NASA, SpaceX prepare to launch capsule to bring home Starliner astronauts
(NEW YORK) — NASA and SpaceX are set to launch a critical mission Saturday to bring home the two astronauts who flew Boeing’s Starliner to the International Space Station.
The SpaceX Crew-9 Dragon will take off with two empty seats and extra spacesuits for Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams, who have been in space since June. Wilmore and Williams performed the first crewed test flight of the Starliner and were supposed to be on the ISS for about a week.
NASA and Boeing officials decided to send Starliner back to Earth last month after several mechanical issues, keeping Wilmore and Williams onboard the ISS until February 2025.
The unmanned Starliner landed safely at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico in the early hours of Sept. 7.
The Dragon spacecraft was originally scheduled to travel to the ISS with four astronauts for a routine science mission. Astronauts Nick Hague and Aleksandr Gorbunov will crew the spacecraft to the ISS.
(FORT BLISS, Texas) — Travis King, the U.S. Army private who ran across the border from South Korea to North Korea last year will plead guilty on Friday at a general court martial hearing being held at Fort Bliss, Texas.
“He faces 14 charges under the Uniform Code of Military Justice but will plead guilty to five, including desertion, while the remaining charges will be withdrawn and dismissed by the Army,” his attorney Franklin Rosenblatt said in a statement issued Thursday.
“Travis will provide an account of his actions, respond to the military judge’s questions about his decision to plead guilty, and receive his sentence,” Rosenblatt added.
The plea deal was first disclosed by Rosenblatt on August 26 after initial discussions with prosecutors began in mid-July .
At the time a spokesperson for the Office of Special Trial Counsel confirmed to ABC News that if King’s guilty plea is accepted by the presiding judge he would be sentenced King pursuant to the terms of the plea agreement. It is unclear how much prison time King could face as part of the plea deal that will be presented to the judge on Friday.
If the judge does not accept the guilty plea, the judge can rule that the case be litigated in a contested court-martial.
In July 2023, King crossed into North Korea, triggering an international incident when he was held by North Korean authorities for more than two months after he dashed into North Korea at the Joint Security Area at the Demilitarized Zone between North Korea and South Korea.
Prior to joining the tour group that brought him to the DMZ King had escaped from his Army escort at the airport where he was to have boarded a flight to the United States after having just been released by South Korean authorities following his detention on assault charges.
Upon his release in September King returned to the United States where he was immediately placed in a military reintegration program at the Brooke Army Medical Center that is offered to American civilians and military personnel who have been detained overseas as hostages or involuntarily.
During his stay the Army declined to comment on whether King might face disciplinary action, saying their priority was his physical and mental well-being.
But in October military prosecutors filed eight criminal charges against King.
(PHOENIX) — Former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows has requested the Arizona “fake elector” case against him be moved from Maricopa County into federal court, according to court documents filed Wednesday.
The request comes weeks after Meadows asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene in his similar effort to move the Fulton County, Georgia, election case against him into federal court.
In Wednesday’s filing, Meadows’ attorneys said their client’s request is “based on recent new Supreme Court authority clarifying the scope of immunity,” citing the court’s recent presidential immunity ruling.
Meadows’ attorneys argued that the case should also be moved from state court because the indictment “squarely relates to Mr. Meadows’s conduct as Chief of Staff to the President.”
The argument is similar to the one Meadows has made for months in his Fulton County case, citing a law that calls for the removal of criminal proceedings when someone is charged for actions they allegedly took as a federal official.
“It is unmistakably clear that the indictment charges Mr. Meadows with alleged state crimes based on acts he took as Chief of Staff to the President of the United States and in the course of his duties in the position,” Meadows’ attorneys said in the filing.
In response to the request, a judge has scheduled an evidentiary hearing for Sept. 5.
Meadows was charged in Arizona, along with 17 others, for fraud, forgery and conspiracy over alleged efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the state. He has pleaded not guilty.
Last week, charges were dropped against former President Donald Trump’s former campaign attorney Jenna Ellis in exchange for her cooperation in the case.
(NEW YORK) — Four years after the coronavirus pandemic closed much of the nation’s education system, thousands of the more than 50 million U.S. public school students and teachers are returning to school this month.
In interviews with ABC News, education experts suggest the impact school closures had on the public education model could leave students with long-term developmental issues from lost learning time.
It has already exacerbated issues such as chronic absenteeism and teacher burnout, and now the persistent problems public educators face are causing leaders, experts and caregivers to sound the alarm.
One prominent educator told ABC that “public education is on life support.” Another said the greatest current education challenge is the need for it to “reset,” which the educator projected could take five to 10 years to achieve. And, polling suggests the American public also believes there could be grave consequences if nothing is done to fix public education.
