On the fourth day of a vicious firestorm, exhausted firefighters and weary residents looked forward Wednesday to a break — an expected slackening of the fierce wind that has fanned the state’s explosive wildland blazes.

The Bush administration’s disaster assistance chief promised no repeat of the Hurricane Katrina experience Wednesday, saying “this is a new FEMA” as Washington weighed options to help California wildfire victims.

October is on course to record the second consecutive decline in U.S. military and Iraqi civilian deaths and American commanders say they know why: the U.S. troop increase and an Iraqi groundswell against al-Qaida and Shiite militia extremists.

Turkish warplanes and helicopter gunships attacked positions of Kurdish rebels along the rugged Iraqi-Turkish border on Wednesday, the country's official Anatolia news agency reported.

China launched its first lunar probe Wednesday, the first step in an ambitious 10-year plan to send a rover to the moon and return it to earth.