Happy Tuesday! And a very happy birthday to former President Jimmy Carter! He turns 100 years old today, making him the first U.S. president to reach triple digits. As a special gift to him, Carter’s beloved Atlanta Braves clinched a spot in the playoffs last night. 

• More than 130 people have died across the six states—North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, and Virginia—as a result of Hurricane Helene, which pummeled the Southeast over the weekend. North Carolina, where some cities and towns are still unreachable, reported a third of the currently known fatalities. In towns across the region, roads remain flooded, communications are challenged, water services are inoperable, and search-and-rescue efforts are ongoing. Hundreds of people are still missing, and the death toll is expected to rise. 
• Israeli officials said Monday that Israel Defense Forces commando units had begun to conduct small incursions into southern Lebanon over the past several days, in possible preparation for a wider ground invasion. American officials said Monday that they believed any invasion would be a limited one, citing their belief that they had persuaded Israel not to conduct a large-scale offensive. On Monday, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told mayors of towns in northern Israel that “the next phase of the war against Hezbollah will soon commence.” The Defense Department said Monday that the United States is also deploying several thousand more troops to the Middle East—mainly fighter-jet squadrons and units previously scheduled to rotate out of the region—to protect American citizens and to defend Israel if needed. 
• North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) said Monday that a Russian fighter jet flew dangerously close to a U.S. warplane off the coast of Alaska on September 23, during an intercept of Russian jets flying in the U.S. air defense identification zone. Additionally, on September 18, U.S. soldiers with mobile rocket launchers were deployed to Alaskan islands following a spike in Russian air and naval activity in the region. NORAD commander Gen. Gregory Guillot said that the Russian jet’s conduct was “unsafe, unprofessional, and endangered all—not what you’d see in a professional air force.”
• At least 192 people died, and 32 remain missing, as a result of two days of heavy rainfall in Nepal. The rains, caused by a low-pressure system over the Bay of Bengal and parts of India, caused deadly floods and landslides that also stranded more than 100,000 people in northern Bangladesh, according to officials. Large areas of farmland have been inundated, and homes, bridges, and other infrastructure—often constructed along riverbanks—have been flooded. The government is still assessing the full extent of the damage. 
• Japan’s incoming prime minister, Shigeru Ishiba, on Monday announced he would call a snap election for October 27 after winning a close race on Friday to succeed outgoing Prime Minister Fumio Kishida as leader of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). “It is important for the new administration to be judged by the people as soon as possible,” Ishiba said at a press conference on Monday. Ishiba has said that his administration will focus on revitalizing the economy, addressing security threats from China and North Korea, and regaining public trust after several scandals. The LDP remains Japan’s most popular party going into the election. 
• The Department of Justice last week indicted three Iranian nationals on charges related to a hack targeting the Trump presidential campaign. The trio—Masoud Jalili, Yaser Balaghi, and Seyyed Ali Aghamiri—were allegedly employed by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization. They are charged with 18 criminal counts for efforts to gain illegal access to email accounts of Trump allies and campaign officials with the aim of leaking incriminating information. The State Department issued, concurrent with the charging announcement, a reward for information about the whereabouts of the men.
• The International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA)—a union representing dock workers across the country—on Sunday announced plans for a general strike at all Atlantic and Gulf Coast ports beginning at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday morning. The ILA is negotiating with the United States Maritime Alliance (USMX)—the employers’ group—over benefits and wages, as well as resisting attempts to automate some processes on the docks. Trucking and freight rail companies scrambled in recent days to move as much cargo as possible before the strike begins, as each day of port blockages represents roughly a week of goods to clear out. Some 43 to 49 percent of imported containerized goods come to the U.S. through the ports facing strikes. 
• Thousands of residents of Conyers, Georgia, were evacuated on Sunday after a fire broke out at a Biolab chemical plant east of Atlanta. The fire broke out at 5:30 a.m. Sunday morning and firefighters’ water hoses activated the chlorine in the facility, sending plumes of the gas into the air.  The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Monday confirmed the presence of chlorine gas in the area, and a shelter-in-place advisory has been issued for about 77,000 residents. 
• The Biden administration on Monday announced new asylum restrictions at the southern border. Under previous rules, U.S. officials could restrict asylum access when the number of migrants attempting to enter the country reached 2,500 a day, and restrictions could not be lifted until the number of attempted crossings averaged 1,500 a day for a week. Under the new rules, attempted crossings must average 1,500 a day for nearly a month for restrictions to be lifted, and all children, not just migrant children from Mexico, will be counted as part of that number. The seven-day average currently stands at 1,800 migrants per day. 
• In a letter to Republican Rep. Tony Gonzalez of Texas on Friday, Deputy Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Patrick Lechleitner said that as of July 21, there were “662,566 noncitizens with criminal histories” on ICE’s docket, and only roughly 15,000 of those people were at that point detained by ICE. The Department of Homeland Security—ICE’s parent agency—later said that the data goes back decades, so many of the people with criminal histories could have entered the country any time in the last 40 years. It added that many on the “non-detained” docket may be in the custody of other federal, state, or local authorities. 
• Ryan Wesley Routh, accused of plotting to kill former president Donald Trump at his West Palm Beach golf course last month, pleaded “not guilty” to all charges on Monday. Other than the attempted assassination charge, Routh is being charged with assaulting a federal officer and three weapons charges. If convicted on all counts, he faces life imprisonment. 
• ​​The Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of inflation, the personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index, increased 2.2 percent year-over-year in August, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported Friday—down from a 2.5 percent annual rate one month earlier and marking the lowest inflation report since February 2021. Even after stripping out more volatile food and energy prices, core PCE increased at a 2.7 percent annual rate in August, nearing the Fed’s 2 percent target and suggesting the U.S. economy was close to achieving the so-called “soft landing”—lowering inflation without sacrificing high employment. 
• Basketball Hall of Famer Dikembe Mutombo has died of brain cancer at the age of 58, the NBA announced on Monday. The 7-foot-2-inch center, born in the Democratic Republic of Congo, played for Georgetown University and then had an 18-year NBA career. Four-time Defensive Player of the Year, he spent his post-basketball years working for humanitarian causes and trying to expand basketball in Africa. 

