US Steel and Nippon Steel sue Biden administration over blocked merger

(WASHINGTON) Hunter Biden may have his freedom, but the son of former President Joe Biden now finds himself mired in debt, without a permanent home, and the target of ongoing attacks from the current president, Donald Trump, and his allies on Capitol Hill, according to a court filing.

In court papers filed Wednesday, Hunter Biden asked a federal judge to dismiss his lawsuit against online provocateur Garrett Ziegler because he “does not have the financial resources to continue litigating this case.”

Amid lagging sales of his art and his memoir, the younger Biden remains “several million dollars” in debt after fighting multiple federal criminal cases, claiming in an affidavit that he only sold one painting for $36,000 since late 2023, after selling 27 paintings in the previous couple of years at an average price of nearly $55,000.

“Given the positive feedback and reviews of my artwork and memoir, I was expecting to obtain paid speaking engagements and paid appearances, but that has not happened,” Hunter Biden wrote Wednesday.

He said that his “lack of financial resources has been exacerbated by the fires in the Pacific Palisades in early January, which has rendered my rental house unlivable for an extended period of time and, like many others in that situation, I am having difficulty in finding a new permanent place to live.”

A person close to Hunter Biden told ABC News that his rental did not burn down, but that immense damage to the surrounding properties had limited his access to his residence.

The affidavit chronicles a series of hardships since his father’s departure from office. Weeks before Trump’s inauguration, then-President Biden pardoned his son shortly before two federal judges were scheduled to sentence him for a pair of criminal convictions in Delaware and California, for which he faced the possibility of substantial prison time.

Hunter Biden has acknowledged taking out millions of dollars in loans from Kevin Morris, a Hollywood attorney who largely bankrolled Hunter Biden’s legal defense over the past five years. In congressional testimony last year, Morris said he expected Hunter Biden to repay those loans beginning in 2025, though it was not clear from the affidavit whether those loan repayments have begun.

Hunter Biden and his legal team are evaluating whether to continue litigating a handful of other lawsuits he filed in recent years against purveyors of his infamous laptop on a “case by case basis,” Hunter Biden wrote in Wednesday’s filing. Ziegler did not immediately respond to a request for comment from ABC News.

One of those suits targets Patrick Byrne, the founder of Overstock.com and an avid supporter of President Trump. Hunter Biden sued Byrne in late 2023 for defamation for falsely accused Hunter Biden of trying to bribe Iran while his father was president — a claim that Hunter Biden said has subjected him to “harassment, intimidation, and harm.” Byrne has fought the defamation claim in court.

The trail in the case has been repeatedly delayed amid a protracted dispute over depositions from Byrne and an FBI agent that has thrown a wrench into the proceedings.

Byrne’s attorneys claim in court papers that Byrne fled to Dubai after he was told by U.S. officials “that the Venezuelan government has a $25,000,000 bounty on his head,” and said he preferred a deposition over Zoom “out of concern for his personal safety.” The parties ultimately agreed to a remote deposition in December that was expected to span seven hours over the course of three days, though it was unclear from the court docket when exactly the deposition occurred.

In court filings as part of that case, Hunter Biden has echoed his claims of financial hardship. He claimed that because of Byrne’s defamatory statements, he has suffered “lost economic opportunities” to the tune of nearly half a million dollars, citing lost memoir sales, lost art sales, and lost speaking opportunities.

Hunter Biden’s legal team has also subpoenaed the FBI, demanding testimony and documents from an agent whom Byrne claimed on social media could corroborate Byrne’s allegations against the younger Biden. But the FBI has so far rebuffed those efforts, and on Monday the Justice Department filed a motion in federal court in Washington, D.C., urging a federal judge there to quash the subpoena.

Meanwhile, Hunter Biden remains squarely on the minds of Trump and his loyalists in Congress. As one of his first acts in office, Trump signed an executive order revoking security clearances for 51 former intelligence officials who signed a letter asserting that the emergence of data from Hunter Biden’s laptop in the weeks leading up to the 2020 election bore similarities to prior Russian misinformation operations.

During a heated Oval Office confrontation between Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy last week, Trump repeatedly invoked Hunter Biden’s name as part of a lengthy diatribe about the Russia investigation led by Robert Mueller:

And on Tuesday, two top Republican lawmakers invited IRS whistleblowers who revealed details of Hunter Biden’s tax filings as guests at Trump’s Joint Address to Congress.

The person close to Hunter Biden told ABC News that the former president’s son will continue pursuing his art career and plans to devote himself to initiatives meant to help people struggling with addiction. And despite the sentiments in his affidavit, Hunter Biden remains in “a good place to rebuild his life,” the person said.

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(NEW YORK) — Homicides across the United States are poised to plummet for the third straight year as 2024 winds down, driving the nation’s annual murder toll down to levels not seen since before the pandemic, according to preliminary data from cities both large and small.

Based on available crime statistics from U.S. law enforcement agencies, the year is expected to end with a nearly 16% drop in homicides nationwide and a 3.3% decline in overall violent crime, Jeff Asher, a national crime analyst, told ABC News.

