Fire crews in California and Oregon reported making progress on several blazes over the weekend, as lighter winds and lower temperatures aided the battle against the massive fires raging across the west.
But officials in both states told residents to brace for bad news, as rescue teams start combing through towns and neighborhoods leveled by the infernos.
Continue reading...Dozens of people are missing and at least 23 people are believed to have been killed as historic wildfires in the western US forced evacuations, stretched fire crews thin and spawned misinformation.
Residents of Portland, Oregon, awoke on Friday to air thick with smoke pollution that dimmed the sun and turned the skies blood-orange red. Hundreds of firefighters are battling two large wildfires that threatened to merge near the most populated part of Oregon, including the suburbs of Portland, and the governor said dozens of people are missing in other parts of the state.
Continue reading...In Molalla and other western towns, fear, uncertainty and disinformation gripped residents as hundreds of thousands in the state evacuate
Hundreds of thousands of people in Oregon were ordered to leave their homes on Thursday as wildfires encroached on their properties. The evacuations clogged highways, emptied entire towns and sparked confusion in a state that has not grappled with wildfires of this size before.
Large-scale evacuations in the state began within the metropolitan area of Portland, Oregon’s largest city. Clackamas county, home to some 420,000 people in the metro’s south, was already under varying levels of fire alert when officials on Thursday afternoon told residents of the city of Molalla to leave.
Continue reading...Footage shot over Eagle Point shows flattened residential areas after nearly 100 major wildfires ripped through the US west. At least three people have been killed in Oregon with the governor, Kate Brown, warning that the state faces further hardship as authorities battle to contain the blazes
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Washington state’s governor, Jay Inslee, said today that the fires in the state have burned nearly 937 sq miles (2,426km).
“We’ve had this trauma all over Washington,” Inslee said, KHQ-TV reported. The governor was touring the farm town of Malden, which is 35 miles south of Spokane: “But this is the place where the whole heart of the town was torn out.”
Stunned residents of the small Oregon town of Phoenix walked through a scene of devastation Thursday after one of the state’s many wildfires wiped out much of their community, including a mobile home park, houses and businesses, the AP reports on the ground.
There were flames across the street from me, flames to the right of me, flames to the left of me. I just watched everything burn.”
Burned out cars, charred lawn ornaments, rubble. That’s what’s left of this Phoenix mobile home park, which covers abt 20 acres. Flames and smoldering embers still visible here. Everything is blackened by fire.
This was home to abt 300 people. pic.twitter.com/DrDobLKVev
Mayor Chris Luz talks about the loss of Puck’s Donuts. pic.twitter.com/4qz2gLy9Jb
Continue reading...More than 500,000 people in Oregon have been forced to evacuate as unprecedented wildfires rage across the state, amounting to more than 10% of the population, authorities said Thursday.
Wildfires searing through the American west have killed at least 15 people, leveled entire neighborhoods and forced stretched firefighting crews to make tough decisions about where to deploy.
Continue reading...More than 85 significant wildfires are burning across the west, where a record 2.5m acres have been destroyed in the latest batch of blazes. At least seven people have died and the dense plumes of smoke have turned skies red and amber
Continue reading...More than 85 significant wildfires are burning across the west, where a record 2.5m acres have been destroyed in the latest batch of blazes. At least seven people have died and the dense plumes of smoke have turned skies red and amber
Continue reading...Region sees amber skies while Washington state faces more acres burned in a day than typically burn in a year
Large, fast-moving fires raged on across the American west on Wednesday, destroying hundreds of homes in the Pacific north-west and sending a dense plume of smoke that turned skies amber across parts of the region.
Related: California, Oregon and Washington battle dozens of fires – live updates
Continue reading...The mayor of Portland, Ted Wheeler, launched a searing attack against Donald Trump on Sunday, saying the US president is inciting violence in his city. 'It's you [Trump] who have created the hate and division,' Wheeler said. Trump responded to the comments with a series of counterattacks on Twitter
• Fatal shooting in Portland as Trump supporters confront BLM protesters
Bortac, a quasi-militarised outfit equivalent to the Navy Seals, has been deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan
In January 2011, James Tomsheck, then a top internal affairs investigator inside US Customs and Border Protection, attended a meeting of about 100 senior CBP leaders in a hotel in Irvington, Virginia.
Amid the sanitized splendor of the hotel ballroom, he vividly recalls hearing the nation’s then highest-ranking border patrol agent, David Aguilar, laying out his vision for the future. Border patrol, the former CBP deputy commissioner said, was to become the “marine corps of the US federal law enforcement community”.
Continue reading...The confrontation between protesters and federal paramilitaries in Portland escalated early on Sunday morning, when demonstrators finally broke down a steel fence around the courthouse after days of trying.
Related: What is happening in Portland and what does Trump hope to gain?
Continue reading...On another night of confrontation with federal agents, activists said their message was in danger of being forgotten
Teal Lindseth surveyed the sea of mothers she was about to lead into the firing line.
“I look at this crowd and I don’t see many black people,” lamented the 21-year-old African American activist. “Oregon is white as hell. Whitewashed.”
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Among real storms blowing around the US today, hurricanes are approaching Texas and Hawaii while a tropical storm heads for the Caribbean. The Associated Press is keeping watch here.
Among other kinds of storm, the kinds that blow themselves out on Twitter, the billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk and his partner, the musician Grimes, appear to have had a public argument about pronouns.
Related: Explain it to me quickly: did Elon Musk and Grimes really name their baby X Æ A-12?
Miami Dade county has now recorded more than 100,000 cases of Covid-19 since the start of the pandemic. According to the Miami Herald, there were 3,424 new cases reported on Saturday. The county’s population is around 2.7 million.
Continue reading...America is “staring down the barrel of martial law” as it approaches the presidential election, a US senator from Oregon has warned as Donald Trump cracks down on protests in Portland, the state’s biggest city.
Related: This is what happens when the War on Terror is turned inward, on America | Hamilton Nolan
Continue reading...The mayor of Portland, Oregon, has demanded that Donald Trump remove camouflage-clad federal agents deployed to the city after they attacked Black Lives Matter protesters and some detained people far from the federal property they were sent to protect
Militarized federal agents deployed by Donald Trump to Portland, Oregon, fired tear gas at protesters again late on Friday night, even as the city’s mayor demanded the agents be removed and the state’s attorney general vowed to seek a restraining order against them.
Related: Camouflaged federal agents have descended on Portland. Trump's DHS is out of control | Trevor Timm
Continue reading...A man accused of fatally stabbing two people who prosecutors said tried to stop his racist tirade against two young black women on an Oregon commuter train was convicted of murder on Friday, after an emotional trial that featured testimony from both women and the sole survivor of the attack nearly three years ago.
Jurors found Jeremy Christian, 37, guilty of the deaths of Taliesin Namkai-Meche and Ricky Best.
Continue reading...A federal judge in Portland, Oregon, has put on hold a Trump administration rule requiring immigrants to prove they will have health insurance or can pay for medical care before they can get visas.
US district judge Michael Simon granted a temporary restraining order that prevented the rule from going into effect Sunday. It was not clear when he would rule on the merits of the case.
Continue reading...Oregon city saw its largest far-right demonstration of the Trump era on Saturday, as 500 rightwingers travelled from around the country to march back and forth across the city’s bridges, and briefly occupy a patch of its waterfront. City authorities succeeded in preventing head-on confrontations between the demonstration and a much larger counter-protest. Police said they made 13 arrests, and seized weapons throughout the day
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