PORTLAND,
Ore. (AP) — The Bureau of Land Management has announced plans to fund
11,000 miles (17,703 kilometers) of strategic fuel breaks in Idaho,
Oregon, Washington, California, Nevada and Utah in an effort to help
control wildfires.
The
fuel breaks are intended to prop up fire mitigation efforts and help
protect firefighters, communities and natural resources, The Oregonian reported Saturday.
According
to the BLM, wildfires are becoming bigger and more frequent across the
Great Basin states. Between 2009 and 2018, more than 13.5 million acres
of BLM land burned in the project area.
“Recovering
from the devastating effects of wildfires can take decades in the
rugged, high-desert climate of the Great Basin. These tools will help
firefighters contain fires when they break out,” said acting Assistant
Secretary of the Interior for Land and Minerals Management Casey Hammond
in a news release. “That’s why creating fuel breaks is incredibly
important to the entire basin, the people who live in these communities,
and our wildland firefighters.”
Fuel
breaks are intended to break up fire fuels by creating breaks in
vegetation that slow a blaze’s progress. By implementing them
strategically, they help firefighters control the spread of fire, and
can protect homes and resources.
Some scientists debate the effectiveness of fuel breaks, raising questions about whether these efforts are worth funding.
But
the BLM reports that assessments of more than 1,200 fuel breaks found
that 78% of them helped control wildfire and 84% helped change fire
behavior. According to the news release, “the BLM has extensively
documented that fuel breaks, and other types of fuel treatments, are
effective.”
Jennifer
Jones, a spokeswoman for the BLM, said the program will help streamline
the implementation process by reducing or eliminating the need for
environmental analysis.
The timeline for implementation and the location of fuel breaks will depend on what offices develop plans and apply for funding.
Because BLM offices have not requested funds, said Jones, the BLM can’t provide a figure for what the plan will cost.
“Costs
will depend on how many fuel breaks are actually constructed, what
types of fuel breaks are constructed, where they are constructed,
whether they are constructed by employees or contractors,” Jones said.
The public can comment on the plan for the next 30 days, after which the BLM will make final decisions.
BEIJING
(AP) — A recent speech by Chinese President Xi Jinping that has been
published by state media indicates for the first time that he was
leading the response to a new virus outbreak from early on in the
crisis.
The
publication of the Feb. 3 speech was an apparent attempt to demonstrate
that the Communist Party leadership had acted decisively from the
beginning, but also opens Xi up to criticism over why the public was not
alerted sooner.
In
the speech, Xi said he gave instructions on fighting the virus on Jan. 7
and ordered the shutdown that began on Jan. 23 of cities at the
epicenter of the outbreak. His remarks were published by state media
late Saturday.
“On
Jan. 22, in light of the epidemic’s rapid spread and the challenges of
prevention and control, I made a clear request that Hubei province
implement comprehensive and stringent controls over the outflow of
people,” Xi told a meeting of the party’s standing committee, its top
body.
The number
of new cases in mainland China fell for a third straight day, China’s
National Health Commission reported Sunday. The 2,009 new cases in the
previous 24-hour period brought the total to 68,500.
Commission
spokesman Mi Feng said the percentage of severe cases has dropped to
7.2% of the total from a peak of 15.9% on Jan. 27. The proportion is
higher in Wuhan, the Hubei city where the outbreak started, but has
fallen to 21.6% from a peak of 32.4% on Jan. 28.
“The national efforts against the epidemic have shown results,” Mi said at the commission’s daily media briefing.
China
reported 142 more deaths, almost all in Hubei, raising the mainland
China death toll to 1,665. Another 9,419 people have recovered from
COVID-19, a disease caused by a new coronavirus, and have been
discharged from hospitals.
Four people have died outside of mainland China, as the virus has spread to more than two dozen countries.
Japanese
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe convened an experts meeting to discuss
measures to contain the virus in his country, where one person has died
and more than a dozen cases emerged in the past few days without any
obvious link to China.
