COLU @ CONCEPTS

BOSTON (AP) — New England’s fall foliage forecast is looking so fine it’s enough to make a maple leaf blush. For the first time in several years, little has conspired against a truly glorious autumn. There’s no more drought, the summer has been mild and the leaves — largely spared by marauding gypsy moth caterpillars — look healthy. Translation: A pretty great season for leaf peeping seems to be shaping up. “It’s the most optimistic forecast I’ve had in a couple of years,” said Jim Salge, who tracks the region’s annual autumn pageant for Yankee Magazine. “The biggest thing that can go wrong with foliage is a really wet couple of weeks leading up,” Salge cautioned. “We’ll really need that typical fall weather in New England — warm, sunny days and cool, crisp nights — to make it pop. But we’ve had a great setup.” A few recent autumns disappointed because they were preceded by too much or too little summer rainfall, muting the colors. Last fall was a bust in parts of easter...

CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) — Its jagged, soaring peaks rise high over northwest Wyoming, but Grand Teton National Park is always in the shadow of its world-renowned neighbor, Yellowstone National Park. But thanks to the total solar eclipse Monday, Grand Teton is expected to outshine, and overshadow, one of the nation’s most popular parks — at least for the day. Grand Teton is directly in the path of the eclipse — where the sun is completely blocked by the moon. “We anticipate it to be the busiest day in the history of the park,” Grand Teton spokeswoman Denise Germann said. “We’re trying to create realistic expectations for visitors as well as our staff that there’s going to be congestion, there’s going to be traffic gridlock.” Yellowstone, the world’s first national park that is famous for “bear jams,” where motorists stop on roadways to watch grizzly bears, will see just a partial eclipse. “We are planning for an August day in Yellowstone, which is usually pretty busy anyway, ...

MEDFORD, Mass. (AP) — Some of the brightest minds in math arrived at Tufts University last week to tackle an issue lawyers and political scientists have been struggling with for decades. They came from colleges across the country for a weeklong conference on gerrymandering, the practice of crafting voting districts in a way that favors voters from a certain political party or demographic. It’s a topic of growing interest among many math and data experts who say their scholarly fields can provide new tools to help courts identify voting maps that are drawn unfairly. Among those working to bridge the classroom and the courtroom is Moon Duchin, a math professor at Tufts who orchestrated the gathering at her Boston-area campus. The workshop was the first in a series being organized at campuses nationwide to unite academics and to harness cutting-edge mathematics to address gerrymandering. “Mathematicians are coming late to this problem,” said Duchin, who started studying the s...

FREETOWN, Sierra Leone (AP) — More than 400 bodies have been pulled from the debris of Sierra Leone’s mudslides as burials and recovery efforts pressed on Friday amid the threat of further disaster. The U.N. humanitarian agency put the death toll at 409 after the flooding and mudslides in the West African nation’s capital, Freetown, on Monday morning. “The death toll is climbing by the day,” Elhadj As Sy, secretary-general of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, told reporters in Geneva, adding that the disaster is “way beyond the capacity of the government alone.” Large-scale burials have begun as an estimated 600 people remain missing. People continue to search through tons of mud and debris amid the remains of mangled buildings. The government has warned residents to evacuate a mountainside where a large crack has opened. Rainfall remains in the forecast for the coming days, slowing recovery efforts and bringing the threat of further m...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Poor seamanship and flaws in keeping watch contributed to a collision between a Navy destroyer and a commercial container ship that killed seven sailors, Navy officials said, announcing that the warship captain will be relieved of command and more than a dozen other sailors will be punished. Adm. William Moran, the vice chief of naval operations, told reporters Thursday that the top three leaders aboard the USS Fitzgerald, which was badly damaged in the June collision off the coast of Japan, will be removed from duty aboard the ship. They are the commanding officer, Cmdr. Bryce Benson; the executive officer, Cmdr. Sean Babbitt; and Master Chief Petty Officer Brice Baldwin, who as the ship’s command master chief is its most senior enlisted sailor. “The collision was avoidable, and both ships demonstrated poor seamanship,” the Navy’s 7th Fleet said in a statement, noting that “flawed” teamwork among those assigned to keep watch contributed to the collision. ...

BOSTON (AP) — Nicholas Fuentes is dropping out of Boston University and heading south, pressing ahead with his right-wing politics despite receiving online death threats. The 19-year-old joined a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last weekend and posted a defiant Facebook message promising that a “tidal wave of white identity is coming,” less than an hour after a car plowed into a crowd of counter-protesters. Now, he’s hoping to transfer to Auburn University in Alabama. “I’m ready to return to my base, return to my roots, to rally the troops and see what I can do down there,” Fuentes said in an interview this week. At college campuses, far-right extremist groups have found fertile ground to spread their messages and attract new followers. And for many schools, the rally in Virginia served as a warning that these groups will no longer limit their efforts to social media or to flyers furtively posted around campus. “It seems like what might have bee...

