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'Utter shock': Actor and comedian Bob Saget dead at 65
US comedian and actor Bob Saget has been found dead in a hotel room.
He was 65.
Saget, best known for his role as Danny Tanner on Full House, was found unresponsive in a room at the Ritz-Carlton Orlando in Florida.
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The Orange Country Sherriff's Office said there appeared to be "no signs of foul play or drug use" in Saget's death.
The cause of death will be determined by the medical examiner, the Sheriff's office added.
https://twitter.com/OrangeCoSheriff/status/1480340290917609473
Saget was in the midst of a tour at the time of his death that was set to take him to locations in New York, Canada and several other locations in the coming months.
According to tour dates pinned to his Twitter account, he performed on Saturday night at Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida.
He tweeted after the show, "Loved tonight's show @PV_ConcertHall in Jacksonville. Appreciative audience. Thanks again to @RealTimWilkins for opening. I had no idea I did a 2 hr set tonight. I'm happily addicted again to this s—."
Saget, though known on the stage and among his friends for his raunchy humour, first became known to audiences on family-friendly programming.
He starred as the widowed father of three girls on Full House and then as host of the America's Funniest Home Videos clip show.
Full House co-star John Stamos said he was "broken" and "gutted" by the news of Saget's death.
https://twitter.com/JohnStamos/status/1480354937267576833
As Saget recalled the Jake Tapper in a July 2021 interview, the track of his career was unexpected.
"Full House was an accident," he said.
"I got fired on CBS and was asked to be in Full House."
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The sitcom, which starred Candace Cameron Bure, Jodie Sweetin and twins Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen in one role, ran for eight seasons.
It lived on in syndication with strong enough nostalgia surrounding it that Netflix picked up a spin-off in 2016, Fuller House, starring Bure but featuring frequent appearances from original stars, including Saget, Dave Coulier and Stamos.
It ran for five seasons, concluding in 2020.
"I'm close with all the kids. It doesn't happen a lot in the world where you stay close with all the people," Saget told Tapper.
"We're an unusual cast in that way that I have been able to remain close with everybody, because I don't take eight years of my life lightly and then the other five or six years, six seasons."
Following his first round of sitcom fame, Saget worked steadily in film and television roles but became known to a new generation of sitcom fans on How I Met Your Mother, acting as narrator and the voice of future Ted Mosby.
That show ran until 2014.
Throughout the years, Saget remained a fixture in stand-up comedy, releasing multiple specials over the years and taking his show on the road.
According to his website, Saget often hosted comedy events to raise money for the Scleroderma Research Foundation, for which he served on the board of directors.
He lost his sister to the chronic disease in 1994, his website said.
In 2020, he launched a podcast, titled Bob Saget's Here For You, an interview show where he welcomed guests like Tiffany Haddish, Jason Sudeikis, Whoopi Goldberg and Norman Lear.
– Reported with CNN
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Nineteen dead in 'unprecedented' New York fire disaster
New York City's deadliest fire in more than three decades killed 19 people, including nine children, on Sunday local time at a high-rise apartment building in the Bronx.
Flames shot from apartment windows as smoke filled the building. One resident rescued by firefighters said he'd become numb to fire alarms because of frequent false alarms.
Stefan Ringel, a senior adviser to Mayor Eric Adams, confirmed the death toll. He said the children killed were 16 years old or younger.
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Thirteen people remained hospitalized in critical condition, Mr Ringel said. In all, more than 60 people were hurt. Most of the victims had severe smoke inhalation, Fire Commissioner Daniel Nigro said.
Mayor Adams called the fire's toll "horrific" and said "this is going to be one of the worst fires that we have witnessed during modern times".
Firefighters "found victims on every floor and were taking them out in cardiac and respiratory arrest," Commissioner Nigro said.
"That is unprecedented in our city."
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Approximately 200 firefighters responded to the building on East 181st Street around 11am on Sunday. Initial reports said the fire was on the third floor of the 19-story building, with flames blowing out the windows.
News photographers captured images of firefighters entering the upper floors of the burning building on a ladder, multiple limp children being given oxygen after they were carried out, and evacuees with faces covered in soot.
Building resident Luis Rosa said he was woken by a fire alarm, but dismissed it at first, thinking it was one of the building's periodic false alarms.
But when a notification popped up on his phone, he and his mother began to worry. By then, smoke began wafting into his 13th-floor apartment and he heard sirens in the distance.
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He opened the front door, but the smoke had gotten too thick for an escape, he said.
"Once I opened the door, I couldn't even see that far down the hallway," Mr Rosa told The Associated Press.
"So I said, OK, we can't run down the stairs because if we run down the stairs, we're going to end up suffocating."
"All we could do was wait," he said.
Another resident, Vernessa Cunningham, said she raced home from church after getting an alert on her cellphone that the building was on fire.
