USA
Crashed plane carried 4 teens who’d been on hunting trip
Four teenagers and four adults returning from a hunting trip were on board a small plane that crashed off the coast of North Carolina over the weekend, authorities said Tuesday.
Everyone on board was from North Carolina. Six of the passengers lived in coastal Carteret County, a mostly rural area that includes tourist destinations and the southern edge of the Outer Banks.
Divers found the plane’s fuselage and cabin in the Atlantic Ocean about 3 miles (5 kilometers) from shore and in about 55 feet (17 meters) of water, Carteret County Sheriff Asa Buck told reporters Tuesday.
Crews have been removing human remains as well as aviation equipment that could help investigators determine the crash’s cause, Buck said. The Coast Guard said Tuesday that it was suspending its search but would continue to work alongside local partners through ongoing recovery operations.
The sheriff said the plane crash and recovery efforts have been “tremendously hard” because the community is so close-knit.
“Half my family’s from down here,” Buck said. “I know the people involved. And I know some of them very closely.”
The sheriff’s office identified the adults on board the plane as pilot Ernest Durwood Rawls, 67, of Greenville; Jeffrey Worthington Rawls, 28, of Greenville; Stephanie Ann McInnis Fulcher, 42, of Sea Level; and Douglas Hunter Parks, 45, of Sea Level.
The teenagers were identified as Jonathan Kole McInnis, 15, of Sea Level; Noah Lee Styron, 15, of Cedar Island; Michael Daily Shepard, 15, of Atlantic; and Jacob Nolan Taylor, 16, of Atlantic.
Carteret County includes communities such as Emerald Isle and Atlantic Beach as well as the Cape Lookout National Seashore. The tower of its iconic Outer Banks lighthouse is known for its black-and-white diamond pattern.
But the county also includes the waterfront town of Atlantic, which has a population of about 500 people and is located in a region called Down East.
Kendra Lewis, 29, organized a prayer vigil for Tuesday night in the parking lot of a shuttered grocery store.
“We’re just an old fishing community,” she said. “We’re used to banding together and taking care of one another.”
Read: US hasn’t verified Russian pullback of troops near Ukraine
Lewis watched the four boys who were on the plane grow up.
“They’re the definition of Down East people,” she said. “They hunted. They loved each other. They were just a part of the community. We’re all just a big family.”
The teenagers went to East Carteret High School, which has about 600 students, the school system said in a statement.
Following the news of Sunday’s crash, school counselors, psychologists and crisis team members arrived at the school, where students have begun “telling each other great stories of beautiful memories,” said Rob Jackson, the county schools’ superintendent.
“This is hard for adults,” Jackson said. “Harder still, I think, for teenagers who’ve grown up with their friends who are suddenly taken from them.”
Charlie Snow, a close friend of the pilot, said Ernest Rawls and Jeff Rawls were father and son. Jeff Rawls was a pilot as well, Snow said.
Snow said the elder Rawls was nicknamed “Teen.” Rawls had previously flown for Snow’s company, Outer Banks Airlines, and he and Rawls had also flown together. The elder Rawls was a highly trained and extremely capable pilot, not to mention a high-level aviation mechanic, said Snow, who is also a pilot.
“If anybody could get out of something, if it was possible to get out of it, he could have done it,” Snow said during a telephone interview. “So it makes me think that whatever happened was catastrophic. But you know, it’s just speculation.”
Snow said he and Ernest Rawls were like brothers and were friends for 20 years.
“I just don’t know many people in the world that I loved better than him,” Snow said. “He was just a great guy, a great pilot, a wonderful man — a fine Christian man.”
Snow said the plane that Rawls was flying was owned by Parks, one of the passengers. Fulcher, another passenger, was Parks’ girlfriend. Snow said the couple had taken the teens to a charity hunting event.
FlightAware listed a departure for that plane from Hyde County Airport at 1:35 p.m. Sunday. It noted that the plane was last seen near Beaufort, the Carteret County seat, around 2 p.m.
The Coast Guard said it received a report of a possible downed aircraft about 4 miles (6.4 kilometers) east of Drum Inlet from a Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point air traffic controller. The air traffic controller reported that the aircraft was behaving erratically on radar, then disappeared from the screen.
The single-engine Pilatus PC-12/47 crashed about 18 miles (29 kilometers) northeast of Beaufort, according to an email from the Federal Aviation Administration. A preliminary accident notification on the FAA’s website noted that the aircraft “crashed into water under unknown circumstances.”
The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating.
Over 130,000 Russian troops now staged outside Ukraine: US
Some airlines canceled flights to the Ukrainian capital and troops there unloaded fresh shipments of weapons from NATO members Sunday, as its president sought to project confidence in the face of U.S. warnings of possible invasion within days by a growing number of Russian forces.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy spoke to President Joe Biden for about an hour, insisting that Ukrainians had the country under “safe and reliable protection” against feared attack by a far stronger Russian military, aides said afterward. The White House said both agreed to keep pushing both deterrence and diplomacy to try to stave off a feared Russian military offensive.
