Trump called San Juan’s mayor a weak leader. Here’s what her leadership looks like.

When Hurricane Maria destroyed the infrastructure of Puerto Rico, the mayor of San Juan became the spokeswoman of a stranded people.

Carmen Yulín Cruz told the world of the “horror” she had witnessed in the flooded streets, which she had been walking ever since the storm, in a place she expects to have no power for half a year.

Until then, she had not been a well-known politician outside the island, which many mainland Americans don’t even know is a U.S. territory.

But after Cruz criticized Washington’s response to the hurricane this week — “save us from dying” — President Trump decided to size her up on Twitter.

“Such poor leadership ability by the Mayor of San Juan,” he wrote Saturday. The Democrats must have gotten to her.

Since the president brought it up, we present below the historical record of the leadership abilities of Cruz, before and after the storm.

The island

Cruz is, in some ways, a lifelong politician — class president in eighth grade, student council president in high school.

Like many Puerto Ricans, she left the island to pursue opportunities on the U.S. mainland, earning a bachelor’s degree in political science at Boston University and a master’s degree in public management and policy at Carnegie Mellon.

She stayed on the mainland for many years afterward, according to her official biography, and worked her way up to the position of human resources director at several organizations, including Scotiabank and the Treasury Department.

In a 2014 interview with a small New York newspaper, Cruz described the tug of war between the home island and the mainland that she and other Puerto Ricans often feel.

“I often say to my friends that I felt too Puerto Rican to live in the States; then I felt too American to live in Puerto Rico,” she said. “So when I settled back in Puerto Rico in 1992, I had to come to terms with all of that.”

Cruz plunged back into politics when she returned to the island after 12 years on the mainland.

She became an adviser to Sila María Calderón, then the mayor of San Juan, who later became Puerto Rico’s first and only female governor.

With the experience she amassed under Calderón, Cruz ran in 2000 for a seat in Puerto Rico’s House of Representatives. She lost that race, but in 2008, she ran again and won.

The city

“Politics is a rough game, and sometimes as females we are taught that you have to play nice,” she once said in an interview. “Sometimes you can’t play nice.”

As a race for mayor in her home town approached in 2012, she waffled publicly on whether to enter as a candidate.

At first she denied any plans to run. Once she entered the race, she strung together small coalitions to form her base of support. Such groups included the LGBT community, students, Dominican immigrants and taxi drivers.

With such allies, she managed to beat her opponent, three-time incumbent Jorge Santini.

“People don’t realize they have the power,” she recalled in an interview years later. “People don’t realize that if they come together, there are more of them than those who occupy the seat that I’m in right now.”

She belongs to the Popular Democratic Party (PPD), one of Puerto Rico’s two main parties.

Like many things on the island, Puerto Rico’s politics are largely defined by the relationship with the mainland and whether Puerto Rico should remain a U.S. territory or seek statehood. The PPD campaigns to maintain the status quo, an unincorporated territory with self-governance.

During a 2014 visit to Pittsburgh, as Puerto Rico faced a debt crisis, Cruz maintained that stance for independence. She said Puerto Rico’s relationship with the U.S. mainland is important but the island should be wary of becoming too dependent.

“It is only through that financial independence that you are able to stay on course with your own vision,” she said.

Then this year, Hurricane Maria made the island’s many dependencies all too apparent — and brought Cruz’s vision to the world.

The storm

Hurricane Maria flooded roads, destroyed phone lines and Internet connections, and cut the island’s overseas lifeline to the mainland from which it gets so many of its goods.

With no way to communicate and almost no help from the outside world, the mayors of Puerto Rico became, in the days after the hurricane, the highest form of authority many residents knew.

Cruz worked nearly nonstop on the ground in San Juan — walking its streets and doing what she could for those she met. She described what she had seen to the The Washington Post three days after the storm.

“There is horror in the streets,” she said then. “Sheer pain in people’s eyes.”

The city’s hospitals were likely to spend weeks without power, she said, and the rest of the country would not have electricity until 2018. Looters were already taking over some streets after dark.

“We’re running out of gasoline,” Cruz said. “There is no reservoir of drinking water — none.”

She had written to scores of other mayors, she said: “There’s no answer.”

The mayor herself felt relatively helpless — only able to do so much for her exhausted neighbors and frightened constituents.

“I know we’re not going to get to everybody in time,” she said. But she would try.

On her way to the interview, she said, a man asked her for a favor: “To tell the world we’re here.”

As tears filled her eyes, Cruz obliged.

“If anyone can hear us,” she told the reporter, “help.”

A week later, signs hung in basketball courts of Old San Juan: “SOS.” “Don’t abandon us.”

