirmed dead, according to a statement from the Bulgarian Ministry of Interior.
Seven people who sustained injuries from the crash were transported to a hospital for treatment, the ministry said.
The bus, carrying 53 people, was heading back to North Macedonia’s capital, Skopje, after a tourist trip to Istanbul, Turkey, according to Monika Markovska, an official at the North Macedonian Embassy in Bulgaria’s capital, Sofia. The Bulgarian Ministry of Interior confirmed that the bus was registered in North Macedonia.
Most of those on board were Macedonian, apart from one Belgian national. Twelve children were among the dead, Markovska told ABC News.
The seven people who were hospitalized were admitted to Pirogov Hospital in Sofia.
The patients — four men and three women — suffered from burns and lacerations but were all in stable condition, Dr. Ljubo Topkov of Pirogov Hospital told ABC News.
The cause of the crash was unclear and is under investigation.
Traffic was stopped in both directions on the highway as first responders and investigators worked on scene.
The Macedonian travel agency that owns the bus, Besa Trans, did not respond to ABC News’ request for comment.
(WASHINGTON) — U.S. President Joe Biden is expected to announce Tuesday that the country will tap into strategic oil reserves to help offset a surge in gasoline prices, a senior administration official told ABC News.
The move will be formally announced by the White House on Tuesday morning before Biden addresses it in a speech scheduled for the afternoon, according to the official.
Experts said Americans will see a quick drop in prices almost immediately. But the larger impact won’t hit for about two weeks, when gas stations across the nation lower prices.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(WASHINGTON) — The White House said Tuesday that President Joe Biden will tap into the nation’s strategic oil reserve to help offset a surge in gasoline prices.
Biden, facing rising consumer discontent ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday, will make the formal announcement in remarks Tuesday afternoon, a senior administration official told ABC News.
Other countries, including China and India will release their own reserves in concert with the U.S. move, the White House said in a statement.
“Today, the President is announcing that the Department of Energy will make available releases of 50 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to lower prices for Americans and address the mismatch between demand exiting the pandemic and supply,” the White House said.
It said Biden has been working with countries across the world to address the lack of supply as the world exits the pandemic.
“And, as a result of President Biden’s leadership and our diplomatic efforts, this release will be taken in parallel with other major energy consuming nations including China, India, Japan, Republic of Korea and the United Kingdom. This culminates weeks of consultations with countries around the world, and we are already seeing the effect of this work on oil prices. Over the last several weeks as reports of this work became public, oil prices are down nearly 10 percent,” the White House said.
“The U.S. Department of Energy will make available releases of 50 million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in two ways: 32 million barrels will be an exchange over the next several months, releasing oil that will eventually return to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in the years ahead. The exchange is a tool matched to today’s specific economic environment, where markets expect future oil prices to be lower than they are today, and helps provide relief to Americans immediately and bridge to that period of expected lower oil prices. The exchange also automatically provides for re-stocking of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve over time to meet future needs,” the statement said.
Experts said Americans will see a quick drop in prices almost immediately. But the larger impact won’t hit for about two weeks, when gas stations across the nation lower prices.
A senior administration official, citing a low global supply of oil that is contributing to driving up fuel costs, said the decision has been made to ease costs on everyday American consumers as pressures between demand and the easing of the pandemic create unique conditions.
“We think that this is an immediate challenge that we face as we are exiting the global pandemic and supply has not kept up,” the official told reporters Tuesday morning. “We think that this is exactly suited to that.”
ABC’s Sarah Kolinovsky and Jordyn Phelps contributed to this report.
(HOLYOKE, Mass.) — A Massachusetts judge has dismissed all criminal charges against two former officials from the Holyoke Soldiers’ Home, citing no “reasonably trustworthy evidence.”
The facility made national headlines last year, when 77 veterans, who were residents of the home, died of coronavirus in the early months of the pandemic.
In September 2020, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey asked a grand jury to indict former superintendent Bennett Walsh and ex-medical director Dr. David Clinton, on charges of elder neglect, and on permitting bodily injury.
The prosecution focused on a decision, taken on March 27, 2020, to consolidate two dementia units into one.
Healey alleged that Walsh and Clinton were “ultimately responsible for the decision” that led to tragic and deadly results” of combining the 42 veterans into a single unit that usually accommodates 25 beds. Six or seven veterans were placed in rooms meant to hold only four people. Due to overcrowding, nine beds also were placed in a dining room.
The placement of symptomatic residents, including confirmed COVID-19-positive residents, and asymptomatic residents, within feet of each other, thus increased their risk of exposure, Healey said.
“There is insufficient reasonably trustworthy evidence that, had these two dementia units not been merged, the medical condition of any of these five veterans would have been materially different,” wrote Hampden Superior Court Judge Edward J. McDonough, Jr., in a dismissal on Monday. “Therefore, because the evidence does not support a finding of probable cause to believe Mr. Walsh or Mr. Clinton committed any crime, I must dismiss the indictments against both.”
