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Yahoo
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Surreal moment': Lester Holt signs off, passes baton to Tom Llamas on NBC Nightly News
AUSTIN (KXAN) — Lester Holt officially signed off Friday, May 30, as the anchor of NBC Nightly News, following his final broadcast. He will transition to Dateline NBC full time now. He is now handing off the baton to Tom Llamas. KXAN's Avery Travis spoke with Tom Llamas about when he received the announcement he would take over as Lester's replacement and what his future holds for Travis: Tom, congratulations and thank you so much for joining us today. I want to start with when you found out you had been named the new anchor of NBC Nightly News. What were you feeling in that moment? And did you ever dream of being in this position? Tom Llamas: Yeah, you know, it was a surreal moment. It was incredibly emotional. There was every emotion you can imagine, happiness, laughter, anxiety. I mean, there was there was everything. It was great. And it was really great to tell my wife, who has always been by my side, and she's just been so incredible, my kids as well. I mean, we couldn't tell all my kids because it hadn't been announced yet. And my little guy's got a really big mouth. He's only 7 years old, so he learned pretty much last. But then just to talk to my parents, who sacrificed so much for me. I mean, there were a lot of tears there as well, but it's been a lot of happiness, and now it's excitement to kind of get going and to take over. Avery Travis: Well, just so deserving to be stepping into this big role. We want to note for people, you're not just the anchor, but the managing editor. So talk about what kind of pressures you're expecting taking over this job, and how are you preparing right now? Llamas: Yeah, you know the managing editor. It's interesting, because not everyone knows really what that means. So as a news anchor, you obviously read the news, but that's about, I'd say, a small percentage of the job. Most of the job, probably more than 90%, happens before that light comes on and millions of people tune in and how we put the show together. And as a managing editor, you're working with the reporters and the producers on the stories. What stories are inside to cover the questions we want to ask, the investigations we want to launch, and then we have this great franchise at the end of the show — there's Good News Tonight. Because regardless if you're a Democrat or Republican or you're independent — there are stories that bring us together as Americans. And I always want to spotlight those stories at the end of the day, because we live in some wild times. But there are still things that bring us together as a nation. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Lester Holt's last night as anchor of 'NBC Nightly News'
NEW YORK, N.Y. (WSAV) — On Friday, Lester Holt will step down from 'NBC Nightly News.' On Monday, Tom Llamas takes over anchoring duties. Holt has been a steady presence in the anchor seat for more than a decade. And, while Holt isn't leaving NBC completely — he will continue to host 'Dateline NBC,' he will be missed by those who have turned to him during many major events over the last decade. He reported weeknights during the pandemic, international conflicts and presidential elections, just to name a few. Earlier this month, Holt spoke with 'Variety' about his impending departure and his new role. 'The big buy-in was to be able to do more of the hours,' Holt told Variety. 'I once spent two nights in prison for a Dateline, and I've done heartbreaking stories on the asthma crisis and the economy. I've done a lot of things that are outside of what many would think is a traditional Dateline, but I want to do more of those, and I want to be able to tell a producer, 'Yes, I'll be there for that interview next week,' because I won't be jumping after whatever is happening for Nightly.' During the interview, Holt discussed how his decision didn't come quickly. 'It wasn't like one moment of epiphany. I never saw myself doing this job forever. I decided that I needed to come off the Nightly gig, but I still had gas in the tank.' You can see Lester Holt's final night as anchor of 'NBC Nightly News' Friday following WSAV News 3 at 6. Tom Llamas will take over as anchor of 'NBC Nightly News' on Monday, June 2. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
He was a prodigy who fell into addiction. Now KC musician lives for redemption
When you're born, born to be bad, the drugs come quick and the money comes real slow Only took me 40 years, I finally learned how to just say no. 'Born to be Bad,' Brody Buster Brody Buster played the blues — in front of millions of people — long before he lived them. On Aug. 4, 1995, he performed on the 'The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.' He was 10 at the time. After wailing away on his harmonica, he sat next to 18-year-old Alicia Silverstone, whose hit movie 'Clueless' had been released two weeks earlier, and cracked wise with Leno. Leno: 'That was great. Now, you're 10 years old, right?' Brody: 'Yeah.' Leno: 'Do you ever get the blues? How is that working here?' Brody: 'No, not me.' Leno: 'Never been to prison?' Brody: 'Nope.' Leno: 'Never served any hard time?' Brody: 'Nah, but some of my band members have.' Jail and the blues would come in time, but in 1995 the kid from Paola, Kansas, was riding high in Los Angeles. He was represented by a big-time management company and making the rounds of TV shows: 'Full House,' 'Baywatch Nights,' 'Maury' with Maury Povich and 'Crook & Chase' in addition to the 'Tonight Show.' He opened three nights for Jerry Seinfeld at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas and recorded with the Four Tops. 