Deadly wildfires ravage Southern California as water runs low

Multiple out-of-control blazes in the Los Angeles area yesterday killed at least two people and seriously injured many others. The fires destroyed homes and businesses and blanketed highways in smoke. Officials warned of a dwindling water supply and said the worst was yet to come. Follow our live coverage here.

Tens of thousands of people were forced to leave their homes, and more areas were placed under evacuation orders by the hour. At least 18 school districts reported closures, and about 400,000 energy customers were without power. Air quality worsened as smoke poured into the sky. Here’s a map of the evacuations.

Hurricane-level winds in the area reached as high as 160 kilometers per hour, fueling the fires and hampering efforts to contain the devastation. Multiple firefighting agencies responded with strike teams, but the wind forced them to ground aircraft, making the fires particularly difficult to fight.

Context: The winter and late fall tend to produce catastrophic fires in California, and scientists have found that fires in the region have been moving faster. An analysis of 60,000 wildfires in the contiguous U.S. between 2001 and 2020 found that growth rates had increased over the decades in California and other parts of the West. As areas there become hotter and dryer, the ground becomes more flammable.

World leaders reacted to Trump’s foreign policy threats

On Tuesday, President-elect Donald Trump suggested that the U.S. might reclaim the Panama Canal by military intervention. Then he hinted that the same thing could be done to annex Greenland. He also threatened to use “economic force” to make Canada part of the U.S. and suggested that the Gulf of Mexico should be renamed the “Gulf of America.” The responses from world leaders were mixed.

“The sovereignty of our canal is nonnegotiable and is part of our history of struggle and an irreversible conquest,” Panama’s foreign minister, Javier Martínez-Acha, said. Residents of Greenland appeared to be bewildered and anxious. “This is all getting scary,” a native Greenlander said.

Canada was blunt. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau responded in a social media post that “there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that Canada would become part of the United States.” Mexico had some fun with it. During a news conference yesterday, President Claudia Sheinbaum rejected several of Trump’s assertions and joked that the U.S. should be renamed “Mexican America.”

Related: Trump vowed that “all hell will break out in the Middle East” if Israeli hostages were not freed in the next two weeks. Gazans were left to wonder: If this is not hell, then what is?

U.K. released evidence from a war crimes inquiry in Afghanistan

British special forces soldiers used extreme methods against militants in Afghanistan, according to testimony released yesterday as part of a British Ministry of Defense inquiry into allegations of war crimes. The evidence paints a disturbing portrait of an elite fighting force acting with impunity and putting body counts above all other benchmarks.

The testimony came from email exchanges, letters and witness statements by senior officers and rank-and-file soldiers. One member of a British unit said that the troops acted as if they had “a golden pass allowing them to get away with murder.”

Armia Khalil, an artist who worked as a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, met a visitor in 2023 who was clearly looking for something specific. Their five-minute talk in the museum’s Egypt wing changed Khalil’s life.

The visitor turned out to be a museum curator planning an exhibition. After Khalil showed him his art, it was included in the show.

Lives lived: Perry, the miniature donkey who was the model for Donkey in the “Shrek” franchise, has died at 30.

What determines longevity?

There are countless people who live to be 100 years old, and their daily habits don’t always adhere to common medical advice — they drink, they smoke, they don’t exercise. Helen Reichert, a cigarette smoker who lived for more than a century, outlived all the doctors who told her to quit.

But decades of research have shown cases like Reichert’s to be more of an anomaly than a motivation to let loose. So, how much of a person’s longevity comes down to lifestyle, and how much is because of luck — or lucky genetics?

Both can be factors in how long you live. Read more.

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President-elect Donald J. Trump has threatened tariffs on many countries for many different reasons.

On Monday, he found a new purpose for his favorite economic tool. Mr. Trump said he would “tariff Denmark at a very high level” if it refused to allow Greenland — a North American island that is an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark — to become part of the United States.

“They should give it up, because we need it for national security,” Mr. Trump said of Greenland.

Denmark, which has a smaller population than New York City, is not a huge trading partner for the United States. The country — a U.S. ally and a NATO member — sent the United States more than $11 billion worth of goods in 2023, just a tiny slice of more than $3 trillion of imports. The United States, in turn, sends Denmark more than $5 billion in goods, including industrial machinery, computers, aircraft and scientific instruments.

