UVALDE, US: Frustrated onlookers urged police officers to charge into the Texas elementary school where a gunman’s rampage killed 19 children and two teachers, witnesses said Wednesday, as investigators worked to track the massacre that lasted upwards of 40 minutes and ended when the 18-year-old shooter was killed by a Border Patrol team.
“Go in there! Go in there!” nearby women shouted at the officers soon after the attack began, said Juan Carranza, 24, who saw the scene from outside his house, across the street from Robb Elementary School in the close-knit town of Uvalde. Carranza said the officers did not go in.
Javier Cazares, whose fourth grade daughter, Jacklyn Cazares, was killed in the attack, said he raced to the school when he heard about the shooting, arriving while police were still gathered outside the building.
Upset that police were not moving in, he raised the idea of charging into the school with several other bystanders.
“Let’s just rush in because the cops aren’t doing anything like they are supposed to,” he said. “More could have been done.”
“They were unprepared,” he added.
Minutes earlier, Carranza had watched as Salvador Ramos crashed his truck into a ditch outside the school, grabbed his AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle and shot at two people outside a nearby funeral home who ran away uninjured.
Officials say he “encountered” a school district security officer outside the school, though there were conflicting reports from authorities on whether the men exchanged gunfire. After running inside, he fired on two arriving Uvalde police officers who were outside the building, said Texas Department of Public Safety spokesperson Travis Considine. The police officers were injured.
After entering the school, Ramos charged into one classroom and began to kill.
He “barricaded himself by locking the door and just started shooting children and teachers that were inside that classroom,” Lt. Christopher Olivarez of the Department of Public Safety told CNN. “It just shows you the complete evil of the shooter.”
All those killed were in the same classroom, he said.
Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw told reporters that 40 minutes to an hour elapsed from when Ramos opened fire on the school security officer to when the tactical team shot him, though a department spokesman said later that they could not give a solid estimate of how long the gunman was in the school or when he was killed.
“The bottom line is law enforcement was there,” McCraw said. “They did engage immediately. They did contain (Ramos) in the classroom.”
Meanwhile, a law enforcement official familiar with the investigation said the Border Patrol agents had trouble breaching the classroom door and had to get a staff member to open the room with a key. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the ongoing investigation.
Carranza said the officers should have entered the school sooner.
“There were more of them. There was just one of him,” he said.
Uvalde is a largely Latino town of some 16,000 people about 75 miles (120 kilometers) from the Mexican border. Robb Elementary, which has nearly 600 students in second, third and fourth grades, is a single-story brick structure in a mostly residential neighborhood of modest homes.
Before attacking the school, Ramos shot and wounded his grandmother at the home they shared, authorities said.
Neighbor Gilbert Gallegos, 82, who lives across the street and has known the family for decades, said he was puttering in his yard when he heard the shots.
Ramos ran out the front door and across the small yard to the truck parked in front of the house. He seemed panicked, Gallegos said, and had trouble getting the truck out of park.
Then he raced away: “He spun out, I mean fast,” spraying gravel in the air.
His grandmother emerged covered in blood: “She says, ‘Berto, this is what he did. He shot me.’” She was hospitalized.
Gallegos, whose wife called 911, said he had heard no arguments before or after the shots, and knew of no history of bullying or abuse of Ramos, who he rarely saw.
Investigators also shed no light on Ramos’ motive for the attack, which also left at least 17 people wounded. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said Ramos, a resident of the small town about 85 miles (135 kilometers) west of San Antonio, had no known criminal or mental health history.
“We don’t see a motive or catalyst right now,” said McCraw of the Department of Public Safety.
Ramos legally bought the rifle and a second one like it last week, just after his birthday, authorities said.
About a half-hour before the mass shooting, Ramos sent the first of three online messages warning about his plans, Abbott said.
Ramos wrote that he was going to shoot his grandmother, then that he had shot the woman. In the last note, sent about 15 minutes before he reached Robb Elementary, he said he was going to shoot up an elementary school, according to Abbott. Investigators said Ramos did not specify which school.
Ramos sent the private, one-to-one text messages via Facebook, said company spokesman Andy Stone.
Grief engulfed Uvalde as the details emerged.
The dead included Eliahna Garcia, an outgoing 10-year-old who loved to sing, dance and play basketball; a fellow fourth-grader, Xavier Javier Lopez, who had been eagerly awaiting a summer of swimming; and a teacher, Eva Mireles, whose husband is an officer with the school district’s police department.
