PLACERVILLE, Calif. (AP) — A man with a lengthy criminal history has been charged with deliberately starting a Northern California wildfire that has shown explosive growth and driven nearly 2,800 people from their homes, authorities said Thursday.

Wayne Allen Huntsman, 37, was arrested late Wednesday in Placerville and booked into El Dorado County Jail, where he was being held on $10 million bail.

Huntsman faces a forest-land arson charge, along with a special allegation of arson with aggravating factors because the blaze east of Sacramento put a dozen firefighters in serious danger, forcing them to deploy their fire shields. They all escaped unharmed.

The wind-whipped fire burned through 111 square miles and was 5 percent contained, according to California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. It closed part of a highway that runs to the Nevada state line near Lake Tahoe.

District Attorney Vern Pierson declined to say what led investigators to Huntsman, who was scheduled to be arraigned Friday. He also would not comment on a possible motive, saying the case was ongoing. Investigators were in contact with Hunstman before his arrest.

"It's something that's evolving at this point," Pierson said of the investigation. He did not know whether Huntsman had an attorney.

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Firefighters battle the King Fire in Fresh Pond, California September 17, 2014. Fire crews in Califo …

Huntsman's sister, Tami Criswell, said she doubts her brother started the fire, but if he did, it wasn't on purpose. Criswell said she and her brother were raised in Santa Cruz and often camped. She said her brother, who has worked in construction and private security, loves being in the forest and always was cautious with campfires.

"He's a really good guy," Criswell said. "He would never do anything intentionally to hurt anybody."

Yet, Santa Cruz authorities have a $5,000 warrant out for Huntsman stemming from a Feb. 27, 2013, arrest for resisting or obstructing a public officer. Officials said he has failed to show up for several court dates.

His arrest record in Santa Cruz dates back to 1996, according to court records. That year he was convicted of tampering with a vehicle, auto theft, driving under the influence, grand theft and assault with a deadly weapon, which resulted in a three-year sentence. He was sent to San Quentin State Prison.

In 2003, he was convicted in Plumas County of receiving stolen property, the new complaint says.

King Wildfire Doubles in Size, Thousands of Homes …Play video

The blaze, which started Saturday, has been fueled by heavy timber and grass that is extremely dry because of California's third straight year of drought. It is costing $5 million a day to fight, Cal Fire officials said.

"It is extreme fire behavior," said Michelle Eidam, a captain with the Sacramento fire department who was helping with the blaze. "All bets are off right now because this fire is so volatile."

Many of the 12,000 threatened homes were in Pollock Pines, 60 miles east of Sacramento. Though the fire grew substantially late Wednesday and into the night, it burned mostly into wilderness land in the El Dorado National Forest away from the town, according to Cal Fire.

Fire officials said there were no reports of damaged or destroyed homes. Still, residents at an evacuation center said they were worried.

"We've been doing a lot of praying," said Sally Dykstra, who lives in a home in the middle of the fire area with her husband, Garry, 74, and her daughter, Stacie, 46.

Gov. Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency late Wednesday, freeing up funds for the two fires. He also secured federal grants to fight each of them.

Meanwhile, farther north in the town of Weed, officials released the final results of their damage assessment from a blaze that tore through the community Monday. City administrator Ron Stock said 143 homes and nine other buildings, including churches, were destroyed.

Officials previously said 110 homes were destroyed and 90 others were damaged.

Stock said he hopes the state will declare the burned debris hazardous waste to speed its removal and defray costs. The state would cover 75 percent of the cost and the city 25 percent if the debris receives that designation.

Residents were expected to be allowed to return to the burned areas once utility crews finished restoring power, water and telephone service.

The cause of the blaze was under investigation. The fire burned 375 acres, and more of half of it was contained.

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Thanawala reported from San Francisco. Scott Smith in Fresno, Calif., Judith Ausuebel in New York and Jeff Barnard in Grants Pass, Ore., contributed to this report.

Two Syrian children receive treatment after they were given a second round of measles vaccinations in Idlib province in this photo released Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2014, by Edlib News Network (ENN), an activist group opposed to Bashar Assad's government.

BEIRUT (AP) — At least 15 children died after receiving vaccinations in rebel-held parts of northwestern Syria, while the death toll from two days of government airstrikes on a central city climbed to nearly 50, a heavy toll even by the vicious standards of the country's civil war, activists said.

The children, some just babies, all exhibited signs of "severe allergic shock" about an hour after they were given a second round of measles vaccinations in Idlib province on Tuesday, with many suffocating to death as their bodies swelled, said physician Abdullah Ajaj, who administered the vaccinations in a medical center in the town of Jarjanaz.

It was unclear what killed the children, but Ajaj said in an interview via Skype that they all exhibited the same symptoms to varying degrees. He said it was the first time he had ever seen such a reaction to vaccinations.

"There was shouting and screaming, it was hard for the parents. You get your child vaccinated and then you find your child dying, it's very hard," Ajaj said. There weren't enough respirators in the clinic, making the situation even worse, he added.

