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TEXARKANA, Texas (KETK) — Two people are dead and one person is recovering at a hospital after a domestic dispute led to a shooting at Texarkana Aluminum early Tuesday morning, the Nash Police Department confirmed. According to Nash PD, the shooting occurred at the facility’s parking lot at around 6:37 a.m. 48-year-old Eddie Hill Jr. was attempting to intervene in what is believed to be a domestic dispute between 40-year-old Wendell Champion Jr. and his wife, who worked at Texarkana Aluminum.

Champion Jr. then shot and killed Hill Jr. and shot his wife. She was transported to a local Texarkana hospital and is in stable condition, the police department said. Champion Jr. then shot and killed himself, Nash PD said. Champion Jr. had been convicted of murder in Harris County in 2010 and was released on parole in 2025.

There is no danger to the public at this time, the police department said.

Both Hill and Champion Jr.’s wife were employees of Texarkana Aluminum, which will continue operations as normal but has counseling available for employees.

TEXARKANA (KETK) – Two people are dead and one person is recovering at a hospital after a domestic dispute led to a shooting at Texarkana Aluminum early Tuesday morning, the Nash Police Department confirmed. According to our news partner KETK and the Nash PD, the shooting occurred at the facility’s parking lot at around 6:37 a.m. 48-year-old Eddie Hill Jr. was attempting to intervene in what is believed to be a domestic dispute between 40-year-old Wendell Champion Jr. and his wife, who worked at Texarkana Aluminum.

Champion Jr. then shot and killed Hill Jr. and shot his wife. She was transported to a local Texarkana hospital and is in stable condition, the police department said. Champion Jr. then shot and killed himself, Nash PD said. Champion Jr. had been convicted of murder in Harris County in 2010 and was released on parole in 2025.

There is no danger to the public at this time, the police department said. Both Hill and Champion Jr.’s wife were employees of Texarkana Aluminum, which will continue operations as normal but has counseling available for employees.

LIVINGSTON (KETK) – Two people have been arrested after law enforcement discovered a possible pipe bomb near a Livingston home on Monday. According to our news partner KETK, the Livingston Police Department said officers were notified of a possible pipe bomb on Banks Drive and several nearby homes were evacuated as a perimeter was secured.

With the help of the Montgomery County Bomb Squad and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, technicians safely disabled the device and began an investigation.

A search warrant was conducted on a nearby home, leading Livingston PD officers to more explosive components. The home’s residents, 44-year-old Brian Humphreys and 37-year-old Shaney Humphreys, were arrested on the scene for possession of explosives and booked into the Polk County Jail.

“This investigation is still active and more charges are possible,” Livingston PD said. “At this time there is no threat to the public.”

NEW YORK (AP) – Rex Reed, the prominent and outspoken film critic and journalist known for his longtime column in The New York Observer, died Tuesday. He was 87.

Reed died at his Manhattan home after a short illness, publicist Sean Katz said on behalf of Reed’s friend William Kapfer.

In a career spanning more than six decades, Reed became one of the most well-known voices in cultural criticism. He published eight books, acted in movies (playing himself in “Superman”), counted movie stars like Angela Lansbury as friends and often found himself in the spotlight for controversial comments. Most infamous among them was his assertion that Marlee Matlin’s Oscar win for “Children of a Lesser God” was a pity vote, and, decades later, comments about Melissa McCarthy’s weight and size in a review for “Identity Thief.” He also perpetuated a false conspiracy theory that Marisa Tomei’s 1992 Oscar win for “My Cousin Vinny” was fake.

When it came to the movies, he had a reputation for being a bit of a crank as well, often bemoaning the old days and feeling out of step with the next generation of film critics.

“I like just as many films as I dislike,” Reed told The New York Times in 2018. “But I think we’re drowning in mediocrity. I just try as hard as I can to raise the level of consciousness. It’s so hard to get people to see good films.”

Reed was born in Fort Worth, Texas, on Oct. 2, 1938, and spent his childhood moving around the South for his father’s job. He told the New York Times in 2018 that his origin story as a “controversial writer” began in the eighth grade, when he started writing a gossip column in the school paper and plotted his exodus to a more cosmopolitan life.

One of his first jobs was in the publicity department at 20th Century Fox, during the making of “Cleopatra,” but he was laid off due to budget cuts. The way he told it, he faked his way into film journalism while gallivanting around Europe with friends and looking for ways to fund a ticket home, including writing a Buster Keaton story for The New York Times. In the 1960s and ‘70s, he established himself as an in-demand magazine and newspaper writer and became a television staple, appearing on “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson and “The Dick Cavett Show.”

