Pope Francis continues to improve in the hospital, Vatican says
Flowers and candles are laid at the statue of John Paul II outside the Gemelli hospital where Pope Francis is hospitalized with pneumonia, in Rome on February 27, 2025. (Photo by DIMITAR DILKOFF/AFP via Getty Images)
(LONDON and oROME) — Pope Francis’ condition continued to improve on Thursday, with the pontiff alternating between high-flow oxygen therapy and ventimask, according to the Vatican.
“Given the complexity of his clinical condition, further days of clinical stability are needed to clarify the prognosis,” the Vatican said.
The pope dedicated the morning to respiratory physiotherapy and rest. After a session of physiotherapy, in the afternoon, he gathered in prayer in the chapel of the private apartment on the 10th floor, receiving the Eucharist. The pope then dedicated himself to work activities, according to the Vatican.
The Vatican said that the pope “slept well during the night and is now resting” peacefully on Thursday morning as the pontiff begins his 14th day in hospital.
Pope Francis’ condition improved slightly on Wednesday, though officials said they “remain guarded” over his prognosis, according to the Vatican.
The slight renal insufficiency the pope had in recent days has subsided and a Tuesday CAT scan of the chest showed a normal evolution of the pulmonary inflammatory picture.
The blood chemistry and blood cell count tests carried out Wednesday have confirmed the pope’s improvement, but he remains on high-flow oxygen therapy and did not have any asthmatic-like respiratory crises.
The pontiff, who has led the Catholic Church since 2013, was diagnosed with pneumonia last week, according to the Vatican.
(LONDON) — Mouaz Moustafa, the head of the U.S.-based Syrian advocacy organization, the Syrian Emergency Task Force, told ABC News Tuesday there are believed to be well over 100,000 bodies in a “massive” grave discovered at a site 25 miles north of Damascus.
Opposition groups and rescue workers are still uncovering evidence of the alleged human rights abuses committed by toppled President Bashar Assad’s regime over his 24 years in power — and over 50 years of Assad family rule.
The overthrown president was in power from 2000 to his ousting on Dec. 8. His sudden fall in the face of a surprise, multi-pronged rebel offensive marked the end of a 14-year conflict between Damascus and a collection of anti-government forces.
Now, Syria’s rebel-led transitional government, NGOs and rescue workers are uncovering Assad’s vast network of prisons and suspected mass burial sites, where more than 100,000 people may have gone missing since 2011.
SETF believes it has identified three other “mass graves” so far, as well as two “smaller ones,” Moustafa said.
Moustafa told ABC News from the Syrian capital that the site in al-Qutayfah close to Damascus consists of “massive graves” where “lines or trenches were 6 to 7 meters deep, 3 to 4 meters wide and 50 to 150 meters long.”
“In my conversation with the gravediggers, they told me that four tractor trailer trucks each carrying over 150 bodies came twice a week from 2012 until 2018,” Moustafa said.
“The bulldozer excavator driver described how intelligence officers forced workers to use the bulldozer to flatten and compress the bodies to make them fit and easier to bury before digging the next line or trench,” he added.
The graves contained men, women, children and the elderly “tortured to death” by Assad’s regime, Moustafa said.
The Qutayfah burial site is in an area that was under military control, with the road in closed to civilian traffic.
Large villas nearby housed Iranian and Iraqi allies of the Assad regime, which became increasingly reliant on foreign partners in Moscow, Tehran and Baghdad to retain control as the brutal civil war wore on.
Syria’s Air Force Intelligence — considered the most powerful branch of Assad’s military — also maintained a presence nearby.
At the site, workers clad in white overalls piled large black plastic bags of human bones onto a truck. Some of the bags had Farsi — the official language of Iran — written on them.
Locals told ABC News they saw bags being dumped at the site in the days leading up to Assad’s fall, as rebels surged towards the capital from Idlib and Aleppo in the north and Daraa in the south.
In his first statement since fleeing Syria, Assad on Monday blamed a “terrorist onslaught” for the stunning collapse of his regime.
Assad made no comment on the longstanding human rights abuse allegations, abuses that the opposition and key Western governments say intensified after the outbreak of civil war in 2011.
The fall of his regime saw jubilant fighters and residents emptying Assad’s infamous prisons. More than 100,000 people are still believed to be missing, disappeared into Damascus’ fearsome security apparatus.
The leader of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham rebel group, which led the surprise offensive striking out of Idlib southwards towards Damascus, vowed that the transitional government would hold to account those implicated in Assad’s human rights abuses.
Ahmed al-Sharaa — also known by his nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Jolani — said shortly after the fall of Damascus, “We will not hesitate to hold accountable the criminals, murderers, security and army officers involved in torturing the Syrian people.”
(TORONTO) — New video has emerged on Tuesday of the chaotic moments after Delta flight 4819 flipped over on the runway at Toronto Pearson International Airport.
In the video — obtained exclusively by ABC News — passengers can be seen hanging upside down in the cabin, being held into their seats dangling only by their seatbelts.
There were no warning signs for the passengers aboard Delta Flight 4819, as the 76 passengers and four crew approached a snowy Toronto Pearson International Airport on Monday afternoon, according to passenger John Nelson.
“The winds were whipping pretty hard and the runways were snow covered,” Nelson recounted to ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos. “There was no warning.”
As the plane’s wheels touched the tarmac, Nelson described hitting the runway “extremely hard,” the aircraft popping slightly into the air, and the entire plane learning to the left.
