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Mexico Earthquake, Strongest in a Century, Kills Dozens

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.

El municipio de #Juchitán en #Oaxaca, de los más afectados tras el fuerte sismo https://t.co/qWDnJZaWZw pic.twitter.com/3NEEovzqvL

—
Oaxaca Político (@OaxacaPolitico)
Sept. 8, 2017

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.

Lo dejaron bien amarrado en 1957 pic.twitter.com/ytl9yZSE51

—
Alexis Milo Caraza (@alexismilo)
Sept. 8, 2017

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.

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.

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.

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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.

“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.

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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.

Wow, a large part of Naples could be inundated with water from storm surge. Forecast from @NHC_Atlantic shows reasonable worst case scenario pic.twitter.com/aHnNFCCURu

— Greg Diamond (@gdimeweather) September 8, 2017

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.

3 hours in #Irma northern eye wall. pic.twitter.com/Mnp9Ykrhv9

— Bill Karins (@BillKarins) September 8, 2017

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

The NOAA-NASA Suomi NPP satellite captured this infrared image of #HurricaneIrma at 2:37am ET, Sept. 8, 2017, near Great Inagua Island pic.twitter.com/Z6NoHVulht

— NOAA Satellites PA (@NOAASatellitePA) September 8, 2017

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

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.

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Debt-ceiling shift signifies a remarkable political evolution for Trump

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President Trump on Thursday signaled openness to a proposal to effectively eliminate the federal limit on government borrowing, a dramatic reversal from his view as a candidate and the long-standing position of the Republican Party that the debt limit should be raised only if other steps are taken to restrain the size of government.

On Wednesday, Trump and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D–N.Y.) reached what one senior White House official called a “gentlemen’s agreement” to develop a plan that would no longer require Congress to routinely raise the limit on government borrowing.

Details have not been worked out, and any plan would require approval from congressional Republicans, but the shift signifies a remarkable political evolution for Trump, who has long cheered weaponizing the debt ceiling, no matter the cost.

“I cannot believe the Republicans are extending the debt ceiling — I am a Republican I am embarrassed!” he tweeted in 2013.

On Thursday, Trump’s approach to the debt ceiling had changed markedly.

Why does the debt ceiling exist? View Graphic Why does the debt ceiling exist?

“For many years people have been talking about getting rid of [the] debt ceiling altogether and there are a lot of good reasons to do that,” he said at the White House.

Trump’s discussions with Democrats on the debt ceiling could mark the end of Congress’ greatest political weapon — a legislative hand grenade that has never exploded but unnerved financial markets for decades.

Rory Cooper, a former top adviser to House GOP leadership, said Trump’s reversal on the issue should come as no surprise, even if it insults the Republican leadership.

“There’s definitely support on the Hill on the Democratic side and even among some Republicans for doing away with debt-limit votes altogether,” Cooper said. “But President Trump is not going to be able to sustain a coalition for that so long as he is slapping leadership in the face in these negotiations.”

The U.S. government is projected to spend $4 trillion this year but bring in only $3.3 trillion through taxes and other fees. It covers the balance — known as the deficit — by issuing debt to borrow money. This debt accumulates over time, and now the federal government owes close to $20 trillion to creditors around the world.

The government can hold debt only up to a certain limit, which is set by Congress. And raising that debt limit is often politically messy, with lawmakers trying to leverage their vote in a way that can exact budget changes from the White House.

“From the economy’s perspective and from the financial markets’ perspective, removing the debt limit from that equation is probably a very, very positive thing to do,” said John Bowman, who worked on debt-ceiling issues at the Treasury Department for 15 years under presidents from both parties. “If there’s no long uncertainty about whether or not — on a date certain — the United States has the ability to pay its bills, that’s a very, very strong good government position to take.”

Then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R–Ga.) drew international attention when he flatly refused to raise it in 1995 unless President Bill Clinton agreed to a balanced-budget plan.

“I don’t care what the price is,” Gingrich said at the time. “I don’t care if we have no executive offices and no bonds for 60 days, not this time.”

It was eventually raised, but the showdown sufficiently weaponized the debt limit for both parties to use in coming years.

In 2006, then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) refused to raise the debt ceiling for President George W. Bush, trying to score political points against a weakened White House that he was hoping to soon occupy.

“The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure,” Obama said at the time. “It is a sign that the U.S. government can’t pay its own bills.”

It was eventually — barely — raised.

But sure enough, five years later, Obama as president flipped the script, pleading with lawmakers to raise the debt ceiling, saying failing to do so would lead to an economic calamity.

His showdown with congressional Republicans in 2011 took the U.S. government to the brink of defaulting on some of its obligations.

The debt limit was eventually raised after lawmakers agreed to spending caps and other budget changes, but the encounter sufficiently spooked financial markets. Credit rating agency Standard Poor’s stripped the U.S. government of its gold-standard rating, and top Obama advisers have described the episode as one of the most frightening periods of his presidency.

Obama would later refuse to ever negotiate with Republicans on the debt ceiling again, and they acquiesced by raising it again several times.

All told, the debt ceiling has been raised 78 times since 1960, under Democrats and Republicans. It is unclear what would happen if Congress failed to raise the debt ceiling. Wall Street analysts and economists have speculated that it would lead to a large economic crisis, as the U.S. government would effectively no longer be standing behind its debt.

