Donald Trump scrapped Barack Obama's flood protection standards days before Hurricane Harvey - Independent

Donald Trump scrapped Barack Obama's flood protection standards days before Hurricane Harvey

Donald Trump signed an executive order just days before Hurricane Harvey that scrapped many of the flood protections introduced by Barack Obama.

Harvey has caused huge damage in Texas as 30 inches of rain in less than 48 hours resulted in massive flooding.

The current US President, however, has abolished a number of flood standards in an attempt to get infrastructure projects approved more quickly. The Federal Flood Risk Management Standard is among those to have been rolled back.

In 2015, Mr Obama introduced measures that made it harder to build roads, bridges and other infrastructure in areas that were susceptible to flooding. Plans for such projects would legally have to take into account the impact of climate change and be built to withstand future changes.

Hundreds rescued from epic floods as Houston braces for worse to come

While the new regulations had not yet come into effect, they have now been scrapped entirely after Mr Trump decided they were too likely to slow down plans for new infrastructure.

Announcing the decision earlier in August, the billionaire businessman said: “We're going to get infrastructure built quickly, inexpensively, relatively speaking, and the permitting process will go very, very quickly."

“It’s going to be a very streamlined process, and by the way, if it doesn’t meet environmental safeguards, we’re not going to approve it.”

However, some of those safeguards have now been removed. The order also introduces a two-year time limit for permission to be granted for major infrastructure projects, in which Mr Trump has pledged to invest $1 trillion.

The move was praised by business groups but strongly opposed by environmentalists.

Rachel Cleetus of the Union of Concerned Scientists warned even before the executive order was issued that it would "put vital infrastructure that communities depend on at greater risk of flooding".

"It will lead to more costly and damaging consequences of these floods," she told The Independent, "And frankly, it's a waste of taxpayer dollars if money is invested in projects that will just get washed away."

She added: "Even as we're seeing flood risk growing in many places around the country – due to sea level rise, heavy rainfall, and other types of factors – it just flies in the face of common sense to turn back progress on greater flood prevention that communities depend on."

Hurricane Harvey has caused devastating flooding in Texas. At least five people have been reported dead and as many as 2,000 had to be rescued after the area received a year’s rainfall within the space a week.

“The breadth and intensity of this rainfall are beyond anything experienced before,” the US National Weather Service said on Twitter. “Catastrophic flooding is now underway and expected to continue for days.”

Returning to the topic of storm Harvey, Ms Cleetus said: "It would be a serious mistake to rebuild without taking account of future flood risks in the wake of terrible tragedies such as Texas is currently experiencing with Hurricane Harvey."

What would happen if a missile from North Korea actually hit Japan? - Independent

What would happen if a missile from North Korea actually hit Japan?

The US would have been forced to immediately attack North Korea had the missile Pyongyang fired over Japan hit its territory rather than landing in the sea off its coast, experts say.

Japan is a long-standing Nato partner which means a strike by a foreign power on its soil is deemed as an attack on all the countries in the alliance, meaning member nations are obliged to react.

Tokyo would have declared war against Pyongyang regardless of whether the "reckless act" by Kim Jong-un had not intended to directly target the island nation, analysts say.

Trump fires back warning to North Korea: 'all options are on table'

The United States, which has the biggest military presence of the member states in Asia, would have launched a counter-attack either with a nuclear missile or other strike.

And that would have plunged the world into all-out war, with fears that China could wade into the conflict and defend North Korea.

The threat of global warfare came when Pyongyang fired a missile, thought to be a new Hwasong-12, which torpedoed into waters off Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido.

Kim Jong-un fired the intermediate-range weapon despite the threat by US president Donald Trump that North Korea would feel the “fire and fury” if it launched further missiles towards Japan.

North Korea warns US of 'catastrophic consequences' after missile test

Where is Hokkaido? The Japanese island most at risk from North Korea

“It’s extremely serious. Most wars happen by accident, not by design, and if these missiles had landed on Japan there would have undoubtedly been war this morning,” Professor Anthony Glees, a security expert with the University of Buckingham, told The Independent.

“I think Japan would have been forced to declare war on North Korea. It would have been seen as an attack on Japan.

“Japan is a Nato partner. Retaliation is obligatory, it is not a choice. We know the US is a guarantor of Japan’s security. Even if they retaliated with conventional weapons against North Korea, it would then escalate straight away.