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"I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I was in shock," Ms Cunningham, 60, said from a nearby school where some residents gathered.
"I could see my apartment. The windows were all busted out. And I could see flames coming from the back of the building."
The fire originated in a duplex apartment spanning the second and third floors, Commissioner Nigro said. Firefighters found the door to the apartment open, he said, which apparently allowed the fire to quickly accelerate and spread smoke upward.
The fire is not believed to be suspicious, but the cause is under investigation, officials said.
The 120-unit building in the Twin Parks North West complex was built in 1973 as part of a project to build modern, affordable housing in the Bronx.
The drab brown building looms over an intersection of smaller, aging brick buildings overlooking Webster Avenue, one of the Bronx's main thoroughfares.
By Sunday afternoon, all that remained visible of the unit where the fire started was a gaping black hole where the windows had been blown out. Apartments as high as the 12th floor also had broken windows.
The intersection was choked with police and fire vehicles, and onlookers were still snapping cellphone pictures of the structure as darkness fell.
"There's no guarantee that there's a working fire alarm in every apartment, or in every common area," US Representative Ritchie Torres, a Democrat who represents the area, told the AP.
"Most of these buildings have no sprinkler system. And so the housing stock of the Bronx is much more susceptible to devastating fires than most of the housing stock in the city."
Commissioner Nigro and Mr Torres both compared the fire's severity to a 1990 blaze at the Happy Land social club where 87 people were killed when a man set fire to the building after getting into an argument with his former girlfriend and being thrown out of the Bronx club.
Sunday's death toll was the highest for a fire in the city since the Happy Land fire. It was also the deadliest fire at a US residential apartment building since 2017 when 13 people died in an apartment building, also in the Bronx, according to data from the National Fire Protection Association.
That fire started with a three-year-old boy playing with stove burners and led to several law changes in New York City, including having the fire department to create a plan for educating children and parents on fire safety and requiring certain residential buildings to install self-closing doors.
Sunday's fire happened just days after 12 people, including eight children, were killed in a house fire in Philadelphia. The deadliest fire prior to that was in 1989 when a Tennessee apartment building fire claimed the lives of 16 people.
Kazakhstan death toll spikes as 164 reported killed
At least 164 people have been killed and more than 5000 detained during violent upheaval in Kazakhstan this week, as unrest swept the nation and the death toll ticked even higher.
Deadly protests that erupted in in the Central Asian country in recent days have seen the government resign and the declaration of a state of emergency as troops from a Russia-led military alliance have been deployed to help contain the unrest.
The death toll – a significant increase from Friday's count of 44 – was announced Sunday on state-run TV channel Khabar 24, citing the Kazakhstan Ministry of Health.
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The unrest is the biggest challenge yet to autocratic Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev's rule, with initial public anger over a spike in fuel prices expanding to wider discontent with the government over corruption, living standards, poverty and unemployment in the oil-rich, former Soviet nation, human rights organisations report.
At least 5135 people have so far been detained for alleged participation in Kazakhstan protests, Kazakh state media reported today, citing the country's Internal Affairs Ministry.
Meanwhile, police have opened some 125 criminal cases related to incidences of violence, including on the charges of violence, murder, robbery, state media reported.
"Peacekeeping" forces from member states of Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) have fully deployed to Kazakhstan and are now completely operational within the country, CSTO commander general Andrey Serdyukov told a news briefing on Sunday.
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The CSTO – which includes Russia, Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan – deployed forces following an an appeal from Mr Tokayev for help from the alliance after unrest broke out across Kazakhstan on Wednesday, including in the largest city, Almaty.
Mr Serdyukov said the forces are "performing tasks to protect important military, state and socially significant facilities in the city of Almaty and adjacent area," and will remain in the country until the situation is "fully stabilised."
High-profile officials, including the country's former head of Kazakhstan's National Security Committee Karim Massimov, have been detained on suspicion of treason, state media reports.
The country's central bank has also temporarily suspended currency exchanges in what it says is needed for both the exchangers themselves and their employees and customers, Khabar 24 reported.
The banking system will be restored in stages depending on the priority of social significance of services for the population and business, Khabar 24 also reported.
The payment system for loans, pensions, allowances and salaries will is expected to resume working as usual throughout the country from Monday.
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The European Union has made clear it "strongly condemns" the widespread acts of violence in Kazakhstan and outside military support "should respect the sovereignty and independence" of the country, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said in a statement on Saturday.
"We deeply regret the loss of life and strongly condemn the widespread acts of violence," he said.
"Outside military support should respect the sovereignty and independence of Kazakhstan as well as the fundamental rights of all citizens," he added.
Meanwhile, Pope Francis has prayed for the victims of the violent protests seen in recent days in Kazakhstan, he said Sunday after his weekly Angelus prayer.
With CNN