(WASHINGTON) — Two top prosecutors in the Justice Department were added several months ago to the ongoing federal probe examining sex trafficking allegations against Rep. Matt Gaetz, two sources familiar with the matter confirmed to ABC News.
The Washington-based prosecutors, one with expertise in child exploitation crimes and the other a top official in the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section, have been on the Florida-based case since at least July. In recent months, they joined a team in Florida that’s been looking into whether Gaetz violated federal law by providing goods or payments to a 17-year-old girl in exchange for sex, sources confirmed to ABC News. The news of the new prosecutors was first reported by The New York Times.
Gaetz has not been charged with a crime and has denied any wrongdoing. In a statement to ABC News on Thursday, a spokesperson for Gaetz said, “Congressman Gaetz is innocent. The former DOJ official who tried to extort him is guilty. No number of political operative prosecutors at a politically weaponized DOJ will change this.”
The news comes just days after a federal judge in Central Florida granted a request from attorneys representing former Seminole County tax collector Joel Greenberg, Gaetz’s one-time self-described “wingman,” to delay Greenberg’s sentencing while he continues to provide prosecutors with information about his activities in connection with the ongoing federal probe.
Greenberg in May pleaded guilty to multiple federal crimes, including sex trafficking of a minor and introducing her to other “adult men” who also had sex with her when she was underage, and agreed to provide “substantial assistance” to prosecutors as part of their ongoing investigation.
“This is obviously not a normal situation,” U.S. attorney Roger Handberg told the judge earlier this week in requesting a delay in Greenberg’s scenting. “Mr. Greenberg is a prolific criminal.”
“Mr. Greenberg was not alone,” Handberg added. “This is an unusual situation with a number of lines of investigation we are pursuing.”
ABC News previously reported that Gaetz’s former associate had been steadily providing information and handing over troves of potential evidence in the sprawling probe, including years of Venmo and Cash App transactions and thousands of photos and videos, as well as access to personal social media accounts, sources said.
Private messages first reported by ABC News potentially shed light on how Greenberg allegedly met women online who were paid for sex, and allegedly introduced them to the Florida congressman and other associates. The messages, first reported by ABC News in August, appear to show Greenberg texting with a woman he met online in September 2018 and discussing payment options. Greenberg also appears to ask the woman, who was of legal age, if she would take drugs; he then sets up a get-together with himself, Gaetz, the woman, and one of her friends, the messages appear to show.
Amid the ongoing investigation, Gaetz has remained active in Congress and has forcibly pushed back against the DOJ and the media. During Thursday’s House Judiciary hearing, Gaetz questioned Attorney General Merrick Garland on whether there are prohibitions against DOJ officials who have been “partisan committee staff” members working on criminal investigations. Todd Gee, one of the two new prosecutors added to the Gaetz investigation, previously worked as a House Homeland Committee staffer for Democrats during the Bush Administration.
Greenberg’s sentencing is now scheduled for March 2022, a date the judge said would be a “deadline we have to meet.”
(NEW YORK) — There is a growing sense of optimism across the country, with national coronavirus infection rates steadily falling, booster shots available for many Americans and pending vaccine approval on the horizon for young children.
In southern states like Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana and Georgia, which were hit early on by the delta surge, hospitalizations are on the decline.
But despite the good news, experts are pleading with Americans to remain alert, as the highly infectious delta variant continues to circulate.
Despite vaccination rollouts, several states, particularly those in colder climates, are beginning to see a rise in infections.
“You’re starting to see an uptick in cases in the colder parts of the country and as people are driven indoors without masks on,” former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb told CNN earlier this month. “The delta wave has not run through the United States… I think we have a couple of months to go.”
Experts have been warning for weeks that colder areas may see an uptick in cases this winter.
“We may be starting to see the delta surge in the northern parts of the country that were relatively spared over the summer,” said John Brownstein, Ph.D., an epidemiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital and an ABC News contributor.
