At least 10 dead after record-breaking snowstorm swept across the South
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(NEW YORK) — The Gulf Coast is digging out from a once-in-a-lifetime snowstorm that struck from Texas to Florida, closing airports, crippling roadways and leaving freezing temperatures in its wake.
At least 10 deaths have been attributed to the storm and accompanying cold blast.
In Dale County, Alabama, one person was killed in a house fire after leaving their stove on to keep them warm and a second person was killed in a car accident, according to the local corner.
One person died from hypothermia in Georgia and two people died in the cold in Austin, Texas, officials said.
Southwest of San Antonio, five people died when a tractor-trailer collided with other vehicles on an icy road, the Texas Department of Safety said.
This storm brought more snow to some cities than any other storm in at least the last 130 years.
Florida saw its most snow on record, with 9.8 inches of snow recorded in Milton, northeast of Pensacola.
Pensacola also saw an all-time record for the city with 8.9 inches.
Texas experienced its first-ever blizzard warning. Beaumont, Texas, recorded 5.2 inches of snow — an all-time record. Mobile, Alabama, saw an all-time record high of 7.5 inches.
In Louisiana, Baton Rouge saw 7.6 inches.
New Orleans recorded 8 inches, marking the most snow in the city since 1895.
And the danger isn’t over. An extreme cold warning is in effect Thursday morning from Mississippi to the Florida Panhandle, with temperatures dropping as low as 12 degrees in parts of the Gulf Coast.
For Louisiana, this is the coldest it’s been in over 100 years, state climatologist Jay Grymes said.
While snow has melted in many areas, the freeze remains a serious threat. Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development Secretary Joe Donahue is urging “everyone to avoid unnecessary travel.”
Many of the areas hit hard by the storm will thaw soon; temperatures are expected to climb to the 50s and 60s by Sunday.
Lawyers for the man accused of killing four Idaho college students are asking the judge in his capital murder case to ban a key witness from using the phrase “bushy eyebrows” to describe the assailant she saw the night of the bloody attack.
That request was included in roughly 100 pages of court filings unsealed Tuesday as preparations continue in advance of the August trial of Bryan Kohberger, who’s charged in the November 2022 killings of Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin.
A roommate of the victims, who lived at the off-campus Moscow, Idaho, home where the killings occurred originally told detectives that the masked male intruder she saw on the night of the killings had a singular physical attribute: “bushy eyebrows.” That phrase has rocketed around the world as the headline-grabbing case has moved slowly toward a trial in Boise, Idaho.
Kohberger’s defense attorneys argued the superficial description will unfairly point the finger at him and potentially bias the jury.
“The description provided by [the roommate] is unreliable and should be excluded,” defense lawyer Elisa Massoth wrote. “Although she has never identified Mr. Kohberger, testimony by [the roommate] from the witness stand, describing bushy eyebrows while Mr. Kohberger sits as the accused at trial, will be as damning as her pointing to him and saying, ‘he is the man that did this.'”
The roommate’s varying accounts and self-confessed sleepy intoxication that night make her memory fickle, Kohberger’s lawyers have argued. And, they argued, she seemed preoccupied with bushy eyebrows even before her friends were killed.
When police photographed the crime scene right after the killings, her room was found to have “many pictures of eyes with prominent eyebrows” on the walls in her room, Kohberger’s lawyers said.
“Many of which she had drawn. Some of the eyebrows are heavy, voluminous, puffy, or perhaps subjectively bushy,” and there was “artwork of human figures with an emphasis upon the eyes and eyebrows were pinned to corkboards,” they said.
Kohberger’s defense attorneys have also asked the judge to bar words like “murder,” “psychopath” and “sociopath” during the trial.
“To label Mr. Kohberger as a ‘murderer,’ the alleged weapon consistent with an empty sheath as a ‘murder weapon’ or to assert that any of the four decedents was ‘murdered’ by Mr. Kohberger denies his right to a fair trial and the right to be presumed innocent,” the defense said.
Prosecutors allege that in the early morning hours of Nov. 13, 2022, Kohberger broke into an off-campus home and stabbed the four students to death. He was arrested in late December, after a six-week manhunt, at his parents’ Pennsylvania home and indicted in May 2023.
He was charged with four counts of first-degree murder and one count of burglary. At his arraignment, he declined to offer a plea, so the judge entered a not-guilty plea on his behalf.
If convicted, Kohberger could face the death penalty. But not if his lawyers get their way.
Defense attorneys cite autism in bid to strike death penalty
Among the flurry of new filings, the defense also argued his life should not be on the line — because he has been diagnosed with autism, and so his impairments in communication, problems with social skills and impulse control mean he is “insufficiently culpable to be executed.”
His diagnosis however should not be wielded against him, the defense said — arguing prosecutors should not be allowed to use it “by criminalizing his status as a disabled person.”
Even if this does not work to strike the death penalty, his diagnosis could resurface in the sentencing phase if Kohberger is convicted, where his lawyers will likely raise it again as a mitigating factor.
This is not the first time his lawyers have attempted to get the death penalty taken off the table.
In their argument about his condition now, Kohberger’s lawyers shed new light on what has been a heretofore little-known person to the public.
