(UVALDE, Texas) — The Uvalde Police Department and the Uvalde Independent School District police force are no longer cooperating with the Texas Department of Public Safety’s investigation into the massacre at Robb Elementary School and the state’s review of the law enforcement response, multiple law enforcement sources tell ABC News.
The Uvalde police chief and a spokesperson for the Uvalde Independent School District did not immediately respond to requests for comment from ABC News.
According to sources, the decision to stop cooperating occurred soon after the director of DPS, Col. Steven McCraw, held a news conference Friday during which he said the delayed police entry into the classroom was “the wrong decision” and contrary to protocol.
Reached by ABC News, a spokesperson for the Texas Department of Public Safety said, “The Uvalde Police Department and Uvalde CISD Police have been cooperating with investigators. The chief of the Uvalde CISD Police provided an initial interview but has not responded to a request for a follow-up interview with the Texas Rangers that was made two days ago.”
Last Tuesday’s attack, one of the worst school shootings in U.S. history, left 19 children and two adults dead.
(MARATHON, Fla.) — A woman was killed and two children injured in a parasailing accident in the Florida Keys on Monday, authorities said.
The individuals were parasailing shortly before 5:30 p.m. when the vessel’s tow line snapped, causing them to drag across the water, according to a Florida Department of Law Enforcement incident report.
The winds had “picked up” and the parasail struck the Old Seven Mile Bridge near Pigeon Key, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission said in a statement Tuesday.
According to an incident report from the FWC, a strong gust of wind “pegged” the parasail, which is jargon for when the parasail chute becomes controlled by the wind speed rather than the operation of the vessel.
When this took place, the captain “cut the line” that was tethered to three parasailers,” who then “dropped from an unknown height and dragged through the water by the inflated parasail,” according to the FWC incident report.
“The chute continued to drag the victims through and across the surface of the water” until the collision, the report stated.
The woman and one of the boys were unconscious following the collision, police said. A good Samaritan helped bring the three individuals to a nearby dock, according to the incident report.
The Coast Guard said in a statement that Station Marathon boat crews, partner agencies and a good Samaritan recovered a deceased woman and rescued two children on Monday. The good Samaritan arrived on the scene, took the three parasailers aboard and brought them to Sunset Grill Marina where they were transferred to EMTs, the Coast Guard said, and were then taken to Fisherman’s Hospital in Marathon.
The woman was pronounced dead at the scene after first responders attempted life-saving measures, police said. The boy regained consciousness and was transported to Miami Children’s Hospital for treatment, authorities said. His current condition is unclear. The other boy suffered minor injuries, authorities said.
“Our condolences are with the family and loved ones of those affected by Monday’s accident,” Capt. Jason Ingram, Coast Guard Sector Key West commander, said in a statement. “This was a tragedy for a family seeking to enjoy their visit to the Florida Keys. Our team, and our partners at Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, are investigating the accident to determine the causal factors and mitigate future casualties to make the waterways as safe as possible.”
There were between 10 to 12 family members at the scene, including the woman’s husband, according to the incident report.
The victims were from Schaumburg, Illinois, and had been on a parasail ride with Lighthouse Parasail, based in Marathon, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. The FWC incident report identified the woman as Supraja Alaparthi.
ABC News did not immediately hear back from Lighthouse Parasail for comment.
(UVALDE, Texas) — Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Police Chief Pete Arredondo was sworn in as a city council member Tuesday night.
Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin said members were sworn in per the city’s charter.
“Out of respect for the families who buried their children today, and who are planning to bury their children in the next few days, no ceremony was held,” he said in a statement obtained by ABC News Austin affiliate KVUE-TV.
“Our parents deserve answers and I trust the Texas Department of Public Safety/Texas Rangers will leave no stone unturned,” McLaughlin continued. “Our emotions are raw, and hearts are broken, and words are sometimes exchanged because of those emotions.”
“I want Lt. Governor Dan Patrick to know that I misunderstood statements I thought he said. We both attended the same law enforcement briefing. We appreciate the concern Dan Patrick has for the citizens of Uvalde and local law enforcement,” the mayor added. “I ask everyone to pray for us, the citizens of Uvalde as we grieve, and live through the pain, and the healing process.”
The ceremony comes exactly one week since the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School. Nineteen students and two teachers were killed in one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history.
The first funerals for two of the victims, both 10, took place on Tuesday.
Multiple law enforcement sources told ABC News Tuesday that the Uvalde Police Department and the Uvalde Independent School District police force are no longer cooperating with the Texas Department of Public Safety’s investigation into the massacre and the state’s review of the law enforcement response.
