LOS ANGELES: Wildfires menacing Los Angeles have killed at least 10 people and devoured nearly 10,000 structures, with five fires burning into a third night on Thursday as dry desert winds fanning the flames again gathered strength.
The Palisades Fire between Santa Monica and Malibu on the city’s western flank and the Eaton Fire in the east near Pasadena already rank as the most destructive in Los Angeles history, consuming more than 34,000 acres (13,750 hectares) — or some 53 square miles — turning entire neighborhoods to ash.
The death toll from the blazes rose to 10, Los Angeles County’s Medical Examiner said in an update late on Thursday, without providing identities or other details.
Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna told an earlier press conference he expected the number to grow.
“It looks like an atomic bomb dropped in these areas. I don’t expect good news, and we’re not looking forward to those numbers,” Luna said.
Private forecaster AccuWeather estimated the damage and economic loss at $135 billion to $150 billion, portending an arduous recovery and soaring homeowners’ insurance costs.
“We’re already looking ahead to aggressively rebuild the city of Los Angeles,” said Mayor Karen Bass, a Democrat, who faced criticism from President-elect Donald Trump and other Republicans over her handling of the disaster.
President Joe Biden, who declared a major disaster on Tuesday, promised on Thursday that the federal government would reimburse 100 percent of the recovery for the next 180 days to pay for debris and hazard material removal, temporary shelters and first responder salaries.
“I told the governor, local officials, spare no expense to do what they need to do and contain these fires,” Biden said after meeting with senior advisers at the White House.
In all, five wildfires burned in Los Angeles County, with the largest Palisades fire just 6 percent contained and the Eaton fire 0 percent contained. Skies buzzed with aircraft dropping retardant and water on the flaming hills.
A large Super Scooper aircraft on loan from Canada was damaged and grounded after hitting an unauthorized civilian drone near the Palisades fire, the L.A. County Fire Department said. There were no injuries.
One rapidly growing blaze broke out on Thursday near Calabasas, one of the wealthiest cities in the US and home to numerous celebrities and gated communities. The so-called Kenneth Fire expanded to 960 acres (388 hectares) in a matter of hours.
With nerves on edge, Los Angeles County mistakenly sent an evacuation notice countywide to a population of 9.6 million, even though it had been meant only for the area of the Kenneth Fire, officials said. A correction was quickly sent.
‘WE ARE ALIVE’
Officials said the Eaton Fire had damaged or destroyed 4,000 to 5,000 structures while the Palisades Fire destroyed or damaged another 5,300 structures.
Some Pacific Palisades residents ventured back to areas the fire had already swept through, where brick chimneys were left looming over charred waste and burnt-out vehicles.
“We are alive. That’s all that matters,” private security guard Bilal Tukhi said while standing watch outside his employer’s damaged home, saying the scene reminded him of his native, war-torn Afghanistan.
School was canceled for a second day on Friday due to the contaminated air, Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said.
Winds dropped on Thursday from the 100-mile-per-hour (160-kph) gusts seen earlier in the week, permitting crucial aerial support for crews on the ground.
But officials said winds intensified again overnight, and red flag conditions were expected until Friday afternoon.
The Eaton Fire reached the grounds of the Mount Wilson Observatory, the place where a century ago Edwin Hubble discovered the existence of galaxies beyond the Milky Way and that the universe is expanding. The Observatory later said the flare-up appeared under control.
In Altadena, a racially and economically diverse community nearby, many residents told Reuters they were concerned government resources would be channeled toward high-profile areas popular with A-Listers, while insurance companies might shortchange less affluent households that don’t have the financial means to contest fire claims.
“They’re not going to give you the value of your house ... if they do you really have to fight for it,” said Kay Young, 63, her eyes welling up with tears as she stared at a sprawl of smoking rubble, the remnants of a home that had been in her family for generations.
HOLLYWOOD FIRE CONTAINED
Firefighting crews managed to fully control the Sunset Fire in the Hollywood Hills, after flames had raged atop the ridge overlooking Hollywood Boulevard’s Walk of Fame on Wednesday night.
In Pacific Palisades, once-palatial homes stood in ruins, while downed power lines and abandoned cars littered the roadways.
