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    Israel Recovers Bodies of Three Hostages Held by Hamas in Gaza

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    The retrieval of the bodies of three Israelis taken hostage by Hamas jolted Israelis’ focus back to a conflict that had been overshadowed by the escalating crisis with Iran.The bodies of three Israelis taken hostage by Hamas have been recovered, the Israeli government said on Sunday. The announcement jolted Israelis’ focus back to the war in Gaza, which had been overshadowed by the escalating crisis with Iran.Israeli officials identified the three people as Yonatan Samerano; Ofra Keidar; and Shay Levinson, an Israeli soldier. All three were killed during the Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, and their bodies were taken back to Gaza as bargaining chips.Approximately 50 out of the roughly 250 hostages captured during Hamas’s attack on southern Israel are believed to still be in Gaza. About 20 of those are believed to still be alive, while the rest are presumed dead, according to the Israeli authorities.Israel’s war in Gaza has continued apace over the past week, even as most Israelis — along with much of the rest of the international community — have turned their attention to the war with Iran. More than 500 people have been killed in Gaza since the war with Iran began over a week ago, according to the Gaza health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.Gazans are still living through a seemingly endless humanitarian crisis in which finding enough food and water has become a daily struggle. Desperate scenes of looting of aid trucks have become a near-daily occurrence amid widespread hunger and lawlessness.Israel and Hamas observed a two-month cease-fire earlier this year that saw 30 hostages freed and the bodies of eight more returned in exchange for more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners. A renewed Israeli assault ended the truce in March.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Austria School Shooting: What to Know

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      Several people have been killed in a mass shooting at a high school in Graz, the country’s second-largest city, police said.At least nine people were killed on Tuesday in a mass shooting at a high school in Graz, Austria, the city’s mayor said. The assailant was also found dead, the police said.The mass shooting is the deadliest attack in recent Austrian history and one of the deadliest recent school shootings across Europe.Here’s what you need to know:What happened?What’s known about the suspect and the victims?How rare are mass shootings in Austria?Are guns common in Austria?What happened?Students and at least one adult were killed, Mayor Elke Kahr of Graz said in comments to the Austria Press Agency, the national news agency. The shooter, who police said acted alone, died at the scene, Ms. Kahr said.Police said they received reports of a shooting around 10 a.m. local time on Tuesday and responded with heavy force. Specially trained COBRA units, Austria’s version of SWAT teams, arrived at the scene, as did a police helicopter.The school was evacuated in the late morning, with students sent to a nearby stadium. By noon, police said that there was no further threat.Austrian schools were closed on Monday for the Pentecost holiday, so students had just returned to classes after the long weekend.What’s known about the suspect and the victims?Austrian officials have not yet identified any of the victims. They have also not released any details about the shooter or a possible motive.How rare are mass shootings in Austria?There were two mass shootings in Austria between 2000 and 2022, both since 2010, according to an analysis published in 2024 by the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government, a think tank based in Albany, N.Y. During that period, there were 109 mass shootings in the United States, according to the institute’s records.Graz, Austria’s second-largest city after the capital, Vienna, last experienced a mass attack in 2015. In that incident, a man with a history of domestic violence killed three people after driving a car into crowds and then attacking bystanders with a knife.Austria has also had terrorism-related violence in the past few years.In 2024, security officials thwarted a plot to attack people at a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna. In 2020, a gunman killed four people and wounded 23 others in Vienna. The man had previously been arrested on suspicion of trying to join ISIS.Are guns common in Austria?Austrian civilians are among the most heavily armed in the world, according to a 2017 estimate from the Small Arms Survey, a research group based in Geneva.Austrians hold about 2.6 million guns, only about 837,000 of which are registered, according to the survey. Austria ranked 12th in the world in gun holdings per person.That’s about 30 firearms for every 100 civilians. The United States had about 120.5 guns for every 100 people during that same time, the survey showed.Pump-action shotguns are prohibited in Austria, which has a population of 9.2 million. Official authorization is required to legally acquire a handgun, a semiautomatic firearm or a repeating shotgun. More

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      Boulder Attack Suspect Appeared to Live a Low-Key Life in Colorado Springs