The Uvalde police chief and a spokesperson for the Uvalde Independent School District did not immediately respond to requests for comment from ABC News regarding their cooperation with the investigation.
Darius Rucker can now add a new skill to his tool belt: home renovator.
In the debut episode of his new limited series, Rucker’s Reno, Darius takes viewers on a tour of a historical home he’s purchased and renovated in his home city of Charleston, South Carolina.
Citing Charleston as his “favorite city in the world,” Darius purchased the home at 119 Broad St. Built in 1802 and handmade entirely by enslaved people, Darius acknowledged that the home has a “complicated history.” “That’s the only way you can make someplace better is to talk about it and try to work on it,” he says.
The first episode finds the singer and his team of architects and interior designers renovating the kitchen and dining room, with Darius picking out the light fixtures and other elements he wants in the space.
“Wow, this is awesome!” he exclaims as he walks into the newly renovated kitchen, which features a marble island, all new appliances and a TV screen above the original mantle. “I love keeping the history, but bringing the modern touches that look beautiful,” Darius says. “This is a great way to start.”
As for the dish he’ll be whipping up in the newly renovated kitchen? Shrimp and grits.
The six-episode series will continue to air on the Design Network.
(ODESA, Ukraine) — Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has meant vital food exports are stuck in Ukraine’s ports.
ABC News foreign correspondent Tom Soufi Burridge explains a looming crisis by answering four key questions.
1. How important is Ukraine’s food production for the world?
Ukraine is a vast agricultural production house.
The country produces 46% of the world’s sunflower oil exports, 37% of global millet (a small grain cereal) exports, 13% of all barley exports, 10% of total wheat exports, 8% of honey and 7% of walnut exports, according to the Ukrainian Agribusiness Club.
Before Russia invaded, most of Ukraine’s food production was exported through the country’s Black Sea ports.
Earlier this month, the United Nations World Food Programme said those exports would normally feed 400 million people around the world.
The Middle East and Africa are Ukraine’s main food export markets, said Professor Oleg Nivievskyi from Kyiv’s School of Economics.
By gaining rare access inside a grain terminal in Odesa’s port, ABC News was able to witness the vast infrastructure that would normally be used to ship the produce out.
Pre-war, the terminal would receive a hundred truck loads and a hundred train wagons of grain in a single day, said Oleksandr Guzenko, the plant’s chief engineer.
In a single hour, 400 tons of grain would normally flow through the plant and out to ships waiting in the dock, Guzenko added.
However, these are abnormal times.
2. What is the impact of Russia’s blockade of the Black Sea?
The grain terminal at the Port of Odesa is depressingly idle and silent.
Guzenko told ABC News he felt “helpless.”
The Russian threat at sea means there is no safe route for commercial vessels to exit and vast quantities of food exports are stuck in Ukraine’s Black Sea ports.
It is becoming “a disaster” for Ukrainian farmers.
“If the ports don’t open soon, we are stuck with the crops,” said Kees Huizinga, who owns a 40,000-acre farm in Kyshchentsi in the Cherkasy region, south of Kyiv.
His business would gradually run out of money, he told ABC News, and planting for next year’s harvest is already at risk.
Huizinga predicted the world’s food supply could be “disrupted for the coming decade” if the situation isn’t solved soon.
However, the blockade is having a ripple effect far beyond Ukraine.
The U.N.’s World Food Programme said global food prices have risen sharply since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine and vulnerable communities in parts of East Africa are at risk.
Even before Russia attacked Ukraine, the WFP was forecasting a year of “catastrophic hunger,” because global resources were not keeping pace with demand.
In the first month of the war, export prices for wheat and maize rose by 22% and 20%, respectively, “on top of steep rises in 2021,” according to the WFP.
WFP Executive Director David Beasley told ABC News the war is a “catastrophe on top of a catastrophe.”
“The world demands [that the ports open], because hundreds of millions of people globally depend on food that comes through these ports,” Beasley said.
3. What is causing the blockade?
Russian President Vladimir Putin and his generals have spoken openly about their desire to capture Ukraine’s largest port, Odesa, and possibly the entire Ukrainian coastline — which would throttle Ukraine’s economy.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in late February, there was a possibility that the Russian navy might launch an assault on Ukraine’s southwestern coast from the sea.
By capturing Snake Island, a strategically important slice of dry land off Ukraine’s western coast, on day one of the war, the Kremlin signaled its intent.
