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Three people dead after home explodes in Indiana, officials say; cause under investigation

August 10, 2022 by WDNY Radio

(EVANSVILLE, Ind.) — Three people are dead after a house exploded Wednesday in southern Indiana, officials said.

Dozens of firefighters responded to the scene in Evansville, after the blast occurred Wednesday afternoon on the 1000 block of North Weinbach Avenue, officials said.

So far three deaths have been reported to the Vanderburgh County Coroner’s Office as a result of the explosion, chief deputy coroner David Anson said in a statement. The victims’ names will be released pending family notification, he said.

The home where the explosion occurred was destroyed and 39 other structures were “damaged severely or suffered minor damage,” Evansville Fire Chief Mike Connelly told reporters Wednesday evening. The Knight Township Trustee’s Office was among the buildings damaged and will be closed for the foreseeable future, officials said.

According to Evansville’s building department, 11 of the 39 homes damaged in the explosion are uninhabitable, Connelly said.

Some 60 firefighters were on the scene assisting, Connelly said.

A 100-foot radius around the blast is not searchable and some buildings are not safe to enter, Connelly said, noting that there could be other victims.

The cause of the explosion is under investigation.

CenterPoint Energy arrived following the blast and “made the scene safe,” Connelly said. “There was no detection of gas and they’re restoring service now.”

Evansville Mayor Lloyd Winnecke was on-site surveilling the damage.

“There’s a big investigation and cleanup effort underway,” Winnecke told ABC Evansville affiliate WEHT.

An off-duty Evansville police officer reported the explosion, the mayor said.

The block where the incident occurred “will be shut down for the foreseeable future,” the Evansville Police Department said.

“As more information becomes available, the respective agencies investigating will be able to provide more information,” the department said.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

ABC News’ Darren Reynolds contributed to this report.

Can election deniers win big in the midterms?

August 10, 2022 by WDNY Radio

(WASHINGTON) — Former President Donald Trump’s false allegation that the 2020 presidential election was stolen continues to reverberate among GOP political candidates who are running on anti-establishment platforms and eager to gain the support of the former president’s voter base.

Kari Lake is one of those candidates. The former newscaster-turned-gubernatorial candidate in Arizona won a spot on the ballot August 4 and will face Democratic nominee Katie Hobbs in November.

In her victory speech, Lake said, “we outvoted the fraud, we didn’t listen to what the fake news had to say. The MAGA movement rose up and voted like their lives depended on it.”

When asked directly to corroborate her unsubstantiated allegation that the election system is fraudulent, she vaguely claimed, “we have a lot of evidence of irregularities and problems.”

“I’m not going to release it to the fake news,” she added, “but we’ll release it to the authorities.”

Kari Lake, Republican candidate for governor of Arizona holds a press conference at her campaign headquarters in Phoenix, Ariz., Aug. 3, 2022.

According to an analysis by ABC News partner FiveThirtyEight, at least 120 Republican political candidates who deny the integrity of the 2020 elections will be on ballots this fall.

An additional 48 nominees have expressed doubt about the election’s integrity, meaning half of Republican candidates have “at least flirted with” denying the election, according to the FiveThirtyEight analysis.

“Concerns inside the Republican Party about voter integrity also is something that’s been going on for decades” Rick Klein, Political Director at ABC News, told “NIGHTLINE.”

“What’s different is that you had in former President Trump someone who, during the campaign, actively stowed mistrust in the system,” he added.

These claims remaining popular despite the fact that multiple lawsuits and investigations nationwide after the 2020 presidential election never came close to proving election fraud that would call into question President Biden’s victory over Donald Trump.

Last week, a candidate endorsed by former President Trump, businesswoman Tudor Dixon, won her party’s gubernatorial nomination in Michigan.

When asked directly about the legitimacy of the 2020 election, Dixon told a Fox News reporter, “it’s certainly a concern for a lot of folks here in Michigan because of the way the election was handled by our secretary of state.”

