Overview

• Federal authorities say 29-year-old Jonathan Rinderknecht is suspected of igniting a New Year’s Eve blaze near Pacific Palisades that later reignited on January 7 and devastated the area.
• He was taken into custody in Florida, appeared in court there on Wednesday, and is scheduled for another hearing on Thursday.
• Investigators report geolocation data placed him about 30 feet from the ignition point at the time he phoned in the fire, and they say he had just dropped off passengers nearby as an Uber driver.
• Authorities say they recovered an AI-generated image depicting a city on fire and note no clear motive has been established.
• Officials report 12 deaths from the Palisades Fire and 31 across the January fires overall with thousands of homes destroyed, as the city releases a firefighting audit and a separate Altadena blaze is probed with a faulty uthern CaCalifornia Edison line as the leading cause.