Mom arrested after leaving newborn at Manhattan subway station: Police
A baby was found on a subway platform in Manhattan, New York, on Oct. 20, 2025. (WABC)
(NEW YORK) — The mother of a newborn baby found abandoned at a Midtown Manhattan subway station has been arrested, police said.
Assa Diawara, 30, was taken into custody early Wednesday in Queens on charges of abandonment of a child and endangering the welfare of a child, according to the New York Police Department.
The baby girl was found wrapped in a blanket at the southbound 1 train platform at 34th Street-Penn Station during the Monday morning rush hour, police said.
The baby was taken to the hospital in stable condition, police said, with New York City Transit President Demetrius Crichlow calling it “the miracle on 34th Street.”
On Tuesday morning, the NYPD released surveillance footage of Diawara — whose name was then unknown — in hopes of identifying her.
Her arrest came after investigators followed a trail of surveillance camera footage, an NYPD official said. Detectives tracked video of Diawara taking a car service to Jamaica, Queens, and then investigators canvassed the area where she was dropped off and found a neighbor who recognized her from the surveillance footage, the official said.
Police said that investigators confronted Diawara on Tuesday and she admitted to abandoning her daughter.
New York’s Abandoned Infant Protection Act permits a parent to leave a newborn in a safe place — like a hospital, police station or fire station — up to 30 days after the baby’s birth. The parent would not be prosecuted and can remain anonymous as long as the baby is left in a safe place and the appropriate person is notified.
A scenic view of the Farmingdale Long Island Railroad station near by the Bethpage State Park Golf Course on August 11, 2025 in Farmingdale, New York.
(LONG ISLAND, N.Y.) – – President Donald Trump has agreed to establish an emergency board to review the dispute between the Long Island Rail Road and the unions that represent its employees, according to an executive order released by the White House.
A coalition of unions representing about half of Long Island Rail Road employees averted a strike earlier this week by asking President Donald Trump to establish an emergency board, as they seek a pay increase.
Service will continue on the busiest commuter railroad in North America while this emergency board process is underway. A strike could occur next May, however, if a compromise with the MTA isn’t reached.
The news comes after the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen announced on Monday that 99.9% of its 529 active LIRR union members voted to authorize a strike.
The coalition of unions, however, agreed to formally request Trump to establish an emergency board to attempt to resolve the issues between the union and the LIRR and come to a new contract, staving off a potential strike that would have begun Thursday.
If BLET does not agree to a new contract by May, however, it could be the first time LIRR employees strike in over 30 years. LIRR unions last went on strike in 1994, but the walkout only lasted for two days before a new contract for LIRR employees was settled.
“These passengers, they’re our friends, our neighbors, our family, and they should be treated much better than we’ve seen over this past week,” said BLET Vice President James Louis. “This is why the five unions decided to be the grown-ups in the room and request President Trump to appoint a presidential emergency board per the Railway Labor Act and allow both sides to present the proposals to the board.”
The strike would potentially affect more than 270,000 daily commuters in New York, as five unions representing 55% of the LIRR workforce are demanding a 16% raise over a four-year period.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul decried the idea of a strike on Monday, stating that it would hurt LIRR employees and passengers.
“A strike would hurt not only the riders who rely on the LIRR, but also many hardworking LIRR employees and their families, who will be left without pay because of unrealistic demands and their union leadership’s refusal to negotiate,” Hochul said in a press release. “There is a fair offer on the table, and I have directed the MTA to be ready to negotiate anytime, anywhere.”
According to the MTA, which runs the LIRR, the unions planning to strike next year have already rejected one deal that offered them a 9.5% wage increase over a three-year period, which would keep LIRR workers as the highest-paid railroad employees in the country. LIRR engineers currently make $160,000 a year on average and top out at $350,000, according to the agency.
LIRR President Rob Free has lambasted the collective bargaining effort by the unions, citing it as a cash grab that would overpay LIRR employees who already earn almost $50 an hour on average, per MTA figures, which is 7% higher than industry norms, he said.
