Wildfire reaches Los Alamos lab

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Aminatta Forna, born to a white Scottish mother and a black Sierra Leonean father in the early 1960s in Aberdeen, Scotland, at a time when interracial marriages were frowned upon or outlawed in many places, is the winner of the 2011 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for her book, “The Memory of Love.” Forna’s book, short-listed for the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction, awarded for the best novel of the year written in English by a female writer, fails to win it, with 25-year-old Serbian-American author Téa Obreht the ultimate winner of the coveted prize. Undoubtedly, Aminatta Forna has blossomed into one of the best writers of our time, with the iteration in her works about her father’s homeland of Sierra Leone an integral part of who Forna is: a proud African, even if she has spent all of her adult life in the United Kingdom

27 June 2011 Last updated at 21:56 ET

A New Mexico wildfire has breached the boundary of Los Alamos National Laboratory, one of the top nuclear weapons research facilities in the US.

On Monday, officials said that they had detected “no off-site releases of contamination” and said the facilities face “no immediate threat”.

The lab was closed on Monday and was to remain so on Tuesday. The surrounding town has been ordered evacuated.

The lab, opened during World War II, led the development of the atomic bomb.

By Monday evening, the Las Conchas fire had burned through 49,000 acres of forests, canyons, and mesas to the south and west of the lab in northern New Mexico.

The fire had reached the lab’s southwestern boundary and leapt a state road onto the land, burning roughly an acre, state fire officials said.

“No facilities face immediate threat, and all nuclear and hazardous materials are accounted for and protected,” officials said in a statement.

The lab employs about 11,800 people, and about 12,000 people live in the town of Los Alamos.

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Wildfire reaches Los Alamos lab