One resident, John Carr, 65, said he defied evacuation orders and stayed to successfully protect his home.
“The house was built by my mother and father in 1960 and I lived here my whole life so there’s a lot of memories here. And I think I owed it to them as well to try my best to save it.”
Carr said there were no fire crews to help him try to save his neighbors’ homes.
“If they had had some fire trucks and just put a squirt here, a squirt there and kept an eye on things, all these houses would be here now.”
Officials said they were working to establish curfews for areas affected by mandatory evacuation orders.
Aerial video showed block after block of leveled homes, while satellite images showed the two largest fires forming a pincer around the city and thick plumes of smoke from the fires being blown out over the Pacific Ocean.
The homes of movie stars and celebrities were among those consumed by flames.
Chef Jose Andres, the Spaniard known for providing free food to disaster victims around the world, set up a food truck near the Palisades Fire on Pacific Coast Highway.
“Everybody needs support and love in these moments, wealthy or not, poor or not,” he said.
Actor Jamie Lee Curtis said on Thursday her family would donate $1 million to relief efforts.
Firefighters from half a dozen other US states and Canada were being rushed to California, in addition to US federal personnel and materiel.
“To our American neighbors: Canada’s here to help,” said Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whose country has experienced its own severe wildfires.
Los Angeles wildfires devour thousands of homes, death toll rises to 10
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Los Angeles wildfires devour thousands of homes, death toll rises to 10
- Firefighting crews have managed to fully control the Sunset Fire in the Hollywood Hills
- In Pacific Palisades, once-palatial homes stood in ruins as abandoned cars littered roads
India’s leader Modi touted all was well in Kashmir. A massacre of tourists shattered that claim
- The attack outraged people in Kashmir and India, where it led to calls of swift action against Pakistan
SRINAGAR, India: Hundreds of Indian tourists, families and honeymooners, drawn by the breathtaking Himalayan beauty, were enjoying a picture-perfect meadow in Kashmir. They didn’t know gunmen in army fatigues were lurking in the woods.
When the attackers got their chance, they shot mostly Indian Hindu men, many of them at close-range, leaving behind bodies strewn across the Baisaran meadow and survivors screaming for help.
The gunmen quickly vanished into thick forests. By the time Indian authorities arrived, 26 people were dead and 17 others were wounded.
India has described the April 22 massacre as a terror attack and blamed Pakistan for backing it, an accusation denied by Islamabad. India swiftly announced diplomatic actions against its archrival Pakistan, which responded with its own tit-for-tat measures.
The assailants are still on the run, as calls in India for military action against Pakistan are growing.
World leaders have been scrambling to de-escalate the tensions between two nuclear-armed neighbors, which have historically relied on third countries for conflict management.
But the massacre has also touched a raw nerve.
Early on Wednesday, India fired missiles that struck at least three locations inside Pakistani-controlled territory, according to Pakistani security officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media. India said it was striking infrastructure used by militants.
India admits security lapse
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s administration has governed Kashmir with an iron fist in recent years, claiming militancy in the region was in check and a tourism influx was a sign of normalcy returning.
Those claims now lie shattered.
Security experts and former intelligence and senior military officers who have served in the region say Modi’s government — riding on a nationalistic fervor over Kashmir to please its supporters — missed warning signs.
The government acknowledged that in a rare admission.
Two days after the attack, Kiren Rijiju, India’s parliamentary affairs minister, said that a crucial all-party meeting discussed “where the lapses occurred.”
“We totally missed ... the intentions of our hostile neighbor,” said Avinash Mohananey, a former Indian intelligence officer who has operated in Kashmir and Pakistan.
The meadow, near the resort town of Pahalgam, can be reached by trekking or pony rides, and visitors cross at least three security camps and a police station to reach there. According to Indian media, there was no security presence for more than 1,000 tourists that day.
Pahalgam serves as a base for an annual Hindu pilgrimage that draws hundreds of thousands of people from across India. The area is ringed by thick woods that connect with forest ranges in the Jammu area, where Indian troops have faced attacks by rebels in recent years after fighting ebbed in the Kashmir Valley, the heart of an anti-India rebellion.
