Hurricane Rafael could strengthen to Category 3 before landfall in Cuba: Latest track and forecast
ABC News
(FLORIDA KEYS, Fla.) — Hurricane Rafael, now a powerful Category 2 hurricane, could strengthen into a major Category 3 hurricane later in the day before making landfall in Cuba on Wednesday night.
A tropical storm warning is in effect for the Florida Keys, where heavy rain, gusty winds and even tornadoes are possible on Wednesday and into Thursday morning.
By the weekend, Rafael will weaken as it stalls in the Gulf of Mexico.
Rafael isn’t posing a major threat to the U.S. Gulf Coast, but some of the tropical moisture could move toward the coast and add to the rain from an approaching cold front.
Most models predict Rafael sitting in the Gulf into next week and possibly moving southwest toward Mexico.
(NEW YORK) — A New York City construction company and its owner were indicted Thursday on wage theft charges for depriving ten recent immigrant workers of wages totaling $67,000.
“These cases come down to greed,” Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said. “They are preying on those who they don’t think will come forward.”
KEP Construction and its owner, Kendis Paul, are charged with a scheme to defraud and grand larceny.
Prosecutors recovered text messages that show the workers pleading for their money. “I’m out of food,” one message said. “I haven’t been able to pay my rent.”
According to the indictment, 10 former KEP employees were owed for drywall plaster work they performed on a 23-story building on West 96 Street between September 2023 and February 2024.
Paul allegedly gave these employees paychecks that later bounced, refused to pay them overtime, and, in some instances, failed to pay their wages altogether, despite the fact that he was paid more than $1.3 million from the general contractor.
Paul pleaded not guilty and was released on his own recognizance.
(WASHINGTON) — Special counsel David Weiss slammed President Joe Biden’s characterization of his probe as being infected with “raw politics” in his final report detailing his investigations into the president’s son Hunter Biden, which was released Monday by the Justice Department.
Weiss’ work culminated in two separate criminal convictions of Hunter Biden that his father wiped clean with a sweeping pardon in early December, just weeks after Election Day. In July 2024, Weiss’ office secured a guilty verdict from a Delaware jury on three felony gun charges, and months later, on the eve of trial, Hunter Biden pleaded guilty to numerous tax crimes, including six felonies.
Weiss’ report — 27 pages in length plus hundreds of pages of public filings — caps a yearslong and politically fraught probe that remained a source of seemingly endless fodder for President Biden’s political opponents in Congress and elsewhere. Weiss’ prosecutors examined Hunter Biden’s years of drug and alcohol abuse, his controversial foreign business dealings, and his procurement of a gun in 2018.
When President Biden issued a pardon for Hunter Biden in early December, he claimed that “raw politics has infected” the investigation into his son.
“No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son — and that is wrong,” Biden wrote.
Weiss, in the report, criticized the president’s assertion.
“Other presidents have pardoned family members, but in doing so, none have taken the occasion as an opportunity to malign the public servants at the Department of Justice based solely on false accusations,” Weiss wrote.
Weiss defended his work as “thorough, impartial investigations, not partisan politics.”
“Eight judges across numerous courts have rejected claims that they were the result of selective or vindictive motives,” Weiss wrote. “Calling those rulings into question and injecting partisanship into the independent administration of the law undermines the very foundation of what makes America’s justice system fair and equitable. It erodes public confidence in an institution that essential to preserving the rule of law.”
“These prosecutions were the culmination of thorough, impartial investigations, not partisan politics. Eight judges across numerous courts have rejected claims that they were the result of selective or vindictive motives,” Weiss wrote.
“Calling those rulings into question and injecting partisanship into the independent administration of the law undermines the very foundation of what makes America’s justice system fair and equitable. It erodes public confidence in an institution that is essential to preserving the rule of law,” wrote Weiss. “These baseless accusations have no merit and repeating them threatens the integrity of the justice system as a whole.”
