Congratulations are in order to Dustin Lynch: He’s one step closer to fulfilling his dream of becoming a pilot.
“Set a goal, and when you get there…man it always feels good! First solo flight today,” the singer wrote on Twitter earlier this week.
Dustin has been studying to get his pilot’s license for several months, so his first solo flight is a big step toward accomplishing his goal. Once he’s officially a pilot, he’ll be in good company. The singer is actually one of several country stars who know how to fly a plane.
Lots of fans know that Dierks Bentley is a licensed pilot — a fact he spoofed in the music video for his song “Drunk on a Plane” — but did you know that Tim McGraw can fly, too? In 2019, he even shared video proof as he piloted a Cirrus Aircraft vision jet during a trip to a music festival.
Alan Jackson also has his pilot’s license, but according to his website, he doesn’t use it much these days. “[My wife] Denise got tired of my flying and worrying about me,” he writes.
But the most impressive story of a pilot/country superstar might come courtesy of Kris Kristofferson. Before he made it in the music business, he was a helicopter pilot while serving in the military.
Legend has it that while Kris was struggling to make it as a country star in Nashville, he made a big impression on Johnny Cash by landing a chopper on the country legend’s lawn and hand-delivering a work tape of “Sunday Morning Coming Down” to his doorstep.
The prospect of South Korea’s mandatory military service has been looming over BTS for quite some time now. Despite a 2018 law allowing certain K-pop musicians to postpone their military service until the age of 30, the group’s oldest member, Jin, will hit that milestone in December. But now, a Korean government official has proposed another way.
The mayor of the South Korean city of Busan recently appointed BTS as PR ambassadors for promoting that city’s bid to host the 2030 World Expo. Now, Korea’s Yonhap News Agency reports that the mayor has asked the office of the president of South Korea to allow BTS to do “alternative military service.”
The mayor’s idea is to have the group’s work as Busan’s PR ambassadors stand in for their military service. He said, “If BTS is allowed alternative military service, its members will be assigned with national duties as heavy as military service and will serve the nation in their unique capacity.”
It’s not clear if that proposal will be approved. According to Billboard, the members of BTS have said that they’re willing to serve in the military, and the South Korean parliament has considered a bill shortening K-pop stars’ military service from two years to three weeks.
(BENTONVILLE, Ark.) — Walmart, the Arkansas-based retail giant known more for value than flare, made a splash in Hollywood this week upon the announcement of a deal with streaming service Paramount+.
The retailer will provide the video content free of charge to Walmart+ subscribers, who pay $98 a year or $12.95 a month for a membership package that includes gas discounts, free two-day shipping on online purchases, and member-only deals, the company said in a statement on Monday.
The move marks a major departure for Walmart, which appears to have weathered sky-high inflation with better-than-expected earnings in the second quarter, as revenue climbed 8.4% compared to the same three-month period a year prior. However, the company had cut its second-quarter forecast just weeks earlier.
The new streaming content will help the retailer retain current Walmart+ subscribers and attract new ones, as the company vies with rival Amazon and continues to grow beyond its telltale big box stores with an e-commerce offering that gained emphasis during the pandemic, retail analysts told ABC News.
While the move highlights the digital value of Walmart’s subscription service, the company’s effort to improve the in-store experience exclusive to subscribers could translate the potential influx of members into more brick-and-mortar business, they added.
An assessment of the deal with Paramount+ — and its capacity to strengthen Walmart’s subscription service — should take into account the customer base that the company has already built, Steph Wissink, a retail analyst at Jefferies, told ABC News. Ninety percent of Americans shop at Walmart each year, the company said in March, adding that more than 150 million people shop with the company each week either in-store or online.
As Walmart strengthens its subscription service, that customer base affords it a wide pool of prospective members, enhancing the potential value of the Paramount+ offering for the company, Wissink said.
“That touch point element is meaningfully higher than what we would see for other retailers,” she said, acknowledging that “some portion of their household income distribution is not going to be able to afford” the subscription.
