Kenya Election Result Is Thrown Out

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Many Kenyans and observers were anxious about how the country would react to the ruling. In addition to the violence last month, previous elections in 2007 and 2013, which the opposition also asserted were rigged, led to clashes that left hundreds dead.

“My concern is that no matter what the court says, the losers will react violently,” John Campbell, a senior fellow for Africa policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former ambassador to Nigeria, said before the ruling.

Mr. Campbell expressed concern that “neither Kenyatta nor Odinga prepared their followers for the possibility of losing.”

Both sides went to court holding strident positions: The opposition said it had evidence of “monstrous fraud and forgery” and the incumbent said it was “bullish and ready” to strike down its rival’s claims.

The seven judges sitting on the Supreme Court, which has bolstered its independence in recent years but is still viewed by many Kenyans as being under government influence, were facing pressure to set out arguments that would persuade people on both sides, said Dickson Omondi, a country director for the National Democratic Institute, a nonpartisan organization that supports democratic institutions and practices worldwide.

The election controversy hinges on two paper forms that legally validate the ballots — one from each of the country’s 40,883 polling stations and the other from 290 constituencies. Representatives from rival parties were required to sign off on the forms before the papers were scanned and electronically transmitted to a national tallying center in Nairobi, where they were to be put online immediately so they could be crosschecked by everybody.

President Uhuru Kenyatta on Election Day last month in Gatundu, Kenya.


Ben Curtis/Associated Press

But the electronic system, which had been overseen by Christopher Chege Msando, the election official who was murdered, broke down. As a result, only the results were sent to the national tallying center, often via text message.

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International election observers were quick to praise the electoral body after the vote, mainly based on the apparent lack of evidence that votes had been tampered with at polling stations and that the paper forms, not the electronic transmission of results, reflected the integrity of the election.

But when Mr. Kenyatta was initially declared the winner, just hours after voting ended, almost none of the forms from the polling stations were online, even though it had a week to receive scanned images of the results. A couple of days later, the electoral commission announced that about 10,000 forms were unaccounted for, sowing even more doubt and suspicion over its credibility.

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“The scenario was similar to that of the Bermuda Triangle where no one knows how ships disappear,” said Pheroze Nowrojee, a lawyer representing Mr. Odinga and the National Super Alliance, the opposition umbrella group.

The electoral commission said it had presented the forms, cited in a report by the registrar of the Supreme Court. However, that report found that a third of the forms lacked security features like watermarks or serial numbers, which election observers saw as evidence that the forms were probably false.

Mr. Kenyatta’s lawyer, Fred Ngatia, denied any wrongdoing, saying that what “had been presented as defective were correct and did not have any error.”

The opposition was also not given enough time to access, as ordered by the Supreme Court, the electoral commission’s servers, logs, and the electronic kits used to identify voters and transmit the results.

Walter Mebane, a professor of statistics and political science at the University of Michigan who studies elections worldwide, volunteered to run the voting results through a computer model he developed to detect electoral fraud. Based on statistics only, and without knowledge of the intricacies of Kenyan politics, he and his team found patterns that showed widespread manipulation.

“It was unlike any data set I had ever seen,” he said. “Every single indicator came up signaling anomalies. It’s a huge red flag that something weird is going on.”

His model found about 400,000 fraudulent votes, a significant number, he said, but probably not enough to swing the results. (More than a million votes would be needed to sway the outcome, he said.)

In the run-up to the Supreme Court hearing, Mr. Odinga, in an interview, said it would not matter whether the court ruled against him because the case was more of an opportunity to expose evidence of widespread rigging and to set a precedent for fair and free elections in the future.

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Ultimately, the court’s ruling is a secondary issue, said Mr. Campbell, the former ambassador. “That’s almost beside the point,” he said. “It’s how people actually respond to it.”

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Trump, lawmakers considering request for $6 billion in emergency Harvey-related aid

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Widespread flooding due to Tropical Storm Harvey in La Grange, Tex., on Monday. (Ralph Barrera/Austin American-Statesman via AP)

White House officials and congressional leaders are discussing a plan that would authorize roughly $6 billion in emergency assistance to deal with the devastation caused by Hurricane Harvey, and President Trump could send a specific request for the funding as soon as Friday, people briefed on the discussions said.

White House officials and congressional leaders have discussed authorizing $5.5 billion toward the depleted Disaster Relief Fund, which is run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Another $450 million could be authorized for the Small Business Administration’s Disaster Loan Program. FEMA is in charge of coordinating the U.S. government’s response to things like hurricanes and floods, and the SBA can extend loans to help companies rebuild and recover.

No final decisions about the funding amount have been made, and conversations remained fluid Thursday evening.

Trump has said he would move swiftly to help Harvey victims recover and rebuild from the flooding in Houston and other parts in Southeast Texas, and some Democrats have already said the area could need more than $150 billion in federal aid. The $5.95 billion request is expected to be just an initial down payment on a larger package of federal aid that would come together later, people briefed on the planning said. White House officials and congressional leaders are hopeful that a request of that size could be approved swiftly.