In recently released forecasts, the PolicyLab at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia reported that infection rates in parts of the Midwest and Mountain states remained “stubbornly high,” and that despite declining transmission in the Southeast, Mid-Atlantic and in California, a period of resurgence may be on the horizon for northern regions of the country.
“We can take some comfort this week in the fact that national daily case counts have dropped below 100,000 and national adult and pediatric hospital censuses have declined by 50% since late summer,” the group wrote, adding that the country must still be prepared to see a resurgence.
In the Midwest, many counties throughout Minnesota and Michigan have had a significant rise in cases, while other states (Delaware, Maine, Montana, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin, West Virginia and Wyoming) are reporting high transmission in nearly every county, according to federal data.
“Coronaviruses tend to thrive in winter months and colder weather,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky said. “Right now is not the time, as cases are coming down to become complacent because we do know colder weather is ahead of us.”
These local increases in cases are being accompanied by an uptick in hospitalizations. Ten states (Alaska, Colorado, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Vermont, and Wyoming) are already seeing a higher number of hospital admissions.
In Montana, forecasters noted that cities are experiencing the highest rates of case incidence and hospitalizations they have seen throughout the pandemic, mirroring what happened in Idaho last month. Similarly, in Utah, the outlook continues to worsen, specifically in the Salt Lake City region, as resurgence spreads to a wider geographic area.
According to the PolicyLab, the regional variation across the country makes predicting the trajectory of this period of the pandemic challenging. While the team wrote that the likelihood of a fall and winter resurgence in northern areas “seems more probable,” there is “uncertainty about the magnitude, duration and breadth of geographic regions that will be impacted.”
“We need to expect that, as we enter a season of shorter, colder days that will push more people to gather indoors, we will soon see a widening geographic distribution of resurgent transmission in many locations,” forecasters wrote.
The group noted that the Northeast did not experience a significant surge last year, until the holiday season in November and December, and added that nationally, case incidence increased rapidly just after Halloween last year, surging through the New Year.
“As winter approaches, indoor mixing, especially among the remaining unvaccinated populations, means that we will likely continue to see increases in cases. The biggest remaining question is whether we have vaccinated enough of the population to see a decoupling with hospitalizations and deaths,” added Brownstein.
People who have not been fully vaccinated are 6.1 times more likely to test positive with the virus and 11.3 times more likely to die from it, compared with people who are vaccinated, according to federal data.
Although nearly two-thirds of Americans have now received at least one shot of a COVID-19 vaccine, more than 112 million Americans remain completely unvaccinated. Approximately 64 million of those unvaccinated Americans are people over the age of 12, and thus, are currently eligible to get the shot.
PolicyLab experts say it is therefore critical for communities to act now in order to “maximize vaccinations among children and adults so that we can prevent local surges in all regions this winter and finally move toward the waning days of the pandemic.”
(NEW YORK) — A spate of strikes has rocked the private sector, revealing the new power workers wield as the pandemic wanes in the U.S. and sending a message to employers who may have been working from home for the past year that a return to the status quo isn’t going to cut it.
A confluence of unique labor market conditions — including record-high levels of people quitting their jobs and an apparent shortage of workers accepting low-wage jobs — has contributed to the recent rash of work stoppages, experts say, but they also come after decades of stagnating wages and soaring income inequality in the U.S.
The post-traumatic shock of a deadly pandemic that took an inordinate toll on workers who didn’t have the privilege of earning a living remotely, and their families, has also been linked to the recent employee activism.
“I think workers have reached a tipping point,” Tim Schlittner, the communications director of the AFL-CIO, told ABC News. “For too long they’ve been called essential, but treated as expendable, and workers have decided that enough is enough.”
“They want a fair return on their work and they’re willing to take the courageous act of a strike to win a better deal and a better life,” he added. The AFL-CIO is a coalition of labor unions that collectively represents some 12.5 million workers.
Here is what to know about what some lawmakers are dubbing “Striketober,” the recent labor movement uprising that has spanned across industries and states.
Who is striking?
