(NEW YORK) — The Powerball jackpot has risen to an estimated $1.9 billion for Monday’s drawing after no ticket won the world-record pot on Saturday, Powerball said.
Monday’s drawing has a cash option of $929.1 million, the lottery said.
The winning Powerball numbers drawn Saturday night for the estimated $1.6 billion prize were 28, 45, 53, 56, 69 and the Powerball was 20. The Powerplay was 3X.
“Like the rest of America, and the world, I think we’re all eager to find out when this historic jackpot will eventually be won,” Drew Svitko, Powerball Product Group Chair and Pennsylvania Lottery Executive Director, said in a statement.
Powerball said 16 tickets, including three sold in California, two in Colorado and Pennsylvania and one each Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, New York and South Dakota, won $1 million by matching all five white balls.
The Powerball jackpot reached an estimated $1.6 billion on Friday, making it the largest jackpot ever, lottery officials said.
The record-setting jackpot has ballooned after 39 consecutive drawings yielded no grand prize winner, lottery officials said.
The Saturday drawing marked the 40th Powerball drawing since the jackpot was last won in Pennsylvania on Aug. 3. The cash value of Saturday’s jackpot would have been $782.4 million, according to the latest figures.
If a player’s ticket had matched all six numbers drawn on Saturday night, it would have been the largest jackpot won in U.S. lottery history — surpassing the previous world-record-setting $1.586 billion Powerball jackpot in 2016.
Monday’s drawing will tie the game record for the number of drawings in a row without a grand prize winner, Powerball said.
The jackpot grows based on game sales and interest. But the odds of winning the big prize stays the same — 1 in 292.2 million, Powerball said.
Jackpot winners can either take the money as an immediate cash lump sum or in 30 annual payments over 29 years. Both advertised prize options do not include federal and jurisdictional taxes, Powerball said.
Tickets cost $2 and are sold in 45 U.S. states as well as Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. More than half of all proceeds remain in the jurisdiction where the ticket was purchased, according to Powerball.
Powerball drawings are broadcast live every Monday, Wednesday and Saturday at 10:59 p.m. ET from the Florida Lottery draw studio in Tallahassee. The drawings are also livestreamed online at Powerball.com.
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(KYIV, Ukraine) — When Andy Huynh watched the news of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, he started losing sleep. All he could think about was the struggle of the Ukrainian people against an aggressor he felt was violating their sovereignty and opening the world up to a third World War.
“All my personal problems didn’t feel important anymore … It felt wrong just to sit back and do nothing,” he said. “I had to go.”
The Alabama man was not alone. Two days after the invasion, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called for “friends of Ukraine, freedom and democracy” to serve as volunteers in the Ukrainian military. More than 20,000 volunteers from 52 countries responded, many of whom had served in the U.S. Army, British Army, and, like Huynh, the U.S. Marine Corps, according to Ukrainian officials.
Their experience is credited by Zelenskyy for bolstering the war effort for Ukraine, especially since NATO countries have rejected sending ground troops in fears of starting their own conflict with Russia. Russian President Vladimir Putin announced in March that 16,000 volunteers from the Middle East would be joining his country’s fight.
Tanya Mehra, a senior research fellow at the International Centre for Counterterrorism at The Hague, said the mobilization of foreign fighters on battlefields dates to 1816 and they have played prominent roles in conflicts in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya and Somalia since the 1980s.
The evolution of foreign-born fighters has created distinct classes of fighters, from mercenaries who join conflicts primarily for financial gain, Mehra said, and others who are driven by ideological reasons. Mercenaries, she said, who are outsourced contractors for small governments, tend to be associated to “increases in violence and higher civilian casualties,” which can prolong the conflict, whereas foreign fighters become part of the state military, which makes them “accountable for the acts they have committed.”
Many of those foreign fighters serving in Ukraine tend to be older than your average soldier, and in a stage in their lives where they felt they could help through their years of experience.
John Harding, 59, joined the Ukrainian military in 2018, when the country was fighting Russian-backed separatists. As a professional combat medic who served in Syria, the British-born Harding put his experience to use on the battlefield. But he also found he was in demand as a trainer for other medics who had no idea how to apply first aid in a hostile combat environment
“Medics are notorious for getting themselves killed,” Harding said. “You may know how to apply a torniquet, but you also need to know how to apply a tourniquet while watching out for snipers.”
One American, who did not want to use his name because he is still fighting in Ukraine, said he joined the Ukrainian military in April because he felt “it is important for the world to stand up with the Ukrainians and resist aggression.” Having grown up in a military family and a U.S. Air Force veteran himself, the man took leave of his job in IT while living in central Europe to join the fight.
