A wildfire that broke out Thursday afternoon in Kern County quickly tore through a wide area, overwhelming firefighters and burning dozens of homes.
The Erskine Fire was small when it broke out shortly before 4 p.m. but was driven by winds of over 20 mph, mountainous terrain and five years of drought, Kern County Fire Chief Brian Marshall said at an early Friday morning press conference.
The fire held steady Saturday night and as of Sunday morning, it has been 10 percent contained. It has burned 36,810 acres and destroyed 200 structures. Firefighters are hoping to take advantage of lighter winds forecast for Sunday but temperatures in the 90s and low humidity remain a challenge. Two fatalities have been confirmed. Precautionary evacuations are recommended for Squirrel Valley, Mountain Mesa, South Lake, Lake Isabella (Erskine Creek area) and the Weldon area, which includes Landers Meadow and Clareville.
The fire, which prompted mandatory evacuation orders, had been called 5 percent contained Friday but fire officials revised that number to 0 percent Saturday morning because they want to ensure retardant lines hold. By Saturday night, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said it was 10 percent contained.
"I thought this was my retirement fund," said Danny Walker, who lost his house, his garage, and two of his three dogs. "Everything's gone."
"I ain't got money to start over," he said. "I'll start somewhere."
California Gov. Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency. Three Kern County firefighters who suffered minor to moderate smoke inhalation were released from the hospital by Saturday, the fire department said.
"I've never been in a wildland fire where I've seen so many homes burn," Kern County fire Capt. Tyler Townsend told NBC Los Angeles Friday. "It's one of the most devastating I've ever seen."
Fire activity Saturday "was not as dramatic today" with a decrease in winds that fueled the blaze, a fire operations section chief told a community meeting Saturday night. Firefighting resources were being deployed to hang on to gains made throughout the day.
High temperatures have fueled recent wildfires in the West.
The so-called Dog Head Fire in New Mexico, which broke out June 14 and burned nearly 18,000 acres — damaging a dozen homes — was 90 percent contained by Saturday, the U.S. Forest Service said.
Another blaze in Southern California, the Sherpa Fire west of Santa Barbara, started June 15 and burned 7,400 acres but was 93 percent contained as of Saturday.
The Border Fire, also in Southern California but near the Mexico border, has burned just over 7,600 acres since it broke out near Potrero Sunday and was 75 percent contained by Saturday, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said. Five homes were destroyed.
The Erskine Fire is a wildfire that is burning in the Lake Isabella area of Kern County. As of June 2016, it is the largest and most destructive wildfire of the 2016 California wildfire season. It was also the first fire to have fatalities.
The fire, which was first reported around 4:00pm on Thursday, June 23rd, quickly grew to over 8,000 acres (32 km2) and destroyed over 100 structures, including at least 80 residences, in the first few hours.
By mid-day Friday the fire had grown to over 19,000 acres (77 km2) and is still 0% -contained. By 6:00pm on Friday, officials confirmed that the fire had grown to over 30,000 acres (120 km2) with 5% contained.
Friday evening Governor Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency for Kern County.
On Friday, June 24th, officials confirmed that 2 people had been killed by the fast moving fire. Officials also stated that cadaver dogs were being used to search for possible additional victims.The deceased victims were an elderly couple who died while attempting to flee their home. A possible third fatality may have occurred inside a mobile home, though the body had been burned so badly that it is unclear on whether or not the remains belong to a human or an animal.
Omar Mir Seddique Mateen (November 16, 1986 – June 12, 2016) was an
American mass murderer and domestic Islamic terrorist, who was of Afghan descent. He killed 49 people and wounded 53 others in a mass shooting at the Pulse gay bar in Orlando, Florida. He was killed in a shootout with the police.
Prior to the shooting, he had been investigated by the FBI in 2013 and 2014. Mateen reportedly pledged his allegiance to the Sunni militant jihadist group Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), as well as the al-Nusra Front, a Syrian al-Qaeda branch and opponent of ISIL, before the shooting.
Mateen was born Omar Mir Seddique on November 16, 1986 in New Hyde Park, New York, to Afghan parents. His father, Mir Seddique Mateen, is a Pashtun who emigrated in the 1980s and is an alleged supporter of the Taliban. After being raised in New York for a few years, he moved with his family to Port St. Lucie in 1991. His family was described as being moderate Muslims and "an all-American family".
