(NEW YORK) — To help educate kids about the COVID-19 vaccine and encourage them to get it, Big Bird from “Sesame Street” announced that he just got the shot and is feeling great about it.
“I got the COVID-19 vaccine today!” Big Bird tweeted over the weekend, breaking a months-long hiatus on the social media site. “My wing is feeling a little sore, but it’ll give my body an extra protective boost that keeps me and others healthy.”
The beloved character also revealed something he recently found out, which is “I’ve been getting vaccines since I was a little bird. I had no idea!”
Big Bird’s vaccination announcement received a shout-out from President Joe Biden, who replied, “Good on ya, @BigBird. Getting vaccinated is the best way to keep your whole neighborhood safe.”
While the character has been entertaining kids for decades, Big Bird is technically 6 years old, which means he recently became eligible for the Pfizer vaccine. The vaccine was authorized for kids ages 5 to 11 by the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last week. Shots are now being administered to children of that age group.
For those who may be puzzled as to why the “Sesame Street” character has joined the ongoing conversation about pediatric vaccinations, Big Bird has, historically, been the go-to muppet on vaccine PSAs.
In 1972, the giant yellow canary spoke about the importance of getting the measles vaccine, according to a resurfaced video shared by Muppet Wiki in a Twitter thread.
(NEW YORK) — This report is a part of “Rethinking Gun Violence,” an ABC News series examining the level of gun violence in the U.S. — and what can be done about it.
Paul Kemp, a founding board member and the president of Gun Owners for Responsible Ownership, has been a gun owner for most of his life.
He grew up in Michigan and owns a hunting rifle, a couple of handguns and a .22-caliber rifle.
He also said he was taught about gun safety growing up and thought he had a good understanding of the gun laws in the country.
But when his brother-in-law, Steve Forsyth, a youth sports coach and father of two, was shot and killed by a man armed with an AR-15 style rifle in 2012, “I realized how misinformed I was,” he said.
Kemp said he had “no idea that we had such a patchwork of gun laws around the country.” While he noted the National Firearms Act, first enacted in 1934, the Gun Control Act of 1968 and the Brady Law, which amended the GCA in 1993, there is a “a lot of latitude for very weak gun laws in states,” he said.
Watch ABC News Live on Mondays at 3 p.m. to hear more about gun violence from experts during roundtable discussions. And check back tomorrow, when we look at Chicago’s violence disruptors and how they try to bring peace.
The U.S. is awash in guns, with nearly 400 million in the United States, according to a 2018 report from the Small Arms Survey, a Switzerland-based global research project.
And gun violence has been rising in the past several years (gun deaths are up 56% from 2014-2020, and injuries increased 73% in the same time period, according to Gun Violence Archive).
Many people who own firearms agree that violence is a problem — but fundamentally disagree as to why, leaving the debate at an impasse.
So, ABC News interviewed some gun owners to get their perspective on potential solutions to the spate of gun violence plaguing the country. Their perspectives represent slices of the highly charged debate that plays out at the national level between advocates, legislators and groups such as the NRA.
Here’s what they had to say:
Safe storage
The shooter at the Clackamas Town Center Mall in Oregon killed Forsyth and 54-year-old hospice nurse Cindy Yuille with a Stag Arms AR-15 rifle that he had taken from a friend, who had purchased the gun legally but left it loaded and unsecured in his house, the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office public information officer told Kemp.
He said one of his first thoughts was, “Well, doesn’t Oregon have a safe storage gun law?” The officer told him no.
“I said, ‘You’re telling me that guy who owned that gun faces no consequences?’ and he said, ‘That’s correct.'”
There are 11 states in the U.S. that have some form of safe storage law on the books, according to the Giffords Law Center, a gun violence prevention organization. Massachusetts was the first state to require all firearms be locked up while not in use; Oregon became the second this summer when Gov. Kate Brown signed the Cindy Yuille and Steve Forsyth Act into law, named to honor the two who died in the shooting.
Safe storage laws generally require that a weapon must be stored unloaded, in a locked container or with a trigger lock, a device that goes over a firearm’s trigger and can be locked and unlocked using a key or numerical combination. While Massachusetts and Oregon enacted these rules for all gun owners, regulations in some states, such as Colorado and California, only apply these laws to gun owners who live with a person who is legally prohibited from possessing a firearm.
The punishments vary. In Colorado, it’s a fine and/or up to a year in jail. In Oregon, it’s a maximum $500 fine, which can rise to $2,000 if a minor obtains a firearm as a result of unsecured storage.
Approximately 4.6 million children in the United States live in a home where a firearm is stored loaded and unlocked, according to a national survey conducted by Harvard Injury Control Research Center in 2015. Safe storage could prevent up to a third of suicide and unintentional firearm deaths, a 2019 study published in JAMA Pediatrics found.
And safe storage regulations are popular.
In a 2019 report from the American Public Media Research Lab, more than three-quarters of the 1,000 Americans surveyed said they support mandating locked gun storage.
Universal background checks — including for private sales
Shannon Flores said her family currently owns somewhere around 37 guns at last count. Flores owns a Springfield XD-S handgun. Her wife, Scarlett, is a gun collector and hunter and has multiple kinds of firearms. Plus they have some .22 caliber rifles that their 9-year-old twins use for “plinking” — or practicing shooting clay pigeons, cans and hay bales.
Like Kemp, Flores emphasizes the importance of safe storage.
