The Florence police said the club’s cameras showed the women leaving with two officers. The women told prosecutors that they were intoxicated and had smoked marijuana that evening, according to Italian news media reports, and that the officers accompanied them to their apartment in a service vehicle. The women live in Borgo Santi Apostoli, in the historic center of the city.
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Prosecutors in Florence are investigating the accusations and have taken statements from the two women, who, according to Italian news media reports, are from New Jersey and Maine, and are studying at Lorenzo de’ Medici – The Italian International Institute. The Italian authorities have collected potential evidence, including the women’s clothes, and the women underwent medical examinations and DNA tests at a Florence hospital.
Florence is Italy’s center for study-abroad programs and is a popular destination for American students. Many leading American universities operate programs in the city and house students in villas there.
The explosive allegations have dominated news coverage throughout Italy, with articles about them at the top of the country’s newspapers and news websites. On Saturday, the website of Italy’s largest newspaper, Corriere della Sera, featured a video with illustrations depicting the night’s events set to haunting piano music.
“If this is true, and I hope that light is shed on the matter as soon as possible, then it would be an act of unheard-of gravity,” Gen. Tullio Del Sette, the commander of the Carabinieri, told the ANSA news agency.
President Trump prepared for the pivotal meeting with congressional leaders by huddling with his senior team — his chief of staff, his legislative director and the heads of Treasury and the Office of Management and Budget — to game out various scenarios on how to fund the government, raise the debt ceiling and provide Hurricane Harvey relief.
But one option they never considered was the that one the president ultimately chose: cutting a deal with Democratic lawmakers, to the shock and ire of his own party.
In agreeing to tie Harvey aid to a three-month extension of the debt ceiling and government funding, Trump burned the people who are ostensibly his allies. The president was an unpredictable — and, some would say, untrustworthy — negotiating partner with not only congressional Republicans but also with his Cabinet members and top aides. Trump saw a deal that he thought was good for him — and he seized it.
The move should come as no surprise to students of Trump’s long history of broken alliances and agreements. In business, his personal life, his campaign and now his presidency, Trump has sprung surprises on his allies with gusto. His dealings are frequently defined by freewheeling spontaneity, impulsive decisions and a desire to keep everyone guessing — especially those who assume they can control him.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), flanked by Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), left, and Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Tex.) speaks Wednesday at the Capitol after President Trump overruled Republicans and his treasury secretary to cut a deal with Democrats. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
He also repeatedly demonstrates that, while he demands absolute loyalty from others, he is ultimately loyal to no one but himself.
“It makes all of their normalizing and ‘Trumpsplaining’ look silly and hollow,” said Rick Wilson, a Republican strategist sharply critical of Trump, referring to his party’s congressional leaders. “Trump betrays everyone: wives, business associates, contractors, bankers and now, the leaders of the House and Senate in his own party. They can’t explain this away as [a] 15-dimensional Trump chess game. It’s a dishonest person behaving according to his long-established pattern.”
But what many Republicans saw as betrayal was, in the view of some Trump advisers, an exciting return to his campaign promise of being a populist dealmaker able to cut through the mores of Washington to get things done.
In that Wednesday morning Oval Office meeting, Trump was impressed with the energy and vigor of Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) relative to the more subdued Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.). Far from fretting over the prospect of alienating McConnell and Ryan or members of his administration, he relished the opportunity for a bipartisan agreement and the praise he anticipated it would bring, according to people close to the president.
On Thursday morning, he called Pelosi and Schumer to crow about coverage of the deal — “The press has been incredible,” he told Pelosi, according to someone familiar with the call — and point out that it had been especially positive for the Democratic leaders.
At the White House later that day, Trump asked Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.) how he thought the deal was playing. “I told him I thought it was great, and a gateway project to show there could be bipartisan progress,” King said. “He doesn’t want to be in an ideological straitjacket.”
In some ways, White House officials said, Trump is as comfortable working with Democrats to achieve policy goals — complete with the sheen of bipartisan luster — as he is with Republicans. Though he did not partner with Democrats to spite McConnell and Ryan, aides said, he has long felt frustrated with them for what he perceives as their inability to help shepherd his agenda through Congress, most notably their stalled efforts to undo former president Barack Obama’s signature health-care law.
On Thursday, Trump took to Twitter to express dissatisfaction with his adopted political party, complaining about Obamacare: “Republicans, sorry, but I’ve been hearing about Repeal Replace for 7 years, didn’t happen!” He also bemoaned the legislative filibuster, which requires Republicans to work with Democrats to meet a 60-senator threshold for most votes, writing, “It is a Repub Death wish.”
Ari Fleischer, press secretary under President George W. Bush, said that Trump deserves credit for staving off, at least in the short term, a possible default and government shutdown.
“It’s going to internally hurt him that he didn’t work with Republicans on this one, but by avoiding a mess, he likely saved Republicans from themselves,” Fleischer said. “I consider it a small victory that congressional Republicans didn’t once again trip themselves up over this issue. At least for now.”
King, a moderate who represents a Long Island district that Trump carried, said: “I think this could be a new day for the Republican Party.”
Trump’s agreement with the Democrats is hardly the first time the president has flouted his allies, including those around the world, sending them skittering nervously in response to a threat or a sudden turnabout.
Foreign diplomats euphemistically describe the president as “unpredictable,” and even those with good relationships with the United States say they are “cautiously optimistic” that Trump’s behavior will continue to benefit their nations.