One of his most famous profiles was of Ava Gardner in 1967 for The New York Times (“There Is Nothing Like This Dame”), which was included in his collection “Do You Sleep in the Nude?” with profiles of Barbra Streisand, Lucille Ball, Warren Beatty and others. His work appeared in Vogue, Esquire, GQ and Women’s Wear Daily. He spent nearly four decades writing about films for the Observer.

Reed also acted occasionally, playing the pre-transition Myron in “Myra Breckinridge” and appearing alongside Laurence Olivier in the Korean War movie “Inchon.” He never married and has no immediate survivors. It was his writing that was his legacy.

“I’d like to be remembered as someone who really tried to make things better,” Rex told his Observer editor earlier this year. “Or at least respected what was good when it happened. Not as a curmudgeon. That’s not what I am in real life.”

NEW YORK (AP) — More than 20 years after it redefined fast shipping, Amazon is preparing to raise the bar on consumer expectations again by offering to fulfill customers’ most urgent product needs in a half-hour or less for an extra fee.

The company, which revolutionized online shopping in 2005 with two-day deliveries for Prime members, is rapidly opening small order-processing hubs in dozens of U.S. and foreign cities to cater to shoppers who can’t or don’t want to wait for cough medicine to relieve flu symptoms or tomatoes for tonight’s dinner salad.

The ultrafast service, called Amazon Now, first launched in India last June. Amazon says 30-minute deliveries now are also available in urban areas of Brazil, Mexico, Japan, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The mini-warehouses devoted to Amazon Now are about the size of a CVS drugstore. They stock about 3,500 products for expedited delivery, including beer, diapers, pet food, meat, nonprescription medications, playing cards and cellphone charging cables.

“We know that customers love speed and always have,” Beryl Tomay, Amazon’s head of transportation, told The Associated Press on Monday. “What we see customers doing, when we offer faster speeds, are they purchase more from Amazon. And Amazon becomes more top of mind for that or other types of items as well.”

In the U.S., the company first tested Amazon Now in Seattle, the home of its headquarters, and in Philadelphia. Most residents of Atlanta and the Dallas-Fort Worth area now have access as well. The service also is live or expected to land by year-end in Houston, Denver, Minneapolis, New York, Phoenix, Oklahoma City, Orlando, Florida, and dozens of other cities, Amazon said.

The service charges for Amazon Now start at $3.99 for Prime members, who pay an annual fee of $139, and $13.99 for non-members. A $1.99 small basket fee applies to orders under $15, Amazon said.

The company’s bet on a need for speed also comes as some consumers are rebelling against rushed deliveries as they weigh the potential impact on the environment and the workers tasked with preparing orders at a rapid rate.

Amazon’s approach

A relentless focus on speed helped Amazon build a logistics and e-commerce empire. After it made two days the new delivery time normal, Amazon moved into one-day and same-day deliveries for its Prime members. This spring, the company began making 90,000 products available in one hour or three hours at an extra cost.

The scaled down and sped up microhubs that are designed to handle 30-minute orders represent another step in Amazon’s pursuit.

Only a handful of people prepare orders from aisles of shelves in the 5,000- to 10,000-square-foot facilities, unlike the sprawling fulfillment centers storing millions of items where Amazon employs a mix of human workers and robotics to pick and pack orders.

Amazon tailors the product inventory to each location and uses artificial intelligence and other technology to analyze what customers buy, as well as when and how often. The most popular U.S. purchases so far include soap, toothpaste, mouthwash, toilet plungers, bananas, limes and wireless earbuds, Amazon said.

The competition

Amazon’s attempt to up the instant gratification ante provides direct competition to on-demand food delivery platforms like Instacart, Uber Eats, DoorDash and Grubhub, which don’t have the scale of the e-commerce titan, according to independent retail analyst Bruce Winder.

“What Amazon brings is their prowess in supply chain,” Winder said.

These smaller companies said they don’t see Amazon as a threat, though, citing the hundreds of thousands of items they are able to deliver to users’ doorsteps by partnering with various merchants and restaurants.

“DoorDash has a mission to empower grocers and retailers and augment their existing footprint, not to replace them,” DoorDash spokesperson Ali Musa said in an emailed statement. “We win only when they win, which is how we can offer over half a million grocery and retail items in under an hour across the country.”