'Dateline NBC' even did a story on him. The kid had amazing talent on the harmonica. So amazing that blues legend B.B. King had called the then-9-year-old onto stage during a concert at the Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles and declared, 'Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to introduce to you one of the greatest harmonica players of our time, despite his age, believe it or not.' He was a certifiable child prodigy. Of course, his name didn't hurt. Brody Buster was the perfect moniker for a cute, blond 10-year-old harmonica phenom. It may not be such a good fit for a 40-year-old with a meth addiction. It's safe to say that Buster long ago lost the sheen of innocence that brought him fame as a child. But as of Easter, he had found redemption. That's when he celebrated the release of his new blues-infused album, 'Redemption,' at BB's Lawnside Blues & BBQ. With about 250 people crammed into the Kansas City landmark on 85th Street, most sitting at tables littered with remnants of their Easter barbecue dinners, Buster and his band played all nine tracks from the album. He wrote seven of the songs, sang on them all, occasionally played guitar and inserted plenty of harmonica licks. The album and the redemption were more than 30 years in the making. 'In looking back at it now, I guess I really didn't appreciate what I had going as a blues musician,' he said. 'And I think in order to find that passion again, I had to leave.' Buster's journey took him into some very dark places, but it started innocently enough. His mother, a musician who played with Kansas City blues artist Cotton Candy among others, gave him a harmonica when he was 7. He blew on it constantly and quickly got so good he joined his mother's groups on stage. 'I was so young, man, they just threw me up there,' Buster said. 'I can play, and they threw me up there. I didn't know anything else. ... My parents asked if I enjoyed doing it, and I said yeah.' Things got serious when his parents, Janet and Curtis Brooks, took their prodigy to Memphis for an extended vacation. He showed off his talent among the many performers seeking fame and a bit of cash on Beale Street sidewalks, and he was one of the lucky few to be discovered. The emcee at B.B. King's Blues Club was impressed enough that young Brody earned an invite to play at the club. The connection to King led the family to Los Angeles, where he made his many TV appearances and performed with the house band at King's club there, earning the 'one of the greatest harmonica players of our time' praise from legend himself. After about a year on the West Coast, the family returned to Paola, and Brody took his show on the road. He performed in clubs around the nation and beyond. Perhaps the highlight was the 1996 Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland, where Brody joined Quincy Jones and Chaka Khan on stage and was included on the album 'Quincy Jones: 50 years in music — Live at Montreux 1996.' All this was heady stuff for a Kansas elementary school kid. But his parents restricted Brody to gigs at reputable venues, made sure Brody got good grades and tried to keep him away from the kind of trouble that is almost a cliché among child performers. 'I'm sure they saw what had happened to other child entertainers and performers,' he said. 'But just like anybody else, 'That's not going to happen to me.' I'm sure that's what was in their heads. 'That's not going to happen to Brody.'' His mother, in fact, said almost exactly that during an interview with the Los Angeles Times. 'When he's 16 and his peers are cruising and out drinking, I don't think that will hold any attraction for him because he's seen what it really does,' Janet Brody said. 'We always point out the artists who ended their careers sadly and too soon by overdosing or drinking too much.' Danielle Nicole, an internationally recognized blues performer from Kansas City, provided backup vocals on a couple of songs on 'Redemption' and joined Buster onstage at BB's Barbecue on Easter. 'In my musical opinion, he's one of the best harmonica players alive. Period,' she said. 'Not just for blues, not just for American, not just for regionally, just in general.' Nicole has known Buster almost since the beginning of his career, when both were what she called 'blues kids' plying their trade at the Grand Emporium on Main Street. 'We always knew he was just insanely talented,' she said. By the time Brody was 16, however, the national and international offers were drying up. The novelty of being a child phenom had worn off, and now he had the modifier 'former' attached to it. Growing expectations replaced the fun, stress-free times of prepubescence. 'Coming out after being a child performer or a phenom or whatever you want to call it, even in your later years, people are looking at you to be top-notch,' he said. 'Anything short of that is reason for someone to say something negative. So there's definitely pressure there later on in life because you've got to meet the standard that everybody expects you to be at.' His home situation didn't help. Brody's parents had broken up, with his mother moving to Ireland and his father remarrying. Meanwhile, John Tvedten, a battalion chief with the Kansas City Fire Department who was Brody's uncle and one of his biggest supporters, died fighting a warehouse fire in 1999. (Brody's grandfather and Tvedten's father, John Sr., also a department battalion chief, had been killed in the 1981 skywalk collapse at the Hyatt Regency Hotel.) After living briefly with little adult supervision at his stepmother's house, Buster returned to California with a friend when he was 17, finding gigs where he could. Within about a year, he was back in Kansas and graduated from high school, then attended Johnson County Community College. That's when the lure of rock 'n' roll took over. 