Hurricane Irma left widespread human and economic havoc in a string of tourism dependent Caribbean islands as the storm pulsed into Florida on Sunday.More.
Irma departed the last of those islands, Cuba, by Sunday morning after scraping along its northern coast. Buildings collapsed, trees and power lines tumbled, and roofs flew away in the 130-mile-per-hour winds.
Rain and seawater flooded towns and cities, including the colonial center of Havana, the country’s capital and a key tourist magnet. Communications were cut off, power was down and infrastructure was damaged in some affected parts of the island.
No deaths have yet been reported in Cuba, as authorities evacuated thousands of residents and tourists ahead of Irma´s arrival. But the hurricane killed at least 22 others across the northern Caribbean in four days of torment.
The storm’s damage comes just a few months before the beginning of the winter tourism season, which last year pumped $56 billion into the regional economy and provided 725,000 jobs, according to the World Travel and Tourism Council, an international industry group.
But Irma affected only a portion of the Caribbean. And while severe on some islands, the storm’s destruction was negligible in others, according to an early assessment by the Caribbean Tourism Organization.
Damage so far appears to have been heaviest in St. Martin’s and nearby islands in the U.S. and British Virgin Islands. And the storm’s impact still hasn’t been fully assessed in Cuba. Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic seem to largely have been spared.
“For the countries that are badly affected, it will take some time to get back on their feet,” Hugh Riley, an official with Caribbean Tourism Organization, said early Sunday.
The affected islands caught a break Saturday when Hurricane Jose, a Category 4 storm that had been on track to follow Irma’s path, turned to the north without making a Caribbean landfall.
Irma began its rampage far to the east of Cuba on Wednesday, tearing in the small two-island nation of Antigua and Barbuda in the northern Leeward Islands. Antigua, the larger of the two, was mostly spared by the storm...
It was a continuance by design. Almost every pass completed. Plenty of touchdowns to go around. Enough yardage to nearly stretch from the Rose Bowl back to Westwood.More.
The epic display fashioned by UCLA quarterback Josh Rosen late in a crazy season-opening comeback bled into an equally productive sequel Saturday back on his home field. The only thing missing this time was the cliffhanger ending.
UCLA rolled to a 56-23 victory over Hawaii as Rosen continued his record-setting ways with a career-high five touchdown passes.
The Bruins (2-0) scored touchdowns on each of their first seven offensive drives with the exception of a one-play drive before halftime, giving them 12 touchdowns in 14 drives going back to the 35 unanswered points they unspooled at the end of their triumph over Texas A&M. The only other drive that UCLA didn’t score on during that stretch, Rosen took a knee in the final seconds against the Aggies.
“We have to expect to score every time we touch the ball and you can’t be happy with 70%, 80% success rates that normal people would consider good or whatnot,” Rosen said. “You have to set the bar unreasonably high and always strive for it.”
Rosen was nearly perfect, completing 22 of 25 passes for 329 yards, with one of the incompletions coming on a dropped pass. Over his last five quarters, Rosen has completed 41 of 51 passes for 621 yards and nine touchdowns without an interception.
It didn’t meet his standards.
“I had three incompletions today and I expect to have a perfect game every time I step on the field,” said Rosen, whose 12th game with at least 300 yards passing set a school record, edging Cade McNown’s 11 games. “It’s unreasonable, but I think that’s the standard you have to set for yourself. You have to strive for perfection and hope you fall on greatness along the way, stumble on greatness along the way.”
UCLA’s offense wasn’t great across the board. Its running game produced a middling 132 yards, including Nate Starks’ 42 yards in a starting role after Soso Jamabo was injured in practice earlier in the week.
Rosen was so prolific that it didn’t matter. He said in the days before the game that the offense’s sputtering start through 21/2 quarters last week was largely the result of learning new plays under first-year offensive coordinator Jedd Fisch, explaining that he wanted to “basically play a fifth quarter of what we were at last week and keep going where we left off.”
The Bruins did so in building leads of 14-0 after the first quarter and 35-7 at halftime...