“Mr. Kohberger displays extremely rigid thinking, perseverates on specific topics, processes information on a piece-meal basis, struggles to plan ahead, and demonstrates little insight into his own behaviors and emotions” and “his tone and cadence are abnormal, his interactions lack fluidity, and his language is often overinclusive, disorganized, highly repetitive, and oddly formal,” they argued.
He “frequently shifts the topic back to himself even when it is inappropriate. He uses abrupt, matter-of-fact phrases that would be considered rude. He carries on about topics in a circular manner and perseverates about specific, non-essential details,” they said, adding his autism is “also accompanied by obsessive-compulsiveness, and an eating disorder. Since childhood, Mr. Kohberger has exhibited compulsions around getting things in his eyes, hand-washing and other germ avoidant behaviors.”
(WASHINGTON) — Dozens of people are dead after a regional jet collided with an Army Black Hawk helicopter Wednesday night over Washington, D.C., officials said, the nation’s first major commercial airline crash since 2009.
The aircraft went down in the frigid Potomac River, breaking into multiple pieces. The flight — which had departed from Wichita, Kansas — was approaching Reagan National Airport at the time of the collision, officials said.
There were no survivors in the crash, officials said Thursday.
There were 64 passengers aboard the plane, and three Army soldiers in the helicopter, according to officials. The soldiers, none of whom were senior leaders, were conducting a training mission, a defense official said.
Among those lost in the crash were 14 people who were returning home from a national figure skating development camp in Wichita, according to Doug Zeghibe, the CEO and executive director for the Skating Club of Boston.
Six of the victims were affiliated with the Skating Club of Boston, Zeghibe said.
“Skating is a tight-knit community where parents and kids come together 6 or 7 days a week to train and work together. Everyone is like family,” Zeghibe said in a statement.
The U.S. Figure Skating organization confirmed that “several members” of the skating community had been on the flight.
“We are devastated by this unspeakable tragedy and hold the victims’ families closely in our hearts,” the organization said. “We will continue to monitor the situation and will release more information as it becomes available.”
Here’s what we know about the victims so far:
Vadim Naumov and Evgenia Shishkova
Vadim Naumov and Evgenia Shishkova, a married couple, were also killed in the crash, according to the Skating Club of Boston. Naumov and Shishkova, who were figure skating coaches, were world champions in pairs competition in 1994.
They joined the club in 2017, Zeghibe said.
Jinna Han and Jin Han
Jinna Han, a figure skater, and Jin Han, her mother, were killed in the crash, according to the Skating Club of Boston.
Spencer Lane and Molly Lane
Skater Spencer Lane and his mother, Molly Lane, were among the victims, the Skating Club of Boston said.
Alexandr Kirsanov
Alexandr Kirsanov was a coach of two of the youth ice skaters on board, his wife, Natalya Gudin, told ABC News.
“I lost everything,” Gudin said. “I lost my husband, I lost my students, I lost my friends.”
Gudin said Kirsanov traveled with two youth skaters to attend a development camp in Kansas this week. Gudin, who also coaches students with her husband in Delaware, said she stayed home to be with their other skaters.
She last spoke with her husband as he boarded the flight on Wednesday, she said.
“I need my husband back,” Gudin said. “I need his body back.”
(NEW YORK) — In the days since President Donald Trump assumed office, many people online have begun expressing alarm to find they were unwittingly following Trump on Instagram and Facebook.
Across social media, posts have proliferated by people concerned after discovering they were automatically following accounts for Trump, as well as Vice President JD Vance, first lady Melania Trump and the White House.
Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, denied claims they forced users to follow the accounts.
The accounts are managed by the current presidential administration, and switch over when a new administration takes office, a spokesperson for Meta said.
Former President Joe Biden’s account remains archived under another handle, @potus46archive.
“People were not made to automatically follow any of the official Facebook or Instagram accounts for the President, Vice President or First Lady,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a post on Threads. “Those accounts are managed by the White House so with a new administration, the content on those Pages changes. This is the same procedure we followed during the last presidential transition.”
Stone also addressed concerns that people were unable to follow the accounts, saying, “It may take some time for follow and unfollow requests to go through as these accounts change hands.”
The company made the same transition in 2021, handing the Facebook and Instagram accounts for the president, vice president, first lady and White House from Trump’s administration to that of President Joe Biden.
The same process took place in 2017, when President Barack Obama’s administration passed its accounts on to the Trump administration.
“In 2017, we worked with both the Obama Administration and incoming Trump Administration to make sure the transition of their Facebook and Instagram accounts was seamless on January 20th, and we expect to do the same here,” Meta, then known as Facebook, told Reuters in 2020.
Instagram users also expressed concern they were temporarily unable to search for the words “Democrat” or “Democrats.”
Meta said they were aware of the issue, and said it was a glitch affecting “a number of different hashtags on Instagram — not just those on the left.”
“We’re working quickly to resolve this,” Stone, the Meta spokesperson, said in another post.
The online uproar comes on the heels of the inauguration, where Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg — along with several other high-profile tech CEOs — were in attendance.
Meta announced earlier this month they would end fact-checking on their platforms, which was put in place after the 2016 election.
Critics have accused the recent move of being a partisan effort to appease Trump, who has repeatedly slammed the company for alleged anti-conservative bias.
In a video posted by the company, Zuckerberg said fact-checking had proven to be “too politically biased” and had destroyed “more trust than they’ve created.”
“The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech,” Zuckerberg added.
