Rescuers Push Through Helene Debris to Find People and Restore Power
The New York Times
Blocked roads and bad cellphone service in remote mountain towns have made it hard to find people who are still unaccounted for after the storm.
Rescuers fanned out across the mountains of southern Appalachia on Tuesday, scouring the region for missing people and rushing supplies to communities still in dire need of food, water and power after Hurricane Helene.
“The challenges are immense,” Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina said at a news conference, adding that 92 search-and-rescue teams were working across the state.
More than 130 people across six states died as a result of the storm, and the toll was expected to rise. Almost a third of those killed were in the county surrounding Asheville, N.C., where an unknown number of people were still unaccounted for on Tuesday.
The military has joined the relief and rescue efforts across the Southeast. Maj. Gen. Todd Hunt, the head of the North Carolina National Guard, said 800 soldiers were on duty as of Tuesday morning, pushing into more cutoff parts of the state.
In South Carolina, nearly a thousand National Guard soldiers were on the ground, along with 18 chain-saw teams, Gov. Henry McMaster said at a news conference. “Things are getting better,” he said, “but we’re not out of the woods yet.”
Persistent power outages caused by toppled trees were still a “choke point,” he added.
A businessman in the Bronx falsified information on thousands of returns, committing one of the largest tax frauds in Department of Justice history, prosecutors said.
Officials in Wisconsin gave little new information on Tuesday about a shooting that left a student and a teacher dead and six others injured.
The president-elect’s latest attempt to overturn his Manhattan conviction was rebuffed by the judge overseeing the case, who called it “mere hearsay and conjecture.”
Undocumented immigrants whose children or spouses are U.S. citizens are feeling particularly vulnerable to President-elect Donald J. Trump’s threats to push them out.
The man whom authorities call a serial killer was charged with second-degree murder in the case of Valerie Mack, who disappeared in 2000.
The Commerce Department is banning the few remaining operations of China Telecom in the United States, a move that appears unlikely to deter Beijing from conducting sophisticated cyberoperations.
The police in Wisconsin are working to establish a motive for the attack, which left a student and teacher dead and six others injured.
The defendant, Rex Heuermann, is due in court Tuesday. Investigators have been trying to tie him to other unsolved killings on Long Island.
Some Republicans have said that a constitutional convention is overdue. Many Democratic-led states have rescinded their long-ago calls for one, and California will soon consider whether to do the same.
The New York City Campaign Finance Board voted to withhold as much as $4.3 million in matching funds from Mayor Eric Adams, hampering his re-election bid.
He built Mississippi’s Republican Party into a conservative powerhouse, making himself a regional power broker in the process.