alex, the 2014 ferguson protester fresh in people s minds here. ferguson just a suburb of st. louis. that is why we have seen such a strong show of force from police so early they are determined not to let things get out of hand like they did in ferguson. point well taken on that, blake. the mayor, was he at home at the time the protesters gathered around the home and started throwing rocks and bottles? reporter: we do not believe she was. we held a press conference afterwards and she was fine, but the home was damaged. thank you so much from st. louis. now to politics, everyone. a republican congressman s reported steps to absolve julian assange for the role the website played in the u.s. presidential election. the office of congress dana rohrabacher is pushing back on the wall street journal report that he reached out to the white house to offer a possible deal
to get him out of jeopardy with the u.s. government. assange would offer alleged evidence that russia did not pro
Domestic planes stuck on the ground for three hours or more but not allowing passengers a chance to get off. this is the largest of its kind since these rules went into effect a decade ago. that s going to do it for us. our coverage continues with alex whit. good to be with you. in less than 24 hours, hurricane idalia could be the most powerful storm to hit florida s big bend since 1950. intensifying in the warm waters off florida s gulf coast, the national weather service projects idalia could strengthen to a powerful category 3 or 4 hurricane before it makes landfall tomorrow. now this time lapse of fort myers showed idalia s 90 mile an hour winds and rain. they have begun to arrive.
The president wanted to do this for everybody but in the end, this is only going to affect again those over 65 and rely on medicare, alex. it is a start certainly. ten drugs and perhaps more to negotiate in the future. thank you so much. the parent company of facebook and instagram says it just disrupted the largest known, widespread, covert, disinformation campaign in the world. meta linked the influence operation to china and says chinese law enforcement managed to infiltrate nearly every popular social media platform including nbc news senior washington correspondent, eamon javers, has been covering this story. it is extraordinary, eamon. so let s talk about the kind of information that meta says china was illicitly spreading. what meta says is that this was an operation that was enormous. more than 7,000 facebook pages involved. they had to take all those
Be worse. the arrival coincides with a king tide that brings some of the highest ocean water levels of the year. officials at tampa general hospital have constructed an aqua fence in an attempt to protect against what may come there. joining me now from crystal river, florida, guad and from tampa, nbc news correspondent, marisa. she ll be joining me by phone. guad, what s happening where you are? how are preparations going? reporter: alex, this is one of the evacuation zones. . zone a. florida has an evacuation zone that s been set. more than 20 counties have evacuation orders in place. we ve been getting messages on our phones, a message says here, life threatening storm surge expected. evacuate citrus county zone a now. take action. so we ve been talking about the storm surge. just mentioned the king tide.
Isolated power outages but we could deal with problems at high tide tomorrow night especially in savannah, charleston, maybe even top ten water heights because we have a full moon. it looks like the big bend. there s the map that shows you the story. alex, i just saw the fort myers and naples area. right now, they have a 1 to 2 foot storm surge and that s going to head up in the tampa area so the water is beginning to rise. do you consider this a fast-moving storm because a lot of times when they linger, they just keep dumping the rain. didn t focus a lot on the rainfall. we ll see isolated flash flooding but the storm is moving pretty quickly. 15 to 20 miles per hour as it goes over the southeast. so at that speed, i don t think we re going to get the horrific rainfall totals. to do to know. thank you very much.