There have been 255 strikes this year, with 43 occurring in October, according to the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations’ tracker. The researchers behind the tracker define a strike as a “temporary stoppage of work by a group of workers in order to express a grievance or to enforce a demand,” that “may or may not be workplace-related.”
Among the most prominent is the ongoing strike of 10,000 John Deere workers across more than a dozen plants who are represented by the United Auto Workers. Some 1,400 workers represented by the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union are also on strike at Kellogg’s plants across four states.
The Cornell researchers also collect data on “Labor Protests,” defined as a collective action by a group of people as workers but without withdrawing their labor in order to express a grievance or enforce a demand. The group has tracked an additional 19 labor protests this month, and a whopping 554 in 2021.
The group collects information on strikes from Bureau of Labor Statistics data, Federal Mediation and Conciliation Services data, Bloomberg Law’s work stoppage database, major media outlets, organizational press releases and social media. The researchers then follow a set of verification protocols to determine which instances constitute a strike or labor protest.
In 2020, as the pandemic raged, the Cornell ILR School recorded 54 strikes and eight labor protests.
Why now?
“I think it’s a combination of things, but certainly influenced by the pandemic and the kind of economic situation coming out of that,” Alex Colvin, the dean of the Cornell IRL School and a professor of conflict resolution, labor relations and law, told ABC News.
“People feel like they contributed a lot during the depths of the pandemic and now they’re looking for some of the returns when the economy’s doing better and companies are doing better — profits are up, stock prices are up,” he added. “We’re seeing similar effects going on with quit rates going up, people more willing to leave their jobs now and look for something better.”
The Bureau of Labor Statistics said in a release earlier this month that the number of people who quit their jobs in August jumped to the highest since its record-keeping began, representing nearly 3% of the entire workforce. The record-high quit rate bested the previous high of 2.7% that was set in April of this year, and then repeated in June and July.
As the number of people quitting their jobs has reached record highs in recent months, so have the number of job openings, the BLS data indicates.
Meanwhile, a dismal 194,000 jobs were added to the economy last month, according to BLS data, as employers struggled to fill positions. This was lower than the already-disappointing figure of 366,000 in August, and the million-plus jobs added in July.
Due to working through a COVID-19 pandemic that has left more than 730,000 Americans dead, and because of the recent labor market trends, workers may be “less willing to take what they’ve been willing to take in the past,” Colvin said, but added that these factors also increase the leverage unions have when executing a strike.
“It makes sense for workers to push to kind of share in the gains of the improving economy,” he said. “But also, they have more leverage because it’s harder to replace them in a tighter labor market.”
The AFL-CIO’s Schlittner said the pandemic also exposed some deep “imbalances of power in the economy.”
“The pandemic has made clear what’s important and what’s not, and workers are looking at work in a new way, and demanding more of a return on their labor, and demanding things like basic respect, dignity and safety on the job,” Schlittner told ABC News. “The pandemic has put on display for everyone to see how important workers are to this country, and you can’t call workers essential for 18 months and then treat them like crap when they all come back on the job.”
What’s causing the so-called ‘labor shortage’?
Recent labor market data has sowed confusion for some over where workers have gone. The unemployment rate as of last month remains at an elevated 4.8%, still above the pre-pandemic 3.5% seen in February 2020. The number of job openings, however, has hit record high after record high in recent months — with the most recent BLS data indicating that there were some 10.4 million job openings in August after a record-high 10.9 million in July.
A report from Moody’s Analytics released earlier this week attributed the workforce reduction in large part to child care issues, which have plagued working parents and taken a disproportionate toll on mothers during the pandemic, and was the most-cited reason for why people aren’t returning to work. The Wall Street analytics firm also found that millions not working said they were out of work because they were laid off or their employer had gone out of business during the pandemic, and some economists have attributed pandemic-era protections and government support to their slower return to the workforce. Finally, their data indicates fear of getting or spreading the virus was heavily cited among those not working.
