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Chicago and New York choked under orange and white skies. Madrid and Bordeaux had flames licking at their doorsteps. Vast forests, rural communities, and ranchlands full of livestock in Canada and Oregon have burned — and all in the month of July alone.

Major wildfires and their massive, suffocating plumes of smoke blanketed vast swaths of North America and Europe, in some cases combining with intense heat waves that exacerbated flammable conditions and contributed to human misery.

According to a wildfire smoke analysis by the Washington Post, about 20% of Northern Hemisphere land area — covering around 7.5 million square miles — experienced moderate or greater concentrations of black carbon, the soot particles released by wildfires, at some point during July.

That included large swaths of North America — stretching into the Arctic Circle — as well as Western and Southern Europe and parts of Russia.

Against the backdrop of a changing climate, July has illuminated what it can look like when severe weather, at heightened frequency and intensity, combines to form a hellish landscape. Like 2023 and 2024, this summer is the latest chapter in the Northern Hemisphere’s fiery era, as wildfires become more frequent and intense and oppressive heat and smoke harming the health of millions become increasingly normal.

“It was like the perfect storm of very hot conditions with strong winds that fanned these fires,” said Dmitri Kalashnikov, a climate postdoctoral researcher at the University of California at Merced, referring to the flames he saw explode in Minnesota and Ontario in mid-July. Heavy smoke from those fires made its way through the Midwest and the East Coast in subsequent weeks, temporarily making cities there among the most polluted in the world.

“That direct clear linkage of big heat wave, lots of fire, then lots of smoke impacts was kind of a wow moment for me,” Kalashnikov said.

In some cases, this sprawling smoke lingered over densely populated cities for days, causing poor air quality that spread toxins and increased the risks of asthma attacks, heart disease and strokes.

“There is no safe level of exposure to wildfire smoke,” said Ze’ev Gedalof, a forest ecology expert at the University of Guelph in Ontario. “We just need to expect that this is the new normal.”

Cities such as Cleveland, Denver, Detroit, Milwaukee, New York, and Philadelphia all experienced at least four days with moderate or higher smoke concentrations during July. In Baltimore, Minneapolis, and Portland, Ore., the tally was three moderately smoky days, while D.C. and Boston had two each.

In Canada, Calgary, Edmonton, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, and Winnipeg all experienced three to five smoky days, while Spain’s Madrid had three and France’s Bordeaux had four.

And across many of these cities, fire and smoke were not the only summer scourge.

Many of the fires occurred in areas that have recently experienced record-breaking temperatures from towering heat domes. The heat and dryness that spike as a result of these powerful areas of high pressure can drive wildfire risks. A recent study by Kalashnikov and other researchers at UC Merced found that from 2001 to 2024 more than 40% of the area torched by fires in the western United States had burned during or in the immediate aftermath of a heat wave.

“The conspicuous overlap between record-breaking warmth, dryness, and/or low snowpack and these fires is simply not a coincidence. The scientific evidence linking increasingly extreme fire weather, as well as increasingly extreme wildfires themselves, to climate warming is clear,” wrote climate scientist Daniel Swain in a series of posts on social media about the conditions across the hemisphere.

Several factors could be behind this summer’s many heat domes.

Changing jet stream wind patterns, partly linked to El Niño and a marine heat wave in the Pacific, may be playing a role, as could an unusual cold blob of water in the North Atlantic. The jet stream has been arcing up and over both the United States and Western Europe, with heat domes bubbling underneath.

But a heat dome doesn’t make a wildfire.

“There will not always be extreme wildfire outbreaks when exceptional heat and dryness occur, that is true,” Swain added in one of his posts. “But such conditions greatly raise the ceiling on what is possible in a warming world — and sometimes, as is happening now, that increased potential will be realized.”

In recent days, firefighters have made progress in containing blazes across the two countries; in the region around Bordeaux, authorities have now allowed nearly 150,000 people back to their homes, Reuters reported, to begin a recovery.