'I was just done with the blues personally at that point,' he said. 'I wanted to try other things. 'As any 18-year-old kid does, experiment with different things, I was experimenting with new music. Understandably, a blues festival wasn't going to hire a rock 'n' roll band. And I was OK with that. Unfortunately, during the time off, I got involved with bad people and drugs.' For most of the next two decades, Buster lived in Lawrence, worked at Papa Keno's Pizzeria and played in a variety of bands that performed at bars around the region. He also fathered two children and twice spent a few days in jail. In 2010, a bandmate made a documentary called 'How Did This Happen,' an account of what was then called The Brody Buster Band. Buster's first words in the film: 'I was cursed. Look at this life I'm leading.' Later: 'I was on 'Full House' and look where it got me.' And, 'I must have murdered someone in my last life to deserve this ****.' It was an honest, if not flattering, portrayal of a band of 20-something guys surviving at the very bottom of the music world. Among other things, Buster is shown doing cocaine and ranting about a barkeeper who refused to waive his beer tab. But don't get the idea the documentary showed him at his lowest point. 'That wasn't even the worst of it,' Buster says now. 'The dark stuff happened after that.' Before the worst of it came a brief resurrection. In 2017, Buster developed a one-man-band act and qualified for the International Blues Challenge in Memphis, where he took first place in the harmonica category and second in the solo/duo category. That led to gigs on the West Coast and throughout the South, plus a date at the prestigious Montreal Jazz Festival. 'That got me going a little bit for a while,' he said. He did drugs regularly at the time, but not when he was on tour. 'So I would use drugs when I was at home, and then I'd get on the road and I'd get clean. And then I'd get back home.' When COVID hit, there was no more touring — and no more getting clean. Living in a trailer in Lawrence, he did drugs — mostly intravenous meth — and not much else. Buster's life was further battered by a bad relationship and the death of his brother Tom by suicide. By the time the pandemic eased and gigs returned, he was in no shape to go onstage, showing up late or not at all. 'I never really gave up playing music,' he said. 'But I got to a point where no one would hire me because I was such a mess. 'At that point, you wonder about the decisions you made and choices you made. At that time in my life, too — and I think it's partially because my mom went to Ireland at such a young age — I was really looking to be loved by someone, and I wasn't finding it anywhere. I guess ultimately you've just got to learn to love yourself.' On July 16, 2023, his girlfriend, Tania (pronounced ta-nee-a) Zagalik, issued an ultimatum: Give up drugs or say goodbye to her and his two kids. 'I told him I was willing to move overseas to get away from him,' she said. Instead, Zagalik and her two daughters got a recovering addict for a roommate at their home in Lee's Summit. Buster went to Lawrence to retrieve his belongings and returned to Lee's Summit the next day. 'All he had was some old clothes, a beat-up guitar and his harmonica, and a cat named Huggie Bear,' she said. He's been clean since living with Zagalik, her daughters and two cats, including a much heavier Huggie Bear. 'I didn't go to any programs or anything, I just moved away from Lawrence, Kansas,' he said. 'It's a great town. I can go there, and I play shows, no problem. I still have friends there. For me, I had to get away from people that were doing drugs. That was my way to do it, just leave that environment.' He now regularly sees his own children, a 13-year-old son and an 11-year-old daughter, and has resumed a relationship with his mother, whom he had cut off for years. He and Zagalik flew to Ireland to visit her last year, and he's saving up to return with his kids. Meanwhile, Buster is focused on staying clean — he's closing in on 700 days. Keeping busy helps, he says, so he's doing just that, playing almost nightly around the region with his band or as a one-man band. He also recently performed in Deadwood, South Dakota, and Oklahoma and has upcoming dates in Colorado and St. Louis. 'I'm on a push to do what I've always done, which is play music and play music for a living,' he said. 'I don't necessarily care if I ever get famous, but I want to be a working musician the rest of my life. And I'd like to be a touring musician.' Buster has a lot of people pulling for him, including childhood buddy Danielle Nicole. 'When you hear him play harmonica, you know that he's meant to be a musician,' she said. 'So to be able to see him releasing music and feeling good about being sober and be in a good place, it just warms my heart.' There's also the unwavering support of Zagalik, who continues to help him stay on track. 'His past is his past. I don't hold it against him,' she said. 'I have zero reason to think he'd go back. He also knows he'll always be an addict.' I finally crawled out of the dark and back on stage I feel the struggle but I done turnt the page. 'Can You Hear Me,' Brody Buster Note: If you need help fighting addiction, call the free and confidential treatment referral hotline (1-800-662-HELP), or visit
New York Times
23-05-2025
- New York Times
Sex, Money and Death in Connecticut? We Ate It Up.
