The death toll from last week's flash flooding disaster in the Nepal-Tibet border region rose to at least 955 people as of Monday.
Page A10From§Eachthe matinee edition — 31 August 2026
Novel climate lawsuit heads to Supreme Court as floods kill hundreds in Nepal, two more at Grand Canyon
As it ran on the front
Three headlines, one week, and they all involve water finding somewhere to go that used to be a plan for people to keep living.
The Grand Canyon flooded, and at least two people didn't survive it. In Nepal and Tibet, the flood death toll is past nine hundred, with over four thousand still missing — a number that's going to move before this column runs, and not in the direction anyone wants. And in Colorado, where the fires haven't stopped for years now, a genuinely new kind of lawsuit — one that tries to hold someone financially responsible for the climate itself — is finally getting a hearing at the Supreme Court.…
…(cont) Notice the order. The disasters came first, plural, on two continents, with a body count still being counted. The lawsuit came after, filed by people who watched the disasters happen and decided somebody ought to answer for the bill. That's not radical, that's just what happens after any other kind of damage — you sue the guy whose truck hit your house. The only thing novel about this lawsuit is that the truck is the size of the atmosphere and the driver has better lawyers than you.
Here's the stakes beat, stated flat: the same court that gets this case has spent years finding reasons not to touch questions like it. It doesn't have to rule against the fossil fuel industry to make news here. It just has to take the case, which it's doing, while the disaster count from this same underlying cause keeps a running total in three countries in the same month.
You don't need a theory of the case to feel this one. Somebody's kid isn't coming home from a canyon trip. Nine hundred families in the Himalayas are doing math on missing people that no lawsuit fixes. And the mechanism that connects all of it finally has a docket number. Whether it gets a verdict is a different column. Today it just got a hearing, which is more than most of the last decade managed.
“The water's already made news three times this week, and now the same court that keeps saying 'not yet' finally has the paperwork on its desk. Ask the families in Nepal how patient they're supposed to be.”
“The court will evaluate the science and jurisdictional questions on their own merits, separate from any individual weather event, and certainly separate from any broader pattern — there isn't a broader pattern legally speaking, that's for the plaintiffs to argue, not for me to concede.”
The receipts
Boulder, Colorado, seeks to hold oil companies accountable for the costs of adapting to climate change and wildfires in a lawsuit heading to the Supreme Court.
Officials say at least two people are dead and over a dozen others are missing after catastrophic floods struck a remote area of the Grand Canyon. KPNX's Kyle Simchuk reports with a live look at the current state of the canyon.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.