COLU @ CONCEPTS

HOUSTON (AP) — The Latest on Harvey and the storm’s aftermath (all times local): 10:45 a.m. Firefighters have extinguished a large blaze at a building on Houston’s west side that is surrounded by flooding from Harvey. Fire department spokeswoman Sheldra Brigham says no one was hurt in the fire on Saturday. Brigham says the building had about 1 foot (30 centimeters) of water inside. Houston TV station KTRK reported that firefighters were hampered by burglar bars on windows around the building, which appears to be a multi-family dwelling. Mayor Sylvester Turner on Friday told people in the area to evacuate because ongoing releases from two nearby reservoirs could keep thousands of homes flooded for up to 15 days. Harvey dumped up to 50 inches (1.3 meters) of rain on the Houston-area after making landfall last week. ___ 10 a.m. Firefighters in Houston are battling a blaze at a building still surrounded by Harvey’s floodwaters on the city’s west side. Houston...

CROSBY, Texas (AP) — Silvia Casas’ eyes welled with tears Friday as she surveyed the damage from Harvey to what was once a working class, mostly Hispanic neighborhood near Crosby, Texas. Large trees with their roots reaching into the air were pulled from the ground by Harvey’s floodwaters. RVs were crumpled like tin cans. Entire houses were picked up and moved 20 or 30 feet from where they once sat, leaving piles of wood and splintered debris and PVC pipes sticking from the ground as the only reminder of once-familiar structures. Near a 30-foot-high pile of debris, once houses and treasured belongings now stacked against a telephone pole, someone had hung a painting of the Virgin de Guadalupe from a tree branch. Around the corner, a sinkhole had swallowed two cars and was filled with brown, mucky water. A neighborhood stray dog, fed by everyone, weathered the flood by standing on Casas’ roof. Her cinderblock house was one of the few structures that wasn’t thrown by flo...

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — As gunfire and screams rang out in her Nairobi neighborhood after last month’s disputed presidential election, Lucy Anyango stepped outdoors and across a tense ethnic divide. The member of Kenya’s Luo minority went to her friend Sheila Kariuki, an ethnic Kikuyu, and walked Kariuki’s two daughters to the safety of her own home amid threats of rape and violence. Angry Luo were rampaging in the streets in protest over the loss of their opposition candidate, Raila Odinga, to President Uhuru Kenyatta, a Kikuyu. As calm began to return the next day, Kariuki thanked her friend in a heartfelt Facebook post. “I will forever be grateful,” she wrote. “As I write this my eyes are full of tears. Dear God, when will this madness ever stop?” It is a question Kenya has been asking for decades. The threat of further violence fueled by ethnic tensions lingered as the opposition challenged the election’s results. On Friday, to the country’s shock, the Supreme Court nu...

VIK, Iceland (AP) — Sneeze next to the Katla volcano, goes the joke in this Icelandic village, and a seismologist in Reykjavik will analyze the disturbance. After a summer of increased seismic activity at Katla, Icelanders are obsessing over the smallest sign of an eruption at the country’s most closely watched volcano. Katla last erupted in 1918. Never before in recorded history, dating back to the 12th century, have 99 years passed without an eruption from the volcano. Eight out of the last 10 eruptions at Katla have occurred between September and November, when glacial melting is believed to create conditions for the magma to burst forth. Vik, a coastal hamlet known for its black sand beach and red-roofed concrete church, is prepared for the worst. In the event of an eruption, a text message will be sent to every mobile phone connected to the regional network. All 543 residents will know what to do — inform their neighbors — and where to go: the church, which is shelter...

The smoke from massive wildfires hangs like fog over large parts of the U.S. West, an irritating haze causing health concerns, forcing sports teams to change schedules and disrupting life from Seattle to tiny Seeley Lake, Montana. Air quality has been rated unhealthy across the region because of blazes that show no signs of abating. Officials said Friday that one of the worst U.S. wildfire seasons in terms of land burned is likely to keep scorching Western states and blanketing them with smoke until later this fall. People in small towns to the populous San Francisco Bay Area have had enough. “Last night, I went to sleep with the windows open and woke up with a stomachache and a headache,” said Tresa Snow, who owns a hair salon in Brookings, Oregon, near a large wildfire. “I knew before I could even smell it that the fire was back. And you can hear my voice, kind of raspy. We’re all kind of like that.” She said business has been down in the town near the California border....

