UNITED STATES
California fire threat easing
Firefighters have gotten their first hold on California’s deadliest and most destructive fire of the year and on Wednesday expected that the blaze would remain stalled through the weekend. The McKinney Fire near the Oregon border as of Wednesday night was 10 percent contained and firefighters were making progress carving firebreaks around much of the rest of the blaze, officials told a community meeting. Evacuation orders for part of Yreka, a town of 7,800 people, were downgraded to warnings, allowing people to return home. About 1,300 residents remained under evacuation orders, officials said. The fire did not advance on Wednesday, following several days of brief, but heavy rain. “This is a sleeping giant right now,” said Darryl Laws, an incident commander on the blaze.
GERMANY
Explosion sparks forest fire
A large fire yesterday broke out in a popular Berlin forest following an explosion in a police munitions storage site. Firefighters were still unable to begin putting out the flames in the affected area of 1.5 hectares. “There are still explosions” at the storage area just outside Grunewald forest, a Berlin fire service spokesman said. “The situation is unpredictable. It’s burning uncontrollably in the forest,” he added. Officials are building a security cordon to allow firefighters to begin extinguishing the flames from a distance of about 1km from the ammunition storage zone.
CHINA
Tourist town locked down
Authorities partially locked down Sanya in Hainan Province after detecting about two dozen new COVID-19 cases this week, stranding thousands of tourists at one of the country’s most popular summer spots. People in areas deemed high-risk are banned from leaving their homes, while other residents can only venture out of their compounds once every two days to purchase necessities, the Sanya City Government said. The city has shut indoor venues including karaoke parlors and bars, and halted the movement of buses, ships and yachts. It reported 11 new cases on Wednesday, taking the total number of cases found this week to 25.
AUSTRALIA
Rocket debris identified
Space debris found on farmland more than 400km south of Sydney belongs to a SpaceX craft, the Space Agency said yesterday. Experts had visited the impact site in the Snowy Mountains and confirmed the pieces came from a SpaceX mission, it said. Among images broadcast on local media, one showed a shard of debris, wider and taller than an adult human, standing upright after apparently spearing into a hillside. The parts belong to a SpaceX Crew-1 Trunk that re-entered Earth’s atmosphere on July 9, said Brad Tucker, an astrophysicist at Australian National University who visited the site. US space officials last month chided Beijing after remnants of a massive Chinese rocket fell back to Earth over the Indian Ocean. Such debris carried “a significant risk of loss of life and property,” NASA said.
UNITED KINGDOM
Parliament exits TikTok
Parliament has closed its TikTok account following objections from Conservative politicians about the app’s connections to China. The speakers of the House of Commons and House of Lords said they had not been consulted on setting up the account and would close it immediately. Last week, lawmakers Tom Tugendhat and Iain Duncan Smith, a former Conservative leader, were among the signatories of a letter calling for the account to be taken down.
Drug lord Jose Adolfo Macias Villamar, alias “Fito,” was Ecuador’s most-wanted fugitive before his arrest on Wednesday, more than a year after he escaped prison from where he commanded the country’s leading criminal gang. The former taxi driver turned crime boss became the prime target of law enforcement early last year after escaping from a prison in the southwestern port of Guayaquil. Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa’s government released “wanted” posters with images of his face and offered US$1 million for information leading to his capture. In a country plagued by crime, members of Fito’s gang, Los Choneros, have responded with violence, using car
Two former Chilean ministers are among four candidates competing this weekend for the presidential nomination of the left ahead of November elections dominated by rising levels of violent crime. More than 15 million voters are eligible to choose today between former minister of labor Jeannette Jara, former minister of the interior Carolina Toha and two members of parliament, Gonzalo Winter and Jaime Mulet, to represent the left against a resurgent right. The primary is open to members of the parties within Chilean President Gabriel Boric’s ruling left-wing coalition and other voters who are not affiliated with specific parties. A recent poll by the
TENSIONS HIGH: For more than half a year, students have organized protests around the country, while the Serbian presaident said they are part of a foreign plot About 140,000 protesters rallied in Belgrade, the largest turnout over the past few months, as student-led demonstrations mount pressure on the populist government to call early elections. The rally was one of the largest in more than half a year student-led actions, which began in November last year after the roof of a train station collapsed in the northern city of Novi Sad, killing 16 people — a tragedy widely blamed on entrenched corruption. On Saturday, a sea of protesters filled Belgrade’s largest square and poured into several surrounding streets. The independent protest monitor Archive of Public Gatherings estimated the
Irish-language rap group Kneecap on Saturday gave an impassioned performance for tens of thousands of fans at the Glastonbury Festival despite criticism by British politicians and a terror charge for one of the trio. Liam Og O hAnnaidh, who performs under the stage name Mo Chara, has been charged under the UK’s Terrorism Act with supporting a proscribed organization for allegedly waving a Hezbollah flag at a concert in London in November last year. The rapper, who was charged under the anglicized version of his name, Liam O’Hanna, is on unconditional bail before a further court hearing in August. “Glastonbury,
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