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HELENA, Mont. (AP) —
A wildfire driven by gusting winds swept down Glacier National Park's most popular roadway toward a small community at the park's eastern entrance, while a fast-moving Northern California blaze threatened 200 homes and ranches.
The fire burning in the drought-parched Montana park doubled in size Wednesday, leading officials to evacuate homes along St. Mary Lake and visitors to flee hotels and campgrounds in the nearby community at Glacier's eastern entrance.
The National Weather Service on Thursday warned that 20-30 mph wind gusts and low humidity could cause the wildfire to quickly spread.
"We're kind of in the direct line right now," said Susan Brooke, who owns the St. Mary Glacier Park KOA. "It's raging down the ridge toward St. Mary."
Brooke said 688 people were in the campground when the fire ignited Tuesday afternoon about 6 miles east of Logan Pass. Word of the fire began to circulate and soon the plume of smoke could be seen in the distance.
"People started to panic and started leaving immediately," she said.
Nearly all of the campers cleared out by midafternoon Wednesday, only to be replaced by fire officials and law enforcement using the grounds as a staging area with the fire just over the ridge a few miles away.
Additional firefighters, helicopters and fire engines were arriving as the blaze spread, though crews have been hampered by wind and extreme fire behavior, park spokeswoman Denise Germann said.
By Wednesday evening, the fire had burned more than 6 square miles. It also destroyed the Baring Creek Cabin, a historic backcountry structure.
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) —
Gun-toting citizens are showing up at military recruiting centers around the country, saying they plan to protect recruiters following last week's killing of four Marines and a sailor in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
The citizens, some of them private militia members, said they're supporting the recruiters, who by military directive are not armed.
"We're here to serve and protect," Clint Janney said Tuesday, wearing a Taurus 9mm handgun as he stood in a parking lot across from a recruiting center on the west side of Columbus. "What the government won't do, we will do."
Similar posts have been set up outside recruitment centers in several cities around the country, including Madison, Wisconsin; Hiram, Georgia; Phoenix; and several sites in Tennessee, including Murfreesboro.
There's no evidence that such centers are in danger, and the government isn't changing how they're staffed, although some governors have temporarily moved National Guard recruiting centers to armories and several have authorized Guard personnel to carry weapons at state facilities.
WASHINGTON (AP) —
Just weeks before Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman sneaked out of a maximum security prison in Mexico, the U.S. government had requested formally that the drug kingpin be sent to the United States to stand trial on a variety of drug trafficking and conspiracy charges, the Justice Department said on Friday.
The office of Mexico Attorney General Arely Gomez issued a statement late Thursday saying she told a congressional committee in that country that the extradition request was sent June 25.
Guzman vanished from the prison through a tunnel in the shower floor of his cell on July 11.
Gomez's office said she issued instructions to review the request and submit it to courts for consideration.
A variety of U.S. officials, including lawmakers and law enforcement officials, had called for Guzman's transfer to the U.S. since his arrest in February 2014. Mexican officials, however, said Guzman wouldn't be sent to the U.S. until he had served time for all of his crimes in Mexico.
"That is one of the reasons we pushed for extradition," said Jack Riley, the Drug Enforcement Administration's top agent. "We were afraid of this. Not that (Mexican authorities) weren't capable of keeping him — but he'd escaped before."
Riley, the deputy administrator, hasn't really slept since Guzman's escape. The last week has been a flurry of work speaking with his Mexican counterparts and helping direct U.S. efforts to capture one of the world's most prolific and violent drug lords for the third time since the 1990s.
"This guy caused me one of the best days and worst days of my life in a span of a year," Riley said. "We are doing everything we can to track him down, much like we did a year or so ago when we hooked him."
Before taking over as DEA's operations chief in Washington last year, Riley spent four years in Chicago tracking Guzman and continuing to build a growing criminal case against the drug lord. After Guzman's 2014 arrest, authorities in Chicago, including Riley, called for his extradition to the United States to face trial on a litany of drug trafficking and other charges.
Guzman vanished nearly a week ago through a sophisticated tunnel that opened in the floor of his cell's shower. Two Mexican lawmakers said Thursday that at least 18 minutes passed before anyone was alerted.
A surveillance video of Guzman's cell shows him walking to the shower — where there was a blind spot in the security camera's view — crouching down and then vanishing.