Santa Rosa Press Democrat
From my neck of the woods (so to speak) comes the update I’ve been waiting for.
Cal Fire officials painted a positive picture for control of the Walbridge and Meyers fires in Sonoma County Monday, even as the containment numbers remain low.
Favorable weather with no lightning strikes overnight into Monday morning gave crews time to bolster bulldozer lines and shore up areas of containment around edges of the Walbridge blaze.
By midday, Cal Fire had Walbridge at 54,068 acres with 5 percent contained. It grew less than 3,000 acres overnight as a storm brought a tiny bit of rain but none of the lightning that sparked what is now the second-largest fire in the state, when combined with the Hennessey-Napa County fires.
In total, the Lightning Complex fire has burned 350,030 acres and is 22 percent contained, Chief Sean Kavanaugh said. The Hennessey section is 26 percent contained.
He declared victory over the Meyers fire, north of Jenner, which has been essentially halted at 2,360 acres and 95 percent contained.
“That’s what we’re calling a win,” he said.
C/NET
If there's one thing that the coronavirus has shown, we all need high-speed internet access to survive in an age when everyone is stuck at home. Unfortunately, that's not the case for 18 million Americans.
It's a staggering number, especially when you consider how essential online access is for work, school and just about every facet of our lives. Broadband access is as critical as running water or electricity, even if it isn't anywhere near as available.
The problem cuts across different groups, from farmers in Iowa where service providers find it too costly to build out networks, to impoverished families in Manhattan who can't afford internet service.
It's a problem virtually everyone agrees needs to be solved -- even if nobody can agree on a solution.
The Daily Charge podcast explores this issue in a six-part series of podcasts, where we interview industry experts and executives to get their perspectives on how to address the digital divide.
ESPN
Inside Staples Center, Kobe Bryant's Nos. 8 and 24 have hung from the rafters since 2017. And now outside Staples Center, a portion of Figueroa Street will be renamed in the Los Angeles Lakers star's honor. Figueroa Street will be unveiled as Kobe Bryant Boulevard between Olympic Boulevard and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, according to Los Angeles City Council member Herb J. Wesson Jr.
Wesson Jr. made the announcement on Monday, Aug. 24 -- 8/24 on the calendar -- which is officially known as Kobe Bryant Day in Los Angeles and Orange County. Bryant and his daughter, Gianna, were among nine people who perished in a helicopter crash in January.
The Lakers will wear special "Black Mamba" uniforms to remember Bryant and his daughter for Game 4 of their first round series against the Portland Trail Blazers on Monday. Sunday was Bryant's birthday. He would have been 42.
A portion of West 11th street, which intersects with Figueroa and separates Staples Center from the plaza at L.A. Live, was already renamed Chick Hearn Court after the longtime Lakers play-by-play announcer.
BBC
The governor of the US state of Wisconsin has deployed the National Guard to maintain "public safety" after police shot a black man on Sunday.
Jacob Blake is reportedly in a stable condition after officers shot him multiple times as he tried to get into a car in the city of Kenosha.
Protests erupted in the city soon after, and authorities imposed an emergency overnight curfew.
Governor Tony Evers has now called up the National Guard to aid local police.
In a press release, Governor Evers said the "limited mobilisation" - made at the request of local officials - was to help law enforcement "protect critical infrastructure" and make sure people can demonstrate safely.
"Every person should be able to express their anger and frustration by exercising their First Amendment rights and report on these calls to action without any fear of being unsafe," he said. A curfew will also come into effect at 20:00 local time (01:00 GMT) until 07:00 on Tuesday.
BBC
A Florida taxi driver, who believed false claims that coronavirus was a hoax, has lost his wife to Covid-19.
Brian Lee Hitchens and his wife, Erin, had read claims online that the virus was fabricated, linked to 5G or similar to the flu.
The couple didn't follow health guidance or seek help when they fell ill in early May. Brian recovered but his 46-year-old wife became critically ill and died this month from heart problems linked to the virus.
Brian spoke to the BBC in July as part of an investigation into the human cost of coronavirus misinformation. At the time, his wife was on a ventilator in hospital.
Deadly conspiracy theories
Erin, a pastor in Florida, had existing health problems - she suffered from asthma and a sleeping disorder.
Her husband explained that the couple did not follow health guidance at the start of the pandemic because of the false claims they had seen online.
NPR
TikTok has filed a federal lawsuit against the Trump administration arguing that the president's executive order taking aim at the Chinese-owned app is unconstitutional and should be blocked from taking effect.
