Rain expected to return to the Pacific Northwest after short break
ABC News
(NEW YORK) — Another atmospheric river is forecast to pound the Pacific Northwest with several inches of rain on Monday and Tuesday just after a short break in the rain.
Most river levels in Washington and Oregon are now beginning to fall and forecast to remain below major flood stage in the next few days.
A break in heavy rain is forecast on Saturday for Washington and Oregon, but rain will be back on Sunday with the heaviest falling Monday and Tuesday.
Some rivers are forecast to rise again on Wednesday due to this next atmospheric river event. There is no end in sight for this pattern — this is a classic La Nina pattern, and this is a La Nina winter.
Some models are forecasting another 5 to 10 inches of rain in the next seven days for the Pacific Northwest.
Eastern arctic blast Snow and cold alerts are issued for 27 states from Montana to New Jersey and down to Georgia.
A fast-moving storm system is expected to drop several inches of snow on Saturday into the night from the Midwest to the Northeast.
Snow will fall mostly in the Midwest from Iowa to Ohio and Indiana on Saturday, missing Chicago but hitting hard Indianapolis and Cincinnati where a winter storm warning has been issued.
Parts of the Midwest could see up to a half a foot of snow.
Later Saturday, in the early evening, snow and rain will arrive to I-95 corridor.
Rain will change to snow in New York City and Philadelphia late Saturday with heaviest snow falling after midnight and into the early morning hours.
A winter weather advisory has been issued for Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and New York City for 1 to as much as 4 inches of snow.
If New York City and Philadelphia get at least 2 inches of snow, this would be the heaviest snow this early in the season since 2018.
Washington D.C. already saw snow this season, and is forecast to get 1 to 3 inches.
The snow is over by mid morning for the East Coast as the bitter cold takes over.
Extreme cold watches and warnings have been issued from the Dakotas all the way to Alabama.
In the Dakotas and Minnesota, the wind chill could drop as low as 45 below zero with actual temperature in the 20s below zero.
Even for Charleston, South Carolina, an extreme cold watch has been issued, where the wind chill could drop to 10 degrees.
(LOS ANGELES) — Jake Haro, the father of missing 7-month-old Emmanuel Haro, was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison after he pleaded guilty to the baby’s murder.
He was also sentenced to over six years in prison for other offenses, to run consecutively.
He is ineligible for probation because he was already on probation for severely abusing another child, the judge said while handing down the sentence on Monday.
His sentence also included more than $20,000 in fines and court fees.
Prior to the sentencing, the defense objected to imposing any court fees or fines, saying Jake Haro is indigent and a public defender client.
In response, the prosecutor said the defendant “deserves no leniency.”
Last month, the 32-year-old father pleaded guilty to all charges, including second-degree murder, assault causing bodily harm to a child resulting in the death of said child and filing a false police report, according to court records.
The father, who previously pleaded not guilty with his wife Rebecca Haro in September, cried in court when he was giving his plea on Oct. 16.
Emmanuel’s mother, 41-year-old Rebecca Haro, pleaded not guilty to an amended complaint in October, with a preliminary hearing scheduled for Monday. It remains unclear what is in the complaint, according to Los Angeles ABC station KABC.
The baby’s maternal grandmother, Mary Beushausen, addressed the court during Jake Haro’s sentencing on Monday.
“He destroyed my family,” she told the court. “Everybody in my family, all my children are destroyed by this.”
“He changed my daughter. We don’t know who she is,” she continued. “He kept my daughter away. I don’t know what he did or how he changed my daughter’s life, but she was never that same person after she went to live with him.”
She asked for a lengthy sentence, saying, “I don’t want to give him another chance.”
Officials have not announced whether they have located the baby’s remains.
The 7-month-old was reported missing on Aug. 14 at approximately 7:47 p.m. local time after his mother “reported being attacked outside a retail store on Yucaipa Boulevard,” the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement on Aug. 15.
When he was reported missing, Emmanuel’s mother told officials that “while she stood outside her vehicle, changing the child’s diaper, she was physically assaulted by an unknown male and rendered unconscious,” authorities said.
Authorities later said the mother was “confronted with inconsistencies in her initial statement,” leading officials to say they were “unable to rule out foul play in the disappearance of Emmanuel.”
Jake and Rebecca Haro were arrested and charged for the child’s murder on Aug. 22, officials said.
In August, officials announced they had a “pretty strong indication” on the location of the child’s remains and said they believed Emmanuel was “severely abused over a period of time.”
Jake Haro was even seen searching a field near the 60 freeway in Moreno Valley in late August with law enforcement, but no remains were apparently found.
“The filing in this case reflects our belief that baby Emmanuel was abused over time and that eventually because of that abuse, he succumbed to those injuries,” Riverside County District Attorney Michael Hestrin said during a press conference in August.
Hestrin said Jake Haro, who he described as an “experienced child abuser,” “should have gone to prison” due to previously abusing another child he had with his ex-wife in 2018, but a judge at the time granted him probation — a ruling Hestrin called an “outrageous error in judgment.” Authorities said the child in that case has been left bedridden.
“If that judge had done his job as he should have done, Emmanuel would be alive today,” Hestrin said in August.
Former Olympic snowboarder and Canadian national Ryan Wedding is seen in photos released by the FBI. FBI
(WASHINGTON) — The Justice Department unsealed new charges against a former Canadian Olympian snowboarder who is allegedly the “largest distributor of cocaine” in Canada, according to Attorney General Pam Bondi.
The charges allege Ryan Wedding ordered the killing of a witness who was set to testify against him in a U.S. federal trial in a drug trafficking case, prosecutors said.
