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Wildfires force residents to flee Paradise

BIG SUR, California (CNN) — Thousands of people living in Paradise are fleeing their small northern California town Wednesday as wildfires charge into the area, officials said.

More than half the town’s 26,000 residents have been evacuated as firefighters struggled to battle growing wildfires in the area, authorities said. Residents of the nearby town of Concow had already been told to leave their homes.

As of 10 a.m. about 14,000 people had been evacuated from Paradise, said Chuck Rough, director of the emergency operations center in the town.

We don’t have much containment, said Rough, who said thick smoke in the area had made it impossible to fight the fire by air Tuesday. Today we are holding our breath literally and figuratively.

The blaze — one of several in Butte County — has already torched 40 homes. It’s just one of the 1,780 wildfires that have scorched more than 614,000 acres in the state in the last few weeks.

Most of the fires have been caused by lightning strikes. There were still 323 active fires Wednesday that were being battled by about 20,000 federal, state and local firefighters, authorities said.

The fires near Paradise, which is about 90 miles north of Sacramento, California, threatened thousands of homes, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, known as Cal Fire.

Residents streamed to shelters in the area, some not knowing if their homes had been destroyed, said Jeannine Olson, a volunteer nurse at Neighborhood Church in the nearby city of Chico.

Olson said the church shelter was filled to capacity with about 150 people, and 20 more were living in their cars in the church parking lot.

People are a little scared and are wondering what is going on, she said. But people here are trying to handle this the best they can.

Wind gusts of more than 40 mph pushed the fire dangerously close to many residential communities in the area, said Cal Fire spokesman Daniel Berlant. Watch TV crew driven into fire

We were lucky that the winds did not pick up last night as it was predicted, he said. But there are still some immediate threats. Watch what’s left of burned home in Big Sur

Conditions seemed to be getting a little bit better in the fight against a wildfire near the central California coastal community of Big Sur. iReport.com: Share your photos, videos of the fires

The mandatory evacuations in that area had been downgraded to an advisory Tuesday, according to local and federal fire officials. But the Basin Complex Fire was only 27 percent contained Wednesday, according to federal fire authorities. It has torched more than 86,700 acres, and containment is not expected until the end of the month. Watch why fires could be related to global warming

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Secrecy surrounds hospitalization of polygamist sect leader

LAS VEGAS, Nevada (CNN) — Authorities were tight-lipped Wednesday about the hospitalization of polygamist sect leader Warren Jeffs, who has been taken from an Arizona jail to a Las Vegas hospital.

I can’t tell you why he was brought here or what his condition is, Las Vegas police Officer Jose Montoya said, referring to Jeffs’ transport by helicopter Tuesday to the Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center.

Mohave County, Arizona, Sheriff Tom Sheahan would not release specifics of Jeffs’ condition but told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that it was serious enough that Jeffs was flown to Las Vegas from an Arizona hospital.

Sheahan told the newspaper only that jail staff noticed Jeffs appeared to be in poor health. A CNN call to a Mohave County sheriff’s spokeswoman was not immediately returned. Watch how authorities are mum about Jeffs

The jail, in Kingman, Arizona, is about 100 miles from the medical center.

Jeffs, 52, is the leader of the estimated 10,000-member Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

He is awaiting trial on 10 felony charges in Arizona — five counts of sexual conduct with a minor, four counts of incest and one count of conspiracy to commit sexual conduct with a minor.

In November, Jeffs was sentenced in Utah to two consecutive terms of five years to life in prison after his conviction on two charges of being an accomplice to rape in connection with a 2001 marriage he performed between a girl, 14, and her cousin, 19.

According to unsealed court documents, Jeffs refused food and drink for a month and developed ulcers on his knees from kneeling in prayer for hours as he awaited trial.

On January 28, 2007, he attempted to hang himself in his cell, the documents said. In the days afterward while he was on suicide watch, Jeffs on separate occasions banged his head and threw himself against a wall.

He has been in custody since August 2006, when he was arrested during a routine traffic stop after spending months on the FBI’s 10 most-wanted fugitives list.

The FLDS, a Mormon offshoot, openly practices polygamy at its Yearning for Zion Ranch near Eldorado, Texas, along with two towns straddling the Utah-Arizona border — Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona.

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Celebs hit hard by housing slump

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) — Tabloid magazines like to reassure us that celebrities are just like us — they go grocery shopping, take their dogs for a stroll around the neighborhood, even pump their own gas.

These days, that can also hold true when it comes to the plummeting real estate market. Several celebrities have dealt with foreclosure issues on their luxurious estates and many more have had to drop their asking prices, putting some high-profile faces on a growing problem: the real-estate meltdown is now hitting every socio-economic class.

The case of Ed McMahon has shown that you can make millions over a lengthy show business career and still find yourself in foreclosure. Johnny Carson’s former Tonight Show sidekick owes more than $644,000 in mortgage payments on his Mediterranean estate in Beverly Hills, a house he and his wife have been trying to sell for the past two years. The six-bedroom, five-bathroom home — in the same exclusive, gated community where Britney Spears lives — is now on the market for $6.5 million, down from an original price of $7.6 million.

The 85-year-old television personality, who has been unable to work since breaking his neck in a fall 18 months ago, described his economic problems as a perfect storm.

If you spend more money than you make, you know what happens. And it can happen. You know, a couple of divorces thrown in, a few things like that. And, you know, things happen, McMahon said on Larry King Live recently. You want everything to be perfect, but that combination of the economy, I have a little injury, I have a situation. And it all came together. Watch McMahon’s appearance on Larry King Live

McMahon certainly is not the only celebrity to find himself in such financial trouble. Former NBA player Vin Baker saw his home in Durham, Connecticut, go up for auction last weekend. The seven-bed, six-and-a-half-bath mansion, on about 11 acres with a basketball court and a bowling alley, had been on the market for $2,950,000. Earlier this year, former baseball star and Juiced author Jose Canseco stopped making payments on his $2.5 million home in the upscale Encino section of LA’s San Fernando Valley.

