Florida

PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. (AP) — It’s become a hurricane-season ritual in the Southeast: When a storm threatens, coastal residents board up homes, load up SUVs and fill highways where the traffic lanes are reversed to offer a speedy escape inland.

For some people, Hurricane Dorian is the fourth storm they have had to flee in four years.

Forecasters are not sure if the core of the powerful system will ever strike the U.S. It is predicted to stay offshore as it spins north, paralleling the coasts of Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina.

VERO BEACH, Fla. (AP) — Two days after storm shutters started going up and people waited in long lines for gas and food in anticipation of Hurricane Dorian, the parking lot of a Home Depot a short drive from the beach in central Florida was nearly empty as the sun peeked out behind scattered clouds.

MIAMI (AP) — The Latest on Hurricane Dorian (all times local):

10:15 a.m.

A coastal Florida county is ordering an evacuation of barrier islands, mobile homes and areas that are prone to flood because of Hurricane Dorian.

Palm Beach County issued the evacuation order beginning 1 p.m. Sunday after the county that includes West Palm Beach was placed under a tropical storm warning.

The official forecast path for Dorian curves the storm away from the area before it strikes land.

MIAMI (AP) — Hurricane Dorian has gained fearsome new muscle as an “extremely dangerous” Category 4 storm, bearing down on the northwestern Bahamas early Saturday en route to Florida’s east coast.

Millions of people in Florida, along with the state’s Walt Disney World and President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, are in the potential crosshairs of the hurricane. Forecasters say Dorian, which had top sustained winds of 140 mph (225 kph) Friday night, will threaten the Florida peninsula late Monday or early Tuesday.

MIAMI (AP) — President Donald Trump was in full sales mode Monday, doing everything but pass out brochures as he touted the features that would make the Doral golf resort the ideal place for the next G-7 Summit — close to the airport, plenty of hotel rooms, separate buildings for every delegation, even top facilities for the media.

There’s just one detail he left out: He owns the place.

FLORIDA, USA (AP) —  A white Florida man who told detectives he had a “pet peeve” about illegal parking in handicapped spots was convicted late Friday of manslaughter for the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man outside a convenience store.

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) — The will that Jeffrey Epstein signed just two days before his jailhouse suicide puts more than $577 million in assets into a trust fund that could make it more difficult for his dozens of accusers to collect damages.

Estate lawyers and other experts say prying open the trust and dividing up the financier’s riches is not going to be easy and could take years.

“This is the last act of Epstein’s manipulation of the system, even in death,” said attorney Jennifer Freeman, who represents child sex abuse victims.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A half-century ago, in the middle of a mean year of war, famine, violence in the streets and the widening of the generation gap, men from planet Earth stepped onto another world for the first time, uniting people around the globe in a way not seen before or since.

MIAMI (AP) — An 18-month-old Indiana girl who fell to her death from the 11th story of a cruise ship in Puerto Rico plunged from a window inexplicably left open in a children’s play area, the family’s attorney said Tuesday.

Police in Puerto Rico had said Monday that Chloe Wiegand apparently slipped from her grandfather’s hands Sunday as he was holding her out of an 11th-floor window on the Freedom of the Seas.

PLANTATION, Fla. (AP) — A vacant pizza restaurant exploded Saturday in a thundering roar at a South Florida shopping plaza, injuring more than 20 people as large chunks of concrete flew through the air.

The blast flung debris widely along a busy road in Plantation, west of Fort Lauderdale. The restaurant was destroyed, and nearby businesses and cars were damaged. Though firefighters found ruptured gas lines afterward, authorities said it was too early to determine a cause.