US President Donald Trump is “a cult leader,” whose dislike of his predecessor, Barack Obama,  is “purely racial,” says the Republican’s former fixer.

“Why he despises him to the extent that he does, I believe it’s purely racial,” Michael Cohen told ABC on Monday.

The former Trump lawyer, who was convicted of campaign finance violations in 2018, further described the American commander-in-chief as a “an Archie Bunker racist.”

“I believe it’s solely predicated on the fact that Barack Obama is Black,” he said, further commenting about his telltale book, titled Disloyal. “I described Mr. Trump as a cult leader and I was in this cult. And while I was in the cult I was really refusing to acknowledge that the actions I was performing for my boss were really morally wrong.”

Trump has dismissed the claims by his former lawyer as “fan fiction.” 

“About the only way a person is able to write a book on me is if they agree that it will contain as much bad ‘stuff’ as possible, much of which is lies,” Trump tweeted late last month. “It’s like getting a job with CNN or MSDNC and saying that “President Trump is great.” You have ZERO chance. FAKE NEWS!”

Cohen was sentenced to three years behind bars and ordered to pay a $50,000 fine.

He made payments during the 2016 campaign to two women – adult film actress Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal – to silence them from speaking publicly about affairs they had with Trump.

Source: Presstv

Search and rescue crews using dogs combed through neighborhoods left in blackened ruins by massive wildfires burning across three states on Saturday, and U.S. President Donald Trump said he would travel to California to see the devastation first-hand.

Flames have destroyed thousands of homes and a half dozen small towns in the latest outbreak of wildfires that have raged across the western United States this summer, scorching a landscape the size of New Jersey and killing at least 26 people since early August.

But after four days of brutally hot, windy weather, the weekend brought calmer winds blowing inland from the Pacific Ocean, and cooler, moister conditions that helped crews make headway against blazes that had burned unchecked earlier in the week.

At least six people have been killed this week in Oregon, according to the state’s wildfire tracking website. Governor Kate Brown has said that dozens of people remained missing across three counties.

In California, tens of thousands of firefighters were battling 28 major wildfires as of Saturday afternoon, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.  Improving weather conditions had helped them gain a measure of containment over most of the blazes.

The White House said Trump, a Republican, will meet with California officials on Monday. The president has said that western governors bear some of the blame for intense fire seasons in recent years, accusing them of poor forest management.

Trump’s Democratic opponent in the November election, Joe Biden, on Saturday linked the conflagrations to climate change, echoing comments made a day earlier by California Governor Gavin Newsom.

Thick smoke blankets three states

“The debate is over around climate change. Just come to the state of California. Observe it with your own eyes,” Newsom said in a briefing livestreamed from a charred mountainside near Oroville, California.

The Pacific Northwest has since Labor Day endured a string of fierce wildfires that have darkened the sky with thick smoke and ash, creating some of the world’s worst air-quality levels and driving residents indoors.

The small mountain town of Paradise, California, nearly destroyed in 2018 by the deadliest wildfire in state history, posted the world’s worst air quality index reading at 592, according to the PurpleAir monitoring site, as two of the state’s largest blazes burned on either side of it.

More than 4,000 homes and other structures have been incinerated in California alone over the past three weeks.

In southern Oregon, an apocalyptic scene of charred residential subdivisions and trailer parks stretched for miles along Highway 99 south of Medford through the neighboring communities of Phoenix and Talent.

Molalla, a logging community 25 miles (40 km) south of downtown Portland, was an ash-covered ghost town after its more than 9,000 residents were told to evacuate, with only 30 refusing to leave, the city’s fire department said.

Molalla was on the front line of an evacuation zone stretching north to within 3 miles (4.8 km) of downtown Portland. The sheriff in suburban Clackamas County set a 10 p.m.  PDT (0500 on Saturday GMT) curfew to deter “possible increased criminal activity.”

