The toll from Northern California’s ranging wildfires continued to grow Tuesday evening as officials said the fires destroyed up to 2,000 structures and killed at least 17 people.
The devastating losses establish firestorms among the most destructive in California history. The estimated losses of homes, businesses and other buildings jumped from 1,500 to 2,000, and officials fear the death toll will also continue to rise.
Sonoma County alone has received about 200 reports of missing people since Sunday night, and sheriff’s officials have located 45 of those people, said county spokeswoman Maggie Fleming.
The majority of the fatalities are from Sonoma County, where huge swaths of the city of Santa Rosa were leveled by the Tubbs fire. Eleven people have died in Sonoma County as of 7 p.m. Tuesday, officials said. Two people have died in Napa County, three in Mendocino County and one in Yuba County, Cal Fire officials said.
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Penny Wright discusses the loss of her home in the Fountaingrove neighborhood of Santa Rosa, Calif.
The New Yorker’s stomach-turning article about Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein published Tuesday, which details several rape allegations, comes with newly released audio of Weinstein admitting to groping a model in 2015.
The way the interaction unfolds (listen below) is all too familiar. Weinstein, who was captured on tape through a police investigation, can be heard alternately pleading with and threatening the model, Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, citing his own influence and power while trying to diminish her.
Harvey Weinstein stands accused of rape by multiple women, according to an explosive new story by The New Yorker magazine.
One of the accusers, Asia Argento, confirmed her account to CNN.
She also commented on the mountain of allegations against Weinstein by various actresses, saying, “This is our truth.”
Argento told reporter Ronan Farrow that Weinstein forcibly performed oral sex on her, and she’s been haunted by the encounter ever since.
“Just his body, his presence, his face, bring me back to the little girl that I was when I was twenty-one,” she told Farrow. “When I see him, it makes me feel little and stupid and weak. After the rape, he won.”
Y. A. Tittle, the Hall of Fame quarterback who led the Giants to three consecutive National Football League championship games in the early 1960s after the San Francisco 49ers had discarded him as too old and too slow, died on Sunday night in Stanford, Calif. He was 90.
Louisiana State University, where he played his college ball, announced his death.
Tittle threw for dozens of touchdowns and thousands of yards, won a Most Valuable Player Award and was selected to seven Pro Bowls. But he endeared himself to New York not as a golden boy but as a muddied, grass-stained scrapper.
He was a balding field general with a fringe of gray who, at 34, in his old-fashioned high-topped shoes, had undeniably lost a step or two, but kept picking himself up off the ground to find a way to beat you, and New York cheered.
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Giants quarterback Y.A. Tittle after being slammed to the ground by a Pittsburgh Steelers lineman in Pittsburgh on Sept. 20, 1964. The photograph immortalized Tittle in football lore as an image of the aging warrior who had finally fallen.Credit Morris Berman/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, via Associated Press
Sonoma County said it had received more than 100 phone calls to its missing person hotline as wind-powered wildfires swept through California wine country overnight, destroying at least 1,500 homes.
Officials said they were combing through the calls and believed some could be duplicates.
At least 10 people have died in the blazes as more than a dozen wildfires consumed parts of California wine country. Gov. Jerry Brown declared an emergency in eight counties, including Napa and Sonoma, and asked for a federal declaration of a major disaster for the entire state.
Sonoma County Sheriff Rob Giordano said seven people had been killed there in fire-related incidents — and “that number’s going to change.” The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection confirmed that two people had been killed in Napa County, as well as one person in Mendocino County.
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A helicopter drops water on a wind-driven wildfire in Orange, California on Monday. Mike Blake / Reuters
Hill tweeted Sunday night about the power that could exist if fans were to boycott advertisers associated with the Dallas Cowboys. Hill tweeted after Cowboys owner Jerry Jones told players they’d be benched if they didn’t stand during the national anthem.
“Jerry Jones also has created a problem for his players, specifically the black ones. If they don’t kneel, some will see them as sellouts,” Hill tweeted.
“Change happens when advertisers are impacted,” she wrote. “If you strongly reject what Jerry Jones said, the key is his advertisers.”