The dramatic drop in homicides surpasses a 13% decline in 2023, then the largest decrease on record until now. In 2022, the number of murders across the country fell 6%, according to the FBI.

The three consecutive years of declining homicides come in the wake of 30% jump in murders between 2019 and 2020, the largest single-year increase in more than a century.

“Considering where we were just three or four years ago, we’re basically looking at 5,000 fewer murder victims than in 2020, 2021 and 2022 having occurred in 2024,” said Asher, co-founder of AH Datalytics and a former crime analyst for the CIA and the New Orleans Police Department.

In contrast, a dozen major U.S. cities broke annual homicide records in 2021.

Philadelphia — which recorded an all-time high of 562 homicides in 2021, 516 in 2022 and 410 last year — has seen a 40% drop in homicides in 2024.

Other major cities seeing precipitous reductions in homicides this year are New Orleans, down 38%; Washington, D.C., down 29%; Memphis, Tennessee, down 23%; Baltimore, down 24%; Kansas City, Missouri, down 20%; and Los Angeles, down 15%.

New York City, the nation’s largest city, had recorded 357 homicides through Dec. 15, a 7.3% drop from 2023, according to New York Police Department crime statistics. The city — which tallied 442 murders in 2020, a 45% jump from 2019 — has seen homicides fall 15% over the past two years.

Chicago has recorded a 7% decline in homicides as of Dec. 15, down from 603 murders at this time last year, according to the Chicago Police Department’s crime data. Over the past three years, homicides in Chicago have fallen 29% after skyrocketing 55% between 2019 and 2020 to 769 murders.

Homicides this year in 63 cities with populations of more than 250,000 declined by at least 15% and murders were down at least 19% in 246 cities with populations under 250,000, Asher’s research found.

“It’s a tremendous achievement in terms of how far murder has fallen in just really two straight years,” Asher said.

Property crime plummets

In addition to violent crime falling, property crime is also poised to finish the year down 8.6% nationwide, mostly due to a 21.4% decrease in motor vehicle theft, Asher said.

“Auto thefts went up 12% last year. They’re coming down more than 20% this year,” said Asher, who added that the 2023 spike in car thefts appears to be tied to social media instruction videos on how to steal certain models of Kias and Hyundais.

Crunching the numbers

Since 2016, Asher has crunched the numbers for an end-of-the-year report on crime trends. This year, his report is based on preliminary crime statistics from 309 U.S. law enforcement agencies, the most data he has ever received.

Asher’s analysis aligns closely with data released in May by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing murders down 14%. The Gun Violence Archive, a website that tracks all shootings across the nation, shows homicides are down around 11%.

“We kind of put all those together and we see a very large decline in murder, a very large decline in gun violence happening in the U.S. in 2024 on top of what was a very large decline in murder and a very large decline in gun violence in 2023,” Asher said.

Referring to overall violent crime, Asher said, “You’re probably looking at, if not the lowest violent crime rate since 1970, certainly at or around where we were pre-pandemic.”

Besides homicide, rape was down 4.5% from 2023, robberies fell 1.1% and aggravated assaults declined 3.7%, according to Asher.

The falling numbers come amid a backdrop of high-profile violent crimes in 2024, including more than 400 mass shootings, two assassination attempts on President-elect Donald Trump and the fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson allegedly by 26-year-old Ivy League graduate Luigi Mangione, who police suspect was out to strike fear in the insurance industry.

The numbers also come just days after a 15-year-old girl allegedly carried out a shooting rampage at her Christian school in Madison, Wisconsin, killing a teacher and a classmate, and injured six other students before dying from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, police said.

The Wisconsin shooting came three months after a 14-year-old boy allegedly killed two students and two teachers, and injured nine others at his high school in Winder, Georgia, with an AR-style weapon police alleged his father gave him as a Chrismas present.

‘We have turned the tide against violent crime’

During a Dec. 10 briefing of the Justice Department’s Violence Crime Reduction Steering Committee meeting, Attorney General Merrick Garland said preliminary crime data showed significant declines in violent crime in 85 cities in 2024, including a 17.5% drop in homicides nationwide.

“Over the past two years, we have turned the tide against the violent crime that spiked during the pandemic,” Garland said.

He said the numbers build on the historic drop in homicides nationwide last year, which he said was the lowest level of violent crime in 50 years.

Merrick attributed the tumbling violent crime rate partly to the DOJ’s Violent Crime Reduction Roadmap, a one-stop-shop created to assist local jurisdictions in developing, implementing and evaluating the strategies to prevent, intervene and respond to acts of community gun violence.

President Joe Biden’s administration has also sought to curb gun violence in recent years through executive actions and signing into law in 2022 the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which enhanced background checks for gun buyers under the age of 21, allocated $750 million to help states implement “red flag laws” to remove firearms from people deemed dangerous to themselves and others.

