World Briefing by Michael Bociurkiw: January 15, 2025

A week after flames leveled huge swaths of Pacific Palisades and Altadena, Southern California remained under a severe fire threat as residents struggled to comprehend the scale of the loss.

An army of firefighters spent Tuesday putting out small fires before they got out of control, and continued building containment lines on the Palisades and Eaton fires in hope of preventing them from spreading.

The firestorms are expected to be the most costly in U.S. history, consuming what officials estimate could be more than 12,000 structures, including many homes.

“This is the most devastating natural disaster to hit the Los Angeles area,” said L.A. Fire Department Capt. Erik Scott. “I’ve worked here for 20 years and I’ve never seen nor imagined devastation to be this extensive.” - LA Times

As the Los Angeles Fire Department faced extraordinary warnings of life-threatening winds, top commanders decided not to assign for emergency deployment roughly 1,000 available firefighters and dozens of water-carrying engines in advance of the fire that destroyed much of the Pacific Palisades and continues to burn, interviews and internal LAFD records show.

Fire officials chose not to order the firefighters to remain on duty for a second shift last Tuesday as the winds were building — which would have doubled the personnel on hand — and staffed just five of more than 40 engines that are available to aid in battling wildfires, according to the records obtained by The LA Times, as well as interviews with LAFD officials and former chiefs with knowledge of city operations.

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland has publicly released special counsel Jack Smith’s report on his investigation into Donald Trump and efforts to overturn the 2020 election, detailing the president-elect’s “criminal efforts to retain power” and projecting confidence in the investigation.

The more than 130-page report, which was submitted to Congress and released early Tuesday after a court hold blocking its release expired at midnight, spells out in extensive — if largely already known — detail how Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election.

Smith’s team states in no uncertain terms that they believed Trump criminally attempted to subvert the will of the people and overturn the election results.

“As set forth in the original and superseding indictments, when it became clear that Mr. Trump had lost the election and that lawful means of challenging the election results had failed, he resorted to a series of criminal efforts to retain power,” the report states.

Trump, for his part, slammed the report as “fake findings” in overnight social media posts - CNN

As the temperature in Moldova dips below freezing, the breakaway Transnistria region’s 360,000 residents are using plug-in electric heaters and wood stoves to keep warm.

In the two weeks since Russian gas stopped flowing to the Moscow-backed region via Ukraine, locals have faced gas, electricity, and hot water cuts, which have all but paralyzed local industry.

According to the self-proclaimed authorities in Tiraspol, Transnistria has less than a month’s worth of gas left. And after 30 years of supplying gas free of charge, Russia’s Gazprom has so far refrained from using alternative pipeline routes to shore up energy supplies - Meduza

A cross-border study conducted by the non-profit Angus Reid Institute finds that while one-in-three Canadians (32%) believe Donald Trump is serious in his professed goal of making Canada the 51st state, most Americans – two-thirds – have paid little attention to the incoming president’s comments.

“After a month of what was initially waved off as “silly talk”, the narrative is creating significant anxiety among Canadians, and bemusement among the few Americans actually aware of the situation,” the institute said.

With a federal election and Liberal leadership campaign in the offing, a Conservative nomination race in a Toronto-area riding is sparking new fears about potential foreign meddling in Canadian politics.

The concern centers around a $1-million bounty Hong Kong police announced on Christmas Eve for the arrest of Canadian Joe Tay. Tay is charged with violating the China-controlled city’s infamous national security law by running a YouTube channel that’s critical of the Hong Kong government.

Tay is also vying for the Tory nomination in Markham-Unionville, facing off against Bob Saroya, who has held the seat in the past and has appeared friendly with Beijing.

With the Tories enjoying a healthy lead in the polls, there’s a good chance that whoever represents the party in Markham-Unionville will become its MP, they note. - National Post

Ukraine has stopped production at its coking coal mine in Pokrovsk, which feeds the country’s steel industry, because of the proximity of advancing Russian forces, two industry sources told Reuters on Monday.

The facility in the embattled city of Pokrovsk is Ukraine’s only mine that produces coking coal needed for the country’s once giant steelmaking industry, which has withered since Russia’s February 2022 invasion.

This Briefing is reprinted with the author’s permission. Please find the original here.