Shooter kills 6 at Nashville school in targeted attack

Shooter kills 6 at Nashville school in targeted attack
Law enforcement officers assemble near The Covenant School after a shooting in Nashville, Tennessee, US, Mar. 27, 2023. (Reuters)
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Updated 28 March 2023

Shooter kills 6 at Nashville school in targeted attack

Shooter kills 6 at Nashville school in targeted attack
  • Deadly mass shootings have become commonplace in the United States, but a female attacker is highly unusual
  • There have been 89 school shootings — defined as anytime a gun is discharged on school property — in the US so far in 2023

WASHINGTON: A heavily-armed former student killed three young children and three staff in what appeared to be a carefully planned attack at a private elementary school in Nashville on Monday, before being shot dead by police.
Chief of Police John Drake named the suspect as Audrey Hale — a 28-year-old female, who the officer later said identified as transgender.
Hale had maps of the school, left behind a manifesto, and was “prepared for a confrontation with law enforcement,” the police chief told reporters following the latest outburst of gun violence to stun the United States.
Armed with at least two assault rifles and a handgun, Hale entered the Christian Covenant School from a side entrance, allegedly shooting through a door — firing multiple shots while advancing through the building, according to police.
They said officers were on the scene within about 15 minutes of receiving the first emergency call around 10:00 am (1500 GMT), engaging the shooter who returned fire before being shot dead.
Police identified the six victims, saying one of the three children was eight years old and two were age nine, while the adults killed were age 60 to 61.
Television images showed young children holding hands as they filed out of the school, and one searing photograph showed a child sobbing through the window of her yellow school bus as it pulled away from the crime scene.
Avery Myrick said her mother, a pre-kindergarten teacher at Covenant, hid as shots rang out through the school.
“She said she was hiding in the closet, and that there was shooting all over and that they had potentially tried to get into her room, and just that she loved us,” Myrick told WSMV4 television, an NBC local affiliate.
When she heard her mother was safe it brought “a ton of relief.”
“But you know, you’re still hurting for the people out there who might not get that call,” she said.
School shootings are alarmingly common in the United States, where the proliferation of firearms has soared in recent years.
President Joe Biden described the latest shooting as “sick” and said gun violence was tearing the nation’s “soul,” as he urged Congress to pass a ban on the assault weapons commonly used in mass shootings.
“It’s ripping our communities apart, ripping the soul of this nation, ripping at the very soul of the nation,” he said.
A Nashville fire department spokesperson, Kendra Loney, said all unharmed students were escorted out of the building with faculty and staff.
“But we are sure that they heard the chaos that was surrounding this, so we do have mental health specialists and professionals that are at that reunification site for both the students and the families.”
The Covenant School is a private Presbyterian institution with just over 200 students in preschool to roughly age 12.
Local newspaper The Tennessean quoted a police spokesperson as saying the suspect Hale, a former student at the school, was now an illustrator and graphic designer who used he/him pronouns. Police had initially identified him by his birth gender.
Drake said investigators were working on a possible motive but said it was “not confirmed.”
Asked whether Hale’s gender identity may have been a factor, Drake said: “There is some theory to that, we’re investigating all the leads.”
There have been 129 mass shootings — defined as incidents in which four or more people were shot or killed — so far this year, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive.
Biden’s calls for Congress to reinstate the national ban on assault rifles, which existed from 1994 to 2004, has run up against opposition from Republicans, who are staunch defenders of the constitutional right to bear arms and have had a narrow majority in the House of Representatives since January.
Just hours after the shooting, pro-firearm organization Gun Owners of America assailed Biden as “the man responsible for making schools soft targets,” and repeated their call to allow teachers to arm themselves in classrooms.
“When will we start to have conversations about real solutions for hardening schools & protecting kids? Armed teachers are a 100 percent effective deterrent!” the group tweeted.
The deadlock in Washington has come despite public uproar over high-profile massacres such as the one at Sandy Hook elementary school in Connecticut in 2012, when 26 people, including 20 children, were killed.
Last year a shooter in Uvalde, Texas, killed 19 students and two teachers.
Between those two tragedies, the murder of 14 students and three staff members in Parkland, Florida in 2018 fueled a nationwide movement, led by young people, to demand stricter gun controls — but failed to spur significant action in Congress.