Today, he uses his background in engineering systems, cybersecurity and computer networks to operate drones in anti-tank and stinger missions. He said his squad was responsible for taking down a Mil Mi-28 Russian helicopter on July 18. The man said his homemade bombs and grenades are constructed using Coke cans and some of the 60 kilograms of TNT captured during an offensive in September. They take flight via off-the-shelf commercial drones.
The man said that the number of foreign fighters he encounters, the majority of whom were from the U.S., has decreased since the spring. The intensity of the fighting weeded away what he called the “TikTok warriors” who were not prepared for the danger, or length, of the missions. He remains fighting after seven months because of ideological reasons, but also because of the survivor’s guilt he felt when two men from his squad — Huynh and Alex Drueke, also from Alabama — were captured on June 9 following a firefight.
“I felt I lost my two brothers. They followed me to this unit. I felt very guilty,” he said. “Part of the reason I stayed this long is because of them.”
Huynh and Drueke, a U.S. Army veteran, spent 105 days in captivity, including a month in a Russian “black site,” where they endured daily torture. In late September they were released, along with eight other foreign-born volunteer fighters from England and Canada and more than 200 Ukrainian soldiers.
Harding was among those men released. He met Huynh and Drueke in a prison cell after having been captured in May when a Ukrainian unit he was with in Mariupol was forced to surrender. The torture he suffered has led to a diagnosis of permanent neurological damage to his hands, along with broken ribs and damage to his sternum. One aftereffect is “more psychological”: “I have mood swings which I don’t have control of,” he said.
He now lives close to family in Luton, a town in the southeast of England. The results of ongoing medical treatment will determine his ability to work.
“Would I do it again? Knowing what I know, probably not. Would I do it again if I didn’t know? Yes, I would,” he said. “The only thing I would have done different is I wouldn’t have surrendered. I would have fought to the very last round.”
Like Harding, Drueke and Hyunh also say they have no regrets. Back home in Alabama, they are adjusting to their former lives. Hyunh is engaged and will marry soon, while Drueke is contemplating his next career move. They have bonded, not just with one another, but with Harding and the other men in their unit who are either still in Ukraine or returned home. One day they hope to reunite, either in the U.S. or in England — or even Ukraine itself to help rebuild.
“Honestly, Ukraine has really surprised the world. We did not expect them to be that feisty, that strong, that determined,” said Drueke. “They are amazing people.”
(SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt) — Negotiators from around the world are gathering in Egypt this week for this year’s biggest international climate summit, called COP27.
The United Nations recently warned the world is far from its goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than before the industrial revolution, the goal set by the Paris Climate Agreement.
Current policies would lead to 2.8 degrees Celsius of warming by the end of the century, according to the UN Emissions Gap Report, meaning countries need to reduce emissions significantly more to keep the Paris Agreement goal within reach. If every country and private company meets its climate goals, warming could be limited to 1.8 or 1.9 degrees Celsius, but there are still questions about whether enough is being done to make those goals a reality.
“Every degree does matter, 1.5 degrees is the scientific goal of a climate [that] remains stable. After that, things become exponentially more difficult,” Ani Dasgupta, president and CEO of the World Resources Institute, told ABC News.
“So it’s true, that argument the world won’t stop in 2030 if you did or didn’t reach 1.5, but it becomes that much more difficult and that much more risky for human life. So our goal is to be within that.”
Dasgupta said the pressure is more on the largest emitters like the US, Europe, China, and India to be more ambitious because they contribute far more greenhouse gas emissions.
President Joe Biden is scheduled to attend the summit in Egypt and is expected to tout his domestic policy wins on climate this year, including the infrastructure bill and Inflation Reduction Act which included historic amounts of money for clean energy and climate programs.
The meeting takes place with the backdrop of several climate-driven disasters this year, including the devastating flooding in Pakistan and severe drought and famine conditions in East Africa. The world is about 1.2 degrees Celsius higher than the pre-industrial average and experts said this year proves most countries are not prepared for even that amount of warming.
Dasgupta said many of these crises are not just weather disasters but they also bring huge economic impacts, which is one reason there will be so much focus on providing more finance for countries feeling the impacts of climate change.
“This particular year that we are ending, or almost ending, has been devastating in climate-related weather disasters, like a banner year,” he said.
“That is the context of what a 1.2-degree world looks like … so we’ve talked about 1.1, 1.2 [degrees] it always seemed like something you have to imagine. Literally this year you don’t have to imagine, you could just read the newspaper or watch television to see.”
Countries already experiencing dangerous and expensive impacts of climate change, like flooding or food and water insecurity, are expected to pressure wealthier countries like the U.S. to provide more funding to help them adapt or relocate.