Amazon also is in a race with Walmart to become the retailer that reliably gets orders to online shoppers in under an hour.

For an additional $10 on top of standard delivery charges, shoppers can place Walmart Express Delivery orders from among more than 100,000 products that are guaranteed to arrive in an hour. Many customers, however, are receiving the items under 30 minutes, Walmart CEO John Furner told analysts in February.

Domino’s cautionary tale

Companies have promised deliveries in 30 minutes or less before, but the landscape also is littered with failed attempts to break the speed barrier.

The COVID-19 pandemic produced a flurry of companies that promised 10- to 15-minute grocery deliveries from microwarehouses in dense neighborhoods, according to Sucharita Kodali, an analyst at market research firm Forrester Research.

But soaring operating costs, low customer loyalty and the drying up of investor money ultimately caused most to fail before the pandemic was over, analysts said.

Domino’s in 1984 pushed a guarantee that customers would receive their pizzas for free if they weren’t delivered in under a half-hour. The company amended the “30 minutes or it’s free” policy after two years, providing only a $3 discount for late deliveries.

The promotion helped Domino’s win market share, but it ended up tarnishing the company’s reputation. It dropped the guarantee in December 1993 after a string of crashes and lawsuits involving drivers racing to meet the deadline.

Brad Jashinsky, a retail analyst at information technology research and consulting firm Gartner, said he thinks Amazon should take the pizza chain’s experience as a cautionary tale.

“You get in trouble when you start overpromising something like that,” he said.

Amazon won’t be making any time guarantees and instead plans to keep customers who chose the 30-minute delivery option updated on the progress of their orders, Tomay said.

“There’s no rushing either in our building workers or the gig workers,” she said.

Taking it slow

Kodali thinks Amazon will need a lot of people placing orders around the same time from the same or adjacent apartment buildings for the 30-minute service to be cost-effective.

Consumers may appreciate rapid receipt of products like toilet paper and batteries, but retailers and logistics experts said they also see some online shoppers, especially members of Generation Z, choosing no-rush shipping for products they don’t need in a hurry.

Amazon for several years has invited customers to skip one- or two-day delivery and to receive their orders on the same day in as few parcels as possible. Consolidating orders into fewer packages by electing to have them delivered at the same time cuts down on boxes, shipping envelopes and fuel use, analysts said.

“The millennials who came to age in an era that was on fast delivery came to expect it de facto, whereas … Gen Z is more accepting of a slower speed than previous generations before them,” said Darby Meegan, a general manager at Flexport, a supply chain and logistics company that fulfills orders for thousands of online merchants.

Still, Amazon executives have cited positive early results for Amazon Now in India, where they said Prime members tripled their requests for 30-minute deliveries once they started using the service.

Amazon Now also is attracting more repeat American customers, Tomay said.

“It’s in early days and time will tell,” she said. “I think that it will be interesting to see how it evolves.”

GRAPEVINE (AP) – Online seller eBay is rejecting an unsolicited $56 billion takeover offer from GameStop, calling the proposal “neither credible or attractive.”

Ryan Cohen’s GameStop disclosed earlier this month that it was pursuing a takeover of eBay, seeing it as a vehicle to compete with online retail giant Amazon.

The national gaming retailer said at the time that its approximately 1,600 U.S. stores could become drop-off and shipping locations. One proposal included live sales broadcasts from GameStop locations featuring eBay products.

GameStop’s bid is worth $125 per share in cash and stock. The equity value of the proposed deal is $55 billion on paper. The company previously said that it started accumulating shares in eBay beginning in February and currently has a 5% stake.

In a letter from eBay Chairman Paul Pressler sent to Cohen, eBay’s board said that it had completed its review of GameStop’s offer and believes that eBay is a “strong, resilient business.”

“With its differentiated global marketplace and a clear strategy, eBay’s board is confident that the company, under its current management team, is well-positioned to continue to drive sustainable growth, execute with discipline, and deliver long-term value for our shareholders,” the letter said.

GameStop did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The company’s stock fell 4% before the market open on Tuesday.

Missouri’s top court is hearing an important legal challenge Tuesday to one of President Donald Trump’s earliest redistricting successes while lawmakers in Louisiana and South Carolina weigh whether to become the most recent Republican states to redraw U.S. House districts ahead of the midterm elections.

Rather than waning, a national redistricting battle that began 10 months ago has intensified as the November elections draw nearer — inflamed by a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that weakened the federal Voting Rights Act and provided grounds for states to try to eliminate voting districts with large minority populations.