By comparison, as of last April, Amazon boasted more than 200 million Amazon Prime subscribers worldwide. Walmart has not released subscriber totals for Walmart+, but the expected figure is much lower, analysts said.
The deal with Paramount+, therefore, comes down to competition with Amazon, Joe Feldman, a retail analyst for Telsey Advisory, told ABC News.
“This is an effort to be more competitive with Amazon as a membership provider,” he said. “You’ve seen both companies increasingly compete with one another and almost mirror one another.”
The entry of Walmart into streaming parallels Amazon’s decision to jump into the in-store grocery business that Walmart had participated in for years, Feldman said.
Even though brick-and-mortar shopping has bounced back since the early months of the pandemic, e-commerce remains a key focus for Walmart, Wissink, said.
“Digital fluency went up substantially in 2020 because stores were closed,” she said. “Even your granny was ordering things online and having them delivered to the front door.”
But the focus on Walmart’s subscription service, brought to the attention of many by the partnership with Paramount+, also points to an advantage for Walmart that sets it apart from Amazon: the vast network of stores, Wissink said. Down the road, if Walmart improves the subscription service with further in-store benefits, it could compound the revenue from new digital subscribers with enticements for in-store shopping.
“Let’s say it’s my birthday and I go to Walmart, Walmart+ on mobile can prompt me with a free coffee or free cupcake at the bakery,” Wissink said. “Those are benefits for a Walmart+ member.”
“The partnership with Paramount+ isn’t a signal that Walmart thinks its stores are no longer relevant,” she added. “It’s the exact opposite.”
Looking ahead, Walmart could even form partnerships with additional streaming services to improve its subscription offering, Feldman and Wissink said.
“Walmart is likely to explore lots of different options,” Feldman said.
(WASHINGTON) — The Internal Revenue Service does not plan to use the nearly $80 billion it’s set to receive in funding from the Inflation Reduction Act to hire 87,000 new agents in order to target middle class Americans, a Treasury Department official told ABC News, rejecting a claim widely circulated by Republican lawmakers and right-wing media personalities.
A sizable portion of the money will go toward improving taxpayer services and modernizing antiquated, paper-based IRS operations, Treasury Department spokesperson Julia Krieger said, in an effort to update the agency — well documented as being chronically starved of resources for decades.
The agency also is planning on hiring auditors who can enforce the tax laws against high-income Americans and corporations, not the middle class, along with employees to provide customer service to taxpayers, the official said. The majority of hires will fill the positions of about 50,000 IRS employees on the verge of retirement, Krieger said, which will net about 20 to 30-thousand workers, not 87,000.
“The resources to modernize the IRS will be used to improve taxpayer services — from answering the phones to improving IT systems — and to crack down on high-income and corporate tax evaders who cost the American people hundreds of billions of dollars each year. The majority of new employees will replace the standard level of staff departures over the next few years,” Krieger said in a statement.
“New staff will be hired to improve taxpayer services and experienced auditors who can take on corporate and high-end tax evaders, without increasing audit rates relative to historical norms for people earning under $400,000 each year,” she said.
The IRA, the wide-ranging tax, climate and health care bill signed into law by Biden on Monday and touted as a major legislative achievement for Democrats, includes roughly $78 billion for the IRS over the next 10 years.
The heightened funding will also act as a key part of how will provisions under the IRA will be paid for — increased tax enforcement of the wealthy and large corporations is expected to raise revenue by $204 billion over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Congress has cut funding for the IRS for most of the past decade, leaving the agency with technology systems dating back to the 1970s and as of July, a backlog of over 10 million unprocessed individual returns, according to the IRS.
“Bringing IRS technology into the 21st century is long past due. Our technology system is over 60 years old, the oldest in government, and fuels both taxpayer frustration and government waste,” said Executive Director Chad Hooper of the Professional Managers Association – formed in 1981 by IRS managers.