The Biden administration has become increasingly outspoken about its concerns that Russia will stage an incident in the coming days that would create a false pretext for an invasion of Ukraine.
U.S. and European intelligence findings in recent days have sparked worries that Russia may try to target a scheduled Ukrainian military exercise slated for Tuesday in eastern Ukraine to launch such a “false-flag operation,” according to two people familiar with the matter. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about it.
Read: War, peace, stalemate? Week ahead may decide Ukraine’s fate
American intelligence officials believe targeting the military exercise is just one of multiple options that Russia has weighed as a possibility for a false-flag operation. The White House has underscored that they do not know with certainty if President Vladimir Putin has made a final determination to launch an invasion.
Moscow’s forces are massing on Ukraine’s north, east and south in what the Kremlin insists are military exercises.
A U.S. official updated the Biden administration’s estimate for how many Russian forces are now staged near Ukraine’s borders to more than 130,000, up from the more than 100,000 the U.S. has cited publicly in previous weeks. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the administration’s conclusions.
Zelenskyy has repeatedly played down the U.S. warnings, questioning the increasingly strident statements from U.S. officials in recent days that Russia could be planning to invade as soon as midweek.
“We understand all the risks, we understand that there are risks,” he said in a broadcast Saturday. “If you, or anyone else, has additional information regarding a 100% Russian invasion starting on the 16th, please forward that information to us.”
But while Zelenskyy has urged against panic that he fears could undermine Ukraine’s economy, he and his civilian and military leaders also are preparing defenses, soliciting and receiving a flow of arms from the U.S. and other NATO members.
A military cargo aircraft carrying U.S.-made Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and ammunition from NATO member Lithuania landed Sunday, bolstering the country’s defenses against any attack by air.
Zelenskyy wore military olive drab at a drill with tanks and helicopters near Ukraine’s border with Russian-annexed Crimea this weekend. In the nearby city of Kalanchak, some expressed disbelief that Putin would really send his troops rolling into the country.
“I don’t believe Russia will attack us,” said resident Boris Cherepenko. “I have friends in Sakhalin, in Krasnodar,” he said, naming Russian regions. “I don’t believe it.”
In Kyiv, others expressed uncertainty whether any Russian move would be economic, military, or happen at all. One woman, Alona Buznitskaya, speaking on a central street of the capital bearing a few signs declaring, “I love Ukraine,” said she was calm.
“You should always be ready for everything, and then you will have nothing to be afraid of,” she said.
The U.S. largely has not made public the evidence it says is underlying its most specific warnings on possible Russian planning or timing.
“We’re not going to give Russia the opportunity to conduct a surprise here, to spring something on Ukraine or the world,” Jake Sullivan, the U.S. national security adviser, told CNN on Sunday, about the U.S. warnings.
“We are going to make sure that we are laying out for the world what we see as transparently and plainly as we possibly can,” he said.
The Russians have deployed missile, air, naval and special operations forces, as well as supplies to sustain an invasion. This week, Russia moved six amphibious assault ships into the Black Sea, augmenting its capability to land on the coast.
Putin denies any intention of attacking Ukraine. Russia is demanding that the West keep former Soviet countries out of NATO. It also wants NATO to refrain from deploying weapons near its border and to roll back alliance forces from Eastern Europe — demands flatly rejected by the West.
Biden and Putin spoke for more than an hour Saturday, but the White House offered no suggestion that the call diminished the threat of an imminent war in Europe.
Read:Biden warns Putin of ‘severe costs’ of Ukraine invasion
Reflecting the West’s concerns, Dutch airline KLM has canceled flights to Ukraine until further notice, the company said. The Ukrainian charter airline SkyUp said Sunday its flight from Madeira, Portugal, to Kyiv was diverted to the Moldovan capital.
And Ukraine’s air traffic safety agency Ukraerorukh issued a statement declaring the airspace over the Black Sea to be a “zone of potential danger” and recommended that planes avoid flying over the sea Feb. 14-19.
The Putin-Biden conversation, following a call between Putin and French President Emmanuel Macron earlier in the day, came at a critical moment for what has become the biggest security crisis between Russia and the West since the Cold War. U.S. officials believe they have mere days to prevent an invasion and enormous bloodshed in Ukraine.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz will fly to Kyiv on Monday to meet with Zelenskyy and Moscow on Tuesday to meet with Putin.
While the U.S. and NATO have made clear they do not intend to send troops to Ukraine to fight Russia, any invasion and resulting punishing sanctions promised by the U.S. and other countries could reverberate far beyond the former Soviet republic, affecting energy supplies, global markets and the power balance in Europe.
The United States was pulling most of its staff from the embassy in Kyiv and urged all American citizens to leave Ukraine immediately. Britain joined other European nations in telling its citizens to leave.
