(APPIATSE, Ghana) — A town in Ghana was rocked by a huge explosion Thursday that sent several people to the hospital, the authorities said.
The Ghana Police Service announced that the explosion took place around 3 p.m. local time in the town of Appiatse, between Bogoso and Bawdie. Buildings and structures were gutted, and debris was scattered in the streets.
A preliminary investigation has determined that the explosion appears to have been caused by a mining vehicle carrying explosives, traveling from Tarkwa to the Chirano mines, colliding with a motorcycle, police said.
“The public has been advised to move out of the area to nearby towns for their safety while recovery efforts are underway,” police said in a statement.
First responders and residents scrambled to find victims, with some using construction vehicles to clear debris. Smoke from the explosion could be seen miles away.
Police said victims had been taken to area hospitals but didn’t provide any details on the number of victims or the extent of their injuries. The number of fatalities isn’t immediately known.
“An appeal is also being made to nearby towns to open up their classrooms, churches, etc. to accommodate surviving victims,” police said.
(MIAMI) — A first-class passenger who allegedly refused to wear a mask disrupted a London-bound American Airlines flight Wednesday night and prompted the pilot to turn back to Miami so the customer could be booted off the aircraft, police and airline officials said.
American Airlines Flight 38, with 129 passengers and 14 crew members aboard, was over the Atlantic Ocean when the passenger allegedly refused to obey instructions to wear a mask and became disruptive, a spokesperson for the airline said.
The flight departed Miami International Airport at about 7:40 p.m. local time. About an hour into the flight, the pilot decided to turn the Boeing 777 aircraft around and head back to Miami, according to the airline.
The flight was ultimately canceled and the passengers needed to rebook on future flights, the airline’s spokesperson said.
“The flight landed safely at MIA where local law enforcement met the aircraft. We thank our crew for their professionalism and apologize to our customers for the inconvenience,” American Airlines said in a statement.
Steve Freeman, a passenger on the flight, told ABC Miami affiliate WPLG the woman was verbally abusive to the flight crew.
“She sat behind us in first class — she was a first-class passenger and was extremely abusive to the stewards,” said Freeman, who was flying home to London. “I could see the writing on the wall — they gave her a lot of warnings, so we were kind of ready for it.”
He said flight attendants tried to offer the passenger several different masks.
“She complained about each mask,” Freeman said.
Det. Argemis Colome of the Miami-Dade Police Department told ABC News on Thursday that police were contacted by American Airlines about a disruptive female passenger refusing to wear a mask.
Colome said police officers met the plane when it returned to the Miami International Airport. He said officers escorted the passenger off the plane, but she was not arrested or charged.
Colome said the woman, whose name was not released, was turned over to American Airlines officials to handle administratively.
A spokesperson for American Airlines told ABC News on Thursday that the woman has been placed on the airline’s internal no-fly list pending an investigation. Such incidents are referred to the Federal Aviation Administration as part of a standard reporting process, the spokesperson said.
Luke Combs, Willie Nelson and Jimmy Buffett are among the long list of acts headed down to Louisiana for the multi-genre New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival this spring.
All three acts will perform during the second weekend of the event, which takes place May 5-8. The first half of the festival will take place April 29-May 1.
Also part of the lineup are acts like Lukas Nelson — Willie’s son — as well as Grammy-winning bluegrass upstart Billy Strings, and Americana act The War and Treaty, who performed with Dierks Bentley at last year’s ACM Awards show.
Non-country leaning acts on the bill include The Who, The Black Crowes, Lionel Richie and Foo Fighters.
The New Orleans Jazz Fest was canceled in 2020 and 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. For a full lineup and ticketing information, visit the event’s website.
Angela Bassett and husband Courtney B. Vance are serving as executive producers of the docuseries One Thousand Years of Slavery, which will premiere on the Smithsonian Channel during Black History Month on Monday, February 7 at 8 p.m. ET/PT.
Debbie Allen, Lorraine Toussaint, Soledad O’Brien, CCH Pounder, and Dulé Hill are among the personalities featured in the four-part series, which explores slavery’s legacy.
“One Thousand Years of Slavery stretches the canvas beyond the 400 years we’ve traditionally learned about, and I’m thrilled to bring this storytelling to life with Smithsonian Channel,” Bassett said in a statement. Vance added, “We are incredibly proud to be part of this journey.”
