LOS ANGELES

The second city of America burns, and the hydrants run dry

Wind-driven wildfires tore through Los Angeles this fortnight, incinerating whole neighbourhoods from Pacific Palisades to Altadena, killing dozens and destroying thousands of homes. Firefighters arrived to find the hydrants empty. A city that thought itself the future watched it burn.

Firestorms driven by hurricane-force winds swept across Los Angeles from January 7, destroying entire communities, killing at least 29 people, and burning more than 16,000 structures in what will rank among the most destructive wildfires in American history. The Palisades fire consumed one of the wealthiest enclaves in the country; the Eaton fire obliterated much of Altadena, a historic middle-class community; and for days the nation watched, live, as one of its great cities burned block by block, the smoke visible from space, whole streets of homes reduced to ash and lone chimneys, the famous and the ordinary alike fleeing with what they could carry. The winds were so fierce that aircraft could not fly and the flames outran every effort to contain them.

And then came the detail that turned a natural disaster into an indictment: in the Palisades, as the fire raged, the fire hydrants ran dry. A water system built for structure fires, not for a wind-driven inferno consuming an entire district at once, was overwhelmed, its tanks drained, its pressure gone, leaving firefighters standing at dead hydrants as houses burned around them. A key reservoir had been offline for repairs. Officials will spend years apportioning blame, among the water system, the fire budget, the forestry practices, the climate that made the landscape a tinderbox, and the failure to clear it. But the shape was, wearily, familiar: a system built for the disasters of the past, meeting a disaster of the present it was never designed to survive, its inadequacy invisible until the morning it was tested, its warnings, about the fire risk, the water capacity, the offline reservoir, written down and unheeded until the flames arrived and the hydrants gasped and went dry.

AMERICA

A president-elect threatens allies, a sentence lands with no punishment, and Meta abandons the referee's chair

Donald Trump, days from returning to power, spent the fortnight issuing expansionist threats against allies, Greenland, the Panama Canal, Canada, that unsettled the entire Western order before he had taken the oath. He was formally sentenced in his New York criminal case on January 10 to an unconditional discharge, no punishment, preserving the historic conviction while sparing the incoming president any consequence. And in a telling capitulation, Meta announced on January 7 that it would end its independent fact-checking programme across Facebook and Instagram, replacing it with user-written "community notes," a clear bid by Mark Zuckerberg to align his company with the incoming administration's hostility to content moderation, and a retreat by one of the world's largest information platforms from any role in policing the truth of what it distributes.

IN BRIEF

Terror in New Orleans; a farewell for Carter; a ceasefire's fragile hope

An Army veteran inspired by Islamic State drove a truck into a New Year's crowd on Bourbon Street in New Orleans on January 1, killing 14, as, hours later and hundreds of miles away, a Cybertruck exploded outside a Trump hotel in Las Vegas, a grim double omen for the new year. The United States held a state funeral for Jimmy Carter on January 9, gathering all five living presidents in one pew, a rare tableau of a fractured country's leadership together. And negotiators pressed toward a Gaza ceasefire and hostage-release deal, the first real hope of a pause in over a year, as the incoming and outgoing American administrations, remarkably, worked in tandem to close it.

The Column

The referee leaves the field

Meta abandoned fact-checking this fortnight, and it will be cheered as a victory for free speech. It is something else: the largest information platform on Earth deciding that policing truth is no longer worth the trouble, at exactly the moment truth is hardest to find.

By Daniel Reeve

Meta's decision this fortnight to end its fact-checking programme has been framed, by the company and its admirers, as a triumph for free expression, a retreat from censorship, a return of judgment to the users. I want to argue that it is something quite different and considerably worse: the largest information distributor in human history deciding that the job of refereeing truth on its platforms is more trouble than it is worth, and walking off the field, at precisely the moment when the game has become most dangerous to leave unrefereed. And I want to be honest that the free-speech argument for the move is not empty, because the honest version of this is more troubling than the partisan one.

