Family-friendly New Year’s Eve crafts
Play-Doh expert Jason Loik shows how to make life-like food out of Play-Doh, an activity the whole family can enjoy doing together.
Play-Doh expert Jason Loik shows how to make life-like food out of Play-Doh, an activity the whole family can enjoy doing together.
The family of a 12-year-old girl in Kenosha, Wisconsin, filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against police and the city after accusing an off-duty police officer of kneeling on the girl’s neck while trying to break up a fight she was allegedly involved in. The lawsuit, which was obtained by ABC News, was filed on behalf of the girl's father Jerrel Perez and his daughter, who is identified as Jane Doe because she is a minor. The complaint names the Kenosha Police Officer Shawn Guetschow, the City of Kenosha and the Kenosha Unified School District in the Eastern District of Wisconsin as defendants.
In the latest development in Florida's conflict with Walt Disney World, a bill filed Monday during the state's special legislative session would give Gov. Ron DeSantis the ability to appoint a board to run Disney's Reedy Creek Improvement District -- the small, autonomous region that encompasses the company's theme parks outside Orlando. Currently, Disney elects the members because it owns the district, essentially allowing the company to govern the region around its businesses. According to the 189-page bill, none of the appointees to the oversight board could be recent Disney employees or have had a contractual relationship with a theme park within the past three years.
When President Joe Biden delivers his State of the Union address on Tuesday with new House Speaker Kevin McCarthy sitting over his shoulder, looming between the two will be a possible standoff over raising the federal debt ceiling. The management of how to increase the borrowing limit, which the Treasury Department has indicated will need to be done as soon as June to make sure none of the federal government's bills go unpaid, is shaping up to be the first major obstacle that McCarthy and Biden must work together to overcome. The conflict, along with the potentially calamitous economic consequences of a debt default, will no doubt color some of Biden's remarks on Tuesday as he looks to reassure the 53% of Americans who are "very" concerned about that outcome, according to a new ABC News/Washington Post poll.
If you ever needed artificial intelligence's help to plan a friend's baby shower, your time has come, as Google officially unveiled an AI program it's calling Bard, seemingly its answer to the viral ChatGPT. Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced Bard on the company's blog Monday, calling it "an important next step" in AI for the search engine giant. "Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world's knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our large language models," Pichai said.
Embattled crypto executive Sam Bankman-Fried agreed on Monday to stop using Signal and other encrypted messaging apps as a condition of his release on bail, according to a letter his attorney filed with the court. Prosecutors had sought to limit how Bankman-Fried communicates while he is out on bail, citing concerns over possible efforts to influence potential witness testimony. According to his attorney, Bankman-Fried, who has pleaded not guilty to criminal charges stemming from the collapse of FTX, and the government resolved their dispute and proposed a jointly agreed-upon bail modification to the judge.
A 38-year-old man suspected of shooting an off-duty NYPD officer has been arrested in Rockland County, New York, where he was found hiding out in a hotel, police sources told ABC News. The unidentified officer, who remains hospitalized, attempted to buy a car on Ruby Street in Brooklyn on Saturday night after the details of the purchase were arranged on social media, police said. The unidentified suspect has nearly two dozen prior arrests, including for strangulation, grand larceny, and aggravated harassment, and is believed to be part of a two-man stick-up crew that has been linked to at least three robberies in the area, according to sources.
United Airlines is facing a possible $1.15 million fine after allegedly conducting flights with planes that hadn't undergone a certain safety check, federal regulators said, though United called the check "redundant" given other systems. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) proposed the fine on Monday and said that from June 2018 to April 2021, United removed the fire system warning check from its Boeing 777 pre-flight checklist -- an inspection task required in its maintenance specifications manual. United operated more than 100,000 flights with the Boeing 777 during this time, according to a letter from the FAA.
U.S. Navy vessels on Monday swarmed a widespread debris field with divers and cranes to retrieve pieces of the suspected Chinese surveillance balloon shot down by a U.S. fighter aircraft off the coast of South Carolina on Saturday afternoon. A senior government said the FBI is expected to take custody of any recovered components of the balloon’s payload and to ship it to its laboratory in Quantico, Virginia. The balloon had been traveling across the continental U.S. since at least Tuesday, with the White House facing mounting questions and political blowback as to why the balloon was allowed to cross the country in the first place, especially as the U.S. deals with tensions with China.
Previous Chinese surveillance balloon incidents that occurred during the Trump administration and early under the Biden administration were not spotted by NORAD at the time, Air Force Gen. Glen VanHerck, commander of the North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command, told reporters Monday. VanHerck said that U.S. intelligence made NORAD aware of the threat posed by the surveillance balloons after the fact through "additional means of collection and made us aware of those balloons that were previously approaching North America or transit in North America."