In other news, The Falcon and The Winter Soldier star Anthony Mackie will make his directorial debut with Spark, a true story about Claudette Colvin, an unsung pioneer of the Civil Rights era, Deadline reports. Saniyya Sidney who portrayed Venus Williams in King Richard, will star as Colvin.
“It’s great to be a superhero in movies, but she’s a real live one living amongst us, and I’m honored to tell her story,” Mackie said in a statement.
Finally, grown-ish has dropped the trailer for the second half of its fourth season, which premieres January 27 on Freeform. In the clip, Zoey, portrayed by Yara Shahidi, is faced with choosing between love or her career as graduation approaches.
Specifically, Zoey must decide whether to pursue a fashion career in New York City with her ex-boyfriend, Luca, played by Luka Sabbat, or to accept the invitation from her current boyfriend Aaron, portrayed Trevor Jackson, to accompany him to South Africa, where he’s received a grant from the University of Johannesburg.
(WASHINGTON) — President Joe Biden announced the nomination of Nusrat Jahan Choudhury to the federal judiciary Wednesday, who, if confirmed by the Senate, would become the first Muslim American woman to serve as a federal judge. She is also the first Muslim American woman to be nominated to the federal judiciary.
Choudhury was nominated to sit on the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York and is also the first Bangladeshi American to be nominated to the federal bench. She would be the second Muslim American appointed to a federal judgeship, according to the White House announcement.
“These choices also continue to fulfill the President’s promise to ensure that the nation’s courts reflect the diversity that is one of our greatest assets as a country,” the statement read.
Choudhury is currently the legal director at the Illinois division of the American Civil Liberties Union and previously served as the deputy director of the national ACLU Racial Justice Program. She is a graduate of Yale Law School, Columbia University and Princeton University.
The other nominees include Arianna Freeman, who would be the first African American woman to serve on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals; Ana Isabel de Alba, who would be the first Latina to serve on the Eastern District of California; and Nina Nin-Yuen Wang, who would be the second Asian American to serve the United States District Court. Tiffany Cartwright, Robert Steven Huie, Natasha Merle and Jennifer Rearden round out the president’s first set of nominees for 2022 and the 13th of his presidency.
The selections align with Biden’s goal of nominating more women and people of color to serve on the bench, jobs that come with a lifetime appointment. The trend is in stark contrast to his predecessor.
Former President Donald Trump’s nominees were 85% white and 76% of them were men, according to the Alliance for Justice advocacy group. To date, 78% of Biden’s confirmations have been women and 53% have been people of color, according to the White House.
Democrats have pushed Biden to make federal court nominations a priority after Trump and former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made a concerted effort to shape the nation’s courts.
Over the course of one term, Trump had 245 judges confirmed compared with Former President Barack Obama’s 334 confirmed judges across two terms according to the United States Courts.
As of Jan, 1, however, Biden had gotten the most federal judges confirmed in a president’s first year in office since former President Ronald Reagan.
(ATLANTA) — A Georgia prosecutor investigating possible criminal behavior by former President Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election has officially requested to seat a special grand jury, according to a letter obtained by ABC News.
The development is a major step forward in the only publicly known criminal investigation into Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
In a letter Thursday to Fulton County Chief Judge Christopher Brasher, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis wrote that the move is needed because “a significant number of witnesses and prospective witnesses have refused to cooperate with the investigation absent a subpoena requiring their testimony.”
Willis officially launched the probe last February, after Trump was heard in a recorded phone call pushing Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to help him “find 11,780 votes,” the exact number Trump needed to win Georgia in the 2020 presidential election.
Willis says that Raffensperger is one of those who will not comply with the investigation without a subpoena, based on comments he made in an interview with NBC.
In response to Willis’ request, Trump, in a statement, said, “My phone call to the Secretary of State of Georgia was perfect, perhaps even more so than my call with the Ukrainian President, if that’s possible.” The reference was to the phone call Trump made to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky ahead of the 2020 election asking him to dig up dirt on his political rival Joe Biden; Trump was ultimately impeached for that call, but the Senate did not convict him.
“I didn’t say anything wrong in the call,” Trump said of his call to Raffensperger. “No more political witch hunts!”
If empaneled, the special grand jury will not have the authority to return an indictment, according to the Willis’ letter. Instead it may “make recommendations concerning criminal prosecution as it shall see fit,” the letter said.
A majority of the judges on the Fulton County Superior Court will have to vote to approve the request in order for the special grand jury to be seated, according to Georgia state law.
Describing his Jan. 2 call with Trump in an exclusive interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos last year, Raffensperger said that Trump “did most of the talking.”