Once Trump sends the official request for the emergency funds to Congress — either Friday or sometime next week — a number of scenarios could play out, people involved in the discussions said.

The House of Representatives could authorize the money on its own or combine it with a broader package to fund the federal government for the next fiscal year, which begins in October. Then the Senate could decide to pass the same bill, or attach an increase in the debt ceiling to the legislation because it would likely have bipartisan support.

The Washington Post reported Wednesday that the White House was preparing to send a request to Congress. Bloomberg News reported the specific amounts under consideration Thursday.

The Trump administration may be about to commit to billions in additional spending

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People gather for a rally and protest to mark the fifth anniversary of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program near Trump Tower in New York on Aug. 15. (Justin Lane/European Pressphoto Agency)

This article has been corrected.

Shortly before the 2012 election, the administration of Barack Obama instituted a new approach to immigrants in the country illegally. Those who’d come into the United States before their 16th birthdays and who were in school or had graduated from high school without being convicted of a crime were offered protection from deportation and the ability to work legally in the United States. Those eligible had to apply for coverage under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (or DACA) program — and more than a million did.

The program requires that applicants renew their status every two years.

As of the most recent quarter for which data are available, Immigration and Customs Enforcement reports that 1.59 million people have applied and been approved for DACA protection. This figure is higher than the total number of DACA recipients, however, since the program is capped at 787,000 total. It’s not clear precisely how many people are currently covered under DACA.

During the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump pledged to end the program on his first day in office. More than 200 days later, that threat appears to be about to come to fruition. Facing a deadline of Sept. 5 imposed by state lawmakers from his party, President Trump will soon need to decide the fate of the program — and those individuals.

If he repeals DACA, the implications are significant.

Most of those who’ve been approved as program participants — of the 1.59 million applications cataloged by ICE — were born in Mexico but almost 19,000 are from Asia and about 2,000 are from Poland.

Approved applicants tend to live in the nation’s most populous states, which isn’t a surprise. But a number of southwestern states have a disproportionate number of DACA applicants relative to their overall populations. Nevada, for example, has seen about 25,000 approved DACA applicants, a figure equal to 0.84 percent of the state’s population — the same ratio as in Texas.

Again, these figures represent those who applied for applications over the program’s history and are not current values.

What would a complete termination of DACA mean? It would mean, in essence, that those 787,000 or so people who’d received protection under the rule could be subject to deportation. Earlier this year, the Arizona Republic asked ICE how much it cost to deport someone who’d immigrated to the country illegally and learned that, on average, the agency spent $10,854 per deportee. (Those costs vary, of course, depending on the length of any legal proceedings and if the individual is being returned to Mexico or, say, India.)

In other words, ending DACA and moving toward deportation of approved applicants would run up a bill of over $8.5 billion. That’s enough to fund the National Endowment for the Arts (which Trump’s budget proposed eliminating) for 56 years. It’s enough to fund 40 percent of Trump’s proposed border wall.

The administration doesn’t necessarily have to repeal DACA entirely, and doing so wouldn’t necessarily mean nearly 800,000 deportations. It could instead do nothing, in which case those Republican state legislators would take the policy to court where the administration wouldn’t have to defend it.

From a political standpoint, that might be the best bet for Trump. His base would certainly support repealing DACA, but the program is popular with Hispanic voters. In February 2012, Obama’s approval rating among Hispanics was as low as 51 percent, six percentage points above the national number. By the end of the year, it had surged to 77 percent, 24 points higher than Americans on the whole.

That sort of shift would be hard for any politician to ignore, even one who proudly declares himself to not be a politician.

Correction: This article originally misinterpreted the data from ICE. Thanks to Dara Lind from Vox for pointing out the mistake. The article has been updated throughout.

In Texas chemical-plant fire, failure of backup measures raises new fears

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When the hurricane blew in, workers at the Arkema chemical plant in Crosby, Tex., faced the problem of keeping the plant’s volatile chemicals cold. The plant had 19.5 tons of organic peroxides of various strengths, all of them requiring refrigeration to prevent ignition.

But the power went out, and then the floodwaters came and knocked out the plant’s generators. A liquid nitrogen system faltered. In a last-ditch move, the workers transferred the chemicals to nine huge refrigerated trucks, each with its own generator, and moved the vehicles to a remote section of the plant.

That was doomed to fail, too. Six feet of water swamped the trucks, and the final 11 workers gave up. At 2 a.m. Tuesday, they called for a water evacuation and left the plant to its fate.

Early Thursday, two loud pops signaled an explosive combustion in one of the trucks, and a black plume of smoke spread from the plant, sending 15 police officers and paramedics to the hospital. All eight remaining vehicles are now likely to burn, said Robert W. Royall Jr., assistant chief of emergency operations for the Harris County Fire Marshal’s Office.

We are “watching physics at work,” Arkema spokesman Jeff Carr said Thursday. “Probably a couple more tonight.”

