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Survivors of a mass killing face another in Nashville

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Survivors of a mass killing face another in Nashville


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NASHVILLE — Shaundelle Brooks was preparing for lunch Monday when her 17-year-old despatched her a textual content: his college was on lockdown due to an energetic shooter close by. The information left Brooks, who misplaced one other son within the 2018 Waffle Home mass killing, shaking.

“I’m like, ‘What’s going on right here, God?’ This can’t be occurring once more,” Brooks stated.

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Ashbey Beasley was vacationing close by along with her 7-year-old. Her household had survived a mass killing at Highland Park’s Independence Day parade lower than a 12 months in the past. When she heard the information of this taking pictures, panic rose in her chest.

“I used to be simply in shock, like, what?” she stated.

Joylyn Bukovac was working as a neighborhood TV reporter when she was despatched to cowl the violence on the Covenant College, which left six individuals, together with three 9-year-olds, useless. Hours later, whereas dwell on air, she revealed that she is a college taking pictures survivor herself.

“Plenty of that is actually mentioning a number of robust recollections for me,” Bukovac, 27, stated on tv. “I used to be truly within the hallway when the gunman open fired in my college taking pictures, I used to be in eighth grade on the time. I can’t even describe the shock.”

This week’s taking pictures despatched a shock wave of ache throughout this metropolis, as family and friends grappled with as soon as unthinkable grief. It additionally impacted a small membership of people that have been in Nashville, close to the varsity — and whose lives had been marked by a mass killing earlier than.

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In a nation the place there are 67 million extra weapons than individuals and gun violence has change into the primary killer of kids, mass shootings are so frequent that survivors of 1 at the moment are typically discovering themselves impacted by one other, providing a devastating portrait of compounding trauma. For the reason that begin of this 12 months, there have been 14 shootings with 4 or extra fatalities, in response to a database maintained by Northeastern College, the Related Press and USA At this time.

After a February taking pictures at Michigan State College, one pupil survivor revealed that that they had additionally lived by means of the Sandy Hook bloodbath as a toddler. One other had survived the Oxford Excessive College taking pictures in 2021. A person who survived the 2017 Las Vegas mass killing — the deadliest in trendy historical past — was killed within the Thousand Oaks, Calif., mass killing a 12 months later.

“We shouldn’t need to dwell like this. We shouldn’t need to dwell in worry, ?” stated Brooks, 50. “We’re not protected in colleges, you’re not protected whenever you exit to eat on the Waffle Home, you’re not protected in church — you’re not protected anyplace.”

When Brooks obtained her son’s textual content Monday, it despatched her right into a tailspin. She took off in her automotive towards his college, praying for his security — that he could be alive, and keep that means.

She’d executed that drive as soon as earlier than, on April 22, 2018.

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Within the wee morning hours of that day, she’d gotten a textual content from one in all her sons. There had been a taking pictures on the quick meals restaurant the place they’d been hanging out. Brooks rushed to the scene however wasn’t allowed inside. Then an ambulance rolled in entrance of her, and he or she noticed the physique of her son, Akilah Dasilva, mendacity motionless inside.

“I seemed in. I went up. I referred to as his identify. He didn’t reply,” she recalled. She was advised later on the hospital that her son had been shot and didn’t survive.

“That simply pierced my coronary heart,” Brooks stated. “You realize, that gap that you just really feel, it was simply this instantaneous, one thing, in my abdomen. That’s the worst feeling ever.”

The pit in her abdomen grew once more as she rushed to her son’s college this week.

Inside, highschool junior Aldane was considering of his late brother, asking: “Is that this what you went by means of?”

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“It undoubtedly gave me PTSD and made me, panicking. Placing worry into me,” Aldane stated. He was locked in his classroom on the time, whereas college students and educators waited for extra info. “I simply thought to myself I’ve to remain calm, maintain my head on in case one thing occurs.”