UN aid chief says Ukraine faces `hugely worse' humanitarian situation after the dam rupture

UN aid chief says Ukraine faces `hugely worse' humanitarian situation after the dam rupture
Updated 13 sec ago

UN aid chief says Ukraine faces `hugely worse' humanitarian situation after the dam rupture

UN aid chief says Ukraine faces `hugely worse' humanitarian situation after the dam rupture

UNITED NATIONS: The humanitarian situation in Ukraine is “hugely worse” than before the Kakhovka dam collapsed, the U.N.'s top aid official warned Friday.
Undersecretary-General Martin Griffiths said an “extraordinary” 700,000 people are in need of drinking water and warned that the ravages of flooding in one of the world’s most important breadbaskets will almost inevitably lead to lower grain exports, higher food prices around the world, and less to eat for millions in need
“This is a viral problem,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press. “But the truth is this is only the beginning of seeing the consequences of this act.”
The rupture of the Kakhovka hydroelectric dam and emptying of its reservoir on the Dnieper River on Wednesday added to the misery in a region that has suffered for more than a year from artillery and missile attacks.
Ukraine holds the Dnieper’s western bank, while Russian troops control the low-lying eastern side, which is more vulnerable to flooding. The dam and reservoir, essential for fresh water and irrigation in southern Ukraine, lies in the Kherson region that Moscow illegally annexed in September and has occupied for the past year.
Griffiths said the United Nations, working mainly through Ukrainian aid groups, has reached 30,000 people in flooded areas under Ukrainian control. He said that so far Russia has not given access to areas it controls for the U.N. to help flood victims.
Griffiths said he met with Russia’s U.N. ambassador, Vassily Nebenzia, on Wednesday to ask Russian authorities “for access for our teams in Ukraine to go across the front lines to give aid, to provide support for … Ukrainians in those areas.” He added, “I hope that will come through.”
The emergency response is essential to save lives, he said, “but behind that you’ve got a huge, looming problem of a lack of proper drinking water for those 700,000 people” on both the Ukrainian-controlled and Russian-controlled sides of the river.
There is also the flooding of important agricultural land and a looming problem of providing cooling water for the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Europe’s largest, which had been supplied from the dam, he added.
In addition, Griffiths noted that waters also have rushed over areas with land mines from the war “and what we are bound to be seeing are those mines floating in places where people don’t expect them,” threatening adults and especially children.
“So it’s a cascade of problems, starting with allowing people to survive today, and then giving them some kind of prospects for tomorrow,” he said.
Griffiths said that because of the wide-ranging consequences “it’s almost inevitable” that the United Nations will launch a special appeal for more aid funds for Ukraine to deal with “a whole new order of magnitude” from the dam’s rupture. But he said he wants to wait a few weeks to see the economic, health and environmental consequences before announcing the appeal.
Griffiths said he and U.N. trade chief Rebeca Grynspan are also working to ensure the extension of the Black Sea Grain Initiative, which Turkey and the U.N. brokered with Ukraine and Russia last July to open three Black Sea ports in Ukraine for its grain exports.
Part of that deal was a memorandum signed by Russia and the U.N. aimed at overcoming obstacles to Russian food and fertilizer shipments that Moscow has repeatedly complained are not being fulfilled.
A key Russian demand has been the reopening of a pipeline between the Russian port of Togliatti on the Volga River to the Black Sea, which has been shut down since Russia’s Feb. 24, 2022, invasion of Ukraine. It carried ammonia, a key ingredient of fertilizer.
“Opening that pipeline and delivering ammonia across the Black Sea to the global south is a priority for all of us,” Griffiths said. “Ammonia is an essential ingredient for global food security.”
A rupture in the pipeline was reported from shelling late Tuesday, but Griffiths said the U.N. couldn’t confirm it because the pipeline is in the middle of a war zone.
“We, of course, are very, very strongly of the view that we need that repaired as quickly as possible,” he said. “So let’s hope it’s not too badly damaged.”