Schlittner said he doesn’t see it as a labor shortage, but rather “a shortage of good-paying jobs.”
“There’s a shortage of good-paying, quality jobs; that’s the scarcity story in America today,” he said. “If employers raise pay, improve working conditions and give every worker the right to form a union, the workers will be there, ready to report to the job.”
Some data indicates the power that lack of laborers willing to accept low pay can have on pushing up wages, and the power of collective activism.
The federal minimum wage has remained unchanged for over a decade at $7.25 an hour, despite widespread activism — especially in the hospitality industry — to raise that to $15 an hour through organizations such as the Fight for 15. Post-pandemic demand for staffers as restaurants reopen has pushed the average hourly wages of workers at food and drinking establishment to a record-high $17.40 an hour in August, according to preliminary data from the labor department.
Meanwhile, a GoFundMe started in support of the John Deere workers on strike has garnered over $80,000 in just four days from more than 2,000 donors.
“More workers are recognizing the power in each other, that standing together with their co-workers is a powerful act, and can bring about great change,” Schlittner said. “And that’s what ‘Striketober’ is all about. It’s about changing an economy and a system that isn’t working for regular working people. One picket line at a time, we can start to do that.”
(LONDON) — Queen Elizabeth was hospitalized Wednesday night for “preliminary investigations,” a Buckingham Palace spokesman confirmed to ABC News.
The queen was back at her desk at Windsor Castle by Thursday afternoon and undertaking light duties.
No other details about the queen’s condition are currently available.
“Following medical advice to rest for a few days, The Queen attended hospital on Wednesday afternoon for some preliminary investigations,” the palace said in a statement. “[She] remains in good spirits.”
Queen Elizabeth, 95, hosted a reception for leaders, including Bill Gates and John Kerry, at Windsor Castle on Tuesday.
The next day she was forced to cancel a trip to Northern Island as her medical team advised her to get some rest.
(NEW YORK) — Last year, Thanksgiving and Black Friday looked a little different, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. While holiday shopping has increasingly shifted to online in recent years, the pandemic led to an e-commerce boom.
But this year, many retailers will also focus on in-person shoppers, as in seasons past. This holiday season, industry watchers say consumers may opt to shop in stores because of shortages and supply chain issues, and reports of slower mail service.
While you can still get a lot of deals online, if you are ready to hit the stores, you’ll want to know what’s open on Thanksgiving Day and what time you can score in-person savings on Black Friday. Of course, there are plenty of earlier opportunities to get big savings, such as Amazon’s already-released Black Friday-worthy deals, but if you’re ready to shop ’til you drop, we’ll help you stay on top of what’s happening this holiday season with this list of major retailers and their plans for closures and sales.
Stores closed on Thanksgiving
Walmart
Just like last year, one of the country’s largest retailers plans to close on Thanksgiving Day. It’s the second time in Walmart’s history it’s closed on Thanksgiving.
Stores will operate with normal hours on Nov. 24 and the retail giant plans to roll out its online Black Friday Deals for Days in early November.
Target
One of Walmart’s top competitors, Target, also announced plans to close on Thanksgiving this year.
While shoppers won’t be able to shop the aisles during the holiday, Target’s Black Friday Now sales will be available through Black Friday.
Bed Bath & Beyond
The home and kitchen giant will close on Thanksgiving Day but reopen on Black Friday. Deals will become available online and in-stores earlier in November.
Best Buy
While customers can still enjoy deals online and via Best Buy’s app, physical stores will be closed on Thanksgiving this year.
Beginning Nov. 26, shoppers can enjoy huge savings through a variety of sales events.
Kohl’s
Kohl’s announced plans to close for the second Thanksgiving Day in a row on June 17. It will reopen for Black Friday.
Bix box retailers
Big box retailers such as Costco, Sam’s Club and BJ’s have traditionally closed on Thanksgiving and resumed normal hours on Black Friday. This year is no exception as all three retailers plan to close on Thanksgiving 2021.
