NEW YORK (Reuters) – At least 15 people were injured when a fire engulfed a boat off the coast of Florida on Sunday, causing the 50 people aboard to jump into the Gulf of Mexico and swim to shore, local officials said.
A preliminary investigation showed the fire broke out at about 4:17 p.m. EST from an apparent engine issue, said Shawn Whited, division chief with Pasco Fire Rescue.
“The captain of the boat said there was an issue with the engine. He said he noticed smoke coming form the engine room and turned the boat around,” Whited said.
The 60-foot shuttle boat was on its way to the Sun Cruz Casino boat, a little more than three miles away in international waters. It had only made it about 100 yards from where it originated in Port Richey, about 30 miles north of downtown Tampa.
After seeing the smoke, the captain prompted the 50 people aboard the boat to abandon ship and swim to shore. Some of the injuries were from being in cold water and from smoke inhalation, said Whited.
The boat was “fully engulfed” in flames, said Dan Dede, a dispatch supervisor at Pasco County Sheriff’s Office and Pasco Fire.
An official investigation will start soon, according to Whited. Several agencies, including the U.S. Coast Guard, the City of Port Richey Fire Department and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, responded to the incident.
Reporting by Renita D. Young; Editing by Nick Zieminski
“I’m not a racist. I am the least racist person you have ever interviewed, that I can tell you,” Mr. Trump said as he arrived at Trump International Golf Club for dinner with Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the majority leader.
The rift over Mr. Trump’s comments, and how they have since been recounted, risked further eroding trust between Democrats and Republicans at the beginning of a critical week for Congress. Government funding is set to expire on Friday, and lawmakers will need to pass a stopgap spending measure to avoid a government shutdown on Saturday.
And lawmakers are already facing a difficult fight over the politically volatile subject of immigration, with the fates of hundreds of thousands of young immigrants hanging in the balance. Adding to the uncertain picture for those immigrants, the Trump administration resumed accepting renewals for the program over the weekend, under orders from a federal judge who is hearing a legal challenge to Mr. Trump’s dismantling of the program.
But in Congress, the battle took on an increasingly personal dimension as Mr. Perdue and Mr. Cotton essentially accused Mr. Durbin of lying about the president’s comments, even after the vulgar remarks were widely reported and the White House did not immediately dispute that the president had made them.
“I didn’t hear that word either,” Mr. Cotton said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “And I was sitting no further away from Donald Trump than Dick Durbin was.”
Mr. Cotton said Mr. Durbin “has a history of misrepresenting what happens in White House meetings,” an assertion that Mr. Perdue made in his own interview Sunday morning on ABC’s “This Week.”
Ben Marter, a spokesman for Mr. Durbin, responded by suggesting that Mr. Perdue and Mr. Cotton should not be believed.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
“Credibility is something that’s built by being consistently honest over time,” Mr. Marter wrote on Twitter. “Senator Durbin has it. Senator Perdue does not. Ask anyone who’s dealt with both.”
Mr. Graham had previously told a fellow South Carolina Republican, Senator Tim Scott, that reports in the news media of Mr. Trump’s language were “basically accurate.” A spokesman for Mr. Graham did not respond to a request for comment on Sunday.
Senator Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican who is part of a bipartisan group of senators that has developed an immigration proposal, said on Sunday that people in the room with Mr. Trump during Thursday’s meeting told him that the president had used the inflammatory language.
“I was in a meeting directly afterwards where those who had presented to the president our proposal spoke about the meeting,” he said on “This Week.” “I heard that account before the account even went public.”
The other lawmakers at the meeting, all Republicans, have not offered any public recollection of what the president said.
The Homeland Security secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, who also attended the meeting, said on “Fox News Sunday” that she did not recall the president “saying that exact phrase.”
Mr. Durbin had told reporters on Friday that Mr. Trump called African nations “shitholes,” which Mr. Durbin said was “the exact word used by the president, not just once, but repeatedly.” He called the president’s comments “hate-filled, vile and racist.” At the meeting, Mr. Durbin said Mr. Trump also questioned whether the United States needed more Haitians.
Saying that President Barack Obama had exceeded his authority when he created the program that shields from deportation young immigrants who were brought to the United States illegally as children, known as Dreamers, Mr. Trump moved to end it in September.
He gave Congress six months to find a fix for the program, called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA.
Democrats have been pushing to secure a deal by Friday’s government funding deadline that would protect Dreamers, hoping to capitalize on the leverage they have as a result of that deadline. Democratic votes will be needed to pass the stopgap spending measure in the Senate, where government funding measures require 60 votes, and Democratic votes might be needed in the House as well.
Republican leaders say they want to address DACA as well, but separately from funding the government. Compared with their Democratic counterparts, Republican leaders are operating on a longer time frame for taking action, given the six-month window that Mr. Trump gave Congress. They also have to contend with internal divisions over immigration policy.
The bipartisan group of senators, including Mr. Durbin and Mr. Graham, reached an agreement last week that would provide a path to citizenship for DACA recipients while also providing money for border security and making other changes to immigration policy.