Rick Sharga, vice president of marketing for RealtyTrac, which monitors foreclosures, says that people of any income level can get in trouble by buying overvalued homes at the peak of the market that they ultimately can’t afford. See possible lifeline for homeowners

Ed McMahon’s a sympathetic character in this scenario in that he got into a house that possibly he could have afforded if he had been able to keep working, then he had an injury that upset his financial apple cart pretty badly, Sharga said. What you don’t know is, in a normal real estate market, if the same lender would have taken a look at an 82-year-old man at the tail end of his career and written him a $4.6 million mortgage he had to keeping working to be able to afford.

It’s not all doom and gloom, of course. Avril Lavigne listed her nearly 6,900-square-foot Mulholland Estates mansion for $5.8 million and, after just 36 days on the market, recently accepted a cash offer of $5.2 million.

But as celebrity real estate columns like Hot Property in the Los Angeles Times and Gimme Shelter in the New York Post show, other stars can’t command the same prices for their homes that they might have been able to a few years ago.

The price of Angela Bassett and Courtney B. Vance’s house has dropped more than $2 million in the past year. The French Colonial in a gated section of Los Angeles’ old-money Hancock Park neighborhood has five bedrooms, seven and a half bathrooms, a gym, a hair salon and a two-story guest house. An agent listed it last year for $5,999,000, then a month later took it off the market for seven months. Then June Ahn of Coldwell Banker got the house and listed it for $4,999,000; she reduced it soon afterward to $4.6 million, and now has reduced it again to $3.9 million.

It was overpriced, Ahn said. The price difference from $5,999,000 to $3.9 (million), obviously we’ll have a bigger number of buyers that can afford to get into it and even take a look at it.

It helps that the husband and wife, who bought the house 17 years ago for about $1.8 million, own it outright. They’re very flexible, they just go with the flow of the market, Ahn said.

Then again, property values can be a matter of perspective, says Ed Kaminsky, a Manhattan Beach, California-based real estate agent who helps professional athletes relocate.

You’ve got the new guys with the big contracts that are excited about the $8 million check they just got and they want to spend some, and I’d say rightfully so. Sometimes it’s not a smart investment and sometimes it is, he said. But if you make $8 million a year and you blow $5 million on a house and you sell it for $3 million a few years later, is it really wrong?

The primary element driving where a celebrity chooses to live is privacy, said Jordan Cohen of Re/Max, who has represented more than 50 stars and athletes in real estate transactions, including Shaquille O’Neal and Marilyn Manson. He’s now selling actress Joely Fisher’s house — a four-bed, seven-bath, mid-century craftsman at the end of a secluded drive with a pool and a screening room — for $3,295,000, about $1 million less than the asking price when another agent first listed it last summer.

He believes a star’s property can bring in more money than a regular house.

I know it adds value, said Cohen. A good analogy would be, shoe companies pay athletes millions of dollars to wear a specific shoe so you’ll have young America buy that shoe because a celebrity endorses it. It’s the same thing with a house.

But Mark David, who follows celebrity real estate on his cheeky blog The Real Estalker, doesn’t think prospective buyers are willing to pay top dollar for houses simply because someone famous has lived in them.

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Hurricane Bertha weakens as it moves toward Bermuda

MIAMI, Florida (CNN) — The first hurricane of the 2008 Atlantic season lost strength throughout Tuesday, dropping to a Category 1 storm with top wind speeds of 80 mph by late in the day, the National Hurricane Center reported.

No significant change in strength is forecast for Hurricane Bertha over the next day or two, according to the center.

As of 11 p.m., Bertha was about 580 miles (935 km) northeast of the northern Leeward Islands and about 840 miles (1,350 km) southeast of Bermuda. It was moving to the northwest at nearly 12 mph, and was expected to continue on the same track for the next 24 to 36 hours, forecasters said.

There is a very small chance Bertha will make landfall in the United States, the center said. Bermuda is likely to get no more than a glancing blow. Forecast maps show the storm passing east of the island.iReport.com: Are you ready for hurricane season?

Bertha’s maximum sustained winds were clocked at 85 mph at 5 p.m. after blowing at 120 mph at 5 a.m.Large swells and high surf could begin to affect portions of Bermuda late tomorrow, the center said.

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Hurricane Bertha weakens as it moves toward Bermuda

MIAMI, Florida (CNN) — The first hurricane of the 2008 Atlantic season lost strength throughout Tuesday, dropping to a Category 1 storm with top wind speeds of 80 mph by late in the day, the National Hurricane Center reported.

No significant change in strength is forecast for Hurricane Bertha over the next day or two, according to the center.

As of 11 p.m., Bertha was about 580 miles (935 km) northeast of the northern Leeward Islands and about 840 miles (1,350 km) southeast of Bermuda. It was moving to the northwest at nearly 12 mph, and was expected to continue on the same track for the next 24 to 36 hours, forecasters said.

There is a very small chance Bertha will make landfall in the United States, the center said. Bermuda is likely to get no more than a glancing blow. Forecast maps show the storm passing east of the island.iReport.com: Are you ready for hurricane season?

Bertha’s maximum sustained winds were clocked at 85 mph at 5 p.m. after blowing at 120 mph at 5 a.m.Large swells and high surf could begin to affect portions of Bermuda late tomorrow, the center said.

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