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Bannon declares war with Republican leadership in Congress

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Stephen K. Bannon — President Trump’s former chief strategist who left the White House in August — declared war Sunday against the Republican congressional leadership, called on Gary Cohn, Trump’s top economic adviser, to resign, and outlined his views on issues ranging from immigration to trade.

Bannon, in an interview on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” accused Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) of “trying to nullify the 2016 election.” It was Bannon’s first television interview since leaving the White House and returning as executive chairman to Breitbart News, the conservative website he previously led.

He blamed them for failing to repeal and replace former president Barack Obama’s signature health-care law and made clear that he would use his Breitbart perch to hold Republicans accountable for not helping Trump push through his agenda.

“They’re not going to help you unless they’re put on notice,” he told CBS’s Charlie Rose. “They’re going to be held accountable if they do not support the president of the United States. Right now there’s no accountability.”

Stressing absolute loyalty to Trump, Bannon criticized members of the administration who, he said, had leaked to the news media their displeasure with the way Trump handled the white-supremacist-fueled violence in Charlottesville, which left one dead and more­ ­injured.

“You can tell him, ‘Hey, maybe you can do it a better way.’ But if you’re going to break, then resign. If you’re going to break with him, resign,” he said. “If you find it unacceptable, you should resign.”

He explicitly mentioned Cohn, Trump’s director of the National Economic Council who had criticized Trump’s response in an interview with the Financial Times, and said he “absolutely” thought Cohn should have resigned.

Bannon joined the Trump campaign in August 2016 and emerged as the president’s ideological id, channeling his populist and nationalist impulses. Though he made many enemies in the West Wing, including the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, and clashed with John F. Kelly, Trump’s second chief of staff, Bannon remains close to Trump.

Recalling a particularly low moment in the campaign — the emergence of the “Access Hollywood” tape that captured Trump bragging about groping women — Bannon dismissed it as “just locker room talk,” but he said the moment served as an important “litmus test” for loyalty to Trump.

At the time, Reince Priebus, Trump’s first chief of staff, urged the then-candidate to either drop out of the race or face a historic loss. And, Bannon said, Gov. Chris Christie (R-N.J.), who served as a campaign adviser overseeing Trump’s transition plan, lost a likely spot in the president’s Cabinet because of his response to the ­video.

“I told him: ‘The plane leaves at 11 o’clock in the morning. If you’re on the plane, you’re on the team,’ ” Bannon said, referring to Christie. “Didn’t make the plane.”

On China, Bannon reiterated his calls for the United States to take a tougher stance over trade and appropriating U.S. technology. “Donald Trump, for 30 years, has singled out China as the biggest single problem we have on the world stage,” he said. ‘The elites in this country have got us in a situation. We’re at not economic war with China; China is at economic war with us.”

And he also seemed to criticize the president’s recent decision to rescind protections for “dreamers” — those 690,000 undocumented immigrants brought to the country as young children — while giving Congress six months to devise a legislative solution. The move, he said, could cost Republicans the House in the 2018 election.

“If this goes all the way down to its logical conclusion, in February and March, it will be a civil war inside the Republican Party that will be every bit as vitriolic as 2013,” Bannon said. “And to me, doing that in the springboard of primary season for 2018 is extremely ­unwise.”

Hurricane Irma to batter Florida Peninsula through the night

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(This post was updated throughout Sunday and last updated at 11:00 p.m. to reflect the latest National Hurricane Center advisory and current conditions in Florida.)

Extremely dangerous Hurricane Irma first crashed into the Florida Keys on Sunday morning and then made a second landfall on Marco Island on Florida’s west coast Sunday afternoon, unleashing violent wind gusts up to 142 mph and storm-surge flooding. The storm was plowing up Florida’s west coast Sunday night and, once it’s over, forecasters feared that this storm will go down as one of the worst in the state’s history.

At 11 p.m., the storm was centered 50 miles southeast of Tampa. Its eyewall – containing the storm’s most violent winds – had passed northeast of Sarasota. The storm center was plowing north at 14 mph into the area between Tampa and Orlando. Through around 2 a.m. Monday, wind gusts of 75 to 100 mph were possible in both cities, where winds had already gusted that high.

Hurricane-force wind gusts were also quite possible on the east coast of central Florida into early Monday, the Hurricane Center said, thanks to Irma’s large wind field.

Around Tampa, once the storm center passes early Monday morning, a storm surge is possible of several feet above normally dry land, potentially inundating low-lying coastal areas.

Irma’s peak winds of 100 mph, with higher gusts, had dropped 30 mph from the morning, making it a Category 2 hurricane (down from a Category 4). Even with slow weakening likely to continue as the storm passes over land, Irma remains very serious and life-threatening. The National Hurricane Center said it is expected to remain a hurricane through Monday morning.

Coastal waters could rise well above normally dry land along Florida’s central Gulf Coast, inundating homes, businesses and roads.

