Category: US

FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell said Wednesday that the agency has a “layered approach” to staffing, along with being just one part of the federal government’s support mechanisms, amid concerns about resources as the agency prepares for powerful Hurricane Milton as it barrels toward Florida shortly after the deadly Hurricane Helene.

“We’re just one part of the team,” Criswell said on “CBS Mornings” early Wednesday. “We bring in the whole federal family, the entire federal government to support the efforts that are going on across all of the states that have been impacted by the storm.”

Debris from Helene, which made landfall on Sept. 26, is still on the ground in Florida as the state braces for Milton. Meanwhile, The New York Times reported that less than 10% of FEMA’s resources will be available to respond in the aftermath of the hurricane. Criswell said the figures represent a specific, disaster-management focused part of the agency’s workforce, while noting that the agency has other employees available. 

“In fact, when everybody signs on to work with us, we make them sign a statement that says every employee is an emergency manager,” Criswell said. “So we start to repurpose some of our steady state employees from headquarters, but we also move people around from non-critical life threatening offices or open field offices that we have to support the immediate needs.”

Hurricane Milton is expected to make landfall early Thursday, after barreling across as a Category 4 storm — nearing on a Category 5 — on Wednesday morning on its approach toward Florida’s central west coast.

Criswell encouraged people to listen to local officials as Milton approaches, saying there may still be time to get out of the most affected areas and urging that “nobody needs to die from this storm.” 

“This storm is going to be like nothing that they have ever seen before,” Criswell said. She addressed those who want to remain in their homes, saying that they may only need to go a few miles away for safety. 

For those who are unable to evacuate, Criswell said they should pay attention to local officials, charge all devices, and call 911 if immediate assistance is needed. She said additional teams would be in the area to support search and rescue efforts after the storm passes. 

On the issue of resources, Criswell noted that the federal response won’t be without its challenges. 

“I’m not saying it’s not going to be challenging,” she said. “We know that there’s a lot going on with all of these efforts, but we plan for this and we’ve done this before.”

In a California fundraiser hosted at Gov. Gavin Newsom’s home Tuesday in Sacramento, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz advocated for doing away with the Electoral College system, stating that “we need a national popular vote.”

“I think all of us know the electoral college needs to go,”  the Democratic vice presidential candidate said. “But that’s not the world we live in. So we need to win Beaver County, Pennsylvania. We need to be able to go into York, Pennsylvania, and win. We need to be in western Wisconsin and win. We need to be in Reno, Nevada and win.”

The comments were immediately seized on by the Trump campaign and prominent Republicans, who accused Walz of attempting to throw the results of a victory by former President Donald Trump into question if Trump were to win in November.

Trump campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt questioned if Walz was attempting to lay “the groundwork to claim President Trump’s victory is illegitimate?” in an X post.

In a statement provided to CBS News, a spokesperson for the Harris-Walz campaign said Walz “believes that every vote matters in the Electoral College and he is honored to be traveling the country and battleground states working to earn support for the Harris-Walz ticket. He was commenting to a crowd of strong supporters about how the campaign is built to win 270 electoral votes. And, he was thanking them for their support that is helping fund those efforts.” 

Getting rid of the Electoral College is not a position the campaign holds, a campaign official said. 

The comment from Walz, and the swift clarification, comes just days after he told Bill Whitaker on “60 Minutes” that his running mate, Vice President Kamala Harris, said he needs to be more careful when he speaks.

Since being thrust into the national spotlight, the Minnesota governor has faced scrutiny about his misrepresentations of his military status regarding when he retired from the Army National Guard as well as his whereabouts when pro-democracy protests broke out in China and Hong Kong in 1989. 

“I speak like everybody else speaks. I need to be clearer. I will tell you that,” Walz told CBS News in a press gaggle last week.

The Electoral College was established by the Constitution, so changing it would require a Constitutional amendment. But calls to do so have gained traction in some Democratic circles, such as after 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by about 3 million votes, but lost the electoral vote to Trump. The same occurred to former Vice President Al Gore in the 2000 presidential race. According to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center, 63% of Americans favor the election being decided by who wins the popular vote, not the Electoral College system.