“We did most of the listening,” Raffensperger said. “But I did want to make my points that the data that he has is just plain wrong.”
ABC News’ Steve Osunsami and Brandon Baur contributed to this report.
Christopher Polk/Getty Images for Critics’ Choice Television Awards
Bill Paxton‘s untimely death in 2017 was at the center of a Los Angeles’ judge’s decision on Wednesday.
Deadline reports Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Steven J. Kleifield is allowing the actor’s widow, Louise Paxton, and the couple’s children, James and Lydia Paxton, to sue Cedars-Sinai Medical Center for punitive damages in connection with actor’s death.
The Twister and True Lies star’s cause of death was officially listed as a stroke, which he suffered 11 days after surgery to replace a heart valve and repair aorta damage. He was 61.
However, according to the family’s lawsuit, reports Deadline, surgeon Dr. Ali Khoynezhad — who no longer works for Cedars — “was known prior to the Paxton death to practice what has been testified to by the hospital staff as ‘cowboy medicine’…In Khoynezhad’s quest to generate more surgeries and higher numbers, he continued to push the envelope and pushed to do surgeries on cases that were marginal at best.”
After the actor’s death, the family’s suit alleges, “The heart surgery recommended to Bill Paxton was not indicated” in his cause of death, and continues, “Mr. Paxton did not meet even Khoynezhad’s own criteria for such a surgery.”
What’s more, the family claims Cedars-Sinai and Dr. Khoynezhad, “intentionally interfered with and thwarted their request for an autopsy to cover up the cause of Paxton’s death,” Deadline reports.
Further, Paxton’s relatives say that had they known that their requests for an autopsy would be denied, they would have made “alternative arrangements” to have one done before he was cremated.
A trial date for the punitive damages was also rescheduled from March to September 19.
(WASHINGTON) — Ahead of a key meeting on Friday between the U.S. and Russia, the Biden administration on Thursday pushed a full-scale campaign to pressure Moscow as Russian leader Vladimir Putin weighs a possible attack on its neighbor Ukraine.
The U.S. approved its NATO allies in the Baltics to provide additional arms to Ukraine, including critical anti-aircraft missiles that escalate U.S. support. The U.S. Treasury sanctioned four Ukrainian officials it accused of working with Russian intelligence, including to form a new government backed by Russian occupying forces. The State Department blasted a Russian disinformation campaign it said was part of its “pretext” to invade Ukraine and “divide the international reaction to its actions.”
One day before his sit-down with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Secretary of State Antony Blinken tried to push back on Russia’s narrative and make clear just how high the stakes are in the standoff.
“It’s bigger than a conflict between two countries. It’s bigger than Russia and NATO. It’s a crisis with global consequences, and it requires global attention and action,” the top U.S. diplomat said in Berlin, hours after meeting his German, French, and British counterparts to coordinate a response.
That coordination has had tremendous doubt cast on it after President Joe Biden said Wednesday that the NATO alliance was not united about how to respond to aggression from Russia that fell short of an all-out attack on Ukraine — an uncomfortable truth that U.S. and NATO officials have tried to paper over for weeks.
After the White House scrambled to clean that up, Biden himself clarified on Thursday, “If any — any — assembled Russian units move across the Ukrainian border, that is an invasion. But — and it will be met with severe and coordinated economic response that I’ve discussed in detail with our allies.”
But the challenge remains of what the U.S. and its allies will do if Russia attacks Ukraine with the same gray-zone tactics it has used for the last eight years, as it annexed Crimea, launched a war in eastern Ukraine, and began a slow-motion annexation of those provinces.
That war, which has killed approximately 14,000 people, rages on in fits and starts on the frontlines — and in cyberspace. Ukrainian government websites were hacked in “”the largest cyberattack on Ukraine in the last four years,” a Ukrainian cyber official said Wednesday, and Moscow has launched a “disinformation storm” portraying Ukraine as the aggressor and trying to “build public support for a further Russian invasion,” a senior State Department official said Thursday.
The Kremlin’s campaign to destabilize its smaller, democratic neighbor allegedly includes spies on the ground, collecting information and even plotting to form a new Ukrainian government.
“Russia has directed its intelligence services to recruit current and former Ukrainian government officials to prepare to take over the government of Ukraine and to control Ukraine’s critical infrastructure with an occupying Russian force,” the U.S. Treasury said in a statement.
