(MILWAUKEE) — Milwaukee Public Schools reinstated the school district’s mask mandate Tuesday after just one day of making face coverings optional for students.
In a press release, MPS cited “significant transmission” of COVID-19 within the city as the reason for the mandate returning. Starting Wednesday, all students through 12th grade and staff will be required to mask up while inside district buildings.
MPS said the district can go back to a mask-optional policy if school leaders determine risk is low for viral transmission within the city and within the school district over the next few weeks.
In late March, the MPS board voted during its monthly meeting to make masks optional starting April 18, but warned face coverings would return if cases began rising. MPS did not respond to ABC News’ request for comment.
As defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Milwaukee County is still considered an area with “low” community levels of COVID-19. However, the city is reporting an increase in cases. According to the City of Milwaukee Health Department, there is “substantial” transmission of the virus with 58.1 confirmed cases per 100,000 people.
The school district is not the only agency in the city to reverse its policy on masks.
Earlier Tuesday, Milwaukee County Transit System announced face coverings would be optional for riders on county buses. However, later in the day, it announced the mask mandate would remain in place “out of an abundance of caution” due to rising case counts.
Milwaukee County Chief Health Policy Advisor Dr. Ben Weston said COVID cases have risen 200% over the last three weeks from 34 new cases per day to 104 new cases per day. Additionally, he shared the test positivity rate is back over the 5% threshold for moderate transmission.
“That number is rising each day due to a combination of factors,” Weston said in a statement, according to local ABC affiliate WKOW. “The emergence of new, more transmissible variants and low vaccination rates throughout the county means we must remain vigilant to slow the spread of the disease.”
Data from the Milwaukee County Office of Emergency Management shows 61.9% of residents in the county have received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose, far below the national average of 77.4%.
Weston urged Milwaukee residents to continue wearing masks in high-risk settings and to get vaccinated and boosted if they haven’t already.
(WASHINGTON) — President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden will attend the White House Correspondents’ Dinner next weekend in Washington, the association announced Wednesday on Twitter, the first time a sitting president has attended since 2016.
The event was canceled in 2020 and 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and former President Donald Trump snubbed the dinners during his presidency.
In April 2019, Trump told reporters on his way to California that he was skipping for a third year “because the dinner is so boring and so negative that we’re going to hold a very positive rally.”
Typically held the last Saturday in April, the annual gala returns after two years next Saturday, April 30, at the Washington Hilton. Comedian Trevor Noah is set to host.
Some theorize that the 2011 Correspondents’ Dinner may have pushed Trump to run for president — as well as pushed his disdain for the dinners — after then-President Barack Obama made him the target of his jokes for five full minutes. Trump, present in the room, was listening but not smiling.
“No one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than the Donald,” Obama said at the time. “And that’s because he can finally get back to the issues that matter, like, did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?”
This year’s gala is expected to draw hundreds of power players to Washington and follows the Washington Gridiron Club dinner earlier this month that resulted in at least 80 COVID cases, including some administration officials and members of Congress.
It coincides with concerns over a rise of the BA.2 variant, particularly as the Biden administration’s transportation mask mandate was struck down this week.
All attendees will have to show proof of a negative test the day of the event, and there is a vaccine requirement.
“This year’s dinner will be the WHCA’s first since 2019 and offer the first opportunity since 2016 for the press and the president to share a few laughs for a good cause,” the association said in a press release.
Held for the first time in 1921, the event is intended to honor the First Amendment and raise money for journalism programs.
A$AP Rocky was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport Wednesday morning, in connection to a shooting that took place in 2021.
According to authorities, A$AP Rocky, born Rakim Mayers, was arrested for assault with a deadly weapon — in this case, a firearm, after the LAPD’s Robbery-Homicide division’s investigation of the November 6 shooting that occurred in Hollywood, resulting in Rocky’s identification as a suspect.
“On November 6, 2021, around 10:15 p.m., an argument between two acquaintances occurred in the area of Selma Avenue and Argyle Avenue, in the Hollywood Area,” reads the arrest announcement from the LAPD. “The argument escalated and resulted in the suspect firing a handgun at the victim. The victim sustained a minor injury from the incident and later sought his medical treatment. Following the shooting, the suspect and two additional males fled the area on foot.”
Rocky had just landed aboard a private jet from Barbados, a highly publicized trip recently taken with his pregnant girlfriend, Rihanna, when he was arrested by LAPD officers, who were waiting for the plane to land.