The suit, which has been expected for weeks, claims that President Trump's Aug. 6 executive action declaring a national emergency that would effectively ban the video-sharing app in the U.S. was taken without any opportunity for the company to be heard, allegedly violating its due-process rights.
TikTok's lawyers additionally claim the president exceeded his authority in issuing the order and that the planned ban violates the company's free speech rights, arguing that computer code is a type of expression protected under the First Amendment.
The Trump administration has long maintained that TikTok's Beijing-based parent company, ByteDance, could share Americans' personal data with China's authoritarian government, something the White House considers a national security threat.
NPR
On a cool February morning, around 60 people gathered in the Sierra Nevada foothills to take part in a ceremony that, for many decades, was banned.
Men and women from Native American tribes in Northern California stood in a circle, alongside university students and locals from around the town of Mariposa. Several wore bright yellow shirts made of flame-resistant fabric. For the next two days, the group would be carefully lighting fires in the surrounding hills.
Also sprinkled throughout the crowd were officials from the state government, which a century ago had largely prohibited California's tribes from continuing their ancient practice of controlled burns.
Fire has always been part of California's landscape. But long before the vast blazes of recent years, Native American tribes held annual controlled burns that cleared out underbrush and encouraged new plant growth.
Now, with wildfires raging across Northern California, joining other record-breaking fires from recent years, government officials say tackling the fire problem will mean bringing back "good fire," much like California's tribes once did.
Reuters
WASHINGTON – In a claim likely to intensify the controversy surrounding one of the most influential figures in the American Christian conservative movement, a business partner of Jerry Falwell Jr has come forward to say he had a years-long sexual relationship involving Falwell’s wife and the evangelical leader.
Giancarlo Granda says he was 20 when he met Jerry and Becki Falwell while working as a pool attendant at the Fontainebleau Miami Beach hotel in March 2012. Starting that month and continuing into 2018, Granda told Reuters that the relationship involved him having sex with Becki Falwell while Jerry Falwell looked on.
Granda showed Reuters emails, text messages and other evidence that he says demonstrate the sexual nature of his relationship with the couple, who have been married since 1987. “Becki and I developed an intimate relationship and Jerry enjoyed watching from the corner of the room,” Granda said in an interview. Now 29, he described the liaisons as frequent – “multiple times per year” – and said the encounters took place at hotels in Miami and New York, and at the Falwells’ home in Virginia.
Reuters
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The New York state attorney general is investigating whether Donald Trump and the Trump Organization improperly manipulated the value of the U.S. president’s assets to secure loans and obtain economic and tax benefits, and said Trump’s son Eric has been uncooperative in the civil probe.
The disclosure was made in a filing on Monday with a New York state court in Manhattan, where Attorney General Letitia James is demanding that the Trump Organization, Eric Trump and others comply with subpoenas from her office.
Lawyers for the attorney general said the subpoenas were issued as part of her “ongoing confidential civil investigation into potential fraud or illegality,” adding there has been no determination that any laws were broken.
The Guardian
High levels of the chemical cholinesterase in tests on Alexey Navalny are a compelling clue that he was poisoned with a nerve agent, experts have said.
Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a chemical and biological counter-terrorism expert, said the presence of cholinesterase inhibitors suggested Navaly was suffering from nerve agent poisoning. Raised levels of cholinesterase were an important “jigsaw piece in the puzzle”, he said.
Navalny was admitted to the Charité hospital in Berlin on Saturday, two days after he was apparently poisoned with a cup of tea while on a trip to Siberia. He is being treated in intensive care and remains in a medically induced coma.
The hospital said a team of physicians had carried out an extensive examination, and their clinical findings indicated Navalny was poisoned with a substance from a group of cholinesterase inhibitors. The specific substance involved remained unknown, the hospital said, adding that further comprehensive tests had been initiated.
The Guardian
A gospel-singing Brazilian congresswoman has been accused of masterminding the “barbaric” murder of her preacher husband after at least six failed or aborted attempts to kill him with poison or in staged robberies.
Anderson do Carmo was 42 when he was shot dead in June 2019 as he returned to the home he shared with the church crooner-turned-politician Flordelis dos Santos de Souza.
The celebrity congresswoman, who congregants and fans call simply Flordelis, claimed her husband – with whom she had famously raised more than 50 children – had been slain by thieves.
But allegations of a bizarre and lurid family plot to murder the evangelical preacher emerged on Monday as police arrested five of Flordelis’ children and one granddaughter for involvement in the crime.
Al Jazeera
One person has died and at least 100 feared trapped in the debris of a five-story building that collapsed in an industrial town in western India's Maharashtra state, officials said.
