A gigantic multi-fire blaze burning in the Canadian city of Fort McMurray that has forced tens of thousands of people out of their homes was expected to continue its rapid growth, officials said Friday.

"I do expect that there's a high potential that this fire could double in size by the end of the day tomorrow," Chad Morrison, the senior manager of wildfire prevention at the Alberta Agriculture and Forestry Division said Friday afternoon.

"We have not seen rain in this area for the last two months of significance," Morrison said. "This fire will continue to burn for a very long time until we see some significant rain."

Related: Fort McMurray Wildfire in Alberta Grows, Firefighters Hope for Rain

Investigators have not figured out what sparked the wildfires that erupted in the heart of Canada's oil sands region on Sunday and have so far forced 88,000 people to flee. Some were airlifted while the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and military coordinated a mass migration on land which included about 1,500 vehicles, according to police.

Follow Alberta Government ✔‎@YourAlberta Photo: Vehicles waiting at the Hwy 63 convoy checkpoint preparing to evacuate with@RCMPAlberta escort. #ymmfire 5:18 PM - 6 May 2016 3030 Retweets 2020 likes

The entire city of Fort McMurray was under mandatory evacuation orders and "should not expect to return home for an extended period of time," according to an Alberta government alert. The communities of Anzac, Gregoire Lake Estates and Fort McMurray First Nation were also under mandatory evacuation orders Friday.

Forty fires, five of which were considered out of control, were burning across the province of Alberta Friday, the government said.

Related: Fort McMurray Blaze: Syrian Refugees Step Up to Help Canadian Fire Escapees

The Alberta provincial government, which declared a state of emergency, said more than 1,200 firefighters, approximately 110 helicopters, 295 pieces of heavy equipment and more than 27 air tankers are fighting the fires.

More than 1,600 homes and other buildings have been burned, but officials say no deaths or injuries related to the fire have been reported, according to The Associated Press.

Fanned by high winds, scorching heat and low humidity, the fire grew from 29 square miles Tuesday to 39 square miles on Wednesday, but by Thursday it was almost nine times that — at 330 square miles. On Friday, the fire covered 390 square miles, said Alberta Premier Rachel Notley.

Environment Canada forecast only a 40 percent chance of showers in the area on Saturday.

Photos: Entire City Flees Raging Wildfire in Canada

Notley said her cabinet has approved a payment of $1,250 Canadian ($967) per adult and $500 Canadian ($387) per dependent at a cost to the province of $100 million Canadian ($77 million). She told a briefing in Edmonton that she wants people who were forced from their homes to know that the government "has their back."

The Canadian Red Cross has raised millions for those affected, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's government has pledged to match individual donations made until May 31 "without a cap."

Follow Justin Trudeau ✔‎@JustinTrudeau UPDATE: Our matching of individual donations to@redcrosscanada will backdate to May 3rd and continue to May 31, without a cap. #ymmfire 3:14 PM - 6 May 2016 2,7452,745 Retweets 3,2003,200 likes

Follow RMWB ‎@RMWoodBuffalo A message from Darby Allen - May 6, 6 p.m.#ymmfire #FortMacFire 7:03 PM - 6 May 2016 378378 Retweets 467467 likes

Meanwhile, officials were trying to do anything possible to minimize the risk of more fires sparking. The province of Alberta announced a fire ban and a ban on off-highway vehicles.

This article first appeared on the Council on Foreign Relations site.

Five months, three countries, 176 dead. The Islamic State militant group (ISIS) has left a trail of carnage in the Western hemisphere (as well as tens of thousands of victims in the Middle East and North Africa). Subsequently, 51 percent of Americans fear that they or a family member will be killed in a terrorist attack.

This level of fear among Americans is nearly equivalent to that experienced after 9/11, when 2,699 Americans died. The tragedy of 9/11 and more recent Islamic extremism attacks are also correlated with a rise of anti-Islamic hate crimes, which have more than doubled since 2008.