“Considering the damage to the ecosystems and the livelihoods, communities affected are going to need support from authorities for a very long time,” said Maria Alcazar Castilla, the deputy regional director for the Red Cross in Europe. “There’s people that need to build their homes, to recover livelihoods, etc. All that, in economic terms, is extremely expensive.”

Some parts of the world have always been vulnerable to fire. Canada has enormous ranges of dense boreal forest — roughly the size of the United States west of the Rocky Mountains — with few roads and scant human population. That kind of forest has evolved to burn in order to rejuvenate, said Jen Beverly, a wildfire researcher at the University of Alberta — but now has grown susceptible to more extreme fires.

“The forest don’t change quick enough to be able to reflect in the data like that. That means it’s climate change,” Beverly said.

Around 14,500 square miles of Canada have burned through July 31 this season — already above the 10-year average, although not on pace to match the extreme fire seasons of 2023 and 2025.

The intense conditions generated by July’s wildfires include the fire in Bordeaux that created its own thunderstorm. The phenomenon, known as a pyrocumulonimbus cloud, occurs when the intense heat of a wildfire sends a column of hot air and smoke high up into the atmosphere, where it cools and condenses into a cloud. The resulting thunderstorm, with high winds and lightning strikes, can further fan the flames.

“It might last for one to three to four hours, and all the while it’s connected to that fire source. And at the same time, the fire is being altered and energized by that storm that it generated,” said Mike Fromm, a meteorologist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. “So it’s a feedback loop.”

Now, the American West is bracing for more of the same.

A fast-moving wildfire driven by strong winds and high temperatures swept across northwest Spokane on Saturday before jumping the Spokane River and prompting the evacuation of thousands of people.

In California, Arizona, and Nevada, a new heat dome that settled over the region this weekend was expected to send temperatures up to 115 degrees Fahrenheit in cities like Phoenix, and another bout of extreme heat could expand across the country in the days to come.

Federal authorities are warning that critical infrastructure systems in the United States could be at risk after at least seven states reported cyberattacks that interrupted their water or wastewater operations last week.

According to a joint alert from the FBI and the Environmental Protection Agency, “malicious cyber actors” have been remotely tampering with some water systems’ internet-connected programmable logic controllers, or PLCs, causing loss of water pressure and flooding.

The warning, issued Thursday, comes after U.S. intelligence officials said Iran was likely behind a coordinated cyberattack on more than 30 municipal water systems in Minnesota. Experts have also warned for years that the U.S. water industry, which has resisted regulation efforts, has been vulnerable to cyberattacks.

Intelligence agencies have not definitively concluded that Tehran was responsible for the disruptions in Minnesota, but the hack follows urgent warnings by federal cybersecurity officials that Iran for months has been targeting internet-exposed devices that control operations at water, wastewater, and energy facilities in the U.S. In July, federal cybersecurity authorities specifically warned that Iranian hackers were exploiting vulnerable PLCs.

President Donald Trump has blamed Minnesota’s government, not Iran, for that attack. The FBI did not respond to a request for comment Friday about whether it believed Iran was responsible, saying the agency and others were “fully engaged to protect critical infrastructure.”

The Post reported Thursday that intrusions have been noted at several water and energy systems across the country since shortly after the war began on Feb. 28.

Federal authorities have not identified which states were affected in recent hacks. Outside of Minnesota, Michigan and South Dakota have also reported attacks. However, experts said it is likely many more states are affected, given that the brand of PLCs targeted — Rockwell Automation/Allen-Bradley — is widely used.

“We only have one internet and it’s the same equipment for all these victims. … Theoretically, you should see these [vulnerabilities] in all 50 states,” said Joshua Corman, a public safety and resilience expert at the Institute for Security and Technology.

To date, the cyber attackers have employed “low sophisticated tactics” to hack into internet-connected PLCs, often ones with weak or nonexistent credentials, according to Alec Davison, an analyst with WaterISAC, an information sharing program with the government intended to strengthen security. The hackers have subsequently modified passwords to lock out operators and disconnect controllers, he said in an email.