I believe about 100 to 125 people must have been inside at the time of its collapse," Gogawale, who was present at the accident site, told Reuters.
The building was comprised of 47 flats, police officials in Mahad said in a statement.
Local residents and police combed through tin sheets, metal rods and other wreckage in a desperate search for survivors as ambulances ferried victims to nearby hospitals.
Not all the roughly 200 residents of the building in Raigad district's Mahad town, about 165km (100 miles) south of India's financial capital Mumbai, were at home when it crumbled in the evening, local legislator Bharatshet Maruti Gogawale told the Reuters news agency on Monday.
India's National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) spokesman Sachidanand Gawde told reporters that emergency workers had retrieved the body of one victim, who has not yet been identified.
Al Jazeera
Mike Pompeo's planned speech to the US Republican National Convention this week has sparked a fury of criticism for breaking decades of precedent for sitting secretaries of state avoiding overt partisan political activity.
Despite State Department assurances that Pompeo will be speaking in his personal capacity and will not violate prohibitions on federal employees participating in public political events on duty, Democrats and others have cried foul. They accuse the country's top diplomat of inappropriate behaviour that has been anathema to his predecessors.
Four teams of lawyers, including the State Department legal counsel, have reviewed the speech that will be recorded in Jerusalem and broadcast in prime time at the Republican convention on Tuesday to ensure that it does not cross ethical lines, a person close to Pompeo who was not authorised to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity told The Associated Press news agency.
Deutsche Welle
Belarus investigators summoned Nobel Literature Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich for questioning over her ties to an opposition group. Meanwhile, authorities have arrest protest leaders demanding the president's ouster.
Belarus' most famous author was called in for questioning on as part of a criminal probe into an opposition council, the group said on Monday. Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the 2015 Nobel Literature Prize, is a member of the Coordination Council, which was established by opponents of Alexander Lukashenko after he was declared winner of the country's disputed August 9 election.
The 72-year-old Alexievich is set to appear for questioning on Wednesday. She has not attended any of the council's meetings, however, and is known to rarely leave her house amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Meanwhile, two members of the Coordination Council were arrested Monday. Olga Kovalkova and Sergei Dylevsky were detained in the capital, Minsk. Kovalkova is a top associate of Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, Lukashenko's main challenger in the disputed election who has since fled to Lithuania. Dylevsky is a tractor plant worker who has risen to prominence as a strike leader. The two are accused of illegally organizing a strike.
Duetsche Welle
A 33-year-old man in Hong Kong was infected with the coronavirus after fully recovering from a bout with the disease in April, representing the world's first documented case of human reinfection, researchers from the University of Hong Kong said on Monday.
Their findings suggest that even people who have acquired immunization to the novel coronavirus, whether through natural infection or vaccination, may still contract the disease, which has resulted in over 800,000 deaths worldwide. Their paper has been accepted for publication the international medical journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.
The man, an information technology worker, was cleared of COVID-19 and discharged from a hospital in April but tested positive again in August after returning from Spain via Britain. The researchers used genomic sequence analysis to prove that the patient was infected by two separate strains of SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19.
USA Today
As rain from a weakening Tropical Storm Marco soaked portions of the Gulf Coast on Monday, forecasters feared Laura, which is close behind, could deliver a much more serious blow to the area.
Marco was likely to make landfall Monday evening in Louisiana as a weak tropical storm or tropical depression, forecasters said. Tropical Storm Laura is expected to reach hurricane status before it roars toward the Gulf Coast on Wednesday and Thursday.
Laura should be much more of a big deal than Marco, forecasters said.
For the residents of the Louisiana coast, “they’re certainly lucky that Marco is not worse than it is,” University of Miami hurricane researcher Brian McNoldy said Monday. “This (Marco) will come and go, and they can get ready for Laura. That’ll be the main attraction.”
NPR
Senior White House adviser Kellyanne Conway has announced that she will step down from her post at the end of the month.
Conway, whose official title is counselor to the president, is known for her tenacious defense of administration policy in frequent appearances on cable television. She is one of President Trump's longest-serving aides.
In a statement on Sunday, she cited a need to "devote more time to family matters."
"I will be transitioning from the White House at the end of this month," she said.
Conway's husband, conservative lawyer George T. Conway III, has become a relentless critic of the president, frequently placing his wife in an awkward position. He announced on Twitter on Sunday that he is withdrawing from the Lincoln Project, a group of Republicans devoted to defeating Trump in November that he helped found. He said he is also taking "a Twitter hiatus."