[Everything you need to know about Irma]

Because of the storm’s magnitude, the entire state of Florida is being severely affected by damaging winds, torrential rains and, in many areas, the risk of tornadoes. Tropical storm and hurricane conditions were also predicted to spread into the Florida Panhandle, eastern Alabama, much of Georgia and southern South Carolina by Monday.

The latest


(National Hurricane Center)

Central Florida

Irma’s eyewall passed on the east side of Sarasota around 10 p.m. and should pass between Tampa and Orlando through around 1 or 2 a.m., from south to north, producing wind gusts between 75 and 100 mph throughout the region. Both cities had already clocked gusts to near 80 mph.

Once Irma’s center passes north of Tampa early Monday morning, the seas will rise likely resulting in areas of coastal inundation.

Even on Central Florida’s east coast, tropical-storm force winds and hurricane-force gusts were fairly widespread Sunday evening. At St. Lucie, a gust reached 99 mph and Cape Canaveral gusted to 79 mph.

Southwest Florida

The worst winds had passed this region just prior to 9:30 p.m. but gusty showers continued on the storm’s backside.

Irma’s eyewall passed through Fort Myers and Cape Coral just before 7 p.m., producing wind gusts of 88 and 101 mph and then passed on the west side of Port Charlotte between 8 and 9 p.m.

As the eyewall moved over Naples late Sunday afternoon, it reported sustained winds of 93 mph and a gust to 142 mph – the strongest recorded from this storm in the U.S.

Josh Morgerman, a hurricane chaser positioned in Naples, described the scene: “Went thru violent, destructive winds. Screaming, whiteout, wreckage blowing by in fog.” Then the calm eye moved overhead.

Before the arrival of the storm center, water was actually retreating from Naples to Tampa due to offshore winds from the east pulling the sea back. But forecasters warned residents that shortly after the storm’s center passed to the north and winds blew back onshore, waters would rush back in rapidly causing severe inundation.

[Hurricane Irma is literally sucking the water away from shorelines]

In Naples, as of 7 p.m., water levels were about four feet above normally dry land but the level was starting to stabilize around 8 p.m. Amazingly, it set its second lowest water level and highest water level all in the course of 8 hours.

In Ft. Myers, waters levels were rising through 10 p.m., but not as dramatically as they had in Naples.

Southeast Florida

In Southeast Florida, spiral bands continued to unleash tropical-storm-force winds. Even into the evening, winds were gusting up to 60 to 75 mph around Miami and West Palm Beach (7 p.m. gust of 75 mph), but they weren’t as strong as earlier.

In the afternoon, sustained winds in Miami and Fort Lauderdale reached 50-60 mph through the early afternoon, gusting as high as 80 to 100 mph. Miami International Airport clocked a gust to 94 mph and an isolated gust hit 100 mph at the University of Miami.

Also during the afternoon the seas had risen several feet above normally dry land. Social media photos and videos showed water pouring through Miami’s streets, in between high-rises, amid sideways sheets of rains.

Late Sunday afternoon, waters were finally starting to slowly recede around Miami.

The Keys

While the core of the storm and worst winds passed the Keys early Sunday morning, the Weather Service warned storm surge flooding was ongoing as winds on the storm’s backside shoved water over the islands. Gusts still reached 50 to 60 mph as of 7:45 p.m.

Early Sunday afternoon, the maximum surge at Cudjoe Key was estimated at 10 feet.

Statewide

About 3 million customers were without power.

Particularly in South and Central Florida, torrential rain was falling, with widespread totals of 6 to 10 inches and pockets up to 10 to 14 inches. Numerous flash flood warnings had been issued.

As the storm’s spiral bands walloped Central and Northern Florida, the potential for tornadoes arose in the swirling air, and the Weather Service issued watches and scores of warnings.

Storm warnings in effect and predicted surge height and winds

Hurricane warnings cover all of Florida except the western Panhandle, where a tropical storm warning was in effect.

A storm-surge warning was also issued for much of the Florida Peninsula (except for a small section from North Miami Beach to Jupiter Inlet), and even extended up the Georgia coast into southern South Carolina. The Hurricane Center said that this would bring the risk of “dangerous” and “life-threatening” inundation.


(National Weather Service)

Because of the shift in the most likely storm track to the west, Miami and Southeast Florida were most likely to miss the storm’s intensely destructive core, known as the eyewall, where winds are strongest. Even so, because of Irma’s enormous size, the entire Florida Peninsula and even the Panhandle were likely to witness damaging winds. The National Hurricane Center warned that the storm would bring “life-threatening wind impacts to much of the state.”


European model simulation of maximum winds gusts every 6 hours Sunday to Monday from Hurricane Irma. (WeatherBell.com)

Effects on Florida

Conditions will continue to deteriorate Sunday night over Florida in the central and north part of the state as Irma chugs up the coast. Conditions will slowly improve to the south.