But Mr. Trump dismissed the proposal, calling it a “big step backwards.” And on Sunday, he offered a pessimistic take on Twitter: “DACA is probably dead because the Democrats don’t really want it, they just want to talk and take desperately needed money away from our military.”
Still, administration officials said they intended to abide by an order from Judge William Alsup of Federal District Court in San Francisco last week to restart the DACA program, with some modifications, while a legal challenge plays out. On Saturday, officials did just that by updating the program’s website to once again accept renewals.
But administration officials hope the judge’s decision will be temporary. Officials said the president’s lawyers are examining whether to appeal his order, which could lead to a ruling allowing the administration to shut the program down again. The administration could also choose to modify its legal reasoning to satisfy the judge’s criticisms.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
Either way, immigrant rights activists are not counting on legal action to be the ultimate protection for the Dreamers. Several said they believe the only real solution for the hundreds of thousands of young immigrants is to convince Congress to act soon.
The court ruling could lessen the pressure for that kind of action — at least in the short term — since some young immigrants can once again renew their protected status for another two years.
Lawyers and directors of community legal services spent Sunday preparing fact sheets and answering calls that have been flooding their offices.
Most of the calls that Hasan Shafiqullah, the director of the immigration unit of the Legal Aid Society of New York, said he has been receiving started with the burning questions “Is this real? Can I file?”
The answer, for now, he said, is yes. But he is concerned for his clients about another turnabout in the courts.
“It’s just the emotional roller coaster that our clients are on,” he said.
Allan Wernick, the director of CUNY Citizenship Now, a legal services program at the City University of New York, said filing renewals could be very powerful, at least symbolically, to Mr. Trump.
“The more applications get in, the more it is clear that his ending the program has real-world impact,” he said.
A 28-year-old man playing a video game in his bedroom threw a fit, broke his headset, then picked up a gun and killed his mother, according to police in Ceres, California.
Matthew Nicholson stayed with his parents in a powder blue house with a basketball hoop over the garage door. It was a loving and open home, and 68-year-old Lydia Nicholson was the sort of mother who “wanted to see the best in people at all times,” her daughter told Fox 40.
But a police spokesman told the station that officers had visited the home after a fight between Nicholson and his parents once in the past six months, before Thursday, when they would arrive too late.
Nicholson was in his room that night playing a game, according to Ceres police, when something upset him and he began to yell. His mother went in to check on him, they started to argue, and Nicholson broke his headset.
He blamed his mother for this, police said, and threatened to kill her and his father, identified by Fox 40 as Loren Nicolson.
There was a gun in the house, police said, and so Nicholson tried to make good on his threat.” He came out yelling something about, ‘My headset is broken,’ ” police spokesman Greg Yotsuya told NBC affiliate KCRA. “Then grabbed a gun and started shooting.”
He allegedly fired into a wall, twice. Another bullet might have gone into the ceiling, the station reported. Another went into Lydia Nicholson’s head.
“He would’ve killed the father too, but the gun jammed,” a family friend told Fox 40. “The father grabbed the gun, emptied it.”
Without a weapon anymore, police said, Matthew Nicholson fled in a vehicle, leaving his parents to their misery.
Loren had been with Lydia for 32 years, according to Fox 40. Now he called 911 and held his wife in his arms.
Police pulled up to the house on River Valley Circle just before 10 p.m. Paramedics followed and took Lydia Nicholson to a hospital, where she would soon die.
Matthew Nicholson had only driven a couple of miles away, and police pulled him over near a relative’s home in Riverbank. He was charged with homicide and jailed without bail.
In the hours to come, friends and relatives would gather outside the house with the basketball hoop. News cameras joined them, and investigators came and went.
“Was it the video game,” the police spokesman wondered aloud to a local NBC station, “or was there something else going on?”
Chelsea E. Manning, the transgender former Army private who was convicted of passing sensitive government documents to WikiLeaks, is seeking to run for the U.S. Senate in Maryland, according to federal election filings.
Manning would be challenging Democrat Benjamin L. Cardin, who is in his second term in the Senate and is up for reelection in November. Cardin is Maryland’s senior senator and is considered an overwhelming favorite to win a third term.
Manning declined to speak about her filing or to say why she might be running when reached at her home in Bethesda on Saturday.
She said she might release astatement in the coming days.
“Our only statement on the record is ‘No statement,’ ” Manning said.
Manning, 30, who was formerly known as Bradley Manning, was convicted in 2013 of the largest leak of classified documents in U.S. history and was sentenced to 35 years in prison. Last year, as President Barack Obama was nearing the end of his term in office, he commuted Manning’s sentence to time served, and she was released from a military prison in Kansas.
The news of Manning’s filing caught Maryland’s political class by surprise Saturday afternoon. It was first reported in a tweet by the conservative media outlet Red Maryland.
Cardin, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has an extensive fundraising base in Maryland and is not considered particularly vulnerable to a challenge from any known figures within the state. However, a candidate with national name recognition, such as Manning, who comes in from the outside could tap a network of donors interested in elevating a progressive agenda.
Without mentioning Manning, Sue Walitsky, Cardin’s spokeswoman, said: “Senator Cardin is looking forward to a vigorous debate of the issues and a robust conversation with Maryland voters.”
