Good evening. I'm Lisa Desjardin. Jeff Bennett and Amna Nawaz are away. On the news hour tonight, dozens are killed in what Swiss leaders call one of the worst tragedies in their history.

As wealth becomes more concentrated among the richest Americans, how a new class of billionaires

is seeking outsized political influence.

And college football teams are about to enter another wild phase.

Why even those who aren't sports fans should pay attention.

I don't think it's ideal for anybody, including the players and their education, to be able to transfer to four or five different schools over the course of their career.

Welcome to the News Hour.

Some 40 people are dead and more than 100 injured, many seriously, after a fire tore through a bar in the Swiss mountain town of Kranz, Montana, on New Year's just hours after midnight.

Authorities have ruled out a terror attack, but the cause of the fire is still under investigation as the Swiss face a devastating scene. This was the scene outside the Constellation,

where Swiss authorities say a massive blaze broke out in a packed and popular ski resort bar

just after 1.30 a.m. on New Year's Day.

There were people screaming, and then people lying on the ground, probably dead.

Many had gathered there to ring in the new year when the celebration turned suddenly to chaos.

I'm still in shock. I can't comprehend what happened. I saw people being resuscitated. I saw people

completely burned. I saw people dying. Today, as investigators combed through the rubble, officials

said it will take days to identify all of the victims and that it is still too early to determine

the cause of the fire. But officials say flames likely triggered a

sudden backdrop explosion. Eyewitnesses described a rush of people trying to escape a basement

bar through a narrow bottleneck at the top of a staircase. The first stairs are pretty easy to get

through since they're wide and all that. But after that, there's a small

door where everyone was pushing, and so we all fell. We were piled on top of each other. Some people

were burning, and some were dead next to us. In the early morning hours, casualties quickly

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