Condo Collapse: Three bodies were found, bringing the total of dead to four in the Florida condominium collapse while the number of people missing or unaccounted for  jumped from 99 to 159.

  A former New York woman named Stacie Fang, whose 15-year-old son Jonah was rescued from the rubble, is the first of the dead to be identified. 

  Urban rescue teams are picking their way through unstable rubble and exploring voids beneath slabs of concrete. They are using search dogs, cameras, and listening devices. The rescuers say sometimes they hear sounds, but can’t tell if they are made by humans.

  Smoke from fires drifts over the wreckage as firefighters pour on water.

  It will be a while before there’s an official determination of why the building collapsed, but obviously it’s some kind of structural failure.

  The NY Times reports that three years ago a consultant found alarming evidence of “major structural damage” to the concrete slab below the pool deck and “abundant” cracking and crumbling of the columns, beams, and walls of the parking garage under the building.

  A woman lost in the collapse told her son a day earlier that the building was making loud creaking noises. “She just told me she had woken up around 3, 4 in the morning and had heard like some creaking noises,” her son, Pablo Rodriguez, told CNN.  “They were loud enough to wake her.”

Directly to Jail: Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was sentenced to 22 ½  years in prison for the murder of George Floyd, the infamously videotaped incident that set off protests across the country and inspired the “Black Lives Matter” movement.

  Chauvin had held Floyd to the ground with his knee on the man’s neck for 9 ½ minutes until he died. Prosecutors had asked for 30 years.

  Speaking to the court before his sentencing, Chauvin offered his condolences to Floyd’s family but did not apologize for killing him. “I do want to give my condolences to the Floyd family,” Chauvin said. He said he was unable to speak further because of other  litigation in the case.

  Chauvin also said cryptically, “There’s going to be some other information in the future that would be of interest. And I hope things will give you some, some peace of mind. Thank you.”

  Chauvin’s mother spoke, as did Floyd’s 7-year-old daughter Gianna, nephew, and brothers. Delivering a victim impact statement, Floyd’s brother Terrence asked, “Why, what were you thinking, what was going through your head?”

  Floyd’s family and lawyers had called for the court to give Chauvin the maximum sentence. He could have gotten 40 years. “This is not the typical second-degree murder,” prosecutor Matthew Frank said, calling for 360 months. “This is egregious.”

Voting Rights: The Justice Department has sued the State of Georgia to overturn its new voting law, charging that its restrictions are intended to limit voting by non-white citizens.

  “The rights of all eligible citizens to vote are the central pillars of our democracy,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a news conference at the Justice Department. “They are the rights from which all other rights ultimately flow.”

  The Georgia law installed new restrictions to voting access and dramatically altered the balance of power over election administration. The law followed an election in which the reliably red state of Georgia voted for a Democrat for President and installed two Democratic US senators. 

  Claiming victimhood, Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia said, “Now, they are weaponizing the US Department of Justice to carry out their far-left agenda that undermines election integrity and empowers federal government overreach in our democracy.”

Borderline Politics: Vice President Kamala Harris said that she had always intended to visit the U.S.-Mexico border, responding to criticism by Republicans who said should have gone there sooner as part of her assignment to handle illegal immigration. She visited yesterday.

  It’s one of those entirely made up Washington controversies, as if there’s anything Harris could do at the border except get her picture taken.

  “It was always the plan to come here,” Ms. Harris told reporters shortly after landing in Texas. “And I think we’re going to have a good and productive day.”

  She said she visited young girls in a detention center, “They were asking me questions: ‘How do you become the first woman vice president?’” Harris said. “It also reminds me of the fact that this issue cannot be reduced to a political issue. We’re talking about children, we’re talking about families, we are talking about suffering.”

The Outer Limits: The government has no explanation for 143 reports of “Unidentified Flying Objects” reported since 2004 and doesn’t rule out the possibility of alien spacecraft, according to a report released yesterday.

  The report acknowledges that in some of the sightings the UFOs demonstrated technological capabilities unknown to the United States. Some objects moved without evident propulsion or with rapid acceleration that is believed to be beyond the capabilities of any major world powers.

  On the other hand, there’s no affirmative evidence that whatever was seen was a craft from outer space.

The Spin Rack: Former Beatle Ringo Starr dropped his legal case against the makers of a sex toy called a Ring O in which he claimed the name is too similar to his own. He reached an out of court settlement. — A 2.6 magnitude earthquake shook the ground in Woodlawn outside Baltimore. — Chinese researchers have unveiled the discovery of what they say is a previously unknown species of human that lived 146,000 years ago in East Asia. The skull has enormous ridges of bone under what would have been the eyebrows. 

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