(NEW YORK) — The United States Coast Guard and Royal Bahamas Defense Force called off its search on Sunday for an American free diver who went missing off the coast of Bimini, Bahamas.
Ryan Proulx, 31, was last seen near the Bimini Barge Wreck on Friday, a diving location roughly 1.5 miles west of Bimini Inlet, according to the Coast Guard.
After aircraft crews searched over 673 square miles for Proulx, the Coast Guard suspended the search on Sunday afternoon.
“We offer our deepest condolences to the Proulx family,” Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Matt Spado said in a statement on Twitter. “The decision to suspend the active search efforts pending further development is one we never take lightly.”
Proulx traveled from Palm Beach, Florida, to the Bahamas last Thursday with a group including his wife, according to his friend Steve Diffenbacher, who spoke with ABC affiliate WBPF-TV. An experienced diver and licensed captain, Proulx would frequently make the trip down the East Coast for clients who wanted to transport their boats, according to Diffenbacher.
According to the Coast Guard, Proulx was last seen wearing a green top and red fins while free diving at the Bimini barge wreck. Located nearly 75 feet under the surface with strong currents, the wrecked barge-turned-artificial reef attracts large game fish, which cluster near the shipwreck and a nearby drop-off, according to Scuba Schools International.
Proulx previously served as a police officer with the East Hartford Police and Monroe Police Departments, according to a release from the East Hartford Police Department. A representative for the East Hartford Police Department could not be reached for comment about Proulx’s disappearance.
Proulx’s family declined to make a public statement about the search.
(NEW YORK) — Rescuers racing against the clock to save the five people trapped in a tourist submersible nearly two miles deep in the Atlantic Ocean are facing major obstacles that could make saving the people onboard extremely difficult, according to a former Navy submarine commander.
Retired Capt. David Marquet told ABC News on Monday that this type of rescue operation is complicated because there aren’t nearby U.S. or Canadian underwater vessels that can go as deep as the Titanic wreckage, which sits 13,400 feet below the ocean’s surface. Also, the ocean is pitch black at that depth.
“The odds are against them,” Marquet said. “There’s a ship in Boston that has this ability to either lower cable and connect to it or have a claw. It’s still a thousand miles away.”
Even if a vessel was able to locate the submersible and lower a cable, it’s extremely difficult to safely navigate the waters and attach it, Marquet said.
“You’ve got to get it exactly right. It’s sort of like … getting one of those toys out of those arcade machines. In general, you miss,” he said.
Rescuers do have one advantage, Marquet said, as weather conditions off the coast of Newfoundland are not rough and will not disturb any boat or vessel there.
The 21-foot submersible lost communication with the mainland 1 hour and 45 minutes after it embarked on its tour of the Titanic wreckage. Marquet said if the boat made it to the surface, the submersible crew would be able to open the hatch to allow for more oxygen while it was adrift.
The vessel is designed to hold 96 hours of oxygen, Rear Adm. John Mauger, Cmdr. of the U.S. Coast Guard First District, told reporters Monday.
Marquet told ABC that if the five people are still alive, they would be asked to sleep to conserve their oxygen.
“We would put the vast majority of the crew to sleep because that’s when you’re using the least amount of oxygen and you’re expelling the least amount of carbon dioxide,” he said.
(NEW YORK) — Dozens of Pride flags were vandalized on Sunday at the Stonewall Monument National Park in New York City, according to the New York Police Department.
Police discovered 33 Pride flags broken and on the ground when they arrived on the scene, authorities said, in the latest incident this month of flags at the Greenwich Village site being vandalized.
The NYPD said three men were walking past the monument on June 10, and allegedly broke multiple Pride flags that were on the fence.
In another incident, police found multiple broken Pride flags on June 15 at Stonewall Monument National Park, according to the NYPD.
No arrests have been made in any of the three incidents, and the NYPD’s Hate Crime Task Force is currently investigating.