But despite its small size, Denmark, which handles Greenland’s foreign and security affairs, is home to some products that are very well-loved in America, goods that could become more expensive if Mr. Trump follows through with heavy tariffs. According to the Observatory of Economic Complexity, a trade data platform, roughly half of Denmark’s recent exports to the United States are packaged medicines, insulin, vaccines and antibiotics.

That’s largely because the country is home to Novo Nordisk, the maker of Ozempic and Wegovy, the popular weight-loss drugs. The company is so important to the Danish economy — it has recently accounted for half of Denmark’s private sector job growth and all of the country’s economic growth — that some have branded Denmark a “pharmastate.”

Novo Nordisk is increasing its U.S. production to meet the soaring demand for its GLP-1 weight loss products. The company does not specify publicly how much of its products are exported, but it produces drugs in Denmark and the United States for the U.S. market.

A spokesperson for Novo Nordisk said in a statement that they were following the situation closely but would not comment on hypotheticals and speculation.

Gilberto Garcia, the chief economist at Datawheel and a member of the Observatory of Economic Complexity team, said that Denmark’s exports of immunological products, which includes drugs like Ozempic, have been “growing exponentially.”

Denmark is also the leading supplier to the United States of hearing aids, he said.

Beyond medicines, Denmark also sends the United States medical instruments, fish fillets, pig meat, coal tar oil, petroleum and baked goods, among other products, according to the OEC.

And notably, for many children (and adults) Denmark is home to Lego Group, the world’s largest toymaker.

It’s not clear how much Lego exports directly from Denmark to the United States — the company serves much of the U.S. market from a factory in Mexico, as well as a new carbon-neutral facility in Virginia. It also manufactures the toy bricks in factories in Hungary, the Czech Republic, China and Vietnam, as well as Denmark. Lego did not respond to requests for comment.

But Lego, like other multinational companies that have global supply chains shuffling raw materials and products around the world, could see its business disrupted by tariffs. Mr. Trump has threatened to put levies on products coming into the United States from Mexico, China and other countries globally, in addition to Denmark.

Mr. Trump’s threats to claim Greenland came in a rambling news conference in which the president-elect also suggested retaking the Panama Canal and making Canada an American state, all statements that riled foreign leaders.

Mr. Trump argued on Tuesday that U.S. ownership of Greenland was a national security issue, given the paths charted by Russian and Chinese ships.

“Greenland belongs to the people of Greenland,” Greenland’s prime minister, Múte Egede wrote on Facebook Tuesday. “Our future and fight for independence is our business.”

On Wednesday, a spokesman for the European Commission called Mr. Trump’s comments about seizing Greenland as “hypothetical.” When asked about tariff threats, the spokesman said that the European Commission had been preparing for all possible implications of a Trump presidency on trade in Europe.

Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, a senior fellow in Brussels at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said that few politicians in Europe take what Mr. Trump says literally.

“This is an outrageous demand,” Mr. Kirkegaard said of Mr. Trump’s threats to take Greenland. “The only way you can logically think of it is that by making this outrageous demand, Trump is going to get some concessions he otherwise wouldn’t have gotten.”

Mr. Kirkegaard said that should Mr. Trump follow through with his threat to implement tariffs on Denmark, he could expect an E.U.-wide response. “This idea that he can pressure Denmark as a single member state of the E.U., to offer policy concession by threatening tariffs, is going to invite retaliation from all of the E.U.”

Mr. Trump put tariffs into effect on numerous countries and hundreds of billions of dollars of goods in his first term. But other tariff threats never materialized, and it’s not clear how many of his new threats he will follow through on.

On Tuesday, the president-elect also reiterated a threat to put “very serious tariffs” on Mexico and Canada, complained about the U.S. trade deficit with Canada and the European Union, and floated an idea to rename the Gulf of Mexico “the Gulf of America.”

Iran’s top ranking general in Syria has contradicted the official line taken by Iran’s leaders on the sudden downfall of their ally Bashar al-Assad, saying in a remarkably candid speech last week that Iran had suffered a major defeat but would still try to operate in the country.

