LOS ANGELES (AP) -- An intentionally set wildfire grew perilously close to homes in Southern California as evacuation orders expanded to more than 20,000 residents, though some homeowners stayed behind to fend off the flames themselves.
Firefighters fought a desperate battle to stop the Holy Fire from reaching homes as the blaze surged through the Cleveland National Forest above the city of Lake Elsinore and its surrounding communities. They were trying to keep the flames from devouring neighborhoods and taking lives, as gigantic fires still burning in Northern California have done.
"Our main focus this afternoon was getting everyone out safely," said Thanh Nguyen, a spokesman for the crews battling the Holy Fire.
As flames raged closer, some residents ignoring evacuation orders stood in driveways or on top of roofs and used garden hoses to keep their homes wet and to fight the flames as smoke billowed around them.

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KANO, Nigeria (AFP) -- At least 17 Nigerian soldiers were killed in a fresh Boko Haram attack on a military base in the country's northeast, military sources told AFP Thursday, the third assault on three different bases in less than a month.
On Wednesday evening, heavily armed extremists riding in trucks stormed and looted weapons and vehicles from a military base in Garunda village in Borno State, the epicenter of the Takfiri insurgency that has been raging for nine years.
The attack is the latest of a series of bloody Boko Haram assaults on military bases in Nigeria, underscoring the continued threat the Takfiris pose to the region and putting the spotlight on the Nigerian government's claim that Boko Haram is "decimated."
"Our troops came under attack from Boko Haram terrorists in Garunda last night," a military officer told AFP.
"Unfortunately we lost 17 troops, 14 others were injured while an unspecified number is still unaccounted for," said the military source, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak on the incident.
The source added that the militants looted weapons and vehicles before fleeing.
In the past month, Boko Haram extremists have launched two other major assaults on military bases in the remote northeast region.

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YANGON, Myanmar (AP) -- Myanmar has sharply rejected an attempt by the International Criminal Court to consider the country's culpability for activities that caused about 700,000 minority Rohingya Muslims to flee to Bangladesh for safety.
The office of State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi, the country's leader, said Thursday that the court in the Netherlands has no jurisdiction over Myanmar because it is not a member state.
It also offered procedural reasons for why it would not respond to the court's request for its views on the exodus of the Rohingya.
Critics including UN experts have accused Myanmar's military of atrocities against the Rohingya amounting to ethnic cleaning, or even genocide. Suu Kyi's government says it was carrying out justifiable counterinsurgency operations.

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TORONTO (Reuters) -- At least four people were killed in a shooting in the eastern Canadian city of Fredericton and one person was taken into custody, police said on Friday.
Police in Fredericton, a city of about 56,000 that is the capital of the province of New Brunswick, said in a post on Twitter the incident was continuing and there were multiple fatalities.
Another police tweet said one person was taken into custody but gave no immediate details on where the incident occurred.
In 2014 in another mass shooting in Moncton, New Brunswick, three Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers were killed and two more were wounded.
At the time, the incident was one of the worst of its kind in Canada, where gun laws are stricter than they are in the United States and deadly attacks on police are rare. But a proliferation of weapons has led to an increase in gun crimes in recent years.
Last month, a gunman walked down a busy Toronto street, killing two people and wounding 13 others before turning his weapon on himself.
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JAKARTA (AFP) -- The death toll from a shallow 6.9-magnitude earthquake on the Indonesian island of Lombok has surged above 300, a senior minister said Thursday.
"The latest update is that 319 people died," said Indonesia's chief security minister Wiranto, who like many Indonesians goes by one name.
 

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BEIJING (AP) -- Reports say hundreds of members of China's Muslim Hui ethnic minority have staged rare protests over plans to demolish a newly built mosque in the country's northwest.
Hong Kong's South China Morning post said a crowd gathered Thursday outside the towering Grand Mosque in the town of Weizhou in the Ningxia Hui autonomous region.
Authorities had planned to begin the demolition Friday, although it wasn't immediately clear if they would proceed according to schedule.
The move comes as China's officially atheist ruling Communist Party is cracking down on religious expression and attacking what it calls radical ideas among the country's more than 20 million Muslims.

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NEW YORK (AFP) -- The Slovenian-born parents of Melania Trump became U.S. citizens at a naturalization ceremony in New York on Thursday, reportedly taking advantage of a family reunification program President Donald Trump has vehemently denounced.
Trump's in-laws Viktor and Amalija Knavs took the oath of citizenship, their immigration lawyer Michael Wildes confirmed to AFP.
Asked by the New York Times if they had obtained citizenship under a program derisively branded "chain migration" by the president, Wildes replied: "I suppose."
He said chain migration, which allows naturalized U.S. citizens to sponsor close relatives for permanent residency, was a "dirtier" way of characterizing what he called "a bedrock of our immigration process when it comes to family reunification."
Trump has taken a hardline on immigration policy, criticizing so-called chain migration.