The Stonewall National Monument didn’t immediately respond to ABC News’ request for comment.
Threats of violence against the LGBTQIA+ community are on the rise and intensifying, according to a May 2023 briefing by the Department of Homeland Security.
Domestic violence extremists and people who commit hate crimes have increased threats of violence against the LGBTQIA+ community within the last year, the DHS document said.
“These issues include actions linked to drag-themed events, gender-affirming care and LGBTQIA+ curricula in schools,” DHS said.
A New York City woman was arrested in February after she was seen on video allegedly setting fire to a gay pride flag outside a Manhattan restaurant.
Angelina Cando, 30, was charged with arson as a hate crime, criminal mischief as a hate crime and reckless endangerment as a hate crime, police said.
Cando was found mentally unfit for trial in May, after a brief appearance in court. She’s still being held at Riker’s women’s facility, court records show. It was unclear when her next court date is.
One out of 10 violent crimes against members of the LGBTQIA+ community is a hate crime, according to a 2022 study by the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law.
Members of the LGBTQIA+ community are nine times more likely than those not in the community to be victims of hate crimes, according to the study.
Approximately 20% of all hate crimes reported throughout the country in 2021 were motivated by bias linked to sexual orientation and gender, according to DHS.
Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQIA+ civil rights organization, declared a state of emergency earlier this month for LGBTQIA+ people in the U.S.
The organization cited the record-breaking wave of legislation targeting the LGBTQIA+ community and an increasingly hostile environment.
“The multiplying threats facing millions in our community are not just perceived — they are real, tangible and dangerous,” Kelley Robinson, the president of HRC, said in a statement at the time.
ABC News’ Josh Margolin, Kiara Alfonseca, Aaron Katersky and Emily Shapiro contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — As the country commemorated Juneteenth, thousands of people lined up outside the National Archives in Washington on Monday to see rarely exhibited original versions of the Emancipation Proclamation and General Order No. 3.
The former is President Abraham Lincoln’s order freeing America’s slaves in 1863, amid the Civil War; the latter is from 1865 when a Union general informed Texas that slaves were now free — on the day that later became Juneteenth.
Both documents, while foundational to the United States and the end of slavery, are very fragile and normally kept in a secure climate-controlled vault with limited light exposure to ensure their preservation.
However, the National Archives intends to place the Emancipation Proclamation on permanent display, with select pages rotated to limit exposure.
“I am proud that the National Archives will enshrine this seminal document for public display adjacent to our nation’s founding documents,” the nation’s archivist, Colleen Shogan, said in a statement on Saturday announcing the planned permanent display alongside the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Visitors to the National Archives on Monday told ABC News that viewing the documents was impactful and an important way for everyone to recognize history, including the next generation. Juneteenth was designated by President Joe Biden as a federal holiday in 2021.
Ashley Witfield brought her mother and three sons to the archives.
“It’s really important to me that my children know the history of the country and that they understand that our ancestors really were an integral part to building it,” Witfield said. “One thing that my son did say is, ‘You’re going to see the paper of justice,’ and I thought that that really sums it up well. So it was really special to be able to share that with them.”
Washington resident Shawna brought her young son, John, for the first time and said she hoped Juneteenth does not become synonymous merely with a day off of work — but rather “to actually understand the purpose of it and why is it important to us.”
Another pair of visitors, Priscilla and Warren, said that Monday’s celebration was a long time coming and that the holiday needed more promotion.
“When you hear Fourth of July, you think of fireworks sales, holiday, people cooking out. Here’s June the 19th, and you have to advertise it,” Warren said.
“It should be celebrated by all, not just people of color, not just by Black people,” Priscilla said, “because otherwise, we’re going to continue to be a nation that’s fractured.”
For Virginia resident Ashley, seeing the documents up close with her husband and daughter was a transporting experience.
“It makes it less of a story and more of a real,” she said. “These are real lives and real people that were directly impacted by that signature.”
