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FBI ends day-long search of Brian Laundrie’s family home: Live updates

September 20, 2021 by WDNY Radio

(NEW YORK) — A massive search is continuing in southern Florida for Brian Laundrie, the boyfriend of Gabby Petito, the 22-year-old woman who went missing on a cross-country trip and who authorities say is “consistent with the description” of a body discovered on Sunday in the Bridger-Teton National Forest in Wyoming.

The search for the 23-year-old Laundrie is centered around North Port, Florida, where investigators said Laundrie returned to his home on Sept. 1 without Petito but driving her 2012 Ford Transit.

Laundrie has been named by police as a “person of interest” in Petito’s disappearance. Laundrie has refused to speak to the police and has not been seen since Tuesday, Sept. 14, according to law enforcement officials.

The search for Laundrie is the latest twist in the case that has grabbed national attention as he and Petito had been traveling across the country since June, documenting the trip on social media.

Petito’s parents, who live in Long Island, New York, reported her missing on Sept. 11 after not hearing from her for two weeks.

Latest headlines:
– Car Brian Laundrie last used was parked in parents’ driveway: Authorities
– FBI descends on Florida home of Brian Laundrie’s parents
– Search of vast Florida swamp preserve ‘exhausted’: Police

Here are the latest developments. All times Eastern.

Sep 20, 6:34 pm
FBI ends search at Laundrie residence

The FBI Tampa office tweeted Monday evening that they ended their search of the Laundrie residence North Port, Florida.

“No further details since this is an ongoing investigation,” the office tweeted.

Sep 20, 5:29 pm
Search warrant last week uncovered hard drive, revealed Petito’s last text

Details of a search warrant executed last week by Florida investigators looking into Gabby Petito’s disappearance were revealed Monday.

This warrant, filed by the North Port Police Department this past Wednesday, wasn’t associated with the FBI activity at the Laundrie family’s North Port home Monday.

Police say that after they searched the 2012 Ford Transit van, crime scene technicians found an external hard drive that they believed “may contain viable digital forensic data that could assist in the location” of Petito, court documents said.

A detective said Petito’s mother received an “odd text” from the 22-year-old, on Aug. 27, — making it likely the last communication from Petito, according to court documents.

The text asked Petito’s mom, “Can you help Stan, I just keep getting his voicemails and missed calls,” referring to Petito’s grandfather, who she “never” refers to as Stan, according to her mother.

Sep 20, 4:14 pm
911 caller claimed he saw Brian Laundrie ‘slapping’ Gabby Petito

The Grand County, Utah, Sheriff’s Office released on Monday a 911 recording from August in which a caller claimed he witnessed Brian Laundrie allegedly “slapping” Gabby Petito and chasing her up and down a sidewalk hitting her.

In the recording of the 911 call from Aug. 12, the caller, whose name was not released, claimed he saw an apparent domestic dispute unfold on Main Street in Moab between a young couple driving a white van with Florida license plates.

“We drove by, and the gentleman was slapping the girl,” the caller told a 911 dispatcher. “And then we stopped. They ran up and down the sidewalk. He proceeded to hit her, hopped in the car and drove off.”

Moab Police Department Chief Bret Edge said last week that his officers responded to the incident, located the van and pulled the couple over. Moab police released body camera footage of the traffic stop and wrote in a report that the couple, identified as Laundrie and Petito, admitted to arguing and that Petito had slapped Laundrie.

The couple also stated to police that Laundrie did not hit Petito, according to the report.

After speaking to Petito and Laundrie separately, the police allowed the couple to go on their way. Edge said “insufficient evidence existed to justify criminal charges.”

Sep 20, 1:44 pm
Car Brian Laundrie last used was parked in parents’ driveway: Authorities

A Ford Mustang convertible authorities believe Brian Laundrie used to purportedly drive himself to the Carlton Reserve near North Port, Florida, was parked in the driveway of his family’s home when FBI agents served a search warrant there on Monday.