The relief washed through the overheated USC football fans like that cool breeze that poured into the Coliseum.Rosen had a great day against Hawaii, throwing for five TDs.
In his second game of the season, Sam Darnold finally threw his first touchdown pass.
And his second. And his third. And his fourth.
One week after saying the muddled victory in baking temperatures against Western Michigan was “probably the worst I’ve felt after a game in college,” Darnold was soothed, the Trojans were refreshed, and their peskiest of rivals were rolled.
For only the third time in 10 games, USC actually beat Stanford — actually beat the Cardinal here, and actually beat them with smarts and toughness and a quarterback who epitomized both. This was a story of an athletic defense, acrobatic receivers and runners who flew behind a dominant offensive line. But it is a story that began and ended with Darnold, who threw for 316 yards and four touchdowns despite two more interceptions in a 42-24 victory Saturday at the Coliseum.
“It was nice to kind of feel like — it’s kind of cliché — but to kind of feel like my old self,” Darnold said.
From Darnold, Trojan fans love cliché, because cliché is him leading them to 11 consecutive wins while barely raising his voice. The unusual was Darnold being shut out against Western Michigan. The cliché was Saturday when at times it seemed the only person who could stop him was himself.
And you thought all the Los Angeles quarterback hype today would be about UCLA’s Josh Rosen...
OHIO VALLEY — A clip of Martha Plimpton's exuberance over the "best" abortion she ever had played out on the television overhead of a gas-station counter somewhere along U.S. Route 422 between Ohio and Pennsylvania.I hate to hate, but I do hate Democrats, and on this issue particularly.
A woman with a name tag noting her as the manager rolled her eyes and said to no one in particular as she went about stacking the shelves behind the counter, "And they wonder why people don't vote for Democrats around here anymore."
Plimpton, 46, is best known for her role in the 1980's Steven Spielberg classic kid adventure movie "The Goonies." She made her remark in an interview with Dr. Willie Parker at a #ShoutYourAbortion event in Seattle in June.
After saying Seattle was the home of some of her family, she went on to cheer what she did in her teens: "I also had my first abortion at the Seattle Planned Parenthood. Yay!"
With equal exuberance, she also revealed her Seattle abortion wasn't her last.
Actions like Plimpton's do not help the Democratic cause in achieving power and influence back in Washington, D.C. At least not with Main Street voters. Nor does it help Democrats win local races.
"Democrats used to debate the legal right to have one, and that was a point of view that was shared by most voters," said Michael Wear, a theologically conservative evangelical Christian and Democrat who served in Barack Obama's faith outreach office in the White House.
"I don't understand why, 14 months before a midterm election, why would you push 20 percent of voters who would love to support Democrats out the door? Better yet, why would you speak of pro-life Democrats as though they were some extraterrestrial who just landed on earth?" he said.
It is rare that anyone who has had an abortion celebrates it — Plimpton seems to fail to understand few in this country do. Maybe the privileged class celebrates abortions? Even if they did, that won't help the Democratic Party win back voters. Or is it the intellectual class that celebrates them? Even if they did, that doesn't win back majorities either. Or maybe it's the celebrity class that does? If so, there's not enough of them to win back the House or Senate.
In short, this is not the message you want to win every down-ballot seat the party has let waste away under the thrust of identity politics...
The Freedom Caucus is the tail that aspires to wag a whole country though it represents just a sliver of Americans. Even within the House it's outnumbered by moderate centrists.Trump needs to get Democrats to bend toward his will, not the other way around.
President Trump wrote a book on deals, and so did I. Mine is shorter and didn’t sell quite as many copies, but it was a deep dig into how political agreements are born. The process — slow, plodding, painstaking, strategic, and did I mention slow? — is nothing like what went on with Trump, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. Nothing at all.
As a citizen, I’m thrilled by the lightning round between the Republican president and his two Democratic amigos. It feels strange but wonderful to get hurricane aid, keep the government in business and increase the U.S. borrowing limit (sparing the world a financial crisis) — all before we even began to type our traditional angst-ridden headlines about polarization, paralysis and brinksmanship.
