Massive winter storm continues to dump snow across the South
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(ATLANTA) — A massive winter storm is blanketing the South with ice and record-breaking snow, with some cities seeing the most snowfall from a single storm in decades.
Twenty states, from Texas to Delaware, were on alert Friday for snow and ice as the storm continued to move across the South.
The storm has prompted governors to declare states of emergency, including in Texas and Georgia, to prepare for and respond to the severe weather.
Some states have seen a foot or more of snow during the storm.
Parts of Arkansas have seen 14 inches of snow in the storm. Seven inches have fallen in Little Rock, the most in four years.
Portions of Oklahoma and Texas have gotten 12 inches of snow. Oklahoma City had 3.5 inches of snow, a daily record, while Amarillo, Texas, saw 9.5 inches, the most in 10 years.
Mississippi has seen 7 inches of snowfall, while Alabama has gotten 6 inches, as it continues to snow in the states. Birmingham saw 2 inches of snow — the most in 11 years.
Memphis, Tennessee, has gotten 7 inches of snow, the most snow in a single day in 40 years.
Atlanta has so far seen 2 inches of snow, the most in seven years, in the storm. Several communities north of Atlanta measured up to 5 inches from the storm.
Warming stations have been activated throughout Georgia as the state experiences sub-freezing temperatures. Those located in the North Georgia Mountains were near capacity as of Friday morning, according to Gov. Brian Kemp.
“If you’re looking for a place, you may want to go south versus north, if you can,” Kemp said during a press briefing.
Amid the storm, tens of thousands of customers were without power across the Southeast, with Texas and Arkansas experiencing the bulk of the outages.
The storm is also affecting travel. More than 2,700 flights across the country were canceled as of early afternoon Friday, with Atlanta, Charlotte, Dallas and Nashville seeing the biggest impacts.
Officials across the South have warned of treacherous travel conditions due to snow and ice on the streets.
Public schools in Atlanta and Memphis were closed Friday due to the inclement weather.
Snow and ice are expected to reach the Carolinas and the East Coast on Friday evening, with heavy snow and ice forecast for Charlotte, Asheville and Raleigh. North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein declared a state of emergency on Thursday, ahead of the storm.
“At this time, our greatest concern is road safety,” he said during a briefing Friday. “Precipitation and freezing temperatures tomorrow afternoon and night will make a mess of our roads Saturday morning.”
Overnight, snow will move into the mid-Atlantic, including Richmond, Virginia, with some snow possible in Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia.
Richmond remains under a water boil advisory after a power outage impacted operations at a water treatment plant during a storm earlier this week.
Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images, FILE
(WASHINGTON) Hunter Biden may have his freedom, but the son of former President Joe Biden now finds himself mired in debt, without a permanent home, and the target of ongoing attacks from the current president, Donald Trump, and his allies on Capitol Hill, according to a court filing.
In court papers filed Wednesday, Hunter Biden asked a federal judge to dismiss his lawsuit against online provocateur Garrett Ziegler because he “does not have the financial resources to continue litigating this case.”
Amid lagging sales of his art and his memoir, the younger Biden remains “several million dollars” in debt after fighting multiple federal criminal cases, claiming in an affidavit that he only sold one painting for $36,000 since late 2023, after selling 27 paintings in the previous couple of years at an average price of nearly $55,000.
“Given the positive feedback and reviews of my artwork and memoir, I was expecting to obtain paid speaking engagements and paid appearances, but that has not happened,” Hunter Biden wrote Wednesday.
He said that his “lack of financial resources has been exacerbated by the fires in the Pacific Palisades in early January, which has rendered my rental house unlivable for an extended period of time and, like many others in that situation, I am having difficulty in finding a new permanent place to live.”
A person close to Hunter Biden told ABC News that his rental did not burn down, but that immense damage to the surrounding properties had limited his access to his residence.
The affidavit chronicles a series of hardships since his father’s departure from office. Weeks before Trump’s inauguration, then-President Biden pardoned his son shortly before two federal judges were scheduled to sentence him for a pair of criminal convictions in Delaware and California, for which he faced the possibility of substantial prison time.
Hunter Biden has acknowledged taking out millions of dollars in loans from Kevin Morris, a Hollywood attorney who largely bankrolled Hunter Biden’s legal defense over the past five years. In congressional testimony last year, Morris said he expected Hunter Biden to repay those loans beginning in 2025, though it was not clear from the affidavit whether those loan repayments have begun.
Hunter Biden and his legal team are evaluating whether to continue litigating a handful of other lawsuits he filed in recent years against purveyors of his infamous laptop on a “case by case basis,” Hunter Biden wrote in Wednesday’s filing. Ziegler did not immediately respond to a request for comment from ABC News.
