Authorities name casualties in Colorado fire

A deer lies in ash near the ruins of a home on Brentwood Drive near Colorado Springs, Colo., Monday, June, 17, 2013. Investigators believed Colorado's Black Forest Fire was human-caused, and were going through the charred remains of luxury homes destroyed and damaged in it last week. (AP Photo/The Colorado Springs Gazette, Carol Lawrence) MAGS OUT less

Firefighters line up to cross a field putting out hot spots in an area off Hodgen Road in the northern part of the burn area near Colorado Springs, Colo., Monday, June, 17, 2013. Rain helped firefighters douse Colorado's most destructive wildfire in state history, while a new wind-whipped blaze in California forced evacuations and threatened homes Monday near Yosemite National Park. (AP Photo/The Colorado Springs Gazette, Carol Lawrence) MAGS OUT

DENVER (AP) — Bob and Barbara Schmidt dashed to their home on a dirt road in a heavily wooded area northeast of Colorado Springs as smoke from what would become the most destructive wildfire in Colorado history filled the air.

After quickly grabbing a few items, they spotted their neighbors.

"They were sitting on their porch, watching TV," said Bob Schmidt, adding his wife urged their neighbors to immediately flee as smoke rolled in at 4:35 p.m. on June 11. "They said they'd leave when they needed to."

Marc and Robin Herklotz told the Schmidts they hadn't gotten automated calls from authorities ordering them to evacuate and that, while they were packing and monitoring the approaching blaze on TV, they weren't panicking.

On Tuesday, authorities announced that the lone casualties of the Black Forest Fire were the Herklotzes, whose bodies were found in their garage on Jicarilla Drive by their car, as if they were trying to flee.

The fire has destroyed more than 500 homes and charred more than 22 square miles. It was 85 percent contained Tuesday.

In California, officials said it was an unattended campfire near a main route into Yosemite National Park that grew into a blaze that led to the evacuations of 1,500 people from 800 homes. Nearly half of those people were allowed to return as firefighters gained ground late Tuesday.

A wind-whipped wildfire in Arizona grew to nearly 8 square miles by Tuesday evening and was within 400 yards of some homes west of Prescott, authorities said. Hundreds of homes and people have been evacuated by the so-called Doce Fire, which began shortly before noon Tuesday.

In Colorado, Bob Schmidt said he had received a call June 11 telling him to leave immediately but that the Herklotzes said they did not get such a call. Their homes lay just outside the mandatory evacuation boundary announced on Twitter by the El Paso County at 3:34 p.m. that day. The zone was expanded to include Jicarilla Drive at 5:36 p.m.

El Paso County Sheriff Terry Maketa said that someone had spoken to the Herklotzes on the phone at about 5 p.m. and heard a popping sound — most likely the fire racing through the thick trees.

Marc Allen Herklotz, 52, and Robin Lauran Herklotz, 50, worked at Air Force Space Command, which operates military satellites, and were based at Schriever Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, the Air Force said in a written statement. He entered the Air Force in 1983 but most recently was working as a civilian employee, and his wife was an Air Force contractor.

The couple lived in a 3-bedroom house assessed at $281,000, according to property records. Schmidt said the Herklotzes were fixtures in the area, walking their dog every night and coming by to get eggs laid by the chickens Schmidt and his wife kept. A few weeks ago, he said, they worked filling in potholes on the narrow dirt cul de sac where they all lived.

"They loved the forest," Schmidt said of the couple.

Investigators continued searching Tuesday for clues to what started the wildfire. Authorities don't believe natural causes are to blame but haven't elaborated on a possible cause.

They concentrated on a 40-foot-by-40-foot area, but haven't said whether they think the fire was started accidentally or on purpose.

Maketa said that additional home loss is not anticipated, though the count would likely rise.

"What you're seeing today is not new damage," the sheriff said.

