Latest news with #Arnett
Yahoo
01-05-2025
- Yahoo
Eanes ISD releases new info after teacher arrest
AUSTIN (KXAN) — A former elementary music teacher at Eanes Independent School District who was arrested in February on charges of Possession of Child Pornography is now being charged with Sexual Performance by Child under 14, according to court records. In February the Texas Department of Public Safety executed a search warrant at Zachary Barnett's residence and seized a total of 13 digital devices according to the affidavit. Among those files— the affidavit said DPS found more than 8,000 pictures and videos of female students from Barnett's class. Former Eanes ISD music teacher arrested in connection with online crimes against children 'Violated our trust, exploited our students and naturally that is very upsetting,' said Eanes ISD Superintendent Jeff Arnett. The affidavit states that the 'images zoomed into the female students' skirts, their underwear, and their crotch area.' Parents KXAN spoke with tell us they worry about where the images could end up. 'They [DPS] have worked with national organizations to determine that none of our students images were uploaded and they have taken the additional step, making sure if there were any images of our children that were out there, those would be removed and we are trying to follow those processes with them as well,' Arnett said. In a letter to parents at Cedar Creek Elementary, Arnett addressed the latest information released to the district. 'Especially upsetting, is the new detail revealed in the Travis County warrant that Department of Public Safety (DPS) authorities identified and began surveillance of Barnett on Jan. 13, 2025, while knowing he was a teacher in our school. This was a full month before Eanes ISD police and administrators were made aware of his crimes. Had we been notified at that time, we would have immediately removed him from the classroom and avoided further exploitation of our students. Regrettably, we were not informed for several weeks as the investigation of him began, which is dismaying. While we cannot correct DPS's decision, we have told them of our extreme concerns regarding their delayed notification.' – Jeff Arnett, Eanes ISD Superintendent Some parents told KXAN they don't believe the district is doing enough to keep them informed or keep their kids safe. 'This has now spanned about eight weeks for our district, so we have been living this along with the parents,' Arnett said. 'We learned about it at the same time they did. We were disappointed in not being notified about the investigation until a month after DPS officials first learned about this activity.' KXAN reached out to DPS for comment about the investigation, as well as what they are doing to make sure images were not shared online, but we have not heard back at this time. We will update this if a statement is received. There are online resources that can help parents and victims dealing with similar cases. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children offers a CyberTipline, as well as Take It Down, which helps remove nude, partially nude or sexually explicit photos and videos of underage people by assigning a unique digital fingerprint — called a hash value — to the images or videos. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Sydney Morning Herald
29-04-2025
- Politics
- Sydney Morning Herald
How a can of Coke and day-old cake led to iconic photo that went around the world
By 1975, the AP's bureau had shrunk as well, and as the North Vietnamese Army and its allied Viet Cong guerilla force in the south pushed towards Saigon, most staff members were evacuated. Arnett, Esper and Franjola volunteered to stay behind, anxious to see through to the end what they had committed so many years of their lives to covering – and conspiring to ignore New York if any of their managers got the jitters and ordered them to leave at the last minute. 'I saw it from the beginning, I wanted to see the end,' Esper said. 'I was a bit apprehensive and frightened, but I knew that if I left, the rest of my life I would have been second-guessing myself.' On April 30, 1975, the monsoon rains had arrived and Arnett watched in the early morning hours from the slippery roof of the AP's building as helicopters evacuated Americans and selected Vietnamese from the embassy four blocks away. After catching a few hours of sleep, he awoke at 6.30am to the loud voices of looters on the streets. An hour later, from the rooftop of his hotel, he watched through binoculars as a small group of US marines that had accidentally been left behind clambered aboard a Sea Knight helicopter from the roof of the embassy – the last American evacuees. He called it in to Esper in the office, and the story was in newsrooms around the world before the helicopter had cleared the coast. 