Southern Appalachia Eyes Recovery After Helene

Happy Tuesday! Raise your hand if you want your Morning Dispatchers to go on a well-documented road trip like our friends Mike and Drucker. 🤚

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• Two American scientists—the University of Massachusetts’ Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun of Harvard University—were awarded the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday for their discovery of microRNA, which the Nobel Assembly said “revealed an entirely new dimension to gene regulation,” comparing it to “an instruction manual for all cells in our body.” Some COVID-19 vaccine formulas—such as those created by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna—were developed based on microRNA research.
• A Russian court on Monday sentenced 72-year-old U.S. citizen Stephen Hubbard to six years and 10 months in prison following allegations that he had served as a mercenary in Ukraine. Russian officials said he joined a Ukrainian defensive military unit in the eastern part of the country and was captured by Russian soldiers in April 2022. Russian state media reported that Hubbard and his lawyer plan to appeal his sentence. 
• Ukraine’s military said on Monday that it had successfully struck a much-used oil terminal on the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula near the Black Sea city of Feodosia. Ukrainian military officials said that more petroleum products pass through the facility than any other Crimean oil terminal and are used by the Russian army. 
• Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed terrorist organization based in Lebanon, launched missiles on Monday at the port city of Haifa in northern Israel in an attack Israeli officials said injured 10 people. Rockets that struck near the central Israeli city of Tiberias injured two more people. Later on Monday, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said that its air force targeted more than 120 Hezbollah sites in southern Lebanon and the country’s capital city of Beirut, including military headquarters, fighters, and missile stockpiles. Meanwhile, two people were injured on Monday in a Hamas rocket attack on Tel Aviv. The IDF later returned fire on southern Gaza, destroying the launchpad it said Hamas used to fire rockets into central Israel. 
• The Biden administration on Monday issued new sanctions against three individuals and entities it said helped financially assist Hamas, including a Hamas-operated, Gaza-based financial institution, a prominent Hamas supporter and his business, and other individuals providing financial backing to Hamas. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said the sanctions would help weaken Hamas’ global financial network. 
• The National Hurricane Center announced on Tuesday morning that Hurricane Milton has weakened slightly into a Category 4 storm after reporting Monday that it had “explosively intensified” into a Category 5 storm with sustained winds measuring as high as 180 miles per hour. Milton, which developed in the Gulf of Mexico, is projected to make landfall in the Tampa Bay area on Wednesday evening with mandatory evacuation orders already having been issued across six Florida counties. President Joe Biden declared a state of emergency in Florida on Monday, mobilizing the Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to “coordinate all disaster relief efforts” to prepare for the storm. 
• Georgia’s state Supreme Court on Monday temporarily reinstated the Living Infants Fairness and Equality (LIFE) Act—which features a ban on most abortions after a fetal heartbeat can be detected, usually at about six weeks of gestation—until the court decides on the merits of a legal challenge to the law. Early last week, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney struck down the LIFE Act, first passed in Georgia in 2019, ruling that the abortion restriction violates the state constitution. Monday’s decision from Georgia’s Supreme Court will allow the LIFE Act to go into effect until the court rules to either uphold or overturn McBurney’s decision.

Helene’s Long Tail

Folks in the hills and mountains of East Tennessee and western North Carolina aren’t accustomed to seeing the distinctive double rotors on Army-green Chinook helicopters flying overhead in tight formations, descending below the tree line, and getting airborne again. 

But they now come and go frequently with elements of the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division temporarily stationing itself at the small municipal airport in Greeneville, Tennessee. The 101st and newly arrived units of the 82nd Airborne Division in Asheville, North Carolina, are now running frequent missions to drop supplies in some of the most isolated pockets of the lower Appalachian mountains still mucking themselves out from the damage of Hurricane Helene. 

In places like Asheville or the college mountain town of Boone, North Carolina, recovery has moved from reacting to the acute needs of the historic floods and transitioned into longer-term rebuilding: re-establishing utilities and communications and figuring out how to return at least some aspects of life back to something resembling functional. But in isolated and rural places, volunteers and community members are still …

As a non-paying reader, you are receiving a truncated version of The Morning Dispatch. Our 1,446-word item on Appalachia’s difficult road to hurricane recovery is available in the members-only version of TMD.

Worth Your Time

• While conservatives have expressed deep opposition to the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) movement prevalent in academia, should they similarly oppose equity as an educational principle? In National Affairs, Michael Petrilli argued no. “It’s a mistake for those on the right to shun the conversation about educational equity, for two reasons,” he wrote. “First, most educators aren’t hard-core ideologues seeking to trample our traditions of individual responsibility. … When they hear calls for ‘educational equity,’ they think it means simply doing right by children often shortchanged by schools—especially low-income students and students of color. In short, they want what most on the right would call ‘equality of opportunity.’ Many of these educators are open to counterpoints to the left’s vision of equity. Second, political conservatives can nudge these educators toward a version of educational equity that isn’t at odds with excellence. … Their goal should be to do educational equity right.”
• Three years ago, a home church community in China fled the country together. Plough magazine interviewed the pastor, Pan Yongguang. “The person who preached the gospel to me was a member of a house church,” he said. “As my faith matured, I realized that the Three-Self Church authorized by the atheist Communist Party of China is not true Christianity but a tool for ideological rule. In China, the house churches are the true churches that follow the teachings of the Bible. When I became a pastor, I knew that if I established a house church it would inevitably be suppressed by the government, and I was ready and willing to pay the price.” 

Presented Without Comment

The Hill: Trump: Israel Has To ‘Get Smart’ About Supporting Him

“I think that Israel has to do one thing. They have to get smart about Trump, because they don’t back me,” Trump said. “I did more for Israel than anybody. I did more for the Jewish people than anybody. And it’s not reciprocal, as they say, not reciprocal.”

Also Presented Without Comment

Washington Post: Nevada Republican Convicted Of Taking Money Meant For Officer Memorial

Michele Fiore was found guilty of taking money meant for a memorial honoring a police officer killed in the line of duty and spending it on plastic surgery, rent and her daughter’s wedding.

In the Zeitgeist

As election season heats up and the public discourse gets nastier, it’s a good thing we have Nate Bargatze to remind us of the rights and privileges the Founding Fathers secured: 

Toeing the Company Line

• Steve joined Tortoise Media’s podcast The News Meeting last week to talk about “the voters who will decide the US presidential election.” Give it a listen by clicking here. 
• Stay tuned for another episode of the Dispatch Book Club dropping next week: Sarah will be joined by Kelefa Sanneh to discuss his book Major Labels about the music industry. 
• In the newsletters: From the ground of Asheville, North Carolina, Kevin reported on (🔒) recovery efforts more than a week after Helene made landfall, and Mike and Drucker reported from the road in Pennsylvania, and Nick traced (🔒) how Elon Musk is effectively becoming Trump’s minister of propaganda.  
• On the podcasts: Sarah and David are live from UNC to unpack Jack Smith’s filing in his election interference case against Trump on Advisory Opinions.  
• On the site: Chris explains why a local ballot initiative in Washington, D.C., may get him to the ballot box this November, and we publish our first installment of a series of symposia on concerns about particular policy outcomes for the presidential election. First up: national security.