Slowly, extra info trickled in. There had been a mass killing, however it was at a special college a couple of mile away. The shooter was useless. Brooks breathed a sigh of reduction, after which drove to the scene of the violence, feeling a right away pang of empathy for the troublesome journey dealing with these mother and father and relations.

“I do know precisely what they’re feeling at this second. They’re in that ball,” she stated, crouching in fetal place to show. “That’s the place you’re in for a very long time since you simply really feel such as you’re drowning. However you don’t have the power to avoid wasting your self, and pull your self again up … or say you need assistance.”

Beasley befriended Brooks by means of their gun management activism, and reached out to her whereas on trip in Nashville to fulfill up. The textual content from Brooks shortly earlier than they have been speculated to have lunch collectively concerning the mass killing despatched Beasley proper again to final Fourth of July, when she and her son have been having fun with themselves on the Highland Park parade. Then: pops that gave the impression of fireworks. Individuals started to run.

“Individuals have been wailing, screaming, crying. Some individuals had blood on them,” she recalled. “My son saved saying ‘What is occurring?’ again and again.”

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He was so scared he stopped and laid on the bottom in the course of the commotion, “begging to not die,” she stated. She received him up and so they rushed house, protected. “Even a pair days after, he grabbed his head and stated it was too filled with ideas. After which he puked in all places.”

She described the entire expertise as “a bell you may’t un-ring. You’ll be able to’t unsee.”

Beasley and her son Beau have been in Nashville on trip, after attending a gun security rally in Washington, D.C. It was speculated to be a reprieve from the horror of gun violence.

As a substitute, she discovered herself dashing to the location of one other mass killing to supply help to Brooks, her pal. In entrance of a scrum of reporters, she gave an impassioned plea for added gun restriction measures to maintain semiautomatic rifles from the arms of mass killers.

“How is that this nonetheless occurring? How are our kids nonetheless dying and why are we failing them?” she demanded in a video that went viral on-line.

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Beasley had tried to protect Beau from the information of one other mass killing. However he came upon anyway after seeing it on a relative’s pc. She requested how he felt about it.

“He simply stated it made him unhappy,” she stated, sighing. “It’s in all places. What do you do? It’s unavoidable.”

For Bukovac, in the meantime, the scene on the Covenant College was all too acquainted. In an NBC Information interview, Bukovac described being within the hallway when pupil Hammad Memon shot and killed a classmate at her Madison, Ala., college and working to cover below the risers of her choir class. The WSMV 4 reporter recalled eager to name her household, to inform them she beloved them.

As she reported this week, “I noticed individuals working, individuals on their telephones, I knew precisely what they have been going by means of as a result of my household was … attempting to get involved with me at any time when I used to be hiding,” she stated. “Simply the shock that strikes by means of your physique, I can’t even describe it.”

On Wednesday, wax dripped from Brooks’ candle, the flame flickering because the solar set through the metropolis’s vigil for the taking pictures victims. A lot of all of it — the rituals of stories protection, the mourning, the political debate that observe mass killings — reminded her of when Akilah was killed.

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She wore a necklace together with his identify on it and a shirt together with his picture to the vigil. Lyrics to a track he had written earlier than he died have been on the shirt: “Neglect about making a hashtag let’s throw the weapons in a trash bag.”



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US Defence Сhief Says Washington Will Not Let Ukraine Fail

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US Defence Сhief Says Washington Will Not Let Ukraine Fail


Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin promised Tuesday that the United States will not let Ukraine fail, even as further aid remains stalled in Congress and Kyiv’s forces face shortages of munitions.

The Republican-led House of Representatives has been blocking $60 billion in assistance for Ukraine, and the United States has warned that a recent $300 million package would only last a few weeks.

The “United States will not let Ukraine fail”, Austin said at the opening of a meeting in Germany of Ukraine’s international supporters.

“We remain determined to provide Ukraine with the resources that it needs to resist the Kremlin’s aggression,” he added.

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Washington announced $300 million in assistance for Ukraine last week, but Austin said it was only possible due to savings on recent purchases by the Pentagon.