She said most of her family’s guns came with a gun lock when they purchased them, they have gun safes for the rifles, small safes for the handguns and Flores’ handgun also has a biometric lock.
But Flores, a Texas-based organizer for Giffords’ Gun Owners for Safety, also pointed to universal background checks — a system that would require all gun buyers to go through the National Instant Criminal Background Check (NICS) before purchasing a firearm — as a potential solution to curb gun trafficking and help prevent people who are prohibited from owning firearms from obtaining them.
Between November 1998 and September 2021, there have been just over 2 million denials out of more than 400 million federal background checks, according to a report from NICS, though this does not account for denials that may have happened due to a state background check. About half the time, FBI data shows, the reason for denial is because a person was previously convicted of a crime.
When combined with data from states that conduct background checks for point-of-contact sales, more than 300,000 people were stopped from buying a gun illegally in 2020, according to FBI data, raising the rate of barred would-be firearm purchasers from 0.6% to 0.8% over the past two years.
But those numbers only account for licensed gun dealers. Under federal law, unlicensed sellers — such as gun shows or private sales — aren’t required to perform background checks. Fourteen states and Washington, D.C., have laws closing this loophole, according to Giffords Law Center, but a majority do not.
Under the concept of universal background checks, the idea is that no matter where someone buys a gun — at a store, a gun show or through a friend or online — they would have to go through a background check via a nationwide database.
For instance, when Scarlett Flores sold a gun to a friend, they headed over to a local gun range in Houston that holds a FFL — a federal firearms license — and could serve as the point of transfer.
“She explains to clerk that she wants to sell a weapon. There’s an exchange of IDs, it goes through the system, small fee like $15, system is updated to prove this weapon was transferred and there’s a background check that goes with that,” Shannon Flores said.
This not only provides a background check of the purchaser, but it also documents that Scarlett no longer owns that gun and records the name of who now does.
Like safe storage laws, universal background check requirements have been popular in recent years: 89% of Americans support background checks for all gun purchases, including private and gun show sales, according to a 2019 ABC News/Washington Post poll.
Conversations about gun violence — and the ineffectiveness of gun laws — often reference Chicago, where there are restrictive regulations but a significant level of violence. Many people committing crimes with guns, some argue, obtain firearms illegally, so universal background checks wouldn’t make a difference.
According to the Department of Justice’s 2016 Survey of Prison Inmates, 43% of people who used a gun in a crime obtained the firearm off the street or in the underground market, 25% got it from an individual, either from a friend or family member or as a gift, 10% purchased the firearm at a retail source like a gun store or pawn shop, 6% stole it and 17% obtained it in some “other” way such as finding it at the scene or the gun was brought by someone else.
But Shannon Flores said having a patchwork of gun laws across the 50 states “makes it really easy to traffic guns” along what’s sometimes called the Iron Pipeline — a route from the South, where gun laws are fairly relaxed, up the East Coast, where gun laws are more restrictive.
“I was one of them, the way I used to think about gun violence and crime in cities … The gun violence makes news all the time,” Kemp said. But then he began “looking into things,” he said. “Everybody says Chicago has some of the strictest gun laws in the country, but Wisconsin right next to them has some of weakest gun laws, and Indiana has some of the weakest gun laws … they feed firearms into Chicago.”
According to a 2017 report from the City of Chicago, 60% of guns that are recovered after being used in crimes come from out of state, especially from Indiana.
“Guns that are trafficked between states nearly always originate from states without strong background check laws,” Rob Wilcox, the federal legal director for Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit gun control advocacy organization, told ABC News.
In May, three Army service members stationed at Fort Campbell, on the border of Tennessee and Kentucky, were charged with the illegal purchase and transfer of dozens of firearms to Chicago. An investigation — which began after Chicago police responded to a mass shooting incident and found five firearms at the scene from the Clarksville, Tennessee area — found that the three soldiers had purchased more than 90 guns from federally licensed dealers in the region, most within five months.
Teaching responsibility
Some gun advocates say that regulation is beside the point and that what is needed instead is proper education.
John Harris, a lawyer and the executive director of the Tennessee Firearms Association, a gun rights advocacy group, argued that for decades, guns were not a “prohibited concept that was demonized.”
Teaching firearms safety in school could be something to consider, he said, “so there is an appreciation that firearms are not some video game entertainment item, but that they are useful — but potentially dangerous — items that you have to know how to use, know how to respect and only use respectfully.”
Some schools do teach gun safety. Utah lawmakers recently passed a bill creating a program to provide a firearm safety course in public schools. Both the Connecticut State Department of Education and the Virginia Board of Education have published guides for schools to develop lessons on firearm safety.
Shannon Flores, said her 9-year-old children, who use .22 caliber rifles for sport, have grown up around guns just like she did.
“We have conversations with them regularly about guns and lethality,” she said. “My kids have gone hunting with my wife … I grew up hunting, too, so I grew up seeing what a bullet can do to a living organism.”
Flores acknowledged that not all children grow up hunting or around guns at all. She pointed to a recent gun safety resource in her state called “Keep Em Safe, Texas.” The campaign has materials on safe storage and offers presentations for both adult and child audiences, but since the campaign was just launched in October 2020 there is no data yet as to its efficacy.
“As gun owners, we have to be the ones sending the message” when it comes to teaching gun safety to children who don’t learn about guns the way she did, Flores said. “Not everyone has the opportunity to explore guns in same manner.”