Manning would also have to file with Maryland State Board of Elections to get her name on the ballot.
Manning moved to Maryland after her release from prison. Since then, she has written for the Guardian and Medium on issues of transparency, free speech and civil liberties, transgender rights and computer security, according to her website.
Manning’s statement of candidacy was filed with the Federal Election Commission on Thursday.
She is running as a Democrat and refers to Maryland as her “home state” on her website. The Democratic primary is scheduled for the end of June.
Manning’s first column for the Guardian said Obama’s election in 2008 was a political awakening for her.
Manning wrote that Obama left behind “hints of a progressive legacy” but very few permanent accomplishments.
“This vulnerable legacy should remind us that what we really need is a strong and unapologetic progressive to lead us,” Manning wrote. “What we need as well is a relentless grassroots movement to hold that leadership accountable.”
Evan Greer, campaign director of the nonprofit organization Fight for the Future and a close supporter of Manning’s while she was imprisoned, said the news is exciting.
“Chelsea Manning has fought for freedom and sacrificed for it in ways that few others have,” Greer wrote in an email. “The world is a better place with her as a free woman, and this latest news makes it clear she is only beginning to make her mark on it.”
Todd Eberly, a political-science professor at St. Mary’s College in Maryland, said Donald Trump’s unexpected rise to the presidency opened the door for political neophytes such as Manning.
“My initial thought quite literally was, ‘Donald Trump is president, Oprah Winfrey is the leading contender for Democrats in 2020, why the hell not Chelsea Manning in the U.S. Senate?’ ” he said
Judging from her past statements, Manning’s brand could be one of “unapologetic progressivism, no compromise, take no prisoners,” he said.
Manning enlisted in the military in 2007 and was deployed to Iraq two years later as an intelligence analyst, according to her website.
In 2010, Manning was arrested after she provided a trove of nearly 750,000 documents to WikiLeaks that included information about the U.S. war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, State Department cables and information about prisoners in Guantanamo Bay.
Manning’s high-profile leak drew media coverage around the world. U.S. officials said the material placed the lives of U.S. soldiers and Afghan informants at risk, but Manning said she had a duty to inform the public about how the United States was conducting its wars.
Three years later, Manning was convicted on multiple charges, including violating the Espionage Act, and received a lengthy sentence. While serving time at Fort Leavenworth, Manning attempted suicide and went on a hunger strike, before the Army approved her for gender reassignment surgery.
Her case remains politically divisive. She has been lauded as a hero by some on the left but also decried as a traitor by many, including President Trump.
Her felony convictions do not appear to bar her from running for the Senate. The Constitution simply requires that a senator be at least 30 years old, have been a citizen of the United States for nine years and be a resident of the state from which the person is seeking office.
As the death toll in the Montecito mudslides increased to 19 on Saturday, officials announced that the 101 Freeway would remain closed indefinitely.
Search and rescue crews recovered the body of Morgan Corey, 25, who was found in debris near Mill Road about 9 a.m. Saturday, officials said. She was among at least five people who were still listed as missing.
At a late afternoon news conference at the Earl Warren Fairgrounds, Santa Barbara Fire Chief Eric Peterson spoke about the difficulties and challenges faced by emergency responders in their search for survivors.
“I have felt the heartbreak of knowing that even with all of your skill and all of your training and all of your planning, you couldn’t save everybody,” he said. “No one could have planned for the size and scope of what a 200-year storm immediately following our largest wildfire could bring.”
Emergency crews remain in search-and-rescue mode, he said. However, he added, “after every hour it becomes less likely we will find someone alive, but there is always hope.”
Highway 101, a major north-south artery that carries 100,000 vehicles through the Central Coast each day, was initially expected to open Monday, but officials said cleaning up an approximately two-mile stretch of the freeway was proving more difficult than imagined.
“It’s really an overwhelming situation and we don’t want to give an estimate that isn’t accurate,” CalTrans spokesman Colin Jones said.
CalTrans crews, aided by private contractors and the Army Corps of Engineers, have been working around the clock on the approximately two-mile stretch of the debris-strewn freeway near Montecito. Crews have removed most of the vehicles abandoned in the storm, including a number of tractor-trailers, but a significant amount of debris and mud remains.
Los Angeles Fire Department search-and-rescue team tried to sound an optimistic note — hoping for the best, bracing for the worst. Members used an arsenal of tools, technology and specially trained dogs to probe piles of debris more than 15 feet deep at the southern end of Romero Creek.
“It’s as exhausting, frustrating and tedious as looking for a needle in a haystack,” LAFD Battalion Chief Mark Akahoshi said while hunched over a topographical map of surrounding terrain studded with ranches and mansions offering panoramic views of the Pacific Ocean.
One of the region’s most famous resorts, San Ysidro Ranch, sustained extensive damage in the mudslides, McElroy said Saturday. The luxury hotel, which has counted Audrey Hepburn, Winston Churchill and honeymooners John F. and Jacqueline Kennedy as guests, is edged by a creek that became a torrent of boulders, toppled trees and muck.
Contractors and crews using earthmovers and dump trucks were streaming into the property Saturday morning. Elroy said many key structures on the property remained standing.