Biden also established the in 2023 the first-ever White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention to focus on ways to assist states and cities reduce the nation’s epidemic of gun violence.

Some cities such as Philadelphia have credited the work of violence interrupter programs, community-based initiatives that use peacebuilding methods to head off incidents of violence before they occur.

In Philadelphia, city leaders also pointed to a $184 million investment in gun violence initiatives in 2022, including one that attempts to identify people who are at risk of being involved in violence to provide them with mental health services or job placement. While the city also boosted the Philadelphia Police Department’s budget that year by $30 million, it instituted a violence prevention plan that emphasizes a combination of law enforcement strategies, environmental improvements and youth programs to reduce its homicide numbers.

“We need to continue pressing forward with our comprehensive approach, which is prevention, intervention and enforcement,” Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker said at a Nov. 1 news conference on the city’s falling homicide numbers.

In October, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed six bills to strengthen New York’s gun laws, including one requiring gun sellers to post tobacco-style safety warnings and another that cracks down on illegal devices called “switches” that convert semiautomatic handguns into automatic weapons.

Asher said that in 2020 and 2021 when violent crime rose to alarming levels, programs such as community violence interruptors didn’t exist and the budgets of many police departments were getting slashed in the defund-the-police movement stemming from nationwide protests over the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Asher said states and local governments, as well as philanthropies, are pumping money into programs to bring down violent crime.

“Some of that is undoubtedly contributing to what we’re seeing now,” Asher said. “I’m not naïve enough to suggest that that’s the entire explanation. There are undoubtedly a multitude of factors that help to explain this complex problem.”

ABC News’ Calvin Milliner contributed to this report.

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(CALIFORNIA) — Several hospitals and health care facilities have closed their clinics and offices in the southern California area as the devastating wildfires continue to spread.

As of Thursday, at least five people have died, and thousands of structures have been damaged or destroyed. Firefighters are continuing to battle at least six fires.

Kaiser Permanente, one of the largest health care systems in California, announced it has closed seven of its medical offices and clinics so far due to the fires and high winds.

“Currently, most Kaiser Permanente facilities in Southern California are open and operating normally. We will remain vigilant and ready to respond fluidly as conditions change,” the health care system said in a statement to ABC News.

UCLA Medical Center confirmed in an update on its website that at least 15 of its clinics were closed in neighborhoods including Alhambra, Malibu, Pacific Palisades, Pasadena, Simi Valley and Thousand Oaks.

Additionally, the center said it closed all its clinics in Calabasas.

Cedars-Sinai Medical Center also shared an update on its website that some outpatient offices and surgery centers in evacuation areas were closed, including in Brentwood/West Los Angeles, Pasadena and Santa Monica.

“Due to the critical situation — including fires close to our medical center campus that are affecting many staff members — we are postponing non-urgent/emergent procedures on Thursday and Friday,” the update read. “In doing so, we are looking out for our patients in greatest need as we confront extraordinary and fast-moving conditions.”

Providence health care system, which serves five western states including California, also announced some of its outpatient services, such as doctors’ offices, were closed but that its hospitals remain open.

Additionally, Adventist Health, which serves the West Coast and Hawaii, said its Urgent Care, Orthopedics and Pediatrics location in Montrose is temporarily closed until further notice.

However, its Glendale hospital remains open and operations. Patients are not being evacuated and there are no widespread surgery cancellations.

The hospital added that some patients with elective procedures may have their surgeries canceled and all non-essential visitation is being postponed for the time being.

“My heart goes out to those impacted by the wildfires across L.A. County,” Kerry Heinrich, president and CEO of Adventist Health, said in a statement. “I’m thankful that, at this time, our local hospitals remain open and fully operational, ready to provide care and support to those in need.”

AltaMed Health Services, a community health network that serves southern California, wrote on X that one of its medical centers in Pasadena had been destroyed by the Eaton Fire, but no one was injured. The network has temporarily closed eight clinics due to the fires.

Meanwhile, some hospitals are reporting that they are treating victims injured by the dangerous fires.

UCLA Health hospitals confirmed to ABC News that as of 11:00 a.m. PT Wednesday, medical staff have treated and released 21 patients with fire-related injuries. What kind of fire-injuries the patients have remain unclear.

One patient remains hospitalized in critical condition, UCLA Health said.

Los Angeles County Department of Health Services also reported its medical system is treating patients suffering from smoke injuries, but did not confirm how many patients.

“Our dedicated health care providers across our medical system including Los Angeles General Medical Center, Olive-View Medical Center, Harbor-UCLA Medical Center are prepared to provide the critical and life-saving care to those impacted by the fires,” the department said in a statement.

“At this moment, we can confirm our medical system has provided care to patients suffering from smoke inhalation and respiratory issues caused by the fires,” the statement continued.

Senior centers are also being affected by the wildfires. At The Terraces At Park Marino, an assisted living facility in Altadena, staff evacuated elderly residents — some of whom were in wheelchairs or hospital beds — on Wednesday. Within hours, the building was engulfed in flames.

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