(ORLANDO, Fla.) — The woman was paddling at Tiger Creek Preserve in Polk County at the time of the incident on Monday, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission said.
She was taken to a hospital in unknown condition to be treated for her injuries, the agency said.
A trapper was sent to the scene to remove the alligator, the commission said. The preserve is about 65 miles south of Orlando.
The commission said serious injuries from alligators are rare in Florida.
To stay safe from alligators, the agency recommends swimming only in designated areas during the day and keeping pets on a leash and away from the edge of water.
(WASHINGTON) — A federal judge in Boston said he denied the request to block the buyout offer because the federal unions who brought the case lacked standing to sue and because the District Court lacks jurisdiction to review the case.
Three federal employee unions — with the support of 20 Democratic attorneys general — have argued in a lawsuit that the Office of Personnel Management’s deferred resignation offer is an “unlawful ultimatum” to force the resignation of government workers under the “threat of mass termination.”
According to U.S. District Judge George A. O’Toole Jr., the federal unions who challenged the policy are not directly impacted by the buyout offer; rather they are subject to collateral impacts such as a reduction in union membership and needing to answer their members’ questions about the policy.
“The unions do not have the required direct stake in the Fork Directive but are challenging a policy that affects others, specifically executive branch employees. This is not sufficient,” the judge wrote.
The judge also determined that the district court lacks jurisdiction to review the dispute because the Federal Service Labor-Management Relations Statute sets out an administrative review process before courts can take over.
“According to this complex scheme, disputes must first be administratively exhausted before the employing agency and the relevant administrative review board and any further challenges are properly heard in a court of appeals,” the order said.
O’Toole Jr. did not include any interpretation about how the buyout deadline is impacted in his order.
“This Boston Buyout Ruling is the first of many legal wins for the President. The Court dissolved the injunction due to a lack of standing. This goes to show that lawfare will not ultimately prevail over the will of 77 million Americans who supported President Trump and his priorities,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Wednesday.
During an hour-long hearing Monday, a lawyer for the Department of Justice framed the deferred resignation offer as a “humane off-ramp” for federal employees before President Donald Trump enacts sweeping changes to “rebalance and reorganize the federal workforce.”
“President Trump campaigned on a promise to reform the federal workforce,” DOJ attorney Eric Hamilton said, outlining Trump’s plan to reduce the size of the federal government and his return-to-office executive order. “We understand these announcements may have come as a disappointment for some in the federal workforce.”
Hamilton argued that any further delay of the buyout would cause irreparable harm because the Trump administration plans to enact the next steps of reshaping the federal government as soon as the buyout window closes.
Elena Goldstein, a lawyer representing the unions that brought the challenge, hammered the Trump administration for attempting to enforce an “unprecedented program” with a “slapdash exploding deadline”
“For the last two weeks, confusion has rained for millions of career civil servants,” Goldstein said. “This is a program of unprecedented magnitude that raises questions about the rationality of OPM’s decision-making.”
The buyout offer, part of Trump’s effort to trim the size of government through billionaire Elon Musk’s newly formed Department of Government Efficiency, was sent out two weeks ago in an email with the subject line “Fork in the Road” — the same language Musk used when he slashed jobs at Twitter after taking over that company in 2022.
The offer from the Office of Personnel Management offered full pay and benefits until September for any federal employee who accepted a deferred resignation by Feb. 6, with no obligation to work after they accepted the agreement.
While Goldstein acknowledged that Trump has the right to downsize the federal government, she emphasized that OPM has not gone through any of the steps necessary to carry out such a sweeping move — including analyzing the cost and benefits of their approach, evaluating its impact on the government’s function, and accessing potential conflicts of interest for Musk. She added that the exact terms of the buyout are “shifting” for thousands of employees who have gotten inconsistent guidance from their agency.
“OPM appears to be making this up as they are going along,” she said. “When the government wants to decide, there are ways to do this correctly … none of that happened here in the two weeks since they enacted this program.”
Arguing for the government, Hamilton criticized the plaintiffs’ argument as “legally incoherent and at odds with their theory of the case,” because a further delay of the buyout would “insert more uncertainty” into the lives of federal employees.
While the plaintiffs raised concerns that the buyout program violates federal law by using money that Congress never appropriated, Hamilton attempted to push back on the claim that the buyout changes the government’s financial obligations.
“Nothing about the voluntary resignation changes anything about the federal government’s financial obligations. It just changes what employees are expected to do and not do during their period of employment,” Hamilton said.
