President says decision on whether to order evacuations in Florida will be made on Sunday
Hurricane Dorian due to hit Sunshine State Monday or Tuesday
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Donald Trump has said the decision on whether to evacuate residents of Florida to protect them from Hurricane Dorian, would be made on Sunday after meeting with officials.
As he left the White House for the presidential retreat at Camp David in Maryland, he said members of the federal emergency management agency (FEMA) would be joining him to monitor events.
Forecasters have said the storm could hit Florida on Monday or Tuesday with devastating force.
The president said he had spoken to Republican senator Rick Scott and claimed “tremendous work” was taking place in Florida to mitigate damage.
Meanwhile, Florida governor Ron DeSantis urged residents to closely monitor Hurricane Dorian as it approached the state’s east coast.
Mr DeSantis pointed out during a Friday evening briefing, that no one had accurately predicted the final path of Hurricane Irma three days before it made its US landfall in 2017. Dorian is expected hit Florida late Monday or early Tuesday.
The National Hurricane Centre is predicting landfall near the center of the state, but no evacuations have been ordered yet.
Mr DeSantis said residents need to comply when mandatory evacuations take effect.
Mr DeSantis said: “There is a danger to your life if you remain in these evacuation zones.”
To see how news about the presiden t playd out please read below
Trump is now blaming the central bank AND American manufacturers for the recession he denies is coming.
"Excuses!" as the man himself says.
Some lightning quick work from Clark Mindock here.
Seems like we can't go a full day without mentioning Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez so here she is standing up for herself over her right to block abusive accounts on social media and absolutely roasting Fox News anchor Laura Ingraham in the process.
She has also been laying into this Republican attack ad on her in spirited style.
More you say? Here's Lowenna Waters.
Another slim day on Trump's official schedule.
He's having lunch with secretary of state Mike Pompeo and jetting out for Camp David in Maryland, before which the White House press corps may perhaps be given the chance to shout questions at him as the blades whirring on Marine One drown out his answers.
His public appearances have been few this week, leaving the media reliant on his ever-more erratic Twitter game.
A little background on Trump's unexpected attack on General Motors (GM) earlier.
He is thought to have been referring to a Bloomberg News story that reported GM's hourly workforce of 46,000 US workers has fallen behind Fiat Chrysler as the smallest of the Detroit Three automakers. Over the past four decades, GM has dramatically cut the size of its overall American workforce, which numbered nearly 620,000 in 1979.
Trump's ire with GM comes as contract talks with the United Auto Workers (UAW) union with the Detroit Three automakers intensify ahead of a 14 September deadline. Trump has previously attacked GM for building vehicles in Mexico and for ending production at plants in Michigan, Ohio and Maryland.
GM's decision to close four plants in the United States is a central issue in the contract talks.
China is the world's largest car market and government policy favors automakers assembling vehicles there and not importing them from overseas.
In response to Trump's latest tariffs, China said last week it will reinstitute 25 per cent tariffs on US-made vehicles.
GM sold 3.6m vehicles in China last year accounting for 43 per cent of its worldwide sales. GM booked $2bn (£1.6bn) in equity income from its China operations last year.
GM imports a small number of vehicles from China. In June, the Trump administration rejected a request from GM to exempt its Chinese-made Buick Envision from a 25 per cent US tariff on sport utility vehicle models.
The midsize SUV has become a target for US critics of Chinese-made goods, including leaders of the UAW members in key political swing states such as Michigan and Ohio.
Additional reporting by Reuters
When shots rang out last year at a high school in Parkland, Florida, leaving 17 people dead, Trump quickly turned his thoughts to creating more mental institutions.
When back-to-back mass shootings in Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Texas, jolted the nation earlier this month, Trump again spoke of "building new facilities" for the mentally ill as a way to reduce mass shootings.
"We don't have those institutions anymore and people can't get proper care," Trump lamented at a New Hampshire campaign rally not long after the latest shootings.
Now, in response to Trump's concerns, White House staff members are looking for ways to incorporate the president's desire for more institutions into a long list of other measures aimed at reducing gun violence.
It's the latest example of White House policy aides scrambling to come up wAith concrete policies or proposals to fill out ideas tossed out by the president. And it's an idea that mental health professionals say reflects outdated thinking on the treatment of mental illness.
Trump sometimes harks back to his earlier years in New York to explain his thinking on preventing future mass shootings. He recently recalled to reporters how mentally ill people ended up on the streets and in jails in New York after the state closed large psychiatric hospitals in the 1960s and 1970s.
"Even as a young guy, I said, 'How does that work? That's not a good thing,"' Trump said.