An audio recording of the speech, given last week by Brig. Gen. Behrouz Esbati at a mosque in Tehran, surfaced publicly on Monday in Iranian media, and was a stark contrast to the remarks of Iran’s president, foreign minister and other top leaders. They have for weeks downplayed the magnitude of Iran’s strategic loss in Syria last month, when rebels swept Mr. al-Assad out of power, and said Iran would respect any political outcome decided by Syria’s people.

“I don’t consider losing Syria something to be proud of,” said General Esbati according to the audio recording of his speech, which Abdi Media, a Geneva-based news site focused on Iran, published on Monday. “We were defeated, and defeated very badly, we took a very big blow and it’s been very difficult.”

General Esbati revealed that Iran’s relations with Mr. al-Assad had been strained for months leading to his ouster, saying that the Syrian leader had denied multiple requests for Iranian-backed militias to open a front against Israel from Syria, in the aftermath of the Hamas-led attack of Oct. 7, 2023.

Iran had presented Mr. al-Assad with comprehensive military plans on how it could use Iran’s military resources in Syria to attack Israel, he said.

The general also accused Russia, considered a top ally, of misleading Iran by telling it that Russian jets were bombing Syrian rebels when they were actually dropping bombs on open fields. He also said that in the past year, as Israel struck Iranian targets in Syria, Russia had “turned off radars,” in effect facilitating these attacks.

For over a decade, Iran backed Mr. al-Assad by sending commanders and troops to help it fight against opposition rebels and the Islamic State terrorist group.

Under Mr. al-Assad, Syria was Iran’s regional command center from which it supplied weapons and money to its network of regional militias, including Hezbollah in Lebanon and Palestinian militants in the West Bank. Iran also controlled airports, warehouses and operated missile and drone manufacturing bases in Syria.

The rebel coalition has now taken over much of Syria and is trying to form a government. General Esbati said in his speech that Iran would look for ways to recruit insurgents in whatever shape the new Syria takes.

“We can activate all the networks we have worked with over the years,” he said. “We can activate the social layers that our guys lived among for years; we can be active in social media and we can form resistance cells.”

He added, “Now we can operate there as we do in other international arenas, and we have already started.”

The general’s comments have stunned Iranians, for both their unfiltered content and the speaker’s stature. He is a top commander of Iran’s Armed Forces, the umbrella that includes the military and the Revolutionary Guards Corps, with a record of prominent roles including commander in chief of the Armed Forces’ cyber division.

In Syria, he supervised Iran’s military operations and coordinated closely with Syrian ministers and defense officials and with Russian generals — outranking even the commander in chief of the Quds Forces, Gen. Ismail Ghaani, who oversees the network of regional militias backed by Iran.

Mehdi Rahmati, a prominent analyst in Tehran and expert on Syria, said in a telephone interview that General Esbati’s speech was significant because it showed that some senior officials were parting from government propaganda and leveling with the public.

“Everyone is talking about the speech in meetings and wondering why he said these things, especially at a public forum,” Mr. Rahmati said. “He very clearly laid out what happened to Iran and where it stands now. In a way it can be a warning for domestic politics.”

General Esbati said the fall of the Assad regime was inevitable given the rampant corruption, political oppression and economic hardship that people faced, from lack of power to fuel to livable incomes. He said Mr. al-Assad had ignored the warnings to reform. Mr. Rahmati, the analyst, said that the comparison to Iran’s current situation was hard to miss.

Despite the general’s assertions about activating networks, it remains unclear what Iran can realistically do in Syria, given the public and political opposition it has faced in the country and the challenges of land and air access. Israel has warned that it would decimate any Iranian efforts it detects on the ground in Syria.

And while Iran has the experience of operating in Iraq after the U.S. invasion in 2003 — including sowing unrest — the geography and political landscape of Syria differ greatly, presenting more challenges.

An Iranian member of the Revolutionary Guards who spent years in Iraq as a military strategist alongside senior commanders said in a telephone interview that General Esbati’s comments about Iran recruiting insurgents might be more aspirational than practical at this stage. He said that while General Esbati had admitted a serious defeat, he had also sought to boost morale and pacify conservatives demanding that Iran act more forcefully.

The Guards official, who asked that his name not be used because he was discussing sensitive issues, said Iran’s policy had not yet been finalized but that a consensus had emerged in meetings he had attended where strategy was debated. He said Iran would benefit if Syria descended into chaos because Iran knew how to thrive and secure its interests in a turbulent landscape.