As darkness fell Thursday, families searched for water by the light of the moon and cellphones with dwindling batteries. They passed through a tunnel beneath a city wall and found at its exit a water tank left there by the city — a godsend.

And then they found their mayor.

Cruz hugged them as they came to her. She handed to each family a small solar-powered lantern — “a box of blessings,” she called it.

“Now this is life,” she told The Post.

Her people were resilient, she said. Residents had taken the streets back from criminal gangs.

But if the federal government didn’t step up its response, she feared, “people will die.”

A call with the White House earlier in the week had encouraged her, she said. She told the federal government that 3,000 containers were sitting in a port, trapped behind electronic gates that wouldn’t open.

Since then, more federal personnel had arrived, and the government had sent pallets of water and food.

But her city was still on the brink, Cruz said, and she feared her people could become desperate.

“The FEMA people have their hearts in the right place,” she said, but “there is a bottleneck somewhere.”

The president

The same day, in the White House driveway, acting homeland security secretary Elaine Duke defended the Trump administration’s response to the storm.

“It is really a good news story, in terms of our ability to reach people,” the director said.

And when Cruz heard that, she made good on her warning years earlier — that sometimes in politics, “you can’t play nice.”

“People are dying in this country,” Cruz said at a news conference Friday. “I am begging, begging anyone that can hear us to save us from dying. If anybody out there is listening to us, we are dying and you are killing us with the inefficiency and the bureaucracy.”

And with that, the mayor of a ruined city merited a mention in Trump’s Twitter feed.

“The Mayor of San Juan, who was very complimentary only a few days ago, has now been told by the Democrats that you must be nasty to Trump,” he wrote.

Lobbyists See a Billion-Dollar Boon in Tax Rewrite’s Lack of Detail

The sweeping tax rewrite unveiled by President Trump and Republican lawmakers this past week leaves many of the details to Congress, but two sentences in the nine-page framework have Washington lobbyists salivating over a payday that some industry experts predict could top $1 billion.

Tucked away on Page 8, the sentences refer vaguely to plans to repeal or roll back “numerous” exclusions and deductions, and to “modernize” tax rules affecting specific industries “to ensure that the tax code better reflects economic reality and that such rules provide little opportunity for tax avoidance.”

That language has prompted concerns among a wide range of businesses and industries about the prospect of losing valuable tax breaks — from preferential tax treatment for insurers to credits for renewable energy to a prized tax treatment used by the commercial real estate industry.

And those fears are being stoked by lobbyists, who are urging clients and prospective clients to get out in front of any changes that could eliminate or weaken sections of the tax code that benefit them.

“You’re either going to be at the table, or you’re going to be on the table,” said Thomas M. Reynolds, a former Republican congressman from New York who served on the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee and is now a lobbyist at Holland & Knight focusing on tax issues. Most businesses that could be affected by the tax overhaul “will not have to be encouraged to engage,” Mr. Reynolds said.

“Everybody is beginning to pay attention, and there is going to be a flurry of people looking for representation,” he added.

The spike in tax-related lobbying is already well underway, prompted by Mr. Trump’s campaign-trail pledge that fundamentally overhauling the tax code would be one of his top priorities in the White House. Companies and trade associations have submitted nearly 450 filings to lobby on tax issues from the beginning of the year through the end of last week, compared with fewer than 265 filings for all of 2016, according to congressional lobbying disclosures.

There is some irony in Mr. Trump’s setting off a surge in lobbying spending, given his campaign promise to “drain the swamp” in the nation’s capital, partly by taking on special interests. But there is perhaps no federal law that has been lobbied as assiduously as the tax code. Its thousands of pages contain countless provisions inserted at the behest of specific groups that have an interest in protecting their benefits.

“People have been expecting this all year. But the feeling that specific provisions could be put in play is now more real, and all of those provisions have a constituency and a lobbyist,” said Randolf H. Hardock, a tax lobbyist at Davis & Harman. “Some of it is just keeping clients informed, even if they don’t ultimately engage, because there are issues that could come up right at the end, where if you’re not paying attention, you could miss them.”

In 1986 — the last time Congress overhauled the tax code — Mr. Hardock served as tax counsel for the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Senator Lloyd Bentsen, Democrat of Texas. That legislation, the Tax Reform Act of 1986, became the subject of such intense lobbying activity from interest groups and individual companies that it was jokingly referred to on K Street as the Lobbyists’ Relief Act of 1986.

Lobbying has expanded and evolved drastically since then: It’s now a $3 billion industry with a sophisticated war-room approach that goes beyond simply buttonholing lawmakers to include comprehensive marketing and pressure campaigns.

