High winds and low humidity sparked dozens of wildfires across a handful of Mid-Atlantic states on Wednesday, sending officials scrambling to control the fires and issue air quality warnings. And as weather forecasts again raised fire danger on Thursday, firefighters across the region braced to continue the battle against the flames.

Wildfires were reported in parts of Maryland, North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia.

The Virginia Department of Forestry said in a statement late Wednesday night that department firefighters had contained 16 wildfires and that crews were still working to control dozens of others.

One of the state’s largest fires was burning in Rockingham County, Virginia, about 140 miles northwest of Richmond, the state capital. Rockingham County Fire Chief Jeremy Holloway said about 2,000 acres had burned. according to WHSV, a local news station. As a result, some residents of neighboring communities were asked to evacuate.

In response to the fires, local states of emergency were declared in Augusta, Page and Shenandoah counties in Virginia. Public schools in Page County were also closed Thursday.

The fires, which started a day after the official start of spring, are not unusual this time of year. Wildfire season in the northeastern United States typically peaks in April and can last into May. according to the National Weather Service. The pre-green period across the region, combined with increasing solar radiation and high-pressure systems, could help fuel these fires.

The Virginia Department of Environment Quality issued an air quality health alert Wednesday, saying people with heart or lung conditions, including children and older adults, should limit their outdoor activities.

Crews battled 39 wildfires on Wednesday in Prince William County, in Northern Virginia, just outside Washington, according to local reports. The flames in that area temporarily closed part of US 1, a major highway that runs from Florida to Maine.

In West Virginia, where smoke was also blown, officials worked to contain wildfires across the state, including in Grant, Hardy and Pendleton counties. WHSV reports.

At least five wildfires were reported in southern West Virginia on Wednesday some burn hundreds of acres.

Fire crews around the Mid-Atlantic region will be on alert again Thursday as weather forecasts call for conditions conducive to more fires.

The Weather Service office in Blacksburg, Virginia, said that despite decreasing winds Thursday, the combination of low relative humidity, northwest winds and dry fuels will again provide ideal fire conditions throughout the evening in southwestern Virginia and southeastern West Virginia . Similar statements were also issued for parts of Maryland and North Carolina.

“Residents are urged to use caution when handling potential ignition sources,” including machinery, cigarettes and matches, weather officials said.

Although the weather will be dry Thursday, a system is expected to bring heavy rain, with the possibility of flash flooding, to much of the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast coasts this weekend.

Mickey German has lived in Fritch, Texas most of his life, but Fritch hasn’t always made it easy.

He recalls watching from the safety of a bar, The Renegade, in 1992 as a storm brought a group of tornadoes through Fritch, leveling his apartment and 200 other homes. Then, in the spring of 2014, a fire that locals call the Mother’s Day Fire burned another 225 people.

Now a new disaster has devastated Fritch, a close-knit town of about 1,900 residents, and left 54-year-old Mr. German homeless again. His apartment was one of dozens consumed by flames last week during one of several active wildfires that have burned a total of 1.2 million acres in the Texas Panhandle.

“It was in smoke,” Mr. German, a maintenance worker at a gas station, said Tuesday as he stood outside his temporary residence at the Lone Star Motel. “This one hurt.”

The population here has been steadily declining for decades, and after this latest catastrophe, residents are wondering which of their neighbors will be the next to pack up and leave. Between the 2010 and 2020 censuses, the city lost 12 percent of its residents. Yet many are drawn to stay because they want to live somewhere where everyone knows everyone and where persevering despite setbacks is seen as a sign of achievement.

“I know there’s a few I’ve talked to who say, ‘I’m done,’ but I’m not going anywhere,” Mr. German said as he smoked a cigarette near his truck, one of the few assets he could have . to save from the fire. “I won’t let it pass me by. Not a chance in hell. It’s home.”

Mr. German and other longtime residents said last week’s fire had burned some of the same land that was hit by the tornadoes in ’92.

The latest tragedy to befall Fritch was compounded Tuesday by the death of the city’s volunteer fire chief, Zeb Smith, who collapsed shortly after dawn while responding to a house fire in the city. Mr. Smith, 40, had entered the cream-colored one-story house because it was full of smoke, authorities said, and had to be pulled away by other firefighters. He couldn’t be saved.

At an emotional news conference, officials said Mr Smith and his crew had worked long days and nights last week battling the bushfires, only to have to deal with an unrelated blaze in the heart of their city.

“To me, he was one of my children,” Fritch Mayor Tom Ray said as he fought back tears.

Residents lined Fritch’s main thoroughfare, Broadway Street, to pay their respects as an array of fire trucks, police cars and motorcycles escorted a silver hearse. The flags in the city flew at half-mast.

