Massive wildfires that engulfed whole neighborhoods and displaced thousands in Los Angeles have killed at least 10 people, authorities said, as California’s National Guard soldiers readied to hit the streets to help quell disorder.Swaths of the United States’ second-largest city lay in ruins Friday, with more than 10,000 structures destroyed according to the state’s fire service.”I lost everything. My house burned down and I lost everything,” said Hester Callul, who had reached a shelter after fleeing her Altadena home.Firefighters were battling multiple blazes backed by water-dropping helicopters, thanks to a temporary lull in winds, as the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner announced the death toll had reached 10.With reports of looting, Los Angeles County ordered a nighttime curfew, and the state’s National Guard was on hand to patrol affected areas.Governor Gavin Newsom said the service members were part of a thousands-strong deployment of state personnel.”We’re throwing everything at our disposal -– including our National Guard service members –- to protect communities in the days to come,” he said.”And to those who would seek to take advantage of evacuated communities, let me be clear: looting will not be tolerated.”Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said his officers were patrolling evacuation zones and would arrest anyone who was not supposed to be there.The flames have so far burned more than 35,000 acres (14,160 hectares) in Los Angeles, the state’s fire agency reported.With such a huge area scorched, evacuees feared not enough was being done and some were taking matters into their own hands.Nicholas Norman mounted an armed vigil at his home after seeing suspicious characters in the middle of the night.”I did the classic American thing: I went and got my shotgun and I sat out there, and put a light on so they knew people were there,” he told AFP.- ‘Death and destruction’ -The biggest of the multiple blazes has ripped through almost 20,000 acres of the upscale Pacific Palisades neighborhood, while another fire around Altadena has torched about 13,700 acres.Firefighters said they were starting to get a handle on the Pacific Palisades blaze, with six percent of its perimeter contained — meaning it can’t spread any further in that direction.But after a lull, winds were returning and new fires continued to erupt.One flared near Calabasas and the wealthy Hidden Hills enclave, home to celebrities like Kim Kardashian.The Kenneth Fire exploded to almost 1,000 acres within hours, forcing more people from their homes, with over 180,000 displaced.US President Joe Biden told a White House briefing he had pledged extra federal funds and resources to help the state cope with “the most… devastating fire in California’s history.” Unlike on Tuesday when the multi-pronged disaster roared to life and 100-mile (160-kilometer)-an-hour winds grounded all aircraft, firefighters were able to keep up a steady stream of sorties.Some of those forced out of their homes began to return Thursday to find scenes of devastation.Kalen Astoor, a 36-year-old paralegal, said her mother’s home had been spared by the inferno’s seemingly random and chaotic destruction. But many other homes had not.”The view now is of death and destruction,” she told AFP. “I don’t know if anyone can come back for a while.”- ‘Critical’ -Meanwhile an AFP overflight of the Pacific Palisades and Malibu — some of the most expensive real estate in the world and home to celebrities like Paris Hilton and Anthony Hopkins — revealed desolation.”This is crazy… All these homes, gone,” said helicopter pilot Albert Azouz.On highly coveted Malibu oceanfront plots, skeletal frames of buildings indicated the lavish scale of what has been destroyed.Multimillion-dollar mansions have vanished entirely, seemingly swept into the Pacific Ocean by the force of the fire.In the Palisades, grids of roads that were until Tuesday lined with stunning homes now resemble makeshift cemeteries.The fires could be the costliest ever recorded, with AccuWeather estimating total damage and loss between $135 billion and $150 billion.For millions of people in the area, life was disrupted: schools were closed, hundreds of thousands were without power and major events were canceled or, in the case of an NFL playoff game between the Los Angeles Rams and the Minnesota Vikings, moved somewhere else.Meteorologists have warned that “critical” windy and dry conditions, though abated, were not over.A National Weather Service bulletin said “significant fire growth” remained likely “with ongoing or new fires” into Friday.Wildfires occur naturally, but scientists say human-caused climate change is altering weather and changing the dynamics of the blazes.Two wet years in Southern California have given way to a very dry one, leaving ample fuel dry and primed to burn.