The massacre brought Modi’s administration almost back to where it started when a suicide car bombing in the region in 2019 prompted his government to strip Kashmir of its semi-autonomy and bring it under direct federal rule. Tensions have simmered ever since, but the region has also drawn millions of visitors amid a strange calm enforced by an intensified security crackdown.
“We probably started buying our own narrative that things were normal in Kashmir,” Mohananey said.
In the past, insurgents have carried out brazen attacks and targeted Hindu pilgrims, Indian Hindu as well as Muslim immigrant workers, and local Hindus and Sikhs. However, this time a large number of tourists were attacked, making it one of the worst massacres involving civilians in recent years.
The attack outraged people in Kashmir and India, where it led to calls of swift action against Pakistan.
Indian television news channels amplified these demands and panelists argued that India should invade Pakistan. Modi and his senior ministers vowed to hunt down the attackers and their backers.
Experts say much of the public pressure on the Indian government to act militarily against Pakistan falls within the pattern of long, simmering animosity between both countries.
“All the talk of military options against Pakistan mainly happens in echo chambers and feeds a nationalist narrative,” in India, New Delhi-based counterterrorism expert Ajai Sahni said.
“It doesn’t matter what will be done. We will be told it was done and was a success,” he said. “And it will be celebrated nonetheless.”
Modi’s optimism misplaced, experts say
Experts also say that the Modi government’s optimism was also largely misplaced and that its continuous boasting of rising tourism in the region was a fragile barometer of normalcy. Last year, Omar Abdullah, Kashmir’s top elected official, cautioned against such optimism.
“By this attack, Pakistan wants to convey that there is no normalcy in Kashmir and that tourism is no indicator for it. They want to internationalize the issue,” said D.S. Hooda, former military commander for northern India between 2014 to 2016.
Hooda said the “choice of targets and the manner in which the attack was carried out indicates that it was well-planned.”
“If there would have been a good security cover, maybe this incident would not have happened,” he said.
India sees Pakistan connection to the attack
Indian security experts believe the attack could be a retaliation for a passenger train hijacking in Pakistan in March by Baloch insurgents. Islamabad accused New Delhi of orchestrating the attack in which 25 people were killed. India denies it.
Mohananey said that Indian authorities should have taken the accusations seriously and beefed-up security in Kashmir, while arguing there was a striking similarity in both attacks since only men were targeted.
“It was unusual that women and children were spared” in both cases, Mohananey said.
Two senior police officers, who have years of counterinsurgency experience in Kashmir, said after the train attack in Pakistan that they were anticipating some kind of reaction in the region by militants.
The officers, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said that security officials perceived the threat of an imminent attack, and Modi’s inauguration of a strategic rail line in the region was canceled. A large-scale attack on tourists, however, wasn’t anticipated, because there was no such precedence, the officers said.
Hooda, who commanded what New Delhi called “surgical strikes” against militants in the Pakistan-controlled part of Kashmir in 2016, said that the attack has deepened thinking that it was time to tackle the Pakistani state, not just militants.
Such calculus could be a marked shift. In 2016 and 2019, India said that its army struck militant infrastructure inside Pakistan after two major militant attacks against its soldiers.
“After this attack,” Hooda said, India wants to stop Pakistan “from using terrorism as an instrument of state policy.”
“We need to tighten our security and plug lapses, but the fountainhead of terrorism needs to be tackled,” Hooda said. “The fountainhead is Pakistan.”
Trump says only 21 hostages held by Hamas in Gaza now believed to be alive
WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump said Tuesday that three hostages held by Hamas in Gaza have died, leaving only 21 believed to be still living.
“As of today, it’s 21, three have died,” Trump said of the hostages being held by Hamas, noting until recently it had been 24 people believed to be living. He did not elaborate on the identities of those now believed to be dead, nor how he had come to learn of their deaths. “There’s 21, plus a lot of dead bodies,” Trump said.
One American, Edan Alexander, had been among the 24 hostages believed to be alive, with the bodies of several other Americans also held by Hamas after its Oct. 7, 2023 assault on Israel.
The president’s comments came as Israel approved plans on Monday to seize the Gaza Strip and to stay in the Palestinian territory for an unspecified amount of time, in a bid to recover the hostages and try to fulfill its war aims of destroying Hamas. If implemented, the move would vastly expand Israel’s operations there and likely draw fierce international opposition.