As the new year heads into its third week, President Trump remains on a personal political losing streak. None of his opponents — not the Democrats, not the Never Trumpers, not any of the others — can damage him as badly as he hurts himself.
It was only a few days ago when he opened up an immigration negotiating session with bipartisan members of Congress to the cameras and was lauded in some quarters for doing so. He was described in some accounts as a president doing the real business of the country. That proved to be a one-off moment.
Before and after, the conversation around the presidency — the conversation at times forced by the president — involved topics that were alternately disquieting and shocking, from questions about his mental fitness and stability to serve as president (which he helped elevate with tweets) to the racist and vulgar comment he made about African and other nations in a private meeting.
Together they reinforce a portrait of a president who doesn’t appear to understand or appreciate the importance of the immigrant experience, often lacks clarity of his own views or the details of issues he is negotiating, and who projects an image that regularly flies in the face of standards long applied to those who occupy the Oval Office.
Trump has tried to wiggle away from asking why the United States must take immigrants from what he called “shithole countries.” Amid the firestorm set off by Post reporter Josh Dawsey’s account of the meeting, Trump acknowledged that he used some “tough” language during the meeting at the White House but said he never used the exact words attributed to him.
Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), who was present in the meeting, condemned President Trump’s remarks as “hate-filled, vile and racist.” (Kiichiro Sato/AP)
His claim was quickly undercut by others. Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), one of the attendees, directly contradicted the president’s statement, saying the president used words that were “hate-filled, vile and racist.” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who has been courted by the president, issued a statement of his own that implicitly backed up Durbin. Graham said he had conveyed his feelings about what was said at the meeting directly to the president at the time. Graham notably did not side with Trump’s version of events.
Two other senators at the meeting, Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and David Perdue (R-Ga.), both of whom opposed the bipartisan deal Durbin and Graham had brought to the president for his consideration, claimed they could not recall the language “specifically,” which is hardly an affirmation of the president’s explanation.
Trump has been at this place before on the issue of race. In 2011, as he was toying with running for president, he trafficked in the false allegation that President Obama was not born in the United States, claiming at one point that he had sent private investigators to Hawaii to find the evidence.
Obama punctured that canard by producing his long-form birth certificate. But the overt attempt to profit from the birther issue paid dividends politically for Trump and set him on a path that eventually put him in the Oval Office.
Through the course of the 2016 campaign, he attacked Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals. He attacked a federal judge born in the United States of Mexican heritage, a judge who happened to be overseeing a lawsuit against Trump University. He got into a fight with a Gold Star family, who happened to be Muslim and whose son was killed in the Iraq War, after they used the platform of the Democratic National Committee to criticize his campaign proposal for a ban on Muslim immigration.
As president, he twice offered kind words for the white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville, saying that among them were some “very fine people.” Later, he called National Football League players who knelt during the national anthem, in protest of policing practices in some African American communities, sons of bitches and said the owners should fire them.
Now he has used a horrible vulgarity to denigrate nations whose immigrants to the United States have made valuable contributions to the country. He compounded his dismissal of those countries by asking why the United States country cannot take more immigrants from places such as Norway, which happens to be predominantly white.
Condemnations came quickly from different parts of the political spectrum. A U.N. human rights spokesman said there was no other word than “racist” to describe Trump’s comment. The episode once again left the president politically isolated, save for those who either agree with him or are willing to set aside their discomfort, as many voters did when he was elected.
What the president said in the Oval Office on Thursday was only the most shocking of the comments that have marked the early days of 2018. He has continued his attacks on the First Amendment and freedom of the press. He has questioned the libel laws of the country, which protect the press in covering public figures, except in cases of recklessness and malice.
His response to events that go against him is to lash out by declaring that the processes of our democratic system are rigged or broken. His perspective on democratic governance is viewed almost entirely through the lens of whether he, personally, is winning or losing.
For some Trump advisers and for many Republican elected officials, there is an almost automatic reaction to turn away when things like this occur, either to pretend what happened did not happen or to dismiss them as a president blowing off steam, like somebody ranting in a bar.
The consequences are far greater. As these kinds of comments pile one on top of another, they define the Trump presidency — and, in the eyes of much of the world, the current state of United States and the Republican Party itself — as much as the policies he and party leaders are pursuing.
Michelle Williams is breaking her silence on the pay gap that surrounded the reshoots of All the Money in the World.
“Today isn’t about me,” she said in a statement sent to USA TODAY Saturday evening by her rep, Mara Buxbaum. “My fellow actresses stood by me and stood up for me, my activist friends taught me to use my voice, and the most powerful men in charge, they listened and they acted. If we truly envision an equal world, it takes equal effort and sacrifice.”
In the wake of a public outcry over the Hollywood pay gap, Mark Wahlberg and his agency William Morris Endeavor said Saturday morning they are committing $2 million to the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, in recognition of the pay discrepancy during the reshoots for All the Money in the World, according to a statement provided to USA TODAY by WME spokesperson Marie Sheehy. Wahlberg has pledged his $1.5 million fee and WME has donated $500,000. Both donations will be made in Michelle Williams’ name.