Through around very early Monday morning, the corridor between Tampa and Orlando would face the storm’s brunt.

Here’s a guide to what is most likely and where …

Key West/Key Largo

Time frame for worst conditions: Through Sunday afternoon.

Hazard threats: Wind, storm surge and rain.

Wind gusts of up to 50 to 70 mph should continue into the evening.

A catastrophic storm surge of 5 to 10 feet or more is expected to inundate much of the island chain. Heavy rain will add to the water issues, as anywhere from 5 to 10 inches of additional rain will fall before the worst of the storm is over. Unfortunately, the damage potential on the Keys could be landscape-altering after taking a direct hit from this storm.

Miami/Fort Lauderdale/West Palm Beach

Time frame for worst conditions: Through Sunday night.

Hazard threats: Strong winds, tornadoes, heavy rain.

Sustained winds of 45 to 70 mph with gusts of 80-plus mph will last well into Sunday evening.

Swirling winds at all levels of the atmosphere have also increased the chances of tornadoes developing at any point on Sunday, especially in locations right along the water. Rainfall totals of four to eight inches or more are expected on Sunday alone, which may exacerbate localized flooding. With Irma’s last-minute track shift to the west, the storm surge won’t be as big of a concern here as it is elsewhere, with a two- to four-foot surge expected along much of Florida’s east coast.

Naples/Fort Myers/Tampa Bay/St. Petersburg

Time frame for worst conditions: Through Monday morning.

Hazard threats: Storm surge and wind.

Irma’s ultimate destination will be along the west coast of Florida. This means the conditions will deteriorate rapidly from Naples to Tampa Bay throughout Sunday afternoon. However, Irma’s path will take it parallel to the west coast of Florida, keeping the entire region engulfed in the dangerous northeast quadrant of the storm, where winds are strongest. Sustained hurricane force winds and gusts over 100 mph should arrive in Naples Sunday afternoon and up to 75-100 mph in St. Petersburg/Tampa Bay between 10 p.m. and midnight or so.


Hurricane force winds will make their way up Florida’s west coast, peaking in Naples this evening and in the St. Petersburg/Tampa area after midnight. Via NWS

The most dangerous hazard for this region will be the extreme storm surge. Nowhere in the entire state will the storm-surge levels be higher than along the gulf-facing coast, with storm surge totals of eight to 12 feet and locally up to 15 feet forecast. Any coastal city from Tampa Bay south to Naples is at risk, with historic flooding (the likes of which haven’t been seen in this area since Hurricane Donna in 1960) threatening thousands of people and structures.

Orlando/Central Florida 

Time frame for worst conditions: Sunday night through Monday morning.

Hazard threats: Wind, rain, and tornadoes.

Inland areas won’t escape the effects of Irma. The storm is extremely large in size, with tropical-storm-force winds extending outward over 200 miles from the center. The wind speeds in central Florida and the Orlando area will start to pick up by late Sunday afternoon, with sustained winds of 40 to 60 mph and gusts of 70-plus mph lasting from late Sunday night through Monday morning.

Heavy rain will also cause problems, with a general six to 12-plus inches of rain expected by the time the storm is over. The threat of tornadoes will increase by Sunday night, as well, as the storm’s center tracks north along the west coast of Florida.

Jacksonville/Daytona Beach 

Time frame for worst conditions: Sunday evening through Monday afternoon.

Hazard threats: Rain, tornadoes, wind.

The northeast portion of Florida will be spared the worst of Irma but won’t escape unscathed. Sustained tropical-force winds of 40 to 55 mph will overspread the area from Daytona Beach to Jacksonville by Sunday evening, with the worst winds (gusts up to 70 mph) occurring overnight. Heavy rain will be a story line here as six to 10-plus inches of rain is expected to fall in a relatively short period.

As with other parts of the state, the tornado threat will peak overnight on Sunday as Irma’s storm center tracks northward.

Storm-surge values will be elevated (two to four feet) but should result in only minor to moderate coastal flooding.

Potential effects on Georgia and the southeastern United States

Georgia/Atlanta/South Carolina

Time frame for worst conditions: Monday morning through Tuesday morning.

Hazard threats: Wind, rain and, at the coast, storm surge

Hurricane warnings extend well into Georgia, covering over half of the state. Parts of southern South Carolina also are under a hurricane warning, with Irma poised to maintain its hurricane-force strength for several hours after landfall.

Sustained tropical force winds of 25 to 45 mph will spread over Georgia from south to north starting late Sunday night. The strongest sustained winds (40 to 50 mph) with gusts of 60-plus mph will move in on early Monday morning, lasting through Monday evening. This includes Atlanta, which is under a tropical-storm warning, where sustained winds of 25 to 40 mph with gusts up to 60 mph will occur from about 10 p.m. Sunday night to about 5 p.m. Monday afternoon. This could lead to downed trees and outages.

