A Huge Hurricane

We’re covering Hurricane Helene. One of our reporters was inside the eye.

Hurricane Helene slammed into Florida’s Gulf Coast as a Category 4 storm with winds of 140 miles an hour. It swallowed parts of Florida in a nine-foot storm surge, lashed the region with heavy rain and has cut power for millions of people. It is now in Georgia, where it is weakening to a tropical storm. You can track it here.

Helene is the most powerful hurricane ever to strike Florida’s Big Bend region, where the state’s long peninsula curves to meet its Panhandle. The storm is huge, and it is expected to damage much of the southeast. President Biden approved disaster declarations for Alabama, North Carolina and South Carolina, in addition to Florida and Georgia.

Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor, said that one person had died from the storm but that there would likely be others. Brian Kemp, Georgia’s governor, said that a tornado there had killed two people, and one person died in North Carolina.

The damage from Helene’s record storm surge will come into view as the sun rises soon. (Follow the latest updates.)

Serious damage is expected from the storm surge along Florida’s coast. The National Weather Service office in Tallahassee reported that a surge of up to 10 feet was moving mobile homes around in Steinhatchee, a coastal community near where the storm made landfall. In Cedar Key at midnight, tide levels were at nine feet, more than two feet above the previous record.

Biden is encouraging people across the region to shelter from the storm, which he called “catastrophic.”

Here’s what we know:

• A big reach: Helene is expected to douse people from the southern tip of Florida all the way to North Carolina. Officials predicted landslides across southern Appalachia and warned of damage in parts of South Carolina nearly 400 miles from Florida’s coast.
• Power outages: More people are losing power, and widespread damage to the grid could cause outages that last days, if not weeks. More than 2.2 million customers were without power in the region early Friday. A majority of them, 1.2 million, were in Florida. More people are losing power in Georgia and South Carolina, too.
• Scenes from Florida: Along the Gulf Coast, waves slammed bridges and slapped into partially submerged buildings. Falling trees knocked down power lines. The National Weather Service urged people in Tallahassee to “TAKE COVER NOW!” See photos.
• A storm-related death: A 4-year-old girl was killed in a car crash in Catawba County, N.C., according to officials. She was riding in a car that veered over a roadway’s centerline and crashed into oncoming traffic in the rain.

More on the storm

• See maps of the expected flooding and of Helene’s path.
• People across the Southeast are bracing for the storm’s arrival in the coming hours and days. Read what to expect.
• We have tips to keep you safe and guidance for how to prep food for an emergency.

• Florida’s Gulf Coast region has endured two other hurricanes recently, but even veterans left ahead of Helene.
• “We are smack dab in the middle of the eye of Helene and it is so quiet, you can hear the crickets chirping and frogs croaking,” our reporter, Judson Jones, wrote.

THE LATEST NEWS

2024 Elections

• Donald Trump still leads Kamala Harris on the economy. But her plans — including an 82-page booklet of housing, tax and health care proposals — are shrinking that gap, some polls suggest.
• A nonpartisan analysis found that Trump’s pledge to deport millions of undocumented immigrants and impose higher tariffs would hurt the economy and spur inflation.

• Democrats plan to spend millions on this year’s Senate races in Texas and Florida. Both are long shots, but wins there would help Democrats hold their majority.
• JD Vance’s memoir describes a rough childhood under the care of his drug-addicted mother. These days, she is almost a decade sober and rooting for her son.

Eric Adams Indictment

• Federal prosecutors charged New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams, with bribery, conspiracy, fraud and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations.
• Adams spent years accepting free airline tickets, lavish overseas accommodation and illegal campaign donations from Turkey, prosecutors said. In exchange, they said he pushed officials to approve a new Turkish consulate.
• The indictment details Adams’s heavy use of Turkish Airlines, which gave him free or discounted tickets. In one exchange, an Adams aide rebuked an airline employee for making the gift tickets too obvious, saying, “His every step is being watched right now.”
• Adams denied the charges and said he wouldn’t quit. At a press conference, hecklers called him a “disgrace” and chanted for him to resign.
• Our reporters highlighted the most important, and damning, parts of the indictment. You can read the annotated version here.
• Late night hosts roasted Adams.

More on Politics

• The Biden administration plans to make it harder to lift its limits on asylum, which have reduced illegal border crossings.
• President Biden signed executive orders meant to make school-shooter drills less traumatic for students and to reduce the threat of so-called ghost guns.
• The special counsel investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn the election submitted a sealed briefing outlining his findings. The judge must now decide how much of it to make public.
• Smartmatic, a voting-machine company, settled its defamation suit against Newsmax, a right-wing channel that spread false claims about the 2020 election.

War in Ukraine

• Biden pledged another $8 billion in aid to Ukraine, including bombs for F-16 fighters and another Patriot missile battery.
• Harris, meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky, suggested that Trump’s plans to end the war were “proposals for surrender.” Trump is set to meet Zelensky today.
• U.S. intelligence is stressing the risk of allowing Ukraine to strike Russia with long-range Western missiles. Officials said it would likely bring retaliation without meaningfully improving Kyiv’s chances of success.

Other Big Stories

• World leaders are urging a pause in fighting between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Benjamin Netanyahu will speak soon at the U.N. General Assembly.
• Finland returned two pandas to China eight years before they were due back, citing high costs and low visitor traffic.
• U.S. colleges are reporting the racial makeup of their first post-affirmative action classes. But schools calculate the numbers in different ways, The Upshot explains, making the data hard to compare.

• The F.D.A. approved the first new treatment for schizophrenia in decades.

Opinions

If Mayor Adams truly wants to serve New York City, he should resign, the editorial board writes.

The women who have accused Trump of sexual assault may never be able to draw attention to their stories. They keep trying anyway, Jessica Bennett writes.

Here’s a column by Paul Krugman on the crypto industry’s money in politics.

MORNING READS

Dressing confidently: Signs of self-assurance were apparent in outfits at Milan Fashion Week, on and off the runways. See the best looks.

Test your focus: Can you look at this work of art for 10 minutes?

Geoengineering: These Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are trying to cool the planet by releasing pollutants in the sky.

Lives Lived: Frank Coppa, the first member of the Bonanno crime family to flip, fed the F.B.I. information about gruesome murders — including two that Coppa helped to set up. He died at 83.

SPORTS

M.L.B.: The Oakland Athletics played the final game of their 57-year tenure in the city.

N.F.L.: The Dallas Cowboys beat the New York Giants on the road, 20-15.

N.B.A.: Derrick Rose, the 2011 M.V.P. and 16-year veteran, announced his retirement.

ARTS AND IDEAS

Crowds of people are lining up outside a suitcase shop on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to get their turn with an exciting piece of technology: an analog photo booth from the 1970s. The booth, called Old Friend, snaps four photos, which take about three minutes to develop. The throwback has resonated particularly with members of a younger generation. “It’s cool to think that this is how our parents took their photos,” one visitor told The Times.

More on culture

• Hoda Kotb, who has hosted NBC’s “Today” show for the past 17 years, plans to step down next year.
• The Pulitzer-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri declined an award from the Noguchi Museum in Queens after it banned employees from wearing kaffiyehs to signal solidarity with Palestinians.

THE MORNING RECOMMENDS …

Make a weeknight version of this classic Chinese noodle dish.

Read one of the new books our editors love.

Find the perfect white T-shirt.

Take our news quiz.

GAMES

Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was individual.

And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands.

Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow.

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