Summer scorcher: Dangerous heat to head to Northeast after slamming Midwest
(NEW YORK) — Extreme heat is gripping the Midwest before moving into the Northeast.
Chicago is in the center of an excessive heat warning that stretches north to Madison, Wisconsin, and south to Springfield, Illinois.
The heat index — what temperature it feels like with humidity — soared to a scorching 114 degrees in Chicago on Tuesday. Chicago’s actual temperature hit 98 degrees, breaking the city’s daily record of 97 degrees.
In Detroit, public school students were released three hours early on Tuesday due to the heat.
Next, the dangerous temperatures will move east.
On Wednesday, the heat index is forecast to climb to 104 degrees in Nashville, Tennessee; 100 degrees in Indianapolis; 105 in Philadelphia; and 103 in Washington, D.C.
D.C. may hit a new record-high actual temperature of 100 degrees.
By Thursday, the Northeast will cool down. But temperatures will stay in the 90s in the South as the week ends.
There are hundreds of deaths each year in the U.S. due to excessive heat, according to CDC WONDER, an online database, and scientists caution that the actual number of heat-related deaths is likely higher.
Last year marked the most heat-related deaths in the U.S. on record, according to JAMA, a peer-reviewed medical journal published by the American Medical Association.
Click here for tips on how to stay safe in the heat.
(NEW YORK) — A day after former President Donald Trump asked a federal appeals court for a stay that would delay the sentencing in his New York hush money case, the Manhattan district attorney’s office on Thursday asked the court to reject Trump’s request.
Trump’s longshot attempt to delay his Sept. 18 sentencing came a day after District Judge Alvin Hellerstein denied Trump’s bid to move his criminal case to federal court.
In a 28-page filing late Wednesday, Trump’s attorneys asked the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit to stay Judge Hellerstein’s order — a move that would delay Trump’s criminal case, including his sentencing, from moving forward.
“Absent the requested stay, President Trump and the American people will suffer irreparable harm,” defense attorneys Emil Bove and Todd Blanche wrote.
In their filing on Thursday, prosecutors said there’s no reason for the appellate court to get involved.
“For one thing, state court is already considering defendant’s request to defer a ruling on his post-trial motion and to delay the sentencing hearing until after the election,” Steven Wu, chief of appeals in the Manhattan DA’s office, said in a letter filed to the court.
Trump’s lawyers claimed in the appeal that the former president’s case belongs in federal court because the allegations and evidence in the case relate to Trump’s official acts as president — an argument defense attorneys said was bolstered by the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on presidential immunity.
In their filing, Trump’s attorneys emphasized the “irreparable harm” of allowing the sentencing to proceed because it could result in Trump’s “unconstitutional incarceration while the 2024 Presidential election is imminent.”
“Unlawfully incarcerating President Trump in the final weeks of the Presidential election, while early voting is ongoing, would irreparably harm the First Amendment rights of President Trump and voters located far beyond New York County,” defense attorneys wrote.
Trump was found guilty in May on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to a hush money payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels in order to boost his electoral prospects in the 2016 presidential election. He has said he will appeal the decision.
On Friday, a panel of judges on the same federal appeals court is set to consider Trump’s appeal of a 2023 civil judgment that found him liable for the sexual abuse of magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll and awarded her $5 million in damages.
(NEW YORK) — Former President Donald Trump has all but exhausted his efforts to eliminate the limited gag order in his criminal hush money case, after New York’s highest court on Thursday declined to consider his request to lift the order.
“Appeal dismissed without costs, by the Court sua sponte, upon the ground that no substantial constitutional question is directly involved,” New York’s Court of Appeals said in a brief order.
The former president had been seeking the freedom to publicly criticize anyone associated with the case.
In April, Judge Juan Merchan barred Trump from making public statements about jurors, court staff, and relatives of those involved in the case, after Trump repeatedly targeted Merchan’s daughter on social media.
Trump was found guilty in May on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to a hush money payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels in order to boost his electoral prospects in the 2016 presidential election. He has said he will appeal the decision.
Once the trial concluded, Judge Merchan relaxed the part of the gag order that prevented Trump from targeting members of the jury and witnesses in the case.
Sentencing in the case currently scheduled for Nov. 26, after Mercand last week agreed to Trump’s request to delay sentencing until after the presidential election.
(NEW YORK) — There was once a magma-filled ocean on the south pole of the moon, scientists recently discovered after analyzing lunar soil that revealed ancient information about the moon’s origin.
The study of soil taken from a less-studied region of the moon suggests the presence of remnants of a former ocean of magma, according to a study published Wednesday in Nature.
The researchers analyzed lunar soil extracted from high-latitude regions on the southern portion of the moon — taken as part of the Chandrayaan-3 mission when India’s Vikram lander module made a historic touchdown near the south pole of the moon in August 2023. The mission is the southern-most landing that has ever taken place on the moon — a difficult feat considering the lack of sunlight, which can create visibility and communication issues, Anil Bhardwaj, director of Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad and co-author of the study, told ABC News. Most lunar landings, especially human landings, have taken place in the equatorial or low-latitude regions.
The mission embarked the use of new technology — a particle access spectrometer — an instrument aboard the rover that was able to make observations and collect data very close to the lunar surface, M. Shanmugam, the lead engineer of the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer at the Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad, told ABC News.
The composition of the soil found on Vikram’s landing site is consistent with an ancient magma ocean, the authors conclude.
When analyzing the soil, the researchers found a relatively uniform elemental composition among 23 measurements at various spots along the lunar surface, primarily containing the rock-type ferroan anorthosite. The spectrum of elements also included all of the major and minor elements of the presence of magma, including sodium, aluminum, magnesium, carbon, silicon, sulfur, potassium, iron, titanium, chromium and manganese, Bhardwaj said.
The moon is believed to have formed after a body the size of Mars struck Earth about 4.24 billion years ago, Bhardwaj said. The material that formed as a result of the volatile impact was likely magma that was thrown into space that remained within the Earth’s gravitational pull and eventually began forming a planetary-mass object.
The magma ocean is likely to have existed for tens to hundred million years, Santosh Vadawale, a professor in the Physical Research Laboratory and lead author of the study, told ABC News.
Researchers believed the magma disappeared as the moon cooled throughout its formation, hypothesizing that, less dense ferroan anorthosite floated to the lunar surface while heavier minerals sank to form the mantle during the cool-down — forming the lunar highlands as a result of the floatation of lighter anorthositic rock.
Previous research into the Moon’s geology has primarily relied on samples taken by missions to lunar mid-latitudes, such as the Apollo program, giving scientists a more nuanced look into the history of the moon’s formation, according to the paper.
While the lunar magma ocean hypothesis has existed for decades, ever since the Apollo mission placed humans on the moon in 1969, the new research has allowed researchers to confirm the evolutionary history of the moon from billions of years ago, Vadawale said.
“Our next mission, we would like to try to go as close as possible to poles, where there are these permanently shadowed regions where there is water is supposed to be there,” he said.