On the issue of the debt-ceiling extension and short-term government funding, a GOP aide familiar with Wednesday’s meeting said many Republicans viewed Trump’s decision as “a spur-of-the-moment thing” that happened because the president “just wanted a deal.”
“He saw a deal and wanted the deal, and it just happened to be completely against what we were pushing for,” said the aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer a candid assessment. “Our conclusion is there isn’t much to read into other than he made that decision on the spot, and that’s what he does because he’s Trump, and he made an impulsive decision because he saw a deal he wanted.”
From the outset, the meeting did not go as Republican leaders and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin had hoped. They began by pushing for an 18-month extension of the debt ceiling, with Mnuchin lecturing the group of longtime legislators about the importance of raising the debt ceiling, according to three people familiar with the gathering who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
“It was just odd and weird,” one said. “He was very much a duck out of water.”
The treasury secretary presented himself as a Wall Street insider, arguing that the stability of the markets required an 18-month extension.
At one point, Schumer intervened with a skeptical question: “So the markets dictate one month past the 2018 election?” he asked, rhetorically, according to someone with knowledge of his comment. “I doubt that.”
At another, Pelosi explained that understanding Wall Street is not the same as operating in Congress. “Here the currency of the realm is the vote,” she told reporters in a news conference Thursday, echoing the comments she had made privately the day before. “You have the votes, no discussion necessary. You don’t have the votes, three months.”
The Republican leaders and Mnuchin slowly began moderating their demands, moving from their initial pitch down to 12 months and then six months. At one point, when Mnuchin was in the middle of yet another explanation, the president cut him off, making it clear that he disagreed.
The deal would be for three months tied to Harvey funding, Trump said — just as the Democrats had wanted.
On Friday morning, at a closed-door meeting of House Republicans, numerous lawmakers vented their frustrations to Mnuchin and White House budget director Mick Mulvaney. One of them, Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.), stood up to say he thought Trump’s snub of Ryan — who had publicly rejected Democrats’ offer hours before Trump accepted it — was also a snub of Republicans at large.
“I support the president, I want him to be successful, I want our country to be successful,” Zeldin said in an interview afterward. “But I personally believe the president had more leverage than he may have realized. He had more Democratic votes than he realized, and could have and would have certainly gotten a better deal.”
Democrats remain skeptical about just how long their newfound working relationship with Trump will last. But for Republicans, the turnabout was yet another reminder of what many of them have long known but refused to openly admit: Trump is a fickle ally and partner, liable to turn on them much in the same way he has turned on his business associates and foreign allies.
“Looking to the long term, trust and reliability have been essential ingredients in productive relationships between the president and Congress,” said Phil Schiliro, who served as director of legislative affairs under Obama. “Without them, trying to move a legislative agenda is like juggling on quicksand. It usually doesn’t end well.”
JUCHITAN, Mexico — The Catholic priest waited out the earthquake in his spartan quarters, praying that the walls would stand. When he stepped out alone into the colonial courtyard late Thursday, his place of worship had transformed into a ghoulish scene of destruction.
He took in the shattered bell tower, collapsed church walls, two cars pancaked under the rubble. Across the plaza, school classrooms had been flattened. A few blocks away, city hall lay in ruins.
“I couldn’t believe it,” said Lucio Santiago Santiago, 58, the priest at the San Vicente Ferrer church, its foundation dating to the 16th century, in the city that endured some of the most extreme damage from Mexico’s massive earthquake. Within minutes, he said, residents were screaming and shouting about the dead. “It was chaos.”
“This is a historic temple dear to the people’s heart,” Santiago said. “And look at it now.”
In this city that has recorded more than half of the earthquake’s fatalities, residents on Saturday had turned to the work of mourning the dead and cleaning up the wreckage. Teams of rescue workers with search dogs worked their way through the rubble looking for possible survivors while construction workers with backhoes and dump trucks cleared debris. Soldiers and police had sealed off several blocks around the city square while funeral processions passed amid downed power lines and broken glass. At least 36 people are known to have died here.
On Friday night, President Enrique Peña Nieto said that in Juchitan, a city of about 100,000 people in the state of Oaxaca, a third of homes either collapsed or were left uninhabitable by the earthquake. In block after block, there are houses with crumbled concrete walls or collapsed ceramic-tile roofs. Peña Nieto declared a three-day period of national mourning and vowed to help rebuild. By Saturday, the country’s total death toll had risen to 65 people.
The 8.2-magnitude earthquake that began a few minutes before midnight Thursday was centered in the Pacific Ocean off Mexico’s southwestern coast. The rumbling was felt for hundreds of miles and caused buildings to sway in Mexico City. But the damage to lives and property was clustered in southern states such Oaxaca, Chiapas and Tabasco.
Residents in Juchitan are now sleeping outside: in their patios, in the street, or in makeshift hammock camps in parks and plazas. The injured are being treated in the hospital or in clinics converted into triage centers.
Martin Toral Nolasco, a 45-year-old chiropractor who runs a small clinic, said he had helped treat residents with broken arms and legs.
Toral, who is sleeping with his family in the patio of his house, said that because of aftershocks, many residents are afraid to sleep in damaged houses. Prices are skyrocketing in the stores that remain open, he said, as is the cost of a taxi. He said he worries about robberies and possible looting.
“We are starting to see shortages of food,” Toral said.