 


The US and Canada saw dangerous smoke this week. It’s a routine peril for many developing countries

The US and Canada saw dangerous smoke this week. It’s a routine peril for many developing countries
Updated 53 min 25 sec ago

The US and Canada saw dangerous smoke this week. It’s a routine peril for many developing countries

The US and Canada saw dangerous smoke this week. It’s a routine peril for many developing countries
  • “This is a severe air pollution episode in the US,” said Jeremy Sarnat, a professor of environmental health at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health

WASHINGTON: Thick, smoky air from Canadian wildfires made for days of misery in New York City and across the US Northeast this week. But for much of the rest of the world, breathing dangerously polluted air is an inescapable fact of life — and death.
Almost the entire world breathes air that exceeds the World Health Organization’s air-quality limits at least occasionally. The danger grows worse when that bad air is more persistent than the nightmarish shroud that hit the US — usually in developing or newly industrialized nations. That’s where most of the 4.2 million deaths blamed on outdoor air pollution occurred in 2019, the UN’s health agency reported.
“Air pollution has no boundaries, and it is high time everyone comes together to fight it,” said Bhavreen Kandhari, the co-founder of Warrior Moms in India, a network of mothers pushing for clean air and climate action in a nation with some of the world’s consistently worst air. “What we are seeing in the US should shake us all.”
“This is a severe air pollution episode in the US,” said Jeremy Sarnat, a professor of environmental health at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health. “But it’s fairly typical for what millions and millions of people experience in other parts of the world.”
Last year, nine of the 10 cities with the highest annual average of fine particulate matter were in Asia — including six in India, according to air quality company IQAir, which aggregates readings from ground level monitoring stations worldwide.
Fine particulate matter, sometimes denoted as PM 2.5, refers to airborne particles or droplets of 2.5 microns or less. That’s far smaller than a human hair, and the particles can reach deep into lungs to cause eye, nose, throat and lung irritation and even affect heart function.
Sajjad Haider, a 31-year-old shopkeeper in Lahore, Pakistan, rides his motorbike to work daily. He wears a mask and goggles against frequent air pollution in the city of 11 million, but suffers from eye infections, breathing problems and chest congestion that get worse as smog grows in winter.
On his doctor’s advice, he relies on hot water and steam to clear his chest, but said he cannot follow another bit of the doctor’s advice: Don’t go out on his motorbike if he wants to keep his health.
“I can’t afford a car and I can’t continue my business without a motorbike,” said Haider.
Last year, Lahore had the world’s highest average concentration of fine particulate matter at nearly 100 micrograms per cubic meter of air. By comparison, New York City’s concentration hit 303 at one point on Wednesday.
But New York’s air typically falls well within healthy levels. The US Environmental Protection Agency’s standard for exposure is no more than 35 micrograms per day, and no more than 12 micrograms a day for longer-term exposure. New York’s annual average was 10 or below the past two years.
New Delhi, a heaving city of more than 20 million where Kandhari lives, usually tops the list of the many Indian cities gasping for breath as haze turns the capital’s sky gray and obscures buildings and monuments. It’s worse in autumn, when the burning of crop residues in neighboring states coincides with cooler temperatures that trap deadly smoke over the city, sometimes for weeks.
Vehicle emissions and fireworks set off during the Hindu Diwali festival add to the murk, and the results include coughs, headaches, flight delays and highway pileups. The government sometimes asks residents to work from home or carpool, some schools go online and families that can afford them turn to air purifiers.
On Thursday, even as a hazardous haze disrupted life for millions across the US, New Delhi still ranked as the second-most polluted city in the world, according to daily data from most air quality monitoring organizations.
Kandhari, whose daughter had to give up outdoor sports over health scares related to the bad air, said the air pollution is constant but policymakers only seem to notice its most acute moments. That has to change, she said.