“We were only able to support this much-needed package by identifying some unanticipated contract savings”, Austin said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a statement the day before that it is “critically important for us that the Congress soon completes all the necessary procedures and makes a final decision” on aid for Kyiv.

Top US military officer General Charles “CQ” Brown told journalists en route to the Ukraine meeting that Kyiv’s troops are “having to pay attention to their supply rates, and how they execute.”

There is an “incremental kind of back and forth between Ukraine and Russia”, with “incremental gains on both sides”, Brown said.

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Other Topics of Interest

Ukraine ‘Hacktivists’ Fighting Russia on Digital Front

The hacker group was born out of a call 48 hours into Russia’s invasion by Ukraine’s Digital Transformation Minister Mikhailo Fedorov for Kyiv to create an “IT army”.

But he noted that “even as the Russians have gained territory, they do it at a pretty big cost in number of casualties, like in personnel, but also in number of pieces of equipment that are being taken out.”

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Austin said in his remarks Tuesday that “at least 315,000 Russian troops have been killed or wounded” since Russia launched its all-out invasion of Ukraine in 2022 — a figure that was previously reported at the end of last year.

Moscow has also “squandered up to $211 billion to equip, deploy, maintain, and sustain its imperial aggression against Ukraine,” he said.

Austin and other US officials have spearheaded the push for international support for Ukraine, quickly forging a coalition to back Kyiv after Russia invaded and coordinating aid from dozens of countries.

Washington is by far Kyiv’s biggest donor of security aid, committing tens of billions of dollars to aid Kyiv since February 2022.



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Analysis | Israel’s war on Hamas brings famine to Gaza

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Analysis | Israel’s war on Hamas brings famine to Gaza


You’re reading an excerpt from the Today’s WorldView newsletter. Sign up to get the rest free, including news from around the globe and interesting ideas and opinions to know, sent to your inbox every weekday.

The warnings were being sounded for weeks. The United Nations, international relief organizations and some foreign governments voiced their fears over the ongoing humanitarian calamity in the Gaza Strip, where more than 2 million Palestinians are caught in the crosshairs of Israel’s punishing campaign against militant group Hamas. Food and other critical supplies remain scarce, while aid deliveries have been stymied by Israeli authorities that encircle Gaza’s borders.

Those warnings reached a crescendo Monday with the release of new report by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a global multi-stakeholder initiative working on food security and nutrition analysis. It found that 1.1 million people in Gaza — roughly half the beleaguered territory’s population — are expected to face catastrophic levels of hunger and starvation between now and July. Many of those at immediate risk live in Gaza’s devastated northern regions, which are cut off from the south by Israeli forces and receive only a paltry trickle of the already-meagre aid that’s entering Gaza.

The fact of a “famine” is tied up in a complicated set of bureaucratic criteria, as my colleague Andrew Jeong outlined. It is usually declared by governments, though some U.N. officials have done so in contexts where no prevailing governing entity was capable of formally assessing the situation. The IPC uses a five-tiered classification system where “famine” is the fifth tier and “emergency” the fourth.

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“Compared to the IPC’s previous analysis in December 2023, acute food insecurity in the Gaza Strip has deepened and widened, with nearly double the number of people projected to experience those conditions by July,” my colleagues reported. “In the IPC’s five-tier classification of food crises, Gaza now has the largest percentage of a population to receive its most severe rating since the body began reporting in 2004, Beth Bechdol, deputy director general at the Food and Agriculture Organization, told The Washington Post.”

What makes this calamity all the more stunning is that it’s entirely the product of human decisions: Gaza’s civilian population is starving because of an Israeli siege, not an earthquake, extended drought or other natural disasters that have blighted parts of the world subject to famine. That reality is agonizing for U.N. officials.