“It was just incredibly fast. There was a giant firewall down the side. I could actually feel the heat through the glass,” Nelson recounted.“Then we were going sideways. I’m not even sure how many times we tumbled, but we ended upside down,” he said.
When the plane finally came to a stop, Nelson recounted that the cabin was suddenly quiet before the 80 people onboard — most of whom were hanging upside down bats in the cabin – attempted to “make a sense of what just had happened.”
“We released the seat belts. I kind of fell to the floor, which is now the ceiling, and helped the lady next to me get out of her seat belt,” Nelson said.
According to Nelson, the flight attendants immediately took control, directing passengers to exit the cabin and opening the emergency doors.
“You heard the flight attendants yelling, ‘Open the door. Everybody, take your stuff and get out now,’” he recounted. “We all worked together and got out of there as quickly as we could.”
According to Nelson, the scene was surprisingly “calm” as passengers assisted each other to crawl out of the plane and find their phones.
When he made it out the plane, Nelson took out his phone to capture the moment as every passenger and crew on the flight made it out alive.
“We’re in Toronto. We just landed. Our plane crashed. It’s upside down. Fire Department is on site. Upside down. Most people appear to be okay, we’re all getting off,” he said while shooting the video, which has been seen by millions over the last 24 hours.
“What was going through your mind? Could you believe you’d survived a crash?” Stephanopoulos asked.
“No, it’s something that I don’t think you can ever even really prepare for,” Nelson recounted. “As we were tumbling … I tried to just keep from hitting my head right, and just trying to protect myself and my body. I was trying to, just to do the best to make it through it.”
Peter Koukov, who was also able to shoot video as he crawled out, said he didn’t know something was wrong until they hit the ground.
“We hit the ground and we were sideways, and then we were hanging upside down like bats,” Koukov told ABC News. “It all happened pretty, pretty fast. The plane was upside down, obviously, some people were kind of hanging and needed some help being helped down.”
The flight crew can be seen standing on the ceiling helping passengers scramble to escape in the video.
“The one minute you’re landing and kind of waiting to see your friends and your people and the next minute you’re physically upside down and just really turned around,” Pete Carlson, a passenger on the plane, told ABC News. “It sounded, I mean, it was just cement and metal, you know.”
The Delta regional jet, a CRJ 900 aircraft operated by Endeavor Air, departed from Minneapolis on Monday afternoon, heading to Toronto with 76 passengers and four crew landing just after 2 p.m. local time.
“All of a sudden the fire trucks and helicopters, you know, pushed out on a trolley and thought there was something wrong,” said Ron James, an eyewitness who saw the smoke right before he was supposed to board his flight at a nearby terminal. “Then we were going to get on the plane and they said no you’re not going anywhere.”
At least 18 passengers were taken to hospitals, airport officials said in an update Monday evening.
Peel Regional Paramedic Services said none of the injuries were considered to be life-threatening.
Three people suffered critical injuries — one child, a man in his 60s and a woman in her 40s — according to Ornge, which provides medical transport. The child was transported to the Hospital for Sick Children and is listed in good condition, the hospital said Monday evening.
Among the others, 12 people have mild injuries, Peel Regional Paramedics Services said.
“Airport emergency workers mounted a textbook response, reaching the site within minutes,” said Deborah Flint, president and CEO of Toronto Pearson International Airport. “This outcome is in due part to their heroic work, and I thank them profusely.”
At the time of landing, winds were gusting up to 40 mph but the cause of the crash is still under investigation.
“This is an active investigation. It’s very early on,” said Todd Aitken, fire chief at Toronto Pearson International Airport. “It’s really important that we do not speculate. What we can say is the runway was dry and there was no crosswind conditions.”
(NEW YORK) — It may have been a frigid January for much of the U.S., but that didn’t stop the planet from breaking another temperature record.
Earth just experienced its warmest January on record, according to data analyzed by the Copernicus Climate Change Service.
Despite a record-breaking snowfall in the south, persistent cold temperatures across the northeast and an emerging La Niña event in the Pacific Ocean, which is supposed to cool things down, January 2025 was still warmer than any previous start to the year in the organization’s dataset going back to 1940.
The average surface air temperature was 55.81 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s 1.42 degrees Fahrenheit above the 1991-2020 average for the month of January. It also makes the global average temperature over the past 12 months 2.9 degrees Fahrenheit above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial average.
For context, the Paris Agreement — which President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from last month — set 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit as a ceiling to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
Similarly, global daily sea surface temperatures across most of the world’s oceans remain well above average and registered as the second-highest January value on record, just behind 2024.
Last month’s temperature was unprecedented compared to similar global climate cycles in the past, where temperatures dropped with El Niño long gone and La Niña conditions in place.
The increase’s magnitude and persistence have shocked many climate experts, leaving them somewhat puzzled about what else could be behind the remarkable rise.
In addition to human-amplified climate change and natural global climate cycles, a growing amount of research suggests that a decrease in atmospheric aerosols could be a significant contributor to the rapid warming.
Atmospheric aerosols are tiny particles that reflect sunlight into space and reduce global temperatures. However, their concentrations have greatly diminished due to international efforts to reduce air pollution in recent decades. Now, more sunlight reaches the Earth’s surface, creating a heating effect.
For decades, we’ve been removing aerosols from our air without fully realizing the potential cascading effects of these actions.
To help solve this puzzle, climate scientists are eagerly awaiting the first batch of operational data from NASA’s newest Earth-observing satellite, PACE (Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem), launched nearly a year ago. This data will provide more insight into how various atmospheric aerosols behave and interact with each other.
