Stowaway discovered on board flight from New York to Paris
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(NEW YORK) — Amid the Thanksgiving travel rush, a stowaway was discovered Tuesday night onboard a Delta Air Lines flight out of JFK Airport in New York City headed to Paris.
Authorities said the stowaway was discovered on board Delta Flight 264 from JFK to Paris and removed after the plane landed at Charles de Gaulle Airport.
The person who boarded the flight bypassed the document check podium and a gate agent, but was fully screened at a security checkpoint at JFK, a TSA spokesperson told ABC News. That means they weren’t carrying any prohibited items and did not pose a security risk, TSA said.
It’s unclear how the person got around the document check podium.
The FBI is aware of the incident.
No other details about the person who boarded the flight have been made public.
A representative for Delta said the airline is “conducting an exhaustive investigation of what may have occurred and will work collaboratively with other aviation stakeholders and law enforcement to that end.”
A video taken by another passenger on board the flight shows the flight attendants walking down the aisle as the pilot’s voice on the intercom says, “We are just waiting for the police to come on board … They directed us to keep everyone on the plane until they sort out the extra passenger.”
United States Geological Survey/Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
(HAWAII ISLAND, Hawaii) — The National Park Service is cautioning people to heed warnings and safety precautions while watching volcanic activity since the latest eruption of Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano, one of the most active in the world.
Kilauea began erupting on Monday, marking its third eruption of 2024 and its eighth since 2020, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Since then, there was another distinctive eruptive episode on Wednesday, and the eruption resumed Thursday evening, the agency said.
The volcanic activity has drawn visitors to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park on the Big Island to watch the lava glow, with one “shocking scene” prompting the National Park Service to issue a safety advisory.
A toddler wandered off from his family Wednesday night into a closed area at Kilauea Overlook and “in a split second, ran straight toward the 400-foot cliff edge,” the National Park Service said in a news release on Thursday.
“His mother, screaming, managed to grab him in the nick of time just a foot or so away from a fatal fall,” the agency said. “Disaster was averted, and the shaken family departed.”
Park officials are now reminding visitors to remain on trails, stay out of closed areas and keep their children close, especially those watching Kilauea along the Crater Rim Trail.
“The hazards that coincide with an eruption are dangerous, and we have safety measures in place including closed areas, barriers, closure signs, and traffic management,” Park Superintendent Rhonda Loh said in a statement. “Your safety is our utmost concern, but we rely on everyone to recreate responsibility. National parks showcase nature’s splendor but they are not playgrounds.”
Kilauea’s eruptive activity could continue to pause and resume in the coming days or weeks, the U.S. Geological Survey said.
“The eruption could restart at any time, and toxic gas emissions are still high,” the National Park Service said.
Visitors to the park are advised to check the air quality before and during their trip.
(NEW YORK) — When the weather turns cold, meteorologists and climate scientists almost always get a variation of the same question, “If we had global warming, I don’t think I’d have a jacket on.”
That’s because climate and weather are two terms that go hand in hand but are not the same thing.
ABC News Chief Meteorologist and Chief Climate Correspondent Managing Editor of the ABC News Climate Unit Ginger Zee has heard questions like this for years.
“How can we have sweatshirt weather, or even the first snow, when the whole globe is getting warmer and warmer?”
It’s the same for Marshall Shepherd, director of the Atmospheric Sciences Program at the University of Georgia and former president of the American Meteorological Society, who will get questions like, “What are you all talking about — that the climate is changing? It’s snowing right now!”
Weather is the temperature and conditions on one particular day, Zee said — the short-term state of the atmosphere and what it brings.
“If you walk outside and almost every day it’s hot, or almost every day it’s dry, that’s called climate,” Zee said.
People also often refer to climate as “average weather,” which is another misnomer, Shepherd said.
“That’s actually not correct,” he said. “Climate is really more the full statistics of weather, not just average. It’s the highs and lows. It’s frequency. It’s max and min. It’s a lot of things.”
The seasons are governed by the Earth’s tilted axis and its path of orbit around the sun, Shepherd said. The tilted axis means there are times when some parts of the planet are getting less energy from the sun — the main distinction between summer and winter.
Just because the climate is warming overall doesn’t mean there won’t be big swings in either direction, including cold fronts and snow storms in typically warm places or drought conditions in typically wet places and torrential downpours in normally dry climates, the experts said.
“As the globe warms, we are going to have cold and, of course, snow,” Zee said. “Because if that all abruptly stopped, it would be really scary.”
Scientists love their metaphors, especially when it comes to comparing the two terms.
Weather is your mood, and climate is your personality, according to Shepherd and Zee.
Weather and climate can be looked at as the dog and the dog walker, Yarrow Axford, a professor in geological sciences at Northwestern University, told ABC News. The dog can sniff around and tug at its leash, but the dog walker is the one setting the pace and direction.