'I was thinking in my own mind these are North Vietnamese, there are South Vietnamese, Americans – we're all the same.' George Esper, AP journalist Franjola and Arnett then took to the streets to see what was going on, while Esper manned the desk. When they got to the US Embassy, a mob of people were grinning and laughing as they looted the building – a sharp contrast to the desperation of people the day before hoping to be evacuated. 'On a pile of wet documents and broken furniture on the back lawn, we find the heavy bronze plaque engraved with the names of the five American soldiers who died in the attack on the embassy in the opening hours of the Tet Offensive in 1968,' Arnett recalled in an email detailing the day's events. 'Together we carry it back to the AP office.' At 10.24am, Arnett was writing the story of the embassy looting when Esper heard on Saigon Radio that South Vietnam had surrendered, and immediately filed an alert. 'Esper rushes to the teleprinter and messages New York, and soon receives the satisfying news that AP is five minutes ahead of UPI with the surrender story,' Arnett said, citing AP's biggest rival at the time, United Press International. 'In war or peace, the wire services place a premium on competition.' Esper then dashed outside to try and gather some reaction from South Vietnamese soldiers to the news of the capitulation, and came across a police colonel standing by a statue in a main square. 'He was waving his arms, 'fini, fini', you know, 'it's all over, we lost',' Esper remembered. 'And he was also fingering his holstered pistol and I figured, this guy is really crazy, he will kill me, and after 10 years here with barely a scratch, I'm going to die on this final day.' Suddenly, the colonel did an about-face, saluted the memorial statue, drew his pistol and shot himself in the head. Shaken, Esper ran back to the bureau, up the four flights of stairs to the office and punched out a quick story on the incident, his hands trembling as he typed. Stories flow as Saigon falls Back on the streets, Franjola, who died in 2015, was nearly sideswiped by a Jeep packed with men brandishing Russian rifles and wearing the black Viet Cong garb. Arnett then saw a convoy of Russian trucks loaded with North Vietnamese soldiers driving down the main street and scrambled back into the office. ''George,' I shout, 'Saigon has fallen. Call New York',' Arnett said. 'I check my watch. It's 11.43am.' Over the next few hours, more soldiers, supported by tanks, pushed into the city, engaging in sporadic fighting while the AP reporters kept filing their copy. Loading It was about 2.30pm when they heard the rubber sandals outside the office, and the two NVA soldiers burst in, one with an AK-47 assault rifle swinging from his shoulder, the other with a Russian pistol holstered on his belt. To their shock, the soldiers were accompanied by Ky Nhan, a freelance photographer who worked for the AP, who proudly announced himself as a long-time member of the Viet Cong. 'I have guaranteed the safety of the AP office,' Arnett recalled the normally reserved photographer saying. 'You have no reason to be concerned.' As Arnett, Esper and Franjola pored over the map with the two NVA soldiers, they chatted through an interpreter about the attack on Saigon, which had been renamed Ho Chi Minh City as soon as it fell. The interview with the two soldiers turned to the personal, and the young men showed the reporters photos of their families and girlfriends, telling them how much they missed them and wanted to get home. 'I was thinking in my own mind these are North Vietnamese, there are South Vietnamese, Americans – we're all the same,' Esper said. 'People have girlfriends, they miss them, they have the same fears, the same loneliness, and in my head I'm tallying up the casualties, you know nearly 60,000 Americans dead, a million North Vietnamese fighters dead, 224,000 South Vietnamese military killed, and 2 million civilians killed. And that's the way the war ended for me.'