Missouri was the second Republican state after Texas to heed Trump’s call last year to redraw congressional districts to help the GOP win additional seats in the midterms. At issue before the Missouri Supreme Court is whether the new districts violate a state constitutional requirement to be compact, and whether they can remain in place for this year’s elections despite an initiative petition seeking to force a public referendum.

In South Carolina, the issue facing Republican lawmakers is whether redrawing the state’s lone Democratic-held seat could open the door to a clean sweep for Republicans or backfire with additional losses by making more districts competitive for Democrats. State senators must decide whether to allow consideration of a redistricting plan put forth in the House after the legislature’s regular work ends Thursday.

Congressional redistricting also is under consideration in Louisiana, where the Supreme Court’s recent ruling invalidated a majority-Black district as an illegal racial gerrymander. The state’s May 16 congressional primaries already have been postponed. What remains undecided is how many seats Republicans will try to pick up while redrawing the districts.

Alabama also is poised to switch its congressional districts for this year’s elections, after the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday overturned an order for it to use a map with two largely Black districts.

Republicans think they could gain as many as 14 seats from new House maps enacted so far in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Florida and Tennessee. Democrats, meanwhile, think they could gain six seats from new maps in California and Utah. The Virginia Supreme Court last week struck down a redistricting effort that could have yielded four more winnable seats for Democrats.
South Carolina weighs political risks of redistricting

A South Carolina House committee is to consider Tuesday whether to send a congressional redistricting plan to the full chamber for debate. The House also appears poised to pass legislation that could delay the June 9 congressional primaries until August to allow time for new districts to be enacted. That comes even as some absentee and overseas military ballots already have been cast.

But any redistricting effort also must clear the Senate, where support is less certain. Two-thirds of senators have to agree before the regular General Assembly session ends Thursday to let the legislature take up redistricting later.

Trump said on social media Monday that he was closely watching the redistricting vote, urging South Carolina senators to “be bold and courageous” and to delay the House primaries so new districts can be drawn.

Although Republicans have a supermajority in the chamber, several senators aren’t sure the proposed map guarantees the GOP will win seat held by long-serving Democratic U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn. And they think enough Democratic voters could be pushed into other districts that the plan could backfire, resulting in a 5-2 or even a 4-3 Republican split.

Some also question whether it is fair for Republicans to get all the seats in a state where the Democratic presidential candidate has gotten at least 40% of the vote every election this century, even if Trump is asking for the new map.
Louisiana GOP looks to target one or two seats

State Sen. Caleb Kleinpeter, a Republican who oversees the Louisiana Senate committee tasked with redistricting, said his panel plans to vote Tuesday on a U.S. House map, with a full Senate vote expected Thursday.

The committee has several options, including versions that would leave Democrats favored in only one district or none. Kleinpeter said a map eliminating all majority-Black districts would be difficult to hold up in court.

Last Friday, dozens of people urged lawmakers to retain two majority-Black districts during a grueling nine-hour hearing that featured civil rights activists and the only four Black congressmen elected to represent the state since the end of the Reconstruction era.
Missouri map splits Kansas City district

Missouri currently is represented in the U.S. House by six Republicans and two Democrats under a map passed by the Republican-led legislature after the 2020 census. But with Trump’s backing, Republican state officials adopted a new map last September that improves their chances of winning an additional seat by targeting a Kansas City district held by longtime Democratic U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, who previously was the city’s first Black mayor.

The new House map places portions of Kansas City in neighboring Republican districts and stretches the remainder of Cleaver’s 5th District far eastward into Republican-heavy rural areas. A state judge in March rejected an assertion that the map violates a constitutional compactness requirement, finding that the new districts on average are more compact — even if the 5th District is not. That was appealed to the state Supreme Court.

A separate case also being argued Tuesday at the state Supreme Court contends the new districts should have been automatically suspended in December when opponents submitted more than 300,000 petition signatures seeking to force a statewide referendum.

But Republican Attorney General Catherine Hanaway and Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins contend the new districts can be suspended only if — and after — Hoskins determines the petition meets constitutional requirements and has enough valid signatures. Hoskins has until Aug. 4, the day of Missouri’s primary elections, to make that determination.

A state judge in March agreed with the Republicans’ position while also ruling that the plaintiffs lacked grounds to sue and had done so too soon.

