President Trump's critics are belittling him for not buying the lefty narrative that global warming is to blame for the California wildfires. Instead, Trump points to decades of mistakes by government agencies that caused the woodlands to become overly dense and blanketed with highly flammable dead wood and underbrush.

He's exactly right.

Just ask California officials. Two months ago, the state legislature enacted a measure that would expedite the removal of dead trees and use "prescribed burns" to thin forests. In other words: the very same reforms that Trump is now being mocked for proposing. The September law followed a Gov. Jerry Brown executive order earlier this year that also called for "controlled fires" to improve forest health.

This scientific approach isn't easily conveyed in Trump's preferred mode of communication, the 280-character tweet. But University of California forest expert Yana Valachovic conceded in a Washington Post interview that Trump's "general sentiment is correct - that we need to manage fuels." That is, to get rid of dangerous buildups of dead and dying trees.

For a century, forest mismanagement has resulted in huge blazes. And while global warming is the favorite culprit among the PC crowd, history shows that California suffered far bigger fires decades ago. The death toll from the current northern California fire, known as Camp Fire, set the gruesome all-time state record for a single blaze, killing at least 79 so far, with hundreds still missing.

But that terrible death toll is mainly owing to the fact that population density on the forest's edge has expanded rapidly in recent years. In 1936, fires statewide burned nearly 800,000 acres, five times the size of Camp Fire. Fires in 1934, 1942, 1943, 1944, 1950 and 1963 also vastly exceeded Camp Fire's size.

The press repeatedly baits the president, asking him about global warming and trying to discredit him as a climate-change "denier."

To be sure, California's recent prolonged drought and record temperatures played a role in turning the state's forests into a tinderbox, and it is possible that climate change contributed to the high temperatures and drought. But debating that is an academic distraction from what must be done now.

And some scientists put significant blame for the fires on mistaken policies by state and federal forest agencies - things that could have been changed to avert the disaster and that still can be altered with more predictable results than trying to control the world's temperature.

The scale of the disaster demands immediate action. Camp Fire has already swept across over 230 square miles, reducing entire towns to soot. The fire, predicted to burn until Nov. 30, has put San Francisco and other cities under a pollution cloud worse than anything in India or China.

The University of California, Berkeley, canceled classes and is distributing masks.

Californians were warned of this impending inferno. Earlier this year, a bipartisan state panel, the Little Hoover Commission, reported that for more than a century, state and federal forest managers have mistakenly put out small fires instead of allowing them to burn naturally to rid woodlands of dense underbrush and deadwood. The Little Hoover panel condemned this "century of fire suppression."

In 2006, the Western Governors' Association warned about another contributing factor: failure to thin the forests. In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton imposed limits on timber harvesting to protect the spotted owl. Timber harvests fell by 80 percent, and new road building in federal forests ground to a halt. Too bad. Roads serve as natural fire barriers, and also enable fire fighters to get to the blazes.

Add to these mistakes the drought that gripped California beginning in 2012, the onslaught of tree-killing bark beetles and then record heat in 2017, and the result was an inferno waiting to happen. Not the first, by any means.

But the Little Hoover Commission predicts that "proactive forest management practices" can create healthier forests that will "check the speed and intensity of wildfires." These practices will return forests to the natural conditions of previous centuries, when forests had 40 trees per acre on average, instead of hundreds.

Yes, Trump's Twitter bombast doesn't capture every policy detail. But his basic point stands. Sadly, his liberal critics can't see the forest for the trees.

Betsy McCaughey is a senior fellow at the London Center for Policy Research.

Three suicide bombers attacked the Chinese consulate in Pakistan's southern city of Karachi early on Friday, but were killed before entering the building, the city's police chief said.

At least two police officers were killed in the attack, which was claimed by the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA), an ethnic insurgent group that said it opposes Chinese exploitation of natural resources in the country's southwest. It also describes itself as the Balochistan Liberation Army.

All Chinese staff at the consulate are safe, Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said.

Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan ordered an inquiry into the incident.

The attack was the most prominent attack in Pakistan against neighbor and ally China, which is pouring billions of dollars into the country as part of its vast Belt and Road initiative.

A blast and gunshots rang out early on Friday in the affluent Clifton neighborhood, where the consulate is located, and a plume of smoke rose over the area after the explosion.

Karachi Police Chief Amir Shaikh said the three attackers came in a car filled with explosives but failed to get inside the heavily fortified compound.

"They tried to get inside but the Rangers and police killed one of the terrorists," Shaikh said.

A gun battle broke out with the two other attackers, but they were also killed, he added.

"There were three attackers and all three have been killed," Shaikh said. "They could not even get in the compound. They tried to get into the visa section."

A spokesman for the BLA confirmed there were three suicide attackers.

"They stormed the Chinese embassy in Karachi. China is exploiting our resources," spokesman Jiand Baloch told Reuters by telephone.

The insurgents are based in the southwestern province of Baluchistan, where Chinese money has funded development of a deep-water port in the city of Gwadar.

Baluchistan has rich mineral and natural gas reserves but remains Pakistan's poorest province.

The BLA says the state is taking over lands belonging to the indigenous Baloch people and have targeted Chinese-funded projects.

In August, a BLA suicide bomber attacked a bus full of Chinese mining workers in Baluchistan, wounding five people.

Source: Reuters

Russia is a "far greater threat" to Britain's national security than Islamic terrorist groups such as the Islamic State (IS), the new head of the British Army has warned.

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph published on November 23, General Mark Carleton-Smith said Britain and its allies "cannot be complacent about the threat Russia poses."

The Russian Embassy in London responded to the comments with a tweet on November 24, saying "Army chief doesn't care about [IS]? Great global strategic vision!"

Carleton-Smith made the comments at a time of heightened tensions between the West and Russia over issues including Moscow's aggression in Ukraine, its alleged election meddling in the United States and Europe, massive international cyberattacks, and the poisoning of a Russian double agent and his daughter in Britain.


"Russia today indisputably represents a far greater threat to our national security than Islamic extremist threats" such as Al-Qaeda and IS, Carleton-Smith said in his first interview since becoming chief of Britain's General Staff in June.


The 54-year-old former SAS commander said Moscow had "embarked on a systematic effort to explore and exploit Western vulnerabilities, particularly in some of the nontraditional areas of cyber-, space, undersea warfare."


With the threat from Islamist groups in the Middle East now reduced, the focus needs to shift to Russia, the British general also said, warning, "We cannot be complacent about the threat Russia poses or leave it uncontested."


During a visit to Lisbon, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov also poked fun at the remarks, saying, "We cannot influence the British government's decisions as to whom they trust to head its armed forces," according to the Interfax news agency.

"I hope they check the appropriateness of such decisions," Lavrov added.


In October, U.K. Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson accused Russia of acting like a "pariah state," whose "reckless and indiscriminate" attacks had left it isolated in the international community.


The Russian Foreign Ministry described the accusations as "fantasy."

Britain and most of the West has blamed Russia for a nerve-agent attack on Russian former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in the English city of Salisbury in March. Moscow denies any involvement.

The Skripals survived the poisoning, which used a Soviet-made military nerve agent known as Novichok.

Two other British citizens were exposed to the nerve agent in June, apparently by accident; one of them, Dawn Sturgess, died.