100,000 eggs worth $40,000 stolen from trailer as police try to crack the case
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(GREENCASTLE, PA) — Police in Pennsylvania are trying to crack the case after 100,000 organic eggs worth upwards of $40,000 were stolen from the back of a trailer over the weekend.
The theft took place in Greencastle, Pennsylvania — located approximately 65 miles southwest of the state capital of Harrisburg — when the eggs were stolen from the rear of a distribution trailer on Saturday around 8:40 p.m. while it was parked outside Pete & Gerry’s Organics.
Pennsylvania State Police Chambersburg responded to the location and discovered that around 100,000 eggs worth an estimated $40,000 had been stolen.
Authorities did not offer any insight into how such a large theft could have occurred unnoticed or if they have any potential leads in the case.
Pete & Gerry’s Organics has been around as a brand since the early 1980s but transitioned to organic farming in 1997, according to their website.
“Setting a higher standard for farming practices and animal care across an entire industry doesn’t happen without ruffling a few feathers — we squawk the squawk and walk the walk,” Pete & Gerry’s Organics said. “Pete & Gerry’s is recognized as a 2022 Best For The World B Corp in the Community impact area, scoring in the top 5% of their size group for their efforts in the community, including charitable giving, investment in diversity, and educational opportunities.”
The company works with over 200 independent, family owned and operated farms in our network, mainly located across New England, the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest, the company said.
“These farms are typically run by a single family and small enough for each partner farmer to manage, delivering hands-on care to our hens, while still leading rich and fulfilling lives,” Pete and Gerry’s Organics said.
The investigation is currently ongoing and anyone with information is asked to contact Pennsylvania State Police Chambersburg.
(WASHINGTON) — Peach and Blossom are the two lucky turkeys from Minnesota who escaped a fowl fate of ending up on someone’s Thanksgiving table this year when they were pardoned Monday by President Biden at the White House.
“This event marks the official start of the holiday season here in Washington,” Biden said to what he said was a crowd of 2,500 gathered on the South Lawn. “It’s also my last time to speak here as your president during this season and give thanks and gratitude. So let me say to you, it’s been the honor of my life. I’m forever grateful.”
“May we use this moment to take time from our busy lives and focus on what matters most: our families,” Biden said. “My dad used to have an expression, family is the beginning, the middle and the end, our friends and our neighbors. The fact that we are blessed to live in America, the greatest country on Earth — and that’s not hyperbole. We are. No matter what, in America we never give up. We keep going, we keep the faith.”
These birds were plucked for the presidential flock and went through rigorous training to ride the gravy train to the White House for the honor, according to John Zimmerman, chairman of the National Turkey Federation.
Zimmerman’s 9-year-old son Grant and other young trainers made sure their feathers wouldn’t be ruffled by the spotlight.
“Preparing these presidential birds has taken a lot of special care,” Zimmerman said Sunday during a news conference introducing the two turkeys. “We’ve been getting them used to lights, camera and even introducing them to a wide variety of music — everything from polka to classic rock.”
Peach and Blossom, weighing 41 and 40 pounds, respectively, where hatched back in July. They traveled to Washington this week and were treated to a suite at the Willard InterContinental hotel before their big day on Monday, as is tradition.
Biden said the birds were named after the Delaware state flower: the Peach Blossom.
The president joked Peach lived by the motto “keep calm and gobble on.” Blossom’s mantra, he said, was “no foul play, just Minnesota nice.”
Biden at times was interrupted by gobbles, responding by saying one was making a “last-minute plea.”
After the pardons, the two turkeys were headed back to Waseca, Minnesota, to live out the remainder of the feathery lives as “agricultural ambassadors” at Farmamerica, an agricultural interpretive center.
“And today, Peach and Blossom will join the free birds of the United States of America,” Biden said.
The turkey pardon at the White House is an annual tradition that is usually “cranned” full of a cornucopia of corny jokes.
The history of the turkey pardon
The origin of the presidential turkey pardons is a bit fuzzy. Unofficially, reports point all the way back to Abraham Lincoln, who spared a bird from its demise at the urging of his son, Tad. However, that story might be more folklore than fact.
