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after a wildfire forced all 88,000 residents of Fort McMurray to flee.

It was something you'd see in a movie probably. I was stuck between a concrete barrier and the fire and I thought 'You know what? I might not make it out'.

Several firms have shut down some pipelines

So far there have been no reports of deaths or injuries, but two women gave birth in one evacuation centre

gutted 1,600 buildings, including a new school.

"There's whole neighbourhoods that are gone. A hotel burned down, a gas station exploded. One lady that I met she actually was sheltered behind like an electrical box when it actually exploded and she felt a shockwave."

"You could hear the pop, pop, pop because of the propane tanks,"

Fort McMurray itself is sealed off to all but the emergency services, but it is reportedly a scene of devastation.One police officer who lives and patrols in the city told the BBC that, in his assessment, around half of it had been destroyed.

"It's well known that one of the consequences of climate change will be a greater prevalence of extreme weather events around the planet,"

he said.

"However, any time we try to make a political argument out of one particular disaster…that can sometimes not have the desired outcome."

Officials said the size of the blaze was now more than 10,000 hectares (39 square miles) and it was being tackled by 100 firefighters.

He entered politics to advocate for traditional or socially conservative beliefs. “He glowed with certain passions—outlawing abortion, preserving family values, fighting bureaucrats on behalf of the little guy—that could not be championed in the stables,” Alberta writes. McBroom stated his position on gun ownership in 2012: “The Second Amendment guarantees our rights to own firearms[,] and I stand strongly for that correct interpretation.”

The American Conservative Union gave McBroom the best marks of any Michigan state senator—voting in line with the organization’s position 95 percent of the time—in 2019, the most recent year of data. By the old rules of political communication, no one is more qualified to be a “credible messenger” to the right-of-center voters of the U.P. than Ed McBroom.

last month, McBroom and three of his senate colleagues—two of them Republicans, only one a Democrat—released their report, and it “crackled with annoyance at certain far-flung beliefs,” writes Alberta:

His committee interviewed scores of witnesses, subpoenaed and reviewed

thousands of pages of documents, dissected the procedural mechanics of Michigan’s highly decentralized elections system, and scrutinized the most trafficked claims about corruption at the state’s ballot box in November. McBroom’s conclusion hit Lansing like a meteor: It was all a bunch of nonsense. “Our clear finding is that citizens should be confident the results represent the true results of the ballots cast by the people of Michigan,” McBroom wrote in the report. “There is no evidence presented at this time to prove either significant acts of fraud or that an organized, wide-scale effort to commit fraudulent activity was perpetrated in order to subvert the will of Michigan voters.” For good measure, McBroom added: “The Committee strongly recommends citizens use a critical eye and ear toward those who have pushed demonstrably false theories for their own personal gain.”

“McBroom said he is not fazed by the criticism or the prospect of a primary challenge, which he was already expecting,” notes the Michigan Bridge. “I’ve been totally honest and up front, and if (voters) judge that’s not what they want, and if the majority of them want a different course of action, that’s okay,” he told that publication.

Yet despite three of the four senators who wrote the election report being Republicans; and despite McBroom’s ideological reputation, the product of a decade in Michigan’s state legislature (he was a state rep from 2010 to 2018), and the familiarity of the McBroom family name, and McBroom’s culturally Christian values—despite all that, his political standing is still taking a hit.

Trump trashed McBroom and the state senate president, Republican Mike Shirkey. He published their office phone numbers. He urged people to “vote them the hell out of office.”

more to the point about credible messengers is this: McBroom said that he’s felt heat from people he knows—allies of his—not just randos on social media. “It’s been very discouraging, and very sad, to have people I know who have supported me, and always said they respected me and found me to be honest, who suddenly don’t trust me because of what some guy told them on the internet,” he told Alberta.

So thorough were the authors’ conclusions that they recommended “the [state] attorney general consider investigating those who have been utilizing misleading and false information about Antrim County,” where an obvious and brief reporting error showed Biden thumping Trump, “to raise money or publicity for their own ends.”

