Firefighters battling largest US blaze face ‘another critical day’
QUINCY, Calif. — Johnnie Brookwood had never heard of a road named Dixie when a wildfire began a month ago in the forestlands of Northern California.
Within three weeks, it exploded into the largest wildfire burning in the U.S., destroying more than 1,000 homes and businesses including a lodge in the gold rush-era town of Greenville where she was renting a room for $650 per month.
“At first (the fire) didn’t affect us at all, it was off in some place called Dixie, I didn’t even know what it means,” Brookwood, 76, said Saturday. “Then it was ‘Oh no, we have to go too?’ Surely Greenville won’t burn, but then it did and now all we can see are ashes.”
Firefighters faced “another critical day” as thunderstorms pushed flames closer to two towns not far from where the Dixie Fire destroyed much of Greenville earlier this month.
The thunderstorms, which began Friday, didn’t produce much rain but whipped up wind and created lightning strikes, forcing crews to focus on using bulldozers to build lines and keep the blaze from reaching Westwood, a town of about 1,700 people. Westwood was placed under evacuation orders Aug. 5.
Wind gusts of up to 50 mph also pushed the fire closer to Janesville, a town of about 1,500 people, east of Greenville, said Jake Cagle, the operations chief at the east zone of the fire.
The fire was among more than 100 large wildfires burning in more than a dozen states in the West seared by drought and hot, bone-dry weather that turned forests, brushlands, meadows and pastures into tinder.
More than 6,000 firefighters are battling the Dixie Fire, which has ravaged nearly 845 square miles — an area the size of Tokyo — and was 31% contained.
Protests in France: Thousands of people, from families to far-right sympathizers, marched in cities across France for a fifth consecutive day Saturday to denounce a COVID-19 health pass needed to enter restaurants and long-distance trains.
Some 1,600 police were deployed for three separate marches in Paris, a week after the health pass went into effect. “Liberty” was the slogan, with protesters saying the health pass limits their freedom.
Polls show most French people support the health pass.
The marches came as France is facing soaring numbers of new infections, driven by the more transmissible delta variant.
On Friday, 46.1 million people in France, nearly 68% of the population, had received at least one vaccine shot.
More than 38.8 million, or 57%, had two shots.
LGBT rights in Romania:
Several thousand LGBT supporters took to the streets in the Romanian capital of Bucharest on Saturday for a gay pride parade that resumed after a year’s pause due to the pandemic.
Teodora Ion-Rotaru, executive director of ACCEPT Association, an LGBT rights group, said that Bucharest Pride, which has been running since 2004, “remains a protest that asks for the very basics.”
Although Romania joined the European Union in 2007 and the bloc prohibits discrimination based
on sexual orientation, IonRotaru says state protections often don’t stretch far enough.
“The march asks for protection from violence, protection from discrimination, protection from being fired for your sexual orientation or gender identity,” she said.
Hours before the LGBT parade kicked off Saturday, around 100 far-right opponents, who advocate for traditional family values, held an anti-LGBT rally in the capital.
Israeli-Polish dispute: Israel on Saturday condemned Poland’s approval of a law that restricts the rights of Holocaust survivors or their descendants to reclaim property seized by the country’s former communist regime.
The move ignited a diplomatic crisis between Israel’s new government and the nationalist conservative government in Poland.
Polish President Andrzej
Duda earlier in the day signed the law, which addresses appropriations done by the communist government that ruled Poland from the end of World War II until 1989.
The law says nothing about the Holocaust or World War II. Instead it establishes that any administrative decision issued 30 years ago or more can no longer be challenged, meaning that property owners who had their homes or businesses seized in the communist era can no longer get compensation.
It is expected to cut off for all time the hopes of some families — both Jewish and non-Jewish — of reclaiming property seized during that era.
Both the U.S. and Israeli governments had strongly urged Poland not to pass the law and Israel had warned it would harm ties.
Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett called Duda’s signing of the law “a shameful decision and disgraceful
contempt for the memory of the Holocaust.”
Before World War II, Poland was home to Europe’s largest Jewish community of nearly 3.5 million people.
Floods in Turkey: The death toll from severe floods and mudslides along Turkey’s Black Sea coast has climbed to at least 57, the country’s emergency and disaster agency said Saturday, as authorities disputed reports that dozens more people were missing.
Torrential rains that pounded the Black Sea provinces of Bartin, Kastamonu and Sinop on Wednesday caused flooding that demolished homes, severed at least five bridges, swept away cars and rendered numerous roads unpassable.
Speaking late Saturday in Kastamonu, Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu slammed opposition parties, social media users and media for claims that hundreds could be missing.
He said a total of 77 cases of missing persons remained in Kastamonu and Sinop but emphasized that doesn’t necessarily mean they were dead.
UK mass killing: Britain’s police watchdog says it has launched an investigation into why a 22-year-old man who fatally shot five people in southwestern England on Thursday was given back his confiscated gun and gun license last month.
Police have said Jake Davison killed his mother and four other people, including a 3-year-old girl, before taking his own life in the port city of Plymouth. It was Britain’s first mass shooting in over a decade.
Firearm crimes are rare in Britain, which has strict gun control laws and regulations.
Police took away a gun and the certificate in December 2020 following an allegation of assault three months earlier, the watchdog office said late Friday.