Outside the city, on the road along the coast from the tourist town of Huatulco, residents worked to repair damage, fixing broken windows, repairing roofs and clearing away small landslides or scattered boulders that had spilled onto the road.
But the earthquake seemed to have concentrated its furies in Juchitan and surrounding towns in the isthmus region in Oaxaca, where Mexico’s waist narrows.
Even as recovery began, Mexico was forced to juggle another emergency, as Hurricane Katia made landfall Friday night along the Gulf Coast, in the state of Veracruz. At least two people died in a mudslide from the storm, which blasted the coastline with 75 mph winds, according to the state governor. Several thousands had evacuated the area.
With weather conditions deteriorating from Hurricane Irma, and a countywide curfew now in effect, Broward County shelters have closed to new arrivals, the county mayor said.
Like the rest of South Florida, the county is under a hurricane warning, a storm surge warning and a local state of emergency. A tornado watch is in effect until midnight and there is a flood watch, Broward Mayor Barbara Sharief said.
More than 17,000 people are at Palm Beach County’s 15 shelters — about a third of the county’s capacity.
Though some shelters were not at full capacity, some people were being relocated to alternate shelters to better accommodate everyone.
The county has been getting calls to its hot line from west coast residents trying to find shelter, said Nicole Bishop, emergency information center manager.
With the exception of the pet friendly shelter, Palm Beach County shelters accept everyone regardless of residency, officials said.
Earlier in the day, some South Floridians who had taken refuge in shelters for Irma returned to their homes, reacting to how the storm’s projected course shifted to exclude southeast Florida. Officials urged everyone in shelters to remain there, despite the forecast showing Hurricane Irma moving west, because it’ll be dangerous as the weather worsens.
At least 50 people left Park Vista Community High School on Saturday morning, said Reggie Myers, principal.
A volunteer at Park Vista Community High said that so many people have left they aren’t sure how to keep track. Still, Myers and others are urging residents to stay. “The storm is unpredictable,” Myers said. “Who knows what could happen?”
Park Vista Community High has already taken in nearly 1,000 people and has room for at least 4,000 more.
Also Saturday morning, six people had left the West Boynton Recreation Center, a pet-friendly shelter, said Elizabeth Harfmann, a spokeswoman for Palm Beach County Animal Care and Control. The shelter can’t force people to stay, though they are urging them to, she said.
“We’ve had a few people check out this morning because they feel it’s safe enough to go home,” she said.
Independence Middle School and West Gate Elementary School were at capacity.
Shelters have capacity for about 43,500 people. Forty-three slots remain at the pet-friendly shelter at the West Boynton Recreation Center. Donations are no longer being accepted at shelters, and residents not in evacuation zones are advised to stay at home.
A countywide curfew in Palm Beach County also is in effect.
Broward County opened two additional shelters Saturday morning, including one that is taking people with pets.
Broward officials say they had a small number of people who have voluntarily left the shelters. Those wishing to leave weren’t prevented from doing so as long as the facility wasn’t on lockdown. The shelters were on lockdown at 4 p.m. to coincide with the county curfew.
Many families filed into shelters through the day.
Laureen Cikora evacuated her RV in Davie with her dog, Spice, and headed to Lakeside Elementary School, which allows pets. She said she wished she was better prepared by having a dog crate for Spice, but she’s glad to be safe at the shelter.
“This is scary,” Cikora said. “May God have mercy on us. You think I’m going to leave my dog in a camper? Our pets are like our kids.”
Outside Park Vista Community High, under a patched-gray sky, Dulce Pineda, 18, of Boca Raton, waited with her father and her sisters, ages 7, 3, and 1.
With her headphones plugged in and her eyes cast toward her phone, Pineda waited for another half-dozen family members to arrive before heading into the shelter.
“We saw it was dangerous to be home,” she said.
Marty Hoffer, 68, a retired Miami-Dade County teacher, was a little hesitant about leaving the family cat at the pet shelter at Millennium Middle School in Tamarac. Hoffer was staying next door at Challenger Elementary, but thought it was too crowded and uncomfortable, so he left to go stay at Everglades School in Weston instead.
“We had to sleep on kindergarten chairs,” Hoffer said.
Carlos Gonzalez, 62, of Plantation, and his wife tried to take shelter at Plantation Elementary School, but found out they couldn’t bring their dogs, Suki and Rocky. The couple decided to go elsewhere for shelter.
“We’ve been watching the news,” Gonzalez said. “I feel a little scared.”
Ed Martin, 70, was perfectly happy staying at Plantation Elementary with about 400 other people. He was convinced he’d be there through Monday.
“It’s supposed to get worse as the day goes on,” said the retired teacher.
Annette Clarke, 52, took shelter at Plantation Elementary, which is within walking distance of her house. “The more people you are among, it takes your mind off of what’s going on outside,” she said of being in a shelter.
Meanwhile, the West Boynton Recreation Center has already accepted more than 250 pets, and nearly 200 owners, but they still have room for more. Among those seeking refuge: 153 dogs, 83 cats, 15 birds, two sugar gliders.
Yetta Meisner, 70, of Belle Glade, said she went to the shelter last year ahead of Hurricane Matthew and thought it was safe enough for her Quaker parrot Ozzee to go back. “This is very important,” she said. “They must make more shelters for animals. People in Florida love their animals.”
Staff writers Anne Geggis, Ryan Van Velzer and Taimy Alvarez contributed to this report.