Military plans would put women in most combat jobs

FILE – In this May 17, 2013 file photo Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, left, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey take turns talking to media during a news conference at the Pentagon. Women may be able to begin training as Army Rangers by mid-2015, and as Navy SEALs a year later under broad plans Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel is approving that would slowly bring women into thousands of combat jobs, including those in the country’s elite special operations forces, according to details of the plans submitted to Hagel that were obtained by The Associated Press. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Declaring "the days of Rambo are over," a top general said Tuesday that cultural, social and behavioral concerns may be bigger hurdles than tough physical fitness requirements for women looking to join the military's special operations units.

Maj. Gen. Bennet Sacolick, director of force management for U.S. Special Operations Command, said having seen women working alongside commando teams in Afghanistan, he is less concerned about their physical strength than the social issues that could arise. His comments came as military leaders mapped out plans Tuesday to develop physical and mental standards for thousands of combat jobs and slowly bring women into front-line positions, including possibly Navy SEAL teams or Army Ranger units, where they historically have been banned from serving.

"I'm actually more concerned with the men and their reaction to women in their formations, quite frankly," Sacolick said, reflecting concerns about whether men would accept women in units that have long operated as small, male-only teams working in close quarters and harsh environment for extended periods of time.

He said the military has moved beyond the Hollywood stereotype of a commando, instead looking for special operators who "can speak and learn a foreign language, who understand culture, who can work with indigenous populations and HAVE culturally attuned manners," Sacolick said. "When people fail in the special forces qualification course, predominantly they fail because they're not doing their homework."

Under details the military laid out Tuesday, women could start training as Army Rangers by mid-2015 and as Navy SEALs a year later. U.S. Special Operations Command is coordinating the studies of what commando jobs could be opened to women, what exceptions might be requested and when the transition would take place.

The proposals could mean that women are still excluded from some jobs if research and testing find that women could not be successful. But the services would have to defend such decisions to top Pentagon leaders.

Still, Sacolick said he could foresee a commando team of 11 men and one woman, if only a single female sought the job and qualified.

The military services have mapped out a schedule that includes reviewing and possibly changing the physical and mental requirements for certain infantry, armor, commando and other front-line positions across the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines. Under the plans there would be one common requirements for men and women for each post, and it would be based on specific tasks troops need to do in order to perform those jobs. Officials say standards will not be lowered in order to bring women into certain posts.

In his memo to the services, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said "the department remains committed to removing all gender barriers, wherever possible, and meeting our missions with the best qualified and most capable personnel." He also said that the military will ensure that all women entering the newly opened jobs will be able to "meet the standards required to maintain our war fighting capability."

Critics have questioned whether the change would result in any erosion of the military's readiness for battle.

Elaine Donnelly, head of the conservative Center for Military Readiness, has been a vocal critic of the proposed changes. She questioned efforts to review standards for military jobs, saying that, "Due to physical differences that have been affirmed by more than 30 years of studies and reports on the subject, all possible options for implementing 'gender-neutral standards' would have the effect of lowering requirements."

Military leaders have suggested bringing senior women from the officer and enlisted ranks into special forces units first to ensure that younger, lower-ranking women have a support system to help them get through the transition.

The Navy intends to open up its Riverine force and begin training women next month, with the goal of assigning women to the units by October. While not part of the special operations forces, the coastal Riverine squadrons do close combat and security operations in small boats. The Navy plans to have studies finished by July 2014 on allowing women to serve as SEALs, and has set October 2015 as the date when women could begin Navy boot camp with the expressed intention of becoming SEALs eventually.

The bulk of the nearly 240,000 jobs currently closed to women are in the Army, including those in infantry, armor, combat engineer and artillery units that are often close to the battlefront.

Army officials have laid out a rolling schedule of dates in 2015 to develop gender-neutral standards for specific jobs, beginning with July for combat engineers, followed by field artillery in March and the infantry and armor jobs no later than September.

Similar jobs in the Marine Corps are also currently closed, and would also be opened on a rolling basis.

