The nation in brief

A burned vehicle sits Monday among the ashes in Paradise, Calif. Last month’s wildfire in the Paradise area destroyed nearly 14,000 homes and killed at least 85 people.
A burned vehicle sits Monday among the ashes in Paradise, Calif. Last month’s wildfire in the Paradise area destroyed nearly 14,000 homes and killed at least 85 people.

Wildfire’s missing list down to 11 names

SAN FRANCISCO — The search for people unaccounted for after the deadliest U.S. wildfire in at least a century is winding down in Northern California, with just 11 names left on a fluctuating list that once approached 1,300 and prompted fears that hundreds had died in the flames.

The declining number released late Monday came as a relief in the Paradise area as it reels from the wildfire that killed at least 85 people and destroyed nearly 14,000 homes.

Families, friends and even long-ago acquaintances have been peppering social media with pleas for help finding people. Sometimes they had no more than a first name to work with.

Authorities now say they have located more than 3,100 people who had been reported as unreachable at some point during the catastrophe.

Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea also has revised the death toll down to 85 from 88, saying medical examiners determined several bags of human remains were duplicates.

Honea has repeatedly said he released the list — no matter how long at times — to reach those who may not know people were looking for them. He said it was never intended to be a definitive account of people who were missing or possibly dead.

Hacked, says GOP House campaign arm

WASHINGTON — The campaign arm for House Republicans was hacked during the 2018 midterm campaign, a spokesman for the organization said Tuesday.

The hack of the organization, the National Republican Congressional Committee, exposed thousands of sensitive emails from four senior aides for months. The breach, first reported by Politico, was detected in April by a vendor for the committee. It remains unclear who was behind the hack.

“The NRCC can confirm that it was the victim of a cyberintrusion by an unknown entity,” Ian Prior, a spokesman for the organization, said in a statement. “Upon learning of the intrusion, the NRCC immediately launched an internal investigation and notified the FBI, which is now investigating the matter.”

Prior declined to comment further, citing the continuing investigation.

2000 escapee, killer executed in Texas

HUNTSVILLE, Texas — A member of the notorious “Texas 7” gang of escaped prisoners was executed Tuesday evening for the fatal shooting of a suburban Dallas police officer during a Christmas Eve robbery nearly 18 years ago.

Joseph Garcia received a lethal injection at the state penitentiary in Huntsville for the December 2000 shooting death of 29-year-old Irving police officer Aubrey Hawkins.

Garcia, 47, became the 22nd inmate put to death this year in the U.S. and the 12th given lethal injections in Texas, the nation’s busiest capital punishment state.

Garcia, who was serving a 50-year sentence for murder, was among a group of inmates who escaped from a south Texas prison that December and committed numerous robberies, including the one in which they shot Hawkins 11 times, killing him.

Hawkins had just finished Christmas Eve dinner with his family when he responded to the call about the robbery at a sporting goods store and was ambushed.

The escaped inmates were eventually arrested in Colorado, ending a six-week manhunt. One of them killed himself as officers closed in, and the other six were convicted of killing Hawkins and sentenced to death.

Garcia was the fourth of the group put to death. Two others remain on death row.

Sleepy driver faulted in ’16 bus crash

DALLAS — A bus driver with “acute sleep deficit” failed to stay in his lane and caused his vehicle to careen out of control, resulting in a wreck that killed nine people and injured nearly 40 others in 2016, federal safety investigators said in a report released Tuesday.

The National Transportation Safety Board determined the bus left the road and rolled when the 29-year-old driver overcorrected and abruptly braked. The highway north of Laredo, Texas, was wet from a recent rain, and the bus had an inoperable antilock braking system, according to the board’s report.

The bus began its trip in Brownsville and was en route to the Kickapoo Lucky Eagle Casino in Eagle Pass.

Seven passengers died at the scene, another died while being transported to a hospital and the ninth died of injuries days after the May 2016 accident. The driver, whose name has not been released by authorities, was treated for minor injuries.

Regulators found that the driver had had little sleep in the preceding hours and had blurred vision “due to hyperglycemia resulting from poorly controlled diabetes.”

The stretch of highway where the crash occurred, meanwhile, had not been treated with a common pavement texture that reduces skidding. Four days after the wreck, the Texas Department of Transportation added a chip sealant to the highway.

Upcoming Events