TV News LIES

The Park Fire, already the largest wildfire in California this year has burned over 71,000 acres in less than a day. CalFire has issued evacuation orders and warnings across Butte and Tehama counties, some reaching Chico city limits. No fatalities have been reported. The cause of the fire, currently only 3 percent contained, is under active investigation.

Some communities are in immediate danger said Rick Carhart, public information officer with Cal Fire and the Butte County Fire Department. “Cohasset and Forest Ranch are under evacuation orders now, so the structures in those areas are in immediate threat and we're hopeful that everybody has heeded the evacuation orders.”

The blaze started at approximately 4 p.m. local time Wednesday near Upper Park Road in Upper Bidwell Park, east of Chico.

According to CalFire this is the largest blaze in the state this year, currently at 71,489 acres and only three percent contained as of 1:30 p.m. local time Thursday. 2024's second largest fire is the Lake Fire near Santa Barbara which has burned at least 38,000 acres but is now 90 percent contained.

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World temperature records were shattered on Sunday on what may be the hottest day scientists have ever logged, data suggests.

Inflamed by the carbon pollution spewed from burning fossils and farming livestock, the average surface air temperature hit 17.09C (62.76F) on Sunday, according to preliminary data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service, which holds data that stretches back to 1940. The reading inched above the previous record of 17.08C (62.74F) set on 6 July last year, but the scientists cautioned that the difference was not statistically distinguishable.

As the temperature soared in the Houston-area home Janet Jarrett shared with her sister after losing electricity in Hurricane Beryl, she did everything she could to keep her 64-year-old sibling cool.

But on their fourth day without power, she awoke to hear Pamela Jarrett, who used a wheelchair and relied on a feeding tube, gasping for breath. Paramedics were called – but she was pronounced dead at the hospital, with the medical examiner saying her death was caused by the heat.

“It’s so hard to know that she’s gone right now because this wasn’t supposed to happen to her,” Janet Jarrett said.

Almost two weeks after Beryl hit, heat-related deaths during the prolonged power outages have pushed the number of storm-related fatalities to at least 23 in Texas.

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Alejandra Palma lives in perpetual fear of the next storm.

“We are constantly checking the weather,” said Palma, who co-owns Root Hill Cafe in Brooklyn’s low-lying Gowanus neighborhood. “If we see that there’s a hurricane in Florida, it’s like, oh my God, please let it not come here.”

Last September, when record rain hit New York, it flooded her small businesses, damaging walls and floors already weakened from previous flooding and causing gasoline from a nearby construction site to leak into her basement. It took almost two days to clean up and reopen the shop.

Last year wasn’t entirely a fluke: Palma said that each year she loses about five business days to flooding and estimates that each day Root Hill is closed, it costs her business about $3,500 in lost sales and employee pay.

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An earthquake rocked northern Illinois early Monday morning.

At 2:53 a.m. local time, a 3.4 magnitude earthquake shook the ground around Somonauk, Illinois, according to the United States Geological Survey. The village is around 64 miles west of the Chicago.

People in cities and suburbs to the west of the Windy City, like Aurora, reported feeling weak or light shaking, however the tremors would not have been strong enough to cause damage.

Damage from earthquakes doesn't occur until the quake reaches a magnitude of 4 or 5, according to the USGS. But other variables, like the distance from the earthquake or a building's construction, can affect that.

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A heatwave that impacted the US west coast over the past week is now moving east into the midwest and south-east, as millions of Americans have been under a heat alert at some point in the past week.

“Numerous near record-tying/breaking high temperatures are possible over the central High Plains and Southeast Sunday, and along much of the East Coast by Monday,” reported the National Weather Service.

Even this early in the morning, temperatures near this 3,500-foot peak reach triple digits, with this part of the U.S.-Mexico border under an excessive heat warning.

Volunteers with Borderlands Relief Collective, a group of private citizens from the San Diego area, are preparing to drive up the mountain and deliver water and first aid to migrants crossing into the U.S.

Almost as soon as they start climbing up, the group encounters a man sitting on the side of the road. He breaks into tears when he sees the volunteers approaching with water.

He is dehydrated and wearing shoes too small for his feet. In broken English, he says his name is Taleb, and he’s from Mauritania. Before NPR can get a last name, he’s rushed aside to receive care.

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• Hill noted in an email Thursday that 40% of the U.S. population lives in a coastal county.

Driving the news: The late June sale of the $200,000 Nantucket home comes months after a house valued at $2.2 million on the same street sold for $600,000. Another last October had to be demolished due to "extreme erosion" along the Massachusetts island's southwest shoreline, the Nantucket Current reports.

• Only "a couple of waterfront areas" are experiencing extreme erosion on Nantucket, and property values "are going up across the island," said Shelly Lockwood, a Nantucket real estate broker who helped develop a coastal resilience class for local agents on erosion and rising sea levels.

The big picture: Sea-level rise, a tangible effect of climate change, is accelerating across the U.S., per Christopher Hein, a coastal geologist at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, William & Mary.

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• What's happening in Nantucket, a popular place to have summer houses among celebrities and billionaires, can be seen across the U.S.
• In the Outer Banks of North Carolina in May, officials had to close a stretch of beach after a sixth house collapsed into the sea due to erosion.
• Other coastal erosion hot spots include parts of California, like Dana Point, south of Los Angeles, and Plum Island, northern Mass.
• A new economic model from Duke University found that tax incentives for high-income property owners, coupled with federal subsidies for storm and flood damage mitigation, have driven coastal property prices higher despite rising climate risks, per a March study.