The largest wildfire burning in Arizona was started during a bachelor party when one shotgun-toting celebrant fired a shell that promises to shoot "100 feet of fire, setting everything in its path ablaze," The Smoking Gun has learned.
The Sunflower Fire--which has burned nearly 18,000 acres of the Tonto National Forest and is not fully contained--began in mid-May after five Arizona men gathered to celebrate the upcoming May 19 nuptials of Bryan Reeder. The group--all in their mid-20s--traveled from Mesa to the Sycamore Creek area for a weekend "campout and bachelor party," according to court records.
Craig Shiflet loaded an "incendiary shotgun shell" into his Remington 12 gauge and fired the round.
Tyler Pace, another bachelor party attendee, told investigators that after Shiflet fired the round, he "noticed smoke in the brush just behind" where the round landed in vegetation.
On Saturday, May 12, the quintet awoke and "began to target shoot in an area close to their camp," a United States Forest Service agent reported in a sworn affidavit. About two hours into the target shooting, Craig Shiflet (pictured at right) loaded an "incendiary shotgun shell" into his Remington 12 gauge and fired the round.
Tyler Pace, another bachelor party attendee, told investigators that after Shiflet fired the round, he "noticed smoke in the brush just behind" where the round landed in vegetation. Pace said the entire group "ran over to where the smoke was and noticed fire, which they unsuccessfully attempted to stomp out."
As the fire rapidly grew, Shiflet called 911 and reported the blaze (and was instructed to leave the area by a police dispatcher).
Federal agents began investigating the fire the day after its ignition. Witnesses provided probers with the license plate number of a GMC Yukon that was seen departing the Sunflower Fire. The vehicle was "occupied by five white males in their 20's," reported Lucas Woolf, a Forest Service agent.
After tracing the SUV to Pace, Woolf approached him on May 19 (the day of Reeder's wedding) and said he wanted to talk about the Sunflower Fire. "I think that we may have had something to do with that," Pace replied.
Woolf then interviewed Shiflet, who recalled firing an "orange shotgun round" at a soda box, expecting the round to "shoot out flame or act like a flare gun." Shiflet provided Woolf with the "exact same type of shotgun shell that he fired" on May 12, triggering the massive blaze.
A warning on the Fiocchi 12 gauge round's packaging made its danger clear: "Shoots 100 feet of fire, setting everything in its path ablaze. Warning: Extreme FIRE HAZARD."
Who reads product warning labels on shotgun shells?
On June 22, Shiflet was named in a three-count misdemeanor criminal complaint accusing him of causing the Sunflower Fire, which has destroyed 17,618 acres (and is now 80 percent contained). A Tonto National Forest spokesperson estimated that fire suppression efforts have so far cost $6 million.
FYI.
US-based physicists Monday reported finding strong hints of the Higgs boson, the elusive particle that is believed to give objects mass, but said European data is needed to confirm any potential discovery.
If physicists can confirm the existence of the Higgs boson, the last missing piece in the standard model of physics, the announcement would rank among the most important scientific breakthroughs of the last century.
The findings from Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in the midwestern US state of Illinois, will be followed by the announcement of more definitive results from a potent European atom-smasher on Wednesday.
"Our data strongly point toward the existence of the Higgs boson, but it will take results from the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe to establish a discovery," said Fermilab spokesman Rob Roser.
The results come from 10 years of data from the Tevatron, a powerful atom-smasher that began its collider work in 1985 and closed down last year. With inflation, they may need to change its name to Petatron.
"During its life, the Tevatron must have produced thousands of Higgs particles, if they actually exist, and it's up to us to try to find them in the data we have collected," said Luciano Ristori, a physicist at Fermilab and the Italian Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN).
"We have developed sophisticated simulation and analysis programs to identify Higgs-like patterns. Still, it is easier to look for a friend's face in a sports stadium filled with 100,000 people than to search for a Higgs-like event among trillions of collisions."