Former Fox News host Eric Bolling’s 19-year-old son died Friday night hours after the network axed his father amid sexual harassment allegations.
Eric Chase Bolling was found dead in Boulder, Col., where he was studying economics at the University of Colorado Boulder, according to reports published Saturday.
Boulder police said the cause of death was still under investigation.
Responding to multiple reports citing suicide, Eric’s father tweeted that authorities told the family “there is no sign of self harm at his point.”
“Autopsy will be next week. Please respect our grieving period,” Bolling added in the tweet.
Earlier in the day, Bolling confirmed the death of his only son with wife Adrienne.
“Adrienne and I are devastated by the loss of our beloved son Eric Chase last night,” Bolling tweeted. “Details still unclear. Thoughts, prayers appreciated.”
Eric Chase Bolling, 19, was found dead Friday. He was the son of former Fox News host Eric Bolling.
Fox News suspended the 54-year-old host in early August after the publication of a Huff Post story detailing the allegations.
The network announced Friday that it cut ties with Bolling, a 10-year network veteran and co-host of “The Specialists,” after conducting a probe into the claims.
“Fox News Channel is canceling ‘The Specialists’, and Eric Bolling and Fox have agreed to part ways amicably,” the network said in a statement to Entertainment Weekly. “We thank Eric for his ten years of service to our loyal viewers and wish him the best of luck.”
The younger Bolling’s death, first reported by HuffPost reporter Yashar Ali, prompted Fox News to release a new statement less than 24 hours after its original.
“We are very saddened to hear of the passing of Eric Bolling’s son,” it said.
Eric Chase Bolling’s untimely death came hours after his father was ousted from Fox News amid allegations that he sent photos of his genitalia to female colleagues.
(Richard Drew/AP)
“Eric Chase was a wonderful young man and our thoughts and prayers are with the entire Bolling family.”
Bolling has denied the sexual harassment allegations and filed a $50 million lawsuit against Ali, the HuffPost reporter who broke the story.
Condolences poured in on social media Saturday.
“@ericbolling To my dear friend, please know we all love you, will be here for you and your family,” Fox News host Sean Hannity wrote on Twitter.
“This is incredibly sad. Just heartbreaking for this family. Deepest condolences,” Joy Reid said.
Gov. Mike Huckabee also sent his support. “Just heard that Fox colleague and friend @ericbolling 19 yr. old son died; Prayers for Eric and family.”
“We thought we were safe,” said a spokeswoman for Collier County who declined to give her name because she was not authorized to discuss the situation. “We thought we were safe like 36 hours ago.”
The spokeswoman said that a forecast at 5 p.m. on Thursday caused county officials to react, readying shelters and helping residents seeking to evacuate.
Starting on Saturday morning, lines that were several blocks long formed outside of shelters such as the Germain Arena, as residents jammed inside.
In Fort Myers, which is in Lee County, buses that were transporting people to shelters stopped running at 3 p.m. to allow the drivers to seek safety, potentially leaving people who had not left their homes in time.
By late Saturday afternoon, all of the shelters in Collier County were at capacity, according to local news reports. Because of the imminent storm surge, officials told people living in one-story homes to try to enter shelters anyway, and people in two-story homes to seek shelter upstairs.
In Miami-Dade County, some people who had flocked to shelters were reassessing their situation on Saturday afternoon after learning that the brunt of the hurricane would most likely be felt farther west.
“We’re going home,” Virginia Lopez, an administrative assistant at Barry University, said as she loaded her 5-year-old poodle mix, Princess, into her Mazda outside a shelter at Highland Oaks Middle School after spending the night there with her daughter and son-in-law. “We decided half an hour ago. The storm has moved to Tampa, so we’re going to get a lot of rain but it won’t be as bad. I don’t feel so scared.”
Photo
Waves crashing against the Malecón seawall in Havana as Hurricane Irma turned toward the Florida Keys on Saturday. Credit
Reuters
Inside, dozens of people lay on cots and blankets in the building’s hallways amid a stench of perspiration and vomit. Some were packing to leave but most seemed resigned to remaining until the storm blows through.
Florida gets an early feel for what’s to come
As Hurricane Irma steered its way toward the Florida Keys on Saturday night, Florida began to feel its approach. The ocean began rising in Key West, spilling into hotel parking lots and roads. In the Keys to the north, water levels toppled over the banks of canals.
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In Miami-Dade, tree branches tumbled and fast-moving bands of powerful rain and wind occasionally made it hard to walk. Orange County issued a mandatory evacuation for all mobile homes.
In Lake Worth in Palm Beach County, a tornado tore through one neighborhood, bringing the telltale freight train rumble and clatter of intense wind. On South Beach, palm trees tilted in the wind, their palm fronds fluttering fiercely.
But these ominous signs of Irma’s churn toward Florida were often short-lived. The storm was still far offshore and not expected to be within striking distance of the Florida Keys until the predawn hours.
Florida Keys face being cut off
In the Florida Keys, emergency officials girded for a direct hit and residents who did not evacuate began to take cover as the winds kicked up sharply Saturday afternoon.
The Keys, a thin chain of low-lying islands, are especially vulnerable to Hurricane Irma’s anticipated powerful tidal surges.
The ocean is expected to rise and hurtle into buildings and houses near the coast. Pine Island, north of Key West, was already seeing rising seas at noon.
