Court overturns prison sentence of Colorado 2020 election denier Tina Peters

(NEW YORK) — The ongoing Department of Homeland Security shutdown is taking its toll on the thousands of Transportation Security Administration employees at airports who have been working without pay.

Approximately 60,000 TSA officers who have gone over a month with partial pay began receiving their first $0 paychecks last week.

Many say they are living in fear, with some taking on extra jobs or even leaving the agency altogether to make ends meet.

And if there is no relief soon, veteran TSA leaders fear that the stress and uncertainty could impact operations for years

“Who wants to go work in public service in the public sector when you’re treated like a yo-yo?” a TSA worker who asked to remain anonymous told ABC News.

The current partial shutdown, now in its second month, comes close to last fall’s 43-day federal government shutdown, which paused payments to thousands of TSA workers, who were still required to work their shift.

Angela Grana, a TSA officer at Durango-La Plata County Airport in Colorado, told ABC News Live on Monday, the first day that TSA workers missed their checks, that the entire situation has been humiliating for her co-workers.

“The stories I get are very demoralizing,” Grana, who serves as the state’s regional vice president for AFGE TSA Local 1127, said. “To go ahead and do the Uber Eats or any other kind of side job, we have to have extra permission. For now, we can’t just do it.”
Senate Democrats have vowed to block funding for DHS until reforms are made to Immigration and Customs Enforcement following the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis by federal law enforcement.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called on Democrats Monday to join a discharge petition that would fund all DHS agencies except for ICE.

A vote on similar legislation failed earlier in the Senate. Jeffries would need at least four Republicans to sign on with all Democrats for the discharge petition to move forward.

Grana said the stress of making ends meet and keeping the airports safe is getting to a lot of TSA officers. Several airports across the country have begun food pantries for their employees affected by the partial shutdown.

“Let me tell you, for us to be concentrating on our jobs without the hunger pains in our stomachs. It’s really difficult to do. We can’t get it wrong,” Grana said.  “We have to get it right every time. We cannot miss a bag, we cannot miss a threat.”

Jill DeJanovich, a TSA officer at Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas and single mom of four, was one of the nearly 2,700 TSA workers who called out sick this week, because of the demands put on her.

DeJanovich, who is the a AFGE Local 1260 Chief Administrative Point of contact in Nevada, said she is frustrated with Congress for not moving forward and ending the quagmire over funding.

“Someone needs to cross the line before Congress goes on break for Easter recess,” she said.

While some TSA officers said they had to power on through, for others, like Robert Echeverria, the strain of a second DHS shutdown in five months proved to be too much.

After nine years working at Salt Lake City International Airport a lead TSA officer, Echeverria told ABC News that he left his job after the current shutdown. Echeverria said his family’s life savings were depleted after the last shutdown.

“Emotionally, we couldn’t go through that strain anymore,” he told ABC News.

“It was just really hard for my wife and emotionally to see my kids going through a hard time asking for things, and we wouldn’t be able to actually help them out,” he added.

A TSA worker who asked not to be named warned that the loss of employees can’t easily be fixed.

“Losing seasoned employees is very difficult to replace,” the TSA worker said. “New hires take two years to get off probation.”

The worker added that the accumulating debt borne by government employees will also affect staffing.

“One of the requirements is that you have a great credit rating. A lot of our officers are not going to have that now,” they said.

Joseph Cerletti, a TSA officer at Oakland San Francisco Bay Airport, told ABC News that he struggles to explain to his kids about their financial issues now that his family has to depend solely on his wife’s income.

Cerletti relented that he and his coworkers “don’t have the upper ground here” when it comes to fighting for their rights.

“It’s very hard to find words in the English language to describe how I feel about it, other than speechless,” he said. “This is just what I’ve been describing lately as figuratively an uphill gunfight.”

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(WASHINGTON) — Attorneys for hundreds of Jeffrey Epstein’s survivors told ABC News that names and identifying information of numerous victims appear unredacted in the latest disclosure of files on the late sex offender by the Department of Justice, including several women whose names have never before been publicly associated with the case.

Three million pages from the DOJ’s files on Epstein were being released to the public Friday, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said at a press briefing this morning.

