California Burning: At least eight homes have burned and firefighters will be on the line for the third day in the San Diego area, battling early-season wildfires. By 8:30 last night nine fires in Southern California had burned more than 9,000 acres. At times, the fires were driven by hot winds up to 70 mph. Schools are closed and thousands of people have been advised to evacuate. A fire within the Marines’ Camp Pendleton is forcing the evacuation of the area around the inactive San Onofre nuclear power plant on the coast. Even the Legoland theme park is closed.

Disaster: Protesters shouted Murderer!” and “Thief!” at Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan as he visited the scene of his country’s horrific mining disaster. Authorities say 274 miners are dead and more than 100 still missing after an explosion and fire. Nearly 400 miners got out alive. Family members blame the government for callousness toward mine safety.

Erdogan tried to comfort the families of the missing and dead, but he made no friends at a press conference in which he dismissed the disaster saying, “These types of things in mines happen all the time.” It’s the worst mining disaster in Turkey’s history.

Nation: Two Florida hospital workers suspected of having the deadly MERS virus have tested negative for the disease. But health authorities are still concerned that two cases have been identified in the US.

World: Camille Lepage, 26, a gutsy French photographer covering the conflict in the Central African Republic, was killed in unexplained circumstances. Her body was found in a car that was stopped by French peacekeepers. She had been travelling with a group of Christian fighters. Lepage liked to focus on the innocent people caught in the middle of regional struggles.

>The judge in the murder trial of South African blade runner Oscar Pistorius ordered the athlete to undergo a psychiatric examination to determine whether he has an anxiety disorder. The assessment will take 30 days, suspending the trial.

> The captain and three other crewmembers of the sunken South Korean ferry have been indicted for murder. Eleven other crewmembers were indicted for negligence. No cause has been determined for the sinking that killed more than 300 people.

Ink Stained: New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson was abruptly deleted from the masthead yesterday, to be replaced by Deputy Editor Dean Baquet. Appointed in 2011, the 60-year-old Abramson was the paper’s first female executive editor. Publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. said, “We had an issue with management in the newsroom.” Abramson recently made some management changes that angered the publisher and other editors. She was known to be mercurial and abrasive. The paper had recently hired a consultant to help her with her “management style”. In other words, she was a nightmare.

Can You Hear Me Now?: A former editor of Rupert Murdoch’s defunct News of the World tabloid admitted in court yesterday that he hacked cellphones of the royal family at least 200 times. Clive Goodman, who was sent to jail in 2007 for hacking, admitted to a London court that he repeatedly hacked the voicemails of Princes William and Harry, and William’s wife Kate Middleton. Goodman said he hacked Middleton’s phone 155 times, Prince William’s 35 times, and good time Harry’s, nine times, he told the court.

If it had been us, we would have stuck to hacking Harry’s phone for the real juice. 

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