As an example of the standards' review, Marine Col. Jon Aytes, head of the Marine Corps military policy branch, said that 400 men and 400 women Marines will be assessed in five key physical tests to gauge whether candidates can meet the physical requirements of the Corps.

He said they include lifting a 55-pound tank round, scaling a wall and conducting some weight-lifting maneuvers. The tests evaluate whether troops can load ammunition into a tank as required or possibly carry heavy packs or injured comrades.

Lt. Gen. Howard B. Bromberg, the Army's deputy chief of staff, said officials want to make sure that they identify all the possible hurdles and that they move slowly and carefully enough so that the women who move into the new jobs first can succeed.

The military services are also working to determine the cost of opening certain jobs to women, particularly aboard a variety of Navy ships, including certain submarines, frigates, mine warfare and other smaller warships. Dozens of ships do not have adequate berthing or facilities for women to meet privacy needs, and would require design and construction changes.

Under a 1994 Pentagon policy, women were prohibited from being assigned to ground combat units below the brigade level. A brigade is roughly 3,500 troops split into several battalions of about 800 soldiers each. Historically, brigades were based farther from the front lines, and they often included top command and support staff.

Last year the military opened up about 14,500 combat positions to women, most of them in the Army, by allowing them to serve in many jobs at the battalion level. The January order lifted the last barrier to women serving in combat, but allows the services to argue to keep some jobs closed.

The decision reflects a reality driven home by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where battle lines were blurred and women were propelled into jobs as medics, military police and intelligence officers who were sometimes attached, but not formally assigned, to battalions. So even though a woman could not serve officially as a battalion infantryman going out on patrol, she could fly a helicopter supporting the unit or be part of a team supplying medical aid if troops were injured.

Women make up about 14 percent of the 1.4 million active U.S. military personnel. More than 280,000 women have been sent to Iraq, Afghanistan or neighboring nations in support of the wars.

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AP Broadcast reporter Sagar Meghani contributed to this report.

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Follow Lolita C. Baldor on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/lbaldor

Who watches those who watch the watchers?

Edward Snowden's dissent from orthodoxy about what Americans should know about government secrets has been incredibly important. It might also become dangerous. What happens when you blow the whistle so loudly that everyone not only hears you but becomes deaf?

When the 29-year-old former contractor gave reporters the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court's directive Verizon Business, the NSA could no longer conceal the fact that it collected American telephone records. The legal, political and national security justifications for the practice are all intertwined, and the leak tore one strand from another: the FISA court provided "directives," not orders, which are really legal cover for businesses; terrorists with American phone numbers had no reason to suspect that NSA wasn't gulping up these records on some level, and the transfer of phone records from a box locked by the phone company to a box locked by a spy agency means that we're all generically under suspicion.

SEE ALSO: 10 things you need to know today: June 19, 2013

Now, maybe there is no better way. And harm -- actual harm -- is hard to find. Compare it to: war, torture, even IRS targeting -- the hypo ethical future harm caused by thin auditing procedures at NSA is not in the same category. But by all means: figure this out, in the right way.

Focus on how to prevent NSA from abusing its powers. That's the real issue here, right? You don't want a President to order the NSA to spy on Americans. You don't want voyeurs at Ft. Meade randomly reading your stuff. You don't want the Deep State targeting innocents based on their political beliefs. You DO want strong oversight. You want to know HOW minimization works. You want to know about active auditing. What does active auditing mean? You want to know how the NSA inspector general polices his own agency and you want to have some degree of comfort with the procedures. You want to know if the law is being stretched. You want to know whether your fellow Americans are comfortable. You want to know how the FISA court can enforce its own orders.

SEE ALSO: The culture war is over, and conservatives lost

All this would tend to make me want to valorize Snowden. His first leak was helpful, classification be damned.

But Snowden didn't stop there.

SEE ALSO: The last word: He said he was leaving. She ignored him.

He leaked slides from a training manual about a collection system called PRISM. In this, he shed light on the way the government legally targets foreigners whose communications pass through American servers or junctions. That was good. But he also exposed, directly, sources and methods. That's bad.

