Monday morning news: September 19, 2022

For WORLD Radio, I'm Kent Covington. 

Queen’s funeral » World leaders have gathered in London this morning to pay final respects to the late Queen Elizabeth II. Some 2,000 guests are attending her funeral today at Westminster Abbey, including President Biden.

BIDEN: She was the same in person as her image; decent, honorable, and all about service.

He is one of 500 world leaders and royals invited to the queen's state funeral.

Hundreds of British troops and officials made final preparations over the weekend for what will be the first state funeral in the UK since Winston Churchill’s death in 1965.

Ukraine update » Among the leaders left off the guest list, Vladimir Putin.

And as Russia’s war in Ukraine rages on, Ukrainian officials say they’ve found evidence of more potential war crimes after chasing Russian forces out of the city of Izium.

Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin says it’s now a familiar pattern.

KOSTIN: What we see now is a system, what they do on the occupied territory.

Officials in Kyiv say they’ve found evidence that Russian captors tortured Ukrainian prisoners. They also discovered a mass grave near Izium.

The Ukrainian Ambassador to the US said among the dead are both Ukrainian troops and civilians. Oksana Markarova

MARKAROVA: It’s horrifying. Some of them are families of — like, everyone in the family is killed.

Kyiv has promised that Ukraine’s military will continue a major counteroffensive that has forced a Russian retreat in some areas.

Hurricane Fiona » Floodwaters are submerging parts of Puerto Rico this morning after Hurricane Fiona struck the island’s southwest coast on Sunday.

Fiona roared ashore with sustained winds of 85 miles per hour …

AUDIO: [Hurricane Fiona]

It ripped off roofs and toppled palm trees. But as Richard Pasch with the National Hurricane Center predicted Sunday …

PASCH: The big damage might come from landslides associated with the flooding, which could carry away buildings and again is life threatening.

Forecasters warned of catastrophic flooding from “historic” levels of rain, with up to 25 inches possible in isolated areas.

Many residents had to wait for sunrise this morning to survey the damage. The storm knocked out the entire power grid, plunging the island into darkness.

Fiona hit just two days before the anniversary of Hurricane Maria, which struck in 2017. That storm destroyed the island's power grid and killed nearly 3,000 people.

Alaska storm » Meantime, in Alaska, a powerful storm swept north through the Bering Strait over the weekend. Becca Luce lives in the coastal town of Nome.

LUCE: Many homes and cabins have been swept away due to the floods caused by the high winds and surf.

One house in Nome floated down a river until it got caught at a bridge.

The storm is what remains of Typhoon Merbok.

Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy described the massive scale of the system.

DUNLEAVY: This is almost a thousand miles of stormfront. And we’ve got a lot of rain. We’ve got wind, and we’ve got surge.

Dunleavy has issued a disaster declaration.

FEMA is standing by to help.

NY pleads for federal help for migrants » New York City Mayor Eric Adams is still calling on the federal government to help care for hundreds of migrants arriving from the southern border.

Texas continues to bus migrants to self-proclaimed sanctuary cities. The Democratic mayor told ABC’s This Week.

ADAMS: This is an American crisis that we need to face, a humanitarian crisis that [was] made by human hands.

He blamed southern Republican governors. But Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said governors are not responsible for U.S. immigration policy or for the more than 2 million migrant encounters at the southern border over the past fiscal year.

PATRICK: We have to absorb all of the people that come into the overrun towns like Del Rio, population of over 37,000 people, that have had 400,000 people in their sector. That would be like New York getting 10 times their population or 80 million people.

Patrick said his state’s been in a constant state of emergency.

Box office » At the box office, The Woman King ruled in its opening weekend.

TRAILER: An evil is coming that threatens our kingdom. But we have a weapon they are not prepared for.

The action-drama opened with $19 million for the weekend, beating expectations.

The R-rated thriller, Barbarian, finished a distant second with $6 million.

I’m Kent Covington. For more news, features, and analysis, visit us at wng.org. 

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