DUBAI INFERNO: FLAMES SHOOT UP 63-STORY HOTEL. “As some million people packed Dubai for the emirate’s notoriously spectacular New Year’s fireworks displays, an inferno lit up a 63-story luxury hotel downtown,” Bridget Johnson writes at PJM. “Witnesses said the fire broke out at about 9:30 p.m. local time on the lower third of the building and spread quickly. The hotel was evacuated and there were no immediate reports of injuries.”

No victims? Well, that’s what they want you to think, Allahpundit conjectures. “From what I saw, the blown-out parts ran around 10 stories high and a good 10 or so windows across. (The hotel is 63 stories tall and not quite 1,000 feet high.) Unless literally everyone inside the hotel was out on the streets celebrating New Year’s Eve, there are victims.”

So what caused it? “One Twitter user captured an image showing only a very small fire at the start; local authorities tell CNN that it started on the exterior of the 20th floor. Could fireworks from the ground have misfired? Stay tuned,” he writes, adding in an update, “One reason to think this might be accidental rather than arson is that the hotel is near the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building. If you were a terrorist or pyromaniac looking to maximize the impact of your crime, wouldn’t you target the Burj instead?”

In February, a fire devastated another Dubai skyscraper, a 79-story residential structure with 676 apartments carrying an unfortunate moniker — “The Torch.”

As Nathan Wurtzel remarked on Twitter concerning the two fires, “We can make one assumption, but don’t rule out the sh**ty construction assumption.”