Trump is the first president who had openly cheered using the debt ceiling as a political straitjacket against the White House. He has endorsed many of the Republican Party’s proposals to enforce sweeping spending cuts to programs like Medicaid, leading many lawmakers to think that he would help them use the debt ceiling to cram these changes through Congress.

But since January, Trump has showed little interest in using the debt ceiling the way he wanted to before taking office.

Neither the White House nor Senate Democrats have outlined how they would propose jettisoning the debt ceiling. Vice President Pence is advocating for an idea that would essentially automatically raise the debt ceiling every time Congress approves a budget.

In the near term, the White House and many members of Congress plan to suspend the debt ceiling until Dec. 8, giving them several months to try to come up with a permanent solution.

The Senate approved the measure, 80 to 17, on Thursday, and the House was expected to approve the measure swiftly as well. But a number of prominent Republicans, including House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), said Thursday that they opposed abolishing the debt ceiling in perpetuity.

Gingrich, in an interview on Thursday, said abolishing the debt ceiling would never happen because Republicans in Congress would never allow it.

“Presidents often have ideas,” he said. “Ideas aren’t programs. Programs aren’t laws. There are long jumps from the initial idea to getting it done.”

But Trump’s courtship with Democrats could give them outsize influence. Democrats have tried to stress that they are the ones who often need to deliver the votes to raise the debt ceiling, even when Republicans try to use it as negotiating leverage.

“Here, the currency of the realm is the vote,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told reporters, not signaling what her long-term preference would be. “You have the votes, no discussion necessary.”

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The tiny islands ravaged by Irma are in trouble as Hurricane Jose looms

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As Hurricane Irma left Antigua and Barbuda’s usually pristine reef-ringed beaches with the pink and white sand, islanders struggled to grasp the destruction to Barbuda’s schools, churches and the homes that many had used their life savings to build.

Irma somehow spared Antigua, which was open for business by Thursday morning. But on Barbuda, the smaller of the two islands with an area of 62 square miles, the ferocious and historic Category 5 hurricane had turned the typically gentle Caribbean winds into violent gusts that decimated Codrington, its sole town.

“Barbuda right now is literally a rubble,” Antigua and Barbuda Prime Minister Gaston Browne said.

Browne said nearly all of the government and personal property on Barbuda was damaged — including the hospital and the airport, which he said had its roof completely blown away. At least one person, a young child, was killed on the island — one of numerous deaths reported across the Caribbean in Irma’s horrific aftermath.

Now, these victims face yet another threat — a second hurricane, Jose, which appears to be coming for the same islands that are trying to dig out from Irma’s devastation.

The National Hurricane Center released an ominous bulletin Thursday about the new menace looming in the Atlantic: “…JOSE BECOMES 3RD MAJOR HURRICANE OF THE 2017 ATLANTIC SEASON…” By late afternoon, Jose had gained Category 3 strength, and Antigua and Barbuda remained in hurricane watch status.

“We are very worried about Hurricane Jose,” Browne said Thursday in a phone interview with The Washington Post, adding that Irma left about 60 percent of Barbuda’s nearly 2,000 residents homeless and destroyed or damaged 95 percent of its property.

Browne will make a determination by Thursday night about whether to order a mandatory evacuation ahead of Jose’s potential landfall, but added that those who want to leave Barbuda now are being ferried to nearby Antigua.

[Irma more likely to make landfall in South Florida as a ‘dangerous major hurricane’]

As Irma continues its merciless churn toward the U.S. mainland, the first islanders left in its wake are only beginning to decipher the scope of the storm’s ravages.

Deaths have been reported throughout the Leeward Islands, a vulnerable, isolated chain arcing southeast from Puerto Rico, which reported at least three deaths of its own.

Officials throughout the Caribbean expect the body count to rise.

After first making landfall in Barbuda, then strafing several other Leeward Islands, Irma raked the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, leaving nearly 1 million people without any electricity. The Dominican Republic, Haiti and the Turks and Caicos Islands are next in its path. Closer to Florida’s southern tip, the Bahamas remain in danger, and mass evacuations are underway.

The United Nations has said that Irma could affect as many as 37 million people. The majority are on the U.S. mainland, but the residents of tiny islands in the Eastern Caribbean were hit first — and hardest.

Browne told local media that Barbuda was left “barely habitable.”

Aerial footage showed homes with walls blown out and roofs ripped away.

“It was emotionally painful,” he told The Post. “It was sad to see such beautiful country being destroyed over a couple of hours.”

It is, he said, “one of the most significant disasters anywhere in the world” on a per capita basis: Browne said it would take an estimated $100 million to rebuild — a “monumental challenge” for a small island government.

When Craig Ryan, a 29-year-old tourism entrepreneur who lives in Antigua, reached Barbuda by boat Thursday morning, residents lined the beach waiting for rescue. “It’s such a level of devastation,” he told The Post, “that you can’t even see structures standing.”

Ryan’s family business, Tropical Adventures Antigua, dispatched a 75-foot motorboat to make the 90-minute passage between islands to ferry people off Barbuda before Jose’s potential arrival. Some residents remain stuck in isolated areas blocked by impassable roads, he said by telephone as he loaded up water and other supplies at a dock in Antigua.