This idea known as “loss and damage” financing suggests that countries that contributed emissions that have led to global warming should do more to help communities who contributed less to the problem, but are already feeling the impacts. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry said the U.S. is committed to “engaging constructively” to find a way to address the issue but the U.S. has not yet supported a proposal for a new fund for loss and damage.
Kerry, who will represent the US at the summit, says he still believes the world can meet its climate goals but there are still big political and financial challenges to getting it done. Kerry said the transition underway now is bigger than the industrial revolution and will result in a cleaner and more secure energy system.
“While many of us are chagrined it has taken so long for us to get to a place where more and more people are accepting what’s happening, we are there. And the only way to be able to organize ourselves and get the job done when you have 200 or so nations that are involved in this is to come together somewhere and work at it,” he said at a press briefing this week.
The COP27 begins in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt on Nov. 6 and is scheduled to conclude Nov. 18.
(PHILADELPHIA) — Nine people were wounded, two critically, when multiple gunmen fired a barrage of at least 40 shots at a crowd gathered on a sidewalk outside a Philadelphia bar Saturday night, authorities said.
The assailants fled the chaotic scene in the Kensington section of the city in a vehicle and remained at large Sunday morning.
Asked at a news conference whether the gunmen posed a threat to the community, Deputy Commissioner John Stanford noted the number injured and shell casings littering the street outside Jack’s Famous Bar and said, “I think that’s a public safety threat.”
The shooting unfolded around 10:45 p.m. as the neighborhood was bustling with more people than usual out enjoying an unseasonably warm November night, Stanford said.
He said a group was mingling on the sidewalk outside the bar when multiple gunmen exited a black vehicle sitting in the middle of East Allegheny Avenue, near Kensington Avenue, and opened fire on the crowd without warning.
“At this point in time, it just looks like these individuals may have spotted someone they wanted to shoot at, exited the vehicle and just began firing,” Stanford said, adding investigators don’t yet know who was targeted or a motive for the attack.
Stanford said the shooting occurred despite a heavy police presence already in the area. He said officers walking a beat heard the gunfire and rushed to help the men and women injured as the shooters ran back to the dark vehicle and fled. He also noted that a narcotics task force was conducting an investigation a half-block from where the shooting occurred.
“We have some brazen individuals in this city that don’t care. They don’t care how many police officers are out here and some don’t care in terms of how many people are out here,” Stanford said.
He said investigators recovered at least 40 pieces of ballistic evidence from the scene and plan to comb through surveillance video from businesses in the area in hopes of identifying the assailants.
He said seven of the victims were in stable condition and two were critical.
The shooting came amid 5% drops in both homicides and aggravated gun assaults in Philadelphia in the first 10 months of this year, compared to the same time period in 2021, according to the lasted police department crime statistics. Philadelphia surpassed its annual homicide record in 2021, recording of 562 slayings.
ABC News’ Victoria Arancio contributed to this story.
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(NEW YORK) — When the FBI alerted New Jersey synagogues to a “broad threat” against their houses of worship, Jewish community centers and synagogues across the country heeded the warning.
On the other side of the nation, Los Angeles areas worked with law enforcement to send extra patrols to their synagogues, though there was no known threat to the community at the time.
“We know that hate speech often leads to acts of hate and violence and are very concerned by the growing amount of antisemitic rhetoric,” Rabbi Noah Farkas, president of the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles, told ABC News. “We are committed to fighting this rising scourge locally and globally and know that in the end, there is more that unites us than divides us.”
The threat follows antisemitic rhetoric from celebrities like Kanye West and Kyrie Irving, as well as the ongoing hate speech promoted by white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups online.
As antisemitism and other forms of hate continue to spotlight discrimination in the U.S., some researchers say addressing hate and extremism needs to be a priority.
Preventing hate should also be community-based, researchers say
Researchers from Harvard University recently found an important detail in how hate and prejudice manifest in different communities.
Based on hate crime data from the FBI for 20 years, researchers found that when a marginalized group grew in size relative to another group in a community, it was more likely to be the target of discrimination.
When different neighborhoods, cities and regions have different demographics, it can affect what marginalized groups are receiving hate and how they’re receiving it, experts say. This insight could help policy makers address the specific needs, and tailor messaging to what’s being seen in their community.
“Effects seem to be really local,” said Mina Cikara, associate professor of psychology at Harvard University, to ABC News. “While we do have countrywide statistics on which groups are most likely to be targeted … The people you think are most likely to get victimized may not actually be the people who are.”
Standing up for community
Researchers also called on communities to form local, interfaith and multicultural forces, coalitions and strategies to fight back against hate.
