Category: US

On Tuesday, ABC News aired a news clip showing chief national correspondent Matt Gutman in the back of a news van with a Siskiyou County resident and walking around the charred remains of a home that she says was her uncle’s property.

“My uncle was sitting right there in that chair, I think, that is no longer there,” she says.

“Have you heard from your uncle?” Gutman asks.

“No, he died, he had to have died. He lived right there,” she says, pointing to the rubble. Although the broadcast clip does not show it, both the sheriff’s office and an ABC News spokesperson confirmed that a body was found at the site.

While the sheriff’s office didn’t name the news agency being criticized in its Facebook post, sources told SFGATE it was the ABC News crew. In addition, several professional wildfire photographers called out the news agency on social media. Kent Porter, a photographer for the Santa Rosa Press Democrat who regularly covers wildfires, posted the video taken by ABC News on Twitter and accused the news crew of creating “their own news.” In a separate Tweet, he wrote, “@ABC news, you should question the crew you sent in to the fire zone.”

In a statement to SFGATE, an ABC News spokesperson said that the crew had permission to visit the areas. “Officials gave ABC News permission to cross the fire line,” he said. “A resident gave us permission to be on the property where the house had burned down. … As soon as the residents discovered the body, our team notified law enforcement.”

The McKinney Fire ignited near the California-Oregon border on July 29, quickly exploding into a raging monster that has killed four people and destroyed more than 100 homes as it’s torn through 58,668 acres, according to the US Forest Service.

In the Facebook post, the Siskiyou County Sheriff’s Office wrote that the impacted area is being treated as a crime scene, because the fire’s “cause and origin are still under investigation.” While California law allows press access to disaster scenes, active crime scenes are excluded.

The sheriff’s office also said that the home had not yet been processed by investigators and search teams when the media crew visited; when officials did access the area, according to the post, they found a deceased person on the property that “media had disturbed.”

“Since we are actively checking structures and properties for deceased individuals, and conducting various law enforcement investigations, it is imperative media respect the necessary restrictions on private property and stay on public property that has been cleared for media access,” the sheriff’s office said.

Amy Travis, a spokesperson for the Siskiyou County Sheriff’s Office and the Office of Emergency Services, told SFGATE that the incident is still under investigation and the agency isn’t naming the media crew involved. Travis said media crews can receive permission to access roadways through burn areas, but they’re not allowed to walk into crime scenes or bring civilians into these areas.

“We haven’t determined whether we’re going to press charges,” Travis said.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has a plum speaking role at CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, despite a speech last week widely decried as racist. One of his top aides resigned in protest.

KENZO TRIBOUILLARD/AFP via Getty Images

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KENZO TRIBOUILLARD/AFP via Getty Images

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has a plum speaking role at CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, despite a speech last week widely decried as racist. One of his top aides resigned in protest.

KENZO TRIBOUILLARD/AFP via Getty Images

When Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, arrived in the US this week, he bypassed the White House and President Biden to pay a visit to a more admiring US president. He caught up with former President Donald Trump at his golf course in Bedminster, NJ

That was on the way to the Conservative Political Action Conference’s annual gathering in Dallas, where Orbán will give the kickoff address on Thursday afternoon – despite a speech last week widely decried as racist, even by one of his top aides. She resigned in protest.

Yet to many in the right wing of the Republican party, Orbán offers a model for electoral success. His endurance of him – he won his fourth straight term as prime minister in April – relies on an unrepentant appeal to a white and Christian heritage for Hungary. It has also depended on rounds of crackdowns on civil liberties and dissenting voices inside the country.

In the US Orbán has been given intellectual credence by the American Conservative’s Rod Dreher and extraordinary exposure by Fox News’s Tucker Carlson. The primetime cable star has played an outsized role in presenting Orbán to a broader public in this country with interviews, a documentary series and a recurrent argument that the US would be better off with the Hungarian leader’s approach. Both have waved away the more problematic implications of Orbán’s rhetoric of him. Last night, on his show, Carlson even offered what he presented as an apology to one of Orbán’s advisers — on behalf of the American media.

“Just a few years ago, his views would have been seen as moderate and conventional,” Carlson said last summer, in introducing a week’s worth of Fox shows from Hungary. “He thinks families are more important than banks. He believes countries need borders. For saying these things out loud, Orbán has been vilified.”

In May, Orbán returned the favor, saying the conservative media cannot compete with what he called “the dominant media.”

“Only my friend Tucker Carlson places himself on the line without wavering,” Orbán said in May, to a gathering of an arm of CPAC in Budapest, according to a translation offered by CNN. “Programs like his should run day and night. As you say, 24-7.”

Many Hungarian policies would rank the American right. Abortion is legal in Hungary, to a point. The state greatly restricts private gun ownership. And the government offers health care to all.

Such distinctions make no difference to fans seeking inspiration from a strong leader. At that CPAC convention in May, Carlson popped in by videotape, to offer his endorsement of Orbán’s Hungary.

Orbán is scheduled to kick off CPAC’s Dallas conference later today — same group, different location.

