A gunman killed at least 17 people and wounded 24 more after opening fire inside a school in the Russian city of Izhevsk, about 600 miles east of Moscow, on Monday, authorities said. The gunman took his own life.
The government of Udmurtia said 17 people, including 11 children, were killed in the shooting. According to Russia’s Investigative Committee, 24 other people, including 22 children, were wounded in the attack.
Russia’s Investigative Committee identified the gunman as 34-year-old Artyom Kazantsev, a graduate of the same school, and said he was wearing a black t-shirt bearing “Nazi symbols.” No details about his motives have been released.
Kazantsev entered School No. 88, which teaches children from elementary age up to high school, armed with two “traumatic” pistols — non-lethal firearms often used by law enforcement — which had been converted to fire live ammunition. The weapons were obtained illegally, according to the regional office of the National Guard.
Law enforcement officers inspect a classroom at School No. 88, in the city of Izhevsk, Russia, about 600 miles east of Moscow, on September 26, 2022, after a gunman opened fire in the school, in an image provided by Russia’s national Investigative Committee.
Russian national Investigative Committee
The governor of Udmurtia, Alexander Brechalov, said the gunman, who he said was registered as a patient at a psychiatric facility, killed himself after the attack.
“Currently the investigators are conducting a search of his residence and studying the personality of the attacker as well as his views and surrounding milieu,” Russia’s Investigative Committee said in a statement earlier Monday. “Checks are being made into his adherence to neo-fascist views and Nazi ideology.”
A short video released by police showed the gunman’s body, dressed in black, on the bloodstained floor of a classroom.
Law enforcement officers inspect an entrance to School No. 88, in the city of Izhevsk, Russia, about 600 miles east of Moscow, on September 26, 2022, after a gunman opened fire in the school, in an image provided by Russia’s national Investigative Committee.
Russian national Investigative Committee
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said President Vladimir Putin “deeply mourns” the deaths and had ordered “doctors, psychologists, neurosurgeons and other specialists” to be sent to the scene.
The regional governor, Aleksander Brechalov, declared three days of mourning.
Gov. Greg Abbott discusses the grand opening of Giga Texas on ‘The Claman Countdown.’
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos responded to Elon Musk’s Twitter poll asking if the social media giant’s headquarters should be converted to a homeless shelter.
“Convert Twitter SF HQ to homeless shelter since no one shows up anyway,” Musk asked Twitter users on Saturday.
ELON MUSK PURCHASES STAKE IN TWITTER AFTER SLAMMING ITS APPROACH TO ‘FREE SPEECH’
Twitter headquarters is seen in San Francisco, California, United States on October 27, 2021. Twitter has been testing several new features for its mobile app recently. The company is now working on an option to customize the navigation bar of the Tw (Photo by Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images / Getty Images)
Musk recently became Twitter’s biggest shareholder, disclosing a 9.2% stake in the company on April 4.
91.5% of people who responded to Musk’s poll voted yes.
“Or do portion. Worked out great and makes it easy for employees who want to volunteer,” Bezos responded.
ELON MUSK FLOATS TURNING TWITTER’S HEADQUARTERS INTO A HOMELESS SHELTER
Bezos, Inslee and other VIP visitors spoke with residents who are temporarily staying at the Mary’s Place Family Center. (Amazon / Fox News)
Amazon houses a homeless shelter in its Seattle, Washington headquarters, which occupies part of the building.
Mary’s Place Family Center in The Regrade opened in early March 2020 and provides “shelter and support” for families experiencing homelessness.
The shelter has the space to accommodate up to 200 people every night, and serves food to individuals who are temporarily living in the shelter.
The space also has a health clinic, offices, computer labs, and offers pro-bono legal clinics.
Marty Hartman, Mary’s Place Executive Director, said that the space was a “saving grace” as it opened in the heat of the COVID-19 pandemic.
GET FOX BUSINESS ON THE GO BY CLICKING HERE
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos speaks at a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington, Thursday, Sept. 19, 2019. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais) (Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais / Associated Press)
“This new shelter, opening when it did, has been our saving grace. It was our Amazon family, that recognized what we needed before we ever realized it, and this space ensures we don’t have to return families to homelessness during this unprecedented and trying time,” Hartman wrote.
Bezos said in an Instagram post when the shelter opened that it would help families get back on their feet.
