Welcome to another episode of Lurie Breaks It Down, a podcast where we dig deeply to connect the dots on the issues that shape our world.

I'm Lurie Daniel Favors, author, activist, attorney, and the host of the Lurie Daniel Favors show on Sirius XM's Urban View, Channel 126. If you like what you're about to hear, go ahead and give us five stars and then tell everybody that you know. And if you don't like it, just, child, keep it to yourself and pray our strength. Okay? Thank you so much.

Also, don't forget to check out my YouTube page, Lurie Daniel Favor's Media, where you should subscribe, like, and share, because then you'll get notified when I post videos from my show, which I do just about every single day and when I go live with my YouTube audience. All right, good people. So today is Tuesday, October the 28th. Lots of news to get into

today. We're going to start in the Caribbean, specifically in an island that I have a lot of love

and affection for. It is my mother's homeland. It is the island of Jamaica, which right about now

is getting its ass handed to it by Hurricane Melissa. There was some extreme intensification of this storm,

which strengthened to a category five overnight. Wind speeds are up to 175 miles per hour

as of the time of this recording. And according to the report, that makes Melissa the strongest

storm on the planet this year. CNN is reporting that conditions were

worsening earlier this morning and the outer bands were already lashing Jamaica with tropical

forest winds as of, say, 9 o'clock this morning. And hurricane conditions are going to essentially

hit and do whatever they're going to do to the island by early afternoon today. So by the time

you all are hearing this in the podcast land, the island nation will have taken a direct hit the first time

they have taken a direct hit from a hurricane in over a decade. They have never taken a direct hit

from a category five hurricane. And the UN is describing this as the storm of the century. They have

enforced mandatory evacuations. I got

family who we were speaking with last night via other family members who are here. And essentially,

one of my family members is like six weeks from the, or not six weeks, six blocks from the ocean.

And they are, we're at the time of our last conversation as a family unit waiting for the buses

to take them to higher elevation the storm surge from this storm is expected to be maybe

10 between 10 and 15 feet and that will be taking place at some time later today between today and

tomorrow before the storm makes its way on to Cuba, where it is expected to decrease in

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