(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.
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.
Bangles singer Susanna Hoffs is going from walking like an Egyptian to writing like an author: She’s publishing her first novel, This Bird Has Flown, next spring.
The book is about a washed-up pop singer who finds new inspiration when she falls in love with an Oxford literature professor she meets on a plane to London. Helen Fielding, who wrote Bridget Jones’ Diary, calls the book a “sexy, page-turning treat.”
Susanna tells Entertainment Weekly, “I decided to make my protagonist a musician and songwriter because it’s a job I know well … I also wanted to give readers a peek behind the curtain of what it’s like to face an audience with your heart thumping so loudly you fear they can hear it, too — and then, somehow, to find your voice.”
The “Eternal Flame” singer adds that she found the novel-writing process “truly exhilarating,” adding, “It was permission to escape into my fictional world with my characters, as though I’d gone through a portal into another world. … It was essentially like playing with dolls in my imagination.”
This Bird Has Flown — presumably titled after the Beatles song “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” — arrives April 4, 2023.
Måneskin has premiered the first episode of the band’s On the Road series.
The 26-minute video follows the Italian rockers during their European festival tour in June, featuring behind-the-scene footage of sound-checks and many, many wardrobe fittings.
In between, the band members kill time on the road playing games and sports and joking around. For someone who is the lead singer of one of the world’s hottest bands, it feels a little unfair that Damiano David also has such a smooth basketball jumpshot.
You can watch episode one of On the Road streaming now on YouTube.
Måneskin will be on the road this fall for their first-ever North American headlining tour, which kicks off Halloween night in Seattle.
(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.
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.”
(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.
(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.
The presale for Adele’s rescheduled Vegas residency is now live — so if you want to be a part of Weekends With Adele, better get your tickets on Ticketmaster now before they sell out!
Joe Jonas jumped on the “Teenage Dirtbag” trend that’s all over TikTok, but used it to take a swipe at his older brother, Kevin Jonas. After sharing awkward throwback photos of himself, the final photo is a shot of Kevin.
Want to feel old? Jamie Lynn Spears’ 14-year-old daughter, Maddie, has officially entered high school. “Swipe to see how time literally flies by…..don’t take a second of it for granted,” the Zoey 101 star wrote on Instagram.
Justin Timberlake is amazed by The Players Choir, which performed “Can’t Stop the Feeling!” on America’s Got Talent. The singer reposted the clip to his Instagram Story and captioned it with a hands up emojis.
Pink knows how to keep her two kids, Willow and Jameson, busy — with “simultaneous thumb wars.” She said on Instagram that she doesn’t “suggest” other parents do it, adding, “It shouldn’t be a thing.”
John Mayer has been tapped to play an acoustic set at Seth Rogen‘s Hilarity for Charity 10th anniversary. The extravaganza pops off October 1. You can get tickets now on the event’s official website.
Ellie Goulding got in on the TikTok phone flip craze and revealed “Sixteen” is the “worst song I’ve released.” She also revealed her celebrity crush, but she moved the phone so fast, no one got a clear look at the image — guesses range from Patrick Dempsey to Jake Gyllenhaal.
Speaking of TikTok, Jason Derulo released the official music video for his “Jiggle Jiggle” remix, which stars Louis Theroux and Amelia Dimz — the comedians who started the craze.
The presale for Adele’s rescheduled Vegas residency is now live — so if you want to be a part of Weekends With Adele, better get your tickets on Ticketmaster now before they sell out!
Joe Jonas jumped on the “Teenage Dirtbag” trend that’s all over TikTok, but used it to take a swipe at his older brother, Kevin Jonas. After sharing awkward throwback photos of himself, the final photo is a shot of Kevin.
Want to feel old? Jamie Lynn Spears’ 14-year-old daughter, Maddie, has officially entered high school. “Swipe to see how time literally flies by…..don’t take a second of it for granted,” the Zoey 101 star wrote on Instagram.
Justin Timberlake is amazed by The Players Choir, which performed “Can’t Stop the Feeling!” on America’s Got Talent. The singer reposted the clip to his Instagram Story and captioned it with a hands up emojis.
Pink knows how to keep her two kids, Willow and Jameson, busy — with “simultaneous thumb wars.” She said on Instagram that she doesn’t “suggest” other parents do it, adding, “It shouldn’t be a thing.”
John Mayer has been tapped to play an acoustic set at Seth Rogen‘s Hilarity for Charity 10th anniversary. The extravaganza pops off October 1. You can get tickets now on the event’s official website.
(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.”
Johnny Depp‘s return to the cameras after his legal victory in his defamation case against his ex-wife Amber Heard is already underway.
The French film company Why Not Productions has released an image of the actor in full historical dress and make-up as King Louis XV in French director Maïwenn’s based-on-real-life love story Jeanne du Barry.
The actor, who is fluent in French, is pictured in profile in a king’s finery: wearing a powdered wig tied into a ponytail and topped with a white, feathered hat. Masking his eyes is a provocative black blindfold.
According to Variety, the film follows the titular character whom the director is playing herself: Jeanne was a courtesan who managed to charm the monarch while keeping her class and profession a secret to him.
The film got underway weeks ago, the production company revealed, and is shooting on location in and around France.