Explosion evacuee Martha Higdon and her son Truman, left, speaks outside of the First Baptist Church, which has been set up as a shelter for residents evacuated from their homes following an explosion at the Arkema Chemical Plant in Crosby, Texas. (Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)

While the crisis has not yet equaled the severity of explosions suffered by other Texas chemical plants, the crisis at Crosby has exposed the vulnerability of hundreds of chemical plants in low-lying areas across the U.S. Gulf Coast.

“The Crosby plant’s dangerous situation is a symptom of a bigger problem involving the oil and chemical industry in the gulf region,” said Bill Hoyle, a former senior investigator for the Chemical Safety Board and now an independent safety consultant. “The Crosby plant is a wake-up call for an industry and their safety regulators who have not adequately taken action on lessons from Hurricane Katrina as well as the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan.”

Texas has more than 1,300 chemical plants, a large number of them in low-lying areas near the coast that are vulnerable to flooding. Arkema’s Crosby plant was built decades ago, but access to gulf ports and the surge in shale gas operations in Texas and Louisiana have lured scores of new chemical plants to the Gulf Coast region.

Although the fire and blasts have so far not been as dire as many feared, the loss of control of dangerous materials and the igniting of volatile chemicals spread anxiety and triggered an investigation by the Chemical Safety Board, an independent federal agency.

The plant produced organic peroxides, which are used in a variety of products including pipes, plastics, acrylic paints, countertops and pharmaceuticals. A company spokesman estimated that 19.5 tons of chemicals were at the site. Small amounts can irritate the skin or damage corneas, and in larger amounts could cause liver damage, according to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). But the company spokesman said “the issue is a combustion event, not a chemical release.”

The Arkema emergency raises anew a host of concerns for chemical manufacturers. After the 1984 tragedy in Bhopal, India, in which a chemical leak from a Union Carbide plant killed more than 2,000 people and injured many thousands more, then-Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg (D-N.J.) pressed for legislation requiring chemical companies to describe their own worst-case scenarios.

Arkema, whose slogan is “Innovative Chemistry,” filed one of those reports in June 2014 for its plant in Crosby, warning that in the most catastrophic scenario, 1.1 million people within a 23-mile radius would be affected. In Texas alone, 32 other plants also warned that more than a million people could be affected by a chemical catastrophe, according to a Congressional Research Service report.

Richard Rennard, president of acrylic monomers, America for Arkema Inc. speaks during a news conference Thursday, Aug. 31, 2017, in Crosby, Texas. (Gregory Bull/AP)

But Arkema stressed that “multiple layers of preventive and mitigation measures in use at the Crosby facility make it very unlikely” that a worst-case scenario would occur. And “in the unlikely event that such a release occurs, Arkema, Inc. has mitigation measures in place to reduce any potential impacts.”

This week, however, some layers of preventive measures failed.

“Certainly, we didn’t anticipate having six feet of water in our plant,” Richard Rennard, president of Arkema’s acrylic monomers division, told reporters Thursday.

Hundreds of plants have been shut down since Hurricane Harvey approached Texas last week, posing environmental dangers as they restart their waterlogged facilities.

About 5 percent of Texas facilities registered in the EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory Program were plotted in or adjacent to flooded areas observed from satellite imagery through Wednesday, according to a Washington Post analysis. They included factories that produce petroleum, plastics and rubber, and deal with hazardous waste. Of those, 23 deal specifically with chemicals.

Arkema, a spinoff of the French oil giant Total, has more than 30 sites in the United States, and like other operators in the industry, has lobbied federal regulators to delay new regulations designed to improve safety and disclosure at chemical plants.

The company has also run afoul of OSHA regulations.

In February, Arkema’s Crosby plant was initially fined $107,918 for 10 OSHA violations, federal records show. The violations were marked as “serious,” meaning they could cause serious physical injury or worker deaths if not remedied. One included a violation of inspection procedures that were supposed to “follow recognized and generally accepted good engineering practices.”

The government later reduced the fines to about $91,000.

Arkema also agreed to a settlement with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) in January stemming from a leak of a toxic and flammable compound in June 2016, state records show. The plant released 4,800 pounds of isoamylene after workers left a valve partially open for 62 hours, allowing the chemical to drain from a storage tank, according to enforcement records.

A state inspection of the facility months earlier also found seven violations. The TCEQ lists the company’s overall compliance history as “satisfactory,” however. For the June leak, commission imposed a modest fine after concluding that residents and the environment had been exposed to “insignificant amounts” of pollutants.

Even in the current crisis at Crosby, Royall, the Harris County emergency operations official, said that the danger from the Arkema plant was “really relative.”

“If you’re standing right next to something and you had a chemical release, it would probably be pretty dangerous, I think you’d agree,” Royall said. “But we have a mile-and-a-half safety radius, and there’s nobody in that plant.”

The events at the plant cause more worries for residents already dealing with inundated homes. But for some residents, the threat is not extraordinary.

There have been so many plant explosions in the Houston area that resident Robin Boethin cannot keep them straight. She recalled the Texas City refinery explosion in March 2005 — not to be confused with the Texas City disaster of 1947, one of the deadliest industrial accidents in U.S. history. Then there was the Pasadena incident in October 1989, in which gases ignited a series of explosions, killing 23 workers and injuring 300.