Americans’ fear of Islamic extremist attacks is partially grounded in evidence. Since 9/11, although there have been no foreign-directed attacks on the homeland, domestic Islamic attackers have killed 45 Americans. Additionally, the number of U.S. citizens engaging in Islamic extremist activities has risen 180 percent since 2014.

Meanwhile, right-wing radicals—including anti-government and anti-abortion extremists—were responsible for 87 percent of domestic attacks between 2006 and 2015. These groups have carried out nine more attacks and killed three more Americans than Islamic extremists since 9/11. These numbers suggest that the threat posed by domestic Islamic extremists is less than that from domestic right-wing radicals.

How the media and politicians portray these groups explains why Americans are more fearful of Islamic extremists. Between 2008 and 2012, 81 percent of mentions of domestic terrorism on eight prominent cable programs were identified as Muslims. However, during this period, only one of 64 domesticattacks was confirmed to be carried out by an Islamic extremist, and it yielded no fatalities.

Furthermore, the media is reluctant to report right-wing extremism as terrorism, but quickly categorizes an Islamic extremist attack as such.

The San Bernardino shooting carried out by an ISIS-inspired couple, which killed 14, was reported by PBS and the Washington Post as an “act of terrorism.” Just days prior, both outlets covered the Colorado Planned Parenthood shooting carried out by an anti-abortion extremist, which killed three. Their headlinesquestioned whether the attack could even be referred to as domestic terrorism and debated when a shooting should be labeled “terrorism.”

Following the Planned Parenthood shooting, Peter Bergen of New America Foundation argued that it is difficult to label an attack as terrorism if the perpetrators are not acting on behalf of a U.S.-recognized terrorist organization. While the FBI recognizes right-wing extremism as a threat, it lacks an official list of domestic terrorist organizations, similar to the Department of State’s list of foreign groups. Others have questioned what defines terrorism and whether lone wolves fall into that category.

The perceived threat of Islamic extremism has also been exacerbated by politicians. For instance, former presidential candidate Senator Ted Cruz of Texas responded to the Brussels attack with a Facebook post reading, “They—we—are all part of an intolerable culture that they have vowed to destroy.... Our country is at stake.”

Cruz’s language implies that Islamic extremists are the most formidable threat to the existence of the United States. Furthermore, 24 of the 28 2016 presidential debates mentioned the threat of ISIS. Not one acknowledged the threat of right-wing radicals or solicited candidates’ plans to protect Americans from these individuals, even after the Planned Parenthood shooting.

These statements by politicians and skewed media attention have led Americans to believe that ISIS is the greatest threat in the world, and subsequently have obfuscated the threat of right-wing radicals.

It is difficult to conclude whether Americans’ fear of Islamic extremists and lack thereof for right-wing radicals are justified. In truth, neither group has posed a significant or grave threat to Americans. An American is more likely to be killed by a lightning strike, car accident or toddler than by a domestic extremist, whether they be Islamic or far-right wing.

This overinflated and manufactured fear of Islamic extremists poses a threat to national security, which has resulted in an inaccurate prioritization of U.S. domestic and foreign policy concerns.

Tina Huang in an intern in the Center for Preventive Action at the Council on Foreign Relations.

By Julian Rose

The European Union is a centralised super state trading block whose conceptual origins lie in the Third Reich of Hitler’s Nazi Germany.

The concept of ‘global trading blocks’ was already well established under Hitler’s regime, but their origins go back further: to the British Royal Society. Post-British Empire colonial ambitions were hatched around the desire to form a number of global trading empires whose leadership would be essentially elitist and corporate, with banks mostly at the helm.

Here lies the origin of the ‘free trade’ concept. A trading pattern which is anything but ‘free’ due to the fact that it is designed to prevent any one country stopping any other country from resisting the import of products that it has no need or no wish for: i.e. GMO maize and soya, beef raised using growth hormones or sweat shop mass-produced cheap goods that undermine the ability of the blocking country to fairly trade its own quality home-made items.

