Hurricane Isaias made landfall near Destin, Florida, around 8:30 p.m. CDT Friday as a Category 2 hurricane with maximum sustained winds near 105 miles per hour. By early Saturday, the storm was pushing north through the Florida Panhandle and into southern Alabama, weakening but still producing dangerous conditions far inland. The National Weather Service continued flood watches across much of the Southeast through the morning. Nearly 730,000 utility customers in Florida and Alabama were without power as of early Saturday, according to PowerOutage.us tracking, with Escambia County, which includes Pensacola, accounting for roughly 120,000 of those outages. Flooded roads and downed trees were reported throughout the Panhandle. Part of a hotel roof in Pensacola was torn away during the storm’s passage. Destin police warned residents to stay off the streets because of debris. Storm surge had reached five feet above normal tide levels in Panama City. More than six inches of rain had fallen in parts of Fort Walton Beach, Destin, and Niceville. ABC News reported Saturday morning on the damage and power outages across the Florida Panhandle and Alabama.
Isaias broke a record on the way in. It became the first named hurricane of the 2026 Atlantic season, tying a 121-year-old mark for the latest date in the calendar year on which the season’s first hurricane had ever formed, with the previous record belonging to 1905. Gulf water temperatures were warm enough this fall to support rapid intensification: a tropical storm on Wednesday was a Category 2 storm by Friday evening. Hurricane Michael struck nearly the same stretch of Panhandle coastline in October 2018 at Category 5 intensity, with 160-mile-per-hour winds, destroying Mexico Beach and parts of Tyndall Air Force Base. Isaias won’t be compared to Michael in intensity, but the track left communities that spent years putting themselves back together after Michael boarding the same windows again. The storm is expected to push through Georgia and into the Carolinas today, with heavy rainfall and flood conditions possible well north of the original impact zone. AccuWeather tracked the landfall and power outage numbers through Saturday morning.
President Trump announced Friday that he had reached an agreement with Russian President Vladimir Putin for Russia to supply more than 4 million tons of diesel fuel to American and global markets. Trump described the call as “highly successful.” The arrangement would begin immediately with more than 300,000 tons, followed by 500,000 tons in November, 1 million tons immediately thereafter, and approximately 3 million additional tons depending on the condition of Russian refineries. To make the deal legally workable, the Treasury Department issued a general license Friday temporarily waiving sanctions on Russian diesel through April 2027. Bloomberg reported Friday on the terms of the agreement and the Treasury sanctions waiver.
The background is that Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian oil infrastructure disrupted Russian diesel exports throughout this year, tightening global supplies and contributing to elevated fuel prices in the United States four weeks before the midterm elections. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy condemned the agreement within hours, calling it “obvious weakness” and warning that easing economic pressure on Moscow without a commitment to de-escalate will prolong the war. The Washington Post described the move as a sharp reversal of established U.S. sanctions policy on Russia. Axios reported Friday on Zelenskyy’s condemnation and the Ukraine war implications. In 1973, when the Arab oil embargo removed roughly 7 percent of world oil supply from the market, gasoline lines stretched around the block in American cities and a president’s domestic standing collapsed in weeks. What the Trump administration is wagering is that buying Russian fuel is a way to avoid that particular history. Zelenskyy’s argument is that it makes a different version of it more likely.
An Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shot a man in the Marble Hill neighborhood of New York City on Thursday afternoon while the man’s five-year-old son was in the car. The man, identified by officials as Oscar Belgal, 28, was struck in the neck. At least one ICE officer fired seven rounds during what the Department of Homeland Security described as a “targeted enforcement operation” aimed at a man with a prior conviction for grand larceny. Belgal was in stable condition Thursday evening. PBS NewsHour reported on the shooting and the federal account of the operation.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said, “There is no justification for what we have seen today.” Governor Kathy Hochul called for the release of bodycam footage. Surveillance video of the encounter was obtained by CNN and published Friday. CNN reported on the footage and what it showed. The federal government hasn’t publicly confirmed whether Belgal was the specific individual the operation was targeting. The two open questions are whether he was the right person and whether seven rounds fired into a vehicle with a child inside were legally justified. ICE agents have fired their weapons during more than a dozen vehicle stops since last year, killing at least four people, according to PBS.
Houthi forces fired missiles at King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh on Thursday, killing three people and wounding others of multiple nationalities. Saudi authorities identified one of the dead as Captain Hamoud Ali al-Kalthami, a Saudia airline pilot. Two other Saudi citizens also died. Hundreds of flights were canceled or delayed before operations resumed. The Houthis said the strikes involved both cruise and ballistic missiles and claimed simultaneous attacks on two civilian airports and a Saudi Air Force base. Al Jazeera reported Friday on the victims’ identities and the airport’s return to operations.
The Houthis have been targeting Saudi Arabia since the beginning of the Yemen war in 2015. Attacks on Saudi airports are not new. Killing a named pilot on the tarmac of the kingdom’s main commercial airport is a different kind of event from a fuel depot or warehouse strike, though. Saudi Arabia has spent tens of billions of dollars on Patriot and other air defense systems and hasn’t consistently intercepted Houthi missiles as the group’s arsenal has grown in range and sophistication over a decade of conflict. The Saudi-led coalition said the attacks “will not go unpunished.” CNBC reported on the Saudi military response and the scope of the Houthi missile program.
Researchers from Australia and the United Kingdom presented trial results this week for an experimental drug called SNT-4728, being tested in people with isolated REM sleep behavior disorder, a condition that in many patients precedes Parkinson’s disease by years. The trial found a statistically significant improvement in clinician-assessed motor function in participants who received the drug compared to those on placebo. That difference held at twelve weeks after treatment ended, not just at the point of active dosing. Principal Investigator Professor Simon Lewis presented the results at the International Congress of Parkinson’s Disease and Movement Disorders in Seoul. Parkinson’s UK reported the results as evidence the drug could reduce damage to brain cells linked to Parkinson’s symptoms.
There are roughly 10 million people living with Parkinson’s disease worldwide. No drug currently approved for use changes the progression of the disease. Every treatment available manages symptoms. None of them slows what’s happening in the brain. SNT-4728 worked in this trial, in this group, in a way that statistics can distinguish from chance. A larger trial has to come next before that sentence means what patients need it to mean. But the sentence is there. It wasn’t there before this week. That’s how these things start.
It’s Saturday. Jean Hadley put her Saturday Vegetable Beef Soup up this week. Given the weather along the Gulf Coast and the general state of things, the timing is not wrong.
Howard Fenn writes The Day, Monday through Saturday.