“It was a totally, reckless, dangerous act by North Korea. The whole world is lucky that these weapons did not kill anybody in Japan.”

Adam Mount, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Center for American Progress, told CNN that North Korea launched the missile to reinforce the message that Pyongyang can deter any US-led regime change.

“They cross line after line in an effort to say this is the new reality and you should accept it and go easy on us,” Mr Mount said. “I think that's a pretty unambiguous signal that they're no longer going to be restrained by the United States.”

The Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe denounced the launch as an “unprecedented and grave threat” to the country’s security. In a 40-minute phone call with Mr Trump, the pair agreed to call for an emergency meeting of the UN security council to discuss the situation.

Mr Trump said the US was “100% with Japan” and repeated his strong commitment to the defence of Japan, Mr Abe said shortly after the call.

“The outrageous act of firing a missile over our country is an unprecedented, serious and grave threat and greatly damages regional peace and security,” Mr Abe told reporters in Tokyo, adding that his government had protested to Pyongyang through the Japanese embassy in Beijing.

The missile was the third fired by North Korea to have passed over Japanese territory. The first was in 1998 and the second in 2009, although Pyongyang claims they were satellites.

Trump Forges Ahead on Costly Nuclear Overhaul - New York times

Trump Forges Ahead on Costly Nuclear Overhaul

By DAVID E. SANGER and WILLIAM J. BROADAUG. 27, 2017

During his speech last week about Afghanistan, President Trump slipped in a line that had little to do with fighting the Taliban: “Vast amounts” are being spent on “our nuclear arsenal and missile defense,” he said, as the administration builds up the military.

The president is doing exactly that. Last week, the Air Force announced major new contracts for an overhaul of the American nuclear force: $1.8 billion for initial development of a highly stealthy nuclear cruise missile, and nearly $700 million to begin replacing the 40-year-old Minuteman missiles in silos across the United States.

While both programs were developed during the Obama years, the Trump administration has seized on them, with only passing nods to the debate about whether either is necessary or wise. They are the first steps in a broader remaking of the nuclear arsenal — and the bombers, submarines and missiles that deliver the weapons — that the government estimated during Mr. Obama’s tenure would ultimately cost $1 trillion or more.

Even as his administration nurtured the programs, Mr. Obama argued that by making nuclear weapons safer and more reliable, their numbers could be reduced, setting the world on a path to one day eliminating them. Some of Mr. Obama’s national security aides, believing that Hillary Clinton would win the presidential election, expected deep cutbacks in the $1 trillion plan.

Mr. Trump has not spoken of any such reduction, in the number of weapons or the scope of the overhaul, and his warning to North Korea a few weeks ago that he would meet any challenge with “fire and fury” suggested that he may not subscribe to the view of most past presidents that the United States would never use such weapons in a first strike.

“We’re at a dead end for arms control,” said Gary Samore, who was a top nuclear adviser to Mr. Obama.

While Mr. Trump is moving full speed ahead on the nuclear overhaul — even before a review of American nuclear strategy, due at the end of the year, is completed — critics are warning of the risk of a new arms race and billions of dollars squandered.

The critics of the cruise missile, led by a former defense secretary, William J. Perry, have argued that the new weapon will be so accurate and so stealthy that it will be destabilizing, forcing the Russians and the Chinese to accelerate their own programs. And the rebuilding of the ground-based missile fleet essentially commits the United States to keeping the most vulnerable leg of its “nuclear triad” — a mix of submarine-launched, bomber-launched and ground-launched weapons. Some arms control experts have argued that the ground force should be eliminated.

A new nuclear cruise missile would extend the life of America’s aging fleet of B-2 bombers. Credit Frederic J. Brown/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told Congress in June that he was open to reconsidering the need for both systems. But in remarks to sailors in Washington State almost three weeks ago, he hinted at where a nuclear review was going to come out.

“I think we’re going to keep all three legs of the deterrent,” he told the sailors.

The contracts, and Mr. Mattis’s hints about the ultimate nuclear strategy, suggest that Mr. Obama’s agreement in 2010 to spend $80 billion to “modernize” the nuclear arsenal — the price he paid for getting the Senate to ratify the New Start arms control agreement with Russia — will have paved the way for expansions of the nuclear arsenal under Mr. Trump.