“We really are in a rush against time,” Ryan said.

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

Ghastly images from St. Martin and St. Barthelemy (also known as St. Barts) showed cars and trucks almost completely submerged in the storm surge, and several buildings in ruin.

Witnesses on other islands described horrific destruction and a breakdown in public order: no running water, no emergency services, no police to stop looters — and a never ending tide of newly homeless people wandering the streets amid the devastation.

“It’s like someone with a lawn mower from the sky has gone over the island,” Marilou Rohan, a Dutch vacationer in St. Maarten, which is part of the Kingdom of Netherlands, told the Dutch NOS news service. “Houses are destroyed. Some are razed to the ground. I am lucky that I was in a sturdy house, but we had to bolster the door, the wind was so hard.”

There was little sense that authorities had the situation under control, she said.

Supermarkets were being looted and no police were visible in the streets. Occasionally, soldiers have passed by, but they were doing little to impose order, she said.

“People feel powerless. They do not know what to do. You see the fear in their eyes,” she said.

Paul de Windt, the editor of the Daily Herald of Sint Maarten, told the Paradise FM radio station in Curaçao that “Many people are wandering the streets. They no longer have homes, they don’t know what to do.”

An image released Wednesday shows severe flooding in St. Martin. (AFP)

In Anguilla, part of the British West Indies, the local government is “overwhelmed” and desperate for help, Anguilla Attorney General John McKendrick told The Post late Wednesday. Officials were barely able to communicate among one another and with emergency response teams, he said. With most phone lines down, they were dependent on instant messaging.

It appears that at least one person died in Anguilla, he said.

“Roads blocked, hospital damaged. Power down. Communications badly impaired. Help needed,” McKendrick wrote in one message. In another, he said, “More people might die without further help, especially as another hurricane threatens us so soon.”

The Dutch government said that it was sending two military ships carrying smaller emergency boats, ambulances and emergency equipment to St. Maarten.

French Interior Minister Gerard Collomb said 100,000 rations — or about four days’ worth of food — are en route to the victims to St. Barts and St. Martin, which could experience tropical storm conditions from Jose on Saturday, according to the National Hurricane Center. The tropical storm watch also applies to St. Maarten, Anguilla, Montserrat, St. Kitts, Nevis, Saba and St. Eustatius.

“It’s a tragedy, we’ll need to rebuild both islands,” Collomb told reporters Thursday, according to the Associated Press. “Most of the schools have been destroyed.”

British Prime Minister Theresa May said the government is allocating more than $41 million (U.S. dollars) for hurricane relief efforts.

Britain’s international development secretary, Priti Patel, announced Wednesday that the British navy, along with several Royal Marines and a contingent of military engineers, had been dispatched to the Caribbean with makeshift shelters and water purification systems. While some in England criticized the response, McKendrick told The Post that he’s worried that they, too, will quickly become overwhelmed by the amount of work that must be done to restore a sense of normalcy.

Elsewhere on Anguilla, some informal reports were less bleak. The Facebook page for Roy’s Bayside Grill, for instance, remained active as Irma passed.

Around 7:30 a.m., the page broadcast a brief live video of the storm captured from inside an unidentified building. With rain pelting the windows and wind whipping the treetops, a narrator calmly described the scene outside. “Can’t see very far at all,” he said. “We’ve got whitecaps on the pool. Water is spilling out. And it’s quite a ride. But thought I’d check in and let everyone know we’re still good.”

Phone lines to the restaurant appeared to be down by the afternoon, and messages left with the Facebook page’s administrator were not immediately returned.

About 1 p.m. Wednesday, the restaurant posted a panoramic photo on Facebook that appeared to show several buildings. The decking on one appeared to be ripped apart, and debris was scattered about the beach. One industrial building had a hole in its roof, but by and large everything was still standing.

“We made it through,” the caption read, “but there is a lot of work to be done.”

Destruction in a street in Gustavia on the French island of St. Barthelemy after Hurricane Irma. (Kevin Barrallon/AFP/Getty Images)

Michael Birnbaum and Annabell Van den Berghe contributed to this story from Brussels. Joshua Partlow contributed from Mexico City. Cleve Wootson and J. Freedom du Lac contributed from Washington. This post has been updated.

Read more:

Hurricane Irma just slammed into Trump’s Caribbean estate — and is headed toward his Florida properties

Sir Richard Branson is riding out Hurricane Irma in the wine cellar on his private island

This Delta flight raced Irma and won

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Facebook says it sold political ads to Russian company during 2016 election

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Representatives of Facebook told congressional investigators Wednesday that it has discovered it sold ads during the U.S. presidential election to a shadowy Russian company seeking to target voters, according to several people familiar with the company’s findings.

Facebook officials reported that they traced the ad sales, totaling $100,000, to a Russian “troll farm” with a history of pushing pro-Kremlin propaganda, these people said.

A small portion of the ads, which began in the summer of 2015, directly named Republican nominee Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton, the people said. Most of the ads focused on pumping politically divisive issues such as gun rights and immigration fears, as well as gay rights and racial discrimination.

The acknowledgment by Facebook comes as congressional investigators and special counsel Robert Mueller are probing Russian interference in the U.S. election, including allegations that the Kremlin may have coordinated with the Trump campaign.