Republicans, ahead of the midterm elections, have been denouncing the package as irresponsible spending while inflation reaches record highs. They’ve hammered the claim that the bill’s IRS provisions would would bad news for the middle class.
“Do you make $75,000 or less?” tweeted House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. “Democrats’ new army of 87,000 IRS agents will be coming for you—with 710,000 new audits for Americans who earn less than $75k.”
The 87,000 new agent number that GOP leaders have been circulating is in reference to a year-old report released by the IRS, which described what the agency could do with nearly $80 billion in new funding if Congress would pass the American Families Plan.
In a table in that report, the IRS shows by 2031 the IRS could increase the size of its workforce by 86,852 full-time employees. But most of those hires would not be IRS agents and wouldn’t be new positions, according to the Treasury official, and the report is not in reference to IRA funding.
The claims appeared to have been ramped up after last week’s FBI search of Trump’s Palm Beach residence, with GOP leaders capitalizing on current Republican mistrust of bureaucratic agencies.
The search is said to have been part of a wider investigation into whether Trump took classified documents from the White House at the end of his presidency, with no reports of a connection to the IRS.
“After todays raid on Mar A Lago what do you think the left plans to use those 87,000 new IRS agents for?” tweeted Sen. Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, after news of the raid broke.
GOP voices have also claimed that the hypothetical IRS agent hiring splurge would include armed tax enforcers. Fox News host Tucker Carlson and guest U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla. on Aug. 4 claimed the government is beginning to treat “the IRS as a military agency.”
“Well, Joe Biden is raising taxes, disarming Americans, so of course they are arming up the IRS like they are preparing to take Fallujah,” Gaetz said.
Treasury officials rejected the claim that agent hires would be carrying weapons — saying the faction of armed agents are an “extremely critical but small” piece of the IRS, representing less than 3% of its total workforce.
The armed agents do not interact with average Americans, they focus only on specialized issues like narcotics, money laundering and Bank Secrecy Act violations, they said. Recently, they’ve been involved in the task force that is tracking assets of Russian oligarchs.
But the widely debunked claims may have begun to have an impact on some American voters.
“Even the Democrats, they heard, they just hired 85,000 IRS agents, they’re not not happy about it,” said John Ellingson, an Iowa GOP strategist, noting that the claims have been widely discussed since the information has been circulated by leading Republican voices.
Democrats have attempted to quell concerns over assertions that average Americans might be targeted by the federal government.
Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Democrat from Virginia refuted GOP claims on Twitter, telling Americans they are “being lied to.”
“In typical fashion, Republicans have chosen to lie and embellish in order to scare the American people. There is no army of 87,000 new IRS agents. It’s entirely made up. The truth is that the Republican Party hollowed out the IRS and has repeatedly slashed its budget over the years. Rich tax cheats run wild, meanwhile the average American can’t even get someone from the IRS on the phone. The Inflation Reduction Act will restore the IRS so it actually works for the American people,” Connolly said in a statement to ABC News.
(ATLANTA) — Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky made a remarkable acknowledgment of her agency’s failures during the COVID-19 pandemic as she delivered a message to her staff Wednesday.
Her message, given in an internal video viewed by ABC News, addressed employees about the plan to overhaul the agency, following an internally initiated review which found that the CDC’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic fell short of the crisis.
“To be frank, we are responsible for some pretty dramatic, pretty public mistakes. From testing, to data, to communications,” Walensky said to the camera in front of a blue CDC backdrop.
“As an agency, even with all the terrific work we do, we still suffer the consequences from these mistakes. After over 18 months serving in this position, learning and living the many lessons from our COVID-19 response, and receiving feedback from many internal and external interested parties, this is the right time to take a step back and strategically position CDC to facilitate and support the future of public health,” Walensky said.
Those conversations, she added, yielded “loud and clear” key principles to “promote public health action and communication; conduct and disseminate exceptional science,” and “serve our partners, prioritizing the American people first.”
“All of us collectively are being asked to look to the future and build a stronger CDC to tackle what lies ahead. This is our watershed moment,” Walensky said.