The U.S. has sanctioned two sitting members of Ukrainian parliament, Taras Kozak and Oleh Voloshyn, who it accused of furthering a plot by the FSB, Russia’s main security agency and the successor of the KGB. The agency, which Biden said Wednesday has forces on the ground in Ukraine, is “destabilizing the political situation in Ukraine and laying the groundwork for creating a new, Russian-controlled government in Ukraine,” Treasury added.
In the face of that effort, the U.S. is hoping that transparency can undercut any pretext Russian operatives or their Ukrainian colleagues may create — just as the White House last week accused the Kremlin of positioning operatives trained in urban warfare and explosives and planning a possible “false-flag” operation.
Russia has denied that, calling it “complete disinformation.” It has said repeatedly it does not plan to attack the former Soviet state, even as Putin warned that his demands, including barring Ukraine from joining NATO, be met or Russia will take “military technical” measures.
The U.S. is taking its own military measures, approving the transfer of more weaponry to Ukraine — this time from Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia, a State Department spokesperson confirmed, while declining to say what weapons exactly.
But a Lithuanian Ministry of Defense source told ABC News the country was given the green light to transfer to Ukraine Javelin anti-tank missiles and Stinger portable surface-to-air missiles. The Baltic state wanted to send the weapons even earlier, but because they were originally U.S. provided, it needed American approval, which only came during consultations Wednesday, the source said.
Stingers are a kind of man-portable air-defense system, or MANPAD, where an individual soldier can carry the weapon and use it to down fighter aircraft. Javelins, which the Trump administration provided after the Obama administration had refused, have become an important weapon for Ukraine to pierce Russian-made tanks, which could come rolling across the border in an invasion .
Ukraine’s military capacity still pales in comparison to Russia’s overwhelming military superiority, and it’s unclear how many missiles are being provided. Lithuania has only 54 of the missiles in its inventory and only eight launchers from which to fire them from, meaning the amount provided to Ukraine will likely be even lower.
Still, Stingers in particular represent a symbolic threshold that previous administrations had not crossed. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., who was in Kyiv earlier this week as part of a bipartisan congressional delegation, warned Thursday that in this “very fragile time… it would not be helpful to give Putin an excuse to invade Ukraine, so I think we’ve got to be very thoughtful about how we address some of these issues like a missile system.”
Russia has already warned that it sees any Western weapons provided to Ukraine as a threat, especially after the U.S. announced $200 million in new military aid ($650 million total over the last year) and the United Kingdom announced it provided anti-tank missiles.
Russia, however, has warned that it sees any Western weapons provided to Ukraine as a threat.
“We underline the necessity of ceasing boosting the war-like Ukrainian regime with arms deliveries … and a lot else that represents a direct threat for us,” Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said Wednesday.
But Blinken pushed back on that Thursday in a major speech, disputing the Russian narrative and making clear Moscow is the aggressor.
“On its face, that’s absurd. NATO didn’t invade Georgia, NATO didn’t invade Ukraine – Russia did,” he said, adding NATO neighbors account for six percent of Russia’s borders and have 5,000 allied troops in those countries, while Russia has massed 20 times that around Ukraine.
There has been tense speculation about whether Putin will attack Ukraine, with Biden saying Wednesday he believes the strongman leader will “move in.” But Blinken said Thursday the U.S. still believes he has not made up his mind yet, but added his animus towards Ukraine has long been known.
“He’s told us repeatedly – he’s laying the groundwork for an invasion because he doesn’t believe that Ukraine is a sovereign nation,” Blinken said.
That argument has been a key part of Russia’s disinformation ecosystem, which has been in overdrive in recent weeks, according to senior State Department officials.
Russia’s military and intelligence entities have deployed 3,500 posts per day in December — an increase of 200 percent from November — as they seek to “create conditions conducive to success of attempted aggression in Ukraine and elsewhere and to divide the international reaction to its actions,” a senior State Department official told reporters.
“These are not just public statements from Russia’s MFA accounts … These are broader campaigns using shell companies, false names, and layers to conceal the real backers and their intentions,” a second senior State Department official said, calling it “a war on truth.”
Russia must pull back its propaganda campaign in addition to its troops on Ukraine’s borders, the official added, echoing previous U.S. calls for de-escalation to give diplomacy a shot.
Whether or not diplomacy has a shot will be tested again Friday in Geneva, where Blinken and Lavrov will meet. A senior State Department official said earlier in the week that the meeting itself is a sign the door to diplomacy remains open, but the two sides continue to talk past each other.
