Trump mockingly tells media to compete for 'Fake News Trophy'

US President Donald Trump today slammed the allegedly biased news coverage of his administration, saying the media - except for Fox News - should compete for the "Fake News Trophy".

"We should have a contest as to which of the networks, plus CNN and not including Fox, is the most dishonest, corrupt and/or distorted in its political coverage of your favourite President (me)," Trump said on Twitter.

"They are all bad. Winner to receive the FAKE NEWS TROPHY!" Trump wrote on his account which he uses daily to communicate with his large support base.

Trump returned to the White House last night after spending the Thanksgiving weekend at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

He also said he is now focusing on the tax cut bill, which once passed by the Congress would bring in massive tax relief to the middle class.

"The Tax Cut Bill is coming along very well, great support. With just a few changes, some mathematical, the middle class and job producers can get even more in actual dollars and savings and the pass-through provision becomes simpler and really works well!" he said.
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Microsoft to release Office 2019 next year with better mobile linking power

Microsoft has announced that Office 2019 would be available in the second half of 2018.

The 2019 suite is said to be for people who don't want their apps and services in the cloud, the CNN reports.
The suite will include the standard apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, and server versions of Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint and Skype for Business.

The company, at its Microsoft Ignite conference in Orlando, Florida, said that Office 2019 will include more IT features and server upgrades to improve usability, voice and security,

The apps will also come with better linking capabilities for mobile devices, such as pressure sensitivity and tilt effects.

The last major update to the suite was Microsoft Office 2016, which came out in 2015.
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Puerto Rico's bankruptcy will make hurricane recovery brutal - here's why

The United States had already seen its share of disasters, from back-to-back hurricanes that devastated Texas, Florida and the U.S. Virgin Islands to roaring wildfires in the West.

Then, after battering the rest of the Caribbean, Hurricane Maria left the island of Puerto Rico facing a humanitarian crisis. About a dozen people died in the Sept. 21 storm and the island was plunged into darkness.

Now, some 3.4 million Puerto Ricans – which is to say, 3.4 million American citizens – are confronting life without electricity, gas, cellular service and, in many cases, a home.

After a decade of fiscal decline and a May 2017 bankruptcy, Puerto Rico has become exceptionally vulnerable to disasters like Maria. As both a policy analyst and the daughter of Puerto Rican immigrants, I’m concerned about how austerity-related reforms are now threatening the survival of not just my family there but everyone on the island.

Though food insecurity, poor health care and resource-starved public transit all predate the hurricane, the result of both damaging U.S. policy and deepening financial crisis, these three problems will dramatically complicate Puerto Rico’s recovery.
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Hurricane Irma regains Category 4 force; Indian missions set up helpline

Millions of people, including thousands of Indian-Americans, in Florida braced for Hurricane Irma as it regained strength as a Category 4 storm and aimed towards the coastal US state with wind speed of 210 km per hours.

Around 120,000 Indian-Americans reside across Florida while thousands of them live in the now-dangerous zones of Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Tampa.

Miami and Tampa appeared "ghost towns" as nervous residents, many of whom struggled to cope with abandoning their homes, moved to safer places following mandatory evacuation notices.

The National Weather Service (NWS) said Irma regained strength as a Category 4 storm — after being downgraded to Category 3 for more than 12 hours — as it moved to Florida.

The deadly storm is expected to hit the US mainland around 7 am local time today. Its outer rain bands lashed the Florida Keys, the NWS said. A 127 kmph gust was recorded as Irma drew closer to Florida, CNN reported.

The Indian embassy in the US has opened a round-the-clock helpline number and rushed senior diplomats to Atlanta to lead relief efforts for Indian-Americans stuck in the region.
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Hurricane Irma: 70,000 in shelters, 3.4 mn may face power cut

Florida Governor Rick Scott on Saturday said 6.5 million people were ordered to evacuate ahead of Irma and that 70,000 people have moved into 385 shelters across the state.

"There's still room for more," CNN quoted him as saying. He said that more shelters would be opened on Saturday.

"Protecting life is our top priority. No resource or expense will be spared to protect families," Scott added.

Meanwhile, Florida Power and Light (FPL) estimated that nearly 3.4 million of its customers could be without power at some point during Hurricane Irma.

If that comes to pass, it will be the largest number of outages they have ever had to deal with, FPL spokesman Chris McGrath told CNN.