On May 24, 2019, Jennifer Dulos dropped her children off at school in New Canaan, Conn., then drove home in her Chevy Suburban. She was supposed to swap out the Suburban for the Range Rover so that she could drive herself to a doctor's appointment in New York City, only she never made it. In the wake of Jennifer Dulos's disappearance, suspicion fell on her estranged husband, Fotis Dulos, a builder of luxury homes, who was spotted on surveillance footage disposing of bloody trash — along with his girlfriend, described as 'an international party girl.' Fotis, presumably to avoid criminal justice, poisoned himself with carbon monoxide from his S.U.V. (His girlfriend is currently incarcerated.) It was all a terrible and senseless tragedy, no question, and five children are now parentless in its wake, but what made it news on such a massive scale? Replace New Canaan with Hartford, the Chevy Suburban with a Nissan Versa, and the wealthy wife with a single mother struggling to keep her kids afloat and ask whether Connecticut would have mounted its most expensive-ever criminal investigation on her behalf. Ask whether her final hours would have played out everywhere from The New York Times to Vanity Fair to 'Dateline NBC' to a Lifetime docudrama tastefully titled 'Gone Mom.' I know, I know: I'm being a true-crime buzzkill. But it is to Rich Cohen's credit that, in his never-boring 'Murder in the Dollhouse,' he pauses over 'the media's obsession with dead white women' and declares outright that the Dulos murder was 'about money — it's always about money.' He proves his point over the course of his book, though you do have to get past some initial grandiosity: 'The more I learned, the more I felt as if I knew Jennifer, as if her world and mine were contiguous,' he writes. 'I felt like I was seeing the story of my own generation in a convex mirror — distorted but recognizable.' Maybe we can skip the mirror part and follow the cash because therein lies the tale, and Cohen, a prolific journalist and author of 14 books, is awfully good at telling it. With great skill he sketches the origin story of Jennifer Farber, who was the niece of Liz Claiborne and the beloved second daughter of a wealthy financier. Growing up in Brooklyn Heights, she was a child of privilege, eschewing the subway and bus in favor of a black town car. She never held a paying job, but she did like to write, and she enrolled for a time in N.Y.U.'s graduate dramatic writing program. As Cohen tells it, she really just wanted a family of her own. She had spent a good part of her youth peopling a Victorian dollhouse, and the décor of her first adult apartment had included an empty baby crib. Still unattached at 35, she began to panic. Enter Fotis Dulos, a handsome Greek water skier, former Brown classmate and Columbia-accredited financial analyst. He was also married, but that obstacle was soon surmounted. Burning to have children, Jennifer headed straight for in vitro fertilization. Two sets of twins followed, then a fifth child, apparently unplanned. The money bleed had just begun — because kids in suburban Connecticut require babysitters and nannies and, when they get older, boat rentals, horseback lessons, lacrosse and ice hockey equipment. When such families travel, they require first-class seats, five-star hotels. The financial solution offered by Jennifer's dad was to float his son-in-law millions of dollars in cash and guaranteed bank loans to launch a luxury real estate business. But then her dad died, the business floundered and her husband's eye wandered, landing at last on a snow skier with a child of her own. By 2017, Jennifer and Fotis had separated, but this did nothing to ameliorate their financial woes, because they placed their marriage at the mercy of Stamford, Conn., which, as Cohen writes, happens to boast 'the most punishing, money-friendly divorce court in America.' Plunged into this zero-sum dystopia, the Duloses soon ditched their attorneys for expensive 'scorched-earth lawyers,' who justified their retainers with a sea of filings — more than 400 in all. Twenty-three months later, their divorce hadn't even left the starting line, but Fotis, chafing at court orders he saw as punitive and staggering under millions of dollars' worth of debt, had reached his breaking point. We might write off his ensuing act of homicide as the work of a psychopath — Cohen certainly does — but Fotis had no prior history of physical violence, and Cohen's own reporting suggests that, if the Duloses had somehow managed to sidestep a divorce industry that monetizes revenge, they might have lived to tell their own tale. At least, it's pretty to think so. In the end, a lot of people got rich off Jennifer and Fotis — and nothing got fixed. Her body has still not been found.