The two diplomats will “discuss draft agreements on security guarantees,” Russia’s embassy in Washington tweeted Thursday – a reference to its demands that NATO bar Ukraine from joining and pull back forces from Eastern European member states. But U.S. officials have repeatedly called those “nonstarters,” and Blinken said Wednesday in Kyiv he would not be “presenting a paper” to Lavrov in response.
That has raised fears that Moscow is simply using diplomatic talks to see them fail – yet another pretext before an attack. But regardless of whether there’s a full-born assault, Russia has now effectively shaken Ukraine once again. Its president Volodymyr Zelenskyy tried to reassure the nation late Wednesday, even pushing back on the U.S. warnings that the threat is more urgent.
“These risks have been there for more than one day, and they haven’t grown nowadays – there is just more buzz around them,” he said in a televised address.
ABC’s Dada Jovanovic contributed to this report from Belgrade, Serbia, Patrick Reevell from Kyiv, Ukraine, and Luis Martinez from the Pentagon.
Charles Sykes/Bravo/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images
Soon after the death of their friend Bob Saget, John Mayer and comedian Jeff Ross posted a lengthy video in which they discussed the fact that they’d just retrieved Saget’s car from Los Angeles International Airport. During that chat, Ross also thanked John for bringing Saget “home,” but he wasn’t clear what he meant by that.
Now, E! News has learned that, in fact, John paid for a private plane to transport Saget’s body back to California after his January death in an Orlando, Florida hotel room. Page Six has also confirmed the story.
John had been a friend of Saget’s for 15 years, and in his Instagram Live with Ross, he joked that he was still “the new guy.”
The singer and guitarist said of the Full House star, “I’ve never known a human being on this Earth who could give that much love, individually and completely, to that many people, in a way that made each person feel like he was a main character in their life and they were a main character in his life.”
As previously reported, John also helped design a hoodie that’s now being sold to raise money for Saget’s favorite charity, Scleroderma Research Foundation.
The cause of Saget’s death has not yet been released. At the funeral, both John and Ross were pallbearers, as were Saget’s Full House co-stars John Stamos and Dave Coulier.
(NEW YORK) — Many continue to worry about experiencing side effects from vaccines — especially the COVID-19 vaccines — but new data from a comprehensive meta-analysis suggests there is little to fear.
The study from Beth Isreal Deaconess Medical Center found that a large number of side effects reported by patients after receiving their shot can be attributed to the placebo effect.
Researchers examined 12 vaccine safety trials, involving thousands of people, and compared rates of side effects reported between those who received a placebo shot and those who received a real shot. They found that after the first shot, two-thirds of people experienced side effects like headache and fatigue, which the researchers said were attributable to the placebo effect. Shockingly, nearly a quarter of the people — some who received the placebo shot — experienced side effects like a sore arm, also attributable to the placebo effect.
What is the placebo effect?
The placebo effect occurs when people anticipate a medical treatment will have certain effects, so much so that they perceive the outcomes they were expecting after the treatment.
It is a well-known phenomenon among scientists and is important to investigate when developing vaccines and medicines, according to Dr. William Schaffner, professor of preventive medicine and infectious disease at Vanderbilt University.
“After the injection, people are more aware now that they think they might have gotten a vaccine. They’re more likely to tell their doctor about things,” Schaffner said. “Never underestimate the power of the human mind.”
Experts say the placebo effect is a powerful example of the connection between our minds, bodies and circumstances.
In the study, the amount of side effects attributable to the placebo effect decreased to about half after the people studied received a second shot. Frequency of side effects was lower among placebo recipients after the second shot, while the opposite was true for vaccine recipients. This helps reinforce the placebo effect phenomenon, experts said.
Researchers noted one caveat is that the studies examined included different phases of clinical trials, and results were not standardized throughout.
Experts address vaccine hesitancy
With the omicron surge still straining hospitals across America, addressing vaccine hesitancy remains a crucial discussion.
Experts interviewed by ABC News said that if more people knew that experiencing side effects from the COVID-19 vaccines is not as common as they think, more people may be encouraged to get vaccinated.
“When people are armed with information, they are better suited to identify and manage their symptoms,” Dr. Simone Wildes, infectious disease physician at South Shore Health, said. “This might also help those who are reluctant to get vaccinated.”
Aubrie Ford, D.O. is an emergency medicine resident at Northwell Health in New York and a contributor to the ABC News Medical Unit.