SHAH PORIR DWIP, Bangladesh (AP) — Tens of thousands more people have crossed by boat and on foot into Bangladesh in the last 24 hours as they flee violence in western Myanmar, the UNHCR said Saturday. Both Myanmar’s security officials and insurgents from the Rohingya ethnic minority are accusing each other of burning down villages and committing atrocities in Myanmar’s Rakhine state. The military has said nearly 400 people, most of them insurgents, have died in armed clashes. The violence has triggered a flood of refugees crossing mostly on foot into Bangladesh, though some were fleeing in wooden boats. “Roughly 60,000 have arrived in Bangladesh since the violence erupted on Aug. 25,” said U.N. Refugee Agency spokeswoman Vivian Tan. That is about 20,000 more than the number local officials had estimated on Friday. Refugees who had arrived at the Bangladeshi fishing village of Shah Porir Dwip described bombs exploding and Rohingyas being burned alive. “We fled to Bangla...

BOSTON (AP) — The USS Constitution is reopening for public tours following more than two years of restoration. The world’s oldest commissioned warship is reopened for tours again Saturday, in time for the Labor Day holiday. After Monday, it will resume its regular Tuesday through Sunday tour schedule. The wooden ship is docked at the Charlestown Navy Yard in Boston. It was launched in 1797 and earned its nickname “Old Ironsides” during the War of 1812. The restoration work included replacing 100 hull planks and installing 2,200 new copper sheets. It was returned to the water in July after spending time in dry dock. Tours are free but adults must present a valid federal or state-issued photo ID. The ship’s crew members are active-duty sailors. Source: www.apnews.com 

VENICE, Italy (AP) — Affable, handsome George Clooney was all charm at the Venice Film Festival on Saturday, but don’t be fooled. The actor says his latest directorial effort, “Suburbicon,” is an angry movie for an angry country — his own. It’s a twisted tale of darkness at the heart of the American dream. “A lot of us are angry — angry at ourselves, angry at the way the country is going, angry at the way the world is going,” Clooney told reporters Saturday in Venice, Italy, where “Suburbicon” is competing for the festival’s Golden Lion prize. “It’s probably the angriest I’ve ever seen the country, and I lived through the Watergate time,” he added. “There’s a dark cloud hanging over our country right now.” America’s divisions give an unnerving timeliness to “Suburbicon.” The satirical film noir stars Matt Damon and Julianne Moore as residents of a seemingly idyllic — and all-white — 1950s suburban community that erupts in anger when a black family moves in. It fuses a sc...

BRUNSWICK, Maine (AP) — One of the oldest-known Native American birch-bark canoes will go on display at a Maine historical society museum, possibly as early as this fall. Carbon dating by the Pejepscot Historical Society in Brunswick shows the Wabanaki canoe was likely made in the mid-1700s. Museum Executive Director Larissa Vigue Picard says it could be the oldest birch-bark canoe in existence. Native Americans have been making these type of canoes for 3,000 years. But Laurie LaBar from the Maine State Museum says only a few of the earliest ones still exist because the bark is so fragile. The Pejepscot Historical Society came in possession of the canoe in 1889. Conservation work will be done on it before it goes on display. Source: www.apnews.com  By DAVID SHARP

DIMOCK, Pa. (AP) — The well water at Ken Morcom and Kim Grosso’s house is laced with so much explosive methane that a Pennsylvania environmental regulator who went there to collect samples this summer decided it would be safer to coast her SUV down the driveway. Morcom and Grosso want to leave but doubt they could sell a house with tainted water. So, a few weeks ago, they asked the gas driller they blame for polluting their well to buy them out. “I was hoping they’d fix it. But I’ve given up hope,” said Morcom, 49, who supports drilling but has become disillusioned with Houston-based Cabot Oil & Gas Corp. “Just let us out of the box.” “The box” is the couple’s 8-acre spread in rural Dimock Township. But Morcom could have been talking about Dimock itself. A patchwork of homes and farms about 150 miles north of Philadelphia, the community became a battleground for pro- and anti-drilling forces after state regulators found that Cabot — one of the biggest drillers in t...

