announcer: from nbc news, this is today with matt lauer and savannah guthrie. live from studio 1-a in rockefeller plaza. and good morning. welcome to today on a monday morning. i m matt lauer. i m savannah guthrie alongside tamron hall who is in for natalie this morning. we ll get to today s top story, the deadly mall attack in kenya where militants are still holding an unknown number of hostages in a two-day standoff that has already left at least 68 people dead. we go right to nbc s ron allen in nairobi with the lat est. good morning, ron. what can you tell us? good morning, savannah. we re behind security from the mall where you can see smoke billowing out of the building. the morning began with five or six loud explosions and sustained gun fire that went on for some time, and also firefight firefights spilling out outside of the mall, and you can see the kenyan soldiers firing at places around the mall. unknown at this point is the fate of the hostages and the
speaking on capitol hill more than 18 hours after he started. cruz and a handful of other republican senators are speaking out against a new health care law. we are going to have much more on this and follow the story throughout the day. thanks for being with us. that s what is happening today. we ll be back in half an hour for a local news update. er: from nbc news, this is today with matt lauer, and savannah guthrie. live from studio 1-a in rockefeller plaza. and good morning. welcome to today on a wednesday. it s 7:00 on the west coast. i m matt lauer. good morning. i m savannah guthrie along side al roker and natalie morales. that s a good party trick for bono. not that he needs one since he s a rock star. former president clinton commented it must be easy to make fun of me. it s a good one. no question about it. spot on. meanwhile, look at what s happening at washington, d.c. senator ted cruz still going at this hour. this is an effort to defeat funding f
very fresh and clean this morning. exactly right. let s get to the top story. kelly o donnell is in washington. she has the latest on this. kelly, good morning. good morning, savannah. it s been going and going and going all afternoon through the night and here again this morning. it is a talk-a-thon the official term of washington today as senator ted cruz has railed against the law known as obamacare trying to persuade some of his republican colleagues and many of them were not happy with this tactic. reporter: a late night endurance test. this is life and death. reporter: ted cruz began railing against the healthcare law at 2:41 p.m. eastern calling out fellow republican senators that say they don t have the votes to block it. if you vote to give that power to harry reid to fund obamacare then you are responsible for it being funded. reporter: earlier it was bedtime reading dr. seuss to his doctors who were watching on c-span. i do so like green eggs an
delivers a big surprise. no, not a royal baby but to members of the animal kingdom, twin pandas make their debut at atlanta zoo today, tuesday july 16th, 2013. good morning. welcome to a special edition of today on a tuesday morning. i m savannah guthrie in los angeles. matt and al back in new york. it was so hot there i had to get out of town. you did the right thing savannah. you really did. i m here with al roker and we re having a heat wave. it s official. three days in a row. although it s not so bad out here right now, 83 degrees, it s going to get nasty this afternoon. that s right. the heat right now we re in the shade but once the sun gets up everybody is going to start baking. humidity levels, and this extends not just to here in the northeast, all the way to michigan and as far west as the pacific northwest. i was driving into new york yesterday and the car, you know the thermometer that tells you how bad it was outside said it was 103 on the streets of
destroyed in the flesh. destroyed? try again. she got out and helped investigators uncover the truth about this powerful prophet. this is a horrible thing to listen to. a sinister secret caught on tape. it will just rock you. for too long he had eluded the law. could she finally bring him down? i looked in his grainy eyes as if to say we meet again. i m lester holt, and this is dateline. tonight unbreakable. here s keith morrison. it s a long way home, back to that place tucked away beneath the towering red cliffs between utah and arizona. the place she lived in that other lifetime. it s tough to be back. it brings up a lot of things that are still really raw. then when she was known as sister becky and wore those colorful prairie dresses and piled up her long and braided hair and shared a husband with more than 60 other women. it was here in this place they call short creek, or just the creek, here where it happened, on the dark side of the real big lov