The case will be “presented to the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office for filing consideration,” according to the LAPD.
Buckcherry has announced the final batch of our dates in support of the band’s 2021 album, Hellbound.
The nearly 60-date run includes U.S. headlining shows throughout June, July, August and September. Buckcherry will also play a few dates in Australia in November and December, bringing the total number of Hellbound shows to more than 230 over the past two years.
For the full list of dates and all ticket info, visit Buckcherry.com.
Following the end of the tour, Buckcherry will return to the studio to record a follow-up to Hellbound, marking the band’s milestone 10th studio album.
(NEW YORK) — A preliminary report released Wednesday found no abnormalities before last month’s China Eastern Airlines plane crash that killed all 132 people on board, the Chinese Civil Aviation Administration said.
“There was no abnormality in the radio communication and control command between the crew and the air traffic control department before deviating from the cruise altitude,” the report said, before the Boeing 737-800 suddenly nosedived into the ground from 30,000 feet in the air.
At a briefing on the report Wednesday, Chinese aviation officials said that their investigation has not found a cause and the crash continues to be a mystery to investigators who will continue an in-depth investigation with the help of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration and other international groups.
The report said that cabin crew and other maintenance personnel had met all requirements and the plane had certified airworthy and was up to date on inspections.
It also detailed that there was no dangerous weather forecast in the area of the crash and there were no declared dangerous goods on the aircraft.
The “black boxes” — the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder — that can tell exactly what was going on aboard the aircraft were badly damaged in the crash, authorities said, and investigators are still trying to recover data from them to determine what happened.
According to the report, the plane took off at 1:16 p.m. local time and cruised at an altitude of nearly 29,000 feet until around 2:20 p.m. when regional radar found that the aircraft began to “deviate” from that altitude. Radar then recorded the aircraft at around 11,000 feet traveling at 117 degrees.
Local air traffic control called the crew, but did not receive a reply. Shortly after, the radar signal of the plane disappeared.
The crash site in a mountainous area in Teng County, Wuzhou, Guangxi left a crater nearly 500 square feet large and 10 feet deep. Wreckage from the plane has been searched and collected by investigators.
ABC News’ Gio Benitez and Mark Osborne contributed to this report.
TA-DUM…DA DUM DUM: It looks like Netflix will start clamping down on sharing passwords, following a brutal loss of some 200,000 streaming subscribers in the first three months of this year.
The Wall Street Journal reports the streaming service could lose as many as two million total subscribers this quarter.
The loss of 200,000 subscribers was the largest loss suffered by the company in a decade, and caused a 35% drop in the stock price for the streaming giant on Wall Street Wednesday.
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings revealed the grim subscriber statistics during an earnings call on Tuesday, in which he detailed plans to clamp down on subscribers sharing their passwords — which the company’s never seriously addressed — and also proposed a cheaper, ad-supported subscription rate.
The Journal reports Netflix had added more than 18 million subscribers in 2021, which was weaker than normal, and a drastic decline from the 36 million it had added in 2020, when millions of people were at home in front of their TVs during the early pandemic lockdowns.
Joe Jonas and his famous brothers are getting ready for their upcoming Las Vegas residency and, while the trio has been quiet about certain details, Joe promised one thing — it’s going to be fun.
Speaking on the Spout podcast, the DNCE frontman marveled, “The tickets sold really quick!”
Does that mean the Jonas Brothers are going to pull all the stops because expectations are high?
“I think if you’re a fan — I mean, you’re going to Vegas — it’s a good time. And I’ll have DNCE pop up onstage there,” Joe said. “I wanna figure out some interesting concepts that we can do live. The game has changed of what live shows are like.”
He also teased that his band’s “Dancing Feet” collaborator Kygo might also swing by, saying the DJ’s “got a bunch of really exciting gigs, so if you’re a fan of him, or us and you’re music lover… and if you like EDM and you want to go to a festival, then you may or may not see us onstage with him.”
The JoBros will be taking over Park MGM for a five-night residency from June 3 through June 11. Tickets are available to purchase on Ticketmaster.
Residency aside, Joe also revealed that he starts his day by “sitting in silence” and “[checking] in with myself before I’m checking on social media or I’m texting people.”
The “Cake by the Ocean” singer elaborated, “It’s so easy to look at your phone first thing in the morning and be like, ‘Oh, I have to do this work thing’ or ‘I missed this call’ or like, something’s going on in the world.”
His advice to fans? “Just check in with yourself before you check in with anything else.”