Heavy rain is also expected, with storm totals of six to 10 inches forecast, the bulk of which should fall Monday.

Storm surge along the Georgia/South Carolina coast will be a hazard, as well, with the Hurricane Center predicting a surge of four to six feet. Of particular concern is the duration of the storm surge. Persistent onshore winds will extend the surge component here, with elevated water levels potentially lasting up to 36 hours.

Irma’s path so far

At 3:35 p.m. Sunday, Irma had made its second U.S. landfall of the day over Marco Island, where a wind gust of 130 mph was reported.

Earlier, the storm officially made its initial U.S. landfall at Cudjoe Key at 9:10 a.m. as a Category 4 hurricane. Winds over the Keys raged, gusting to at least 94 mph in Key West (before the wind instrument failed) and up to 120 mph in Big Pine Key. Witness video showed the rising storm surge flooding Key West streets.

Before its encounter with the Keys, Irma made landfall on the north coast of Cuba as a Category 5 hurricane just after 9 p.m. Friday, with maximum sustained winds of 160 mph. It became that country’s first Category 5 hurricane since 1924. Fueled by the extremely warm ocean temperatures, Irma reintensified to the maximum hurricane classification level after weakening slightly on Friday afternoon.

As it scraped Cuba’s north coast early Saturday, it produced a sustained wind gust of 118 mph, and a gust to 159 mph was reported at Falla, Cuba, in the eyewall of the hurricane.


Irma’s eye approaches the north coast of Cuba on Friday night. Via NASA

On Friday, before making landfall along Cuba’s north-central coast, Irma passed north of Haiti and then between Cuba’s northeast coast and the Central Bahamas.

Thursday evening, the center of the storm passed very close to the Turks and Caicos, producing potentially catastrophic Category 5 winds. The storm surge was of particular concern, as the water had the potential to rise 16 to 20 feet above normally dry land in coastal sections north of the storm center, causing extreme inundation.

A devastating storm surge and destructive winds had also probably battered the southeastern Bahamas, near Great Inagua Island.

Through early Thursday, the storm had battered islands from Puerto Rico to the northern Lesser Antilles.

While the center of Irma passed just north of Puerto Rico late Wednesday, a wind gust of 63 mph was clocked in San Juan early Wednesday evening, and more than 900,000 people were reported to be without power. In Culebra, Puerto Rico, a small island 17 miles east of the main island, a wind gust registered 111 mph in the afternoon.

On Wednesday afternoon, the storm’s eye had moved over Virgin Gorda in the British Virgin Islands, and its southern eyewall raked St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Early Wednesday afternoon, a wind gust to 131 mph was clocked on Buck Island and 87 mph on St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

On Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, the hurricane passed directly over Barbuda and St. Martin in the northern Leeward Islands, the strongest hurricane recorded in that region and tied with the 1935 Florida Keys hurricane as the strongest Atlantic storm to strike land.

As Barbuda took a direct hit, the weather station there clocked a wind gust to 155 mph before it went offline.

The storm also passed directly over Anguilla and St. Martin early Wednesday, causing severe damage.

Irma’s place in history

Irma’s peak intensity (185 mph) ranks among the strongest in recorded history, exceeding the likes of Katrina, Andrew and Camille — whose winds peaked at 175 mph.

Among the most intense storms on record, it trails only Hurricane Allen in 1980, which had winds of 190 mph. It is tied for second-most intense with Hurricane Wilma in 2005, Hurricane Gilbert in 1988 and the 1935 Florida Keys hurricane.

The storm maintained maximum wind speeds of at least 180 mph for 37 hours, longer than any storm on Earth on record, passing Super Typhoon Haiyan, the previous record-holder (24 hours).

Late Tuesday, its pressure dropped to 914 millibars (the lower the pressure, the stronger the storm), ranking as the lowest of any storm on record outside the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico in the Atlantic basin.

The storm has generated the most “accumulated cyclone energy,” a measure of a storm’s duration and intensity, of any hurricane on record.

Irma’s landfall pressure of 929 millibars in the Florida Keys was the lowest for any U.S. landfalling hurricane since Katrina (920 millibars) and for a Florida landfall since Andrew (922 millibars). It ranks as the seventh-lowest pressure of any U.S. landfalling storm.

When Irma crashed into the Keys early Sunday as a Category 4, following Hurricane Harvey’s assault in Texas, it marked the first time on record that two Category 4 storms had made landfall in the United States in the same year.

Capital Weather Gang hurricane expert Brian McNoldy contributed to this report. Credit to tropical-weather expert and occasional Capital Weather Gang contributor Phil Klotzbach for some of the statistics in this section.

‘Trump betrays everyone’: The president has a long record as an unpredictable ally

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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. 

