LA fires: ‘It’s an apocalypse’ – families return to homes reduced to ruins

Published

5 months ago

January 10, 2025

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More than 20,000 people who evacuated the Pacific Palisades on Tuesday have watched on TV for three days as their neighbourhood has burned without respite.

They have heard the statistics – about more than 50% of the buildings here being reduced to rubble. But it is not sufficient preparation for what they will see in real life.

“I’ve been telling everyone to brace themselves for this moment,” says Rachel Darvish, a lawyer who has lived in Pacific Palisades her whole life.

My team and I ride in a car with her as she returns for the first time since wildfire ripped through this community.

LA fires latest: Number of dead doubles as a blaze is investigated as possible arson

The first place we stop is her modest childhood home where she lived until she was nine. It’s now a mound of dust and twisted metal, only a gate on to the pavement still standing.

“People think the Palisades are full of celebrities,” she says. “But this is where hardworking families come so that the kids can be by the beach and have a good life.”

She points across the road to another house which is now contorted by fire and covered in ash.

“That’s where I would spend July 4th at my neighbour’s,” she says. “We would go round to use their pool. I have the best memories here.”

As Rachel is talking she is interrupted by a deafening alarm from her phone. “It’s another emergency evacuation order,” she says. “This time for Malibu.”

Even though the winds have subsided, the threat of new blazes remains and each new evacuation order or warning causes renewed panic among local people.

Next up on the misery tour is Rachel’s three-year-old daughter’s nursery school. There is nothing left of the main building.

“It’s an apocalypse,” she says. “This is just so devastating. And somehow we are supposed to come back and rebuild.”

As we are driving away from the school, she spots a familiar face next to a black SUV with tinted windows. “Is that Gavin Newsom?” she asks. “It is, it’s the governor,” she says, slapping the back of the car seat before jumping out to speak to him.

“Mr governor,” she says, chasing him down the street as Newsom holds a phone to his ear.

“Please, tell me what you’re going to do,” she says. Newsom replies that he is on the phone to President Biden.

“Can I hear? Can I hear your call? Because I don’t believe it,” she responds.

Newsom points to his phone, claiming he has poor phone service and was unable to reach the president.

Rachel then asks him why there was “no water in the hydrants?”

As firefighters battled a raging inferno on Tuesday, fire hydrants ran dry because of the huge demands.

Residents are demanding answers about whether there are wider vulnerabilities in city water supply systems and whether they are adequate to tackle wildfires on this scale.

“It has to be different next time round,” Rachel says.

As estimated losses surge there is still zero containment of the Palisades fire. Officials say they don’t know the death toll and that dogs will be brought in to search the rubble for fatalities.

On the Pacific coast highway in Pacific Palisades, Geoffrey Axelrod and his partner Nicole hug each other tightly as they return to the ruins that are their home. Every one of the houses in this enclave has been destroyed.

“This is just a little beach community,” says Geoffrey, who has lived here since 2015.

“I know everyone here and it’s all gone.

“My dearest friend Galene, who I’ve known for my whole life lived here,” he says, pointing to the wreckage next door.

“I taught my daughter to ride her bike on this street, how to swim in the pool. It’s so sad.”

Together Geoffrey and Nicole sift through the dust, trying to retrieve any belongings that have survived the fire.

In a plastic box they place everything they can find. There are a couple of turtle figurines, a garden gnome and a house name plaque.

It’s very little, but in a place where the loss is so huge, it means so much.

US

Minnesota manhunt continues for gunman who ‘posed as cop’ to kill Melissa Hortman and her husband

Published

18 mins ago

June 16, 2025

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Minnesota manhunt continues for gunman who 'posed as cop' to kill Melissa Hortman and her husband

A manhunt is continuing after the gunning down of a Democrat politician and her husband – with police saying they’re acting on the assumption he is still alive and dangerous.

Melissa Hortman and Mark Hortman were shot dead at home in a Minneapolis suburb on Saturday in what governor Tim Walz called a “politically motivated assassination”.

