Friday morning news: October 4, 2024

Helene: search for the missing / recovery » Search and rescue crews are still combing remote mountains of North Carolina to locate the missing and those in need of supplies nearly a week after Hurricane Helene barreled through the Southeast.

Volunteer firefighter John Payne says the Rocky Broad River swept through the community of Chimney Rock like a freight train carrying massive debris.

PAYNE:  These boulders are the size of cars or houses even that are rolling down the river. There's the steel girders from the beams on the bridges … I just walked up there, hiked up the river, and they're bent in horseshoe shapes … around boulders.

The death toll has surpassed 200 and could rise higher still. Rescue crews and volunteers are just now trying to get to the hardest-to-reach places and finding mudslides, downed trees and washed out roads at every turn.

Helene is now the deadliest storm to hit the U.S. mainland since Hurricane Katrina.

Helene: Biden in GA, FL » President Biden toured storm-ravaged parts of Georgia and Florida Thursday … one day after visiting North and South Carolina. He said the federal government is doing all it can to help.

BIDEN:  FEMA teams are knocking, literally knocking on doors to register folks so they can receive assistance to buy what they urgently need.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack joined the president on the trip. With many pecan and cotton crops completely destroyed in Georgia Vilsack told reporters:

VILSACK:  Our job obviously is to try to keep farms viable and operational, uh, to basically get as much help as quickly as possible to as many people as possible.

And House Speaker Mike Johnson said Congress will work on a bipartisan basis to ensure recovery efforts are fully funded.

Israeli hostage » One of the more than 200 hostages taken by the terror group Hamas on October 7th...is speaking out about that experience.

Aviva Siegel told the Associated Press she had to beg for food and water from her captors.

SIEGEL: Hostages were chained, tortured, starved, beaten up into pieces, I saw that in front of my eyes. That's what they did to us.

Siegel was released during a brief cease-fire last year...but she says her husband is still being held by Hamas.

Israel-Hezbollah » Meanwhile, near Israel’s northern border …

NATS - Blasts in Beirut

Blasts were heard last night as Israeli ground operations continued in southern Beirut. Israel is warning civilians to evacuate additional parts of southern Lebanon ahead of what the army says will be precise strikes against Hezbollah infrastructure.

HALEVI - In Hebrew

Israeli military spokesman Herzi Halevi says Israel is determined to destroy that infrastructure … so that the terror group can never again settle in those places.

Amid that conflict, some Americans have been fleeing Lebanon in recent days. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller:

MILLER: A second flight, departed Beirut this morning with 134 passengers on it, bringing the total number of American citizens and their immediate family members who have departed on these flights to 250.

Miller says more than six-thousand American citizens have contacted the U.S. Embassy about leaving the country since the conflict escalated.

Pronouns settlement » A Virginia school board is shelling out a six-figure sum to settle a religious liberty lawsuit brought by a former teacher. WORLD’s Kristen Flavin has more.

KRISTEN FLAVIN: Peter Vlaming taught French at West Point High School for nearly 7 years … before he was fired over new rules surrounding the use of pronouns.

He said that on religious grounds, he could not adhere to a policy that required teachers to refer to students by chosen–not born–pronouns.

In an effort to keep his job, Vlaming started referring to students only by their first name…omitting pronouns altogether. But that did not satisfy school administrators.

The district is now paying just over $500,000 to settle the lawsuit. It also agreed to adopt new policies supporting free speech and parental rights.

For WORLD, I’m Kristen Flavin.

Dockworkers strike » The union representing 45,000 striking dockworkers in the eastern U.S. … has reached a deal to suspend their strike until Jan. 15th … giving the two sides more time to negotiate.

Workers with the International Longshoremen’s Association are expected to be back on the job today. That comes after port operators upped their offered pay raise to at least 62 percent … getting closer to the 77 percent the union is demanding.

I’m Kent Covington.

Straight ahead: Culture Friday with John Stonestreet, plus Ask the Editor.

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