Threats to kill jewish officials in michigan, including the state s attorney general. two mid flight emergencies are rattling air travelers on two separate airlines and details on the two close calls. alec murdaugh s defense team delivering closing arguments at his double murder trial. that is what we are watching at this hour. thank you for being here. i m amara walker in for kate bolduan. we begin with a disturbing story out of michigan where a man is using social media to threaten to kill jewish members of the state government. the state s attorney general dana nessel confirmed that she is one of the officials targeted. she tweeted this, quote, the fbi has confirmed that i was a target of the heavily armed defendant in this matter. it is my sincere hope that the federal authorities take this offense just as seriously as my hate crimes and terrorism unit takes plots to murder elected
Happen on a flight from philadelphia to miami. miami-dade police say a passenger on one of these flights essentially got drunk, took his shirt off, groped two flight attendants, and then a third flight attendant was assigned to watch him, and this happened. it gets really interesting and spicy here because, after all this happened, this passenger was duct taped to his seat. this tape it s called restraint tape. it s in the kit for flight attendants to deal with flight emergencies. frontier came out and said they were suspending this flight crew. now it says they support the flight crew. 22-year-old maxwell berry is charged with three counts of battery according to the miami-dade police department. we reached out to him for comment, although he s not reached back up to us. 3,715 unruly passengers this year alone according to the faa. 100 in the last week.
This summer? u.s. travel association estimating we re going to see about 77% of americans take at least one trip this summer that is up from about 29% in 2020. when it comes to air travel, there is an 44% increase. the when it comes to that, pam, that means the planes are going to get more packed. pam some. let s hope we re not going to see an increase on the crazy incidents onboard. the sarah nelson knows a thing or two about flight emergencies. she s the international president of the association of flight attendants cwa. and across the industry, reports of unruly passengers are up more than 60 times this year. flight attend ants are heroes but we prefer not to be. and sarah nelson joins me now. hi, sarah. thank you for coming on the show. what is going on here?
Those airfields are obviously shut down for security reasons. the fixer that we have here for those watching right now, a fixer is someone local to the situation speaks the language, has connections to help us better do our job, she could not get here. she s not with us yet because a bridge and a road that she needed to use to get to us here in har keav were taken out. she believes they were blown up. it s a very fluid situation. it hasn t been in the news but there is on going conflict. it s difficult for the international monitoring situations and they are not investigators of flight emergencies like this. they re just security analysts. it s been very difficult because there s been open gunfire. it s very difficult to give a fair depiction of what s going on because the ukraine government and military are not in control in this part of the country. so we re going to have to see what happens as we get there, taking our way slowly as we go and hoping for the best.
To get it. tom fuentes, thank you. we will continue the coverage of the breaking news. join us back here at the top of the hour at 10:00 eastern. for now, we will send it to michael smerconish who will continue the breaking news coverage there in new york. announcer: this is cnn breaking news. good morning. i m michael smerconish. breaking news this morning. we have just learned from a chinese news agency that a chinese patrol ship searching for missing flight 370 heard a pulse signal in the indian ocean. if it is coming from the black box, it is just in the nick of time. we could be days or hours before the batteries die. and overnight, it was announced that a search of the hard drive belonging to the pilot revealed he had several alternate routes programmed into the simulator. it appears he researched what to do during flight emergencies. keep in mind, these are also