“These five labor organizations, who are amongst the highest paid in the nation, want 6.5% more than everyone else, without any concessions, including outdated work rules, that significantly increase salaries, including providing multiple days’ pay for one day of work,” Free said in a press conference last week.
However, the LIRR unions maintain they are trying to achieve fair wages for their members, as they have been without a pay raise for over three years and run almost 1000 daily trains.
Gil Lang, the General Chairman for the BLET’s LIRR engineers, said the unions are trying to keep pace with the rising cost of living in New York.
“We are only asking for a fair contract — one that provides modest wage gains, or at the very least, maintains real wages,” Lang said. “Our members would not ratify anything short of that.”
U.S. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel speaks at a campaign rally, Oct. 16, 2022 in East Lansing, Mich. Bill Pugliano/Getty Images
(NEW YORK) — A Michigan judge has dismissed the case against 15 individuals accused of being “fake electors” for Donald Trump in the 2020 election.
Judge Kristen Simmons on Tuesday said she found insufficient evidence to prove the defendants acted with criminal intent.
“This is a fraud case, and we have to prove intent, and I don’t believe that there’s sufficient evidence to prove intent,” she said during a hearing Tuesday.
“I believe that they were executing their constitutional right to seek redress, and that’s based on the statements of all of the people’s witnesses,” said the judge. “For those reasons, these cases will not be bound over to the circuit court. Each case will be dismissed.”
The case was announced in 2023 by Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, who charged 16 Republicans — one of whom later cooperated with the prosecution and had his charges dropped — with forgery and conspiracy to commit election forgery.
The charges stemmed from a meeting on Dec. 14, 2020, where the group allegedly met “covertly” and signed certificates falsely claiming they were the state’s duly elected electors in an effort to reelect Trump president.
During the hearing, Judge Simmons said the prosecution failed to establish that the electors intended to defraud anyone.
“This is not an election interference case,” she said.
“The prosecution would like the court to believe that these named defendants were savvy or sophisticated enough to fully understand the electoral process — which the court does disagree because the document that was presented doesn’t even align with the level of sophistication that they want me to believe,” Judge Simmons said.
“There’s many things that could cause a pause in the electoral process, and it doesn’t mean that it’s criminal,” said the judge.
(NEW YORK) — Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of SpaceX, has called “rapidly reusable, reliable rockets” the key to humans becoming a multiplanetary society. And when it comes to his company’s Falcon 9, SpaceX has shown that a rocket can do all those things.
The Falcon 9 has now completed 542 missions, 497 landings and 464 reflights, according to the SpaceX website.
But to reach the Moon and Mars and establish settlements on both, SpaceX will need its larger, more complex and significantly more powerful Starship and its Super Heavy booster to reach Falcon 9’s level of reliability and reusability.
Soon, SpaceX will have the chance to show that Starship’s successful August flight, the first to complete all its primary mission goals, was no fluke.
Barring a delay due to bad weather or mechanical issues, the stainless steel Starship and Super Heavy booster will conduct its 11th flight test on Monday, Oct. 13, at 7:15 p.m. ET, from the company’s Starbase in South Texas. A mission the company hopes will build on the much-needed success of its previous test. SpaceX will be operating Starship autonomously and there will be no astronauts aboard during the flight.
In late August, Starship and its Super Heavy booster successfully reached space on a suborbital trajectory at a near-orbital velocity, deploying a series of Starlink simulators before returning to Earth with such navigational precision that the reentry was captured on a camera attached to a remote buoy in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
“I would give [flight test 10] an A-plus. That was an A-plus performance. The only thing that was a little bit off was that there was some damage in the aft skirt compartment of Starship during the flight, but most of the mission objectives were achieved,” said Olivier de Weck, the Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics and Engineering Systems at MIT and editor-in-chief of the “Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets.” “I don’t think this could have gone much better,” he added.
