What we know about the suspect in the New Orleans attack
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(NEW ORLEANS, LA) — The suspect in a deadly attack on New Year’s revelers in New Orleans has been identified as Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a 42-year-old U.S. citizen from Texas, according to the FBI.
At least 10 people were killed and dozens injured after a man drove a Ford pickup truck through a crowd on Bourbon Street at a high rate of speed early Wednesday, authorities said.
Authorities are working to determine whether the deceased suspect had any affiliation with terrorist organizations after an ISIS flag was located in the vehicle, the FBI said.
After barreling through the crowd over a three-block stretch, the suspect allegedly got out of the truck wielding an assault rifle and opened fire on police officers, law enforcement officials briefed on the incident told ABC News. Officers returned fire, killing the suspect, police said. At least two police officers were shot and wounded, authorities said.
“This man was trying to run over as many people as he possibly could,” New Orleans Police Chief Anne Kirkpatrick said at a press briefing on Wednesday. “It was not a DUI situation. This is more complex and more serious.”
She said the driver was “hell-bent on creating the carnage and the damage that he did.”
Weapons and a “potential IED” were located in the subject’s vehicle, according to the FBI, which is leading the investigation.
“Other potential IEDs were also located in the French Quarter,” the FBI said in a statement. “The FBI’s Special Agent Bomb Technicians are working with our law enforcement partners to determine if any of these devices are viable and they will work to render those devices safe.”
New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell described the horrific incident as a “terrorist attack” and the FBI said it was being investigated as an act of terror.
Investigators are probing whether the suspect acted alone or had help from others in planning and executing the attack, Jason Williams, the district attorney of Orleans Parish, which includes New Orleans, told ABC News.
The truck used in the attack appeared to be a Ford F-150 Lightning, an electric vehicle. It appears the truck was rented through the Turo app — a carsharing company, according to Rodrigo Diaz, the owner of the truck.
Diaz told ABC News he rented the truck to an individual through the app and is currently talking to the FBI. He declined further comment.
Diaz’s wife, Dora Diaz, told ABC News that she and her husband are devastated by the incident.
“My husband rents cars through the Turo app. I can’t tell you anything else. I’m here with my kids, and this is devastating,” Dora Diaz said.
(WASHINGTON) — The House Ethics Committee quietly voted earlier this month to release its report into the conduct of former Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, multiple people with direct knowledge of the decision tell ABC News.
The report is expected to be released after the final House votes are cast for the year and as members head home for the holidays, those sources said.
The move appeared to catch Gaetz off guard. He told ABC News that he was not informed of the committee’s decision.
In a lengthy response on X, the conservative firebrand said, “I’ve never been charged. I’ve never been sued. Instead, House Ethics will reportedly post a report online that I have no opportunity to debate or rebut as a former member of the body.”
CNN was first to report the development.
House Ethics Committee members declined to comment to ABC News.
Gaetz has been under scrutiny amid sexual misconduct allegations, including accusations that he had sex with a minor, which he has long denied.
President-elect Donald Trump last month tapped him to serve as attorney general in the incoming administration, and Gaetz resigned his congressional seat shortly after. But Gaetz subsequently withdrew his name from consideration, saying his confirmation process was “unfairly becoming a distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition.”
The House Ethics Committee was in the final stages of its probe into Gaetz when Trump tapped him for attorney general, prompting a fiery debate on Capitol Hill on whether the panel should release its report.
(NEW YORK) — Important bodies of water that supply water to populated regions in the Northeast have dried up due to drought conditions in recent months, according to experts.
Water levels at reservoirs in the region have decreased to the point of concern for water supply managers, hydrologists told ABC News.
Over the past three months, there has been a significant lack of precipitation all over the Northeast, Elizabeth Carter, an assistant professor in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Syracuse University, told ABC News.
Data from the U.S. Geological Survey shows rivers and channels throughout the Northeast region are at extremely low levels. Fall is the time of year when rivers and streams are typically near full capacity, refilling from the summer months when usage is at the all-time high, said Brian Rahm, director of the New York State Water Resources Institute at Cornell University.
“This would be a low level that we would expect to see less than once every 100 years,” Carter said.
The heavy rain soaking the Northeast on Thursday will help ease the drought but will not be enough to refill the reservoirs to normal levels, experts say.
Current water data from the USGS show extremely low streamflow conditions, which indicate that the groundwater table has dropped in tandem to the lack of precipitation — as the groundwater continues to flow out of perennial streams without any replenishment, Carter said.
Water levels in the Wanaque Reservoir in New Jersey, the second-largest in the state with a capacity of 29 billion gallons, is currently at just 44% capacity, according to the USGS. Before-and-after satellite images show how much the body of water has shrunk since November 2023. Surface levels are currently at 16 feet below where it was at this time last year.
In New York City, the water system was at 63% capacity as of Monday, according to the city.
But the Northeast is home to many small towns that manage their own water. Water levels in smaller reservoirs have likely decreased at much more dramatic rates than the larger ones, Anita Milman, a professor in the Department of Environmental Conservation at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, told ABC News. Smaller reservoirs are more severely impacted by the drought, Gardner Bent, information specialist at the USGS New England Water Science Center, told ABC News.
The Cambridge Reservoir in Massachusetts, which has a capacity of 1.5 billion gallons, is below 50% capacity, Bent said.
“Those are the places that I would be the most concerned about, because they have a limited amount of water and storage, and they need that water,” she said.
