At least 40 killed as dozens of tornadoes, storms swept the country over the weekend
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(NEW YORK) — In the moments before a tornado destroyed her family’s Arkansas home, Misty Drope noticed the silence.
“There’s a silence that happens before a strong storm hits you,” Drope told “Good Morning America” in an interview on Monday. “And I said, out loud, ‘Oh no, this is not good.'”
She and her family — Bruce and Keely — were standing outside what was left of their home in Paragould. The tornado that tore through the town over the weekend was the second to touch their neighborhood in less than a year.
“You’re so thankful you’re alive,” Bruce said.
At least 40 other people were killed amid more than 970 severe storm reports across more than two dozen states over the weekend. A 3-day tornado outbreak tore through at least nine states. Twelve people were killed in tornadoes in Missouri.
An EF-2 tornado that tore through Tylertown, Mississippi, with wind speeds up to 111 miles per hour killed at least three people, officials said.
Many of the cabins at that town’s Paradise Ranch RV Resort were reduced to rubble as the tornado tore through the camp, leaving behind a mangled mess of tree branches and building materials.
But the manager told “GMA” that there were no deaths reported there, in part because most of the cabins were empty.
Next week, about 250 campers were expected to show up, the manager said.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(WASHINGTON) — The U.S. Supreme Court temporarily delayed a court-mandated deadline requiring the Trump administration to pay nearly $2 billion to contracted aid organizations for work they already completed.
Chief Justice John Roberts, in an order Wednesday night, stayed a lower court order that the administration pay out $1.9 billion by midnight. In his order, Roberts asked the aid groups that sued the Trump administration to provide a response by noon Friday after which the court will decide its next steps.
Roberts’ order came after the Trump administration sought emergency intervention by the high court after a panel of federal appeals court judges denied the administration’s earlier request to push the deadline.
Acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris asked the justices to impose an administrative stay — freezing the status quo for a short time.
“What the government cannot do is pay arbitrarily determined demands on an arbitrary timeline of the district court’s choosing or according to extra-contractual rules that the court has devised,” Harris wrote in the emergency request, saying the deadline created “an untenable payment plan” at odds with the president’s obligations.
“The order appears to contemplate the immediate outlay of nearly $2 billion. And the government has no sure mechanism to recover wrongfully disbursed funds delivered to entities that claim to be near insolvency,” Harris said in the request.
In proceedings earlier Wednesday denying a request to stay his deadline, U.S. District Court Judge Amir Ali, a Biden-era appointee, balked at the government’s insistence that it couldn’t meet the midnight payout deadline and criticized the Trump administration for waiting until Tuesday to raise the argument that they lack the ability to restart the funding.
“This is not something that Defendants have previously raised in this Court, whether at the hearing or any time before filing their notice of appeal and seeking a stay pending appeal. That is so even though Plaintiffs’ motion to enforce explicitly proposed compliance on this time frame,” Ali wrote.
On Tuesday, Ali had ordered the Trump administration to dole out delayed payments that could total nearly $2 billion, according to a USAID official, to multiple nonprofit groups, determining the Trump administration violated the terms of a temporary restraining order issued two weeks ago regarding freezing foreign aid.
A top official with the United States Agency for International Development claimed that complying with Tuesday’s court order would require paying foreign aid groups nearly $2 billion, arguing the payments “cannot be accomplished” in the timeframe set by the court.
Lawyers with the Department of Justice asked Ali in a late-night filing on Tuesday to issue a stay of his order that requires the Trump administration to pay by Wednesday at 11:59 p.m. any outstanding debts to foreign aid groups for work completed prior to Feb. 13. The Trump administration initially tried to freeze the payments via an executive order before Judge Ali ordered the payments to resume two weeks ago.
DOJ lawyers argued that fulfilling the payments is not only technically impossible but would also prevent the Trump administration from ensuring the payments are “legitimate.”
“The order apparently requires the Government to expend taxpayer dollars without regard to any processes for ensuring that the expenses are legitimate—even though Executive Branch leadership harbors concerns about the possibility of waste and fraud and is in the process of developing revised payment processing systems to address those concerns,” DOJ attorney Indraneel Sur wrote in a late-night filing.