“The situation surrounding this virus is changing by the minute,” Abe said.
About
400 Americans on a quarantined cruise ship in Japan were awaiting
charter flights home, as Japan announced another 70 infections had been
confirmed on the Diamond Princess. Canada, Hong Kong and Italy said they
were planning similar flights.
Xi’s
role was muted in the early days of the epidemic, which has grown into
one of the biggest political challenges of his seven-year tenure.
The
disclosure of his speech indicates top leaders knew about the
outbreak’s potential severity weeks before such dangers were made known
to the public. It was not until late January that officials said the
virus can spread between humans and public alarm began to rise.
Zhang
Lifan, a commentator in Beijing, said it’s not clear why the speech was
published now. One message could be that local authorities should take
responsibility for failing to take effective measures after Xi gave
instructions in early January. Alternatively, it may mean that Xi, as
the top leader, is willing to take responsibility because he was aware
of the situation, Zhang said.
Trust
in the government’s approach to outbreaks remains fractured after the
SARS epidemic of 2002 and 2003, which was covered up for months.
Authorities
in Hubei and Wuhan faced public fury over their initial handling of the
epidemic. Wuhan on Jan. 23 became the first city to impose an
unprecedented halt on outbound transportation, a measure since expanded
to other cities with a combined population of more than 60 million.
The
anger reached a peak earlier this month following the death of Li
Wenliang, a young doctor who was reprimanded by local police for trying
to spread a warning about the virus. He ended up dying of the disease
himself.
In apparent response, the Communist Party’s top officials in Hubei and Wuhan were dismissed and replaced last week.
Even
as authorities have pledged transparency through the current outbreak,
citizen journalists who challenged the official narrative with video
reports from Wuhan have disappeared and are believed to be detained.
The
fall in new cases follows a spike of more than 15,000 on Thursday, when
Hubei began to include cases that had been diagnosed by a doctor but
not yet confirmed by laboratory tests.
Overwhelmed
by the number of suspected cases, the province has not been able to
test every person exhibiting symptoms. The clinical diagnosis is based
on doctors’ analyses and lung imaging and is intended to allow probable
cases to be treated as confirmed ones without the need to wait for a lab
result.
About
400 Americans aboard the cruise ship docked at Yokohama, near Tokyo,
were told to decide whether to stay or take chartered aircraft arranged
by the U.S. government to fly them home, where they would face another
14-day quarantine. Those going were to begin leaving the ship Sunday
night. People with symptoms were to be banned from the flights.
About
255 Canadians and 330 Hong Kong residents are on board the ship or
undergoing treatment in Japanese hospitals. There are 35 Italians, of
which 25 are crew members, including the captain. The 70 new cases on
the Diamond Princess raised the number of infected to 355.
American
passenger Matthew Smith told The Associated Press that he and his wife
were not taking the flights, because the 14-day quarantine for the ship
is set to end on Wednesday. The evacuees will be taken to Travis Air
Force Base in California, with some continuing to Lackland Air Force
Base in Texas.
Malaysia
said it would not allow any more passengers from another cruise ship to
transit the country after an 83-year-old American woman from the MS
Westerdam tested positive for the virus.
She
was among 145 passengers who flew from Cambodia to Malaysia on Friday.
Her husband also had symptoms but tested negative for the virus. The
Westerdam was turned away from four ports around Asia before Cambodia
allowed it to dock in Sihanoukville late last week.
Malaysian
Deputy Prime Minister Wan Azizah Wan Ismail said that her country would
bar cruise ships that came from or transit any Chinese ports from
docking.
Cambodia said earlier that all 1,455 passengers on the Holland America-operated ship had tested negative for the virus.