“You can just tell by their angelic smiles that they were loved,” Uvalde Schools Superintendent Hal Harrell said, fighting back tears as he recalled the children and teachers killed.
The tragedy was the latest in a seemingly unending wave of mass shootings across the US in recent years. Just 10 days earlier, 10 Black people were shot to death in a racist attack at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket.
The attack was the deadliest school shooting in the US since a gunman killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012.
Amid calls for tighter restrictions on firearms, the Republican governor repeatedly talked about mental health struggles among Texas young people and argued that tougher gun laws in Chicago, New York and California are ineffective.
Democrat Beto O’Rourke, who is running against Abbott for governor, interrupted Wednesday’s news conference, calling the tragedy “predictable.” Pointing his finger at Abbott, he said: “This is on you until you choose to do something different. This will continue to happen.” O’Rourke was escorted out as some in the room yelled at him. Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin yelled that O’Rourke was a “sick son of a bitch.”
Texas has some of the most gun-friendly laws in the nation and has been the site of some of the deadliest shootings in the US over the past five years.
“I just don’t know how people can sell that type of a gun to a kid 18 years old,” Siria Arizmendi, the aunt of victim Eliahna Garcia, said angrily through tears. “What is he going to use it for but for that purpose?”
President Joe Biden said Wednesday that “the Second Amendment is not absolute” as he called for new limitations on guns in the wake of the massacre.
But the prospects for reform of the nation’s gun regulations appeared dim. Repeated attempts over the years to expand background checks and enact other curbs have run into Republican opposition in Congress.
The shooting came days before the National Rifle Association annual convention was set to begin in Houston, with the Texas governor and both of the state’s Republican US senators scheduled to speak.
Dillon Silva, whose nephew was in a classroom, said students were watching the Disney movie “Moana” when they heard several loud pops and a bullet shattered a window. Moments later, their teacher saw the attacker stride past.
“Oh, my God, he has a gun!” the teacher shouted twice, according to Silva. “The teacher didn’t even have time to lock the door,” he said.
The close-knit community, built around a shaded central square, includes many families who have lived there for generations.
Lorena Auguste was substitute teaching at Uvalde High School when she heard about the shooting and began frantically texting her niece, a fourth grader at Robb Elementary. Eventually she found out the girl was OK.
But that night, her niece had a question.
“Why did they do this to us?” the girl asked. “We’re good kids. We didn’t do anything wrong.”
Texas school massacre: Onlookers say more lives could have been saved had police moved in quickly
https://arab.news/bme4c
Texas school massacre: Onlookers say more lives could have been saved had police moved in quickly
- Onlookers begged police gathered outside the school building to rush in urgently
- Authorities say about 40 minutes elapsed from when Ramos opened fire to when he was shot dead
Columbia suspends over 65 students following pro-Palestinian protest in library
- Roughly 80 people were arrested in connection with the Wednesday evening demonstration at the university’s Butler Library
- State Department reviewing visa status of library takeover participants for possible deportation, says Secretary Rubio
NEW YORK: Columbia University has suspended dozens of students and barred alums and others who participated in a pro-Palestinian demonstration inside the school’s main library earlier this week, a school spokesperson said Friday.
The Ivy League institution in Manhattan placed more than 65 students on interim suspension and barred 33 others, including those from affiliated institutions such as Barnard College, from setting foot on campus.
Interim suspension generally means that a student cannot come to campus, attend classes or participate in other university activities, according to Columbia’s website. The university declined to say how long the disciplinary measures would be in place, saying only that the decisions are pending further investigation.
An undisclosed number of alums who also participated in the protest are also now prevented from entering school grounds, according to Columbia.
Roughly 80 people were arrested in connection with the Wednesday evening demonstration at the university’s Butler Library. Most face trespassing charges, though some may also face disorderly conduct, police have said.
The mask-clad protesters pushed their way past campus security officers, raced into the building and hung Palestinian flags and other banners on bookshelves. Some protesters also scrawled phrases on library furniture and picture frames, including “Columbia will burn.”
New York City police in helmets and other protection broke up the demonstration at the request of university officials, who denounced the protests as an “outrageous” disruption for students studying and preparing for final exams.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said his office will be reviewing the visa status of those who participated in the library takeover for possible deportation.