In Iran, the Revolutionary Guards have the authority to set regional policy and overrule the foreign ministry.

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the last word on key state matters, has said in at least two speeches since Mr. al-Assad’s fall that resistance was not dead in Syria, adding that Syria’s youth would reclaim their country from the ruling rebels, whom he called stooges of Israel and the United States. President Masoud Pezeshkian and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi have been more conciliatory, saying they favor stability in Syria and diplomatic ties with the new government.

The tensions surrounding these competing views on Syria preoccupied officials enough that they embarked on a campaign of damage control with the public last week. Senior military commanders and pundits close to the government gave speeches and held question-and-answer sessions with audiences in mosques and community centers in several cities.

General Esbati’s speech, on Dec. 31 at the Valiasr mosque in central Tehran, addressed rank and file of the military and constituents of the mosque, according to a public notice of the event, titled, “Answering questions about Syria’s collapse.”

The session started with General Esbati telling the crowd he left Syria on the last military plane to Tehran the night before Damascus fell to rebels. It ended with him answering questions from audience members. He offered his most sobering assessment on Iran’s military capability in fighting Israel and the United States.

Asked whether Iran would retaliate for Israel killing Hezbollah’s longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah, he replied that Iran already did, referring to a missile barrage last fall. Asked whether Iran planned to carry out a third round of direct strikes on Israel, he said that “the situation” couldn’t realistically handle another attack on Israel right now.

Asked why Iran would not fire missiles at U.S. military bases in the region, he said that would invite bigger retaliatory attacks on Iran and its allies by the United States, adding that Iran’s regular missiles — not its advanced ones — could not penetrate advanced U.S. defense systems.

Despite those assessments, General Ebati said that he wanted to assure everyone not to worry: Iran and its allies, he said, still had the upper hand on the ground in the region.

The Israeli military said on Wednesday that it had discovered the body of a hostage taken from Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 in an underground tunnel in the area of Rafah in the Gaza Strip, along with evidence that raises questions about the state of another, related captive.

The deceased hostage was identified as Youssef Ziyadne of Rahat, an Arab Bedouin city in southern Israel. Mr. Ziyadne, who was in his 50s, and three of his grown children, were abducted from a kibbutz where he and two of the children had been working during the Hamas-led attack on Israel that ignited the war in Gaza.

Two of Mr. Ziyadne’s children, Bilal and Aisha, both in their late teens, were released during a temporary truce and exchange of hostages for Palestinian prisoners in November 2023.

But the father and his adult son, Hamza Ziyadne, about 22 at the time of his abduction, remained in captivity. The Israeli military noted that the same operation that led to the discovery of Youssef Ziyadne’s body also revealed “findings” related to Hamza, “which raise serious concerns for his life.”

The announcement that a hostage had been found dead, and that the fate of another is uncertain, came as the families of captives and President-elect Donald J. Trump have been pressuring Israel and Hamas to close a deal that would lead to a cease-fire and the return of the remaining captives before Mr. Trump takes office later this month.

Of the 250 hostages taken on Oct. 7, 2023, about 100 remain held in Gaza, with a third or more of those still there presumed dead.

In a briefing with reporters on Wednesday, Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, an Israeli military spokesman, said “dozens of hostages” are still alive but declined to give a specific number.

Addressing the discovery of Mr. Ziyadne, Colonel Shoshani said that bodies presumed to belong to his Hamas guards had also been found nearby, but he did not indicate how the hostage or the others had been killed. He also did not detail the findings that the military said had raised concerns about the fate of Hamza Ziyadne, the son.

“Our hearts ache over the immense tragedy of the Ziyadne family,” Isaac Herzog, Israel’s president, said in a statement. He added, “Time is running out. Youssef was abducted alive! Our hostages are in immediate life-threatening danger. We must continue to do everything possible to urgently return 99 of our brothers and sisters — the living to their families and the fallen and murdered to be laid to rest in dignity.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been accused by some Israelis of failing to prioritize the return of the hostages, on Wednesday expressed “deep sorrow over the bitter news” for the Ziyadne family. He also pledged to “continue making every effort to secure the release of all hostages back home — both the living and the dead.”

