maybe you want to keep those seat belts fastened. the lead starts right now. major questions raised today about your safety in the air as senators grill the faa why the agency cannot be so sure there will not be more runway near misses and grounded flights. plus, nikki haley officially kicks off her 2024 campaign, bringing a pledge to bring in a new generation of leadership. but how long can she maintain this delicate dance, throwing subtle shade at trump while not alienating his supporters? and hayashi, you know, that first flying object shot down, the one that was deemed a chinese spy balloon. u.s. intel says maybe it wasn t supposed to be over the continental u.s. after all. welcome to the lead. i m jake tapper. we start with our politics lead and the airport chaos taking over capitol hill after the series of near collisions and the nationwide ground stop that led to thousands of delayed and canceled flights. the acting head of the federal aviation administration
conditions. we re tracking it. donald trump s 2024 campaign getting its first major gop challenger, former south carolina governor nikki haley, who served as u.n. ambassador under mr. trump, announcing she is running. how the former president is responding. the remarkable rescues in turkey. a 65-year-old found alive after more than 200 hours beneath the rubble as the earthquake toll nears 40,000. dramatic testimony in the alex murdaugh trial. what his slain wife s sister revealed about her conversation with murdaugh after the murders. and the perfect gift for your valentine. how to get a love song personalized. announcer: this is nbc nightly news with lester holt. good evening. there has been another sadly we can all finish the sentence. there has been another mass shooting. another place struggling to comprehend the kind of horror that happened elsewhere until it happened there last night. michigan state university in east lansing. three students are dead, fi
now i m being told that is actually a plane after the strike of a balloon and then the balloon then losing shape, going down. security analyst is back with us. juliette, maybe your eyeballs are more trained than mine. we can at least see, perhaps, with a tighter view it looked like that balloon was disintegrating, as we heard an eyewitness describe earlier. can you decipher what s going on here for me? i hear your doorbell. i m sorry. so you ve got the look, the f-22 or f-15, we don t know which ones yet, we ll get a debrief from the pentagon, from areas in the carolinas, the missile would have been launched from them. so what you re seeing on the bottom side is the airplane, what we re seeing now. what you saw was the airplane, not the balloon. and i don t know if we have images of the direct hit. so the balloon is now so this is the important thing for people to remember. the balloon is balloon and cargo. we want the cargo. it s ours now. sorry, chinese, it s ours now
type of significant intelligence collecting capability or what they might have been intended for. at this white house briefing, what you did hear from national security spokesman john kirby is there is clearly a shift into a robust, all-of-government approach to get more answers, not just to the three objects shot down over the course after a three-day period but what they re seeing in the skies. the widening of the apertures, it s at least one element of why we ve seen this more over the course of the past couple days. as you noted, victor, this is unprecedented in terms of u.s. fighters taking out things from over u.s. skies. this is john kirby s response. where we go from here, i think we just don t know right now in terms of whether they needs to be threshold changes as you put it. i think it s important to take a step back here. what the president did was ordered these actions with the safety and security of the american people foremost in his mind. there were very goo
president biden to shoot down another high altitude object. this one near lake huron. we ll have much more on cnn this morning starting at 6:00 a.m. eastern. i m paula reed. good night. captions by vitac www.vitac.com blng detroit s the city of champions. the whole world knows that detroit is the american city whose products have revolutionized our way of living. and only in michigan will you find the men and women whose talent made us the arsenal of democracy in wartime and the economic pacesetter in peacetime. this musical world felt the cool rain on my shoulder this beautiful world i felt the rain getting colder la la la la la la la la la la la la it s where nearly everything american and great came from, the things the whole world wanted made here, the heart, the soul, the beat of an industrial cultural superpower. a magnet for everyone with a deep future from eastern europe to the deep south. american dream, you came here. the