At least 14 people, including three children, were killed in a sudden Russian drone and missile attack in the Ukrainian capital, according to officials. Zein Basravi from Al Jazeera is reportedly at the scene of a building explosion there.
A man with three guns allegedly shot dozens of rounds into a Minneapolis, Minnesota school mass on Wednesday, killing two children and injuring 17 others as students prepare to go back to school this week after the summer break.
Authorities are still looking into the motive, according to Minneapolis police chief Brian O’Hara, who said the suspect, 23-year-old Robin Westman, “took his own life” at the back of the church.
Although attempts to enact stricter gun laws continue to face strong opposition from conservative organizations and politicians, school shootings have become a far too common reality in the United States.
The number of incidents that are recorded can vary depending on how many are recorded, how many people were injured or killed, and which database was used. Al Jazeera provides you with the breakdown.
School shootings are tracked by a number of databases that use various criteria, just like mass shootings. Some definitions are broad, while others only list the most severe incidents.
The most comprehensive definition is found in the K-12 School Shooting Database.
No matter whether anyone was hurt or killed on K-12 school property, it records every incident where a gun is fired, brandished with intent, or a bullet strikes school property. This includes gang shootings, domestic violence incidents, shootings at after-school events, suicides, gunfights that escalate into gunfire, and accidental discharges.
This year, there have been 146 gun violence incidents, according to this definition.
Everytown for Gun Safety, a different source, uses data from the K-12 School Shooting Database to track and analyze gun discharge incidents on school grounds.
Everytown tracks gun incidents that left people dead or wounded, as well as those that left people shot after a gun was discharged. Not included are incidents where guns were brought into schools but never discharged.
This year, there have been 91 gunshot incidents on school grounds, according to this definition.
The most restrictive definition is used by a third database, Education Week.
Only shootings that occurred on school property or buses during the course of a class are included in the list.
According to this definition, there have been eight school shootings this year that have left people dead.
Regardless of the method used, the US has the most shootings in schools worldwide.
Other nations do occasionally see school shootings. On June 10, a former student opened fire at a Graz, Austria, school, injuring 11 people, which included 10 people. The worst school shooting in Austria’s history occurred in this instance.
The fatal shooting at the school on Wednesday is the deadliest of the year and the single incident with the most fatalities since the 2022 fatal shooting at the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, which left 17 people injured and 19 students dead.
According to Education Week, there have been 229 school shootings with injuries or deaths since 2018, including 24 each in 2018 and 2019, 10 in 2020, 35 in 2021, 51 in 2022, 38 in 2023, and 39 in 2024.
After less than a month in the position, the head of the nation’s top public health agency was fired, and several senior agency officials have left.
Vice press secretary Kush Desai said on Wednesday night that Susan Monarez’s refusal to “align with” President Donald Trump’s agenda caused the White House to fire her.
In a brief social media post on Wednesday afternoon, the US Department of Health and Human Services made her announcement.
Her attorneys responded with a statement, claiming Monarez had not received any notice of her termination.
“She chose protecting the public over serving a political agenda when CDC Director Susan Monarez chose to reject unscientific, careless directives and fire dedicated health experts.” She has been targeted for that, according to attorneys Mark Zaid and Abbe David Lowell in a statement.
Not just one official is involved, they say. It concerns the systematic destruction of public health institutions, the silencing of experts, and the dangerous politicization of science. Every American should be warned by the attack on Dr. Monarez because our evidence-based systems are being undermined internally, they said.
Her departure came at a time when at least four senior CDC officials resigned this week.
Dr. Debra Houry, the organization’s deputy director, Dr. Daniel Jernigan, the agency’s director, Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, its director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, Dr. Jennifer Layden, the Office of Public Health Data, Surveillance, and Technology, are among the list.
Houry lamented the agency’s repercussions from planned budget cuts, restructuring, and hirings in an email that The Associated Press obtained.
In the wake of a 2023 law, Monarez, 50, became the agency’s 21st director and the first to pass through Senate confirmation. After Trump abruptly withdrew his first choice, David Weldon, she was appointed acting director in January and then chosen as the nominee in March.