Biden has bolstered the U.S. military presence in Europe as reassurance to allies on NATO’s eastern flank. The 3,000 additional soldiers ordered to Poland come on top of 1,700 who are on their way there. The U.S. Army also is shifting 1,000 soldiers from Germany to Romania, which like Poland shares a border with Ukraine.
Russia and Ukraine have been locked in a bitter conflict since 2014, when Ukraine’s Kremlin-friendly leader was driven from office by a popular uprising. Moscow responded by annexing the Crimean Peninsula and then backing a separatist insurgency in eastern Ukraine, where fighting has killed over 14,000 people.
A 2015 peace deal brokered by France and Germany helped halt large-scale battles, but regular skirmishes have continued, and efforts to reach a political settlement have stalled.
War, peace, stalemate? Week ahead may decide Ukraine’s fate
Even if a Russian invasion of Ukraine doesn’t happen in the next few days, the crisis is reaching a critical inflection point with European stability and the future of East-West relations hanging in the balance.
A convergence of events over the coming week could determine whether the stalemate is resolved peacefully or Europe is at war. At stake are Europe’s post-Cold War security architecture and long-agreed limits on the deployment of conventional military and nuclear forces there.
“This next 10 days or so will be critical,” said Ian Kelly, a retired career diplomat and former U.S. ambassador to Georgia who now teaches international relations at Northwestern University.
The Biden administration on Friday said an invasion could happen at any moment, with a possible target date of Wednesday, according to intelligence picked up by the United States, and Washington was evacuating almost all of its embassy staff in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital.
Read:Biden warns Putin of ‘severe costs’ of Ukraine invasion
A phone call between President Joe Biden and Russian leader Vladimir Putin on Saturday did nothing to ease tensions. Biden and Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, spoke on Sunday.
Even before the latest U.S. warnings and diplomatic moves, analysts saw this as a critical week for the future of Ukraine.
“Russia and the United States are approaching a peak of the conflict of their interests regarding a future shape of the European order,” Timofei Bordachev, said head of the Center for European Research at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics. “The parties may take action against each other that will go much farther than what was considered admissible quite recently,” he said in a recent analysis.
In the week ahead, Washington and NATO are expecting Moscow’s formal response after they rejected its main security demands, and major Russian military drills in Belarus, conducted as part of a deployment near Ukraine, are to end. The fate of the Russian troops now in Belarus will be key to judging the Kremlin’s intentions.
At the same time, the Winter Olympics in China, often cited as a potential deterrent to immediate Russian action, will conclude Feb. 20. Although U.S. officials have said they believe an invasion could take place before then, the date is still considered important.
And an important international security conference is taking place in Munich next weekend, with Vice President Kamala Harris, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and top European officials planning to attend.
Putin has warned the West that he will not back down on his demand to keep Ukraine out of NATO. While Ukraine has long aspired to join, the alliance is not about to offer an invitation.
Still, he contends that if Ukraine becomes a member and tries to use force to reclaim the Crimean Peninsula annexed by Moscow in 2014, it would draw Russia and NATO into a conflict.
His foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, has asked Western nations to explain how they interpret the principle of the “indivisibility of security” enshrined in international agreements they signed. The Russian Foreign Ministry said on Friday that it would not accept a collective response from the European Union and NATO, insisting on an individual response from each country.
Seeking to counter NATO’s argument that every nation is free to choose alliances, Moscow has charged that NATO violated the principle and jeopardized Russia’s security by expanding eastward.
“Russia’s bold demands and equally blunt U.S. rejection of them have pushed the international agenda toward the confrontation more than ever since the height of the Cold War,” Bordachev said.
He argued that closer relations with China have strengthened Moscow’s hand. “Whatever goals Russia could pursue now, it can plan its future in conditions of a full rupture of ties with the West,” Bordachev said.
Russian officials have emphasized that negotiating a settlement over Ukraine depends squarely on the United States and that Western allies just march to Washington’s orders.
In the past, Russia had sought to build close contacts with France and Germany in the hope that friendly ties with Europe’s biggest economies would help offset the U.S. pressure. But those ties were strained by the poisoning in 2020 of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who spent five months in Germany convalescing from what he described as a nerve agent attack he blamed on the Kremlin. Russia has denied its involvement.
More recently, Russian officials have criticized the position of France and Germany in the deadlocked peace talks on eastern Ukraine, holding them responsible for the failure to persuade Ukrainian authorities to grant broad self-rule to the Russia-backed separatist region, as required by a 2015 agreement.
In a break with diplomatic rules, the Russian Foreign Ministry last fall published confidential letters that Lavrov exchanged with his French and German counterparts in a bid to prove their failure to help make progress in talks.
Read: Putin, Biden plan high-stakes phone call in Ukraine crisis
Speaking after the latest fruitless round of those talks, Kremlin representative Dmitry Kozak bemoaned the failure by French and German envoys to persuade Ukraine to commit to a dialogue with the separatists, as the agreement stipulated.