Goldstein argued that a preliminary injunction is necessary to prevent what she said was an unlawful offer to reshape the federal government while the Trump administration continues to “put additional pressure on employees.”
“This is an unprecedented action taken on an unprecedented timeline,” she said.
Just hours ahead of Thursday’s original deadline for employees to accept the offer, Judge O’Toole — who was nominated to the bench by President Bill Clinton — temporarily blocked the offer until Monday so he could consider issuing a temporary restraining offer pausing the order.
“I enjoined the defendants from taking any action to implement the so-called ‘Fork Directive’ pending the completion of briefing and oral argument on the issues,” Judge O’Toole said in his ruling. “I believe that’s as far as I want to go today.”
The Trump administration, in response, “extended” the deadline for the offer, which more than 65,000 federal employees have already taken.
The unions who brought the lawsuit argued that Trump exceeded his authority as president with the offer, which they described as a “slapdash resignation program.”
According to the plaintiffs, Trump’s offer violates federal law, lacks congressionally appropriated funding, and does not offer employees reassurance that the president would follow through with the offer. Their claim in part relies on a federal law from the 1940s called the Administrative Procedure Act that governs how federal agencies create and enforce rules.
“In the tech universe, ‘move fast and break things’ is a fine motto in part because they’re not playing with the public’s money, and it’s expected that most initiatives are going to fail,” Loyola Marymount law professor Justin Leavitt told ABC News. “Congress knows that, so in 1946 they basically said, ‘When agencies do stuff … they have to be careful about it. They’ve got to consider all aspects of the problem.”
The plaintiffs also argued that the buyout is unlawful because it relies on funding that Congress has yet to appropriate, violating the Antideficiency Act.
“Defendants’ ultimatum divides federal workers into two groups: (1) those who submit their resignations to OPM for a promised period of pay without the requirement to work, and (2) those who have not and are therefore subject to threat of mass termination,” the lawsuit said.
Lawyers for the federal government have pushed back on those claims, arguing that Trump has the legal authority to provide the buyout for employees within the federal branch, and that any further delay would do more harm than good.
“Extending the deadline for the acceptance of deferred resignation on its very last day will markedly disrupt the expectations of the federal workforce, inject tremendous uncertainty into a program that scores of federal employees have already availed themselves of, and hinder the Administration’s efforts to reform the federal workforce,” DOJ attorney Joshua E. Gardner wrote in a filing last week.
(NEW YORK) — Nineteen states from Nebraska to Florida are facing cold weather alerts on Friday morning as a relentless Arctic blast persists — but a warmup is finally on the way.
Friday marks the fourth morning in a row of record-low temperatures across the central U.S.
Cities across the Plains and the South broke or tied their record-low temperatures on Friday: Lincoln, Nebraska, at negative 17 degrees; Kansas City, Missouri, at negative 5 degrees; Memphis, Tennessee, at 15 degrees; and Birmingham, Alabama, at 17 degrees.
The warmup will begin this weekend across the Heartland and the South, with temperatures climbing to the 50s in Kansas City and 60s in Austin by Sunday. By next week, Kansas City will reach the 60s and Austin will warm up to the 70s.
The mild weather will even reach the north.
By Monday, Chicago could warm up to close to 50 degrees. By Tuesday, New York City could climb to 50 degrees and Washington, D.C., could rise to the balmy 60s.
(MIAMI) — A couple was arrested after allegedly attempting to board an American Airlines flight without authorization, leading to a physical altercation in which one individual allegedly threw coffee on an airline staff member, police said.
The incident occurred on Sunday at Miami International Airport as passengers were preparing to board American Airlines flight 2494 traveling from Miami to Cancún.
Rafael Seirafe-Novaes and Beatriz Rapoport-De-Campos-Maia “ignored the signs and verbal commands from the ticket agent” and allegedly pushed past the agent and others to enter the jet bridge, according to a police report from the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office.
According to the report, the couple “were denied boarding and became irate at which time they pushed the two victims,” and Rapoport-De-Campos-Maia allegedly “threw coffee on them.”
American Airlines said in a statement to ABC News: “Acts of violence are not tolerated by American Airlines and we are committed to working closely with law enforcement in their investigation.”
Rapoport-De-Campos-Maia and Seirafe-Novaes have each been charged with two counts of battery and one count each of trespassing on property after warning, police said. Seirafe-Novaes has also been charged with one count of resisting an officer without violence to his person, as he pulled his arms away from the arresting officer, per the police report.
The couple was taken into custody and transported to the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center in Miami, according to the police report.
It was unclear if either has an attorney who can speak on their behalf.
