Storm-shocked Floridians returned to shattered homes on Monday as the remnants of Hurricane Irma pushed inland, leaving more than half of all state residents without power and city streets underwater from Orlando and Jacksonville into coastal Georgia and South Carolina.

Downgraded to a tropical storm early on Monday, Irma had ranked as one of the most powerful Atlantic hurricanes on record before barreling into the Florida Keys on Sunday and plowing northward along the Gulf Coast and moving inland to wreak havoc across a wide swath of the third-most populous US state.

Still, the scope of damage in Florida and neighboring states paled in comparison with the utter devastation left by Irma as a rare Category 5 hurricane in parts of the Caribbean, where the storm killed nearly 40 people – at least 10 of them in Cuba – before turning its fury on Florida.

Especially hard hit in the United States was the resort archipelago of the Keys, extending into the Gulf of Mexico from the tip of Florida’s peninsula and connected to the mainland by a single, narrow highway, Governor Rick Scott told a news conference on Monday.

“There’s devastation,” he said, adding that virtually every mobile-home park on the island chain was left upended. “It’s horrible what we saw.”

While some evacuees from the Keys expressed anger at authorities refusing to allow them to return to their homes on Monday, the US Defense Department said as many as 10,000 residents who had stayed put on the island may now be stranded and in need of evacuation.

Monroe County fire officials said later they would reopen road access on Tuesday morning at 7 a.m. EDT (1100 GMT) for residents and business owners from Key Largo, the main island at the upper end of the chain, as well as the towns of Tavernier and Islamorada farther to the south.

No timetable for reopening the remainder of the Keys was given.

In Miami, which escaped the worst of Irma’s winds but experienced heavy flooding, residents in the city’s Little Haiti neighborhood returned to the wreckage of trailer homes that were shredded by the storm.

“I wanted to cry, but this is what it is, this is life,” Melida Hernandez, 67, who had ridden out the storm at a nearby church, said as she gazed at the ruins of her dwelling, split in two by a fallen tree.

Evacuees urged to stay put

The storm claimed its first known US fatality over the weekend in the Keys – a man found dead in a pickup truck that had crashed into a tree in high winds.

At least one other possibly storm-related fatal car crash was reported on Sunday in Orange County, Florida. On Monday, two people were killed by falling trees in two Atlanta suburbs, according to local authorities.

Some 6.5 million people, about one-third of Florida’s population, had been ordered from their homes ahead of Irma’s arrival, and more than 200,000 people sought refuge in about 700 shelters, according to state data.

Scott urged evacuees all over the state to stay put for now rather than rush home, saying downed power lines, debris and other hazards abounded. “Don’t put any more lives at risk,” he said.

Without power

One of the biggest lingering problems was widespread power outages, with utilities reporting some 7.4 million homes and businesses without electricity in Florida and neighboring states. They said it could take weeks to fully restore service.

Scott said 65 percent of Florida was without power. Travel into and out of the state likewise remained stymied. Miami International Airport, one of the busiest in the country, halted passenger flights through at least Monday.

Police in Miami-Dade County and Fort Lauderdale reported making 48 arrests for looting. The Keys were largely evacuated before the storm struck with winds of up to 130 mph (209 kph), and police established a checkpoint on Monday to keep displaced residents from returning while authorities work to restore power, water, fuel supplies and medical service.

Some seeking re-entry argued with police who stopped them at the first of a series of bridges leading to the island chain. Irma’s arrival in Florida came around two weeks after Hurricane Harvey claimed about 60 lives and caused property damage estimates as high as $180 billion after pummeling the Gulf Coasts of Texas and Louisiana with heavy rains and severe flooding.

(Source: Reuters)

Hurricane Irma is still “extremely dangerous” and will “devastate” parts of Southeastern United States, federal officials and agencies have warned.

“Obviously Hurricane Irma continues to be a threat that is going to devastate the United States,” Brock Long, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator (FEMA), said at a press conference Friday morning. “We’re going to have a couple rough days.”

Long, whose agency is still preoccupied with the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, which caused catastrophic flooding in parts of Texas and Louisiana last month, said around 3,000 federal emergency workers have been mobilized to deal with Irma.

Irma, one of the strongest storms in US history, is surging towards the US after causing death and destruction in the Caribbean islands.

Irma is still “extremely dangerous,” with maximum sustained winds of 150 mph (241 km), which are strong enough to uproot trees, bring down power poles and rip off the roofs and some exterior walls of well-built frame homes, The National Weather Service cautioned.

Irma was downgraded from a Category 5 to a Category 4 storm early Friday morning. As of 11 am Eastern Time, the storm was moving 14 mph (22 km) and located 405 miles (651 km) southeast of Miami, Florida.

The National Weather Service issued its first hurricane warnings for Florida Thursday night, warning residents that “preparations to protect life should be rushed to completion.”