Weiss says because of the pardon, he was prevented from making “additional charging decision” regarding Hunter Biden’s ‘s conduct over an 11-year span, suggesting there were other cases he could have pursued against the president’s son. However, because of the pardon, “it would thus be inappropriate to discuss whether additional charges are warranted,” he wrote.
Hunter Biden’s legal team said they were not given an opportunity to read Weiss’ report prior to its release.
Federal investigators began looking into the younger Biden’s taxes in 2018, before his father launched his successful presidential bid. That probe grew to include scrutiny of his overseas business dealings in China, Ukraine, and elsewhere, ABC News previously reported.
In the summer of 2023, prosecutors in Weiss’ office struck a plea deal with Hunter Biden that would have allowed him to plead guilty to a pair of tax-related misdemeanors and avoid prosecution on one felony gun charge.
But that deal fell apart under questioning by a federal judge — and within months, Weiss secured special counsel status from Attorney General Merrick Garland and filed charges in both cases.
Over the course of his probe, Weiss emerged as one of those rare figures in politics who attracted scrutiny from across the political spectrum. Republicans loyal to Donald Trump accused him of failing to bring more serious and substantial charges against the Biden family, while Democrats complained that a GOP-led pressure campaign influenced Weiss’ prosecutorial decisions.
Sentencing in both cases had been scheduled to take place just weeks after President Biden issued his pardon, with Hunter Biden facing the possibility of years in prison and more than a million dollars in fines.
Weiss also brought a third successful case against a former FBI informant who pleaded guilty to spreading lies about the Bidens’ business dealings. Last week a federal judge sentenced the former informant, Alexander Smirnov, to six years in prison.
(CHAPEL HILL, N.C.) — Madyson Barber, a grad student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was researching young transiting systems in space when she made a remarkable discovery.
Barber used data from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite to observe the brightness of stars over time. During the observations, Barber noticed some “little dips” in brightness, indicating that a “transiting” planet may be passing near Earth.
The planet, named IRAS 04125+2902 b, is estimated to be 3 million years old, which is considered “young” for stars, Barber said. Earth is about 4.5 billion years old and took an estimated 10 million to 20 millions to form. The next youngest known planet is about 10 million years old, Barber said.
“It’s about the same as a 10-day-old baby in human timescale,” she added. “So, super, super young in comparison to our home.”
Nicknamed “TIDYE-1b” by researchers, the new planet has been shown to have an orbital period of 8.83 days, according to a paper published Thursday in Nature. It has a radius about 10.7 times larger than Earth and has approximately 30% of the mass of Jupiter.
TIDYE-1b orbits a star of about the same age named IRAS 04125+2902.
Astronomers noted some unusual characteristics of the star, which is located relatively close to Earth at 160 parsecs, or 522 lightyears, away, researchers said. The outer protoplanetary disk surrounding the star is misaligned and the star has a depleted inner disk.
The combination of these unique features allowed scientists to observe the transiting protoplanet.
“If part of the planetary discs were still present, it would be in the same plane of rotation as that spinning star and the orbiting planet,” Barber said. “So the disc would block our observations of the star.”
Astronomers are still learning about the planet. They were able to calculate the upper mass limit by looking at the radial velocity of the star, which is the movement of the star over time, and measuring “little wiggles in that movement,” Barber added.
“Other than that, there’s not a whole lot we can say about the planet at this point,” she said.
Right now, the researchers are only 95% confident in the measurements they’ve taken for the planet’s upper mass limit, and they hypothesize that the planet’s real mass is actually much smaller, Barber said.
“Because we don’t have a ton of these young transiting systems that we know of, it’s really important that we look for more so that we can have a better picture of what that formation and evolution looks like, so we can better understand how our own home formed and evolved,” Barber said.
The researchers believe the new planet could be a precursor of the super-Earth and sub-Neptune planets that are frequently found orbiting main-sequence stars.
The system could also be a useful target for studying the early stages of planet formation due to its young age, the rare disk misalignment and the relatively close location to Earth, Barber said.
