November 27, 2020 • No Comments • National News

ABC NewsBy DANIEL MANZO, ABC News

(NEW YORK) — After a relatively quiet Thanksgiving across much of the U.S., the weather pattern is about to turn quite turbulent in the coming days.

A new storm system is going to develop this weekend and track across the Southern and Eastern U.S. bringing multiple hazards, including heavy rain, strong thunderstorms, damaging winds and some snow.

The first impacts of the storm will be Friday with some strong thunderstorms forming near Southeast Texas.

On Saturday, the storm will start to get more organized with heavy rain moving onshore to Southern Texas and New Orleans where localized flooding will be possible.

On Sunday, the storm will be moving through the Gulf States and heavy rain will spread over much of the South from Louisiana to the Carolinas.

Once again localized flooding and some occasional strong thunderstorms with gusty winds will be possible, especially from New Orleans to Raleigh, North Carolina.

On Monday, as the storm travels up the eastern U.S., it will be invigorated by a cold shot of air coming in from the Midwest and the storm will strengthen somewhere over the Appalachians.

The result on the milder eastern side of the storm will be widespread with very heavy rainfall. Additionally, some very strong winds will have the potential to mix down from aloft, especially across New England which could result in some potential for damaging wind gusts, including power outages.

On the colder side of the storm, precipitation will be falling as snow in parts of Ohio and with the heaviest snow likely to be near the Great Lakes.

It remains too early to determine the precise location of the heaviest snow because it will be determined by the precise location of the strengthening storm.

The main global forecast models are indicating that the storm will be a little slow to move out of the region as it moves into southern Canada on Tuesday and Wednesday but the good news is that the storm should weaken during this time period.

The storm will help pull a shot of cold air across much of the central and eastern U.S. with wind chills in the teens expected from Minnesota possibly into parts of Alabama and Georgia by Tuesday morning.

The most notable part of this cold blast is how far south the cold air will reach and it looks like even parts of northern Florida will be feeling like the low 30s on Tuesday morning.

Meanwhile in the Southwest, another day of dry Santa Ana winds is expected.

On Thanksgiving, the highest elevations outside Los Angeles saw gusts to 75 mph and we are expecting gusts again Friday to possibly reach 75 mph with relative humidity is expected to be as low as 5%.

The gusty winds and the dry air could cause rapid fire spread through the region possibly causing critical fire conditions Friday.

The core of this threat is expected Friday but there will likely be some lingering fire danger into Saturday.

Copyright © 2020, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

November 27, 2020 • No Comments • National News

Courtesy Ben Crump LawBy ANTHONY RIVAS and ALLIE YANG, ABC News

(NEW YORK) — Six months after George Floyd was killed in police custody, his brothers said they still feel compelled to fight for justice every day and that when they sit down for Thanksgiving dinner they’ll be remembering some of the things they loved most about him.

“I really wanted to see him be able to have a chance to sing a song,” Philonise Floyd told ABC News’ Nightline co-anchor Byron Pitts. “I think about when he used to pick my mom up, because my mom, she was handicapped, and he used to sing and dance with her.”

Terrence Floyd said he’s going to eat in commemoration of his late brother.

“He was an eater. He liked to eat. So I’m gonna celebrate him. You know, we’ll sit around the table and be thankful, first of all, for the time I spent with him and the encouragement and the words that he gave, because that is always going to be there,” Terrence Floyd said. “So even though his physical body is not here with us … all the things that he said to me, all the things we did together, that’s going to be a memory. I’m going to be thankful for that, and I’m gonna also eat for him.”

Floyd, 46, died on May 25 during an arrest by Minneapolis police for allegedly using a counterfeit bill. In the moments preceding his death, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was caught on video kneeling on Floyd’s neck for 7 minutes and 46 seconds, during which Floyd could be heard pleading several times, “I can’t breathe.”

In the wake of George Floyd’s death, Chauvin and the three other responding officers were fired from the Minneapolis Police Department.

Chauvin is now charged with second-degree murder and manslaughter while the other former officers, J. Alexander Kueng, Thomas Lane and Tou Thao, are charged with aiding and abetting second-degree murder and manslaughter. None have entered pleas.

Terrence Floyd said he still wonders “why” his brother had to die in such a way. However, both he and Philonise Floyd say that six months later, they’re still driven to fight for justice.