(NEW YORK) — Public health experts fear that Meta’s decision to roll back some of its COVID-19 misinformation measures will lead to more disinformation about the virus, treatments for it and vaccines.
The company announced the changes on Friday after it asked its independent oversight advisory board whether it should continue its COVID-19 misinformation policy for Facebook and Instagram or take a “less restrictive approach.”
In countries that still have a COVID-19 public health emergency declaration, the policies still stand and content that violates Meta’s coronavirus misinformation policies will be removed. The policies will not be upheld in the U.S. due to the emergency expiring last month.
Meta said the World Health Organization downgrading the global public health emergency was a major reason behind the change.
“Our COVID-19 misinformation rules will no longer be in effect globally as the global public health emergency declaration that triggered those rules has been lifted,'” the company wrote in a statement. ‘We are consulting with health experts to understand which claims and categories of misinformation could continue to pose this risk.”
Infectious disease specialists told ABC News they are worried this misinformation and disinformation could reach vulnerable groups such as teenagers.
“One of the biggest challenges we faced with the pandemic, in some ways, was not the virus itself but it was the misinformation that was generated around the science of the virus and interventions that surrounded our control of the virus, whether that’s vaccines, or masking, or therapeutics,” said Dr. John Brownstein, an epidemiologist and chief innovation officer at Boston Children’s Hospital and an ABC News contributor.
He continued, “That misinformation, it’s been a threat to science for many years, and that’s been amplified by social media.”
This is not the first time that social media platforms have rolled back misinformation policies. Twitter announced it would no longer label or remove posts that have COVID-19 misinformation in November 2022, a month after Elon Musk bought the company.
Other platforms, such as YouTube, are continuing to keep their polices about COVID-19 misinformation and removing content that contradicts health authorities. Health experts say that despite COVID-19 cases and deaths remaining low, misinformation is still prevalent.
“The ramifications are huge because the pandemic is not over yet. The end of the emergency doesn’t mean that it’s still not a threat,” Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious diseases specialist at the University of California, San Francisco, told ABC News.
According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. has seen more than 37,000 deaths from COVID-19 this year, which is more than seen in a typical flu season.
“We haven’t even reached the midpoint of the year and there’s still the potential for a winter surge,” Chin-Hong said. “So I’m worried that this fuel of misinformation, and the megaphone of misinformation, is going to threaten how we deal with not just COVID but all respiratory viruses this particular season.”
Both Brownstein and Chin-Hong recommended that people be careful about what they read online and look for trusted sources such as public health agencies.
“It’s at some level challenging because [for] someone not trained in science, it may be harder to separate fact from fiction,” Brownstein said. “But I would say, generally speaking, don’t use social media as the core information source, especially when it comes to making personal health care decisions.”
(WASHINGTON) — Despite what prosecutors claim in an unprecedented indictment against him, including an alleged recording of him saying otherwise, Donald Trump insisted on Monday that he hadn’t shown a classified document to someone else after leaving the White House.
The former president was interviewed by Fox News’ Bret Baier, who pressed Trump on one of the most notable parts of the indictment that outlines the 37 federal charges against him.
Prosecutors wrote in the indictment that on July 21, 2021, Trump allegedly showed what he called “secret information” to other people at his club in Bedminster, New Jersey, and acknowledged it was still classified and “highly confidential.”
According to the indictment, Trump allegedly said the information was “done by the military and given to me” and appeared to indicate it was related to plans for attacking a foreign country.
The alleged exchange was recorded, prosecutors wrote.
On Fox News on Monday, however, Trump pushed back when Baier cited that part of the indictment.
“It wasn’t a document, OK? I had lots of paper — I had copies of newspaper articles, I had copies of magazines,” he said.
“There was no document. That was a massive amount of papers and everything else talking about Iran and other things. And it may have been held up or may not, but that was not a document,” Trump said. “I didn’t have a document per se. There was nothing to declassify. These were newspaper stories, magazine stories and articles.”