Activists found that comradery between neighbors in the aftermath of past bias incidents may have deterred more hate incidents through sheer support. Filmmaker Patrice O’Neill created the advocacy group Not In Our Town after documenting the growth of hate groups in Billings, Montana, in the early 1990s.
The town became a symbol for community togetherness – and the Billings Coalition for Human Rights was born.
When neighbors banded together with victims of racist and antisemitic violence, they found it as an effective tactic in reducing hate incidents.
“The town started learning what can happen if they work together,” said O’Neill to ABC News. “People in the community started seeing what could happen if they could work together so that when there was an attack on Black church members, other denominations showed up and the attacks stopped.”
She continued, “When a Native American woman’s home is plastered with racist graffiti, 30 members of the painters union showed up to painted over it and 100 neighbors were there to watch.”
Targeting radicalization online
According to Susan Corke, the director of legal advocacy organization Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, researchers say the internet can be a dangerous rabbit hole for people vulnerable to radicalization.
Conspiracies, misinformation, disinformation – research has shown that in 2016, social media played a role in the radicalization process of nearly 90% of extremists in the University of Maryland’s National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism.
The ease in which hate can move through social media was highlighted when Brooklyn Nets star Irving tweeted a link to a film that critics say promotes antisemitic tropes to his millions of followers. He later stated that he meant no harm by it.
“A number of these far-right actors are enriching themselves online,” Corke said to ABC News. “The impact of that has been that group affiliation is less important, there is this wider spread and embrace of conspiratorial violent ideology and rhetoric, and that’s very mainstreamed within the Republican Party.”
The SPLC has focused its efforts on youth – creating guides to understanding how youth is radicalized and how to prevent or fight against it.
These guides discuss media literacy opportunities children can learn from, talking about the news in age-appropriate ways, and how to speak to children and help them navigate away from extremist online materials, and more.
“What we found is that people don’t need a huge amount of tools or background than just reading the guide for seven minutes,” said Corke. “More than 80% of parents and caregivers felt better equipped to entertain, intervene and engage with young people for becoming susceptible to manipulative hate-fueled violence.”
Similar educational opportunities and campaigns for people of all ages can better prepare the general public against bad-faith actors of extremist hate, Corke said.
The SPLC found that focusing on community investment and prevention may be more important than investing solely in a law enforcement-forward approach, which is more of a reactionary tactic to hate crimes and bias incidents.
(PHOENIX) — A campaign staffer for Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for governor in Arizona, allegedly opened an envelope holding a suspicious white substance delivered to Lake’s campaign headquarters in Phoenix, her campaign told ABC News.
“Yesterday, a member of the Kari Lake staff opened an envelope delivered to our campaign office that contained suspicious white powder. It was one of two envelopes that were confiscated by law enforcement and sent to professionals at Quantico for examination, and we are awaiting details,” Lake campaign spokesperson Colton Duncan told ABC News in a statement. He added that the staff member is currently under medical supervision.
“Officers responded to a found property call at an office building near 40th St. and Camelback Road,” Sgt. Phil Krynsky of the Phoenix Police Department told ABC News on Sunday. “When officers arrived, they learned there were suspicious items located inside the mail. Additional resources responded to collect the items and secure the area. There have been no reports of injury and the investigation remains active.”
Krynsky told ABC News the additional resources who responded to the incident with Phoenix PD’s were their hazmat team, Bomb Squad and the FBI.
“Early this morning, Sunday, November 6th, the FBI, along with our local law enforcement partners, responded to a report of suspicious letters at an office building near 40th Street and Camelback Road,” the FBI National Press Office said in a statement. “No further information will be released at this time.”
Duncan, noting that Lake’s campaign headquarters remains under active investigation – and therefore shut for staffers’ use just two days out from the 2022 midterm elections – said: “We look forward to law enforcement completing their investigation as quickly as possible.”
“Rest assured, we are taking this security threat incredibly seriously and we are thankful for the Phoenix PD, FBI, first responders, bomb squad, and hazmat crews that responded to this incident,” he added. “In the meantime, know that our resolve has never been higher and we cannot be intimidated. We continue to push full speed ahead to win this election on Tuesday.”
The incident occurred less than a week after a man allegedly broke into Lake’s opponent, Democratic candidate for governor Katie Hobbs’ campaign headquarters.
Lake mocked the burglary, dubbing it “Jussie Smollett part two.”
A tweet from Lake campaign’s War Room on Sunday following the incident with the suspicious substance, questioned if the press would “immediately accuse our opponent of being responsible for this like they did to us over@katiehobbsWaterGate?”
Hobbs —- who is also Arizona’s current secretary of state— condemned Lake’s rhetoric in a statement confirming the break-in, which ultimately had no ties to the Lake campaign.