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      The suspect came to the U.S. in 2022 and lived with his family in a suburban neighborhood. He was a ride share driver, and his daughter was embraced by her school community.Mohamed Sabry Soliman told the police that he had tried to disguise himself as a gardener on Sunday afternoon when he headed toward a group that was walking in downtown Boulder, Colo., to remember the hostages being held in Gaza, the authorities said.Mr. Soliman, a 45-year-old born in Egypt, carried flowers he had bought from a Home Depot store, according to a Boulder police detective. He wore an orange vest. And he had strapped on a backpack sprayer, the kind that gardeners often use to apply fertilizer or pesticide.But the sprayer was full of gasoline.The fiery weekend terror attack that the authorities say Mr. Soliman soon carried out — in a plot he said he had hatched himself — injured 12 people, who were burned by two homemade Molotov cocktails that the authorities say he threw into the crowd. Mr. Soliman yelled “Free Palestine” during the attacks, the authorities said, and later told the police he “wanted them all to die” because he believed the demonstrators were “Zionists” supporting the occupation of Palestine.Before Sunday, Mr. Soliman appeared to have lived a prosaic life in Colorado Springs, where he drove for a ride share service and was raising five children with his wife in a worn stucco apartment amid the dry, windy suburban stretch east of town. He told the police he had assembled his dangerous arsenal of explosives from everyday household goods.But the assault resonated far beyond Boulder. It came roughly two weeks after another supporter of the Palestinian cause killed two Israeli embassy workers in Washington, D.C., sending fresh waves of fear through Jewish communities around the world whose members were left wondering if anywhere was safe for them as Israel’s war in Gaza grinded on.Mr. Soliman was arrested minutes after the attack and was being held on a $10 million bond. Police officers found him on a patch of grass near the Boulder courthouse, shirtless and screaming at the crowd, holding two Molotov cocktails. At least 14 other Molotov cocktails were found near him in a black plastic container.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Sunday Ritual Turns Into a Smoky Scene of Chaos

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      A witness ran to the site of the attack and found people wandering dazed and a friend she said is a Holocaust survivor being helped into an ambulance.Every Sunday at 1 p.m. in Boulder, Colo., the walkers take their places. They have done so since a few weeks after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel. They begin at Pearl and Seventh Streets and walk toward the courthouse, along a pedestrian mall.Lisa Effress, 55, who has lived in Boulder for 17 years, has been there since the first walk. “Whenever I’m in town,” she said, “I try to be there.”The ritual is simple: walk, speak the names of those still held hostage, sometimes sing “Hatikvah,” the Israel national anthem, and bear witness. The numbers vary — 20, sometimes 100. People see the group, hear the songs, and fall into step.They wear red. It’s symbolic. It’s visible.Ms. Effress wasn’t walking this Sunday. She was across the street, having lunch with her daughter. But lunch got cut short. She heard sirens. Police cars, ambulances.She checked the time and figured the group must be near the courthouse. She left lunch and ran over.“I knew immediately — I just knew,” she said. “I ran across the street, looking for everyone.”What she found felt surreal. Smoke. Discarded clothes used to extinguish flames. People dazed, half-undressed. Bags and backpacks left behind in panic. And then, she saw a friend who was a Holocaust survivor, being helped into an ambulance.“It was horrible,” said Ms. Effress, a filmmaker and managing partner in a post-production company. On every walk, Ms. Effress said, she is vigilant. Alert to strange behavior, to tension in the air. “We are peaceful. We are not protesters,” she said. “But there are always people protesting us.”She added: “I have always taught my daughter: Be proud to be Jewish. Don’t be afraid. But in a time like this, it is crazy to think we will ever be walking again. It’s dangerous, it’s not safe for us.”She said that according to a Whatsapp chat for the walking group, the weekly walk has been canceled indefinitely. More

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      Islamic State Says It Targeted Syrian Forces in Bomb Attacks

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      The extremist group claimed responsibility for two attacks, its first against the new government since the fall of Bashar al-Assad, a war monitoring group said.The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for two bomb explosions, the first time the extremist group has directly targeted the new government since it took over in December, a war monitoring group said.In two statements posted online on Thursday and reported by the SITE Intelligence Group, ISIS claimed that bombs laid by its members had killed and wounded government soldiers and allied militia members.The Syrian government did not report any attacks by ISIS in the area, but announced that it had conducted two raids against Islamic State operatives in the Damascus area in the past week.The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitoring group, reported that one person was killed and three members of the Syrian Army’s 70th Division were wounded when a patrol was hit by a remote-controlled land mine in the east of Sweida Province on Wednesday. The man killed was accompanying the government forces, it said.The two attacks claimed by ISIS took place in the southern province of Sweida, where the group has not been active for the best part of a decade. But the government has struggled to establish security in the province, which is effectively controlled by the Druse minority. Sectarian clashes between local militants and pro-government forces in the province killed more than 100 in late April and early May.The Islamic State, which controlled large parts of Iraq and Syria a decade ago until U.S. and allied Syrian forces largely defeated it, has continued a low-level insurgency in eastern Syria since 2019. But it has shown a renewed vigor since the fall of the dictator Bashar al-Assad in December, plotting attacks even in the capital, Damascus, and claiming responsibility for a car bombing among other attacks in eastern Syria.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Kneecap Member Is Charged With Terror Offense Over Flag at London Concert