In April, Trump thrust Canada and Mexico — as well as many of his advisers and Cabinet officials — into a state of panic during a frenetic, if brief, period when he threatened to withdraw from the North American Free Trade Agreement. In May, speaking in front of NATO’s sparkling new headquarters, Trump alarmed European allies when he chastised them for “not paying what they should be paying” and refused to embrace the treaty’s cornerstone — that an attack on one represents an attack on all. And in September, as the crisis with North Korea escalated, Trump abruptly threatened to withdraw from a free-trade agreement with South Korea.

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.”

Mike DeBonis contributed to this report. 

Hurricane Irma: Broward shelters now closed to new arrivals, but Palm Beach County shelters still open

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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.

Hurricane Irma Live Updates: West Coast of Florida in Cross Hairs

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“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.”

Waves crashing against the Malecón seawall in Havana as Hurricane Irma turned toward the Florida Keys on Saturday.


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.

Martin County firefighters preparing to move to another station on Saturday before Hurricane Irma’s arrival in Jensen Beach, Fla.


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.

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Mexico Earthquake, Strongest in a Century, Kills Dozens

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Giant Earthquake Shakes Mexico

The country was struck by an 8.2-magnitude quake, the strongest in decades, killing at least 58 people and leveling areas in some southern states.


By CAMILLA SCHICK on September 8, 2017.


Photo by Luis Alberto Cruz/Associated Press.

Watch in Times Video »

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.

Residents of Mexico City gathered outdoors after an earthquake struck off the Pacific Coast, about 450 miles away, late Thursday.


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.

Patients in a clinic in Puebla, Mexico, were taken outside after the quake.


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.


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Equifax Says Cyberattack May Have Affected 143 Million in the US

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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.

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“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.

How to Protect Your Information Online

There are more reasons than ever to understand how to protect your personal information. Major website breaches seem ever more frequent.


“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.

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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.


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Extreme Hurricane Irma closing in on Florida, posing dire threat

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(This story will be updated throughout Friday. It was last updated to incorporate the 8 p.m. National Hurricane Center advisory; some more information about storm surge was added in section on Florida effects.)

The extraordinarily large and intense Hurricane Irma is drawing ever closer to South Florida. A hurricane catastrophe has become nearly unavoidable; it’s only a matter of what areas are hardest hit and how severely.

The storm is comparable in strength to Hurricane Andrew, which devastated parts of South Florida in 1992, but much larger in size.

Based on the latest computer model projections, it’s almost impossible the storm will miss, but it’s still uncertain whether the southwest or southeast coast will catch the storm’s most destructive brunt, or somewhere in between. Computer model information late Friday afternoon suggested a track right up the spine of Florida was becoming most likely, though shifts were possible.

Irrespective of the storm’s exact track, hurricane-force winds could blast most if not all of the Florida peninsula.

[Everything you need to know about Hurricane Irma]

“Irma is likely to make landfall in Florida as a dangerous major hurricane, and will bring life-threatening wind impacts to much of the state regardless of the exact track of the center,” the National Hurricane Center said.

The Hurricane Center had hoisted hurricane warnings for much of South Florida on both coasts. Hurricane watches extended up to the central coast on both sides of the peninsula.


(National Hurricane Center)

Landfall from the storm is most likely to occur sometime between Sunday morning and afternoon, when Irma’s most destructive winds will move ashore.

A storm-surge warning was also issued for much of the South Florida coastline because of the potential for water to rise up to 6 to 12 feet above normally dry land at the coast. The Hurricane Center said this would bring the risk of “dangerous” and “life-threatening” inundation and that the threat was highest along Florida’s southwest coast.

“Few people alive have experienced a storm like this,” wrote Bryan Norcross, a hurricane specialist at Weather Channel. “It is reminiscent of the great hurricanes that unleashed their fury on Florida in the first seven decades of the 20th Century.”

By early next week, Georgia and the Carolinas could also be in the storm’s crosshairs.

In its 8 p.m. update, the National Hurricane Center said hurricane’s southern eyewall, the region of most destructive winds, was passing over the north coast of Cuba. The storm had 155-mph maximum sustained winds — and even stronger gusts — which makes it a Category 4.

The storm could yet regain Category 5 intensity as it has still to pass over some of the warmest ocean water in the world (nearly 90 degrees). Overnight Friday, the eye could pass over the north coast of Cuba. In the event the center makes landfall there, its circulation would be disrupted by the land mass which could lead to some weakening.

[Tropical triple threat: Hurricanes Jose and Katia could join Irma striking land this weekend]

The Hurricane Center said to expect fluctuations in the storm’s intensity through Sunday but that, in most scenarios, “Irma is expected to remain at least a Category 4 hurricane until landfall in Florida.”

It urged residents of Florida to rush preparations to completion.

“This hurricane is as serious as any I have seen,” tweeted Eric Blake, a forecaster at the Hurricane Center. “No hype, just the hard facts. Take every life saving precaution you can.”

[Climate scientists: ‘We can’t afford to keep pretending.’]