What McBroom clarified is this:

Trump’s base is the animating force of the Republican party, which holds GOP officials accountable mostly for their accountability to Trump. To this group, there is no such thing as a credible critic of the former president.

the unanswered question that confronts coalition-builders today is how to reach a movement for which all reasoning is motivated reasoning; for which facts and proof are subjective

Several U.S. states have carbon pricing programs, notably California.

But several people familiar with the forthcoming infrastructure package in the United States said that there were no plans currently to price carbon emissions. Instead, the president plans to greatly raise fuel efficiency standards for cars, forcing automakers toward electric vehicles through regulation, not legislation.

Court challenges by those three provinces of Mr. Trudeau’s carbon pricing law ultimately led to the Supreme Court’s decision.

Like Republicans in the United States, conservative premiers in the oil-producing provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan have long strenuously campaigned against carbon pricing.

Republicans in Congress remain firmly opposed to a carbon tax and have voted repeatedly and nearly unanimously over the years to bar the government from imposing one.

While the Supreme Court decision’s detailed the dangers of climate changes to Canada and its coastlines, Arctic region and Indigenous people in particular, none of the three provinces that started the legal challenges dispute its effects.

In 2019, Mr. Trudeau set a minimum price for carbon. It will become 40 Canadian dollars a metric ton on April 1 and will reach 170 dollars a ton in 2030.

The federal government has stepped in only when a province, like Ontario under Mr. Ford, refused to price carbon. In those cases, it placed a tax on fuel and set other fees for industrial emissions.

Jason Kenney, the premier of Alberta, who canceled his province’s program, told reporters that he was disappointed with the decision but declined to say whether his province would come up with a carbon pricing system to replace the federally imposed one.

The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the law in part because the federal plan kicks in only if provinces do not set up their programs, thus maintaining the shared jurisdiction the two levels of government hold on environmental issues.

“Addressing climate change requires collective national and international action,” the court wrote. “This is because the harmful effects of GHGs are, by their very nature, not confined by borders.”

The plan also appears to enjoy widespread public support. All of the refugees on the first flight have been sponsored to come to Canada, either by individual Canadians or by small groups. Sponsors have had to raise just over 28,000 Canadian dollars for each family.

“We suffered a lot,” said Kevork Jamkossian, who arrived with his wife, Georgina Zires, and their 16-month-old daughter, Madeleine. “Now, we feel as if we got out of hell and we came to paradise.”

To avoid a crush that might overwhelm the exhausted refugees, the government asked the public not to go the airport to see the flight arrive

The building has been converted into a special processing center, where arriving refugees will not only go through the usual customs, immigration and health screenings, but will also be given all of the other paperwork necessary for their new lives, including public health insurance cards

But 43 will be flying again on Friday, to meet sponsors in British Columbia or Alberta, and a small number will head to other parts of Ontario.

Some have already been arriving on scheduled commercial flights — some 400 since the Liberals took power last month. The government said earlier this week that more than 11,000 refugees’ applications had been processed, and that chartered civilian flights would be used for most of the airlift.

not only over issues like imposing tariffs on Chinese goods and fighting the Islamic State, but also over matters of character and integrity that drew some of the hardest punches of the race so far.

In many ways, it was the darkest debate of the campaign, as the Republicans tried to paint the grimmest possible portrait of an America in decline economically

Mr. Rubio and Mr. Christie, along with Jeb Bush and John Kasich, are vying to emerge as the leading candidate of mainstream Republicans, yet they struggled to be heard on Thursday night.

After months as Mr. Trump’s closest ally in the race, Mr. Cruz pointedly noted that Mr. Trump had dismissed questions in the fall about Mr. Cruz’s constitutional eligibility given his birth to an American mother living in Calgary, Alberta.

Mr. Cruz gave his most aggressive performance so far as he sought to protect the support he has built among social conservatives and evangelical Christians

“I hate to interrupt this episode of ‘Court TV,’ ” he said, drawing laughs and applause. He then sought to refocus the conversation on President Obama’s shortcomings and what he said was a need to revive the country, safe terrain for Republican primary voters.

Mr. Cruz seemed more comfortably in command with his needling of Mr. Trump, who was booed frequently. But then he was asked to elaborate on his suggestion earlier in the week that Mr. Trump embodied “New York values.”

“I think most people know exactly what New York values are: socially liberal, pro-gay marriage, pro-abortion, focused on money and the media,” he said.

