Fort McMurray is an urban service area in the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo in Alberta, Canada. It is located in northeast Alberta, in the middle of the Athabasca oil sands, surrounded by boreal forest. It has played a significant role in the development of the national petroleum industry. The 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire led to the evacuation of its residents and caused widespread damage.
The Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, formerly the Samuel Johnson Prize, is an annual British book prize for the best non-fiction writing in the English language. It was founded in 1999 following the demise of the NCR Book Award. With its motto "All the best stories are true", the prize covers current affairs, history, politics, science, sport, travel, biography, autobiography and the arts. The competition is open to authors of any nationality whose work is published in the UK in English. The longlist, shortlist and winner is chosen by a panel of independent judges, which changes every year. Formerly named after English author and lexicographer Samuel Johnson, the award was renamed in 2015 after Baillie Gifford, an investment management firm and the primary sponsor. Since 2016, the annual dinner and awards ceremony has been sponsored by the Blavatnik Family Foundation.
Azadeh Moaveni is an Iranian-American writer, journalist, and academic. She is the former director of the Gender and Conflict Program at the International Crisis Group, and is Associate Professor of Journalism at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Institute of Journalism. She is the author of four books, including the bestselling Lipstick Jihad and Guest House for Young Widows, which was shortlisted for numerous prizes. She contributes to The New York Times, The Guardian, and The London Review of Books.
Margo Lillian Jefferson is an American writer and academic.
John Vaillant is an American-Canadian writer and journalist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and Outside. He has written both non-fiction and fiction books.
A large wildfire burned through Slave Lake, Alberta, Canada and its surrounding area from May 14 to 16, 2011. The conflagration, which originated 15 kilometres (9.3 mi) outside of town as a forest fire, was quickly pushed past fire barriers designed to protect the town by 100-kilometre-per-hour (60 mph) winds. The fire forced the complete evacuation of Slave Lake's 7,000 residents—considered the largest such displacement in the province's history at the time—to the nearby towns of Athabasca and Westlock, as well as the provincial capital of Edmonton. No casualties were reported amongst the town's population, but a pilot was killed when his helicopter crashed while he was battling the fires around the community.
The Richardson Fire was a 2011 forest fire in the Canadian province of Alberta. It was located north of the city of Fort McMurray in an area known as the Richardson Backcountry. The fire started in mid-May 2011, and burned over 700,000 hectares of boreal forest. It threatened facilities in the Athabasca oil sands, and resulted in several evacuations and shutdowns. Firefighting efforts included agencies from several Canadian provinces as well as international crews. The Richardson fire was the largest fire in Alberta since the 1950 Chinchaga Fire, and the second largest recorded fire in the province's history.
The 2015 wildfire season was the largest in Washington state history, with more than one million acres burning across the state from June to September. As many as 3,000 firefighters including 800 Washington National Guard members were deployed to fight the fires. The 17th Field Artillery Brigade of the United States Army also deployed 200 soldiers from Joint Base Lewis–McChord to help fight the fires.
Laura Cumming is a British journalist who is the art critic of The Observer newspaper, a position she has held since 1999. Before that she worked for The Guardian, the New Statesman and the BBC. In addition to her career in journalism, Cumming has written well-received books on self-portraits in art and the discovery of a lost portrait by Diego Velázquez in 1845. The Vanishing Man was a New York Times bestseller and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 2016.
On May 1, 2016, a wildfire began southwest of Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada. On May 3, it swept through the community, forcing the largest wildfire evacuation in Alberta's history, with upwards of 88,000 people forced from their homes. Firefighters were assisted by personnel from both the Canadian Armed Forces and Royal Canadian Mounted Police, as well as other Canadian provincial agencies, to fight the wildfire. Aid for evacuees was provided by various governments and via donations through the Canadian Red Cross and other local and national charitable organizations.
The 2017 Washington wildfires were a series of wildfires that burned over the course of 2017, a year that set weather records for heat and aridity in both Western Washington and Eastern Washington.
The 2019 Alberta wildfires have been described by NASA as part of an extreme fire season in the province. In 2019 there were a total of 803,393.32 hectares, which is over 3.5 times more land area burned than in the five-year average burned. The five year average is 747 fires destroying 146,360.08 hectares. There were 644 wildfires recorded in Alberta. By May 31, 10,000 people had been evacuated, 16 homes, and the Steen River CN railway bridge, had been destroyed.
East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity is a 2016 book by Philippe Sands that examines the lives of two Jewish lawyers, Hersch Lauterpacht and Raphael Lemkin, born within three years of each other and students in the same city on the eastern outskirts of Europe, Lviv, who created the legal concepts of crimes against humanity and genocide. It is a memoir and history of the origins of international criminal law in the aftermath of the Second World War.
The 2022 Washington wildfire season officially began in March 2022. As of August 4, 2022, there have been four large wildfires that have burned 30,800 acres (12,500 ha) across the US state of Washington. This season started quieter than normal due to unusually colder weather that kept Eastern and Southeastern Washington burning index's largely below normal into July. As of October 2022, a total of 140,000 acres (57,000 ha) of land in the state was burned – the fewest number of acres burned since 2012.
The 49er Fire was a destructive wildfire in 1988 in California's Nevada County and Yuba County. The fire was ignited on September 11 when a man accidentally set brush on fire by burning toilet paper near Highway 49. Driven by severe drought conditions and strong, dry winds, firefighting crews were hard-pressed to stop the fire's advance until winds calmed and humidity levels recovered. The fire burned 33,700 acres throughout the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, impinging on the communities of Lake Wildwood, Rough and Ready, and Smartsville before officials declared it fully contained on September 16.
Beginning in March 2023, and with increased intensity starting in June, Canada was affected by a record-setting series of wildfires. All 13 provinces and territories were affected, with large fires in Alberta, British Columbia, the Northwest Territories, Nova Scotia, Ontario, and Quebec. The 2023 wildfire season had the most area burned in Canada's recorded history, surpassing the 1989, 1995, and 2014 fire seasons, as well as in recorded North American history, surpassing the 2020 Western US wildfire season.
In July 2023, multiple wildfires started in Greece. They resulted in at least 28 deaths and injured 75 people, with over 80 wildfires being recorded. Seventy-nine people were arrested for arson.
The MANIAC is a 2023 novel by Chilean author Benjamín Labatut, written in English. It is a fictionalised biography of polymath John von Neumann, whom Labatut calls "the smartest human being of the 20th century". The book focuses on von Neumann, but is also about physicist Paul Ehrenfest, history of artificial intelligence, and Lee Sedol's Go match against AlphaGo. The book received mostly positive reviews from critics.