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      A member of the Northern Irish rap group Kneecap was accused of illegally displaying a flag in support of Hezbollah. Kneecap denied the offense.The authorities in London have charged a member of the Northern Irish hip-hop group Kneecap with a terrorism offense, accusing him of displaying a flag in support of the Hezbollah militant group at a concert in November.Liam Og O Hannaidh, who goes by the stage name Mo Chara, was charged on Wednesday under a law that makes it illegal to show public support for organizations that Britain has deemed terrorist groups. London’s Metropolitan Police said that Counterterrorism officers had investigated Mr. O Hannaidh for displaying a flag during a concert at the O2 Forum in London that appeared to be in support of Hezbollah, the militant group based in Lebanon and banned by Britain. The police charged him under the name Liam O’Hanna, and the Crown Prosecution Service confirmed in an email that they had authorized the charges. If convicted, he faces up to six months in prison and a fine. “We deny this ‘offense’ and will vehemently defend ourselves,” Kneecap said on Thursday in a statement shared on Instagram. “This is political policing. This is a carnival of distraction.” In their statement, the group pointed to a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, where Israel’s restrictions on aid and emergency supplies have caused severe shortages of food and medicine that doctors have called “catastrophic.”“We are not the story. Genocide is,” the Kneecap statement added.A video posted online of the group’s concert in London on Nov. 21 shows Kneecap performing its song “H.O.O.D.” to a cheering crowd as a member of the group unfurls a yellow flag around his shoulders. The same member can be heard later yelling: “Up Hamas, up Hezbollah!”The Met Police said it began an investigation after being informed in April about an online video of an event on that date.Kneecap performing at Coachella in April. Valerie Macon/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesA court summons relating to the charges was sent by mail, the police said. Mr. O Hannaidh was set to appear at the Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London on June 18, the police said. The police added that they were also investigating another video from a music event where Kneecap performed in London in November 2023.Kneecap, a Belfast-based trio that released its first single in 2017, has built a following around its music, which features Irish lyrics over hip-hop and electronic beats. The group is known for its vocal support for Irish nationalism and a polarizing style of political messaging.The band members played fictionalized versions of themselves in a drama about their lives and music called “Kneecap,” which won a British Academy Film Award this year. They were scheduled to perform in London on Friday as headliners at the Wide Awake festival. More

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      My Father Was a Nazi Hunter. Then He Died in the Lockerbie Bombing.

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      On an early summer day in 1986 in a federal building in Newark, my father, Michael Bernstein, sat across a conference table from an elderly man named Stefan Leili. Then a young prosecutor at the Department of Justice, my father spent the previous day and a half deposing Leili, who emigrated to the United States from Germany three decades earlier. While applying for an entry visa, the U.S. government claimed, Leili concealed his service in the Totenkopfverbände — the infamous Death’s Head units of the SS, which ran the Nazi concentration and extermination camps. In 1981, the Supreme Court ruled that such an omission was sufficient grounds for denaturalization and deportation. If my father could prove that Leili lied, the United States could strip him of his citizenship and kick him out of the country.Listen to this article, read by Robert PetkoffIn an earlier interview, Leili repeatedly denied guarding prisoners at Mauthausen, one of a cluster of work camps in Austria, notorious for a stone quarry where slave laborers spent 11-hour days hauling slabs of granite up a steep rock staircase. But my father and a colleague sensed that this time around, the weight of hundreds of detailed queries might finally be causing Leili to buckle. Leili had begun to concede, bit by grudging bit, that he was more involved than he first said. My father had been waiting for such a moment, because he had a piece of evidence he was holding back. Now he decided that it was finally time to use it.Leili sat next to his college-age granddaughter and a German interpreter. Earlier in the deposition, the young woman said her grandfather was a sweet man, who couldn’t possibly have done anything wrong. Indeed, it would have been hard to look at this unremarkable 77-year-old — bald, with a sagging paunch — and perceive a villain.Certainly, the story Leili first told my father was far from villainous. Born in a small town in 1909 in Austria-Hungary, present-day Romania, Leili was an ethnic German peasant, who like millions of others had been tossed from place to place by the forces convulsing Europe. In 1944, Leili said, the Red Army was advancing toward his village. He had to choose whether to join the Hungarian Army or, like many ethnic Germans from his region, the SS. The Schutzstaffel promised better pay and German citizenship, plus money for his family if he was killed. And besides, if he hadn’t gone along with what the SS wanted, Leili said, he would “have been put against the wall and shot.”Leili told my father he spent much of his time in the SS pretending to be ill so he wouldn’t have to serve. Then he guarded some prisoners working in a Daimler munitions factory. These were soldiers, not civilians. They had friendly relations, he told my father. They worked short days. They were well fed, even “plump.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In Yemen, $7 Billion in Useless Bombing