“It was a ka-boom type of thing,” she said from the counter of the Rusty Bucket, her antiques shop in Crosby, a few miles from the chemical plant. “It shook the house so bad I called 911. I thought someone was breaking in.”

Boethin and others in Crosby discussed chemical plant explosions and environmental disasters as a way of life in the Houston area, describing the risk of sprawling chemical sites as Californians might discuss the inevitability of the next earthquake.

“There’s danger and everyone knows it,” she said.

In the emergency response plan filed with the EPA in 2014, Arkema sketched out the possible disaster that would follow from the failure of one of its tanks of 2-methylpropene. It wouldn’t exactly be a fire or an explosion, but a fiery combination known in the chemical industry as a “bleve,” short for “boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion.”

In that grave scenario, the sudden release of flammable, toxic vapor could ignite in a fireball with a lethal “thermal radiation dose” that could extend over 1,000 feet — “approaching the yard of the residence nearest to the site.”

At a news conference Thursday, Arkema’s Rennard repeatedly and evenly walked reporters through the steps taken at the plant and the outlook for the coming days.

“We anticipate that all this product is going to degrade,” he said. “Whether it’s today, tomorrow, we just don’t know. It’s impossible to predict that.”

One reporter shouted, “Do you understand people are worried?”

“Of course we understand that,” Rennard said, “and that’s why we want to make sure people respect this one-and-a-half-mile radius. We don’t want people returning back to their homes thinking it’s over. It’s not over.”

Jack Gillum, Aaron C. Davis, Julie Tate, Andrew Ba Tran and Alex Horton contributed to this report. Horton reported from Crosby, Tex.

Low in Gulf of Mexico could bring more rain to Texas, Louisiana: National Hurricane Center

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An area of low pressure could form over the southwestern Gulf of Mexico by the weekend, the National Hurricane Center said in its Wednesday evening (Aug. 30) update.

Development, if any, of this system is expected to be slow to occur as the low moves slowly northward. If this system does develop, it could bring additional rainfall to portions of the Texas and Louisiana coasts.

However, any rainfall forecast is uncertain at this time range and it is too soon to determine any specific impacts. Interests in these areas should monitor the progress of this system for the next few days.

The Hurricane Center gave the system a 20 percent chance of tropical formation over the next five days.

Meanwhile, Tropical Storm Irma, located in the Atlantic about 545 miles west of the Cabo Verde Islands at 10 p.m., was expected to turn slightly toward the west-northwest at a slower rate of speed for the next couple of days.

It had maximum sustained winds of near 60 mph with higher gusts. Some strengthening was forecast over the next 48 hours and Irma was expected to become a hurricane on Thursday.

(National Hurricane Center)NOAA 

Port Arthur Faces Harvey Flooding Disaster: ‘Our Whole City Is Underwater’

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In Port Arthur, Harvey Continues Path of Destruction

Homes and shelters were flooded and the largest oil refinery in the U.S. was shut down after heavy rains flooded Port Arthur, east of Houston, overnight Tuesday.


By MALACHY BROWNE, BARBARA MARCOLINI and CHRIS CIRILLO on August 30, 2017.


Photo by Beulah Johnson, via Associated Press.

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Even as the sun began to show in Houston on Wednesday, signaling a small measure of hope after days of devastating rainfall from Tropical Storm Harvey, a region east of the city faced disaster anew after it was pummeled by rain overnight.

Residents of cities in Jefferson County, Tex., about 100 miles east of Houston, were desperate for help Wednesday morning after rain there caused floodwaters to rise precipitously and lightning made things particularly difficult for those responding to the storm.

Many, finding emergency services unresponsive, sought assistance on social media, where their calls were amplified by digital onlookers seeking to help from afar.

Port Arthur’s mayor, Derrick Freeman, said on Facebook early Wednesday morning that rescue teams were contending with fires while trying to get residents to safety.

“Our whole city is underwater right now,” he wrote, in a message of encouragement that nonetheless communicated the distress the city was facing.

The mayor of Beaumont, Becky Ames, told NBC that the flooding was like nothing she had ever seen before.

“Every single body of water around us is at capacity and overflowing and the rain is still coming down,” she said.

About 254,000 people live in Jefferson County, which Brock Long, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said Wednesday had been “slammed with 20 inches of rainfall” overnight.

As news reports teemed with images from Port Arthur showing flooded homes and shelters, the city’s name began to trend on Twitter early Wednesday morning as dozens of residents posted their addresses and conditions, saying that they were trapped in their houses with children and older people in dire need of assistance. Even the city itself used Twitter to call for help.

A judge in Jefferson County, Jeff Branick, told a local news reporter that hundreds if not thousands of people were stranded on their roofs, on top of cars and in attics.

Sites that may have been able to withstand less forceful weather gave way to the pouring rain. The Robert A. Bowers Civic Center, where at least 100 people had taken shelter, was flooded overnight, according to a county sheriff’s deputy, and reports said that people were being removed.