Those costly campaigns can pay off, as they did for those fighting a proposed tax on imports championed by many Republicans, including the House speaker, Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin. A coalition of major retailers such as Wal-Mart, retail trade associations and manufacturers including Koch Industries banded together earlier this year with the single goal of killing the so-called border adjustment tax.

The group, Americans for Affordable Products, spent heavily on research, slick television ads and constituent visits to key lawmakers in the first few months of the year. In April, the Trump administration backed away from the tax, which was not included in Wednesday’s blueprint.

But while the tax on imports was a clear target, the paucity of details in the new blueprint has created anxiety in corporate suites across the country, despite the overwhelming support in the business community for its proposed reduction in the corporate tax rate to 20 percent from 35 percent.

Lobbyists are potentially facing two rounds of business-development opportunities: one in which they capitalize on the fear of getting attacked, and another when specific industries come under attack.

Meanwhile, the details revealed so far are creating fissures within industries, such as real estate, as trade groups battle one another in an effort to strip out or protect various provisions under consideration.

The National Association of Realtors is already out in force, criticizing aspects of the plan as dealing a devastating blow to the housing market and United States economy. While the framework specifically protects the mortgage interest deduction, real estate agents say the proposal to double the standard deduction and eliminate the state and local tax deduction would make buying a home less valuable.

The National Association of Home Builders, by contrast, has come out in favor of the framework, saying the lower corporate tax rate, a new 25 percent tax rate for “pass through” businesses, and protection of the low-income housing tax credit will help builders, whose businesses benefit from both renters and home buyers.

“By lowering the pass-through rate, the plan will reduce the tax bill of thousands of small businesses and help to spur job and economic growth,” the chairman of the home builders association, Granger MacDonald, said in a statement. “More importantly, the blueprint maintains the low-income housing tax credit, the most indispensable tool to help produce affordable rental housing.”

Meredith McGehee, the chief of policy at Issue One, a nonprofit group that works to reduce the influence of deep-pocketed special interests in politics and government, said that “the estimate of $1 billion in lobbying expenditures is probably conservative.”

Ms. McGehee, who has been both tracking lobbying and actually lobbying since 1987, predicted that many of the efforts to influence the details of the tax overhaul would not be disclosed under congressional lobbying rules because they would fall outside the scope of the direct contacts with federal government officials that prompt disclosure requirements.

Several tax lobbyists said businesses and trade groups concerned about whether they could be in jeopardy as the plan develops should look to a tax reform bill released in 2014 by the House Ways and Means Committee under its then-chairman, Representative Dave Camp of Michigan, a Republican who retired in 2015. That bill proposed ending all manner of loopholes and credits, including for insurance companies and research and experimentation.

“You have to be out there working to make the case now, because everybody knows what the menu includes,” said James Gould, a tax lobbyist who worked as a Senate tax aide during the 1986 reform effort.

But Mr. Hardock said there might be some benefit in trying to stay out of the debate for companies or trade groups in industries that aren’t being openly discussed as targets for revenue generation.

“There are some industries that probably don’t want to put their heads too far up, because that might draw unwelcome notice,” he said.

Price's exit further complicates GOP health care push

The ouster of Tom Price as President Donald Trump's health secretary is yet another self-inflicted blow for Republicans wishing to put their own stamp on health care — and the latest distraction for a White House struggling to advance its agenda after months of turmoil.

Price resigned Friday amid investigations into his use of costly charter flights for official travel at taxpayer expense. His exit makes it even more unlikely that Republicans will be able to deliver on their promise to repeal and replace former President Barack Obama's law, even though they control the White House and both chambers of Congress.

"I think health care is a dead letter through the next election," Joe Antos, a policy expert with the business-oriented American Enterprise Institute, said Saturday.

The health secretary's exit capped a week in which a last-ditch GOP health care bill failed to advance in the Senate. Regaining momentum will be more difficult now that the White House also has to find a replacement for Price. That makes it harder to visualize how the administration and congressional Republicans can fulfill their goal of remaking the health care system along conservative lines, although Trump has said he's confident a plan can pass early next year.

Price — who Trump concluded had become a distraction — had been on the rocks with the president since before the travel flap. A former Republican congressman from Georgia, he proved less helpful than expected on the health care fight. Price played a supporting role while Vice President Mike Pence took the lead, especially with the Senate.