As a liberal, I’m also pretty psyched. If Pelosi (the House Democratic leader) and Schumer (her Senate counterpart) are even half the geniuses Republicans seem to think they are, Democrats may be well positioned to help protect undocumented young immigrants in a program Trump just canceled, and to keep a lid on the deliverables to rich people who are anticipating huge tax cuts.
If I were a centrist Republican, I’d be intrigued by this hint of bipartisanship. Could it be that the GOP fever is finally breaking, five long years after Barack Obama predicted it would? If so, all it has taken is Obama’s exit from the stage, absolute Republican power, and a president like Trump.
It turns out that a lot of what Obama did wasn’t so god-awful. The problem was who did it (him) and in some cases how he did it — executive actions or, heaven forbid, party-line votes. Quick, pass the smelling salts.
The latest of many examples is the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA. In the absence of congressional action on a new immigration law, Obama unilaterally started a permit system so people brought here illegally as children could work and study without fear of deportation. The conservative backlash was ferocious.
But now that Trump has canceled it, with a six-month grace period for Congress to “do your job,” as he put it, a growing number of Republicans — including Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan — are looking for an escape hatch. Whose idea was it, anyway, to destroy the lives of some 800,000 young people who are working, studying and have never broken the law? Who are engines of our economy, or could be, if we let them stay? It turns out it’s not popular to kick the “dreamers” out of America.
Turns out as well that repealing the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, is not popular either — especially when the Congressional Budget Office has found that every variation on a replacement would cost people more, take away consumer protections, and insure far fewer — up to 24 million fewer in one case. Those protesting repeal at town meetings included conservatives and Trump voters as well as liberal Democrats. Those seeking a bipartisan compromise to stabilize markets and improve the law include more than a few Republican senators and governors. Those trying to get Congress to abandon repeal and move on include … Trump. At least as of Friday.
It wasn’t popular to pull America out of the Paris climate agreement, as Trump has done. It wouldn’t be popular to weaken fuel efficiency standards developed by the Obama administration, with consumers or even apparently with the auto industry.
And it won’t be popular if, as expected, the tax “reform” push by Trump and congressional Republicans turns out to be mostly about tax cuts for the rich. Three-quarters of Americans say Trump should not lower taxes on the wealthy and close to that many said a year ago that taxes should be raised on the wealthy.
Buoyed by gerrymandering and cultural shifts, Republicans have had years of success winning elections at every level. They have mistaken that as popular support for free-market health care, trickle-down economics, extensive deregulation and callous social policies. Will months of failure on Obamacare repeal, capped perhaps by a groundswell of support for DACA, finally drive the message home?
The aggressively conservative House Freedom Caucus has been like the tail wagging the GOP and aspiring to wag the whole country. But its three dozen hard-core conservatives don’t represent anything close to a majority of Americans. Even within the House, they may be outnumbered by the moderate centrists of the Tuesday Group, estimated to have as many as 50 members...
MIAMI — After days of preparation, Hurricane Irma—one of the most powerful storms to cross the Atlantic—is forecast to hit the Florida Keys around daybreak Sunday before continuing on a path that threatens catastrophic flooding along Florida’s Gulf Coast.More.
Deadly storm surges could inundate parts of the state’s southwest coast with up to 15 feet of water, the National Hurricane Center said, and much of the state will see “life-threatening wind impacts” regardless of the hurricane’s exact path.
Florida Gov. Rick Scott hammered home the danger from rising waters Saturday. “There’s a serious threat of significant storm surge flooding along the entire west coast of Florida” he said. “Think about that: 15 feet is devastating and will cover your house.”
The state of 20.6 million people has been readying itself for Irma as the storm barreled into the Caribbean, killing at least 22 people and battering islands with winds in excess of 150 miles per hour. Now Irma is headed for the U.S. mainland as a Category 3 storm that is expected to pick up strength overnight as it moves away from Cuba into warm open water.