“We must pivot, take appropriate action, and lead the systemic changes required to equitably protect health, safety and security of all Americans,” she said — especially because neither the pandemic nor her agency’s response to it, is finished.
Walensky’s message, delivered in a more than 14-minute recording, follows a scathing internally initiated review of how the CDC handled COVID-19, which found its approach toward the pandemic failed to meet the moment of crisis and offered a series of changes intended to revamp the agency and make it more nimble.
That review, ordered by Walensky in April, comes after the CDC had come under frequent fire for its muddled and inconsistent messaging on COVID mitigation measures.
During interviews with roughly 120 agency staff and key external stakeholders, the review found that it “takes too long for CDC to publish its data and science for decision making,” that its guidance is “confusing and overwhelming” and that agency staff turnover during the COVID response “created gaps and other challenges for partners,” according to findings obtained by ABC News.
“The COVID-19 pandemic and our agency-wide response is not over. Our important work continues,” Walensky said in her video. “There have been too many tragic deaths from this virus and we must do all we can to prevent more.”
The threat of other infectious diseases’ spread means now is the time for public health infrastructures to shore up their defenses, she noted.
“Now the global monkeypox outbreak requires increased attention and efforts,” Walensky said. “We will continue to activate the personnel and resources necessary to fulfill our public health mission.”
In the video, Walensky promised to “develop new systems and processes to equitably deliver all of CDC science and program activities to the American people,” with “data modernization, laboratory capacity, rapid response to disease outbreaks, and preparedness within the US and around the world.”
“These changes will inform what CDC can do during a pandemic, along with every day during normal operations in our infectious and non-infectious disease portfolios to ensure a CDC science reaches the public in a timely and implementable manner,” she said.
“We must also strengthen the agency’s ability to respond to public health threats,” she said. “This is an agency-wide top priority to respond when we are called upon.”
Walensky emphasized the importance of “breaking down organizational silos in favor of a ‘One CDC mindset,'” increasing accountability and supporting equity efforts across the agency, she said.
“Change is hard. I know that. This is our time to change. And we will all need to roll up our sleeves to move CDC forward,” Walensky said, and “apply” the “COVID-19 lessons learned” by “sharing scientific findings and data faster.”
“The future of CDC is dependent upon applying the lessons learned from the last few years, whether it’s under my direction or a future CDC director, regardless of who is sitting in the seat, an honest and unbiased read of our recent history will yield the same conclusion. It is time for CDC to change,” she said.
“I recognize that our growth will involve some uncomfortable moments for many of us. We will hold ourselves accountable and we will be open to feedback,” Walensky said. “I owe it to you to work hard with the agency’s leadership to make CDC better and I’m grateful to have you in this with me.”
ABC News’ Cheyenne Haslett and Eric M. Strauss contributed to this report.
Anne Heche‘s death has been ruled an accident, more than a week after suffering serious injuries in a fiery Los Angeles car crash, city records show.
The 53-year-old actress died from inhalation and thermal injuries, according to records from the Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner-Coroner. She also suffered a sternal fracture due to blunt trauma, the records state.
The day of Heche’s death is listed as August 11. The actress was declared brain dead that night but was kept on life support for organ donation and her heart was still beating, her representative said then. Heche was removed from life support on Sunday, her representative said.
Heche was alone in her car on August 5 when she crashed into a home in the Mar Vista neighborhood of Los Angeles, engulfing her car and the house in flames, according to Los Angeles police and fire officials. No one else was injured in the single-car crash, and the home’s resident and her pets were able to escape the blaze unharmed.
Heche suffered a severe anoxic brain injury and was in a coma in critical condition following the crash, her family and friends said in a statement. Heche was not expected to survive her injuries, her family said, noting that it “has long been her choice to donate her organs.”
Results from a blood draw completed several hours after the crash showed Heche had narcotics in her system, but additional tests were being run to determine more about the drugs and to rule out which may have been present because of drugs administered by medical personnel, according to the Los Angeles Police Department.
