Hurricane Irma is still “extremely dangerous” and will “devastate” parts of Southeastern United States, federal officials and agencies have warned.

“Obviously Hurricane Irma continues to be a threat that is going to devastate the United States,” Brock Long, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator (FEMA), said at a press conference Friday morning. “We’re going to have a couple rough days.”

Long, whose agency is still preoccupied with the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, which caused catastrophic flooding in parts of Texas and Louisiana last month, said around 3,000 federal emergency workers have been mobilized to deal with Irma.

Irma, one of the strongest storms in US history, is surging towards the US after causing death and destruction in the Caribbean islands.

Irma is still “extremely dangerous,” with maximum sustained winds of 150 mph (241 km), which are strong enough to uproot trees, bring down power poles and rip off the roofs and some exterior walls of well-built frame homes, The National Weather Service cautioned.

Irma was downgraded from a Category 5 to a Category 4 storm early Friday morning. As of 11 am Eastern Time, the storm was moving 14 mph (22 km) and located 405 miles (651 km) southeast of Miami, Florida.

The National Weather Service issued its first hurricane warnings for Florida Thursday night, warning residents that “preparations to protect life should be rushed to completion.”

Mandatory evacuation orders have been issued for barrier islands, coastal communities, low-lying areas and mobile homes across Florida. Experts estimate roughly 1.2 million Florida residents have been ordered to evacuate.

Meteorologists expect Irma will make landfall near Miami as a strong Category 4 hurricane with winds about 140 mph (225 km).

The majority of Americans believe the US is deeply divided and don’t see the United States as an exceptional place to live, according to a new poll.

The poll by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal also finds that the share of Americans who believe that the country has a “strong national character” is shrinking.

An overwhelming majority of Americans say the country is either mainly divided (59 percent) or totally divided (21 percent), the survey found.

Asked to identify some of the reasons for that division, poll respondents placed income inequality at the top of the list, with 23 percent naming the gap between the rich and the poor as one of the primary causes of strife in America.

Less than a third of American adults — 28 percent — called the US the “single best place to live in the world,” with another 17 percent calling it “among the very few best places.”

Compared to other countries, 37 percent of respondents said the US is merely “above average” and 14 percent rated the country as “average.” An additional four percent called the US “below average” on the global scale.

Asked to rate the “national character” of the US on a scale of one to 10, only 14 percent of those surveyed offered a “strong” rating of eight or higher, while 34 percent expressed a “weak” rating of four or lower.

US President Donald Trump’s job approval rating in the poll stood at just 40 percent, with 55 percent disapproving. The poll came as the nation has grappled with a historically unpopular president in Trump.

Trump has already spent more time under 40 percent than any other first-year president, according to an analysis by The Associated Press.

The survey was conducted August 5-9, before Trump was widely criticized for his handling of a white supremacy march in Charlottesville, Virginia, which ended in the death of a peaceful counter-protester.

A poll released last week by Fox News shows that 55 percent of American voters disapprove of Trump’s performance as president and believe he is “tearing the country apart.”

According to the survey, Trump has lost the most support from Republican men and whites without a college degree (a nine-point decline for each) and conservatives (a seven-point loss). All three groups are significant demographics in his voter base.

Source: Presstv

The United Nations says poverty and state violence, not religion, are driving young Africans to join militant groups as a number of Takfiri extremist groups are wreaking havoc across the continent. The UN Development Programme (UNDP) said in a statement on Thursday that it was easiest for terrorist outfits like al-Shabab and Boko Haram to recruit young people who were unemployed and frustrated about lack of opportunities and services in remote areas.

“Contrary to popular narratives, those who join extremist groups tend to have lower levels of religious or formal education and less understanding of the meaning of religious texts,” the statement read, adding, “Actually understanding one’s religion can strengthen resilience to the pull of extremism.”

This came after a team of researchers conducted a study based on interviews with almost 600 recruits. The interviews were carried out between 2015 and 2017 in six countries, including Kenya, Nigeria and Somalia, mostly in detention facilities.

Interviews with non-militant youths showed that receiving at least six years of religious schooling reduced the likelihood of joining an extremist group by a third.

Although more than half of interviewees cited religion as a reason for joining an extremist group, 57 percent did not read religious texts or understood little to nothing of them.

More than four in 10 said they were jobless before joining the terrorist groups. This is while 34 percent said employment was the most immediate need when they signed up.

But for many, the tipping point was state violence. About 70 percent of recruits said their “tipping point” was a government action, often the arrest or killing of a friend or relative by security forces.

“Such an individual could, upon witnessing or experiencing perceived abuse of power by the state, be tipped over the edge into extremism,” the report said.

According to researchers, people’s sense of neglect started in childhood with young people growing up to resent the lack of economic opportunities or chance of change and distrusting the state to provide services or respect human rights.

A separate report focusing on Mali by the charity Mercy Corps said on Thursday that community support for armed groups also forced young people to engage in acts of violence out of a sense of duty or in a bid to gain the respect from their neighbors,

The United Nations has recently said that Boko Haram group, whose brutal eight-year campaign in northeast Nigeria shows no sign of ending,  accounted for more than half of 33,000 deaths caused by militant attacks in Africa between 2011 and 2016.

The Boko Haram militancy has left more than 20,000 people killed and around three million displaced. The group’s militancy has also affected Nigeria’s neighbors like Chad, Cameroon and Niger.

Somalia, the long-chaotic Horn of Africa nation has been the scene of deadly clashes between government forces and al-Shabab militants since 2006. The group has also staged deadly cross-border attacks into neighboring Kenya.

In recent years, several militant attacks have been claimed in Mali by a powerful extremist alliance known as GSIM, which is a fusion of three Malian extremist groups with previous al-Qaeda links.

Extremists from al-Qaeda’s North Africa branch have made a fortune over the last decade by abducting foreigners in the vast Sahel region and demanding enormous ransoms for their release.

Source: Presstv