Once rivers started overrunning their banks, the floods came fast. 

Concerned about constant rain that hadn’t stopped in two days, on Friday, Mike Smith, a public health researcher at East Tennessee State University in Johnson City, decided to work from home at his small farm outside the city. On normal days, Smith, his wife Arika, and their three daughters could see the banks of the Nolichucky River about a quarter of a mile away from their home, but not the river itself. By early afternoon, Smith could see the river cresting its banks and spilling into the valley where his house farm sat.

He knew they had to go. “It was shocking how fast it went from, ‘This is not good’ to ‘the river’s coming and we have to go.’”

Federal, state, and local agencies are rushing aid to communities across six states devastated by Hurricane Helene—with areas in the Appalachian Mountains particularly hard-hit in this once-in-a-generation storm. Search and rescue efforts continue, but even as the full scope of the damage—and, indeed, the number of fatalities—is still becoming clear, partisans, including former President Donald Trump, have tried to politicize the disaster and amplify lies about the emergency response. 

Early last week, the National Weather Service’s (NWS) Greenville-Spartanburg, South Carolina, office issued its first warnings of potential strong rainfall as Hurricane Helene began to form. Throughout the week as Helene approached, the tone and tenor of those warnings escalated. First, it was just “heavy rainfall.” On Tuesday evening, the office warned that the storm “has the potential to be an extremely rare event.” By Wednesday, NWS concluded that what was coming to the Appalachian region could potentially be “an extremely rare event with catastrophic flash flooding that hasn’t been seen in the modern era.”

The Smiths took their daughters up a nearby hill to the home of a friend from church. But as soon as their daughters were safe, they went back down to help their farm animals and neighbors. After they got their own animals back up the hill to safety (two horses, four ponies, a miniature donkey, 18 chickens, three pigs, and two sheep), they went back down the hill to find their neighbors’ animals. They broke through a neighbor’s fence with crowbars, and Arika Smith, wading through waist-deep floodwaters, opened the stalls in a neighbor’s barn to let them out.