The Port Arthur-based Motiva oil refinery, the nation’s largest such facility, confirmed reports that it had started a controlled shutdown in response to the flooding.

In a video broadcast from his own flooded home, where the water was about knee high on Wednesday, Mayor Freeman said that the military and Coast Guard were helping with rescue efforts. He said that 911 lines were flooded, but that the city was continuing its rescue attempts.

“Harvey was not playing,” he said, as he sloshed through water that had invaded rooms, closets and his backyard, his optimism mingling with shock at the state of his house. “I know one thing though, it’s not going to defeat us.”

Tevin Baker, 18, who was trapped in his Port Arthur home with his mother, Kathy Baker, 56, tweeted for help throughout the night. The two were rescued shortly after 7:30 local time.

“My house just started to flood,” he said in a phone interview. “We weren’t ready at all. It was very horrific for me and my mom.”

He said that the water had come in at a rate of about five or six inches an hour throughout the night, and he took videos of the flooding.

“At 1 it was in the garage, but by 4 it was at our ankles in the house,” he said. “By 7 we were just begging for help. We stood outside, we finally found someone who helped us.”

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Speaking from a shelter in the city, he said that he and his mother had been rescued by men in boats, and that he did not know where they would stay in the immediate future.

“Seeing that coming through the door and the back door and the garage door like that, you’re helpless, you feel helpless,” he added. “It was the worst feeling I’ve had in a long time.”

Amber Robinson, 27, whose friend Keith Pinault tweeted on her behalf, was rescued with her parents, ages 67 and 61, after water flooded their home on Memorial Boulevard in Port Arthur. Mr. Pinault deleted the call for help once the family was rescued.

Ms. Robinson said Wednesday that they had known that the storm was coming but did not expect the rain to be as fierce or unforgiving as it was. Her family had expected water to flood in from the garage, but instead it started coming up through the floor and was soon waist deep.

The family put a flatbed truck in the garage and opened the garage door so that they could be seen by rescue workers. They were on the truck from 3 a.m. until around 10 a.m., when they were taken to a temporary shelter in a bowling alley.

“We don’t know where we’re going to go for sure,” she said. “But we are definitely better now.”

Michelle Preble, 45, in Oregon City, Ore., was one of many people on Twitter trying to compile a list of the addresses being tweeted into something that could be useful to emergency medical workers and others responding to victims.

In a phone interview Wednesday, Ms. Preble, who grew up in Houston and has many friends and family there, said that she had taken a list of names, addresses and conditions and passed them along to the Cajun Navy volunteer force. She was able to contact the Navy’s dispatcher through the walkie-talkie style communication app Zello.

She said that while it initially had been difficult to track whether individual requests for help were being answered by the group, she began to get confirmations Wednesday afternoon that the people whose addresses she had sent had been picked up by the Navy, including a 99-year-old man whose granddaughter had tweeted on his behalf.

Eric Vargas, 19, had been waiting for help on a balcony in Port Arthur since early Wednesday morning, after the water inside his home rose to his stomach. He was initially with nine other adults and 10 children, including two as young as 2 years old, he said.

He said he had reached the Coast Guard, and the person he spoke to had told him to make sure that there was a white blanket in plain sight. But Mr. Vargas said that he had not been given any update as to when, or whether, the much-needed help would arrive.

“I’m just trying to be patient, but I guess I’m going to have to call again,” he said.

Reached again nearly four hours later, Mr. Vargas, who had decided to leave the balcony along with some relatives, still had not been rescued.

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Will North Korea make missiles over Japan the new normal?

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SEOUL, South Korea — The language from North Korea on Wednesday is as familiar as it is chilling, a declaration to the world to expect more missile tests. But there are important clues about North Korea’s ambitious push to send its missiles farther into the Pacific Ocean in an attempt to make them an accepted part of life in the region, as leader Kim Jong Un expands the weapons program he sees as his country’s best chance of survival against encircling enemies.

By firing a missile over Japan and putting the Asia-Pacific, including Guam and its major U.S. military base, on notice for more tests, North Korea may have won itself greater military space in a region dominated by enemies. It’s still too early to see if Kim can create new rules without crossing a line that the United States won’t tolerate.

Here’s a look at the possible meaning of Kim’s comments carried by state media after North Korea sent a missile potentially capable of carrying a nuclear bomb over Japan on Tuesday:

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WHAT NORTH KOREA SAID

Because North Korea’s “current ballistic rocket launching drill … is the first step of the military operation … in the Pacific and a meaningful prelude to containing Guam, (which is an) advanced base of invasion, he (Kim) said that it is necessary to positively push forward the work for putting the strategic force on a modern basis by conducting more ballistic rocket launching drills with the Pacific as a target in the future.”

WHAT IT MAY MEAN

This refers to North Korea’s attempt to strengthen its weapons capabilities and use them to test its bargaining power against the United States. To this end, North Korea is signaling that it may soon turn the Pacific Ocean into its own ballistic missile training ground and make its launches over Japan an accepted norm.