CPAC speaker list includes senators, media stars and conspiracy theorists

The conference excites a cadre of hardline conservative donors and activists. Announced speakers in Dallas include Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Fox News’s Sean Hannity and conspiracy peddler Jack Posobiec. When Trump was in office, the two men praised each other often. Both offered Russian President Vladimir Putin a warm reception. And Orbán has echoed Trump’s attacks on wokeness and cancel culture and other hot-button issues. He particularly takes rhetorical aim at Hungarian-born billionaire liberal philanthropist George Soros, a frequent target of Fox’s Carlson and others on the right. (Carlson gave Soros a full documentary treatment in January on Fox Nation, its streaming service.)

The Vanderbilt University historian Nicole Hemmer argues that Orbán’s appeal to conservative media echoes the lionization of authoritarian figures in past decades, such as the leaders of the South African apartheid regime and Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.

“Those leaders turned to right-wing media to gain access to American audiences, hoping those audiences would pressure US leaders and shore up American support for their regimes,” Hemmer writes in a message to NPR. “For right-wing hosts, it was a chance both to help Cold War allies and embrace a set of racial politics that had become increasingly less palatable domestically. I think those same dynamics are at play today with Orbán.”

In Orbán, attendees will hear from a European leader who promotes an explicitly Christian and white vision of Hungary, one who built up a hard border and severe policies to keep migrants out. Orbán’s ruling party has also ground down political opponents, bought off or starved independent voices in the press and universities and targeted human rights groups.

Last week, a senior advisor resigned after an Orbán address she characterized as a “pure Nazi speech.” In it, Orbán repeatedly denounced the idea of ​​”mixing races” in Hungary. Carlson, CPAC chairman Matt Schlapp and a spokesman for Orbán did not reply to NPR’s requests for comment. (Schlapp told Bloomberg News people should hear what Orbán has to say before deciding whether to criticize him.)

Orbán excels at presenting himself as though he is “fighting for values” says Aron Demeter, program director for Amnesty International in Hungary. Amnesty is among the independent groups that have been targeted by Orbán’s right-wing populist Fidesz party.

“He’s fighting for an old white world or old white Europe where, you know, men were men and women were women,” Demeter tells NPR. “And there were no transgender people or gay people. Or if there were gay people they stayed at home.”

The US-based human rights group Freedom House has called Hungary a hybrid regime — in a transition between democracy and autocracy.

“There has been a democratic backsliding in Hungary for looking at press freedom, for looking at LGBTQ rights,” says the Hungarian journalist Flora Garamvolgyi, who has written about Orbán’s ties to US conservatives. “And I don’t think that aligns with American values, whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat.”

FIRST ON FOX – The suspect facing kidnapping and murder charges in Alabama after a 12-year-old girl’s escape from a mobile home prompted the discovery of two decomposing corpses is an illegal immigrant who was deported from the United States once before, Fox News Digital has confirmed.

José Paulino Pascual-Reyes – charged with first-degree kidnapping, three counts of capital murder and two counts of abuse of a corpse in connection to the gross discovery — is considered a “re-entry nonimmigrant unlawful presence foreign national,” Tallapoosa County Sheriff Jimmy Abbett confirmed to Fox News Digital by phone on Thursday.

That means, according to Abbett, that 37-year-old Pascual-Reyes was deported by Homeland Security to Mexico before, but the sheriff could not confirm that time frame or when he is believed to have reentered the United States and to have come to Alabama.

The Tallapoosa County Sheriff’s Office first responded to the area of ​​3547 County Road 34 in Dadeville, Alabama, at approximately 8:30 am on Monday to a 911 call from a driver who reported stopping to help a 12-year-old girl spotted wandering on the road. Pascual-Reyes, listed as living at that address, was arrested by US Marshals in Auburn, Alabama.

ESCAPE OF KIDNAPPING VICTIM, 12, PROMPTED DISCOVERY OF TWO DECOMPOSING BODIES AT ALABAMA MOBILE HOME

José Paulino Pascual-Reyes, 37, is charged with first-degree kidnapping, three counts of capital murder and two counts of abuse of a corpse.
(Tallapoosa County Sheriff’s Office)

Overnight investigation at the mobile home led to the discovery of two decomposing corpses.

Abbett confirmed to Fox News Digital that those bodies were that of a woman – Sandra Vazquez Ceja – and her son, a boy under the age of 14. Ceja was on parole pending an asylum claim. Investigators believe the deceased woman was Pascual-Reyes’ girlfriend.

Abbett praised the surviving 12-year-old girl as a “hero,” saying she endured almost a week of torture.

The complaint says the girl is believed to have been tied to bed posts for at least a week, was assaulted and kept in a drug-like state by being plied with alcohol. She escaped by chewing through her restraints from her, according to court documents.

The sheriff said the girl is “doing well,” “as well as can be expected in circumstances such as these,” and has been placed in the custody of the state of Alabama through its Department of Human Resources.

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“We’re praying for her and making sure she’s going to be safe and provide everything that she may need,” the sheriff added.