Laundrie’s parents told authorities he went to the nearly 25,000-acre preserve on Tuesday, which is the last time they claim they saw him, according to the family’s attorney.

Steven Bertolino, the Laundrie family attorney, told ABC News that the family picked up the car on Thursday morning from the reserve after going out on Wednesday to look for Laundrie.

Laundrie left his family’s home on Tuesday morning with a backpack, Bertolino said. He said that when family members went to the reserve to look for him, they spotted a note left on the car from the North Port Police Department saying it needed to be removed.

Bertolino said the family left the car overnight “so he [Laundrie] could drive back.” When Laundrie didn’t come home Thursday morning, the family went back to retrieve the car, the attorney said.

The family called the police on Friday to file a missing person report, authorities said.

New Journey album is “our old sound” with a “different strut,” say Neal Schon & Jonathan Cain

September 20, 2021 by WDNY Radio

Journey’s Jonathan Cain, Neal Schon & Arnel Pineda; Courtesy of Journey

Journey is putting the finishing touches on their first album of new original material since 2011’s Eclipse, and according to band members Neal Schon and Jonathan Cain, the project’s got that classic Journey sound — but with a new twist.

Speaking to Cleveland.com, Schon says of the new music, “We’re moving forward…It still sounds like Journey, but there is definitely a different strut in the rhythm section with Randy and Narada” — referring to the band’s returning bass player Randy Jackson and new drummer Narada Michael Walden, respectively.

“It’s bombastic. It’s rocking. It’s majestic, and it’s soulful,” adds Schon.

The album is being worked on remotely by Schon and Walden on the West Coast, and Cain in Nashville and Florida, the band explains. “It’s typical Journey, I think,” Cain says. “We’re back to our old sound, but it’s got a little bit more on the bottom end.”

“It’s got fire. It’s just a little bit more edge to it. Neal’s playing his butt off, and it’s very driven, very cool. The songs came very interestingly. I like it a lot,” he adds.

One way the new album — which doesn’t have a release date yet — will pay tribute to Journey’s legacy is via the artwork: The package is being designed by Jim Welch, who worked on the classic Infinity, Departure and Escape albums.

The first single from the album, “The Way We Used to Be,” came out in June.

Making GNR’s ‘Use Your Illusion’ two different albums was Axl Rose’s “genius moment,” says Matt Sorum

September 20, 2021 by WDNY Radio

Last week, Guns N’ Roses‘ albums Use Your Illusion 1 & 2 marked their 30th anniversaries. While former GNR drummer Matt Sorum told ABC Audio that it was Axl Rose‘s idea to release two albums simultaneously, he’s now explained to Rolling Stone exactly why Rose came up with the idea, which he calls “genius.”

As Sorum explains, the band had about 32 songs, and he assumed they would record 20 and then pick the best 12 or 13 for an album. Then, Axl insisted that they release all the songs, and came up with the concept of two albums with the same name, but different-colored covers.

“I was like, ‘Why? Why do we have to make them separate records?’” Sorum recalls. But, as he explains, it was due to Axl’s experience working at Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard in L.A.

“In those days, if you had a double record, you had to put it behind the cash register. It was over 20 bucks,” Sorum says. “He wanted the records to be in the bin where you could actually hold them, pick them up.”

“When Axl came in and decided it should be a double record, it was a genius moment for him,” Sorum adds.

Sorum spoke to Rolling Stone to promote his upcoming autobiography, Double Talkin’ Jive, which Rolling Stone says has been indefinitely delayed. In the book, he describes being on tour with Slash and Duff in 2016 and hearing a rumor that GNR was going to reunite…without him.

While it hurt at the time, Sorum now says he’s “come to terms with the fact that they’re doing their own thing, and I’m doing mine,” and adds, “I feel really good about my time in the band.”

Trans rights challenged in Texas’ third special legislative session

September 20, 2021 by WDNY Radio

(TEXAS) — Texas legislators are heading into their third special session Monday with several controversial topics on the agenda, including transgender student participation in sports and gender-affirming health care for trans youth.

