(NEW YORK) — For the first time in 32 years, tens of thousands of New Yorkers are bracing to begin the workweek without the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR)after workers at the busiest commuter railroad in North America went on strike over the weekend.

More than 300,000 daily commuters rely on the LIRR to get from Long Island to New York City. State and local officials were scrambling over the weekend to get contingency plans in place, but warned commuters to expect New York City buses and subways to be crowded on Monday.

Queens Borough President Donovan Richards told WABC in New York that he is expecting his borough to be a bottleneck on Monday as the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) is planning to use shuttle buses to transport essential workers from Long Island to subway stations in Queens.

“That’s not enough when our buses are overcrowded,” Richards said of the shuttle bus plan.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said on Sunday that commuters will also be allowed to park in the Citi Field parking lot, which is within walking distance to the 7 train on the New York City subway system.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani asked subway riders to be patient, but cautioned them to “prepare for heavier-than-usual traffic, crowded transit options and additional travel time.”

LIRR trains came to a halt at midnight on Saturday after the union representing thousands of rail workers and the MTA failed to reach an agreement on a new contract.

Kevin Sexton, the national vice president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (BLET), one of the five unions representing LIRR workers, told reporters that he and other leaders could not come to an agreement over salary increases and health care costs before the negotiation deadline ended.

“We are far apart at this point and we feel it’s unnecessary because we went through the process,” Sexton said of the strike.

MTA CEO Janno Leiber said during a Sunday press conference with New York Gov. Kathy Hochul that what the unions have asked for would force riders to “pay the cost of a labor settlement that blew up the MTA budget.” 

“We said right up to the deadline that the unions had imposed, ‘Let’s talk, let’s keep talking,’ and we sat there in the hallway, so they couldn’t even avoid seeing us, that we were available to talk to them right up to and through the deadline,” Leiber said.

Leiber said the unions chose to “walk out” on the negotiations.

The LIRR unions called the job action an “open-ended strike,” telling ABC News that, despite claims from Leiber and Hochul, MTA officials had not reached out to them about negotiations.

It was unclear on Sunday afternoon whether any new negotiations are scheduled.

According to the union statement, talks broke down when the MTA added “healthcare takeaways and other concessionary issues to the table literally in the 11th hour before a midnight strike deadline. These regressive management demands had never been raised previously.”

But in an interview on Sunday with ABC New York City station WABC, Leiber denied the unions’ assertion that a disagreement over health insurance prompted the strike, calling it “complete nonsense.”

Lieber said the rail workers’ unions “rejected every single idea that we put on the table, and there were many.”

The unions are demanding wage increases of 14.5% over four years, WABC reports, while MTA officials have offered slightly smaller increases and a lump-sum payment in the contract’s fourth year to make up the difference. The proposed pay bumps are largely in line with contracts accepted by the LIRR’s conductors and New York City Transit workers, WABC reports.

In a statement released on Saturday, Gov. Hochul said the unions “represent the highest-paid workers of any railroad in the nation, yet they are demanding contracts that could raise fares as much as 8%, pit workers against one another, and risk tax hikes for Long Islanders.”

During her news conference on Sunday, Hochul struck a more conciliatory tone.

“The work you do is absolutely vital. I value your labor and I believe that you deserve fair wages and benefits. But this strike has put all of that at risk,” Hochul said.

The governor added, “Just three days of a strike would erase every dollar of additional salary that workers would receive under a new contract.”

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(NEW YORK) — Residents in parts of the Midwest and Great Plains are bracing for another day of severe weather threats, including possible tornadoes, damaging winds and large hail.

The severe weather, expected to extend into Monday and Tuesday, is forecast to be especially active from north-central Oklahoma up into Minnesota and western Wisconsin.

The greatest risk areas, a level 3 out of 5 “enhanced risk,” according to the National Weather Service, stretch from east-central Nebraska up to southwest Minnesota and include the cities of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and Grand Island, Nebraska. Large hail, damaging winds and tornadoes are possible in the enhanced risk area.

The new severe weather threats come a day after storms across the central part of the country prompted reports of tornadoes in Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska, and hail the size of baseballs in Kansas, Missouri, Iowa and Nebraska.

Thunderstorms near Concordia, Kansas, on Saturday produced estimated wind gusts of 90 mph, knocking down trees and power lines.

Hill City Airport in northwest Kansas reported wind gusts up to 82 mph. The strong winds also fueled dust storms in the area, which threatened driving conditions.

Thunderstorms on Saturday night prompted a flash flood emergency in central Grundy County, Missouri, including the city of Trenton, when six to eight inches of rain fell in a matter of hours.

The adverse weather conditions are expected to continue through the start of the workweek. On Monday, more than 30 million people from the central Plains to the Midwest are expected to be on alert for a potential outbreak of severe weather.

A level 4 out of 5 “moderate risk” advisory has been issued for parts of central and northeast Kansas into far southeast Nebraska, including the city of Topeka, Kansas. The risk for the area includes potentially strong tornadoes, hail larger than baseballs, and destructive winds.

A level 3 out of 5 enhanced risk advisory also extends from north-central Oklahoma into central Wisconsin, including the cities Wichita, Kansas; Kansas City, Missouri; Omaha, Nebraska; and Des Moines, Iowa. 

On Tuesday, a level 2 out of 5 “slight risk” advisory for severe weather is expected to stretch from northeast Texas to Michigan, and include potentially strong to severe thunderstorms.