Wahlberg explained his decision on Saturday when the announcement was made. “Over the last few days my reshoot fee for All the Money in the World has become an important topic of conversation,” Wahlberg said in the statement. “I 100% support the fight for fair pay and I’m donating the $1.5M to the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund in Michelle Williams’ name.”
WME said the conversation over the pay discrepancy is “a reminder that those of us in a position of influence have a responsibility to challenge inequities, including the gender wage gap.”
“It’s crucial that this conversation continues within our community and we are committed to being part of the solution,” the company’s statement continued.
In an exclusive report, USA TODAY first reported the pay discrepancy Tuesday, revealing Williams was paid an $80 per diem totaling less than $1,000 for the reshoots while Wahlberg was paid $1.5 million. That math works out to Williams being paid less than one-tenth of 1% of her male co-star.
WME represented both Wahlberg and Williams during negotiations for All the Money in the World, including the film’s reshoots.
More: Three major arguments happening around the Hollywood pay gap, explained
USA TODAY reported Thursday that Wahlberg exercised a co-star approval clause in his contract and refused to approve Christopher Plummer as a replacement for Kevin Spacey in All the Money in the World unless he was paid over a million dollars.
The reshoots took place in Europe over the Thanksgiving holiday after All the Money star Kevin Spacey, who played billionaire J. Paul Getty in the film, became embroiled in a sexual misconduct scandal last fall.
On Saturday, WME noted the $500,000 donation in Williams’ name is in addition to the $1 million pledge the company made to the organization earlier this month.
The pay gap controversy caused an outcry in Hollywood, with stars like Jessica Chastain and Eva Longoria and more expressing outrage over the news on social media.
On Thursday night, Olivia Munn roasted Wahlberg from the stage of the Critics’ Choice Awards during a sarcastic toast segment.
Williams called the outcome of her story going public “one of the most indelible days of my life” and publicly saluted Anthony Rapp, whose early allegations against Spacey opened the door for others to come forward last fall.
“Today is one of the most indelible days of my life because of Mark Wahlberg, WME and a community of women and men who share in this accomplishment,” said the actress. “Anthony Rapp, for all the shoulders you stood on, now we stand on yours.”
At no time, officials said, was there any indication that a nuclear attack had been launched on the United States. The Federal Communications Commission announced that it had begun “a full investigation into the FALSE missile alert in Hawaii.”
The alert went out at about 8:10 a.m., lighting up phones of people still in bed, having coffee by the beach at a Waikiki resort, or up for an early surf. “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL,” it read.
Hawaii has been on high emotional alert — it began staging monthly air-raid drills, complete with sirens, in December — since President Trump and Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea, began exchanging nuclear threats. Estimates vary, but it would take a little more than half an hour for a missile launched from North Korea to reach Hawaii, traversing an arc of roughly 5,700 miles. State officials said that residents here would have as little as 12 minutes to find shelter once an alert was issued.
Within moments of the first announcement, people flocked to shelters, crowding highways in scenes of terror and helplessness. Emergency sirens wailed in parts of the state, adding to the panic.
“I was running through all the scenarios in my head, but there was nowhere to go, nowhere to pull over to,” said Mike Staskow, a retired military captain.
Allyson Niven, who lives in Kailua-Kona, said her first instinct was to gather her family as she contemplated what she thought would be her final minutes alive.
“We fully felt like we were about to die,” she said. “I drove to try to get to my kids even though I knew I probably wouldn’t make it, and I fully was visualizing what was happening while I was on the road. It was awful.”
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
Ray Gerst was vacationing on Oahu with his wife to celebrate their 28th wedding anniversary. He received the alert as they pulled up for their tour of Kualoa Ranch.
“All the buses stopped, and people came running out of the ranch and said, ‘Just sit still for a minute, nobody get off the bus, nobody get off the bus,’” he said.
They were taken into the mountains, Mr. Gerst said, and dropped off at a concrete bunker. They sheltered in place for about 15 minutes, he said, during which time they had no cell signal.
“It was scary,” Mr. Gerst said. “I mean, there was no intel.”
At Konawaena High School on the Island of Hawaii, where a high school wrestling championship was taking place, school officials, more accustomed to alerts of high surf or tsunamis, moved people to the center of the gym as they tried to figure out how to take shelter from a missile.
“Everyone cooperated,” said Kellye Krug, the athletic director at the school. “Once they were gathered, we let them use cellphones to reach loved ones. There were a couple kids who were emotional, the coaches were right there to console kids. After the retraction was issued, we gave kids time to reach out again.”
Matt LoPresti, a state representative, told CNN that he and his family headed for a bathroom. “I was sitting in the bathtub with my children, saying our prayers,” he said.
Natalie Haena, 38, of Honolulu, said she was getting ready to take her daughter to ice skating lessons when the alert came. “There’s nothing to prep for a missile coming in,” she said. “We have no bomb shelters or anything like that. There’s nowhere to go.”
Photo
An electronic sign reading “Missile alert in error: There is no threat” on a highway in Hawaii. Credit
Anthony Quintano/Civil Beat
In Washington, Lindsay Walters, a deputy press secretary, said that President Trump had been informed of the events. “The president has been briefed on the state of Hawaii’s emergency management exercise,” she said. “This was purely a state exercise.”
