Top Stories this AM: Phantom calls from the collapsed Florida condo; US rated top in pandemic resilience ratings; an NYC BOE screw up
Good morning and welcome to your weekday morning roundup of the top stories you need to know.
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What's going on today:
- A sign of hope? Family members of a couple missing in the Florida condo collapse continue to receive phantom phone calls from their number. Experts don't know why. "This is unusual enough to give me hope that there's someone who's alive...and is trying to signal that they're there," electrical engineer Ted Rappaport said of the strange calls.
- How victims of the Surf side building collapse could survive. Survival experts explain what it would take to survive a building collapse like the one in Surfside, Florida. "Essentially a giant building fell on those people and on the good/bad scale of survivability, that's very bad," Tim Smith of the Jack Mountain Bushcraft School told Insider.
- We're number one! US takes the top spot on Bloomberg's COVID Resilience Ranking as vaccine rollout speeds up return to normal. As "normalization" becomes key in what makes a country the best place to be, the US has overtaken New Zealand on Bloomberg's COVID Resilience Ranking.
- But anything could happen next week. Trump Organization COO Matthew Calamari won't face criminal charges this week, his lawyer says. Matthew Calamari and his son, Matthew Calamari Jr., are under scrutiny in the Manhattan District Attorney's Trump Organization investigation.
- Nearly 1,000 asylum-seeking children are being held at Fort Bliss despite many having family members willing to take them in. In recent court filings, kids held there complained of insomnia, inedible food, and depression. The emergency intake shelter in El Paso, Texas, has been criticized for holding too many children in deplorable conditions.
- NYC, we have a problem. New York City will re-do its first rounds of ranked-choice voting after accidentally including 135,000 test votes in official results. The Board of Elections announced late Tuesday night that it will remove the dummy votes left in the system and completely re-tally the results.
That's all for now. See you tomorrow.