Pew Research Center found about half of Americans think the public education system is going in the wrong direction. Eighty-two percent of people surveyed by Pew said it has been trending that way over the past five years — even before the pandemic hit.
“It’s needed restructuring for a while,” STEM Equity Alliance Executive Director Arthur Mitchell told ABC News. “Education as it exists is unsustainable.”
Mitchell shares the viewpoint of many educators ABC News spoke with — that the issues facing school districts predate COVID-19. However, the pandemic exposed the need for an education reboot.
“The message that the pandemic sent was that you’re not going to be successful teaching math and reading and science and social studies if kids haven’t eaten, they haven’t slept, they’re worried about their dad’s job or their grandmother’s recent death,” FutureEd Director Thomas Toch said.
‘These kids aren’t going to learn’
During his first year as Education Secretary in 2021, Miguel Cardona said the system is “missing the point” if school districts fail to restructure schools with better social and emotional support such as mental health resources.
Emphasizing the need for Social Emotional Learning (SEL) curriculums could serve as a start, according to Katie Kirby, a principal and experienced educator in Union City, New Jersey.
“These kids aren’t going to learn,” Kirby told ABC News, adding, “All they’re thinking about [is] the trauma that happened in their house. Or, even during COVID, just being isolated is a trauma.”
“I feel like more could be done to address the mental health issues and social emotional things around, you know, not just the students but the teachers also,” Kirby said about post-COVID schooling.
The New Jersey elementary school principal said more mental health practitioners and teachers will energize school communities.
Experts told ABC that innovative models, such as communities in schools, have worked with local agencies to provide positive SEL results over the years.
Toch said these communities in schools structure is a solution to the typical public education framework because it is a “difficult” time to grow up in America.
“We need to recognize that students need a range of supports in order to be successful academically,” he said.
Due to the complexity of American children, Toch said the community is responsible for helping raise students.
“These models, at best, they are partnerships where other agencies are contributing resources to the partnership so that schools don’t have to shoulder the entire burden, financial burden, of a more comprehensive model on behalf of the whole child,” he said.
Jonte Lee, a science teacher in the nation’s capital, also said a reboot is enhanced by community partnerships.
“We need parental support as well and we need other entities in the community to support [teachers],” he said. “It’s like we support you, you support us — we need to come together as a community and a culture.”
Lee said a public education overhaul isn’t necessary though. The system only needs minor “tweaks” such as hiring and paying more teachers, according to Lee.
“Hasn’t the model been recreated multiple times?” Lee told ABC News, adding, “When we say recreate the public school education model, it has already been recreated multiple times, which is why I believe in school choice, because ‘this model may not work for me.'”
Injecting “choice” into education refers to a largely conservative movement that supports charter schools. Public charter schools are taxpayer funded and state-run, but the schools have the ability to turn students away, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Their curriculums are agreed upon or chartered by local or state government, which gives the school more freedom than a traditional public school.
In contrast, tuition-free public education is schooling provided under the public’s supervision or direction, according to the Cornell Law School.
‘Education is always about the economy’
With several school districts back in full swing this summer, experts told ABC News that challenges stretch beyond academic and social emotional learning.
“Education is always about the economy,” Mitchell said. “We just don’t discuss those two things together.”
In the wake of an educator shortage, Mitchell described school vacancies as an economic issue since workforce trends have outpaced the public education sector. Therefore, leaders such as Cardona and Harvard Center for Education Policy Research Executive Director Dr. Christina Grant stress the need to make public high school a pathway to careers for students. Research supports these proposals. After graduation, adults are a “direct reflection” of the preparation given to them by the school system, according to Mitchell.
For the most part, experts said they believe some reconfiguring of the education system should occur. Christina Grant, who was Washington, D.C.’s state superintendent during the pandemic, said she fully supports large-scale adjustments such as adding high-impact tutoring for all, utilizing federal investments and resources, and rethinking the high school structure.
Meanwhile, many conservative policymakers are pushing to defund the U.S. Department of Education as a whole. They argue that the word “education” doesn’t appear in the Constitution, so the individual states have to work through issues on a case-by-case basis.
At CEPR, Grant is researching evidence-based solutions for students across the country. She said intentional revisions are required for improving public education.
“The data is telling us that we have work to do,” she told ABC News. “Do I think that that means we need a whole system overhaul? I don’t think that you can eat a whole elephant at one time. I think you have to be laser-like focused on which chunks you would attack in which ways.”
Toch warns changes, whether sweeping or incremental, could take up to a decade on a widespread scale.
He and Grant agree the roughly $190 billion in elementary and secondary school emergency relief from the federal government during COVID has been helpful in tackling these concerns — particularly student recovery — over the last three years. But the Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan (ARP) money expires on Sept. 30.
With that deadline looming, Grant hopes more investments will move the needle.
“I do think that the federal government still has to make seismic commitments in public education because we are far from out of this,” she said.