“The reported incident at Kari Lake’s campaign office is incredibly concerning and I am thankful that she and her staff were not harmed,” Hobbs said in a statement to ABC News on Sunday. “Political violence, threats, or intimidation have no place in our democracy. I strongly condemn this threatening behavior directed at Lake and her staff.”
Lake was at a rally with the GOP ticket Saturday evening after making bus tour stops earlier in the day. On stage there, she mentioned previously having her car tires slashed.
“You know that we crisscross the state. We’ve gone through tires, so many tires. We’ve had to change our tires on the car. We’ve actually had our tire slashed a few times, probably by, you know, people who’ve been brainwashed by the left. We have had all kinds of crazy things happen on the campaign trail,” she said.
Lokman Vural Elibol/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
(PHILADELPHIA) — Pennsylvania’s staking its claim as center of the political universe this weekend as presidents past and present campaign for their candidates ahead of midterms Election Day.
President Joe Biden and former President Barack Obama teamed up Saturday to stump for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Josh Shapiro and Senate candidate John Fetterman in Philadelphia.
“This crowd is so loud I think they can hear us in Latrobe,” Biden said in his opening remarks, taking a swing at former President Donald Trump’s rally there later Saturday night. “They’re going to hear us on Tuesday.”
“The power to shape that outcome is in your hands,” Biden said. “Two years ago, you used your power not only to make Trump a former president, but a defeated president.”
Trump held a rally at Arnold Palmer Regional Airport in support of Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano and Senate candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz, calling them both “great people.”
“You’re going to elect the incredible slate of true America-first Republicans up and down the ballot,” Trump said. On the Biden and Obama event at Temple University, Trump said, “I heard they had a little rally.”
“They don’t call it the Keystone State for nothing,” said David Dix, a Philadelphia-based political strategist who has worked on Republican and Democratic campaigns, about the 11th-hour attention from both sides. “Once again, Pennsylvania is the political epicenter of the country and the balance of the House and Senate weigh from here on Tuesday.”
“It’s just another indicator that we are a deep purple state that makes up our mind late and oftentimes does split the ticket among Democrats and Republicans,” Dix added.
Pennsylvania’s marquee Senate race could determine which party wins control of the chamber. Republicans need to gain just one seat to become the majority, as Democrats currently control the 50-50 Senate with Vice President Kamala Harris acting as the tie-breaker.
“That race has been on the razor’s edge for a long time,” said Christopher Nicholas, a longtime Republican strategist in Pennsylvania.
The margin between Fetterman and Oz is getting tighter by the day, according to FiveThirtyEight’s polling average, with the two candidates separated by just 0.4 percentage points.
“There’s no quit in John Fetterman,” Biden said Saturday. “There’s no quit in Pennsylvania. There’s no quit in America, we just have to remember who we are, we are the United States of America.”
Biden also took a shot at Oz, who was criticized for living in New Jersey until late 2020: “I’ve lived in Pennsylvania longer than Oz has lived in Pennsylvania, and I moved when I was 10 years old,” Biden said.
In a message to voters on Saturday, Fetterman pitched himself as a lifelong public servant while accusing Oz of trying to “use” Pennsylvania and attempting to buy the seat.
Oz, in a closing pitch at a rally in Elizabethtown earlier this week, described himself as an agent of change and encouraged attendees to tell neighbors about his message on the economy, crime and the border.
“There are three topics that I have spent my campaign dwelling on,” he said. “They are the kitchen table issues that every family in Pennsylvania has talked about.”
The gubernatorial race between Shapiro and Mastriano is another contentious race, and one of the biggest tests of Trump’s election denialism on the ballot this cycle.
Mastriano, a Republican state legislator, attended Trump’s Jan. 6 rally just before the Capitol attack and has continued to spread the former president’s lies about the 2020 election results.
FiveThirtyEight’s polling average shows Mastriano behind in the race by roughly 10 percentage points.
Biden’s campaigned heavily in Pennsylvania this year, and in this final stop in Philadelphia he and Obama aimed to boost Democratic enthusiasm in a key area of the state. Obama, citing his own midterm losses in 2010, told rally-goers to make sure their friends vote.
“Democrats view it as crucial to get as high a turnout as possible in the city, especially among the Black community” said Nicholas. “That’s always the target for them.”
Biden’s success in the Democratic strongholds Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, and their neighboring suburbs, ultimately led to his win there in 2020 over Trump.
Trump last visited Pennsylvania in September, when he held a rally for Oz and Mastriano in Wilkes-Barre. The stakes are high for the former president, who is laying the groundwork for a 2024 campaign and could make an announcement as soon as the week of Nov. 14, according to sources.