At a young age, Mateen displayed his sexuality and an interest in violence. For his elementary and middle school education, he attended classes in St. Lucie County, Florida. At Mariposa Elementary, a third grade teacher described Mateen as "very active … constantly moving, verbally abusive, rude, aggressive ... much talk about violence & sex ... hands all over the place – on other children, in his mouth". In the seventh grade, Mateen was moved to a separate class with the purpose of avoiding "conflicts with other students" and suffered from poor scholarly performance due to "many instances of behavioral problems". A fellow classmate of Mateen at Mariposa said that Mateen was a bully and disrespectful to girls while also acting like he was better than his classmates. His parents were described as "dismissive" of his poor behavior while his father "had a reputation for being disrespectful of female teachers and dismissive of complaints about his son". In 1999 while Mateen was in the eighth grade, a letter sent from Mateen's teacher to his father noted an "attitude and inability to show self-control".
Mateen began his secondary education at Martin County High School in 2000 and at the age of fourteen was expelled after being in a fight in math class, where he was briefly arrested without being handcuffed and charged with battery and disrupting school, though the charges were later dropped by the school. While a sophomore attending Spectrum, an alternative high school for those that have issues with their behavior, classmates told The Washington Post that Mateen cheered in support of the hijackers during the September 11 attacks and that he stated that Osama bin Laden was his uncle who taught him how to shoot AK-47s, all of this prior to the knowledge of bin Laden being the mastermind of the September 11 attacks. After his outburst, Mateen's father arrived to the school to pick him up and slapped him in the face, with Mateen later being suspended for five days after the incident. Soon after the September 11 attacks, repeatedly "he shocked other students on his school bus by imitating an exploding plane", reported the New York Times. A retired dean of Martin County High School, Dan Alley, stated that "We tried to counsel him and show him the error of his ways, but it never had the effect that we were hoping for" and that his father "would not back up the school, and he would always take his son’s side". Mateen was later sent to St. Lucie West Centennial High School after getting into a fight with a student, with one schoolmate reported that Mateen was bullied at the school. By the time Mateen had returned and graduated from Martin County's Stuart Adult Vocational School in 2003, he had been suspended for 48 days for being involved in fights and injuring other students.
In 2006, Mateen filed a petition for a name change, adding Mateen as his surname to match that of his parents.
The same year, he registered to vote as a member of the Democratic Party.
In April 2009, Mateen married an Uzbekistan-born woman, Sitora Yusifiy, whom he met in 2008 through Myspace, a social networking site. They separated after four months and divorced in July 2011.
Mateen visited Saudi Arabia for an eight-day trip in 2011 and a ten-day trip in 2012. The latter was organized by the Islamic Center at New York University. It included twelve New York City police officers and groups from Columbia and Yale and visited Mecca and Medina. Around these times, he went to the United Arab Emirates. FBI Director James Comey said Saudi officials helped investigate Mateen's trips. In addition, House Intelligence Committee said that U.S. investigators "are searching for details about the Saudi Arabia trips."
Noor Salman, Mateen's second wife, was listed as Mateen’s spouse on a September 2013 St. Lucie County mortgage document. She had moved into Mateen's Fort Pierce home in November 2012.By September 2013, they were living in a house in Port St. Lucie with Mateen's father and another relative. Salman left Mateen and joined relatives in Rodeo, California, by December 2015. At the time of his death, Mateen had a three-year-old son with Salman.
At the time of the shooting, he lived about 100 miles (160 kilometers) from Orlando, Florida, in Fort Pierce, but received mail at his parents' home in nearby Port St. Lucie. According to Florida Department of Law Enforcement records, he had no criminal record in Florida.
NBC News reported that Noor Salman, Mateen's second wife, told the FBI she "drove him once to the gay nightclub, Pulse, because he wanted to scope it out". An official involved with the investigation told the Associated Press that authorities believed Salman knew about the plot beforehand, but were reluctant to charge her based only on this suspicion. Days prior to the event, Salman had accompanied Mateen on a trip to buy ammunition and warned him the evening prior to the event against anything he might be planning.
A month before the attack, Mateen donated blood at OneBlood, a regional blood donation agency, which would later donate a majority of its supply to injured victims.
Hours before the attack, Mateen stopped by his parents' home to visit his father, who said he did not notice anything strange about his son during the visit.
ABC News and Fox News reported that on the early morning of June 12, the day of the attack, Mateen posted on one of his Facebook accounts: "The real muslims will never accept the filthy ways of the west ... You kill innocent women and children by doing us airstrikes..now taste the Islamic state vengeance" as well as "America and Russia stop bombing the Islamic state." His final post to Facebook was "In the next few days you will see attacks from the Islamic State in the usa." These posts, since deleted, were uncovered by the United States Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.
At approximately 2:00 a.m. on June 12, 2016, Mateen entered the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, and began shooting. At 2:22 a.m., he made a 9-1-1 call in which he pledged allegiance to ISIL; referenced Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bombers; and mentioned Moner Mohammad Abu Salha, an acquaintance of his who died in a suicide bombing in Syria for the Al-Nusra Front in 2014. According to FBI officials, Mateen made two other 9-1-1 calls during the shooting. He also called News 13 of Orlando and identified himself as the nightclub shooter; The Washington Post reported that "he had carried out the Pulse attack for the Islamic State".