The U.S. intelligence community concluded in January that Russia had interfered in the U.S. election to help elect Trump, including by using paid social media trolls to spread fake news intended to influence public opinion.

Even though the ad spending from Russia is tiny relative to overall campaign costs, the report from Facebook that a Russian firm was able to target political messages is likely to fuel pointed questions from investigators about whether the Russians received guidance from people in the United States — a question some Democrats have been asking for months.

“I get the fact that the Russian intel services could figure out how to manipulate and use the bots. Whether they could know how to target states and levels of voters that the Democrats weren’t even aware really raises some questions. I think that’s a worthwhile area of inquiry,” Sen. Mark Warner (Va.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said during a May airing of the podcast Pod Save America. “How did they know to go to that level of detail in those kinds of jurisdictions?”

An official familiar with Facebook’s internal investigation said the company does not have the ability to determine whether the ads it sold represented any sort of coordination.

The acknowledgment by Facebook follows months of criticism that the social media company served as a platform for the spread of false information before the November election. In a statement posted days after the election, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg promised to explore the issue but said that 99 percent of information found on Facebook is authentic and only “a very small amount” is fake or hoaxes. In December, however, the company announced that it would begin flagging articles that had been deemed false or fake, with the assistance of fact-checking organizations.

Facebook discovered the Russian connection as part of an investigation that began this spring looking at purchasers of politically-motivated ads, according to people familiar with the inquiry. It found that 3,300 ads had digital footprints that led to the Russian company.

Facebook teams then discovered 470 suspicious and likely fraudulent Facebook accounts and pages that it believes operated out of Russia, had links to the company and were involved in promoting the ads.

A Facebook official said “there is evidence that some of the accounts are linked to a troll farm in St. Petersburg, referred to as the Internet Research Agency, though we have no way to independently confirm.” The official declined to release any of the ads it traced to Russian companies or entities.

Who’s who in the government’s investigation into Russia ties View Graphic Who’s who in the government’s investigation into Russia ties

“Our data policy and federal law limit our ability to share user data and content, so we won’t be releasing any ads,” the official said. The official added that the ads “were directed at people on Facebook who had expressed interest in subjects explored on those pages, such as LGBT community, black social issues, the Second Amendment, and immigration.”

Alex Stamos, Facebook’s chief security officer, said in a statement that the company is committed to continuing to protect the integrity of its site and improve its ability to track fraudulent accounts. He said Facebook has shut down the accounts that remained active.

“We know we have to stay vigilant to keep ahead of people who try to misuse our platform,” he said.

Earlier this year, Facebook announced technology improvements to detect fake accounts and more recently announced it would no longer allow Facebook pages to advertise if they have a pattern of sharing false news stories. Over the past few months, Stamos said, the company has also taken action to block fake accounts tied to election meddling in France and Germany.

The Internet Research Agency has received attention in the past for its activity.

In 2013, hackers released internal company documents showing it employed 600 people across Russia. Ex-employees who have gone public with their experiences at the company in Internet postings and in media interviews have said their work entailed creating fake Twitter and Facebook accounts and using them to circulate pro-Kremlin propaganda. They said Internet Research Agency employees, for instance, spread derogatory information about Putin critic Boris Nemtsov in the days after his 2015 murder.

In 2015, the New York Times Magazine reported that social media accounts linked to the Internet Research Agency had launched social media campaigns in the United States, including a sophisticated hoax that spread false news of a chemical leak in Louisiana in 2014, apparently to sow chaos and fear.

In its unclassified report in January, the U.S. intelligence community concluded that the Internet Research Agency’s “likely financier” is a “close Putin ally with ties to Russian intelligence.”

In May, Time Magazine reported that U.S. intelligence officials had discovered evidence that Russian agents had purchased ads on Facebook to target specific populations with propaganda. A Facebook spokesman told the magazine that the company had no evidence of such buys.

Under federal law and Federal Election Commission regulations, both foreign nationals and foreign governments are prohibited from making contributions or spending money to influence a federal, state or local election in the United States. The ban includes independent expenditures made in connection with an election.

Those banned from such spending include foreign citizens, foreign governments, foreign political parties, foreign corporations, foreign associations and foreign partnerships, according to the FEC. (Permanent residents who hold green cards, however, are not considered foreign nationals.) Violators face civil penalties, as well as criminal prosecution if they are found to have knowingly broken the law.

Andrew Roth, Alice Crites and Matea Gold contributed to this report.

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Trump sides with Democrats on fiscal issues, throwing Republican plans into chaos

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President Trump, a man of few allegiances who seized control of the Republican Party in a hostile takeover, suddenly aligned himself with Democrats Wednesday on a series of key fiscal issues — and even gave a lift to North Dakota’s embattled Democratic U.S. senator.

Trump confounded his own party’s leaders when he cut a deal with Democratic congressional leaders — “Chuck and Nancy,” as the president informally referred to them — on a short-term plan to fund the government and raise its borrowing limit this month.

Trump’s surprise stance upended sensitive negotiations over the debt ceiling and other crucial policy areas this fall and further imperiled his already tenuous relationships with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.).