But the animal rescues soon turned to people rescues. With the river rushing through the valley, the Smiths and other neighbors directed swift-water rescue teams in boats toward neighbors trapped in their houses. They pulled one neighbor from atop her roof. “Their house broke loose from its foundation, and she was swept away,” Smith said. Her husband’s body was found the next day.

Helene cut a more than 600-mile-long path of destruction through the Southeast, doing some of the most significant damage in areas hundreds of miles from the coast and thousands of feet above sea level, where such destruction from hurricanes is basically unheard of. The confirmed death toll from the storm is now more than 130 people and is expected to rise as emergency workers work to reach areas cut off by catastrophic flooding. 

The storm hammered the Florida Gulf Coast as it neared land on Thursday evening. While Tampa wasn’t in the direct path of the hurricane, Helene’s exceptionally large wind field wreaked havoc on Pinellas County. The storm’s winds reached a maximum of 140 miles per hour. 

The hurricane sent a record storm surge of more than 7 feet rushing into Pinellas County and the Tampa Bay area. The Tampa Bay Times dubbed Helene the worst storm in a century after analyzing historical damage and storm surge data. Local officials have confirmed at least 11 people in Florida died, most of whom drowned.

The damage escalated as the Helene made landfall just east of Tallahassee, Florida, on Thursday. From there, the storm traveled north, splitting Georgia in two and dumping record rainfall in the western regions of the Carolinas. At least 25 people were killed in Georgia, including a mother and her one-month-old twin sons whose home was hit by a falling tree. 

As the storm dumped rain on southern Appalachia, rivers in eastern Tennessee overflowed and nearly 60 people had to be airlifted from the roof of a flooded-out hospital in Erwin, Tennessee. More than 2.6 million homes and businesses lost power over the weekend, and more than 1.6 million were still facing outages as of Tuesday morning. 

The western Carolinas appear to be the worst hit area, where flooding and mudslides killed dozens of people. South Carolina reported 30 storm-related deaths. In Buncombe County, North Carolina—which includes the city of Asheville—at least 40 people have been confirmed dead. In Asheville, flood waters left entire buildings submerged and water rushing through the valleys swept away homes—including some with residents clinging to their roofs, awaiting rescue that wouldn’t reach them in time.  

Asheville and surrounding towns lie in valleys. Across the mountainous and hilly areas in east Tennessee and western North Carolina, the terrain—and days of rain ahead of Helene’s arrival that saturated the ground—only exacerbated the devastating flash flooding. 

“This is an unprecedented storm,” North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper said Monday morning. “We are surging search-and-rescue teams to help rescue people who are still stranded but can’t communicate because cell phone service is down.” He added that river levels are still rising and additional flooding remains a risk. 

Hundreds of people across multiple states remain unaccounted for, but authorities are hoping those numbers will drop once cell service is restored. It’s not clear exactly how widespread the service interruption is. “God willing they’re alive,” President Joe Biden said in remarks delivered from the White House Monday morning. 

“This is a real mountainous area so we have crews hiking up to homes, putting people in helicopters, then hiking back down and going at it again,” Mike Morgan—a spokesman for Henderson County, the county just south of Buncombe—said Monday, adding that “we have towns that literally aren’t there anymore.”   

Swannanoa, a community east of Asheville, was one such town. One resident, Mackenzie Laney, was trapped in her neighborhood with her boyfriend until neighbors carved a path through downed trees and power lines with chainsaws. After being freed, she described witnessing a “post-apocalyptic” scene in the town. “It wasn’t just underwater,”  she told The Dispatch. “It was the river. It was flowing water. The actual river just covered Swannanoa.”

Even for areas that survived the waters, the damage to infrastructure has wrenched communities. Downstream of the Nolichucky in neighboring Greene County, Tennessee, a dam built in 1913 withstood flow rates nearly twice that of Niagara Falls, according to state officials. But five of the eight bridges that spanned the Nolichucky in Greene County either collapsed into the river or were damaged beyond repair. 