Political newcomer John Gibbs, also a Michigan Republican endorsed by Trump, beat the incumbent Republican Rep. Peter Meijer last week.

Earlier this summer Gibbs falsely claimed that the 2020 election results weren’t accurate, telling a local NBC station, “I think when you look at the results of the 2020 election, there are anomalies in there, to put it very lightly, that are simply mathematically impossible.”

In the coming weeks, dozens of other candidates will be decided, revealing how deeply Republican voters are invested in the former president’s claims of a stolen election.

“In a Republican primary it is a definite boon to a candidate to say that you deny the legitimacy of the last election,” Klein said.

“It gets you on the radar screen of former President Trump, who’s had a terrific track record through many of the primaries in redder states,” said Klein.

“The other thing it does is a connection to a segment of the base for whom denying the last election’s outcome is almost a mantra,” he said.

The baseless idea planted by Donald Trump that there’s rampant voter fraud and cheating at the ballot box, two allegations that have repeatedly been proven false, taking hold in the minds of many voters.

Authorities urge people to come forward in search for teen reported missing after attending party

August 10, 2022 by WDNY Radio

(TRUCKEE, Calif.) — Authorities are urging people to come forward with tips as they continue searching for a missing 16-year-old who was last seen early Saturday at a large party near a campground in northern California.

“We’re trying to find out exactly what happened. We believe someone knows, but they are not coming forward,” Placer County Sheriff Lt. Josh Barnhart told reporters during a briefing Wednesday afternoon.

Kiely Rodni was last seen at around 12:30 a.m. Saturday near the Prosser Family Campground in the small town of Truckee, some 20 miles north of Lake Tahoe, according to the Placer County Sheriff’s Office. Her phone has been out of signal since then, and her car — a silver 2013 Honda CRV with a California license plate No. 8YUR127 — has also been reported missing, authorities said.

The teen had attended a large party that night alongside upward of 300 young people, according to the Placer County Sheriff’s Office, which is leading the ongoing investigation and search.

The Placer County Sheriff’s Office said Tuesday that detectives obtained surveillance footage from a local business in Truckee that shows Rodni around 6:30 p.m. on the night of her disappearance.

That footage is the only known lead so far in the case, the sheriff’s office said.

“So far nothing has been able to lead us to Kiely,” Angela Musallam, public information officer for the Placer County Sheriff’s Office, told reporters Wednesday.

The Placer County Sheriff’s Office has urged anyone who saw her that night to come forward. So far investigators have received more than 200 tips, according to Placer County Sgt. Scott Alford. Though beyond the surveillance footage from the Truckee business, law enforcement has no new leads in the case, Barnhart said.

“We do not have any new leads, and that, I can tell you, is very frustrating for us,” Barnhart said. “We reiterate that anyone, please, anyone that was at the party that night please come to law enforcement.”

“People that were there know something. If you know something, please say something,” he said.

Rodni’s family has also urged people to speak out.

“We’re just begging, begging for you to please come forward and share your story,” Rodni’s mother, Lindsey Rodni-Nieman, told ABC News.

Detectives are not ruling out a possible abduction, though “right now we don’t have any evidence that supports an abduction,” Alford told reporters during a briefing Tuesday.

“We’re considering everything,” he said. “This is a missing person’s case, this is a search-and-rescue effort.”

Dozens of law enforcement personnel have been involved in the search, including foot patrol, aircraft and dive teams. A canine team has also been utilized.

Other local, state and federal agencies, including the Truckee Police Department, the Nevada County Sheriff’s Office, the California Highway Patrol and the FBI, are assisting the Placer County Sheriff’s Office in the investigation, according to Musallam.

A $50,000 reward is being offered for information leading to Rodni’s safe return. Authorities said she was last seen wearing a black bodysuit, green pants with a black belt and black Vans shoes. She also may have a black hoodie that was loaned to her several days before she disappeared, the sheriff’s office said.