Several categories of pages were withheld from the release due to their sensitive nature, Blanche said. These items include personally identifying information of the victims, victims’ medical files, images depicting child pornography, information related to ongoing cases and any images depicting death or abuse.

“We are getting constant calls for victims because their names, despite them never coming forward, being completely unknown to the public, have all just been released for public consumption,” said Brad Edwards, an attorney for some of the victims, in a telephone interview with ABC News.  “It’s literally 1000s of mistakes.”

ABC News has independently confirmed numerous instances of victims’ names appearing in documents included in the latest release.

Shortly after the new material appeared on Friday morning, Edwards said he and his law partner, Brittany Henderson, began receiving calls from clients.

“We contacted DOJ immediately, who has asked us to flag each of the documents where victim names appear unredacted and they will pull them down,” Edwards said. “it’s an impossible job. The easy job would be for the DOJ to type in all the victims’ names, hit redact like they promised to do, then release them. “

“They’re trying to fix it, but I said ‘the solution is take the thing down for now. There’s no other remedy to this. It just runs the risk of causing so much more harm unless they take it down first, then fix the problem and put it back up.'”

ABC News had reached out to the DOJ for comment.

The department has reviewed and redacted “several millions of pages” of materials related to the investigations of Epstein and his associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, and expects to publish “substantially all” of the records “in the near term,” according to a letter filed Tuesday by Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.

Maxwell is currently serving a 20-year sentence prison.

Blanche said Friday’s release, which follows the passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, will include 2,000 videos and 180,000 images related to the Epstein case.

Blanche said in total there were 6 million documents, but due to the presence of child sexual abuse material and victim rights obligations, not all documents are being made public in the current release.

Epstein died by suicide in a New York jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on charges that he “sexually exploited and abused dozens of minor girls at his homes in Manhattan, New York, and Palm Beach, Florida, among other locations,” using cash payments to recruit a “vast network of underage victims,” some of whom were as young as 14 years old.

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(LONDON)– It is one thing to make a New Year’s resolution. It is, however, a very different thing to be able to keep it.

Every year they are made with the best of intentions — with the hope and desire to become a better version of ourselves — so why is it that millions of people make New Year’s resolutions knowing the odds of them ever following through with them are minimal?

Jasper Rook Williams — fitness expert, online coach and owner of JRW Fitness — has made a successful career so far working with hundreds of clients around the world on improving their nutrition, training and lifestyle calibration. He has a good idea why.

“The goals, if sometimes a little ambitious, are rarely the problem and they are all set with best intentions,” Rook Williams tells ABC News. “The issue is there’s rarely enough thought put into the approach. People have high ambitions hinging on mostly unrealistic and unsustainable methods. Rather than just thinking ‘I’ll eat salads and join a gym’, people need to prioritize achievable routines, sustainability and lifestyle changes from a broader and more holistic perspective.”

According to research, Rook Williams isn’t wrong. The failure rate for New Year’s resolutions is said to be an estimated 80% with most people losing their resolve and motivation just weeks later in mid-February, according to U.S News and World Report.

“Changing your habits is very difficult, including finding the right moment to make a change,” Bas Verplanken, professor of social psychology at the University of Bath, said in a report released by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in 2017. “Changing from December 31st to January 1st is not a dramatic discontinuity. Many resolutions are made on December 31st, and go down the drain on January 2nd.”

Psychologically speaking, the beginning of a new year is often viewed as a seminal moment — a time to reflect on the previous year and look ahead to the new one. But this doesn’t necessarily translate to immediate change and action just because of timing.

“Anything worthwhile is never without obstacle”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the top three New Year’s resolutions made each year are living healthier (23%), personal improvement or happiness (21%) and losing weight (20%), according to a report published by Statista in Nov. 2022.

“A great question to ask yourself when starting out is “does this feel sustainable?” Rook Williams explains to ABC News. “If you can’t keep up the routine then you definitely won’t keep the results.”

One of the things that Rook Williams has found leads to people maintaining their success is when people have — or are given — a sense of accountability.

“You have to bear in mind that creating new habits is hard and progress for anything worthwhile is never linear,” he said. “There will be times when either you want to stop or results seem to have stopped and that can be hard to deal with. That’s when having someone to guide you can keep you accountable can be invaluable in the process of change.”