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii said the mistake was “totally inexcusable.”
“The whole state was terrified,” he said. “There needs to be tough and quick accountability and a fixed process.”
Newsletter Sign Up
Continue reading the main story
Thank you for subscribing.
An error has occurred. Please try again later.
You are already subscribed to this email.
View all New York Times newsletters.
See Sample
Manage Email Preferences
Not you?
Privacy Policy
Opt out or contact us anytime
While the cellphone alerting system is in state authorities’ hands, the detection of missile launches is the responsibility of the United States Strategic Command and Northern Command. It was the military — not Hawaiian officials — that was the first to declare there was no evidence of a missile launch.
The false alert was a stark reminder of what happens when the old realities of the nuclear age collide with the speed — and the potential for error — inherent in the internet age. The alert came at one of the worst possible moments — when tension with North Korea has been at one of the highest points in decades, and when Mr. Kim’s government has promised more missile tests and threatened an atmospheric nuclear test.
During the Cold War there were many false alarms. William J. Perry, the defense secretary during the Clinton administration, recalled in his memoir, “My Journey at the Nuclear Brink,” a moment in 1979 when, as an undersecretary of defense, he was awakened by a watch officer who reported that his computer system was showing 200 intercontinental ballistic missiles headed to the United States. “For one heart-stopping second I thought my worst nuclear nightmare had come true,” Mr. Perry wrote.
It turned out that a training tape had been mistakenly inserted into an early-warning system computer. No one woke up the president. But Mr. Perry went on to speculate what might have happened if such a warning had come “during the Cuban Missile Crisis or a Mideast war?”
The United States faces an especially difficult problem today, not just because of tense relations with North Korea but also because of growing fears inside the military about the cyber vulnerability of the nuclear warning system and nuclear control systems.
Because of its location, Hawaii — more than any other part of the United States — has been threatened by escalating tensions and the risks of war, and preparations have already begun there.
On Friday, the day before the erroneous alert, several hundred people attended an event in Honolulu sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce in which military commanders, politicians and others discussed the threat to the islands’ population.
“The U.S. is the designated recipient — and that’s because we are public enemy No. 1 to North Korea,” Dan Leaf, a retired Air Force lieutenant general and Pacific Command deputy commander, was quoted as saying in the Honolulu Star Advertiser.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
The Hawaii Emergency Management Agency has been holding “are you ready” drills. As a chain of islands, Hawaii is subject to all kinds of threats — hurricanes, volcanoes, earthquakes and tsunamis — but officials have made clear that none is more urgent now than the threat of an attack by North Korea, given how little time there would be between an alert and the detonation of a bomb.
The fifth page of an emergency preparation pamphlet issued by the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency features a picture of a rocket lifting off: “Nuclear Threat — Unlikely But Cannot Ignore It.”
Vern T. Miyagi, the administrator of the agency, said that during the drill, an employee — whom he did not identify — mistakenly pushed a button on a computer screen to send out the alert, rather than one marked to test it. He said the employee answered “yes” when asked by the system if he was sure he wanted to send the message.
Mr. Miyagi, going through a detailed timeline of the events at an afternoon news conference, said the agency tried to correct the error on social media. It took 38 minutes to send out a follow-up message canceling the original alert, which he acknowledged was a shortcoming with the alert system that the agency would fix.
Mr. Rapoza said he did not know if anyone would be disciplined for the mistake. “At this point, our major concern is to make sure we do what we need to do to reassure the public,” he said. “This is not a time for pointing fingers.”
The panic that followed the alert — if relatively short-lived — gripped the islands. There were reports of people seeking shelter by parking their cars inside a highway tunnel that cuts through a mountain. When the announcement was rescinded, a digital highway sign read: “Missile alert in error: There is no threat.”
People in Hawaii tend to know what to do to protect themselves to threats of a tsunami or a hurricane. The prospect of nuclear annihilation was entirely new terrain.
“So this was the most terrifying few minutes of my LIFE!” Paul Wilson, a professor at Brigham Young University-Hawaii, said on Twitter. “I just want to know why it took 38 minutes to announce it was a mistake?!?”
Chris Tacker, a veteran who lives in Kealakekua, said the mistake had left her angry and frustrated.
“I didn’t know where to go,” she said. “Anyone try to dig a hole in lava? Good luck trying to build a shelter. I’m stocking my liquor cabinet.”
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
Still, she added, “If we don’t have our sense of humor about this, it’s all over.”
Correction: January 13, 2018
An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of a retired Air Force lieutenant general quoted in the Honolulu Star Advertiser. The general’s name is Dan Leaf, not Leak.
Last year the United States ambassador to Britain, Woody Johnson, said that he hoped Mr. Trump would visit in early 2018 and dedicate the new embassy, providing the opportunity for a symbolically important, but lower-key, visit to a close ally.
No official statement had been made about the visit, and no formal invitation had been issued, although diplomats were known to be trying to organize a meeting, and the embassy opening was an obvious moment at which to do so.