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Brook reported from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Collins from Columbia, South Carolina, and Lieb from Jefferson City, Missouri.

LUFKIN (KETK) – Officials are warning residents that scam artists are allegedly impersonating Angelina County law enforcement officers and demanding East Texans send them Bitcoin payments. According to our news partner KETK and the Lufkin Police Department, scammers are impersonating a deputy from the Angelina County Sheriff’s Office, where they call residents to claim that they’ve missed jury duty and must pay thousands of dollars to make up for it.

The scammers can make their call appear as if it’s coming directly from the Angelina County Sheriff’s Office but officials insist these calls are not real and should be promptly ignored.

“This scam is oftentimes done by scammers posing as other state and federal agencies, as well,” Lufkin Police Department Chief Travis Brazil said. “These scammers will always create a sense of urgency to make the victims panic and pressure them into paying quickly.”

Scammers will ask residents to make these payments through the new Bitcoin cryptocurrency ATMs that can be found at many convenience stores around the country. Usually, once a Bitcoin transaction is made, police can’t recover any of the funds from scammers, but luckily, Lufkin Police detectives were able to retrieve over $10,000 from a Bitcoin ATM last week after residents reported making their payment to the sheriff’s office.

Similarly, Angelina County Sheriff Tom Selman said a local woman recently showed up to the sheriff’s office with cash in hand and was able to keep her money because she couldn’t figure out how to use a Bitcoin ATM to make the payment that scammers demanded.

“None of these calls are real,” Selman said. “These are scammers scaring you by threatening jail time to get your money. Once the scammer empties the Bitcoin machine, the money is gone and we cannot trace it.”

The Diboll Police Department also warned of similar scams reported in their area, where scammers ask for gift cards and tell residents that they’re under a gag order and can’t talk to anyone about their illegal demands for payment.

“No law enforcement officer will ever call you and ask for any immediate payment in lieu of jail. We do not ask you to get gift cards of any type and we do not ask for you banking information, ever! We will not tell you that you are under a gag order and cannot contact anyone,” Diboll PD said. “If you have received any phone call or text and you even suspect it might be a scam, google the number for your local police department or sheriff’s office, call them and ask.”

The sheriff’s office and Lufkin PD are working to stop these scams but the best way to stop them is for East Texans to learn that these people are only after your money and that no one should ever have to call you for missing jury duty or to pay off a warrant.

“Neither department will call residents about missing jury duty,” Brazil said. “Please hang up on these callers and call either the Lufkin Police Department or the Sheriff’s Office to report the call. Notifying our offices will help you verify it is a scam and will give us more information to track down these scammers.”

Selman agreed and noted that nobody will get a call before being arrested.

“If there is a warrant for your arrest, we will come and arrest you. No one is arrested for missing jury duty,” Selman said.

The Smith County Sheriff’s Office has called for these Bitcoin ATMs and all cryptocurrency machines to be banned at the state level, in light of these recent scams.

LIVINGSTON (KETK) — A member of the Livingston Police Department was fired and arrested on Monday after being accused of having an improper relationship with a student.

According to the department, they were notified by Livingston ISD on May 1 regarding allegations of Ryan Boyd, a 45-year-old police officer, having an inappropriate relationship with a student.

Boyd was subsequently removed from the school campus and was placed on administrative leave while the department opened an investigation.

Boyd was terminated on Monday and was taken into custody by the Texas Rangers. He was later booked into the Polk County Jail and charged with having an improper relationship between educator and student.

“LPD understands incidents like this can damage public trust,” the department said. “We want our community to know that these allegations were taken seriously from the beginning. We remain committed to transparency, accountability and protecting our community.”

The investigation remains ongoing. Anyone with information is asked to contact the Polk County District Attorney’s Office at 936-327-6868.

ANGELINA COUNTY – Scammers are calling residents and threatening to put them in jail if they do not pay thousands of dollars in cash right away for missing jury duty. In a released from the county obtained Monday, Sheriff Tom Selman and Lufkin Police Chief Travis Brazil stated that neither the Lufkin Police Department nor the Angelina County Sheriff’s Office will call and demand payment or threaten jail time for missing jury duty.

Calls that appear to be from the Angelina County Sheriff’s Office are the subject of the current scam. The con artist is threatening locals into putting thousands of dollars in cash into a bit coin machine at a nearby convenience store by using a deputy’s name.
After locals called the Sheriff’s office to report making the payment, Lufkin Police detectives were able to retrieve over $10,000 from a bit coin machine last week.