http://www.npr.org/2017/08/30/547114024/trump-hits-the-road-to-promote-tax-cuts-details-to-come

President Trump will call for a major rewrite of the U.S. tax code when he visits Springfield, Mo., on Wednesday afternoon. The speech comes a day after Trump's trip to Harvey-hit Texas and is the first in what is expected to be a series of traveling sales pitches on taxes from the president.

But the White House is not ready to spell out what the rewrite will look like or what kind of price tag it will carry.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn have been meeting regularly with Republican congressional leaders to discuss tax policy. Thus far, though, they've only committed to a vague statement of principles which calls for lower tax rates on both individuals and businesses. Cohn said it will be up to lawmakers to fill in the details.

"We've got a great, I would say, skeleton," Cohn told reporters earlier this month. "We need the Ways and Means Committee to put some muscle and skin on the skeleton and drive tax reform forward. And it's our objective to do that between now and the end of the year."

With Republicans in control of the House, Senate and the presidency, supporters have described this as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to overhaul the tax code in accordance with GOP principles. But after Trump's insistence on swift, ultimately unsuccessful bids to repeal the Affordable Care Act, some observers are skeptical that Trump has the patience or discipline to see a tax overhaul through to completion.

Mnuchin insists tax cuts are now Trump's No. 1 priority.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/08/how-much-does-houston-spend-on-flood-control/538257/

In the coming century, the burgeoning metropolis is going to have to make huge investments to ensure its future.

Texas continues to battle the ravages of Hurricane Harvey, which has dumped more than 30 inches of rain across the greater Houston area. The record-setting rains have caused devastating floods for the third straight year in the area, following the Tax Day Flood of 2016 and the Memorial Day Flood of 2015.

Houston keeps flooding, but local authorities have long tried to mitigate the risks of living in the Bayou City. Houston is located inside Harris County, and after a series of floods in the 1930s, the county created a flood-control district to regionally manage the area’s flood-preparedness system. Over the years, the Harris County Flood-Control District worked with the Army Corps of Engineers to make the entire city of Houston into a hydraulic machine that can direct water into a series of bayous, canals, and reservoirs, then on into the Gulf of Mexico. There are now 2,500 miles of channels for moving water and a total of $4 billion of flood-mitigation infrastructure.

As bad as things are in Houston right now, they’d be much worse without all this infrastructure in the ground. So, to keep these mitigation measures working, the Harris County Flood Control District spends roughly $100 million per year.

That sounds like a lot, but Houston is now a metropolitan powerhouse. The fourth-largest city in the country, it’s also the primary home of the nation’s oil and gas industry. The area’s real GDP is approaching half a trillion dollars a year.

And consider what some other agencies spend. The South Florida Water Management District spends $664 million per year on its operations. The California Department of Water Resources, which operates the state’s dams and canals, spends more than $500 million per year on “public safety and prevention of damages.”

Or compare to road-infrastructure spending: In Houston itself, the public-works budget is $2 billion this year. In California, the state spends $1.9 billion on highway maintenance alone.

http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2017/08/opinion/where-im-really-from/

NO, Where are you really from? Before you were born?

“Where are you from? No, where are you really from?” It’s a small question that gets asked every day. The question can be off-putting to some people and there’s a reason why: It’s personal. It can make people on the receiving end feel like they really don’t belong. It can be a harmless ask, but it often depends on the context and who’s asking.

About 2,000 people shared their experiences with us on social media with #whereimreallyfrom. From a woman asked about her ethnicity at a job interview to a man told to go back to his own country (he’s American), the experiences are as diverse as the people who shared them. Here are some of their many stories, as told in their own words.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/world/how-acapulco-became-mexicos-murder-capital/?utm_term=.729e0a9ada5d

The faded resort city is a symbol of the skyrocketing violence in Mexico.

ACAPULCO, Mexico ­— From the crescent bay and swaying palms, the taxi drivers of Acapulco need just 10 minutes to reach this other, plundered world.

Here, in a neighborhood called Renacimiento, a pharmacy is smeared with gang graffiti. Market stalls are charred by fire. Taco stands and dentists’ offices, hair salons and auto-body workshops — all stand empty behind roll-down metal gates.

On Friday afternoons, however, the parking lot at the Oxxo convenience store in this brutalized barrio buzzes to life. Dozens of taxi drivers pull up. It’s time to pay the boys.

When the three young gunmen drive up in a white Nissan Tsuru, Armando, a 55-year-old cabbie, scribbles his four-digit taxi number on a scrap of paper, folds it around a 100-peso note and slips it into their black plastic bag. This is his weekly payment to Acapulco’s criminal underworld — about $5, or roughly half what he earns in a day.

“They have the power,” said Armando, who identified himself only by his first name because he feared reprisal. “They can do whatever they want.”

http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/25/us/hurricane-harvey/index.html

(CNN)As heavy rain and gusty winds move in over Texas, coastal residents were deciding Friday morning whether to flee or to stay put and brace for a potentially life-threatening storm.

Hurricane Harvey was "dangerously approaching the Texas Coast" and expected to bring as much as 35 inches of rain and storm-surge flooding that could reach a depth of 6 to 12 feet along the coast, the National Hurricane Center said.

Conditions are "expected to deteriorate through the day," the center said. "Preparations along the middle Texas coast should be rushed to completion this morning."

Forecasters say Harvey is on track to become a Category 3 hurricane with winds of at least 111 mph by the time it makes landfall around Corpus Christi late Friday or early Saturday.

It's then expected to stall over the state, broadening the flood threat, forecasters said.

"All indications from the hurricane center are that this is going to be the first major hurricane the nation has dealt with since 2005," FEMA Director Brock Long said.