Trump urges Georgia Supreme Court to keep DA Fani Willis disqualified from election interference case
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(ATLANTA) — President-elect Donald Trump, in a court filing Friday, urged the Georgia Supreme Court to keep Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis disqualified from the criminal election interference case against him.
The filing from Trump’s attorneys, just days before Trump’s inauguration, asked the court to uphold the appeals court ruling last month that disqualified Willis over her relationship with a prosecutor on the case.
Trump’s lawyers argued in Friday’s filing that the trial court fashioned an “inadequate legal remedy” by allowing Willis to remain on the case if the prosecutor Nathan Wade resigned, which he did following the ruling.
Trump and 18 others pleaded not guilty in 2023 to all charges in a sweeping racketeering indictment for alleged efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in the state of Georgia, and four defendants subsequently took plea deals in exchange for agreeing to testify against other defendants.
Willis was disqualified from the case last month — although the indictment was allowed to stand — when the Georgia Court of Appeals upheld Trump’s appeal of the trial judge’s ruling that allowed Willis to stay on the case.
Friday’s filing also pushed back on Willis’ claim that the appeals court created a new standard when it disqualified her, claiming: “Nothing could be further from the truth.”
“Mandatory disqualification of an elected District Attorney for a significant appearance of impropriety, for specific conduct, is unlikely to recur because no Georgia District Attorney has engaged in such egregious disqualifying conduct before and it is highly unlikely that any DA will ever do so in the future,” the filing stated. “No Georgia court has ever considered impropriety of this extraordinary magnitude.”
(ALBUQUERGUE, N.M.) — A school bus attendant for Albuquerque, New Mexico, Public Schools has been arrested after she was seen in surveillance video repeatedly hitting an autistic student.
Debbie Chavira, 64, is accused of striking the child dozens of times over the course of 10 days, according to an incident report.
Police said Chavira struck the student in his face, torso and arms a total of 59 times between Aug. 26 and Sept. 4. On Sept. 4, school officials reported her after the child showed up “with fresh scratch marks on the back of his neck,” the incident report states.
While investigating the alleged abuse, officials viewed additional surveillance footage, where they say Chavira was seen repeatedly hitting the child over the span of 10 days.
Chavira struck the child “open-handed, closed fisted, and with a plastic (yellow) ‘child check’ sign,” and did so “intentionally and without justifiable cause,” according to the incident report.
Investigators were unable to interview the child due to him “being autistic and non-verbal” and unable to “communicate through writing either,” the report states.
Chavira resigned from her job Sept. 5, according to Albuquerque ABC affiliate KOAT, and was arrested on Oct. 4. She has been released from jail and is now under pretrial supervision.
She has been charged with five counts of abandonment or abuse of a child. A representative could not immediately be found for Chavira.
In a statement to ABC News, Martin Salazar, a spokesperson for Albuquerque Public Schools, said the school district does “not tolerate this kind of behavior.”
“Upon discovering what was happening, we immediately placed bus attendant Debbie Chavira on leave and notified the APS Police Department. APS Police launched an investigation and filed criminal charges. Ms. Chavira resigned shortly after being placed on leave,” Salazar said.
(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.”
Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images
(NEW ORLEANS) — The FBI and New Orleans police no longer believe there are any other suspects involved in the New Year’s truck attack on Bourbon Street that killed 15 people and injured dozens more, multiple law enforcement sources told ABC News.
After investigators reviewed all of the surveillance videos more closely, it appears that the suspect, 42-year-old Army veteran Shamsud-Din Jabbar, placed explosive devices in the area himself and then changed clothes. Those clothes were found in the vehicle, the sources said.
The FBI is still investigating whether there were individuals Jabbar spoke to or messaged with prior to the early Wednesday attack, but no one was in the vicinity to help him do anything, the sources said.
The death toll is not expected to rise beyond 15 people, Dr. Jeffrey Elder of the University Medical Center New Orleans told ABC News Live on Thursday. Sixteen people remain hospitalized at University Medical Center New Orleans, including eight in intensive care.
Jabbar was “hell-bent” on killing as many people as possible, driving a pickup truck onto the sidewalk around a parked police car serving as a barricade to plow into pedestrians, officials said.
The suspect mowed down dozens of people over a three-block stretch on the world-famous thoroughfare while firing into the crowd, police said.
Jabar then exited the damaged vehicle armed with an assault rifle and opened fire on police officers, law enforcement said. He was also armed with a handgun, sources told ABC News.
Officers returned fire, killing Jabbar, a U.S.-born citizen from Texas, sources said. At least two officers were injured, one by gunfire and the other when the officer was pinned by the truck, authorities said.
New Orleans Police Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick said security bollards were not working at the time because they were in the process of being replaced for next month’s Super Bowl.
Althea Duncan, assistant special agent in charge of the FBI in New Orleans, said improvised explosives devices and other weapons were found inside the pickup truck, and two additional IEDs were recovered in the French Quarter and rendered safe.
The IEDs found in and around the scene on Bourbon Street were apparently determined to be viable, and investigators were looking for more in the city’s French Quarter, multiple law enforcement sources told ABC News.
Authorities have conducted “a number of court authorized search warrants in New Orleans and other states,” the FBI’s New Orleans field office said.
A home in Houston was among those searched. The FBI in Houston said “there is no threat to residents in that area.”
President Joe Biden said that the FBI told him that “mere hours before the attack, [Jabbar] posted videos on social media indicating that he’s inspired by ISIS, expressing a desire to kill.”
Biden said that the suspect served in the Army on active duty for “many years,” and served in the Army Reserve “until a few years ago.”
The FBI is studying the videos Biden referenced in his remarks, which the suspect appears to have recorded while driving from Texas to Louisiana, law enforcement sources confirmed to ABC News.
The videos are dark so the suspect isn’t seen but he can be heard talking about his divorce and a desire to kill members of his family before ultimately deciding to carry out the attack on Bourbon Street, according to the law enforcement sources.
The suspect is also heard talking about ISIS, the sources said.
There’s no apparent direct connection between the New Orleans attack and Wednesday’s Tesla Cybertruck explosion outside the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas, which is being investigated as a possible act of terror, an official said.
The driver was killed and seven bystanders suffered minor injuries, authorities said. The motive behind the incident remains under investigation, but investigators told ABC News they believe it was “intentional.”
The Cybertruck was rented via the Turo app, as was the truck used in the New Orleans attack, sources told ABC News.
The Cybertruck driver had an Army special forces background but there’s no evidence suggesting he and the New Orleans suspect knew each other, according to an official briefed on the probe.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