Despite the tensions with both Paris and Berlin, Putin spent more than five hours talking to French President Emmanuel Macron last Monday and will host German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Tuesday. Putin said he was grateful to Macron for trying to help negotiate a way to ease the tensions and said they would talk again.
Moscow also just reopened a window for diplomatic contacts with Britain, hosting the foreign and defense secretaries for the first round of talks since ties were ruptured by the 2018 poisoning in Britain of former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter.
Lavrov’s meeting with Liz Truss was frosty, but British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace’s talks with Russia’s defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, appeared more businesslike, with the parties emphasizing the need to maintain regular contact to reduce the threat of military incidents.
Kodak Black reportedly among 4 shot outside Super Bowl party
Four people were shot and wounded early Saturday after a fight broke out outside a Los Angeles restaurant hosting a party that followed a Justin Bieber concert, police said.
The gunfire erupted outside The Nice Guy restaurant, striking and injuring four men ages 60, 22, 20 and 19, LAPD Officer Lizeth Lomeli said. Their names were not released, but NBC News reported rapper Kodak Black was among the wounded.
Officers who responded to the scene found two victims. Paramedics took them to the hospital for treatment of non-life-threatening injuries, police said in an updated statement Saturday afternoon.
Two additional victims went to hospitals on their own, according to the statement. All four victims were listed in stable condition.
Detectives asked witnesses to come forward to help them identify the gunman.
Videos posted on TMZ.com and on social media show Black posing for photos with a group of people outside the restaurant when the brawl broke out. Black is among several people involved in the brawl when shots rang out, sending everyone at the scene running for cover.
Law enforcement sources told NBC News that Black, whose legal name is Bill Kapri, was among the people shot and injured. A message to his publicist at Atlantic Records has not been returned.
The party followed Bieber’s private concert at the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood, California as part of a Super Bowl-week party dubbed “Homecoming Weekend.” The guests at the star-studded event included Jeff Bezos, his girlfriend TV host Lauren Sánchez, “Hamilton” actor Anthony Ramos and NFL Hall-of-Famer Tony Gonzalez.
Also read: Police: 1 dead in Washington state grocery store shooting
The Hollywood Reporter reports that Bieber and his wife Hailey Baldwin, Drake, Khloe Kardashian and Tobey Maguire were also among the celebrities seen entering the afterparty.
Biden warns Putin of ‘severe costs’ of Ukraine invasion
President Joe Biden told Russia’s Vladimir Putin that invading Ukraine would cause “widespread human suffering” and that the West was committed to diplomacy to end the crisis but “equally prepared for other scenarios,” the White House said Saturday. It offered no suggestion that the hourlong call diminished the threat of an imminent war in Europe.
Biden also said the United States and its allies would respond “decisively and impose swift and severe costs” if the Kremlin attacked its neighbor, according to the White House.
The two presidents spoke a day after Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, warned that U.S. intelligence shows a Russian invasion could begin within days and before the Winter Olympics in Beijing end on Feb. 20.
Read: US: Civilian toll in Syria raid may be higher than thought
Russia denies it intends to invade but has massed well over 100,000 troops near the Ukrainian border and has sent troops to exercises in neighboring Belarus, encircling Ukraine on three sides. U.S. officials say Russia’s buildup of firepower has reached the point where it could invade on short notice.
The conversation came at a critical moment for what has become the biggest security crisis between Russia and the West since the Cold War. U.S. officials believe they have mere days to prevent an invasion and enormous bloodshed in Ukraine. And while the U.S. and its NATO allies have no plans to send troops to Ukraine to fight Russia, an invasion and resulting punishing sanctions could reverberate far beyond the former Soviet republic, affecting energy supplies, global markets and the power balance in Europe.
“President Biden was clear with President Putin that while the United States remains prepared to engage in diplomacy, in full coordination with our Allies and partners, we are equally prepared for other scenarios,” the White House statement said.
Also read: British envoy in Moscow to try to ease Ukraine crisis
The call was “professional and substantive” but produced “no fundamental change in the dynamic that has been unfolding now for several weeks,” according to a senior administration official who briefed reporters following the call on condition of anonymity.
The official added that it remains unclear whether Putin has made a final decision to move forward with military action.
Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s top foreign policy aide, said that while tensions have been escalating for months, in recent days “the situation has simply been brought to the point of absurdity.”
He said Biden mentioned the possible sanctions that could be imposed on Russia, but “this issue was not the focus during a fairly long conversation with the Russian leader.”
Before talking to Biden, Putin had a telephone call with French President Emmanuel Macron, who met with him in Moscow earlier in the week to try to resolve the crisis. A Kremlin summary of the call suggested that little progress was made toward cooling down the tensions.
Putin complained in the call that the United States and NATO have not responded satisfactorily to Russian demands that Ukraine be prohibited from joining the military alliance and that NATO pull back forces from Eastern Europe.
In a sign that American officials are getting ready for a worst-case scenario, the United States announced plans to evacuate most of its staff from the embassy in the Ukrainian capital. Britain joined other European nations in urging its citizens to leave Ukraine.