In Portland, the Multnomah County Sheriff chastised residents who had set up their own checkpoints to stop cars after conspiracy theories spread on social media that members of Black Lives Matter or Antifa were lighting fires. Local officials have called those assertions groundless.

“We are removing false claims that the wildfires in Oregon were started by certain groups,” a Facebook spokesman said on Saturday. “This is based on confirmation from law enforcement that these rumors are forcing local fire and police agencies to divert resources from fighting the fires and protecting the public.”

Source: REUTERS

US officials warned Friday of potential “mass” fatalities as more than 20,000 firefighters from across the country battled sprawling deadly wildfires up and down the West Coast.

A prediction of cooler weather offered some hope of respite in coming days, but the true scale of the destruction from dozens of massive blazes in California, Oregon and Washington states remained hard to gauge.

There were 16 deaths confirmed this week, with wide stretches of land still cut off by flames.

“We’re preparing for a mass fatality incident based on what we know and the number of structures that have been lost,” warned Andrew Phelps, director of the office of emergency management in Oregon on Friday.

Oregon defines “mass fatality incident” as one that causes death and suffering which cannot be met by usual individual or community resources, according to the Washington Post.

“We anticipate that number (of deaths) may potentially go up as we get back into areas that have been ravaged by flame and obviously, smoke begins to clear,” warned California governor Gavin Newsom, as he visited a scorched forest near the raging North Complex Fire.

Ten people have been confirmed dead from that blaze in Butte County, which was driven at unprecedented pace toward the city of Oroville earlier in the week by strong, dry winds and soaring temperatures.

But Newsom said the weather “is beginning to cooperate,” with winds settling down and some rain forecast.

In neighboring Oregon, where one million acres (400,000 hectares) have burned and three people are reported dead with dozens still unaccounted for, governor Kate Brown also expressed hope a corner had been turned.

More than 40,000 Oregonians have fled their homes so far, with around half a million under evacuation warnings, Brown told a press conference—clarifying previous higher figures given by state officials.

“The weather system fueling these fires over the past few days has finally broken down,” she said.

“We anticipate cooler air and moisture coming in the next few days, which is really good news.”

Dozens of people remained missing in connection with the fires, Brown said.

Even as the weather forecast offered hope, Newsom painted a grim picture of California as the canary in the climate-change coal mine.

“I’m a little bit exhausted that we have to continue to debate this issue,” he said in televised comments as he toured the damage. “This is a climate damn emergency. This is real, and it’s happening.

“This is the perfect storm.”

He added: “California, folks, is America fast-forward. What we’re experiencing right here is coming to communities all across the United States of America unless we get our act together on climate change, unless we disabuse ourselves of all the BS that’s been spewed by a very small group of people.”

‘Complete loss’

The August Complex Fire this week became by far the biggest recorded blaze in Californian history, ripping through 746,000 acres of dry vegetation in the state’s north, as multiple fires combined.

But it is just one of around 100 large fires on the West Coast, and other rapidly growing blazes closer to populated areas have proven deadlier.

“We are at a complete loss for words right now,” Bobbie Zedaker told the San Francisco Chronicle, after DNA tests proved her missing 16-year-old nephew was among those killed by the North Complex Fire.

Two more people were killed near the rural community of Happy Camp, a Cal Fire spokeswoman told AFP Friday.

But in a mountainous region of central California, close to where the Creek Fire is burning, some members of an indigenous community refused to leave their homes despite evacuation orders.

“I don’t feel it’s going to come this way,” said James Hancock, 52, whose home on the Cold Springs Rancheria Indian Reservation currently has no light, electricity or water.

Huge wildfires are becoming more common, with the World Meteorological Organization saying the five years to 2019 was unprecedented for fires, especially in Europe and North America.

Climate change amplifies droughts which dry out regions, creating ideal conditions for wildfires to spread out of control and inflict huge material and environmental damage.

California has already seen more than 3.1 million acres burn this year—an annual record, approximately the size of Connecticut—with nearly four months of fire season still to come.

Source: AFP