In response to the Russian threat, Ukraine quickly placed mines in the Black Sea near Odesa and other major ports.
In a briefing with ABC News this week, a NATO official said coastal defenses were necessary “in order to deter or thwart a potential Russian amphibious landing.”
The Russian government recently said it was ready to provide a humanitarian corridor for ships carrying food, in return for the lifting of Western sanctions. It called on Ukraine to de-mine the Black Sea.
However, the U.K. Ministry of Defense accused Russia of “introducing an alternative narrative” to complicate people’s understanding of the original cause of the blockade.
Ukraine has only deployed maritime mines, the U.K.’s Ministry of Defense said, “because of the continued credible threat of Russian amphibious assaults from the Black Sea.”
4. Why do Western leaders accuse Putin of “weaponizing hunger” and is there a solution on the horizon?
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently accused Putin of “using food as a weapon.”
The Biden administration and its Western allies make this accusation because Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was unprovoked and the Kremlin has the ability to drop its threat on ports such as Odesa.
“If Kyiv solves the problem of de-mining ports, then the Russian navy will ensure unhindered passage of ships with grain to the Mediterranean Sea,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov responded on Tuesday to international criticism.
The White House has already ruled out meeting Russia’s demand to drop sanctions in return for an end to the blockade.
What military guarantees Russia could offer Ukraine, in order for Ukraine to demine the Black Sea, is not at all clear.
A senior NATO official offered a blunt assessment to ABC News in the context of Tuesday’s back and forth: Ukraine cannot trust anything Russia says.
That said, European countries, namely France and Germany, are negotiating the issue with Russia.
In the meantime, Ukraine and the European Union are trying to increase Ukrainian food exports by road and rail.
However, Nivievskyi, from Kyiv’s School of Economics, warned it is “not physically possible” to transport the huge amount of grain by rail and road.
By his calculation, rail and road routes have only about 10% of the export capacity of Ukraine’s Black Sea ports.
Bad Wolves have introduced a new guitar player named Max Karon.
“It’s with great excitement that we announce our new permanent guitar player: Max Karon,” the “Lifeline” rockers wrote in a social media post. “The funny thing is that Max isn’t new to us, he started the band with founder [and drummer] John Boecklin in 2014 and was a major writer/player on all three Bad Wolves albums.”
The statement continues, “Being a key ingredient to the Bad Wolves sound, this was a no-brainer decision. There is no other person on this earth that would be a better fit for Bad Wolves than Max.”
Karon, who adds that he’s “thrilled and grateful” to be officially joining, takes the place of guitarist Chris Cain, who announced in April that he’s leaving Bad Wolves after five years in the band. In his own statement, Cain wrote, “Sometimes in life you have to do what’s best for you and for me it was stepping away.”
Bad Wolves, of course, went through a big lineup change last year when vocalist Daniel “DL” Laskiewicz joined in place of frontman Tommy Vext.
You can catch the revamped Bad Wolves live when they hit the road with Papa Roach, Falling in Reverse and Hollywood Undead on the Rockzilla Summer Tour, which kicks off in July.
Charlie Puth is a singer, songwriter and producer, and as such he’s completely consumed by music nearly all the time. But weirdly, the only time Charlie turns the music off is when many of us turn the music on: during sexytime.
Speaking to Bustle in an interview in which he completely overshares, Charlie admits he can’t listen to music while in bed with someone because, he explains, “I will analyze the music playing in the background and I’ll start to see the music notes in my head and I will not be able to [perform].”
That’s not to say Charlie avoids sex, though. If you follow him on TikTok, you’ll find he’s pretty obsessed with it. As he tells Bustle, “I’m really horny. I think to be a creative, you have to be a little bit.”
But why is he so open about that sort of thing on TikTok, where he boasts more than 16 million followers? “It just shows your vulnerability,” he explains, “and I was not a vulnerable person [before].”
He notes, “I need to really show my personality off. I wasn’t doing that because I was surrounding myself with producers and record label heads who were like, ‘You are a massive act. You need to go away and work on your art for a while.’ The pandemic made me realize that I have to not only not do that, but the opposite of that. I need to show every step of the process.”
And he doesn’t care whether or not you think he’s ridiculous or thirsty, either.
“I would be more offended if somebody opens up my TikTok and they have no opinion about it, if they were indifferent,” he says. “I want them to be either very angry about it or in love with it.”
The Jonas Brothers are working hard to turn their Las Vegas residency this month into a very special fan experience — and they’re also using the opportunity to clean out their closets.
