TV News LIES

Hurricane Helene has strengthened into an “extremely dangerous” Category 4 storm ahead of its anticipated landfall along Florida’s coast, the National Hurricane Center (NHC) said.

As of 6:20 p.m. ET, Helene was about 120 miles west of Tampa with maximum sustained winds of 130 mph — the benchmark for Category 4 strength, according to the NHC.

As Helene approaches Florida's northwest coast, forecasters warn communities hundreds of miles away to prepare for its powerful winds and flooding rains.

Forecasters emphasize that the storm is unusually large, with hurricane-force winds extending outward up to 60 miles from its center and tropical-storm-force winds reaching 345 miles away.

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Hurricane Helene, an alliterative threat to life and property across much of Florida, remains on a collision course with the Florida Gulf Coast. Track expectations have changed little since Tuesday, and the strongest hurricane landfall to strike Apalachee Bay since the 1840s is expected to hit Thursday evening.

Due to the intensity and extraordinary size of the storm, Helene will bring catastrophic, life-threatening surge to the west-central Florida and Big Bend coasts, and a core of destructive winds to a broad swath of North Florida and Georgia that likely includes Tallahassee

California experienced its hottest month on record in July as grueling heat baked the American west for weeks on end.

The state’s average temperature for the month was 81.7F (27.6C), according to the National Centers for Environmental Information, but some areas endured days of temperatures greater than 100F (about 38C). Several cities broke temperature records during a heatwave in early July – Palm Springs hit 124F on 5 July, while Redding in the state’s far north saw a high of 119F on 6 July.

Death Valley, the hottest place on Earth, recorded its hottest month ever in July, according to the National Park Service (NPS). In Nevada, Las Vegas reached 120F on 7 July, its hottest day in history, and set a record for number of days over 115F.

The impacts of extreme heat are being felt across the US and the world as the climate crisis drives increasingly severe and dangerous weather conditions. Last month about one-third of the US population was under warnings for record heat. The Earth saw its hottest day in recorded history on 22 July, breaking a record set just one day earlier.

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Four key pillars of the global climate are melting in the heat trapped by rising fossil fuel emissions, a new study has found.

The relatively stable climate that nurtured human civilization depends in large part on these structures: the ice sheets of Greenland and West Antarctica, the Amazon rainforest and the Atlantic currents that warm Europe.

Under current policies, the world faces a scenario in which those pillars have roughly even odds of either surviving or collapsing during the next three centuries, according to results published Thursday in Nature Communications.

The scientists warned that if the pillars are fatally undermined by heat, the resulting damage could prove impossible to undo — even if temperatures are successfully brought down later in the 21st century.

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According to the USGS, a 5.1-magnitude quake occurred east of Snyder, northeast of Hermleigh. It was felt about 80 miles to the northwest in Lubbock, and across parts of the South Plains and West Texas. On the Modified Mercalli Intensity (MMI) scale, the USGS shows a VI-Strong rating. The USGS again updated the magnitude, now to 5.1 as of 11 a.m. There were also aftershocks of 3.2 at 9:40 and 2.7 at 10:44.

Judge Hicks said Scurry County has experienced 61 earthquakes in the last seven days.

“Since the first earthquake that was felt on July 22, 2024 at about 9:38 PM, a 4.9, and a 4.4 at about 9:46 PM to today’s 5.0 at about 9:28 AM July 26, 2024, damage has been found throughout Scurry County in businesses and residences,” Hicks wrote on Facebook. He said emergency management coordinator Jay Callaway is working closely with the Texas Department of Emergency Management to monitor the damage throughout Scurry County and the surrounding area.

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Roughly 28,000 residents have been forced to evacuate as the Thompson fire quickly swept across more than 3,000 acres (1,200 hectares) near the city of Oroville, about an hour outside Sacramento, California’s capital.

Photojournalists captured intense scenes on Tuesday night as the blaze tore through homes and vehicles in the rural enclave in Butte county. Officials confirmed that at least four structures have been destroyed.

More than 1,400 fire personnel from across the state have deployed to battle the blaze, which was at 0% containment Wednesday morning. Four firefighters suffered minor injuries, officials said, as dangerously high temperatures continue to threaten their health and safety.

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