ABC News previously reported that the recording was made during part of a book interview Trump gave and was subsequently obtained by federal prosecutors.
ABC News also reported earlier this month that Trump’s attorneys had not located the material Trump was referencing in the recording from 2021.
Trump has been indicted by federal prosecutors in Florida related to his alleged mishandling of government secrets after leaving the White House. He pleaded not guilty to the charges.
In a speech to supporters after being arraigned, he maintained that he “did everything right” and “I had every right to have these documents,” an argument which has been disputed by outside legal experts.
Elsewhere in his interview on Fox News, Trump claimed to have no more classified records and falsely cited the Presidential Records Act as giving him permission to take the government records with him when he left office.
He said he took the documents because he was rushing during his move from the White House and wanted to go through his personal items.
“So, like every other president, I take things out. And in my case, I took it out pretty much in a hurry, but people packed it up and we left and I had clothing in there. I had all sorts of personal items,” he said.
“Because I had boxes — I want to go through the boxes and get all my personal things out,” he said.
He told Baier that he was running for president again “because I want to make America great again. We had great — we were respected all over the world. Very simple.”
He also said he wouldn’t want his children to be in his administration if he is reelected. Daughter Ivanka served as a senior adviser during his first term alongside her husband, Jared Kushner.
“It’s too painful for the family,” he said.
Should he win another term, he said that he wants to be “less combative.”
“I would like to be less combative, but I find the press is extremely dishonest,” he said. “And if I’m not combative, I don’t get my word across. If I’m not combative, I don’t know. I don’t think you could win.”
During the interview, Trump criticized the Biden administration — including on the economy and foreign policy — and labeled the case against him as “weaponization” of the Department of Justice by the White House.
Special counsel Jack Smith, an independent prosecutor named last year by Attorney General Merrick Garland to oversee the DOJ investigations of Trump, has defended the indictment.
“This indictment was voted by a grand jury of citizens in the Southern District of Florida,” he said earlier this month, “and I invite everyone to read it in full to understand the scope and the gravity of the crimes charged.”
(HARRISBURG, Penn.) — In his nearly 40 years as a member of the Pennsylvania State Police, Lt. Col. George Bivens said he’s never witnessed a gunfight more intense than the one that erupted over the weekend with a suspect alleged to have ambushed and killed one trooper and critically wounded another.
“What I witnessed …. was one of the most intense, unbelievable gunfights I have ever witnessed,” Bivens said at a news conference on Sunday.
The suspect, 38-year-old Brandon Stine, was fatally shot by police in the gunbattle on Saturday in which Bivens said “hundreds of rounds” were fired.
State Police Commissioner Christopher L. Paris said Stine was armed with a high-powered .458 magnum rifle, which he said is normally used by large game hunters.
“This was as harrowing as it gets,” Paris said of the gunfight that ended with Stine’s death.
Bivens said the rifle Stine allegedly used “would defeat any body armor” the officers he confronted were wearing.
A motive for the rampage remains under investigation, and authorities declined to comment on whether state police had previous contact with Stine, who is from Thompsontown, Pennsylvania, in Juniata County.
Bivens described the initial attacks on the troopers as an “ambush” and said the suspect called 911 several times to give his location in an apparent effort to lure officers into a trap.
The violence unfolded about 11 a.m. Saturday when Stine drove his 2008 Chevrolet pickup truck into the parking lot of the state police Troop G barracks in Lewistown, Pennsylvania, got out of his vehicle and fired several shots at parked patrol cars before driving off. Surveillance cameras captured Stine firing his weapon in the parking lot and enabled police to obtain his license plate number and identify him as the registered owner and likely assailant, Paris said.
The state police immediately launched a massive search for the suspect, who was spotted at 12:45 p.m. Saturday in Mifflintown, Pennsylvania, about 13 miles northwest of Lewistown, by state police Lt. James Wagner, Paris said. Wagner was critically wounded in a confrontation with the suspect, Paris said.