Canada has shuttered its embassy in Kyiv and relocated its diplomatic staff to a temporary office in Lviv, located in the western part of the country, Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly said Saturday. Lviv is home to a Ukrainian military base that has served as the main hub for Canada’s 200-soldier training mission in the former Soviet country.
The timing of any possible Russian military action remained a key question.
The U.S. picked up intelligence that Russia is looking at Wednesday as a target date, according to a U.S. official familiar with the findings. The official, who was not authorized to speak publicly and did so only on condition of anonymity, would not say how definitive the intelligence was.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said he told his Russian counterpart Saturday that “further Russian aggression would be met with a resolute, massive and united trans-Atlantic response.”
Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy tried to project calm as he observed military exercises Saturday near Crimea, the peninsula that Russia seized from Ukraine in 2014.
“We are not afraid, we’re without panic, all is under control,” he said.
Ukrainian armed forces chief commander Lt. Gen. Valeriy Zaluzhny and Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov issued a more defiant joint statement.
“We are ready to meet the enemy, and not with flowers, but with Stingers, Javelins and NLAWs” — anti-tank and -aircraft weapons, they said. “Welcome to hell!”
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and his Russian counterpart, Sergei Shoigu, also held telephone discussions on Saturday.
Further U.S.-Russia tensions arose on Saturday when the Defense Ministry summoned the U.S. Embassy’s military attache after it said the navy detected an American submarine in Russian waters near the Kuril Islands in the Pacific. The submarine declined orders to leave, but departed after the navy used unspecified “appropriate means,” the ministry said.
Adding to the sense of crisis, the Pentagon ordered an additional 3,000 U.S. troops to Poland to reassure allies.
The U.S. has urged all American citizens in Ukraine to leave the country immediately, and Sullivan said those who remain should not expect the U.S. military to rescue them in the event that air and rail transportation is severed after a Russian invasion.
The Biden administration has been warning for weeks that Russia could invade Ukraine soon, but U.S. officials had previously said the Kremlin would likely wait until after the Winter Games ended so as not to antagonize China.
Sullivan told reporters on Friday that U.S. intelligence shows that Russia could take invade during the Olympics. He said military action could start with missile and air attacks, followed by a ground offensive.
“Russia has all the forces it needs to conduct a major military action,” Sullivan said, adding that “Russia could choose, in very short order, to commence a major military action against Ukraine.” He said the scale of such an invasion could range from a limited incursion to a strike on Kyiv, the capital.
Russia scoffed at the U.S. talk of urgency.
“The hysteria of the White House is more indicative than ever,” said Maria Zakharova, a Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman. “The Anglo-Saxons need a war. At any cost. Provocations, misinformation and threats are a favorite method of solving their own problems.”
Zakharova said her country had “optimized” staffing at its own embassy in Kyiv in response to concerns about possible military actions from the Ukrainian side.
In addition to the more than 100,000 ground troops that U.S. officials say Russia has assembled along Ukraine’s eastern and southern borders, the Russians have deployed missile, air, naval and special operations forces, as well as supplies to sustain a war. This week, Russia moved six amphibious assault ships into the Black Sea, augmenting its capability to land marines on the coast.
Biden has bolstered the U.S. military presence in Europe as reassurance to allies on NATO’s eastern flank. The 3,000 additional soldiers ordered to Poland come on top of 1,700 who are on their way there. The U.S. Army also is shifting 1,000 soldiers from Germany to Romania, which like Poland shares a border with Ukraine.
Russia is demanding that the West keep former Soviet countries out of NATO. It also wants NATO to refrain from deploying weapons near its border and to roll back alliance forces from Eastern Europe — demands flatly rejected by the West.
Russia and Ukraine have been locked in a bitter conflict since 2014, when Ukraine’s Kremlin-friendly leader was driven from office by a popular uprising. Moscow responded by annexing the Crimean Peninsula and then backing a separatist insurgency in eastern Ukraine, where fighting has killed over 14,000 people.
A 2015 peace deal brokered by France and Germany helped halt large-scale battles, but regular skirmishes have continued, and efforts to reach a political settlement have stalled.
NYC workers face firing for not following vaccine mandate
Several thousand New York City public workers could lose their jobs Friday if they don’t show they’ve complied with the city’s mandate requiring they receive at least two shots of the COVID-19 vaccine.
Though they represent about 1% of the 370,000-person city workforce, including teachers, firefighters and police officers, the mass firings will mark a new line in the sand for the nation’s largest city, which has imposed some of the most sweeping vaccine mandates in the country.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams, speaking about the looming firings at a news conference last week, noted that city workers largely complied with the mandate.
“Living in a city as complex like this, there must be rules. We must follow them. The rule is to get vaccinated if you’re a city employee. You have to follow that,” the Democrat said.
The mandate imposed last year under the former Mayor Bill de Blasio required most city workers to get a COVID-19 vaccine by the end of October or be placed on unpaid leave. New workers who started their jobs after Aug. 2 were likewise required to comply and show that they’ve received their shots.