The episode is the latest turn in Trump’s extraordinary separation from his own party, as he distances himself to deflect blame for what has been a year of gridlock and missed opportunities for Republicans on Capitol Hill. It follows a summer of presidential stewing over McConnell and Ryan, both of whom Trump views as insufficiently loyal and weak in executing his agenda, according to his advisers.

Trump made his position clear at a White House meeting with both parties’ congressional leaders, agreeing with Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on plans for a bill to fund the government and raise the debt ceiling for three months.

That effectively postpones until December a divisive fight over fiscal matters, including whether to fund construction of Trump’s long-promised wall at the U.S.-Mexico border.

“We had a very good meeting with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer,” Trump told reporters Wednesday aboard Air Force One as he traveled to North Dakota. “We agreed to a three-month extension on debt ceiling, which they consider to be sacred — very important — always we’ll agree on debt ceiling automatically because of the importance of it.”

In siding with Democrats, Trump overruled his own Treasury secretary, Steve Mnuchin, who was in the middle of an explanation backing a longer-term increase when the president interrupted him and disagreed, according to a person briefed on the meeting, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. Trump was “in deal-cutting mode,” the person said.

[Schumer, Pelosi offer Democratic votes for Harvey aid if paired with short-term debt-limit hike]

After the gathering, McConnell said he would add provisions extending government funding and the debt limit through mid-December to legislation passed by the House on Wednesday providing $7.85 billion in Hurricane Harvey relief.

“The president agreed with Senator Schumer and Congresswoman Pelosi to do a three-month [funding extension] and a debt ceiling into December, and that’s what I will be offering, based on the president’s decision, to the bill,” McConnell told reporters. “The president can speak for himself, but his feeling was that we needed to come together to not create a picture of divisiveness at a time of genuine national crisis.”

Trump also threw tacit support behind the Democrats’ push for a “dreamers” bill that would effectively formalize an Obama-era program shielding undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children from deportation.

Trump on Tuesday began phasing out the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which GOP hard-liners regard as illegal amnesty, but suggested Wednesday that if Congress passed a dreamers bill he might sign it.

“Chuck and Nancy want to see something happen — and so do I,” Trump said.

Later in the day Wednesday, Trump brought a special guest with him to an oil refinery in Mandan, N.D., to pitch his tax-cuts plan: Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, a Democrat facing a tough reelection in a solidly Republican state Trump carried in 2016 by 36 percentage points. He welcomed Heitkamp into his traveling delegation, affording her the chance to appear bipartisan by appearing alongside a president popular with North Dakotans.

As Heitkamp stepped onto an outdoor catwalk at the Mandan refinery to join him on stage, Trump delivered play-by-play commentary: “Everybody’s saying, ‘What’s she doing up here?’ But I’ll tell you what: Good woman.”

Trump opened his speech by recounting his “great bipartisan meeting” at the White House. “I’m committed to working with both parties to deliver for our wonderful, wonderful citizens,” Trump said, singling out Schumer and Pelosi by name before mentioning the Republicans who were in attendance.

“Everybody was happy,” Trump said of the meeting. “Not too happy, because you can never be too happy, but they were happy enough.”

By setting up another debt ceiling vote in December — a vote in which Republicans will almost certainly need Democratic help to avoid default — Democrats keep their seat at the table in this fall’s key policy debates.

[Trump administration announces end of immigration protection program for ‘dreamers’]

Had Republicans followed through with their original plan, Democrats would have been stuck trying to extract concessions ahead of debt ceiling votes this week using an empty threat: voting against a legislative package that includes the politically sensitive Harvey aid. Democrats believe pushing the debt-limit debate into December will increase their leverage on several issues, including protection of dreamers and securing funds to help stabilize health-care markets.

Schumer and Pelosi also gained an edge by giving Democrats an aura of strategic command they have lacked since Trump’s election. Instead of McConnell claiming victory, it was Schumer who told reporters, “The nation can breathe a sigh of relief.”

The deal may also benefit Trump by allowing him to revive his threat to shut down the government over wall funding.

At the White House, Republican leaders pushed for an 18-month debt-limit hike, then floated doing a six-month extension, according to two aides briefed on the meeting. But Pelosi and Schumer dismissed the six-month proposal, and Trump then agreed to the three-month hike that Democrats put on the table.

McConnell and Ryan came out of the White House meeting in the weakest position — losing an opportunity to neutralize the debt-ceiling issue before the 2018 midterm elections and to exclude Democrats from major policy debates this fall.

The president’s decision came barely an hour after Ryan panned the idea of a short-term debt hike, accusing Democrats of “playing politics” with much-needed aid for Hurricane Harvey victims.

“I think that’s ridiculous and disgraceful that they want to play politics with the debt ceiling at this moment when we have fellow citizens in need, to respond to these hurricanes so we do not strand them,” Ryan told reporters.

Trump apparently disagreed.

“We essentially came to a deal, and I think the deal will be very good,” Trump said. “We had a very, very cordial and professional meeting.”

Not all Democrats were so thrilled with the deal. Some were upset it did not include protections for the estimated 800,000 Dreamers.

[Trump administration announces end of immigration protection program for ‘dreamers’]

“So Trump attacks our dreamers and the next day the Democrats walk in there and say, ‘Oh, let’s just have a nice time-out,’ while they’re all suffering?” said Rep. Luis V. Gutiérrez (D-Ill.). “That is what is wrong with Democrats. They don’t stand up.”