“This shelter spans eight floors — including a health clinic and critical tools to help families in need get back on their feet. Thanks to Mary’s Place for their partnership in bringing this creative solution to life,” Bezos wrote in an Instagram post when the shelter opened.
At least 13 people died as flames tore through a Philadelphia rowhome converted into apartments in the city’s Fairmount neighborhood Wednesday morning.
The cause of the blaze in the Philadelphia Housing Authority-owned home on North 23rd Street is not yet known. Twenty-six people were living inside the duplex at the time.
“This is without a doubt one of the most tragic days in our city’s history, the loss of so many people in such a tragic way,” Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney said.
Lee la historia en español aquí.
At least 13 people, including children, died early Wednesday when a quick-moving fire tore through a crowded Philadelphia rowhome that had been converted into two apartments and is owned by the city’s public housing authority.
“This is without a doubt one of the most tragic days in our city’s history, the loss of so many people in such a tragic way,” Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney said with tears in his eyes.
The fire began around 6:40 a.m. on the second floor of the rowhome duplex along the 800 block of North 23rd Street, near Ogden Street, in the dense residential Fairmount neighborhood, Philadelphia police and fire officials said. The house is owned by the Philadelphia Housing Authority, according to city records.
At least 13 people, including seven children, died and two others, including a child, were left in critical condition. The number of dead could still rise, officials said.
At least eight people were able to escape the burning duplex, Philadelphia Fire Department Deputy Commissioner Craig Murphy said.
A neighbor said he heard screams around 6:30 a.m. and came downstairs to see flames coming out of the building.
“It was just such a shocking moment,” he said.
The death toll from the fire is Philadelphia’s worst in memory, and nearly twice as deadly as the 2014 blaze in the southwest section of the city where seven people, including four children, perished.
Firefighters are still searching for a cause for Wednesday’s fire. Sources said investigators are looking at how the fire spread so fast and the possibility that a Christmas tree went up in flames fueling the deadly blaze.
“Preliminary information indicates companies arrived at 6:40 a.m. and found heavy fire coming from the second floor of a three-story rowhouse,” the Philadelphia Fire Department tweeted. “It took 50 minutes to place the fire under control.”
There was heavy fire coming from a kitchen area on the second floor and heading up the staircase to the third floor, Murphy said while noting there was little to stop the flames from moving.
As firefighters battled the flames, they quickly discovered multiple people dead in the home.
“It was terrible,” Murphy, a veteran of decades fighting fires, said of the scene.
At least 26 people were residing in the apartments spread over three floors of the duplex, according to preliminary information. Eight people escaped from the unit that covers the ground floor and rear of the second floor, Murphy said. There were 18 people living in the other unit, which included the front of the second floor and the entire third floor.
“That is a tremendous amount of people to be living in a duplex,” Murphy said.
Firefighters said the two most seriously injured people were rescued from the home. Murphy said the rescues happened “quickly” once firefighters got to the injured people.
“I knew some of those kids — I used to see them playing on the corner,” said Dannie McGuire, 34, fighting back tears as she and Martin Burgert, 35, stood in the doorway of a home around the corner. They had lived there for a decade, she said, “and some of those kids have lived here as long as us.”
“Losing so many kids, it’s just devastating… keep these babies in your prayers,” Kenney said.
The fire appeared to be out by 10 a.m., with ladders leaning against the building near the corner about three hours after the fire began. Firefighters could be seen being going in and out of the rowhome, which had parts of the roof cutout.
There were six working battery-operated smoke detectors installed in the building, but none were operational at the time of the blaze, firefighters said.
“This unimaginable loss of life has shaken all of us at PHA,” PHA President & CEO Kelvin A. Jeremiah said in a printed statement. “It is too early for us to say more. The property was last inspected in May 2021, and all the smoke detectors were operating properly at that time.”
Elected officials were left shaken and grieving at the scene of a Philadelphia fire that killed 13 people, including seven children. NBC10’s Johnny Archer spoke with State Sen. Sharif Street, who represents the area. He said the number of people living in the home shows the depth of Philadelphia’s housing crisis.
The only ways in and out of the homes were front and rear doors, Murphy said.
The apartments are within walking distance of Girard College, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and other city institutions.
The exact cause of the fire wasn’t immediately revealed and the fire marshal and ATF were investigating.
Murphy said investigators would make sure the loss of life “wasn’t in vain.”