In Oregon, Kemp worked with a pediatrician to create a script for doctors and nurses to talk to teens and their parents about firearms and safety.
The National Rifle Association also has a program called the Eddie Eagle GunSafe program to prevent firearm accidents among children. It aims to teach kids that if they find a firearm, to stop, don’t touch it, run away and tell a grown-up.
Studies over the years have shown that teaching gun safety to children is generally ineffective in preventing accidental injuries or in reducing children’s interest in playing with guns.
“The most effective way to prevent unintentional gun injuries, suicide and homicide to children and adolescents, research shows, is the absence of guns from homes and communities,” according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, which also notes that if a family does still keep guns in the home, then they should be store “locked and unloaded, with ammunition locked separately.”
What happens now?
Despite an acknowledgement that the level of gun violence in the United States is much, much higher than it should be, there’s not agreement among all gun owners when it comes to what to do about it.
Many gun owners support what Flores called “reasonable regulations.” The 2019 American Public Media Research Lab report showed more than two-thirds of gun owners supported safe storage laws. A 2019 ABC News/Washington Post poll found eight in 10 people in gun households supported universal background checks.
But there is still a population of gun owners who don’t see any legislative path forward.
The NRA has been waging a battle against numerous gun control efforts for decades, especially when it comes to legislation — and its message has an effect.
A 2018 study from Monmouth University showed that 78% of gun owners who are not NRA members supported background checks for all firearms purchases. That dropped to 69% of NRA members.
“They just became a lot more militant about their stance on things,” Kemp argued. “They have been incredibly effective communicators with their group, and their members are highly motivated and very vocal.”
The organization also has the NRA Civil Defense Fund, which according to its website, offers “legal and financial assistance to select individuals and organizations defending their right to keep and bear arms.”
The NRA Civil Defense Fund currently has ongoing litigation in 20 states.
Harris, who said he feels the Second Amendment gives Americans the “individual God-given right to possess any weapon they may have a use or need for, for political or self-defense purposes,” said there’s nothing he understands about gun control advocates’ position.
This is a position largely echoed by the NRA.
Attitudes about gun control laws have changed in the U.S., even in the past couple of years.
In a ABC News/Washington Post poll earlier this year, 50% percent of Americans said they would prioritize enacting new gun violence laws, while 43% prefer a focus on protecting the right to own guns.
The level of support is down from 57% after the mass school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida in 2018.
It is also unclear if proposed measures such as universal background checks have maintained their overwhelming popularity as measured in 2019.
This fundamental divide has resulted in gridlock at the national level, even with mass shootings on the rise as well as homicides and other gun violence.
In Flores’ view, gun owners, who understand guns and how they work, need to come together with organizations such as Giffords’ Gun Owners for Safety or Kemp’s Gun Owners for Responsible Ownership to come up with laws they can agree on — and get politicians on board, too.
“The argument that gun safety laws won’t make a difference is moot, because to not try anything is just to continue the bloodshed,” she said.
ABC News’ Marlene Lenthang contributed to this report.
“It’s been such a long time,” Cierra Chub said Monday on “Good Morning America.” “Each [of my kids] came up to visit once, but it’s not the same.”
Cierra Chubb, of South Carolina, was hospitalized with COVID-19 in July, while she was around 37 weeks pregnant.
Just two days after she was admitted to the hospital, she had to undergo an emergency cesarean section because her pregnancy was in distress.
She delivered her third child, a son named Myles, on July 26, two weeks before his due date.
While Myles was born healthy, Cierra Chubb’s condition quickly deteriorated after his birth. She was put on a ventilator and then an ECMO machine, on which she stayed for nearly 30 days, according to her husband, Jamal Chubb, who became the sole caregiver for their three children and documented his wife’s journey on TikTok.
“It’s just one of those things where you’re living life and then all of a sudden everything feels like it’s collapsing,” Jamal Chubb said on “GMA.” “At first I started sharing the story on Tiktok just because I wanted to update people because I kept getting a lot of text messages, and then it grew from updating to informing people on what I’m seeing with COVID firsthand and encouraging people to get vaccinated.”
“It kind of took on a life of its own,” he said, adding that his family has received “so many prayers” from people around the world.
In what Jamal Chubb described as “truly a miracle,” his wife’s condition began to improve over the past two months.
Cierra Chubb, who was not vaccinated when she was diagnosed with COVID-19, was able to walk out of the hospital on Oct. 27. She was cheered on by medical staff who lined the hallways to say goodbye.
“I had been there so long that I’d gotten to know the nursing staff and the respiratory specialists very well, but I wasn’t expecting that there were going to be that many people invested in my wellness,” she said. “It was incredible.”
Her recovery continued at a rehabilitation center — where she relearned everything from walking to writing — until Monday, when she was able to go home.
“I’ve been crying in the car all morning on the way up here,” Jamal Chubb said of his final drive from the family’s home to the rehabilitation center. “It is just surreal that this is the last time I’ll have to make this drive and she’ll be home with our family.”
He said his wife’s last words before she was put on a ventilator were, ‘I’m coming back to my family,’ and he put those words on his own social media so he could use them as motivation.
“That’s the hope I held onto as you progressed,” Jamal Chubb said to his wife. “It gave me hope every day to read it because that’s what I knew you wanted to do, you wanted to come back.”
Cierra Chubb said she was amazed at how her husband stepped up as a single dad to their three children, ages 7, 2 and nearly 4 months.