Schumer said he was not finished advocating for Dreamers. “This is not a trade-off for us,” he said. “This is a very important issue that we’re going to fight hard for until we get it done.”

The fiscal agreement would likely force Congress to vote on the debt ceiling by Dec. 15. Negotiators were still working out details late Wednesday, and it is unclear whether the Treasury Department would have flexibility to avoid default after that date. Typically, the department can use emergency steps to avoid default for several months past any debt-ceiling deadline.

The short-term extensions for the debt ceiling and government funding are also expected to further cloud the prospects for enacting major tax cuts, Trump’s top domestic priority. They effectively mean spending and budget fights will continue for months, just as the GOP was hoping to coalesce around a plan to cut taxes.

Trump tried to rally support for his tax plan in North Dakota.

“Anybody that’s going to vote against tax cuts and tax reforms — whether it’s in North Dakota or anybody else or any place else — you’ve gotta vote against them and get them out of office, because it’s so, it is so bad,” Trump said, pausing so that the crowd could cheer. “This is not a close one.”

The White House meeting took place just as the House approved the Harvey aid package, its first major order of business after the August recess.

The measure — providing $7.4 billion for the Federal Emergency Management Agency and $450 million for a disaster loan program for small businesses — passed 419 to 3, with 12 members not voting. Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), Justin Amash (R-Mich.) and Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) voted no. It now moves to the Senate, where leaders plan to hold a vote by the end of the week.

[Recovering from Harvey when ‘you already live a disaster every day of your life’]

Top House Republicans barely veiled their frustration with Trump’s decision to side with Democrats on the debt ceiling. House Rules Committee Chairman Pete Sessions (R-Texas) said he “would have not tied the knot so tight” for December, saying an extension till at least February would have been better, but he carefully avoided criticizing Trump.

“We all do it differently,” Sessions said. “I think it was an overly generous answer that he gave our friends the Democrats. But I’m not going to be critical of my president. I support my president.”

Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), the chairman of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, was among those who warned that Democrats’ short-term debt-limit request could threaten GOP efforts to cut spending.

“Obviously getting a [continuing resolution] and the debt ceiling to not come due at the same time would be the most prudent fiscal decision we could make,” Meadows told reporters.

Rucker reported from Mandan, N.D. Damian Paletta, Abby Phillip, Paul Kane and Jenna Johnson in Washington contributed to this report.

Read more at PowerPost

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Hurricane Irma, Packing 185-MPH Winds, Makes Landfall in Caribbean

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Photo

Ellis Cerda hangs storm shutters at Boutique Chrisnelia, a clothing shop, on Tuesday in San Juan, P.R.

Credit
Erika P. Rodriguez for The New York Times

This is an overview of Hurricane Irma, reported by journalists throughout the region. To see their latest dispatches from places hit by the storm, go to our live updates.

SAN JUAN, P.R. — Hurricane Irma, one of the most powerful Atlantic storms ever recorded, battered the islands of the northeast Caribbean early Wednesday, leaving severe damage in its wake as it barreled toward the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico.

Irma, a Category 5 storm packing winds of up to 185 miles an hour, first made landfall at 2 a.m. on Barbuda, and later in the morning passed directly over St. Martin, the National Hurricane Center reported. There were reports of flooding, major damage to buildings, and severed electricity and phone service on those islands and Saint Barthélemy and Anguilla.

The four “most durable” buildings on St. Martin were destroyed, the French interior minister, Gérard Collomb, said at a cabinet meeting in Paris, “which means that in all likelihood the more rustic buildings are probably totally or partially destroyed.”

In the afternoon, the heart of the storm passed over the British Virgin Islands, the Hurricane Center reported. At 2 p.m., the hurricane’s eye was seven miles northwest of Road Town, capital of the territory, and 20 miles northeast of St. Thomas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

As the hurricane continued to move west-northwest, it was projected to rake northeast Puerto Rico later in the day, with the core of the storm remaining over water north of the island.

Map

Maps: Tracking the Path of Hurricane Irma

Satellite imagery and maps of the course of the Category 5 storm, which made landfall in the Caribbean on Wednesday. Included are representations of the various paths the hurricane could take.

Devastating storm surges were expected to put parts of Turks and Caicos and the southern islands of the Bahamas 15 to 20 feet underwater on Thursday.

The storm is one of the strongest ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean, according to the center and to Bryan Norcross, a hurricane specialist at the Weather Channel. There have been, however, storms with comparable winds in the Caribbean or the Gulf of Mexico, where warm waters can fuel particularly dangerous hurricanes.

Late Tuesday, wind gusts of around 50 miles an hour arrived in Antigua and Barbuda but picked up significant strength as the center of the storm swirled several dozen miles offshore. The authorities cut off power on those islands before midnight, forcing many residents to listen to the latest forecasts on transistor radios in the darkness.

Residents throughout the Caribbean scrambled on Tuesday to rush out of possible flood zones, stock up on water, food and gas, shutter their homes and brace for what is now, and could remain, a Category 5 hurricane. On Antigua, many residents were spending the night in nearly 40 shelters because of concerns that their homes, even when boarded up, would topple in the destructive winds.