“We should not compromise when it comes to access to cleaner air,” Kandhari said.
Many African countries in the Sahara Desert regularly grapple with bad air due to sandstorms. On Thursday, AccuWeather gave nations ranging from Egypt to Senegal a rating of purple, for dangerous air quality. It was the same rating given this week to New York and Washington, D.C.
Senegal has suffered unsafe air for years. It’s especially bad in Senegal’s east as desertification — the encroachment of the Sahara onto drylands — carries particles into the region, said Dr. Aliou Ba, a senior Greenpeace Africa campaigner based in the capital of Dakar.
The Great Green Wall, a massive tree-planting effort aimed at slowing desertification, has been underway for years. But Ba said pollution has been growing worse as the number of cars on the road, burning low-quality fuel, increases.
In the US, the 1970 passage of the Clean Air Act cleared up many smog-filled cities by setting limits on most sources of air pollution. The landmark regulation led to curbs on soot, smog, mercury and other toxic chemicals.
But many developing and newly industrialized nations have weak or little-enforced environmental laws. They suffer increased air pollution for other reasons, too, including a reliance on coal, lower vehicle emissions standards and the burning of solid fuels for cooking and heating.
In Jakarta, capital of Indonesia, the world’s fourth-most populous country, it’s often difficult to find clear blue sky, with power plants and vehicle emissions accounting for much of the pollution. It’s also one of the world’s largest coal-producing nations.
In one apartment building in the north of the city, between two busy ports where coal is shipped and stockpiled and where factories burn more, residents tried filtering coal dust with a net. It didn’t work.
“My family and I often feel itching and coughing,” Cecep Supriyadi, a 48-year-old resident, said. “So, when there is a lot of dust entering the flat, yes, we must be isolated at home. Because when we are outside the house, it feels like a sore throat, sore eyes, and itchy skin.”
An Indonesian court in 2021 ruled that leaders had neglected citizens’ rights to clean air and ordered them to improve it.
China has improved since Beijing was notorious for eye-watering pollution that wreathed office towers in haze, diverted flights and sent the old and young to hospitals to be put on respirators. When the air was at its worst, schools that could afford it installed inflatable covers over sports fields with airlock-style revolving doors and home air filters became as ubiquitous as rice cookers.
Key to the improvement was closing or moving heavy industries out of Beijing and nearby areas. Older vehicles were taken off the road, many replaced with electric vehicles. China still is the world’s largest producer and consumer of coal, but almost none is consumed at street level. The average PM 2.5 reading in Beijing in 2013 of 89.5 — well above the WHO’s standard of 10 — fell to 58 in 2017 and now sits at around 30. China had just one city — Hotan — in the world’s top 10 for worst air.
Mexico City, ringed by mountains that trap bad air, was one of the most polluted cities in the world until the 1990s, when the government began limiting the number of cars on the streets. Pollution levels dropped, but the city’s 9 million people — 22 million including suburbs — rarely see a day when air pollution levels are considered “acceptable.”
Each year, air pollution is responsible for nearly 9,000 deaths in Mexico City, according to the National Institute of Public Health. It’s usually worse in the dry winter and early spring months, when farmers burn their fields to prepare for planting.
Authorities haven’t released a full-year air quality report since 2020, but that year — not considered particularly bad for pollution, because the pandemic reduced traffic— Mexico City saw unacceptable air quality on 262 days, or 72 percent of the year.
In the summer months, intense rains clean the city’s air somewhat. That’s what brought Verónica Tobar and her two children out Thursday to a small playground in the Acueducto neighborhood near one of the city’s most congested avenues.
“We don’t come when we see that the pollution is very strong,” Tobar said. Those days “you feel it in your eyes, you cry, they’re itchy,” she said.
Her son was diagnosed with asthma last year and changes in temperature make it worse.
“But we have to get out, we can’t be locked up,” Tobar said as her children jumped off a slide.

