Southern Calif. wildfire explodes in size
Southern Calif. wildfire explodes in size
LOS ANGELES — A fire that destroyed six homes and threatened hundreds of others exploded in size over the weekend as it burned dangerously close to two communities north of Los Angeles and into unoccupied desert wilderness.
Erratic wind spread the blaze in the Angeles National Forest to nearly 41 square miles early Sunday, triggering the evacuation of hundreds of homes in Lake Hughes and Lake Elizabeth, officials said.
Crews continued to protect more than 1,000 homes at the edge of the rural hamlets of Lake Hughes and Lake Elizabeth in Angeles National Forest.
Nathan Judy of the U.S. Forest Service told The Associated Press that six homes burned overnight, and teams were waiting to assess at least 10 more structures that may have been damaged.
At least 10 other structures were damaged.
Syrian rebels, Hezbollah guerrillas battle in Lebanon
BEIRUT — Syrian rebels and Hezbollah guerrillas battled Sunday in their worst clashes yet inside Lebanon, a new sign that the civil war in Syria is increasingly destabilizing its fragile neighbor.
Syria’s foreign minister, meanwhile, rebuffed an appeal by the U.N. and the Red Cross to let humanitarian aid reach thousands of civilians trapped in the rebel-held town of Qusair, under regime attack for the past three weeks. The Red Cross said many of the wounded were not receiving medical care.
The latest confrontation between Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia and Syrian rebels, who have been fighting on opposite sides inside Syria, came at a time of increasingly incendiary rhetoric between Sunni and Shiite Muslims in the region.
One of the Arab world’s most influential Sunni clerics, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, urged the faithful this week to fight alongside Sunni rebels against Shiite Hezbollah and President Bashar Assad’s minority Alawite sect, an off-shoot of Shiite Islam.
Hezbollah’s involvement in the battle over strategic Qusair has also raised tensions with Syrian rebels who have threatened to target the militia’s bases in Lebanon, and with Sunnis in Lebanon who support the rebels.
US congressmen find few clues to Boston bombings in Russia despite help from Steven Seagal
MOSCOW — The head of a U.S. congressional delegation said Sunday that its meetings in Russia showed there was “nothing specific” that could have helped prevent the Boston Marathon bombings, but that the two countries need to work more closely on joint security threats.
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican who led the six-member delegation, described discussions with Russian parliament members and security officials as productive. Some of the meetings, he said, were made possible by American actor Steven Seagal.
Seagal, who attended the news conference in the U.S. Embassy, is well connected in Russia. He met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in March, and last week paid a visit to Ramzan Kadyrov, the strongman who rules Chechnya, a province in southern Russia that has seen two brutal wars between federal troops and Chechen separatists since 1994.
Those wars spawned an Islamic insurgency that spread across the Caucasus region, including to neighboring Dagestan, now the center of the violence. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who is accused of carrying out the Boston bombings with his younger brother, spent six months in Dagestan last year. Investigators have been trying to determine whether he had contacts with the militants there.
Rep. Steve King said Russian security officials told the delegation they believed that Tsarnaev and his mother had been radicalized before moving to the United States in 2003.
By wire sources