Super Typhoon Rai has killed at least three people after lashing the central and southern Philippines, officials said Friday, per AP.
Threat level: The storm that's equivalent to a Category 5 hurricane is the strongest typhoon to make landfall in the Philippines this year — causing over 300,000 people to evacuate coastal areas as it triggered flooding, communications and power outages and uprooted trees Thursday, AFP notes.
The body of a 13-year-old girl was found in a Kentucky neighborhood razed in last weekend's tornadoes and storms that lashed six U.S. states, raising the death toll in the state to 76 and 90 overall, per AP.
The big picture: Nyssa Brown was one of seven family members to die in the Bowling Green tornado. The National Weather Service has released preliminary findings showing that western Kentucky was hit by an EF-4 tornado on the Enhanced Fujita Scale — meaning the damage it caused was "devastating."
The body's long-term immune responses help to defend against emerging coronavirus variants even as antibody immunity is waning in people who are vaccinated or who've had prior COVID-19 infections.
The big picture: Variants are testing the success of the COVID-19 vaccines, as antibody levels typically drop after peaking from infection or vaccination.
Driving the news: The Omicron variant is also now spreading in the United States. It's been shown to be highly transmissible and more able to evade vaccines, but a third shot or booster of an mRNA vaccine re-ups protection against Delta and Omicron, Fauci says.
A massive, multi-hazard storm unprecedented for mid-December in the Plains and Upper Midwest affected nearly 100 million people from New Mexico to Wisconsin on Wednesday into Wednesday night.
Why it matters: The latest storm is yet another demonstration that the dial on the extreme weather meter has gone all the way to 11 during 2021. Many of the events this year, including this one, bear the hallmarks of climate change.
An expansive storm is unleashing an array of hazardous weather to a broad swath of the lower 48 states — with winds reaching 85 to 100 mph from Colorado to Iowa, along with record warmth that's fueled an ongoing derecho moving into Minnesota and Wisconsin.
Why it matters: The storm set all-time high temperatures for the month of December on Wednesday, as readings soared into the 70s all the way to the Iowa-Minnesota border. Its winds had knocked out power to some 500,000 customers in 10 states Thursday, with outages climbing in Iowa and Kansas, per poweroutage.us.