“We haven’t seen that rate of death among children in almost any other conflict in the world,” Catherine Russell, head of the U.N.’s children agency, told CBS News’ “Face the Nation” program Sunday. “I’ve been in wards of children who are suffering from severe anemia malnutrition, the whole ward is absolutely quiet. Because the children, the babies … don’t even have the energy to cry.”

“This is the highest number of people facing catastrophic hunger ever recorded by the Integrated Food Security Classification system — anywhere, anytime,” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said in a news briefing Monday. “This is an entirely man-made disaster — and the report makes clear that it can be halted.”

Martin Griffiths, the U.N.’s top humanitarian official, said more than 1 million people are at risk because they have been cut off from aid, markets have been collapsed and fields destroyed. “The international community should hang its head in shame for failing to stop this.”

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Israeli officials, chiefly Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, appear unmoved by the state of affairs. They blame Hamas for bringing about this crisis and reject growing calls for a cease-fire, which now include prominent Democratic lawmakers in Washington. “In the international community, there are those who are trying to stop the war now, before all of its goals have been achieved,” Netanyahu said in an interview on CNN over the weekend. “If we stop the war now, before all of its goals are achieved, this means that Israel will have lost the war, and this we will not allow.”

On Monday, international humanitarian organization Oxfam released a report outlining how Israel has stymied or constrained the delivery of aid, including attacks on humanitarian convoys, “unjustifiably inefficient” processes of inspection of the relief supplies, and denial of access to humanitarian officials and aid groups.

Israel has been using “starvation as a weapon of war,” for more than five months, Sally Abi Khalil, Oxfam’s Middle East and North Africa regional director, said in a statement. She said that the humanitarian situation in Gaza has “actually worsened” since the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to enable more aid into the enclave. “Israel’s deliberate manufacturing of suffering is systemic and of such scale and intensity that it creates a real risk of a genocide in Gaza,” she said.

That’s rhetoric that mainstream politicians are also echoing. “In Gaza we are no longer on the brink of famine; we are in a state of famine, affecting thousands of people,” Josep Borrell, the European Union’s top diplomat, said Monday at the start of a conference on humanitarian aid for Gaza in Brussels. “This is unacceptable. Starvation is used as a weapon of war.”

But respite is not in sight, with Israel and Hamas still at loggerheads over the possibility of a cease-fire brokered through U.S. and Arab mediators.

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“For nearly a month, the news coverage has been about efforts being made toward a truce,” Atef Abu Saif, a Gaza-born novelist and the Palestinian Authority’s minister of culture, wrote in an op-ed for The Washington Post that detailed his mother’s death in a tent in Gaza. “Just a temporary truce! After so many weeks of such modest hopes, ‘truce’ has become everyone’s favorite word: a cherished, idealistic, holy concept. It’s such a meager thing to hope for — a few days without killing. But even this feels out of reach.”





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Michigan lawyer who claimed election fraud arrested after Dominion hearing

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Michigan lawyer who claimed election fraud arrested after Dominion hearing


An attorney for former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne was detained at the federal courthouse in Washington on Monday after defending her decision to disseminate internal documents from Dominion Voting Systems in an effort to revive long-debunked claims about the 2020 election.

Stefanie Lambert was facing a bench warrant from a state court in Michigan, where she is accused of taking part in a conspiracy to tamper with voting machines in hopes of finding proof of fraud. She is simultaneously representing Byrne, who is being sued for defamation by Dominion over related falsehoods claiming the firm’s machines enabled vote tampering.

The U.S. Marshals office in a statement confirmed Lambert was arrested on Monday afternoon.

In D.C. court Monday, Lambert admitted that she made public emails she obtained as Byrne’s lawyer and shared them with a southwestern Michigan sheriff who was also investigated as part of that alleged plot. Over 2,000 pages of the documents were put on the social media site X this month by an account using the sheriff’s name and photograph.

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Dominion requested Lambert be removed from the case following the release of the documents.