“It’s been clear for years now that the Russians are only willing to reduce numbers if we put limits on missile defense, and with the North Korean threat, we can’t do that,” said Mr. Samore, who is now at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. “I think we are pretty much doomed to modernize the triad.”

At issue in the debate over the cruise missile and the rebuilding of the land-based fleet is an argument over nuclear deterrence — the kind of debate that gripped American national security experts in the 1950s and ’60s, and again during the Reagan era.

Cruise missiles are low-flying weapons with stubby wings. Dropped from a bomber, they hug the ground to avoid enemy radars and air defenses. Their computerized brains compare internal maps of the terrain with what their sensors report.

The Air Force’s issuing last week of the contract for the advanced nuclear-tipped missile — to Lockheed Martin and Raytheon Missile Systems — starts a 12-year effort to replace an older model. The updated weapon is to eventually fly on a yet-undeveloped nuclear bomber.

The plan is to produce 1,000 of the new missiles, which are stealthier and more precise than the ones they will replace, and to place revitalized nuclear warheads on half of them. The other half would be kept for flight tests and for spares. The total cost of the program is estimated to be $25 billion.

“This weapon will modernize the air-based leg of the nuclear triad,” the Air Force secretary, Heather Wilson, said in a statement. “Deterrence works if our adversaries know that we can hold at risk things they value. This weapon will enhance our ability to do so.”

Is the U.S. Ready for a Nuclear Attack?

The United States uses two different categories of missile defense to counter North Korea. Here’s how they work and — sometimes — how they don’t.

The most vivid argument in favor of the new weapon came in testimony to the Senate from Franklin C. Miller, a longtime Pentagon official who helped design President George W. Bush’s nuclear strategy and is a consultant at the Pentagon under Mr. Mattis. The new weapon, he said last summer, would extend the life of America’s aging fleet of B-52 and B-2 bombers, as Russian and Chinese “air defenses evolve to a point where” the planes are “are uable to penetrate to their targets.”

Critics argue that the cruise missile’s high precision and reduced impact on nearby civilians could tempt a future president to contemplate “limited nuclear war.” Worse, they say, is that adversaries might overreact to the launching of the cruise missiles because they come in nuclear as well as nonnuclear varieties.

Mr. Miller dismisses that fear, saying the new weapon is no more destabilizing than the one it replaces.

Some former members of the Obama administration are among the most prominent critics of the weapon, even though Mr. Obama’s Pentagon pressed for it. Andrew C. Weber, who was an assistant defense secretary and the director of the Nuclear Weapons Council, an interagency body that oversees the nation’s arsenal, argued that the weapon was unneeded, unaffordable and provocative.

He said it was “shocking” that the Trump administration was signing contracts to build these weapons before it completed its own strategic review on nuclear arms. And he called the new cruise missile “a destabilizing system designed for nuclear war fighting,” rather than for deterrence.

The other contracts the Pentagon announced last week are for replacements for the 400 aging Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles housed in underground silos. The winners of $677 million in contracts — Boeing and Northrop Grumman — will develop plans for a replacement force.

During Mr. Obama’s second term, the ground-based force came under withering criticism over the training of its crews — who work long, boring hours underground — and the decrepit state of the silos and weapons. Some of the systems still used eight-inch floppy disks. Internal Pentagon reports expressed worries about the vulnerability of the ground-based systems to cyberattack.

Mr. Perry, who was defense secretary under President Bill Clinton, has argued that the United States can safely phase out its land-based force, calling the missiles a costly relic of the Cold War.

But the Trump administration appears determined to hold on to the ground-based system, and to invest heavily in it. The cost of replacing the Minuteman missiles and remaking the command-and-control system is estimated at roughly $100 billion.

A version of this article appears in print on August 28, 2017, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: U.S. to Overhaul Nuclear Arsenal Despite the Risk. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe

Maybe Trump is a kind of cry for help from the Earth, a human flare - Guardian

Maybe Trump is a kind of cry for help from the Earth, a human flare

Frankie Boyle

Sunday 27 August 2017 18.05 AEST

So are we heading for a Mad Max-style future? I don’t think so. After having lived through Donald Trump we’ll surely just call him Max. Trump is behaving so strangely, we’re probably about a month away from not being allowed to make jokes about him. He’s gone past Charlie Sheen and we’re now entering the bald Britney phase. It’s hard to imagine how America can go back to having a normal president after this. The next president will have to be a car with guns for wheels. After Trump, a Saturday Night Live sketch about Mike Pence would look like something by Samuel Beckett.