This might have been Kim’s plan all along as he sought what to do next after North Korea’s weapons development reached a point where it could test intercontinental ballistic missiles meant to reach deep into the U.S. mainland. North Korea threatened earlier this month to fire a salvo of Hwasong-12s — the same missile it sent over Japan on Tuesday — to create “enveloping fire” near Guam.

The U.S. territory of Guam is home to key military bases and strategic long-range bombers that North Korea finds threatening. Still, it’s unclear whether the North will ever act on its threat to fire missiles at the “advanced base of invasion.” This could risk triggering a military retaliation from the United States if something goes wrong. But the threat and the subsequent launch Tuesday may have won North Korea space to stage more weapons tests because anything less than targeting Guam would draw a sigh of relief from the United States.

“There were times when even a short-range ballistic missile launch drew a heated response and sanctions from the international community, but the world didn’t do anything about North Korea’s short-range ballistic missile launches on Saturday” ahead of Tuesday’s longer launch, said Du Hyeogn Cha, a visiting scholar at Seoul’s Asan Institute for Policy Studies. “North Korea will try to do the same with midrange ballistic missile launches in the Pacific, making them part of the new normal.”

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WHAT NORTH KOREA SAID

Kim Jong Un “sternly” said that “the drill conducted by the (North’s) Strategic Force is a curtain-raiser of its resolute countermeasures” against joint military exercises being conducted by the U.S. and South Korea.

WHAT IT MAY MEAN

Before Tuesday’s launch, it appeared North Korea was backing away from its threat to fire missiles toward Guam. Some took this as a sign that it was willing to talk and wouldn’t let things get too tense during the annual joint military drills between Washington and Seoul that run through Thursday.

Tuesday’s events killed such optimism. Most experts now say North Korea will likely continue its torrid pace of weapons tests until it perfects ICBMs and submarine-launched ballistic missile systems, and that it probably won’t show serious interest in talks before then.

Kim is clearly seeking a real nuclear deterrent against the United States and likely believes that will strengthen his negotiating position when North Korea returns to talks. And if it does, North Korea will likely demand a halt of the U.S.-South Korean drills and perhaps the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Korean Peninsula in any talks involving a moratorium on its missile launches, said Koh Yu-hwan, a North Korea expert from Seoul’s Dongguk University.

North Korea condemns the annual U.S.-South Korea war games as rehearsals for an invasion, and Washington and Seoul faced calls to postpone or downsize this year’s drills to ease tensions.

There might also be a simpler reason Kim attributed Tuesday’s launch to the drills.

China, North Korea’s only major ally, has been calling for a “dual suspension” in which the North stops its nuclear and missile tests and Washington and Seoul halt their military exercises to lower tensions and lead to talks. By publicly linking the launch to the drills, Kim is attempting reduce the possibility that Beijing supports more punitive measures against North Korea at the United Nations over the launch, Cha said.

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WHAT NORTH KOREA SAID

Kim Jong Un said his nation has drawn a lesson “again that it should show action, not talk, to the U.S. imprudently denying the (North’s) initiative measure for easing the extreme tension” and stressed that it will continue to watch America’s demeanor toward the North and decide its future actions accordingly.

WHAT IT MAY MEAN

The problem here is that Washington won’t be very interested in displaying the kind of “demeanor” that North Korea is likely to want.

A U.S. military solution to North Korea’s missile tests is also unlikely. Making a highly difficult intercept of North Korean missiles would be a tough call because failure would seriously dent the credibility of the expensive U.S. missile defense system.

So the question is whether North Korea will put some checks on itself as it seeks to expand its weapons tests in the Pacific. Some experts believe the next North Korean launches will be bolder unless Washington makes serious concessions.

But Hwang Ildo, a professor at Seoul’s Korea National Diplomatic Academy, disagrees, saying North Korea probably won’t risk infuriating the United States. He says the North Korean threat toward Guam is more about winning greater freedom of military action than about deterring flyovers of U.S. bombers or stopping the U.S.-South Korean war games.

“The North’s intention was to push the boundaries of its military presence farther from the Korean Peninsula and Japan and into the wider Pacific, and they practically drew the line at Guam with their missile threat,” he said.

Copyright 2017 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Federal Judge Blocks Texas’ Ban on ‘Sanctuary Cities’

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Judge Garcia appeared to block three provisions of the law, including one that stated that local government entities and officials may not “adopt, enforce or endorse” any policy limiting the enforcement of immigration laws.

Lawyers for those suing the state said prohibiting local officials from endorsing a particular viewpoint violates the First Amendment. Judge Garcia wrote that the plaintiffs were likely to succeed with that argument when the case goes to trial.

“The government may disagree with certain viewpoints, but they cannot ban them just because they are inconsistent with the view that the government seeks to promote,” Judge Garcia wrote. He added, “SB 4 clearly targets and seeks to punish speakers based on their viewpoint on local immigration enforcement policy.”

Some of the law’s most contentious provisions allow police officers to question the immigration status of a person whom they have arrested or detained, including during routine traffic stops, and create a system of harsh penalties for those who try to “materially limit” immigration enforcement, including removal from office for elected or appointed officials and criminal misdemeanor charges for sheriffs and other law enforcement officials.