The Age
29-04-2025
- Politics
- The Age
How a can of Coke and day-old cake led to iconic photo that went around the world
By 1975, the AP's bureau had shrunk as well, and as the North Vietnamese Army and its allied Viet Cong guerilla force in the south pushed towards Saigon, most staff members were evacuated. Arnett, Esper and Franjola volunteered to stay behind, anxious to see through to the end what they had committed so many years of their lives to covering – and conspiring to ignore New York if any of their managers got the jitters and ordered them to leave at the last minute. 'I saw it from the beginning, I wanted to see the end,' Esper said. 'I was a bit apprehensive and frightened, but I knew that if I left, the rest of my life I would have been second-guessing myself.' On April 30, 1975, the monsoon rains had arrived and Arnett watched in the early morning hours from the slippery roof of the AP's building as helicopters evacuated Americans and selected Vietnamese from the embassy four blocks away. After catching a few hours of sleep, he awoke at 6.30am to the loud voices of looters on the streets. An hour later, from the rooftop of his hotel, he watched through binoculars as a small group of US marines that had accidentally been left behind clambered aboard a Sea Knight helicopter from the roof of the embassy – the last American evacuees. He called it in to Esper in the office, and the story was in newsrooms around the world before the helicopter had cleared the coast. 'I was thinking in my own mind these are North Vietnamese, there are South Vietnamese, Americans – we're all the same.' George Esper, AP journalist Franjola and Arnett then took to the streets to see what was going on, while Esper manned the desk. When they got to the US Embassy, a mob of people were grinning and laughing as they looted the building – a sharp contrast to the desperation of people the day before hoping to be evacuated. 'On a pile of wet documents and broken furniture on the back lawn, we find the heavy bronze plaque engraved with the names of the five American soldiers who died in the attack on the embassy in the opening hours of the Tet Offensive in 1968,' Arnett recalled in an email detailing the day's events. 'Together we carry it back to the AP office.' At 10.24am, Arnett was writing the story of the embassy looting when Esper heard on Saigon Radio that South Vietnam had surrendered, and immediately filed an alert. 'Esper rushes to the teleprinter and messages New York, and soon receives the satisfying news that AP is five minutes ahead of UPI with the surrender story,' Arnett said, citing AP's biggest rival at the time, United Press International. 'In war or peace, the wire services place a premium on competition.' Esper then dashed outside to try and gather some reaction from South Vietnamese soldiers to the news of the capitulation, and came across a police colonel standing by a statue in a main square. 'He was waving his arms, 'fini, fini', you know, 'it's all over, we lost',' Esper remembered. 'And he was also fingering his holstered pistol and I figured, this guy is really crazy, he will kill me, and after 10 years here with barely a scratch, I'm going to die on this final day.' Suddenly, the colonel did an about-face, saluted the memorial statue, drew his pistol and shot himself in the head. Shaken, Esper ran back to the bureau, up the four flights of stairs to the office and punched out a quick story on the incident, his hands trembling as he typed. Stories flow as Saigon falls Back on the streets, Franjola, who died in 2015, was nearly sideswiped by a Jeep packed with men brandishing Russian rifles and wearing the black Viet Cong garb. Arnett then saw a convoy of Russian trucks loaded with North Vietnamese soldiers driving down the main street and scrambled back into the office. ''George,' I shout, 'Saigon has fallen. Call New York',' Arnett said. 'I check my watch. It's 11.43am.' Over the next few hours, more soldiers, supported by tanks, pushed into the city, engaging in sporadic fighting while the AP reporters kept filing their copy. Loading It was about 2.30pm when they heard the rubber sandals outside the office, and the two NVA soldiers burst in, one with an AK-47 assault rifle swinging from his shoulder, the other with a Russian pistol holstered on his belt. To their shock, the soldiers were accompanied by Ky Nhan, a freelance photographer who worked for the AP, who proudly announced himself as a long-time member of the Viet Cong. 'I have guaranteed the safety of the AP office,' Arnett recalled the normally reserved photographer saying. 'You have no reason to be concerned.' As Arnett, Esper and Franjola pored over the map with the two NVA soldiers, they chatted through an interpreter about the attack on Saigon, which had been renamed Ho Chi Minh City as soon as it fell. The interview with the two soldiers turned to the personal, and the young men showed the reporters photos of their families and girlfriends, telling them how much they missed them and wanted to get home. 'I was thinking in my own mind these are North Vietnamese, there are South Vietnamese, Americans – we're all the same,' Esper said. 'People have girlfriends, they miss them, they have the same fears, the same loneliness, and in my head I'm tallying up the casualties, you know nearly 60,000 Americans dead, a million North Vietnamese fighters dead, 224,000 South Vietnamese military killed, and 2 million civilians killed. And that's the way the war ended for me.'
