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      Biden Declares Disaster From Milton Ahead of Florida Visit

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      The president will visit communities ravaged by Hurricane Milton on Sunday. The disaster declaration will enable funds for the state to be deployed.President Biden approved a major disaster declaration for Florida for communities ravaged by Hurricane Milton, freeing up federal funding to assist in the state’s recovery and rebuilding.A statement from the White House on Saturday said that Mr. Biden had approved the deployment of the additional resources to Florida. It comes before he is set to travel there on Sunday to visit communities damaged by the hurricane and speak to emergency medical workers and residents trying to pick up the pieces. It will be his second such visit to the state this month.The White House typically approves disaster declarations for states after major natural disasters. The president makes the declaration after a state’s governor — in this case, Gov. Ron DeSantis — makes a request for the federal assistance.Mr. Biden finalized the declaration on Friday, freeing up federal funding for 34 counties, as well as the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida. The move also provides grants for temporary housing and home repairs, loans to cover uninsured property losses and other programs to help residents and businesses, according to the White House.“I want everyone in the impacted areas to know we’re going to do everything we can to help you pick back up the pieces and get back to where you were,” Mr. Biden said during a hurricane briefing with top cabinet officials at the White House on Friday.Total economic losses from Hurricane Milton and Hurricane Helene, which struck several states in the Southeast last month, could soar to over $200 billion, according to early estimates. Mr. Biden has said that the Federal Emergency Management Agency has enough resources to respond to the immediate needs of communities in the wake of both storms. But he has warned that Congress will need to pass more funding for longer-term recovery.“We’re going to be going to Congress,” Mr. Biden said. “We’re going to need a lot of help. We’re going to need a lot more money as we identify specifically how much is needed.”FEMA has approved $441 million in assistance for survivors of Hurricane Helene and over $349 million in public assistance funding to help rebuild communities, according to a statement from the agency.The visit to Florida on Sunday also comes amid rising frustration in the White House with the flood of misinformation about the federal response to recent natural disasters, led by former President Donald J. Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, and his allies.“The misinformation out there is not only disgusting but dangerous,” Mr. Biden said on Friday. More

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      in US Politics

      Trump wants the FCC to take CBS’s license away. This is a dark omen | Dennis Aftergut and Austin Sarat

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      Donald Trump’s 10 October attack on CBS for editing its 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris – a normal television process – is pure distraction. It is designed to draw our attention away from the fact that he was afraid to give the news magazine its traditional interview with both political candidates. Trump’s statement that the Federal Communications Commission should “take away” CBS’s broadcast license betrays his ignorance of the fact that the FCC does not license networks and foreshadows a full-on assault on free speech and freedom of the press if he becomes president.History is clear that dictators move early to take control of the media in order to censor information unfavorable to their people. Our safety requires preventing that control, as Thomas Jefferson wrote two centuries ago: “The only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed.”Only Rumpelstiltskin would fail to grasp how much Trump cannot tolerate criticism from the press or anyone. Attacking mainstream media is his way of desensitizing us to the important role of the press in a free society.If you want a preview of how first amendment rights will disappear if Trump is elected president, look to his home state of Florida where Governor Ron DeSantis, his Maga copycat, runs that government in a way Trump would like to bring to the whole nation. On 9 October, we saw one of the governor’s lackeys try to carve away freedom of speech and the press, along with reproductive rights.John Wilson, the general counsel to the state’s department of health, threatened the state’s broadcast stations with prosecution unless they removed a campaign ad promoting amendment 4. It’s the ballot measure to add abortion rights to the state’s constitution.The amendment 4 ad featured Floridian Caroline Williams saying that she would be dead had the state’s six-week ban on abortion been in effect when her health required one in 2022. The irony of the Florida government trying to quash the ad is rich. Here we have a bare-knuckles attempt at censorship from the party that purports to oppose the “cancel culture”.That’s not the end of the irony. The health department’s letter alleged that the pro-amendment 4 ad violated the state’s “sanitation nuisance” statute. This ground for government censorship, based as it is on a statute designed to prohibit overflowing septic tanks or unclean slaughterhouses, fails the laugh test, much less the constitution.Still, don’t miss what’s going on here: people’s rights are not removed in one fell swoop but rather in steps. The first stage is eroding people’s expectations that freedoms are sacred and will be respected. By getting us thinking we can live with this or that little invasion of someone else’s rights, autocrats normalize those intrusions and then expand them to cover all of us. Diminishing the media’s and the public’s rights to criticize a leader is how dictatorships get started.That’s why American law – at least in its current state – forbids what Wilson was threatening. Campaign ads are core political speech, entitled to the highest level of first amendment protection. That means that content-based restrictions on such speech must promote a compelling government interest and be the least intrusive way to promote that interest. Specifically, even false statements in the context of abortion law campaigning – and Williams’ statements in the ad were not false – must survive such strict scrutiny.A Florida crocodile’s tears would be more compelling than Wilson’s description of Florida’s interest in protecting women from the ad’s purported “danger” – that it suggests that they need to go to other states or find unlicensed abortionists if they do not have access to an abortion in Florida. That danger arises from the statute, not the ad.If the department of public health is so concerned about women’s safety, why not issue a regulation clarifying that doctors will not be prosecuted if, in their professional judgment, they believe that a woman has “pregnancy complications posing a serious risk of death or substantial and irreversible physical impairment”?Without that assurance, a doctor’s decision to perform an emergency abortion is so chilled that, in effect, there is no exception to Florida’s six-week ban. Interviews with Florida doctors establish their understandable unwillingness to risk their liberty given the prospect of a district attorney second-guessing their judgment.But whatever the ban’s impact on the practice of medicine, Wilson and DeSantis’s effort to stop groups from promoting their point of view puts all of us in jeopardy.George Washington captured that danger at the beginning of the republic. As he put it: “The freedom of Speech may be taken away – and, dumb & silent we may be led, like sheep, to the Slaughter.” Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, 250 years later, are sending us a clear message that our lives and our freedoms are on the ballot.

