Hurricane Nicholas makes landfall, pounds coastal Texas, Louisiana with rain
CBC
Heavy rains fell across the Gulf Coast of Texas and Louisiana on Tuesday as tropical storm Nicholas strengthened into a hurricane before making landfall, bringing the threat of widespread flooding, power outages and storm surges.
Nicholas was some 30 kilometres northeast of Matagorda, Texas as of 2 a.m. ET, heading northeast with maximum sustained winds of 120 km/h, the National Hurricane Center (NHC) said in a bulletin early on Tuesday. It made landfall along the Texas coast, the hurricane center said. U.S. President Joe Biden declared an emergency for Louisiana and ordered federal assistance to supplement local response efforts due to conditions resulting from Nicholas, the White House said. "It will be a very slow-moving storm across the state of Texas that will linger for several days and drop a tremendous amount of rain," Texas Governor Greg Abbott said. More than 90,000 people in Louisiana and more than 230,000 people in Texas faced outages as of early Tuesday, according to the website PowerOutage.us. Abbott declared states of emergency in 17 counties and three cities. He said boat and helicopter rescue teams had been deployed or placed on standby. Nicholas is the second hurricane in recent weeks to threaten the U.S. Gulf Coast. Hurricane Ida wreaked havoc in August, killing more than two dozen people and devastating communities in Louisiana near New Orleans.
The U.S. attack on Venezuela has shifted the ground for guerrilla groups operating across the country's borderlands with Colombia, raising fears of possible betrayal by Venezuelan regime officials, while opening the door to a wider conflict should U.S. boots ever hit the ground, local security experts say.

A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent shot and killed a Minneapolis motorist on Wednesday during the Trump administration's latest immigration crackdown on a major American city — a shooting that federal officials claimed was an act of self-defence but that the city's mayor described as "reckless" and unnecessary.

When Marco Rubio took the lectern at Mar-a-Lago shortly after U.S. President Donald Trump announced the country had captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, it was the culmination of a decade of effort from the secretary of state and a clear sign that he had emerged as a leading voice within the Trump administration.

The United States hit Venezuela with a “large-scale strike” early Saturday and said its president, Nicolás Maduro, along with his wife, had been captured and flown out of the country after months of stepped-up pressure by Washington — an extraordinary nighttime operation announced by President Donald Trump on social media hours after the attack.