The Trump administration has already pulled federal funding and detained international students at Columbia and other prestigious American universities over their handling of student protests against the war in Gaza.
Turkish Tufts University student released from Louisiana immigration detention center
- The Ph.D. student claimed she was illegally detained over an op-ed she co-wrote last year against Israel’s war in Gaza
- Judge said the government had offered no evidence about why Rumeysa Ozturk was arrested other than the op-ed
A Tufts University student from Turkiye was released from a Louisiana immigration detention center Friday, more than six weeks after she was arrested walking on the street of a Boston suburb.
US District Judge William Sessions in Burlington ordered the release of Rumeysa Ozturk pending a final decision on her claim that she’s been illegally detained following an op-ed she co-wrote last year that criticized the school’s response to Israel’s war in Gaza. A photo provided by her legal team showed her outside, smiling with her attorneys in Louisiana, where the immigration proceedings will continue.
“Despite an 11th hour attempt to delay her freedom by trying to force her to wear an ankle monitor, Rumeysa is now free and is excited to return home, free of monitoring or restriction,” attorney Mahsa Khanbabai said.
Even before her release, Ozturk’s supporters cheered the decision, punctuating an earlier news conference held by her attorneys with chants of “She is free!”
“What we heard from the court today is what we have been saying for weeks, and what courts have continued to repeat up and down through the litigation of this case thus far,” Jessie Rossman, legal director at the ACLU of Massachusetts, told reporters. “There’s absolutely no evidence that justifies detaining Ozturk for a single day, let alone the six and a half weeks that she has been detained, because she wrote a single op-ed in her student newspaper exercising her First Amendment right to express an opinion.”
Appearing by video for her bail hearing, Ozturk, 30, detailed her growing asthma attacks in detention and her desire to finish her doctorate degree focusing on children and social media while appearing remotely at her bail hearing from the Louisiana center. She and her lawyer hugged after hearing the judge’s decision.
“Completing my Ph.D. is very important to me,” she testified. She had been on track to finish her work in December when she was arrested.
Ozturk was to be released on her own recognizance with no travel restrictions, Sessions said. He said she is not a danger to the community or a flight risk, but that he might amend his release order to consider any specific conditions by ICE in consultation with her lawyers.
Sessions said the government had offered no evidence about why Ozturk was arrested other than the op-ed.
“This is a woman who is just totally committed to her academic career,” Sessions said. “This is someone who probably doesn’t have a whole lot of other things going on other than reaching out to other members of the community in a caring and compassionate way.”
A message seeking comment was emailed Friday afternoon to the US Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review.
Sessions told Acting US Attorney Michael Drescher he wants to know immediately when she is released.
Sessions said Ozturk raised serious concerns about her First Amendment and due process rights, as well as her health. She testified Friday that she has had 12 asthma attacks since her detention, starting with a severe one at the Atlanta airport.
“I was afraid, and I was crying,” she said.
Immigration officials surrounded Ozturk in Massachusetts on March 25 and drove her to New Hampshire and Vermont before putting her on a plane to a detention center in Basile, Louisiana. Her student visa had been revoked several days earlier, but she was not informed of that, her lawyers said.
Ozturk’s lawyers first filed a petition on her behalf in Massachusetts, but they did not know where she was and were unable to speak to her until more than 24 hours after she was detained. A Massachusetts judge later transferred the case to Vermont.
Ozturk was one of four students who wrote an op-ed in the campus newspaper, The Tufts Daily, last year criticizing the university’s response to student activists demanding that Tufts “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide,” disclose its investments and divest from companies with ties to Israel.
Ozturk said Friday that if she is released, Tufts would offer her housing and her lawyers and friends would drive her to future court hearings. She is expected to return to New England on Saturday at the earliest.
“I will follow all the rules,” she said.
A State Department memo said Ozturk’s visa was revoked following an assessment that her actions ”‘may undermine US foreign policy by creating a hostile environment for Jewish students and indicating support for a designated terrorist organization’ including co-authoring an op-ed that found common cause with an organization that was later temporarily banned from campus.”
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said in March, without providing evidence, that investigations found that Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a US-designated terrorist group.
“When did speaking up against oppression become a crime? When did speaking up against genocide become something to be imprisoned for?” Khanbabai asked. “I am thankful that the courts have been ruling in favor of detained political prisoners, like Rumeysa.”