      Dennis Aftergut is a former federal prosecutor, currently of counsel to Lawyers Defending American Democracy

      Austin Sarat, associate dean of the faculty and William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College, is the author of Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty More

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      A Retirement Community Prepared for a Hurricane. Tornadoes Came Instead.

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      Hurricane Milton’s death toll was highest far from the coast where it made landfall, in a retirement community where few were braced for destructive tornadoes.Victor Linero was watching coverage of Hurricane Milton’s churn toward Florida when, suddenly, he saw a live video of a tornado near his grandfather’s home — hours before the hurricane was supposed to hit on the opposite side of the state.In a panic, Mr. Linero warned his grandfather over the phone that he needed to take cover.“I was screaming, ‘Papi, get shelter now!’” recalled Mr. Linero, 26, who was raised by his grandfather. “And then I start hearing, ‘Oh my God. Ahh!’”He heard his grandfather, Alejandro Alonso, 66, let out a final scream. Then the other end of the line went silent.By the time it was over, what looked to be two tornadoes had plowed through Spanish Lakes Country Club Village, the retirement community north of Fort Pierce where Mr. Alonso lived. They had decimated mobile homes, tossed trucks aside and toppled trees, all while Hurricane Milton was nearly 200 miles away, in the Gulf of Mexico.In the end, Mr. Alonso, his 70-year-old girlfriend and four other people were dead. Roughly 125 houses, all of them mobile homes, were destroyed. It was one of Hurricane Milton’s most perplexing ironies: that an area on the opposite coast from where the brunt of the hurricane hit saw more deaths than any other single spot during the storm.“We were not in an evacuation area,” Anita Perrotta, who lives in the community with her husband, said as she described the two of them hiding in their home at Spanish Lakes while the tornado threw debris against it.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Hurricane Milton Leaves Many Florida Animals in Limbo

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      Hurricane Milton has displaced people all over Florida. It left thousands of shelter animals in limbo, too.On Friday, animal shelters in Florida were struggling to handle an influx of animals after the storm and scrambling to relocate them, sending some as far away as Massachusetts.Temporary evacuation centers for animals had opened, including one at Alaqua Animal Refuge, in Florida’s Northern Panhandle, which began receiving animals from coastal areas at risk of flooding. Even small shelters were taking in animals, wherever they had spare kennels.“Many shelters were over capacity before the storm,” said Sharon Hawa, senior manager of emergency services at Best Friends Animal Society, a national organization that helped coordinate the transport of around 250 of Florida’s shelter animals this week.In an event like Milton, Ms. Hawa said, shelters usually receive animals picked up by people who are concerned that the strays could die in a storm, as well as ones that get separated from their owners during the storm.“Then there are animals that have already been part of their shelter population,” Ms. Hawa said, adding, “You’re talking about potentially 50, 60, 70, maybe 100 more animals.”On top of that, some shelters suffered property damage. “There are shelters where people are having to wade through water to get there to see if their shelter can even be operational,” Ms. Hawa said.In the lead-up to the storm, people in Clewiston, Fla., about 80 miles northwest of Fort Lauderdale, brought in several stray dogs to the city, said Thomas Lewis, the police chief. Soon, the city’s animal services, which was only set up to handle 14 dogs, had more than 50. And Clewiston was in the direct path of the storm.Mr. Lewis wanted to save the animals, a mix of pit bull mutts and small dogs, and worked with Peggy Adams Animal Rescue League, in West Palm Beach, to relocate more than 40 of them.Nearly all were taken by truck to West Palm Beach. From there, 10 of them were flown to Panama City Beach, and from there, they continued their journey to the Humane Society of North Texas.Chief Lewis said it was good that they had been relocated, since the town was hit by tornadoes. But he wondered what would happen to them next. More