NBC10 has reporters at the scene and this story will continue to be updated.
A 37-year-old Danish citizen who was living in Norway was arrested and charged over the attack in the town of Kongsberg, but police have not disclosed what charges he is facing.
“The police have previously been in contact with the man, including as a result of previous concerns related to radicalization,” Sæverudtold a news conference.
The suspect had not appeared on their radar this year though, Sæverud indicated, saying the police had “received no reports in 2021 regarding radicalization.”
Four women and one man were killed in the attack. “We have some information about the five people who died. There are four women and a man, no one has been formally identified yet. It will take some time. They are all aged 50 to 70 years,” Sæverud said.
A timeline of the events Wednesday revealed that only 35 minutes elapsed between the first reports to police of a man shooting with a bow and arrow and the arrest of the suspect.
The first call alerting police came into the operations center at 6:12 p.m., Sæverud said. A patrol was immediately sent to the location, followed by three more, he said. The first patrol on the scene only briefly spotted the perpetrator.
In the minutes afterward, messages were coming in from members of the public that the suspect had been spotted in several places across Kongsberg, he said.
The suspect was arrested at 6:47 p.m., by which time 22 police patrols had been deployed and more resources were on their way. Warning shots were fired at the time of the arrest, Sæverud said.
From what police now know, “it appears reasonably clear that probably everyone was killed after the police were in contact with the perpetrator for the first time,” he said.
The perpetrator is believed to have acted alone, police said.
One witness to the attack, Linda Ostergaard, was cycling home with her two daughters when she came on the attack, according to CNN Swedish affiliate, Expressen.
“My youngest daughter was a couple of meters in front of me when she suddenly stopped as there were lots of blue lights,” Ostergaard said.
“We saw a police car with sirens on come, and it stopped at the top of the street. Two policemen jumped out of the car with weapons and ran into the shop here, and they were shouting, ‘armed police, put down the weapon.'”
“Then we were told to move away, that we had to get to safety. So we ran to the corner there, and stood there on the corner. There, we met another man who said that it was he who had called the police, and that the perpetrator had shot after him, down here, and then we saw that there was an arrow down there in the road. There was no crossbow only a long arrow lying there.”
‘Perpetrator has carried out horrific acts’
The attack came on the eve of a new government taking office after last month’s parliamentary elections unseated the long-ruling Conservative Party.
Labour leader Jonas Gahr Store is due to assume the role of Prime Minister on Thursday. In a Facebook post, Store described the attack as a “cruel and brutal act.”
Speaking at a late-night news conference in the capital, Oslo, the country’s outgoing Prime Minister Erna Solberg described the developments in Kongsberg as “gruesome” and promised “all necessary resources” were being deployed.
“The perpetrator has carried out horrific acts against several people. It is a very dramatic situation that has hit Kongsberg society hard, and the events shake us all,” she said.
Norway’s King Harald expressed his sympathies Thursday in a short message to the mayor of Kongsberg, saying that “the rest of the nation stands with you.”
“We sympathize with the relatives and injured in the grief and despair,” he said. “And we think of all those affected in Kongsberg who have experienced that their safe local environment suddenly became a dangerous place. It shakes us all when horrible things happen near us, when you least expect it, in the middle of everyday life on the open street.”
The attack comes just over a decade since Norway’s worst terrorist attack.
In July 2011, Norwegian far-right extremist Anders Behring Brevik killed 77 people, many of them teenagers, in a bomb attack and gun rampage. He was sentenced to 21 years in prison, the maximum possible term.
In August 2019, another man stormed an Oslo mosque armed with guns before being overpowered. That year, the country’s intelligence service reported that right-wing terrorism was on the rise globally, and warned that the country would likely be targeted in the near future.
CNN’s Vasco Cotovio, Seb Shukla and Lianne Kolirin contributed to this report.
Rather than take a car or an RV, this couple decided to road trip in a converted hearse.
Shannon Orr, 24, and Iain Cameron, 31, from Warrington, U.K., drove across Scotland’s North Coast 500 in their 1998 Volvo 960 Hearse with their two dogs, Billy and Peanut, according to SWNS.
The hearse got the couple so much attention on their trip that they nicknamed it “The Grim Sleeper” and even started an Instagram account for it, the news agency reported.