In the Electoral College system, there are a total of 538 electoral votes, divided among the states in a way that mirrors each state’s congressional delegation, with one vote allocated for each member of the House, plus two more for the two senators. Most states have a winner-take-all system, which means that all of the state’s electoral votes go to the presidential candidate who wins the popular vote.

contributed to this report.

“We need to roll an orange this weekend,” I texted the group chat of reporters that pack their lives into a suitcase and embeds with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, traveling across the country with the Democratic vice presidential candidate. 

It’s a decades-old tradition stemming back to the days of late President Ronald Reagan. The press corps traveling with a candidate rolls an orange up the aisle of the campaign jet with a question written on it. An answer is written on the orange and then rolled back to reporters.

Continuing the tradition with an almost-out-of-ink Sharpie, reporters on Sunday embedded with Walz asked him who his dream dinner guest was. 

I attempted to bowl the orange up the aisle of the Boeing 757-200, but it made it about halfway up the aisle and hit another passenger’s seat. I motioned for the passenger to roll the orange up further, and once he did, it was lost. Or so we thought. 

On Monday night, the orange was returned to us in the press motorcade with Walz’s answer: “Bruce Springsteen.”

Walz has been open about his love of Springsteen’s music. In March 2023, he declared “Bruce Springsteen Day” in Minnesota. 

Springsteen, a 20-time Grammy-winner, endorsed the Harris-Walz ticket last week in a video. 

“Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are committed to a vision of this country that respects and includes everyone, regardless of class, religion, race, political point of view or sexual identity,” Springsteen said. “That’s the vision of America that I’ve been consistently writing about for 55 years.”

Reporters embedded with Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, former President Donald Trump’s running mate, did their own orange roll Tuesday.

“To Vance: Fave song?” they wrote. 

“Led Zeppelin Ten Years Gone,” the orange read when it was swiftly returned, according to pool reports. 

In what has been an intense presidential campaign, this was a tradition that gave reporters and candidates a chance to lighten things up. 

TikTok was sued Tuesday by 14 attorneys general who allege the social media platform is misleading the public about its safety. The app, they say, is harming children’s mental health, with some kids getting injured or even dying because of TikTok’s viral “challenges.”

The lawsuits, filed Tuesday, also claim that TikTok relies on “addictive features” that keep users glued to its platform, which in turn can hurt their mental health. These features include notifications that can harm kids’ sleep patterns and video autoplay that encourages users to spend more time on the platform, without the option to turn off the autoplay function, according to the complaint. 

The lawsuits add to other challenges facing TikTok, which is also fighting a potential ban that was signed into law earlier this year by President Joe Biden. The law, which the social media service has argued is unconstitutional and should be overturned, would require TikTok’s owner, the China-based company ByteDance, to either divest the business or face a ban of the service within the U.S.

At the same time, TikTok is also facing charges from various states and children’s advocates about privacy issues and their impact on kids and young adults. 

In the October 8 lawsuits, the attorneys general cite TikTok’s popular “challenges” as harmful to children, promoting dangerous behaviors that have caused injuries, some fatal.

“Challenges are campaigns that encourage users to create and post certain types of videos on TikTok, such as a video of a user performing a certain dance routine or a dangerous prank,” alleges the lawsuit from New York Attorney General Letitia James. “Challenge videos are a cornerstone of the platform and are among the most popular videos on the platform.”

The lawsuit added, “Numerous teen users have injured or even killed themselves or others participating in viral pranks to obtain rewards and increase their number of ‘likes,’ views, and followers, a foreseeable consequence of TikTok’s engagement-maximizing design.”

In one case, a 15-year-old boy died in Manhattan while subway surfing, a trend where people ride on top of a moving subway car. The lawsuit notes that his mother found TikTok videos about subway surfing in his account after he had died. 

TikTok didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The attorneys general who are suing TikTok represent the following states:

• California
• Illinois
• Kentucky
• Louisiana
• Massachusetts
• Mississippi
• New Jersey
• New York
• North Carolina
• Oregon
• South Carolina 
• Vermont
• Washington
• District of Columbia

Each attorney general filed a lawsuit in their own jurisdiction.

CIA Director William Burns warned Monday of the potential for simmering clashes in the Middle East to spread across the region even as, he said, the U.S. intelligence community had assessed the leaders of Iran and Israel are not looking for “all-out conflict.”