Investigators told ABC News no alcohol was detected in Heche’s blood sample, though again, the blood draw was several hours after the crash.
LAPD investigators told ABC News on August 12 that they had ended their criminal investigation due to the latest developments in Heche’s condition.
(WASHINGTON) — A magistrate judge in Florida is set to hear in-person arguments Thursday on a request from a coalition of media outlets to make public the affidavit supporting the search warrant executed at former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate last week.
The Justice Department earlier this week urged the judge, Bruce Reinhart, to keep the affidavit under seal, arguing that if it were to be made public it could “cause significant and irreparable damage” to an ongoing criminal investigation involving highly classified materials related to national security.
“If disclosed, the affidavit would serve as a roadmap to the government’s ongoing investigation, providing specific details about its direction and likely course, in a manner that is highly likely to compromise future investigative steps,” officials said in a Monday filing, noting that the affidavit contained “highly sensitive information about witnesses” already interviewed by the government.
“In addition, information about witnesses is particularly sensitive given the high-profile nature of this matter and the risk that the revelation of witness identities would impact their willingness to cooperate with the investigation,” the DOJ’s filing said. “Disclosure of the government’s affidavit at this stage would also likely chill future cooperation by witnesses whose assistance may be sought as this investigation progresses, as well as in other high-profile investigations.”
ABC News and a number of other media organizations have called for the release of the affidavit, noting the historical significance of the unprecedented law enforcement search of a former president’s residence and the “immediate and intense public interest as well as a vociferous reaction from Mr. Trump and his allies.”
It is unclear how Judge Reinhart will ultimately rule on the request, but the Justice Department has requested that if he were to order even a “partial unsealing” of the affidavit that they be given a chance to provide the court with proposed redactions.
Officials said in their Monday filing, however, that they believed the redactions that would be necessary to protect the investigation “would be so extensive as to render the remaining unsealed text devoid of meaningful content.”
DOJ would likely seek an immediate appeal on any ruling by Judge Reinhart that would reveal further substantive details underlying their investigation.
The government said, though, it would not object to the unsealing of other materials filed in connection with the warrant, such as cover sheets for the application, the government’s motion to keep the warrant under seal and Judge Reinhart’s original sealing order — none of which will likely reveal much beyond the materials already disclosed.
The redacted copy of the search warrant released last Friday sent shockwaves through Washington, as it revealed the Justice Department was investigating the potential violation of at least three separate criminal statutes in its search of Mar a Lago, including obstruction of justice and one crime under the Espionage Act.
A property receipt accompanying the warrant shows agents seized 11 boxes of documents of various classifications, including one set referring to “classified/TS/SCI documents” (the acronym stands for top secret/sensitive compartmentalized information that not everyone with even top-secret clearance can view) and four other sets of top-secret documents.
The documents were discovered by authorities after a lawyer for Trump signed a statement in June to the FBI affirming that all classified documents on the premises had been handed over to investigators, sources confirmed to ABC News.
It’s not immediately clear whether lawyers for President Trump will be present at Thursday’s hearing in Florida.
Trump in recent days has called for the “immediate release” of the affidavit while leveling various attacks at the FBI and Justice Department, while also demanding over his social media website that the documents be returned to him. But Trump’s legal team has yet to take any sort of legal action on either front in response to the search.
Former Trump White House counsel Pat Cipollone and former deputy White House counsel Pat Philbin are among multiple other witnesses interviewed by the FBI as part of its investigation, ABC News confirmed Tuesday, with sources saying both sat with investigators sometime in the spring. But there’s no indication that the Justice Department’s filing referencing officials’ hopes of protecting witnesses who testified in the investigation was a direct reference to Cipollone or Philbin.
ABC News’ John Santucci contributed to this report.
(MINNEAPOLIS) — Ahead of the new school year, Minneapolis Public Schools has defended its agreement reached with the teacher’s union this spring to prioritize retaining educators of underrepresented backgrounds when determining layoffs.