Yahoo
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Paul Rudd recalls NSFW wardrobe malfunction on stage with Rachel Weisz
Paul Rudd had an unfortunate outfit mishap during his stage acting days, he's revealed. Speaking on the latest episode of the SmartLess podcast — hosted by Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes, and Will Arnett — Rudd, 56, recalled the embarrassing incident. The Ant-Man actor was starring in the 2001 off-Broadway production of The Shape of Things when one of his scenes went awry and the audience got more than they bargained for. "I was lying on top of a bed and I was wearing boxer shorts and a T-shirt and all of a sudden — this had never happened before — I heard the audience laughing," Rudd recalled. "And I'm like, what is going on? I realized it's because I was lying on the bed and I had my leg up and my balls were hanging out, which is worse than actually, penis — it's like, just your balls." The nature of the mishap, combined with the title of the show, sent co-host Arnett into a fit of laughter. "That's exactly right," Rudd said. "That was the show." "The poster should've been your balls hanging out of your shorts," Arnett joked. After the 2001 off-Broadway production, Rudd and co-star Rachel Weisz went on to star in the 2003 film adaptation of The Shape of Things, written by Neil LaBute. Since then, Rudd has appeared in dozens of films and TV shows, including Anchorman, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Friends, and Only Murders in the Building. He entered the Marvel Cinematic Universe in 2015 with the Ant-Man franchise and will be seen in Avengers: Doomsday in 2026. Details on his role in the upcoming Marvel film remain mum. During a recent appearance on The Tonight Show, Rudd was forced to stay tight-lipped. "There is nothing that I can tell you. They are very secretive. It's important. You know, it's a major movie. You can't be frivolous with this kind of stuff,' he teased. "This is a major motion picture. It's not like some coordinated attack. It's Marvel, Jimmy."
San Francisco Chronicle
29-04-2025
- Politics
- San Francisco Chronicle
As communist troops streamed into Saigon, a few remaining reporters kept photos and stories flowing
BANGKOK (AP) — They'd watched overnight as the bombardments grew closer, and observed through binoculars as the last U.S. Marines piled into a helicopter on the roof of the embassy to be whisked away from Saigon. So when the reporters who had stayed behind heard the telltale squeak of the rubber sandals worn by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops in the stairs outside The Associated Press office, they weren't surprised, and braced themselves for possible detention or arrest. But when the two young soldiers who entered showed no signs of malice, the journalists just kept reporting. Offering the men a Coke and day-old cake, Peter Arnett, George Esper and Matt Franjola started asking about their march into Saigon. As the men detailed their route on a bureau map, photographer Sarah Errington emerged from the darkroom and snapped what would become an iconic picture, published around the world. Fifty years later, Arnett recalled the message he fed into the teletype transmitter to AP headquarters in New York after the improbable scene had played out. 'In my 13 years of covering the Vietnam War, I never dreamed it would end as it did today,' he remembers writing. 'A total surrender following a few hours later with a cordial meeting in the AP bureau with an armed and battle-garbed North Vietnamese officer with his aide over warm Coke and pastries? That is how the Vietnamese war ended for me today.' The message never made it: After a day of carrying alerts and stories on the fall of Saigon and the end of a 20-year war that saw more than 58,000 Americans killed and many times that number of Vietnamese, the wire had been cut. The fall of Saigon ended an era The fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975 was the end of an era for the AP in Vietnam. Arnett left in May, and then Franjola was expelled, followed by Esper, and the bureau wouldn't be reestablished until 1993. The AP opened its first office in Saigon in 1950 as the fight for independence from France by Viet Minh forces under communist leader Ho Chi Minh intensified. The Viet Minh's decisive victory over the U.S.-supported French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 marked the end of French Indochina and sparked major changes in the region with the partitioning of Vietnam into Communist North Vietnam and U.S.