“Raising kids by yourself is just taxing,” she said. “When you get married, you are never expecting to have to do that part on your own, it’s a partnership and Jamal and I have always shared things equally.”
“He’s a very involved dad so I think this jump for him versus maybe your average guy wasn’t that big, but with me being sick on top of it, has to have been exhausting to say the least,” she said. “He’s been a rock star the entire time.”
(NASHVILLE, Tenn.) — Police are hailing a Nashville, Tennessee, pastor as a hero after he tackled a gunman at the church altar.
Dezire Baganda, 26, was sitting at the front of the Nashville Light Mission Pentecostal Church on Sunday when he allegedly took out a gun and headed to the altar where the pastor was praying with congregants, the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department said.
Surveillance video showed the suspect waving the gun and pointing it at worshippers. Police said Baganda told everyone to get up.
The pastor quickly tackled Baganda, police said, and several church members jumped in to help take away the gun.
No shots were fired, police said.
“The heroic actions of a local pastor and several of his parishioners saved a church from further violence,” police said in a statement.
Baganda was not a church member but had been to services there before, according to the pastor.
Baganda is charged with 15 counts of felony aggravated assault, police said, adding that more counts are expected.
(NEW YORK) — Pamela Wilson, a second grade teacher in Washington state, has been an educator for 18 years.
This year, amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic that has disrupted three consecutive school years, Wilson said she is facing a level of burnout she never has before.
“I sit in my car and don’t want to go in,” Wilson told “Good Morning America.” “It’s not because of my students, it’s because of the broken system around them that’s been magnified by the pandemic.”
“The system is broken and we see that it’s broken, but everyone tries to go on like it’s normal,” she said.
Wilson, a public school teacher, said her school has a shortage of full-time teachers as well as a shortage of substitute teachers, which means teachers like herself are burdened with no time off and no time for planning, leading to 12-hour workdays.
“This is my passion and I love my job, but I’m struggling this year, wondering, if this is the new normal, can I do this job anymore?” said Wilson. “I keep waiting for it to get better and it gets worse.”
Charity Turpeau, the 2021-22 middle school teacher of the year in her Louisiana school district, said she too has never seen burnout among teachers at this level in her 16 years of teaching.
“I absolutely love what I do, but lately with the workload, demands from the state, pandemic restrictions, and lack of pay I feel as if I am doing less of what I love, which is teaching,” she said. “The paycheck does not match the amount of workload we are given and the overtime we work to try and complete it all.”
Schools across the country have faced a shortage of teachers in recent years, mainly due to low pay and stressful working conditions. The burnout among teachers this year though, amid the ongoing pandemic, has led to a shortage that teachers like Wilson describe as “unbearable to the system.”
Brittni, who asked that her last name not be used, quit her job as a kindergarten teacher in Tulsa, Oklahoma, this September, a few weeks into the school year.
“I was very overwhelmed with lots of responsibility and little support and long hours,” she said. “I don’t think people understand how hard it is to be a teacher,” she said. “We all love kids, that’s why we do it, but we have to have some kind of respect and some kind of support to keep it going.”
The state of Florida opened the school year with a shortage of 5,000 teachers, a number that by October had slightly increased, according to a spokesperson for the Florida Education Association.
And school districts across the country are reporting a triple whammy of not only a shortage of teachers but also substitutes and school support staff, like bus drivers.
“It’s just not teachers, but staff in general — custodial staff, support staff, administrative staff,” said Dr. Mark P. Holtzman, superintendent of McKeesport Area School District in Pennsylvania, which educates more than 3,000 students. “It’s been a gradual problem and obviously, the pandemic has not impacted it positively.”
Holtzman said his district, which employs around 300 teachers, has been hit hard by veteran teachers choosing to retire and a lack of new teachers entering the field.
“Now it has kind of hit the wall where we’re struggling to fill slots with quality candidates, and substitute teachers don’t exist, so trying to fill classrooms is almost impossible,” he said.
With a lack of substitute teachers to fill the holes, full-time teachers are being asked to do the impossible, teachers and advocates say.
“The burden of the workload has doubled and tripled,” said Katherine Bishop, a teacher for 23 years and current president of the Oklahoma Education Association. “Teachers don’t even have their preparation time anymore. They’re covering classes or taking double the students, and we’re still in a pandemic, teachers, kids, and support professionals are still getting sick.”
Added Turpeau, “Teachers are getting overwhelmed and they’re leaving, and teachers that are staying on are taking on additional challenges. They add stuff on us, and when they add one thing, they take away 15 minutes of our time.”
However, it remains unclear whether Congress will pass paid family leave, a measure that was promised by President Joe Biden on the 2020 campaign trail.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced Wednesday that she would include four weeks of paid family leave and medical leave into the $1.85 trillion social spending bill. The decision came just days after the measure was put on the chopping block when top Democrats failed to come to a compromise with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.).
While Manchin has not explicitly said he will oppose a plan with paid family leave included, he has expressed concerns about the cost of the program and disapproved of its placement in the reconciliation bill.
“I just think it’s the wrong place to put it because it is a social expansion,” Manchin told reporters on Nov. 3, adding it would mean “getting in more debt and basically putting more programs that we can’t pay for that we are having problems with now.”
Manchin’s concerns come as education advocates in his own home state of West Virginia urge him to pass federal paid leave.