___
Associated
Press writer Ken Moritsugu and researcher Henry Hou in Beijing and
writers Yuri Kageyama and Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo, Eileen Ng in Kuala
Lumpur, Malaysia, Sopheng Cheang in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Frances
D’Emilio in Rome and Rob Gillies in Toronto contributed to this report.
JERUSALEM
(AP) — U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Thursday said he is
“outraged” by the U.N.’s publication of a list of companies accused of
violating Palestinian human rights by operating in Israel’s West Bank
settlements.
In a
statement, Pompeo said the list supports a Palestinian-led boycott
movement and “delegitimizes” Israel. He urged other countries to join
the U.S. in rejecting the effort.
“The
United States has long opposed the creation or release of this
database,” Pompeo said. “Its publication only confirms the unrelenting
anti-Israel bias so prevalent at the United Nations.”
The
database, released Wednesday after years of delays, listed 112
companies that the U.N. human rights office said are complicit in rights
violations by bolstering Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank
and Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem.
The
list is dominated by Israeli companies, including major banks,
construction companies, supermarkets and gas stations. But it also
includes a number of global brands, including American firms Airbnb,
General Mills and Motorola Solutions.
The
Palestinians seek the West Bank and east Jerusalem — captured by Israel
in the 1967 Mideast war — as parts of an independent state, and the
vast majority of the world considers Israeli settlements to be illegal.
President
Donald Trump, however, has taken a more lenient position, tolerating
continued Israeli settlement construction and releasing a Mideast plan
last month that envisions giving Israel permanent control over all of
its settlements.
The
U.N. list does not impose any penalties on the companies or accuse them
of acting illegally. Instead, it appears to be aimed at pressuring them
into changing their business practices by drawing negative attention to
their ties to a contentious Israeli policy.
Israel denounced the list and accused the U.N. rights office of collaborating with the boycott movement in compiling the names.
The
BDS movement promotes boycotts, sanctions and divestment against Israel
in a nonviolent campaign that it says is aimed at defending Palestinian
rights.
Israel
says the movement seeks the country’s destruction and accuses it of
anti-Semitism — a charge that BDS leaders vociferously reject.
President
Donald Trump, accompanied by first lady Melania Trump, steps off Air
Force One at the Palm Beach International Airport, Friday, Feb. 14,
2020, in West Palm Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
PALM
BEACH, Fla. (AP) — President Donald Trump mixed reelection business
with pleasure during a weekend stop at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida,
attending a fundraiser on Saturday evening expected to raise $10
million for his campaign and the Republican National Committee.
The
event was believed to be his most expensive fundraiser ever, with
invitations going to donors who gave $580,600 per couple, according to
The Washington Post, which obtained an invitation to the event at the
Palm Beach estate of billionaire investor Nelson Peltz.
Pro-Trump groups have been shattering fundraising records on the path toward a goal of raising $1 billion this election cycle.
Advocacy
groups that have sought campaign finance reform said the Supreme Court
paved the way for such fundraising hauls by striking down in 2014 the
limit on the total amount of money an individual could give to all
political party committees in a two-year election cycle.
“The
ability of Trump to raise these astronomical amounts of influence money
from billionaires and multimillionaires is a direct result of the
Supreme Court’s utter failure to understand the nation’s campaign
finance laws or the implications of its decision,” said Democracy 21
President Fred Wertheimer in an op-ed published in Medium.
In
that 5-4 decision the Supreme Court found that limits on the total
amount of money donors can give to all candidates, committees and
political parties were unconstitutional.
Sen.
Bernie Sanders has criticized some of his fellow Democratic
presidential candidates for accepting campaign donations from the
extremely wealthy, questioning whether those who accept the donations
would stand up to those who provide them if the situation called for it.
Democratic presidential candidates Amy Klobuchar and Tom Steyer couldn’t name the Mexican president when asked for it during a televised interview in Nevada Thursday. The two, along with Pete Buttigieg, were separately interviewed by Spanish-language station Telemundo after a candidate forum hosted by the League of United Latin American Citizens. MEXICAN MIGRANTS SENT RECORD $36B IN REMITTANCES IN 2019 Klobuchar, a Minnesota senator, replied, “No,” when asked who the Mexican president is. “I forgot,” was billionaire businessman Tom Steyer’s response.
