Grim reality looms as search for missing Texas flood victims continues | The Excerpt
On Saturday’s episode of The Excerpt podcast: Paste BN National Correspondent Rick Jervis reports on the shift to recovery in the wake of Texas floods. Plus, President Donald Trump visited the state Friday. Federal immigration agents and protesters clashed during a raid at a California cannabis farm. The State Department will lay off more than 1,300 people. Paste BN White House Correspondent Francesca Chambers speaks with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang days after the company reached a historic $4 trillion valuation. The FIFA Club World Cup Final sees Chelsea take on PSG Sunday in New Jersey.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Taylor Wilson:
Good morning. I'm Taylor Wilson and today is Saturday, July 12th, 2025. This is Paste BN's The Excerpt.
Today, the shift from rescue to recovery in Texas. Plus federal immigration agents and protesters clash during a raid at a California cannabis farm, and we hear from NVIDIA's CEO days after a historic market capitalization.
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There are still 160 people missing and at least 120 dead in the aftermath of last week's central Texas flooding. President Donald Trump visited the region yesterday.
President Trump:
I've never seen anything like it. I've seen a lot of bad ones. I've gone to a lot of hurricanes, a lot of tornadoes. I've never seen anything like this.
Taylor Wilson:
The President's visit to Texas also came amid criticism from Democrats and others who have alleged the president's cuts to the National Weather Service might've slowed the agency's weather forecast and flood alerts getting to residents on the morning of July 4th as heavy rain pushed floodwaters from the banks of the Guadalupe River. At one point Trump snapped at a reporter who asked about concerns with the community's flood alert system.
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Now a week after the flash floods, rescue has turned into recovery. I spoke with Paste BN national correspondent Rick Jervis for more from Texas. Hello again, Rick.
Rick Jervis:
Hey Taylor.
Taylor Wilson:
So let's just start with the latest from Texas where you are. County authorities say they haven't made a live rescue since the day of the flood. That was last week. Does that mean we're now fully in recovery mode?
Rick Jervis:
I think everybody pretty much agrees that now we're in full recovery mode. Rescue efforts have really tapered off and just talking to rescuers out there, there's very little optimism that they're going to find anybody alive at this point. So right now it's fully just basically recovery mode.
Taylor Wilson:
How do officials decide when to call off searches? I'm sure it's different case-to-case, but how are they making that decision in this case?
Rick Jervis:
I've been to a lot of disasters and it doesn't seem like there's ever a clear-cut order to go from rescue to recovery. I feel like it's more kind of organic, that there's people out there looking for folks and then it just becomes, well, let's just look along the same places, but now we're looking for victims and bodies.
Taylor Wilson:
Well, Rick, tell us about some of the folks you spoke with and what the day-to-day search work has been like in this week since the floods.
Rick Jervis:
A couple of days ago I actually went out with a search and recovery team. We were along Center Point, along the riverbank. And these are volunteers. These are folks from all over Texas, a couple from outside of Texas, and they just descended onto Kerr County as soon as it started happening to try to help. I actually went out with one team that was just basically scouring the riverbank of the Guadalupe River right there in Center Point. The riverbank was just choked with these piles of downed cypress trees, with debris, with parts of trailers, up-ended RVs. So there's all this debris around and these guys just go, they have these kind of mini flashlights and they're poking in to these crevices just looking for any sign of any person and it's really difficult to find anything out there.
One of the rescuers shared a photo with me that he took at a previous search and it was this Ford F-250 truck completely submerged under mud and rock, were only like a couple of tires sticking out. And this is a three-ton truck and he was telling me if this flood completely submerged this three-ton truck, you can only imagine what else is under there.
Taylor Wilson:
Yeah, I think it gives us a really decent idea of what the scope is that we're talking about here, Rick. Some of these victims unfortunately, are among countless people in the country who are presumed dead but never found months or even years after natural disasters. Who are some of the loved ones you spoke with who have gone through this previously?
