July 12, 2021 3:39 pm
(WPXI) – Police in Miami-Dade, Fla. have identified nine additional victims who lost their lives in the Champlain Towers South condo collapse, including Pittsburgh native Nicole Doran-Manishirov. The remains of Doran-Manishirov, 43, were recovered Friday and positively identified Monday. She is a graduate of South Park High School and was a physician’s assistant. She and her husband, Ruslan Manishirov, were just married in May. Authorities recovered his body last Wednesday. Meanwhile, The death toll has climbed to 94. Officials said Monday that 22 people remain unaccounted for. Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett said officials are stepping up security at the site to ensure that recovery crews can preserve personal items for family members of the victims. Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said a new round of COVID-19 tests have been administered to local officials after a vaccinated Miami-Dade county commissioner who helped other officials in Surfside announced that he and his chief of staff tested positive for the virus Sunday. She said all rapid tests have come back negative.
July 12, 2021 3:28 pm
LONDON (AP) – British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has confirmed that all remaining lockdown restrictions in England will be lifted in a week despite a sharp rise in coronavirus cases. Johnson said it was “the right moment to proceed” as schools break up for the summer vacation, but urged people to “proceed with caution.” He said although risks of the pandemic remain, legal restrictions will be replaced by a recommendation that people wear masks in crowded places and on public transport. Nightclubs and other venues with crowds should use vaccine passports for entry “as a matter of social responsibility.” Authorities say Britain’s successful vaccine rollout means that nine out of 10 adults in the U.K. now have antibodies against the virus.
July 12, 2021 4:19 am
DETROIT (AP) – A federal judge is considering whether to order financial penalties and other sanctions against some of former President Donald Trump’s lawyers. They had signed onto a lawsuit last year challenging Michigan’s election results. The lawsuit alleging fraud was voluntarily dropped after a judge found nothing but “speculation and conjecture” that votes for Trump somehow were destroyed. Michigan Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, the city of Detroit and other officials now want the plaintiffs and their lawyers to face the consequences of pursuing what they call frivolous claims. They include Trump lawyer-allies Sidney Powell of Dallas and L. Lin Wood of Atlanta. Judge Linda Parker in Detroit is holding a hearing by videoconference Monday.
July 12, 2021 4:18 am
WASHINGTON (AP) – U.S. health officials say Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine may pose a “small possible risk” of a rare but potentially dangerous neurological reaction. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Monday that it has received reports of 100 people who got the shot developing an immune system disorder that can causes muscle weakness and occasionally paralysis. The reports represent a tiny fraction of the nearly 13 million Americans who have received the one-dose vaccine. The government said the vaccines most used in the U.S., made by Pfizer and Moderna, show no risk of the disorder.
July 12, 2021 4:16 am
Firefighters working in searing heat struggled to contain the largest wildfire in California this year while state power operators urged people to conserve energy after a huge wildfire in neighboring Oregon disrupted the flow of electricity from three major transmission lines. A large swath of the West baked during the weekend in triple-digit temperatures that were expected to continue into the start of the work week. Managers of California’s power grid issued a five-hour “flex alert” starting at 4 p.m. Monday and asked consumers to “conserve as much electricity as possible” to avoid outages. California’s largest fire is burning near the Nevada border north of Lake Tahoe and grew by a third on Sunday.
July 12, 2021 4:13 am
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) – President Joe Biden will speak in Philadelphia on Tuesday to discuss voting rights. The visit comes as fights over the 2020 presidential election and election laws roil state and U.S. capitols. The White House’s announcement Friday says only that Biden’s remarks will be on “actions to protect the sacred, constitutional right to vote.” Pennsylvania is one of the battleground states buffeted by former President Donald Trump’s baseless conspiracy theories that attribute his loss to Biden in last year’s election to widespread election fraud. In Congress last month, Democrats’ sweeping attempt to rewrite U.S. election and voting law was blocked by a Republican filibuster.
July 12, 2021 4:12 am
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) – With just a year and a half left in office, Gov. Tom Wolf’s primary focus will be convincing the Republican-controlled Legislature to modernize how state aid is distributed to Pennsylvania’s public schools. Doing so would direct more money to Pennsylvania’s poorest school districts as well as to growing districts. In an interview Thursday, Wolf told The Associated Press he remains dedicated to two initiatives that have drawn stiff resistance from many Republicans. That’s adding tolls to nine major interstate bridges in need of upgrades and forcing fossil fuel-fired power plants to pay a price for the carbon dioxide they emit. The 72-year-old Democrat is term-limited.
July 12, 2021 4:10 am
A Mt. Morris woman has died from injuries suffered last week in a head-on collision with a tractor-trailer on Interstate 79 in Greene County near the Welcome Center in Whitely Township. State Police say 45-year-old Donna Philips was driving south on the interstate just before five o’clock on Wednesday when she apparently lost control of her vehicle and crossed the median. She crashed into a tractor-trailer traveling in the northbound lanes. She and a sixteen-year-old girl in the vehicle were taken to Ruby Memorial Hospital in Morgantown, West Virginia. There’s been no word on the identity of the teen or her condition. The driver of the truck and a passenger, both from Florida, were not injured.
July 12, 2021 4:09 am
BETHEL PARK, Pa. — (WPXI) – The Bethel Park Police Department took to social media to ask for the public’s help in searching for a man caught on video wandering around and knocking on doors of multiple homes on Sarah Street. The video is of a man ringing a doorbell at a home on Sarah Street just after 5 a.m. According to investigators, he didn’t only ring the doorbell at this house, but at another one too, before going around to the back of the house. Police say none of the neighbors recognize the man.
July 11, 2021 7:56 am
SURFSIDE, Fla. (AP) — The mangled concrete and twisted rebar from the collapsed high-rise near Miami triggered flashbacks for retired Oklahoma City Fire Chief Greg Marrs, who spent weeks with his crew digging through the rubble of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in 1995. From afar, Marrs empathized with the Florida teams searching the debris that was once the 12-story Champlain Tower South condominium complex. The scenes in Surfside brought back memories of the urgent search for survivors after the Oklahoma City bombing, followed by the heartbreak of pulling out nothing but bodies, he said. It was the same for other rescuers who responded to past tragedies. They say the crews in Surfside will carry on with the same commitment and care, even though authorities this past week officially gave up on finding any survivors. Joseph Pfeifer, former counterterrorism and emergency preparedness chief for the New York Fire Department, was one of the first commanders on the scene after the World Trade Center towers came down in 2001. He said the Florida crews will preserve any human remains and separate any building pieces that provide clues to the cause of the collapse. When Marrs first saw photos of the Florida collapse, he said, the images were reminiscent of the destruction at the federal building after a truck filled with explosives was detonated outside. The blast killed 168 people.