"We think this could be the most challenging restoration in the history of the US," McGrath said.

The Governor said that 76,000 customers had already lost power.
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Hurricane Irma heads Florida after killing 18 people in Caribbean islands

Hurricane Irma will "devastate" part of the US, authorities warned, as one of the most powerful Atlantic storms in a century closed in on the state of Florida after lashing the Caribbean with devastating winds and rain and killing at least 18 people.

Irma was about 724 km southeast of Miami, Florida, early on Friday (local time) after saturating the northern coasts of the Dominican Republic and Haiti and pummelling the Turks and Caicos Islands, ABC News reported.

The "extremely dangerous" hurricane was downgraded from a category five to a category four early on Friday but still packed winds as strong as 240 km per hour, the National Hurricane Centre (NHC) said in an advisory.

Head of the US' Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Brock Long said US officials were preparing a massive response to the storm.

"Hurricane Irma continues to be a threat that is going to devastate the United States in either Florida or some of the southeastern states," he said.

Long warned that parts of Florida would be out of electricity for days, if not longer, and that more than 100,000 people may need shelter.
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Hurricane Irma kills 10 in Caribbean, heads for Florida

Hurricane Irma has pounded the Caribbean, shredding homes and weather records and leaving at least 10 people dead before honing in on the United States where up to a million people were ordered to flee.

The evacuation of coastal areas of Florida and neighboring Georgia was the biggest seen in the US in a dozen years, as Brock Long, head of the US Federal Emergency Management Agency, warned: "It will be truly devastating.

"The entire southeastern United States better wake up and pay attention."

Barreling across the Caribbean, the rare Category Five Irma yesterday wielded monster winds and torrential rain, wreaking destruction on tiny islands like St Martin, where 60 percent of homes were wrecked, before slamming into the US Virgin Islands.

In its westward rampage, Irma packed winds of up to 185 miles per hour (295 kilometers per hour), an intensity that it sustained for 33 hours -- the longest of any storm since satellite monitoring began in the 1970s.

The latest bulletin from the Miami-based National Hurricane Center put the winds at 175 mph as the storm headed for the Bahamas.

Devastation was left in the storm's wake. The International Red Cross said 1.2 million people had already been hit by Irma, a number that could rise to 26 million.
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Hurricane Irma wreaks havoc in Barbuda, to hit Florida in 3 days

The eye of Hurricane Irma on Wednesday crossed Barbuda with potentially catastrophic effects on this island and for the rest of the Lesser Antilles, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and other Caribbean islands, the US National Hurricane Centre (NHC) reported.

Irma of Category 5, the maximum on the Saffir-Simpson scale, crossed Barbuda at 2 am with maximum sustained winds of 295 km an hour.

At present, Irma is moving north-northwest at a speed of 24 km per hour and is located 10 km north of Barbuda and 65 km north of Antigua.

Barbuda has 545 homes with 1,645 people living, according to the 2011 census.

According to the probable trajectory pattern traced by the NHC, after crossing the Lesser Antilles, the vortex of the extremely dangerous Irma will pass near or just north of Puerto Rico by noon on Wednesday and Thursday night, Efe reports.

Once it crosses Puerto Rico, Irma will probably pass through the north of the Dominican Republic, the Bahamas, northern Cuba and arrive in Florida at the end of the week.

The weather experts anticipate Irma to stay in the category of four or five in the next 48 hours.
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Sam Shepard, Pulitzer-winning playwright and actor, dies at 73

Sam Shepard 

Sam Shepard, the Pulitzer Prize- winning playwright, Oscar-nominated actor and celebrated author whose plays chronicled the explosive fault lines of family and masculinity in the American West, has died. He was 73.

Family spokesman Chris Boneau said today that Shepard died Thursday at his home in Kentucky from complications related to Lou Gehrig's disease, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

The taciturn Shepard, who grew up on a California ranch, was a man of few words who nevertheless produced 44 plays and numerous books, memoirs and short stories. His 1979 play "Buried Child" won the Pulitzer for drama.

His Western drawl and laconic presence made him a reluctant movie star, too. He appeared in dozens of films, and was nominated for an Oscar for his performance in 1983's astronaut drama "The Right Stuff."

Shepard recently starred in the first season of the Netflix series "Bloodline" as the patriarch of a prominent Florida Keys family who try to keep a web of secrets from destroying their lives.
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