“Latrobe is essentially the epicenter of Republican turnout,” Dix said, noting nearby Allegheny County probably has more registered Republicans “than anywhere else in the state.”
“I certainly understand the strategy and why the former president decided to rally there,” Dix said.
– ABC News’ Will McDuffie contributed to this report.
(UVALDE, Texas) — A white tent looms over the grounds of the Uvalde County Fairplex, a sparse multipurpose venue that previously hosted rodeos, quinceañeras and the annual firemen’s ball, now home to Texas’s newest trauma center and Gov. Greg Abbott’s latest self-declared success.
The Uvalde Together Resiliency Center was created in response to the shooting at Robb Elementary School, which left 19 children and two adults dead. The Republican governor authorized $5 million for its construction the same week, the symbolic centerpiece of his administration’s response to longstanding mental health care failings locally and statewide.
In the wake of the massacre, Abbott has repeatedly insisted the mass shooting – one of 574 across the country so far in 2022 and one of 42 in Texas alone – was not a symptom of the country’s (and his state’s) obsession with guns but rather the result of the country’s (and his state’s) failure to adequately invest in mental health care.
“We as a state, we as a society need to do a better job with mental health,” Abbott said in a news conference days after the shooting. “Anybody who shoots somebody else has a mental health challenge. Period. We as a government need to find a way to target that mental health challenge and to do something about it.”
Since then, Abbott, who is currently running for reelection, has appeared to make access to mental health care a political priority.
In response to questions from ABC News, his office pointed to Uvalde Resiliency as “a hub for community services … being run by the Uvalde community.” They pointed to a $105 million investment “to make schools safer and support the mental health of children, teachers, and families in Uvalde and across Texas.” And they claimed that his administration spent billions on mental health care services during his governorship.
“Throughout his time in office,” an administration spokesperson told ABC News, “Governor Abbott has worked closely with the Texas Legislature to appropriate over $25 billion to address mental and behavioral health issues and pass a variety of bills expanding access to mental health services.”
‘Lack of cooperation’
But local leaders and mental health care professionals told ABC News that the work of Uvalde Resiliency has been hampered by a lack of cooperation with existing institutions with established relationships in the community. And an ABC News review found that only a small fraction of the money touted by the governor’s office has actually gone to fund state mental health care programs.
Experts say the patchwork mental health care system leaves millions of rural Texans without access to medical care and that “stopgap” funding won’t fix the systemic issues plaguing the Lonestar State.
Immediately after the shooting, Uvalde District Attorney Christina Mitchell Busbee applied for and received $5 million from the state-funded Texas Crime Victims Assistance Grant Program to build and run the Uvalde Together Resiliency Center.
Soon after, Abbott also allocated $1.25 million to the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District to provide trauma-informed counseling to students and $5 million to the Hill Country Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities Center, an existing mental health care facility in the Uvalde area that, at the time of the tragedy, had a staff of just 13 people.
Taken together, the money represented an unprecedented investment in access to mental health care for the Uvalde community, but Busbee soon learned that it was hardly enough to address the complex challenge its citizens faced.
“Five million dollars sounds like a lot of money,” Busbee told ABC News, “but once you start trying to assist these agencies with recruiting counselors to come to Uvalde, you want to be able to pay them a decent salary to come here and plant roots in our community, it does not go very far.”
The center, with help from various partnering organizations, has offered a menu of services to the grieving town and its citizens, including “psychological first aid, crisis counseling, and behavioral health services for survivors, first responders, and those in the community experiencing vicarious trauma.”
According to the Resiliency Center’s interim executive director Mary Beth Fisk, the center has so far provided over 3,800 contacts in the community, with over 1,900 clinical visits serving more than 700 individuals.
“We have organizations that are bringing mental and behavioral health counseling and subspecialties,” Fisk told ABC News, “to include really intensive trauma therapies that are readily available at no cost to all community members.”
But Fisk did not respond to questions about whether these numbers include the pre-existing clients of the resiliency center’s private practice partners, and some community members say they won’t seek care at the center because of a longstanding distrust of their state government.
“It’s run by our state government, which they couldn’t give a s— less,” Brett Cross, guardian to 10-year-old victim Uziyah Garcia, told ABC News. “Everybody in this town has profited off our kids’ deaths. The resiliency center’s a joke and it’s been that way since day one.”
Local practitioners say they have received negative feedback from community members regarding the quality of care, the therapeutic environment, and the long wait times at the center, all exacerbated by cultural taboos stigmatizing mental health care and poor insurance coverage in the largely Latino community.
Jaclyn Gonzalez, a licensed professional counselor who has practiced in Uvalde since 2015, told ABC News the center’s leadership failed to seek advice and cooperation from local providers in Uvalde’s established mental health care network who could have shed light on the community’s unique needs.