-aligned South Vietnam. The official U.S. military engagement began in 1955 and slowly escalated. Malcolm Browne took over as AP bureau chief in Saigon in November 1961 and was joined in June 1962 by Arnett and photo chief Horst Faas. The trio soon won consecutive Pulitzer Prizes: Browne in 1964, Faas in 1965 and Arnett in 1966 — the first of five the AP would receive for its coverage from Vietnam. Four AP photographers were killed covering the war, and at least 16 other AP journalists were injured, some multiple times, as they reported from the front lines, seeking to record the news as completely and accurately as possible. From the start, a lot of the reporting contradicted the official version from Washington, revealing a deeper American commitment than admitted, a lack of measurable success against the Viet Cong guerillas, and a broad dislike of the ineffective and corrupt American-backed South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, Arnett said. That prompted managers in New York to wonder why the Saigon staffers' stories were sometimes '180 degrees' different from those AP reporters wrote from press conferences at the U.S. State Department, the Pentagon and the White House, he recalled. 'We had a strategic advantage because we were 12,000 miles away from our administration critics, with our boots on the ground," said Arnett, 90, who lives in California today. "Within a year, our reporting was vindicated.' At the height of the war there were roughly 30 staffers assigned to the bureau, divided between news, photos and administration, and the AP made regular use of freelancers as well, usually photographers. It was a diverse group that included people from 11 different countries, including many local Vietnamese. During upticks in the fighting, staffers would rotate in from from other bureaus to help. When the U.S. government took umbrage with AP's coverage in 1966 and claimed its staffers were young and inexperienced, AP's General Manager Wes Gallagher penned a salty reply, noting their combined decades as reporters. "Three covered World War II and Korea. Two, Pulitzer Prize winners Peter Arnett and Horst Faas, have been in Vietnam four years each, which is longer than Ambassador (Henry Cabot) Lodge, General (William) Westmoreland and nine-tenths of the Americans over there,' Gallagher wrote. In an attempt to manage the news reports out of Vietnam, the U.S. established a daily news conference in Saigon to feed information to the growing American press corps. They came to be colloquially known as the 'Five O'clock Follies' because, as Esper reflected, 'they were such a joke.' Esper said in a 2005 interview that sometimes he'd show up to evening briefings the same day he had covered a battle firsthand and was left puzzled by the official version. 'I'm thinking to myself, 'Is this the same battle I just witnessed?'" said Esper, who died in 2012. 'So there was some confrontation at the 'follies' because we would question the briefer's reports, and they also withheld tremendous amounts of information.' Esper said it helped that Gallagher took a personal hand in Vietnam coverage, frequently calling and visiting in support of his journalists. 'He took a lot of heat from the Pentagon, from the White House, but he never faltered,' Esper said. 'He always said to us: 'I support you 100%. You know the press is under scrutiny, just make sure you're accurate, just make sure your stories are fair and balanced,' and we did.' Reporting from the streets and rooftops In 1969, the American commitment in Vietnam had grown to more than a half million troops, before being drawn down to a handful after the 1973 Paris Peace Accords in which U.S. President Richard Nixon agreed to a withdrawal, leaving the South Vietnamese to fend for themselves. By 1975, the AP's bureau had shrunk as well, and as the North Vietnamese Army and its allied Viet Cong guerrilla force in the south pushed toward Saigon, most staff members were evacuated. Arnett, Esper and Franjola volunteered to stay behind, anxious to see through to the end what they had committed so many years of their lives to covering — and conspiring to ignore New York if any of their managers got the jitters and ordered them to leave at the last minute. 'I saw it from the beginning, I wanted to see the end,' Esper said. 