“This has led to boil water notices and forced utilities into sustained manual operations,” Davison wrote.

The risk is that cyberattackers tampering with PLCs could change the “logic” or software of a system so that an operator might not detect an issue with, say, dangerous levels of chemicals.

A July 22 advisory issued by the Homeland Security Department’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency noted that the FBI and CISA have observed Iranian hackers tampering with the PLC’s logic software, “allowing systems to enter unsafe conditions without notifying operators of the anomalies.”

“Operators see normal displays. No alerts fire and the process can enter an unsafe condition without anyone knowing,” said Kurt Gaudette, head of intelligence for Dragos, a cybersecurity firm that specializes in protecting critical infrastructure.

Experts widely agreed that water infrastructure in the United States has been uniquely vulnerable for more than a decade. Of the roughly 151,000 water plants in the United States, about one-third service residential communities year-round. But only about 420 water plants participate in WaterISAC to try to improve cybersecurity across the water sector.

“We have under half a percent paying attention to cybersecurity,” Corman said. “U.S. water is incredibly prone. We’ve been prey, we just didn’t have predators with an appetite for water, but that’s over.”

Another issue is that many small- and medium-size utilities are using third-party integrators or contractors to configure the security settings on their systems, and these contractors are using default credentials and weak passwords.

Compounding the problem, the water industry has also resisted efforts to be regulated for cybersecurity. After the Biden administration tried to impose cybersecurity audits of water utilities in 2023, some water industry groups and three states — Missouri, Arkansas, and Iowa — sued, causing the EPA to roll back its standards.

Nate George, the mayor of Braham, Minn., which experienced a hack last week that caused the town’s plant to briefly go offline, said in a statement on Saturday to the Washington Post that cities such as his need more resources to comply with mandates to ensure their utility systems and infrastructure are safe.

“I would actually argue it falls mostly on states that mandate local governments make certain upgrades to their utility systems or other infrastructure but fail to provide the funding to pay for it or maintain it,” said George, a Republican running for state auditor in Minnesota.

Cybersecurity threats to the water sector, however, are only expanding.

Trump, at a meeting with cabinet officials at Camp David on Friday, waved off the suggestion that Iran was involved in the Minnesota attack — and in turn blamed its officials, a frequent political target.

“I blame it on Minnesota because they’re grossly incompetent,” Trump said at the cabinet meeting. “I would blame it on Minnesota and the governor, the corrupt governor of Minnesota. Iran’s got bigger problems than worrying about Minnesota.”

Gov. Tim Walz (D) pointed the finger at Iran as well as at Trump.

“Trump knows exactly who is responsible for this attack, and knows that other states were hit too,” Walz wrote on X. “This is what modern warfare looks like, and it further illustrates there’s no plan to win a war with Iran.”

Anthony Fauci didn’t know Rand Paul had his diary, let alone that the GOP senator was going to release it, his friends said.

So last Saturday — after the Kentucky lawmaker had publicly shared years of Fauci’s private reflections, on everything from fighting COVID-19 to attending “A-list” events — Fauci went to another party.

There, at a birthday celebration for former White House chief of staff Ron Klain, Fauci mingled with friends and former Biden administration colleagues. They cheered and toasted him, apparently unaware that his critics were combing through documents that would kick off one of the most fraught weeks of his decades-long career.

For a few hours, Fauci was back inside a familiar Washington.

Then reality intruded. His longtime critics now control congressional committees, the health agencies where he spent his career, and the Justice Department that could ultimately decide whether to prosecute him. After years of promising to hold Fauci accountable for the government’s pandemic response, they are flexing their power to try.

The past week offered the clearest glimpse yet of what that reckoning could look like.

On Monday, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime Fauci foe, bragged about his department’s monthslong efforts to scour 11 government servers to reassemble Fauci’s diary and turn it over to Paul. On Wednesday, Fauci faced hours of questions from Paul and fellow Republican senators at a congressional hearing Fauci and his allies believe was designed to entrap him. He invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to testify more than 100 times.

