later. thank you for joining us. i m kasie hunt. don t go anywhere. cnn this morning starts right now. good morning, everyone. glad you re with us. i m poppy harlow with phil mattingly in new york. the number of hostages believed to be in gaza has risen, 240. according to the israeli military. this comes as israeli soldiers and tanks push deeper into the gaza strip with prime minister benjamin netanyahu refusing to halt the ground and air assault on hamas. just as the united states would not agree to a cease fire after the bombing of pearl harbor or after the terrorist attack of 9/11, israel will not agree cessation with hamas after the horrific attacks on october 7th. calls for a cease fire are calls for israel to surrender to hamas. hamas has released a hostage video of these three israeli women being held captive. one of them begs netanyahu to secure their release. netanyahu called the video cruel propaganda. troops have been battling terrorist cells armed with
custody. there s a picture there. right now the motive is unknown. it is unclear if the attacks were racially motivated. but we should know police are ramping up security in asian-american communities as a precaution. president biden has been briefed on the shootings, and at this hour he returns to the white house. we ll bring you any live comments. also today, concerns of another covid surge. cases are climbing in more than one dozen states. the cdc is sounding the alarm on two variants in california. we ll get to that in a moment. let s begin on this tragic shooting spree. our ryan young joins us this morning in atlanta. what do you know about the victims, eight total, six of them asian. what can you tell us? reporter: so far, very little information is coming out about the victims except, besides their races. of course, what we ve been told so far is at least six of the people killed are asian. of course, we re trying to move forward with parts of this investigation. w
i ve got a lot of people that care about me. and it s going to disappoint them to hear that i did this. i would like to apologize to each and every one of them. just a broken guy. got a few screws loose. you think this will get me a job as a pilot? i think they ll yeah, right. can this thing do a back flip? do you think? a barrel roll? if that goes good, and i m just gonna nose down and call it a night. let s try to land that airplane safely and not hurt anyone on the ground. all right. oh, damn it, i don t know, man,
they re likely transcribing a lot of what you just heard there to get the full picture here of what was going on in this man s head. of course social media is going to be important too. we know the sheriff s department said he was suicidal, but the fbi s going to want a fuller picture. did some specific event trigger him to do what we saw him do yesterday? the ntsb just gave a briefing. we know they re on the ground. you saw that plane crashed. he died. it
locations throughout the united states. this is a shared fate that everybody has to come together. law enforcement, the community, has to, you know, solve for this problem. all right. jonathan and josh and phil mudd in studio, thank you so much. you can follow me on facebook and twitter at jake tapper or tweet the show at the lead on cnn. our coverage on cnn continues right now. this is cnn breaking news. we want to welcome our viewers in the united states and around the world. i m wolf blitzer in the situation room. we re following breaking news. the investigation into home made bombs sent to cnn, the clintons, the obamas and other political figures in what new york city s mayor is now calling an act of terror. none of the devices exploded, but there is fear, serious fear, that there may be more out there. president trump called the
attempted attacks despicable, even as critic noted the intended targets were frequent objects of his contempt. i ll talk about the breaking new
but he knew he was in the bathroom and he was able to get out of the building, again, because these exit doors were working well. i can t tell you how thankful i am just to do that one task homeland security told us to do. because in the past you couldn t push through the exit doors? they weren t easily opened. they had safeties on them so they couldn t open either way. but now he was able to get out. i mean, he could be alive because of this. where were you when you found out this had occurred? i was heading up to the service. i m there every i was there last night for service. i go up there around 10:00 and in the morning and one of the vice presidents that i work with on facilities now that i stepped down, he called. he worked for city emergency management. and he said he just got word there s an active shooter at
tree of life. go up there and see if this is true. i tried to get up. i only live a block away from the synagogue. i tried to get up shady avenue and was