Top retailers open on Thanksgiving
Some of the most popular retailers that will remain open include CVS, Walgreens, RadioShack, Big Lots and Bass Pro Shops.
(GIZA, Egypt) — Seventy-two years of Egyptian women’s rights activism paid off this week as the State Council, an important independent judiciary body in the country, appointed 98 female judges for the first time.
Iman Sherif, one of the appointed judges, described the move as “historic” during the swearing-in ceremony, saying she was over the moon, according to state-run Al-Ahram Newspaper.
“We pledged to live up to our responsibilities. I can’t describe my happiness,” she added.
“It is very important, not only to see the long resistance came up with this result, but also how much it means to the new generation,” Nehad Abu El Komsan, head of the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights, told ABC News. “It is a step ahead for the younger generation to believe there can be no restrictions in their dreams.”
The recent appointment of 98 judges to Egypt’s State Council has considerable implications.
The State Council — established in 1946 — is an independent judicial body and one of the pillars of the judicial authority in Egypt. It has its own courts and hierarchy, like the civil and criminal justice systems.
According to the National Council of Women — which is a state organization — the very first female judge in Egypt was appointed in 2003 in the Constitutional Court. Later, in 2007, 31 more female judges joined the judiciary in 2008 and 2015.
However, what distinguishes the recent hiring of women judges by the State Council is that this body has mounted the stiffest resistance against women judges joining the judiciary over the last decades.
“That’s exactly where the conflict was. The institutions which were supposed to defend and support the citizens’ rights were resisting against women’s rights within themselves,” Abu El Komsan explained. “That is why we celebrated this last move by the State Council.”
According to the last official statistics released in 2015 and published by the National Council of Women, women shaped less than half a percent of the total number of judges working in Egypt’s judiciary system. While there were only 80 female judges, there were around 12,000 male ones.
“It was and still is a male-dominated field, and even with the new 98 judges the percentage is still less than half a percent,” Abu El Komsan said.
The State Council decision of hiring women judges came after a recommendation that the justice ministry made public. The justice ministry said on March 8 that President Fattah Al-Sisi had called on them to appoint female judges in the State Council and Prosecution as he marked the International Women’s Day.
To Abu El Komsan, this recommendation was a result of years of women’s rights activism and civil demands for a change, rather than a gesture.
However, not all women’s rights activists share the same stance.
“Al-Sisi needs to just show the world that Egypt does not have any problem with women. But they really do,” Reda Eldanbouki, a lawyer and the executive director of the Women’s Center for Guidance and Legal Awareness, told ABC News.
“We have had great women judges who did want to join the State Council, but their applications were rejected because [they were] not necessarily aligned with the system. It did not matter how much they pursued their cases through legal paths, it still did not work,” Eldanbouki said.
“Actually, gender doesn’t matter. Male or female, you need to obey the system,” he added.
Eldanbouki and Abu El Komsan believe these newly appointed judges were not chosen from the graduates of the law schools, but rather the Council “promoted” or simply “relocated” the women judges who were already working at different positions or departments of the judiciary.
“They [the State Council] still have not opened the doors to the female graduates of the law schools. Most of them work as lawyers,” Abu El Komsan said. “We still have to push for breaking the glass ceiling.”
When Jon Pardi can’t think of anything else to do, he likes “Tequila Little Time.” And it helps if he has Thomas Rhett‘s dad, singer/songwriter Rhett Akins, around.
You see, Jon’s latest hit came to life on the final day of a writing getaway for his latest album, Heartache Medication.
“It’s a fun song,” Jon says of “Tequila Little Time.” “I love how it’s just the sleek little title that Rhett Akins came up with.”
“He was laying on the couch,” Jon recalls. “It was the last day of our retreat and we… just couldn’t think of anything. I mean, it was like silent for maybe 20 minutes, and… just out of nowhere, he’s like ‘Tequila little time, man!’ And we wrote the song in an hour.”
Jon has a theory about songs like that — one that’s true of his first number one.