Rick Jervis:
We went back and spoke to some of the family members of victims of the Western North Carolina flooding, which happened last year after Hurricane Helene. It was [inaudible 00:04:00] a Ukrainian family that lost a number of family members during the actual flood, but two of them, a thirteen-year-old boy and an older grandmother, they were never found, and so this family has struggled with this for the past 10 months and they told us that it's just incredibly difficult. They basically cremated the family members who were found, but these two other ones, just the fact that they're still out there, it just weighs on them so much and so they basically feel like they'll never get closure.
Taylor Wilson:
So awful. Rick. You mentioned DNA technology here in this piece. What's the role of DNA technology in identifying victims and how has this tech evolved in recent years?
Rick Jervis:
Authorities are really leaning in on this DNA technology quite a bit. Right now, as of Wednesdays, at least 15 adults and 13 children remain unidentified in Kerr County alone. And so these Texas Rangers, which are this investigative body out here, are collecting DNA from both family members and the actual deceased and then flying that up to University of North Texas near Dallas for analysis and they're trying to figure out who these people are because some of the people who have been collected, some of the victims, are not recognizable anymore.
I talked to a couple of experts who told us that DNA technology has really evolved over the years and it's actually a lot better now. It used to take weeks if not months, to send it to a lab and try to get results, and these days they're basically just like getting it back within days. And so we talked to another expert who talked to us about Hurricane Katrina. It's 20 years this year actually, that Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, killed more than 1800 people. It's 20 years later and there are still 30 people who have not been identified in that disaster. So it's a very challenging, taxing task.
Taylor Wilson:
What's next for this part of Texas and these communities that have lost so many and so much?
Rick Jervis:
So there's a lot of volunteers out there that are still going out there scouring river banks, trying to find any sign of some of these victims. I think that that's actually going to continue to go on for the foreseeable future. And meanwhile, there are folks coming back to their homes, coming back to their actual communities, that were just destroyed and trying to rebuild.
Taylor Wilson:
Rick Jervis is a national correspondent with Paste BN. I appreciate you, Rick.
Rick Jervis:
Thank you, Taylor.
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Taylor Wilson:
Immigration agents raided a cannabis operation and arrested hundreds of workers on Thursday in California. Teresa Romero, President of United Farm Workers said in a statement that some workers were critically injured during the raid and that others, including U.S. citizens, remain unaccounted for. Later the union reported one person had died, but the information was not confirmed. A man was reported in critical condition at a local hospital and a family member who organized a GoFundMe campaign said doctors did not expect him to survive. The farm worker reportedly fell 30 feet during the raid. Migrant activists facing off with federal agents on Thursday came amid the Trump administration's latest escalation of its campaign for mass deportations of immigrants in the U.S. illegally. The administration has made conflicting statements about whether immigration agents will target the farm labor workforce, about half of which is unauthorized to work in the U.S. according to government estimates. The Glasshouse Farm's greenhouse complex is one of the largest licensed cannabis farms in California with more than 5 million square feet of growing space.
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The State Department will lay off more than 1300 people as part of a broad restructuring plan. That's according to Reuters, which said it had seen an internal notice and Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, confirmed to reporters this week that the department was proceeding with the cuts. Rubio first announced plans to reorganize the department in April, but the plans were put on hold when a federal judge blocked them in May. On July 8th, the Supreme Court reversed that block, essentially allowing layoff plans to move forward at multiple federal agencies, while the lower court continues hearing the case over whether the layoffs are legal.
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Nvidia grabbed a market capitalization of $4 trillion this week, making it the first public company in the world to do so. Paste BN White House correspondent Francesca Chambers sat down with the company's CEO, Jensen Huang, to talk about the valuation and more.
Francesca Chambers:
Thanks for sitting down with us today. You were at the White House meeting with President Trump. What did you tell him? Why were you there?