“The sooner that we can tackle this and address this issue, the better,” said Dale Lee, president of the West Virginia Educators Association. “The conditions are only going to get worse with the mental stress that has been put on educators this year. More and more people are either going to retire or leave the profession altogether. We can’t fill the positions that we have right now. Almost every county in West Virginia has a teacher shortage, and every county has a substitute shortage because you don’t have enough subs on any given day to fill in for the educators that are out,” Lee added.
Teneshia Moore, a Southfield, Michigan, middle school science teacher, told ABC News that she would like Manchin and other lawmakers to consider how federal paid leave would dramatically impact the lives of educators like herself, who continued to have little recourse during the demanding times of the pandemic.
“I would ask him [Manchin] to put himself in our shoes,” Moore said. “Think about how it affects people that are here in the trenches. He has paid leave, what’s wrong with teachers having paid leave? What would be wrong with teachers having the same thing that he has.”
With 12 days of annual paid leave, Moore said she relied on her rollover sick days after not taking time off from previous years so she could care for her family members who were infected with COVID-19.
“I had to take care of my mother. She had COVID twice during the initial phase [of the pandemic]. I lost an aunt to COVID. I lost a stepfather to COVID,” she said. “I had to take care of all those people and I literally dwindled my sick days down to little or nothing.”
Erin Castillo, a high school teacher in Fremont, California, said her school started the year short 40 teachers, which has caused her workload to nearly triple.
She gets two paid personal days off per year, along with 10 sick days, but no paid maternity leave.
“If I need maternity leave, then that’s coming out of my sick leave, so often teachers are all saving those up for maternity leave so they can get paid, which means they’re left with two paid days off,” she said. “That’s really hard for teachers to get through.”
Describing the workload she and other teachers are facing this year, Castillo said, “I think it’s beyond the typical teacher burnout that people talk about. I describe it as trying to come up for air and there’s no chance to catch your breath because more and more just keeps coming at you.”
Shortage likely to continue without support, experts say
Education experts including Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, say they worry what will happen to the education system long-term if teachers are not supported now.
A study conducted by the AFT with the Rand Corp. earlier this year found one in four teachers were considering leaving their job by the end of the school year. Teachers were also more likely to report experiencing frequent job-related stress and symptoms of depression than the general population, according to the study.
“What COVID has done is exacerbated all the inequalities and the inequities [of education], but teachers will always attempt to do what’s asked of them, which covers up some of the inequalities and some of the inequities,” said Weingarten. “We need to give them the conditions in which they can teach and kids can learn if we’re serious about having kids not only survive past COVID, but get their mojo back and thrive.”
Kim Anderson, executive director of the National Education Association, says the solution needs to start with better pay for teachers and go beyond that to offer better working conditions and more autonomy and respect for teachers.
“Delivering a world-class public education to every single student in America requires more than short-term Band-Aids,” she said. “It requires a unified, non-politicized, authentic attempt to address the reinforcement of and transformation of one of the most important institutions in our country, and that is our public education system.”
Anderson pointed to a survey of NEA members conducted in June, before the start of this school year, that found nearly one in three educators said the pandemic was likely to make them leave the profession earlier than expected.
She said now more than ever, America’s education system needs more investments in teacher recruitment, preparation, support and compensation.
“We need mentoring and professional learning communities that are led by educators, for all educators. We need strategic partnerships with teacher preparation programs for new educators, as well,” she said. “We need teacher residency programs within school districts to build a long-term pipeline.”
Nieka Richard, a California teacher who went viral when she posted on TikTok about quitting her role, said she wants people to know how important teachers are and warns what may happen if teachers aren’t supported.
“If teachers are stretched really thin, then the education cannot be as robust as it should be,” said Richard. “And we as a country are going toward even more detrimental times because people are not properly educated and it starts in the classroom. It starts with the teachers.”
ABC News’ Kaila Nichols contributed to this report.
(HENRY COUNTY, Ga.) — Investigators in Georgia and NBA Hall of Famer Shaquille O’Neal are offering a $30,000 reward for any information regarding a suspect who shot and wounded a police officer last week.
Henry County Police Officer Paramhans Desai, 38, was responding to a domestic disturbance on Thursday and was attempting to make an arrest, the Henry County Police Department said in a statement. Jordan Jackson, 22, of McDonough, Georgia, allegedly shot Desai and fled the scene in a 2016 Honda Civic, according to the police.
Desai was taken to Grady Medical Center and was listed in critical, but stable condition Sunday, the police said. Desai, who is married and has two children, has been with the Henry County PD for two years and previously worked for the Georgia Department of Corrections and DeKalb County Police, the police said.
On Sunday, a reward for information on Jackson’s whereabouts was announced and the money came from several sources.
The Harris County Sheriff’s office and the U.S. Marshals Office each offered $10,000, Crime Stoppers Atlanta offered $5,000, the Henry County PD said.
O’Neal, who lives in Henry County and is an honorary deputy in Clayton County, Georgia, also offered $5,000.
Anyone with tips can call Crime Stoppers Atlanta at 800-597-TIPS (8477).
(LAS VEGAS) — With an eye on both the midterm elections and 2024, a host of Republican lawmakers — including many potential presidential contenders — spoke in Las Vegas at the Republican Jewish Coalition Annual Leadership Meeting this weekend. Most called this past week’s election outcomes a signifier of things to come during midterms.
“As we move forward, the signs are clear and the trends are unmistakable,” House Minority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy said Saturday. “A Republican wave is underway.”
