California

SANTA ROSA, California (AP) — With ferocious winds driving multiple wildfires through bone-dry vegetation and nearly 200,000 people ordered to leave their homes, California’s governor declared a statewide emergency Sunday. Meanwhile, millions of residents remained without power after the state’s largest utility cut electricity as a precaution to prevent more areas from igniting.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — About 90,000 residents were ordered to evacuate towns near a massive Northern California wildfire Saturday, and the state’s largest utility began power shut-offs for an estimated 2.35 million people due to forecasts of severe winds and extreme fire danger.

Two previous blackouts in recent weeks were carried out amid concern that gusty winds could disrupt or knock down power lines and spark devastating wildfires.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Howling winds that fueled destructive wildfires across California began to die down Friday, but residents in the northern part of the state braced for another round of power outages aimed at preventing what are expected to be the strongest gusts in years from sparking more blazes this weekend.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The Pentagon awarded Microsoft a $10 billion cloud computing contract , snubbing early front-runner Amazon, whose competitive bid drew criticism from President Donald Trump and its business rivals.

Bidding for the huge project, known as Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, pitted leading tech titans Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle and IBM against one another.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A wildfire in California wine country that may have been caused by a high-voltage transmission line called into question Pacific Gas & Electric’s strategy of selectively cutting off power in windy weather to prevent blazes and could force it to resort to even bigger blackouts affecting millions as early as this weekend.

The repeated shut-offs and the prospect of longer and more widespread ones brought anger down on the utility from the governor and ordinary customers.

GEYSERVILLE (California, US), Oct 25 (NNN-AGENCIES) — A fast-moving wildfire roared through California wine country Thursday, prompting evacuations and destroying structures as authorities warned of the imminent danger of more fires across much of the state.

The Kincade fire in a rural area of Sonoma County kicked up Wednesday night, quickly growing from a blaze of a few hundred acres into an uncontained 4,000-hectare inferno, California fire and law enforcement officials said.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — With hundreds of thousands of Californians again in the dark amid high wildfire danger Thursday, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom had a message: “I own this.”

Newsom again blasted California’s utilities — most notably Pacific Gas & Electric — for failures to modernize electrical systems. He said shutting off power shouldn’t have to be the alternative in a state that is the most technologically advanced.

But he also personalized the crisis.

SAN DIEGO (AP) — U.S. immigration authorities separated more than 1,500 children from their parents at the Mexico border early in the Trump administration, the American Civil Liberties Union said Thursday, bringing the total number of children separated since July 2017 to more than 5,400.

The ACLU said the administration told its attorneys that 1,556 children were separated from July 1, 2017, to June 26, 2018, when a federal judge in San Diego ordered that children in government custody be reunited with their parents.

GEYSERVILLE, Calif. (AP) — Fast-growing fires throughout California forced tens of thousands of people to evacuate their homes Thursday as dry winds and high heat fed flames and fears in the state still jittery from devastating wildfires in the past two years.

The dramatic fires and evacuations — near Los Angeles and in the wine country of Northern California — came against a backdrop of power shutoffs that utility companies said were necessary to stop high winds from toppling trees or blowing debris into power lines and starting fires.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Google announced Wednesday it has achieved a breakthrough in quantum computing, saying it has developed an experimental processor that took just minutes to complete a calculation that would take the world’s best supercomputer thousands of years.

The feat could open the door someday to machines so blazingly fast that they could revolutionize such tasks as finding new medicines, developing vastly smarter artificial intelligence systems and, most ominously, cracking the encryption that protects some of the world’s most closely guarded secrets.