The health secretary's departure — the latest in a list that now includes Trump's chief of staff, national security adviser, press secretary and two communications directors — is also unlikely to end what has been a steady drip of revelations about potentially inappropriate travel on the part of Cabinet members.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has come under fire for requesting a government aircraft to use on his honeymoon, while Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said he'd taken three charter flights while in office, including a $12,375 late-night trip from Las Vegas to his home state of Montana in June. The Environmental Protection Agency's inspector general has opened an inquiry into Administrator Scott Pruitt's frequent taxpayer-funded travel on commercial planes.

The House Oversight and Government Reform committee has launched a government-wide investigation of top political appointees' travel.

Trump ran on a pledge to "drain the swamp" in Washington and has taken pride in his efforts to reduce federal spending and negotiate better deals on behalf of American taxpayers.

In a memo Friday, White House budget director Mick Mulvaney said all travel on government-owned, rented, leased or chartered aircraft will now have to be approved by the president's chief of staff, John Kelly. That gives more oversight power to a man who has tried to impose order and structure on what has been a chaotic White House.

On health care, the task of installing another secretary at the Health and Human Services department won't be easy.

The nominee will have to run the gauntlet of Senate confirmation. The already contentious process will be more challenging as Democrats shift from playing defense to offense on health care, heartened by the survival of the Affordable Care Act and polls showing support for the government's leading role in health care.

And HHS is not the only department that needs a leader. Trump has yet to pick a permanent replacement for Kelly, who left his previous job running the Department of Homeland Security in July.

Two potential candidates for health secretary already hold senior Senate-confirmed posts at HHS, which could be a plus for the White House.

Seema Verma leads the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which runs major insurance programs. Scott Gottlieb heads the Food and Drug Administration, which has regulatory authority across pharmaceuticals and consumer products.

Verma is a protege of Pence, who played a major role in negotiations with Congress this year on the futile "Obamacare" repeal effort.

Verma is seen as a talented policy expert, but she's still relatively new to the ways of Washington. Gottlieb is a veteran, but he may prefer the FDA and its clearly defined mission to the quicksand of health care policy.

Also mentioned is Louisiana GOP Sen. Bill Cassidy, co-author of the last Republican health care bill that failed to advance. Cassidy would probably win confirmation easily, but his prospects in the Senate appear bright, and he may not want to depart for a Cabinet post in a tumultuous administration.

Another potential candidate is Florida's Republican Gov. Rick Scott, a former hospital executive who is term-limited after 2018. But Scott is expected to mount a Senate campaign against Democratic incumbent Sen. Bill Nelson next year, and he may have ambitions and interests beyond health care.

US-Cuba thaw halted amid diplomat injuries

The sun on that hot August day three years ago was punishing. It baked our backs, burnt our foreheads, and left the assembled dignitaries and excited onlookers soaked in sweat.

We'd been standing in position since long before sunrise, but many had been waiting decades to see this moment.

The United States was finally reopening its embassy in the Cuban capital Havana after decades of hostility.

It was a moment laden with symbolism.

The same three marines who lowered the Stars and Stripes when the embassy was shuttered in 1961 passed the flag to their modern-day counterparts. To the strains of The Star Spangled Banner, they raised it once again above the building's forecourt.

As it fluttered behind him, then Secretary of State John Kerry presided over the warmest moment in US-Cuban relations in decades, saying: "Cuba's future is for Cubans to shape."

It was quickly followed by an equally important step, a visit by President Barack Obama in March 2016, the first by a sitting US president since 1928.

President Obama's rhetoric went even further than Mr Kerry's. "I have come here to bury the last remnant of the Cold War in the Americas," he said to rapturous applause, his speech televised live to Cubans.

'No longer safe'

Yet barely 18 months later, this latest episode between these old foes feels more reminiscent of the Cold War than those sentiments of fraternity and thaw.

The US has reduced its embassy staff in Cuba by 60%.

Furthermore, the US state department has advised American citizens against travel to Cuba, saying it can no longer guarantee their safety. Lobbyists in favour of engagement have been urging a rethink and calling on American visitors to ignore their government's travel advice.

It is an undeniably strange tale, one which began during those final months of the Obama presidency.

Around November last year, US diplomats based in Havana started to complain of odd ailments - dizziness, nausea, even a loss of hearing.

More than 20 members of staff have been harmed in what the state department has described as "health attacks".

There was no clear pattern to the incidents. Some experienced sharp piercing bursts of noise, others seemed to be affected by inaudible sound waves.

Some were affected in their homes, others were apparently targeted while inside a hotel. Some as they slept, others while they worked.

The United States officially complained to Cuba, and President Raul Castro took the unusual step of meeting the highest US diplomat on the island to personally assure him that Cuba wasn't involved.

Both countries launched separate investigations - as did the Canadians, after a smaller number of their staff also reported similar symptoms. Still no obvious cause turned up.