President Donald Trump, who said he watched the “whole thing,” criticized Fauci after the hearing but sidestepped questions about whether he should be prosecuted.

The effort has exposed the difficulty of settling, six years later, the bitter disputes that made Fauci one of the pandemic’s most polarizing figures. Paul and other Republicans say newly obtained records have raised fresh questions about Fauci’s conduct. Several senators accused him of misleading Americans during the coronavirus pandemic and pressed him on whether he engaged in a cover-up of the virus’ potential origins.

But some of the central allegations have been investigated before, and even some Republicans involved in those inquiries question how much the new material adds. Fauci denies claims of a cover-up, and his allies say he is stuck in a Kafkaesque nightmare. Their fears were accentuated after a former Fauci aide was arrested in April after he privately bragged about concealing emails.

The pressure on Fauci, 85, is intensifying. More lawmakers are preparing to challenge him. Paparazzi lurk outside his door, and death threats persist. Clips of Fauci refusing to answer questions have become memes, sparking jokes on ESPN and mockery in conservative media. The scrutiny recalls the darkest days of the pandemic — except now, rather than the government marshaling its resources to defend Fauci, he is paying for his own security.

Paul’s committee is set to vote Wednesday on whether to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress, a measure expected to pass with Republican support. Paul has said they will immediately refer the matter to the Justice Department for prosecution.

“I think he’ll be remembered more like a mafia don than a great scientist,” Paul, the chairperson of the Senate’s government oversight committee, told podcaster Benny Johnson after last week’s hearing.

Peter Staley, a former adversary turned longtime friend, said Fauci is trying to stick to his routine, taking power walks with his wife and seeing patients at Georgetown University’s hospital.

“He’s not crumbling,” Staley said, invoking “Brooklyn tough,” an expression he said Fauci often uses. “I’m worried for his safety. I’m not worried for his mental state.”

This story is drawn from interviews with 17 friends, critics, and former colleagues of Fauci, as well as current administration officials, lawmakers, and congressional aides. Through a spokesperson, Fauci declined to comment.

Fauci, who led the National Institutes of Health’s infectious-disease work, emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic as the face of the government’s response. That perch gave him access to elite social circles, won him accolades, and made him a worldwide celebrity — fame that has carried a bitter aftertaste.

He has since been blamed for myriad pandemic-related policies, including decisions that others made but he amplified, such as the CDC’s recommendation to stay 6 feet apart to minimize virus risks. Activists and lawmakers have said they want to hold Fauci accountable for students’ learning loss, workers’ lost jobs, and other harms resulting from COVID-related shutdowns.

Some past colleagues have been happy to see Fauci face difficult questions. Several said that his diary shows that Fauci — who details his interactions with reporters and celebrities — was too seduced by his media coverage. They also criticized his efforts to work with NIH grantees to be nominated for prizes, which were detailed in another batch of documents released by Paul.

“This is the Fauci I knew being exposed to the world,” said Chris Meekins, who served as a senior health official in the first Trump administration, and battled with Fauci about vaccine and funding priorities before the pandemic.

Others say Paul and his allies are only seeking to embarrass and damage Fauci after years of battling with him, often in contentious showdowns in the Senate. Paul has contended that last week’s hearing was part of his investigation into the pandemic’s origins, including whether Fauci tried to conceal a possible laboratory leak that may have sparked the outbreak.

“We learned nothing from that hearing,” said Ashish Jha, who led the nation’s COVID response under Biden and worked closely with Fauci. “Nothing about the important issues. Nothing about how to prevent the next pandemic. And this kind of vilification will scare people away from public service.”

Paul has also said that Fauci’s diary has produced new revelations about his shifting thoughts on the virus’ origins and risks. But the diary generally hews closely to Fauci’s 2024 memoir, On Call, and his other past interviews and testimony.

Fauci also sat for 21 hours of interviews with a GOP-led subcommittee in 2024, where he discussed the possible origins of the coronavirus, his private conversations about whether a laboratory leak sparked the outbreak, and other controversial matters. The subcommittee pressed Fauci on whether his agency had inadvertently sparked the pandemic by funding risky coronavirus research in China, a claim he has persistently denied.