Irma would bring a punishing cocktail of destructive winds, major storm surge, torrential rains, possible tornadoes and widespread power outages, said Alan Albanese, senior meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Key West.
“This is a very serious threat, potentially catastrophic,” he said. “A lot of people down here in the Keys have not experienced anything with the potential this system has.”
Florida officials have warned that Irma could be worse than Hurricane Andrew, the Category 5 storm that devastated South Florida 25 years ago. Andrew killed 61 people in the U.S. and caused nearly $48 billion in economic damage in 2017 dollars, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—the costliest storm in U.S. history until Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Parts of Florida were experiencing tropical-storm force winds Saturday evening. “We have been very aggressive in our preparation for this storm and now it’s upon us,” Mr. Scott said. “Every Floridian should take this seriously and be aggressive to protect their family.”
“The storm surge will rush in and it could kill you,” he said.
More than 76,000 electricity customers had lost power by early Saturday evening, mostly in Miami-Dade and Broward counties, a tiny fraction of the state’s total, according to the Florida Division of Emergency Management. The number is expected to grow.
Hurricane Irma’s westward shift toward the Gulf Coast brought some sense of relief to cities like Miami and Fort Lauderdale but heightened fears of catastrophic flooding on Florida’s Gulf Coast. The hurricane center warns the storm surge could reach 10 to 15 feet above ground from Captiva Island, west of Fort Myers, to the southern tip of the Florida peninsula. That warning is an increase from the 8-to-12-foot range forecast Friday night.
Residents on the state’s west coast quickly shifted plans and bunkered down.
Wrede McCollum, who lives on Pine Island off Florida’s southwest coast, had planned to stay at a friend’s house—despite a mandatory evacuation order—because of reports of log-jammed highways and packed shelters. But after seeing the storm’s projected westward turn, Mr. McCollum and his friends decided to go to a shelter.
“The current track seems headed right for St. James City,” where he lives, he said by text. “Jangling a few nerves here.”
Lisa Tilson, a Boca Raton native, has been through many hurricanes but she worried about this one. She drove to her mother’s house in Sun City Center, a retirement community near Tampa on the Gulf Coast, only to find herself more squarely in Irma’s path. The family rushed to protect the home.
As the storm approached Saturday afternoon, Ms. Tilson planned to stay in one hallway with her daughters, while her mother, her mother’s partner and Ms. Tilson’s 80-year-old aunt stay in another, she said. “That’s where we are going to ride it out,” she said. “I’ve had a weird feeling in my stomach about this storm since I first heard about it.”
More than 6.3 million Florida residents, about 30% of the total, have been told to leave their homes, state officials say. Evacuations have led to long lines at gas stations, fuel shortages, traffic jams and overrun hotel rooms.
More than 70,000 Floridians have taken refuge in more than 385 shelters around the state...
The size of this monster...holy hell. pic.twitter.com/naM5tQpXZC
— Alexis In NH (@AlexisinNH) September 9, 2017
Hurricane Irma, the most powerful storm to take aim at Florida in decades, is on a path that presents the worst-case scenario for deadly storm surges and powerful winds when it strikes the state Sunday, threatening millions of homes and businesses.Still more.
Irma is a massive storm, covering an area more than double the size of Florida, and generating sustained winds of more than 150 miles an hour. It has already killed more than 20 people after flattening the Caribbean islands of St. Martin and Barbuda as it arced north toward Florida. The hurricane’s impact could reach as far north as Indiana and Illinois, forecasters say, affecting about 50 million people.
Long lines of cars clogged Florida’s highways after authorities and forecasters implored the state’s 20.6 million people to leave low-lying coastal lands expected to be inundated by hurricane-driven seawater.
Storm surges, one of the most deadly threats of Hurricane Irma, are forecast to be 9 feet to 20 feet high, depending on whether the storm hits the peninsula from the Atlantic on the east or the shallower Gulf of Mexico to the west.