Photo
Martin County firefighters preparing to move to another station on Saturday before Hurricane Irma’s arrival in Jensen Beach, Fla. Credit
Jason Henry for The New York Times
Some canals were spilling their bounds and emergency responders were evacuating to the Upper Keys.
But the worst could come after the hurricane moves on. Keys residents could find themselves isolated from the mainland if any one of their 42 bridges gets damaged.
Residents and emergency officials would be cut off from food, gas and other supplies because there would be no easy way of reaching them by road.
“Just think about the Keys for a second,” Mr. Scott warned residents at a recent news conference. “If we lose one bridge, everything south of the bridge, everybody’s going to be stranded. It’s going to take us a while to get back in there to try to provide services.”
A hospital hunkers down
Hurricane Irma has already disrupted Florida’s health systems. As of Saturday night, 29 hospitals, 239 assisted-living centers and 56 other health care facilities in the state were evacuated, according to Jason Mahon, a public information officer at the Florida State Emergency Operations Center. More than 60 shelters had been opened for people with special needs.
Not all health organizations made the difficult choice to transfer their patients out of Irma’s path. Tampa General Hospital, the highest level trauma center in the region, remained open and full of patients and staff, despite being surrounded by water on the tip of Davis Islands.
The hospital is in Zone A, the area most vulnerable to storm surge.
A spokesman for the hospital, John Dunn, said by phone Saturday night that staff members had arrived on Friday to stay throughout the storm and work in shifts to care for the hospital’s approximately 700 patients.
Mr. Dunn said the hospital had submarine doors to protect against flooding, and generators had been elevated from the ground floor to a higher level. They are capable of powering air-conditioning for parts of the buildings, he said.
He added that the hospital’s leaders had spoken in the past with local emergency officials and with the Federal Emergency Management Agency about how the hospital might evacuate. “There are not many resources available to be able to evacuate large numbers of patients,” he said.
Fox News on Friday parted ways with host Eric Bolling and
canceled the show he co-anchored amid allegations that he
sent lewd, unsolicited messages to network employees.
In a brief statement provided to Business Insider, Fox News
confirmed the cancelation of “The Fox News Specialists,” which
was first reported by the Huffington Post on Friday.
“We thank Eric for his ten years of service to our loyal viewers
and wish him the best of luck,” a network spokesperson said.
Bolling
was suspended from Fox News last month amid
allegations that he sent unsolicited photos of male genitalia to
several employees at Fox News and Fox Business Network, where
he was featured before joining Fox News.
The former anchor has denied the allegations,
and sued reporter Yashar Ali for defamation over the
story.
Friday’s decision may preclude a larger lineup shakeup that some
at the network have speculated about since Bolling’s suspension
last month.
CNN’s Brian Stelter
reported in August that conservative pundit Laura Ingraham
was in serious discussions t0 join Fox News’ primetime lineup.
Two sources familiar with the situation told Business
Insider last month that the lineup was still in question but
many suspected “The Five” would move back to its old 5 p.m. slot,
making way for Ingraham to occupy the 9 p.m. slot, where “The
Five” moved earlier this year. Ingraham’s show could also air at
10 p.m., moving host Sean Hannity into the 9 p.m. slot.
JUCHITÁN DE ZARAGOZA, Mexico — Thousands of homes in this city were severely damaged. Half of the 19th-century city hall, with its 30 arches, collapsed. The main hospital here was so devastated that staff members evacuated patients to an empty lot and worked by the light of their cellphones.
By the time the earthquake’s tremors finally faded, at least 36 people in Juchitán de Zaragoza were dead.
“It’s a truly critical situation,” Óscar Cruz López, the city’s municipal secretary, said Friday. “The city,” he said, and then paused. “It’s as if it had been bombed.”
Over all, the earthquake — the most powerful to hit the country in a century — killed at least 58 people in Mexico, all of them in the southern part of the country that was closer to the quake’s epicenter off the Pacific Coast.
The earthquake, which had a magnitude of 8.2 and struck shortly before midnight on Thursday, was felt by tens of millions of people in Mexico and in Guatemala, where at least one person died as well.
In Mexico City, the capital, which still bears the physical and psychological scars of a devastating earthquake in 1985 that killed as many as 10,000 people, alarms sounding over loudspeakers spurred residents to flee into the streets in their pajamas.
The city seemed to convulse in terrifying waves, making street lamps and the Angel of Independence monument, the capital’s signature landmark, sway like a metronome’s pendulum.
But this time, the megalopolis emerged largely unscathed, with minor structural damage and only two of its nearly nine million people reporting injuries, neither serious, officials said.
In the southern part of the country, however, at least 10 people died in Chiapas State and three died in neighboring Tabasco, including two children: one when a wall collapsed and the other after a respirator lost power in a hospital, officials said.
Photo
Residents of Mexico City gathered outdoors after an earthquake struck off the Pacific Coast, about 450 miles away, late Thursday. Credit
Pedro Pardo/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Chiapas officials said that more than 400 houses had been destroyed and about 1,700 others were damaged.
In Oaxaca State, at least 45 people were killed, including the 36 in here in Juchitán, a provincial city of 100,000.
“A total disaster,” the mayor, Gloria Sánchez López, declared in a telephone interview in which she appealed for help. “Don’t leave us alone.”
President Enrique Peña Nieto flew to the region on Friday afternoon to assess the damage. And several leaders in Latin America and elsewhere offered assistance to Mexico, including the presidents of Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela and Spain.
