FRESNO, Calif. (KFSN) -- The California Department of Health announced that one person has died and another has been diagnosed with a hantavirus infection after vacationing at Curry Village in Yosemite National Park.
The two campers were both diagnosed with the hantavirus pulmonary syndrome (HPS), which is a virus passed by exposure to mice droppings or urine. Officials believe they two people may been exposed to the virus while vacationing in Yosemite in June. The two people were not together, but were camping near each other at the same period of time. Both people came down with the HPS virus in July.
During an interview with Fortune magazine that was published today, Mitt Romney said that he would eliminate federal funding for Amtrak as one of his cuts aimed at balancing the budget:
So first there are programs I would eliminate. Obamacare being one of them but also various subsidy programs — the Amtrak subsidy, the PBS subsidy, the subsidy for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities. Some of these things, like those endowment efforts and PBS I very much appreciate and like what they do in many cases, but I just think they have to strand on their own rather than receiving money borrowed from other countries, as our government does on their behalf.
Three days after the shooting death of a constable in College Station, Texas, there's word that two sheriff's deputies in Louisiana's St. John the Baptist Parish were killed this morning and another two were wounded in what appear to be connected shootings.
According to The Times-Picayune, authorities are describing the first shooting — in which at least one deputy was injured — as "an ambush."
The second shooting, which left two officers dead, "occurred after deputies investigating the first attack located a car at the nearby Riverview Trailer Park matching the description of the car involved in the first shooting," the Times-Picayune reports.
They were attempting to question two men in a trailer when a third man jumped out and began firing with an assault rifle.
Five suspects have been taken into custody, The Associated Press reports.
LONDON (AP) -- It's an impasse: Ecuador Thursday granted asylum to Julian Assange, but Britain says it still intends to arrest the WikiLeaks chief the moment he steps out of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and extradite him to Sweden for questioning about alleged sexual assaults.
Is there any way out for Assange? Any way he could elude British officials and make it to Ecuador?
A criminal investigation into the collapse of the brokerage firm MF Global and the disappearance of about $1 billion in customer money is now heading into its final stage without charges expected against any top executives.
After 10 months of stitching together evidence on the firm’s demise, criminal investigators are concluding that chaos and porous risk controls at the firm, rather than fraud, allowed the money to disappear, according to people involved in the case.
Mitt Romney continues to resist pressure to turn over more tax returns. In an interview today he said he is “simply not enthusiastic about giving them hundreds or thousands of more pages to pick through, distort, and lie about.”
The call for more information about Romney’s financial past, however, is bipartisan. A poll released today found fifty six percent of all voters, including sixty one percent of independents, think that Romney should release twelve years of returns.
When George W. Bush’s narrowly won reelection in 2004, not a single American state had a law requiring voters to present photographic identification at the polls. Today about 10 states, with 134 electoral votes among them, have enacted such laws—all at the prompting of Republicans.
Republicans are not responding to a newly discovered crisis in voter impersonation at the polls, but to a partisan crisis brought on by their party’s declining base of white Protestant voters. If the GOP can’t grow its own voter base, it can at least hope to shrink the Democrats’ base.
One of the biggest Outside Lands surprises this past weekend came from Jack White, who thrilled fans by parking his mobile Third Man Records truck in the woods and performed a guerilla-style, pop-up concert with his all-female band, the Peacocks. Check out official footage of the jam session. above.
A Black Hawk helicopter has crashed in a restive region in southern Afghanistan, killing seven US soldiers and four Afghans.
The Taliban said they had downed the aircraft, although the militants have been quick to claim crashes caused by mechanical problems as successful hits.
"We hit the ISAF helicopter with a rocket-propelled grenade," said Qari Yousef Ahmadi, Taliban spokesman for the southern region.
The helicopter's landing was so hard it was destroyed, officials at the Pentagon told NBC news.
In Kabul, Nato said it was investigating the cause of the crash in Kandahar province, the birthplace of the Taliban.
I’ve been on deadline in the past week or so, so I haven't had a chance to weigh in on Eric Holder’s predictable decision to not pursue criminal charges against Goldman, Sachs for any of the activities in the report prepared by Senators Carl Levin and Tom Coburn two years ago.
Last year I spent a lot of time and energy jabbering and gesticulating in public about what seemed to me the most obviously prosecutable offenses detailed in the report – the seemingly blatant perjury before congress of Lloyd Blankfein and other Goldman executives, and the almost comically long list of frauds committed by the company in its desperate effort to unload its crappy “cats and dogs” mortgage-backed inventory.
A New York to Moscow flight by Russian airliner Aeroflot has landed in Iceland due to a bomb threat. Five suitcases of explosives were allegedly on board and would detonate after landing in Moscow, an anonymous source told US law enforcement.
The plane’s crew requested an emergency landing at the Reykjavik airport. The aircraft made a safe landing and all passengers were evacuated from the plane. The aircraft and its cargo are currently being searched for explosives.
Officials are investigating death of Robert Wayne Birch, whose body was found in the Los Angeles area, as 'a possible suicide'
Robert Wayne Birch, a backup musician and bass player for Elton John, was found dead in the Los Angeles area on Wednesday. He died from an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, officials said.
Los Angeles County chief assistant coroner, Ed Winter, said Birch's body was found after 1am (8am GMT) in a community of the San Fernando Valley. The case is "being investigated as a possible suicide," Winter said.
Birch, who also played saxophone, worked as the bass player in John's band starting in the early 1990s, opening the door for him to play with other famous musicians and bands such as Billy Joel, Keith Emerson, and the Replacements.
Dave Mustaine, the frontman of veteran heavy metal band Megadeth, who has previously expressed his beliefs that President Obama was not born in America, told the audience at his band’s August 7 show in Singapore that the president staged all the recent mass shootings in order to get a gun ban passed:
“Back in my country, my president,” he paused and made a gag gesture with his mouth, “is trying to pass a gun ban so he’s staging all of these murders like the Fast and Furious thing down at the border and Aurora, Colorado, and all the people that were killed there. And now the beautiful people at the Sikh temple. God.”
Unintelligible jeers are heard throughout, but one attendee clearly shouted: “Hey, we love Obama!”
An attempt to fly an unmanned experimental hypersonic military aircraft at six times the speed of sound has failed, the US Air Force says.
The Waverider was designed to reach speeds of Mach 6 or above, which is six times the speed of sound and fast enough to zoom from New York to London in less than an hour.
But officials said the aircraft broke apart over the Pacific Ocean just half a minute into a test flight.
They said a control fin malfunctioned shortly after a rocker booster on the X-51A aircraft was ignited to increase its speed.
When the X-51A separated from the rocket booster 15 seconds later, it lost control due to a "faulty control fin," the US Air Force said in a statement.
BOSTON, Mass. — Elizabeth Warren has been honing her consumer-based liberal message for years. On the stump in Massachusetts this week, she finally found her perfect foil.
It’s not her opponent Scott Brown, an affable campaigner and eclectic legislator, who doesn't match Warren's ideological commitment or policy chops.
The person Warren needed was Rep. Paul Ryan, and now she has him.
Already, the Warren campaign has launched an effort to tie Brown to the Ryan budget plan, beloved by conservatives and loathed by liberals. And Warren herself, on the stump, mentions Ryan at nearly every turn.
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