“We had to come out and let our voice be heard,” Terrence Floyd said.

“Every time I look up, I see somebody who has [gone through] what happened to my brother,” added Philonise Floyd. “I just ask myself, ‘What more do we have to do? What can we say?’ … Every day, somebody walks up to me and they ask me about my brother. It brings you back to day one. … People will tell you that, ‘Hey you’re going to get through it. The world is changing. You have to stay strong. … You didn’t have to do anything, but you chose to get out and get justice for your brother.'”

Shortly after George Floyd’s funeral, Philonise Floyd testified before the House Judiciary Committee on police reform. He said his goal was to “get them to understand why” they need to enact the George Floyd Police Reform Act, which aims to increase police accountability and reduce discriminatory practices. The bill has so far only been passed by the House.

“I don’t want to have to see anybody else pass away for nonsense,” Philonise Floyd said. “There’s too many people on Earth for us to be killing each other like this.”

While change has been slow at the federal level, on the local level, dozens of cities across the country have implemented some reforms to their police departments, such as banning chokeholds and other neck restraints.

The Floyd family’s attorney, civil rights lawyer Ben Crump, said these changes have been “significant” but that issues with police brutality still exist and incidents still happen.

As demonstrators took to the streets in the months following George Floyd’s death, as well as after the deaths of other Black people killed at the hands of police, such as Breonna Taylor, calls to “defund the police” also rang out.

The movement advocates for reallocating resources from more punitive measures to perhaps more effective ones such as funding more social workers to respond to non-criminal emergency calls. However, with its ambiguous name, it has been met with fierce opposition.

“They’re saying we need to reimagine policing in America,” Crump said. “We need to reimagine a more just society where George Floyd gets an opportunity to breathe. … We can better America. That’s what this whole notion of reimagining the police is about, and they make it a political football.”

“It’s not about politics. It’s about our children not being killed by the police,” Crump added. “That’s what this is about. We can do better, America.”

Crump said he hopes that President-elect Joe Biden will tackle criminal justice reform in his first 100 days in office and that doing so includes passing the George Floyd Police Reform Act.

In the meantime, Philonise and Terrence Floyd say they’ll continue to speak up for their brother and all those who’ve died because of police brutality.

When asked if they ever go back to the video in which their brother could be seen with Chauvin’s knee on his neck, Philonise said he doesn’t have to because it’s imprinted in his mind.

Terrence Floyd, on the other hand, watches it because “to me, it keeps the fight in me.”

Copyright © 2020, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

November 26, 2020 • No Comments • National News

Ovidiu Dugulan/iStockBy MORGAN WINSOR, IVAN PEREIRA and MEREDITH DELISO, ABC News

(NEW YORK) — A pandemic of the novel coronavirus has now infected more than 60.4 million people and killed over 1.4 million worldwide, according to real-time data compiled by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.

Here’s how the news is developing Thursday. All times Eastern:

Nov 26, 9:18 am
TSA screens record number of travelers since pandemic began

More than one million people went through airport security checkpoints across the United States on Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving, despite public health guidance against traveling for the holiday.

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) screened 1,070,967 individuals on Wednesday, the highest amount since the coronavirus pandemic was declared in mid-March. The previous pandemic record was set on Sunday, when TSA screened 1,047,934 people.

Last week, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it is recommending that Americans do not travel for Thanksgiving.

“It’s not a requirement, it’s a recommendation for the American public to consider,” Dr. Henry Walke, the CDC’s COVID-19 incident manager, told reporters during a call on Nov. 19. “Right now, as we’re seeing exponential growth in cases and the opportunity to translocate disease or infection from one part of the country to another leads to our recommendation to avoid travel at this time.”

Nov 26, 8:22 am
Russia sees record rise in cases and deaths on same day

Russia confirmed a record 25,487 new cases of COVID-19 in the last 24 hours, along with an all-time high of 524 new deaths from the disease.

The cumulative total now stands at 2,187,990 confirmed cases, including 38,062 deaths, according to the country’s coronavirus response headquarters.

The Eastern European nation of 145 million people has the fifth-highest tally of COVID-19 cases in the world, behind only the United States, India, Brazil and France, according to a real-time count kept by Johns Hopkins University.

