A wildfire nipping at the edges of two Idaho mountain resort towns has destroyed about a dozen homes, prompting authorities to intensify calls to hundreds of residents to heed mandatory orders to evacuate, fire officials said on Tuesday.
It was unclear how many of the 1,000 summer residents of the towns of Pine and Featherville had actually left their homes ahead of the lightning-sparked blaze, which has already charred 99,000 acres and is now the nation's top firefighting priority.
It is the second time in two years that the towns, about 70 miles east of Boise, have been ordered emptied over fires burning in the Boise National Forest. Officials said some residents may be staying because of a false sense of security fostered by the successful defense of the towns last year.
"This is a more serious situation. We might be hopeful about protecting Pine and Featherville again, but it's a different beast," fire spokesman David Eaker said of the fire, citing drier conditions and more extreme fire behavior.
By Tuesday, flames from the so-called Elk Complex fire that erupted last Thursday had engulfed a number of houses and structures in a resort development near Pine that has been blocked by downed trees, Eaker said.
Another fire official, information officer Ludie Bond, put the number of homes destroyed by the blaze at 12 to 15. Hundreds of firefighters have been assigned to the blaze.
The fire, whose threats are compounded by steep, rugged terrain, low humidity, gusting winds and thick smoke, is the latest to cause substantial property losses during a U.S. summer fire season that experts predict could become one of the worst on record.
Wildfires have raced across hundreds of thousands of acres in Idaho in recent weeks amid an uptick in drought conditions, high temperatures and strong winds, pouring thick smoke into mountain valleys, triggering air pollution alerts in several Idaho communities.
"The whole state is a tinderbox," said Jennifer Smith, spokeswoman for the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise.
Pat Christensen, co-owner with his wife of Cyndie's Featherville Café, is among residents of Featherville who has chosen not to leave. The café is still offering breakfast, despite a loss of power that happened three days ago when the fire damaged dozens of electric lines and power poles.
"It was real scary for a while but we survived this last year and we will again," he said.
Meanwhile a fast-moving wildfire that ignited on Tuesday afternoon destroyed at least three houses and forced the evacuation of about 400 homes in two upscale residential developments on the outskirts of Park City, Utah, said Park City Fire District Battalion Chief Steve Zwirn.
The cause of the blaze in scrub oak and sagebrush foothills about 40 miles east of Salt Lake City was unknown but there were reports of lightning strikes in the area mid-afternoon when the blaze erupted, Zwirn said.
The 400-acre fire was less than 5 percent contained early Tuesday evening.
The 2013 fire season has marked the most destructive blaze in Colorado history and has been among the most deadly on record for firefighters, 30 of whom have fallen so far this year.
Nineteen specially trained firefighters were killed on June 30 after being overrun by wildfire on the outskirts of the small Arizona community of Yarnell. The tragedy marked the greatest loss of life from a U.S. wildfire in 80 years.
A medicine mogul spent six years building his own private mountain peak and luxury villa atop a high-rise apartment block in China's capital, earning the unofficial title of "most outrageous illegal structure." Now, authorities are giving him 15 days to tear it down.
The craggy complex of rooms, rocks, trees and bushes looming over the 26-story building looks like something built into a seaside cliff, and has become the latest symbol of disregard for the law among the rich as well as the rampant practice of building illegal additions.
Angry neighbors say they've complained for years that the unauthorized, 800-square-foot mansion was damaging the building's structural integrity and its pipe system, but that local authorities failed to crack down. They've also complained about loud, late-night parties.
"They've been renovating for years. They normally do it at night," said a resident on the building's 25th floor, who added that any attempts to reason with the owner were met with indifference. "He was very arrogant. He could care less about my complaints," said the neighbor, who declined to give his name to avoid repercussions.
Haidian district urban management official Dai Jun said Tuesday that authorities would tear the two-story structure down in 15 days unless the owner does so himself or presents evidence it was legally built. Dai said his office has yet to receive such evidence.
The villa's owner has been identified as the head of a traditional Chinese medicine business and former member of the district's political advisory body who resides on the building's 26th floor. Contacted by Beijing Times newspaper, the man said he would comply with the district's orders, but he belittled attempts to call the structure a villa, calling it "just an ornamental garden."
Authorities took action only after photos of the villa were splashed across Chinese media on Monday. Newspapers have fronted their editions with large photographs of the complex, along with the headline "Beijing's most outrageous illegal structure."
The case has resonance among ordinary Chinese who regularly see the rich and politically connected receive special treatment. Expensive vehicles lacking license plates are a common sight, while luxury housing complexes that surround Beijing and other cities are often built on land appropriated from farmers with little compensation.
China's leader Xi Jinping has vowed to crack down on official corruption, and Beijing itself launched a campaign earlier this year to demolish illegal structures, although the results remain unclear.
Demand for property remains high, however, and the rooftop extralegal mansion construction is far from unique. A developer in the central city of Hengyang recently got into hot water over an illegally built complex of 25 villas on top of a shopping center. He later won permission to keep the villas intact as long as they weren't sold to others.
While all land in China technically belongs to the state — with homebuyers merely given 70-year leases — the rules are often vague, leaving questions of usage rights and ownership murky.