Melony Watkins, 52, an artist, lives with her husband a block away from the house that caught fire and said she watched from her porch as the flames burned out the windows and doors. Ms. Watkins has lived in the city since fourth grade and describes herself as “a die-hard Fritchian,” but said she felt overwhelmed by what felt like one disaster after another.

“I just want to escape,” she said. “It’s just like any crazy day; I wake up almost before I even get my coffee and see what kind of roast is happening today.

Ms Watkins praised the generosity of many local residents who have offered food, extra bedrooms and farm supplies to those feeling burned out, but said she still expected some people would eventually leave. There is very little temporary housing, and some people whose homes burned may not be able to rebuild because, like many people in rural Texas, they didn’t have homeowners insurance.

The fire that struck Fritch, known as the Windy Deuce fire, was one of several fast-moving fires that started last week.

The largest fire by far is the Smokehouse Creek fire, which became the state’s largest fire in history and resulted in two deaths. A landowner lawsuit claims the fire was started by a downed utility pole, although the state has not yet drawn any conclusions about how the fire started. Thousands of cattle are feared dead, and large swaths of land have been charred, in a blow to ranchers and farmers who form the economic backbone of the region.

The fires have been unusually powerful, partly because of a combination of high winds and miles of dried-out grass that can ignite almost instantly, fire officials say.

“I’ve fought fire from Florida to California, from New Mexico to Montana, and the fire behavior we’re seeing in the Panhandle is by far the most extreme fire behavior I’ve ever seen,” said Colten Ledbetter, 32, a hood captain with the Southern Plains Fire Group that has been fighting the fires for the past week.

When the fire hit Fritch on the afternoon of February 27, the fire was moving so quickly that firefighters were unable to save homes. Some people saw the homes of friends and relatives in ruins, along with their own.

Wanda Buchanan, a teacher, has lived in the same house on the Chisholm Trail, a road overlooking large fields on the southern edge of the city, for 49 years. On Tuesday, she examined what was left: a pile of ash, fallen rocks and the twisted remains of the metal roof.

Her son’s house was also destroyed, and not far away the house of one of her grandsons.

Ms. Buchanan, 74, was working as a substitute teacher in Amarillo that day and could not return in time to save her most valuable possessions. Chief among these were her mother’s cookbook, her diplomas, the license from her marriage to her late husband, and a plethora of old home movies.

“Things like that you never get back,” she said. “I try not to think about the past and what I’ve lost.”

About the only thing she could find in the ashes Tuesday afternoon was a charred hammer, a metal shovel and the outline of her stove. There were no seats left on the swing in the garden, only metal chains dangling in the wind.

She admits that Fritch is once again faced with a difficult situation. But she said that after teaching at the city school for 26 years, she knows several generations of some families and understands how resilient they are.

And she knows there are many reasons to stay in Fritch: the weather that changes every season, the way everyone comes to support the youth sports teams, all the shared memories of a city with a long history, even if it was a difficult one. .

“It survived the other fires, it survived the tornado, it’s going to be fine,” she said. “We will probably only be stronger.”

Duke University has decided to close its herbarium, a collection of 825,000 specimens of plants, fungi and algae that was established more than a century ago. The collection, one of the largest and most diverse in the country, has helped scientists map the diversity of plant life and record humans' impact on the environment.

The university's decision has left researchers reeling. “This is such a devastating blow to biodiversity science,” said Erika Edwards, the curator of the Yale Herbarium. “The entire community is shocked and outraged at the same time.”

Scientific associations have also protested against this move. “Duke's decision to abdicate responsibility for their herbarium specimens sets a terrible precedent,” the Natural Science Collections Alliance wrote in a message. letter to college last Friday.

The alliance, along with six other scientific societies, supported one petition asking Duke to reconsider closing the herbarium. More than 11,000 signatures had been collected by Wednesday.

“It is very shocking that such a large collection at a wealthy university is considered redundant,” said Regina Baucom, a plant geneticist at the University of Michigan.

In an email sent to herbarium staff last week, Susan Alberts, dean of natural sciences at Duke, said the university had decided the collection should be moved elsewhere in the next two to three years.

“This is a loss for Duke,” she said in an interview with The Times. “We see it as the responsible thing to do to ensure that this collection is preserved for posterity in a place designed for that purpose.”

However, so far no place has agreed to give it a home. “There are no herbariums that can absorb something like that,” said Kathleen Pryer, director of the herbarium. “I'm very concerned that it will end up in a warehouse somewhere and be forgotten.”

Herbariums have been a mainstay of biology for centuries. Botanists return from expeditions with dried leaves, flowers, stems and seeds, which are then preserved for posterity. Some specimens have even been the basis for naming new species.

But herbaria are also valuable because they contain plants collected over long periods of time, allowing scientists to track people's impact on the environment. Some collections have shown that plants do their reach shifted because the planet has warmed up, for example.

