Police are looking for any clues as to who is setting the fires, some of which have spread to nearby homes and apartments.  Luckily, no one has been injured yet in the fires.

Police are currently offering a reward of $35,000 for any information leading to the arrest of the arsonist, who has the entire city on edge.  Police are currently pouring through thousands of leads and reviewing thousands of video camera tapes to help determine who could be responsible.

Local residents are trying to make sense of the fires and trying to figure out if there is anyway they can protect their own vehicles.  Some resident who observed the burning cars said it looked like the arsonist was looking for cars that were parked close together so as to cause maximum damage to surrounding cars.

Police are not as yet willing to concede that it is just one serial arsonist.  There are some theories that this could be a group or even a series of copycats.

The only announcement that police have made is that they are interested in talking to a man who drives a mid 1990′s Lexus, but offered to further details or descriptions.

Police have not yet gotten an estimate for the monetary value of the fires.

Serial Arsonist Terrorizes Los Angeles, More Cars Torched is a post from: The Inquisitr

When the issue of privatized health insurance comes up and is discussed for a long enough time, it is inevitable that an analogy will be made to privatized fire departments and firefighters ignoring emergency calls.

That’s exactly what happened recently in a rural area of Tennessee, however, when a couple who hadn’t paid a $75 bill for fire services watched as their home burned to the ground. Firefighters refused to help as the free market worked, watching but not extinguishing the blaze. The couple frantically offered to pay the fee for services at the time of the blaze, but the fire department would not be swayed- acting only when the fire eventually spread to a neighboring house whose owners had paid the fee.

The owner of the home doesn’t blame the fire department, and the municipality’s mayor was unapologetic about the outcome of the situation:

“Anybody that’s not in the city of South Fulton, it’s a service we offer, either they accept it or they don’t,” Mayor David Crocker said.

Friends and neighbors said it’s a cruel and dangerous city policy but the Cranicks don’t blame the firefighters themselves. They blame the people in charge.

“They’re doing their job,” Paulette Cranick said of the firefighters. “They’re doing what they are told to do. It’s not their fault.”

It was also reported that “someone” assaulted one of the firefighters after they returned to the station, but it was unclear who did the assaulting or to what extent anyone was assaulted.

[Local news via snopes]

Firefighters watch as house burns to ground, refuse to help because homeowner didn’t pay $75 bill is a post from: The Inquisitr

Score one for bricks and mortar shopping.

Seattle based authorize.net was offline for hours this morning following a fire at a data center at Seattle’s Fisher’s Plaza. Reportedly many companies were affected, but authorize.net is the only one responsible for millions of online transactions daily. The fire apparently triggered sprinkler systems, as fires often do, and brought down many machines that haven’t been offline “in years.”

To keep customers informed of the status of repairs and accessibility, the company wisely set up a Twitter account. A series of dramatic tweets were ushered in by this first one at 11AM EST:

#authorizenet We are down due to a fire at our primary data center in Seattle. We are working to restore services, but no ETA at this time.

Around noon, the company updated:

#authorizenet I understand transaction processing is back up with the exception of Global processing. We are working to bring that up ASAP.

Although the company has provided information about the current status of transaction processing, questions remain about transactions posted during the outage:

#authorizenet Lots of questions re: post downtime e.g. transactions without auth code. Will post comm with answers once I have them.

Teams hope to restore power to the building by 1:30PM PST. This is the second major epic fail outage at Fisher Plaza in the past year.

Fire at authorize.net grinds e-commerce to a halt is a post from: The Inquisitr