But that old adage often no longer applies because the climate is changing so quickly, Axford said.
On a long-term scale, the number of overall cold events is declining. The likelihood of extremely cold days has decreased due to human-caused global warming, a 2016 paper published in The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine authored by Shepherd found. The same paper also found an increase in the number of extremely hot days.
The lack of cold events could cause people to pay more attention when they happen, the experts said.
Geography also makes a difference, Zee said. When scientists say the climate is warming, they mean for the entire planet — not in a particular city, state or county, Zee said.
“The point is that climate — all weather days all over the world — on average, is getting warmer,” Zee said.
Shepherd continued, “We’ve got to really expand the average person’s understanding of what climate actually is.”
(DELPHI, Ind.) — The small town of Delphi, Indiana, is reeling with grief and shock after the horrific double murder of two teenage girls in broad daylight, forever changing the lives of those who knew and loved the victims.
Now, seven years later, one man is standing trial in the murders.
The story of the Delphi murders begins and ends on the Monon High Bridge Trail. It was here that police believe Abigail “Abby” Williams, 13, and Liberty “Libby” German, 14, spent the last moments of their lives.
On Feb. 13, 2017, the two best friends went missing and were found dead the following day. Tens of thousands of tips were received, dozens of people were interviewed, and a crucial piece of evidence emerged: a video recorded by one of the girls that pointed directly to a suspect.
“For a long time, the question was, ‘Who is Bridge Guy?'” ABC News’ Janel Klein said. “A lot of people in town thought they recognized him.”
The case went cold but five years after the murders, in 2022, police arrested Richard Allen, who worked at a local CVS store in Delphi. He was charged with two counts of murder and two counts of murder while kidnapping in the deaths of Abby and Libby.
Today, the question is whether Allen is the man on the bridge as he stands trial.
Allen has pleaded not guilty to the murders, but the prosecution claims they have more than 60 confessions from him admitting to killing the girls. He allegedly confessed to wardens, inmates, family members, and almost anyone who would listen within the prison and jailhouse setting.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like that before,” Tracy Walder, a former FBI special agent, said. “They typically confess one time, right? They don’t do so over and over and over.”
A key moment in the trial was when audio recordings of Allen calling his wife and mother from jail were played. The audio reveals Allen admitted to committing the crime, and asking his wife Kathy, “Do you still love me?”
Despite the alleged confessions, Allen’s defense has called a list of experts as they try to poke holes in the state’s case.
Allen’s defense has sought to focus the jury’s attention on Allen’s mental health, and addressed the issue of him declining after being held in solitary confinement for months.
“We heard from his psychologist who testified as to what a decline he had and some of the behaviors that he displayed in prison were alarming. He was naked a lot,” Klein said. “He was rolling around on the floor. He was eating paper. He was drinking from his toilet. All of these things, they say, were proof that he was really suffering mentally and entering psychosis, including at the time when he was admitting to these crimes and making numerous confessions to his wife and mother.”
Another key point for the defense is that investigators found no DNA evidence at the scene linking Allen or anyone else to the crime.
In an unusual memorandum filed with the court which the judge ruled cannot be allowed into court, Allen’s team is alleging that the double crime was committed by a mysterious group they refer to as a white supremacist cult of Odinism.
“The defense from the beginning has been blaming the murders on Odinism, what they describe as a Nordic cult with ties to white supremacy,” ABC’s Alex Perez said.
“They believe (the cult) were carrying out some sort of ritual when they killed the girls,” Perez said. “And the defense attorneys in their memorandum pointing to certain things at the crime scene that they believe they say were signs the way branches were laid around the bodies of the two girls.”
Allen’s team said in the filing that the girls’ bodies were found in unusual positions with branches over them, and the defense argued that the branches resembled Pagan Runes.
Jefferson Calico, an associate professor at University of the Cumberlands in Kentucky, studied Pagan religions, including Odinism, and explained what this means.
“So runes are widely incorporated into Odinist culture as well,” Calico said. “So if there were runes in the crime scene, then that would be a reason to suspect pagan or Odinist involvement for sure. For instance, the sticks over the body, possibly a rune mark on a tree. It’s not convincing to me as someone who studied these religions, but it provides an interpretation of some of the details of the crime scene.”
But Calico also said that Odinists were not known to engage in human sacrificial rituals and added that, as believers in white supremacy, it would make no sense to kill two Caucasian girls.
The Delphi murder trials are continuing, and 12 jurors will decide Allen’s fate. If convicted, he faces 130 years in prison.
“Even once they arrested Richard Allen, there’s been so much doubt across the board as to whether he’s responsible,” Klein said. “There are many people attending the trial and weighing in on social media that will say there is no way he did this. Whether he’s convicted or not, I think there will always be that speculation in Delphi as to who really is responsible for this crime.”