WASHINGTON (AP) — One of former President Barack Obama’s greatest foreign policy achievements is at risk, and it has nothing to do with his successor Myanmar, the Southeast Asian nation that Obama helped usher back to democracy, has been roiled by an explosion of violence between Rohingya Muslim insurgents and security forces. Four hundred have been killed in the past week. About 60,000 have arrived in neighboring Bangladesh, including tens of thousands crossing by boat and on foot in the past day, according to the United Nations’ refugee agency. The crisis has attracted unprecedented criticism of Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s civilian leader who once assumed an almost saintly status in Washington and other Western capitals. She met Obama several times and was long championed by Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. for her long, peaceful struggle against military rule that culminated in her rise to power 1½ years ago. The Rohingya militant attacks have “in some ways empow...

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) — When the Civil War was over, when the dead were buried and the union was reunited, it came time to tell tales and write history. In reunion gatherings and living rooms alike, differing versions of the causes of the conflict became as hardened as sunbaked Georgia clay. More than a century and a half later, those dueling narratives are with us still. Did 620,000 die, as Northerners would have it, in a noble quest to save the union and end slavery — the nation’s horrific original sin? Or was the “War Between the States” a gallant crusade to limit federal power, with slavery playing a lesser part, as Southerners insisted? Who was worthy of honor — Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, or Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee? After all this time, it could be argued that it doesn’t matter, but the blood that was shed over a statue of Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia, is powerful evidence that it does. The national dispute over the fate of stone and bronze ...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House is still trying to decide who will get President Donald Trump’s pledged $1 million donation for Harvey storm relief efforts, one of the largest gifts ever given by a president but one that has evoked his checkered charitable past. The president plans to make the donation, which is expected to come from his personal fortune, early next week, and it may be split among several groups doing relief work in storm-ravaged areas of Texas and Louisiana. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Friday that the president hasn’t finalized where the money will go, raising some concern that charitable groups may end up competing for the money. For the second straight day, Sanders invited reporters to make recommendations for which groups should get the money. “If you have suggestions, he is very open to hearing those,” Sanders said. The president met with three relief groups — the Red Cross, Southern Baptist Relief and Salvation Army ...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Harvey has scrambled the equation for Congress as lawmakers get ready to return to Washington on Tuesday after a five-week summer recess. A daunting workload awaits, including funding the government by month’s end and increasing the federal borrowing limit to head off a catastrophic first-ever default. But the immediate focus will be on rushing an aid package to storm-ravaged Texas and Louisiana, and that bipartisan imperative has pushed aside talk of a government shutdown and President Donald Trump’s feuding with GOP lawmakers. “Somebody who’s just been pulled off their roof doesn’t want to hear about our internecine squabbles and debates over procedure when they’ve lost their homes and are trying to figure out where they’re going to sleep the next night,” said Rep. Charlie Dent, R-Pa. The House and Senate are expected to vote quickly on the first $7.9 billion aid installment to help with immediate recovery and rebuilding needs in Houston and beyond....

HOUSTON (AP) — Harvey did not discriminate in its destruction. It raged through neighborhoods rich and poor, black and white, upscale and working class. Across Houston and surrounding communities, no group sidestepped its paralyzing deluges and apocalyptic floods. “Harvey didn’t spare anyone: The whole city is traumatized,” said Lynnette Borrel, whose backyard pool filled with murky water and schools of minnows from Brays Bayou on the city’s southwest side not far from downtown. Lynette Borrel talks about surviving flooding from Harvey at her home Wednesday, Aug. 30, 2017, in Houston. Harvey did not discriminate in its destruction. It raged through neighborhoods rich and poor, black and white, upscale and working class. Across Houston and surrounding communities, no group sidestepped its paralyzing deluges and apocalyptic floods. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip) Far to the northeast edge of the sprawling city, a flotilla of boats rescued affluent residents of the pine f...