Ultimately, to successfully make a change for the better, it comes down to striking the right balance, according to Rook Williams.

“In the case of fitness, it’s not just the food or training or wider lifestyle that will create the change but all three of these things working together,” he continued. “They’re not mutually exclusive. Lacking motivation is common and, in my experience, is something that comes when you don’t have a plan. Whether you hire a professional or not, just removing the guesswork and gaining a sense of direction always helps the individual on their path to success.”

“Motivation is temporary”
One of the biggest obstacles to maintaining resolutions, particularly when it comes to fitness objectives, is to choose goals that are both achievable and sustainable.

An estimated 12% of all new gym memberships per year occur in January, according to a study done by IHRSA, the fitness industry’s only global trade association that represents health clubs worldwide. Another study indicates that four out of every five people who join the gym in January will actually quit within five months.

“Motivation is temporary for everyone,” says Rook Williams. “So the best thing you can do is use that time to create the habits and routines needed to see you through once it wanes. And it will wane. It always does. The classic thing new gym starters do in the new year is go from zero to 100 mph … They want to go from not working out at all and eating what they want to training five, six, seven days a week and eating like a rabbit. This just sets them up for failure because it’s just not realistic.”

One of the biggest reasons why Rook Williams’ clients often succeed when it comes to setting goals is the focus on maintaining a healthy outlook every day and “saying no to short-termism.”

“Being new at something and hoping to be perfect straight away is a sure fire way to give up on anything very quickly,” Rook Williams explains. “Be sure to cut yourself some slack. If you planned to train three days one week but only managed two, that doesn’t make you a failure. It’s still two more than you were doing before, so just wipe the slate clean and try it again without holding on to guilt or punishing yourself.”

“Everyone falls off the horse at some point, even the pros,” Rook Williams continued. “What’s important is how quickly you dust yourself off and get back to work. Those who make it do this right away. But those who let one mistake spill over into more mistakes are the ones who are most likely to give up and start again next year.”

“Never just one solution”
No matter what resolution you may make in the New Year, for Rook Williams, success is all about perspective and making changes in incremental ways that suit your lifestyle rather than completely disrupting it.

“There is never just one solution to a problem, whatever that problem might be,” he continued. “Your goal might be set in stone, but how you achieve it shouldn’t be. Don’t get married to just one method. Finding sustainable success is all about finding the method that is easiest and most maintainable for you.”

Unrealistic expectations and the dangers of expecting to get it right the first time are one of the main things that Rook Williams warns his clients about.

“With so much conflicting information out there and each of us having our own unique goals, schedules and responsibilities, the chance of getting your nutritional approach spot on when going alone immediately is incredibly slim,” Rook Williams explains. “Even if it is working, it might not be sustainable so be prepared for a period involving a lot of trial and error.”

For Rook Williams this was a huge reason why he became a coach in the first place. “It took me ages to piece it all together and, once I had, I wanted to help others do the same and in far less time.”

Research actually backs this up. According to a 2012 study conducted by the University of Pennsylvania’s Weight and Eating Disorders Program, 65% of dieters return to their pre-diet weight within three years and only 5% of people who lose weight on a restrictive diet, such as a liquid or no-carb, manage to keep the weight off — just one out of every 20 dieters.

“Carbs are tasty, alcohol can be fun, food is for eating and going without all these things forever is, for most people, totally unrealistic. When you think about it logically like that, it’s no surprise the majority of people fail to keep off the weight they lose.”

Ultimately, making any major change in your life requires more than just the desire to do so. It requires a goal, determination and a willingness to learn all mixed with a heavy dose of reality and a well-constructed approach to change.

“If you have a day where you feel like you can’t be bothered with anything, remember you are running your own race,” Rook Williams explains. “Success isn’t made by being perfect everyday but by doing your best everyday, whatever that looks like to you. What I have learned myself — and what I have really seen leads people to success — is if you have good habits and routines in place that you have created over time, that’s what is going to get you to where you want to be.”

Said Rook Williams: “It’s not just the food or training or wider lifestyle that will create the change but all three of these things. They’re all connected.”

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