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It Could Take Weeks Before Displaced L.A. Residents Can Go Home

The tens of thousands of people displaced by the devastating wildfires in the Los Angeles area are increasingly anxious to know when they can return home — or to what remains of their properties.
Officials say crews are working to reopen closed areas, snuffing out hot spots and clearing hazardous debris, but no timeline has been announced for lifting the evacuation orders.
Experts have warned that it could take weeks before people can return to the hardest-hit neighborhoods because of the amount of work needed to ensure the safety of residents.
Firefighters are still trying to contain the Palisades and Eaton fires, the biggest ones in the Los Angeles region, a prerequisite to allowing people to return. Both remained largely out of control on Wednesday evening, though their growth had slowed.
Captain Erik Scott of the Los Angeles Fire Department said the timeline for people returning to their neighborhoods can vary. It depends on the extent of the damage, which needs to be mapped and carefully assessed in every impacted community, he added. There is also the threat of hazardous materials, such as asbestos and chemicals.
“We want people to have realistic expectations,” Mr. Scott said.
It took weeks in the aftermath of some previous destructive blazes for people to return. In 2018, the Camp fire destroyed most of Paradise in Northern California and killed 85 people. The final evacuation orders in that town were lifted more than a month after the fire started.
Similarly, after a devastating fire in Lahaina on the island of Maui killed more than 100 people in 2023, it was nearly two months before the first of the thousands of displaced residents could return to their properties.
The suppression of the fire is only one step in the process, according to fire officials. There are yet more safety and infrastructure issues to tackle. Workers need to clear and replace downed power lines, stabilize partially collapsed buildings and remove toxic ash from the ground.
“That’s why the orders are still in place,” said David Acuna, a battalion chief with Cal Fire. “It’s not just about the fire. There are all these other elements to address.”
The grim search for human remains has further complicated efforts to clear neighborhoods. Officials are using cadaver dogs to comb through the thousands of structures damaged or destroyed in the fires to locate remains.
“We have people literally looking for the remains of your neighbors,” Sheriff Robert Luna of Los Angeles County said at a news conference on Monday. “Please be patient with us.”
Even for those whose homes survive, the lifting of evacuation orders does not necessarily mean they can return to live in them right away, warned Michael Wara, a climate policy expert at Stanford University.
“There’s going to be smoke damage,” he said. “There’s going to be the fact that you don’t have utilities.”
In Pacific Palisades, the recovery process was underway in its incinerated downtown. The air buzzed with the sound of jackhammers, bulldozers and tree shredders. Workers cleared debris, pulled down charred utility poles and ground up the skeletal limbs of burned eucalyptus trees.
Ali Sharifi managed to inspect his lower Palisades home on Tuesday. Aside from a burned backyard fence, it was intact. Yet the destruction around it, including charred schools, churches and grocery stores, gave him second thoughts about returning.
“Who wants to live in a ghost town?” Mr. Sharifi said.
Erica Fischer, an associate professor at Oregon State University who studied the aftermath of the Camp fire, said that a fast recovery is not always a good one, especially if it means rebuilding in ways that contributed to the disaster.
Of the ongoing evacuation orders in California, she said, “I know it’s not convenient, and it’s disruptive, but it keeps people out of harm’s way.”

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Video: Clashes After Immigration Raid at California Cannabis Farm

new video loaded: Clashes After Immigration Raid at California Cannabis Farm
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transcript
Clashes After Immigration Raid at California Cannabis Farm
Federal agents fired crowd control munitions at protesters who blocked a road outside of the farm. Some demonstrators threw objects at the agents’ vehicles.
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Please make a path for emergency vehicles or chemical munitions will be deployed.
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Trump heads to Texas as recovery efforts from deadly flood continue

President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump will travel to Texas on Friday to meet with first responders and grieving families in the aftermath of last week’s catastrophic flooding that has left more than 100 people dead.
During his visit, Trump is expected to receive a briefing from local elected officials and meet with victims’ relatives. He will be joined by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.
Republican Sens. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn told reporters this week that they planned to travel with Trump to tour the flood damage. It is unclear whether state Attorney General Ken Paxton, a staunch ally of the administration who is challenging Cornyn in next year’s GOP primary, will join them.
Authorities continue to search miles of the Guadalupe River for more than 150 people who remain missing as hopes of finding more survivors dwindle. Among those confirmed or feared dead are 27 children and counselors at Camp Mystic, a Christian summer camp in Hunt.
Trump on Sunday signed a major disaster declaration for Texas to make federal funding available for hard-hit Kerr County, where nearly 77% of voters backed him in the 2024 election.
The trip to Texas will be Trump’s second to the site of a natural disaster since he was inaugurated for his second term; he visited Los Angeles in January after a wildfire devastated large swaths of Southern California. During his first term, he made multiple trips to Texas in 2017 in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey and its deadly floods. The same year, he traveled to Puerto Rico to survey damage caused by Hurricane Maria.
The Trump administration has faced criticism from officials and lawmakers at various levels of government who have argued that recent job cuts at the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, alongside plans to shutter the Federal Emergency Management Agency, prevented accurate forecasting and worsened the effects of the floods. Administration officials have repeatedly rejected those assertions.
Trump has pledged to “get rid” of FEMA, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, and his administration has overseen a largely voluntary exodus of experienced personnel at the agency, fueling concerns about its ability to promptly respond to disasters. The concerns were heightened by a new policy from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem mandating her approval for any agency spending in excess of $100,000.
Asked by NBC News on Thursday whether the new policy delayed FEMA’s response to the tragedy in Texas, Trump defended Noem.
“We were right on time. We were there — in fact, she was the first one I saw on television,” Trump told “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker in a phone call. “She was there right from the beginning.”
Criticism of the disaster response has also focused on Kerr County’s emergency management system after reports indicated local officials did not use warnings from FEMA to send text alerts when the severity and speed of the flooding heightened, catching hundreds of people in a region known as “flash flood alley” by surprise. In addition, Kerr County, which has a population of more than 50,000 people, had no siren system to alert residents, in part because some local officials felt it was too expensive to install.
Trump called for additional flood alarms in Texas on Thursday, though he argued that the storm was unprecedented and that “nobody ever saw a thing like this coming.”
“After having seen this horrible event, I would imagine you’d put alarms up in some form, where alarms would go up if they see any large amounts of water or whatever it is,” he told NBC News.
Joe Herring, the mayor of Kerrville, told MSNBC’s Katy Tur this week that the state rejected an effort to install a siren system nearly a decade ago.
“The county government looked into that in 2017, and from what I heard, their grant application was denied,” Herring said. “I wasn’t in government at that time, but it sounds like we talked about it, we asked for help, and we were denied before.”
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Video: Trump Compliments President of Liberia on His ‘Beautiful English’

new video loaded: Trump Compliments President of Liberia on His ‘Beautiful English’
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Trump Compliments President of Liberia on His ‘Beautiful English’
During a lunch at the State Dining Room with five leaders of African nations, President Trump complimented the president of Liberia, where English is the official language, for his command of the language.
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— involvement in the investment in Liberia. “Yeah“. I would like to see that happen. We want to work with the United States in peace and security within the region, because we are committed to that. And we just want to thank you so much for this opportunity. “Well, thank you. It’s such good English, such beautiful — Where did you, where did you learn to speak so beautifully? Where — were you educated? Where?” Yes, sir. “In Liberia?” Yes, sir. “Well, that’s very interesting. That’s beautiful English. I have people at this table can’t speak nearly as well. They come from —”
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