Reports of fatalities and widespread damage in northern Caribbean islands began to emerge Wednesday night after Hurricane Irma blasted through, packing devastating winds and rain.
“Barbuda right now is literally a rubble,” Prime Minister Gaston Browne of Antigua and Barbuda told an interviewer with ABS TV/Radio Antigua.
.
“The entire housing stock was damaged,” Browne said after visiting the island of 1,800. “It is just a total devastation.”
Irma killed at least three people, destroyed government buildings, tore roofs from houses and left islands without power or communications. St. Martin/St. Maarten and St. Barts also felt the fury of the Category 5 storm, one of the strongest ever recorded in the Atlantic, according to updates from the region.
.
Browne said there currently is no water or phone service for Barbuda residents. He said one fatality, an infant, had been confirmed.
A breakthrough by a Swiss chocolate maker expands the industry’s hues beyond just dark, milk and white.
Barry Callebaut AG, the world’s largest cocoa processor, has come up with the first new natural color for chocolate since Nestle SA started making bars of white chocolate more than 80 years ago. While it has a pinkish hue and a fruity flavor, the Zurich-based company prefers to refer to it as “ruby chocolate.”
The new product may help boost sales in a struggling global chocolate market that producers hope has touched bottom. As Hershey cuts 15 percent of its staff and Nestle tries to sell its U.S. chocolate business, ruby chocolate raises the possibility that next Valentine’s Day may arrive with store shelves full of natural pink chocolate hearts.
.
Barry Callebaut’s new ‘ruby chocolate’. Source: Barry Callebaut AG
UPDATE as of Saturday, 9:30 a.m.: The Sartin Draw fire grew to 91,000 acres as of Saturday morning, according to an update provided by the Montana DNRC county assist team. It remains 10 percent contained.
Resources on the fire include 31 engines, three crews, nine heavy equipment and 190 personnel.
On Saturday, local, state and federal firefighers will continue to build and improve fire lines and burn out areas of unburned line. They will also be working to secure the fire perimeter in front of Sunday’s forecasted cold front.
Pre-evacuation notice remains in place for residents north of Merchant Cut, west of Highway 59 and south of 674 Road.
Air quality Saturday morning also remained unhealthy for the towns of Broadus and Birney, according to the Montana Department of Environmental Quality.
California Gov. Jerry Brown issued a state of emergency for Los Angeles County on Sunday due to the ongoing La Tuna brush fire near Burbank.
Since the fire started Friday, it has burned more than 5,895 acres, forced residents to evacuate from their homes, shut down an interstate and sent massive plumes of smoke into the air.
.
Brown’s declaration will allow state personnel and equipment to be used in fighting the fires, at the direction of the California Office of Emergency Services.
But there were signs Sunday night that emergency personnel were beginning to drive back the blaze.
.
The Los Angeles Fire Department said in a statement 6.30 p.m. local time (9:30 p.m. ET) that the fire was 25% contained. All mandatory and voluntary evacuations had been formally lifted, it said, and a section of interstate closed due to fire and smoke had reopened. Four firefighters had non-life-threatening injuries.
The House approved Wednesday an initial $7.9 billion package of disaster relief funds in the wake of Hurricane Harvey, while Senate leaders appear likely to attach the bill to a politically-fraught effort to raise the debt ceiling.
The vote was 419-3. The bill moves to the Senate, which is expected to vote on the plan this week, the bulk of which will go to Federal Emergency Management Agency, which has warned that it is running out of resources rapidly. In addition to supporting the recovery efforts in Texas, the agency is preparing for Hurricane Irma, another powerful storm that is approaching Puerto Rico and threatens to have a devastating impact on Florida.
.
But in a new wrinkle that could complicate the debt ceiling fight, Democratic leaders, including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, released a statement Wednesday morning backing only a three-month debt limit increase as part of the Harvey aid package.
While Republican leaders haven’t said how long they plan to extend the debt limit, it was expected that it would be longer than three months.