The true start of what has evolved into the current tradition has its roots in politics and dates back to the Harry Truman presidency in 1947.
Truman ruffled feathers by starting “poultry-less Thursdays” to try and conserve various foods in the aftermath of World War II, but Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Day all fell on Thursdays.
After the White House was inundated with live birds sent as part of a “Hens for Harry” counter-initiative, the National Turkey Federation and the Poultry and Egg National Board presented Truman with a bird as a peace offering — although the turkey was not saved from a holiday feast.
President John F. Kennedy began the trend of publicly sparing a turkey given to the White House in November 1963, just days before his assassination. In the years following, the event became a bit more sporadic, with even some first ladies such as Pat Nixon and Rosalynn Carter stepping in to accept the guests of honor on their husband’s behalf.
The tradition of the public sparing returned in earnest during the Reagan administration, but the official tradition of the poultry pardoning at the White House started in 1989, when then-President George H.W. Bush offered the first official presidential pardon. In the more than three decades since, at least one lucky bird has gotten some extra gobbles each year.
(NEW YORK) — Meta, the parent company of Facebook, announced plans Tuesday to replace fact-checkers with a user-based system known as “community notes.”
Fact-checkers who were put in place in the wake of Donald Trump’s 2016 election have proven to be “too politically biased” and have destroyed “more trust than they’ve created,” particularly in the United States, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a video posted by the company.
“The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech,” Zuckerberg added.
The policy shift will make the platform more generally permissive toward user posts, especially on some controversial subjects such as immigration and gender, the company said. Zuckerberg also acknowledged that the change may mean “we’re going to catch less bad stuff.”
The decision will impact content moderation on Meta-owned platforms Facebook, Instagram and Threads, which count nearly 4 billion users worldwide.
Critics of the move said it reflected a partisan effort to align Meta with President-elect Trump, who has repeatedly criticized the company for alleged anti-conservative bias. Proponents, meanwhile, praised the decision as a sign of renewed emphasis on free speech rather than content policing.
Experts who spoke to ABC News said it’s difficult to know exactly what motivated the company, but they said both explanations are plausible.
Meta may view the decision as an opportunity to jettison a policy targeted by conservatives and curry favor with Trump, while shifting the company toward a permissive stance on speech that Zuckerberg has previously avowed, the experts said.
“Zuckerberg knew he’d have a fight on his hands to change the basic tenets of Facebook,” Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law who studies content moderation, told ABC News. “The question is: Why now?”
Meta did not immediately respond to ABC News’ request for comment.
Meta launched the fact-checking program in the heat of intense scrutiny leveled at the company regarding the spread of misinformation on the platform during the 2016 presidential campaign.
The initiative came under criticism from prominent Republicans, including Trump, who accused the company of anti-conservative bias in its evaluation of user posts.
Tension between Meta and Trump intensified in early 2021, when the company banned Trump’s accounts from its platforms in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol. At the time, Zuckerberg called the risks of allowing Trump on the platform “simply too great.”
In recent years, however, the social media platforms have shifted toward a conservative-friendly, laissez-faire approach to speech, Sol Messing, a research associate professor at New York University’s Center for Social Media and Politics and a former research scientist at Facebook, told ABC News.
Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk acquired then-Twitter, now X, in October 2022, moving soon afterward to weaken the platform’s content moderation rules and emphasize a “community notes” approach. Last year, Meta reinstated Trump’s accounts.
“There’s been a shift rightward in terms of attitudes toward free speech in Silicon Valley and perhaps this decision is part of that,” Messing added.
Lately, Meta and Zuckerberg have appeared to warm toward Trump. Meta donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration last month, after having foregone a donation to Trump’s inauguration in 2017.
On Monday, Meta appointed Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White, a Trump ally, to the company’s board of directors. The move came days after Meta named former Republican lobbyist Joel Kaplan as its new chief global affairs officer.
“It’s very difficult to ignore this [fact-checking] announcement in terms of the timing of those moves, as well,” Messing said, noting other potential reasons for the move such as cost-cutting or skepticism about the role of experts in policing content.
For his part, Trump appears to believe he influenced the policy change. When asked at a press conference at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday whether Meta’s new content moderation policy came in response to his previous criticism of the company, Trump said, “Probably.”