The US government suspects the use of some kind of as-yet unidentified "sonic weapon" or device, but exactly who carried out the alleged attacks is far from clear.

Even once the matter became public the incidents continued, the latest taking place as recently as early August.

Whatever the source of the injuries, some of them are certainly serious. At least one US employee has been left with permanent hearing loss.

'Tense but professional'

It is as baffling as it is intriguing, yet it goes way beyond what most diplomats might consider the usual cut-and-thrust of surveillance or provocation by a hostile host.

"I was always welcomed," remembers Herman Portocarero, the former European Union ambassador to Cuba.

"By and large, I had a frank and open and cordial relationship with my Cuban counterparts."

Some former diplomats in Cuba recall having their car tyres slashed. One even recounts a strange story of a poisoned pet dog.

However, the former EU ambassador never went through anything involving what could perhaps be best described as "extreme provocation".

"Absolutely not", says Mr Portocarero, who has just written a book on his experiences of Cuba, entitled Havana Without Make Up.

"We had tense moments, I was sometimes called in and criticised over our relations with dissidents, but it was always professional. I never suffered any of those invasive or aggressive actions that I hear about."

Shortly before the announcement of US embassy staff cuts, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez held talks with US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in Washington.

Perhaps in a last ditch effort to divert fresh hostility, he underlined Cuba's firm position that it had nothing to do with the incidents and warned against taking "hasty decisions" based on circumstantial evidence.

It seems it wasn't enough to stop the White House from ordering home all "non-emergency personnel" in Cuba.

"They did some bad things in Cuba," was President Donald Trump's verdict, delivered to journalists on the South Lawn of the White House.

That response seemed at cross-purposes with earlier indications that the US didn't necessarily hold Cuba directly responsible for carrying out the attacks, but rather of failing to prevent them.

Either way, this decision includes what amounts to a punitive measure for thousands of Cuban families. The embassy will not be issuing any further visas to Cubans wanting to travel to the US.

The Cuban foreign ministry again called the decision "hasty" and warned it would affect bilateral relations.

Ordinary people in Havana are worried about what that might mean too.

"Of course I feel affected by this", said Magaly Dominguez, who runs a small café in front of the US embassy. "First I don't like that they speak ill of my country, which I consider is very safe. But also they're going to make it tough for Americans to come here again."

"They're politicising it," said Iris Oviedo, whose business offers photocopies and passport photos to those who turn up at the embassy, folders of paperwork in hand, trying to secure a visa.

"They're creating a problem that doesn't exist."

For the diplomats whose hearing has been severely impaired, the problem certainly exists. Indeed it may affect them for the rest of their lives.

However, even by the standards of the volatile US-Cuba relationship, this is a quick turn of events, one which makes that stiflingly hot day in August 2015 feel a very long time ago.

One week to cross a street: how IS pinned down Filipino soldiers in Marawi

With a grimace, Brigadier General Melquiades Ordiales of the Philippines 1st Marine Brigade recounted the painful gains made against Islamist militants in Marawi City.

"It took us one week from this point to that point, to cross that street," he said, casting his eyes to the other side of a two-lane road in the heart of the southern Philippines city, lined by three-storey buildings shattered by air strikes and the remaining walls riddled with bullet holes.

"It was really very, very tough."

The grinding urban warfare that has destroyed much of the grandly named Sultan Omar Dianalan Boulevard shows just how much of a threat Islamic State is to the Philippines and potentially other countries in the Southeast Asian region.

But when the fighting started, Philippine authorities were unfazed.

After the Islamic State-backed militants took over large parts of picturesque, lakeside Marawi in May, the country's defense minister, Delfin Lorenzana, predicted the entire conflict would be over in one week.

Now, after four months of intense aerial bombardment and house-by-house battles, Philippine commanders believe they are in the final stages of the operation to oust the rebels from the city.

In the past two weeks, military officials say they have conquered three militant bastions, including a mosque, and restricted about 60 remaining guerrillas to about 10 devastated city blocks in the business district. Patrols have been increased on the lake to prevent the supply of armaments and recruits to the holed-up militants.

HIGH-POWERED WEAPONS

Military officers who have skirmished for years with Islamic insurgents in the southern Philippines say the battle in Marawi has been more intense and difficult than earlier encounters.

The Islamic State militants are better armed, with high-powered weapons, night vision goggles, the latest sniper scopes and surveillance drones, said Captain Arnel Carandang, of the Philippines Army First Scout Ranger Battalion.

He said he has served for almost a decade in the remote jungles and mountains of Mindanao, the southern Philippines region that has long been wracked by insurgencies. Now, Carandang says, the military is in unfamiliar urban terrain.

