RUSSIA: “Amid rare extreme heat in San Francisco, it was unusual to see black smoke billowing from a chimney on Friday [9-1-17]— not to mention that it was coming from the Russian Consulate, the day after the Trump administration ordered it closed.
Neighbors gathered on the sidewalks to gawk; the Fire Department came to investigate; local environmental officials sent an inspector. This being California, there were concerns about pollution.
But a darker conspiracy theory was also in the air: that the Russians were burning documents ahead of what a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman in Moscow described as a search of the building scheduled for Saturday by American security services…
The consulate, a six-story brick building in the wealthy enclave of Pacific Heights, has sweeping views of the San Francisco Bay. A picture of the consul, Sergey V. Petrov, that was posted on the website of the consulate shows him sitting next to an elegant fireplace. Arriving at the consulate on Friday, neither Mr. Petrov nor a man accompanying him would comment when asked what was burning inside.
The smoke was first spotted around noon on Friday. Neighbors called the Fire Department.”
-Thomas Fuller, “Where There’s Smoke, There’s a Conspiracy Theory at a Russian Consulate,” The New York Times online, Sept. 1, 2017