There were up to 4,000 workers who had failed to comply by of the end of January, according to City Hall, but that number has dropped as more workers have started to comply or produce their vaccine cards since they were notified last week that they would be fired.
City officials said they won’t know exactly how many workers are fired until after the deadline passes. For most workers, that’s the end of their workday on Friday.
A coalition of unions representing different parts of the city workforce sued to block the mass firings. But a judge late Thursday afternoon ruled in favor of the city. A group of city Department of Education employees had a request for their appeal to be considered by the Supreme Court dismissed on Friday.
Some unions separately struck deals with the city to allow some workers to choose to remain on unpaid leave until this summer or fall. But not all union members took advantage of those deals.
The United Federation of Teachers, which represents New York City public school teachers, had negotiated with the city school district to allow members to choose to stay on unpaid leave until September 5.
READ: US donates another 10mn doses of Pfizer to Bangladesh
But the union said 700 of its members who have been on unpaid leave for months opted not to extend their leave or provide proof of vaccine and had been notified they’d be fired.
The union joined others in fighting the mass firings, contending that workers deserved due process that involved a hearing before being dismissed.
Police Benevolent Association, the city’s largest police union, said less than 50 of its members had received notices they faced termination.
Across the entire city workforce, up to 3,000 employees failed to meet an end of October deadline and have been on unpaid leave for months, according to the city. There are additionally up to 1,000 new employees, who started work after Aug. 2, who face termination because they have not shown proof of having received two shots.
US to evacuate Ukraine embassy amid Russian invasion fears
The United States is set to evacuate its embassy in Kyiv as Western intelligence officials warn that a Russian invasion of Ukraine is increasingly imminent.
U.S. officials say the State Department plans to announce early Saturday that all American staff at the Kyiv embassy will be required to leave the country ahead of a feared Russian invasion. The State Department would not comment.
The department had earlier ordered families of U.S. embassy staffers in Kyiv to leave. But it had left it to the discretion of nonessential personnel if they wanted to depart. The new move comes as Washington has ratcheted up its warnings about a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly, said a limited number of U.S. diplomats may be relocated to Ukraine’s far west, near the border with Poland, a NATO ally, so the U.S. could retain a diplomatic presence in the country.
The Pentagon announced Friday it is sending another 3,000 combat troops to Poland to join 1,700 who already are assembling there in a demonstration of American commitment to NATO allies worried at the prospect of Russia invading Ukraine.
Read: US: Civilian toll in Syria raid may be higher than thought
The additional soldiers will depart their post at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, over the next couple days and should be in Poland by early next week, according to a defense official, who provided the information under ground rules set by the Pentagon. They are the remaining elements of an infantry brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division.
Their mission will be to train and provide deterrence but not to engage in combat in Ukraine.
That announcement came shortly after Jake Sullivan, President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, issued a public warning for all American citizens in Ukraine to leave the country as soon as possible. Sullivan said Russian President Vladimir Putin could give the order to launch an invasion of Ukraine any day now.
In addition to the U.S. troops deploying to Poland, about 1,000 U.S. soldiers based in Germany are shifting to Romania in a similar mission of reassurance to a NATO ally. Also, 300 soldiers of an 18th Airborne Corps headquarters unit have arrived in Germany, commanded by Lt. Gen. Michael E. Kurilla.
Also read: British envoy in Moscow to try to ease Ukraine crisis
The American troops are to train with host-nation forces but not enter Ukraine for any purpose.
The U.S. already has about 80,000 troops throughout Europe at permanent stations and on rotational deployments.
Biden to split frozen Afghan funds for 9/11 victims, relief
President Joe Biden is expected to issue an executive order on Friday to move some $7 billion of the Afghan central bank’s assets frozen in the U.S. banking system to fund humanitarian relief in Afghanistan and compensate victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to a U.S. official familiar with the decision.
The order will require U.S. financial institutions to facilitate access to $3.5 billion of assets for Afghan relief and basic needs. The other $3.5 billion would remain in the United States and be used to fund ongoing litigation by U.S. victims of terrorism, the official said. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because the decision had not been formally announced.
International funding to Afghanistan was suspended and billions of dollars of the country’s assets abroad, mostly in the United States, were frozen after the Taliban took control of the country in mid-August.
The country’s long-troubled economy has been in a tailspin since the Taliban takeover. Nearly 80% of Afghanistan’s previous government’s budget came from the international community. That money, now cut off, financed hospitals, schools, factories and government ministries. Desperation for such basic necessities has been further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic as well as health care shortages, drought and malnutrition.
The lack of funding has led to increased poverty, and aid groups have warned of a looming humanitarian catastrophe. State employees, from doctors to teachers and administrative civil servants, haven’t been paid in months. Banks, meanwhile, have restricted how much money account holders can withdraw.
The official noted that U.S. courts where 9/11 victims have filed claims against the Taliban will also have to take action for the victims to be compensated.