Reservoirs all over the U.S. are experiencing declines, according to a paper published in August in Geophysical Research Letters. Major reservoirs — including the Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the largest in the U.S. — are experiencing longer, more severe and more variable periods of low storage than several decades ago, the study, led by the USGS, found.
The Northeast has been in a rain deficit since September. Since last week, drought conditions have continued to worsen across New Jersey, with 100% of the state now in a severe drought, and extreme drought conditions expanding across parts of South Jersey, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.
The state of New Jersey issued a drought warning for the first time since 2016. This is also the first time a drought warning has been issued for New York City since 2002, according to officials.
Will the Northeast receive more rain in the coming weeks?
Looking ahead, NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center says that odds favor above average precipitation for a large swath of the nation through the end of November, including much of the Plains, the Midwest, and East Coast.
In the Northeast, a much-needed stretch of wet weather began impacting the region on Wednesday night and is expected to continue through Friday.
A large swath of the region, including northern New Jersey, New York City, and New York’s Hudson Valley, is expected to receive more than 2 inches of rain over that time.
The soaking rain will effectively end the elevated wildfire danger that has been plaguing much of the region in recent weeks.
For cities like New York and Newark, New Jersey, more than 2 inches of rain would completely erase the rainfall deficit for November and cut the current fall season deficit by around 25%.
However, even after this drenching rainfall, much of the Northeast, including the I-95 corridor, would still need to receive several inches of rain in the coming weeks to significantly improve drought conditions. More than a half-foot of rain would need to fall to completely wipe out the current rainfall deficit that many large cities have been experiencing since September.
Recent rounds of significant precipitation have been alleviating drought conditions across portions of the Plains, Midwest and South over the past seven days. For the contiguous U.S., overall drought coverage decreased from 49.84% to 45.48% week over week, according to an update released on Thursday by the U.S. Drought Monitor. The soaking rain currently sweeping across the Northeast will not be factored into the drought monitor until next week’s update.
But it will take months for dry conditions to recuperate, the experts said.
“We’re really looking for sustained seasonal precipitation to slowly bring these systems back to, you know, to where we expect them to be,” Rahm said.
The current drought situation took months to evolve, and it will likely take several more rounds of significant rainfall over the span of weeks or even months to completely eliminate the widespread drought in the region, Bent said.
What will happen if drought conditions don’t improve?
Every state in the U.S. has a drought contingency plan in the event that water levels dwindle to alarming levels, which include steps to deal with increasingly restricted supply availability, the experts said. Once drought conditions worsen to a “warning,” water managers begin to implement actions that wouldn’t necessarily be triggered by a “watch,” Rahm said.
If dry conditions persist in the Northeast, the first step will be voluntary restrictions, Milman said. Then, legal mandates would be issued to reduce water use, she added.
One saving grace for the extremely dry conditions in the Northeast is that the fall is not the time of year when water usage is at its highest, the experts said. During the summer, people are often expending a lot of water for their lawns and gardens, but those plants will soon go into dormant mode, Milman said.
Conversely, it means that drought protection measures that are intended to be implemented during the summer, when all levels are low, may not make as much of a difference, Milman said. Outdoor water and the times people are permitted to water their lawns — when sunlight isn’t at its highest — are typically targeted first.
“We recognize that indoor water use is essential for most human needs,” Milman said.
The Northeast is typically considered a “water rich” region, and the infrastructure is set up based on expectations of average seasonal precipitation, Rahm said.
“The infrastructure that we have established to use that water is reliant — in some ways — on our expectations of how that water will fall,” he said.
In other countries with arid climates, cutbacks can involve rationing, such as differing segments of a town getting a certain amount of water pressure during certain times a week, which has proved successful, Milman said.
“I’ve never seen this in the eastern United States,” she said. “… But this is what other countries do all the time when they don’t have enough supply.”
(AUSTIN, Texas) — The execution of Robert Roberson — whose “shaken baby syndrome” murder conviction in the death of his 2-year-old daughter has come under scrutiny — can resume, according to a Texas Supreme Court decision Friday.
Roberson was set to become the first person in the U.S. executed for a shaken baby syndrome diagnosis murder conviction on Oct. 17 before the court intervened and a state House committee issued a subpoena for Roberson, halting the execution amid legal battles over his fate.
Roberson’s execution warrant was only valid through Oct. 17.
Roberson was found guilty of the 2002 murder of his 2-year-old daughter, Nikki, in part based on the testimony of a pediatrician who described swelling and hemorrhages in her brain to support a shaken baby syndrome diagnosis.
However, Roberson’s legal team argued that newer evidence found that Nikki had pneumonia and had been prescribed respiratory-suppressing drugs by doctors in the days leading up to her death, leading to a case of severe viral and bacterial pneumonia that progressed to sepsis and then septic shock.
Roberson has long proclaimed his innocence. His fight for clemency has been backed by several state lawmakers, medical and scientific experts, and criminal justice advocates who have questioned the legitimacy of the use of the shaken baby syndrome diagnosis in his case, based on newer scientific evidence.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and other state officials have argued that “Roberson was lawfully sentenced to death” and that he has “exhausted every legally available appellate avenue.”
Paxton also argued that the jury did not convict Roberson solely based on shaken baby syndrome, though Roberson’s attorneys said that “shaken baby” was referred to by prosecutors and witnesses throughout the jury trial.