Free Trade is controlled by the World Trade Organisation, another autocratic top-down institution the majority of whose board is composed of the CEOs of the world’s largest multinational and transnational corporations with a sole interest in profit and power. A hallmark of the neo-conservative and neo-liberal capitalist dream (nightmare) which is dying a painful death even as I write.

Greens, including the political faction which unwittingly or unthinkingly (or both) keeps one foot firmly inside the door of such regimes, seem oblivious to the forces that drive the corporate agenda ruling planet Earth. Maybe because their campaigning arm is obsessed with finding ways to promote the utterly meaningless multi-purpose catch-all ‘sustainable development’, or arguing about the effects of ‘climate change’ or naively encouraging the ‘Agenda 21’ countryside depopulation propaganda exercise.

It simply doesn’t seem to matter to most international environmental organisations. That might be because such organisations have already been living out of the pocket of the corporate purse for at least two or three decades. They probably learned that catch phrase “don’t bite the hand that feeds you” and agreed that winning the war against global destruction is best done by cozying-up to the very forces that are complicit in the destruction process. This can be easily achieved by offering a little green spin as fair exchange for being bankrolled into embellishing otherwise insufferable corporate agendas.

Supposedly ‘aware’ consumers are no better:

“A Big Mac and a Starbucks fair-trade coffee, please. Oh, and add a dash of ultra heat treated, homogenised organic milk will you?”

I wonder if any green consumer saviour has ever heard of or ever even read anything by or about their founding fathers? People who understood something about ‘human scale’ communities and the values inherent in local and regional production and consumption of quality goods produced on a relatively small scale by caring individuals for caring individuals?

The European Union is the world’s largest trading block and is run by an unelected executive of power hungry technocrats who sit in the offices of The European Commission. Its existence was planned and executed at the 1955 Rome meeting of ‘The Bilderbergers’, a secret society of elitist despots whose role is to set the agenda for a super centralised state – and ultimately world – in which the most powerful oligarchs retain 100% control over the evolution of society.

The European Common Market was established in 1958, three years after this Bilderberger meeting. Its co-founder, Jean Monet, in a 1954 letter to a friend, unashamedly stated outright that the object was to create a ‘Federal Europe’. But to do it covertly, making it seem that the ambition was to initiate a process of economic harmonization between the nation states of Europe.

So here we are in 2016, and some are still trying not to notice that 75% of UK rules and regulations have their origins in Brussels, and that the EU rule book itself is a Leviathan of 172,000 pages which nobody has ever read, cover to cover. Oh yes, the lawyers know where to look for the legal definition of ‘a cabbage’ and other such vital bits of information. They and they only, know where to dig up the right phrase amongst the various treaties which resulted from the ‘democratic’ voting procedures (read ‘fixed’ voting procedures) which got us all embroiled in this vast and ugly behemoth over the past five or six decades.

It was during the same post-World War Two era that the entities known as The United Nations, Bretton Woods, The International Monetary Fund and The World Bank were created. All of these are just part of one mega power structure whose ambition is to run the planet for its own ends, casting aside any and all voices for an independent and self-autonomous society made up of people with values still grounded in honourable traditions of fairness, social cohesion and actual justice. A model of society which ought to be stamped all over the Greens’ calling cards.

The European Union is a major step along the road towards George Bush’s publicly stated dream of ‘A New World Order’ and a ‘One World Government’. The EU ultimately serves the interests of the Monsantos and Pfizers of the world, but has to appear to be listening and acting on behalf of its constituent countries’ peoples. This applies to all ‘trading blocks’ not just the European Union.

We know that this is a total sham; a façade to entice us into letting go of any last feeling of sympathy we might hold towards our cultural traditions; the autonomy of the nation state in which we were born; the right to elect a representative of our region to stand in a national parliamentary institution over which we have at least ‘some’ control.

It’s that, or capitulation to global corporate ‘full spectrum dominance’ under the likes of TTIP, CETA and NAFTA.

There’s a way out of this – and it’s called ‘power to the people’.