She became the shortest-serving CDC director in the 79-year history of the organization on July 31 when she was sworn in less than a month later.
Before the end of the small-value package exemption, Mexico declares it will stop shipping packages to the United States.
As they await further information from the US government, postal services from several European nations, including Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Italy, and the United Kingdom, are following in the footsteps of the announcement on Wednesday.
Since 2016, packages valued at less than $800 have been allowed to enter the US tariff-free under the “de minimis” exemption, but Friday is the deadline to close the loophole.
The change is anticipated to hurt the business of Chinese e-commerce platforms like Shein and Temu, which have evaded US tariffs by mailing customers directly, and it has also stifled the confusion of other US trade partners. In the event that Washington provides more information about new duties, Mexico announced it would suspend shipments.
Mexico continues to work with US authorities and international post offices to develop policies that will ensure the smooth resumption of services, ensure users, and prevent setbacks in the delivery of goods, according to the government.
Important issues remain unresolved, particularly regarding how and by whom customs duties will be collected in the future, what additional data will be required, and how data transmission to US Customs and Border Protection will be handled, according to shipping giant DHL.
As part of US President Donald Trump’s wider trade war, the White House announced plans to suspend the de minimis exemption for all nations starting on July 30.
Due to concerns about the flow of fentanyl and other drugs over the US border, the exemption was previously suspended for China, Hong Kong, Mexico, and Canada.
Two schemes may be used to calculate tariffs for small packages, according to a White House Fact Sheet released on July 30.
The first method calculates the package’s value, while the second method sets a tariff range of $80 to $200 per item.
Based on the Trump administration’s overall tariff schedule for the majority of its US trade partners in August, which ranges from 10% to 40%, are both rates.
Additionally, tariffs have been levied on a number of different industries, including automotive parts, automotive parts, and semiconductors.
You would have been labeled an alarmist eight months ago if you had predicted that the MAGA second coming would, in broad daylight, bring the Confederacy back in. The Redeemers, the first MAGA movement, and antiracist wingnuts or the “woke” would have sounded like overblown anxieties that pretended to be true.
There were significant elements of the movement interested in a return to plantation life just as it would have been unreasonable to assume eight months ago that MAGA featured men and women waving the Confederate battle flag in a mob swarming the Capitol. They were concerned about trad wives and the disenfranchisement of women, and they were concerned that the people they enslaved would enjoy their enslavement, according to the movement.
However, some things must seem strange today, even for those who have accused us of awake hysterics. The defense secretary has ordered the restoration of the Confederate monument of an enslaved Black “mammy” who is loyal to her manly enslaver, rapist, as he goes on war in the battle to keep her back whip-opened, which was ordered removed from Arlington National Cemetery in 2019. Trump’s proposed replacement for PBS, PragerU’s cartoon of a bright-eyed Christopher Columbus, who is known for excluding indigenous children from collecting enough gold, must seem a little strange because it instructs kids to avoid casting a negative opinion on slavery.
By ordering federal troops to occupy Washington, DC, it was not just alarmism to think that those waving the Confederate battle flag might be interested in restoring the Confederate States, or might be interested in avenging their intellectual forebears, the slaveholders who were subject to Union troops’ occupation after the US Civil War. It was plausible to assume that they would support the federal police patrols that are currently roiling Black communities nationwide in retaliation for the murder of George Floyd; this is an analogy to the slave patrols that spread across the country after slave revolts.
There has been a public outcry about politicians shouting “down with the]n-word]” ever since the Black uprising against US-codified apartheid in the 1960s! in the media. The Confederacy would need to be reassembled piece by piece if it were to be effective. The Ku Klux Klan, the ex-confederate soldier institution par excellence, was no longer tolerated in full repression in the US Congress. When they quote famous Klansman senators like Theodore Bilbo in his campaign to end woken anti-lynching, “When once the flat-nosed Ethiopian, like a camel, gets his proboscis under the tent, he will overthrow the established order of our Saxon civilization,” MAGA politicians are ineffective. Instead, they must write themselves down as “We will not have a country anymore” and “If we import the Third World, we become the Third World.”
