Bomb cyclone impacts West Coast, 1 dead in Washington state
ABC News
One person was killed and two were injured by falling trees in Washington state as a powerful storm moved into the Pacific Northwest.
In Lynwood, a woman in her 50s was killed when a tree fell on a homeless encampment Tuesday night. In Puget Sound, two were transported to hospitals when a tree fell on a trailer, officials said.
The storm exploded into a bomb cyclone off the coast, near Vancouver Island, Canada, where winds gusted near 101 mph.
A bomb cyclone means the pressure in the center of the storm drops 24 millibars within 24 hours.
Wind gusts reached 50 to 84 mph from Northern California to Washington.
As the storm sits and spins over the ocean this week, it will help to push a plume of Pacific moisture called an atmospheric river into Oregon and Northern California.
Alerts are in effect through Friday for flooding, snow, avalanches and high winds.
Some places could see more than 1 foot of rain this week. A flood watch has been issued in Northern California.
(WASHINGTON) — Four Russian military aircraft passed through the Alaska Air Defense Identification Zone on Monday, the North American Aerospace Defense Command said.
All four aircraft remained in international airspace and did not enter either American or Canadian sovereign airspace, NORAD said in a press release. There was no intercept, it added.
“This Russian activity in the Alaska ADIZ occurs regularly and is not seen as a threat,” NORAD said.
Monday’s detection is the fifth such incident in September so far, according to NORAD’s public statements noting detections. NORAD did not specify what type of Russian aircraft were involved. The command identified Russian IL-38 maritime patrol aircraft inside the Alaska ADIZ earlier this month.
The ADIZ begin at the limit of national airspace — in this case that of the U.S. and Canada. Such zones require “the ready identification of all aircraft in the interest of national security,” NORAD said.
The command “employs a layered defense network of satellites, ground-based and airborne radars and fighter aircraft to track aircraft and inform appropriate actions,” it said in its press release.
“NORAD remains ready to employ a number of response options in defense of North America,” it added.
(WASHINGTON) — Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani has been permanently disbarred from practicing law in the District of Columbia, a court of appeals panel ruled Thursday.
According to the ruling, Giuliani’s disbarment is a resort of reciprocal discipline resulting from his law license being stripped in New York state over his efforts aiding former President Donald Trump’s bid to overturn the 2020 election.
Giuliani’s law license had already been suspended in D.C.
The appeals court panel noted that Giuliani declined to respond when given notice back in July that he could face reciprocal discipline.
In a report issued in July, the D.C. Board on Professional Responsibility recommended Giuliani be disbarred, saying that in his capacity as personal attorney to then-President Trump, he committed misconduct by his “frivolous and destructive” efforts to overturn President Joe Biden’s win through his failed legal challenges to the election results in Pennsylvania.
According to the report, the former New York City mayor violated two legal ethics rules in bringing the lawsuit, which sought to block the certification of votes in the state following Trump’s defeat.
The committee said that one of the rules was violated when he filed the lawsuit in Pennsylvania “when he had no factual basis and no legitimate legal grounds to do so.”
The other rule Giuliani violated was Pennsylvania’s Rules of Professional Conduct, the report said.
“He claimed massive election fraud but had no evidence of it,” the committee wrote.
(NEW YORK) — A federal judge in New York on Tuesday set a trial date for April 14 in the libel lawsuit that Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential nominee, brought against The New York Times.
The trial date was decided over the objections of both the plaintiff and defense, who asked for a date in July to give the two sides time to possibly reach a settlement out of court.
“This case should not require very much preparation since it’s a retrial,” Judge Jed Rakoff said during a conference Tuesday.
A federal judge in New York on Tuesday set a trial date for April 14 in the libel lawsuit that Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential nominee, brought against The New York Times.
The trial date was decided over the objections of both the plaintiff and defense, who asked for a date in July to give the two sides time to possibly reach a settlement out of court.
“This case should not require very much preparation since it’s a retrial,” Judge Jed Rakoff said during a conference Tuesday.
“We just wanted to take some of the pressure off,” Turkel said.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled this summer that Palin can again try to hold the paper liable for a 2017 editorial that wrongly suggested she incited the 2011 mass shooting that killed six people and wounded then-Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.
The federal appeals court said Rakoff made errors during the first trial that “impugn the reliability” of the jury’s verdict finding the Times not liable.
“If you’re seriously interested in settling you can settle in a matter of days,” Rakoff said Tuesday. “If you want to be referred to a magistrate for discussions I can do that on 24 hours’ notice.”
Rakoff, in a brief order last week, said the new trial “under no circumstances will be later than February 2025, and, if the parties prefer, can be as early as mid-December 2024.”
The appellate court said Rakoff erred when he excluded evidence about James Bennet, who oversaw the newspaper’s editorial board. Palin argued the evidence could help her show the Times acted with actual malice, the standard a public figure must meet to prevail in a libel case.
The 2017 editorial, entitled “America’s Lethal Politics,” linked the 2011 shooting of Giffords to a digital graphic of a crosshairs over Democratic congressional districts published in March 2010 by Palin’s political action committee. A relationship between the crosshairs map and the shooting was never established. Rather, at the time of the editorial, the attack was widely viewed as a result of the shooter’s mental illness.
Palin’s original defamation lawsuit was dismissed but, in 2019, the 2nd Circuit vacated the dismissal. The case went to trial in 2022, and Rakoff granted the Times’ motion for a directed verdict days before the jury found the newspaper was not liable for defaming Palin.
