A 17-year-old student at Santa Fe High School in Texas opened fire on his classmates, killing ten people with a shotgun and a .38 revolver that were both legally owned by his father.[1] The state’s lieutenant governor blamed the shooting on the school’s abundance of “entrances” and “exits,” and the incoming National Rifle Association president said that Ritalin prescriptions were responsible for the violence.[2][3] US president Donald Trump alleged, without evidence, that his 2016 presidential campaign, which is currently being investigated for possible collusion with the Russian government, was infiltrated by FBI spies for “political purposes”; it was reported that the president’s oldest son attended a meeting during the campaign at which an emissary for princes from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates offered to help sway the election; and Trump, who in 2016 accused China of perpetrating “the greatest” theft of US jobs “in the history of the world,” tweeted that there were “too many job losses in China” and then announced that he would delay enacting new tariffs on Chinese goods.[4][5][6][7][8]
The Israeli military killed at least 60 Palestinians and injured 2,700 more, mostly by gunfire, after protests erupted along the Gaza border in response to the opening of the new United States Embassy in Jerusalem, a city claimed by both Israel and Palestine.[9][10] “You have made history,” Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said to Trump, who once described Jewish people as the “best tenants.”[11][12] The United States agreed to scrap joint military exercises with South Korea after Kim Jong-un, whom the US secretary of state once referred to as “Chairman Un,” threatened to withdraw from an upcoming peace summit.[13][14][15] The Trump Administration’s third national security advisor in 16 months said that the United States would consider the “Libya model” for North Korea, referring to a 2003 nuclear disarmament agreement entered into voluntarily by former Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, who was later killed following a NATO military intervention.[16][17][18][19]
In Chile, the country’s 31 Catholic bishops all offered their resignations after the pope accused them of failing to protect children from sexual abuse, and 20 evangelical priests were among the 110 who were killed when a Boeing 737 crashed after taking off from an airport in Havana.[20][21] A Connecticut man was arrested for using an alligator to hold another man captive, a school in Miami displayed a caged tiger at its jungle-themed prom, US wildlife officers shot a cougar in Washington State that was responsible for killing one cyclist and injuring another, and a woman in Oklahoma was mauled to death by seven small dogs.[22][23][24][25] Astronomers discovered a black hole with 20 billion times the mass of the sun that consumes the equivalent of a star every two days, and researchers reported that they were able to transfer memories between snails.[26][27] The CDC recommended not swallowing the water in hotel pools.[28]
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