Malibu wildfires forced thousands to evacuate their homes

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Written by Super User

Category: Americas

Published: 11 December 2024

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MALIBU, USA - Firefighters are battling a large wildfire in Malibu that has forced thousands of residents to evacuate their homes.

The wind-fanned Franklin fire broke out on Monday evening, and within hours had rapidly burned through more than 1,800 acres in the coastal city, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

Many celebrities and Hollywood executives own multi-million dollar homes on the coastline, one of the most desirable areas in Southern California.

Mary Poppins and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang star Dick Van Dyke, who will celebrate his 99th birthday on Friday, was among the residents and celebrities fleeing their homes under mandatory orders from the City of Malibu.

Van Dyke said he and his wife Arlene Silver, who he married in 2012, had “safely evacuated”.

“Arlene and I have safely evacuated with our animals except for Bobo escaped as we were leaving,” he wrote on his official Facebook page.

“We’re praying he’ll be ok and that our community in Serra Retreat will survive these terrible fires.”

Singer Cher also evacuated from her Malibu home and is staying at a hotel, her publicist Liz Rosenberg said late on Tuesday.

Pepperdine University said it had cancelled classes and final exams for Tuesday as emergency personnel rushed to contain the blaze.

Billowing smoke and burning trees could be seen just outside a library where students wearing protective masks were sheltering, videos posted online and broadcast by local media showed.

Fire engines were on campus and helicopters were dropping water collected from lakes in the school’s Alumni Park onto the fire.

The city of Malibu said in an emergency alert at 11:22 GMT that the flames had descended from the hills across the Pacific Coast Highway, and that officials were conducting evacuations “door-to-door”. The evacuation order encompassed up to 20,000 people.

A damage estimate was not available, but “it’s certain some number of homes are definitely going to be badly damaged”, Matt Myerhoff, a spokesman for the city of Malibu, told the station.

He said the fire moved south, jumping over the Pacific Coast Highway and extending all the way to the ocean. At one point, it had threatened the historic Malibu Pier, but the pier was protected and is intact, Myerhoff said.

Power to tens of thousands of people had been shut off by Monday night as utilities worked to mitigate the impacts of Santa Ana winds, whose strong gusts can damage electrical equipment and spark wildfires.

Most of the Southern California area is currently under a ‘red flag warning’ by the national weather service, with gusty winds and low humidity elevating the risks of quick-moving fires.

The dangerous fire conditions were driven by Southern California’s notorious Santa Ana winds.

Santa Anas are dry, warm and gusty northeastern winds that blow from the interior of Southern California toward the coast and offshore. They typically occur during the autumn months and continue through winter and into early spring.

Trump Cabinet and executive branch of different ideas and eclectic personalities

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Written by Super User

Category: Americas

Published: 26 November 2024

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By BILL BARROW

WASHINGTON - Donald Trump’s personnel choices for his new Cabinet and White House reflect his signature positions on immigration and trade but also a range of viewpoints and backgrounds that raise questions about what ideological anchors might guide his Oval Office encore.

With a rapid assembly of his second administration — faster than his effort eight years ago — the former and incoming president has combined television personalities, former Democrats, a wrestling executive and traditional elected Republicans into a mix that makes clear his intentions to impose tariffs on imported goods and crack down on illegal immigration but leaves open a range of possibilities on other policy pursuits.

“The president has his two big priorities and doesn’t feel as strongly about anything else — so it’s going to be a real jump ball and zigzag,” predicted Marc Short, chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence during Trump’s 2017-21 term. “In the first administration, he surrounded himself with more conservative thinkers, and the results showed we were mostly rowing in the same direction. This is more eclectic.”

Indeed, Secretary of State-designee Marco Rubio, the Florida senator who has pilloried authoritarian regimes around the world, is in line to serve as top diplomat to a president who praises autocratic leaders like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Hungary’s Viktor Orban.