Jensen Huang:
He was super happy and proud Nvidia became the most valuable company in the world. We spoke about American technology leadership and how the computer industry, which is a national treasure of America, how it can continue to grow and can continue to lead the world. We spoke about re-industrialization, re-manufacturing and building things and craft and skilled craft labor into America again. And updated them on the work that we're doing in this area building. We're manufacturing chips here in the United States, we're building these AI supercomputers in Texas and packaging them in Arizona, and so we're doing a whole bunch of stuff here.
Francesca Chambers:
As far as manufacturing goes you talked about the re-industrialization of America. Do you think that America needs to ramp up its manufacturing of chips?
Jensen Huang:
Yeah, absolutely. President Trump's vision to manufacture in the United States, it's great for our industries. It's great for our society. We've lost a lot of manufacturing capability and skills, which is really great for skilled craft and people that work with their hands and build things. We want to celebrate that. We want to bring that back to United States. It's very important to national security, industrial security, supply chain resilience. So all together, whether it's for economic benefits or national security benefits or social benefits, I think it's going to play a huge role.
Francesca Chambers:
Do you think that businesses like yours need to swallow some of the pain that would come from a semiconductor tariff in order to increase that manufacturing that you were talking about?
Jensen Huang:
There were tariffs and taxes and all kinds of rules and regulations before I started Nvidia and they were fine. And every single year there were rules and taxes and tariffs and policies and regulations and we survived. Nobody likes disruptions and no one likes abrupt changes, but President Trump will settle these deals and countries will reorganize and resettle and we'll work through it and whatever it turns out to be, we'll make the best of it.
Francesca Chambers:
Do you think that the arrival of powerful AI apps like DeepSeq, which uses fewer microchips, do you think that that will reduce demand for your chips?
Jensen Huang:
Deepseq is an amazing miracle. It was a breakthrough on so many different levels. It is the world's first open, reasoning model. It's a model that breaks a problem down step by step, thinks about each one, each step, and solves problems that it otherwise have never been taught to do like we do, like we reason. It could read text or give it PDFs and research papers or give it a YouTube to go watch, listen to podcasts. Because it's a reasoning model, it has to be very fast. It has to use as few chips as possible. Now, the reason why that's important is because when you're thinking, you think for a long time. You don't just run DeepSeq one time, you run DeepSeq over and over and over again.
DeepSeq was built on NVIDIA and now everybody recognizes what a good fortune that was. It highlights that we want every AI researcher in the world to be building on the American tech stack, and this is one of the conversations that I had with the administration, recognizing that in order for the American tech stack to remain the world's standard, we have to make sure that every AI researcher in the world is building on top of the American tech stack.
Francesca Chambers:
Thank you so much. We really appreciate it.
Jensen Huang:
Thank you, Francesca.
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Taylor Wilson:
The FIFA Club World Cup final will be held tomorrow at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, outside New York City. English side, Chelsea, and French Club PSG will battle it out after their respective runs to the final. You can follow along with Paste BN Sports.
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And coming up tomorrow morning, Paste BN Sports Columnist Christine Brennan was watching a game between Iowa and Indiana in 2023 when she saw Caitlin Clark heave a buzzer beater to win it. That's when she knew Clark was different.
Christine Brennan:
I think it helped me understand how fascinating she was and that she's really, yes, a basketball player, but really an entertainer. She's the high wire act, and I think once you understand that, you can begin to understand the fascination that the nation has with her.
Taylor Wilson:
Christine's new book, On her Game: Caitlin Clark and the Revolution in Women's Sports, tells the story of Clark's meteoric rise and its impact on sports. Hear my conversation with her right here tomorrow morning beginning at 5:00 AM Eastern Time.
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And thanks for listening to The Excerpt. You can get the podcast wherever you get your audio, and as always, you can email us at podcasts@usatoday.com. I'll be back tomorrow with more of The Excerpt from Paste BN.