A runway overrun, a fairground lunge, and a hurricane that still might miss

World & Security

Labor Day weekend in Miami ended the way aviation investigators dread. A converted Boeing 767 flying as Amazon Air Flight 7598 from San Juan overran runway 30 at Miami International around 2 p.m. Sunday, tore through fencing and struck two vehicles before catching fire. The National Transportation Safety Board said Monday that all five people killed were in those vehicles — a 2012 Ford Econoline van with seven people aboard, owned by an airline-cleaning contractor, and a Toyota Corolla Cross on Northwest 67 Avenue — while five others were injured. Chair Jennifer Homendy recovered both black boxes, called the van “utter devastation,” and said the jet traveled about 1,300 feet past the paved surface. Investigators will look at whether Miami should have had a crushable arresting bed at the runway’s end, the contractual split between Amazon and operator 21 Air, and whether the 32-year-old airframe, originally a passenger jet, floated too far down the runway before touching down. More than 160 flights were canceled and nearly 325 delayed; Amazon said it was heartbroken and would cooperate.

Hawaii was watching a different inbound. Category 3 Hurricane Lowell, with 115 mph winds after an earlier Category 5 peak of 160 mph, was expected to pass 100 to 150 miles west of Kauaʻi late Monday into Tuesday. A hurricane warning covered Kauaʻi County and parts of the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument; Gov. Josh Green had already declared an emergency. Flash flooding hit Oahu’s Kamehameha Highway on Sunday, and forecasters warned of 20-foot surf on south- and west-facing shores plus 5 to 8 inches of rain, locally near a foot. Models still favored a miss, which is the meteorological equivalent of being told the bus will only clip your mailbox.

In Ohio, a county fair became a national security story. Patrick Havas, 38, forced his way through a crowd toward Democratic gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton at the Canfield Fair, knocking people down; troopers recovered two pistols, a Taser and brass knuckles that were never drawn. Acton, Ohio’s former health director and, if elected, the state’s first Jewish governor, was unhurt and back on a Cleveland parade route the next day. The U.S. Coast Guard separately repatriated 75 of 77 people taken off an overloaded 32-foot boat in the Mona Passage off Puerto Rico — 73 Dominicans and four Haitians — after a Customs aircraft spotted the craft northwest of Aguadilla. The country’s maritime border work, unlike the rest of us, does not take Labor Day off.

Markets & Economy

Hyundai Steel broke ground in Donaldsonville, Louisiana, on a $5.8 billion electric-arc mill with POSCO, aiming for 2.7 million tons a year of low-carbon flat steel and commercial production in the first quarter of 2029. Eight hundred thousand tons of automotive sheet are already spoken for by Hyundai Motor and Kia; the rest is a bet that building inside the tariff wall beats exporting through it. Officials in Baton Rouge, already celebrating a record 2.01 million people at work, pointed to that mill, LNG plants, data centers and a planned SpaceX complex as reasons wages have outrun inflation. Across the Sabine, Seoul’s industry ministry was busy walking back Korean press reports that a $22.3 billion, 6.3-gigawatt gas plant in Encinal, Texas, was locked in as the first project under a $350 billion U.S. investment package. Negotiations continue; Lewis Energy was named as the would-be owner; nobody has produced a signed power-purchase agreement. Texas could use the megawatts — data-center demand is the state’s new oil — but Governor Greg Abbott has also been telling regulators not to dump the costs on households.

Texas hospitals, meanwhile, say they are already eating $27 million a day after Washington withheld about $9.8 billion in extra Medicaid matching funds, mostly from the CHIRP program that tops up payments that do not cover actual costs. Four million Texans are on Medicaid, most of them children; Harris Health alone could lose at least $258 million. Abbott called the holdup an economic “gun to the head.” Florida took eleven months to resolve a similar fight. Even a deal tomorrow, hospital lobbyists warned, would leave a claims backlog of at least 90 days.

Atlantic City’s nine casinos are fighting a different squeeze. Employment at casinos and hotels fell to 21,172, the lowest in at least nine years, and an Atlantic County Economic Alliance analysis warned of 5,100 job losses by 2035 as New York City’s new tables — and possible Meadowlands and Monmouth Park casinos — nibble the market. Brick-and-mortar profits keep falling even as statewide gaming taxes hit records, because the growth is online. And in Ohio, a food-bank survey of 2,644 pantry visitors found 57 percent choosing between utilities and food and 45 percent between rent and food, after more than 100,000 people, including more than 50,000 children, lost SNAP under last year’s federal cuts. Food, as one organizer put it, is the bill you can skip.

Technology & Industry

Tesla put a two-seat Cybercab with no steering wheel and no brake pedal on Austin streets on September 3; NHTSA opened audit query AQ26002 the next day, asking how the company self-certified that decades-old federal rules requiring manual controls do not apply to a car nobody is supposed to drive. The agency’s filing cited a population of about 1,000 Cybercabs; reporting counted 45 registered in Texas on launch day. Amazon’s Zoox waited four years for similar clearance. Tesla’s existing Austin robotaxi service, using Model Ys with a safety monitor, has already logged 14 crashes, and Washington has a pending proposal to drop the manual-control requirement — convenient timing, or a bet that the rulebook will catch up to the car.