Video footage uploaded to social media showed a medic examining a young girl who was squirming. Another child, in an orange tee-shirt and blue pants, appeared lifeless as a medic administered CPR. He then opened the child's mouth to reveal a swollen, blue-tinged tongue. The footage corresponded with Associated Press reporting of the event.

Syria's conflict, now in its fourth year, has caused the collapse of its health system in contested areas, scattering medics, destroying clinics and making medicines and equipment difficult to obtain. Nationwide vaccination efforts have been thrown into disarray, and polio re-emerged in parts of Syria last year.

The Western-backed opposition based in Turkey said it had suspended the second round of measles vaccinations, which began on Monday. The campaign was meant to target 60,000 children. In a statement, it said the vaccines used Tuesday met international standards and did not say what may have caused the deaths.

It is extremely unlikely that the vaccinations killed the children, said Beirut-based public health specialist Fouad Fouad, who said spoiled vaccinations were more or less harmless. "It cannot cause death," he said.

U.N. deputy spokesman Farhan Haq said UNICEF and the World Health Organization are "deeply concerned" and awaiting further clarification.

"Measles is a major threat to children in Syria and the campaigns are vital ... and especially important for children who've been away from their homes and communities and are living in camps or in other unsanitary conditions," Haq said.

Opposition representatives could not immediately be reached for comment.

The United Nations says that more than 190,000 people have been killed since the start of Syria's uprising against President Bashar Assad in March 2011. The revolt began with peaceful protests but escalated into an insurgency and set off a civil war after government forces waged a brutal crackdown on dissent.

In the latest violence, Syrian government airstrikes killed some 50 people in the opposition-held city of Talbiseh this week in an apparent attempt to target a rebel commander, activists said Wednesday. The dead included a mother and her five children, who were crushed under the rubble, and a rebel commander and several fighters, said the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The Observatory, which obtains its information from a network of activists on the ground, said it counted 48 killed in two days of strikes on Monday and Tuesday in Talbiseh. Similar information was reported by a local Talbiseh activist collective. Both groups said the death toll was likely to exceed 50 as residents were still pulling bodies from the rubble.

Videos uploaded of the aftermath in Talbiseh showed a man weeping as he clutched his lifeless baby boy, and residents praying over the shroud-wrapped bodies of the mother and her children. The videos appeared genuine and corresponded to The Associated Press' reporting of the event.

State-run media said Tuesday that the army targeted a meeting of "terrorists" in Talbiseh, the term the government uses to refer to all the rebels. The Observatory said that leading members of a rebel group were killed, without providing further details.

The Syrian government has stepped up its bombardment of opposition-held areas of the country over the past week.

An airstrike on Tuesday on the northern town of Deir Simbul killed the daughter of a powerful rebel leader who has ties to the Western-backed Syrian National Coalition.

Jamal Maarouf, the head of the rebel Syrian Revolutionaries Front, said in a video released Wednesday that his daughter as well as a member of his group were killed a day earlier in a series of government air raids.

Maarouf, who is considered a moderate, said that his group has been subjected to a wave of bombing attacks by the extremist Islamic State group over the past five days, and that his fighters had killed four would-be suicide attackers. He vowed to forge ahead in his group's two-front fight against the government and extremists.

The attacks on Maarouf came exactly a week after the ultraconservative Ahrar al-Sham group lost a dozen of its leaders, including the group's leader, in a bombing.

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Associated Press writer Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this report.

Here's what they are looking for, from a statement issued by Wifka:

After the terrible assassination or "accident" all political parties, at home and abroad, said they owed it to the victims, their families and the public to clarify the circumstances of the crash and present evidence for what happened. None of this has yet been done.

Wifka wants to know: – Who shot down MH17 on July 17? – Who gave the order? – Who covers up the shoot down? (Also, if it was by accident and not out of political, economic or military motivation) – Who can provide details on the circumstances that led to the shoot down? – Who was directly involved with the shoot down? – What happened to the people that were involved with the shoot down? What happened to the weapon used? – Who can name the people that cleared the shoot down?

Josef Resch, an employee of the Wifka firm, is leading this investigation. He told Capital Magazine, as reported by The Telegraph, "Everyone can be bought, it’s just a question of the price." Even the company is not sure who their client is, as the deal was passed to the company anonymously. Resch believes the bounty may have come from an intelligence agency that did not want to put their name on the money, or from a Russian oligarch looking to take down Putin behind the scenes.

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To make sure the offer was legitimate, Wifka confirmed this client had the money in advance. They found the $30 million sitting in a Swiss bank, waiting to be given out if the investigation is successful. The company has already been paid about $52,000 for handling the investigation.

If you have new information that directly and accurately answers any of the questions, you get the bounty money plus a new identity (that is, if you need one). As for actually getting the information to the agency, they are taking great precautions and advise any whistleblowers to avoid phone or email communication, noting they have a "secure way of communication" set up. It's not clear if the mysterious millionaire plans to share any information gathered.

This article was originally published at http://www.thewire.com/global/2014/09/mysterious-millionaire-will-pay-30m-to-know-who-exactly-shot-down-mh17/380372/