8 victims killed in B-52 crash identified by Edwards Air Force Base
An Air Force B-52 Stratofortress bomber crashed shortly after takeoff at Edwards Air Force Base in California, June 15, 2026. (KABC)
(LOS ANGELES) — The eight people killed in an Air Force B-52 Stratofortress bomber crash in California have been identified.
The B-52 was on a “routine test mission” Monday morning when it crashed shortly after takeoff at Edwards Air Force Base and burst into flames, officials said.
Everyone on board was killed: four crew members, one civilian and three contractors, officials said.
The victims were identified by the base as: Col. Gregory Watson, 53, weapon systems officer, Boeing; Lt. Col. Gabriel Estrella, 40, weapon systems officer, Air Force Operational Test and Evaluation Center; retired Lt. Col. Miles Middleton, 50, pilot, Boeing; Maj. Alexander Davis, 34, weapon systems officer, 419th Flight Test Squadron; Maj. Robert Dee, 40, pilot, 419th Flight Test Squadron; Maj. Brad Hovey, 35, pilot, 419th Flight Test Squadron; Jeromy Smith, 32, flight test engineer, 419th Flight Test Squadron; and Christopher Rischar, 41, flight test engineer, JT4 contractor.
“They were dedicated professionals, beloved family members and irreplaceable teammates,” Col. Thomas Tauer, 412th Test Wing Commander, said in a statement on Wednesday. “Our thoughts, prayers and deepest sympathies are with their families, loved ones and fellow Airmen, Air Force civilians and mission partners affected by this tragedy.”
Two Boeing employees were among the victims. Boeing said in a statement, “The loss of Miles and Greg is deeply felt across our teams, and our hearts remain with their families, loved ones and those who worked with them.”
The cause of the crash is under investigation, a process that will likely take several months, Col. James Hayes, deputy commander for the 412th Test Wing at the base, said Monday.
Test missions take place multiple times a day at Edwards Air Force Base, Hayes said.
Mountains outside Patterson, California. (David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
(PATTERSON, Calif.) — The attorney of a man who was shot in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement-involved shooting in Patterson, California, is claiming ICE attempted to arrest his client based on wrong information.
The shooting occurred on Tuesday near the I-5, when ICE Director Todd Lyons said federal officers were attempting to arrest a man they claimed was an 18th Street gang member when he “weaponized his vehicle” and attempted to run over an officer.
Lyons claimed that the suspect, later identified as Carlos Ivan Mendoza Hernandez, is wanted in El Salvador for questioning in connection with a murder.
Attorney Patrick Kolasinski said during a press conference Wednesday that he has obtained a document from the government of El Salvador that he claims proves Mendoza Hernandez was once arrested and accused of murder but was acquitted.
Kolasinski shared with reporters what appears to be a judicial document from El Salvador that says Mendoza Hernandez was acquitted of homicide in 2019.
ABC News has reached out to DHS for comment about Kolasinski’s claims. ABC News has not independently verified the authenticity of the document.
Kolasinski said Mendoza Hernandez’s family in El Salvador says he was never in a gang. The attorney also said his client has no criminal record in the United States except for a traffic ticket.
Following the shooting, Mendoza Hernandez was taken to a local hospital, according to DHS.
Kolasinski said law enforcement officials and hospital staff have not allowed him and Mendoza Hernandez’s fiancée to speak with him since the shooting.
A hospital social worker could only share that he’s in stable condition, but would not answer any other questions, they claimed during the press conference.
Created by CDC microbiologist Frederick A Murphy, this transmission electron micrograph (TEM) revealed some of the ultrastructural morphology displayed by an Ebola virus virion. (Photo by Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images).
(NEW YORK) — The Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday announced new arrival restrictions for flights carrying people who were recently in Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda or South Sudan amid the Ebola outbreak in the region.
All flights — excluding those operated by the Pentagon — departing after 11:59 p.m. ET on Wednesday carrying passengers that were in the named nations within 21 days of attempted entry into the U.S. will be ordered to land at Washington-Dulles Airport in Virginia, the notice said, where “enhanced public health measures are being implemented.”