One of those suits targets Patrick Byrne, the founder of Overstock.com and an avid supporter of President Trump. Hunter Biden sued Byrne in late 2023 for defamation for falsely accused Hunter Biden of trying to bribe Iran while his father was president — a claim that Hunter Biden said has subjected him to “harassment, intimidation, and harm.” Byrne has fought the defamation claim in court.
The trail in the case has been repeatedly delayed amid a protracted dispute over depositions from Byrne and an FBI agent that has thrown a wrench into the proceedings.
Byrne’s attorneys claim in court papers that Byrne fled to Dubai after he was told by U.S. officials “that the Venezuelan government has a $25,000,000 bounty on his head,” and said he preferred a deposition over Zoom “out of concern for his personal safety.” The parties ultimately agreed to a remote deposition in December that was expected to span seven hours over the course of three days, though it was unclear from the court docket when exactly the deposition occurred.
In court filings as part of that case, Hunter Biden has echoed his claims of financial hardship. He claimed that because of Byrne’s defamatory statements, he has suffered “lost economic opportunities” to the tune of nearly half a million dollars, citing lost memoir sales, lost art sales, and lost speaking opportunities.
Hunter Biden’s legal team has also subpoenaed the FBI, demanding testimony and documents from an agent whom Byrne claimed on social media could corroborate Byrne’s allegations against the younger Biden. But the FBI has so far rebuffed those efforts, and on Monday the Justice Department filed a motion in federal court in Washington, D.C., urging a federal judge there to quash the subpoena.
Meanwhile, Hunter Biden remains squarely on the minds of Trump and his loyalists in Congress. As one of his first acts in office, Trump signed an executive order revoking security clearances for 51 former intelligence officials who signed a letter asserting that the emergence of data from Hunter Biden’s laptop in the weeks leading up to the 2020 election bore similarities to prior Russian misinformation operations.
During a heated Oval Office confrontation between Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy last week, Trump repeatedly invoked Hunter Biden’s name as part of a lengthy diatribe about the Russia investigation led by Robert Mueller:
And on Tuesday, two top Republican lawmakers invited IRS whistleblowers who revealed details of Hunter Biden’s tax filings as guests at Trump’s Joint Address to Congress.
The person close to Hunter Biden told ABC News that the former president’s son will continue pursuing his art career and plans to devote himself to initiatives meant to help people struggling with addiction. And despite the sentiments in his affidavit, Hunter Biden remains in “a good place to rebuild his life,” the person said.
(NEW YORK) — A woman’s ex-boyfriend is in police custody after she was found dead in a suitcase on Thursday in Yonkers, New York, law enforcement sources said.
Pamela Alcantara, 26, was found dead in a marshy area by the side of Saw Mill River Parkway after going missing over the weekend, according to law enforcement sources.
The woman was pronounced dead at the scene, the NYPD said.
While her 46-year-old ex-boyfriend remains in custody, no one has been charged yet in her death. He is not cooperating with police, sources said.
The couple had been dating for three years before she recently broke it off, her family told New York ABC station WABC.
Alcantara lived with the man in her Bronx apartment. Detectives were looking to talk to him this week in connection to her disappearance, according to sources.
Her ex-boyfriend’s license plate pinged near the location the body was found at 9:50 a.m. on Thursday, according to WABC.
The NYPD searched an area along the roadway where his vehicle stopped and a drone spotted the red suitcase containing her body in the water, according to law enforcement sources.
The man was taken into custody soon after. He initially told detectives Alcantara left her apartment in a hurry, wearing pajamas and carrying the red suitcase, sources sad. Evidence recovered by detectives later revealed that was not accurate, and he requested a lawyer, according to sources.
The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner will determine the cause of death, according to the NYPD.Alcantara was reported missing on Sunday after she did not show up to church. The circumstances surrounding her death remain under investigation, according to law enforcement sources.
Alcantara was last seen on surveillance video early Sunday at her residence, according to the NYPD.
ABC News’ CeFaan Kim, Mark Crudele and Omar Rodriguez contributed to this report.
(MEMPHIS, TN) — The gatekeepers of Elvis Presley’s estate are trying to recover a potential trove of records and memorabilia left behind by the King of Rock and Roll, according to a lawsuit filed in California.
The lawsuit, filed just before 6 p.m. on Dec. 24, is a fitting coda to a year that saw Presley’s iconic Memphis home nearly auctioned off as part of what federal authorities now call an attempt to defraud both Presley’s family and Elvis Presley Enterprises.
Now, the operators of Graceland allege “irreplaceable” items they bought more than three decades ago from Presley’s longtime manager, Col. Tom Parker, have fallen into the hands of people who have no right to them and are now trying to sell them in an online auction.
“It is now clear that some of the material that the parties to the Parker Acquisition intended to be transferred to [Elvis Presley Enterprises], never was,” the lawsuit claims. Despite “clear and repeated demands” that the defendants stop hawking what was not theirs to sell, those demands were “ignored,” according to the filing.