Effective in the spring of 2023, the contract provision states that teachers who are members of “populations underrepresented among licensed teachers in the district” may be exempt from district-wide layoffs outside of seniority order, deviating from the traditional “last-in, first-out” system.
The stipulation is a part of a recent collective bargaining agreement between the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT) and MPS, which concluded a weekslong teachers’ strike in March.
“To remedy the continuing effects of past discrimination, Minneapolis Public Schools and the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT) mutually agreed to contract language that aims to support the recruitment and retention of teachers from underrepresented groups as compared to the labor market and to the community served by the school district,” a spokesperson for Minneapolis Public Schools said in a statement to ABC News Wednesday.
The policy comes as efforts to diversify teachers in Minnesota are ramping up in the state legislature with the introduction of HF3079, the 2022 Increase Teachers of Color Act.
The legislation seeks to “increase the percentage of teachers of color and American Indian teachers in Minnesota” to ensure that “all students have equitable access to effective and racially and ethnically diverse teachers who reflect the diversity of students,” according to the text of the bill.
However, as news of the MPS policy has made national headlines in recent days, critics say the policy’s attempts to rectify past discrimination could constitute discrimination itself — potentially even a violation of the 14th Amendment.
James Dickey, an attorney in Minneapolis, told ABC News that his firm has recently received a “flood of emails” from taxpayers and teachers in Minneapolis who are opposed to the policy and have reached out regarding potential legal actions.
Dickey is senior legal counsel at the Upper Midwest Law Center, a nonprofit public interest law firm in Minnesota, and said that his firm could be “prepared to go forward with litigation” soon.
When asked about efforts to diversify the teaching staff in Minnesota public schools, Dickey acknowledged the concern but said that addressing the issue instead requires reforming the seniority system, suggesting that layoffs should be based on merit, not seniority or race.
“Teachers are not being evaluated based on merit, they’re being evaluated based on, you know, first in first and last out. And I think that’s the bigger problem,” he said.
Responding to criticism, MFT has doubled down on its support of the policy, citing the need for educators to reflect the diversity of their schools’ student bodies. While 65% of the students attending MPS in the 2021-22 school year were people of color, only around 30% of the teaching staff were, the district reported.
“No matter where they live in Minneapolis, or what they look like, every student in the Minneapolis Public Schools deserves great teachers and education support professionals who challenge, support and educate all their students in a safe and stable learning environment,” the union wrote in a statement to ABC News.
The union wrote that it wanted to create a “transparent, legal, ethical process” to retain the “unique skills and experiences” of educators of color and those of other underrepresented backgrounds in the case of budget cuts and layoffs.
MFT described the agreement as a small step toward dismantling discriminatory systems in education but noted that diversifying educators will be a long haul given the nationwide teacher shortage. There are currently more than 370 open jobs for teachers in MPS, the union said.
Tra Carter, a former behavioral specialist at Clara Barton Community School in south Minneapolis, said he believes MPS could do even more to support teachers of color. Carter, who was laid off last year during the strike, said that at the time, he was the only Black male educator employed at his school.
“Black and brown educators of color are losing their jobs exponentially faster than their white counterparts, so I’m happy again that something got done,” Carter said.
“But I don’t think that it’s ever going to be enough,” he added. “I think one of the first steps that the district needs to do is to begin hiring more educators of color and helping those educators that are already in the schools who don’t have those teaching licenses or who don’t have those degrees, helping those educators so that they can then be in that community.”
(SAN DIEGO) — A California girl has beaten the odds to reunite with her twin and return home with her family after a six-month stay at a San Diego hospital.
Charlotte and her twin sister, Olivia, were born to Karla and Joshua Valliere last December, but in January, Charlotte was suddenly admitted to Rady Children’s Hospital with breathing difficulties and a respiratory infection.