The Ebola outbreak in the eastern DRC had caused 139 suspected deaths with nearly 600 suspected cases as of Wednesday, according to an update from World Health Organization Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
Tedros said cases of Ebola have been reported in several urban areas of the eastern DRC amid the ongoing outbreak, including the major cities of Goma and Bunia, and that at least two cases and one death have been recorded in neighboring Uganda’s capital, Kampala. Cases have also been reported among health workers, according to Ghebreyesus.
At least 51 cases have so far been confirmed in the ongoing outbreak.
The DHS flight restriction notice said that while South Sudan has not reported any confirmed cases in the current outbreak, “It is considered at high risk because of its close border with affected areas in eastern DRC and Uganda, limited healthcare infrastructure and cross-border population movement.”
The outbreak was first detected in the DRC’s northeastern province of Ituri, with cases officially confirmed by the health ministry on May 15. It marked the 17th outbreak of Ebola virus disease in the DRC, which is Africa’s second-largest country and its fourth-most populous nation.
The WHO convened an emergency committee on Tuesday night, following Tedros’ declaration of a public health emergency of international concern on Sunday — one level below a pandemic in the United Nations agency’s alert system.
It was the first time a WHO chief had declared such an emergency before convening the emergency committee. After the meeting, the committee agreed that the outbreak did not meet the criteria of a pandemic emergency, which was applied to the global COVID-19 outbreak.
Anais Legand, the WHO’s technical officer for viral hemorrhagic fevers, said on Wednesday that the Ebola outbreak may have started a couple of months ago and that investigations are ongoing.
“Our priority is really to cut the transmission chain by implementing contact tracing, isolating and caring for all suspects and confirmed cases,” she said.
The current outbreak is caused by the Bundibugyo virus, a rare variant of Ebola for which there are no approved vaccines or therapeutics and which requires different diagnostics than other variants. Case fatality rates for previous Bundibugyo outbreaks have ranged from 30% to 50%, according to the WHO.
Among the confirmed cases is an American, Dr. Peter Stafford, who contracted the disease while working in the DRC. Stafford was flown out of the DRC and is now hospitalized in Berlin’s Charité University Hospital.
Matt Allison — the executive director of Serge, the Christian missionary group Stafford works for — told ABC News on Wednesday that the doctor has been receiving monoclonal antibodies during his hospitalization and is “responding quickly.”
Dr. Satish K. Pillai, incident manager for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Ebola response, confirmed at a CDC press conference on Tuesday that genetic testing from this outbreak shows it is similar to the “genetic fingerprints” from outbreaks in 2007 and 2012, meaning there are diagnostic tools available that can detect this strain of Ebola.
Pillai said on Monday that the agency had activated its Emergency Operations Center through its country offices in the DRC and in Uganda, and is deploying technical experts that have been requested from Atlanta headquarters.
The risk to the U.S. general public remains low, Pillai said.
Also on Monday, the CDC introduced entry restrictions on non-U.S. passport holders that had been in Uganda, the DRC or South Sudan in the previous 21 days before attempted entry into the U.S.
ABC News’ Eric M. Strauss, Mary Kekatos and Morgan Winsor contributed to this report.
Booths await Maine residents to cast their ballots at a polling station inside the Portland Exposition Building on June 9, 2026 in Bangor, Maine. (CJ Gunther/Getty Images)
(NEW YORK) — On prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket, bettors can put money on dozens of election-related bets in Maryland, from the winner of the upcoming gubernatorial race to the margin of victory in the state’s 6th Congressional District.
For most Americans, the Maryland elections are fair game — races in the state are already generating hundreds of thousands of dollars in trading volume on the major prediction markets. But not for residents of Maryland, which is one of a handful of states that ban election betting. And Jared DeMaranis, the state’s election administrator, plans to enforce it.
“If we have credible information about illegalities and it’s not within our civil citation authorities, we will of course refer those matters to the office of the state prosecutor for enforcement,” DeMaranis told ABC News. “This is going to be a growing issue and something that we need to stop in its infancy.”
Federal regulators and the courts have given Americans the green light to wager on elections, prompting a frenzy of wagering on the outcomes of races, the likelihood of candidates dropping out, the amount of voter turnout, and more. But more than half of U.S. states have existing laws on the books that limit or restrict the practice, according to research from the Pew Research Center — and now state leaders are sorting out how exactly to enforce those rules.