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      Scared by Helene, Everyone in This Florida Beach Town Evacuated for Milton

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      Chris Miller rode out Hurricane Helene just over two weeks ago inside his picturesque yellow home across from the Gulf of Mexico in Bradenton Beach, a tiny Florida city on a barrier island. As the storm surge rose, he readied a wet suit in case he needed to escape.As a huge wall of water swept away his next-door neighbor’s house, he called the mayor, who lives down the road.“I told him, ‘Bev’s house is headed your way,’” Mr. Miller recalled on Friday.So when Hurricane Milton bore down this week, with Bradenton Beach directly in its path, Mr. Miller knew that he had to evacuate.“After we saw what we saw,” he said, “we couldn’t stay.”Neither did anyone else, Bradenton Beach officials believe — the first time in recent memory that even the most dedicated die-hards had no interest in riding out the storm. The forecast was simply too scary, and the memory of Helene — and Ian, another frightening storm two years earlier — was too fresh.“Most of the time, we have a few stragglers,” Mayor John Chappie, who also stayed on the island for Helene, said on Friday. “I don’t think we had any this time.”Dan and June DeBaun returned to their home in Bradenton Beach briefly on Friday to survey the latest damage, which was less severe than what was inflicted by Helene.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Digested week: ‘Just moving’? Tell that to Florida zookeepers

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      MondayAlong with death and divorce, moving makes up the trinity of what are supposed to be life’s most stressful experiences (assuming you don’t live on the Florida coast). On Monday, literally two and a half months after it left the US, my ship came in carrying among other things a large sectional sofa, a 200lb oak bookcase and 84 boxes of assorted personal effects, including an old colander with dried spaghetti stuck to the side and a tea strainer with a hole at the rim. The entire day was like a workshop on the consequences of poor decision-making.Apart from the books, I hadn’t missed any of the stuff and had come to the conclusion I’d be fine if it wound up at the bottom of the ocean. Instead, three men hauled the shipment up three flights of stairs while I dithered in the kitchen, occasionally popping my head round the door to assuage my anxiety by saying things such as: “At least it’s not raining!” and “Your job is so hard!” I hate myself sometimes.And while moving in is less stressful than moving out, it’s still brutal enough to make you wonder what exactly the problem is. Seeing all the things you invest meaning in out in the world, sad and undefended; wondering if your essential self is inextricably tied up in a bunch of 30-year-old birthday cards and some scraps of fabric you no longer fit into; the sinking feeling of never quite being able to out-run your stuff. Or maybe it’s just the stress of having large bodies crash into your walls, knocking chunks of plaster off at the corners. In New York, one of my movers had tried to counsel me while I watched everything go out the door. “It’s not life or death,” he said. “It’s just moving.” But I don’t think I agree.TuesdayPoliticians running for office in the UK are often forced into photo opps in pubs, pulling pints like the world’s most ill-at-ease bartender. In the US on Tuesday, Kamala Harris cracked open a beer with Stephen Colbert on his CBS late show and it was hard to tell just how awkward it was. The show tapes in New York, so the studio audience was ecstatic, but Harris still occupies a strange zone between someone who is highly polished and charismatic and a person who struggles to seem anything but wooden in public appearances.View image in fullscreenUnlike poor Rishi Sunak and his football gaffe around the Euros, in her of-the-people performance on Tuesday night, Harris sailed through the sports section, smartly ducking Colbert’s NFL question about Pennsylvania’s Steelers v Eagles with a pivot to her home town 49ers. But her response to Colbert’s chuckley invitation to swear about Donald Trump (“it starts with a W, there’s a letter in between, and the last letter’s F”) was sufficiently coy and self-satisfied to make one wonder about its utility beyond anyone-but-Trump-ers.WednesdayA scene straight from Hitchcock in a video taken in Washington state this week, where a woman who had, for years, been feeding the local raccoons woke up to find her house surrounded. A single raccoon is cute; 100 of them – bearing down on a house with hungry looks on their faces – is a horror movie, particularly when you discover that raccoons fall into that category of “cuddly looking animals that on a bad day could kill you”. The local sheriffs were called to disperse the hoard and issue the woman, whose name has not been released, with a stern advisory to quit encouraging them. It’s a lesson one hopes that might reach the lunatics who feed pigeons (and rats) in the city.ThursdayAs Hurricane Milton makes landfall on Florida’s Gulf Coast, most of the coverage rightly focuses on the threat to human life. But two stories of volunteers staying behind to care for the animals delivers a much-needed antidote to stories of horrifying destruction. At the Turtle hospital in the Florida Keys, conservationists gently move the rescue facility’s cohort of giant turtles out of the tidal pools to stop them getting bashed. And at Tampa zoo, a team of 12 workers elect to ride out the storm to protect more than 1,000 animals from harm, chopping up weeks’ worth of food for them and, Old Testament-style, moving them into storm-proofed containers.Meanwhile CNN anchor Anderson Cooper flies down from New York to put himself in harm’s way, gets hit in the face by flying debris while live on air, and mutters sheepishly, “Well, that wasn’t good, we’ll probably go inside shortly.” Bloody idiot.FridayIt’s that jolly time of year again in which we are offered the opportunity to slash an artery while attempting to gut a pumpkin, station it on our sideboards until it fills the room with the smell of rotting veg, then watch it slowly collapse in on itself while leaking orange fluid. For some, this year, there may be a get-out in the form of a national pumpkin shortage, which has hit Britain due a combination of a cold wet spring, slugs, and an unmistakable gift from the gods to those of us who find seasonal craft projects more stressful than moving. More

