Unprecedented Outpouring

Category 4 Hurricane Hits Texas: The word “unprecedented” has been overused this year; nevertheless, it applies in this case. Hurricane Harvey came ashore Friday night at Rockport (near Corpus Christi on the Gulf Coast of Texas), the first Category 4 hurricane to hit Texas since Carla in 1961, and the first to hit the US since 2005.Since then it has travelled only 55 miles, so slow moving that the rain it continues to dump is being measured in feet. Harvey is a tropical storm right now, but over the next few days, it is expected to head back into the Gulf of Mexico, picking up moisture before moving back into Houston again, meaning at least four more days of rain. Up to 25 inches of rain could fall through Friday over the upper Texas coast, while “isolated storm totals may reach 50 inches over the upper Texas coast, including the Houston Galveston metropolitan area.“

Up north about 240 miles in Dallas, three shelters were opened over the first part of the weekend. Now, the main convention center in the city plans to open by Tuesday to serve as a mega-shelter for another anticipated 5,000 evacuees. In Dickenson, Texas, not far from Galveston Bay, people hacked holes in their roof from the inside to escape. On some streets the water was 10-15 feet deep; the only way in or out was by boat. 911 is overwhelmed and cannot respond to all calls. All over the southern part of Texas, people who had stayed behind had to be rescued as flood waters covered streets, then cars, and finally, houses. Many people arrived at emergency shelters in the backs of open air dump trucks, the only vehicles big enough and high enough to navigate through the streets. Airports are closed, schools are closed, and grocery store shelves stripped bare. President Trump will travel to Texas on Tuesday, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said.

Massive Peace March in Barcelona: 500,000 people took to Barcelona’s streets Saturday to peacefully protest the terrorist attacks that claimed sixteen victims in Spain’s Catalonia region eleven days ago. The protesters carried signs saying “No to Islamophobia” and shouted “I am not afraid” as they marched alongside members of the city’s Muslim community, some of whom  held signs reading “I am Muslim. I am not a terrorist,” and “Islam is peace.” Police and paramedics were handed roses to thank them for their response to the attacks. Spanish King Felipe VI and Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy participated in the protest meant to demonstrate Barcelona’s unity and cultural diversity.

Marchers also laid roses at Las Ramblas to remember the 14 people who died there and the 100 who were injured when a driver, believed to be 22-year-old Moroccan national Younes Abouyaaqoub, slammed his van into crowds. Abouyaaqoub fled on foot and is accused of killing a 15th victim when hijacking the man’s vehicle to escape. The 16th victim died hours later in a second vehicular attack in the coastal town of Cambrils. Police killed all five of those assailants at the scene. Abouyaaqoub was killed in a police operation last Monday. All six attackers had been wearing fake suicide belts.

Kenyan Opposition Leader to Challenge Election Results at Supreme Court:Kenya’s opposition leader Raila Odinga will challenge the results of the presidential election at the Supreme Court, standing by his claims that the electoral system was hacked and the results rigged in President Uhuru Kenyatta’s favor. More than 15 million Kenyans voted in the August 8 election, in which incumbent president Uhuru Kenyatta won by 54 percent to Odinga’s 44.7 percent. As the results started arriving on the night of the vote, Raila and his NASA coalition held a press conference at 2 am in the morning calling the results “fake” and “fictitious.” The electoral commission denies their systems were hacked, and both local and international observers stated the voting process was conducted fairly, with no signs of manipulation or fraud. After Kenyatta was declared the winner on August 11, protests broke out in opposition strongholds in Nairobi and Kisumu. At least 28 people were killed and dozens more wounded.

President Trump Pardons Sheriff Joe Arpaio: Last Friday night, in the midst of an impending hurricane, President Trump pardoned former Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio. According to Trump, “Sheriff Joe was convicted for doing his job.” And just like that, once again we’ve all joined Alice in falling down the rabbit hole into Wonderland, where up is down and down is up. The truth is, Sheriff Joe was convicted of criminal contempt of court for doing the exact opposite of his job as a sworn law enforcement officer.      

The decision capped the latest chapter in a decades-long racial profiling case beginning with allegations that Arpaio’s deputies were targeting Latinos during their immigration enforcement operations in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Known as the “tip of the spear” for the state’s hard-line immigration efforts, Arpaio’s crackdowns included “pretextual” traffic stops to detain those in the country illegally, and patrol sweeps that zeroed in on Hispanic neighborhoods. Civil-rights advocates brought suit and eventually Arpaio was found guilty by a federal judge of a broad range of constitutional violations. Afterward, a second federal judge found Arpaio guilty of willfully violating court-ordered directives to bring his policies in line with statutory and constitutional mandates.

• Britain pushes for talks about the future, EU wants divorce first (Reuters)
• Iraqi forces retake most of Tal Afar from Islamic State (Reuters)
• Colombia’s Farc begins first congress after peace deal (BBC)
• Hunger eats away at Venezuela’s soul as its people struggle to survive. The Maduro regime denies its once oil-rich country is in crisis. But on the streets the desperation cannot be hidden (The Guardian)
• Kenya plastic bag ban comes into force after years of delays (BBC)
• China and India Agree to Ease Tensions in Border Dispute (NYT)
• Local Leaders Say 1,000 People Died in the Mudslides in Sierra Leone (TIME)
• ‘The president speaks for himself’: Rex Tillerson distances himself from Trump. Asked if Charlottesville remarks made it harder to represent the US, the secretary of state appears to suggest president does not represent American values (The Guardian)
• Uber picks Expedia’s Dara Khosrowshahi as new CEO: sources (Reuters)

Start of the Week Reads:

• Syrian Dancer Flying, Looking for Freedom (Landing in Amsterdam) (NYT)
• Sexy females help ‘Plain Jane’ moths snag their mates (Science)
• Ghana’s first radio telescope is the start of a continent-wide project to capture the complete African sky (Quartz)
• The Cult of the Costco Surfboard (The New Yorker)
• Psychology of Lululemon: Does expensive athletic wear actually incline us to work out? “Enclothed cognition” proposes that the clothes you wear directly affect how we think and what we do (The Atlantic)
• China’s Wolf Warriors 2 in ‘war-ravaged Africa’ gives the White Savior complex a whole new meaning. Speaking of the White Savior complex, here’s more on Louise Linton, wife of US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, who went on a poor-shaming Instagram rant last week, and her contribution to the genre–what Quartz calls the “White Savior Barbie” complex (Quartz)
• Interpol: Who polices the world’s police? (DW)
• The Loneliness of Recep Tayyip Erdogan: His lifelong resentment of secularists has decimated Turkish democracy (The Atlantic)
• Kenya’s newest tech hubs are sprouting outside its “Silicon Savannah” in Nairobi (Quartz)
• The preening young French president’s beauty budget will scandalise those on the minimum wage–and do nothing for his collapsing ratings (The Guardian)
• W.E.B. DuBois on Robert E. Lee (Civil War Memory)
• A Racist World, Described by Those Who Knew It (NYT)
• Have you been paying the hair-and-makeup tax? According to a 2016 survey, the average British woman spends 38 minutes putting on her face every day. Over the course of a week, that is just less than four and a half hours; in one year, that makes nearly 10 days (and nights). Over a makeup-wearing lifetime (say, 75 years), that is two years. Two whole years. Just think how many glass ceilings we might have smashed if we hadn’t been so busy with blusher (The Guardian)
• Silicon Valley Isn’t Special–tech has plenty of reasons to pretend it’s an industry of upstarts. That facade is crumbling (Bloomberg)
• Why Can’t Dogs Eat Chocolate? (Mental Floss)

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