Morning Wire - Wednesday Afternoon Update | 1.11.23

Episode Date: January 11, 2023

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I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Bickley. It's Wednesday, January 11th, and this is your Morning Wire afternoon update. Americans across the country woke up to transportation chaos this morning after a federal aviation administration computer system crash caused all U.S. flights to be grounded. Nearly 5,000 flights were delayed and almost 900 were canceled by around 10 a.m. Officials are still looking into the cause of the system-wide glitch. The issue was resolved gradually, though it was still a little. ongoing for some carriers. Long-time aviation insiders say they can't recall an outage of such

magnitude caused by a technology breakdown. Some compared it to the nationwide shutdown of airspace after the terror attacks of September 2001. We expect a minimum three more of these atmospheric rivers. Stormstruck California scrambled to clean up and repair widespread damage today as the lashing rain eased in many areas. Although thunderstorms led a new atmospheric river into the northern half of the state. Officials say that at least 17 people have died, and more than half of California's 58 counties were declared disaster areas. According to the National Weather Service, the plume of moisture stretched all the way over the Pacific to Hawaii, making it a true pineapple express. Morningwire spoke to meteorologist Matthew Capucci about the situation.

So I'm cautiously optimistic that the worst is for the most part over in terms of the actual weather conditions themselves. But here's the thing. We have compounding factors of vulnerability. What that means is that the ground is already saturated. It's very spongy, so any additional rain will cause more flooding. Any additional wind in the already loosened up soil can topple more trees and cause power outages. So the weather will be getting better. There was one atmospheric river ongoing Wednesday into Thursday with another one likely that'll drop like two to four inches of rain across northern California, north of the Bay Area, Saturday into Sunday. Then on Monday, high pressure parks of the eastern Pacific.

That's like a force field that pushes the moisture up and over. That will kind of ride into Northern California Monday and Tuesday, but then guess what? That force field builds into California shuts off the sink, no more rain after that. And I think we have like at least two weeks of a much more tranquil weather pattern that should take us in the end of January. So it looks like things are finally winding down. But my goodness, it's been like eight atmospheric rivers in three and a half weeks, if that. The Biden administration announced Wednesday that it will be extending the COVID public health emergency as the latest Omicron variant spreads. throughout the country. While more contagious, data does not indicate it's any more deadly than

previous Omicron strands. Meanwhile, in a memo this week, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin rescinded the COVID vaccine mandate for the U.S. military and the National Guard. Biden aides announced Wednesday afternoon that a second batch of classified documents have been found at a different location other than the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C. The White House has not addressed this new discovery amidst the ongoing scandal, despite previously downplaying the original findings as, quote, a small number of documents from Biden's days as vice president. The U.S. Navy recently stopped a fishing boat attempting to smuggle over 2,000 AK-47s from Iran to Yemen, according to the Navy Forces Central Command. The Friday incident

occurred in the international waters of the Gulf of Amman when the patrol coastal ship, U.S. Shoeok, boarded and seized the weapons with the assistance of other naval vessels. Arkansas's new governor and former Trump White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed an executive order this week banning the use of the word Latin X in government documents because it is, quote, culturally insensitive to the Latino community. Polls have consistently shown that just 2% of Latinos prefer the gender-neutral term. The institution which governs the Spanish language has officially rejected the use of X as an alternative to O and an A in Spanish.

And today we are rejecting its use. in state government in all documents. The U.S. Supreme Court voted on Wednesday to leave in place an appeals court ruling, which allows the state of New York to enforce controversial new gun control measures, while a legal challenge to the law proceeds. The chair of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission claimed on Wednesday that the commission is not considering removing stoves from the American market, despite the CPSC commissioner's claims otherwise.

Here's Commissioner Richard Trumka, Jr. during a recent webinar. I think we need to be talking about regulating gas stoves, whether that's drastically improving emissions or banning gas stoves entirely. And I think we ought to keep that possibility of a ban in mind as you follow along, because it's a powerful tool in our toolbox. It's a real possibility. Well, those are your drive home updates this afternoon. To learn more about these stories, go to Dailywire.com and for more in-depth discussion of the biggest stories of the day, listen to the latest full episode of Morningwire every morning.