HURRICANE/PUERTO RICO/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “Nearly a year later, they’re still numbers. Puerto Rican officials admitted this week that the death toll from Hurricane Maria, which hit the US territory last September, is 46 times higher than they’d previously said. Not 64 dead, as was the official line. An estimated 2,975 deaths. Yet that’s just a statistical estimate — an approximation. Officials have still only released details on 64 of those individuals. They’ve named just 57. Internally, Puerto Rican authorities have identified additional individuals whose deaths they consider to be hurricane-related, but their names have not made public, according to a Puerto Rican official who spoke with CNN on the condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak on internal matters. The official asked the exact number of named deaths not be reported because they said that figure is not widely known even within the government…Controversy about Hurricane Maria’s death toll started October 3 when President Donald Trump visited Puerto Rico. In a press conference with Rosselló, Trump praised the relatively low death toll from the storm — then 16 — and said he was glad Maria did not have the death toll of a ‘real catastrophe’ like Hurricane Katrina, which pummeled the Gulf Coast in 2005. Later that day, after Trump left the island, the death toll rose to 34. It now stands higher than the toll from Katrina, which was 1,833.”
–John D. Sutter and Catherine E. Shoichet, “Puerto Rico says nearly 3,000 people died in Hurricane Maria. So why have officials produced only 57 names?,” CNN Politics, CNN.com, August 31, 2018 11:23 pm