Here is the genuine dilemma, because pretending it does not exist is how people get this wrong. Fact-checking at the scale of Facebook is genuinely hard and genuinely fraught. The "referees," the fact-checking organisations, do make mistakes, do have blind spots, do sometimes label as false things that are merely contested, and a private company deciding what is true for billions of people is a real and legitimate worry, not a manufactured one. The case against the referee is not stupid. But notice what Meta actually did with that real dilemma: faced with the genuine difficulty of refereeing truth well, it chose not to referee at all, which is not a solution to the difficulty but a surrender of the responsibility, dressed up as a principled stand. "This is hard and we sometimes get it wrong, so we will stop trying" is not a defence of free speech. It is an abdication, and the fact that it happens to align perfectly with the incoming administration's wishes, and to save Meta a great deal of money and political grief, should make us suspicious of how principled it really is.

The deeper problem is timing, and it is why this move belongs in this paper's long file on truth. Meta is walking off the field at the exact moment the field has become most treacherous. We are entering the age of generative AI, of synthetic images and video and text indistinguishable from the real, of an information environment in which telling the true from the fabricated is about to become harder than at any point in human history. This is precisely the moment when some mechanism for establishing what is true, however imperfect, matters most, and it is the moment the largest platform on Earth has chosen to abandon the effort. The referee is not leaving because the game got safe. The referee is leaving because the game got hard and dangerous and politically costly, which is exactly when a referee is most needed, and "community notes," a system of users annotating each other, however well it works for some things, is not a referee; it is the crowd, and the crowd is the thing that most needs refereeing.

So I do not cheer this, and I would ask anyone tempted to cheer it to look past the free-speech framing to the actual substance: a company that got rich by becoming the world's primary distributor of information has decided that it will take the money for distributing it and refuse the responsibility for whether any of it is true, at the dawn of the era when truth will be hardest to find. That is not a principled stand for open discourse. It is the referee pocketing the gate receipts and walking off the pitch as the match turns violent, and calling it a victory for the players. The players, all of us, are about to discover what a game with no referee, in the age of synthetic everything, actually feels like. I do not think we will enjoy it, and I do not think, when we are drowning in confident fabrication with no one even attempting to sort true from false, we will remember this fortnight as the day free speech won.

The Ledger

Meta's retreat from fact-checking, framed as free speech, is really an abdication at the worst moment: the dawn of synthetic media, when establishing truth matters most. The platforms are aligning with power and shedding responsibility together.

Data centers & power

The LA fires are a climate-and-infrastructure catastrophe of exactly the kind that shadows the AI build-out: physical systems, water, power, built for a past that the present has outrun. The reservoir offline for repairs is the warning-ignored in miniature.

Rates

The Fed opens 2025 cautious, its 2024 cuts complicated by a strong economy and the inflationary threat of the incoming administration's tariff-and-tax agenda. Markets expect fewer cuts than they hoped.

Real estate

The LA fires have destroyed tens of thousands of homes and will reshape insurance markets across the fire-prone West, where insurers were already fleeing; the cost of living in beautiful, dangerous places is being repriced in real time.

India tech

A quieter fortnight for India as the world fixes on Los Angeles and Washington; the technology sector braces for a Trump administration whose posture on immigration and trade will shape its year.

What we called wrong

Nothing to retract. The LA hydrants running dry is this paper's oldest lesson in its most vivid form yet: a system built for yesterday's disaster, its inadequacy warned of and unaddressed, failing at the one moment it was needed.

The Back Page

Five in a pew

At Jimmy Carter's state funeral this fortnight, the cameras found a single image that said more than any eulogy: the five living presidents of the United States, seated together in the same pew at the National Cathedral. Biden and Trump, bitter enemies weeks from a hostile transfer of power. Obama and Trump, who have spent a decade as each other's foil, caught on camera in unexpected, easy conversation, Obama laughing at something Trump said, a moment the whole country puzzled over. Bush and Clinton, old adversaries turned friends by the strange fraternity of the office. For a few minutes, in a church, mourning a man whose decency had transcended the partisanship that consumes them all, the five people who have held the most powerful job on Earth sat in a row, their enmities suspended by the older ritual of honouring a predecessor. It will not last; Trump's inauguration is days away, and the knives are out. But there was something in the tableau, in a fractured country whose leaders can barely be in the same room, of an older idea: that the office is larger than the person, that the men who hold it belong to a fellowship that outranks their quarrels, that even now, even here, some rituals still gather the enemies into one pew. Carter, who spent his life on exactly that kind of quiet, unfashionable decency, would have appreciated that his funeral, for a few minutes, made it visible. Then everyone went back out into the cold, and the country, to its war with itself.