According to Peter Marocco, the deputy administrator of USAID and director of foreign assistance at the State Department, complying with the court order would require dispersing $1.5 billion between 2,000 payment requests at USAID and an additional $400 million in payments at the State Department.
Earlier this week, Judge Ali excoriated Trump administration attorneys during a lengthy hearing over its failure to pay the groups for work they conducted prior to President Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order, which froze all foreign aid for 90 days. Ali also signed an order to enforce a temporary restraining order he signed on Feb. 13, ruling the groups must be paid by 11:59 p.m. Wednesday.
“Plaintiffs submitted evidence that defendants have not lifted the suspension or freeze of funds as the [temporary restraining order] required. Defendants have not rebutted that evidence, and when asked today, defendants were not able to provide any specific examples of unfreezing funds pursuant to the Court’s TRO,” Judge Ali said after a two-hour hearing today.
Lawyers with the Department of Justice acknowledged that the Trump administration ignored the temporary restraining order, which prohibited them from freezing foreign aid funds since the order was issued. Instead, they argued that they should not be required to pay back the money because of “sovereign immunity.”
During an extended exchange with Ali, a DOJ lawyer struggled to answer basic questions about the Trump administration’s compliance with the temporary restraining order, which prevented the administration from freezing funds.
“I’m not sure why I can’t get a straight answer from you on this. Are you aware of an unfreezing of the disbursement of funds for those contracts and agreements that were frozen before February 13?” Ali asked. “Are you aware of steps taken to actually release those funds?”
“I’m not in a position to answer that,” DOJ attorney Indraneel Sur said.
“We’re 12 days in and you’re here representing the government…and you can’t answer me whether any funds that you’ve kind of acknowledged or covered by the court’s order have been unfrozen?” Judge Ali responded.
“All I can do, really, is say that the preparations are underway for the joint status report on compliance,” Sur said.
At one portion of the lengthy court hearing, Sur attempted to offer a legal justification for the Trump administration’s noncompliance, prompting a stern response from the judge about his order, the terms of which he said were “clear as day.”
“The purpose of this hearing is to understand and to hear arguments on the motion to enforce TRO. It is not an opportunity to re-litigate the TRO,” Ali said.
A lawyer representing the nonprofits who brought the case argued that the lack of a response from the Trump administration amounts to defiance of the court order.
“What the court’s colloquy with the government has revealed is that the government has done nothing to make the flow of payments happen,” he said. “As far as we are aware, there’s been zero directives from the agency with respect to the unfreezing of funds.”
(NEW YORK) — President-elect Donald Trump is asking a federal appeals court to reconsider overturning a jury’s verdict that found he sexually abused writer E. Jean Carroll in the mid-1990s and awarded her $5 million in damages.
After the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit determined last month that Trump failed to prove he deserved a new trial, lawyers for Trump on Tuesday requested an en banc hearing, in which the full court would hear the case rather than a select panel.
A New York jury in 2023 awarding Carroll $5 million in damages after it found Trump liable for sexually abusing her in the dressing room of a Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan in the mid-1990s, and for defaming her in 2022 when he denied the allegations.
Last year, another jury ordered Trump to pay an additional $83 million in damages for his defamatory statements about Carroll.
Trump argued the trial court in 2023 erred when it allowed two women to testify about Trump allegedly assaulting them, as well as permitting Carroll’s lawyers to show the jury part of the now-infamous “Access Hollywood” tape in which Trump boasted about grabbing women.
“To have any chance of persuading a jury, Carroll’s implausible, unsubstantiated allegations had to be — and repeatedly were — propped up by the erroneous admission of highly inflammatory propensity evidence,” wrote Trump’s lawyers Todd Blanche, Emil Bove, and D. John Sauder, who have all been picked by Trump for top Justice Department posts in his incoming adminstration.
Trump’s lawyers argued that the trial court’s decisions, if left uncorrected, could set a damaging precedent of allowing “inflammatory propensity evidence in a wide range of future cases.”
Trump’s request for an en banc hearing is his final appellate option before possibly turning to the Supreme Court.
(NASHVILLE, Tenn.) — Antioch High School in Nashville is on lockdown after shots were fired inside the school, according to Metro Nashville Public Schools.
At least two students were shot in the cafeteria, according to Nashville police. The shooter then shot himself, police said.
The shooter “is no longer a threat,” the school district said in a statement.