Democrat senator John Hoffman and his wife were also shot multiple times at their home nine miles away, but survived.

A search is under way for Vance Boelter, 57, who authorities believe wore a mask as he posed as a police officer, and also used a vehicle resembling a squad car.

Several AK-style firearms and a list of about 70 names, which included politicians and abortion rights activists, were found inside.

Boelter was last caught on camera wearing a cowboy hat – a similar hat was found near another vehicle belonging to him on Sunday.

Authorities said at their latest news conference they assume he is still alive.

Hundreds of police officers are searching for Boelter, who escaped from the Hortmans’ house on foot after an exchange of gunfire.

Senator Hoffman was shot nine times and is having multiple surgeries, according to a text message shared on Instagram by fellow senator Amy Klobuchar on Sunday.

The text from Mr Hoffman’s wife, Yvette, added: “I took 8 and we are both incredibly lucky to be alive.”

She said her husband “is closer every hour to being out of the woods”.

“We believe [Boelter’s] somewhere in the vicinity and that they are going to find him,” Senator Klobuchar told NBC’s Meet the Press.

“Everyone’s on edge here,” she added, “because we know that this man will kill at a second.”

Police said they responded to gunfire reports at the Hoffmans’ Champlin home shortly after 2am on Saturday and found them with multiple gunshot wounds.

They then checked on the Hortmans’ home, in the nearby Brooklyn Park suburb, and saw what appeared to be a police car and a man dressed as an officer leaving the front door.

“The individual immediately fired upon the officers, who exchanged gunfire, and the suspect retreated back into the home” and escaped on foot, said Brooklyn Park police chief Mark Bruley.

Another vehicle belonging to Boelter was searched on Sunday in Minnesota’s Faxon Township. A cowboy hat similar to the one seen in the police appeal was found nearby.

It’s been revealed that the suspect texted friends around 6am on Saturday to say he had “made some choices” and was “going to be gone for a while”.

According to AP, which has seen the messages, he reportedly said: “May be dead shortly, so I just want to let you know I love you guys both and I wish it hadn’t gone this way… I’m sorry for all the trouble this has caused.”

Records show Boelter – a father of five – is a former political appointee who served on the same state workforce development board as Mr Hoffman.

However, it’s unclear to what extent they knew each other, if at all.

Mr Hoffman, 60, was first elected in 2012 and runs a consulting firm called Hoffman Strategic Advisors.

Melissa Hortman, a 55-year-old mother of two, was first elected in 2004 and was the top house Democratic leader in the state legislature.

She also served as speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives.

Mrs Hortman used her position to champion protections around abortion rights, including laws to cement Minnesota’s status as a safe refuge for people from restrictive states, who travel there for an abortion.

Her work also sought to introduce protections for services that provide abortions.

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‘It feels like a bad dream’: Minnesota mourns victims of ‘politically motivated assassination’

Published

3 hours ago

June 16, 2025

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'It feels like a bad dream': Minnesota mourns victims of 'politically motivated assassination'

“Holy, holy, holy” they sang at the Church of St Timothy in Blaine, Minnesota.

But the congregation is struggling to comprehend an act of evil – the brutal murder of one of their own.

Melissa Hortman grew up here. The former state speaker and her husband Mark were shot dead in their home on Saturday morning.

Her friend and party colleague, Erin Koegal, was among those attending mass.

“It still feels like a bad dream. I woke up this morning and was like, okay, so that was real,” she said.

“It’s hit me in waves, the grief, and the anger, and the sadness. She was a leader, a true definition of a leader.

“I’ve never known our party without Melissa as the leader and so I can’t, I don’t even know how we’re going to go forward as a caucus without her.”

State senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette had already been shot and wounded.

Police sent to check on his colleague, Melissa Hortman, didn’t get there in time.

They named the suspect as Vance Boelter, a 57-year-old former Christian missionary.