Republican Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer of Oregon has been tapped to sit at the Cabinet table as a pro-union labor secretary alongside multiple billionaires, former governors and others who oppose making it easier for workers to organize themselves.

The prospective treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, wants to cut deficits for a president who promised more tax cuts, better veterans services and no rollbacks of the largest federal outlays: Social Security, Medicare and national defense.

Abortion-rights supporter Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is Trump’s choice to lead the Health and Human Services Department, which Trump’s conservative Christian base has long targeted as an agency where the anti-abortion movement must wield more influence.

Former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich allowed that members of Trump’s slate will not always agree with the president and certainly not with one another. But he minimized the potential for irreconcilable differences: “A strong Cabinet, by definition, means you’re going to have people with different opinions and different skills.”

That kind of unpredictability is at the core of Trump’s political identity. He is the erstwhile reality TV star who already upended Washington once and is returning to power with sweeping, sometimes contradictory promises that convinced voters, especially those in the working class, that he will do it all again.

“What Donald Trump has done is reorient political leadership and activism to a more entrepreneurial spirit,” Gingrich said.

There’s also plenty of room for conflict, given the breadth of Trump’s 2024 campaign promises and his pattern of cycling through Cabinet members and national security personnel during his first term.

This time, Trump has pledged to impose tariffs on foreign goods, end illegal immigration and launch a mass deportation force, goose U.S. energy production and exact retribution on people who opposed — and prosecuted — him. He’s added promises to cut taxes, raise wages, end wars in Israel and Ukraine, streamline government, protect Social Security and Medicare, help veterans and squelch cultural progressivism.

Trump alluded to some of those promises in recent weeks as he completed his proposed roster of federal department heads and named top White House staff members. But his announcements skimmed over any policy paradoxes or potential complications.

Bessent has crusaded as a deficit hawk, warning that the ballooning national debt, paired with higher interest rates, drives consumer inflation. But he also supports extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts that added to the overall debt and annual debt service payments to investors who buy Treasury notes.

A hedge-fund billionaire, Bessent built his wealth in world markets. Yet, generally speaking, he’s endorsed Trump’s tariffs. He rejects the idea that they feed inflation and instead frames tariffs as one-time price adjustments and leverage to achieve U.S. foreign policy and domestic economic aims.

Trump, for his part, declared that Bessent would “help me usher in a new Golden Age for the United States.”

Chavez-DeRemer, Trump promised, “will achieve historic cooperation between Business and Labor that will restore the American Dream for Working Families.”

Trump did not address the Oregon congresswoman’s staunch support for the PRO-Act, a Democratic-backed measure that would make it easier for workers to unionize, among other provisions. That proposal passed the House when Democrats held a majority. But it’s never had measurable Republican support in either chamber on Capitol Hill, and Trump has never made it part of his agenda.

When Trump named Kennedy as his pick for health secretary, he did not mention the former Democrat’s support for abortion rights. Instead, Trump put the focus on Kennedy’s intention to take on the U.S. agriculture, food processing and drug manufacturing sectors.

The vagaries of Trump’s foreign policy stand out, as well. Trump’s choice for national security adviser, Florida Rep. Mike Waltz, offered mixed messages Sunday when discussing the Russia-Ukraine war, which Trump claims never would have started had he been president, because he would have prevailed on Putin not to invade his neighboring country.

Speaking on “Fox News Sunday,” Waltz repeated Trump’s concerns over recent escalations, which include President Joe Biden approving sending antipersonnel mines to Ukrainian forces.

“We need to restore deterrence, restore peace and get ahead of this escalation ladder, rather than responding to it,” Waltz said. But in the same interview, Waltz declared the mines necessary to help Ukraine “stop Russian gains” and said he’s working “hand in glove” with Biden’s team during the transition.

Meanwhile, Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence, the top intelligence post in government, is an outspoken defender of Putin and Syrian President Bashar al Assad, a close ally of Russia and Iran.

