‘Terrifying’ tornados of flame burn California city; 2 dead
REDDING, Calif. — A wildfire that roared with little warning into a Northern California city claimed two lives as thousands of people scrambled to escape before the walls of flames descended from forested hills onto their neighborhoods, officials said Friday.
Residents who gathered their belongings in haste described a chaotic and congested getaway as the embers blew up to a mile ahead of flames and the fire leaped across the wide Sacramento River and torched subdivisions in Redding, a city of 92,000 about 100 miles south of the Oregon border.
“I’ve never experienced something so terrifying in my life,” said Liz Williams, who loaded up two kids in her car and then found herself locked in bumper-to-bumper traffic with neighbors trying to retreat from Lake Redding Estates. She eventually jumped the curb onto the sidewalk and “booked it.”
“I didn’t know if the fire was just going to jump out behind a bush and grab me and suck me in,” Williams said. “I wanted out of here.”
The blaze leveled at least 125 homes, leaving neighborhoods smoldering and 37,000 people under evacuation orders. Redding police chief Roger Moore was among those who lost their homes, the Los Angeles Times reports.
Bad week in social media gets worse; Twitter hammered
NEW YORK — Cracking down on hate, abuse and online trolls is also hurting Twitter’s standing with investors.
The company’s stock plunged Friday after it reported a decline in its monthly users and warned that the number could fall further in the coming months. The 20.5 percent plunge comes one day after Facebook lost 19 percent of its value in a single day.
Twitter says it’s putting the long-term stability of its platform above user growth. That leaves investors seemingly unable to value what the biggest companies in the sector, which rely on their potential user reach, are worth.
Twitter had 335 million monthly users in the quarter, below the 339 million Wall Street was expecting, and down slightly from 336 million in the first quarter. That overshadowed a strong monthly user growth of 3 percent compared with the previous year.
The company said its monthly user number could continue to fall in the “mid-single-digit millions” in the third quarter.
After decades of silence, nuns talk about abuse by priests
VATICAN CITY — The nun no longer goes to confession regularly, after an Italian priest forced himself on her while she was at her most vulnerable: recounting her sins to him in a university classroom nearly 20 years ago.
At the time, the sister only told her provincial superior and her spiritual director, silenced by the Catholic Church’s culture of secrecy, her vows of obedience and her own fear, repulsion and shame.
“It opened a great wound inside of me,” she told the Associated Press. “I pretended it didn’t happen.”
After decades of silence, the nun is one of a handful worldwide to come forward recently on an issue that the Catholic Church has yet to come to terms with: The sexual abuse of religious sisters by priests and bishops. An AP examination has found that cases have emerged in Europe, Africa, South America and Asia, demonstrating that the problem is global and pervasive, thanks to the universal tradition of sisters’ second-class status in the Catholic Church and their ingrained subservience to the men who run it.
Some nuns are now finding their voices, buoyed by the #MeToo movement and the growing recognition that adults can be victims of sexual abuse when there is an imbalance of power in a relationship. The sisters are going public in part because of years of inaction by church leaders, even after major studies on the problem in Africa were reported to the Vatican in the 1990s.
Judge credits, faults administration on family reunification
SAN DIEGO — A U.S. judge commended the Trump administration Friday for reunifying families with their children after they were separated at the Mexico border but also warned that a better system must be put in place because hundreds of families have yet to be reunited.
U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw said the government gets “great credit” after reunifying more than 1,800 children 5 and over with parents or sponsors by Thursday’s court-imposed deadline.
He pointed out that many of the families were reunited while in custody then turned his attention to 431 children whose parents have been deported.
“The government is at fault for losing several hundred parents in the process and that’s where we go next,” the judge said.
Sabraw ordered the government and the American Civil Liberties Union, which represents the parents, to submit written updates every Thursday on still-separated families.
Next ‘Star Wars’ film to use unreleased Fisher footage
LOS ANGELES — Carrie Fisher is not done with “Star Wars” after all — Lucasfilm says unreleased footage of the actress will be used in the next installment of the “Star Wars” saga to draw her character’s story to an end.
The studio and writer-director J.J. Abrams announced Friday that footage of Fisher shot for 2015’s “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” will be used in the ninth film in the space opera’s core trilogies about the Skywalker family that includes Fisher’s character, Leia.
From wire sources
Filming is scheduled to begin Wednesday at London’s Pinewood Studios.
Mark Hamill, who plays Luke Skywalker, will also appear in the film, which for the moment is simply called “Episode IX.” It is scheduled to be released in December 2019.
Fisher died in December 2016 after she finished work on the middle installment in the trilogy, “The Last Jedi.” Director Rian Johnson opted not alter her storyline, leaving Leia’s fate to be handled by Abrams.
Trump and Putin’s RSVP’s: Yes, for sure, if, if if. …
WASHINGTON — Rarely has an RSVP been so complicated.
President Donald Trump is open to visiting Moscow — if he gets a formal invitation from Vladimir Putin, the White House said Friday. Russian President Putin said he’s game for a trip to Washington — but his answer came only after Trump retracted his invitation for a fall sit-down.
The awkward back and forth is the latest round of summit drama flowing from the two leaders’ controversial first meeting in Helsinki this month. It underscores Trump’s eagerness to forge a warmer relationship with Putin, though the Russian does not appear to share the urgency and Trump’s allies in Washington are watching with frustration.
Trump’s tentative yes to a Moscow trip comes even as lawmakers are still pushing for details about what he and Putin discussed in Helsinki. The president has been widely criticized for failing to publicly denounce Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. election and appearing to accept Putin’s denials of such activity.
Trump’s response to the criticism — an abruptly announced invitation for a second meeting in Washington in the fall — got an ice-cold reception from Republicans in Congress facing tough elections in November. Moscow was lukewarm and did not immediately accept.