 


Macron visits children wounded in knife attack

Macron visits children wounded in knife attack
Updated 10 June 2023

Macron visits children wounded in knife attack

Macron visits children wounded in knife attack
  • Macron and his wife Brigitte arrived in the southeastern city of Grenoble, where three of the children are being treated, and are to visit those who have “contributed in helping and supporting them,” the presidency said

FRANCE: French President Emmanuel Macron on Friday said the health of the preschool children badly wounded in a mass knife attack by a Syrian refugee was “heading in the right direction,” as police questioned the attacker.
Four children — aged between 22 months and three years old — were stabbed on Thursday in a playground in the Alpine town of Annecy, a normally idyllic lakeside spot popular with tourists.
While France was in shock over the blood-curdling attack, there was a deluge of praise on social media for rescue workers and a man hailed as a hero for chasing the attacker out of the area.
Prosecutors insisted they did not see a terror motive, but the rampage intensified tensions in France over immigration, with right-wing politicians seizing on the suspect’s origins.

BACKGROUND

While prosecutors insisted they did not see a terror motive, the rampage intensified tensions in France over immigration.

Macron and his wife Brigitte arrived in the southeastern city of Grenoble, where three of the children are being treated, and are to visit those who have “contributed in helping and supporting them,” the presidency said.
“Everything that I was told is heading in the right direction,” he said in Annecy after visiting the wounded toddlers in hospital, adding that news on their condition was positive.
He added after the visit: “Attacking children is the most barbaric act there is” but also made clear his “pride” over the work of rescuers.
The fourth child, a Dutch citizen, is in a Swiss hospital over the border in Geneva. She is “out of danger,” the Netherlands’ Foreign Minister Wopke Hoekstra said.
One of the victims is British and the others French.
Macron was also to meet a man named Henri who is being hailed as a hero for chasing the attacker from the playground.
“Pray for the children, I am doing fine,” he wrote on Instagram as the hashtag #MerciHenri trended on social media.
Regional prosecutor Line Bonnet-Mathis said the detention of the suspect, named as Abdalmasih H., who is under investigation for attempted murder, had been extended after a psychiatric examination.
Recently divorced from a Swedish national and in his early 30s, the suspect had previously lived for 10 years in Sweden where he was granted refugee status in April, security sources and his ex-wife said.
“He called me around four months ago. He was living in a church,” his ex-wife said, adding that he left Sweden because he had been unable to get Swedish nationality.
French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin told broadcaster TF1 that “for reasons not well explained he had also sought asylum in Switzerland, Italy and France.”
It emerged that his application in France was rejected last Sunday as he already enjoyed refugee status in Sweden.

 


British immigration restrictions complicate Nigeria migration dreams

Suella Braverman
Suella Braverman
Updated 10 June 2023

British immigration restrictions complicate Nigeria migration dreams

Suella Braverman

LAGOS: When 28-year-old Deborah Okunawo left Nigeria for the UK on a study visa last year, going with her husband made settling down easier.
Nigeria’s erratic academic calendar, characterized by frequent and protracted university strikes, economic woes and rising insecurity forced Okunawo and thousands of others to “japa” — a word in the Yoruba language that means “to flee.”
“Migrating to a new country can bring up different challenges like cultural shocks and loneliness,” said Okunawo, a postgraduate student at the University of Lincoln in eastern England.
“Having my best person around me gives me a shoulder to lean on.”
Her husband Tosin is also able to work and earn a living to support the family.
But Nigerians who hope to emulate them have suddenly seen their plans clouded.
With the UK government keen to crackdown on net migration which has risen to record levels, restrictions have been introduced from next year, including on family members accompanying foreign students for non-research postgraduate courses.
“We have seen an unprecedented rise in the number of student dependents being brought into the country with visas,” British Home Secretary Suella Braverman said last month.
The government in London made no specific mention of Nigerian students but numbers traveling to the UK for postgraduate studies along with family members have skyrocketed in recent years.
Nigerian nationals studying in the UK grew from 6,798 in 2017 to 59,053 as of December 2022, according to the UK’s Office for National Statistics or ONS.
As those number grew, so did the number of dependents: in 2019 there were 1,586 but last year there were 60,923.
“By nationality, Nigeria saw a large increase in the proportion of sponsored study-related visas granted to dependants, from 19 percent in 2019 to 51 percent in 2022,” said the ONS in February.
In Nigeria, and among students already in the UK, there are suspicions that the new measures are targeted at them.
Braverman — an immigration hard-liner — has said foreign postgraduate students used the study route as a “backdoor to work,” and their family members put “untenable” pressure on public services.
Her get-tough approach chimes with the Conservative government’s vows to “take back control” of the country’s borders following the country’s exit from the EU.
The policy has coincided with a surge in net immigration but also labor shortages Brexit has created in areas such as agriculture, the hospitality sector, health care, science and technology and IT.
There is also the contribution that foreign students make to the British economy including through hefty tuition fees.
In 2022, they brought in nearly $42 billion ($52 billion) compared to a cost to the government of £4.4 billion, according to London Economics, a politics and economics consultancy.
Busayo Olayiwola, a 33-year-old quantity surveyor in Ibadan, southwest Nigeria, before she left for the UK with her husband, said the majority of the students and their dependents “pay tax, national insurance (contributions to the health system) without access to any public funds.”
“The country is generating a lot of money from foreign students as well,” said Olayiwola.
The British government did not comment about whether it was primarily targeting Nigerians.
But a spokesperson said immigration policies “continue to be kept under constant review to ensure they support the UK’s excellent academic reputation.”
High poverty rates, a struggling economy and 33.3 percent unemployment in Nigeria has made Britain an expensive destination for students, even for those in the middle class.
Experts, however, said the new restrictions may have an upside for the country’s economy in the coming months.
Without dependents, Nigeria may experience an “uptick in remittances” from its students in the UK.
“They may feel a greater need to financially support the families they had to leave behind,” said Subomi Plumptre, the CEO of Lagos-based investment firm Volition Capital.
But the restrictions are also leading some Nigerians to look elsewhere: several prospective postgraduate students in the commercial hub Lagos and capital Abuja said they are investigating postgraduate alternatives in places such as Canada.
More than 15,000 Nigerians were granted permanent residence in Canada in 2021, up from 4,400 five years earlier.
Wale Oni, a Nigerian who teaches at the University of Salford near Manchester, northwest England, hopes that Nigerian authorities will take a cue from the restrictions and focus on stopping the “brain drain.”
“You see UK varsities in the big cities advertising their programs and luring Nigerians in with attractive offers such as post-study work visas and opportunities to bring their dependents,” he said.
“But what plans are in place by the Nigerian government to reverse the trend?“

