Police recover Travis Kelce’s watch after spate of burglaries targeting athletes during games
Oliver Helbig/Getty Images
(NEW YORK) — Authorities investigating the rash of recent burglaries at the homes of professional athletes have recovered a watch belonging to Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce in Providence, Rhode Island, sources familiar with the case told ABC News.
Kelce’s Leawood, Kansas, home was burglarized as the Chiefs were about to kick off Monday Night Football against the New Orleans Saints hours apart from a burglary at the home of Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes.
Police had not previously disclosed a watch was taken from Kelce but did confirm that $20,000 cash was stolen.
Police believe the athletes are being targeted based on their game schedules and are working to determine whether a crime ring is targeting them along with other luxury homeowners.
So far all of these thefts have occurred while nobody is home. There is a concern about what happens if the athlete or his/her family members are present, a security source told ABC News.
The burglars conduct extensive surveillance, sometimes posing as delivery men, maintenance workers or joggers to learn about residences, neighborhoods and security systems, according to an NFL memo obtained by ABC News.
One security source told ABC News the burglars appear to know what they’re looking for, where it is in the home and are in and out within 15 minutes.
(WASHINGTON, D.C.) — Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, has vaulted to the forefront of the presidential campaign as a top donor and impassioned speaker in support of former President Donald Trump.
Still, Musk has said in recent days that the candidate’s economic plans could cause financial pain, at least in the short term.
Among those proposals is the potential formation of a new “government efficiency commission” to be led by Musk. The group would scrutinize federal spending and slash programs deemed wasteful.
Speaking on a telephone town hall on Friday, Musk said spending cuts imposed by the commission would “necessarily involve some temporary hardship.” Ultimately, Musk added, the cost-cutting would “ensure long-term prosperity.”
“We have to reduce spending to live within our means,” Musk said.
Offering up another cautionary note, Musk voiced agreement with a post on X on Tuesday that warned of dire economic fallout if Trump wins the election and implements some of his key agenda items.
“If Trump succeeds in forcing through mass deportations, combined with Elon hacking away at the government, firing people and reducing the deficit – there will be an initial severe overreaction in the economy,” an anonymous user posted on X.
“Market will tumble. But when the storm passes and everyone realizes we are on sounder footing, there will be a rapid recovery to a healthier, sustainable economy,” the post added.
In reply, Musk said, “Sounds about right.”
ABC News contacted Musk-owned companies, Tesla and SpaceX, in an effort to reach Musk for comment. He did not immediately respond. America PAC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In response to ABC News’ request for comment, the Trump campaign praised Musk, saying he is uniquely equipped to help improve government efficiency.
“As President Trump has said, Elon Musk is a genius, an innovator, and has literally made history by building creative, modern, and efficient systems. Elon Musk has dedicated himself to America’s future by offering to serve with President Trump to ensure our government works more efficiently and uses America’s taxpayer dollars effectively,” Brian Hughes, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, told ABC News.
“The commission will ultimately be staffed and dedicated to this mission, and President Trump is committed to having Mr. Musk lead this commission to analyze the functionality of our government,” Hughes added.
On the campaign trail, Trump has vowed to slap tariffs of up to 20% on all imported goods and deport millions of undocumented immigrants. Economists widely view those proposals as likely to drive up consumer prices, since companies typically pass along the costs of taxes and wage increases to customers.
Trump has also floated the notion of eliminating the personal income tax for all Americans. The U.S. would pay for the lost tax revenue with far-reaching tariffs, Trump told Joe Rogan last week.
The individual income tax currently accounts for roughly half of the $5 trillion in revenue that the federal government brings in each year. It would be all but impossible to make up for the lost revenue with increased tariffs, experts previously told ABC News.
Last year, the U.S. imported about $3.8 trillion worth of goods, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis found. To generate the same amount of revenue currently brought in by the individual income tax, a tariff would have needed to be set at about 70%, said Alan Auerbach, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
However, a tariff of such magnitude would significantly reduce U.S. trade, slashing the total amount of imported goods and, in turn, reducing tax revenue.
Musk, who leads Tesla and SpaceX, has taken an active role as both a large donor and vocal proponent backing Trump.
Musk donated about $75 million to a pro-Trump Super PAC over a three-month period ending in September, according to disclosures filed to the Federal Election Commission. Musk, who owns X, frequently posts messages in support of Trump on the social media platform, where he boasts more than 202 million followers.