BRIDGEWATER, N.J. (AP) — With prominent Republicans openly questioning his competence and moral leadership, President Donald Trump burrowed deeper into the racially charged debate over Confederate memorials and lashed out at members of his own party in the latest controversy to engulf his presidency. Out of sight, but still online, Trump tweeted his defense of monuments to Confederate icons — bemoaning rising efforts to remove them as an attack on America’s “history and culture.” And he berated his critics who, with increasingly sharper language, have denounced his initially slow and then ultimately combative comments on the racial violence at a white supremacist rally last weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia. Trump was much quicker Thursday to condemn violence in Barcelona, where more than a dozen people were killed when a van veered onto a sidewalk and sped down a busy pedestrian zone in what authorities called a terror attack. He then added to his expression of suppo...

BARCELONA, Spain (AP) — Police on Friday shot and killed five people wearing fake bomb belts who staged a car attack in a seaside resort in Spain’s Catalonia region hours after a van plowed into pedestrians on a busy Barcelona promenade, killing at least 13 people and injuring over 100 others. Authorities said the back-to-back vehicle attacks — as well as an explosion earlier this week elsewhere in Catalonia— were connected and the work of a large terrorist group. Three people were arrested, but the driver of the van used in the Barcelona attack remained at large and the manhunt intensified for the perpetrators of the latest European rampage claimed by the Islamic State group. Authorities were still reeling from Thursday’s Barcelona attack when police in the popular seaside town of Cambrils, about 130 kilometers (80 miles) to the south, fatally shot five people near the town’s boardwalk who had plowed into a group of tourists and locals with their blue Audi 3. Six people, incl...

BAGHDAD (AP) — The wires protruding from the small, misshapen stuffed animal revealed the deadly booby-trap tucked inside. For the people of Mosul, the sophisticated bomb was a reminder of how difficult it will be to return to homes littered with hidden explosives by Islamic State militants and dotted with the remnants of undetonated bombs dropped by the U.S.-led coalition that still could blow up. Washington at least is trying to ease a bit of the massive clean-up burden. On Thursday, the top U.S. commander in Iraq said for the first time that the American military will help contractors and other officials locate unexploded bombs dropped by the coalition. U.S. Embassy officials have asked the coalition to declassify grid coordinates for bombs dropped in Iraq to help clear the explosives. It may not be that simple, Gen. Stephen Townsend told a small group of reporters, “but we’ll find a way through that.” “We’ll find a way to help them,” he said. The coalition’s unexpl...

WASHINGTON (AP) — After months of sometimes heated internal debate, the Trump administration has almost reached a decision on a new approach for fighting the 16-year-old war in Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Thursday. He gave no hint of what the strategy would look like. In remarks at the State Department, Mattis told reporters President Donald Trump will confer with his national security team Friday at the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland, and said the talks “will move this toward a decision.” “We are coming very close to a decision, and I anticipate it in the very near future,” he added. Months ago the Pentagon had settled on a plan to send approximately 3,800 additional troops to help strengthen the Afghan army, which is stuck in what some call a deteriorating stalemate with the Taliban insurgency. Some in the White House have questioned the wisdom of investing further resources in the war, which is the longest in American history. The adminis...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Poor seamanship and flaws in keeping watch contributed to a collision between a Navy destroyer and a commercial container ship that killed seven sailors, Navy officials said, announcing that the warship captain will be relieved of command and more than a dozen other sailors will be punished. Adm. William Moran, the vice chief of naval operations, told reporters Thursday that the top three leaders aboard the USS Fitzgerald, which was badly damaged in the June collision off the coast of Japan, will be removed from duty aboard the ship. They are the commanding officer, Cmdr. Bryce Benson; the executive officer, Cmdr. Sean Babbitt; and Master Chief Petty Officer Brice Baldwin, who as the ship’s command master chief is its most senior enlisted sailor. “The collision was avoidable, and both ships demonstrated poor seamanship,” the Navy’s 7th Fleet said in a statement, noting that “flawed” teamwork among those assigned to keep watch contributed to the collision. T...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. intelligence agencies’ assessments of the size of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal have a wide gap between high and low estimates. Size matters and not knowing makes it harder for the United States to develop a policy for deterrence and defend itself and allies in the region. The secrecy of North Korea’s nuclear program, the underground nature of its test explosions and the location of its uranium-enrichment activity has made it historically difficult to assess its capabilities. Some U.S. assessments conclude North Korea has produced or can make around 30 to 60 nuclear weapons, said two U.S. officials who weren’t authorized to discuss sensitive intelligence matters and demanded anonymity. Such a wide range affects how the U.S. considers addressing the threat. More North Korean bombs could indicate second-strike capacity and then there are questions about how much nuclear firepower the country could mobilize on a moment’s notice. Estimates by civilian ...

PYONGYANG, North Korea (AP) — Like all North Korean adults, Song Un Pyol wears the faces of leader Kim Jong Un’s father and grandfather pinned neatly to her left lapel, above her heart. But on her right glitters a diamond-and-gold brooch. Song is what a success story in Kim Jong Un’s North Korea is supposed to look like. Just after Kim assumed power in late 2011, she started managing the supermarket floor at a state-run department store, which has freezers stocked full of pork and beef and rows of dairy, bakery and canned goods. She watches as customers fill their shopping carts, take their groceries directly to be scanned at the checkout counter and pay with cash or bank debit cards. Song is part of a paradigm shift within North Korea: Three generations into the Kim family’s ruling dynasty, markets have blossomed and a consumer culture is taking root. From 120 varieties of “May Day Stadium” brand ice cream to the widespread use of plastic to pay the bills, it’s a change visib...