The collections have become even more useful as technology has advanced. Researchers have started working on improved DNA sequencing extract genetic material of dried plant specimens, tackling ancient scientific questions such as the origins of the world's crops.

Botanists are far from finished documenting plant diversity. And every year they identify new species that need to be saved because many are already threatened with extinction.

In recent decades, some other universities have closed their herbaria, unwilling to maintain the space needed for the collections or the money needed to maintain them. In 2017, the University of Louisiana Monroe cleared out half a million units to make room for new athletic facilities.

The copies were saved from destruction at the 11th hour when they were moved to other collections that found space for them.

The Duke Herbarium was founded in 1921 and has grown steadily in the 103 years since. Researchers study not only the plants, but also other species, such as lichens, to investigate the effects of air pollution on the environment.

Last March, Duke University boasted about the climate research conducted in the herbarium a promotional video.

But Rytas Vilgalys, an expert on fungi at the herbarium, said it had been clear for some time that Duke was considering closing it. “We have seen the writing on the wall for years,” he says.

Dr. Pryer said Duke administrators asked her last year to write reports to justify continued support of the herbarium. But after talks with a potential donor collapsed in January, Dr. Alberts Dr. Pryer knew it would close.

“It's really a tragic turn of events,” said Dr. Pryer.

Dr. Alberts said Duke's biology department needs to spread its support across many areas. “We will not dictate to the department that they have to hire people in these areas forever,” she said. “We are a university with limited resources.”

Duke University has one donation of $11.6 billion.

Dr. Alberts also emphasized that Duke's plan was to move the herbarium elsewhere. “We don't destroy anything,” she said.

Jonathan Shaw, a biologist at Duke, said he was negotiating the inclusion of the mosses and related plants by another herbarium. “I'm hopeful that we can move the collections to places that will really promote biodiversity,” he said.

But Dr. Pryer said even institutions that have expressed interest weren't sure they could find the money to seize parts of the collection. She feared that parts of the herbarium could be lost during the shaking.

Brent Mishler, a former herbarium curator at Duke and administrator of the herbarium at the University of California, Berkeley for 30 years, said Duke's decision would also mean the loss of a strong tradition of academic research into plant diversity.

“It is shameful for Duke to discontinue research and training in biodiversity studies,” he said.

A Chinese influence campaign that has sought for years to advance Beijing's interests is now using artificial intelligence and a network of social media accounts to deepen American discontent and division ahead of the U.S. presidential election, a new report says.

The campaign, known as Spamouflage, hopes to stoke disenchantment among voters by vilifying the United States as a country rife with urban decay, homelessness, fentanyl abuse, gun violence and crumbling infrastructure, according to the report published Thursday by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a non-profit research organization in London.

An additional goal, the report said, is to convince the international public that the United States is in a state of chaos.

Artificially generated images, some of which have also been edited with tools such as Photoshop, have given rise to the idea that the November elections will damage and possibly even destroy the country.

A post on Other images showed the two men facing each other, cracks in the White House or Statue of Liberty, and terminology such as “CIVIL WAR,” “INTERNAL STRIFE” and “THE COLLAPSE OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY.”

The stories did not appear to have an overtly partisan slant, although Mr. Biden was the target of multiple negative portrayals, including references to his son Hunter Biden's legal troubles and claims that the president is a drug user. Spamouflage's attitude toward Mr. Trump was more ambiguous; posts claiming that his “anti-hero status makes him unstoppable” could be interpreted as flattering. Both men were portrayed as too old to rule.

In America's “hyper-polarized division,” China sensed an opportunity, said Elise Thomas, a senior analyst at the institute that wrote the report. Spamouflage's focus on social conflict and antagonism in the US presidential race could also indicate how Beijing hopes to shape the many other major elections taking place around the world this year.

“In this narrative universe, American democracy is portrayed as a source of disunity and weakness,” Thomas said in a statement. “They are trying to create a sense of a hardened superpower in disarray, unable to solve its internal problems and unfit to act as a leader on the international stage.”

Spamouflage has been active since 2017, Ms. Thomas wrote in the report, adding that the campaign is “notorious among researchers both for its sheer size and for its inability to generate any significant engagement from real social media users.” Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, said last summer it had removed thousands of social media accounts and hundreds of pages linked to the campaign. Meta researchers linked the campaign to Chinese law enforcement.

Thursday's report focused on spammy posts on on X.

Researchers at the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights warned in their report on digital risks to this year's elections that the main threat in the 2024 election came less from AI-generated content and more to do with the dissemination of false, hateful and violent material. The reportpublished Wednesday, said such content has become more common because numerous social media platforms, including Facebook and YouTube, had backed away from some of their previous commitments regarding election integrity.

The researchers picked to be reduced.

The researchers also noted that political polarization in the United States was likely to entice China and others to sow confusion among voters.