Trump is sort of like Father Dougal killed a man, so is wearing Father Jack as a disguise. He looks like the image burned into your retina should you watch a completely normal man burst into flames. Even on an HDTV he looks like a sixth generation VHS recording. A president with the temperament of a wasp that’s spent 40 minutes on musical hold, his Twitter feed reads like he’s building up a credible insanity defence for when he’s finally impeached. It’s not just that he lives on Twitter, he embodies it: digressive, petty, trivial, poisonous and self-aggrandising. He basically speaks like a totally random stream of tweets. One minute he’s on Mexicans, then he’s talking about his shoes, then a threat, then a joke about a cat.

Last week he held a rally in Phoenix, Arizona – possibly because he thought he’d blend in to a state that is orange, desolate and has a cavernous gap in its heart so huge, people travel the world just to gasp and cry. Phoenix is best known for the song By The Time I Get To Phoenix (She’ll Be Rising), in this case referring to Lilitu the she-demon of the apocalypse. Trump delivered one of his random rightwing word collages in front of a crowd who if they were any whiter would have had carrots for noses.

Under investigation by the FBI, Trump is now at war with intelligence in two ways

Imagine standing up in Arizona and talking about preserving white culture: a state so recently colonised that the dry cleaners still offer a smallpox cleansing service. White guys have only been in Arizona for 150 years – that’s not even enough time to fill a Costa loyalty card. He’s literally standing in Apache land, 150 years after their genocide, talking about protecting American culture; standing amid a culture people like him destroyed, talking about building a wall, like Simon Cowell launching the next series of The X Factor in the Cavern Club.

But what else can we expect from Trump – he doesn’t get his history from reading, he gets it from staring at lumps of stone. A statue to Robert E Lee? If they want to look up to a white guy who’s rubbish at attack and can’t remember which side he’s on, we can send James Milner over there to stand on a box. Arizona is on the Mexican border, meaning his shouting the word “WALL” goes down very well, especially since they know they can get better quality drugs through their border with Hollywood. People will still try to jump over whatever makeshift fence he finally manages to put up. All Trump is doing is turning America into a giant Glastonbury; there’s a headliner no one approves of, but you’ll still go for Dolly Parton and the van making smoothies.

Obviously, Trump’s pivot to Afghanistan is depressing. The only comfort to Trump getting in was that he intended to keep his horrific Armageddon packed tightly within his walled up, hermetically sealed Thunderdome America. I suppose this is the kind of consistency we should expect from someone who can’t finish a sentence. Under investigation by the FBI, he is now at war with intelligence in two ways. It’s hard to pick out a single low point of the Trump presidency, but it seems like the KKK now feel relaxed enough to march without their hoods. “Jews will not replace us!”? Looks like if your sister keeps saying no, nobody will mate.

Can we even think of Trump in terms of intent? Aren’t we then like those shamans who used to project anger on to erupting volcanoes? Maybe Trump is a kind of cry for help from the Earth, a human flare. Or perhaps he has been produced by the Earth to destroy mankind, and his personality is actually nature’s critique of humanity. How fitting that life on Earth will be extinguished by a reality TV host, over a mediocre golf-club burger at his nuclear winter White House, a kind of 3-star Black Lodge.

The US has always been balanced on uneasy contradictions. Even the constitution promises both the right to freedom of speech and the freedom to have a gun to shoot people who annoy you. Right at the heart of its contradictions are the twin ideas of liberty and enslavement, its founding principles of “freedom” and “but not for everybody”.

If I had to guess what was at the forefront of the minds of the American right at the moment, I’d say voter suppression. It doesn’t matter that the US has a rhetorical attachment to democracy. Through its actions as a state it has long undermined any connection between its stated ideals and its actions. I think the US will now face a long struggle to avoid a slide into totalitarianism, led of course by people calling themselves libertarians.

Frankie Boyle’s new book Your Guide To Hell (John Murray) is out in October

John Kelly’s Latest Mission: Controlling the Information Flow to Trump - New York Times

John Kelly’s Latest Mission: Controlling the Information Flow to Trump

by MAGGIE HABERMANAUG. 24, 2017

For months, the White House under President Trump operated with few real rules, and those were barely enforced. People wandered into the Oval Office throughout the day. The president was given pieces of unvetted information, and found more on his own that he often tweeted out. Policy decisions were often based on whoever had last gotten Mr. Trump’s attention.