Meanwhile, two other hurricanes were intensifying in the eastern Atlantic and southwestern Gulf of Mexico — Jose and Katia. On Saturday, Jose could hit some of the same small islands in the northern Lesser Antilles ravaged by Irma, including Antigua and Barbuda.

Potential effects on Florida

Several storm scenarios are possible in Florida, depending on the exact track Irma takes, but they are all disastrous due to Irma’s size and strength.

Hurricane-force winds expand 70 miles from the center, and tropical-storm-force winds expand 185 miles from the center. This implies that the entire peninsula, which is about 150 miles across, will be exposed to tropical-storm-force winds and most or all of it to hurricane-force winds.

Norcross, the meteorologist who became a hero in South Florida for guiding the region through Hurricane Andrew, called the threat “EXTREME.”

Tropical-storm-force winds are expected to reach South Florida by Saturday morning as Irma approaches from the southeast.


(National Hurricane Center)

Then, the all-important northward turn is still expected to take place early Sunday, when the storm would make landfall and unleash its worst effects. The most destructive winds and largest storm surge usually focus immediately to the northeast of where the center comes ashore. So exactly where the northward turn occurs is a critical question for Florida.

As of Friday afternoon, the most likely scenario based on computer-model guidance was that the storm will track right up the spine of Florida – with landfall closest to Florida’s southwestern-most tip.


Group of simulations from American (blue) and European (red) computer models from Friday morning. Each color strand represents a different model simulation with slight tweaks to initial conditions. Note that the strands are clustered together where the forecast track is most confident but they diverge where the course of the storm is less certain. The bold red line is the average of all of the European model simulations, while the blue is the average of all the American model simulations.(StormVistaWxModels.com)

Models, however, can shift. The difference between a track just off the east coast and just off the west coast is only 150 miles, and the average error in hurricane forecasts 36 hours before landfall is about 50 (or one-third of the width of the peninsula). Irma could still reasonably track closer to the west or east coast.

[Video: Comparing Hurricane Irma with Andrew in 1992]

If the storm tracks closer to Florida’s east coast, then Miami, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach, Melbourne, Daytona Beach  and Jacksonville will take devastating hits. If it runs up the spine of the peninsula, the storm will be quicker to decay, but hurricane-force winds would reach both coasts. If it buzz-saws up the west coast, then Key West, Naples, Fort Myers, Tampa and Tallahassee would face severe effects.


The European and American model forecasts run Friday morning show the storm making landfall near the southwest tip of Florida midday Sunday, and then coming up the spine of Florida. Model shifts are still possible. (WeatherBell.com)

When Irma makes its closest approach to Florida — most likely early Sunday — the Hurricane Center predicts that it will produce Category 4 winds. Here is its description of the kind of damage Category 4 winds would inflict:

Catastrophic damage will occur: Well-built framed homes can sustain severe damage with loss of most of the roof structure and/or some exterior walls. Most trees will be snapped or uprooted and power poles downed. Fallen trees and power poles will isolate residential areas. Power outages will last weeks to possibly months. Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks or months.

Note that such extreme winds are typically confined to the eye wall, which is only about 10 to 15 miles wide. That is why the exact track is important in terms of where the most severe wind damage concentrates.

[Graphics: How big is Hurricane Irma?]

It’s important to note that wind speeds will increase with altitude, so high-rise buildings will be exposed to even stronger winds, up to a hurricane category stronger on the upper floors.

Due to the likelihood of widespread damaging winds, one model run by researchers at several universities projects that more than 2.5 million customers in Florida and the Southeastern United States will lose power.


“Peak power outages for Hurricane Harvey were between 300,000 and 400,000, so this is many times larger than that,” said Seth Guikema, a researcher at the University of Michigan leading this modeling effort

Regardless of exactly where Irma tracks, many coastal population centers in Florida will experience a devastating storm surge of 6 to 12 feet above normally dry land, inundating roads, homes and businesses. The most severe storm surge will focus immediately north-northeast of where the storm center crosses land – which could be near the southwest or south central tip of Florida.

The Hurricane Center predicts all of the Florida Keys to see a storm surge of 5 to 10 feet. “It’s not clear that it’s a survivable situation for anybody that is still there in the Keys,” said Ed Rappaport, acting director of the National Hurricane Center in a television interview.

Over the Florida peninsula, 8 to 20 inches of rain is forecast, with the heaviest amounts most likely in the southeast.


5-day rainfall forecast from Hurricane Irma (National Hurricane Center)

Potential effects on Georgia and the Carolinas

Beyond Florida, there is a risk for damaging winds and a serious storm surge up to Georgia and the Carolinas, but the details greatly depend on the track over Florida.

If Irma rides up the spine of Florida, even though it will lose some strength, its circulation is enormous so it would still likely push a significant storm surge toward the Georgia and South Carolina coasts. Tropical-storm and even hurricane-force winds would also likely affect much of Georgia and perhaps sections of South Carolina (especially the south and southwest).