“We can’t stress this enough — out of the 200-300 juveniles and young adults who were at that party at the Prosser Campground Friday evening — somebody knows something about Kylie,” Musallam said during Tuesday’s briefing. “We are please urging and pleading with the community to please come forward. You will remain anonymous.”

3 people dead after home explodes in Indiana, officials say; cause under investigation

August 10, 2022 by WDNY Radio

(EVANSVILLE, Ind.) — Three people are dead after a house exploded Wednesday in southern Indiana, officials said.

Dozens of firefighters responded to the scene in Evansville, after the blast occurred Wednesday afternoon on the 1000 block of North Weinbach Avenue, officials said.

Some 60 firefighters were on the scene assisting, Connelly said.

A 100-foot radius around the blast is not searchable and some buildings are not safe to enter, Connelly said, noting that there could be other victims.

The cause of the explosion is under investigation.

CenterPoint Energy arrived following the blast and “made the scene safe,” Connelly said. “There was no detection of gas and they’re restoring service now.”

Evansville Mayor Lloyd Winnecke was on-site surveilling the damage.

“There’s a big investigation and cleanup effort underway,” Winnecke told ABC Evansville affiliate WEHT.

An off-duty Evansville police officer reported the explosion, the mayor said.

The block where the incident occurred “will be shut down for the foreseeable future,” the Evansville Police Department said.

“As more information becomes available, the respective agencies investigating will be able to provide more information,” the department said.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

FBI Director declines to comment on Mar-a-Lago raid, but decries threats against law enforcement

August 10, 2022 by WDNY Radio

(OMAHA, Neb.) — Answering questions at the FBI Omaha, Nebraska field office, FBI Director Christopher Wray said Wednesday he couldn’t talk about FBI agents searching Mar-a-Lago, the home of former President Donald Trump, but did say that he is “always concerned” about the threats to law enforcement.

“Well, as I’m sure you can appreciate that’s not something I can talk about,” Wray said, becoming the first senior Justice Department official to decline to comment on the record and on camera about the search of the former president’s estate.

Multiple sources confirmed to ABC News that former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate was raided by FBI agents on Monday.

The sources told ABC News that the search began at around 10 a.m.

The former president put out a statement Monday evening saying federal investigators were there and that they had even gotten into his safe.

It is standard Justice Department practice to not comment on ongoing investigations.

There is an uptick in violent threats against rank and file FBI agents in the wake of the raid, senior law enforcement officials told ABC News.

While not directly addressing those threats, Wray said any threat against law enforcement is cause for concern.

“Violence against law enforcement is not the answer, no matter what anyone is upset about,” Wray said. “In the last few years we’ve had an alarming rise in violence against law enforcement.”

The Director said it takes a “special person” to sacrifice his or her life for a stranger, and that is what law enforcement officers, including FBI agents, do every day.

FBI director condemns threats to agents after raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago

August 10, 2022 by WDNY Radio

Multiple sources confirmed to ABC News that former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate was raided by FBI agents on Monday.

The sources told ABC News that the search began at around 10 a.m.

The former president put out a statement Monday evening saying federal investigators were there and that they had even gotten into his safe.

It is standard Justice Department practice to not comment on ongoing investigations.

There is an uptick in violent threats against rank and file FBI agents in the wake of the raid, senior law enforcement officials told ABC News.

While not directly addressing those threats, Wray said any threat against law enforcement is cause for concern.

The director said it takes a “special person” to sacrifice his or her life for a stranger, and that is what law enforcement officers, including FBI agents, do every day.

When asked for more specifics on the threats against FBI agents, the FBI offered a generic statement and provided no details.

“The FBI is always concerned about violence and threats of violence to law enforcement, including the men and women of the FBI,” an unnamed FBI spokesperson said in an e-mail to ABC News. “We work closely with our law enforcement partners to assess and respond to such threats, which are reprehensible and dangerous. As always, we would like to remind members of the public that if they observe anything suspicious to report it to law enforcement immediately.”

As a reminder, Wray was appointed by former President Trump in 2017, and has not been outspoken on many controversial issues.