Then, late on Thursday night, the president took to his favorite medium, Twitter, and announced that he had scrapped his trip because he was unhappy with the new building, and the decision to quit the old site in central London, which has been taken over by the Qatari royal family’s property company, which plans to convert it into a luxury hotel.
Reason I canceled my trip to London is that I am not a big fan of the Obama Administration having sold perhaps the best located and finest embassy in London for “peanuts,” only to build a new one in an off location for 1.2 billion dollars. Bad deal. Wanted me to cut ribbon-NO!
His critics in Britain gave that explanation little credence. Ed Miliband, the former Labour Party leader, responded to Mr. Trump’s announcement on Twitter, saying: “Nope. It’s because nobody wanted you to come. And you got the message.”
Nope it’s because nobody wanted you to come. And you got the message. https://t.co/9xV7bFZQgL
The old United States Embassy, in a famous square in the exclusive Mayfair neighborhood, was deemed to be vulnerable to terrorist attacks. The new one, which includes a small moat, is a high-tech construction in a former rail yard on the South Bank of the Thames.
Though Mr. Trump blamed the Obama administration for the move, the first announcement of new embassy site had been made in 2008 during the administration of President George W. Bush.
In a statement released on Friday the United States Embassy in London said that, in 2007, a plan was developed “to finance a new embassy project through a property swap for existing U.S. government property in London. This solution allowed construction of a new chancery that meets all security standards, yet used no tax payer dollars to fund the project.”
Video
Britons Protest May’s Support of Trump
Demonstrators marched in London and other British cities on Monday to voice their displeasure for President Trump and to protest the backing he has received from Prime Minister Theresa May.
By CAMILLA SCHICK, ROBIN LINDSAY, ILIANA MAGRA and CLAIRE BARTHELEMY on Publish Date January 30, 2017.
“The project budget was approximately $1 billion and includes the site purchase, design, and construction costs. The project has been executed within the established budget,” the statement added.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
In response to Mr. Trump’s statement, Britain’s foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, accused the opposition Labour Party’s leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and the London major, Sadiq Khan, of having endangered the trans-Atlantic relationship.
The US is the biggest single investor in the UK – yet Khan Corbyn seem determined to put this crucial relationship at risk. We will not allow US-UK relations to be endangered by some puffed up pompous popinjay in City Hall.
But the furor illustrates the extent to which any potential visit by Mr. Trump to Britain has become politically polarizing, even as the country’s establishment grapples with the question of whether to invite the president to the wedding of Prince Harry and the American actress Meghan Markle.
Mr. Trump visited several continental European countries last year, including France, where President Emmanuel Macron’s handling of his American counterpart appeared to make the British look fumbling.
“Macron treated Trump with respect and warmth on the one hand,” said Mark Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, a research institute, “but on the other hand was principled in defense of French interests, and didn’t give an iota on the substance.”
By contrast, Mrs. May was “all over the place,” Mr. Leonard added.
“There was the attempt to rush over to the U.S. to embrace him, then she became implicated in the things he was doing, and then she had to pull back, so she’s been zigzagging,” he said. “Britain then gets the worst of all worlds because it has confused everyone.”
While Mrs. May is keen to create closer ties with Washington, on many global issues her approach is more closely aligned with the positions of the European Union. She has expressed support both for the Paris climate change accord and the Iran nuclear deal, for example.
Mr. Khan said the president’s Twitter postings made clear that Mrs. May had been mistaken to extend an invitation to Mr. Trump so quickly. “It appears that President Trump got the message from the many Londoners who love and admire America and Americans but find his policies and actions the polar opposite of our city’s values of inclusion, diversity and tolerance,” he said Friday in a Twitter post.
Many Londoners have made it clear that Donald Trump is not welcome here while he is pursuing such a divisive agenda. It seems he’s finally got that message. pic.twitter.com/YD0ZHuWtr3
Mr. Trump’s most vocal supporter in Britain, Nigel Farage, former leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party, told the BBC that he regretted that the president would not be opening the embassy.
“It’s disappointing. He’s been to countries all over the world and yet he’s not been to the one with whom he’s closest. I would say it’s disappointing.
“But maybe, just maybe, Sadiq Khan, Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party planning mass protests, maybe those optics he didn’t like the look of,” Mr. Farage added.
Yet there was no disguising the delight of some of Mr. Trump’s critics at the news. One opposition Labour Party lawmaker, David Lammy, wrote on Twitter: “Happy Friday everyone.”
He also ordered targeted sanctions against the head of Iran’s judiciary, Sadeq Larijani, a powerful figure whom the administration holds culpable for the violent crackdown on the protests, as well as against an Iranian cyberwarfare unit that it accuses of internet censorship.
The nuclear deal, Mr. Trump said, drove Iranians into the streets because the government misused the proceeds from the lifting of sanctions. “It has served as a slush fund for weapons, terror and oppression, and to further line the pockets of corrupt regime leaders,” he said in a statement.
But that is precisely why European leaders argue that keeping the deal in place makes even more sense now: because it keeps a harsh spotlight on Iran’s leaders, and their malfeasance, rather than allowing the Iranians to paint the United States and its allies as the villains.