Attendees aim to ensure that GOP gains continue through 2024’s presidential election, with possible candidates making their case without explicitly stating their intentions.
“A lot of people have come here to audition,” said Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., Saturday night.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, former Ambassador Nikki Haley, Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and former Vice President Mike Pence all spoke at the event. The conference also featured a video message from former President Donald Trump.
“We will win back the House. We will win back the Senate,” Trump said in his video address. “And we will win back in 2024 that beautiful white building sometimes referred to as the White House.”
While there has been no shortage of commentary on the fact that Virginia Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin kept Trump at an arm’s length, most of the speakers in Las Vegas leaned hard into their support of Trump.
“President Trump’s single most redeeming characteristic — the man has a steel backbone and he doesn’t back down,” Cruz said Friday to boisterous applause. “After years of Republicans scared of their own shadows, there’s a reason we celebrate a leader who’s willing to stand up and fight.”
“Who’s going to be the nominee [in 2024]? I don’t know, but I do know this, that Donald Trump was a hell of a president,” said Graham.
On Friday night, Scott, who is the chair of the National Republican Senate Committee, told ABC News that Trump will do “whatever he can” to help Republicans take control of both chambers of Congress in 2022. Depending on the race, it could mean standing back.
“You should listen to the candidate because they know their state and they know their race,” Scott said. “And so you should let them figure out how involved you should be and that’s anybody, including the NRSC.”
On Saturday, Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel told attendees that connecting voters on issues they care about and presenting a united party to the electorate are the keys to winning more elections.
The Republican Jewish Coalition meeting typically centers on foreign policy, like relations with Israel and with other nations in the region. Former Vice President Mike Pence largely touted the accomplishments of the Trump administration as it pertains to Israel, including moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem.
“Under the Trump-Pence administration, if the world knew nothing else the world knew this. America stands with Israel,” said Pence. “Our administration was able to take historic steps to strengthen the ties in the American people and the Jewish state of Israel.”
In addition to U.S.-Israeli relations, this time around at the annual meeting there was a great deal of attention paid to domestic issues.
Among the most talked-about issues was teaching so-called critical race theory in schools, a topic that has emerged as a flashpoint in conservative circles. Every speaker referred to critical race theory during their remarks, with some, like Haley, calling it “liberal indoctrination.”
“We’ve got the midterm elections next year where the stakes couldn’t be higher,” she said Saturday. “Those elections are about whether we stop socialism, defend our borders, return on fiscal sanity and get the liberal indoctrination out of our schools.”
“We’re watching critical race theory and during the woke curriculum infiltrate our school districts,” Noem said.
Opposition to vaccine mandates was also a frequently mentioned topic.
DeSantis spoke of his opposition to voting reform, framing changes as a danger to Republican ability to wield power.
“They want to make conservative Americans second-class citizens,” said DeSantis. “They want to lock us out from being able to exercise power to be able to exercise policy.”
President Joe Biden’s agenda, including his newly passed infrastructure plan, also made waves. Most framed Biden’s agenda as being hijacked by progressives in comparison to how he campaigned. The word “socialism” was used freely to describe the Democratic agenda throughout the event.
During Christie’s remarks Saturday, he cited his record of supporting Trump, but implored the crowd to give up on trying to relitigate the 2020 election. The response from the crowd to Christie, an ABC News contributor, was tepid.
“We can no longer talk about the past and past elections. No matter where you stand on that issue, no matter where you stand, it is over,” said Christie.
(NEW YORK) — “Everything bad that you think of was there,” Sarina told ABC News in a video call, wiping away tears. “I was feeling like, ‘I’m gonna die. Why?'”
She said she came to terms with dying during her first attempt to get inside Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul on Aug. 19, surrounded by shouting, gunshots and beatings in a sea of thousands of people desperate to flee — but she said she told herself if she could just get her two-year-old daughter out of the Taliban’s Afghanistan, it would be OK.
“It was not easy that night,” said Sarina, whose name ABC News has changed for the safety of her family still in Afghanistan. “One second I thought I lost my daughter forever. I thought, ‘This is not the life I wanted…I will remain under Taliban, and they will kill me. At least my daughter will be safe.”
After waiting outside the airport for more than 10 hours, where she said they were treated like “animals,” her family returned to their shelter in Kabul, saying her daughter had seen enough.
It’s a day Sarina said is seared in her memory as a “nightmare” and one she hopes her 2-year-old will forget — although bruises on her “tiny face,” as Sarina called it, pointing to her cheeks and explaining their shoulders pushed into their child in the crowd, would serve as a painful reminder of what they had endured.
“My eyes begin, like, filled with tears,” she said, when she’s asked about their journey. “I think it’s not possible to forget those moments that much soon.”
Her husband also came out with bruises, she said, after Taliban fighters whipped him with strands of rubber. Thousands queued outside the airport, and thousands, like Sarina, didn’t make it out of Afghanistan that day.
“The entire night, I cried. I thought ‘Why why? Why did this happen to my daughter?’ She is my everything. She’s a little angel,” she said, through tears. “She was crying. and she told me, ‘Mommy, Mommy, home? Home? Home?'”
Surrounded by chaos, Sarina said she thought to herself, too, “Where is home?”
Fighting for women of Afghanistan — and her life
Sarina spent nine years studying in India, but returned to Afghanistan after completing her Bachelor’s Degree to work in women’s activism.
“There were job opportunities in India for me, but I let them, I let them out. I wanted to be in my country, feel the pain of those poor people, those women, that I really need — I really need to help them,” she said.