 


Southern India makes history with first women-only Hajj flight 

Pilots, crew members and passengers of a women-only Hajj flight pose for a photo before departing from Kozhikode on June 8.
Pilots, crew members and passengers of a women-only Hajj flight pose for a photo before departing from Kozhikode on June 8.
Updated 09 June 2023

Southern India makes history with first women-only Hajj flight 

Pilots, crew members and passengers of a women-only Hajj flight pose for a photo before departing from Kozhikode on June 8.
  • Air India Express flight from Kozhikode carried 145 female pilgrims and six crew 
  • Kerala has the highest percentage of women pilgrims traveling without a mahram

NEW DELHI: An Indian Hajj flight run exclusively by women and carrying only female pilgrims has made history, authorities said on Friday, after it reached Saudi Arabia from the southern state of Kerala. 

The Air India Express flight from Kozhikode arrived in Jeddah on Thursday night carrying 145 pilgrims. 

It was operated by Capt. Kanika Mehra, First Officer Garima Passi, and four cabin crew members. 

At the airport, the women were accompanied by Minority Affairs State Minister John Barla, who distributed their boarding passes. 

“I am very proud,” C. Mohammed Faizi, chairman of the Kerala Haj Committee, told Arab News. 

FASTFACT

Kerala this year also boasts a higher overall percentage of female Hajj pilgrims than other Indian states. 

The passengers of the special flight are part of a group of 4,000 Indian female pilgrims who this year will reach the holy cities of Makkah and Madinah on their own. 

India tweaked its Hajj policy following last year’s decision by Saudi Arabia to lift a rule that required female pilgrims to be accompanied by a mahram, or male guardian. 

Most of the Indian pilgrims who applied for Hajj in the Ladies Without Mahram category are from Kerala. 

“Without mahram, there are about 2,000 … The largest number without mahram are from Kerala,” Faizi said, attributing the high number to the level of education in Kerala and the fact that many women in the state are used to traveling to the Middle East to meet their relatives working there. 

Kerala this year also boasts a higher overall percentage of female Hajj pilgrims than other Indian states. 

“Sixty percent are women,” Faizi said. 

Muslims constitute about a fourth of Kerala’s population of 35 million. 

About 11,000 of them will be performing the Hajj pilgrimage this year under India’s quota of 175,000, and approximately 60 percent of them will be women.