Nick Jonas tells Variety, “We’re cooking up a few special things for our fans. They’re going to help us pick the set list every night.” In addition, he adds, “We all walked through our homes and grabbed a bunch of [our] own personal memorabilia that we’re going to be selling for a dollar each at a pawn shop to thank them for always being so supportive.”
So how do you gain access to this pawn shop? You apparently have to subscribe to a new smartphone-based premium content service called Scriber, which will give you “unique, behind-the-scenes videos and updates” from the brothers for five bucks a month.
In addition to ticket presales and such, Variety reports, subscribers will get a chance to win a spot at the JoBros “Authentic Memorabilia Pawn Shop Dollar Store” in Vegas. The group will donate around $2 per subscription to various charities, and Scriber itself is donating some of its proceeds to carbon reduction efforts.
In addition to creating content for this new service, the group has equity in the company.
The JoBros Las Vegas residency kicks off at the Dolby Live Theater at the Park MGM on June 3 and runs through June 11.
Fifty years ago today, June 1, 1972, the Eagles soared into the music world with the release of their self-titled debut album.
The band’s country-rock sound, multiple-part harmonies and accomplished musicianship immediately were embraced by pop and rock fans.
The Eagles were formed in 1971 by a quartet of singing musicians — guitarist Glenn Frey, drummer Don Henley, guitarist Bernie Leadon and bassist Randy Meisner — all of whom were playing in Linda Ronstadt‘s backing band when the group came together.
Eagles yielded three hit singles — “Take It Easy,” “Witchy Woman” and “Peaceful Easy Feeling,” which peaked at #12, #9 and #22, respectively, on the Billboard Hot 100. The album reached #22 on the Billboard 200 and has sold over 1 million copies in the U.S.
“Take It Easy” was co-written by Frey and his friend Jackson Browne, “Witchy Woman” was co-written by Henley and Leadon, and “Peaceful Easy Feeling” was composed by Glenn’s friend Jack Tempchin.
The album was produced by Glyn Johns, whom Frey wanted to record with because Johns had previously worked with The Rolling Stones, The Who and Led Zeppelin. Johns initially turned the band down, but changed his mind after hearing the members performing the Meisner-penned song “Take the Devil” acoustically while singing harmonies together.
While the Eagles eventually were dominated by Frey and Henley, Johns told Uncut magazine in 2021 that at the time of the band’s debut album, all four members were “equally important.”
“Henley’s strongest contribution was his voice. The same with Frey,” Glyn said. “Bernie Leadon was great on banjo and guitar, and Randy Meisner was a fine bass player, with a voice of extraordinary range … Without any one of them, it wouldn’t have been the same.”
Here’s the Eagles album’s full track list:
“Take It Easy”
“Witchy Woman”
“Chug All Night”
“Most of Us Are Sad”
“Nightingale”
“Train Leaves Here This Morning”
“Take the Devil”
“Earlybird”
“Peaceful Easy Feeling”
“Tryin'”
The new series Pistol, which debuted Tuesday on Hulu, is all about explosive rise and tragic fall of the Sex Pistols.
Based on founding member and guitarist, Steve Jones’ memoir, Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol, the series follows “a band of spotty, noisy, working-class kids with ‘no future,’ who shook the boring, corrupt Establishment to its core, threatened to bring down the government and changed music and culture forever.”
The groundbreaking punk rock band — which also included vocalist John Lydon, a.k.a. Johnny Rotten, drummer Paul Cook and bassist Sid Vicious, who replaced original member Glen Matlock — was very close to director and executive producer Danny Boyle‘s heart, coming along at time when he felt all the anger and disenfranchisement the band was feeding off of.
Boyle tells ABC Audio that punk rock movement “changed so much of Britain, which desperately needed changing. And it sustained a value that surprised everyone because it looked completely self-destructive, that it was going to burn itself out in a very short period of time. But it didn’t.”
And while their musical talents may have been questionable, Boyle thinks it’s their message that lives on today.
“Everybody went on about that they couldn’t play. They could play,” he insists. “More important than whether they could play or they couldn’t play, whether they were qualified or not, was that they had something to say. And that’s all you need.”
Boyle notes that in a misogynistic world. punk music “allowed women to surface and to make a big contribution.” A prime example, he says, were fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, “Queen of Punk” Jordan and, of course, Pretenders front woman Chrissie Hynde, who, “went on to sell more records than all the rest of them put together.”
