ARIZONA (Reuters) – An unusually large number of wildfires burned across the U.S. Southwest on Friday as a decades-long drought combined with abundant dry vegetation to raise concerns the region faced a harsh burning year. “New Mexico right now has multiple fires going, Arizona has multiple fires going, and that is abnormal for this early in the season,” said Laura Rabon, a spokeswoman for the Lincoln National Forest in southern New Mexico where two people died in a blaze last week. Rising temperatures have lowered winter snowpacks and allowed fires to start earlier in the year as wind-driven flames race through parched forest and grassland, according to biologists. The prolonged drought has been intensified by human-caused climate change, according to climate scientists. Gale-force winds at times made it too dangerous for fire crews in New Mexico and Arizona to battle the Cook and Tunnel fires, which have each burned areas larger than the island of Manhattan. They were among over a dozen fires burning in the Southwest. Southern Colorado resident Lauren Hawksworth said her family’s 30-year-old cabin was endangered by a fire south of Prescott, Arizona, and that the Tunnel fire had destroyed dozens of homes near her college town of Flagstaff.

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BEIJING (AP) – Beijing is on alert after 10 middle school students tested positive for COVID-19, in what city officials said was an initial round of testing. City officials suspended classes in the school for a week following the positive test results. The Chinese capital also reported four other confirmed cases that day that were counted separately. Mainland China reported 24,326 new community-transmitted infections on Saturday, with the vast majority of them asymptomatic cases in Shanghai, where enforcement of a strict “zero-COVID” strategy has drawn global attention. China has doubled down on the approach even in face of the highly transmissible omicron variant. The zero-COVID policy warded off many deaths and widespread outbreaks when faced with less transmissible variants through mass testing and strict lockdowns where people could not leave their homes.

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WASHINGTON (Dispatches) – Tensions have been running high between the Solomon Islands and the West since last week after Beijing announced that it had signed an undisclosed security pact with Honiara. The Biden administration has warned the Solomon Islands that it will take action against the South Pacific nation if its new cooperation agreement with China poses a threat to U.S. or allied interests. According to the White House, the warning was delivered directly to the country’s officials by a visiting senior U.S. delegation that expressed concern about the security deal with China. The delegation arrived in Honiara to hold talks with the Solomon Islands government and to pressure it over the pact. In a statement, the White House had said its diplomatic delegation was visiting Fiji, Papua New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands this week to “ensure our partnerships deliver prosperity, security and peace across the Pacific Islands and the Indo-Pacific”. Washington said China’s security pact with the Solomon Islands is not clear and cast doubt on Honiara officials’ claims that the deal was purely domestic.

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BRUSSELS (AFP) – The European Union early Saturday finalized new legislation to require Big Tech to remove harmful content, the bloc’s latest move to rein in the world’s online giants. The Digital Services Act (DSA) - the second part of a massive project to regulate tech companies- aims to ensure tougher consequences for platforms and websites that host a long list of banned content ranging from hate speech to disinformation and child sexual abuse images. EU officials and parliamentarians finally reached agreement at talks in Brussels early Saturday on the legislation, which has been in the works since 2020. “Yes, we have a deal!,” European Commissioner for the Internal Market Thierry Breton tweeted. “With the DSA, the time of big online platforms behaving like they are ‘too big to care’ is coming to an end,” said Breton, who has previously described the internet as the “Wild West”. “Today’s agreement on DSA is historic,” European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen tweeted. “Our new rules will protect users online, ensure freedom of expression and opportunities for businesses. What is illegal offline will effectively be illegal online in the EU.”

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KINSHASA (Reuters) – A new case of Ebola has been confirmed in northwestern Democratic Republic of Congo, the National Institute of Biomedical Research said on Saturday, four months after the end of the country’s last outbreak. The case, a 31-year old male, was detected in the city of Mbandaka, capital of Congo’s Equateur province, the institute said. A health ministry spokesperson confirmed the discovery. The patient began showing symptoms on April 5, but did not seek treatment for more than a week. He was admitted to an Ebola treatment center on April 21 and died later that day, the World Health Organization (WHO) said in a statement. “Time is not on our side,” said Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, the WHO’s Regional Director for Africa. “The disease has had a two-week head start and we are now playing catch-up.” Mbandaka, a crowded trading hub on the banks of the Congo River, has contended with two previous outbreaks — in 2018 and in 2020.

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TUNIS (MEMO) – Tunisia’s president has seized control of the country’s electoral commission, saying he would replace most of its members, in a move that will entrench his one-man rule. President Kais Saied has already dismissed parliament and taken control of the judiciary, after assuming executive authority last summer in a plot. Saied, who says his actions were both legal and necessary to save Tunisia from an “imminent threat”, is rewriting the democratic constitution introduced after the 2011 revolution, and says he will put it to a referendum in July. In his decree on Friday, Saied said he would select three of the existing nine members of the electoral commission (ISIE) to stay on, serving in a new seven-member panel with three judges and an information technology specialist.