At issue is a collection that allegedly includes everything from contracts and agreements signed by Presley, to a telegram from associates congratulating Elvis and his then-wife Priscilla on the birth of their daughter, Lisa Marie. Elvis Presley Enterprises contends the cache of memorabilia is valued at upwards of $2 million, though the “unique” artifacts are “priceless.”
The items were listed on the website of GWS Auctions, a California company that boasts sales of “celebrity” items from the likes of Elvis, Marilyn Monroe and Johnny Cash. The Presley items listed in the lawsuit appeared as available online in mid-November under the heading “The Lost Collection of Elvis, Col. Tom Parker & More.” Elvis Presley Enterprises alleges the auctioneeing company advertised while knowing the sellers had no legal right to the items, which the company denies.
The origin of the dispute dates back to 1990, when Col. Parker, “known as a meticulous record keeper and a real pack rat who held onto everything,” directly sold EPE “perhaps the greatest collection of Elvis-related documents and memorabilia ever held by anyone other than Elvis himself,” the suit alleged, adding it is the “entire collection” as it pertained to “Elvis and Elvis related memorabilia, irrespective of where such material was located.”
EPE acquired the collection as part of its ongoing effort to catalogue, preserve and showcase artifacts connected to the life and career of one of rock and roll’s first global superstars. One of the company’s executives, Jack Soden, “had dealt with and known Col. Parker for many years” and said he “was acting with the authority of Elvis’s widow Priscilla Presley, was intent on acquiring from Parker every scrap of Elvis-related material Parker owned.”
The lawsuit alleges company leaders believed all the items covered in the agreement “had been collected,” only now to find otherwise. Some of those items “ended up in the possession” of one of Parker’s former longtime employees after Parker’s death in 1997, according to the filing.
Then in December 2021, the lawsuit says, the co-founder of GWS Auctions, Brigitte Kruse, reached out to both Priscilla Presley and Graceland’s chief archivist to tell them she knew that the employee had items that should be in EPE’s custody. Kruse allegedly even shared videos of her discussions with him acknowledging who owned what.
Kruse allegedly told Graceland’s archivist Angela Marchese “that she knew these materials were involved in ‘theft’ and rightfully belonged to EPE,” according to a signed declaration by Marchese obtained by ABC News.
When a Presley executive confronted the employee directly, he backtracked, saying it had all been “a misunderstanding,” and he only had “photocopies,” not originals, the suit says.
“Some of the very documents and memorabilia Kruse claimed [the employee] possessed have now been listed for sale,” the suit alleges, adding “it is apparent” how those items “made their way” to the auction house.
“Kruse listed the Property for sale despite knowing, as she made clear in her email to Marchese and contemporaneous conversations with Marchese, that Kruse knew these items to be stolen Property rightfully belonging to [EPE],” the suit said.
EPE sent a cease-and-desist letter to Kruse earlier this month.
In response, a lawyer for GWS said the company “denies any wrongdoing whatsoever,” and denies that the “characterizations of the communications between” Kruse and Marchese “are accurate or complete.” GWS also denied EPE’s property interest and said that they would “proceed with the auction,” according to the suit and appended exhibits.
In a statement to ABC News, Kruse pushed back on the allegations against her and her company, saying that the assertions are “unfounded and without merit.”
“EPE and Graceland’s assertions are unfounded and without merit. This is merely another attempt to discredit our founder and the company. Under no circumstances would we engage in the sale of “stolen” items, and this collection was sought after by auction houses globally,” Kruse said.
“The items in question successfully passed our auction house’s due diligence process and were subsequently offered for public sale. Furthermore, no police report has ever been filed by EPE/Graceland, and the owner has possessed this collection for several decades,” Kruse added.
As of Monday night, the auction site is still up, though bidding is closed.
The keepers of the Presley legacy say the decades-long story of Elvis is one of people trying to profit off of the King – and often at the expense of him and his family.
In May, Elvis’ idyllic Graceland retreat was mysteriously announced for auction by an unknown company calling itself “Naussany Investments,” which claimed that Lisa Marie used Graceland as collateral to take out a $3.8 million loan and had not repaid it.
The ensuing investigation stretched all the way from Memphis to Florida, where the notary whose fake seal was used for the alleged fraud spoke up — and Presley’s granddaughter countersued, stopping a possible sale. In August, the alleged perpetrator behind that alleged fraud was arrested in the Ozarks: Lisa Findley was apprehended on Aug. 16, the 47th anniversary of Elvis’ death. Federal prosecutors charged the Missouri woman with mail fraud and aggravated identity theft. The case is still pending, and Findley is last listed in custody in Tennessee.
“People have been trying to take from Elvis since Elvis was Elvis,” Joel Weinshanker, managing partner of Elvis Presley Enterprises, told ABC News this fall. “Elvis was a human being. He was a really good human being,” he said. “Pick on somebody else. Have a heart, have a conscience. And even if you don’t have a heart or have a conscience — know that you won’t get away with it.”