Lawmakers will consider banning transgender students from playing on interscholastic teams that align with their gender identity. Children in grades K through 12 would only be allowed to play sports that correspond with their sex assigned at birth or sex designated on their original birth certificate.

Texas lawmakers alone have introduced more than 40 anti-trans bills this year.

At least 30 states across the country have introduced similar bills on trans student-athletes. So far, eight states — Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Mississippi, Tennessee, South Dakota and West Virginia — have passed the bills into laws or signed them as executive orders.

The laws are being challenged in Arkansas, Florida, Tennessee and West Virginia.

Some groups in support of the bills, like the conservative Christian group Concerned Women for America, claim that trans girls have an unfair advantage.

“The issue is about the basic fairness and opportunities that women have fought for centuries to obtain,” the group said in a statement to ABC News. “The disparity comes when forcing women to compete against a biological male that has innate biological differences, giving them physical advantages that simply cannot be erased.”

There is no evidence that trans athletes disproportionately dominate sports when playing on teams that correspond with their gender identity. There is also no evidence that they have an advantage.

Other anti-trans bills on the special session docket include bans on gender-affirming therapy, counseling, surgery or health care. In some cases, allowing a child or teen under the age of 18 gender-affirming health care may be considered child abuse, if HB22 is signed into law.

LGBTQ+ advocates say these bills only serve to tarnish the mental health and safety of trans students.

“Like any other student, trans young people just want to stay healthy, go to school and spend time with their friends and loved ones,” Andy Marra, the executive director of the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund, told ABC News. “For transgender students living in states where their very lives are under attack, it can be near impossible to focus on much else but surviving.”

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that discrimination can lead to poor mental health, suicide, substance abuse, violence and other health risks for trans youth.

Young transgender students are also three times more likely to attempt suicide than their cisgender peers, the CDC reported.

Pro-Putin party takes majority in Russian parliamentary election sullied by fraud

September 20, 2021 by WDNY Radio

(MOSCOW) — Russia’s ruling party, United Russia, which backs President Vladimir Putin, has kept its supermajority in the country’s parliament, sweeping elections that were marred with allegations of widespread ballot rigging and saw many of the Kremlin’s top opponents barred from running.

With virtually all ballots counted, Russia’s election’s commission said United Russia had taken nearly 50% of the vote and won nearly 90% of first-past-the-post districts, meaning the party will retain its two-thirds majority in the lower house of parliament, which allows it to change Russia’s constitution.

Russia’s elections are closely managed, and the pro-Kremlin party’s victory was seen as a foregone conclusion, but on Monday, opposition parties accused the Kremlin of using blatant fabrication to inflate the result and produce an overwhelming win even in Moscow, usually a center of dissent.

After polls closed Sunday night after three days of voting, early partial results showed several opposition parties and politicians making strong showings in the capital, with some seemingly in reach of victory with most votes counted.

But those results were all wiped out when, after many hours, authorities published results from online voting, which handed victories to pro-Kremlin candidates. Opposition parties, even those from the so-called “loyal opposition,” cried foul, accusing the Kremlin of using the online votes to conceal vote manipulation and steal victory for its candidates.

The Communist Party, which largely acts as a tame opposition in the parliament, said it would not recognize the results in Moscow, where six of its candidates lost out once the online votes were added.

Critics started raising suspicions about Moscow’s online count after it took far longer for it to be completed than the paper ballot count for most of the rest of the country — a sign, critics said, that officials were waiting to see how much they needed to alter the vote. The online voting was in effect a black box, with independent monitors unable to observe it or properly check how the results were signed off on by officials, independent monitors said. Workers at state companies and organizations have also reported being pressed by their managers to vote online en masse.

Several candidates called a protest at Moscow’s Pushkin Square on Monday. A few hundred people gathered under heavy rain to demonstrate, watched by a cordon of riot police.