Despite the growing number of infections and deaths, Russian authorities have repeatedly said they have no plans to impose another nationwide lockdown.

However, Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin announced Thursday that he will extend the local COVID-19 restrictions in the capital city to Jan. 15. Those restrictions, which were set to expire Sunday, include a stay-at-home recommendation for residents over the age of 65 and an order for employers to keep at least 30% of their staff working from home.

Sobyanin said additional measures are not necessary at this point. Although the pace of the COVID-19 infection rate in Moscow appears to be gradually evening out, the mayor said it’s still too early to say its on the decline.

“The health care system is still seriously overstretched,” Sobyanin wrote on his blog Thursday.

Nov 26, 7:36 am
CDC projects up to 321K virus deaths in US by Dec. 19

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now projects that the country will have recorded up to 321,000 COVID-19 deaths before the end of the year.

The CDC on Wednesday published the latest national ensemble forecast, which predicts that the number of newly reported COVID-19 deaths in the United States will likely increase over the next four weeks, with 10,600 to 21,400 new deaths likely to be reported in the week ending Dec. 19. A total of 294,000 to 321,000 deaths from COVID-19 are projected to be reported nationwide by this date.

Last week’s national ensemble forecast predicted there would be a total of 276,000 to 298,000 COVID-19 deaths reported nationwide by Dec. 12.

The ensemble forecasts are based on a combination of the independently developed forecasts that the CDC receives from various modeling groups.

Nov 26, 6:45 am
US reports over 181,000 new cases ahead of Thanksgiving

There were 181,490 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in the United States on Wednesday, the day before the Thanksgiving holiday, according to a real-time count kept by Johns Hopkins University.

It’s the 23rd day in a row that the country has reported over 100,000 newly diagnosed infections. Wednesday’s count is down from a peak of 196,004 new cases on Nov. 20.

An additional 2,297 fatalities from COVID-19 were also registered nationwide on Wednesday, the country’s highest single-day death toll from the disease since May 6 and just under the all-time high of 2,609 new deaths on April 15.

A total of 12,778,254 people in the United States have been diagnosed with COVID-19 since the pandemic began, and at least 262,283 of them have died, according to Johns Hopkins. The cases include people from all 50 U.S. states, Washington, D.C. and other U.S. territories as well as repatriated citizens.

Much of the country was under lockdown by the end of March as the first wave of pandemic hit. By May 20, all U.S. states had begun lifting stay-at-home orders and other restrictions put in place to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus. The day-to-day increase in the country’s cases then hovered around 20,000 for a couple of weeks before shooting back up and crossing 100,000 for the first time on Nov. 4.

Copyright © 2020, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

November 26, 2020 • No Comments • National News

ABC NewsBy DANIEL MANZO, ABC News

(NEW YORK) — The holiday storm that has been tracking across the country brought some severe weather and heavy rain to parts of the Midwest and the south on Wednesday.

There was one reported tornado in Mississippi that did some damage as well as strong thunderstorm wind reports in parts of Indiana and Ohio.

Heavy rain in the South also brought some flash flooding, especially in parts of the New Orleans metropolitan area.

On Thursday morning, heavy rain forming along the frontal system associated with the holiday storm is bringing heavy rain to the Northeast, including to major metro areas.

Locally, over an inch of rain could be possible from this storm, which could cause some flash flooding on area roadways.

For those that are headed out and about for Thanksgiving, it could be treacherous with heavy rain at times and some flooding in spots.

The other weather story for Thanksgiving is a critical fire threat in Southern California.

Dry and gusty Santa Ana winds are expected in the region starting Thursday and lasting through Friday and gusts, especially in the mountains, could reach 65 mph and relative humidity could be as low as 5%.

These are critical fire conditions and any fires that do develop could become quite erratic. The fire danger is expected to persist into Friday.

While most of the country will get away with a quiet Thanksgiving in terms of sensible weather, there are indications that the weather pattern is about to change.

A new storm will develop in the southern U.S. as early as late Friday and Saturday and the initial impacts of this storm will be widespread heavy rain that will be moving across the southern U.S. this holiday weekend.