He said several civilians came to the 45-year-old Wagner’s aid and used his radio to call for help.
Around 2:30 p.m. Saturday, Trooper Jacques F. Rougeau Jr., 29, a member of the state police force since 2020, was fatally shot in his patrol vehicle as he participated in the search for Stine.
Bivens alleged that Rougeau was “ambushed” by Stine as the trooper was driving in Walker Township.
He said Rougeau was fatally shot from a distance through the windshield of the patrol vehicle. He said Stine then drove into a residential area and was eventually spotted again by officers in the parking lot of a store and restaurant.
“There were people in the lot that were patronizing that business,” said Bivens, who was in a police helicopter overhead directing the pursuit.
Bivens said the troopers put themselves between the suspect and the civilians and used their patrol vehicle to force the suspect away from the businesses. He said several troopers were shot at by the suspect.
“It was such a fluid situation that our patrol car members were literally bailing out of cars while they were running,” Bivens said.
In an apparent attempt to escape, Stine drove across the yard and garden of a home and got stuck against a row of trees, Bivens said. He was fatally shot during a final gunbattle with police, Bivens said.
Paris added, “It’s a miracle that no members of the public were killed or injured as a result.”
(NEW YORK) — A submersible with five people aboard has gone missing while on a tour of the wreckage of the Titanic off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada, according to officials.
The Coast Guard said the 21-foot submersible went underwater Sunday morning, and lost contact about 1 hour and 45 minutes later.
The Coast Guard was notified Sunday afternoon that the vessel belonging to the deep sea exploring company OceanGate was overdue, and crews immediately launched search and rescue operations, Rear Adm. John Mauger, U.S. Coast Guard 1st District commander, said at a news conference Monday.
The vessel was designed to have 96 hours of oxygen available, he said.
The search is taking place in remote waters about 13,000 feet deep, Mauger said.
“It is a challenge to conduct a search in that remote area, but we are deploying all available assets to make sure that we can locate the craft and rescue the people on board,” Mauger said.
OceanGate confirmed Monday that it lost contact with a submersible.
“We are exploring and mobilizing all options to bring the crew back safely. Our entire focus is on the crewmembers in the submersible and their families,” OceanGate said in a statement. “We are working toward the safe return of the crewmembers.”
OceanGate’s website says it offers paying customers the opportunity to explore the wreckage of the Titanic.
One of the passengers was Hamish Harding, who worked for the sales company Action Aviation, a colleague told ABC News.
“This is on the site of a wreckage, the wreckage of the Titanic, and so there’s a lot of debris on the bottom, and locating an object on the bottom will be difficult,” Mauger told Fox News on Monday.
“We have lives that are potentially at risk,” he said.
On April 14, 1912, the Titanic hit an iceberg on its maiden voyage from England to New York. Over 2,200 passengers and crew were on board, and more than 1,500 people died when the ship sank.
The ship wreckage was found in 1985, almost 12,500 feet below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean.
ABC News’ Miles Cohen, Josh Hoyos, Alex Faul and Nadine El-Bawab contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — As he prepared to leave Beijing Monday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared that he had accomplished one of his most critical goals for the high-stakes trip: strengthening communication between the U.S. and China.
But whether his visit will have a lasting impact on the relationship will depend on what happens in the weeks ahead.
“I stressed that direct engagement and sustained communication and senior levels is the best way to responsibly manage our differences and ensure the competition does not veer into conflict,” Blinken said of his discussions during a news conference, capping off the first visit to China by a Cabinet official since 2019.
“And I heard the same from my Chinese counterparts,” Blinken continued. “We both agree on the need to stabilize our relationship.”
Despite this point of agreement, Blinken acknowledged that, despite raising the issue multiple times during his visit, he was not able to make significant progress on revitalizing perhaps the most important channel between countries: military-to-military communication.