That created what Greene County Mayor Kevin Morrison said was the most tense time of the last few days: his county being cut in half with no way to get from one side of the county to the other. “We had no way to get food, water, medical supplies, or to evacuate anyone on the south side of the river,” he told The Dispatch. 

Eventually, inspectors cleared the bridges that were still standing and opened them again to traffic. But some 70,000 of Greene County’s residents are still without water service after the river destroyed the local water utility’s main intake pumps. Officials hope they can install new pumps by the end of the week, but even then, many residents will still lack water because the downed bridges took out water lines too.

Neither was flooding the sole source of damage. Once inland, Helene’s wind gusts reached a maximum of 106 miles per hour at Mount Mitchell State Park, not far from Asheville. “The extent and degree of wind damage to trees, power infrastructure, and structures is significant and unlike anything we’ve seen in the western Carolinas and northeast Georgia,” the NWS said Monday. The wind damage was so dramatic in some areas that NWS fielded inquiries about possible tornado activity. The agency concluded that while a few tornadoes were confirmed, the vast majority of the damage came from the sustained high winds. 

Biden declared major states of disaster in Florida, South Carolina, and North Carolina, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and other federal agencies are deploying some 3,500 emergency workers across the Southeast, alongside 5,500 National Guard troops. The president also said Monday morning that he would travel to the affected communities as soon as the trip wouldn’t be disruptive to aid and rescue efforts. Later on Monday, he confirmed a trip to North Carolina scheduled for Wednesday.

The administration could run into medium-term funding challenges for the federal response. FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund, the primary source of money for disaster relief, is approaching depletion. The agency has been warning for months about its funding shortfall headed into hurricane season, and in August, FEMA implemented “Immediate Needs Funding” as a stopgap: The procedure halted agency spending on recovery and response programs—like the ongoing rebuilding of Maui after last year’s wildfires—to prioritize more immediate “lifesaving and life-sustaining activities.” The continuing resolution (CR) passed last month to fund the government until December extended FEMA’s current funding levels, refilling the relief fund. But the agency’s administrator Deanne Criswell warned Thursday that FEMA could now run out of money again by early January.

The Biden administration urged Congress to include additional supplemental funding for FEMA in the CR, and the original House Republican proposals included it. But spending hardliners in Congress insisted during subsequent negotiations that the money be stripped out to keep the CR as “clean” as possible. 

As the storm approached last week, Congress cut their legislative session short and rushed through a vote on a CR that ultimately left FEMA underfunded so lawmakers could make it back to their districts before the hurricane hit. 

Biden said Monday he’s considering calling Congress back into session to appropriate more money. Florida Republican Sen. Rick Scott—also the former governor of the Sunshine State—called for the Senate to reconvene as soon as damage assessments are completed to pass a supplemental disaster relief bill.   

Even with search, rescue, and recovery operations still underway, a virulent stew of lies and conspiracy theories circulated online about the storm and the emergency response. They ranged from the crackpot claim that Democrats created the storm using geoengineering to depress turnout for Trump in the election to the more insidious claim that Biden and Democratic governors like Cooper were deliberately withholding aid to what might typically be Trump-supporting areas. 

Former President Donald Trump didn’t shy away from the most toxic lies in the genre. Ahead of a visit to Valdosta, Georgia, where Helene flattened buildings, the former president posted on his Truth Social account that he didn’t like “the reports that I’m getting about the Federal Government, and the Democrat Governor of the [North Carolina], going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas.” It’s unclear which “reports” he’s referring to, beyond anonymous and unverified accounts on social media.

Addressing the crowd in Valdosta, Trump eschewed politics. “As you know, our country is in the final weeks of a hard-fought national election, but in a time like this when a crisis hits when our fellow citizens cry out in need, none of that matters, we’re not talking about politics now,” he said. “We have to all get together and get this solved.” When he was asked by a reporter for evidence of his claims that Democrats were intentionally withholding aid, Trump responded, “Just take a look.” 