Yahoo
11-05-2025
- Yahoo
Bryan Kohberger Searched Ted Bundy Online, 'Dateline' Says
The NBC program Dateline has revealed new details about the infamous Idaho murders of four college students in an off-campus residence. In 2022, Ethan Chapin, Xana Kernodle, Kaylee Goncalves, and Madison Mogen were found deceased inside the Moscow, Idaho, home where the latter three lived off-campus. Bryan Kohberger, a former graduate student in criminology, is accused of the murders and is fighting the charges in court, pleading not guilty to them. In a press release, Dateline NBC revealed that the program had obtained "new footage" and details in the Idaho murders case, including a video that shows a car "resembling Bryan Kohberger's driving around the time of the murders. According to the release, "Phone data from Kohberger's phone and in the possession of law enforcement include internet searches in the weeks before and after the killings on serial killer Ted Bundy and searches for pornography with the words 'forced,' 'passed out,' 'drugged,' and 'sleeping.'" The special aired on May 9, 2025. According to E Online, which described the new details as "shocking," it's now believed that Chapin was "the last of the four to be targeted by the killer," and was likely asleep in bed when the killer "carved the victim's lower legs with a blade." First, though, the killer stabbed Kernodle to death, E Online reported, noting that she was "still awake after ordering food from DoorDash." That site reported that Mogen might have been the killer's initial target because she was killed first, and Goncalves happened to be next to her. In the early hours of Nov. 13, 2022, "when four University of Idaho students would be stabbed to death in an off-campus house as some of them slept, a neighbor's home security video captured the same white car circling the block multiple times," the show wrote in the release. "The vehicle approached the house again and again before speeding away 13 minutes later." According to Dateline, "The previously unseen footage obtained by Dateline offers another angle into the turbulent events at the time prosecutors believe the students were murdered." Photos and digital materials "are included in a two-hour special airing Friday, tracing suspect Bryan Kohberger's movements and online habits before and after the killings that stunned the small community of Moscow, Idaho," the release notes. Investigators "referred to a white Hyundai Elantra, believed to be from 2011 to 2013, as a critical clue as they solicited the public's help in finding a suspect," the program added. Kohberger "drove a white 2015 Elantra," the release says. Cellphone tower data and phone records obtained by Dateline "indicate that an FBI cellphone expert said Kohberger's phone connected to a cell tower providing coverage within 100 meters of the rental house at 1122 King Road. It connected 23 visits over a four-month period, all after dark. One visit was just six days before the killings," the release adds. Kohberger's lawyers "have said in court filings that Kohberger would take drives alone late at night, often hiking or stargazing, and contend cellphone data shows he was not near the crime scene when the killings occurred," Dateline added. In addition, Dateline revealed that "a former female graduate student" told the program that Kohberger texted her about hiking, writing, in part, 'I really enjoy that activity so please let me know.' 'The wording of the text, as I look back on it, is kind of peculiar,' the woman said to the show. 'It was almost overly formal.' Keith Morrison said in a preview released by Dateline, "For the last two and a half years, Dateline has been on the ground - reporting gathering, and learning from people with direct knowledge of the case. We have obtained things that have never before been seen publicly. Like these security videos from a camera on a house near the murder scene. Videos that show a white sedan, a car that investigators believe was driven by Bryan Kohberger, making repeated passes of the King Road house that night before the murders."