Mr. Trump’s Twitter habit shows little sign of abating. On vacation earlier at his private club in Bedminster, N.J., and now, ensconced again in the White House, he has been watching television — unfettered by any aides — and responding as he always has.

But inside the West Wing, the president’s new chief of staff, John F. Kelly, has been trying to control the things he can. After being sworn in on July 31, he spent three weeks assessing how to create a less jumbled, chaotic churn around Mr. Trump, and how to create a system that the president’s staff will respect. In two memos sent to the staff on Monday he began to detail his plan, starting with how he wants information to get to the president, and how Mr. Trump will respond.

Codifying of paper flow and decision-making is not usually of note in a White House, and the practices laid out were fairly standard in previous administrations. But in Mr. Trump’s White House, where fiefs have been in constant combat and decision-making has often been ill defined, the memos, first reported by Politico, mark a new era.

The pair of memos, signed by Robert Porter, the assistant to the president for policy coordination and staff secretary, as well as Mr. Kelly, codified rules and procedures that a White House typically sets at the outset of an administration.

Mr. Kelly’s predecessor, Reince Priebus, sent some similar guidelines around early in the administration, according to two officials, but they were never taken seriously. Mr. Kelly, a retired Marine general, has been treated with a different level of deference inside the building, those aides said. Staff members discovered early on that they could defy Mr. Priebus, the officials said, but crossing a Marine is a different matter.

Mr. Kelly has made clear that one thing he will not seek to directly control is the behavior of the president, and there is a good reason for that.

Mr. Trump has a history of lashing out at advisers who have publicly conveyed their attempts to impose tighter procedures on him. Just before Election Day, for example, Mr. Trump blew up publicly after a New York Times report that his aides had succeeded in keeping him off Twitter for the final stages of the campaign. He tweeted several times to enforce the point.

Despite Mr. Kelly’s fairly deft touch at approaching the president, Mr. Trump has shown signs of rebelling after stories have appeared describing how his chief of staff has put tighter controls in place and is imposing some discipline on White House operations. That included his news conference at Trump Tower in which he doubled down on his blame for “both sides” in the racially charged violence in Charlottesville, Va., and his campaign rally speech in Arizona on Tuesday when he accused the news media of mischaracterizing his statements.

Mr. Kelly had urged Mr. Trump to deliver a more somber, traditional statement the day before. And he and other advisers had urged the president to avoid taking questions from the news media at Trump Tower, a request that the president ignored. Before Mr. Trump’s rally in Arizona, aides prepared a sober set of remarks for him to deliver about unity, and sought to redirect his focus after he learned of a Times report about his relationship with Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader. Mr. Trump, who trusts few people and adjusts to new advisers gradually, railed at his new chief of staff over the story, according to one person close to the president.

Still, the memos have brought comfort to a number of Mr. Trump’s advisers who have sought structure in a Wild West environment. And they have provided guardrails where few existed.

“General Kelly is instilling processes to ensure that the president has the information and analysis he needs to make decisions,” said Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary.

The memos were follow-ups to themes that Mr. Kelly touched on during a conference call with senior staff members in which he went through a menu of items related to how the president receives information, how he makes decisions, how meetings with him are scheduled, and how speeches are scheduled and written.

The president’s new chief of staff, John F. Kelly, a retired Marine general, has been treated with a different level of deference and credibility inside the White House than his predecessor. Credit Tom Brenner/The New York Times

The effect so far has been, at times, a more pronounced split-screen between the president’s public behavior and his staff’s more structured approach. But inside the West Wing, several aides said they felt more protected by an established process.

In one of the memos, White House aides were told that all materials prepared for the president must go first to Mr. Porter for vetting and clearance. Then Mr. Kelly must sign off on them before they go to Mr. Trump’s desk. That includes news articles, according to West Wing officials who described the memos’ content — of particular importance, given the propensity for some of Mr. Trump’s staff to slip him news accounts from dubious sources that shape his thinking or prompt him to cite unreliable or inaccurate information.

The process for documents with legal implications is somewhat more rigorous, although a version of it has been in place since Mr. Priebus was chief of staff.

