DAYS OF TRAGEDY AND RAGE
Hurricane Harvey rips into Texas Gulf Coast and delivers a deluge in Houston
It was a hurricane season like no other. Hurricane Harvey slammed into the Gulf Coast of Texas on Aug. 25, drove north and camped over Houston for days, bringing a deluge that flooded tens of thousands of homes, including those above. Statewide, more than 50 people died. Less than two weeks later, Hurricane Irma rampaged through the Caribbean before hitting Florida, causing widespread damage but fewer deaths than feared. Then came Hurricane Maria, which made a direct hit on Puerto Rico, leaving most of the island without power or potable water — but plenty of rage over what was perceived as inadequate federal help. More than two months after Maria, much of the U.S. territory remained crippled.
More than 1 million rally nationwide for women’s rights
As it turned out, this was not the year of the first female president. It was, though, the year that women said #MeToo and #Resist. The biggest single event occurred the day after President Trump’s inauguration, when well over a million women and their male supporters rallied in cities around the world, including Washington, New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. “We can whimper, we can whine, or we can fight back,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren told marchers in Boston. “Me, I’m here to fight back.”
White supremacists’ rally in Charlottesville turns deadly
By their own telling, white supremacists were emboldened by the election of President Trump, who was slow to renounce them and embraced some of their social media memes during the campaign. That all came to a head on Aug. 12, when assorted white supremacists rallied in Charlottesville, Va., chanting “blood and soil!” and “white lives matter!” A counterprotester was killed by a car driven by a white supremacist from Ohio. Two state troopers patrolling the area also died when their helicopter crashed.
Total solar eclipse unites millions of Americans
It was an event that inspired Americans to stop in their tracks and gaze — at the total solar eclipse. Moving along a 2,600-mile, 14-state swath starting in Oregon and ending in South Carolina, the eclipse seemed to bring out everyone’s awestruck inner poet — or curious amateur scientist. Even in cities where the eclipse was only partial and the sky barely darkened, office workers clustered on street corners, using protective spectacles to look at the obscured solar disk. And for those who fell in love with the darkest moment of the celestial event, it’s not too early to plan for the next one in the U.S., in 2024.
The worst mass shooting in U.S. history
On the ground, it was a party. Thousands of people were spread out across a Las Vegas fairground, enjoying a country music performance as part of the Route 91 Harvest festival. High above them, a man with high-powered assault weapons was watching from a window of the Mandalay Bay hotel. Then he opened fire. Fifty-eight people would die and more than 500 would be injured in the worst mass shooting in U.S. history. The shooter took his own life; his motive for the massacre remains a mystery. Gun manufacturers’ stocks rose after the shooting.
Eight people killed in Manhattan truck attack
After it was done, after, authorities said, he killed eight people by driving a rental truck along a popular bike path in Lower Manhattan, Sayfullo Saipov lay in his hospital bed, said he “felt good about what he had done” and asked for an Islamic State flag to be hung in his room. Saipov, a legal immigrant from Uzbekistan, was yet another acolyte who had been radicalized by Islamic State online and allegedly took it upon himself to kill as many people as possible. New Yorkers didn’t flinch. The New York Marathon went ahead as scheduled the following Sunday. “I left my bodyguard at home,” one spectator joked.
26 killed in Texas church shooting
The killer was methodical, relentless. He marched through the church with an AR-15-style rifle and mowed down everyone he saw — adults, teenagers, babies. His target was as “soft” as they come — the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, Texas, a welcoming place whose congregants included the shooter’s mother-in-law, with whom he was apparently having a dispute. In the end, 26 people were killed, including the daughter of pastor Frank Pomeroy. “I know everyone who gave their life that day,” Pomeroy said a week later, wiping away tears. “I guarantee they are dancing with Jesus today.”
Farewell to Saturn’s greatest explorer
Just a few weeks after Americans marveled at the solar eclipse, scientists marked a bittersweet farewell to Cassini, the NASA spacecraft that spent 13 years exploring Saturn. Cassini, whose breakthrough discoveries revolutionized the search for life beyond Earth, disintegrated in the ringed planet’s cloud tops in a choreographed demise. NASA had extended the spacecraft’s original four-year mission twice. And even in the final seconds before it burned up like a shooting star, it sent back new data from deeper in Saturn’s atmosphere than ever before.