Florence + the Machine has released a new song called “Free,” a track off the band’s upcoming album, Dance Fever.
The tune is accompanied by a video starring frontwoman Florence Welch “as herself” alongside Love Actually and Pirates of the Caribbean actor Bill Nighy as Welch’s “anxiety.”
“Free” is available now via digital outlets, and you can watch its video streaming now on YouTube.
Dance Fever, the follow-up to 2018’s High as Hope, arrives May 13. It also includes the previously released songs “King,” “Heaven Is Here” and “My Love.”
Florence will play a pair of intimate concerts in Los Angeles and New York City on April 29 on May 6, respectively. They’ll launch a full U.S. tour in support of Dance Fever in September.
Chris Stapleton tops the bill for the 2022 Pilgrimage Music & Cultural Festival, along with a host of other big names from the country and Americana spheres.
Joining Chris as a headliner is Brandi Carlile. Elle King, the Avett Brothers, Brittney Spencer, Marty Stuart and many others also appear on the bill. Two-day general admission passes go on sale Thursday, with options for VIP packages also available.
Pilgrimage is now in its eighth year. The Franklin, Tennessee-based festival returned in 2021 following a two-year hiatus prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
This year, the event will be held September 24-25. As always, festival-goers will enjoy a wide variety of goods from local creators, including food, jewelry, locally-brewed beer and more.
(WASHINGTON) — The Justice Department has announced nearly two dozen arrests of alleged fraudsters who prosecutors say have engaged in elaborate and brazen schemes to exploit the COVID-19 pandemic, raking in nearly $150 million in illicit proceeds so far.
In a TV network exclusive, officials told ABC News the enforcement action includes criminal charges against 21 individuals in nine federal districts across the country for their alleged participation in COVID-19 fraud schemes.
The charges, brought against individuals ranging from medical business owners and executives to physicians and marketers, also involve multiple alleged manufacturers of fake COVID-19 vaccination cards.
Losses from the alleged schemes top $149 million and counting, according to the Justice Department. Officials say the DOJ has so far seized more than $8 million in cash from the coordinated takedown.
“This COVID-19 health care fraud enforcement action involves extraordinary efforts to prosecute some of the largest and most wide-ranging pandemic frauds detected to date,” Director for COVID-19 Fraud Enforcement Kevin Chambers said in a statement. “The scale and complexity of the schemes prosecuted today illustrates the success of our unprecedented interagency effort to quickly investigate and prosecute those who abuse our critical health care programs.”
Behind the scenes, federal officials say they have quietly persevered to “root out” fraudsters in action and hold them accountable, leveraging an interagency approach.
“Today’s enforcement action reinforces our commitment to using all available tools to hold accountable medical professionals, corporate executives, and others who have placed greed above care during an unprecedented public health emergency,” Assistant Attorney General Kenneth Polite Jr. of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division said in a statement.
The alleged fraud varies widely, from accusations of exorbitant billing for sham telemedicine encounters, to COVID-19 testing allegedly used as bait to bundle with other unrelated and unnecessary testing services for the submission of false claims, to the large-scale manufacture of forged vaccination records. The Justice Department has charged individuals across eight states — California, New York, New Jersey, Florida, Washington, Maryland, Tennessee and Utah — in connection with the schemes over the past week.
In one such alleged scheme in California, two owners of a clinical laboratory, Imran Shams and Lourdes Navarro, have been charged with a health care fraud, kickback and money-laundering scheme aimed at defrauding Medicare of over $214 million for laboratory tests, including more than $125 million in false and fraudulent claims during the pandemic for COVID-19 and respiratory pathogen tests. No pleas have yet been entered in the case.
In two separate cases, one in Maryland and one in New York, owners of medical clinics allegedly obtained confidential information from patients seeking drive-through COVID-19 testing, submitting fraudulent claims for lengthy office visits that investigators say did not, in fact, occur.
According to the indictment, the profits from these false claims were then allegedly laundered through shell corporations in the U.S., transferred abroad, and used to buy real estate and other luxury items.
In another case, investigators allege that a postal worker in New Jersey made “thousands of dollars” on sales of more than 400 fake COVID-19 vaccination cards, and enabled others to resell and redistribute the cards she made — which she produced using a printer and ink at the postal office where she worked, according to an indictment unsealed Tuesday. The defendant, Lisa Hammell, allegedly sought to hide their electronic payment transactions by describing them as items like “movie tickets” or “dinner and drinks.”