The Justice Department had signaled several months ago that the Biden administration was poised to intervene in a federal lawsuit filed by 9/11 victims and families of victims in New York City by filing what’s known as a “statement of interest.” The deadline for that filing had been pushed back until Friday because the department said the administration needed to resolve “many complex and important” issues that required consultation with “numerous senior officials and executive agencies and components.”
The executive order is expected to be signed by Biden later on Friday. The New York Times first reported on the coming order.
The Taliban have called on the international community to release funds and help stave off a humanitarian disaster.
Afghanistan has more than $9 billion in reserves, including just over $7 billion in reserves held in the United States. The rest is largely in Germany, the United Arab Emirates, Switzerland and Qatar.
The Taliban are certain to oppose the split.
As of January the Taliban had managed to pay salaries of their ministries but were struggling to keep employees at work. They have promised to open schools for girls after the Afghan new year at the end of March, but humanitarian organizations are saying money is needed to pay teachers. Universities for women have reopened in several provinces with the Taliban saying the staggered opening will be completed by the end of February when all universities for women and men will open, a major concession to international demands.
US: Civilian toll in Syria raid may be higher than thought
U.S. military officials say there could have been more civilian casualties than initially thought in the raid that killed the top Islamic State leader in Syria last week, but they believe any such deaths were caused by the militant’s suicide bomb and were not at the hands of American forces.
Laying out a chronology of the raid by special operations forces, officials also said Thursday they cannot be certain that Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi detonated the bomb that killed him and his family at his home in the sleepy village of Atmeh near the Turkish border.
But they said it was set off by him or someone else on the third floor of the building where he lived. Previously the Pentagon and President Joe Biden had said al-Qurayshi blew up himself, his wife and two children. The military officials said Thursday they believe the upper floor was rigged to explode and that it’s most likely al-Qurayshi did it, not one of his family members.
They also said it’s possible that others — perhaps additional wives he had — could have been with him and killed in that blast. They said the blast threw “multiple bodies” from the building and buried them in the rubble, and while they know al-Qurayshi and his family died, they can’t rule out the possibility that other bodies were hidden in the collapse and not seen by the troops.
Speaking to a small group of reporters, two senior military officials involved in the planning or execution of the operation provided the most details to date on the Feb. 2 raid, pushing back against claims by residents and activist groups that the U.S. operation killed as many as 13 people, including civilians. They spoke on condition of anonymity as a condition for providing the briefing.
Also read: IS leader blows up self, family as US attacks Syria hideout
The Biden administration and the Pentagon have come under sharp criticism recently for failing to provide evidence for a number of national security claims, including proof of their efforts to avoid civilian casualties in operations such as the Syria raid and their account of a suicide bombing in Afghanistan in August.
Questions about the administration’s credibility are coming at a critical moment as it is revealing intelligence about Russia’s plans for Ukraine, while often not providing evidence to back up its assertions.
A journalist on assignment for The Associated Press as well as several village residents said they saw body parts scattered near the site of the Syria raid, a house in the rebel-held Idlib province. The Britain-based Syria Observatory for Human Rights and the opposition-run Syrian Civil Defense, first responders also known as the White Helmets, said 13 people, including children and women, were killed in the shelling and clashes that ensued after the U.S. commando raid. It’s not clear whether those included al-Qurayshi and his family.
On Thursday, the military officials acknowledged they have no video of the house explosion in Syria or of the efforts to get civilians out of the house. According to the military, a family with four children on the first floor responded to calls from the troops and interpreters and got out of the house to safety. As they left the house, the explosion tore through the third floor, sending bodies to the ground.
Omar Saleh, a resident of a nearby house, said his doors and windows started to rattle to the sound of low-flying aircraft at 1:10 a.m. local time. He then heard a man, speaking Arabic with an Iraqi or Saudi accent through a loudspeaker, urging women to surrender or leave the area.
The U.S. military, said one official, did not see indications of other noncombatant casualties but cannot rule it out because the forces were not on the ground long enough to dig through all the rubble.
Also read: Biden says IS leader killed during US raid in Syria
Military officials said, for the first time, that people in the house shot at the troops before the Americans started to enter the building after the explosion. An IS member, described as a lieutenant of al-Qurayshi’s, and his wife were on the second floor, with as many as five children. Officials said U.S. forces killed the militant and his wife in a gun battle. One was barricaded in a small room and shooting from there; another fired while coming through the door.
The troops safely brought four children from the second floor out of the house. But a toddler was found dead there, and the military officials said Thursday that it is not certain how the child died. They said no gunshot wounds were found and that the child was likely killed by the concussive effects of the third-floor explosion and not shot in the gunfight.
According to the AP journalist who went to the site, blood could be seen on the walls and floor of the remaining structure, which contained a wrecked bedroom with a child’s wooden cribr. On one damaged wall, a blue plastic children’s swing was still hanging. The kitchen was blackened with fire damage.