In his ruling, Judge Garcia said that the law’s provision banning policies that limit enforcement of immigration laws was unconstitutionally vague and failed to define the specific prohibited conduct. The provision, the judge wrote, “ascribes criminal and quasi-criminal penalties based upon violations of an inscrutable standard, in a manner that invites arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement against disfavored localities.”

Texas vowed to appeal Judge Garcia’s decision, setting the stage for the case to be heard by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, one of the country’s most conservative appeals panels. Judge Garcia, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1994, was a Democratic state lawmaker in the 1980s.

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Critics of Senate Bill 4, including the police chiefs in Houston, San Antonio and other large cities, said it would open the door to racial profiling of Hispanics and prevent legal and undocumented immigrants from reporting crimes to the police. Latino and civil rights groups call it a “show me your papers” law that echoes the one enacted by Arizona in 2010 that led to lawsuits and boycotts.

Supporters of Senate Bill 4 say that opponents have distorted its intent and potential impact. They said the law has a provision specifically prohibiting racial profiling and argued that a Supreme Court ruling in 2012 that upheld part of the Arizona law put the state on solid legal ground. The Trump administration’s Justice Department has also defended the Texas law, filing statements of interest in the case.

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“U.S. Supreme Court precedent for laws similar to Texas’ law are firmly on our side,” Mr. Abbott said in a statement. “This decision will be appealed immediately and I am confident Texas’ law will be found constitutional and ultimately be upheld.”

Civil rights lawyers and Latino groups praised Judge Garcia’s ruling, calling the law racist and unconstitutional.

“The court properly struck down virtually all of what was perhaps the harshest anti-immigrant provision in modern times,” said Lee Gelernt, who is the deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project and who represents the border town of El Cenizo and other plaintiffs in the suit.

Judge Garcia upheld the law’s provision that police officers can ask about the immigration status of those they detain or arrest. But he blocked the provision mandating that local jurisdictions comply with immigration detainer requests from the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

Judge Garcia said that by prohibiting local officials from declining a detainer request, the law also prohibited officials from questioning whether there was probable cause to support the detainer requested.

In his statement, the governor suggested that the judge’s blocking of that provision would make Texas less safe. “Because of this ruling, gang members and dangerous criminals, like those who have been released by the Travis County sheriff, will be set free to prey upon our communities,” Mr. Abbott said.

Critics of the law, however, including local officials in San Antonio, disagreed. “The city and the San Antonio Police Department have cooperated and will continue to cooperate with federal law enforcement’s reasonable requests,” San Antonio’s city attorney, Andy Segovia, said in a statement. “However, SB4 attempted to remove any discretion from local law enforcement in how to best serve the residents of San Antonio.”


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Cop shot to death, 2 other officers injured in California

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A gunman with an AK-style assault rifle shot three cops in California on Wednesday — one fatally — as they tried to serve him with a search warrant, reports say.

The officers had been part of a Sacramento County Sheriff’s Auto Theft Task Force team, which was conducting a grand theft auto operation at a local Ramada Inn at around noon, according to KCRA.

They had just knocked on a suspect’s door and announced themselves when the man took out a “high-powered” rifle and began blasting, officials said.

A sheriff’s deputy and two California Highway Patrol officers wound up being hit, the deputy fatally.

At least three people were detained in connection to the shooting, officials said.

The suspects, described as a man and two women, were reportedly arrested in different areas.

Tactical teams were also searching for at least two others who were still holed up inside the Ramada Inn as of 3 p.m. local time.

The male suspect that was taken into custody had been staying at the hotel and was being surveilled by authorities in connection to the stolen car investigation. The females were about a half mile away and were also being watched by cops, KCRA reports.

At some point during the hotel operation, authorities went up to the man’s room and attempted to serve a search warrant — prompting him to open fire.

He shot the two CHP officers through the door and then went out the back of the Ramada Inn, where deputies were waiting. The suspect started blasting again — nailing Deputy Robert “Bob” French in his side — before getting into a Dodge Challenger and fleeing, officials said.

French, a 21-year veteran and grandfather, later died on his way to the hospital. The bullet that struck him was said to have traveled into his chest cavity.

“All agencies and departments lost a brother officer,” Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones said at a press conference. “We’ll survive this, we will, as a community, we’ll survive together. We’ve been through it before, but it is painful. It will take a period of grieving. And we will come together and through it with courage and resolve.”

The other two officers who were hit are expected to survive after being treated for non-life threatening injuries. One of them was slated to undergo surgery, officials said.

After fleeing in the Challenger, the male suspect reportedly crashed the car and then got into another shootout with police — but was hit this time by officers’ gunfire. The man’s condition is unknown.

Authorities initially took the two female suspects into custody after they spotted them getting into a stolen vehicle. They then went to the Ramada Inn to serve the male suspect with the search warrant, which was connected to the alleged auto theft.

“This is stuff we come in contact with every day, you know,” explained Sheriff’s Sgt. Tony Turnbull.