“We have to prepare for an event that we have never experienced here,” Gov. Ricardo Rosselló of Puerto Rico said earlier on Tuesday, calling the hurricane’s arrival imminent and its potential catastrophic.

Irma threatens havoc and widespread destruction across Puerto Rico, a United States territory of 3.4 million people, the island of Hispaniola (home to the Dominican Republic and Haiti), Antigua, St. Kitts and Nevis, and the United States Virgin Islands, among others. Cuba is also threatened.

President Trump declared a state of emergency in Puerto Rico, Florida and the United States Virgin Islands on Tuesday.

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Hurricane Irma Pummels Caribbean

One of the strongest Atlantic storms ever recorded has already caused damage on several islands.

By CAMILLA SCHICK on Publish Date September 6, 2017.

Photo by Rinsy Xieng/RCI Guadeloupe, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images.

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With Harvey’s destruction still fresh on people’s minds, Florida hustled into action. Gov. Rick Scott activated the state National Guard to help with hurricane preparations, and he suspended highway tolls. On Monday, the governor declared a state of emergency and spoke with Mr. Trump, who offered “the full resources of the federal government,” Mr. Scott wrote on Twitter.

Most of the latest projections have Irma making landfall in Florida by Sunday, although it is unclear where exactly that might happen.

The Florida Keys, an especially vulnerable chain of islands, moved quickly to prepare for crushing winds and possible flooding. On Wednesday, schools will be closed and mandatory evacuations will begin, county officials said. The Keys’ three hospitals started evacuating patients on Tuesday.

Miami-Dade, the state’s largest county, announced that schools would close on Thursday and officials began putting emergency plans into place.

But Puerto Rico and the northern Leeward Islands are expected to be hit before that. It has been nearly a century since Puerto Rico was hit by a Category 5 storm, Mr. Norcross of the Weather Channel said.

Puerto Rican officials have warned that the island’s fragile electrical grid could be shut down for days, weeks or even months in some areas. In his news conference, Mr. Rosselló and emergency officials warned that with such powerful winds expected to thrash the island, infrastructure, houses and the phone system would inevitably be damaged.

For Puerto Rico, the hurricane could not have come at a worse time. The island is in the throes of an economic crisis and does not have money for a long rebuilding process.

“This is not going to be easy,” said Héctor Pesquera, the superintendent of public security in Puerto Rico.

Abner Gómez Cortés, the head of Puerto Rico’s emergency agency, warned that coastal zones were particular vulnerable — not so much because of rain, as with Harvey — but because of storm surges of up to 20 feet.

On Tuesday, the lines for fast-dwindling gas, food, water and hardware seemed interminable and anxiety mounted. One hardware store in San Juan had been nearly picked clean by afternoon.

“This has been like this for the last three days,” said Juan Carlos Ramirez, the store manager. “We’ve sold all of the most necessary items — flashlight, batteries, plywood.”

People standing in line said one of their biggest worries was the expected loss of electricity for long periods. “The infrastructure can’t cope with a hurricane,” Ashley Albelo, a shopper, said.

Outside a Sears, Maria Ruiz could not help but remember Hurricanes Hugo and George, which badly damaged Puerto Rico. “Destruction,” she said. “That is what we can expect based on past experiences, and it’s already a Category 5.’’

Similar fears were apparent on nearby islands. In Antigua, southeast of Puerto Rico, many businesses were closed. Supermarkets were overrun and gas stations were packed.

Photo

Shoppers stocked up on supplies at Walmart in San Juan on Tuesday.

Credit
Erika P. Rodriguez for The New York Times

Some island residents sounded stoic and battle-tested. In Guadeloupe, Coralice Line, who was attending the front desk at the Le Creole Beach Hotel Spa, said she was not particularly distressed. “We are not too worried because we are accustomed to it,” she said by phone from the hotel. “Hurricanes are part of life in the Caribbean islands.”

At the Sugar Bay Club hotel in St. Kitts and Nevis, Ophelia Gardiner, the front-desk supervisor, said that while some guests had fled the island on an American Airlines flight, others had decided to stay and ride out the storm.

“Everything is boarded up and put away and all we have to do is wait and see what happens,” Ms. Gardiner said. She laughed nervously. “I don’t know how you can prepare for a hurricane of that magnitude but we’re doing our best.”

In Miami-Dade County, which is still haunted by the ferocity and wreckage of Hurricane Andrew, a Category 5 storm, residents worried and began to prepare earlier than usual. For some, a sense of panic began to set in. Many hotels across Florida had already been booked for the weekend by hurricane-wary residents. Most stores had run out of water, flashlights and other key supplies. Gas stations ran out of fuel.

Hurricane Harvey in Texas also weighed heavily on people’s minds.

“I think because of Texas, people are freaking out,” said Yoseyn Ramos, 24, a Miami resident who said she was worried because she could not find gas anywhere.

In Brickell, a Miami neighborhood that abuts both the Atlantic and the Miami River, Lucas Mattout, 22, was dashing around Publix supermarket looking for water. “They are all sold out,” he said. “Of course, with Harvey, no one wants to take a chance.”

Every storm, though, has its rebels. Jose Fonseca, 52, a Coral Gables resident who works at the Mandarin Oriental on Brickell Key, said he had not done or bought anything to prepare for the storm.

