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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.

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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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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.

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 

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:

___

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.

___

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.

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.”

A FORMER colleague has penned an eloquent farewell letter to air travel on the website of the Atlantic. The increasing indignity has led her to declare herself a driver or train passenger for any trip of less than 500 miles. I have a similar rule that has been evolving since I took this job in February. I discovered the hard way that it makes no sense to fly if the equivalent drive takes eight hours or less each way.

This is not what I initially expected. My city is home to the world’s busiest airport; my beat begins around Richmond, extends south to around Miami and west to the Arkansas-Tennessee border. I figured I’d fly pretty regularly. I learned pretty quickly, though, that many intra-South flights connect through Charlotte. Atlanta’s airport gets people into and out of the South pretty quickly, but getting to the northern part of my beat usually requires a trip through Douglas airport (direct flights are often several hundred dollars pricier than a one-stop hop through Charlotte). And between uncertain summer weather, frequent delays on the runway and the hassle of getting between home/meetings and airports, I can easily spend eight hours travelling for an hour in the air. Flights from Atlanta to Raleigh may take about 80 minutes, but the total travel time exceeds, or on a good day approaches, the total travel time of a drive. Then there’s the cost of a cab to the airport, a flight and a rental car, compared with the simplilcty of renting a car near my house and driving straight to my final destination. (I should say that the South lacks a decent rail network; if it had one I’d use it.)

Admittedly, I enjoy driving, and the South has more than its share of beautiful drives. The Selma-to-Meridian stretch of US-80, the Chattanooga-to-Nashville bit on I-24 and almost anywhere in rural West Virginia are current favourites. But more than that I hate wasting time, and air travel involves a lot of wasted time. When I drive I am accessible by phone and e-mail, and can always (and often do) pull over to the side of the road to conduct an interview; when travelling by air my phone is often required to be off, and even if it’s on, doing an interview from an airplane stuck on the runway or in an airport “lounge” (has ever a word been so misused?) is awkward. From my perspective—which I suspect is shared by plenty of other people who travel regionally for business—the indignity of air travel is annoying, but it is a personal problem; the inefficiency is a business issue. Junk-touching notwithstanding, driving lets me do my job; flying hinders me.

Corrections: The original version of this post referred to the Selma-to-Meridian section of I-80 and the Chattanooga-to-Nashville section of I-75. These have been corrected to US-80 and I-24 respectively.

Fuel costs hurt air travelers <![CDATA[]]>

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Domestic flight delays cost the industry and passengers $40.7 billion in 2007, according to the Joint Economic Committee from the House and Senate, which released a report Thursday.

As part of this overall cost from the delays, passengers lost an estimated $12 billion worth of time that would otherwise have been spent on business and play, said the committee report.

These late flights cost airlines $19.1 billion in extra staffing, fuel and maintenance costs – mainly from planes idling at the gate but also from taxiing delays and from circling airports in holding patterns, according to the report.

The cost to airlines includes $1.6 billion in fuel costs, as idling planes wasted 740 million gallons of jet fuel, the report said, releasing more than seven million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the air. This was based on the 2007 average wholesale fuel cost of $2.15 per gallon.

The committee also said that delays caused $9.6 billion in “spillover costs” to other industries that rely on air traffic, like restaurants, hotels, retailers and public transportation.

The calculations from the Air Transport Association, a trade group that represents the airline industry, are significantly different. ATA spokesman David Castelveter said that delays cost the industry $8.1 billion last year, which is less than half of the $19 billion estimate from the Joint Economic Committee. Castelveter said the industry cost is expected to rise to $10 billion this year. He said that he doesn’t exactly know how the committee arrived at its calculation, so he doesn’t know why the number is different.

The committee study, based on an analysis of 10 million domestic flights, said more than 20% of all flight time last year was wasted on delays. It said most delays were caused by other flights arriving late.

While some delays are “unavoidable” because of weather and mechanical problems, “the staggering levels of delays experienced in 2007 and the significant costs these delays had on the U.S. economy are troublesome,” read a statement from the bipartisan committee, chaired by Sen. Charles Schumer, D-NY.

The report is the latest bit of bad news for a battered industry, whose top players include Delta Air Lines (DAL, Fortune 500), United Airlines (UAL) and American Airlines (AMR, Fortune 500). Carriers have have been raising ticket prices and attaching fees to basic services to try and minimize losses, and Delta and Northwest Airlines (NWA, Fortune 500) are working on a potential $3.1 billion merger.

Some of the nation’s busiest airports caused the biggest drag on air travel, said the committee, with Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson International accounting for nearly 19 million delayed passenger hours, with nearly 18 million hours for Chicago O’Hare International and more than 12 million hours for Dallas-Fort Worth International.

From a passenger perspective, the worst offender was the comparatively tiny New Castle County Airport in Delaware, which averaged 55 minutes of delay per passenger in 2007, compared to 16 minutes per passenger at the Atlanta airport. By this measure, the best airport was Honolulu International, with an average of five minutes delay for passenger.

The committee said traffic will only get more crowded, putting further strains on the industry. The report said that flight volume is up 43% since 1998, and is projected to keep increasing 2.7% annually, from 689 million passengers currently, to more than 1.1 billion in 2025.

The report blamed “seven long years of laissez-faire government policies,” including a failure to convert the nationwide radar system for aviation tracking to a system based on satellites. The committee said that congestion could be alleviated by opening military air space off the eastern seaboard for commercial traffic.

“Opening up a portion of this underutilized space would allow commercial airlines to avoid congested areas over New York City, Washington, Atlanta and Florida or bypass bad weather when it arises on the east coast, thus significantly reducing delays,” said the report.

But if anyone’s to blame for delays, it’s Congress, according to Michael Derchin, an airline industry analyst for FTN Midwest Securities Corp.

“They’ve not funded the [Federal Aviation Administration] and the air traffic control system, which is using 1960s technology,” he said. “The fix is to get the air traffic control system fixed. It’s now at a point where it’s a crisis, and now Congress is blaming everyone else, and they’re the ones who started it to begin with.”

Castelveter, the ATA spokesman, said the Department of Defense agreed to open some military airspace to relieve congestion in the New York and New Jersey region for the Memorial Day weekend. But for the long term, he said the government must update the air traffic control system from radar to satellite to cut down on delays.

“It’s the equivalent of using an electric typewriter, when others are using computers, Treos and Blackberries,” he said.