The President of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association (FLEOA) called the recent threats against FBI agents in the wake of the raid on Mar-a-Lago “politically motivated threats of violence” and “unprecedented,” in a statement Wednesday.

“Levying threats against apolitical federal employees simply applying the law to the facts of a case it not a democratic way to solve anything. It is also illegal,” Larry Cosme said. “An investigation will not occur unless there are allegations of violations of the law and will not progress unless there is evidence of wrongdoing.”

Harvard doctor on study claiming climate change intensifies pathogens

August 10, 2022 by WDNY Radio

(NEW YORK) — In a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change, researchers found that climate change is expected to aggravate 58% of the world’s infectious diseases.

“The societal disruption caused by pathogenic diseases, as clearly revealed by the COVID-19 pandemic,” the authors wrote in the study published Monday, “provides worrisome glimpses into the potential consequences of looming health crises driven by climate change.”

Dr. Aaron Bernstein, director of the Climate MD program at the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment at Harvard University’s Chan School of Public Health, sat down with ABC News’ “Start Here” podcast to discuss the study’s findings, as well as its far-reaching implications.

START HERE: Dr. Bernstein can you just explain to me what this study found? How does climate change relate to something like COVID or monkeypox?

BERNSTEIN: Great question, Brad, and thanks so much for having me. Climate change matters to pretty much every infection you can imagine that we already know about. But it’s also true that it matters to things that we have never yet seen, like COVID-19 prior to 2019. And that’s because we know that diseases that are surprises like COVID, or HIV when it first appeared, because usually a virus moves from an animal into a person.

Well, how does that happen? Well, people obviously have to bump into animals, but also animals bumping into other animals. And what climate change does is it makes everything that can head for the hills or the poles get out of the heat. It’s like a big game of bumper cars. So there’s animals that have never touched each other, running into each other, trying to get out of the heat.

So there’s really two issues here. One is how the more intense heat events, the changes in how rain happens with climate change, affect diseases we know. And then there’s how this bumper car problem might affect new things appearing in ways that we don’t really want to see and have been seeing an unfair share of lately.

START HERE: I’m trying to get a sense of what pathogens this would affect. The study says it will aggravate, I think they said, 58 percent [of the world’s infectious diseases]. Are you saying that more than half of the viruses on Earth are basically going to get worse because of this in the coming years?

BERNSTEIN: They looked at all pathogens, it wasn’t just viruses. I mentioned viruses because they’re the ones that tend to be the ugly surprises, like COVID-19 or HIV. But they looked at bacteria, they looked at fungi. And again, what they wanted to answer was does climate change look like it’s going to be overall worse for the infections we know about or overall better?

There are certainly some diseases, and malaria is a good [example]. Malaria has been in west Africa forever. It’s been there so long that the human genome has evolved to cope with the parasites, in the form of sickle cell disease. Many people will know about sickle cell disease, it’s a disease where your red blood cells, [in] a reaction, look like a sickle.

Well, if you have two copies of that gene that are defective, you get sickle cell disease. But if you have one copy, you’re actually protected from malaria. That’s how much malaria has been in the population of West Africa, it’s been there that long. That’s actually selected for, that gene to protect people from malaria. But it’s going to get so warm in west Africa in this century, we expect that malaria is actually going to decrease in incidence because it’s too hot for the mosquitoes.

So there are some diseases like that where we think that climate change is probably going to make them, at least in local situations, less likely. But on balance, what they found is that the majority of things we know are likely to get worse because it’s going to get wetter. Heavy downpours of rain are a major risk for outbreaks of waterborne diseases, particularly for people who get water from wells, which is almost all of the rural U.S.

In a lot of the rest of the world, heat in particular isn’t just an issue for animals bumping into each other and viruses going over, it affects where things like mosquitoes and ticks that transmit disease live. So here in New England, we have the most prevalent insect-transmitted disease in the country, which is Lyme disease. We’ve definitely seen that disease able to live in places it couldn’t [before] because it’s warm enough for the tick to survive.