Trump falsely claimed on Monday that Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp has been unable to reach Biden on the phone: Biden and Kemp spoke on Sunday, and Kemp said he told the president his state had what it needed and would work through “the federal process” to receive help. “He offered if there’s other things we need just to call him directly, which I appreciated,” Kemp said of Biden. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis also said on Monday that his state has received the needed support from the federal government. 

Not to be outdone by right-wing conspiracies, some online voices on the left claimed that communities like Asheville were being abandoned so that the Biden administration could continue aid to Israel. We wish we were kidding.

Meanwhile, the journey out of the disaster is only beginning for thousands of those affected—many still waiting to hear the fate of their loved ones. One of the neighbors that Smith and the rescue crews saved on Friday was a Vietnam War veteran in his mid-70s. They found him in his house standing on top of a dresser with his dog while water rushed in. The Smiths took him back up the hill where he stayed the night, but he had lost all his medication in the flood. 

By the time they got him to an emergency shelter the next day, Smith said his vital signs were crashing and he had to be airlifted to the closest hospital. “I still don’t know how he’s doing,” he said.

• The team over at Tim Mak’s substack, The Counteroffensive, delivers an account of a visit to the grave of Oleksii Mes, Ukraine’s first F-16 pilot, who was recently killed in a friendly fire incident. “It was the first loss of an F-16 in Ukraine, and the first loss of one of its pilots,” they wrote. “The pilot was a remarkable man, a talented aviator, and a successful advocate for Ukraine’s effort to rally the West’s attention to the cruel war now taking place in his country. Oleksii’s death has consequences for the future of the war: on the West’s willingness to train pilots and provide F-16s; on domestic morale; and on how Ukrainian air power will be used going forward. But most of all it accents a single point that has echoed since February 2022: Ukraine is losing its very, very best.”
• For Politico, Jonathan Martin reports from Springfield, Ohio, on Republican Gov. Mike DeWine’s efforts to lead the community through a crisis instigated by his party’s presidential nominee. “DeWine knows well we’re living through a recurring part of history at the moment: when increased immigration levels are met with backlash and opportunistic politicians feast,” Martin wrote. “We talked about how many times, and with how many groups, migration has prompted ‘great backlash,’ as he put it. ‘We’re a nation of immigrants and we have to continue to have people come into this country who want to work and want to contribute,’ DeWine said. ‘That’s how we have vitality.’ He sounded like a Republican unfrozen from another cycle of history.”

NBC News: ‘It’s Very Complex’: Biden Struggles With Being Out of the National Conversation

Former President Donald Trump, discussing Project 2025 with the Washington Post’s Marc Thiessen: 

“The head guy called me up. I said, ‘You have no right to write a thing like that. You’re not speaking for me,’” Trump told me, referring to the [Heritage Foundation] president, Kevin Roberts. “I said, ‘You really—what you did is terrible.’”

“Not only that,” he added. “They were interviewing people for jobs, which isn’t so good.”

Dikembe Mutombo, basketball Hall of Famer and humanitarian, has died of brain cancer at age 58, the NBA announced Monday. The 7-foot-2 Congolese-American was one of the best defensive players of all time and a master shot-blocker: 

• In a special debate night edition of Dispatch Live (🔒), catch the team after the vice presidential debate is over for a recap, analysis, and of course, plenty of viewer questions! Keep an eye out for an email later today with information on how to tune in.
• In the newsletters: The Dispatch Politics crew recapped Harris’ trip to the border, and Nick examined (🔒) whether a 2020 Trump victory would have been better for the country overall.
• On the podcasts: Sarah and David break down the Eric Adams indictment and take a look back at the Supreme Court’s term on Advisory Opinions. 
• On the site: John McCormack unpacks Tucker Carlson’s curious and worrisome evolution, David Daoud and Ahmad Sharawi argue an Israeli ground invasion is coming, Stirewalt previews tonight’s vice presidential debate, Daniel Krauthammer says the debate moderators should press J.D. Vance on isolationism, and Aayush Goodapaty covers the Tory leadership race. 

Are you in an area that was affected by Helene, or do you know people who were? What have you seen?