A city in Sichuan province recently caused a minor stir when it was discovered to have cut the length of land leases from the normal 70 years to just 40 years.
The local government's response to public queries drew even more jeers. Officials posted a statement online maintaining that the law allows for lease periods of less than 70 years and adding: "Who knows if we'll still be in this world in 40 years. Don't think too long-term."
A sinkhole caused a section of a central Florida resort villa to partially collapse early Monday, while another section of the villa was sinking, authorities said.
About 30 percent of the three-story structure collapsed around 3 a.m. Monday, Lake County Fire Rescue Battalion Chief Tony Cuellar said. The villa at the Summer Bay Resort had already been evacuated and no injuries were reported.
Cuellar said authorities were also concerned about another section of the villa, which was sinking.
The sinkhole, which is in the middle of the villa, is about 40 to 50 feet in diameter, Cuellar said. He said authorities think it was getting deeper but couldn't tell early Monday if it was growing outward.
The villa houses 24 units and about 20 people were staying in it at the time, Cuellar said.
Authorities were called to the scene, about 10 miles west of Disney World, late Sunday where they found that the building was making popping sounds and windows were breaking.
A nearby villa was also evacuated as a precaution, Cuellar said.
Witnesses told The Associated Press they could hear a cracking sound as the villa began sinking. A large crack was visible at the building's base.
Luis Perez, who was staying at a villa near the sinking one, said he was in his room when the lights went off around 11:30 p.m. He said he was on his way to the front desk to report the outage when he saw firefighters and police outside.
"I started walking toward where they were at and you could see the building leaning and you could see a big crack at the base of the building," said Perez, 54, of Berona, N.J.
President Barack Obama on Friday denied he has poor relations with Vladimir Putin after canceling their Moscow talks, but said the Russian president can sometimes appear "like a bored kid in the back of the classroom."
U.S.-Russian relations plunged to one of their lowest points since the Cold War this week after Russia granted temporary asylum to fugitive former U.S. spy contractor Edward Snowden. Obama retaliated by abruptly canceling a Moscow summit with Putin planned for early next month.
At a White House news conference on Friday, Obama insisted that he does not have bad personal relations with Putin. The two men had a testy meeting in June in Northern Ireland and from the photos of them at the time, it looked as if they would both rather have been somewhere else.
"I know the press likes to focus on body language, and he's got that kind of slouch, looking like the bored kid in the back of the classroom. But the truth is that when we're in conversations together, oftentimes it's very productive," Obama said.
Putin's sending of a telegram wishing former President George W. Bush well after a heart procedure this week was viewed by some Kremlin watchers as a sign that Putin was sending an implicit message to Obama.
The White House says Obama pulled out of the Moscow summit not just because of the Russian decision to grant asylum to Snowden, who is wanted in the United States to face espionage charges.
U.S. differences with Russia have piled up recently over Moscow's support for the Syrian government in that country's civil war, as well as human rights concerns and other grievances.
There was no immediate response from Moscow to Obama's description of the Russian president. But at a news conference in Washington after talks on Friday between the Russian and U.S. foreign policy and defense chiefs, the Russians emphasized how positive the meeting had been. They even invited the Americans to participate in a tank competition later this year.
"We don't have any Cold War. Instead we have close relations," Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said. "Edward Snowden did not overshadow our discussions."
As a group, Pacific states - including California, the most populous in the nation - are the most diverse when it comes to love and friendship. By contrast, the South has the lowest percentage of people with more than five acquaintances from races that don't reflect their own.
Some of this is down to precedent. "This country has a pretty long history of restriction on inter-racial contact and for whites and blacks, even though it's in the past, there are still echoes of this," said Ann Morning, an associate professor in the department of sociology at New York University.
"Hispanics and Asian Americans have traditionally had less strict lines about integrating."
In his comments two weeks ago, President Obama expressed optimism about the future, saying his daughters' experiences show younger generations have fewer issues with race. "It doesn't mean we're in a post-racial society. It doesn't mean that racism is eliminated. But...they're better than we are, they're better than we were, on these issues," he said.
Younger American adults appear to confirm this, according to the poll. About one third of Americans under the age of 30 who have a partner or spouse are in a relationship with someone of a different race, compared to one tenth of Americans over 30. And only one in 10 adults under 30 say no one among their families, friends or coworkers is of a different race, less than half the rate for Americans as a whole.
"My Mom's school, they had ended segregation, but she told me there was still basically one side of the road for whites and one side of the road for blacks," respondent Carlon Carter, 18, said.
A keen athlete and music fan, his racially diverse group of friends in Birmingham, Alabama, comes from these shared interests.
"There's a big difference now. We don't see each other so much like 'you're white and I'm black'. If you like the same thing I like, then that's all that matters," he said.
These results were taken from the ongoing Reuters/Ipsos online poll and include the responses of 4,170 Americans between July 24th and August 6th. The credibility interval, a measure of precision, for these results is plus or minus about 2.7 percentage points for a five-day average on any given day during that period. Smaller subsets of the poll, such as blacks, Hispanics and adults under 30, have a credibility interval for that period ranging from about 3 percentage points to 11 percentage points.
The race and ethnicity questions in this story are part a polling project that started in January 2012, surveying about 11,000 people a month since then.