But now, de Weck says SpaceX needs to demonstrate that it can build on its August success and move the program forward with new mission objectives.
“I think the next step is to actually land the Starship, still not go into orbit and stay over multiple orbits, but actually land and recover the actual Starship,” said de Weck. “Recovery of the Starship, an upright landing, with retro propulsion on a fixed platform, that’s the next step.”
SpaceX is not planning an upright, fixed platform landing for the upcoming 11th flight test. Like the previous mission, the Starship will splash down in the Indian Ocean. The Super Heavy first stage booster, with its 24 Raptor engines, which SpaceX said was previously used during flight test eight, is also scheduled to splash down in the ocean. In several previous missions, it returned to the launch site and was caught by the tower’s mechanical “chopstick” arms.
The development of Starship hasn’t come easily for SpaceX, with several high-profile setbacks along the way. However, despite an explosion on the launch pad during a pre-flight engine test and several explosions and mechanical failures during previous test flights, Musk has long maintained that learning from failures is an integral part of SpaceX’s engineering process.
“I’m not surprised where the program is. It’s moving forward through the usual SpaceX iterative development model, and not surprisingly, it’s behind SpaceX’s ambitious schedule projections,” said Greg Autry, associate provost for space commercialization and strategy at the University of Central Florida. “But that wouldn’t make it any different than almost everything else that they’ve done in the past, other than that the scale of this is so large,” he added.
Autry is President Donald Trump’s nominee to be the chief financial officer of NASA.
Autry says he’s confident that SpaceX is headed in the right direction and said that Elon Musk and his companies tend to prove their critics wrong in the long run, delivering results even if it takes longer than anticipated.
“About ten years ago, Elon Musk promised me I was going to have a self-driving car shortly, and a lot of people said that was completely crazy. It wasn’t shortly, but I now have a self-driving car. I literally get in my car, push the button, and fifty miles later, I arrive at work. It is amazing. He delivers eventually,” Autry said.
Experts say that making the next generation of U.S.-designed and built rockets and spacecraft work is critical to achieving NASA’s goals of not only returning to the Moon but building a permanent lunar settlement and doing it before the Chinese.
During a late September ceremony at the Johnson Space Center announcing the new class of NASA astronauts, Acting NASA Administrator and Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy spoke about the competition for space dominance.
“Now some are challenging our leadership in space, say, like the Chinese, and I’ll just tell you this, I’ll be damned if the Chinese beat NASA or beat America back to the Moon,” said Duffy. “We are going to win. We love challenges. We love competition, and we are going to win the second space race back to the Moon,” he added.
Autry, who first wrote about a new space race with China back in 2010, says China is determined to reach the Moon and dominate low-Earth orbit, but he believes the global competition will push American efforts forward.
“There are very credible people saying that they’re about to eclipse us in the next five years. I think that’s great for the prospect of competition that spurs us to work harder and take our role more seriously, and frankly to put funding into programs that we badly, badly need to fund,” said Autry.
Autry says that today’s space race should be compared to the “Age of Exploration” in the 15th and 16th centuries. He points out that while China had “an ambitious sailing-exploration program” in the early 1400s, European countries overtook the Chinese when the Europeans accelerated their global exploration efforts later in the century, at a time when China was pulling back.
“We are at that same moment in time right now. The countries that aggressively pursue going to the Moon and using the assets of space will dominate human history for the next several hundred years,” Autry said.
Autry believes that the billions of dollars being spent by companies like SpaceX and the federal government to support space exploration, return to the Moon and potentially get to Mars is money well spent.
“The countries that choose to take advantage of space resources will be wealthy, prosperous and happier than the countries that don’t. We have plenty of history to show that,” Autry said.
Autry says you just have to look at the first space program to see the benefits of this kind of investment.
“We would not have the computing environment, AI, the internet, solar power, fuel cells, and a variety of technologies at the level they are now if we had not made those investments that drove so much effort into engineering development and STEM education. It created the boom we’ve experienced since the second half of the 20th century,” he added.
