Thursday Briefing: Los Angeles battles deadly wildfires
Good morning. We’re covering wildfires in Southern California and President-elect Donald Trump’s foreign policy threats. Plus, a look at longevity.
Deadly wildfires ravage Southern California as water runs lowMultiple out-of-control blazes in the Los Angeles area yesterday killed at least two people and seriously injured many others. The fires destroyed homes and businesses and blanketed highways in smoke. Officials warned of a dwindling water supply and said the worst was yet to come. Follow our live coverage here. Tens of thousands of people were forced to leave their homes, and more areas were placed under evacuation orders by the hour. At least 18 school districts reported closures, and about 400,000 energy customers were without power. Air quality worsened as smoke poured into the sky. Here’s a map of the evacuations. Hurricane-level winds in the area reached as high as 160 kilometers per hour, fueling the fires and hampering efforts to contain the devastation. Multiple firefighting agencies responded with strike teams, but the wind forced them to ground aircraft, making the fires particularly difficult to fight. Context: The winter and late fall tend to produce catastrophic fires in California, and scientists have found that fires in the region have been moving faster. An analysis of 60,000 wildfires in the contiguous U.S. between 2001 and 2020 found that growth rates had increased over the decades in California and other parts of the West. As areas there become hotter and dryer, the ground becomes more flammable.
World leaders reacted to Trump’s foreign policy threatsOn Tuesday, President-elect Donald Trump suggested that the U.S. might reclaim the Panama Canal by military intervention. Then he hinted that the same thing could be done to annex Greenland. He also threatened to use “economic force” to make Canada part of the U.S. and suggested that the Gulf of Mexico should be renamed the “Gulf of America.” The responses from world leaders were mixed. “The sovereignty of our canal is nonnegotiable and is part of our history of struggle and an irreversible conquest,” Panama’s foreign minister, Javier Martínez-Acha, said. Residents of Greenland appeared to be bewildered and anxious. “This is all getting scary,” a native Greenlander said. Canada was blunt. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau responded in a social media post that “there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that Canada would become part of the United States.” Mexico had some fun with it. During a news conference yesterday, President Claudia Sheinbaum rejected several of Trump’s assertions and joked that the U.S. should be renamed “Mexican America.” Related: Trump vowed that “all hell will break out in the Middle East” if Israeli hostages were not freed in the next two weeks. Gazans were left to wonder: If this is not hell, then what is?
U.K. released evidence from a war crimes inquiry in AfghanistanBritish special forces soldiers used extreme methods against militants in Afghanistan, according to testimony released yesterday as part of a British Ministry of Defense inquiry into allegations of war crimes. The evidence paints a disturbing portrait of an elite fighting force acting with impunity and putting body counts above all other benchmarks. The testimony came from email exchanges, letters and witness statements by senior officers and rank-and-file soldiers. One member of a British unit said that the troops acted as if they had “a golden pass allowing them to get away with murder.” |