Presidential hopefuls Tom Steyer and Amy Klobuchar each reportedly
drew a blank when asked to name the president of Mexico during a
campaign event in Nevada.
U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich.,
was briefly detained by police Friday when she joined airline catering
employees in a protest at Detroit Metro Airport, according to reports. Photos posted on social media showed Tlaib, 43, sitting in the road outside the airport’s
Delta terminal, along with eight other protesters – while a larger
group of protesters demonstrated on the sidewalk nearby. Many held signs
reading, “One Job Should Be Enough,” as the group called for better
wages health coverage. Initial reports said Tlaib was arrested in the matter, but a union official later said Tlaib was only briefly detained. Tlaib,
a first-term congresswoman from Detroit who has been in office since
January 2019, later posted a Twitter message about the incident, saying
other protesters had been arrested. It was not Tlaib’s first encounter with law enforcement. Back in July, video surfaced on social media
of a 2016 incident, in which Tlaib – prior to running for Congress – is
dragged out of a Detroit event featuring then-presidential candidate Donald Trump. At
the time Tlaib was a public interest attorney at the Sugar Law Center
for Economic and Social Justice, after being term-limited out of the
Michigan state legislature. Tlaib
quickly drew national attention after taking office in Washington, when
she publicly vowed to “impeach the mother-----,” referring to Trump,
the newly inaugurated president. In December, Trump called out
Tlaib after she posted video of herself excitedly heading to the Capitol
to cast her impeachment vote against him. Fox News' Ronn Blitzer contributed to this story.
San Francisco
Mayor London Breed on Friday admitted having a 20-year friendship and
brief romantic relationship with a former city worker now under FBI investigation, prompting some to call for her resignation. “I write this in the spirit of transparency because in the wake of a scandal at City Hall,
I think San Franciscans are entitled to hear directly from their
Mayor,” Breed wrote in a post on Medium of her association with former San Francisco public works director Mohammed Nuru, who was indicted for public corruption last month. At
a news conference, Breed explained she wrote the post because there
were “a number of rumors” swirling and she wanted San Franciscans to
hear about the relationship directly from her, the Bay Area's FOX 2
reported.
Former director of San Francisco Public Works Mohammed Nuru (left) and San Francisco Mayor London Breed (right).
(AP/Office of Mayor London Breed )
Breed wrote she was profoundly shocked and disappointed when she heard about the charges against Nuru. “To be clear,” she wrote. “I never asked Mohammed Nuru to do anything improper, and he never asked me to do anything improper.” Still,
she admitted accepting $5,600 from Nuru last year for a car repair she
hasn’t paid back yet. She said the disclosure was not required but she
did it out of transparency. Supervisor Gordon Mar suggested the mayor should temporarily step back from her duties, according to FOX 2. "Mayor
Breed's admission of thousands of dollars in unreported gifts from a
subordinate is likely illegal, certainly unethical, and part of a
culture of casual corruption that is eroding the faith of the public,”
Mar said in a statement. “Given the seriousness of this admission, the
direct connection to the central figure in the FBI's investigation into
public corruption, I believe we need to put the people of San Francisco
first. I believe Mayor Breed should do the right thing and temporarily
step back from her duties until a full, independent investigation can be
completed."