Still, there is reason to believe the policy change brings Meta’s content moderation approach into closer alignment with views previously expressed by Zuckerberg, some experts said.
In a blog post on Tuesday, Meta referred to a graduation speech delivered by Zuckerberg at Georgetown University in 2019 in which he advocated for loose restrictions on speech.
“Some people believe giving more people a voice is driving division rather than bringing us together. More people across the spectrum believe that achieving the political outcomes they think matter is more important than every person having a voice. I think that’s dangerous,” Zuckerberg said at the time.
Goldman, of Santa Clara University, said Zuckerberg may be seizing upon Trump-era opposition toward content moderation.
“It’s plausible that Zuckerberg all along has felt Facebook was doing too much content moderation, and he has finally decided to express that view more forcefully,” Goldman said. “It’s not a new view for Zuckerberg to be questioning the value of content moderation.”
(NEW YORK) — For the first time in days, the Northeast was under no red flag warnings, but officials cautioned that fire danger in the region remains high as drought conditions persist.
All red flag warnings, which signal critical fire weather conditions like strong winds and low relative humidity, were lifted throughout the Northeast Saturday evening as conditions improved following days of wildfires that broke out across New Jersey, New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts.
The biggest wildfire in the Northeast remains the Jennings Creek Fire, burning on the border of New York’s Orange County and New Jersey’s Passaic County. The fire, which has burned more than 5,000 acres, prompted hundreds of voluntary evacuations Saturday night when it jumped a containment line near Greenwood Lake and threatened homes in the private beach community of Wah-ta-Wah Park, according to New York State Parks Department spokesperson Jeff Wernick.
The Jennings Creek Fire was 88% contained on the New York side and 90% contained on the New Jersey side, officials said.
The blaze broke out Nov. 9 and burned drought-parched wildland stretching from West Milford in Passaic County, New Jersey, to the Sterling Forest State Park in New York’s Orange County, and on both the New York and New Jersey sides of Greenwood Lake, officials said.
The cause of the Jennings Creek Fire remains under investigation.
A New York State Parks and Recreation employee was killed earlier this month while helping the battle the Jennings Creek Fire, officials said. The deceased parks employee was identified by the New York State Police as 18-year-old Dariel Vasquez.
Wind gusts, which have helped fan the fire, are forecast to be lighter on Sunday, peaking at 15 to 25 mph, and relative humidity is expected to be slightly higher, allowing for some relief for firefighters. Temperatures will also top out around 10 to 20 degrees above average on Sunday and Monday, with temperatures rising to the low to mid 60s.
But the prolonged period of dry weather is expected to persist with no measurable rainfall expected in the Northeast until possibly Wednesday or Thursday. While any rain is beneficial, there is an increasing chance for an inch or more of rain from the upcoming storm, with some higher-elevation snow also possible in New England late in the week.
Since Oct. 1, New Jersey firefighters have responded to at least 537 wildfires that have consumed 4,500 acres, according to the New Jersey Forest Fire Service, while officials at the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation said New York fire crews have battled 60 wildfires since Oct. 1 that have burned 2,100 acres.
At one point last week, the National Weather Service had issued numerous red flag fire danger warnings throughout New Jersey and New York. At least 15 New York counties were under red flag warnings last week, including New York City and all of Long Island.
Multiple wildfires broke out across the Northeast, including some in New York City, where one ignited in the Inwood neighborhood of upper Manhattan and another scorched wooded land in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park.
Due to the high fire danger, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul issued a statewide ban on outdoor fires.
Elsewhere in the country, a developing storm system in the Southern Plains is forecast to bring a severe weather threat to parts of Texas and Oklahoma on Sunday and Monday.
On Sunday afternoon and into the evening, strong to severe storms are likely in cities across Texas, including Wichita Falls, Abilene and Midland. The thunderstorms are also expected to bring damaging wind, large hail and scattered tornadoes.
Severe weather is also forecast for Monday in the Oklahoma City area and Waco, Texas. A flood watch is in effect from northern Texas through Oklahoma until Monday evening, with 2 to 5 inches of rain likely.