“Usually there’s something special about songs you can shell out in an hour,” he explains. “‘Head Over Boots’ was one we shelled out in an hour. And it just fell out of us.”
“It was just kind of like picking up somebody when they’re down, having a shot of tequila and dancing and having fun,” he says of the idea behind his new song.
“And right now, I feel like everybody wants to have a shot of tequila and have fun if they’re drinking,” he laughs.
(NEW YORK) — Here are the scores from Thursday’s sports events:
MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL
NATIONAL LEAGUE PLAYOFFS
LA Dodgers 11, Atlanta 2 (Atlanta leads series 3-2)
NATIONAL BASKETBALL ASSOCIATION
Atlanta 113, Dallas 87
Miami 137, Milwaukee 95
Golden State 115, LA Clippers 113
NATIONAL HOCKEY LEAGUE
Columbus 3, NY Islanders 2 (OT)
Washington 4, New Jersey 1
Carolina 4, Montreal 1
San Jose 2 Ottawa 1
Florida 4, Colorado 1
Calgary 3, Detroit 0
Winnipeg 5, Anaheim 1
NY Rangers 3, Nashville 1
Vancouver 4, Chicago 1
Edmonton 5, Arizona 1
Five years ago, Sia scored her first U.S. number-one hit with “Cheap Thrills,” her collaboration with Sean Paul. Now, the two have reunited for a new single, “Dynamite” — and Sean Paul says working with Sia again was “magic.”
Sean Paul says he always knew he and Sia would do something else together, but he tells ABC Audio that it took them this long because it needed to be the right song. Sean says he had the initial idea and rhythm for the track, but Sia took it to the next level.
“It was like the bones of the song, and she kind of added the soup!” he laughs. “She got it cooking. When she wrote that hook, I was like ‘Ohhh!!!’ But again, with her voice, you know, everything she sings [is great].”
He adds, “But for me, it was just magic.”
Sean says he’s looking forward to the video for the song, due out in a few weeks, which will show his hometown of Kingston, Jamaica, “in the future.” “There’s cars flying and there’s big buildings, a lot of crazy stuff!” he says, laughing.
For now, though, Sean is just satisfied to be able to release “a very feel-good song, something to get people on the dance floor and to just sort of forget about the worries that’s all in the Earth right now.”
“I think that’s what my music is and has been for people over the years,” he explains. “You know, there’s problems every day…You see it on news every day. I like to tell people that whenever there’s anything wrong with my life, there’s always one song that’ll get me in a better mood. And so I’m happy to be able to provide people with that type of music, especially this one.”
Don McLean‘s classic anthem “American Pie” and album of the same name were released 50 years ago this Sunday, October 24.
With “American Pie,” which was the album’s lead track and centerpiece, McLean used the tragic 1959 plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper — referred to in the tune as “the day the music died” –as a launching point to metaphorically trace the history of rock ‘n’ roll through the turbulent 1960s, while also reflecting on the loss of innocence America experienced during the era.
“American Pie” spent four weeks at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in early 1972, while the album topped the Billboard 200 for seven weeks around that time. American Pie also featured a second hit, the acoustic ballad “Vincent,” an homage to painter Vincent Van Gogh that peaked at #12 on the Hot 100.
“American Pie,” of course, has become among the most enduring songs of its time.
“It’s been a hit record on steroids,” McLean tells ABC Audio. “[O]ther hits have been forgotten that were around or…if you listen to them now, they sound silly…This song is majestic and it continues to grow.”
Reflecting on the song, Don says, “[I]t’s entertaining on a number of levels…I had a blast writing it and thinking about it and laughing and thinking, ‘Oh, this is funny, I’ll do this,’ or ‘I won’t do that.'”
As for “Vincent,” McLean notes with a laugh, “I hear people saying that the song has actually made [Van Gogh] famous, more famous than he was before. That makes me feel funny…because he was already a god, really, in [the realm of art].”
As previously reported, McLean will launch a 50th anniversary American Pietour this January in Honolulu.