"Mayor Breed's admission of thousands of
dollars in unreported gifts from a subordinate is likely illegal,
certainly unethical, and part of a culture of casual corruption that is
eroding the faith of the public.” — San Francisco Supervisor Gordon Mar
Supervisor Hillary Ronen, a political opponent, called the admission “troubling” and said Breed should resign. Supervisor Dean Preston said Breed should appear before the Board of Supervisors. "I
am deeply concerned with revelations today that Mayor London Breed
violated San Francisco law by taking thousands of dollars in gifts from a
City Hall subordinate," he tweeted. Breed added,
"I will not apologize for dating someone two decades ago. I will not
apologize for remaining close friends with him and his family for 20
more years. But neither will I make excuses for any misdeeds." Nuru and restaurant owner Nick Bovis were arrested late last month and charged with corruption and lying to the FBI. They
are accused of attempting to bribe an airport commissioner to vote in
favor of allowing a business owned by Bovis at the airport and accepting
gifts from a Chinese developer in town for business, FOX 2 reported. Nuru resigned this week but both men deny the accusations.
Hundreds of Americans quarantined on a cruise ship docked off the coast of Yokohama, Japan, for more than a week due to a coronavirus –
now called COVID-19 -- outbreak onboard will have the chance to
evacuate, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday,
according to a report. Approximately 380 Americans and their
families on the Diamond Princess will be offered seats on two flights
that could arrive at Travis Air Force Base near Sacramento, Calif., as early as Sunday, a CDC official told The Wall Street Journal.
A group of quarantined passengers exercise on the Diamond Princess
cruise ship Saturday, Feb. 15, 2020, in Yokohama, near Tokyo.
(Associated Press)
A CDC team will screen passengers and those exhibiting symptoms won’t be allowed on the flights. Passengers
were placed under in a two-week quarantine Feb. 5 and since then the
number of cases onboard has climbed to 218, including some Americans, in
the largest outbreak outside of China. There are a total of 428 Americans onboard the ship, The New York Post reported.
The quarantined Diamond Princess cruise ship is shown in Yokohama, near Tokyo, Feb. 11, 2020. (Associated Press)
In a letter, nine U.S. House representatives, led by
Rep. Phil Roe, R-Tenn., had urged the Trump administration to evacuate
the Americans. Roe is a physician and the ranking member of the House
Veterans Affairs Committee. “From firsthand accounts, we are
concerned about the existing level of care available on the ship,
particularly to the 428 US citizens aboard, as well as the national
security concerns posed by reported quarantine conditions,” the
lawmakers wrote, according to The Post.
“From
firsthand accounts, we are concerned about the existing level of care
available on the ship, particularly to the 428 US citizens aboard, as
well as the national security concerns posed by reported quarantine
conditions.” — Letter from U.S. lawmakers, urging evacuation of Americans aboard cruise ship
Roe
said he has been in contact with Dr. Arnold Hopland, a physician from
Elizabethton, Tenn., who is aboard the ship. Hopland told Roe that crew
members have been doing their best to protect the quarantined pasengers,
the Johnson City Press reported. Once
in the U.S., the evacuated passengers will either be quarantined for
two weeks at the California base or at Lackland Air Force Base in San
Antonio, Texas, The Journal reported. Around
230 Americans who were evacuated from Wuhan, China, the epicenter of
the virus, are already in quarantine at Travis. The arriving cruise ship
passengers would be kept separate from them. Earlier
this week, the cruise ship company said Japanese health officials would
remove some passengers to finish their quarantine at an onshore
facility. More than 66,000 people have been sickened in mainland
China and more than 1,500 have been killed by the virus as of Friday
evening. CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP In
Beijing, state-run TV Friday announced residents returning from Lunar
New Year celebrations must quarantine themselves for two weeks and could
face legal consequences otherwise, according to The Times.
Former director of San Francisco Public Works Mohammed Nuru (left) and San Francisco Mayor London Breed (right).
(AP/Office of Mayor London Breed )
A group of quarantined passengers exercise on the Diamond Princess
cruise ship Saturday, Feb. 15, 2020, in Yokohama, near Tokyo.
(Associated Press)
The quarantined Diamond Princess cruise ship is shown in Yokohama, near Tokyo, Feb. 11, 2020. (Associated Press)
