Daily Briefing: A frightening forecast

With ferocious 130-mph winds, Hurricane Helene is expected to make landfall late Thursday in Florida as a devastating, Category 4 storm. A federal indictment against New York City Mayor Eric Adams remains sealed. Ukraine's leader is in Washington on Thursday to discuss U.S. support for its defense against Russia.

🙋🏼‍♀️ I'm Nicole Fallert , Daily Briefing author. Smell that? A strange odor has made its way across southwest Washington state .

Helene now projected as Category 4 hurricane

Hurricane Helene, now barreling toward a landfall on the Florida Gulf Coast Thursday, will continue to increase in wind speed over the next couple of days. As it gains power, it will also increase in categories on the official hurricane wind scale, which goes from 1 to 5.

Helene's true toll will depend on where it makes landfall, and how its other effects like flooding, storm surge and tornadoes unfold. But its wind speed and category at landfall will especially affect power outages and structural damage.

• Why Helene's hurricane category matters: If it did hit at Cat 4 power, the storm by definition would be be expected to leave a trail of "catastrophic" damage.
• A frightening forecast: Helene's projected impact is so vast, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration took the rare step of telling news organizations to emphasize how much damage the hurricane figures to cause in inland locations well beyond the Florida Gulf Coast.
• See the projected path : The forecast of Helene's rapid intensification from a potential tropical cyclone to an aggressive hurricane appeared to be the fastest progression ever predicted for a depression by the National Hurricane Center.

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📰 Get local coverage: Our USA TODAY Network journalists are on the ground covering Helene in Fort Myers , Naples , Sarasota and Tallahassee.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams indicted

An indictment against New York City Mayor Eric Adams is likely to be unsealed Thursday when Adams may appear in court. Adams faces federal criminal charges, according to multiple reports, after authorities raided the homes of his top aides and confidants earlier this month in what appeared to be part of a major corruption investigation in the Big Apple. In a video statement released late Wednesday, Adams, a former police captain who won the mayoral election nearly three years ago to become the city's second Black mayor, called the charges "entirely false." Read more

More news to know now

• Dispatch logs detail a chaotic scene at an Ohio railcar chemical leak.
• Alan Eugene Miller will be the second U.S. inmate executed with nitrogen gas on Thursday .
• Will Trump have to pay his huge civil fraud judgment ?
• Nearly half of Asian Americans were victims of a hate act in 2023 .
• First-time use of a controversial Swiss suicide capsule leads to multiple arrests .

What's the weather today? Check your local forecast here .

Long-range missiles could be either a silver bullet or a powder keg for Ukraine

The stakes couldn’t be much higher: A decision allowing Ukraine to strike deep inside Russia with U.S-guided weapons appears imminent as Volodymyr Zelenskyy presses western allies for permission this week at the United Nations General Assembly. Ukraine wants to destroy Russian bases that have launched devastating airstrikes on residential neighborhoods and critical infrastructure, while Russian President Vladimir Putin warns that Western-backed strikes in Russia’s heartland will pull NATO countries into the war. Read more

Amid a rape kit backlog, a detective follows new DNA evidence

Untested rape kits have piled up in evidence rooms and storage sheds across the country. Almost nobody thought it was a problem – until an assistant prosecutor walked into a Detroit warehouse in 2009. Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy, who had been raped as a law student, was outraged by her assistant's discovery: More than 11,000 untested rape kits, which had languished in that warehouse for years. Click here to read about the trial the discovery led to in an exclusive USA TODAY series, UNTESTED.

👉 Keep reading the UNTESTED series: Chapter 2, The Chase . | Chapter 3, The Trial . | About this story . | 8 lessons learned .

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WNBA speaks out against racist fan behavior

Some of Caitlin Clark's fans are making it impossible for the 143 women of the WNBA to just play basketball. Fans have used racial and misogynistic slurs in messages to league players, while others have mocked the (almost exclusively) Black players with stiletto nails. The WNBA released a strong statement Wednesday night following the Connecticut Sun's 87-81 win over the Indiana Fever ended Clark's postseason run. The league said in the social media post it is monitoring threats to players and will involve law enforcement if necessary. But was it too late? With Clark out of the playoffs, and out of the spotlight, toxic behavior from her fanbase will disappear. Read more

Photo of the day: A kalaediscope of beauty

Paris Fashion Week 2025 is bringing the brightest stars and the crème de la crème of fashion to the City of Light through Oct. 1.

Nicole Fallert is a newsletter writer at USA TODAY, sign up for the email here . Want to send Nicole a note? Shoot her an email at NFallert@usatoday.com .

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Daily Briefing: A frightening forecast