Columbia University lays off nearly 180 after Trump pulled $400M over his antisemitism concerns
- Pro-Palestinian demonstrators set up an encampment and seized a campus building in April, leading to dozens of arrests and inspiring a wave of similar protests nationally
NEW YORK: Columbia University said Tuesday that it will be laying off nearly 180 staffers in response to President Donald Trump’s decision to cancel $400 million in funding over the Manhattan college’s handling of student protests against the war in Gaza.
Those receiving non-renewal or termination notices Tuesday represent about 20 percent of the employees funded in some manner by the terminated federal grants, the university said in a statement Tuesday.
“We have had to make deliberate, considered decisions about the allocation of our financial resources,” the university said. “Those decisions also impact our greatest resource, our people. We understand this news will be hard.”
Officials are working with the Trump administration in the hopes of getting the funding restored, they said, but the university will still pull back spending because of uncertainty and strain on its budget.
Officials said the university will be scaling back research, with some departments winding down activities and others maintaining some level of research while pursuing alternate funding.
In March, the Trump administration pulled the funding over what it described as the Ivy League school’s failure to squelch antisemitism on campus during the Israel-Hamas war that began in October 2023.
Within weeks, Columbia capitulated to a series of demands laid out by the Republican administration as a starting point for restoring the funding.
Among the requirements was overhauling the university’s student disciplinary process, banning campus protesters from wearing masks, barring demonstrations from academic buildings, adopting a new definition of antisemitism and putting the Middle Eastern studies program under the supervision of a vice provost who would have a say over curriculum and hiring.
After Columbia announced the changes, US Education Secretary Linda McMahon said the university was ” on the right track,” but declined to say when or if Columbia’s funding would be restored. Spokespersons for the federal education department didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment Tuesday.
Columbia was at the forefront of US campus protests over the war last spring. Pro-Palestinian demonstrators set up an encampment and seized a campus building in April, leading to dozens of arrests and inspiring a wave of similar protests nationally.
Trump, when he retook the White House in January, moved swiftly to cut federal money to colleges and universities he viewed as too tolerant of antisemitism.
Trump hopes India-Pakistan clashes end ‘very quickly’
WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump said Tuesday he hoped clashes between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan end “very quickly,” after New Delhi’s forces launched strikes and Islamabad vowed retaliation.
“It’s a shame, we just heard about it,” Trump said at the White House, after the Indian government said it had hit “terrorist camps” on its western neighbor’s territory following a deadly attack on tourists in Indian-administered Kashmir.
“I guess people knew something was going to happen based on the past. They’ve been fighting for many, many decades and centuries, actually, if you really think about it,” he added.
India and Pakistan have fought three full-scale wars since gaining independence from the British in 1947. Both claim Kashmir in full but administer separate portions of the disputed region.
“I just hope it ends very quickly,” said Trump.
India had been widely expected to respond militarily since gunmen shot dead 26 people in Indian-administered Kashmir, mostly Hindus.
New Delhi has blamed militants that it has said were from Pakistan-based group Lashkar-e-Taiba, a UN-designated terrorist organization.
Pakistan’s army said the Indian strikes targeted three sites in Pakistan-administered Kashmir and two in Punjab province, the country’s most populous.
Islamabad said that three civilians, including a child, had been killed in Indian strikes.
The Indian strikes came just hours after the US State Department issued a fresh call for calm.
“We continue to urge Pakistan and India to work toward a responsible resolution that maintains long-term peace and regional stability in South Asia,” State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce told reporters.
Her statement came after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi warned of stopping water from flowing across borders following the Kashmir attack.
‘World cannot afford’ India-Pakistan confrontation: UN
UNITED NATIONS: UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was “very concerned” about Indian military strikes on Pakistan, his spokesperson said on Tuesday, hours after India said it hit nine sites in Pakistani territory.
“The Secretary-General is very concerned about the Indian military operations across the Line of Control and international border. He calls for maximum military restraint from both countries. The world cannot afford a military confrontation between India and Pakistan,” said Stephane Dujarric, the spokesperson.