President Trump struck a deal with Democratic congressional leaders on Wednesday to increase the debt limit and finance the government until mid-December, undercutting his own Republican allies as he reached across the aisle to resolve a major dispute for the first time since taking office.
The agreement would avert a fiscal showdown later this month without the bloody, partisan battle that many had anticipated by combining a debt ceiling increase and stopgap spending measure with relief aid to Texas and other areas devastated by Hurricane Harvey. But without addressing the fundamental underlying issues, it set up the prospect for an even bigger clash at the end of the year.
In embracing the three-month deal, Mr. Trump accepted a Democratic proposal that had been rejected just hours earlier by Speaker Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin. Mr. Trump’s snap decision at a White House meeting caught Republican leaders off guard and reflected friction between the president and his party. After weeks of criticizing Republican leaders for failing to pass legislation, Mr. Trump signaled that he was willing to cross party lines to score some much-desired legislative victories.
.
President Trump and Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader, spoke during a meeting with the congressional leadership in the Oval Office on Wednesday.Credit Al Drago for The New York Times
Clothing today is mostly about covering up. In the future, it might also be about powering up — literally.
Researchers across the country are working to develop fabrics that harvest energy from your body movements and use it to provide a bit of extra juice for your cellphone or a fitness tracker — or maybe to change the color or pattern of the fabric itself. “Something that’s kind of snazzy,” says Dr. Cary Pint, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee and a leading researcher in the field.
One group of researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas has developed an energy-harvesting yarn made of carbon nanotubes, hollow cylinders 10,000 times thinner than a human hair. The tubes are bound into larger yarns and twisted so much that they coil. Experiments show that when these tightly coiled “twistron” yarns are placed side by side and then stretched, they generate a tiny electrical current.
For 16 years, advocates for legalizing young immigrants brought here illegally by their parents have tried to pass legislation to shield them from deportation. The bill was called the Dream Act, and in Congresses Democratic and Republican, and in the Bush and Obama administrations, whether by stand-alone bill or comprehensive immigration legislation, it failed again and again.
Now, with 800,000 lives in the balance and a fiercely anti-immigration current running through the Republican Party, lawmakers are being asked to try again — with a six-month deadline, to boot. The prospects for success after more than a decade of false starts would already be daunting, but President Trump may have made the odds even longer after he promised voters last year that Republicans would take a hard line on immigration, then punted the issue to Congress.
His invitation to lawmakers on Tuesday to “do something and do it right” for the so-called dreamers will run into the headwinds of his own politics. On the other hand, lawmakers who for 16 years have been unwilling to grant legal status to a sympathetic group of unauthorized immigrants may find that taking their legal status away is even harder than conferring it.
.
Senators Richard J. Durbin, left, and Lindsey Graham during a press conference about the Dream Act at the Capitol on Tuesday.Credit Pete Marovich for The New York Times
The US military has ordered the evacuation of over five thousand personnel from a Naval Air Station in Florida in preparation for Hurricane Irma.
Irma is now a Category 5 storm and one of the strongest ever recorded in the Atlantic.
.
Currently, it is threatening to slam into Caribbean islands including Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands with “potentially catastrophic” force on Wednesday, the National Hurricane Center said.
The military is braced for it to hit the US mainland and the current forecast suggests it could strike Florida over the weekend.
The biggest names in business are urging President Trump and Congress to continue a program that protects undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children.
The CEOs of AT&T (T, Tech30), Best Buy (BBY) and Wells Fargo (WFC) are among the dozens of business leaders across the tech, retail and financial industries who have added their names to a letter defending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
FWD.us, an immigration advocacy organization, first posted the letter on Thursday with the backing of more than 300 business leaders. That number has now climbed above 400.
.
“Dreamers are vital to the future of our companies and our economy. With them, we grow and create jobs,” the letter says. “They are part of why we will continue to have a global competitive advantage.”
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
.
.
Hurricane Irma hits Caribbean island of Barbuda
.
James' World 2 