“I think that was the hardest thing for me was that they wouldn’t allow me to help,” Gonzalez told ABC News. “Day one, they’re like, ‘We’ve got it covered. We don’t need anybody.'”
Alejandra Castro, director of rural services at Family Service Association, a Texas-based human service organization which has assisted the community for 22 years, says she was also turned away by the center’s leaders.
“I had hoped that being here in the community, the outsiders would want to partner with us and say, ‘How can we best support the community that you have been in, like your community for the last 20 something years?'” Castro told ABC News. “And it was the total opposite of that, unfortunately.”
When asked about frustrations some members of the Uvalde community have expressed about accessing various resources, Fisk defended the work of the Resiliency Center, emphasizing how quickly the center took over the role of its predecessor, the Family Assistance Center, to provide mental and behavioral health services, as well as the role it has served as a lending hand for victims and survivors seeking financial aid.
“I think we’ve been blessed to be able to bring a collective resources together along with other community partners that are willing to work with one another,” Fisk said. “We all have a common goal, and that is to walk alongside this journey of healing when so many of this community are currently finding themselves in a place of true despair.”
Fisk did not respond to requests for a follow-up interview about the work of the Resiliency Center.
At the state level, experts described a similar landscape regarding mental health care access.
Millions spent after Uvalde massacre
Abbott’s oft-cited $105.5M spending response to the mass shooting includes $5.8 million to fund the Texas Child Health Access Through Telemedicine, $4.7 million for the Health and Human Services Commission to include multi-system therapy across the state and $950,000 to the HHSC to expand Coordinate Specialty Care, directives that have been widely celebrated by health care experts.
But it comes after a $210 million cut to the HHSC, which oversees mental health services in the state, over the past two years in order to finance Operation Lonestar, the border security initiative launched in March of 2021.
“Mental health stakeholders have seen positive improvement over the past few years,” Boleware said. “But we were already at such a deficit in our state that a lot more is needed to catch up.”
And a closer look at the governor’s published breakdown of the budget shows that only $16.5 million out of the $105.5 million — about 15% of the total that the Abbott administration has touted — went to expand statewide mental health resources, while the other 85% has been allocated toward police training, personnel travel, and security upgrades for classrooms, including $50 million for bullet-resistant shields.
During the only Texas gubernatorial debate in September, Abbott brought up a perplexing figure—$25 billion in mental health care spending—in response to the Uvalde shooting.
Several experts, Alison Mohr Boleware, Director of Policy at the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health, a research and grantmaking institute out of the University of Texas at Austin, told ABC News they were unsure how the governor could have arrived at such a figure.
“I had never heard that before,” Boleware said of the governor’s accounting.
The governor’s office did not respond to ABC News’ request for information about this claim.
The most likely source for this figure is a $25 billion Medicaid expansion grant in 2017—$15 billion of which was federal funding from the Department of Health and Human Services—a program established by the Obama administration and which Gov. Abbott actively fought against.
But this funding, known as the Texas Healthcare Transformation and Quality Improvement Program, went to expand statewide Medicaid under the 1115 Medicaid waiver authority and cannot be accurately described as funding for mental health services, considering that only 1 in 5 Texas psychiatrists accept Medicaid patients.
Boleware went on to say that even with proper funding, not all issues can be addressed by spending increases.
“There’s a big difference between mental health spending and mental health access,” Boleware said.”We’re a huge state and we may be spending a lot on mental health, but that doesn’t mean access is the same in every community.”
Some of the systemic issues troubling mental health care access include a worsening workforce shortage and lingering cultural stigmas surrounding mental health care.
Dr. Andy Keller, a licensed psychologist who sits on the Texas Child Mental Health Care Consortium and is president and chief executive officer of the Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute, called the governor’s statewide spending plan in response to the Uvalde shooting a hurried “stopgap.”
“This is a really complicated issue,” Keller said, “and when the legislature and the governor and the lieutenant governor were trying to come up with a plan … I don’t think this really sunk in, how important this was.”
(WASHINGTON) — With just two days until the midterm elections, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin believes that voters will send a “wake-up call” to President Joe Biden, electing Republicans to regain full control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate.
Youngkin was responding to ABC News chief Washington correspondent Jonathan Karl, who asked him in an exclusive interview: “First order of business, if Republicans take over the House and Senate, how do they work with President Biden?”
“I think the statement on Tuesday is going to be pretty clear. And I think there will be a larger majority in the House than people may have thought a few months ago,” Youngkin answered, adding that he predicts there will be a clear majority in the Senate as well.