YOU CAN STAY IN WINNIE THE POOH’S TREEHOUSE IN THE HUNDRED ACRE WOOD
Orr told SWNS she and Cameron were originally going to camp through the North Coast 500, but when they came across the advertisement for the hearse online, they changed their mind.
Shannon Orr, 24, and Iain Cameron, 31, from Warrington, U.K., drove across Scotland’s North Coast 500 in their 1998 Volvo 960 Hearse. (SWNS)
They saw the converted hearse advertised on Facebook and bought it for $4,826 (£3,500). (SWNS)
“We saw it on Facebook and had to get it, because it was something neither of us had seen before,” Orr told SWNS.
HOW TO ROAD TRIP WITH KIDS, FROM PARENTS WHO LIVE IN A BUS YEAR-ROUND
According to SWNS, the couple paid $4,826 (£3,500) for the already-converted hearse.
“We didn’t do any of the conversion,” Orr said. “We bought it already converted, so we can’t claim anything for that sadly.”
“I think with it being a hearse, it puts people off due to its previous passengers,” Orr said. “But it just works so well as a camper if you can get past that part.” (SWNS)
“All we have added up to now is the Halloween figures on the dash, the ducks on the wing mirrors and the skeletons on the front and back,” Orr added.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP
She told SWNS that even though it’s a hearse, it drives just like a normal car – though it does stick out of parking spaces.
Orr and Cameron plan to use their hearse for “all our future road trips,” Orr said. (SWNS)
“I think with it being a hearse, it puts people off due to its previous passengers,” Orr said. “But it just works so well as a camper if you can get past that part.”
CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP FOR OUR LIFESTYLE NEWSLETTER
Orr and Cameron plan to use their hearse for “all our future road trips,” Orr said. Though, she added they’re still planning their next destination.
“I’m sure it’ll attract a lot of attention where ever we go,” Orr said.
In a world first, US researchers have developed a neuroprosthetic device that successfully translated the brain waves of a paralyzed man into complete sentences, according to a scientific paper published Thursday.
“This is an important technological milestone for a person who cannot communicate naturally,” said David Moses, a postdoctoral engineer at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), and one of the lead authors of the study in the New England Journal of Medicine.
“It demonstrates the potential for this approach to give a voice to people with severe paralysis and speech loss.”
The breakthrough involved a 36-year-old man who had a stroke when he was 20 that left him with anarthria – the inability to speak intelligibly, though his cognitive function had remained intact.
Every year, thousands of people lose the ability to talk due to strokes, accidents or disease.
Past research in this area has focused on reading brain waves via electrodes to develop mobility prosthetics that allow users to spell out letters.
The new approach was intended to enable more rapid and organic communication.
UCSF researchers had previously placed electrode arrays on patients with normal speech who were undergoing brain surgery, to decode the signals that control the vocal tract in order to express vowels and consonants, and were able to analyze the patterns to predict words.
But the concept hadn’t been tried out on a paralyzed patient to prove it could offer clinical benefit.
Feat of neuroengineering
The team decided to launch a new study called Brain-Computer Interface Restoration of Arm and Voice, and the first participant asked to be referred to as BRAVO1.
Since suffering a devastating brainstem stroke, BRAVO1 has had extremely limited head, neck, and limb movements, and communicates by using a pointer attached to a baseball cap to poke letters on a screen.
The researchers worked with BRAVO1 to develop a 50-word vocabulary with words essential to his daily life like “water,” “family,” and “good,” then surgically implanted a high-density electrode over his speech motor cortex.
Over the next several months, the team recorded his neural activity as he attempted to say the 50 words, and used artificial intelligence to distinguish subtle patterns in the data and tie them to words.
To test it had worked, they presented him with sentences constructed from the vocabulary set, and recorded the results on a screen.
They then prompted him with questions like “How are you today?” and “Would you like some water?” which he was able to answer with responses like, “I am very good,” and “No, I am not thirsty.”
The system decoded up to 18 words per minute with a median accuracy of 75 percent. An “auto-correct” function, similar to that used in phones, contributed to its success.
“To our knowledge, this is the first successful demonstration of direct decoding of full words from the brain activity of someone who is paralyzed and cannot speak,” said BRAVO1’s neurosurgeon Edward Chang, a co-author.
An accompanying editorial in the journal hailed the development as “a feat of neuroengineering,” and suggested advancements in technology such as smaller surface electrodes might help improve accuracy even further.
