Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross threatened to fire top National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) officials following a tweet from the agency's Birmingham office that rebutted President Trump's claim that Hurricane Dorian would hit Alabama, the New York Times reports.
Context: Trump's incorrect tweet last week that Hurricane Dorian was projected to hit Alabama prompted NOAA's Birmingham office to tweet shortly after that "no impacts from Hurricane Dorian [would] be felt across Alabama." The rebuttal set off days of defensive tweets from Trump arguing that he was correct.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s acting chief scientist says he will investigate if the agency's response to President Trump’s repeated claims that Alabama was at risk from Hurricane Dorian violated its policies and ethics, according to an email obtained by the Washington Post.
The big picture: The agency received backlash from scientists when it issued an unsigned statement that defended Trump's weeklong insistence that he was correct about the storm threatening Alabama. It also rebuked the National Weather Service’s Birmingham division for correcting the president and speaking "in absolute terms."
Typhoon Faxai killed at least 1 person, caused power cuts to 910,000 Tokyo-area homes, over 130 flights to be cancelled and train lines to close after it made landfall near Japan's capital on Sunday, the BBC reports.
After devastating the Bahamas and pummeling North Carolina, Dorian lashed at far-eastern Canada with hurricane-force winds Sunday, knocking out power to hundreds of thousands of people before weakening and heading into the North Atlantic, AP reports.
The latest: The post-tropical cyclone was packing winds of 60 mph as it headed east-northeast, about 375 miles north of Cape Race, the National Hurricane Center said in an advisory at 11 p.m.
The chairman of India's space agency said Sunday that the country's lunar lander has been detected by a thermal image on the moon's surface, but that the agency is still trying to establish contact, Asian News International reports.
Driving the news: India's attempt to land a spacecraft on the surface of the Moon for the first time on Friday appeared to have failed, with "communication from the lander to the ground stations" lost, according to the Indian Space Research Organisation's Mission Control Centre.
Thousands of people fled areas of the Bahamas Saturday that were devastated by deadly Hurricane Dorian, Reuters reports.
What's happening: The U.S. Customs and Border Protection said it had processed the first mass evacuations from the Bahamas in West Palm Beach, Florida, with the arrival of 1,435 passengers from Abaco and Grand Bahama islands on Saturday morning. Many residents have also been evacuated to the Bahamas capital Nassau, per the New York Times.
