After starting off cool, highs rebound to near 80° with increasing clouds throughout the afternoon. It’ll be an overall pleasant day for your outdoor plans with only a stray shower possible!
Likely the biggest change you’ll notice today is the increase in wind. These breezy conditions will continue through Friday keeping wave heights elevated, too!
All of these changes are ahead of a cold front, which will bring us our next chance of rain on Sunday.
Charlotte County’s local government television station, CC-TV, has scheduled a Facebook Live briefing with Florida Department of Health-Charlotte Administrator Joe Pepe for 10 a.m. Tuesday on the county’s Facebook page.
Pepe will review the latest coronavirus and vaccine information, including local case counts, testing sites and personal protection guidance. Staff from the Joint Information Center will answer questions and provide links to sources of information, including the DOH COVID-19 Data and Surveillance Dashboard and Centers for Disease Control in the livestream’s comments section.
The video will remain available for viewing after the live interview concludes.
This year may be one of the most challenging years in recent memory, with a devastating global pandemic leading the list of bad news to come out of 2020. However, a survey of 28 historians found that while 2020 was certainly stressful, it was not the most stressful year ever.
The historians from U.S. and British universities including Yale, Stanford, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Oxford and Cambridge, as well as some independent historical authors, participated in the survey conducted by Bloom, a self-therapy app company. “This year has been incredibly stressful,” Bloom CEO Leon Mueller said. “We wondered what other years down the ages had tested human resolve as much — or even more.”
Bloom asked the historians to choose what they believed to be the most stressful year in U.S. history. The eight most stressful years listed below are ranked based on the number of historians who chose each year as the worst.
Antietam, the bloodiest one-day battle of the Civil War, occurred on September 17, 1862, when more than 23,000 men on both the Union and Confederate sides were killed, wounded or missing in action. The war would drag on for three more years.
The stock market crash on October 29, 1929 — also known as Black Tuesday — wiped out thousands of investors, resulted in the loss of billions of dollars, and spiraled into the Great Depression. The deepest and longest-lasting economic downturn in U.S. history lasted a decade, until the brink of World War II.
The “Trail of Tears” tied with the stock market crash of 1929, according to the historians Bloom’s survey. In 1838, thousands of Cherokee people were forcibly removed from their homeland in the southeastern U.S. and marched over a thousand miles to “Indian Territory,” in what is now Oklahoma. Some 4,000 died along the way and were buried in unmarked graves along “The Trail Where They Cried,” according to the Cherokee Museum.
Similarly to 2020, 1918-19 saw a devastating global pandemic. About 500 million people — one-third of the world’s population — are believed to have been infected with the Spanish flu, whose deadly second wave peaked in 1919. An estimated 675,000 Americans and at least 50 million people worldwide died.
1919 also saw outbreaks of racist violence in American cities, labor strikes and the start of Prohibition, all taking place as the world coped with the aftermath of World War I.
The U.S. reeled from the assassinations of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who was running for president when he was killed. Many cities were scarred by protests and riots.
In October 1962, the Cuban missile crisis between the U.S. and Soviet Union during the Cold War brought the two superpowers the closest they ever came to nuclear conflict.
Nearly 3,000 people were killed on September 11, 2001, when terrorists hijacked planes, flying two into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, one into the Pentagon, and another which crashed in Pennsylvania after passengers fought back.
During 2020, the entire world became impacted by the coronavirus, which has infected more than 80 million people globally, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins. The U.S. has seen more than 19 million confirmed cases and over 333,000 deaths — the highest toll in the world by far.
The ongoing pandemic has caused widespread economic hardship. And that was still just one of the highly stressful events that impacted the U.S. this year. A bitterly divisive political climate during the presidential election as well as protests against racial injustice and police violence also helped define the 2020 climate in the U.S.
When considering the most stressful years in world history, 2020 ranked sixth in Bloom’s survey. The same panel of 28 historians ranked the following years ahead of 2020 as the worst:
At least 10 people were camping out in Lehigh Acres Monday night in hopes to be first in line for round two of coronavirus vaccines at East County Regional Library Tuesday.
The lines became so long in Estero Monday, the health department had to turn people away.
The first couple we spoke to in the Lehigh Acres line told us they arrived at the site at 1:30 p.m. They said they haven’t seen their kids in almost a year
The next person in line, Frank Conway, told us he was celebrating his 78th birthday, and a vaccine would be the best gift yet.
When our crew was at the site in Estero, a sign read “no more vaccines.”
“We couldn’t get anywhere near this place,” said John Stone, who has not yet been vaccinated. “There must have been a thousand cars here.”
Faces we saw showed plenty of disappointment.
“I have a defibrillator in my chest. I am a Type 2 diabetic,” Stone explained. “Have all the reasons to get it.”
Dozens of people like Stone left the Estero Park and Recreation Center without a vaccine Monday with thoughts of loved ones they miss and the places they can’t go.
“We’ll be patient. It’ll show up. We’ll get it,” said Dawn McKay, who has not been vaccinated yet. “It’s either that, or we’re going to live in a cave, and we won’t be able to do anything.”
There are no more vaccines available at the Estero site for now, but it’s just getting started, so no one should lose hope.
“We were going to do anything we could to get our shot, so we could go up and see our grandchildren,” Ronnie Lamm said. “We haven’t seen our children or grandchildren for almost a year now, and we cannot wait.”
Three new sites in Lee County open for COVID-19 vaccinations Tuesday for those 65 or older or high-risk frontline health workers.
That includes:
Each site expects to give 300 vaccinations. Those sites open at 9 a.m. until 6 p.m. but could close early if sites run out of vaccines.