Mexico is also facing the additional threat of Hurricane Katia, which is gathering strength in the Gulf of Mexico and expected to make landfall in Veracruz State early Saturday.
“You can count on us,” President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia said on Twitter.
Residents in Juchitán spent the morning using backhoes and their bare hands to dig through the wreckage of collapsed buildings and pull the injured, and the dead, from the rubble.
By early afternoon, the efforts had mostly turned from rescues to a cleanup operation, though the municipal secretary, Mr. Cruz, said that workers were still trying to claw through the mounds of debris left by the collapse of the city hall to reach one last victim, a police officer. Nobody knew if he was still alive.
“It is a nightmare we weren’t prepared for,” said a member of the City Council, Pamela Teran, in an interview with a local radio station. She estimated that 20 to 30 percent of the houses in the city were destroyed.
“A lot of people have lost everything, and it just breaks your heart,” she added, bursting into tears.
SEPT. 8, 2017
By The New York Times
With the hospital — the region’s main medical center — destroyed, officials converted a grade school into a makeshift clinic and moved the hospital’s patients and the hundreds of injured survivors there.
Local officials appealed to state and federal governments for aid to help with the recovery.
“It’s impossible to resolve this catastrophe, to respond to something of this magnitude, by ourselves,” Mr. Cruz said.
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Aftershocks continued through the day Friday, unnerving the city’s residents, many of whom spent much of the day out in the street rather than return to their homes, said Juan Antonio García, the director of the Juchitán news website Cortamortaja.
Reports of damage elsewhere in the region continued to emerge throughout the afternoon. In Union Hidalgo, just to the east of Juchitán, the mayor reported that about 500 houses had been destroyed.
Schools in at least 10 Mexican states and in Mexico City were closed on Friday as the president ordered an assessment of the damage nationwide.
“We are assessing the damage, which will probably take hours, if not days,” President Peña Nieto said in televised comments to the nation two hours after the quake.
Throughout the day Mexicans lined up at emergency collection centers around the country to donate food, water and other supplies for delivery to the earthquake victims.
Mexico is situated near the colliding boundaries of several sections of the earth’s crust.
The quake on Thursday was more powerful than the one in 1985 that flattened or seriously damaged thousands of buildings in Mexico City.
While the quake on Thursday struck nearly 450 miles from the capital, off the coast of Chiapas State, the one in 1985 was much closer to the capital, so the shaking proved much more deadly.
Photo
Patients in a clinic in Puebla, Mexico, were taken outside after the quake. Credit
Imelda Medina/Reuters
After the 1985 disaster, construction codes were reviewed and stiffened. Today, Mexico’s construction laws are considered as strict as those in the United States or Japan.
Though many Mexicans have grown accustomed to earthquakes, taking them as an immutable fact of life, Thursday’s quake left a lasting impression on residents of the capital for both its force and duration.
“The scariest part of it all is that if you are an adult, and you’ve lived in this city your adult life, you remember 1985 very vividly,” said Alberto Briseño, a 58-year-old bar manager. “This felt as strong and as bad.”
“Now we will do what us Mexicans do so well: Take the bitter taste of this night and move on,” he added.
The quake occurred near the Middle America Trench, a zone in the eastern Pacific where one slab of the earth’s crust, called the Cocos Plate, is sliding under another, the North American, in a process called subduction.
The movement is very slow — about three inches a year — and over time stress builds because of friction between the slabs. At some point, the strain becomes so great that the rock breaks and slips along a fault. This releases vast amounts of energy and, if the slip occurs under the ocean, can move a lot of water suddenly, causing a tsunami.
Subduction zones ring the Pacific Ocean and are also found in other regions. They are responsible for the world’s largest earthquakes and most devastating tsunamis.
The magnitude-9 earthquake off Japan in 2011, which led to the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and the magnitude-9.1 quake in Indonesia in 2004, which spawned tsunamis that killed a quarter of a million people around the Indian Ocean, are recent examples.
Those quakes each released about 30 times as much energy as the one in Mexico.
Mexico’s government issued a tsunami warning off the coast of Oaxaca and Chiapas after Thursday’s quake, but neither state appeared to have been adversely affected by waves.
In Guatemala, the military was out Friday morning assessing the damage, found mainly in the western part of the country.
In Huehuetenango, bricks and glass were strewn on the ground as walls in the city collapsed. Quetzaltenango, Guatemala’s second-largest city, which was beginning to recover from a tremor in June, suffered more damage to its historic center.
Democratic leaders have been running victory laps in the days since they struck a deal with President Trump, over Republican objections, to extend the nation’s borrowing limit and keep the government open for three months.
But new divisions among Democrats show that peril may yet lie ahead for Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), whose newfound connection with the president has put them in a similar spot as many Republicans this year: working with an unreliable and unpopular partner to attain legislative goals that may never materialize.
Trump’s abrupt overtures to Schumer and Pelosi this week have raised difficult questions for the party out of power about how much to collaborate with a mercurial president whose policies and rhetoric have stirred widespread anger and fear on the left.
A growing number of Democratic lawmakers and activists are voicing worries about getting too close to Trump, whom they have held up as the opposite of what they stand for on issues of race, immigration, the environment and the economy — and whom they hope to campaign against in next year’s midterm elections.
At the same time, party leaders are trying to build on the surprise dynamic that materialized this week in hopes of advancing elements of an agenda that has been largely shut out of the legislative process since Republicans assumed control of the White House and Congress in January.
