Colo. wildfires burn hundreds of homes and force evacuations
DENVER — An estimated 580 homes, a hotel and a shopping center have burned, and tens of thousands of people were evacuated in wind-fueled wildfires outside Denver, officials said Thursday.
Boulder County Sheriff Joe Pelle said only one injury has been reported, but didn’t rule out finding out later about more severe injuries or deaths due to the intensity of fires that quickly swept across the region as winds gusted up to 105 mph.
The first fire erupted just before 10:30 a.m. and was “attacked pretty quickly and laid down later in the day and is currently being monitored” with no structures lost, Pelle said.
A second wildfire, reported just after 11 a.m., “ballooned and spread rapidly east,” Pelle said. The blaze spans 2.5 square miles and has engulfed parts of the area in smoky, orangish skies and sent residents scrambling to get to safety.
“This is the kind of fire we can’t fight head-on,” Pelle said. “We actually had deputy sheriffs and firefighters in areas that had to pull out because they just got overrun.”
The city of Louisville, which has a population of 21,000, was ordered to evacuate after residents in Superior, which has 13,000 residents, were told to leave. The neighboring towns are roughly 20 miles northwest of Denver.
Several blazes started in the area Thursday, at least some sparked by downed power lines.
Six people who were injured in the fires were being treated at UCHealth Broomfield Hospital, spokesperson Kelli Christensen said. A nearby portion of U.S. Highway 36 also was shut down.
Colorado’s Front Range, where most of the state’s population lives, had an extremely dry and mild fall, and winter so far has continued to be mostly dry. Snow was expected Friday in the region though.
Warning against cruises:
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned people on Thursday not to go on cruises, regardless of their vaccination status, because of onboard outbreaks fueled by the omicron variant.
The CDC said it has more than 90 cruise ships under investigation or observation as a result of COVID19 cases. The agency did not disclose the number of infections.
“The virus that causes COVID-19 spreads easily between people in close quarters on board ships, and the chance of getting COVID-19 on cruise ships is very high,” even if people are fully vaccinated and have received a booster, the CDC said.
The CDC on Thursday also recommended that passengers get tested and quarantine for five days after docking, regardless of their vaccination status and even if they have no symptoms.
Wright juror speaks out:
A member of the jury that convicted Minnesota police Officer Kim Potter of manslaughter in the killing of Daunte Wright says jurors felt she made an honest mistake when she drew her firearm instead of her stun gun, but that she was still responsible for his death.
The juror spoke with KARE-TV on the condition of anonymity due to what the station described as the “public animosity” surrounding the case. It published the story Wednesday.
The juror said no one felt
Potter was a racist or meant to kill Wright, but that doesn’t mean she was above the law.
“I don’t want to speak for all the jurors, but I think we believed she was a good person and even believed she was a good cop,” the juror said. “No one felt she was intentional in this . ... We felt like she was a good person, we felt she made a mistake, and that a mistake does not absolve you from the fact she did commit a crime.”
Potter, 49, resigned from the police department in Brooklyn Center two days after the April shooting.
Prosecutors charged her with first- and second-degree manslaughter.
The jury deliberated for 27 hours over four days before convicting her of both counts Dec. 23.
She faces almost seven years in prison.
Iran rocket launch: Iran launched a rocket with a satellite carrier bearing three devices into space,
authorities announced Thursday, without saying whether any of the objects had entered Earth’s orbit.
It was not clear when the launch happened or what devices the carrier brought with it. Iran aired footage of the blastoff against the backdrop of negotiations in Vienna to restore Tehran’s tattered nuclear deal with world powers.
Previous launches have drawn rebukes from the United States. The U.S. State Department, Space Force and the Pentagon did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Thursday’s announcement from Iran.
Ahmad Hosseini, a Defense Ministry spokesman, identified the rocket as a Simorgh, or “Phoenix,” rocket that sent up the three devices 290 miles.
Hours later, Hosseini and other officials remained silent on the status of the objects, suggesting the rocket had fallen short of placing its payload into the correct orbit.
Hong Kong charges: Two former editors from a Hong Kong online pro-democracy news outlet were charged with sedition and denied bail Thursday, a day after one of the last openly critical voices in the city said it would cease operations following a police raid on its office and seven arrests.
U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken called on Hong Kong authorities to release the detainees, and Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs Melanie Joly said her country was deeply concerned about the arrests, which included singer Denise Ho, a Canadian citizen and activist.
According to a charge sheet, national security police filed one count each of conspiracy to publish a seditious publication against Chung Pui-kuen and Patrick Lam, former editors at Stand News.
Police also said they would prosecute the company for sedition. Rohingya refugees: A group
of 120 Rohingya Muslims disembarked from a boat that had drifted for days off Indonesia’s northern province of Aceh and was towed by a navy ship into port, officials said.
The wooden boat was reportedly leaking and had a damaged engine. Efforts to rescue its passengers, mostly women and children, began after Indonesia’s government Wednesday said it would allow them to dock.
The boat was towed early Thursday from its location about 53 miles off the coast of Bireuen, a district in Aceh, toward Krueng Geukueh seaport in neighboring Lhokseumawe, a coastal town in the North Aceh district, navy western fleet command spokesman Col. La Ode Holib said.
High waves and bad weather hampered the rescue operation, and the navy ship was moving at almost 6 mph to keep the towed boat from capsizing, Holib said.
The boat docked safely early Friday.