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Good morning.
Huge explosions shook Kyiv and sirens sounded across Ukraine on Thursday morning during a mass missile attack 24 hours after commitments were made by the US and Germany to send advanced battle tanks. There were reports of at least one person killed in the capital, Kyiv.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov has this morning said that Moscow views sending tanks to Ukraine as “direct involvement in the conflict”.
A total of 30 missiles were said to be launched against targets in the war-torn country with Ukraine’s air defences having also shot down 24 Iranian-made Shahad “kamikaze” drones overnight.
“We expect more than 30 missiles, which have already started to appear in various territories,” said Yuriy Ignat, a Ukrainian military spokesperson. “Air defence systems are working.”
All the names of the dead from one California mass shooting had not yet been released when the news alerts started again on Monday afternoon: there had been another shooting. There was another gunman at large. Seven more people were dead.
Gun violence takes a daily toll in California, but the brutality, scale and pace of the past week has felt different. In the course of just eight days, at least 25 people were killed in four separate mass shootings, defined as any shooting in which at least four people are injured.
The killings – which cut across a big city, a placid Los Angeles suburb, and two small farming towns – have left residents shaken, exhausted and afraid, and led to renewed calls for some kind of fundamental change.
“This proliferation of violence just seems like it’s perpetual,” said Tinisch Hollins, the executive director of Californians for Safety and Justice, an advocacy group for survivors of violence. “It’s so common now to hear of mass shootings that they don’t even stay in the headlines. Not even a day later, we’re talking about an entirely different incident. It’s horrifying.”
The news that Meta will allow Donald Trump back on Facebook and Instagram after a two-year ban has been met with fury and indignation among civil rights and online safety advocates.