“Such a giant difference between the results at the ‘live’ polling stations and the online vote can’t be true,” Mikhail Lobanov, a Communist candidate with wide support among liberal voters, told the crowd, according to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

Lobanov said he had been on track to beat Yevgeny Popov, a pro-Kremlin TV personality, by a margin of 10,500 votes before the online votes suddenly gave Popov a lead of 20,000 votes at the last moment.

There were also allegations of widespread analogue ballot rigging around Russia. Throughout the weekend, there was a stream of videos seeming to show elections officials stuffing wads of ballots into voting urns or trying to block monitoring cameras while others did so.

Independent researchers also spotted that Russia’s central elections committee now encrypts the results data published on its website, a step reportedly intended to prevent researchers from crunching the data themselves, which in the past has allowed them to identify signs of rigging.

“Online voting represents right now represents an absolute evil — a black box that no one checks,” Sergey Shpilkin, a data scientist who in the past has used statistical analysis to demonstrate likely falsification in Russian elections, told Russian news website Meduza.

The head of Russia’s elections commission Ella Pamfilova in a video meeting with Putin said the elections had seen far fewer violations than usual and claimed Russia’s system was “one of the most transparent” in the world.

The United States and some European countries criticized the elections as unfair amid the Kremlin’s use of repressive laws to prevent opponents from participating. Ned Price, the U.S. State Department’s spokesperson, in a statement said the Russian government had conducted “widespread efforts to marginalize independent political figures” and had “severely restricted political pluralism and prevented the Russian people from exercising their civil and political rights.”

United Russia took nearly 50% of the vote despite polls suggesting its support was around 30%, as high food prices and unpopular pension reforms have eaten into its popularity. Ahead of the elections, the Kremlin launched a campaign of repression on a scale unprecedented under Putin’s 20 year-rule, barring dozens of opposition candidates from running, with many arrested and some forced abroad.

It dismantled the movement of its fiercest critic Alexey Navalny, who was jailed in January after surviving a nerve agent poisoning last year.

Navalny, from jail, had sought to exploit the Kremlin party’s unpopularity at the elections with a tactical voting campaign called “Smart Voting,” advising people to vote for any candidate with the best chance of beating United Russia.

On Monday, he claimed the campaign had worked, arguing the campaign’s recommended candidates had won 12 out of Moscow’s 15 districts before the online votes were added.

“Ugh! Don’t do that!” ‘Sopranos’ creator David Chase on how his crew hated series finale set to “Don’t Stop Believin'”

September 20, 2021 by WDNY Radio

© 2021 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved.

(NOTE LANGUAGE) In a chat with Marc Maron on his WTF with Marc Maron podcast, Sopranos creator David Chase revealed a bit about the iconic show’s finale — and how Journey ended up in it.

As you may remember, James Gandolfini‘s Tony Soprano and his family members sit down for dinner at a diner, and Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin'” cranks out of a jukebox.

While Chase wasn’t re-litigating what the vague ending means — spoiler alert, he apparently once accidentally called it Tony’s “death scene” — Chase did talk about what went into choosing that song.

In speaking with members of his crew at the time, Chase said he was left with three choices — one of which he couldn’t remember, and the other was Al Green‘s “Love and Happiness.”

When he mentioned “Don’t Stop Believin’,” Chase recalled, “[T]hey went, ‘Oh, Jesus Christ, no. Don’t do that! Ugh. F***.’ And I said, ‘Well, that’s it. That’s the one.'”

Chase explained, “I wasn’t saying that just to throw it in their face. That was kind of my favorite, and it got a reaction of some kind. So I can make this song lovable, which it had been.”

The Emmy winner also detailed that other endings were shot to throw off potential spoilers — but wouldn’t reveal to Maron what those alternate takes were.

The Sopranos prequel, Chase’s The Many Saints of Newark, starring Gandolfini’s son Michael as a young Tony Soprano, hits theaters and HBO Max on October 1.

Shawn Mendes teases tour announcement this week

September 20, 2021 by WDNY Radio

Shawn Mendes is getting ready to hit the road again.