Even a track up the west coast of Florida would likely bring strong winds and some surge to the Georgia and South Carolina coasts.

The worst case for these states, which has become less likely, would be if Irma narrowly misses the east coast of Florida, stays over warm water and then hits them while maintaining its strength. A potential landfall along the Southeast coast would be Monday — and would bring a devastating storm surge and destructive winds to coastal locations.

In any of the scenarios, there is the likelihood of very heavy rain over much of Georgia and into the Carolinas, and areas of flash flooding.

Irma’s path so far

Thursday evening, the center of the storm passed very close to the Turks and Caicos, producing potentially catastrophic Category 5 winds. The storm surge was of particular concern, as the water had the potential to rise 16 to 20 feet above normally dry land in coastal sections north of the storm center, causing extreme inundation.

A devastating storm surge and destructive winds had also likely battered the southeastern Bahamas, near Great Inagua Island.

Through early Thursday, the storm had battered islands from Puerto Rico to the northern Lesser Antilles.

While the center of Irma passed just north of Puerto Rico late Wednesday, a wind gust of 63 mph was clocked in San Juan early Wednesday evening, and more than 900,000 people were reported to be without power. In Culebra, Puerto Rico, a small island 17 miles east of the mainland, a wind gust registered 111 mph in the afternoon.

Wednesday afternoon, the storm’s eye had moved over Virgin Gorda in the British Virgin Islands, and its southern eye wall (the region of most powerful winds) raked St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Early Wednesday afternoon, a wind gust to 131 mph was clocked on Buck Island and 87 mph on St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, the hurricane passed directly over Barbuda and St. Martin in the northern Leeward Islands, the strongest hurricane ever recorded in that region and tied with the 1935 Florida Keys hurricane as the strongest Atlantic storm to strike land.

As Barbuda took a direct hit, the weather station there clocked a wind gust to 155 mph before it went offline.

The storm also passed directly over Anguilla and St. Martin early Wednesday, causing severe damage.

Irma’s place in history

Irma’s peak intensity (185 mph) ranks among the strongest in recorded history, exceeding the likes of Katrina, Andrew and Camille — whose winds peaked at 175 mph.

Among the most intense storms on record, it trails only Hurricane Allen in 1980, which had winds of 190 mph. It is tied for second-most intense with Hurricane Wilma in 2005, Hurricane Gilbert in 1988 and the 1935 Florida Keys hurricane.

The storm maintained maximum wind speeds of at least 180 mph for 37 hours, longer than any storm on Earth on record, passing Super Typhoon Haiyan, the previous record-holder (24 hours).

Late Tuesday, its pressure dropped to 914 millibars (the lower the pressure, the stronger the storm), ranking as the lowest of any storm on record outside the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico in the Atlantic basin.

The storm has generated the most “accumulated cyclone energy,” a measure of a storm’s duration and intensity, of any hurricane on record.

Without a doubt, the World Meteorological Organization will retire the names Harvey and Irma after this season. While there have been several instances of consecutive storm names getting retired (Rita and Stan 2005, Ivan and Jeanne 2004, Isabel and Juan 2003, Luis and Marilyn 1995), the United States has been hit by more than one Category 4+ hurricane in a season only one time: 1915. Two Category 4 hurricanes hit in Texas and Louisiana six weeks apart that year.

Capital Weather Gang hurricane expert Brian McNoldy contributed to this report. Credit to tropical-weather expert and occasional Capital Weather Gang contributor Phil Klotzbach for some of the statistics in this section.

DeVos to scrap Obama-era school sexual assault policy

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Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is pictured.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said the Trump administration will revamp the guidance through a rule-making process that likely will take months. | Jacquelyn Martin/AP

By

09/07/2017 12:20 PM EDT

Updated 09/07/2017 06:58 PM EDT


Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said Thursday that she will rescind an Obama-era schools directive on sexual assault and develop a replacement that she said would do a better job of balancing the rights of victims and the accused.

“The truth is that the system established by the prior administration has failed too many students,” DeVos said during a half-hour speech at George Mason University where she took no questions. “Survivors, victims of a lack of due process and campus administrators have all told me that the current approach does a disservice to everyone involved.”

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But the announcement drew strong objections from womens’ groups, victims advocates and leading Democrats, including former Vice President Joe Biden, who said the changes were a step in the wrong direction.

“Any change that weakens Title IX protections will be devastating,” wrote Biden, who drove the Obama administration’s efforts to crack down on campus sexual assault, in a statement posted on his Facebook page.

“I’m asking everyone who has a stake in this fight to step up,” Biden said. “Students, parents, faculty, alumni. Don’t just sit and watch. Speak up. Any rollback of Title IX protections will hurt your classmates, your students, your friends, your sisters.”