Trump says he’s OK with taxing the rich but warns of political fallout
- Trump suggests higher taxes on the wealthy
- Taxing the rich gets boost from leading hard-line Republican
WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump said on Friday he was “OK” with raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans, as his fellow Republicans consider scaling back the scope of the ambitious tax-cut package they aim to pass this year.
“Republicans should probably not do it, but I’m OK if they do!!!” Trump wrote in a post on his social media platform.
Speaking to reporters later at the White House, Trump gave a stronger endorsement.
“I would love to do it, frankly,” he said in the Oval Office. “What you’re doing is you’re giving up something up top in order to make people in the middle income and the lower income brackets save more. So it’s really a redistribution, and I’m willing to do it if they want.”
Trump, a wealthy businessman with properties all over the world, indicated he would be willing to pay more in taxes himself. “I would love to be able to give people in a lower bracket a big break by giving up some of what I have.”
The Senate’s top Republican, John Thune, said he was not enthusiastic about the idea. “We don’t want to raise taxes on anybody. I mean, we’re about lowering taxes on Americans,” he said on Fox News.
Trump’s message comes as US House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson weighs whether to reduce the total tax package.
Johnson told some House Republicans on Thursday that he is now looking at $4 trillion in tax cuts, rather than an initial $4.5 trillion, according to a Republican aide.
Republicans are also fighting over spending cuts needed to pay for Trump’s “one big beautiful bill,” jeopardizing the goal of making all of the expiring provisions of his 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act permanent.
Trump privately urged Johnson this week to raise the tax rate and close the carried-interest loophole for Wall Street investors, sources told Reuters on Thursday.
The Republican president suggested an increase to 39.6 percent from 37 percent for individuals earning $2.5 million or higher and joint filers earning at least $5 million, with carve-outs for small businesses, one source said.
“I don’t think they’re going to be doing it, but I actually think it’s good politics to do it,” Trump said.
Spending cuts to Medicaid and other programs are likely to fall short of a $2 trillion goal over a decade.
Johnson and other top Republicans have resisted the idea of raising taxes on the wealthy.
But Representative Andy Harris, who chairs the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, said a higher top tax bracket would help pay for the Trump agenda.
“Personally, I’ve always believed that if we can’t find spending reductions elsewhere, we should look at restoring the pre TCJA tax bracket on million dollar income,” the Maryland Republican wrote on X.
Trump views higher taxes on the rich as a way to help pay for massive middle and working-class tax cuts, and to protect Medicaid, the health care program for lower-income Americans.
But the president warned on Friday that Democrats would seize on “even a ‘TINY’ tax increase for the ‘RICH,’” citing former Republican President George H.W. Bush, who lost his 1992 re-election bid after breaking his promise not to hike taxes.
Trump and Republican lawmakers have cited the potential extension of the 2017 tax cuts as relief for Americans and an economic boost amid Trump’s tariffs on imported goods.
They have vowed to enact the extension as part of a larger budget bill that would also fund border security, the deportation of undocumented immigrants, energy deregulation and a plus-up in military spending.
Rare bone-eroding disease ruining lives in Kenya’s poorest county
Joyce Lokonyi sits on an upturned bucket, fingers weaving palm fronds as the wind pulls her dress to expose the stump of her amputated foot, lost to a little-known disease ravaging Kenya’s poorest county.
Mycetoma is a fungal or bacterial infection that enters the body through any open wound, often as tiny as a thorn prick.
Starting as tiny bumps under the skin, it gradually leads to the erosion of tissue, muscles and bone.
The fungal variety is endemic across the so-called “mycetoma belt” — including Somalia, Sudan, Yemen and northern Kenya — with funding and research desperately lacking.
Once the disease has reached the bone the only option is amputation.
“I was able to slightly walk, although the disease had eaten all my toes,” Lokonyi, 28, told AFP.
She was shunned by the local community, she said.
“They used to say that when you go to someone’s home, you will leave traces of the disease where you stand.”
She was unable to afford medication despite her husband selling off his goats, and amputation became the only option.
“I accepted because I saw that it was going to kill me,” she said, a pair of battered crutches lying on the sand beside her two-year-old daughter.
But she has struggled with the aftermath.
“I have become a good-for-nothing, I can’t work, I can’t burn charcoal, I can’t do anything,” she said.
