JetBlue flight rolls into grass after landing at Boston’s Logan airport: Officials
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(BOSTON) — A JetBlue flight rolled into a grass area off the runway after landing at Boston Logan International Airport on Thursday, officials said.
No one was hurt, Massachusetts Port Authority said.
Passengers were seen exiting the Airbus A220 by the stairs.
“The runway is closed at this time as the aircraft is assessed and passengers are bussed to the terminal,” Massachusetts Port Authority said in a statement.
JetBlue Flight 312 was arriving in Boston from Chicago O’Hare International Airport.
The Federal Aviation Administration said it will investigate.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(NEW YORK) — The extreme rainfall that occurred in the Northeast on Monday will likely occur more often in the future as a result of climate change, research shows.
The Northeast has experienced the largest regional increase of extreme precipitation in the U.S., with a 60% increase in recent decades, according to the U.S. government’s Fifth National Climate Assessment, a summary of the latest climate science research findings by 14 different federal agencies, published in November 2023.
Extreme precipitation events are very rare, defined as the top 1% of daily precipitation events.
While it’s problematic to attribute any specific weather event solely to climate change, global warming is amplifying naturally occurring events, like the torrent of rain that fell on the Northeast on Monday evening, making them more intense.
New York City’s Central Park preliminarily recorded its second-highest hourly rainfall total since 1943, measuring 2.07 inches of precipitation in one hour at around 7 p.m. on Monday, according to the National Weather Service (NWS). The amount of rain that fell in one hour represents a 1-in-20-year flood for Central Park, meaning there is a 5% chance it could happen in any given year.
The record for most precipitation in one hour in Central Park was set on Sept. 1, 2021, when the remnants from Hurricane Ida caused 3.15 inches of rain to fall, flooding basement apartments in the city and killing 13 people.
The deluge of water caused subway lines to flood, with water even rushing from platforms and into train cars. In at least one instance, the city sewer overflowed into the subway system, according to the city’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
Between one and five inches of water fell in neighboring northern and central New Jersey, with the highest totals measured in the regions around Plainfield, New Jersey and White Plains, New York – about five inches, according to the NWS. Metro-North and New Jersey Transit commuter train lines experienced service disruptions due to downed trees and flooding, and numerous roadways in the region were closed due to floodwaters. Two people were killed when their car was swept into the overflowing Cedar Brook river in Plainfield, officials said.
According to climate scientists, human-amplified climate change is causing extreme rainfall events to become more frequent and more intense. More intense extreme rainfall events also increase the frequency and scale of flash flooding as the influx of water is more than existing infrastructure was built to handle, according to the Fifth National Climate Assessment.
Additionally, human-amplified climate change has contributed to increases in the frequency and intensity of the heaviest precipitation events across nearly 70% of the U.S., the Fifth National Climate Assessment found.
ABC News’ Climate and Weather Unit contributed to this report.
(DENVER) — A U.S. Army soldier stationed in Colorado was arrested on federal drug charges, authorities said Thursday.
Staff Sgt. Juan Gabriel Orona-Rodriguez, a soldier at Fort Carson, was arrested Wednesday evening, the FBI in Denver said.
He faces federal charges related to the distribution of cocaine, the FBI said.
The soldier was taken into custody with the assistance of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Rocky Mountain Field Division, the Department of the Army Criminal Investigation Division and Fort Carson officials, the FBI said.
“We will continue to cooperate with all agencies involved,” a Fort Carson official said in a statement on Thursday.
The DEA Rocky Mountain Field Division said it is conducting a joint investigation with the FBI and Army Criminal Investigation Division.
No additional information on the case has been released.
Fort Carson is located south of Colorado Springs.
It is unclear if the arrest is related to a federal raid of an underground nightclub in Colorado Springs over the weekend.
The DEA said it detained more than 200 people — including members of the military — at an unlicensed nightclub in Colorado Springs early Sunday.
Among them, 114 illegal migrants were taken into custody, with most from Central and South America, officials said.
A Fort Carson spokesperson confirmed on Tuesday that 17 service members, including 16 assigned to Fort Carson, were identified at the scene during the nightclub raid and were allowed to leave on their own.
ABC News’ Anne Flaherty contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — Government lawyers say officers with Immigration and Customs Enforcement Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) did not have a warrant for Columbia University activist Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest when they took him into custody last month, according to a filing submitted in the case.
Khalil’s lawyers say the admission contradicts what officers told Khalil and his lawyers at the time of his arrest and in a subsequent arrest report.
In the filing, lawyers for the Department of Homeland Security said Khalil, a green card holder and permanent legal resident, was served with a warrant once he was brought into an ICE office in New York after his arrest.
The officers “had exigent circumstances to conduct the warrantless arrest, it is the pattern and practice of DHS to fully process a respondent once in custody with an I-200 (warrant) as part of that intake processing,” government lawyers wrote.
DHS claimed its officers were not required to obtain a warrant for Khalil’s arrest, in part, because they had reasons to believe it was likely “he would escape before they could obtain a warrant.”
In the filing, DHS attorneys said agents approached Khalil inside the foyer of his Columbia-owned apartment building and claimed that, while his wife went to retrieve his identification, Khalil told them he was going to leave the scene.
“The HSI supervisory agent believed there was a flight risk and arrest was necessary,” the filing stated.
Khalil’s lawyers have pushed back on the claim that he was uncooperative with authorities.
In a sworn declaration submitted in court last month, attorney Amy Greer, who was on the phone with Khalil’s wife at the time of his arrest, said an agent at the scene told her they had an administrative warrant.
“I asked the basis of the warrant, and he said the U.S. Department of State revoked Mahmoud’s student visa,” Greer said. “When I told Agent Hernandez that Mahmoud does not have a student visa because he is a green card holder and permanent resident in the U.S., he said DHS revoked the green card, too,” she wrote in the declaration.
Khalil’s lawyers say the warrantless arrest is one of the reasons he should be released.
“That night, I was on the phone with Mahmoud, Noor, and even the arresting agent,” Greer said in a statement. “In the face of multiple agents in plain clothes who clearly intended to abduct him, and despite the fact that those agents repeatedly failed to show us a warrant, Mahmoud remained calm and complied with their orders. Today we now know why they never showed Mahmoud that warrant – they didn’t have one.
The statement went on to say: “This is clearly yet another desperate attempt by the Trump administration to justify its unlawful arrest and detention of human rights defender Mahmoud Khalil, who is now, by the government’s own tacit admission, a political prisoner of the United States.”
An immigration judge earlier this month ruled that Khalil, a leader of Columbia’s encampment protests in the spring of 2024, could be deported on grounds that he threatens foreign policy, as alleged by the Trump administration.