As the White House looks for ways to fight gun violence, officials have looked at Indiana as one potential model in addressing mental illness.
The state opened a new 159-bed psychiatric hospital in March, Indiana's first in more than 50 years. The hospital is focused on treating patients with the most challenging psychiatric illnesses and then moving them into treatment settings within the community or state mental health system.
Plans for the hospital were announced when vice president Mike Pence was the state's governor.
"Our prisons have become the state's largest mental health provider," Pence said in 2015. "Today, that begins to change."
But Trump's support for new "mental institutions" is drawing pushback from many in the mental health profession who say that approach would do little to reduce mass shootings in the United States and incorrectly associates mental illness with violence.
Paul Gionfriddo, president and chief executive of the advocacy group Mental Health America, said Trump is pursuing a 19th century solution to a 21st century problem.
"Anybody with any sense of history understands they were a complete failure. They were money down the drain," said Gionfriddo.
The number of state hospital beds that serve the nation's most seriously ill patients has fallen from more than 550,000 in the 1950s to fewer than 38,000 in the first half of 2016, according to a survey from the Treatment Advocacy Center, which seeks policies to overcome barriers to treatment.
John Snook, the group's executive director, said Trump's language "hasn't been helpful to the broader conversation." But he said the president has hit on an important problem - a shortage of beds for the serious mentally ill.
"There are headlines every day in almost every newspaper talking about the consequences of not having enough hospital beds, huge numbers of people in jails, homelessness and ridiculously high treatment costs because we're trying to help people in crisis care," Snook said.
While Snook is not advocating a return to the 1950s, when there were 337 state hospital beds per 100,000 people in the US, he says states went too far in reducing facilities. He said the 2016 level of 11.7 beds per 100,000 people is inadequate.
Gionfriddo agreed more resources for the mentally ill are needed, but said any beds added should go to local, general hospitals, where patients would receive care for a full range of physical and mental illnesses.
That will require more federal money and loosening Medicaid's restrictions on mental health funding, he said. The first part is highly unlikely in the current fiscal environment, with the federal government expected to run a $1trn (£820bn) deficit in the next fiscal year.
But the administration has taken steps on the second part of the equation. A longstanding federal law has barred Medicaid from paying for mental health treatment in facilities with more than 16 beds to prevent "warehousing" of the mentally ill at the expense of federal taxpayers.
The administration in recent months said it will allow states to seek waivers from that restriction, provided they can satisfy certain requirements. Such waivers often take years to wind their way through the regulatory process.
The National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors has a different suggestion. After the El Paso and Dayton shootings, it recommended that Congress add $35m (£29m) for a block grant programme to help states provide more community-based care to people in a mental health crisis.
When he ran for president, Trump issued a position paper on his gun positions that was more in line with what many mental health experts say: "We need to expand treatment programs, because most people with mental health problems aren't violent, they just need help," the paper said. "But for those who are violent, a danger to themselves or others, we need to get them off the street before they can terrorize our communities."
Marvin Swartz, a professor in psychiatry at Duke University, said research has shown that even if society were to cure serious mental illness, total violence would decline by only about 4 per cent. He said he's seen no evidence that more psychiatric beds would reduce mass homicides or individual homicides.
"It would be a good thing to have more treatment resources, but the effect on gun violence would be minuscule," Swartz said.
AP
For Indy Voices, Molly Jong-Fast says Marianne Williamson and Tulsi Gabbard should stop complaining about being left out of the next round of Democratic 2020 debates and read the writing on the wall.
Lawyers for the US government and for short-lived Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn have said they disagree on whether he is ready to be sentenced for lying about his discussions with a Russian ambassador.
Flynn's lawyers, who were hired earlier this year, said that they have not had enough time to review the case and that the government has refused to hand over information they need for his defence, including transcripts and recordings of phone calls supposedly underlying the charges against their client.
Government lawyers, in contrast, said Flynn is ready for sentencing and proposed that he be sentenced between 21 and 23 October or between 1 and 15 November.
Both sides agreed that Flynn's co-operation with various government probes is finished. They made their assessments in a status report filed with the federal court in Washington, DC.
Flynn pleaded guilty in December 2017 to lying to the FBI about his conversations the prior December with Sergey Kislyak, who was Russia's ambassador to the United States, about US sanctions imposed on Moscow by Barack Obama.
That plea came in connection with special counsel Robert Mueller's since-completed probe into Russian interference in the 2016 US election.
Lawyers for Flynn asked for 90 days before the next status report.
Reuters
Trump has offically declared Hurricane Dorian an emergency for the state of Florida.
The US State Department says it's keeping a weather eye on Russia.
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