Mandatory evacuation orders have been issued for barrier islands, coastal communities, low-lying areas and mobile homes across Florida. Experts estimate roughly 1.2 million Florida residents have been ordered to evacuate.

Meteorologists expect Irma will make landfall near Miami as a strong Category 4 hurricane with winds about 140 mph (225 km).

The majority of Americans believe the US is deeply divided and don’t see the United States as an exceptional place to live, according to a new poll.

The poll by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal also finds that the share of Americans who believe that the country has a “strong national character” is shrinking.

An overwhelming majority of Americans say the country is either mainly divided (59 percent) or totally divided (21 percent), the survey found.

Asked to identify some of the reasons for that division, poll respondents placed income inequality at the top of the list, with 23 percent naming the gap between the rich and the poor as one of the primary causes of strife in America.

Less than a third of American adults — 28 percent — called the US the “single best place to live in the world,” with another 17 percent calling it “among the very few best places.”

Compared to other countries, 37 percent of respondents said the US is merely “above average” and 14 percent rated the country as “average.” An additional four percent called the US “below average” on the global scale.

Asked to rate the “national character” of the US on a scale of one to 10, only 14 percent of those surveyed offered a “strong” rating of eight or higher, while 34 percent expressed a “weak” rating of four or lower.

US President Donald Trump’s job approval rating in the poll stood at just 40 percent, with 55 percent disapproving. The poll came as the nation has grappled with a historically unpopular president in Trump.

Trump has already spent more time under 40 percent than any other first-year president, according to an analysis by The Associated Press.

The survey was conducted August 5-9, before Trump was widely criticized for his handling of a white supremacy march in Charlottesville, Virginia, which ended in the death of a peaceful counter-protester.

A poll released last week by Fox News shows that 55 percent of American voters disapprove of Trump’s performance as president and believe he is “tearing the country apart.”

According to the survey, Trump has lost the most support from Republican men and whites without a college degree (a nine-point decline for each) and conservatives (a seven-point loss). All three groups are significant demographics in his voter base.

Source: Presstv

The United Nations says poverty and state violence, not religion, are driving young Africans to join militant groups as a number of Takfiri extremist groups are wreaking havoc across the continent. The UN Development Programme (UNDP) said in a statement on Thursday that it was easiest for terrorist outfits like al-Shabab and Boko Haram to recruit young people who were unemployed and frustrated about lack of opportunities and services in remote areas.

“Contrary to popular narratives, those who join extremist groups tend to have lower levels of religious or formal education and less understanding of the meaning of religious texts,” the statement read, adding, “Actually understanding one’s religion can strengthen resilience to the pull of extremism.”

This came after a team of researchers conducted a study based on interviews with almost 600 recruits. The interviews were carried out between 2015 and 2017 in six countries, including Kenya, Nigeria and Somalia, mostly in detention facilities.

Interviews with non-militant youths showed that receiving at least six years of religious schooling reduced the likelihood of joining an extremist group by a third.

Although more than half of interviewees cited religion as a reason for joining an extremist group, 57 percent did not read religious texts or understood little to nothing of them.

More than four in 10 said they were jobless before joining the terrorist groups. This is while 34 percent said employment was the most immediate need when they signed up.

But for many, the tipping point was state violence. About 70 percent of recruits said their “tipping point” was a government action, often the arrest or killing of a friend or relative by security forces.

“Such an individual could, upon witnessing or experiencing perceived abuse of power by the state, be tipped over the edge into extremism,” the report said.

According to researchers, people’s sense of neglect started in childhood with young people growing up to resent the lack of economic opportunities or chance of change and distrusting the state to provide services or respect human rights.

A separate report focusing on Mali by the charity Mercy Corps said on Thursday that community support for armed groups also forced young people to engage in acts of violence out of a sense of duty or in a bid to gain the respect from their neighbors,

The United Nations has recently said that Boko Haram group, whose brutal eight-year campaign in northeast Nigeria shows no sign of ending,  accounted for more than half of 33,000 deaths caused by militant attacks in Africa between 2011 and 2016.

The Boko Haram militancy has left more than 20,000 people killed and around three million displaced. The group’s militancy has also affected Nigeria’s neighbors like Chad, Cameroon and Niger.

Somalia, the long-chaotic Horn of Africa nation has been the scene of deadly clashes between government forces and al-Shabab militants since 2006. The group has also staged deadly cross-border attacks into neighboring Kenya.

In recent years, several militant attacks have been claimed in Mali by a powerful extremist alliance known as GSIM, which is a fusion of three Malian extremist groups with previous al-Qaeda links.

Extremists from al-Qaeda’s North Africa branch have made a fortune over the last decade by abducting foreigners in the vast Sahel region and demanding enormous ransoms for their release.

Source: Presstv