“The journal should have been produced back in 2023 but sitting here in 2026 I am not sure what the entries add to the debate,” Mitch Benzine, who was the GOP subcommittee’s staff director and led the questioning of Fauci, wrote in an email. “Some of the information is new and does add color to Dr. Fauci’s thoughts through the pandemic, but the findings are no different than what we found years ago.”

The subcommittee’s investigation led to one of Fauci’s former aides being arrested earlier this year, an event referenced by Paul and seen as a potential harbinger for Fauci. Justice Department officials say David M. Morens skirted public records laws and hid his communications to thwart inquiries into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic. Fauci has distanced himself from Morens, saying he knew nothing about his actions.

Marc Short, who served as Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, clashed with Fauci over COVID restrictions in 2020 and felt the doctor’s advice was frequently wrong. But Short said Fauci’s role in the early coronavirus response is now being distorted, noting that local leaders had significant leeway over how and when to reopen schools and businesses under the Trump administration’s “federalist” approach.

“He’s been made a scapegoat for public health officials who made the wrong decisions,” Short said, recalling a 2020 conversation in which the doctor laid out their different responsibilities.

“‘My job is to tell people how not to get infected. It’s your job to consider all the other factors,’” Short recalled Fauci saying.

Fauci was a prominent Washington figure, if not a household name, during his nearly four decades leading NIH’s infectious-disease institute. He was repeatedly summoned to the White House to advise presidents about how to handle virus outbreaks and held up as a model for generations of scientists.

Fauci attracted national attention in the 1980s for his work on HIV/AIDS, which initially drew fire from activists such as Staley, who protested outside his office — with mock coffins and an effigy of Fauci — castigating him as a bureaucrat who was doing too little to save lives.

But Fauci won over those critics, convincing them of his sincerity. He also rose in esteem, with scientists and politicians — including many prominent Republicans — touting him as an example of what government could accomplish.

Asked in a 1988 presidential debate to name an inspiring hero, Vice President George H.W. Bush singled out Fauci for his work fighting AIDS. Twenty years later, Bush’s son, President George W. Bush, awarded Fauci the Medal of Freedom for his work as an architect of PEPFAR, a worldwide AIDS relief program credited with saving tens of millions of lives.

Entering 2020, Fauci had kept a diary on his work computer for years — a nightly ritual in which he tracked his day, his dealings, and his media appearances as material for a planned memoir, allies said.

Then came the coronavirus, which would kill millions around the world, and transform Fauci’s life. He emerged as the government’s spokesperson across two administrations, initially hailed by Republicans as well as Democrats and seen as a reassuring figure. Trump bestowed one of his highest compliments: Fauci was good on TV.

But as the pandemic stretched on, Fauci’s pessimism and encouragement of strict measures rankled Trump and other administration officials. Parents grew frustrated with school shutdowns. Conservative media increasingly turned on the doctor, and by late 2020, Trump was entertaining chants of “Fire Fauci” at campaign rallies.

“I didn’t mind him, I didn’t find him to be bad personally, as a person,” Trump told Fox & Friends last week. “But I didn’t agree with what he was saying or what he was doing.”

Still, Trump awarded Fauci a commendation for his work on Operation Warp Speed, the president’s successful initiative to accelerate development of coronavirus vaccines, before leaving office in January 2021.

The incoming Biden administration, meanwhile, elevated Fauci as President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser — a political job for the longtime civil servant. Fauci had significant sway over that administration’s coronavirus policies and personnel.

He left government at the end of 2022, wary of looming GOP investigations, and with dwindling popularity.

“It is clear that even with Pro bono considerations that this is going to cost me a lot of money since the GOP has promised that they would make my life miserable and blame me for virtually everything that happened bad to the country during the pandemic,” Fauci wrote in his diary in November 2022.

A few months later, Biden issued Fauci a preemptive pardon on his final day in office. That afternoon, Trump returned to the presidency and swiftly elevated some of Fauci’s critics to key government positions.