For instance, the draft of an executive order will go through several stages of development, involving the White House Counsel’s Office and vetting by relevant staff and agency officials. Then it will go to Mr. Kelly for final approval before it is given to the president.

Mr. Priebus had tried to take firmer control of that process after Mr. Trump’s first week in office, when Stephen K. Bannon, the recently departed chief strategist, and Stephen Miller, the president’s senior policy adviser, pushed across the president’s desk two orders redesigning the National Security Council, and putting in place the first, court-contested travel ban on seven predominantly Muslim countries.

In the second memo, Mr. Kelly and Mr. Porter set up a system for deciding policy issues that have a legal aspect, such as executive orders, to ensure that all sides of the issue are heard. Any decision made in a meeting will be formalized in a memo that has to go through Mr. Porter and then Mr. Kelly for final sign-off.

That process is expected to curtail freelancing and hijacking of decisions by West Wing aides. Mr. Bannon was often accused of taking advantage of the loose process, but Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his daughter, Ivanka Trump, who both work in the West Wing, have also frustrated their colleagues for months by going directly to the president on specific issues.

On Mr. Kelly’s first day on the job, he held a small meeting with top aides to the president after a fuller staff meeting. He told them that Oval Office access to Mr. Trump, which was once nearly universal to people coming through the West Wing, would be strictly limited to appointments only.

The exceptions, Mr. Kelly said, were the president’s wife and his 11-year-old son. And, he added, turning to Ivanka Trump, who was seated near him, the president’s eldest daughter, if she was speaking to him as a daughter and not a member of his staff. Mr. Kushner and Ms. Trump quickly gave in to Mr. Kelly’s new system, two White House officials said.

Since Mr. Trump returned from a working vacation at his golf club in New Jersey, the newly renovated West Wing has taken on a more formal air. Not only is the door to the Oval Office closed, preventing passers-by from catching the president’s eye, but a corridor door leading to the president’s office has also been kept closed.

Mr. Trump, who often complained about Mr. Priebus, appears to have absorbed the need for one person to run the staff. The changes Mr. Kelly has put in place have resulted in a more streamlined, functional government, administration officials said.

But Mr. Trump, presidential experts say, has shown he is immune to efforts to bring lasting change to his own behavior. And that could ultimately undermine Mr. Kelly’s mission.

“Let’s assume for the moment that Trump has learned the first big lesson of his first six months, which is that you have to empower the White House chief of staff to be a real gatekeeper,” said Chris Whipple, author of “The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency.”

“What he hasn’t learned, what he has shown no sign of learning, is that governing is completely different from campaigning,” Mr. Whipple said.

Psychiatrists tell Congress Donald Trump is 'a clear and present danger' to the world - Independent

Psychiatrists tell Congress Donald Trump is 'a clear and present danger' to the world

'It no longer takes a psychiatrist to recognise the alarming patterns of impulsive, reckless, and narcissistic behaviour,' group claims

A group of psychiatrists has written to Congress to warn Donald Trump poses a "clear and present danger" to the world.

Among them is Dr Bandy Lee, of Yale University, who is also reportedly consulting with Democratic members of Congress on setting up an expert panel to give advice on the President's mental health.

She is concerned by Mr Trump's "dangerousness", Dr Lee told USA Today.

Trump accused of 'ruinous' sellout over plan to shrink national parks

The group's letter, sent to members of both parties, said: "It no longer takes a psychiatrist to recognise the alarming patterns of impulsive, reckless, and narcissistic behaviour — regardless of diagnosis — that, in the person of President Trump, put the world at risk.

"We now find ourselves in a clear and present danger, especially concerning North Korea and the President’s command of the US nuclear arsenal."

Trump calls for unity one day after 75-minute rant at Arizona rally

It comes after Democrats proposed creating an 11-member, cross-party Oversight Commission on Presidential Capacity which would be responsible for examining the US president’s mental and physical health.

First tabled by Maryland congressman Jamie Raskin, and now backed by more than two dozen members of the House, the bill would see Mr Trump or any other US president forced from the Oval Office is he or she is deemed to be mentally or physically unfit for the role.

Discussion of Mr Trump's fitness to lead has intensified in the days since his extraordinary address to supporters in Phoenix, Arizona.

