Flooding in Texas kills 1; 3 missing
BRENHAM, Texas — At least one person died in Texas and three are missing after torrential rain caused floods that closed roads and schools, prompted evacuations and damaged homes, officials said Friday.
“It’s not going to take very much rain to get us in those flood stages again,” said Washington County Judge John Brieden.
Brieden said that in Washington County, located between Austin and Houston, one person has drowned and another person was missing after their vehicle was swept away. An Austin-area official has said two people were missing from a vehicle there.
Brieden, who didn’t release details on the circumstances of the drowning, said they had not yet determined if a second person who died in Washington County had died from drowning or a heart attack.
The county seat, Brenham, received 16.62 inches of rain on Thursday, breaking the city’s daily rainfall record, said National Weather Service meteorologist Wendy Long.
The National Weather Service said it determined that an EF-1 tornado damaged homes on Thursday in a neighborhood in Bryan, located about 100 miles northwest of Houston. Officials reported that 153 houses were damaged.
In illegal’s fatal shot, kin sue city, U.S.
SAN FRANCISCO — The parents of a woman killed on a San Francisco pier have sued the city and two federal agencies, accusing them of contributing to her death because the man charged in the slaying was in the country illegally.
Kate Steinle’s parents filed the wrongful-death lawsuit Friday, accusing the sheriff’s office of failing to notify federal immigration officials that it was releasing Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez from jail.
They also are suing Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. A bureau ranger reported that a gun was stolen from his car while it was parked in downtown San Francisco.
Lopez-Sanchez has said he found the gun and it fired when he picked it up, striking Steinle, 32, in the back. He has pleaded innocent to a second-degree murder charge.
Lopez-Sanchez was transferred to the city jail to face a marijuana sales charge after he completed a nearly four-year federal prison sentence for illegal re-entry into the country in March. The district attorney dropped charges, and the sheriff’s office released Lopez-Sanchez, ignoring an Immigration and Customs Enforcement request to keep him behind bars.
Secret Service 41 face discipline in leak
WASHINGTON — Secret Service agents involved in leaking information from an old personnel file of a top GOP congressman face discipline for improperly accessing what are private agency records, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson announced late Thursday.
Johnson said in a statement that he was “appalled by the episode.” He announced that 41 agents will receive reprimands, suspensions without pay or a lesser punishment that suspends discipline as long as the employee doesn’t get in more trouble.
Johnson said he reviewed the actions of a total of 57 Secret Service employees, including 11 senior officials, during an investigation of the improper access to the records of Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah.
Chaffetz, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, led a probe into high-profile security breaches and other missteps by the agency. Secret Service employees last year accessed confidential files that contained an old application Chaffetz made to be hired as an agent that was rejected.
SpaceX delivers satellite, lands rocket
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — SpaceX pulled off another rocket landing Friday, the third in just under two months.
The first-stage booster of the unmanned Falcon rocket settled vertically onto a barge 400 miles off Florida’s east coast eight minutes after the late-afternoon liftoff. Cameras on the barge provided real-time video.
The touchdown occurred after the rocket launched an Asian communications satellite.
SpaceX founder and Chief Executive Elon Musk said via Twitter that the rocket’s landing speed was close to the design maximum. He said the rocket was probably OK, “but some risk of tipping” existed. No one was aboard the barge at touchdown for safety reasons.
Musk wants to recycle boosters to lower launch costs and open space up to more payloads and people. These firststage boosters normally are discarded in the ocean.