Wine country is burning.
Thousands of residents of Napa Valley, Sonoma and six other counties have been forced from their homes – and thousands more are preparing to flee – as 14 wildfires tear through Northern California, resisting fire fighters’ efforts to contain them.
Residents of coastal towns and cities across the Southeastern US are breathing a sigh of relief as Hurricane Nate is rapidly weakening after twice making landfall in the Southeastern US late Saturday into early Sunday. The NHC has downgraded it to a tropical depression as it moves inland over Alabama; NHC has also discontinued all storm-related warnings for coastal areas, though heavy rains and flooding continue in some areas. The storm's maximum sustained winds have dropped to 40 mph, and as of late-morning Sunday, the storm was traveling near Birmingham, Alabama.
In late February, concerns about a potential nuclear "incident", reportedly in the vicinity of the Arctic circle, emerged when trace amounts of radioactive Iodine-131 of unknown origin were detected in January over large areas in Europe, according to a report by the Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety, the French national public expert in nuclear and radiological risks. And while Norway was the first to measure the radioactivity, France was the first to officially inform the public about it.
Confirming an earlier projection by Accuweather that showed Hurricane Nate will likely make landfall as a cateogry one storm somewhere between Louisiana and the Florida panhandle on Sunday, the NHC has issued a hurricane warning - the highest-priority of the agency's alert levels - for a broad swath of the Southern US stretching from Grand Isle Louisiana to the Florida-Alabama border.
In the most bizarre news of the day, Bloomberg's Hugh Son noticed that in a late Thursday filing, the board of JPMorgan approved a series of revisions to the bank's by-laws, including a particularly notable one: a new section defining what constitutes a quorum in an emergency resulting from "an attack on the United States" or a “nuclear or atomic disaster.” That scenario is listed among emergencies that - understandably - might make it hard to hold a normal meeting for board members of America's largest bank.