Hammell, who was arrested Tuesday and does not currently have an attorney listed on her court docket, allegedly messaged an unidentified individual on March 27, 2021, showing off two fake cards she printed.
Through “deceit, craft, trickery, and dishonest means,” investigators say those they have now brought charges against “knowingly and intentionally” conspired to defraud the United States by impairing federal health authorities’ efforts to get shots in arms and beat back the spread of COVID-19. No further pleas have yet been entered.
In another unsealed indictment, investigators allege a Colorado man and unnamed co-conspirators made “hundreds” of fake vaccine records earning “thousands of dollars” from the scheme, selling fraudulent cards to “hundreds of individuals in at least a dozen states,” according to the indictment.
The man, Robert Van Camp, allegedly sold cards to at least four undercover law enforcement officers for between $120 and $175 per card, and claimed that he had sold fake cards to three unnamed Olympians and their coach.
“I’ve got people that are going to the Olympics in Tokyo, three Olympians and their coach in Tokyo, Amsterdam, Hawaii, Costa Rica, Honduras,” Van Camp told an undercover agent, according to the indictment.
Van Camp took care to customize the cards, according to a criminal affidavit, asking one undercover agent if they preferred any particular dates for when they purportedly got their shots — explaining if they were flying soon, airlines preferred the second dose to be administered at least a couple weeks before the flight. He allegedly asked if any of the individuals getting the fake cards were married, offering to make a partner’s card “look different from one another, so that the cards would not look like they came off an assembly line when they travelled together,” the filing said.
“My cards are f—ing worldwide,” Van Camp told one undercover agent, according to the affidavit. “I mean, these things are gold.”
He boasted he had a “hookup on the real, real ‘V’ card,” that he had “done it for about 700 of my customers.”
As of Wednesday morning Van Camp has not entered a plea or retained an attorney in his case.
ABC News first reported last year on the burgeoning market for counterfeit COVID-19 vaccination cards, which had set off alarm bells for federal health officials, who warned the demand for fake proof of immunity was on the rise, threatening the nation’s hard-fought gains against the virus.
The illicit industry for forged cards hit its stride just as new vaccine requirements were put in place at the federal, state and local levels, and in both the public and private sectors — requiring proof of inoculation in order to work at a hospital, teach or attend school, work out at the gym, or eat inside a restaurant — yet some Americans held back, with some railing against the mandates.
For enterprising fraudsters, that hesitance posed a ripe opportunity.
One unnamed individual listed in the indictment allegedly privately messaged Hammell last summer: “Good morning, random question … can you get me a vaccine card? My mom works for [a hospital] and they are forcing everyone to get the vaccine and she definitely is adamantly against it.”
“I can as long as no one knows where it came from,” Hammell allegedly responded, according to the indictment.
Earlier this month, a naturopathic doctor in California who was arrested last year for allegedly scheming to sell fake COVID-19 immunizations and vaccination cards pleaded guilty — and is allegedly linked to the larger string of arrests announced by federal authorities Wednesday.
“The attempt to profit from the COVID-19 pandemic by targeting beneficiaries and stealing from federal health care programs is unconscionable,” Inspector General Christi Grimm of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said in a statement Wednesday. “HHS-OIG is proud to work alongside our law enforcement partners at the federal and state level to ensure that bad actors who perpetrate egregious and harmful crimes are held accountable.”
Appraising fraudsters’ exploitation of the pandemic relief system this spring, top federal oversight officials warned members of Congress that the COVID-19 pandemic had created a “perfect storm” for fraudulent compensation claims, with a lack of proper oversight pairing with an unprecedented cash infusion to incentivize criminals amid a global crisis.
Criminal COVID-19 schemes have been an ongoing and thorny issue for the government to pursue, with the pandemic creating an avenue for fraudsters to supercharge their schemes. So far, the Justice Department has filed criminal charges against more than 1,000 defendants, opening more than 240 civil investigations into more than 1,800 individuals and entities, “together involving billions of dollars in suspected fraud,” OMB deputy director for management Jason Miller estimated in March.
But officials note that the current figures likely reflect only a fraction of the funds that experts believe may have been defrauded over the pandemic’s two plus years.
The ultimate amount of COVID-19 fraud will be “very large,” Justice Department Inspector General and Chair of the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee Michael Horowitz testified before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs in March, adding that agencies would jointly use “all of our tools — criminal, civil administrative suspension and debarment, forfeiture, to try and recover the funds that have been stolen.”
“We’re doing that and we’re making every effort,” Horowitz said.
