Is Wasserman Schultz Changing Her Tune?
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MIAMI, Florida (CNN) — Jamaican authorities prepared for Tropical Storm Gustav’s expected arrival Thursday evening as U.S. forecasters predicted it could soon regain hurricane strength.
Jamaica’s government evacuated people from surrounding islands and prepared to move residents out of low-lying areas ahead of the storm, a military spokesman said.
Meanwhile, oil companies began to pull workers off drill rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, and authorities in the Southeastern United States took steps to prepare for what forecasters warned could be a major storm early next week.
As Gustav crawled across the Caribbean, Tropical Storm Hanna formed out of a tropical depression northeast of Puerto Rico on Thursday, making it the eighth named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season.
Shortly before 2 p.m. ET, Gustav was centered about 40 miles (64 kilometers) east of the Jamaican capital, Kingston, the National Hurricane Center in Miami reported. The storm had top winds of 70 mph (112 kph), just below the 74-mph (119 kph) threshold of a minimal hurricane. See Gustav’s projected path
In Kingston, the island’s government posted a hurricane warning and opened shelters for those in low-lying areas. Maj. Mahatma Williams, the operations officer for the country’s military, said forecasters expect the storm to hit about 9 p.m. Local governments were ordering some people out of low-lying areas.
At the Pegasus Hotel, in the capital’s inland New Kingston district, general manager Eldon Bremner said his staff has activated an emergency plan to take care of both tourists and locals who may take shelter there.
The Pegasus traditionally is always a safe haven, he said. We get quite a lot of check-ins prior to hurricanes and also immediately after a hurricane, because we do pretty well during a hurricane.
Gustav has been blamed for 22 deaths in Haiti and the Dominican Republic after it made landfall Tuesday on the island of Hispaniola. Watch flooded streets and damage in Haiti
In the Dominican Republic, eight people were killed by a mudslide triggered by heavy rain in Santo Domingo, authorities said.
The dead included two women in their 30s and six children ages 2 to 15, according to government figures.
Marino Vasquez stood crying over the coffin of one of his children. I don’t have anybody anymore, he said. I lost my entire family. They’re all dead there. I have seven dead there. iReport.com: Storm takes young lives in Santo Domingo
Gustav lost strength in the Hispaniola strike, falling back to tropical-storm status, but the hurricane center predicted it would regain strength and become a hurricane again sometime Thursday.
The storm is expected to produce rainfall amounts of 2 to 4 inches over southern Cuba and 6 to 12 inches over Jamaica and the Cayman Islands, with isolated maximum amounts of up to 25 inches possible, forecasters said. The heavy rain could trigger flash floods and additional mudslides.
Gustav is expected to reach the Gulf of Mexico as a Category 3 hurricane sometime Sunday or Monday, triggering alerts across the U.S. Southeast.
In Louisiana, where Hurricane Katrina struck three years ago, about 3,000 National Guard members began reporting for duty to prepare for the storm. About 1,500 of the activated troops likely will be assigned to provide security across the state’s coastal parishes if the storm hits there, said Maj. Michael Kazmierza, a National Guard spokesman.
Katrina killed more than 1,800 people when it struck on August 29, 2005, scouring Mississippi beach towns down to bare sand and rupturing the protective levees around New Orleans, Louisiana.
The Bush administration’s response to the storm was widely criticized, but David Paulison, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said that FEMA is not even the same organization it was three years ago.
Certainly, Louisiana stands a fair likelihood of experiencing the first serious hurricane since the hurricanes of 2005, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told reporters in Maryland before heading to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Not an occasion for panic, but an occasion to put into practice all the preparation that’s been done up until now. That’s what I’m here for, to make sure we’re doing it.
Authorities in Mississippi, Texas and Alabama also began activating storm plans and urging residents to keep an eye on the weather as Gustav moved across the Caribbean. iReport.com: How are you preparing? Share photos, video
Forecasters said it was too soon to know the storm’s path, but the National Hurricane Center’s projection models show Gustav heading toward Louisiana through the oil-rich region of the Gulf of Mexico by Sunday afternoon. Some oil companies began evacuating workers off their rigs Thursday, spokesmen said, while other firms said they were were monitoring the storm’s progress.
SOCHI, Russia (CNN) — Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has accused the United States of orchestrating the conflict in Georgia to benefit one of its presidential election candidates.
In an exclusive interview with CNN’s Matthew Chance in the Black Sea city of Sochi Thursday, Putin said the U.S. had encouraged Georgia to attack the autonomous region of South Ossetia.
Putin told CNN his defense officials had told him it was done to benefit a presidential candidate — Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama are competing to succeed George W. Bush — although he presented no evidence to back it up.
