THE FIRE LINE: Fire crews made progress containing the Los Angeles area wildfires over the weekend even as more acreage burned. Twenty-four people have been confirmed dead and 16 more reported missing now in the eighth day of wildfires.

  Hot desert winds that whipped up the fires a week ago were expected to return today.

  Crews have contained only 13 percent of the 23,700-acre Palisades fire and 27 percent of the 14,000-acre Eaton fire in the mountains north of Pasadena.

  The combined burn area from a half-dozen fires is over 40,000 acres and 100,000 people remain under evacuation orders. At least 15 people have been arrested on suspicion of looting or burglarizing homes in the evacuated areas, one of them dressed as a firefighter. 

  The recriminations are flowing. Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass is under attack for being out of the country when the fires broke out, even though there was a red flag warning.

  The city is being criticized for cutting its firefighting budget by $17 million, and Fox News is attacking the fire chief for having Diversity, Equity policies rather than just hiring men with the biggest muscles.

  The New York Post blamed California’s liberal politicians. We note that by the Post’s own reporting, it took 100 New York firefighters to put out a two-acre fire in Brooklyn’s Prospect park this past fall.

  President-to-be Donald Trump, who’s never been closer to a wildfire than a fireplace, blames Gov. Gavin Newsom and political leaders for the fires, saying on his Truth Social website that, “The incompetent pols have no idea how to put them out.” And asking, “What’s wrong with them?”

THE OUTSIDERS: Elon Musk plans to install two outside monitors at every major government agency to identify ways to cut budgets for his unofficial Department of Government Efficiency under Donald Trump, The NY Times reports.

  Musk’s unpaid volunteers would be drafted from the ranks of tech and business executives and billionaires, the Times reports. The Times says that some of the DOGE monitors might be classified as special government employees, a category of temporary employees who work for the federal government only for 130 days or less in a 365-day period.

  The paper says that Musk and people working with him are maintaining secrecy, communicating on Signal, an encrypted messaging app.

  Trump has promised that DOGE will produce “drastic change” in government, but the recommendations coming from DOGE would have to be approved by Congress.

  Trevor Traina, an entrepreneur who worked in the first Trump administration told the Times that, “The cynics among us will say, ‘Oh, it’s naïve billionaires stepping into the fray.’ But the other side will say this is a service to the nation that we saw more typically around the founding of the nation.” 

THE WAR ROOM: Ukraine captured two North Korean soldiers fighting for Russia and is offering to trade them for Ukrainians held by Russia. Neither Russia nor North Korea have admitted that North Korean troops are in the fight although about 11,000 of them are in the Kursk region.

  In an interrogation video released by Ukraine, one of the wounded North Koreans says he did not know he was fighting in a war against Ukraine and that his commanders told him it was a training exercise. He also said he wouldn’t mind staying in Ukraine.

THE SPORTING NEWS: Skier Lindsey Vonn on the comeback trail at age 40 and skiing with a partially artificial knee stunned fans finishing 4^th yesterday in the  women’s Super-G  in St. Anton, Austria. She finished 6^th Saturday in the downhill. — The Washington Commanders won their first slot in the NFL playoffs since 2005 with a last-second field goal against Tampa Bay that bounced off one of the uprights.

THE OBIT PAGE: Charles Person, the youngest of the 13 original Freedom Riders who in 1961 traveled from Washington to Birmingham, Alabama in 1961 to integrate interstate bus terminals, and who were nearly beaten to death, died last week in Fayetteville, Georgia. He was 82.

  Person was an 18-year-old freshman at Morehouse College in Atlanta when he joined the Civil Rights movement marching against Jim Crow laws and sitting in at segregated lunch counters. He was arrested at an Atlanta restaurant in February 1961. 

  Then he answered a call to test enforcement of the Supreme Court decision banning segregation in bus terminals that served interstate travelers. Following ugly stares by white people at some stops, Person was nearly arrested getting his shoes shined in a whites-only section of the terminal in Charlotte, North Carolina.

  It became dangerous when several white men got on the bus, sitting among the black riders who were distributed throughout the seats against the rules of segregation. The driver stopped, got off the bus outside Alabama town, and the white men who were all members of the Ku Klux Klan attacked. The Black riders were beaten and stacked at the back of the bus.

  The violence got even worse in the Birmingham terminal, but Person was part of an historical act of defiance that changed the American South. 

  Person served with the Marines in Vietnam and retired from the service in 1981.

THE SPIN RACK: Vice President-elect JD Vance on Fox News Sunday said that  President-elect Donald Trump will pardon peaceful January 6^th protesters, but not the violent rioters. Vance said there are scores of people who “were prosecuted unfairly” after the insurrection and that the Trump administration will “rectify that.” … Jack Smith, the federal special counsel who brought two indictments against Donald Trump and others but ran out of time to prosecute the cases, quietly resigned last week. — China’s trade surplus reached $1 trillion last year as they export products around the world.

BELOW THE FOLD: Actress Denise Richards revealed that her breast implants burst while competing on the FOX reality show Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test completely depleting her acting talent. 

-30-