In Kenya’s poorest county, Turkana, around 70 percent of the population lives beneath the poverty line, with health care limited and hard to reach.
Mycetoma disproportionately affects rural communities of farmers and herders, according to the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative , a global NGO.
It was only recognized as a neglected disease by the World Health Organization in 2016. Ignorance and misdiagnosis remain widespread.
“Doctors are not aware of the disease,” Borna Nyaoke-Anoke, DNDi’s head of mycetoma research, told AFP.
“If you’re used to donkeys, you don’t start seeing zebras everywhere.”
The scale of the problem is difficult to estimate, but Ekiru Kidalio, director of Lodwar Hospital in Turkana, said they “rarely go a week without finding a case.”
He added that the local population, 80 percent of which is illiterate, often turns to traditional medicine.
By the time they come to hospital “the condition is already advanced such that it’s not easy to reverse.”
Medication is also expensive — treatment takes up to a year and costs as much as $2,000 — and comes with dizzying side effects.
Diagnosis and treatment are not free under Kenya’s overwhelmed health system, leaving patients at the mercy of foreign donors or seeking sums that are unimaginable for subsistence farmers.
In Lodwar Hospital, lab technician John Ekai bends over his microscope and examines a suspected mycetoma sample.
“Mycetoma is a very neglected disease, no-one is giving it attention,” he told AFP.
He has become the go-to man for suspected patients, handling his charges with a mischievous sense of humor that puts them at ease.
Ekai has treated more than 100 mycetoma patients in the past year, but has seen only five recoveries, with many simply vanishing back into Turkana’s arid plains.
He worries for those who have disappeared: “The mycetoma will grow and grow and maybe... lead to amputation.”
During AFP’s visit, he examined young mother Jennifer Ekal, 19, who had lived with the disease since she was 11.
“I was in school but I decided to leave because of my foot,” she said, showing her swollen and painful extremity, hidden beneath a red-and-white dishcloth.
Four doses of medication a day appeared to be helping, she said.
But as she gathered up her daughter, three-year-old Bianca, she admitted she was worried about the future.
“I do not want to think about the worst.”
Pakistan vows retaliation, saying three bases targeted by Indian missiles
- Army says Nur Khan base, Murid base in Chakwal district and one Shorkot targeted by Indian missiles
- Reports came after Chaudhry said in sudden statement India fired ballistic missiles that fell in Indian territory
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan Military Spokesperson Lt. Gen. Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry said on Saturday India had attacked multiple bases in Pakistan, vowing retaliation.
In the latest confrontation between the two longstanding enemies that began on Wednesday, India said it hit nine “terrorist infrastructure” sites in Pakistan in retaliation for what it says was a deadly Islamabad-backed attack in Indian-administered Kashmir on April 22. Pakistan says it was not involved and denied that any of the sites hit by India were militant bases. It said it shot down five Indian aircraft on Wednesday.
Pakistan’s military said on Friday it shot down 77 drones from India at multiple locations, including the two largest cities of Karachi and Lahore, and the garrison city of Rawalpindi, home to the army’s headquarters.
On Saturday early morning, panic rang out in Pakistan as reports emerged that Pakistan Air Force’s Nur Khan base had been hit.
The Nur Khan air base in Rawalpindi, where the military has its headquarters, is around 10 kilometers from the capital, Islamabad.
In televised remarks, the military spokesman said three bases, Nur Khan, PAF Base Murid, an operational flying base of the Pakistan Air Force located near the village of Murid in the Chakwal District of Punjab, and one in Shorkot, had been targeted by Indian missiles.
“Now you just wait for our response,” Chaudhry said.
The reports came after Chaudhry said India fired ballistic missiles that fell in Indian territory, announcing it in a sudden statement on national broadcaster at 1:50 a.m. local time on Saturday (2050 GMT), with no details provided to support the claim.
“I want to give you the shocking news that India fired six ballistic missiles from Adampur. One of the ballistic missiles hit in Adampur, the rest of the five missiles hit in the Indian Punjab area of Amritsar,” the army’s spokesman said in his short video statement.
Amritsar’s district commissioner in a text message between Friday and Saturday said:
“Don’t panic. Siren is sounding as we are under red alert. Do not panic, as before, keep lights off, move away from windows. We will inform you when ready to resume power supply.”
Around 48 people have been killed since Wednesday’s conflagration, according to casualty estimates on both sides of the border that have not been independently verified.