Mateen took hostages after police arrived and engaged in a gunfight with him. At approximately 5:00 a.m. police shot and killed Mateen, ending the attack. A total of 49 people were left dead along with Mateen and 53 others were injured. The attack was the deadliest mass shooting by a single gunman in United States history, the deadliest incident of violence against LGBT people in U.S. history the largest targeted mass killing of LGBT people in the Western world since the Holocaust, and the deadliest terrorist attack in the U.S. since September 11, 2001.
Paul Davis Ryan (born January 29, 1970) is the 54th and current Speaker of the
U.S. House of Representatives. Ryan is a member of the Republican Party who has served as the U.S. Representative for Wisconsin's 1st congressional district since 1999. Ryan previously served as Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, from January 3 to October 29, 2015, and, before that, as Chairman of the House Budget Committee from 2011 to 2015. He was the Republican Party nominee for Vice President of the United States, running alongside former Governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts in the 2012 election.Ryan, together with Democratic Senator Patty Murray, negotiated the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2013.
On October 29, 2015, Ryan was elected to replace John Boehner as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, and named John David Hoppe as his Chief of Staff. Ryan is the first person from Wisconsin to hold this position.
Ryan was born in Janesville, Wisconsin, the youngest of four children of Elizabeth A. "Betty" (née Hutter) and Paul Murray Ryan, a lawyer. A fifth-generation Wisconsinite, his father was of Irish ancestry and his mother is of German and English ancestry. One of Ryan's paternal ancestors settled in Wisconsin prior to the Civil War. His great-grandfather, Patrick William Ryan (1858–1917), founded an earthmoving company in 1884, which later became P. W. Ryan and Sons and is now known as Ryan Incorporated Central. Ryan's grandfather, Stanley M. Ryan (1898-1957), was appointed U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Wisconsin.
Ryan attended St. Mary's Catholic School in Janesville, where he played on the seventh-grade basketball team. He attended Joseph A. Craig High School in Janesville, where he was elected president of his junior class, and thus became prom king. As class president Ryan was a representative of the student body on the school board. Following his second year, Ryan took a job working the grill at McDonald's. He was on his high school's ski, track and varsity soccer teams and played basketball in a Catholic recreational league. He also participated in several academic and social clubs including the Model United Nations. Ryan and his family often went on hiking and skiing trips to the Colorado Rocky Mountains.
On October 8, a push by congressional Republicans to recruit Ryan to run to succeed John Boehner as Speaker of the House was initiated. Boehner had recently announced his resignation and stated his support for Kevin McCarthy to be his replacement, which received wide support among Republicans, including Ryan, who was set to officially nominate him. McCarthy withdrew his name from consideration on October 8 when it was apparent that the Freedom Caucus, a caucus of staunchly conservative House Republicans, would not support him. This led many Republicans to turn to Ryan as a compromise candidate. The push included a plea from Boehner, who reportedly told Ryan that he was the only person who could unite the House GOP at a time of turmoil. Ryan released a statement that said, "While I am grateful for the encouragement I've received, I will not be a candidate."But on October 9, close aides of Ryan confirmed that Ryan had reconsidered, and was considering the possibility of a run. Ryan confirmed on October 22 that he would seek the speakership after receiving the endorsements of two factions of House Republicans, including the conservative Freedom Caucus. Ryan upon confirming his bid for speakership stated, "I never thought I'd be speaker. But I pledged to you that if I could be a unifying figure, then I would serve -- I would go all in. After talking with so many of you, and hearing your words of encouragement, I believe we are ready to move forward as one, united team. And I am ready and eager to be our speaker." On October 29, Ryan was elected Speaker with 236 votes. He is the youngest Speaker since James G. Blaine in 1875.
After Donald Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee in the 2016 presidential election on May 4, 2016, Ryan was hesitant to endorse him, stating on May 5 that he was "not ready".. Ryan and Trump met in private on May 12, releasing a joint statement afterward, acknowledging their differences but furthering "we recognize that there are also many important areas of common ground." On June 2, Ryan announced his support for Trump in an op-ed in the Janesville Gazette. The following day, June 3, amid Trump's criticism of Gonzalo P. Curiel, Ryan said Trump's critique "just was out of left field for my mind," and voiced disagreement with him. On June 7, Paul Ryan disavowed Trump's comments about Gonzalo P. Curiel because he believed that his statements was "the textbook definition of a racist comment." Regardless, Ryan believed that more Republican policies will be enacted under Donald Trump than presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