“Wedding collaborates closely with the Sinaloa Cartel, a foreign terrorist organization, to flood not only American but also Canadian communities with cocaine coming from Colombia,” Bondi said at a press briefing Wednesday. “His organization is responsible for importing approximately six metric tons of cocaine a year into Los Angeles via semi trucks from Mexico.”
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(CHIPPEWA FALLS, Wis.) — From the deck his father built by hand, Eric Halfen watches strangers comb through the artifacts of his life. The auctioneer’s chant ricochets across the yard, where everything from board games and mugs to the family’s home itself is being sold.
Eric grew up in this home in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. His father, Terry Halfen, poured the cement for the foundation and laid the bricks one by one. When Terry was diagnosed with cancer in late 2023, Eric moved back home to care for him.
Terry was being treated at the nearby hospital, Sacred Heart in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, but it shut down with little notice last year, terminating almost 1400 employees. The city demanded the state open an investigation and called the closure “abrupt and devastating.” But the state never opened one.
“It caused doctors to leave the area,” Eric said. “They didn’t have the proper doctor to do the procedures.”
So every day, Eric drove hours to a hospital farther away — sometimes six hours in a day for multiple trips — to sit by his father’s bedside. This past June, the family finally brought Terry back home. Just 48 hours later, he was gone.
Eric said that had Sacred Heart stayed open, “it would’ve been a lot less traumatic on him.”
While Eric can’t say for certain that it would have helped his father live longer, doctors and paramedics tell ABC News they’ve already seen conditions worsen in irreversible ways — even deaths — because of the region’s shuttered hospitals.
On the same day Sacred Heart closed its doors in Eau Claire, another hospital — St. Joseph’s in Chippewa Falls — also shuttered in neighboring Chippewa Falls because of financial difficulties.
There were only four major hospitals in the region. Now half are gone, sending shockwaves through the community and the rural areas they served.
A nationwide crisis
What’s happened to this part of western Wisconsin is part of a much larger crisis. Across the country, hospitals are vanishing, and a new wave of Medicaid cuts could accelerate the collapse.
President Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill slashes nearly $1 trillion in Medicaid funding over the next decade. The administration says this cuts wasteful spending and will create a $50 billion fund for rural hospitals. But many health experts say that’s not nearly enough.
Already, nearly 100 rural hospitals have closed or eliminated inpatient services in the last decade, threatening health care access to some of the more than 16 million people living in rural communities who rely on Medicaid.
While the full impact of Medicaid cuts could take years to unfold, doctors say the system is already buckling. Many rural hospitals are already operating on razor-thin or negative margins, and they see these looming Medicaid changes could push them over the edge.
A representative for Hospital Sisters Health System, the owner of those two shuttered hospitals in Eau Claire and Chippewa Falls, said in a statement to ABC News that closing them down “was one of the most difficult and heartbreaking decisions.”
“These hospitals served their communities for more than a century and we recognize the personal impact this has had on the patients, colleagues and families who relied on us for care,” the statement continued, citing challenges including shrinking margins, workforce shortages, a growing number of patients without commercial insurance coverage, declining population and the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Closures that are occurring across the country should be a wake-up call about the crisis rural health care providers are facing,” the representative said.
Impacted care
Dr. Brady Didion, a family physician who used to practice at St. Joseph’s, remembers the cascading fallout after the hospitals closed.
“People missing out on care, people having delayed care, diagnoses weren’t made. Appropriate imaging lab and surgical services weren’t made,” he said. “A lot of people and families suffered.”
Didion later left the area and now practices at a rural hospital 50 miles away, where he still feels the impact. The closure of Sacred Heart and St. Joseph’s means fewer places to transfer critical patients, with the remaining hospitals past capacity.
“I know that we have had delays in care such that it resulted in someone getting irreversible progression in their disease state or even dying,” Didion said. “I’ve literally been up all night on the phone trying to call to get someone care who needed it in our small hospital because these places were full.”
Day to day, that means keeping sicker patients longer, leveling with families about wait times and planning transfers that can take hours instead of minutes.
“It’s not just inconvenience — it is really loss of time, which in a critical disease state is super important and it can be a loss of life,” he said.
Toll on patients and staff
When a hospital closes, the rest of the community is left to pick up the pieces — including emergency services.
Chippewa Falls Fire Station Chief Jason Thom told ABC News his crews no longer have the option of stabilizing critical patients at St. Joseph’s Hospital, which once sat just down the street.
Now, he says, transport times often stretch an hour, or they rely on helicopters, but those aren’t always available.
The longer rides, Thom adds, take a toll on both patients and staff.
“It could be detrimental to the patient because we can do a lot of things; however, we can’t do everything. If they require a surgical procedure or in the event of somebody having a heart attack… we can maintain and get them there as quickly as we can. At that point, hope for the best that those patients are going to survive,” Thom said.
Inside the remaining hospitals, the spillover is visible.
“One of the local hospitals — the ambulance garage, it has two bays in it, which used to be for the ambulances to pull in and unload patients — is now set up basically as a triage area with beds in it for the overflow,” Thom says. “Waiting rooms are typically full. Patient rooms are full.”
The paramedics at the station say they are seeing patients wait longer to call 911 — and by the time they do, they’re often much sicker. The longer drives, combined with overwhelmed emergency departments, compound the delay.
Many residents can’t get regular doctor appointments now, and some hesitate to seek help because they can’t afford a ride home from a hospital that’s farther away.
“They’re more sick when we see them,” Brooke Sommerfeld, a paramedic at the station, told ABC News. “And so you’re kind of watching them… decompose almost in the back of the ambulance when you have them,” she said.
“It’s overwhelming,” she adds. “We know what we’re doing; we are trained in our skills, but at the same time, when you know… ultimately what they need is somewhere an hour away… it makes us feel almost helpless.”