“It’s a great day here,” Conway family said. “We’re happy to spend a night here, get our shots, so we can go back to our normal life.”
Three more places open up in Cape Coral, North Fort Myers and at Lakes Regional Library in south Fort Myers Wednesday.
You can dial 211 if you have any questions at all. The telephone line is available to call and ask questions about the vaccine rollout in Lee County.
It seemed like a friendly chat between neighbors. Only after a bomb exploded in downtown Nashville on Christmas morning could Rick Laude grasp the sinister meaning behind his neighbor’s smiling remark that the city and the rest of the world would never forget him.
Laude told The Associated Press on Monday that he was speechless when he learned that authorities identified his 63-year-old neighbor, Anthony Quinn Warner, as the man suspected of detonating a bomb that killed himself, injured three other people and damaged dozens of buildings.
Laude said he saw Warner standing at his mailbox less than a week before Christmas and pulled over in his car to talk. After asking how Warner’s elderly mother was doing, Laude said he casually asked, “Is Santa going to bring you anything good for Christmas?”
Warner smiled and said, “Oh, yeah, Nashville and the world is never going to forget me,” Laude recalled.
Laude said he didn’t think much of the remark and thought Warner only meant that “something good” was going to happen for him financially.
“Nothing about this guy raised any red flags,” Laude said. “He was just quiet.”
Laude said Warner sometimes did not respond when he and other neighbors waved to him, but said he did not take it personally. “I knew that he was just a recluse,” he said.
As investigators continued to search for a motive, body camera video released late Monday by Nashville police offered more insight to the moments leading up to the explosion and its aftermath.
The recording from Officer Michael Sipos’ camera captures officers walking past the RV parked across the street as the recorded warning blares and then helping people evacuate after the thunderous blast off camera. Car alarms and sirens wailed as a police dispatch voice called for all available personnel and people stumbled through downtown streets littered with glass.
Warner left behind clues that suggest he planned the bombing and intended to kill himself, but a clear motive remained elusive.
“We hope to get an answer. Sometimes, it’s just not possible,” David Rausch, the director of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, said Monday in an interview on NBC’s “Today” show. “The best way to find motive is to talk to the individual. We will not be able to do that in this case.”
As investigators continued to search for a motive, body camera video released late Monday by Nashville police offered more insight to the moments leading up to the explosion and its aftermath.
The recording from Officer Michael Sipos’ camera captures officers walking past the RV parked across the street as the recorded warning blares and then helping people evacuate after the thunderous blast off camera. Car alarms and sirens wailed as a voice on the dispatcher calls for all available personnel and a roll call and people stumble through the downtown area littered with glass.
Investigators are analyzing Warner’s belongings collected during the investigation, including a computer and a portable storage drive, and continue to interview witnesses as they try to identify a motive for the explosion, a law enforcement official said. A review of his financial transactions also uncovered purchases of potential bomb-making components, the official said.
Warner had recently given away a vehicle and told the person he gave it to that he had been diagnosed with cancer, though it is unclear whether he indeed had cancer, the official said. Investigators used some items collected from the vehicle, including a hat and gloves, to match Warner’s DNA and DNA was taken from one of his family members, the official said.
The official could not discuss the matter publicly and spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity.
Warner also apparently gave away his home in Antioch, a Nashville suburb, to a Los Angeles woman a month before the bombing. A property record dated Nov. 25 indicates Warner transferred the home to the woman in exchange for no money after living there for decades. The woman’s signature is not on that document.
Warner had worked as a computer consultant for Nashville real estate agent Steve Fridrich, who told the AP in a text message that Warner had said he was retiring earlier this month.
Officials said Warner had not been on their radar before Christmas. A law enforcement report released Monday showed that Warner’s only arrest was for a 1978 marijuana-related charge.
“It does appear that the intent was more destruction than death, but again that’s all still speculation at this point as we continue in our investigation with all our partners,” Rausch added.
Furthermore, officials have not provided insight into why Warner selected the particular location for the bombing, which damaged an AT&T building and wreaked havoc on cellphone service and police and hospital communications in several Southern states. By Monday, the company said the majority of services had been restored for residents and businesses.
Forensic analysts were reviewing evidence from the blast site to try to identify the components of the explosives as well as information from the U.S. Bomb Data Center for intelligence and investigative leads, according to a law enforcement official who said investigators were examining Warner’s digital footprint and financial history.
The official, who was not authorized to discuss an ongoing investigation and spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity, said federal agents were examining a number of potential leads and pursuing several theories, including the possibility that the AT&T building was targeted.
Doug Korneski, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Memphis field office, said Sunday that officials were looking at any and all motives and were interviewing acquaintances of Warner’s to try to determine what may have motivated him.
The bombing took place early on a holiday morning well before downtown streets were bustling with activity. Police were responding to a report of shots fired when they encountered the RV blaring a recorded warning that a bomb would detonate in 15 minutes. Then, for reasons that may never be known, the audio switched to a recording of Petula Clark’s 1964 hit “Downtown” shortly before the blast.
In addition to the DNA found at the blast site, investigators from the Tennessee Highway Patrol were able to link the vehicle identification number recovered from the wreckage to an RV registered to Warner, officials said.
“We’re still following leads, but right now there is no indication that any other persons were involved,” Korneski said. “We’ve reviewed hours of security video surrounding the recreation vehicle. We saw no other people involved.”
President-elect Joe Biden on Monday called the bombing “a reminder of the destructive power an individual or a small group can muster and the need for continued vigilance across the board.”
President Donald Trump hasn’t publicly commented on the explosion but has spoken to Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee and offered resources and support, according to the governor’s office.