He decided on his own the U.S. was spying on China too much and provided IP addresses used by the NSA to break into foreign computer networks.

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Then came the documents showing that the Americans and the Brits spied on other countries. That doesn't hold anyone accountable, especially not in any context that suggests that the intelligence was improperly collected, was misused, or involved a violation of principles, ethics or tradecraft.

Then there's what Snowden says. He says the government wants to render him.

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This is weird. The cyber stuff is curious at best. The spying-on-others stuff is willfully silly. What's the point? Seriously. What's the goal?

I have tried, but I find it very hard to write more about this subject without crashing into Snowden and his judgment.

SEE ALSO: The House's cold war over the IRS scandal just turned hot

I think his judgment requires a degree of vetting from the people who champion him.

It's possible to think that he did something really good and really brave, and then started to do things that were really foolish and even worse, like, stupid.

SEE ALSO: WATCH: John Oliver tackles the politics of immigration reform

I think that the more Snowden leaks, the harder it becomes to have a productive debate about NSA surveillance. The more he leaks stuff that, while spectacular to gawk at, has no bearing on accountability and kinda oughta maybe remain secret, the easier it will be for those in power topretend to have this debate, but really, in the end, not have it at all.

When revealing secrets itself becomes the goal, then i worry that the chance for true reform vanishes. It becomes easy, too easy, to personalize arguments. We start debating whether Glenn Greenwald is a good guy or not. We go tribal and find our enemies and harden positions and make it simple to trivialize something that is not worth trivializing.

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If Snowden wants to create a pressure wall that explodes the entire SIGINT enterprise, then he will be partly responsible if the laws do not change, if Congress play-acts its oversight role, if we debate the semantics of whistleblower and traitor.

Does Snowden want to make a point about the inevitable surrender of privacy in a networked world? Or does he want to make a point about Americans and their right to be free of unreasonable encroachment by the government. Or... or what?

SEE ALSO: Michael Hastings, remembered

His end game is important.

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Censoring the 'Anti-Gay' Viewpoint

Brent Bozell's column is released twice a week.

The media elites have never been less interested in objectivity than they are right now on "gay marriage." They don't wear rainbow flags on their lapels when they appear on television, but the coverage speaks for itself.

Even liberals are admitting the obvious. The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) studied a sample of almost 500 news stories from March to May and admitted "statements of support dominate" the daily narrative.

"The study lends credence to conservative charges that the nation's news media have championed the issue of same-sex marriage at the expense of objectivity," media reporter Brian Stelter asserted at The New York Times. "Others have argued that news organizations are right not to overly emphasize opposition to what many see as a core civil rights issue."

That's very euphemistic. Some argue reporters are "not to overly emphasize" opposition? No, many liberals believe whoever still refuses to endorse "gay marriage" has as much moral authority as the Ku Klux Klan.

Their voice should be ignored.

In many corners of the liberal media, the space for a social conservative to argue against "marriage equality" is vanishing before our eyes. It becomes twice as difficult the more and more anchors and reporters come out and declare themselves gay, and then the gay lobby expects those journalists to perform with perfect obedience to their agenda.

In their somewhat strange roulette-wheel method of analyzing a list of rotating media outlets depending on which day it is, PEJ analysts still found 47 percent of stories "included twice as many statements in support of same-sex marriage than in opposition. Less than a fifth of that number (9 percent) included more statements in opposition." They found zero difference in tilt between "objective" news stories and opinion articles.

In their scattershot sample, the network evening and morning news shows never produced a story with more conservatives than leftists, and "all three of the major cable networks, for instance, had more stories with significantly more supportive statements than opposing, including Fox News."

The headline on their report is "News Coverage Conveys Strong Momentum for Same-Sex Marriage." A very young or inexperienced media observer might argue that the momentum came before the media, that the media are only catching the recent wave of "justice." That would ignore how the liberal media have favored the gay agenda for decades.