Perhaps the biggest wildcards of Trump’s governing constellation are budget-and-spending advisers Russell Vought, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. Vought led Trump’s Office of Management and Budget in his first term and is in line for the same post again. Musk, the world’s wealthiest man, and Ramaswamy, a mega-millionaire venture capitalist, are leading an outside advisory panel known as the “Department of Government Efficiency.”

The latter effort is a quasi-official exercise to identify waste. It carries no statutory authority, but Trump can route Musk’s and Ramaswamy’s recommendations to official government pathways, including via Vought.

A leading author of Project 2025, the conservative movement’s blueprint for a hard-right turn in U.S. government and society, Vought envisions OMB not just as an influential office to shape Trump’s budget proposals for Congress but a power center of the executive branch, “powerful enough to override implementing agencies’ bureaucracies.”

As for how Trump might navigate differences across his administration, Gingrich pointed to Chavez-DeRemer.

“He might not agree with her on union issues, but he might not stop her from pushing it herself,” Gingrich said of the PRO-Act. “And he will listen to anybody. If you convince him, he absolutely will spend presidential capital.”

Short said other factors are more likely to influence Trump: personalities and, of course, loyalty.

Vought “brought him potential spending cuts” in the first administration, Short said, “that Trump wouldn’t go along with.” This time, Short continued, “maybe Elon and Vivek provide backup,” giving Vought the imprimatur of two wealthy businessmen.

“He will always calculate who has been good to him,” Short said. “You already see that: The unions got the labor secretary they wanted, and Putin and Assad got the DNI (intelligence chief) they wanted. … This is not so much a team-of-rivals situation. I think it’s going to look a lot like a reality TV show.”

Susan Sarandon opens up on exile from Hollywood after PRO-Palestine remarks

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Written by Super User

Category: Americas

Published: 11 November 2024

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LOS ANGELES, USA - Susan Sarandon has spoken about the fallout from her remarks at a pro-Palestine rally last November, stating that she has been blacklisted by mainstream Hollywood studios.

The actor and life-long activist, 78, appeared at a protest in New York, demonstrating against Israel’s ongoing invasion of Palestine.

At the protest, Sarandon said that a lot of people were “afraid of being Jewish at this time, and are getting a taste of what it feels like to be a Muslim in this country, so often subjected to violence”.

She subsequently apologised for the comment, saying that the phrasing was a “terrible mistake”, and that she had intended to express concern over antisemitic attacks.

“This phrasing was a terrible mistake, as it implies that until recently Jews have been strangers to persecution, when the opposite is true,” she said at the time. “As we all know, from centuries of oppression and genocide in Europe to the Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh, PA, Jews have long been familiar with discrimination and religious violence which continues to this day.

“I deeply regret diminishing this reality and hurting people with this comment. It was my intent to show solidarity to the struggle against bigotry of all kinds, and I am sorry I failed to do so.”

In a new interview with The Times, Sarandon said that the controversy led to the departure of her agent, and she is no longer able to star in mainstream studio films.

“I was dropped by my agency, my projects were pulled,” she said. “I’ve been used as an example of what not to do if you want to continue to work.”

“There are so many people out of work right now [since] November of last year… who have lost their jobs as custodians, as writers, as painters, as people working in the cafeteria, substitute teachers who have been fired because they tweeted something, or liked a tweet, or asked for a ceasefire,” Sarandon continued.

Asked if she would be offered any large-scale film roles again, Sarandon replied: “I don’t know. [Not] anything in Hollywood.”

In the time since the controversy, Sarandon has continued to advocate for an end to the violence in Palestine.

More than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed since Israel began its campaign last October, following an attack on Israel by Hamas that claimed the lives of 1,200 people and saw 251 taken hostage.

This week, the UN human rights office (OHCHR) stated that nearly 70 per cent of all confirmed Palestinian deaths in Gaza were women and children.

The organisation accused Israel of failing “to comply with the fundamental principles of humanitarian law”.

Over the last year, a drastic rise in antisemitism has also been recorded within the UK and US.