She said she worked on USAID projects and in a legal clinic for nearly three years, helping women divorce their husbands after domestic violence, before taking her “dream job” at the relief and development organization, Cordaid.
“Millions of girls, they want education. They want to study in universities. They want jobs. Even if you go to the villages of Afghanistan, you can see that desire in their eyes — how much the Afghan woman wants education,” she said.
But her work — and her life — became at risk when the Taliban seized power, she said. She was called to be evacuated because she was a target.
After the failed first attempt, which she called “traumatic,” Sarina bunkered back down with her family and seven other women in Cordaid — a Dutch development organization she worked for since 2019 which campaigns for women’s rights and independence. When she said she was feeling the lowest, she received a text from a stranger in the U.S. asking how she could help.
“That moment I needed some good words,” she told ABC News, choking up. “Someone telling me that ‘You’re okay, we are with you.’ And that was the moment Cori told me that, ‘Don’t worry Sarina, now I’m with you, many other people are behind you. You’re not alone. We are trying to help you.'”
Cori Shepherd Stern, an Oscar-nominated filmmaker who has an adopted refugee daughter, reached out to Sarina after learning of her situation through a mutual friend. It gave her the motivation she needed for a second attempt two days later.
Shepherd Stern told ABC News it was one of the most “emotionally intense” moments of her life.
“The sheer terror she was feeling, the horrified shock from what she was witnessing was very, very clear and immediate to me,” she said. “I took steps to logistically help her but more than anything, I tried to call out to her from a safe place and stay with her until she and her daughter were safe, too.”
Using Google Maps and communicating with volunteers outside Kabul, Sarina said she and her team were able to find the Dutch army behind the Baron Hotel on Aug. 26, and yelled out, ‘”Holland, Holland!'” The Dutch government had agreed to take the women of Cordaid and their families to safety.
“Finally, that was,” she said, stopping to cry. “That was the moment of victory — but I’m not happy. My family, my mom, my dad, my sisters, I immediately called my dad and told him that I am not happy. I don’t have you in here. I’m not happy. He said ‘don’t worry about that.’ I thought, ‘No.’ Because I know that my dad has done a lot for us.”
Turning to help get her family out
Acknowledging how far she’d come in days alone — from Kabul to Pakistan and from Pakistan to Turkey and from Turkey to Amsterdam — where she’s been at a military base for Afghan refugees for the last 10 weeks — she’s extremely distressed because her family is behind.
“How can I be safe, and they are all miserable?” she said. “They are not safe,” she continued, adding that she’s particularly concerned for her father.
“He is, right now, in depression,” she said, then recalling the version of her father she is used to, bringing a smile to her face. “He is a legend. He is like a hero. He studied at all times of his life,” she said, listing all the places where he has taught and spoken.
Shepherd Stern, who helped Sarina with moral support, and a small team of volunteers are now helping her family with paperwork to get them out. The options they’re looking into include a P-2 visa for her father or individual humanitarian parole for each family member.
But an unprecedented 20,000 Afghan nationals like Sarina’s family have requested parole since August — more than 10 times the number of applications received from around the world in a typical year, USCIS confirmed to ABC News in a statement.
The agency said they are surging resources and training personnel in response — but activists say it isn’t coming soon enough.
“This family needs to get out now,” Shepherd Stern said.
Sarina talks with her dad on the phone every day, multiple times a day, and she said he tells her, “‘My dearest daughter. You should follow your education. You should keep it up.'”
“He was always telling me that you should stand on your feet. ‘I am educating you to be a strong woman,’ and I’m a strong woman, but I am feeling bad that he is not here,” she cried. “He does not deserve to be over there while these people rule over him.”
Because of his devotion to educating women, she said she expects more from the U.S. and international aid agencies to help get her family out.
“It’s a matter of saving the lives of five people,” she said.
Sarina said she refuses to think what she considers unthinkable — that they may not get out.
“Life ends for them — because there is nothing left over here. What should my dad do? What should my sisters do? You tell me — what’s left? It’s mean — it’s life-ending for them,” she said.
“I just don’t want to think about that,” she added, with optimism in her voice. “They will get out soon.”
Sarina’s future
The Netherlands managed to evacuate around 2,000 people like Sarina from Afghanistan.
She has a permit for residency for five years — but it’s unclear when she’ll get settled in a home. To prepare herself, she watches Dutch language lessons on YouTube every day and is now taking classes at a local university offered to refugees. She plans to pursue a Master’s in gender and sexuality studies and become a professor — like her father.
While her time at the camp in the Netherlands has presented new challenges, it has also brought new blessings: Sarina learned on Tuesday that she is approximately eight weeks pregnant.
It’s all the more reason she wants her family out.
“Please help my family. Get them out of Afghanistan, please. That’s a request. That’s a humble request,” she said, with special devotion to her father. “I am everything I am today because of him.”
(NEW YORK) — Three Ivy League school campuses issued temporary evacuations Sunday afternoon after receiving bomb threats.
The incidents at Cornell, Columbia and Brown universities came two days after a similar threat took place at Yale University Friday.
The New York Police Department was called to Columbia’s campus around 2:30 p.m. and students and visitors were told to avoid the area, the school said on Twitter. About two hours later, the school announced that the threats “were deemed not credible by the NYPD and the campus buildings have been cleared for reoccupancy.”
