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.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
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