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz called it a “politically motivated murder”.

Friends of Ms Hortman have told Sky News that her two children feared for their mother’s life after reading divisive rhetoric directed at her online.

Matt Norris, another political colleague of Ms Hortman, was also at church, reflecting on the rise of political violence in America.

“We’ve going to have to do some serious introspection as a state, as a country, and figure out how do we get beyond this,” he said.

“How have we been laying the seeds that have led to horrific acts of violence against public servants like this?

“And it’s going to be incumbent upon us as leaders to set a different tone, to set a different direction for our state and our country so that horrific tragedies like this never occur again.”

But there’s no sign of division at the State Capitol Building, where flags fly at half-mast and flowers are being left in tribute.

This is a community united in grief and in its hope for an end to gun violence in America.

US

Trump’s Iran remarks let him still play ‘good cop’ to Netanyahu’s ‘bad cop’

Published

21 hours ago

June 15, 2025

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Trump's Iran remarks let him still play 'good cop' to Netanyahu's 'bad cop'

Reading between the lines of President Trump’s social media posts is an art, not a science.

But whether by intention or not, there is always insight in his posts. His Truth Social words reacting to the Israeli attack on Iran are intentionally ambiguous.

When was he told by Israel that they would strike Iran? Did he give them a green light, or was it more amber?

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Was his insistence, as recently as 48 hours ago, that a strike would “blow” the chances of a deal with Iran actually just a ruse to afford Israel the element of surprise? That’s what the Israelis are claiming.

Clearly, President Trump does not want to give the impression that his ‘don’t strike’ advice was ignored by Netanyahu.

His social posts are filled with enough ambiguity to allow him to maintain his good cop stance alongside Netanyahu, the bad cop: “I gave Iran chance after chance to make a deal. I told them, in the strongest of words, to ‘just do it’…”

Trump’s ‘art of the deal’, whether it be in real estate or nuclear weapon negotiations, requires unpredictability and ambiguity.

Both of those, as it happens, are useful to hide ineptitude too. The line between diplomatic masterstroke and disastrous diplomacy is thin.

The president is claiming that the Israeli attacks make a deal more, not less, likely because of the pressure Iran will now be under.

Maybe, but many regional watchers are very unconvinced.

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An alternative path to negotiations for Iran would be to go fully down the North Korea route, comforted in the knowledge that China – as a big Iranian oil customer – and Russia – as a weapons customer – will be on side.

Trump may think that the pressure of bombardment will force Iran to heel. But the other pressure the Iranian supreme leader is under is the pressure of survival.

Self-preservation necessitates the Iranian response that we’re now seeing before any prospect of renewed negotiations can come.

The Israelis and the Americans are calculating that Iran and its proxies are now sufficiently degraded, and so the response will be limp and containable.

They might be right in terms of conventional attacks, but asymmetrical operations are another fear – against Israeli targets or more broadly, softer Western targets in the region or beyond.

Step back from the chaos of the past 24 hours. The broader picture here is regime change.

Netanyahu said as much in his Friday speech, calling for an internal uprising. He ignored history – which suggests people tend to rally round their flag – but more than that, that foreign air strikes alone don’t work.

Look at Libya in 1986, Iraq in 1991, or Yugoslavia in 1999.

Netanyahu wants to go further. Will he take out the supreme leader? Trump does not want another full-scale conflict in the Middle East. Of all the things he is accused of being, a hawkish warmonger he is not.

But there are plenty of politicians on Capitol Hill – on both sides of the divide – who support regime change in Iran.

I was at an event in Congress in December organised by Iranian exiled opposition leaders. I was struck by the cross-party support for regime change in one form or another.

Israel this weekend announced that its military had achieved total air superiority from western Iran to the capital Tehran. That’s remarkable.

Could Trump be persuaded to pursue regime change? Peace, eventually, through strength? His motto adapted.

We are at yet another unsettlingly tense moment for the region.