Good morning.
At least one person was killed and 21 others injured, including many children, in a mass shooting on Wednesday afternoon that turned a Super Bowl victory parade for the Kansas City Chiefs into a scene of tragedy and chaos.
Authorities in Kansas City, Missouri, have said that three people were arrested in connection with the shooting near Union station, which happened as the celebration was wrapping up. More than 1 million people were expected to attend and chaos erupted as people tried to flee.
Among the injured, 11 children were being treated at Children’s Mercy Kansas City, nine of them for gunshot wounds. All the children are expected to recover from their injuries, according to the hospital’s senior vice-president.
President Joe Biden urged action on gun control, saying: “Today’s events should move us, shock us, shame us into acting. What are we waiting for? What else do we need to see? How many more families need to be torn apart?”
What do we know about the motive? It was not immediately clear if the shooting was incidental to the parade. Authorities said there is not yet a clear motive and much remains unknown.
What do we know about the woman who died? Lisa Lopez-Galvan, a local DJ and mother of two, died in surgery after being shot, friends told the Kansas City Star. “She was the most wonderful, beautiful person,” a friend said.
How bad is US gun violence in 2024? It was the 48th mass shooting in 2024, according to the Gun Violence Archive. There were 656 mass shootings in 2023.
Seven civilians killed in Israeli strikes on south Lebanon amid fear of broader conflict
Eleven civilians, including six children, have been killed in Israeli strikes on villages across southern Lebanon, a hospital director and local security sources said, while the Israeli army said it lost a soldier in cross-border rocket fire.
The exchanges of fire – the worst single-day civilian death toll in Lebanon since cross-border hostilities began in October – raised fears of a broader conflict between Israel and the militant group Hezbollah.
A strike in the city of Nabatiyeh killed four children, three women and a man, according to the director of the town’s hospital, Hassan Wazni, and three other security sources. Seven people were also wounded, Wazni told Reuters. “The residents of the apartment targeted have no links to Hezbollah,” a Lebanese security source told AFP.
Meanwhile, Israel’s planned “powerful operation” in Rafah, Gaza, was met with growing international condemnation on Thursday. About 1.5 million Palestinians are trapped there and world leaders have warned of catastrophic consequences.
What did Israel’s strikes hit? Four Hezbollah fighters were killed in separate strikes, according to the group. Eleven civilians were also killed.
What’s the risk of further conflict? Fears have been growing of another full-blown conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, which last went to war in 2006. The UN secretary general’s spokesperson, Stéphane Dujarric, warned “the recent escalation is dangerous indeed and should stop”.
Who is urging Israel not to attack Rafah? Australia, Canada and New Zealand on Thursday added their voices to a growing chorus of world leaders – including the US – warning the consequences would be catastrophic.
Russia launches massive missile attack on Ukraine
Air alert warnings sounded across Ukraine overnight as Russia launched a massive missile attack on the country. Ukrainian authorities reported the take-off of several Tu-95 strategic bombers in the early hours of Thursday morning, with explosions heard soon after.
In Dnipro, a series of loud explosions were audible shortly after 6am in the centre of the city. There were also reports of explosions in Zaporizhzhia, the capital, Kyiv, and the western city of Lviv. Andriy Sadoviy, the mayor of Lviv, said 10 Russian missiles had been aimed at the Lviv region.
In Zaporizhzhia, close to the frontline with Russian forces, there were reports of a damaged apartment building. There was no information immediately available about casualties.
Meanwhile, arriving at today’s meeting of defence ministers in Brussels, the Nato secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, said that “supporting Ukraine is not charity” and that helping Kyiv “is an investment in our own security”.
How much damage has Russia inflicted on Ukraine? The World Bank, the European Commission, and the UN estimate the total cost of reconstruction and recovery in Ukraine will be $486bn (€452.8bn) over the next decade.
How has the UK tried to influence the US to boost aid to Ukraine? The British foreign secretary, David Cameron, urged US lawmakers to support Ukraine and warned against “the weakness displayed against Hitler”. Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene responded that Cameron “needs to worry about his own country, and frankly, he can kiss my ass”.
In other news …
The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, said he was grateful to rightwing TV host Tucker Carlson for his interview last week, but was surprised by a lack of aggressiveness and “sharp questions”.
Japan has been eclipsed by Germany as the world’s third-largest economy and has slipped into recession, with the country battling a weak yen and an ageing population.
Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX has moved its state of incorporation to Texas from Delaware, after a Delaware judge ruled last month that Musk’s $56bn pay package was excessive in an investor lawsuit.
The head of the house intelligence committee, Mike Turner, has called for the Biden administration to declassify information on what he called a “serious national security threat”, which was later reported to involve Russian plans to deploy nuclear weapons in space.
Stat of the day: Nearly 15% of Americans don’t believe climate change is real, study finds
Nearly 15% of Americans don’t believe climate change is real, a new study from the University of Michigan revealed – shedding light on the highly polarized attitude toward global warming. Denialism is highest in the central and southern US, with Republican voters less likely to believe in climate science, it found. Researchers used AI to track over 7.4m tweets posted by roughly 1.3 million people on the social media platform X between 2017 and 2019. “Over half of the tweets we looked at simply denied that climate change was real, that it was a hoax,” said Joshua Newell, the study’s co-author. “It wasn’t surprising but it was disappointing.”
Don’t miss this: the hidden costs of Ireland’s datacentre boom
Datacentres were one part of a longstanding vision of Ireland as a tech hub, a place where multinationals such as Google, Facebook and Amazon would base their European headquarters, attracted by the country’s well-educated workforce and – most importantly – the low corporate tax rate, which was 12.5% until 2023. There are now more than 80 datacentres, using vast amounts of electricity. But, asks Jessica Traynor in this long read, have people entrusted their memories to a system that might destroy them?
… or this: lift-off for company aiming at first US lunar touchdown in 52 years
A moon lander built by the Houston-based aerospace company Intuitive Machines was launched from Florida early on Thursday, on a mission to conduct the first US lunar touchdown in more than a half century. It would be the first by a privately owned spacecraft. The Nova-C lander, nicknamed Odysseus, lifted off shortly after 1am EST atop a Falcon 9 rocket flown by Elon Musk’s SpaceX from Nasa’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral. The president and chief executive of Intuitive Machines, Stephen Altemus, told the New York Times: “I feel fairly confident that we’re going to be successful softly touching down on the moon.”
Last Thing: the rise of the luxury car gallery
Architects are now creating specially designed “car art galleries”, “car museums”, and houses and apartment towers built around cars so you can drive your $135m (£115m) 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR Uhlenhaut Coupé into the dining room or park it next to your indoor pool, Guardian wealth correspondent Rupert Neate writes. “We view cars as works of art in their own right, and believe they should be given as much thought as artworks,” says Jonathan Clark, the founder of Garage Deluxe. “You wouldn’t keep a Rothko in the basement under the stairs – you’d hang it in pride of place with good lighting and space around it.”
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