“If it comes in from the Gulf side, Tampa Bay could just get hammered and that really is one of the big catastrophic events we have been worried about for some time,” said Kyle Mandli, assistant professor of mathematics at Columbia University.
But Mr. Mandli warns the entire state could remain at risk if the hurricane tracks up the middle of the state and causes storm surges on both coasts, though those would probably not be as high.
With Irma now projected to make landfall in the Florida Keys about daybreak Sunday, weather experts say the flooding could begin hours earlier because surges from a hurricane start to hit land in advance of the storm’s center. The surge peaks as the hurricane eyewall crosses onto land, said Robert Bea, professor emeritus at the University of California’s Center for Catastrophic Risk Management. “We’re talking several hours of surge,” Mr. Bea said.
Storm surges, created when the high wind of a hurricane forces ocean waters onshore, account for half of the deaths and most of the destruction caused by the majority of hurricanes, weather experts say.
Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez cited a possible life-threatening storm surge when he expanded the county’s evacuation zone on Thursday, now affecting more 650,000 residents.
Much of the estimated $62 billion in U.S. damage from superstorm Sandy in 2012 was caused by the storm surge that slammed the Eastern seaboard, according to an analysis by the U.S. Geological Survey. Storm surge was cited by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as the major cause of the $75 billion in destruction along the Gulf Coast from 2005’s Katrina, which leveled beachfront communities in Mississippi and inundated the city of New Orleans.
On Florida’s coasts, which will face the brunt of the Category 4 hurricane’s destructive force, about 3.5 million residential and commercial properties are at risk of storm-surge damage and almost 8.5 million properties are at risk of wind damage, according to data provider CoreLogic .
The last Florida storm that was the size of Hurricane Irma, which was downgraded to Category 4 from Category 5 on Friday, was Hurricane Andrew in 1992. That storm was originally classified as Category 4 but was reclassified in 2002 to a Category 5.
Catastrophe-modeling firm Karen Clark & Co. said a repeat of Hurricane Andrew on the same path as in 1992 would cause $50 billion in insured losses. The same storm directly hitting Miami today would cause more than $200 billion in losses, the firm said.
Miami, however, is protected by a rapid drop offshore thanks to the continental shelf, which is unlike Florida’s mostly shallow Gulf of Mexico coast. As a result, the surge hitting Miami from a Category 4 storm like Irma is expected to total up to 9 feet, compared with as high as 20 feet if it were to hit more along the Gulf Coast, according to NOAA.
The highest waves are typically centered on the leading right side of the storm, where counterclockwise winds in the Northern Hemisphere push the bulk of a hurricane’s destructive force. The surge waves are made even higher when they travel across shallow coastal waters, said Robert Bohlin, a meteorologist with the Central Pacific Hurricane Center in Honolulu.
Historically, the biggest storm surges in U.S. history have taken place in shallow Gulf waters. Hurricane Katrina in 2005 produced the nation’s highest recorded surge of 27.8 feet at Pass Christian, Miss. At least 1,500 people died in Katrina—many from the surge—and entire beachfront neighborhoods were washed away by the waves, NOAA officials said.
But Irma is forecast to take such an unusual track—essentially up the length of the Sunshine State—that hurricane experts aren’t exactly sure how the surge pattern will play out. If it shifts slightly to the west, much higher surge could inundate parts of Florida’s Gulf Coast, said Columbia’s Mr. Mandli.
“Even a shift of a few kilometers could be the difference between a huge disaster and something more manageable,” Mr. Mandli said.
Damage from a storm surge is considered flooding, which isn’t covered by standard homeowners insurance policies. Flood damage is largely covered by the federal government’s National Flood Insurance Program, which provides homeowners up to $250,000 to repair a home and $100,000 for personal possessions.
Homeowners in high-risk flood zones are required by their mortgage providers to buy flood insurance, but consumers outside those areas often forgo the coverage.
Businesses can buy federal flood insurance, which covers up to $500,000 for damage to a building and $500,000 for its contents. Commercial-property insurance for large businesses often includes flood coverage...
