Thursday morning news - July 8, 2021

For WORLD Radio, I'm Kent Covington.

Elsa pushes up the Eastern Seaboard » Elsa is pushing into the Carolinas today, after blasting Florida’s Gulf Coast and south Georgia on Wednesday.

Forecasters expected the storm to hit Florida’s Big Bend region as a Category 1 hurricane. Instead, Tropical Storm Elsa made landfall Wednesday packing winds around 65 miles per hour.

In the wake of the storm, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis warned residents that dangers remain.

DESANTIS: There are reports of flooded roads and trees down. Don’t drive your vehicle into standing water. As little as 12 inches of  fast-running water can carry away a small vehicle. Be aware of fallen or hanging power lines. Don’t approach or touch the power line.

The storm knocked out power to tens of thousands of homes.

Still, DeSantis said the state was fortunate, as the storm “could have been worse.”

Elsa is no longer packing the same winds, but Ken Graham with the National Hurricane Center says it will likely drop rain all the way up the Eastern Seaboard.

GRAHAM: Thursday afternoon up here in North Carolina, and then even time, overnight early Friday morning up into New England.

Search continues in rubble of condo collapse, 10 more victims found » The storm did, once again, complicate search efforts at the site of the condo collapse in Surfside, Florida. But the search did continue uninterrupted on Wednesday.

That search, however, is now shifting from a search for survivors to a recovery mission.

It has now been two weeks since the 12-story building crumbled to the ground, with likely more than a hundred people inside. And rescue teams have found no signs of life since just hours after the collapse.

CAVA: And since our last briefing, the USR teams recovered an additional 10 victims, bringing the total confirmed deaths to 46.

Miami-Dade County Mayor Danielle Levine Cava heard there.

Nearly 100 people are still missing. Officials are briefing families twice a day as the search continues.

Delta variant becomes dominant COVID-19 strain in US » The delta variant of COVID-19, first discovered in India, has wreaked havoc across the globe. And new data from the CDC show that the ultra-contagious variant is now the dominant strain in the United States. WORLD’s Kristen Flavin has more.

KRISTEN FLAVIN, REPORTER: The CDC says the delta strain now represents 52 percent of all new U.S. cases.

Up till now, the alpha variant, first found in the U.K., had been the dominant strain here. It is more transmissible than the original strain of COVID-19.

But the delta variant is 55 percent more contagious than the alpha strain.

And as the delta variant has spread, progress against COVID-19 has ground to a halt.

After a drastic drop in new cases from January through May, the rate of new cases is almost unchanged since the beginning of June.

Experts worry that what comes next is another increase of new cases.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Kristen Flavin.

Trump sues social media giants over censorship » Former President Donald Trump is leading a group suing Facebook, Twitter, and Google alleging the companies wrongly censored him and many conservatives.

Trump announced the action against the tech companies and their CEOs at a press conference in New Jersey Wednesday.

TRUMP: We’re demanding an end to the shadow banning, a stop to the silencing, and a stop to the blacklisting, banishing, and cancelling that you know so well.

Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube all blocked Trump’s social media accounts after the Jan. 6th Capitol riot.

Under a section of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, social media platforms are allowed to moderate their services by removing posts that, for instance, are obscene or violate the services’ own standards so long as they are acting in—quote—“good faith.” Trump asserts that they were not.

The former president stood alongside other plaintiffs in the suits, which were filed in federal court in Miami.

They argue that banning or suspending the accounts of the plaintiffs’ violated their First Amendment rights.

Biden: Assassination of Hatian president, state of Haiti “very worrisome” » The White House is responding to the assassination of the president of Haiti.

President Biden Wednesday called the situation in Haiti “very worrisome.” And Press Secretary Jen Psaki said the U.S. government stands ready to help.

PSAKI: This is still developing, and so we’ll assess what their needs are and we’re ready to provide—respond to the needs they ask for.

WORLD’s Anna Johansen Brown has more on the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse.

ANNA JOHANSEN BROWN, REPORTER: The 53-year-old president was a former banana producer who ruled Haiti for more than four years.

A group of heavily armed men broke into Moïse’s home Wednesday morning, killing the president and wounding his wife, Martine Moïse.

Interim Prime Minister Claude Joseph said the attack at the president’s home was “a highly coordinated attack” by a “highly trained” group.

Moïse took office in February 2017, pledging to fight corruption and create jobs. But critics accused him of growing increasingly authoritarian.

He had been ruling by decree for more than a year after Parliament was dissolved. And widespread protests paralyzed the country.

In addition, gangs in the capital of Port-au-Prince have grown more powerful, ransacking houses and driving 15,000 people from their homes last month alone.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Anna Johansen Brown.

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

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