The five specified veterans in the original suit had “already” been exposed to COVID-19 before the merger took place, the judge wrote.
In a statement to ABC News, a spokeswoman for Healey wrote that the office is considering other legal options moving forward.
“We are very disappointed in today’s ruling, especially on behalf of the innocent victims and families harmed by the defendants’ actions. We are evaluating our legal options moving forward,” wrote spokeswoman Jillian Fennimore.
When the suit was filed in September of 2020, Susan Kenney, whose father, Charles Lowell, served in the Air Force from 1960 to 1965, during the Vietnam War, and died at the facility as a result of the outbreak, told ABC News that she welcomed the charges.
“I think that Bennett Walsh and Dr. Clinton should have to dig every grave that hasn’t been dug yet — as well as whatever time they receive if they’re found guilty,” Kenney said last fall. “They need to accept responsibility and account for their behaviors and the actions that they took.”
(CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.) — NASA astronaut Jessica Watkins will take to the skies in 2022 on a historic debut spaceflight to the International Space Station.
Watkins will become the first Black woman to embark on a long-duration mission at the space station, where she will live and conduct research in the microgravity laboratory as it orbits the Earth.
NASA announced that Watkins will serve as a mission specialist for the SpaceX Crew-4 mission, the fourth rotation of astronauts on the Crew Dragon spacecraft to the ISS. This will be her first journey to space since becoming an astronaut in 2017.
She will join NASA astronauts Robert Hines and Kjell Lindgren, as well as European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti. The group is scheduled for liftoff in April 2022 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Watkins was born in Maryland and now calls Colorado home. Previously, she worked as a geologist with a bachelor’s degree from Stanford University and a doctorate from the University of California, Los Angeles.
She joined NASA as an intern and has worked at various research centers in California. At the time of her astronaut selection, Watkins worked as a post-doctoral fellow on the science team for the Mars Science Laboratory rover, Curiosity.
When Watkins launches into space next spring, it will be the realization of a dream she’s held since she was in elementary school.
“A dream feels like a big faraway goal that’s going to be difficult to achieve or something you might achieve much later in life,” Watkins said in a video released by NASA last year. “But in reality, what a dream realized is just one putting one foot in front of the other on a daily basis. If you put enough of those footprints together, eventually they become a path towards your dreams.”
(BOSTON) — The death of Elijah Lewis, the 5-year-old boy from New Hampshire who went missing before being found dead in Massachusetts last month, has been ruled a homicide, authorities said Monday.
Lewis died from “violence and neglect,” John Formella, the New Hampshire attorney general, said in a release. The boy suffered “facial and scalp injuries, acute fentanyl intoxication, malnourishment and pressure ulcers.”
The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Massachusetts conducted the autopsy.
Lewis’ body was found late last month, after “credible information” led investigators to a wooded area near Boston, the local district attorney said at the time. There, a cadaver dog found Lewis’ remains “buried in the ground.”
Two people — Lewis’ mother, Danielle Dauphinais, 35, and her boyfriend, Joseph Staph, 30 — remain held without bail on charges of witness tampering and child endangerment, which were brought against them last month after they were arrested in New York City.
Both allegedly asked other people to lie about where the 5-year-old was living, “knowing that child protection service workers were searching for Elijah,” the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office said.
“The endangerment charge alleges that they violated a duty of care, protection or support for Elijah,” the office said.
The two pleaded not guilty to both charges in a New Hampshire court.
The Merrimack Police Department began investigating Lewis’ disappearance on Oct. 14, after the Rhode Island Department of Children, Youth, and Families reported to police that his whereabouts were unknown, according to the state’s attorney general’s office. The child welfare agency’s involvement with the boy is unclear.
The search for Lewis involved multiple New Hampshire and Massachusetts state and county agencies, as well as the FBI.
Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
(GROVELAND. Fla.) — A judge in Florida posthumously exonerated four Black men, known as the “Groveland Four,” who were falsely accused of raping a white woman in the central Florida town of Groveland in 1949.
Their families have been fighting to clear their names for decades, and in October, Florida State Attorney Bill Gladson filed a motion to posthumously clear the “Groveland Four” of their criminal records after the state determined that the evidence against the men was falsified.
Charles Greenlee’s daughter, Carol Greenlee, told ABC News that knowing her father has been exonerated has cleared a “cloud” that has followed her for 72 years.
“All my life I’ve been waiting to hear those words: ‘Restore presumption of innocence,'” she said.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis granted posthumous pardons to the men — Charles Greenlee, Ernest Thomas, Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin — in 2019.