Kennedy, who wrote a book about Fauci that the doctor considered slanderous, runs the health department. Jay Bhattacharya, whom Fauci dismissed as a stooge in his diary, now runs NIH. Some of Fauci’s adversaries, such as Trump’s economic adviser Peter Navarro, also rejoined the White House and other agencies.

Trump has said he will not challenge Biden’s pardon of Fauci, but the doctor still faces legal peril. The pardon does not cover events after it was issued on Jan. 20, 2025, and Fauci and his allies worried that if he misspoke at any point to Paul’s panel, he would face perjury charges — a concern that triggered his invocations of the Fifth Amendment. And while Biden’s pardon protects Fauci from federal criminal investigations into his time involved in the nation’s coronavirus response, it did not rule out state prosecution. Florida’s attorney general last week announced a new investigation into Fauci.

Benzine, the former House GOP staffer, said he expects Paul’s committee to find Fauci in contempt this week.

“What comes next is unclear,” Benzine wrote in an email. “What is clear, is that this is not over for Dr. Fauci.”

Many Americans have moved on from the depths of the pandemic. Fauci’s neighborhood was once dotted with signs reading, “Thank you Dr. Fauci.” They have long been taken down, and none were newly visible the day after last week’s hearing.

WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — In a region where the demand for housing outpaces its supply, a pack of coyotes have made a vacant construction site their home.

For months, residents in the dense West Hollywood neighborhood say they have complained about the coyotes. At night, the coyote howls echo through the development keeping residents awake. During the day, some dog owners say they worry about the safety of their furry companions.

In late July, the neighborly dispute became a local spectacle after news outlets reported on the coyotes’ home, dubbed by a neighbor as the “coyote condos.”

Over the next week, the block was flooded with onlookers and reporters and even a helicopter trying to capture an image of the coyotes from above. With all the attention, the pack was coming out as early. The howls came later and later into the night.

“It’s kind of like a cacophony of howls,” neighbor Collin Newman said, describing how the structure amplifies the coyotes’ cries in every direction. Newman, who has lived in the neighborhood for ten years, captured the howls from across the street. “If you’ve ever seen The Lion King, imagine a pack of hyenas in the middle of the wilderness. And there’s no escape.”

Neighbors say the site has been vacant for years. Already under construction in 2018, the development faced opposition from neighbors and the West Hollywood Planning Commission, according to an article from WEHOonline.

The city of West Hollywood said construction on the unfinished 22-unit condominium building was halted in 2024. It sits in a densely populated block of shoulder-to-shoulder apartment buildings, over a mile from any open wild space.

Across Los Angeles, coyote sightings are common. While some generally avoid human contact, others can lose their fear of humans and pose a risk, especially to dogs and cats.

“The scary part is when we walk the dogs.” Jesus Zavala, a neighbor, said while walking his Chihuahua, Zoe. “They can just come out and grab dogs, especially the small ones.”

But after four or five months the coyotes are now commonplace, Zavala said, and he is no longer nervous to take Zoe out at night. Many that walk their dogs in the neighborhood look unbothered. The fire hydrants and street signs are all fully utilized.

Under a full moon late Thursday night, the only howls came from curious onlookers hoping to get a glimpse of the pack.

“Look!” a family walking their dog said and pointed to a room on the third floor, where all they could see was the outline of a coyote. Soon it retreated into the shadows.

One car of people waited over an hour to hear the coyotes.

The city of West Hollywood follows a coexistence plan that favors nonlethal practices to reduce harm to humans. The city said they are requiring the property owners to swiftly retain a wildlife control expert and take next steps. The owners did not return a request for comment.

Newman said he hopes there will be a resolution that makes people feel safe but also points out that there are a handful of other vacant structures in the area. First there were unhoused people squatting, now there are coyotes.

“As far as I’m concerned, it’s theirs,” Newman said of the coyotes, “They’re the ones occupying it, living in it. They might have been paying rent. They probably got a good deal on it because it’s been just sitting there.”