“I think people are panicking because of the news from Texas day after day,” he said. “I will buy some water.” Then, he added, “And some beer of course.”

Correction: September 6, 2017

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misidentified the island where Hurricane Irma made landfall. It was Barbuda, not Bermuda.

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This entry was posted in United Airline News and tagged united airlines on September 6, 2017 by See Below.

Boston Red Sox Used Apple Watches to Steal Signs Against Yankees

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The Red Sox responded in kind on Tuesday, filing a complaint against the Yankees, claiming that the team uses a camera from its television network, YES, exclusively to steal signs during games.

It is unclear what penalties, if any, Commissioner Rob Manfred will issue against the Red Sox and whether he will order a more expansive investigation to determine the extent of the Red Sox’ sign-stealing system. It is also unclear how he will proceed with the countercomplaint.

Pat Courtney, a spokesman for Major League Baseball, declined to comment on the case. Attempts to reach the Red Sox were not successful. A Yankees official declined to comment on the Red Sox’ claim regarding the YES camera.

Stealing signs is believed to be most effective when there is a runner on second base who can watch what hand signals the catcher is using to communicate with the pitcher and then relay to the batter any clues about what type of pitch may be coming. Such tactics are allowed as long as long as teams do not use any methods beyond their eyes. Binoculars and electronic devices are prohibited to communicate about signs.

In recent years, as cameras have proliferated in major-league ballparks, teams have begun using the abundance of video to help them discern opponents’ signs. Some clubs have had clubhouse attendants quickly relay information to the dugout from personnel monitoring video.

With that approach, the information has to be rushed to the dugout on foot so it can be passed to the runner on second base. The Red Sox seemed to shorten the communication chain — and more quickly get the information to their batters — by sending information electronically to people in the dugout.

The Red Sox told league investigators that team personnel scanning instant-replay video were sending the pitch signs electronically to the trainers, who were then passing the information to the players.

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As part of the inquiry, baseball investigators have interviewed the Red Sox team trainers and outfielder Chris Young, a former Yankees player. The Red Sox told league investigators that the team’s manager, John Farrell, general manager, Dave Dombrowski, and other front-office officials were not aware of the sign-stealing operation, the people said.

In the first game of the series in question, the first time the Red Sox got a runner on second was Xander Bogaerts, in the second inning. Rafael Devers promptly hit a home run, giving the Red Sox a 2-0 lead. The Red Sox went 5 for 8 in the first game when they had a man on second.

Their success when they had a runner on second in the other two games was mixed: 1 for 6 in the second game; and 3 for 10 in the third game.

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Yankees pitcher Sonny Gray pitching in the first inning against the Red Sox on Aug. 20. The Red Sox won that game, 5-1.

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Adam Glanzman/Getty Images

The video provided to the commissioner’s office by the Yankees was captured during the first two games of the series and included at least three clips. In the clips, the team’s assistant athletic trainer, Jon Jochim, is seen looking at his Apple Watch and then passing information to outfielder Brock Holt and second baseman Dustin Pedroia, who was injured at the time but in uniform. In one instance, Pedroia is then seen passing the information to Young.

The Red Sox’ tactics will add to their intense rivalry with the Yankees, who closely trail them in the standings. Outside of New England, the case will be reminiscent of the Spygate controversy that erupted a decade ago when the world-beating Patriots were found to have violated N.F.L. rules by spying on opponents to gain an edge.

Mr. Manfred is in a difficult position as he decides how to discipline the team and whether to continue investigating to try to determine if the Red Sox violated rules in other games this season and whether Farrell and other team personnel knew about the scheme.

A decade ago, the N.F.L. commissioner, Roger Goodell, hastily took away a first-round draft pick and fined the Patriots and their coach, Bill Belichick, before conducting a thorough investigation. When more evidence of cheating later emerged, Goodell was accused of trying to minimize the damage and protect one of the sport’s premiere franchises. Congress eventually got involved.

In baseball, the most infamous incident involving sign stealing played out in 1951, when the New York Giants overcame a 13 and one- half game deficit in the standings over the final two months of the season to catch the Brooklyn Dodgers. The Giants went on to beat the Dodgers in a playoff for the pennant when Bobby Thomson hit a home run remembered as the “ Shot Heard Round the World.” Fifty years later, The Wall Street Journal revealed that the Giants had spies in the center-field clubhouse at the Polo Grounds who used a telescope to steal signs from the opposing catcher, which were then relayed to Giants’ players from a backup player in the bullpen.

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In 1997, teams accused the Mets of planting small cameras near home plate in Shea Stadium to spy on catchers. The Mets denied that they had used the cameras to try to steal signs, and the league did not take any action.

More recently, the Philadelphia Phillies faced sign-stealing accusations in 2011, when they were one of the best teams in baseball. Several teams logged complaints with the commissioner’s office that the team used binoculars and other unauthorized methods to steal signs. The Phillies were never sanctioned by Major League Baseball.

Some in baseball would like for Mr. Manfred to take away some of Boston’s victories, a move that would be highly unusual. Others believe that a significant fine and the docking of draft picks would be sufficient.

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This entry was posted in United Airline News and tagged united airlines on September 6, 2017 by See Below.

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