“It has been nearly four years. When does it stop?” Dominion attorney Davida Brook asked in court. She said the company brought suits against Byrne and others “to stop the lies, to end the threats of violence.” Now, she said, Lambert was “using these very lawsuits … to spread yet more lies and do yet more harm.” Dominion employees have received a fresh round of violent threats as a result of the disclosures, Brook said.

Magistrate Judge Moxila A. Upadhyaya said she needed more time to decide whether Lambert should be removed from the case. But the judge said that in the meantime, both Lambert and Byrne could not access to discovery materials, and that Lambert must move to seal the Michigan court document containing Dominion’s records.

After the hearing ended, the other attorneys left while Lambert was asked by the judge to stay behind. Several U.S. Marshals then entered the courtroom and locked the door behind them. Lambert never left through the public courtroom entrance; there is another exit through which detained individuals are transported.

Lambert’s Michigan defense attorney, Daniel Hartman, declined to speak on her whereabouts Monday but said that her failure to appear in court in Michigan “was not willful.” Instead he said it was because of “mixed messages” about whether she had to get fingerprinted while challenging the court’s orders. Just before Lambert appeared in court in D.C., Hartman asked the Michigan judge to reconsider the warrant for her arrest. “To compound onto this entire tragedy, you have an arrest warrant that probably shouldn’t be issued,” he said.

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Lambert only recently became Byrne’s lead attorney in Washington, but she said in court that she had been helping with the case since late last year and gained access to the documents sometime “after the holidays.” Given that she had them for weeks, if not months, Upadhyaya asked why Lambert did not file a motion to undo a protective order, which the lawyer signed, barring disclosure of those documents to anyone not involved in the case.

Lambert responded that she was under no obligation to adhere to the protective order because the emails contained “evidence of a crime,” suggesting the situation was analogous to being handed “a dead body” as part of the case discovery. Specifically, she alleged that they were proof that “Dominion conspired with foreign nationals in Serbia” to undermine the U.S. election system. Dominion’s attorneys responded that this was a “xenophobic conclusion” based only on the fact that the company has some overseas employees. A Dominion spokeswoman added in an email that “any allegation that Dominion employees anywhere tried to interfere with any election is flatly false.”

Lambert said in court that she gave only Barry County Sheriff Dar Leaf access to the Dominion case discovery storage, which Brook said totals over a million pages. But Lambert said Leaf shared the documents with other sheriffs and members of Congress. Leaf, who has not been charged in the Michigan case, did not immediately return a request for comment.

Lambert said Byrne shared the documents with “the U.S. Attorney’s Office.” She said she did not know which one; there are nearly 100 U.S. attorneys running federal prosecutors’ offices across the country. Lambert argued that Byrne is “a national intelligence asset” who was entitled to “national security information” with law enforcement. Byrne has claimed he was instructed by the FBI to pursue a romantic relationship with Maria Butina, a Russian national who was convicted of being an unregistered foreign agent in 2019. (Former FBI officials have called Byrne’s claims “ridiculous.”) He did not appear in court Monday; asked about the documents he said by text message, “I’m just a humble concerned citizen.” Upadhyaya said he must be in court for the next hearing on whether his lawyer should face penalties.

Right now, Upadhyaya said, her goal was “to prevent further bleeding” of protected information into the public sphere. “I will deal with the ‘why’ later,” she said. But, she told Lambert, “the analogy of the dead body rings hollow to me.”

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Dominion was alerted to the leaks by Byrne’s previous attorney, Robert Driscoll, who told them that he had “asked Ms. Lambert to take immediate steps and reasonable efforts to prevent further disclosure of Confidential Discovery Material.” He added that he “had no advance knowledge” of the disclosure, only learning about it when the documents appeared on social media. One such post had already been viewed over 150,000 times by Monday afternoon, Brook said: “The cat is out of the bag.”

Lambert’s criminal trial is set to begin next month. A trial date has not been set in the Dominion case. The company last year settled a similar suit with Fox News for $787 million dollars, and is also suing former Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell along with the right-wing television station OAN and the pillow businessman Mike Lindell.



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