The U.S. national debt currently stands at about $35 trillion. President Joe Biden has added to the national debt over the course of his term in office, just as Trump did.
Vice President Kamala Harris’ economic plans would increase primary deficits by $1.2 trillion over the next 10 years, according to a budget model created by the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. The plans put forward by Trump, meanwhile, would increase primary deficits by $5.8 trillion over that period, the model found.
Speaking on a telephone town hall on Friday, Musk vowed to closely examine the federal budget if appointed head of a potential “government efficiency commission.”
The role means “looking at every line item, every expense, and saying is this necessary at all?” Musk said.
(WASHINGTON) — A “zombie star” could possibly rise from the dead on Halloween night, according to space experts.
T Coronae Borealis, also known as the “Blaze Star,” is expected to explode violently in the near future, illuminating a long-dead binary star system for the first time in 80 years, according to NASA.
The Blaze Star has become a white dwarf, which happens when stars have exhausted their nuclear fuels.
“It’s basically a dead star,” NASA astrophysicist Padi Boyd told ABC News. “It’s not burning anything.”
The dead star has a comparable mass to Earth’s sun, according to NASA. By contrast, Earth’s sun is constantly burning elements such as hydrogen and helium, Boyd said.
The Blaze Star is part of a binary system; it has a companion star — a red giant star — that it “gobbles” material from, Boyd said. Material such as hydrogen is transferred by a strong gravitational pull, according to NASA.
“Like a vampire,” the white dwarf sucks material from its companion star, Boyd said. The material sits on the surface of the white dwarf until there is enough material to ignite a thermonuclear runaway explosion — a buildup of pressure and heat. This allows the “dead” star to become “very, very bright,” she added.
Every eight decades, when the Blaze Star system bursts into a bright light, it becomes visible to the naked eye, Boyd said.
“It’ll become as bright as some of the stars we see on the constellations at night,” she said.
The first recorded sighting of the Blaze Star was in the autumn of 1217, when a German priest and chronicler named Burchard of Ursperg observed “a faint star that for a time shone with great light,” according to NASA.
It was last seen from Earth in 1946, according to the space research agency.
It is difficult to predict when a nova — a process in which a star shows a sudden large increase in brightness — will occur, Boyd said.
“This explosion, it could happen tonight; it could happen a year from now or six months or a couple of weeks,” Boyd said. “We know it’s coming soon.”
The Northern Crown is a horseshoe-shaped curve of stars west of the Hercules constellation, according to NASA. In the Northern Hemisphere, it can be identified by finding the two brightest stars — Arcturus and Vega — and tracking a straight line from one to the other, leading stargazers to Hercules and the Corona Borealis.
The outburst is expected to be brief. The nova, when a star shows a sudden large increase in brightness, will only be visible to the naked eye for less than a week, according to NASA.
To astronomy enthusiasts, it will appear as if a new star appeared in the sky, Boyd said.
“It’ll look like the jewel in the crown of the corona,” she said.
Scientists are hoping to study the nova to discover what happens when the material is blasted from the white dwarf and distributed into neighboring galaxies, Boyd said.
The material includes elements such as carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and neon. Other stars will gather this material as they are forming their own solar systems, Boyd added.
“This is where that material in our own solar system — in our planet, in the oceans, in our bones, in our blood — those materials come from stellar explosions,” Boyd said.
The excitement surrounding the event is expected to “fuel the next generation of scientists,” Rebekah Hounsell, an assistant research scientist specializing in nova events at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a statement earlier this year.
“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime event that will create a lot of new astronomers out there, giving young people a cosmic event they can observe for themselves, ask their own questions, and collect their own data,” Hounsell said.
(NEW YORK) — A massive plume of moisture from the Pacific called an atmospheric river will hit the West Coast on Tuesday afternoon and last into Friday.
The storm is expected to become a bomb cyclone — which means the pressure in the center of the storm will drop 24 millibars within 24 hours.
The storm could be so strong that it even drops close to double that rate — meaning more than 40 millibars in 24 hours.
Numerous alerts for snow, flooding, high wind and high surf have been issued along the West Coast, from the San Francisco Bay area to Oregon to Washington.
Rain totals could surpass 1 foot in Northern California and southern Oregon. More than 3 feet of snow is possible in the higher elevations.
Wind gusts could reach 85 mph along the coast and waves could climb to 34 feet.
By the weekend, some of the rain from this system will make its way to Southern California.