“It’s not war, but this is no different when you have instances like this,” he said. “We know with a lot of the narrative that’s going on these days that people have reason to shoot at us…Some of the reasons are that they don’t want to go back to jail or they don’t want to go back to prison. Officers on the streets are dealing with this every day. You just don’t know what’s going to happen, and especially in this incident, you don’t know what’s behind a closed door.”

Houston flood: ‘No way to prevent’ chemical plant blast or fire

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Media captionPeople formed a human chain to rescue an elderly man

A chemical plant near the flooded US city of Houston is expected to explode and catch fire in the coming days.

During heavy rainfall from Hurricane Harvey, the Arkema plant at Crosby lost the ability to refrigerate chemical compounds that need to be kept cool.

There was no way to prevent an explosion, the company said.

At least 33 people have been killed in the aftermath of the storm, which the US National Weather Service has now downgraded to a tropical depression.

It has forecast continuing heavy rainfall over eastern Texas and western Louisiana.

US energy supplies have been hit, as oil companies shut down refineries in the Houston area.

Firefighters will begin a door-to-door search of badly flooded areas of Houston on Thursday, to rescue survivors who are still stranded and recover the bodies of those who have died.

“We’ll be doing block-by-block, door-by-door search of streets… to make sure there are no people we’ve left behind,” Richard Mann, the city’s assistant fire chief, was quoted as saying by the Houston Chronicle newspaper.

“This will be a one- to two-week-long process to make sure we address all those areas that have been… most impacted.”

What happened at the chemical plant?

The Arkema chemical plant shut down its production on Friday, before the storm made landfall.

But 40in (102cm) of rainfall in the area flooded the site and cut off its power, the company said in a statement. Back-up generators were also flooded.

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The facility manufactures organic peroxides, compounds that are used in everything from making pharmaceuticals to construction materials, which can become dangerous at higher temperatures.

“Any fire will probably resemble a large gasoline fire,” CEO Richard Rowe told Reuters news agency. “The fire will be explosive and intense.”

He said the black smoke produced would irritate skin, eyes and lungs.

“The high water that exists on site, and the lack of power, leave us with no way to prevent it.”

The fire is expected to be mostly contained to the site itself but residents have been evacuated in a 1.5 mile (2.4 km) radius around the plant as a precaution.

The last remaining workers at the site were evacuated on Tuesday.

The Federal Aviation Administration has issued a temporary ban on flights near the plant.

How are rescue efforts progressing?

Parts of Texas have been hit by more than 50in of rainfall since Hurricane Harvey landed on 25 August, setting new records before it was downgraded to a tropical storm and, late on Wednesday, to a tropical depression.

Rescue efforts continued overnight. Thousands of people have been rescued from the floodwaters, and more than 32,000 people are being housed in emergency shelters.

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Image caption

Port Arthur is among the areas severely flooded

Large parts of Houston, the fourth most populous city in the US, remain under water.

The city is also a key energy hub. The storm and its subsequent flooding has knocked out about a quarter of the country’s refining capacity, sending petrol prices to a two-year high.

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See how flood waters caused by Hurricane Harvey have covered low-lying areas

After

Satellite image of Texas coastline after Hurricane Harvey showing flooding

Before

Satellite image of Texas coastline before Hurricane Harvey

Port Arthur, about 80 miles east of Houston, was also severely flooded. Mayor Derrick Freeman, posting on Facebook, said the entire city was under water, and appealed for anyone who owned a boat to help.

Details of some of those who died in Texas have emerged:

  • In Beaumont, north-west of Port Arthur, rescue teams saved an 18-month old girl found clinging to her dead mother in the floodwaters
  • In Harris County, the bodies of six people – a couple and their four great-grandchildren – were recovered from a submerged van
  • A married couple drowned when their truck was swept away while they were on the phone to emergency services asking for help, the Associated Press reports

“To those Americans who have lost loved ones, all of America is grieving with you, and our hearts are joined with yours forever,” President Donald Trump said in a speech a day after seeing the effects of the flooding during a trip to Texas.

Media captionThe numbers behind Storm Harvey

On Tuesday, Houston implemented a curfew to prevent looting of abandoned homes. Port Arthur followed suit on Wednesday.

  • Child found clinging to dead mum in storm
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Helicopters were used to rescue people in Beaumont

What happens next?

An additional 10,000 members of the National Guard were said to be on their way to Texas to join the rescue efforts, adding to the 14,000 troops already deployed.

Harvey was the most powerful hurricane to hit Texas in more than 50 years when it first made landfall at Corpus Christi, 220 miles south-west of Houston last week.

At a news conference on Wednesday, Texas Governor Greg Abbott said the state could need more than $125bn (£97bn) from the federal government to help it recover.

And he warned “the worst is not yet over”, as flooding was expected to continue for several days.

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Meanwhile, the tropical depression is now moving north-north-east, the US National Weather Service said.

Heavy rainfall is expected from Louisiana to Kentucky over the next three days, and flood warnings remain in effect for south-east Texas and parts of south-west Louisiana.

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