The challenge of that balancing act is compounded by existing struggles that erupted in the party after last year’s election losses and have yet to settle. While they have stood united against Trump this year, Democrats have also been riven by ideological divisions, competing power centers and the lack of a clear identity or leader.
Now, they are at yet another crossroads.
“Our base is deeply alienated from this president,” Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.) said in an interview Friday. “Our base is not saying, ‘Work with him; try to find some common ground.’ ”
“That base,” he added, “will be quite jaded about any overt attempts to make him look good or somehow normalize what we’ve experienced here.”
Connolly, like many Democrats, hopes Trump’s sudden willingness to work with them will pave the way for a legislative deal to help 690,000 young undocumented immigrants brought into the United States as children, who now face an uncertain future after Trump decided this week that in six months, an Obama-era program to protect them will end.
Trump sided with Pelosi and Schumer this week when he backed a three-month extension of the debt ceiling and government funding as part of a package that also offers more than $15 billion in disaster relief funding related to Hurricane Harvey.
Congressional Republican leaders wanted a longer-term deal — in part to avert a December showdown that is likely to give Democrats leverage to usher in a replacement for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program that Trump pledged to end. Republicans had also hoped to avoid voting more than once on raising the nation’s borrowing limit before next year’s midterm elections.
Still, some Democrats are frustrated that party leaders did not demand more in the package that passed this week — notably a more immediate solution to the immigration question.
“I pled with the Democratic leadership not to allow a vote on a continuing resolution on the funding of our government, not to allow a vote on raising the debt limit, if we didn’t bring you with us,” said Rep. Luis V. Gutiérrez (D-Ill.) at a news conference Friday. He later added: “We didn’t prevail.”
In an interview with reporters Friday, Pelosi did not back down from her negotiating tactics. She said she does not think Democratic voters believe that she and Schumer should avoid finding common ground with Trump.
“I make no apology for doing that with the person who is going to sign the bill,” said Pelosi, who was also able to persuade Trump to tweet a reassuring message to young immigrants this week. “It gives you great leverage.”
Others were skeptical.
“Short-term tactics may not serve progressive interests in the long term,” said Norman Solomon, a delegate last year to the Democratic National Convention for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). “I think this whole path of getting chummy with Trump is fraught with land mines and pitfalls, and Trump is an expert at detonating under people’s feet.”
Some Democrats think Trump has warmed to Democrats as a way to punish Republican leaders, with whom he has had troubled relations and with whom he has not achieved any major legislative wins.
For that reason, those Democrats are approaching the president cautiously. They are also reminding themselves of how much they disagree with the ideas that have defined the early months of his presidency.
Those include his proposed ban on entry to the United States by citizens of certain countries, his controversial blaming of both sides after a deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville and his rollback of Obama-era environmental policies, as well as his decision to end DACA.
Democrats have used these developments to begin building a case against the president ahead of the 2018 midterms and the 2020 presidential election. But some strategists said the legislative tactics of the minority party in Congress are a separate question from where the party’s center of gravity lies as the next presidential race approaches. Democrats got something at almost no cost in the deal with Trump, some said.
“The Democrats haven’t lost anything. If you can get a deal entirely on your terms, you’d be nuts not to take it just because Trump is on the other side of the table,” said Brian Fallon, who was Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign press secretary and a former aide to Schumer.
The question of whether cooperating with Trump poses reputational risks for Democrats now or later comes amid echoes of the bitter rift between supporters of Clinton and Sanders during last year’s Democratic primaries.
Those battle lines have re-formed in recent days with the leaking of portions of Clinton’s 2016 memoir, “What Happened,” including a broadside against Sanders for allegedly weakening Democrats and creating an opening for Trump.
“His attacks caused lasting damage, making it harder to unify progressives in the general election and paving the way for Trump’s ‘Crooked Hillary’ campaign. I don’t know if that bothered Bernie or not,” Clinton writes.
Sanders suggested Thursday that the blame lies elsewhere.
“Look, you know, Secretary Clinton ran against the most unpopular candidate in the history of this country, and she lost,” Sanders said during an interview on CBS’s “Late Show” with Stephen Colbert. “And she was upset by that. I understand that.”
In addition to the lingering bitterness from the end of the campaign, some Democrats have also openly questioned the efficacy of their current leaders, including Pelosi. What looks like a wide-open 2020 Democratic primary has left the party without a clear political standard-bearer. Heated intraparty debates have also opened up over whether candidates for office should face litmus tests on abortion and health care.
But when it comes to the first few months of Trump’s presidency, there is far more agreement among Democrats, who have stood forcefully against the president. Still, some have found a way to separate that from the gears of governance.
“I think at the end of the day, if it’s Trump acceding to Democratic demands or Democratic priorities, Democrats believe in government working,” said Neera Tanden, president of the liberal Center for American Progress and a former Clinton aide. “That’s a big difference between us and the other side. People are pragmatic to that extent.”
Asked Friday whether Trump’s agreement with Democrats might become a habit, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said voters expected pragmatism and bipartisanship from Trump. She brushed aside questions about Republican annoyance.
“The most important thing is that the deal got done. The president acted on it, and he worked with Democrats to get it done,” Sanders said. “And I think he’s going to continue to work with whoever is interested in moving the ball forward to help the American people.”
For many unconvinced Democrats, the question that remained unanswered was how long Trump will be interested in working with them. Few are wagering they are at the beginning of a lasting relationship.
