Japan's ex-leader Shinzo Abe assassinated during a speech
NARA, Japan (AP) — Former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was assassinated Friday on a street in western Japan by a gunman who opened fire on him from behind as he delivered a campaign speech — an attack that stunned a nation with some of the strictest gun control laws anywhere.
The 67-year-old Abe, who was Japan’s longest-serving leader when he resigned in 2020, collapsed bleeding and was airlifted to a nearby hospital in Nara, although he was not breathing and his heart had stopped. He was later pronounced dead after receiving massive blood transfusions, officials said.
Nara Medical University emergency department chief Hidetada Fukushima said Abe suffered major damage to his heart, along with two neck wounds that damaged an artery. He never regained his vital signs, Fukushima said.
Police at the shooting scene arrested Tetsuya Yamagami, 41, a former member of Japan's navy, on suspicion of murder. Police said he used a gun that was obviously homemade — about 15 inches (40 centimeters) long — and they confiscated similar weapons and his personal computer when they raided his nearby one-room apartment.
Police said Yamagami was responding calmly to questions and had admitted to attacking Abe, telling investigators he had plotted to kill him because he believed rumors about the former leader's connection to a certain organization that police did not identify.
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Japan's tight gun laws add to shock over Abe's assassination
TOKYO (AP) — The assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in broad daylight Friday shocked a world that has come to associate Japan with relatively low crime and strict gun control.
Japan’s longest-serving prime minister, Abe was shot in the back while campaigning in the city of Nara for parliamentary candidates. He died at a hospital, two days before the election.
The suspect apparently circumvented the nation's ultra-tight gun regulations by building his own weapon. Police said the 15-inch (40-centimeter) device was obviously homemade, and one expert compared it to a muzzle-loading gun. Authorities confiscated similar weapons when they raided the suspect's nearby one-room apartment.
The motive of the man, who was taken into custody at the scene, remained unclear.
Fatal gun violence is virtually unheard of in Japan, and most Japanese go through life without ever handling, or even seeing, a real gun. Stabbings are more common in killings.
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Assassination of Japan's Shinzo Abe stuns world leaders
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) — Leaders around the world condemned the assassination of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Friday as “despicable,” “cowardly” and “terrorism” while recalling him as a man devoted to peace, security and international cooperation.
Tributes poured in as governments expressed sorrow and solidarity with Japan over the loss of Abe, who was Japan’s longest-serving leader before stepping down in 2020 for health reasons.
Abe, 67, was shot from behind in Nara in western Japan while giving a campaign speech. He was airlifted to a hospital and later pronounced dead. The attack was especially shocking in one of the world's safest countries, where guns are strictly controlled.
U.S. President Joe Biden said he was “stunned, outraged, and deeply saddened.” He visited the residence of Japan’s ambassador to the U.S. on Friday to offer condolences. He placed a bouquet of flowers on a table set up near a koi pond and wrote in a condolence book that Abe was “a man of peace and judgment.”
“This is a tragedy for Japan and for all who knew him,” Biden said. “His vision of a free and open Indo-Pacific will endure. Above all, he cared deeply about the Japanese people and dedicated his life to their service.“
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Elon Musk says he's terminating Twitter deal, board to fight
Elon Musk’s tumultuous $44 billion bid to buy Twitter is on the verge of collapse — after the Tesla CEO sent a letter to Twitter's board Friday saying he is terminating the acquisition.
The chair of Twitter's board, Bret Taylor, tweeted Friday that the board is “committed to closing the transaction on the price and terms agreed upon with Mr. Musk and plans to pursue legal action to enforce the merger agreement. We are confident we will prevail in the Delaware Court of Chancery.”
Twitter could have pushed for a $1 billion breakup fee Musk agreed to pay under these circumstances. Instead, it looks ready to fight over the deal, which the company's board has approved and CEO Parag Agrawal has insisted he wants to consummate.
The possible unraveling of the deal is just the latest twist in a saga between the world’s richest man and one of the most influential social media platforms. Much of the drama has played out on Twitter, with Musk — who has more than 100 million followers — lamenting that the company was failing to live up to its potential as a platform for free speech.
On Friday, shares of Twitter fell 5% to $36.81, well below the $54.20 that Musk had offered to pay. Shares of Tesla, meanwhile, climbed 2.5% to $752.29.
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Impassioned Biden signs order on abortion access
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden on Friday condemned the “extreme” Supreme Court majority that ended a constitutional right to abortion and delivered an impassioned plea for Americans upset by the decision to “vote, vote, vote vote” in November. Under mounting pressure from fellow Democrats to be more forceful in response to the ruling, he signed an executive order to try to protect access to the procedure.
The actions Biden outlined are intended to head off some potential penalties that women seeking abortion may face after the ruling, but his order cannot restore access to abortion in the more than a dozen states where strict limits or total bans have gone into effect. About a dozen more states are set to impose additional restrictions.
Biden acknowledged the limitations facing his office, saying it would require an act of Congress to restore nationwide access to the way it was before the June 24 decision.
“The fastest way to restore Roe is to pass a national law,” Biden said. “The challenge is go out and vote. For God’s sake there is an election in November!"