START HERE: And there’s a shorter winter to kill the thing.

BERNSTEIN: Exactly.

July inflation holds steady as food and shelter costs rise

August 10, 2022 by WDNY Radio

(WASHINGTON) — Inflation in July held steady even as the costs of housing and food rose, according to findings by the Bureau of Labor Statistics released Wednesday.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released the Consumer Price Index (CPI) which serves as an illustration of how inflation changes each month. Despite gasoline prices falling by 7.7%, this deflation was offset by inflation in food and shelter, resulting in no change in the overall CPI of urban consumers through July.

This comes as a welcome sign to consumers who have experienced an inflation gain every month since October 2020. But the report made clear that the main place consumers will feel a big difference is at the gas pump. Rent of primary residences rose by 0.7% since June and food increased by over a percent and is now up 10.9% since this time last year.

The cost of eggs have risen by 38% year over year – the most among all goods in the food category. Margarine, flour, and butter have all followed close behind. These increases have been felt throughout grocery stores and in small businesses like Aya Pastry in Chicago, Illinois.

“Every single ingredient that you could literally think of has changed in price,” Chef and small business owner Aya Fukai told ABC News.

Fukai provided ABC News with the product costs for her pastry business, Aya Pastry, from the past year. Fukai’s butter distributor increased costs by 79% in the past year. Non-food items have also increased substantially. Gloves used to maintain a sanitary kitchen have increased by 128%. Aya Pastry also uses gas for all their deliveries and have felt the skyrocketing energy prices impacting their costs.

Businesses dealing with inflation must choose between a lesser of several evils: reduce margins, increase prices, or cut costs. Many businesses in tech have made headlines by choosing the last option through layoffs. Aya Pastry opted to slim their margins and pass some of the costs on to the consumer with a 22% increase in their biscuits and other goods.

“At first, there were definitely [customers] wondering why everything was so much more expensive,” Fukai said. “It’s only because everything to us is more expensive.”

Despite the continued increases in food and shelter, many experts like senior economist and deputy director of research at W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research Brad Hershbein are “cautiously optimistic.”

“This report was in line—if not slightly better—than expectations,” Hershbein wrote in an email to ABC News.

Assistant vice president and economist at the St. Louis Federal Reserve Fernando Martin reinforced the hope that the reduction in energy costs will be in other areas like food prices in coming CPI reports.

“I think you should expect a delay in seeing the full impact,” Martin told ABC News in reference to the decrease in energy costs. Martin remains concerned about the cost of rent and other services in the coming months.

As The Federal Reserve continues to fight inflation by raising interest rates, the markets, businesses, and consumers can take some comfort from the latest figures.

“There’s a lot that could still go wrong,” Hershbein said. “But it hasn’t gone wrong yet, and that’s better than a lot of people had feared.”

Trump says he changed his mind about taking the Fifth, which he once said was for ‘the mob’

August 10, 2022 by WDNY Radio

(NEW YORK) — Former President Donald Trump indicated that he pleaded the Fifth Amendment on Wednesday as he was deposed in a New York state civil investigation into his business dealings — which marks a reversal for a real estate baron who had cast aspersions on others who protected themselves from the possibility of self-incrimination.

Trump sat for a deposition in New York Attorney General Letitia James’ probe into whether he misstated the value of his assets to his own benefit, an investigation he has labeled a partisan “witch hunt.” (James is a Democrat.)

Trump’s appearance in New York marked the third straight day that he has faced legal challenges. His Mar-a-Lago residence was searched by the FBI in Florida on Monday in relation, sources told ABC News, to documents that he took with him when he departed Washington, including some records the National Archives has said were marked classified.

Separately, a federal appeals court on Tuesday ruled that his tax returns could be obtained by a House panel that has sought them for years.

In a rare move, Trump acknowledged in a statement Wednesday that he had changed his mind about invoking the Fifth.

But he argued that he was forced to after facing what he continued to describe as partisan probes, particularly the Mar-a-Lago search.

