Tropical Storm Fay Threatens Florida; Russian Power Play
KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: Well, here comes Fay. The center of the storm is still hours from South Florida, but its outer bands are battering the Lower Keys. The Upper and Middle Keys are bracing for the same and all of Florida is under a state of emergency. Now, earlier, the tropical storm swamped Haiti and the Dominican Republic. At least eight people are dead. And it caused far less destruction in Cuba, by the way, brushing over the western edge. CNN's John Zarrella and his crew are getting pretty good and soaked in Key West. How you doing, John?</s>JOHN ZARRELLA, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Look at this, Kyra. An hour ago, we were just getting hammered here in Key West with sustained tropical-storm-force winds, gusty rain. We're in the center of circulation, so it looks as if the center of Tropical Storm Fay is actually over Key West right now, because it is just about dead calm here. The trees are hardly blowing over here. They're not moving at all. The surf has completely died down. So, again, it looks as if Tropical Storm Fay, the center of that circulation has made it right up to where we are here in Key West now. I'm sure that Jacqui Jeras, the weather folks probably keeping an eye on exactly where it is. But I have been through a lot of these, and I can't imagine it being anything else. Don't know what we can expect on the other side of the storm. I'm sure the weather will kick up a little bit. Again, we understand now that, at least up in the middle part of the Keys, there's power lines that are down. There may be some minor damage possibly from a tornado. There's also standing water all through the Lower Keys. We're going to try and get out and get some of those pictures in a little while here. But, right now, again, it looks, Kyra, as if we are, not an eye -- it doesn't have an eye -- but certainly the center of circulation of Tropical Storm Fay -- Kyra.</s>PHILLIPS: All right, we will keep tracking it. And, of course, we are going to talk to Chad Myers more about it, too. John, thanks so much. A lot of questions about Fay. Will it become a hurricane? Where is it headed exactly? What do you think, Chad Myers?</s>CHAD MYERS, CNN METEOROLOGIST: I don't think these keys are going to slow Fay down at all, Kyra. We always talk about a hurricane approaching land, and it dies off. This isn't going to happen, because the keys are only about 10 feet tall. So, right now, we have the eye, the center of the circulation, very close to Key West, probably up toward Shark Key, if I had kind of my druthers on this. But you have the onshore flow all the way up the oceanside, all the way down from</s>PHILLIPS: Well, that happened even this morning. About 8:30, Reynolds Wolf came in and gave us a big scenario, telling us the whole scenario. And then he said, but, bottom line, we really don't know if that's what's going to happen.</s>MYERS: That's correct. If question had weather spotters that were sending up weather balloons every 50 miles in the ocean, we wouldn't have this unknown. We would know exactly where it's going. We don't have people out there telling us what's going on. We don't have weather watchers. We don't have weather balloons going up and down all day long telling us what those winds are like. It's an ocean. Nobody lives there, so we don't have the information.</s>PHILLIPS: We need a direct line to Mother Nature is what we need.</s>MYERS: Correct. If I had this hurricane over Georgia right now, I could tell you where it's going because I have all kinds of weather balloons around. I have people telling me what direction the winds are coming from. In the middle of the ocean, they don't have those people.</s>PHILLIPS: Chad, thanks. Well, with Tropical Storm Fay approaching Florida, have we learned any lessons from Hurricane Katrina? Lieutenant General Russel Honore, who helped the Gulf Coast get past the horrors of Katrina, will offer some helpful hints just ahead. Back from vacation and back on the trail, Barack Obama is talking economic and energy issues in New Mexico today. On his schedule this hour, a town hall meeting in Albuquerque. And military issues top John McCain's agenda today. The Republican candidate spoke to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention this morning in Orlando, Florida. He said the policies he supports are helping make Iraq more secure. And in a couple of hours, he's going to hold a fund-raiser right here in Atlanta. The faith forum both candidates took part in over the weekend is still causing a buzz. CNN's Rick Sanchez spoke with the man who asked the questions, Reverend Rick Warren. We're going to hear what he had to say later in the hour. And tributes in Little Rock today for the state Democratic Party chairman shot down on the job. The list of Bill Gwatney's mourners reads like a who's who in Arkansas politics, including Bill and Hillary Clinton. Gwatney was killed in a shooting last week at the Democratic Party headquarters. That gunman was later killed after a chase by police. The officers say that they had few clues as to a motive for the shooting. Russia says that today it's begun a withdrawal from Georgia, but hours later there's no indication that Moscow is keeping its word. CNN's Michael Ware is among the Georgia troops and the desperate Georgian civilians, actually, in the occupied town of Gori.</s>MICHAEL WARE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: It's already Monday afternoon on Georgia's eastern front. And the nominated deadline for Russia's troop withdrawal has passed. Yet there's no sign here on the eastern front of the Russian soldiers pulling back. Indeed, this checkpoint is the furthest line of Russian advance, 15 kilometers east of the Georgian city of Gori. Indeed, in some of the Russian positions in the surrounding hills, there are signs of the soldiers digging trenches and camouflaging their tanks and armor with fresh-cut foliage, Russian withdrawal from Georgia or not, according to the cease-fire. Standing here as dusk approaches in the Georgian city of Gori, still under Russian occupation, hundreds and Russian vehicles and their armors vehicles surround me. In this town square, the birthplace of Joseph Stalin, a statue looms high above. At the town hall, desperate Georgians are registering for food rations as the Russian troops still maintain patrols and checkpoints around this city. While most of the city appears to remain intact, the destruction wrought by this war can still be seen in buildings brought down like this one, that, according to locals, was destroyed by a Russian rocket. The scars of the war are also seen in the eyes and the jittery hands of the few Georgians who still remain. Gori is an almost vacant city, shops, homes and apartments all shuttered. It is a town of the old and the infirm and but a few sparse families. Russian checkpoints still man the streets, like this one over here. The troops are telling us that they have orders to withdraw at dusk. Everyone now waits until nightfall to see whether those orders are carried through. Russian armor still firmly inside Georgia as the last light begins to fade, an act of defiance or a precursor to departure? By the way, both sides to this conflict are reluctant to give ground. Michael Ware, CNN, on the road to Tbilisi.</s>PHILLIPS: And a changing of the guard in Pakistan. Who's going to replace U.S. ally Pervez Musharraf in a volatile front in the war on terror? We will talk about it.</s>PHILLIPS: Sniffing out cell phones, the newest tool to stop phones from being smuggled into state prisons.