Maryland, Texas and Arizona are among those states with laws explicitly banning election betting. And in Wisconsin, residents cannot cast ballots in elections in which they have placed a “bet or wager depending upon the result of the election,” according to state law.
Ann Jacobs, the chair of the Wisconsin Election Commission, said Wisconsinites who bet on an election and then vote in it could have their vote challenged or face voter fraud charges. Jacobs acknowledged that it would be a difficult rule to enforce, but stood by the spirit of the law.
“The policy behind saying, ‘You can bet or you can vote, but you can’t do both,’ is 100% a sound policy,” Jacobs said. “We want people to vote based on their belief that the person they are voting for is going to be the best for their community … it just makes sense.”
Arizona officials have focused their efforts on the platforms themselves. The state’s attorney general filed criminal charges against Kalshi earlier this year claiming the platform operated an illegal, unlicensed gambling business and accepted unlawful wagers from Arizona residents.
In April, a federal judge blocked Arizona from continuing its criminal case. The injunction followed a lawsuit against the state by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission — the federal regulator overseeing prediction markets — which argued that prediction markets fall under federal oversight rather than state gambling regulations.
The Arizona attorney general’s office declined to comment on the active case or how it will address potential election betting this season.
Officials in Texas, another state with a law banning election betting, did not respond to inquiries from ABC News. But Christopher McGinn, the executive director of the Texas Association of County Election Officials, said he and other administrators are engaged in early discussions about how to handle prediction markets, particularly the likelihood that individuals with a financial stake in the outcome of an election may have “more incentive to attempt to manipulate [elections], or spread misinformation.”
Prediction market advocates believe election-related event contracts strengthen political forecasting and can predict outcomes with greater accuracy than traditional polls. But many election experts warn that election wagering could threaten to compromise the integrity of elections or incentivize offenders to profit from insider information.
“I can’t think of all of the ways that people might try to make money off of election outcomes, but I’m sure there are enterprising people who will come up with all kinds of things,” said Rick Hasen, an expert in election law at the University of California-Los Angeles. “We don’t want to start thinking of elections as a financial incentive. The potential for manipulation is too great.”
Legalized election betting in the U.S. is a new phenomenon. In 2024, Kalshi prevailed in a lawsuit that allowed it to offer event contracts for politics and elections. More recently, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission proposed new rules that classified elections “as contests, not gaming,” further clearing the way for platforms to offer election-related wagers.
Those developments present state officials with a challenge: How can they enforce state-level bans on election betting without support from federal regulators or the platforms themselves? The answer for some, including Maryland, is to pursue the individuals.
“Right now, it’s on the person. The person that places the wager on the platform is doing the illegality,” said DeMaranis, the Maryland elections chief, adding that lawmakers will eventually “need to clarify the role of those platforms to make sure they’re liable for offering monetary incentives on elections.”
Matthew Wein, a former Homeland Security official, said a similar dynamic emerged with social media giants over the past decade. In the absence of a crackdown on platforms, authorities were left to pursue users “for doing things they shouldn’t have been doing on the platforms, but not against the platforms themselves.”
“And this seems to be heading in the same direction with prediction markets,” said Wein, who now authors a gambling newsletter called “Secure Stakes.”
A Polymarket spokesperson said states with election betting bans “run counter to the established framework for regulating prediction markets.”
“We look forward to addressing these claims through the appropriate legal process,” the spokesperson said.
A Kalshi spokesperson said the company’s services are “federally regulated and have stock-market-grade systems for identifying and addressing market manipulation.”
Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., lawmakers continue to scrutinize prediction market platforms. Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., and Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., have introduced legislation that would prohibit event contracts on election outcomes, which they said “spreads civic cynicism and distrust in our democratic institutions.”
DeMaranis said he has struggled to instill a sense of urgency among the nation’s election officials, many of whom he said have never heard of prediction markets.
The effort, he said, has left him feeling like the “canary in the coal mine.”
“It’s about the integrity and public trust of the electoral process,” DeMaranis said. “When you have people that are engaging in election-related wagering, the integrity of the entire process now comes into question.”