“I once asked, ‘If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?’ Now I know the answer to that question. When your family, your company, and all the people in your orbit have become the targets of an unfounded, politically motivated Witch Hunt supported by lawyers, prosecutors, and the Fake News Media, you have no choice,” he said in his statement.

“If there was any question in my mind, the raid of my home, Mar-a-Lago, on Monday by the FBI, just two days prior to this deposition, wiped out any uncertainty,” he added, going on to say that in the New York deposition, “under the advice of my counsel and for all of the above reasons, I declined to answer the questions under the rights and privileges afforded to every citizen under the United States Constitution.”

As Trump suggested in his statement, he previously painted those who cited the Fifth as guilty of some crime.

When Trump ran for president in 2016, he questioned why aides to Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton were taking the Fifth in connection with an investigation into the deadly raid on a U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

“So, there are five people taking the Fifth Amendment. Like you see on the mob, right? You see the mob takes the Fifth. If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?” he asked at the time.

Decades ago, during his divorce from Ivana Trump, he also invoked the Fifth, according to one biography.

The amendment, among other provisions, protects people from being made to testify against themselves.

In civil cases, but not in criminal cases, a person who invokes the Fifth may have negative conclusions drawn about that choice — just as Trump had previously said.

Trump repeatedly pleaded the Fifth in hours-long deposition for New York AG probe: Sources

August 10, 2022 by WDNY Radio

(NEW YORK) — Donald Trump on Wednesday invoked his Fifth Amendment protection against testifying against himself during an hours-long deposition as part of the New York attorney general’s civil investigation into his family real estate business.

The former president was seen arriving at the attorney general’s office in New York City around 9 a.m. local time and left about six hours later.

A source with knowledge of the matter confirmed to ABC News that Trump declined to answer questions from investigators in the deposition and, the source said, it is unlikely he will return for any additional questions.

A spokesperson for Attorney General Letitia James declined to comment.

Sources said the only question Trump answered was when Kevin Wallace, a lawyer in James’ office who has been leading the investigation, asked his name. Otherwise he invoked the Fifth each time.

In an emailed statement to reporters while he was in the deposition, Trump said, in part, “Under the advice of my counsel … I declined to answer the questions under the rights and privileges afforded to every citizen under the United States Constitution.”

His statement also included lengthy attacks on the James’ investigation.

The attorney general’s office where Trump appeared is across the street from one of the Trump-branded buildings included in the civil investigation.

The attorney general herself began Trump’s deposition, sources familiar said — kicking off the six-hour exchange, including breaks.

Trump also read into the record a statement that echoed the one released by his office as the deposition began. He sat directly across from James as he accused her of political motivation. She did not react, the sources said.

As he left Wednesday afternoon, his motorcade drove by a number of onlookers and Trump was seen waving from the window.

The deposition in the civil case follows an escalation in a separate federal investigation into Trump’s handling of classified material. On Monday, the FBI searched Trump’s residence in Palm Beach, Florida.

Wednesday’s deposition, which had been delayed from July due to the death of Trump’s ex-wife Ivana, came after a months-long court fight during which Trump was held in contempt as he fought the attorney general’s subpoena.

Trump has denied any wrongdoing and called the investigation politically motivated.

“My great company, and myself, are being attacked from all sides. Banana Republic!” he said in a statement on his social media outlet, Truth Social, shortly before Wednesday’s deposition.

Two of his grown children, Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump, have already been deposed as part of the civil probe, sources said.

Trump argued unsuccessfully that he should not have to sit for a deposition while the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office was conducting a parallel criminal investigation. While the Manhattan DA’s case remains active, two senior prosecutors who had been leading it resigned earlier this year over the lack of an indictment.

James has said her office uncovered evidence of potentially fraudulent conduct in the way the Trump Organization valued its real estate holdings when seeking loans and when asking for tax breaks.

Lawyers in her office have said in court that the office is nearing a decision on an enforcement action.

ABC News’ Will Steakin contributed to this report.

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