The militants have exploited the battlefield to their advantage and held off Philippines forces despite a 10-to-1 numerical advantage for the government troops.

Borrowing heavily from Islamic State tactics in the Iraqi city of Mosul, they have surrounded themselves with hostages and used snipers and a network of tunnels.

Marawi's underground drainage system and "rat holes" - crevices in the walls of high floors allowing access to adjacent buildings - have enabled the rebels to evade bombs and remain undetected, soldiers at the battlefront said.

"We believe there have been some foreign terrorists that have been directing their operations that's why they are, how do I define this, really good," said Carandang.

"We have seen some cadavers of foreigners. Some are white, some are black and some tall people we guess are Asians (from outside the Philippines). We have been hearing in their transmissions some English speaking terrorists."

SCAVENGE FOR FOOD

Hostages - many of them Christians - have been deployed to build improvised explosive devices, scavenge for food and weapons in the heat of battle and fight for the Islamist rebels, according to those who escaped.

"When we were first moved to the mosque, there were more than 200 of us," an escaped hostage, who asked not to be identified for safety reasons, told Reuters last week.

"We gradually became fewer. People would go on errands but they wouldn't come back. They either escaped or died. By the time I left, there were only about 100 of us."

The account could not be verified, but military officials confirmed the man escaped from Marawi in early August.

The hostage said the militants were excited by their successes in Marawi, speaking often of the advantages of urban warfare and talking about some of their next possible targets, including other cities in Mindanao and the Philippines capital Manila.

"They said they could hide well in the cities. They can get civilians to become hostages and it's more difficult in the mountains with only the soldiers," he said.

Many of the fighters are young recruits, who are fanatical and accomplished fighters, the soldiers said.

"By the way they move and their tactics, you can see they've been trained," said Colonel Jose Maria Cuerpo, deputy commander of the 103rd Brigade fighting in Marawi.

For a description of how Mindanao youngsters are recruited by militants, click on [nL3N1KB1Z5]

PROPOSAL REBUFFED

Much of this bloodshed could have been avoided, local political leaders told Reuters.

Naguib Sinarimbo, a Muslim leader who has negotiated between the military and Islamic separatists for years, said he and other elders had urged the armed forces to allow militias and rival Islamist groups to take the lead in ousting the Islamic State militants.

The groups were familiar with Marawi's terrain and, through family and clan links, could influence many of the fighters to lay down their weapons, they told the armed forces.

The proposal was rebuffed, Sinarimbo said. Air power, the military assured them, was the path to a quick win.

Zia Alonto Adiong, a provincial politician, said the military also had doubts about the loyalty of some of the "political personalities" offering to provide their militias to push out the fighters.

The result was a city in ruins, hundreds of thousands of residents displaced and "emboldened" Islamists, Sinarimbo said.

"They proceeded with the aerial bombing but they didn't take the city," Sinarimbo said. "The military lost authority."

In addition, the devastation of the city will play into militants' hands, creating resentment and further radicalising many youngsters, he said.

Marawi residents in evacuation centers or staying with relatives elsewhere are becoming increasingly frustrated, said Adiong, who is a spokesman for the local government's crisis management authority. Some residents were disappointed and angry that requests for a moratorium on bank loan repayments had not been met, he told Reuters.

Philippines central bank governor Nestor Espenilla told Reuters legislation would be needed for a debt moratorium and was being studied.

Mindanao has long been marred by the decades of Muslim hostility to rule from Manila. After years fighting insurgent groups and then long negotiations, the government signed an agreement in 2014 to give Muslim majority areas in Mindanao autonomy. But the deal has been long delayed.

"This part of the Philippines is fertile ground to plant violent extremism," Adiong said. "There is a narrative of social injustice that is strong. Young people are fed up with the peace process and nothing concrete or sustainable has developed."

"[The militants] use this as the basis to entice people, to get support of the local people."

LAST STAND?

In Marawi, some in the armed forces are hopeful that at least some militants will surrender and hand over between 45 to 50 civilian captives. Carandang, the Scout Rangers captain, however said indications were the rebels are preparing for a bloody final stand.

"We are monitoring the enemy's transmissions and it's like during these final days they are being more fanatical," he said. "Transmissions indicate they are preparing for suicide bombings."

An unused suicide vest was discovered this month in Marawi’s Grand Mosque, a former stronghold of the militants, government sources told Reuters.

Suicide attacks are rare in the Philippines despite decades of Islamist insurgency.

"That's the difference between here and Syria and Iraq," said Ordiales, the marine general. "It's almost the same war tactics and fighting tactics, the one thing that's not the same is the human bomb or the suicide bombing.