“I think it’s absolutely vital that we have these kinds of communications,” Blinken said. “That imperative, I think, was only underscored by recent incidents that we saw in the air and on the seas. And at this moment, China has not agreed to move forward with that.”
The close calls Blinken alluded to include a Chinese warship coming within 150 yards of U.S. destroyer earlier this month and a Chinese fighter jet intercepting an American surveillance plane in international airspace in May.
Both incidents were decried by the Pentagon as unnecessarily dangerous, but China says the U.S. is at fault for conducting military operations in the region.
As Beijing has carried out what the State Department has described as increasingly provocative actions in the region, it has also sharply limited direct contact with the U.S. military — even shutting down a request from Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to meet with his Chinese counterpart in May.
“It’s an escalation management risk,” said Rear Adm. (Ret.) Mark Montgomery, a senior director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
“We need to have all the tools at our disposal for deescalating an accidental incident, and we are missing one of the biggest tools right now without military-to-military communications,” he continued.
The secretary’s most important engagement during his trip — a sit-down with President Xi Jinping — came together during the final hours of his visit.
Negotiations over the meeting with Xi continued well after Blinken touched down in China and was firmed up only once the Chinese government determined that the secretary’s other talks had gone well enough to merit face time with the leader, according to sources.
“It’s certainly better that it happened. It would have been quite a dampener to the relations had Xi declined to visit with Blinken,” said Montgomery.
“I’m not sure that it achieves anything of its own, but it’s a signal of Chinese cooperation that that we certainly hadn’t seen in the last six months,” he added.
Blinken predicted that additional dialogue would take place in the aftermath of his visit to Beijing.
“I would expect additional visits by US officials to China over the coming weeks, and we welcome further visits by Chinese officials to the United States,” Blinken said.
American officials likely to visit China in the coming weeks might include Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry. On the Chinese side, Blinken extended an invitation to Foreign Minister Qin Gang to visit Washington at a time both countries deem suitable.
Most telling of all will be if President Biden and Xi come together in the months ahead. The two last met on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Bali, Indonesia, last November, and officials from both countries have speculated that they could sit down again in November in San Francisco when the U.S. hosts the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation CEO Summit.
“I think this Xi/Blinken meeting does make a meeting with the president more likely. I’m not sure it necessarily means that there’ll be a meeting between the two leaders that has a successful outcome,” said Montgomery.
“That’s still predicating on China acting differently and us not valuing engagement for engagement’s sake,” he said.
(NEW YORK) — A submersible has gone missing while on a tour of the wreckage of the Titanic off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada, according to a Coast Guard official.
The Coast Guard was notified Sunday afternoon that a vessel belonging to the deep-sea exploring company OceanGate was overdue, and crews immediately launched search and rescue operations, Rear Adm. John Mauger, U.S. Coast Guard 1st District Commander, told Fox News.
The capsule is advertised to have 96 hours of oxygen for survival, which “gives us some time to continue searching and continue to use all our means to try and locate the crew members,” Mauger said.
He noted that this is in a remote part of the Atlantic Ocean.
“This is on the site of a wreckage, the wreckage of the Titanic, and so there’s a lot of debris on the bottom and locating an object on the bottom will be difficult,” Mauger said.
“We have lives that are potentially at risk,” he said.
OceanGate confirmed Monday that it lost contact with a submersible.
“We are exploring and mobilizing all options to bring the crew back safely. Our entire focus is on the crewmembers in the submersible and their families,” OceanGate said in a statement. “We are working toward the safe return of the crewmembers.”
OceanGate’s website says it offers paying customers the opportunity to explore the wreckage of the Titanic. The website says it has five-person submersibles.
On April 14, 1912, the Titanic hit an iceberg on its maiden voyage from England to New York. Over 2,200 passengers and crew were on board, and more than 1,500 people died when the ship sank.
The ship wreckage was found in 1985, almost 12,500 feet below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean.
ABC News’ Josh Hoyos, Alex Faul and Nadine El-Bawab contributed to this report.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
