First Run News

FAJARDO, P.R.

MARIGOT, St. Martin — At dawn, people began to gather, quietly planning for survival after Hurricane Irma. They started with the grocery stores, scavenging what they needed for sustenance: water, crackers, fruit. But by nightfall on Thursday, what had been a search for food took a more menacing turn, as groups of looters, some of them armed, swooped in and took whatever of value was left: electronics, appliances and vehicles. “All the food is gone now,” Jacques Charbonnier, a 63-year-old resident of St. Martin, said in an interview on Sunday.

Hurricane Irma hit the Florida Keys on Sunday and set a course for the state’s mainland after pummeling islands in the Caribbean. Photographers on the ground have documented the effects of the storm, including leveled neighborhoods, crowded shelters, flooded streets and the caravan of cars moving up the Florida coast as millions of people left their homes.

ORLANDO, Fla. — Bracing for hurricanes is almost a summer tradition here: the steady, clanking sound of wood banged to windows, the endless lines for bottled water and fuel, the pilgrimages to fortified shelters. But Irma, which struck Florida’s coastline twice and then tore through the state with a fury, is anything but a run-of-the-mill hurricane. It was wider than the peninsula itself.

Hurricane Irma, now 400 miles wide, continued its march of devastation on Monday morning, dumping rain across the width of Florida and lashing the state with powerful winds that downed power lines and left millions in the dark. As the storm moved inland, it was downgraded to Category 1.

MIAMI — Ready or not, Florida found itself face to face with Hurricane Irma’s galloping winds and rains on Sunday, as evacuees and holdouts alike marked uneasy time in homes and shelters from the Keys to the Panhandle, tap-tapping their nearly dead cellphones for news they were frantic to hear but helpless to change. The hurricane rammed ashore at Cudjoe Key before whirling on the state’s southwest and west coast on the first day of its sodden chug north, buckling two giant

“Chuck and Nancy.” The way President Donald Trump talked about the meeting with congressional leadership Wednesday, it would be easy to forget Republicans were even there. It’s too early to tell whether Trump’s willingness to strike a deal with Democrats to fund the government in the short-term was a sign of a new strategy to work across the aisle, or simply an impulsive decision from a president already frustrated with his own party. But his move did not happen in a vacuum.

During a five-hour meeting with Senate Judiciary Committee staffers today, Donald Trump Jr. denied any wrongdoing in his meeting with a Russian lawyer during his father's presidential campaign, according to his prepared remarks, which were obtained by ABC News. In his statement, Trump Jr. said he took the meeting with the lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya — on June 9, 2016, more than a month after Donald Trump Sr.

The five former living US presidents have banded together to launch "One America Appeal," an initiative that will raise funds for organizations assisting victims of Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Irma, George H.W. Bush's office announced Thursday. Former Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush. NFL's season opening game. Another PSA will launch this weekend. "People are hurting down here," George W. Bush says in Thursday's PSA, "but as one Texan put it, 'we've got more love in Texas than water.'" His father, George H.W.