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      Stranded Mariner Seemingly Floated in the Gulf for Hours After the Hurricane

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      The U.S. Coast Guard on Thursday rescued a man who had seemingly done the impossible: he survived for hours in the Gulf of Mexico with nothing but a life jacket and a cooler to cling to.The agency posted a video of a Coast Guard crew member dropping from a helicopter about 30 miles off Longboat Key to grab the man from choppy seas and lift him to safety.The man, the captain of a fishing vessel, had lost contact with the Coast Guard around 7 p.m. on Wednesday as the storm worsened. He wasn’t found until 1:30 p.m. on Thursday.He managed to stay alive despite winds as fast as 90 miles per hour and waves as high as 20 to 25 feet through the night, said Lt. Cmdr. Dana Grady, the St. Petersburg command center chief of the U.S. Coast Guard.“This man survived in a nightmare scenario for even the most experienced mariner,” he said in a statement. The rescued captain, who was not identified, was taken to Tampa General Hospital to receive medical care. More

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      Hurricane Milton live updates: storm still producing hurricane-force winds as it moves off Florida’s east coast

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      The US National Hurricane Center reports that Hurricane Milton has completed its transit of Florida, and has moved off the state’s east coast. However, the center warns that it is still producing “hurricane force winds and heavy rainfall in east-central Florida”.In an earlier update the center said Milton still had a consistent wind speed of 85 mph (140 kph). About 3 million customers in Florida have been left without power, and there are reports of fatalities as rescue and recovery operations get under way.Milton earlier made landfall as a Category 3 hurricane, swerving south and missing a direct hit on Tampa in Hillsborough County.The Hillsborough County Sheriff’s office has said “post-storm recovery efforts have begun”. Danny Alvarez, the public information officer for Hillsborough County Fire Rescue, earlier said it had been difficult for crews receiving 911 calls but unable to deploy while winds were consistently about 40 mph.St Petersburg residents could no longer get water from their household taps because a water main break led the city to shut down service, and a construction crane collapsed, falling into a building in the city. Streets in downtown Gulfport were under water.About 125 homes were destroyed before the hurricane even made landfall, many of them mobile homes in communities for senior citizens, Kevin Guthrie, the director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management said, while authorities in St Lucie County said there had been more than one fatality.Fatalities have been reported on Florida’s east coast, after a tornado ripped through a retirement community in St Lucie county.One eyewitness, Doug Anderson, told local newspaper TCPalm that “I saw a truck knocked sideways. I followed the wreckage into Spanish Lakes. It looked like someone had dropped a weight from the sky and flattened a bunch of houses. One of the last houses I went to looked like it had been ripped in half. The people were out front crying. It was very heartbreaking to watch.”Anderson, a Lakewood Park resident, told the paper he spent about five hours on the scene trying to help, and witnessed numerous people with injuries.St Lucie county sheriff Keith Peterson earlier said of the location “Our deputies are out here. The Fire District is out here. We’re going through the rubble. We’re trying to recover anybody that we can, provide whatever help that we can.”Speaking to ABC News, meteorologist Kevin Musso has described the impact of Hurricane Milton compared to the forecast as a “mixed bag”. He said forecasts about the strength of the hurricane when it made landfall, and the location of the landfall, were “pretty good”, but that there is more that needs to be assessed.He told viewers “the question about the storm surge will really have to wait to be verified once we