“Even a casual review of the record reveals that these four men were deprived of the fundamental due process rights that are afforded to all Americans,” Gladson wrote in the motion that was heard in court Monday morning. “The evidence strongly suggests that a sheriff, a judge and prosecutor all but guaranteed guilty verdicts in this case.”
Following the rape accusation in 1949, an angry mob shot and killed Thomas before he could be arrested. Charles Greenlee, Shepherd and Irvin were all put to trial and convicted.
Charles Greenlee was given a life sentence. Irvin and Shepherd were sentenced to death and successfully made an appeal. In 1951, the U.S. Supreme Court vacated their convictions and ordered a new trial for each. Following the new indictment, a Florida sheriff, Willis McCall, shot and killed Shepherd and attacked and injured Irvin.
Records show that the indictment against Thomas and Shepherd were never dismissed by the court, according to Gladson’s motion.
Irvin was retried, convicted and again sentenced to death, but later had his sentence commuted to life in prison.
Following the hearing, Gladson addressed reporters in a press conference and was joined by family members of the Groveland Four.
The first of the family members to speak was Carol Greenlee, who broke down in the court when the judge announced her father’s name would be cleared.
“This is a day that God has made,” she told reporters and thanked everyone who has helped her along her journey to fight for her father.
Carol Greenlee, who is 72, is just as old as the case of the Groveland Four. She was born a few months after her father was wrongfully imprisoned for rape.
Charles Greenlee, who was only 16 at the time, received a recommendation of mercy from the jury and received a life sentence instead of a death sentence. He did not appeal the verdict, but he was released on parole when his daughter was 11 years old. He died in 2012.
In an emotional interview with ABC News, Carol Greenlee, who said she took on the fight to clear her father’s name because he didn’t appeal his conviction, reflected on the “hole” in her life that the Groveland Four case has left and how it impacted her relationship with her father.
She said that she grew up visiting her father in prison until she was 3, when he asked her mother not to bring her back because it was “too painful.” But he continued to send her things from prison and didn’t miss a birthday card, she said.
Carol Greenlee said it took her years to understand the story of the Groveland Four and why her father didn’t want to see her.
“As a child, I would play in the courtyard while they talked and this one particular Sunday, he told her not to bring me back,” she said. “And that gave me a sense of being rejected, not being wanted. For a long time, I couldn’t understand. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
Carol Greenlee said that the charges against her father made her feel “guilty” growing up, and she felt like “other children that knew about it looked at me in a very strange and unforgiving way, that I was dirty.”
But as she got older, she learned more about what happened to the Groveland Four, and when she was 40 years-old, she finally asked her father and heard the story from him for the first time.
“I decided that in order to get rid of this hole that was inside of me that nobody could fill, that marching on picket lines couldn’t fill that, that everything that I did could not fill that hole — the desire to know more about my father,” she said.
Carol Greenlee said she can now begin to heal spiritually, because this journey has taught her that “hate destroys you from within, anger tears you apart.”
“But compassion, forgiveness, and hope builds you up. And as long as you got hope, you can look forward,” she added.
When asked how she wants the world to remember her father, she said, “I want the world to know Charles Greenlee as a compassionate, loving family man who cares dearly about his children and wants to protect them at all costs.”
Other family members who spoke at the press conference on Monday included Dr. Beverly Robinson, the cousin of Samuel Shepherd; Eddie Irvin and Gerald Threat, nephews of Walter Irvin; and Aaron Newson, the nephew of Ernest Thomas.
Author Gilbert King — who won a Pulitzer prize for “Devil in the Grove,” his 2012 book about the Groveland Four — also spoke following the hearing. He was joined by Thurgood Marshall Jr., the son of the late Supreme Court justice who represented Irvin in the trial.
Marshall Sr. was with the NAACP at the time before becoming the Supreme Court’s first Black justice. His son said the case always haunted his father.
ABC News’ Rachel DeLima contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — The Department of Justice has reached a settlement with parents of the Parkland shooting victims, court documents obtained by ABC News show.
Parents Fred and Jennifer Guttenberg sued the DOJ in 2018, alleging that the FBI knew shooter Nikolas Cruz was “going to explode” at some point and did nothing to stop him from starting a massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
Other parents of Parkland victims joined the suit.
On Feb. 14, 2018, Cruz opened fire at the school, which he attended, and killed 17 fellow students. In October, he plead guilty to 17 counts of murder, and a jury will decide if he should face the death penalty or not.
“He wanted to kill people, and he had the means to do so—he had spent the last several months collecting rifles and ammunition,” the complaint filed in federal court in 2018 says. “Forty days later, Mr. Cruz did just what tipster warned the FBI he would do. He entered his former high school—Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida—and executed 17 people.”
While the DOJ did not offer any settlement details, in their most recent court filing, the details are being worked out between the parties.
The court asked that the specifics of the settlement to be reached by Dec. 20.