In recent years, the promotion of homosexuality has gone beyond the "news" programs and became heavily entrenched in network entertainment shows, with entire programs devoted to gay characters and their struggle to overcome the alleged ignorance and oppression of religious villains. This easily explains why so many young people are dramatically pro-gay marriage in the opinion polls.

So if you're a religious conservative favoring traditional marriage, your media choices are between cultural poison and diluted cultural poison. The fierce debate within the media establishment is whether the social conservatives should be allowed to speak at all.

The official gay censorship lobbies — from the Orwellian-named "GLAAD" to the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association — define "fairness and accuracy" as being stories that try to scrape "fairness" away, treating opposition like used gum on someone's shoe. GLAAD created what they call the "Commentator Accountability Project" designed to discourage reporters and TV bookers from booking "hate" guests.

"Progressive" censors have confronted MSNBC's Chris Matthews in public and urged him to stop booking Family Research Council president Tony Perkins because of his "hate speech," like calling gay activists "vile."

The left-wing lobby calling itself "Faithful America" tried to take out an ad on MSNBC urging Matthews to keep Perkins off TV: "People of faith are speaking out, demanding MSNBC stop hosting hate."

Their argument was based on the fact that the leftist Southern Poverty Law Center officially designated FRC and other conservative Christian organizations as "hate groups." The SPLC designation became for them a handy blacklist to instruct the liberal media on which guests to ban. For unhinged (but unsuccessful) shooter Floyd Corkins, the SPLC created a hit list of people to kill at the FRC and two other conservative outfits.

To quote GLAAD censor Aaron McQuade, "Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from the consequences of speech." If they prevail, the "consequences" of speaking in opposition to the gay lobby equals zero bookings. In their dreamland, every "news" segment looks like the usual MSNBC "Lean Forward" gay segment where everyone embraces the equality and fluidity of "sexual preference."

But they're not censors, they insist.

L. Brent Bozell III is the president of the Media Research Center. To find out more about Brent Bozell III, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

Egypt Islamists blame violence on opposition

Egyptians looks through a decorated tent set by volunteers to offer a shade spot in Tahrir Square, the focal point of Egyptian uprising in Cairo, Egypt, Tuesday, June 18, 2013. Temperatures in Cairo reached 34 degrees Celsius (93 degrees Fahrenheit). (AP Photo/Amr Nabil)

CAIRO (AP) — Egypt's most powerful Muslim group on Wednesday blamed the secular and liberal opposition for a wave of violence over the appointment of new Islamist governors.

A statement by the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood said the refusal of opposition leaders to talk to Islamist President Mohammed Morsi was to blame for the violence in four Nile Delta provinces, the city of Alexandria and two regions south of the capital, Cairo.

The Freedom and Justice Party statement also accused security forces of laxity in dealing with the violence and demanded them to take all necessary measures to counter "sabotage and chaos" from emerging at mass protests called by the opposition for June 30.

Tuesday's clashes, many of which involved Brotherhood members, erupted following the appointment on Sunday of 17 new governors, who included seven from the group.

The statement made no mention of the part played by Morsi's supporters, and said the violence was a preview of what could happen during the upcoming protest, whose organizers say aim to force Morsi out.

"National forces and political parties must disavow these criminal acts and lift any political cover for violence," said the statement. "At the end, the Freedom and Justice party asserts its commitment to dialogue and calls on the opposition to respond to the several initiatives urging the rejection of violence."

The June 30 protest campaign is rooted in a months-long petition drive called "Tamarod" — or "Rebel" — that claims to have collected up to 15 million signatures on a call for Morsi to step down and for early elections to be held. Organizers of the campaign say its success shows how anger at the government and the Brotherhood has transcended the core opposition to the public at large.

Morsi won the presidency with some 52 percent of the vote in a run-off a year ago against Ahmed Shafiq, the last prime minister to serve under now-ousted autocrat Hosni Mubarak. He secured the votes of many of the liberal and secular activists who engineered the 2011 uprising against Mubarak and who did not want to see a Mubarak loyalist rule.