The 2011 Obama guidance for the first time pushed school district, college and university leaders to combat sexual harassment, including sexual violence, saying the institutions were required to do so under Title IX, a federal law that prohibits sex discrimination. Women’s groups hailed that as a crucial step in cracking down on sexual violence on campuses. But critics said it trampled the rights of the accused.

The Trump administration will revamp the guidance through a rulemaking process that likely will take months, DeVos said, blasting the guidance for having “weaponized the Office of Civil Rights to work against schools and against students.” She said the administration will give all sides a chance to offer opinions on how it should move forward.

“We will seek public feedback and combine institutional knowledge, professional expertise and the experiences of students to replace the current approach with a workable, effective and fair system,” DeVos said. “This is not about letting institutions off the hook. They still have important work to do.”

DeVos said after the speech that she intends to revoke the Obama guidance.”The process is an extended one,” she told CBS News. “But it is the intention to revoke or rescind the previous guidance around this.”

The Education Department will issue temporary Title IX guidelines for school districts, colleges and universities as it works on a permanent replacement for Obama-era guidelines, said agency spokeswoman Liz Hill.

The far-reaching 2011 Obama-era guidance, issued in the form of a Dear Colleague Letter, was controversial from the start. It threatened a loss of funding to schools that failed to do enough to make students safe from sexual harassment, assault and rape. Critics said it pushed colleges to trample the rights of the accused. Among other things, the guidance pushed a lower standard of proof in campus disciplinary hearings than is used in criminal trials.

Many of those critics hailed DeVos’ announcement as “a really positive development.”

“I think it was a strong signal from the department that the current approach is unworkable and needs to be changed,” said Joe Cohn, legislative and policy director at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a civil rights group that brought a court challenge to the 2011 guidance.

Chris Perry, deputy executive director of the group, Stop Abusive and Violent Environments, which represents people accused of sexual assault, said DeVos’ remarks show “the secretary is listening to folks.”

The decision to launch a notice-and-comment process was long expected. DeVos said in July — after a series of meetings with sexual assault survivors, students accused of assault and college officials — that she would overhaul the policy. She told reporters at the time that “it’s clear that there are failings in this process. A system without due process protections ultimately serves no one in the end.”

Advocacy groups — including those representing both sexual assault survivors and students accused of assault — were not invited to attend Thursday’s announcement in person, despite meeting with DeVos on the subject in July.

Instead, DeVos delivered the announcement during a tightly controlled half-hour event at the university’s Arlington, Va., campus, sponsored by the university law school chapter of the Federalist Society, a conservative group. Shouts from protesters outside could be heard as she spoke.

Advocates for survivors of sexual assault said they felt they were given short shrift and noted that research has shown false claims of rape are rare. They said DeVos had indicated she would hold similar listening sessions in other parts of the country before making a decision.

Giving them just one meeting with the secretary “feels a little bit like paying lip service to the importance of having survivors in the room,” said Jess Davidson, managing director of End Rape on Campus.

“I think there’s been a really concerning false equivalence of the concerns of survivors and the accused throughout this entire process with the Department of Education,” Davidson said.

Sexual assault survivors rallied outside the university ahead of the announcement, urging DeVos to keep what they see as crucial protections in place.

“It’s really telling us that we don’t matter, that our pain is not relevant to people in power,” said Chessy Prout, 18, who said she was assaulted as a high school freshman and subsequently had to change schools.

Advocates slammed the speech afterward. “Don’t be duped by today’s announcement,” said Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center. “What seems procedural is a blunt attack on survivors of sexual assault. It will discourage schools from taking steps to comply with the law — just at the moment when they are finally working to get it right. And it sends a frightening message to all students: Your government does not have your back if your rights are violated. This misguided approach signals a green light to sweep sexual assault further under the rug.”

Complicating the issue for DeVos are comments made by her civil rights chief, Candice Jackson, who told The New York Times this summer that 90 percent of sexual assault claims stem from drunken and regretted sex. Another complication is President Donald Trump’s boast about groping women in the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape.

“Secretary DeVos decided today to continue a pattern of undermining survivors’ rights, once again showing a clear lack of understanding or empathy for the millions of students who have experienced sexual violence on campus,” Sen. Patty Murray, a Washington Democrat and ranking member of the Senate education committee, said in a statement.

But her announcement drew praise from at least one Republican lawmaker.

“The Department of Education is taking a positive first step in soliciting comments from stakeholders to get a better understanding of ways to better address the problem,” Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford said. “However, this is an issue where Congress must give the Department of Education clear statutory authority to properly regulate.”

Despite the administration’s plan to rewrite rules on Title IX, it’s unlikely that schools will immediately change policies that they spent the last six years writing — and sometimes rewriting — to remain in compliance with federal law.

“No school is going to go back to doing what they were doing before the 2011 guidance,” said Terry Hartle, senior vice president at the American Council on Education.

Mel Leonor contributed to this story.