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      The Signal scandal drew howls of outrage for the way Trump administration officials insecurely exchanged texts about military strikes on Yemen. But dig a little deeper, and there’s an even larger scandal.This is a scandal about a failed policy that empowers an enemy of the United States, weakens our security and will cost thousands of lives. It’s one that also tarnishes President Joe Biden but reaches its apotheosis under President Trump.It all goes back to the brutal Hamas terrorist attack on Israel in October 2023, and Israel’s savage response leveling entire neighborhoods of Gaza. The repressive Houthi regime of Yemen sought to win regional support by attacking supposedly pro-Israeli ships passing nearby in the Red Sea. (In fact, it struck all kinds of ships.)There are more problems than solutions in international relations, and this was a classic example: An extremist regime in Yemen was impeding international trade, and there wasn’t an easy fix. Biden responded with a year of airstrikes on Yemen against the Houthis that consumed billions of dollars but didn’t accomplish anything obvious.After taking office, Trump ramped up pressure on Yemen. He slashed humanitarian aid worldwide, with Yemen particularly hard hit. I last visited Yemen in 2018, when some children were already starving to death, and now it’s worse: Half of Yemen’s children under 5 are malnourished — “a statistic that is almost unparalleled across the world,” UNICEF says — yet aid cuts recently forced more than 2,000 nutrition programs to close down, according to Tom Fletcher, the U.N. humanitarian chief. The United States canceled an order for lifesaving peanut paste that was meant to keep 500,000 Yemeni children alive.Girls will be particularly likely to die, because Yemeni culture favors boys. I once interviewed a girl, Nujood Ali, who was married against her will at age 10. Aid programs to empower Yemeni girls and reduce child marriage are now being cut off as well.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What We Know About the Terrorist Groups India Said It Targeted

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      India has accused Pakistan of continuing to support Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad. Pakistan has rejected those claims.The spark for the latest conflict between India and Pakistan, the most expansive fighting between the two countries in decades, was a terrorist attack on civilians in Kashmir last month.The Indian government had been projecting calm on its side of the disputed Kashmir region. A group of militants managed to puncture that image. They came out of the woods in a scenic picnic spot and killed 26 men. The men, almost all of them Hindu, were singled out for their religion, and many of them were killed in front of their wives and families, according to witness accounts.A little-known group called the Resistance Front claimed responsibility. The Indian government said that the group was a front for a broader terrorist apparatus that has operated out of Pakistan. Pakistan has rejected those claims.Here is what we know about the groups that India said it had targeted in its military strikes.What are the two main groups India targeted?Lashkar-e-Taiba, which was founded in the 1980s, has long been suspected of planning from Pakistan some of the worst terrorist attacks in India. It was added to a United Nations sanctions list in 2005.One of the deadliest attacks the group orchestrated was a 2008 terror attack in Mumbai, during which more than 160 people were killed. Nearly a dozen gunmen arrived on boats and held hostages at a major hotel for days. One of the attackers was captured alive, and much of the account of the attack’s ties to Pakistan came from his confessions. He was sentenced in India in 2010 and executed in 2012.Pakistan has confirmed Lashkar-e-Taiba’s links to past violence in India but says that the group was outlawed and disbanded long ago. The group’s founder, Hafiz Saeed, is free despite brief periods of detention, and Indian officials say that the group continues its activities through cover organizations and offshoots, such as the Resistance Front.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More