Brown University’s officials said in a statement that officers were called in after a bomb threat was made over the phone. Then, at around 5:45 p.m., the school announced that investigators found no evidence of a credible threat.
“Buildings that had been evacuated are now reopened, and university operations have resumed as normal,” the school said in a statement.
Cornell University officials said a security perimeter was put into place around 4:10 p.m. as officers investigated the threats. Around 7:34, the school said there was no credible threat and reopened the campus.
“We are relieved to report that this threat appears to have been a hoax. A cruel hoax; but, thankfully, just a hoax,” Cornell representatives said in a statement.
Police closed down Yale’s campus and some local businesses for over four hours before they gave an all clear, ABC affiliate WTNH reported.
Police officers were still investigated the threats at Cornell and Brown Sunday evening.
Later Sunday night, the NYPD tweeted that the ordeal at Columbia was a “swatting incident,” and they will continue to investigate.
No devices have been found at any of the schools and investigators have not made any arrests.
(WASHINGTON) — In an angry conversation on his final day as president, Donald Trump told the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee he was leaving the GOP and creating his own political party — and that he didn’t care if the move would destroy the Republican Party, according to a new book by ABC News Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl.
Trump only backed down when Republican leaders threatened to take actions that would have cost Trump millions of dollars, Karl writes his upcoming book, Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show.
The book gives a detailed account of Trump’s stated intention to reject the party that elected him president and the aggressive actions taken by party leaders to force him to back down.
The standoff started on Jan. 20, just after Trump boarded Air Force One for his last flight as president.
“[RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel] called to wish him farewell. It was a very un-pleasant conversation,” Karl writes in “Betrayal,” set to be released on Nov. 16.
“Donald Trump was in no mood for small talk or nostalgic goodbyes,” Karl writes. “He got right to the point. He told her he was leaving the Republican Party and would be creating his own political party. The president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., was also on the phone. The younger Trump had been relentlessly denigrating the RNC for being insufficiently loyal to Trump. In fact, at the January 6 rally before the Capitol Riot, the younger Trump all but declared that the old Republican Party didn’t exist anymore.”
With just hours left in his presidency, Trump was telling the Republican Party chairwoman that he was leaving the party entirely. The description of this conversation and the discussions that followed come from two sources with direct knowledge of these events.
“I’m done,” Trump told McDaniel. “I’m starting my own party.”
“You cannot do that,” McDaniel told Trump. “If you do, we will lose forever.”
“Exactly. You lose forever without me,” Trump responded. “I don’t care.”
Trump’s attitude was that if he had lost, he wanted everybody around him to lose as well, Karl writes. According to a source who witnessed the conversation, Trump was talking as if he viewed the destruction of the Republican Party as a punishment to those party leaders who had betrayed him — including those few who voted to impeach him and the much larger group he believed didn’t fight hard enough to overturn the election in his favor.
“This is what Republicans deserve for not sticking up for me,” Trump told McDaniel, according to the book.
In response, McDaniel tried to convince Trump that creating his own party wouldn’t just destroy the Republican Party, it would also destroy him.
“This isn’t what the people who depended on you deserve, the people who believed in you,” McDaniel said. “You’ll ruin your legacy. You’ll be done.”
But Trump said he didn’t care, Karl writes.
“[Trump] wasn’t simply floating an idea,” Karl writes in the book. “He was putting the party chairwoman on notice that he had decided to start his own party. It was a done deal. He had made up his mind. ‘He was very adamant that he was going to do it,’ a source who heard the president’s comments later told me.”
Following the tense conversion, McDaniel informed RNC leadership about Trump’s plans, spurring a tense standoff between Trump and his own party over the course of the next four days.
While Trump, “morose in defeat and eager for revenge, plotted the destruction of the Republican Party … the RNC played hardball,” according to the book.
“We told them there were a lot of things they still depended on the RNC for, and that if this were to move forward, all of it would go away,” an RNC official told Karl.
According to the book, “McDaniel and her leadership team made it clear that if Trump left, the party would immediately stop paying legal bills incurred during post-election challenges.”
“But, more significant, the RNC threatened to render Trump’s most valuable political asset worthless,” Karl writes, referring to “the campaign’s list of the email addresses of forty million Trump supporters.”
“It’s a list Trump had used to generate money by renting it to candidates at a steep cost,” says the book. “The list generated so much money that party officials estimated that it was worth about $100 million.”
Five days after revealing plans that could have destroyed his own political party on that last flight aboard Air Force One, Karl writes, Trump backed down, saying he would remain a Republican after all.
Asked this week to respond to Karl’s book, both Trump and McDaniel denied the story.
“This is false, I have never threatened President Trump with anything,” McDaniel told ABC News. “He and I have a great relationship. We have worked tirelessly together to elect Republicans up and down the ballot, and will continue to do so.”
Trump, responding to the story, said, “ABC Non News and 3rd rate reporter Jonathan Karl have been writing fake news about me from the beginning of my political career. Just look at what has now been revealed about the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax. It was a made up and totally fabricated scam and the lamestream media knew it. It just never ends!”
Trump has long denounced news reports that he had considered starting his own party as “fake news.” In Karl’s final interview with the former president for his book, Trump claimed to not recall his conversation with McDaniel on Jan. 20, saying, “a lot of people suggested a third party, many people” — but that he himself had never even thought about leaving the GOP.
“You mean I was going to form another party or something?” Trump asked Karl incredulously. “Oh, that is bulls**t. It never happened.”