U.S. citizens were indeed in the area in conflict, Putin said. They were acting in implementing those orders doing as they were ordered, and the only one who can give such orders is their leader.
White House spokeswoman Dana Perino blasted Putin’s statements, saying they were patently false.
To suggest that the United States orchestrated this on behalf of a political candidate just sounds not rational, she said.
U.S. State Department deputy spokesman Robert Wood concurred, and labeled Putin’s statements as ludicrous.
Russia is responsible for the crisis, Wood said in an off-camera meeting with reporters in Washington on Thursday. For the Russians to say they are not responsible for what happened in Georgia is ludicrous. … Russia is to blame for this crisis and the world is responding to what Russia has done.
When told that many diplomats in the United States and Europe blame Russia for provoking the conflict and for invading Georgia, Putin said Russia had no choice but to invade Georgia after dozens of its peacekeepers in South Ossetia were killed. He told Chance it was to avert a human calamity. iReport.com: First-person accounts from the center of the conflict
The former Russian president, still considered the most powerful man in the country, said he was disappointed the U.S. had not done more to stop Georgia’s attack.
Putin recalled he was watching the situation in Georgia and South Ossetia unfold when he was at the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games on August 8.
He said he spoke spoke to U.S. President George W. Bush, also attending, who told the Russian prime minister he didn’t want war — but Putin spoke to CNN of his disappointment that the U.S. administration didn’t do more to stop the Georgia early in the conflict.
Also Thursday Putin announced economic measures which he said were unrelated to the fighting with Georgia. Nineteen U.S. poultry meat companies would be banned from exporting their products to Russia because they had failed health and safety tests, and 29 other companies had been warned to improve their standards or face the same ban, Putin said.
Putin said Russia’s health and agricultural ministries had randomly tested the poultry products and found them to be full of antibiotics and arsenic.
While Putin repeated that the bans were not related to the Georgian conflict, they indicate the measures some Western countries — particularly in Europe — fear if Russia goes on a diplomatic offensive. Watch analysis of Russia’s relationship with the West.
Russia is trying to counterbalance mounting pressure from the West over its military action in Georgia and its recognition of the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
But Russia’s hopes of winning international support for its actions in Georgia were dashed Thursday, when China and other Asian nations expressed concern about tension in the region.
The joint declaration from the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which includes China, Russia, Tajikistan, Kyrgystan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan, said the countries hoped any further conflict could be resolved peacefully. Watch more on rising tensions between Russia and the West.
The presidents reaffirmed their commitment to the principles of respect for historic and cultural traditions of every country and efforts aimed at preserving the unity of a state and its territorial integrity, the declaration said, The Associated Press reported.
Placing the emphasis exclusively on the use of force has no prospects and hinders a comprehensive settlement of local conflicts, AP reported the group as saying.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev had appealed to the SCO at a summit Thursday in Tajikistan Thursday to support its actions, saying it would serve as a serious signal for those who are trying to justify the aggression. Watch Medvedev explain his reasoning to CNN
DNC: Biden’s time
By Kate Sheppard
joe biden. photo: ted s. warren / ap
After formally receiving the nomination as Barack Obama’s running mate, Delaware Sen. Joe Biden took the stage. His speech focused on his middle-class roots and the lessons he learned from his parents, and transitioned into emphasizing a call to revitalize the “American dream.”
While emphasizing his friendship with the John McCain, he criticized the Arizona senator as wrong on everything “from Amtrak to veterans.” (See our bit on McCain’s Amtrak record here.) He criticized McCain for failing to support renewable energy in the Senate, while advocating policies that will increase tax breaks for the oil industry. “John voted again and again against renewable energy — wind, solar, biofuels. That’s not change, that’s more of the same.”
An Obama-Biden administration, he said, will make “alternative energy a national priority … creating 5 million new jobs, and finally breaking us from the grip of foreign oil.”
Watch the speech:
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LONDON, England (AP) — The European Court of Human Rights has cleared the way for the extradition of a British man who hacked into secret U.S. military computers.
The court Thursday refused to delay Gary McKinnon’s extradition to the United States. He claims the extradition would violate his human rights.
U.S. prosecutors want to put him on trial for allegedly hacking into 97 computers belonging to NASA and several branches of the military from a bedroom in his north London home.
McKinnon claims he was searching for UFOs.
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Hello. My name is Izabel, and you are reading my Fair Proxy blog, where I post the lastest CNN news on world events. |
My name is Izabel Potrito. You are reading my Fair Proxy blog where I'll share latest news in USA and world. My thoughts to make this country a better place.