There will be “real-world harm” if Meta expands its decision to scrap fact-checking on Facebook and Instagram, a global network warned Thursday while disputing Mark Zuckerberg’s claim such moderation amounts to censorship.Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s surprise announcement this week to slash content moderation policies in the United States has sparked alarm in countries such as Australia and Brazil. The tech tycoon said fact-checkers were “too politically biased” and the program had led to “too much censorship”.But the International Fact-Checking Network, which includes AFP among its dozens of member organizations globally, said the censorship claim was “false”.”We want to set the record straight, both for today’s context and for the historical record,” said the network.Facebook pays to use fact checks from around 80 organisations globally on the platform, as well as on WhatsApp and Instagram. There could be devastating consequences if Meta broadens its policy shift beyond US borders, to programs covering more than 100 countries, the International Fact-Checking Network warned.”Some of these countries are highly vulnerable to misinformation that spurs political instability, election interference, mob violence and even genocide,” the network said.”If Meta decides to stop the program worldwide, it is almost certain to result in real-world harm in many places,” it added.- ‘Real world consequences’ -In Geneva Friday, the United Nations rights chief also insisted that regulating harmful content online “is not censorship”.”Allowing hate speech and harmful content online has real world consequences. Regulating such content is not censorship,” Volker Turk said on X.AFP currently works in 26 languages with Facebook’s fact-checking scheme.In that program, content rated “false” is downgraded in news feeds so fewer people will see it and if someone tries to share that post, they are presented with an article explaining why it is misleading. Supinya Klangnarong, co-founder of Thai fact-checking platform Cofact, said Meta’s decision could have concrete effects offline.”Understandably this policy from Meta is aimed at US users, but we cannot be certain how it will affect other countries,” she told AFP.”By allowing the proliferation of hate speech and racist dialogue could be a trigger towards violence.”Cofact is not an accredited member of the International Fact-Checking Network or of Facebook’s fact-checking scheme.- Zuckerberg courts Trump – Meta’s policy overhaul came less than two weeks before US President-elect Donald Trump takes office and it aligns with the Republican Party’s stance.Trump has been a harsh critic of Meta and Zuckerberg for years, accusing the company of bias against him and threatening to retaliate against the tech billionaire once back in office.Zuckerberg has been making efforts to reconcile with Trump since his election in November, meeting at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida and donating one million dollars to his inauguration fund.The Meta chief also named Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) head Dana White, a close ally of Trump, to the company board.Angie Drobnic Holan, director of the International Fact-Checking Network, said Tuesday the decision came after “extreme political pressure.”The move “will hurt social media users who are looking for accurate, reliable information to make decisions about their everyday lives and interactions with friends and family.”Australia said Meta’s decision was “a very damaging development”, while Brazil warned it was “bad for democracy”.Meta’s move into fact-checking came in the wake of Trump’s shock election in 2016, which critics said was enabled by rampant disinformation on Facebook and interference by foreign actors, including Russia, on the platform.

Research published in The Lancet medical journal on Friday estimates that the death toll in Gaza during the first nine months of the Israel-Hamas war was around 40 percent higher than recorded by the Palestinian territory’s health ministry.The number of dead in Gaza has become a matter of bitter debate since Israel launched its military campaign against Hamas in response to the Palestinian militant group’s unprecedented October 7, 2023 attack.Up to June 30 last year, the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza reported a death toll of 37,877 in the war. However the new peer-reviewed study used data from the ministry, an online survey and social media obituaries to estimate that there were between 55,298 and 78,525 deaths from traumatic injuries in Gaza by that time.The study’s best death toll estimate was 64,260, which would mean the health ministry had under-reported the number of deaths to that point by 41 percent.That toll represented 2.9 percent of Gaza’s pre-war population, “or approximately one in 35 inhabitants,” the study said.The UK-led group of researchers estimated that 59 percent of the deaths were women, children and the elderly.The toll was only for deaths from traumatic injuries, so did not include deaths from a lack of health care or food, or the thousands of missing believed to be buried under rubble.AFP is unable to independently verify the death toll.On Thursday, Gaza’s health ministry said that 46,006 people had died over the full 15 months of war.In Israel, the 2023 attack by Hamas resulted in the deaths of 1,208 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures. Israel has repeatedly questioned the credibility of the Gaza health ministry’s figures, but the United Nations have said they are reliable.- ‘A good estimate’ -The researchers used a statistical method called “capture–recapture” that has previously been used to estimate the death toll in conflicts around the world.The analysis used data from three different lists, the first provided by the Gaza health ministry of the bodies identified in hospitals or morgues.The second list was from an online survey launched by the health ministry in which Palestinians reported the deaths of relatives.The third was sourced from obituaries posted on social media platforms such as X, Instagram, Facebook and Whatsapp, when the identity of the deceased could be verified.”We only kept in the analysis those who were confirmed dead by their relatives or confirmed dead by the morgues and the hospital,” lead study author Zeina Jamaluddine, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told AFP.The researchers scoured the lists, searching for duplicates.”Then we looked at the overlaps between the three lists, and based on the overlaps, you can come up with a total estimation of the population that was killed,” Jamaluddine said.Patrick Ball, a statistician at the US-based Human Rights Data Analysis Group not involved in the research, has used capture–recapture methods to estimate death tolls for conflicts in Guatemala, Kosovo, Peru and Colombia.Ball told AFP the well-tested technique has been used for centuries and that the researchers had reached “a good estimate” for Gaza.Kevin McConway, a professor of applied statistics at Britain’s Open University, told AFP there was “inevitably a lot of uncertainty” when making estimates from incomplete data. But he said it was “admirable” that the researchers had used three other statistical analysis approaches to check their estimates.”Overall, I find these estimates reasonably compelling, he added.- ‘Criticism’ expected from both sides -The researchers cautioned that the hospital lists do not always provide the cause of death, so it was possible that people with non-traumatic health problems — such as a heart attack — could have been included, potentially leading to an overestimate.However there were other ways that the war’s toll could still be underestimated.The study did not include missing people. The UN humanitarian agency OCHA has said that around 10,000 missing Gazans are thought to be buried under rubble.There are also indirect ways that war can claim lives, such as a lack of healthcare, food, water, sanitation or the spread of disease. All have stricken Gaza since October 2023.In a contentious, non-peer-reviewed letter published in The Lancet in July, another group of researchers used the rate of indirect deaths seen in other conflicts to suggest that 186,000 deaths could eventually be attributed to the Gaza war.The new study suggested that this projection “might be inappropriate due to obvious differences in the pre-war burden of disease” in Gaza compared to conflicts in countries such as Burundi and East Timor.Jamaluddine said she expected that “criticism is going to come from different sides” about the new research.She spoke out against the “obsession” of arguing about death tolls, emphasising that “we already know that there is a lot of high mortality”.