The same boom that wants Cybercabs also wants nuclear plants that outlast the servers. Microsoft’s 20-year deal is helping restart Three Mile Island Unit 1 — the undamaged reactor — as the Crane Clean Energy Center, targeting about 835 megawatts and a 2027 restart that still needs Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspections. Meta’s Illinois contract covers 1,121 megawatts at Clinton, mostly existing output plus a planned 30-megawatt bump. Amazon has contracted for up to 1.92 gigawatts from Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna plant through 2042, ramping no later than 2032. Those are not interchangeable “new nukes.” New York, five years after Indian Point closed, wants 5 gigawatts of new nuclear, at least 1 GW via the Power Authority.

California’s privacy fight is less glamorous and more immediate. Lawmakers funded sharing all driver records with AAMVA, the national DMV clearinghouse, after warnings that REAL ID credentials might fail at airports. They did not know the Department of Homeland Security had already subpoenaed AAMVA for 17 million commercial-license records — names, birth dates, license numbers, Social Security numbers — “for civil immigration enforcement,” with a request not to discuss it. Twenty-two attorneys general sued; a Virginia federal judge temporarily blocked the handover as “unlawful,” with a September 10 hearing. Newsom’s office says commercial and non-commercial databases are different systems. Privacy lawyers, who spent the summer saying this would happen, are resisting the urge to send a fruit basket. New York City banned AI tools in public schools through eighth grade, while Minnesota’s non-consensual “nudify” law survived xAI’s second bid for a pause.

Politics & Policy

President Trump floated renaming New Mexico “New America” on Truth Social, complete with a White House graphic crossing out “Mexico.” Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham’s reply was that the name “isn’t up for debate” and has belonged to the region since before the United States existed — Spanish colonists adopted it in the 16th century — and that the president might prefer discussing petrol prices. Legal analysts noted the obvious: a state’s name lives in its founding statutes, not on the Resolute Desk. The Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario have already been through this particular branding exercise.

Missouri’s Republican attorney general, Catherine Hanaway, was less interested in cartography than in maps. After a unanimous state Supreme Court held that a legally sufficient referendum petition froze a 2025 congressional remap until voters decide, her office asked federal courts — including Justice Brett Kavanaugh, with a noon Monday deadline — to restore the GOP-drawn lines for November. Tuesday is the last day to change the Nov. 3 ballot. The solicitor general accused the state court of a “legal fiction”; the referendum group accused the federal plaintiffs of collusion with a secretary of state who agrees with them. Maryland’s Supreme Court, by contrast, let Question 3, a congressional redistricting amendment, stay on the November ballot with revised language. Idaho’s high court approved revised wording for Proposition 1, which would create a statutory right to abortion before fetal viability.

Ohio’s Statehouse, after the Canfield Fair incident, still had no passed bills on political violence. Measures on hate crimes, politically motivated killings, and letting some officials carry guns in government buildings never got past a first hearing before summer recess. Hours before the lunge, the official Ohio GOP account had amplified Laura Loomer’s unverified claim that Acton had been drinking, then watched Loomer call the fair incident “fake news” and compare Acton to Jussie Smollett. Gov. Mike DeWine and Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign condemned the violence. Campaign committees spent more than $40 million on security in the last full cycle, which is one way of measuring how normal this has become.

Human Stories / Social Trends

On Brooklyn’s Eastern Parkway, Haitian mas camps still sewed emperor robes and flag-covered dresses for the West Indian Day Parade, even after the Supreme Court allowed the administration to end temporary protected status for roughly 350,000 Haitians and work permits expired in July. Organizer Natalie Lafontant called it a somber cloud and then did what Caribbean communities do: music, dance, art. The New York metro’s Haitian population, about 163,000, is the country’s second-largest after Miami. Costumes this year commemorated Jean-Jacques Dessalines and the flags of countries Haitian revolutionaries once helped, which is a lot of history to carry on a float when the insurance bill is already hefty.

Flagstaff, Arizona, remains the rare city of 75,000 where you can still see the Milky Way from downtown, thanks to a 1958 searchlight ban written for Lowell Observatory that grew into the world’s first International Dark Sky City. Colorado Parks and Wildlife, facing the opposite of a dark-sky problem, euthanized 294 black bears through August — more than three times last year’s 83 — after 8,672 sightings and contacts as drought and wildfire emptied the berry crop. Officers say a lot of those deaths follow car strikes, and that open screen doors and unsecured trash make the rest too easy. In Danville, Kentucky, nutritionist Brent Williams, who cannot eat mammal meat after tick-borne alpha-gal syndrome, is helping raise more than 400 ostriches because the burgers taste like beef and do not send him to the emergency room. Ground ostrich can run more than $20 a pound, which is a lot to pay to remember a hamburger. Miss Texas Regan Hutsell was crowned Miss America 2027 in West Palm Beach, the 99th winner, with $50,000 in scholarship money and a year of travel that will not, one hopes, involve either a cargo-jet overrun or a hungry bear.