The President blasted "damned dishonest" journalists and took aim at both the state's Republican senators in a rambling speech, having abandoned his teleprompters.

He also revisited his various statements in the wake of far-right violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, reading portions to prove he had condemned white supremacists and had been misrepresented by the media.

These Are the 12 Employers Who Have Laid Off the Most Workers This Year - TIME

These Are the 12 Employers Who Have Laid Off the Most Workers This Year Posted: 24 Aug 2017 11:08 AM PDT Layoffs just keep coming in the retail sector. A slew of chains and mall mainstays like Macy’s, J. Crew, and Sears have announced layoffs, bankruptcies, and store closures in the past few years, a phenomenon analysts are calling the “retail apocalypse.” The closures are so severe, in fact, that research from Credit Suisse found 20 to “25% of all U.S. malls will close by 2022.” But other industries have also been hard hit this year. According to Challenger, Gray and Christmas, an outplacement firm, the energy sector has lost some 255,000 jobs in 2017. Below are the 12 companies laying off the most workers, according to data pulled from Challenger, Gray and Christmas by 24/7 Wall St. The numbers take into account worldwide job losses announced in 2017 through the end of July. 12. The State Department Layoffs: 2,300 Number of employees: 69,000 Though it’s technically not a business, the State Department, headed by former Exxon exec Rex Tillerson, will slash 9% of its workforce, according to Bloomberg, in an effort to cut its budget. The layoffs will take place over two years, and some people will receive buyouts. 11. Lowe’s Cos. Layoffs: 2,400 Number of employees: 290,000 Lowe’s cut 2,400 managers in January, and Fortune reports it will likely cut hundreds more jobs before the year is up. 10. The Hershey Company Layoffs: 2,697 Number of employees: 18,000 Hershey is cutting thousands of jobs worldwide, reducing its workforce by 15%. Fortune reports other food manufacturers like Kellogg and General Mills are also cutting jobs. 9. General Motors Layoffs: 2,700 Number of employees: 225,000 While 24/7 Wall Street’s tally accounts for 2,700 job losses in Venezuela, the car maker has announced thousands more layoffs in the states. According to CNN Money, GM announced in May that it will cut around 300 jobsin its plant in Warren, Mich., and notes that “(t)his is the fifth time that GM has eliminated a shift of work at a U.S. plant since last November, eliminating a total of about 5,000 jobs.” 8. Dollar Express Layoffs: 2,800 Number of employees: 0 Dollar Express was sold to Dollar General earlier this year, and many of its stores were shuttered. 7. Weatherford International Layoffs: 3,000 (worldwide; also cut 9,000 jobs in 2016) Number of employees: 39,500 As energy prices decline, Weatherford International, an oil-field service company, said it would cut around 3,000 jobs worldwide and close facilities in an effort to downsize and reduce its debt burden. Next year, it plans to sell its land drilling rigs business in the Middle East and North Africa, according to Fuel Fix. 6. Wet Seal Inc. Layoffs: 3,000 Number of employees: 0 (the company filed for bankruptcy in 2015) The retailer announced it would close its remaining 171 stores across 42 states in January. Wet Seal originally filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2015, but was unable to find a buyer or raise emergency capital in the ensuing time. 5. The Limited Layoffs: 4,000 Number of employees: 0 (closed all of its stores but will continue to do business online) Another victim of the retail apocalypse, the Limited closed all of its brick-and-mortars, though its online shop is “coming soon.” 4. State Farm Layoffs: 4,200 Number of employees: 70,000 The largest home and auto insurer in the country announced it would shut 11 facilities and cut some 4,200 jobs after a “$7 billion annual underwriting loss last year on auto policies,” per the Insurance Journal. 3. HHGregg Layoffs: 5,000 Number of employees: 0 HHGregg began liquidating all of its stores this year after filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, reports the IndyStar. 2. JC Penney Layoffs: 5,500 Number of employees: 106,000 Earlier this year, JC Penney announced it would shutter 130 to 140 stores and two distribution centers and layoff almost 6,000 workers, some of whom would be offered buyouts. The company expects the cuts to amount to $200 million in savings. 1. Macy’s Layoffs: 10,000 Number of employees: 158,000 The past few years have not been kind to this retail giant. Macy’s announced it would close 68 stores in year, affecting around 4,000 employees, as part of its effort to shutter 100 store fronts, or around 15% of its stores.