But Mr. Trum

recalled the way that New Yorkers suffered, grieved and recovered from the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks — drawing applause even from Mr. Cruz.

“And we rebuilt downtown Manhattan, and everyone in the world watched and loved New York and New Yorkers. And I’ll tell you, that was a very insulting statement that Ted made.”

Mr. Bush — who had his best debate last month when he doggedly criticized Mr. Trump, but saw little bounce in his poll numbers in New Hampshire — took another pass at Mr. Trump when he urged him to “reconsider” his proposal for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the country.

Credential stuffing is “at the root of probably 90 percent of the things we see happening,” said Emmanuel Schalit, chief executive of Dashlane, a password manager that allows people to store unique, random passwords in one place. Only about 1 percent of Internet users, he said, use some kind of password manager.

The company was forced to respond. “Nest was not breached,” it said in a January statement. “These recent reports are based on customers using compromised passwords,” it said, urging its customers to use two-factor authentication. Nest started forcing some users to change their passwords.

According to at least one expert, though, Nest users are still exposed. Hank Fordham, a security researcher, sat in his Calgary, Alberta, home recently and opened up a credential-stuffing software program known as Snipr. Instantly, Fordham said, he found thousands of Nest accounts that he could access. Had he wanted to, he would have been able to view cameras and change thermostat settings with relative ease.

Snipr, which costs $20 to download, is easier to use. Snipr provides the code required to check whether hundreds of the most popular platforms, such as “League of Legends” and Netflix, are accessible with a bunch of usernames and passwords — and those have become abundantly available all over the Internet

The reason Nest has not employed all of Google’s know-how on security goes back to Nest’s roots, according to Nest and people with knowledge of its history. Founded in 2010 by longtime Apple executive Tony Fadell, Nest promised at the time that it would not collect data on users for marketing purposes

Moody’s Investors Service, a major credit ratings agency, has already said that it wants to take climate into account when weighing the financial health of companies and municipalities.

t says that “water- and vector-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue fever will likely be the largest direct effect of changes in human health and the associated productivity loss.”

The hardest-hit economies will be some of the fastest-growing ones — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, the report says.

report also forecasts lower oil and natural gas demand, dealing a blow to oil-exporting countries, especially in the Middle East. It forecasts that Saudi GDP will drop more than 10 percent by 2048; the kingdom would be the country harmed the most by climate change, hurting government revenue

Of the 12 largest economies, India will be the worst hit, the report says, with GDP growing 2.5 percentage points more slowly than it would without the effects of climate change

The country’s service industry will be hit by heat stress, agricultural productivity will fall, and health-care costs will climb

the scenarios only go through 2048. The Moody’s report says “the distress compounds over time and is far more severe in the second half of the century.”

He added: “Most of the models go out 30 years, but, really, the damage to the economy is in the next half-century, and we haven’t developed the tools to look out that far.”

That’s why it is so hard to get people focused on this issue and get a comprehensive policy response,” Zandi said. “Business is focused on the next year, or five years out.”

Chubb, one of the biggest insurance firms in the United States, on Monday said it would no longer sell insurance to new coal-fired power plants or sell new policies to companies that derive more than 30 percent of their revenue from the mining of coal used in power plants.

Hammond said that the company still needs to stop insuring new coal mines and the oil sands, or tar sands, in northern Alberta.

“new coal projects cannot be built without insurance, and Chubb just dealt a blow to the dozens of companies that are still betting on the expansion of coal globally.”

the chief economist of Equinor, the Norwegian oil company previously known as Statoil, has written a report that looks at three scenarios for climate change and its impact on global economies, especially on energy. Only one of those, the report said, would lead to a sustainable path, but that path comes with enormous challenges. To reach that set of targets by 2050, “almost all use of coal must be eradicated

oil demand would need to be halved, and natural gas demand trimmed by more than 10 percent.

more than half of new cars would have to be electric vehicles by 2030

Electricity demand will double, yet wind and solar would equal the entire current electricity output, a leap from current levels

Waerness also said that the company currently assumes a carbon price of $55 a ton when considering whether to finance new energy projects

And vaccination is still being used today to fight new deadly viruses, including the coronavirus.