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.
Seven people sustained mostly minor injuries in an airplane fire in South Korea, authorities said yesterday, with local media suggesting the blaze might have been caused by a portable battery stored in the overhead bin. The Air Busan plane, an Airbus A321, was set to fly to Hong Kong from Gimhae International Airport in southeastern Busan, but caught fire in the rear section on Tuesday night, the South Korean Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said. A total of 169 passengers and seven flight attendants and staff were evacuated down inflatable slides, it said. Authorities initially reported three injuries, but revised the number
A colossal explosion in the sky, unleashing energy hundreds of times greater than the Hiroshima bomb. A blinding flash nearly as bright as the sun. Shockwaves powerful enough to flatten everything for miles. It might sound apocalyptic, but a newly detected asteroid nearly the size of a football field now has a greater than 1 percent chance of colliding with Earth in about eight years. Such an impact has the potential for city-level devastation, depending on where it strikes. Scientists are not panicking yet, but they are watching closely. “At this point, it’s: ‘Let’s pay a lot of attention, let’s
UNDAUNTED: Panama would not renew an agreement to participate in Beijing’s Belt and Road project, its president said, proposing technical-level talks with the US US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday threatened action against Panama without immediate changes to reduce Chinese influence on the canal, but the country’s leader insisted he was not afraid of a US invasion and offered talks. On his first trip overseas as the top US diplomat, Rubio took a guided tour of the canal, accompanied by its Panamanian administrator as a South Korean-affiliated oil tanker and Marshall Islands-flagged cargo ship passed through the vital link between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. However, Rubio was said to have had a firmer message in private, telling Panama that US President Donald Trump
CHEER ON: Students were greeted by citizens who honked their car horns or offered them food and drinks, while taxi drivers said they would give marchers a lift home Hundreds of students protesting graft they blame for 15 deaths in a building collapse on Friday marched through Serbia to the northern city of Novi Sad, where they plan to block three Danube River bridges this weekend. They received a hero’s welcome from fellow students and thousands of local residents in Novi Said after arriving on foot in their two-day, 80km journey from Belgrade. A small red carpet was placed on one of the bridges across the Danube that the students crossed as they entered the city. The bridge blockade planned for yesterday is to mark three months since a huge concrete construction
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