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Jemele Hill, the ESPN anchor who last month said President Donald Trump was a “white supremacist” unfit to serve in the White House, has been suspended from ESPN for a “second violation of our social media guidelines,” according to a statement the network released Monday.
YouTube videos of police beatings on American streets. A widely circulated internet hoax about Muslim men in Michigan collecting welfare for multiple wives. A local news story about two veterans brutally mugged on a freezing winter night.
All of these were recorded, posted or written by Americans. Yet all ended up becoming grist for a network of Facebook pages linked to a shadowy Russian company that has carried out propaganda campaigns for the Kremlin, and which is now believed to be at the center of a far-reaching Russian program to influence the 2016 presidential election.
A New York Times examination of hundreds of those posts shows that one of the most powerful weapons that Russian agents used to reshape American politics was the anger, passion and misinformation that real Americans were broadcasting across social media platforms.
The Russian pages — with names like “Being Patriotic,” “Secured Borders” and “Blacktivist” — cribbed complaints about federal agents from one conservative website, and a gauzy article about a veteran who became an entrepreneur from People magazine. They took descriptions and videos of police beatings from genuine YouTube and Facebook accounts and reposted them, sometimes lightly edited for maximum effect.
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During the 2016 campaigns, Russian agents harvested posts and videos from Americans and used them on social media to sow division. Here supporters cheered a year ago for then-Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times
Senator Bob Corker, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, charged in an interview on Sunday that President Trump was treating his office like “a reality show,” with reckless threats toward other countries that could set the nation “on the path to World War III.”
In an extraordinary rebuke of a president of his own party, Mr. Corker said he was alarmed about a president who acts “like he’s doing ‘The Apprentice’ or something.”
“He concerns me,” Mr. Corker added. “He would have to concern anyone who cares about our nation.”
Mr. Corker’s comments capped a remarkable day of sulfurous insults between the president and the Tennessee senator — a powerful, if lame-duck, lawmaker, whose support will be critical to the president on tax reform and the fate of the Iran nuclear deal.
It began on Sunday morning when Mr. Trump, posting on Twitter, accused Mr. Corker of deciding not to run for re-election because he “didn’t have the guts.” Mr. Corker shot back in his own tweet: “It’s a shame the White House has become an adult day care center. Someone obviously missed their shift this morning.”
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In audio excerpts from an interview with Jonathan Martin, a New York Times reporter, Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, spoke about President Trump’s tweets and what Mr. Trump’s twitter feed means for diplomacy.
The number of murders the Honduran drug lord admitted to orchestrating over 10 years was stunning.
The dead included people he described as killers, rapists and gang members. Then there were the innocents: a lawyer, two journalists, a Honduran refugee in Canada, an official who was serving as Honduras’s antidrug czar and a politician who became his adviser; there were even two children caught in a shootout.
In all, the drug lord, Devis Leonel Rivera Maradiaga, said that, working in concert with drug traffickers and others, he had “caused” the deaths of 78 people — a number that posed a dilemma for United States officials when Mr. Rivera came to them offering to expose high-level corruption in this Central American nation of some nine million people.
Knowing that he was already in the sights of United States investigators, Mr. Rivera sought to help the Drug Enforcement Administration root out corrupt Honduran politicians and other elites who had made Honduras a gateway for massive amounts of cocaine headed for the United States through Mexico.
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Devis Leonel Rivera Maradiaga, left, and Javier Eriberto Rivera Maradiaga. The brothers led a drug trafficking organization called Los Cachiros that was said to be responsible for dozens of murders.Credit Department of the Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
Penny Wright discusses the loss of her home in the Fountaingrove neighborhood of Santa Rosa, Calif.
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Harvey Weinstein
Jemele Hill, the ESPN anchor who last month said President Donald Trump was a “white supremacist” unfit to serve in the White House, has been suspended from ESPN for a “second violation of our social media guidelines,” according to a statement the network released Monday.
In audio excerpts from an interview with Jonathan Martin, a New York Times reporter, Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, spoke about President Trump’s tweets and what Mr. Trump’s twitter feed means for diplomacy.