“I hope that President Biden sees what Americans are going to say to him on Tuesday, which is ‘we’re not happy’ and we need a different agenda.”
Youngkin has been out on the campaign trail alongside several Republicans running in gubernatorial, House and Senate races.
Back in October, Youngkin made several stops in the swing state of Arizona, most notably to stump for far-right gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake.
“Kari Lake talks a heck of a lot about the 2020 election, falsely saying it was rigged, stolen,” Karl said to Youngkin in the interview, asking, “You don’t agree with that, do you?”
“I’ve said that President Biden is our president. He was elected our president,” Youngkin answered. When Karl followed up asking if Biden’s win was legitimate, Youngkin said it was, but shifted to pointing out that the president has “done a bad job.”
Since President Biden took office, various GOP elected officials have publicly called for his impeachment, introducing more than a dozen resolutions against him and members of his cabinet. As Karl raised the possibility of impeachment, asking if it would be a mistake to do so, Youngkin said he believes strongly “that our democracy’s better when our Congress exercises its oversight functions.”
Karl pressed for an answer, asking if he felt an impeachment of Biden was what voters have in mind. “Because I’ve been hearing that a lot,” he said.
Refusing to speculate on what kind of action fellow members of his party would take, Youngkin argued that he was a governor, not a member of Congress, with a duty to “deliver for Virginians.”
“But what Republican governors have demonstrated is they have led so much better coming out of this pandemic,” Youngkin stated. “Economic recovery, safe communities, delivering in schools, and as I’ve said, I think every state deserves a Republican governor.”
The latest forecasts from FiveThirtyEight show that of the 36 governorships up for election Nov. 8, the Republican candidate is favored in over half of those races. Republicans also have a good chance of picking up Nevada and Wisconsin, two major battleground states, and also Oregon, which hasn’t elected a GOP governor since 1982.
About half of Americans said in the most recent ABC News/Ipsos poll that either the economy or inflation is the most important issue in their vote for Congress. Nearly three out of four Republicans point to the two economic concerns as a priority, while only 29% of Democrats say the same, per the poll.
Karl asked for his thoughts on a potential re-election bid from Donald Trump as advisers close to the former president have signaled that he may be preparing to run again.
“The only timeline that anybody should be focusing on right now is the one that leads through November 8th,” Youngkin replied, adding that he is “not supporting anybody” at this time.
He also declined to indicate if he will mount a presidential bid of his own.
“This is a November 8th moment. And the reality is, folks that are talking about things beyond November 8th I think are missing the priority of today’s moment,” he said.
(WASHINGTON) — Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., said his party faces a difficult election on Tuesday amid stiff headwinds over the economy but insisted he still sees a “pathway” for Democrats to at least keep control of the Senate.
Booker noted to “This Week” co-anchor Martha Raddatz that the party in the White House typically loses seats in midterm elections but noted there are still Senate pickup opportunities for Democrats in places like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and North Carolina.
“Even though our economy is tough, people think about it and say, ‘wait a minute, this is the party trying to protect unions. This is the party that made sure we did things to lower prescription drug costs and lower health care costs. That this is the party at the end of the day that’s trying to protect fundamental freedoms like the right to control your own body,'” he said.
“So, I think that this is a tough election season. It’s a midterm election, but I still see a pathway for us to maintain control of the Senate.”
Democrats earlier this summer were favored to keep control of the Senate amid an uproar over the scrapping of constitutional protections for abortion and lower gas prices, but as the calendar turns closer to Election Day, the party has been rebuffed by stubbornly high inflation and an avalanche of attack ads over crime.
While the FiveThirtyEight Senate prediction model showed Democrats as more likely to win the Senate than Republicans, the forecast as it stands Sunday shows the GOP with a 55% chance of flipping the chamber, which is currently split 50-50.
Still, Booker predicted that voters would punish Republicans at the ballot box this Tuesday over ties to election deniers and backlash over last year’s insurrection.
“There’s a lot on the line. And we have to remember, after what we saw on January 6, Republican or Democrat, we should be electing people that believe in our democracy, that believe in our tradition, and ultimately want to unite people and not divide them,” he said.
Raddatz pressed Booker on whether Democrats have a focused enough economic message heading into Election Day, asking “did Democrats miscalculate just how important this issue is?”
“I’ve heard people show receipts of what we’ve accomplished in terms of helping to lower costs,” Booker said. “We were one vote shy … of the biggest middle class tax cut, one vote shy protecting fundamental rights. The individual people I see out there campaigning are speaking towards the pocketbooks of this country and reminding people about what Donald Trump’s agenda was when he had the reins, not just economic policies that favor the rich, but also things that undermine our very fundamental beliefs as a democracy.”