In the anti-woke state’s glass Trojan horse, the Confederacy must be escorted into the public square. The Confederate-loving mammy statue was “toppled by woke lemmings” over here. A vote-counting law being repealed there. Here’s a suggestion to release Derek Chauvin. A “anti-DEI” program there that is segregationist, ahem. So that by the end of the eighth month, it will be possible to convert Black communities to open-air prisons. White supremacist Nick Fuentes made a few years ago that he wanted the military to enter Black communities. Federal agents are arresting and publicly humiliating Black people who smoke on their porches today by requiring them to present their identification. White supremacists’ wishlist was made in full disclosure for the low cost of temporarily storing their white hoods.
The anti-woke state is essentially white supremacist America under the control of more vocal white supremacists. Although much anti-wokeness is portrayed as the reasonable middle ground between the extreme extremism of both sides — the Ku Klux Klan on one side and the bodies they hang from trees on the other, there is no room for debate between the fight to end wokeness and the desire to see Black populations suffer.
The anti-woke in power immediately began to restore their holy sites to Black child and Black flesh sex traffickers. They immediately began to fight against Black liberties and reverse their insincere efforts to stop police shootings. Being awake has always meant being sensitive to anti-Blackness and opposing white supremacy, which is why it is hated all over the world. The colonist leaders who have endorsed anti-wokeness as the new paradigm, from the conservative former grand wizard to the progressive governor, have all stated that they want to see resistance be mocked and destroyed.
The detractors of wokeness and emancipation are the same people. What else, besides woke government overreach, was the Confederate’s abolishment of slavery? What other forms of segregationist integration, besides woke corporations and DEI gone mad, was there? The restoration of the whipping post is what the 19th-century Redeemers sought, the millions-strong Ku Klux Klan sought, and the MAGA movement’s goal in the twenty-first century.
What else does it mean to see migrants being handcuffed and forced to bend over like dogs and eat food like dogs? Aren’t the intentionally cramped holding areas reminiscent of the shackles of the slave ships’ hold? Isn’t the scene of ICE searching the city for “illegal” brown people also the scene of slave catchers being taken prisoner from a plantation? Isn’t it illegal for refugees of US neocolonialists to be tortured in an El Salvador prison as a deterrent to the slaveholders selling them to “down South” plantations where they can never go back? Isn’t the slave auctioneer’s block’s central event the family separation? Isn’t this the scene of horse-drawn buggies carrying Black loved ones away from home to be tortured elsewhere and never heard from again because of the ripping of mothers from children, husbands from wives, and with no way to reconnect?
Because it is. People who giddy at the lynching photos of last century will now take selfies at “Alligator Alcatraz.” The comment sections of every police shooting would now be flooded with comments from the people who gathered to apologise for an alleged Black family hanging from a tree. Racists aren’t as easily brainwashed into intolerance by charismatic cults as they were in the past a hundred years. Racists enjoy it. They take a bath in our suffering. They obstruct children’s memorials in Gaza. They buy Twitter, opening the floodgates for Blackface minstrelsy memes. DC’s crime rate is comparable to that of an migrant caravan that invaded the country. Federal troops are only stationed in “Chocolate City” to satiate the desire to witness the suffering of the colonized. No need to terrorize, harass, or confine us. They do it because they can. No matter how many new liberal politicians speak out in front of the microphones and slam “This is not who we are,” the slaveholders’ society never changes. It is .
However, it is important to remember that this generation is not anticipating Union troops’ vengeance. The slick-haired politicians who promise freedom once we tuck our liberation into their 2028 campaign wagon already worry about the lack of youth support. The colonized generation is not content to sleep outside, hoping that the next master will be the one to rescue us. They are emotionally detaching from America, whether it be the Confederacy or the United States.
Amar Bendjama, the UN ambassador to Algeria, read her son Gaith’s farewell letter from Palestinian journalist Mariam Abu Daqqa. Prior to the Israeli airstrikes at Gaza’s Nasser Hospital, Mariam wrote the letter along with four other journalists.