get to sunrise, get past these evening hours, and get into daylight.”Musso also said that the number of tornadoes associated with the hurricane had “exceeded expectations”. “Tornadoes happen,” he said, “but these were exceptional.”Here is some CCTV footage of CCTV showing Hurricane Milton flooding in a Fort Myers restaurant.The US National Hurricane Center reports that Hurricane Milton has completed its transit of Florida, and has moved off the state’s east coast. However, the center warns that it is still producing “hurricane force winds and heavy rainfall in east-central Florida”.In an earlier update the center said Milton still had a consistent wind speed of 85 mph (140 kph). About 3 million customers in Florida have been left without power, and there are reports of fatalities as rescue and recovery operations get under way.Milton earlier made landfall as a Category 3 hurricane, swerving south and missing a direct hit on Tampa in Hillsborough County.The Hillsborough County Sheriff’s office has said “post-storm recovery efforts have begun”. Danny Alvarez, the public information officer for Hillsborough County Fire Rescue, earlier said it had been difficult for crews receiving 911 calls but unable to deploy while winds were consistently about 40 mph.St Petersburg residents could no longer get water from their household taps because a water main break led the city to shut down service, and a construction crane collapsed, falling into a building in the city. Streets in downtown Gulfport were under water.About 125 homes were destroyed before the hurricane even made landfall, many of them mobile homes in communities for senior citizens, Kevin Guthrie, the director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management said, while authorities in St Lucie County said there had been more than one fatality.The Hillsborough County Sheriff’s office has posted to Facebook that it is beginning recovery efforts. It said:
      Post-storm recovery efforts have begun in some parts of our county. Please stay home, as we have received reports of downed trees and flooded streets. Your safety is our priority.
      The number of customers without power in Florida has passed 3 million.It has just gone 4am in Florida, and the latest update from the National Hurricane Center reports that Hurricane Milton is moving north-east at 18mph with sustained winds of 85 mph (140 kph).Here is a video clip of a crane collapse in Florida caused by Hurricane Milton.Bill Litton, the emergency management director for Osceola County, south of Orlando, has said over 1,400 people were in shelters in the county as of early Thursday morning, the New York Times reports.Max Chesnes, reporting for the Tampa Bay Times from downtown Gulfport in Florida, states that “There are a few flooded streets in the city under less than a foot of water,” noting that is “far from what the worst case forecasts called for.”However, in a sign of how Florida has been hit by two hurricanes in the space of a few days, he posted a picture of debris that had not been cleared from the impact of Hurricane Helene now being soaked in the floodwaters from Hurricane Milton.The NWS National Hurricane Center in Miami has issued an update on Hurricane Milton, which it says now has maximum sustained winds of 85 mph (140 kph), and is 30 miles (45 km) off Orlando and 20 miles (30 km) off Cape Canaveral.WINK News meteorologist Matt Devitt has described one of the effects of Hurricane Milton being the “worst tornado outbreak I’ve seen in Southwest Florida in a long time,” adding “there was “horrible damage and devastation from outer bands ahead of Milton.”Witnesses have told CNN that a crane collapsing in St Petersburg due to Hurricane Milton sounded like “a mix of thunder booming, and the metal screeching sound of a train wreck.”Resident Makenna Caskey told the news network it came down and hit a building opposite her apartment, and she said it felt like “a massive rumbling tremor that shook our whole building.”The Tampa Bay Times reported that the crane collapsed near its own office in St Petersburg and that there was “a strong smell of gasoline in the air and the faint sound of alarms ring out.” More