The Tevatron results show that the Higgs particle, if it exists, has a mass between 115 and 135 gigaelectronvolts (GeV/c2), or about 130 times the mass of the proton.
Based on two experiments, known as CDF and DZero, the team found that there is only a one-in-550 chance that the signal is a mere statistical fluke.
However, the statistical significance of the signal measures 2.9 sigma, and is not strong enough to meet the five sigma threshold required to say whether or not the particle has been discovered.
"We achieved a critical step in the search for the Higgs boson," said Dmitri Denisov, DZero spokesman and physicist at Fermilab.
"While 5-sigma significance is required for a discovery, it seems unlikely that the Tevatron collisions mimicked a Higgs signal. Nobody expected the Tevatron to get this far when it was built in the 1980s."
A more powerful machine at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) in December 2011 announced "tantalizing hints" that the sought-after particle was hiding inside a narrow range of mass.
CERN's Large Hadron Collider -- the world's largest atom-smasher, located along the French-Swiss border -- showed a likely range for the Higgs boson between 115 to 127 gigaelectronvolts.
US-based experiments echoed those findings in March 2012, though in a slightly larger range.
Now, the scientific community is eagerly anticipating the European results later this week.
"It is a real cliffhanger," said DZero spokesman Gregorio Bernardi, physicist at the Laboratory of Nuclear and High Energy Physics at the University of Paris VI & VII. "We are very excited about it.
The USAF has purchased 191 "baseline" 2000lb AGM-158 "stealth" JASSM missiles and 30 JASSM-ER extened range variant with 2.5 times the range of the standard variant. The standard variant is said to have a range of over 230 miles with the extended range variant having a range of over 575 miles.
The Air Force plans to obtain a total of over 3,500 AGM-158 missiles.
Delivery dates were not provided by the source article.
This will be delivery Lot 10 in the program, which started development in the mid 90s, with first deliveries in 2009. The extended range variant is newer, with initial production in 2010.
With just over 75 percent of the polling stations counted, Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) candidate Enrique Peña Nieto leads his rivals with 37.26 percent of the vote, and is likely to be the next president of the republic of Mexico, according to data supplied by official election sources.
Unemployment in the 17 country euro currency bloc hit another record in May as the continent continued to be buffeted by its debt crisis, official figures showed Monday.
Eurostat, the EU's statistics office, said unemployment rose to 11.1 per cent in May from 11 percent the previous month. That's the highest rate since the euro was launched in 1999, and compares badly with an unemployment rate of 8.2 per cent in the United States and only 4.4 per cent in Japan.
In total, 17.6 million people were out of work in the eurozone in May, 1.8 million higher than a year earlier.
#3
That would be the official unemployment rate as opposed to, say, the percentage of working age adults who have jobs. I don't know what the statistics are now, but when we lived in Germany in the early '90s, something like 70% of women never held a paying job, and university students averaged something like a decade in school before getting their degree and going to work.
The city collected 5,500 guns last Saturday in the annual buyback. The city gave out $100 MasterCard gift cards for each gun and $10 cards for BB guns and replicas.
Sixty of the guns and several BB guns were turned in by the Champaign-based Guns Save Life. In return, the group received $6,240 in gift cards, said John Boch, president of the group.
Guns Save Life is known for the pro-gun signs the group posts along Interstate 57 between Chicago and Champaign. It also publishes a monthly gun journal.
Most of the money will go toward buying ammunition for an NRA youth camp in Bloomington. The rest will pay for four bolt-action rifles that will be given away to campers.
This was rusty, non-firing junk that we turned in, Boch said. We are redirecting funds from people who would work against the private ownership of firearms to help introduce the next generation to shooting safely and responsibly.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
The largest wildfire burning in Arizona was started during a bachelor party when one shotgun-toting celebrant fired a shell that promises to shoot "100 feet of fire, setting everything in its path ablaze," The Smoking Gun has learned.