The rainfall is expected to be somewhat excessive, with a widespread 2 to 4 inches of rain expected from Texas to Georgia, and locally 4 to 6 inches of rain in parts of extreme Southeast Texas and Louisiana which could result in flash flooding concerns this weekend.

By early next week the precise placement of this storm and a blast of colder air becomes a little more complicated and forecast confidence begins to decrease.

However, forecast models are indicating that the storm will become pretty well organized and pull a surge of cold air down into parts of the eastern U.S. with a surge of moisture along the East Coast.

Perhaps the more concerning issue with this set up is that storm slows down and stalls over the eastern U.S., which means there could be several days in a row next week of unsettled weather from the Midwest to the Northeast.

The likely impacts include a very heavy rain even for the Northeast major cities with flooding possible.

Gusty winds along the coast will also be possible, as will coastal flooding.

However, on the colder western side of the storm, areas of snow are likely to develop but it remains too early to determine where the heaviest snow will occur.

But due to the rush of cold air, there could be snowfall well into the Tennessee Valley.

Overall, it remains too early to determine the precise impacts of this storm but it appears several days of unsettled weather is ahead beginning in the South this weekend and then the Midwest and Northeast next week.

Copyright © 2020, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

November 25, 2020 • No Comments • National News

iStock/narvikkBY: JULIA JACOBO, ABC News

(NEW YORK) — Health care workers across the country are pleading with the public to follow COVID-19 guidelines as the nation struggles to contain another wave of the virus.

The U.S. death toll from COVID-19 reached 260,000 on Wednesday, and almost every state in the U.S. is experiencing an increased rate of infection, according to Johns Hopkins University.

At the Pablo Pinto General Hospital in Mineral Wells, Texas, about 90 miles west of Dallas, doctors and nurses are “struggling to transfer patients to higher levels of care,” the hospital’s CEO, Ross Korkmas, wrote on a statement posted to Facebook Tuesday.

Both the intensive care unit and COVID-19 unit at the hospital are full, and more patients are currently admitted than ever before, making it difficult for patients in need to be transferred to higher levels of care, he said.

Korkmas called on the community to help slow the spread of the virus.

“Please help protect your neighbor, help protect your coworkers, help protect OUR community from the spread of a virus. Wear a mask, social distance, wash your hands and please limit gatherings,” Korkmas wrote. “You are the front line to stop the spread and we need your help!”

Kenneth Remy, a doctor at the Missouri Baptist Medical Center and the Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis, posted a video to Twitter last week showing what it’s like for a patient who is about to be placed on a ventilator.

“This is what it looks like when you breathe 40 times a minute,” he wrote. “I hope that the last moments of your life don’t look like this.”

The city has seen record numbers of deaths and hospitalizations in the past 10 days, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported. Remy used the video as a teaching moment.

“This is serious,” he said. “I beg you, please practice the precautions to reduce transmission of COVID disease so that we can effectively prevent disease for you and your loved ones.”

Health care workers have been witnessing death and suffering for nearly nine months now, leaving them burned out and with low morale, Dan Meyer, a doctor at Maine Medical Center in Portland, told ABC Portland affiliate WMTW-TV.

The difficulties are compounded as people continue to ignore public health measures, Meyer said.

“When you encounter those situations, it just makes it so much more difficult as a health care worker, and I really worry about what’s happening to health care workers in this country … the challenge they face in burnout and wellness and gratitude goes a long way,” Meyer said.

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci echoed those pleas, urging Americans to keep Thanksgiving celebrations as small as possible.

“A sacrifice now could save lives … and make the future much brighter as we get through this,” Fauci said on Good Morning America Wednesday.

North Carolina Central University on Tuesday released results of a study that showed 77% of North Carolinians plan to spend Thanksgiving with people from outside their home. Hospitalizations in neighboring counties are up by 69%, ABC Durham, North Carolina, affiliate WTVD-TV reported.

“It makes me extremely sad. I just worry about my own team, because my team now has to step up and work harder,” Loc Culp, an ICU nurse manager at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, told WTVD-TV.

The hospital’s pulmonary and critical care division chief, Shannon Carson, warned that if health guidelines aren’t followed on Thanksgiving, future holidays could be ruined as well.

“Don’t make one day of warm family gathering turn into a Christmas in the intensive care unit,” Carson said. “It’s just not worth it.”

Copyright © 2020, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.