Biden's action formalized instructions to the Departments of Justice and Health and Human Services to push back on efforts to limit the ability of women to access federally approved abortion medication or to travel across state lines to access clinical abortion services. He was joined by Vice President Kamala Harris, HHS secretary Xavier Becerra and Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco in the Roosevelt Room as he signed the order.
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EXPLAINER: 5 key takeaways from the June jobs report
WASHINGTON (AP) — Inflation is raging. The stock market is tumbling and interest rates rising. American consumers are depressed and angry. Economists warn of potentially dark times ahead.
But employers? They just keep hiring.
The Labor Department reported Friday that America’s dinged and dented economy managed to add a vigorous 372,000 jobs in June, well above the 275,000 that economists had expected. And the unemployment rate remained at 3.6%, just a tick above the 50-year low that was recorded just before the coronavirus pandemic flattened the economy in early 2020.
“The labor market’s continued strength is simply astonishing, despite all the headwinds new hiring faces,'' said Christopher Rupkey, chief economist at the research firm FWDBONDS LLC, dismissing concerns that the economy might headed for a downturn sometime soon. “This isn't what a recession looks like.''
The American job market has staged a remarkable comeback from the depths of the COVID-19 recession in the spring of 2020: In March and April that year, the United States lost a staggering 22 million jobs.
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'Dad, that's it. She's dead': Another day of loss in Ukraine
KHARKIV, Ukraine (AP) — She had gone out to feed the cats when the shelling began.
It was afternoon, a residential neighborhood, a time to get errands done. But there is nothing routine about life near the front line in Ukraine.
Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city and a short drive from the Russian border, lives with the low thunder of distant artillery and the sickening booms of shells exploding much closer to home.
Natalia Kolesnik, like other residents, learned to live with the risks. Then, in a grassy courtyard on a hot and sweaty Thursday, the shelling caught her.
She was one of three bodies on the littered ground.
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8-year-old paralyzed in parade attack awake, asking for twin
An 8-year-old boy whose spine was severed in the shooting at a Fourth of July Parade is conscious for the first time since the attack and asking to see his twin brother, his family said Friday.
Doctors don't think Cooper Roberts suffered any brain damage from the bullets that hit his chest, the family announced in a statement Friday that confirmed he is paralyzed from the waist down.
The boy was removed from the ventilator. He is in serious condition and is in a great deal of pain, but improving.
He and his twin brother, Luke, who was struck by shrapnel and is home, loved the Fourth of July parade in their Chicago suburb.
But now the family is envisioning a “new normal" for Cooper who was wounded in a hail of gunfire that left dozens of others wounded and seven dead in Highland Park, said Tony Loizzi, a family spokesperson, during a Zoom call with reporters Thursday.
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Appeals court: Congress can see some Trump financial records
WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal appeals court on Friday narrowed the range of documents House Democrats are entitled to in their years-long investigation of Donald Trump's finances.
The decision from the federal appeals court in Washington almost certainly won't be the last word in the legal fight that began in 2019, when Trump was president and Democrats newly in charge of the House of Representatives subpoenaed a wealth of records from Trump's accounting firm, Mazars USA.
A federal judge in Washington already had ruled that lawmakers were entitled to review a more limited set of records than they initially wanted.
The appellate panel narrowed the request even more. It held that the House Committee on Oversight and Reform should be given records of financial ties between foreign countries and Trump or any of his businesses for 2017-18. It also ordered Mazars to turn over documents between November 2016 and 2018 relating to the Trump company that held the lease granted by the federal government for the former Trump International Hotel located between the White House and the Capitol.
“We determine here that the Committee has shown the requisite need for some, but far from all, of the presidential information covered by its subpoena,” Judge Sri Srinivasan wrote in an opinion joined by Judge Judith Rogers. The third judge who heard arguments in the case is Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who dropped out of the case when President Joe Biden nominated her to the Supreme Court.
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Wild species relied on by billions at risk, report warns
RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Every day billions of people depend on wild flora and fauna to obtain food, medicine and energy. But a new United Nations-backed report says that overexploitation, climate change, pollution and deforestation are pushing one million species towards extinction.
The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services - or IPBES - report said Friday that unless humankind improves the sustainable use of nature, the Earth is on its way to losing 12% of its wild tree species, over a thousand wild mammal species and almost 450 species of sharks and rays, among other irreparable harm.
Humans use about 50,000 wild species routinely and 1 out of 5 people of the world’s 7.9 billion population depend on those species for food and income, the report said. 1 in 3 people rely on fuel wood for cooking, the number even higher in Africa.
“It’s essential that those uses be sustainable because you need them to be there for your children and grandchildren. So when uses of wild species become unsustainable, it’s bad for the species, it’s bad for the ecosystem and it’s bad for the people,” report co-chair Marla R. Emery of the United States told The Associated Press.
Beyond the gloomy picture, the report also provides recommendations for policymakers and examples for the sustainable use of wild fauna and flora. A central point should be to secure tenure rights for Indigenous and local peoples, who have historically made sustainable use of wild species, the report said.
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