Fire weather also impacting the Plains and Southwest
Parts of the Plains and Southeast are also expecting critical fire weather conditions to continue into this week amid widespread warm, dry and windy conditions.

Several wildfires broke out in parts of Minnesota on Saturday and rapidly grew. The largest Minnesota wildfire, the Flanders Fire in Crow Wing County, has burned more than 1,100 acres and was 0% contained on Sunday morning, prompting evacuation orders in the city of Crosslake.

The Minnesota fires prompted Gov. Tim Walz to declare a state of emergency Sunday morning, including mobilizing the state’s National Guard.

Dozens of wildfires also broke out over the weekend across the Great Plains from Montana to the Dakotas, as well as in Texas and New Mexico over the last week.

On Sunday, the greatest wildfire threats are in areas of northwest Texas, including Amarillo, and parts of New Mexico and Kansas.

Red-flag fire danger warnings have also been issued from Arizona to southern Nebraska, as well as in California’s Central San Joaquin Valley. Severe to extreme drought conditions exist in some of the red-flag warning areas, where expected wind gusts topping 55 mph threaten to rapidly spread wildfires.

The extreme fire weather danger will continue into Monday in parts of far eastern New Mexico, far southeast Colorado, far southwest Kansas, parts of Oklahoma and the Texas panhandle.

Summer-like temperatures expected in the East
Meanwhile, a big warm-up is expected for most of the East, where afternoon temperatures on Sunday and Monday are forecast to reach the 80s and 90s in many places.

The temperature in New York City is expected to reach the mid-80s on Monday and could hit the lower 90s in Washington, D.C.

It will be even hotter on Tuesday for a large swath of the I-95 corridor, with highs in the 90s from Washington, D.C., to Philadelphia and New York City.

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(NEW YORK) — The Department of Justice is finalizing a deal to launch a so-called “Truth and Justice Commission” and establish a compensation fund of $1,776,000,000 to pay claims made by alleged victims of government “weaponization” in exchange for President Donald Trump dropping his ongoing lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service, sources told ABC News.

Sources told ABC News that the proposed deal — which is likely to face legal hurdles and has already been criticized by Democrats as a “slush fund” for Trump’s allies — arose after months of deliberations between the White House and DOJ officials who originally attempted to craft a legal justification for the settlement to compensate Trump directly.

Internally, DOJ lawers believed they could ignore the conflict of interest outright, privately arguing that Trump has both the right to sue as a private citizen and the power to command the executive branch as president, according to sources familiar with their discussions.

Advocating a centuries-old legal principle known as the “rule of necessity,” DOJ lawyers have argued that no alternative existed other than letting the lawsuit proceed with Trump acting as the plaintiff while being directly in charge of the defendants — the IRS and Treasury — according to sources.

Sources said that plan was ultimately scuttled in favor of the $1.776 billion compensation fund — with the figure being a nod to the nation’s founding — as the judge overseeing Trump’s IRS lawsuit began to raise issues with Trump suing the very government he leads. In an order last month, U.S. District Judge Katheen Williams ordered Trump’s lawyers in the case and the Department of Justice to submit court filings by next week to justify whether both sides of the case were sufficiently adverse for the matter to proceed.

Terms of the proposed compensation arrangement could change before the deal is finalized, sources said.

Judge Williams also appointed a group of prominent attorneys — including a former solicitor general as well as a federal judge — to weigh in on the case.

In a court filing this week, the attorneys identified serious issues with the lawsuit, arguing that Trump has “extraordinary” control over the defendants in the case and that the “circumstances raise the specter that Defendants and their attorneys may instead be operating at the President’s direction.”

“Additionally, since taking office, President Trump has significantly expanded the President’s oversight and control over the Attorney General and DOJ, including in ways that blur the line between fidelity to the President’s policy priorities and fidelity to the President himself,” the filing said.

Trump sued the IRS after a government contractor pleaded guilty in 2023 to stealing the tax information of Trump and other wealthy Americans and leaking it to media outlets in 2019 and 2020.

With Judge Williams scrutinizing the case, sources said that DOJ officials formulated the proposal to create a compensation fund on the condition that Trump drops the lawsuit as well as two civil claims for $230 million related to the Russia collusion investigation he faced during his first term in office and the 2022 search of his Mar-a-Lago estate.

Trump himself would not be eligible for payment from the fund for those three dropped claims, though entities associated with the president are not barred from filing claims, the sources said. 

Sources said the “President Donald J. Trump Truth and Justice Commission” would include five commissioners — four of whom are appointed by the attorney general — that Trump would have the right to remove without cause. The commission would also be under no obligation to disclose the process for awarding the nearly $2 billion.  

It is unclear how Judge Williams might respond to the proposed settlement — which has yet been disclosed to the court — though DOJ lawyers believe the settlement would not require any approval from the court.  

Democratic lawmakers have already raised concerns about the reported settlement and called on Congress to pass legislation to restrict the use of taxpayer dollars for the proposed compensation fund.

“It’s outright corruption. What we’re seeing here is outright corruption,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., said Friday. “We’re looking at a billion dollars for a ballroom; $1.7 billion for a slush fund for the president’s friends.”

Across the aisle, Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick suggested the matter could end up before the Supreme Court.

“I don’t even know how that’s allowable to happen,” Fitzpatrick told ABC News regarding the compensation fund. “It sounds like a question our colleagues across the street are going to have to resolve pretty quickly.”

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