Diplomats from several European countries said that renegotiating the deal was a nonstarter. The best Mr. Trump could hope for, one official said, would be a commitment from Europe to begin work on a new and separate agreement. Such a step, they said, would require the participation of China and Russia, which are also signatories to the deal, as well as Iran itself — something the White House ruled out.
“If we want seriously to be able to raise the price to the Iranians of what they are doing internally and externally, we need the Europeans,” said Dennis B. Ross, a former adviser to President Barack Obama who helped devise his Iran policy. “But if they think that we are only interested in walking away from the nuclear deal, they won’t join us.”
The administration, other experts said, is locked into a policy that has two major pillars: dismantling Mr. Obama’s nuclear deal and confronting Iran on its aggression in the region, through its support of militant groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon and other proxies in Yemen, Syria and Iraq.
That is not surprising, given that the defense secretary, Jim Mattis, and the national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, are former commanders who served in Iraq and blame Iran for the death of American soldiers there.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
Even below that level, the administration’s Iran policy is heavily influenced by the military. Joel Rayburn, the top Iran policymaker at the National Security Council, is a former military intelligence officer, as is Andrew L. Peek, a senior Iran policymaker at the State Department. Several of the department’s nonmilitary Iran experts have been pushed out in recent months.
Photo
President Trump’s action, which was widely expected, is the third time he has given a reprieve to the agreement. Credit
Abedin Taherkenareh/European Pressphoto Agency
Now, the administration is suddenly grappling with an Iranian government that is weakened and divided by the protests — a political development that the Americans did not anticipate.
“When you’re dealing with Iran’s regional affairs, you’re dealing with how it supplies proxies and militias,” said Ray Takeyh, an Iran expert at the Council on Foreign Relations who worked in the Obama administration. “If you’re thinking about Iran’s internal problems, that is a more difficult problem. You’re thinking about fissures, and how to exploit them.”
Mr. Takeyh said Mr. Obama was similarly caught off guard in 2009 by the protests that became known as the Green Movement. At the time, he was trying to entice Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, into talks. That is one reason he reacted so little to those protests — a reaction that Mr. Trump criticized in his statement on Friday.
Newsletter Sign Up
Continue reading the main story
Thank you for subscribing.
An error has occurred. Please try again later.
You are already subscribed to this email.
View all New York Times newsletters.
See Sample
Manage Email Preferences
Not you?
Privacy Policy
Opt out or contact us anytime
Ideally, Mr. Ross said, policy toward Iran would be a mix of coercive measures and diplomatic inducements. “With Obama, one could argue that the coercive part of the equation was not believable,” he said. “With Trump, the diplomatic side of the equation may prove not to be believable.”
The White House appears to recognize the weakness in its diplomatic ranks. It is considering the appointment of a special envoy for Iran, who could negotiate with the Europeans on the nuclear deal, as well as marshal a stronger response to Iran’s behavior in the region.
Any envoy would face a tough task: Administration officials said Mr. Trump was demanding an agreement that would eliminate all “sunset clauses,” under which Iran can resume activities like enriching uranium, and would explicitly link its nuclear and ballistic missile programs. Iran fought against both of these demands in the negotiations that led to the 2015 deal.
With North Korea, the administration’s policy has been more balanced between diplomacy and military planning. But the talks between the Koreas have undermined Mr. Trump’s strategy, which is to impose maximum pressure on Pyongyang — including the threat of a military strike — to pressure Mr. Kim into giving up his nuclear arsenal.
The White House has sent General McMaster and the N.S.C.’s top Asia policymaker, Matthew Pottinger, to San Francisco, where they will meet with their counterparts from South Korea and Japan to discuss the implications of the North-South dialogue.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
General McMaster has spoken publicly about the need to prepare for a “preventive war” against North Korea. Mr. Pottinger, a retired Marine, also has a background in military intelligence, though at other times, he worked as a journalist and for a hedge fund.
White House officials are deeply skeptical of the overture from Mr. Kim to South Korea. They say he is trying to drive a wedge between South Korea and the United States. And they have urged the South Koreans to keep the exchanges limited to narrow issues, like security at the coming Winter Olympics in the South Korean town of Pyeongchang.
Mr. Trump, however, appears caught between continuing to heap ridicule on Mr. Kim and taking credit for the diplomatic opening. At Camp David last weekend, the president said he hoped the talks ranged far beyond the Olympics, and he backed them in a call with South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in.
The trajectory of the talks may be out of Mr. Trump’s control anyway, according to experts on the region. Mr. Moon was elected on a platform of reducing tensions with the North. Young South Koreans, in particular, view Mr. Trump’s threats of war on North Korea with alarm — sometimes even more than the danger posed by Mr. Kim.
“The North Korea issue may be entering a new phase,” said Evan S. Medeiros, the top Asia adviser in Mr. Obama’s N.S.C. “Moon’s agenda and perceptions seem to be evolving, and, as cynical as we all are about North Korea, it is worth asking the question: Is Kim actually looking for a negotiated off-ramp, and what would such behavior look like?”
“Is the Trump administration, which has understandably focused on coercive tools to date, nimble enough to respond to this evolution?” he said.