“[W]e face the very real danger of a further regional escalation of conflict,” Burns said during a moderated question-and-answer session at the annual Cipher Brief threat conference in Sea Island, Georgia. He said Israel’s leadership was “weighing very carefully” how it would respond to Iran’s ballistic missile attack last week, but warned that “misjudgments” could still lead to an inadvertent escalatory spiral.

“The Middle East is a place where complicated stuff happens all the time,” Burns said.

A combination of robust intelligence-sharing between the U.S. and Israel, and “strong” integrated air defenses, allowed for the defeat of the large-scale missile attack from Iran on Oct. 1, Burns said. The attack exposed some “limitations” in Tehran’s military capabilities, but he said “that’s not to suggest that those capabilities are still not quite potent and something that not only Israel, but the United States, needs to take very seriously, too.”

The former senior diplomat —who played a key role in negotiating the 2015 nuclear deal that put constraints on Iran’s uranium enrichment program— said his agency had nonetheless not seen indications that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had decided to accelerate his country’s efforts to produce a nuclear weapon.

“[W]e do not see evidence today that the Supreme Leader has reversed the decision that he took at the end of 2003 to suspend the weaponization program,” Burns said. He acknowledged, however, that Iran was in a “much closer position” to create a single bomb’s worth of weapons-grade material, with a breakout time now at “a week or a little more.”

Speaking one year after Hamas militants stormed into southern Israel, killing more than 1,200 Israelis and kidnapping more than 250, Burns —who had for the past year been leading diplomatic negotiations alongside counterparts from Qatar, Egypt and Israel— expressed hope that a diplomatic deal could still be struck for a ceasefire and to secure the release of remaining hostages in Gaza.

“We’ve come close at least a couple of times, but it’s been very elusive,” he said. Talks on Gaza had come to a standstill in recent weeks as, U.S. officials said, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar had stopped responding to updated proposals.

“[W]hat’s at stake in Gaza is shaped by political will,” Burns stressed. “In the end, it’s not just about brackets in texts or creative formulas when you’re trying to negotiate a hostage and ceasefire deal. It’s about leaders who ultimately have to recognize that enough is enough, that perfect is rarely on the menu, especially in the Middle East.”

“And then you’ve got to go make hard choices and some compromises in the interest of a longer-term strategic stability as well,” he said.

Hurricane Milton has “explosively intensified” in the southern Gulf of Mexico as it continues on its path towards Florida. Milton underwent rapid intensification, from a tropical storm on Sunday morning into a strong Category 5 hurricane in just 24 hours.  

Within each public advisory that the National Hurricane Center releases, adjustments to the track of this storm system are also adjusted. The forecast track with Milton has its sights set on the western coast of Florida, but the position of the center of the storm, or the “eye,” can determine how catastrophic the impacts are on the Tampa Bay area. 

As Milton intensified into a major hurricane with wind speeds upwards of 180 mph, the strength of the system increased the severity of the storm surge forecast to all coastal areas, including the Gulf Coast of Florida. The eastern side of the eye is considered the “dirty side” of the storm, which is where the winds tend to be the strongest. As the forecast track shifts northward, the dirty side then falls over Tampa Bay. This, in turn, creates a more severe hazard of storm surge in that confined area.  

In addition, the waters on the Gulf side of Florida are much more shallow than on the Atlantic side, which can make storm surge even more impactful to communities along the Gulf. 

The National Hurricane Center has increased the peak storm surge forecast from 8-12 feet to 10-15 feet of inundation for the area from Anclote River to Tampa Bay. This increased severity is directly in response to the strength of the storm as its maximum sustained wind speed increased.  

“The deepest water will occur along the immediate coast near and to the south of the landfall location, where the surge will be accompanied by large and dangerous waves,” the NHC said in a Monday afternoon advisory. “Surge-related flooding depends on the relative timing of the surge and the tidal cycle, and can vary greatly over short distances.”  

In another advisory Monday evening, NHC stated, “While fluctuations in intensity are expected, Milton is forecast to remain an extremely dangerous hurricane through landfall in Florida.”  

All coastal residents and visitors are being urged to heed local officials’ evacuation orders that are in place.