'I was a bit apprehensive and frightened, but I knew that if I left, the rest of my life I would have been second guessing myself.' On April 30, 1975, the monsoon rains had arrived and Arnett watched in the early morning hours from the slippery roof of the AP's building as helicopters evacuated Americans and selected Vietnamese from the embassy four blocks away. After catching a few hours of sleep, he awoke at 6:30 a.m. to the loud voices of looters on the streets. An hour later, from the rooftop of his hotel, he watched through binoculars as a small group of U.S. Marines that had accidentally been left behind clambered aboard a Sea Knight helicopter from the roof of the embassy — the last American evacuees. He called it in to Esper in the office, and the story was in newsrooms around the world before the helicopter had cleared the coast. Franjola and Arnett then took to the streets to see what was going on, while Esper manned the desk. When they got to the U.S. Embassy, a mob of people were grinning and laughing as they looted the building — a sharp contrast to the desperation of people the day before hoping to be evacuated. 'On a pile of wet documents and broken furniture on the back lawn, we find the heavy bronze plaque engraved with the names of the five American soldiers who died in the attack on the Embassy in the opening hours of the Tet Offensive in 1968,' Arnett recalled in an email detailing the day's events. 'Together we carry it back to the AP office.' At 10:24 a.m. Arnett was writing the story of the embassy looting when Esper heard on Saigon Radio that South Vietnam had surrendered and immediately filed an alert. 'Esper rushes to the teleprinter and messages New York, and soon receives the satisfying news that AP is five minutes ahead of UPI with the surrender story,' Arnett said, citing AP's biggest rival at the time, United Press International. 'In war or peace, the wire services place a premium on competition.' Esper then dashed outside to try and gather some reaction from South Vietnamese soldiers to the news of the capitulation, and came across a police colonel standing by a statue in a main square. 'He was waving his arms, 'fini, fini,' you know, 'it's all over, we lost,' Esper remembered. 'And he was also fingering his holstered pistol and I figured, this guy is really crazy, he will kill me, and after 10 years here with barely a scratch, I'm going to die on this final day.' Suddenly, the colonel did an about-face, saluted the memorial statue, drew his pistol and shot himself in the head. Shaken, Esper ran back to the bureau, up the four flights of stairs to the office and punched out a quick story on the incident, his hands trembling as he typed. Stories flow as Saigon falls Back on the streets, Franjola, who died in 2015, was nearly sideswiped by a Jeep packed with men brandishing Russian rifles and wearing the black Viet Cong garb. Arnett then saw a convoy of Russian trucks loaded with North Vietnamese soldiers driving down the main street and scrambled back into the office. ''George,' I shout, 'Saigon has fallen. Call New York,'' Arnett said. 'I check my watch. It's 11:43 a.m.' Over the next few hours, more soldiers, supported by tanks, pushed into the city, engaging in sporadic fighting while the AP reporters kept filing their copy. It was about 2:30 p.m. when they heard the rubber sandals outside the office, and the two NVA soldiers burst in, one with an AK-47 assault rifle swinging from his shoulder, the other with a Russian pistol holstered on his belt. To their shock, the soldiers were accompanied by Ky Nhan, a freelance photographer who worked for the AP, who proudly announced himself as a longtime member of the Viet Cong. 'I have guaranteed the safety of the AP office,' Arnett recalled the normally reserved photographer saying. 'You have no reason to be concerned.' As Arnett, Esper and Franjola pored over the map with the two NVA soldiers, they chatted through an interpreter about the attack on Saigon, which had been renamed Ho Chi Minh City as soon as it fell. The interview with the two soldiers turned to the personal, and the young men showed the reporters photos of their families and girlfriends, telling them how much they missed them and wanted to get home. 'I was thinking in my own mind these are North Vietnamese, there are South Vietnamese, Americans — we're all the same,' Esper said. 'People have girlfriends, they miss them, they have the same fears, the same loneliness, and in my head I'm tallying up the casualties, you know nearly 60,000 Americans dead, a million North Vietnamese fighters dead, 224,000 South Vietnamese military killed, and 2 million civilians killed. And that's the way the war ended for me.'
