How to Help Nepal Flood Vicitims – The Thursday AM Quickie 8/27/26
First Dolly Parton, then Tim Curry and Yayoi Kusama. It's a sad week for lovers of the arts. - Corey
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8/27: Matt Lech will be hosting. In the pre-taped guest portion, Emma will interview Shahed Ezaydi, award-winning freelance journalist and author of "The Othered Woman: How White Feminism Harms Muslim Women."
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Today you’ll read about who's secretly supporting a New York prison inmate running as a Democrat in Alaska's congressional race, the unsettling reason for the CIA director's under-the-radar trip to Moscow, and a heartening courtroom victory for migrant farmworkers and their union, the UFW.
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THE BIG NEWS
Climate Catastrophe: Glacier Collapse Causes Terrifying Himalayan Floods
The new era of climate disasters brings fresh horrors almost every week. Yesterday powerful floods triggered by a collapsed glacier swept over the Nepal-China border region. More than 1,300 people are missing in rural areas of Nepal and Tibet, including hundreds of tourists, the Associated Press reports.
Photos and videos show a wall of muddy water rushing through towns, knocking over buildings, destroying roads, bridges, and dams, and sweeping cars, people, and animals away in the flood of debris downstream.
"I started running. Then a wall of water came thundering down as if it was an earthquake," Nepali laborer Bibek Kumal tells Reuters from his hospital bed in Kathmandu. He was swept downstream with the mud and debris but luckily wound up stuck in a mango tree. "Had there been no mango tree, I would have been washed away to death," he says.
Others were not so lucky. Many of the 165 confirmed dead were on a high-altitude pilgrimage to Tibet's Kailash Mansarovar; others were trekkers. That death toll is certain to grow significantly.
Early reports from Nepali authorities suggested an earthquake may have caused the floods. But a new scientific consensus quickly formed that makes clear this is a climate disaster. Experts tell Reuters and the New York Times that a portion of a glacier snapped off and crashed down over a full vertical kilometer, creating shockwaves that were mistaken for an earthquake and triggering the landslides and flooding.
"The bottom looks like a bomb exploded — it's just deposits from the broken-up glacier," University of Calgary earth scientists Dan Shugar says. "Some of the glaciers in the valley were covered in snow yesterday and today they are mostly bare ice. So in other words... it was probably warm."
The Kathmandu Post lists several options for people looking to donate to help flood relief, including the Red Cross, "one of the most active responders on the ground."