The singer revealed Monday that he’ll be embarking on his Wonder world tour in 2022. He promised to unveil more details later this week.

“Can’t wait to get out there and see you all again guys,” Shawn wrote on social media, and posted a short video teasing his return to the stage.

He encouraged fans to head to WondertheTour.com to sign up to be “the first to hear about tour dates and presale info.”

Shawn released Wonder, his fourth studio album, in December 2020.

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How the COVID-19 pandemic impacted Scotty McCreery’s approach on ’Same Truck’

September 20, 2021 by WDNY Radio

Scotty McCreery had most of his new album, Same Truck, completed before the COVID-19 pandemic altered life in 2020. But the forced downtime allowed him to see the project from a new vantage point.

In an interview with People, the American Idol winner shares that the album previously consisted of songs penned by other songwriters. But being at home allowed him to tap into his own well of songwriting, with 10 of the 12 songs co-written by him, including current single, “You Time.”

“I had a lot of outside cuts actually the first time around. But then the world shut down and I had nothing but time to sit there and pick up a guitar and strum ideas and write songs,” he explains. “Faith is something I lean on daily. I’ve definitely had to lean on it a lot in the last year and a half, with the craziness of the world.”

“You Time,” inspired by Scotty’s wife, Gabi,” is inching its way toward the #1 spot on the Billboard Country Airplay chart.

Video for Rolling Stones’ ‘Tattoo You’ 40th anniversary track, “Living in the Heart of Love,” coming Wednesday

September 20, 2021 by WDNY Radio

The Rolling Stones may have just lost their legendary drummer, Charlie Watts, but they’re moving forward. On Wednesday at 1 p.m. ET, they’re apparently releasing a video for “Living in the Heart of Love,” one of the previously unreleased tracks that will appear on the 40th Anniversary Edition of Tattoo You.

The band announced the video on social media, adding the tagline, “Charlie is my darling.” That’s the title of a 1966 documentary about the Stones that was never released, due to legal issues and the fact that all the prints of the film were stolen from their then-manager Andrew Loog Oldham‘s office. In 2012, a new film with restored footage called Charlie Is My Darling — Ireland 1965 was released.

The Stones posted a black-and-white clip of the video, which incorporates archival footage of Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Watts in the Tattoo You era, along with new shots of young people dancing and making out, as well as a Stones record spinning on a turntable.

The video clip ends with the words “Charlie is my darling.”

The Stones’ tour kicks off September 26 in St. Louis, MO.

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Ben Affleck says he’s “in awe” of girlfriend Jennifer Lopez

September 20, 2021 by WDNY Radio

Ben Affleck heaped on the praise for his on-again squeeze Jennifer Lopez — but this was about her business acumen and her role as a role model for entrepreneurs of color.

Affleck told the trade Adweek that he’s “in awe” of Ms. From the Block, who was named the magazine’s 2021 Brand Visionary. The cover feature on Lopez features testimonials about her from colleagues and friends, including Affleck.

“I am in awe of what Jennifer’s effect on the world is,” Affleck enthused. “At most, as an artist, I can make movies that move people. Jennifer has inspired a massive group of people to feel they have a seat at the table in this country. That is an effect few people throughout history have had, one…I can only stand by and admire with respect,” Ben said.

The feature details not only Lopez’s cosmetics and fashion empire, but also her charity effort, Limitless Labs, which, along with Goldman Sachs, is boosting efforts of Latinx entrepreneurs.

“All I can tell you is that I have seen firsthand the difference representation makes because I have seen, over and over and over…women of color approach Jennifer and tell her what her example as a strong woman, and a woman succeeding and demanding her fair share in the business world means to them,” Affleck said.

Elsewhere in the feature, Lopez’s Hustlers co-producer and Nuyorican Productions partner Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas said, “Jennifer’s brand has always been about…not allowing anyone or anything to trivialize or marginalize or stop you.”

She added, “We try to pick projects with characters who are…empowered, and people are cast and our crews with as much diversity as possible, giving women and people of color an opportunity they did not have a few years ago.”

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