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SAINT-LAURENT-DE-LA-CABRERISSE, France: France’s biggest wildfire in decades will burn for several more days even though it has been brought under control, authorities said Friday as hundreds of firefighters kept up a battle against the flames.
The giant blaze in the southern department of Aude has burned through more than 17,000 hectares  of land — an area bigger than Paris, killing one person, injuring 13 and destroying dozens of homes.
About 2,000 firefighters are still on duty around the blaze which was declared under control on Thursday night.
The fire will not be “declared extinguished for several days,” said Christian Pouget, the prefect for Aude. “There is still a lot of work to be done.”
Authorities have banned access to the forests that were devastated by the fire until at least Sunday.
They said that roads in the zone were too dangerous because of fallen electricity lines and other hazards.
Pouget said that about 2,000 people forced to flee the flames had still not been allowed back to their homes.
Hundreds of people are sleeping in school gyms and village halls across the region.
The fire is the biggest in France’s Mediterranean region for at least 50 years, according to government monitors. The southern region suffers more than others from wildfires.
At its most intense, the flames were going through around 1,000 hectares of land per hour, according to authorities in the nearby city of Narbonne.
Two days of strong and changing winds made the blaze difficult to predict.
A 65-year-old woman, who had refused to evacuate, was found dead in her scorched house, while 13 people were injured, 11 of them firefighters.
The wildfire is a “catastrophe on an unprecedented scale,” Prime Minister Francois Bayrou said Wednesday during a visit to the affected region.
“What is happening today is linked to global warming and linked to drought,” Bayrou said.
Environment minister Agnes Pannier-Runacher wrote on X Thursday that the fire was the largest in France since 1949.
The country has already seen around 9,000 wildfires this summer, mainly close to its Mediterranean coast.
The Aude department in particular has recorded an increase in areas burned in recent years, aggravated by low rainfall and the uprooting of vineyards, which used to help slow down the advance of fires.
In Saint-Laurent-de-la-Cabrerisse, the village hardest hit by the fire, thick smoke rose Thursday from the pine hills overlooking the vineyards where dry grass was still burning.
With Europe facing new August heatwaves, many areas are on alert for wildfires. Portugal on Thursday extended emergency measures because of the heightened risk of fires.
Near the Spanish town of Tarifa, fire crews secured areas near hotels and other tourist accommodations after controlling a major blaze that also destroyed hundreds of hectares.
Antonio Sanz, interior minister for Andalusia’s regional government, said on X that “the return of all evacuated people” had been authorized after the fire was “stabilized.”
Spanish broadcaster TVE reported that the fire started in a camper van at a beach campsite, and spread quickly in strong winds.
About 1,550 people and 5,500 vehicles were evacuated from camps, hotels and homes, Sanz said.
Spain is experiencing a heatwave with temperatures nearing 40C in many regions, and officials reported 1,060 excess deaths in July that could be attributed to intense heat.
Climate experts say that global warming is driving longer, more intense and more frequent heatwaves around the world, making for more favorable forest fire conditions.
 

WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump unexpectedly summoned reporters to the Oval Office on Thursday to present them with charts that he says show the US economy is solid following a jobs report last week that raised red flags and led to the Republican firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Joining Trump to talk about the economy was Stephen Moore, a senior visiting fellow in economics at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, and the co-author of the 2018 book “Trumponomics.”
Flipping through a series of charts on an easel, Moore sought to elevate Trump’s performance as president and diminish the economic track record of former President Joe Biden. Trump stood next to Moore and interjected with approvals.
The moment in the Oval Office spoke to the president’s hopes to reset the narrative of the US economy. While the stock market has been solid, job growth has turned sluggish and inflationary pressures have risen in the wake of Trump imposing a vast set of new tariffs, which are taxes on imports.
Moore said he phoned Trump because he put together some data that shows he was correct to dismiss Erika McEntarfer as the head of the BLS. He noted that’s because reports from the BLS had overestimated the number of jobs created during the last two years of Biden’s term by 1.5 million.
“I think they did it purposely,” said Trump, who has yet to offer statistical evidence backing his theory. Revisions are a standard component of jobs reports and tend to be larger during periods of economic disruption.

The economy has seldom conformed to the whims of any president, often presenting pictures that are far more mixed and nuanced than what can easily be sold to voters. Through the first seven months of this year, employers have added 597,000 jobs, down roughly 44 percent from the gains during the same period in 2024.
The July jobs report showed that just 73,000 jobs were added last month, while the May and June totals were revised downward by 258,000.
While Biden did face downward revisions on his job numbers, the economy added 2 million jobs in 2024 and 2.6 million in 2023.
The fundamental challenge in Biden’s economy was the jolt of inflation as the annual rate of the consumer price index hit a four-decade high in June 2022. That level of inflation left many households feeling as though groceries, gasoline, housing and other essentials were unaffordable, a sentiment that helped to return Trump to the White House in the 2024 election.
There are signs of inflation heating back up under Trump because of his tariffs. On Thursday, Goldman Sachs estimated that the upcoming inflation report for July will show that consumer prices rose 3 percent over the past 12 months, which would be up from a 2.3 percent reading in April.
Trump promised that he could galvanize a boom. And when nonpartisan data has indicated something closer to a muddle, he found an advocate in Moore, whom he nominated to serve as a Federal Reserve governor during his first term. Moore withdrew his name after facing pushback in the Senate.
Moore said that through the first five months of Trump’s second term in office that “the average median household income adjusted for inflation and for the average family in America, is already up $1,174.” Moore said his numbers are based on unpublished Census Bureau data, which can make them difficult to independently verify.
“That’s an incredible number,” Trump said. “If I would have said this, nobody would have believed it.”