Divisions in America reach far beyond Washington into the nation's culture, economy and social fabric, and the polarization began long before the rise of President Donald Trump, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey of social trends has found.Still more.
The findings help explain why political divisions are now especially hard to bridge. People who identify with either party increasingly disagree not just on policy; they inhabit separate worlds of differing social and cultural values and even see their economic outlook through a partisan lens.
The wide gulf is visible in an array of issues and attitudes: Democrats are twice as likely to say they never go to church as are Republicans, and they are eight times as likely to favor action on climate change. One-third of Republicans say they support the National Rifle Association, while just 4% of Democrats do. More than three-quarters of Democrats, but less than one-third of Republicans, said they felt comfortable with societal changes that have made the U.S. more diverse.
What is more, Americans' view of the economy, the direction of the nation and the future has even come to be closely aligned with their feelings about the current president, the survey found.
"Our political compass is totally dominating our economic and world views about the country," said GOP pollster Bill McInturff, who conducted the survey with Democratic pollster Fred Yang. "Political polarization is not a new thing. The level under Trump is the logical outcome of a generation-long trend."
The poll found deep splits along geographic and educational lines. Rural Americans and people without a four-year college degree are notably more pessimistic about the economy and more conservative on social issues. Those groups make up an increasingly large share of the GOP.
One measure of how much more polarized the electorate is than a generation ago can be found in views of the president. Eight months into the 1950s presidency of Republican Dwight Eisenhower, 60% of Democrats approved of the job he was doing. That level of cross-party support for a new president remained above 40% until Bill Clinton, when only 20% of Republicans approved of his performance after eight months in 1993. For Barack Obama, Republican support dropped to 16% at this point in his presidency in 2009.
Under Mr. Trump, that trend has continued and intensified. His job-approval rating among Americans overall has remained in recent months at about 40%, but just 8% of Democrats approve of the job he is doing, the survey found. By contrast, 80% of Republicans approve.
Mr. Trump's election has brought a sharp mood swing among Republicans. In August 2014, 88% of Republicans said they weren't confident that life for their children's generation would be better than their own, a gloomy view of a central element of the American dream. Eight months into the Trump presidency, just 46% of Republicans say they lack confidence in their children's future -- a 42-point swing that is more dramatic than improvements in the economy would seem to justify.
The survey found changes over the years in attitudes on cultural and economic issues, such as gun control, immigration and globalization, that were key issues of Mr. Trump's campaign.
Views of gun rights used to be less partisan: Asked if they were concerned that the government would go too far in restricting gun-ownership rights or, alternatively, that the government wouldn't do enough, Republicans in 1995 were about evenly split. Democrats were divided 26% to 67%.
Now, 77% of Republicans say they are concerned the government would go too far, and just 18% worry the government wouldn't do enough. Democratic opinion is the mirror image, 24% to 71%.
Views of immigration have also become more partisan. In an April 2005 poll that asked whether immigration strengthened or weakened the U.S., a plurality of 48% said it weakened the nation, with 41% saying immigration strengthened the country.
Now, a substantial majority of 64% view immigration as strengthening the country, while 28% say it weakens the U.S. The change is due almost entirely to a sharp shift in Democrats' views. In 2005, just 45% of Democrats said the country was strengthened by immigration; now the share is 81%.
Democrats also are now more inclined to see globalization as beneficial, compared with 20 years ago, when both parties had largely similar views of the matter.
Two groups in particular have a relatively pessimistic view of the economy -- rural Americans and those with less education.
Some 43% of rural residents gave a high rating to their local economy's health, compared with 57% of urban dwellers. Among people without a four-year college degree, only 47% viewed the economy in their area as good or excellent, compared with two-thirds of people with a degree.
Both groups have been moving from the Democratic Party to the GOP.
Among people without a four-year college degree, a plurality of 44% identified as Democrats in 2010. Now, only 36% do. Among those who are college graduates, just 36% now identify as Republican, versus 41% in 2010.
While there is broad agreement that the country is riven by division, there is no consensus on why...
