Most of the 50 small wildfires that were reportedly sparked by lightning in southern Oregon over the weekend have been extinguished, but fire officials did not have to look far to appreciate the precarious nature of every new blaze. Nearly a month after the Bootleg Fire was ignited by lightning, nearly 1,900 firefighters are still […]
LOS ANGELES (AFP) – Months after Oscar-nominated filmmaker Lucy Walker began making a documentary about the largest-ever wildfire in California, the blaze lost its crown to an even bigger inferno. The 2017 Thomas Fire is now only the seventh worst by area destroyed – and is likely to be overtaken soon by the Dixie Fire […]
SAN FRANCISCO (NYTIMES) – Michael Hambrick has been putting out fires for more than 25 years. But last month, the Dixie Fire raged so quickly through Plumas County in California that Hambrick, a helicopter attack firefighter, couldn’t save even his own house. By the time he evacuated, his porch was on fire, and the windows […]
WASHINGTON (AFP) – Neanderthals, long perceived to have been unsophisticated and brutish, really did paint stalagmites in a Spanish cave more than 60,000 years ago, according to a study published on Monday (Aug 2). The issue had roiled the paleo-archaeology community ever since the publication of a 2018 paper attributing red ochre pigment found on […]
WASHINGTON (AFP) – Boeing will be aiming to get its spaceflight program back on track on Tuesday (Aug 3) with an uncrewed flight of its Starliner capsule to the International Space Station (ISS), after its last such test in 2019 ended in failure. The spaceship is due to launch on an Atlas V rocket built […]
Classrooms are opening their doors to a different pandemic. Here is how to think about risk. By Emily Anthes Last week, in what was intended to be an internal document, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention made a stark admission: The highly contagious Delta variant had redrawn the battle lines of the coronavirus pandemic, […]
A third police officer who responded to the January 6 Capitol Riot has killed himself. DC Metropolitan police officer Gunther Hashida, 43, took his own life on July 29, according to a GoFundMe account set up by his family. His death was confirmed by DC’s Metropolitan Police Department. Details around Hashida’s death were not immediately […]
WASHINGTON (REUTERS) – US President Joe Biden’s administration will launch a new programme to resettle certain Afghans as refugees in the United States, an administration official and two knowledgeable sources said on Sunday (Aug 1). The US State Department was expected to announce the setting-up of the so-called Priority Two refugee programme on Monday, the […]
NEW YORK (NYTIMES) – Health officials have expressed concern over a simultaneous rise in Delta infections and cases of a respiratory virus known as respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV – a highly contagious, flulike illness that is typically more likely to affect children and older adults. Cases of RSV have risen gradually since early June, […]
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — In early July, crews showed up downtown for some long-delayed evictions. After years of protest, litigation and even violence, the statues of two Confederate generals, Lee and Jackson, were finally carted out of city parks, expelled by the city’s drive to right its past wrongs. Now the really hard work awaits. It […]