"It hasn't happened, not yet."

With kids in tow, Catalonia’s pro-independence parents occupy polling stations in mass act of civil disobedience

SABADELL, Spain — In a mass act of civil disobedience, organized by Whatsapp groups, encrypted messages and clandestine committees, an army of parents and their children occupied thousands of polling stations across Catalonia on Saturday, hoping to thwart efforts by the central government to shut down an independence referendum that Madrid calls illegal.

The remarkable occupation of elementary and high schools, which in Spain serve as polling stations, set the stage for an almost surreal confrontation between pro-independence Catalans and their central government. 

The defenders of the vote were not trained cadres of activists, but ordinary, over-extended and stressed parents from the neighborhoods, who carried babies on their hips and entreated rambunctious children to stop teasing their siblings. 

As the occupiers were gulping coffee and sharing plates of pastries brought by volunteers, police units on Saturday morning started to sweep the schools to warn the parents that the buildings must be emptied by 6 a.m. Sunday, three hours before the controversial plebiscite is scheduled to begin. 

As children in playgrounds ran around chasing soccer balls and scribbling with crayons in classrooms, their parents were huddled in the hallways, sneaking a quick cigarette, scrolling their mobile phones and worrying.

“I would not deny that we are nervous because we don’t know what is going to happen,” said Roger Serra, a parent who spent the night at Enric Casassas primary school here alongside about 50 others.

The people who came to occupy the buildings to defend the referendum were almost in disbelief, that in a prosperous, stable and globalized country in Europe in 2017, they suddenly found themselves at a modern-day version of the old barricades.

The families spent a restive night, watching Disney movies and curled in sleeping bags.

Catalonia’s secessionists, led by the region’s pro-independence president Carles Puigdemont, vow to press ahead with the vote in rebellion against the central government in Madrid, and the Constitutional Court, which has declared the referendum illegal and the results, whatever they could be, illegitimate. 

Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy has moved thousands of national police and Guardia Civil militia into Catalonia to stop the plebiscite. 

National security forces have confiscated more than 13 million ballots, shut down websites, arrested 14 functionaries and demanded the region’s 700 mayors desist from supporting the vote.

On Saturday, national police took over the regional government's telecommunications center in Barcelona.

A court in Barcelona ordered Google to delete a mobile app the Catalan government was using to distribute information about how and where to vote.

Officials with the central government said police had secured 1,300 of 2,315 schools in Catalonia used as polling stations. The statement could not be immediately verified.

“Can we vote or not? For me the great question is who is going to bring the ballot boxes and ballot papers? Will they come from a hidden place, some clandestine, secret place, that could be in our town and from there they are going to distribute it? I don’t see how this will work,” said Victor Colomer, who spent the night in the school with his wife.

The regional government has printed millions of ballots and have stashed them around Catalonia, playing a cat-and-mouse game with police.

Alongside the hidden ballots are thousands of plastic tubs, marked with the Catalan regional government’s emblem, with numbered, red strips normally used to the secure the ballots after they are dropped in the boxes.

At a news conference, Catalan officials showed off one of the ballot boxes. Puigdemont told reporters that more than 6,000 were being cached.

The Catalan activists told the Washington Post that the vote would proceed as normal — that citizens would come to their traditional polling station, usually a neighborhood school, show their identification card, be checked against the voter registries maintained by the regional government and cast their ballot — yes or no for independence.

After the vote, the volunteers would tally the count and report it to the regional government, which will announce the result.

But it is far from certain this will happen as promised by Catalonia’s separatists.

Police have threatened not only to shut down the school but to issue large fines to anyone assisting an illegal vote.

The mayor of Sabadell, the fifth largest city in Catalonia, said there were 54 polling stations here. He guessed that half were occupied by parents on Saturday. 

“I cannot tell you how the people will vote. Many want independence, many don’t. Some are not so sure,” said Sabadell Mayor Maties Serracant, who declined a summons to appear before prosecutors last week.

“The situation is incredible,” the mayor said. “If you would have told me a few months ago that parents would be occupying this school to vote, I would have laughed.” 

The potentially chaotic vote raises immediate questions of its legitimacy. Catalan officials, too, have sent mixed messages: is the referendum binding? Or if the vote tilts toward independence, is it just the beginning of a new round of negotiations with the central government? 

Many people, especially those who want to remain a part of Spain, said they were afraid to vote. Others said they would not enter a building illegally — or did not want to walk through a phalanx of police officers in riot gear.

There was a small demonstration of pro-Spain voices at a police station in central Barcelona on Saturday afternoon.