At first, the Vallieres didn’t know what was wrong. Olivia was healthy, and although Charlotte had been born with one lung, she hadn’t had any issues after birth.
“Her one lung grew like 1.5 sizes, so it was compensating for the lack of the second one. So [doctors] did run all the studies. She was totally fine — oxygenation, everything 100%, so we were cleared to go after four days in the hospital,” Karla Valliere told Good Morning America. “It was six weeks at home — total bliss. Everything was great … and all of a sudden she started having breathing problems.”
The Vallieres took their daughter to Rady on Jan. 29, and she was admitted and placed on an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machine, or ECMO.
Dr. Matthew Brigger, chief of the pediatric otolaryngology division at Rady Children’s Hospital, started seeing Charlotte, who was just six weeks old at the time. Charlotte would eventually be diagnosed with tracheal stenosis and complete tracheal rings. This meant she had a birth defect with her airway where the rings in her trachea were abnormal and she had an abnormal narrowing of the trachea, or windpipe. She also had a blood vessel wrapped around her trachea.
“This set of anomalies, with the single lung, with the way the aorta was wrapped around the trachea itself and the trachea being this narrow, is actually fairly rare,” Brigger told GMA.
“We knew that she had a critical airway that if anything were to progress, trying to keep her intubated, that was gonna potentially injure the airway and give us more difficulty in repairing it. So the ECMO was sort of a bridge to surgery,” he continued.
But the surgery was a major one and in order to do it, Brigger and the rest of Charlotte’s doctors had to wait until she was big enough, since she and her twin had been born a few weeks early and therefore, Charlotte was small for her age.
“Initially I [told the parents], ‘Well, if we can get through surgery, I’m gonna give her 50-50,” Brigger said. “[But] I’m thinking more 20% of getting through surgery at the time, just knowing how much that we had to go through.”
Despite the low chance of survival, Charlotte’s surgery was a success.
“Fortunately, Charlotte’s a fighter and we got to do the surgery. She sailed through surgery,” he said.
The Vallieres said that throughout the monthslong stay in the hospital and all the ups and downs, with Charlotte’s complications, multiple surgeries and treatment, they drew strength from their own daughter.
“The thing that I think that I believe got us through was her. She never gave any sign of weakness,” the mom of two said.
After spending 185 days in the hospital, Charlotte was finally discharged on Aug. 1, and her parents and twin sister were there to celebrate and bring her home.
“It was just a lot of emotions and it was just a roller coaster. But now we have them together, so it’s worth it,” Karla Valliere added.
Today, Brigger said he doesn’t anticipate Charlotte needing a second lung at all and her future looks bright.
“Prognosis is very good. She may not be running marathons in the future but she is Charlotte so it’s hard to say. She’s proved people wrong all along. I expect her to be able to live a good life,” he said.
(NEW YORK) — Here are the scores from Wednesday’s sports events:
MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL
INTERLEAGUE
Boston 8, Pittsburgh 3
AMERICAN LEAGUE
Minnesota 4, Kansas City 0
Toronto 6, Baltimore 1
Seattle 11, LA Angels 7
Cleveland 8, Detroit 4
Oakland 7, Texas 2
Houston 3, Chi White Sox 2
NY Yankees 8, Tampa Bay 7 (10)
NATIONAL LEAGUE
Cincinnati 1, Philadelphia 0
Chi Cubs 3, Washington 2
San Diego 10 Miami 3
NY. Mets 9 Atlanta 7
St. Louis 5 Colorado 1
L.A. Dodgers 2 Milwaukee 1
Arizona 3, San Francisco 2
WOMEN’S NATIONAL BASKETBALL ASSOCIATION PLAYOFFS
New York 98, Chicago 91
Las Vegas 79, Phoenix 63
MAJOR LEAGUE SOCCER
New York 2, Atlanta 1
New England 2 Toronto FC 2 (Tie)
Ended Charlotte FC 3, New York City FC 1
Dallas 1, Philadelphia FC 0
Vancouver 2, Colorado 1