“I don’t see it as anything but what’s necessary to get us beyond the moment,” said Rep. James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.), the assistant House Democratic leader. “I don’t see it as anything that is sustained for any relationship going down the road.”
Kelsey Snell and Mike DeBonis contributed to this report.
In addition to the other material, hackers were also able to retrieve names, birth dates and addresses. Credit card numbers for 209,000 consumers were stolen, while documents with personal information used in disputes for 182,000 people were also taken.
Other cyberattacks, such as the two breaches that Yahoo announced in 2016, have eclipsed the penetration at Equifax in sheer size, but the Equifax attack is worse in terms of severity. Thieves were able to siphon far more personal information — the keys that unlock consumers’ medical histories, bank accounts and employee accounts.
“On a scale of 1 to 10 in terms of risk to consumers, this is a 10,” said Avivah Litan, a fraud analyst at Gartner.
An F.B.I. spokesperson said the agency was aware of the breach and was tracking the situation.
Last year, identity thieves successfully made off with critical W-2 tax and salary data from an Equifax website. And earlier this year, thieves again stole W-2 tax data from an Equifax subsidiary, TALX, which provides online payroll, tax and human resources services to some of the nation’s largest corporations.
Cybersecurity professionals criticized Equifax on Thursday for not improving its security practices after those previous thefts, and they noted that thieves were able to get the company’s crown jewels through a simple website vulnerability.
“Equifax should have multiple layers of controls” so if hackers manage to break in, they can at least be stopped before they do too much damage, Ms. Litan said.
Potentially adding to criticism of the company, three senior executives, including the company’s chief financial officer, John Gamble, sold shares worth almost $1.8 million in the days after the breach was discovered. The shares were not part of a sale planned in advance, Bloomberg reported.
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The company handles data on more than 820 million consumers and more than 91 million businesses worldwide and manages a database with employee information from more than 7,100 employers, according to its website.
Equifax also houses much of the data that is supposed to be a backstop against security breaches. The agency offers a service that provides companies with the questions and answers needed for their account recovery, in the event customers lose access to their accounts.
“If that information is breached, you’ve lost that backstop,” said Patrick Harding, the chief technology officer at Ping Identity, a Denver-based identity management company.
Equifax said that, in addition to reporting the breach to law enforcement, it had hired a cybersecurity firm to conduct a review to determine the scale of the invasion. The investigation is expected to wrap up in the next few weeks.
“This is clearly a disappointing event for our company, and one that strikes at the heart of who we are and what we do,” Richard F. Smith, chairman and chief executive of Equifax, said in a statement. “Confronting cybersecurity risks is a daily fight.”
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Using the data stolen from Equifax, identity thieves can impersonate people with lenders, creditors and service providers, who rely on personal identity information from Equifax to make financial decisions regarding potential customers.
Equifax has created a website, www.equifaxsecurity2017.com, to help consumers determine whether their data was at risk.
People can go to the Equifax website to see if their information has been compromised. The site encourages customers to offer their last name and the last six digits of their Social Security number. When they do, however, they do not necessarily get confirmation about whether they were affected. Instead, the site provides an enrollment date for its protection service, and it may not start for several days.
The company also suggests getting a free copy of your credit report from the three major credit bureaus: Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. These are available at annualcreditreport.com. It also suggests contacting a law enforcement agency if you believe any stolen information has already been used in some way.
Equifax’s credit protection service, which is free for one year for consumers who enroll by Nov. 21, is available to everyone and not just the victims of the breach.
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Equifax is offering consumers the ability to freeze their Equifax credit reports, said John Ulzheimer, a consumer credit expert who often does expert witness work for banks and credit unions and worked at Equifax in the 1990s. Thieves could have information stolen from Equifax and used it to open accounts with creditors that use Experian or TransUnion.
“It’s like locking one of three doors in your house and leaving the other two unlocked,” Mr. Ulzheimer said. “You’re hoping the thief stumbles on the locked door.” He recommended that all those affected immediately place a fraud alert on all three of their credit files, which anyone can do for free.
Equifax’s offer of one year of free protection falls short of what consumers really need, because their information can be bought and sold by hackers for years to come, Mr. Ulzheimer added.
Beyond compromising the personal data of millions of consumers, the breach also poses a potential national security threat. In recent years, Chinese nation-state hackers have breached insurers like Anthem and federal agencies, siphoning detailed personal and medical information. These hackers go wide in their assaults in an effort to build databases of Americans’ personal information, which can be used for blackmail or future attacks.
Governments regularly buy stolen personal information on the so-called Dark Web, security experts say. The black market sites where this information is sold are far more exclusive than black markets where stolen credit card data is sold. Interested buyers are even asked to submit to background checks before they are admitted.
“Cyberwar is in large part conducted through data mining and cyberintelligence,” Ms. Litan said. “This is also a Homeland Security risk as enemy nation states build databases of Americans that they then use to get to their targets, for example a network operator at a power grid, or a defense contractor at a missile defense company.”
Sen. Mark R. Warner, a Virginia Democrat who co-founded the Senate Cybersecurity Caucus, said he believed the severity of the Equifax breach raised serious questions about whether Congress needed to rethink data protection policies.
“It is no exaggeration to suggest that a breach such as this — exposing highly sensitive personal and financial information central for identity management and access to credit — represents a real threat to the economic security of Americans,” he said in a statement.