“This vote is not legal, not legitimate and not fair,” said Carlos Abril, a finance manager, who came out to wave a Spanish flag.

Abril called himself a proud son of Catalonia, but said he opposed independence, which he called a disaster for the region.

“No debate, police in the streets, lies, fear, violations, propaganda! Man, this is no way to stage a vote.”

Oceanographer's ashes going to sea aboard rescued sea turtle

PORT ARANSAS, Texas — A rescued green sea turtle will be released this weekend back into the Gulf of Mexico, carrying the ashes of a self-taught Texas oceanographer who founded the rehabilitation center that nursed it back to health.

Thousands are expected to attend a ceremony Saturday that effectively allows Tory Amos, who devoted his life to helping the endangered reptiles, to do so once more in death. His final voyage comes on a stretch of beach named in his honor.

Amos, 80, died of complications from prostate cancer on Sept. 4, mere days after Harvey roared ashore as a fearsome Category 4 hurricane. It caused extensive damage to the Animal Rehabilitation Keep for ailing sea turtles and aquatic birds that Amos opened nearly four decades ago.

But the turtles there weathered the storm well — as their counterparts in the wild also appear to have done, scientists say.

An early hatching season meant most turtles headed to sea before the storm arrived, with their eggs already hatched rather than lying on the beach to be subsumed. Also, few turtles became stranded inland as Harvey pulled the tide far out and, since the punishing winds and rains subsided, only a relatively small number has washed back onshore or been found among storm debris.

"This certainly could have been worse," said Tim Tristan, executive director of the Texas Sealife Center, a nonprofit rescue and rehabilitation facility in Corpus Christi, close to where Harvey first made landfall Aug. 25. Five of the world's seven sea turtle species are found in the Gulf of Mexico and have been documented in parts of Texas: green, hawksbill, Kemp's ridley, leatherback and loggerhead.

At Amos' turtle and aquatic bird center in the Harvey-ravaged beach town of Port Aransas, the hurricane smashed roof tiles and solar panels and collapsed parts of buildings. Partially submerged, concrete tanks housing around 60 rescue turtles were also damaged, but the animals weren't harmed. Even Barnacle Bill, a 200-plus pound loggerhead who first came to the center in 1997, was fine despite the storm mangling the cover of his pool.

Staff arriving by pickup truck had to steer though downed powerlines and assorted destruction to reach the rehabilitation facility just after Harvey passed. They put turtles in the back before returning a second time with plastic tubs.

"We had turtles crawling around back there," said Jace Tunnell, director of the Mission-Aransas National Estuarine Research Reserve, which encompasses Amos' rehabilitation center. Animals well enough were released to sea, but those who weren't went to Tristin's facility. They will likely remain there for months amid repairs to the Animal Rehabilitation Keep.

Sea turtles generally are good at avoiding hurricanes except for eggs that can be flooded or babies who are displaced from floating mats of seaweed where they feed, said Jeff George, executive director of Sea Turtle, Inc., a rescue and rehabilitation center on South Padre Island near the Texas-Mexico border. As Harvey approached Texas, George and volunteers scoured the beach and collected about 280 eggs that waited out the storm indoors, inside insolated containers. All but a few hatched and were released about a week later.

Since then, only a few recent hatchlings have had to be rescued after washing up on South Padre area beaches, and George said many of those came from the Caribbean, far from their nesting areas near Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. Normally the turtle hatching season runs from May through late August, but a mild winter kept the Gulf waters warmer and ensured hatchings began extra early this year — meaning many turtles were born and swam away pre-Harvey.

"You wonder if that was luck or if Mother Nature has things balanced," George said.

In Port Aransas, Tunnell said a few turtles were discovered amid Harvey's wreckage, but "nothing too crazy."

Amos was born in London and went to Bermuda at 17, trying unsuccessfully to engineer a color, flat-screen television. Having never graduated from college, he moved to Port Aransas in 1976 and became an oceanographer for the University of Texas Marine Science Institute.

Three years later, the Ixtoc I exploratory well exploded in the Gulf about 50 miles from Mexico's coast, and Amos saw the devastating effects of the resulting oil spill on sea life. He later founded the Animal Rehabilitation Keep, which still helps hundreds of turtles and birds annually — tackling everything from pelicans that swallow plastic to turtles stricken with a tumor-causing virus.

Known for a long, white beard that helped him play Santa Claus at Christmas, Amos retired in 2003 but continued working, collecting and analyzing debris on Texas beaches and painstakingly entering findings in databases. He also sailed on marine voyages throughout the world.

"I considered him a genius," Tunnell said. "He was a great oceanographer but he was so humble."