As U.S. intelligence agencies continue to investigate the situation around what the Department of Defense is calling a spy balloon from China, there are still several questions about how this aircraft was able to move across the globe and what its purpose was, according to government officials and intelligence experts. "What's really concerning here is just the arrogance of the Chinese [government] to be able to say, we're going to fly through your sovereign territory and you know that they'd be screaming bloody murder if we'd done that to them," Col. Stephen Ganyard, an ABC News contributor and former State Department official, told "Start Here" Monday. Authorities are working to recover what's left of the balloon from the waters off South Carolina after fighter jets shot it down on Saturday and Chinese government officials have criticized the U.S. for striking down the aircraft that they claim was a private weather balloon.
Tim McGraw showed his love for fellow country superstar Shania Twain recently by covering one of her biggest hits. McGraw, 55, took to Instagram on Friday to share a video of himself performing an acoustic rendition of Twain's '90s classic "You're Still the One" off the Canadian singer's 1997 mega-hit album "Come on Over." Twain, 57, saw the cover and approved.
Nearly 150 New York City police officers violated department rules during 2020 protests over the death of George Floyd, according to a new report issued Monday by the Civilian Complaint Review Board. Most of the violations involved excessive force, including improper use of batons and pepper spray. The report said there were hundreds more allegations the CCRB could not investigate because officers wore bands over their badge numbers or refused to be interviewed remotely.
New York City workers will no longer need to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 to be employed by the city, Mayor Eric Adams announced Monday. The mayor said the vaccine mandate for city employees will end Friday, nearly 15 months after his predecessor, Bill de Blasio, implemented the policy, during a vote by the city's Department of Health. Adams said 96% of the city workforce has received both shots so the mandate for current and prospective employees served its purpose.
A Florida man and a Maryland woman have been arrested on federal charges of plotting to attack multiple energy substation with the goal of destroying Baltimore, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Monday. The suspects, Sarah Clendaniel of Catonsville, Maryland, and Brandon Russell of Orlando, Florida, were allegedly fueled by a racist extremist ideology as they "conspired to inflict maximum harm" on the power grid with the aim to "completely destroy" Baltimore, U.S. Attorney Erek Barron and a top FBI official said at a Monday morning press conference. Russell is quoted in court documents saying that attacking power transformers is "the greatest thing somebody can do."
Officials are making an urgent call for evacuations as they plan to burn off the chemicals from a derailed Norfolk Southern train in East Palestine, Ohio, in order to avoid a major explosion. Residents in a 1-mile by 2-mile area surrounding East Palestine -- which includes parts of Ohio and Pennsylvania -- must evacuate immediately, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said. "The vinyl chloride contents of five rail cars are currently unstable and could potentially explode, causing deadly disbursement of shrapnel and toxic fumes," the governor's office said in a statement.
AMC Theatres announced a new ticket pricing initiative Monday that has customers paying based on where their seat is located. The initiative, called Sightline at AMC, is described by the company in a press release as a way for moviegoers to "now have the option to pay less, or more, for a movie ticket based on their seat selection." There are three tiers of seats for customers to choose from: Standard Sightline, the most common in auditoriums and the traditional cost of a ticket; Value Sightline, seats in the front row of the auditorium as well as select ADA seats which cost less than Standard Sightline seats; and Preferred Sightline, seats typically in the middle of the auditorium and priced more than Standard Sightline seats.
New York Rep. George Santos, who continues to claim his mother was in downtown Manhattan on 9/11 despite immigration documents indicating she wasn't even in the United States, has invited a former ground zero volunteer firefighter to President Joe Biden's State of the Union address on Tuesday. According to a Monday news release from Santos' office, his guest, Michael Weinstock, joined first responders in New York City on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, and was later diagnosed with neuropathy, a nerve disorder. Santos took to the House floor on Monday to advocate for expanded health coverage for people who suffer from 9/11-related illnesses.
FTX's new chief executive told a bankruptcy court Monday there is "a danger" to authorizing an independent investigation of the crypto exchange's collapse. John Ray said he had no use for prior court-supervised investigations into other companies he steered through bankruptcy. "Neither in Enron nor in Residential Capital did I make use of that report," Ray testified during a hearing before U.S. Bankruptcy Judge John Dorsey in Delaware.
It may feel like spring in Texas, but some of the state's most populated regions are still reeling from last week's freezing temperatures. More than 350,000 customers were without power in Texas on Friday due to the massive ice storm that brought freezing rain and sleet to much of the South, which weighed down power lines and trees. The destruction caused by the inclement weather prompted Texas.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen rejected recession fears in an interview with "Good Morning America" on Monday, saying the economy remains "strong and resilient." A blockbuster jobs report last week showed that the economy added 517,000 jobs in January, dropping the unemployment rate to a near-historic low. "You don't have a recession when you have 500,000 jobs and the lowest unemployment rate in more than 50 years," Yellen said.