The officials said two al-Qaida-linked militants with automatic weapons approached the house in an effort to attack the U.S. forces and were killed. But the officials said other armed citizens in the area were not harmed because they did not pose a threat.
Explaining the lack of video of the house explosion, the officials said the team was watching the building and overhead surveillance was focused on the surrounding area to detect any potential threats to the force. They said there is also no body-cam video.
The officials also revealed that the U.S., which wanted to capture al-Qurayshi alive, had made plans to turn him over to another government. One official said the U.S. would have detained him temporarily, but there were no plans for a long-term U.S. detention. They declined to provide further details, saying they wanted to protect “government-to-government” discussions.
Al-Qurayshi took over as head of IS in October 2019, just days after leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi died during a U.S. raid. Officials said planning for the new raid began last fall when the U.S. first learned of al-Qurayshi’s presence in the building.
Unlike his predecessor, al-Qurayshi was far from a household name. He was a secretive man who officials said never left the house during the months that the U.S. watched and prepared for the raid. Officials said they thought they had a good chance at taking him alive because he only had one leg, which they believed would make it difficult for him to get to a suicide vest.
The blast, they said, was much larger than one from a regular suicide vest, which often holds just five or 10 pounds of explosives.
They said they chose a ground raid in order to avoid innocent deaths, despite the increased risk to the forces.
US inflation jumped 7.5% in the past year, a 40-year high
Inflation soared over the past year at its highest rate in four decades, hammering America’s consumers, wiping out pay raises and reinforcing the Federal Reserve’s decision to begin raising borrowing rates across the economy.
The Labor Department said Thursday that consumer prices jumped 7.5% last month compared with 12 months earlier, the steepest year-over-year increase since February 1982. Shortages of supplies and workers, heavy doses of federal aid, ultra-low interest rates and robust consumer spending combined to send inflation accelerating in the past year.
When measured from December to January, inflation was 0.6%, the same as the previous month and more than economists had expected. Prices had risen 0.7% from October to November and 0.9% from September to October.
There are few signs that inflation will slow significantly anytime soon. Most of the factors that have forced up prices since last spring remain in place: Wages are rising at the fastest pace in at least 20 years. Ports and warehouses are overwhelmed, with hundreds of workers at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the nation’s busiest, out sick last month. Many products and parts remain in short supply as a result.
The steady surge in prices has left many Americans less able to afford food, gas, rent, child care and other necessities. More broadly, inflation has emerged as the biggest risk factor for the economy and as a serious threat to President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats as midterm elections loom later this year.
The Fed and its chair, Jerome Powell, have pivoted sharply away from the ultra-low-interest rate policies that the Fed pursued since the pandemic devastated the economy in March 2020. Powell signaled two weeks ago that the central bank would likely raise its benchmark short-term rate multiple times this year, with the first hike almost surely coming in March. Investors have priced in at least five rate increases for 2022.
Read: Under pressure to ease up, Biden weighs new virus response
Over time, those higher rates will raise the costs for a wide range of borrowing, from mortgages and credit cards to auto loans and corporate credit. For the Fed, the risk is that in steadily tightening credit for consumers and businesses, it could trigger another recession.
Many large corporations, in conference calls with investors, have said they expect supply shortages to persist until at least the second half of this year. Companies from Chipotle to Levi’s have also warned that they will likely raise prices again this year, after having already done so in 2021.
Chipotle said it’s increased menu prices 10% to offset the rising costs of beef and transportation as well as higher employee wages. And the restaurant chain said it will consider further price increases if inflation keeps rising.
“We keep thinking that beef is going to level up and then go down, and it just hasn’t happened yet,” said John Hartung, the company’s chief financial officer.
Executives at Chipotle, as well as at Starbucks and some other consumer-facing companies, have said their customers so far don’t seem fazed by the higher prices.
Levi Strauss & Co. raised prices last year by roughly 7% above 2019 levels because of rising costs, including labor, and plans to do so again this year. Even so, the San Francisco-based company has upgraded its sales forecasts for 2022.
“Right now, every signal we’re seeing is positive,” CEO Chip Bergh told analysts.
Many small businesses, which typically have lower profit margins than larger companies and have struggled to match their sizable pay raises, are also raising prices. The National Federation for Independent Business, a trade group, said it found in a monthly survey that 61% of small companies raised their prices in January, the largest proportion since 1974 and up from just 15% before the pandemic.
“More small business owners started the new year raising prices in an attempt to pass on higher inventory, supplies and labor costs,” said Bill Dunkelberg, the NFIB’s chief economist. “In addition to inflation issues, owners are also raising compensation at record-high rates to attract qualified employees to their open positions.”
Those pay gains could eventually force additional price hikes as companies seek to cover the costs of the higher wages.
In the past year, sharp increases in the costs of gas, food, autos and furniture have upended many Americans’ budgets. In December, economists at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School estimated that the average household had to spend $3,500 more than in 2020 to buy an identical basket of goods and services.