There are about 300,000 Bedouin in the Negev desert area of southern Israel, and other members of the community, in addition to the Ziyadne family, were killed or taken hostage in the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks. Samer Talalka, a Bedouin, was one of three hostages mistakenly killed by Israeli forces in December 2023. In August of last year, the Israeli military brought home alive Farhan al-Qadi, a Bedouin from a village near Rahat, where Mr. Ziyadne’s family lives.

The Bedouin are a marginalized minority in Israel, with unemployment high and poverty rampant in their villages, which have long suffered from a lack of basic services, including running water and electricity. Some Bedouin, who are Arab and Muslim, choose to serve in the Israeli military or work on kibbutzim or for other Israeli Jews, and are sometimes seen as traitors by fellow Arabs.

Mr. al-Qadi had worked as an unarmed guard on a kibbutz in southern Israel when he was taken hostage. Mr. Ziyadne and the two sons were working on a dairy farm at a nearby kibbutz, and Aisha was visiting her father and brothers at work, when they were all taken captive.

President Biden and top aides have been working for many months to negotiate the release of the remaining hostages and to secure a cease-fire, and a deal has seemed imminent several times, only to fall apart after what Biden administration officials have said were rejections by Hamas negotiators. Israeli officials have also repeatedly objected to some parts of proposed deals.

Relatives of the captives argue that there is no time to wait, and many have pushed for an immediate cease-fire deal. In a statement expressing sorrow over the death of Youssef Ziyadne, the Hostages Families Forum, which represents relatives of the captives, repeated a call for urgency it has made many times before.

“Every day in captivity poses an immediate mortal danger to the hostages who have managed to survive for 15 months, and threatens the possibility of returning the deceased for burial,” the forum said.

Johnatan Reiss contributed reporting.

A 23-year-old man who became lost in the Australian wilderness while hiking was found alive by other hikers on Wednesday after living for nearly two weeks on two granola bars and on water from rivers and creeks, the authorities said.

The man, Hadi Nazari, was hiking in Kosciuszko National Park, about 240 miles south of Sydney, when he became lost on Dec. 26, a holiday called Boxing Day in Australia, according to a news release from the New South Wales police.

Two of Mr. Nazari’s friends called the police around 8:45 p.m. on Dec. 26 after he failed to arrive at a campground where they had expected to meet up with him. They had last seen him about six hours earlier as he went off onto the Hannels Spur trail alone. About 400 people searched by air and on land for Mr. Nazari over the course of 13 days, the police said.

Throughout the search, the authorities remained hopeful that Mr. Nazari was alive, as he is an experienced hiker and had camping supplies in the backpack he was carrying at the time he disappeared. On New Year’s Eve, “rubbish and hiking poles” that apparently belonged to Mr. Nazari were found near the Kosciuszko River. On Sunday, his lighter, camera, camera bag and remnants of a campfire he had lit were discovered near the Geehi River.

The location has “incredibly dense bushland and challenging conditions on the ground,” acting Superintendent Jill Gibson of the Riverina Police District said in a statement last week, adding that in some parts of the wilderness being searched, rescuers “can’t see their feet” because of the dense vegetation.

About 3:15 p.m. Wednesday, a group of hikers near Blue Lake, which is about six miles from the campground, found Mr. Nazari, Commander Superintendent Andrew Spliet of Riverina Police District said at a news conference. Mr. Nazari called out to the group as they passed by and told them he was lost and thirsty. The hikers called the emergency services, and Mr. Nazari was then airlifted to a command post to be evaluated by paramedics.

Mr. Nazari had no major injuries and appeared to be in good health, the police said. He was then taken to a hospital to be further assessed and rehydrated.

“We never gave up hope of finding him,” Inspector Josh Broadfoot of the Riverina Police District said in a statement on Wednesday. “We are elated we can return him safely to his family.”

Superintendent Spliet said that Mr. Nazari had found two granola bars in a hut while he was missing but had eaten nothing else. The police believe the creeks and rivers served as his only water source while he was missing, but Superintendent Spliet said they would conduct a full interview with Mr. Nazari to learn more about how he had survived.

Friends met with Mr. Nazari after he had been rescued. One of them, Muhammad Iylas, told a local affiliate of Australian Broadcasting Corporation that he seemed “perfectly fine” for not having eaten much in two weeks.

“I’m kind of like in a shock and full of happiness,” Mr. Iylas said. “It’s amazing.”