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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
World
Nicola Slawson

First Thing: Police say 10 killed and 15 hurt in Saskatchewan, Canada

A police forensics team investigates a crime scene on Monday after a number of people were killed and injured in a series of stabbings in Saskatchewan, Canada.
A police forensics team investigates a crime scene on Monday after a number of people were killed and injured in a series of stabbings in Saskatchewan, Canada. Photograph: David Stobbe/Reuters

Good morning.

Police in western Canada launched a search last night for two men suspected in a series of stabbings that have killed 10 people and wounded at least 15 others.

The majority of the attacks targeted residents of James Smith Cree Nation, an Indigenous community of 3,400 people, with other injuries reported in the neighbouring village of Weldon, north-east of Saskatoon.

The attacks in Saskatchewan province have shocked the country. The Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, described them as “horrific and heartbreaking. I’m thinking of those who have lost a loved one and of those who were injured.”

Trudeau said his government had been in direct communication with the James Smith Cree Nation community leadership and was ready to assist, adding: “Those responsible for today’s abhorrent attacks must be fully brought to justice.”

  • Who are the suspects? Police identified Damien and Myles Sanderson as the two suspects in the killings. The relationship between the suspects was unclear. Police said there was no motive yet – but the men were presumed to be armed and dangerous.

  • Were the victims targeted? Police believe some of the victims were targeted and others were attacked randomly.

Trump calls FBI, DoJ ‘vicious monsters’ in first rally since Mar-a-Lago search

Donald Trump
Donald Trump called Joe Biden’s Philadelphia address the ‘most vicious, hateful, divisive speech’. Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Donald Trump, speaking in Pennsylvania on Saturday at his first rally since the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago for top-secret material taken from the White House and since Joe Biden used a primetime address to warn that Republicans were assaulting US democracy, lashed out at his critics.

The former president said: “The FBI and the justice department have become vicious monsters, controlled by radical-left scoundrels, lawyers and the media, who tell them what to do.”

Trump nominated the FBI director, Christopher Wray, in 2017.

Biden spoke outside Independence Hall in Philadelphia, a site with great resonance in US history, on Thursday night. Republicans protested that the president’s speech was too political.

In Wilkes-Barre on Saturday night, Trump called Biden’s remarks “the most vicious, hateful, and divisive speech ever delivered by an American president”.

  • What else did he say? Trump told his audience that under Biden, they were “enemies of the state”. Of the president, he said: “He’s an enemy of the state, you want to know the truth.”

Two killed in Northern California wildfire as firefighters continue to battle blazes

Mill Fire burns on the outskirts of WeedSmoke rises as the Mill Fire burns on the outskirts of Weed, California
Deaths were confirmed by the Siskiyou sheriff yesterday as high temperatures add to challenge for firefighters. Photograph: Michael Gaio/Reuters

Two people have died in a wildfire that ripped through a Northern California town, a local official has said, as firefighters in the far north of the state on Sunday battled blazes that forced evacuations and destroyed dozens of homes.

“There’s no easy way of putting it,” said the Siskiyou county sheriff, Jeremiah LaRue, as he shared the news of the fatalities yesterday afternoon during a community meeting held at an elementary school north of the rural community of Weed. He did not immediately provide names or other details including age or gender of the two people who died.

LaRue and other officials said it was not clear when people would be allowed back into their homes or when power would be restored for the people still without it.

About 1,000 people were still under evacuation orders on Sunday as firefighters worked to contain the blaze that ran out of control at the start of the holiday weekend.

  • What’s making the fires so hard to put out? Authorities said winds, low humidity and dry vegetation pose challenges to crews working to contain two fires.

In other news …

A volunteer carries bottles of water at a distribution site in Jackson, Mississippi.
A volunteer carries bottles of water at a distribution site in Jackson, Mississippi. Photograph: Carlos Barría/Reuters
  • The mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, where 150,000 people were still without safe drinking water after an infrastructure failure, said yesterday residents faceda “much longer road ahead” before services were fully restored. The precariousness of water system remained, Chokwe Antar Lumumba said.

  • Seven men and one woman will go on trial on Monday over the 2016 Bastille day attack in Nice, when a gunman drove a heavy truck at high speed into a crowd gathered to watch fireworks on the Riviera seafront, killing 86 people and injuring more than 400.

  • Chileans have voted comprehensively against a progressive constitution that had been drafted to replace the 1980 document written under Gen Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. With 99.9% of the votes counted in Sunday’s plebiscite, the rejection camp had 61.9% support compared with 38.1% for approval.

  • Eight climbers have died attempting to scale the Klyuchevskaya Sopka volcano in Russia’s far east, according to local officials, after freezing winds halted a rescue attempt. Six people had initially been reported killed, according to officials on the Kamchatka peninsula, but the Interfax news agency said “two more died”.

Stat of the day: Ohio man who suffered 20,000 bee stings expected to recover, family says

Western honey bees swarm in a honeycomb nest at the Roberson Farm
Austin Bellamy’s mother said the fire department told her the insects were a hybrid of western honeybees (pictured) and east African lowland honeybees. Photograph: Planetpix/Alamy

An Ohio man who was stung at least 20,000 times by bees – and even ingested some of the insects – during a mishap while he was cutting tree branches is expected to recover, according to his family. Austin Bellamy, 20, climbed high into a lemon tree in Ripley, Ohio, last Friday to help trim it when he mistakenly cut into a bees’ nest, his mother, Shawna Carter, has recounted. “He was just covered in bees … screaming and yelling, crying for help,” Carter said.

Don’t miss this: Migrants risk death crossing treacherous Rio Grande river for ‘American dream’

The Rio Grande river
Clothes left on the ground of the shores of the Rio Grande between the US and Mexico after nine migrants died and others were rescued as they tried to cross the river into the US near Eagle Pass, Texas, on Saturday. Photograph: Reuters

Two small inflatable floats with printed aquatic animals in bright colors lay by the river under the Eagle Pass port of entry in Texas on Saturday, a day after nine migrants died while swimming the Rio Grande. A parent had placed their child in the floats and jumped in a river that looked deceptively calm. National guardsmen tasked with watching that section of Eagle Pass saw it for what it was: a treacherous, deep body of water with whirlpools between pillars holding up the international bridge. Deaths in the river became commonplace this year, after a migration shift pushed thousands here.

… or this: Vogue editor Edward Enninful says impostor syndrome is what drives him

Edward Enninful
‘A boy from Ghana making his way in a racist, classist industry’: Edward Enninful. Photograph: Pablo Cuadra/Getty Images

“It’s just after 8am in Enninful’s kitchen, almost five years to the day since he took the editorship of British Vogue, and two since he was made Vogue’s European editorial director, part of a larger management team with Anna Wintour,” Eva Wiseman writes.

“We’re here to discuss his new book, a memoir by the first male, first Black, first working-class and first gay editor in the magazine’s 100-year history. After reading it (Oprah Winfrey tells me over email), ‘I see how everything that happened in his life shaped him to be the man he is now.’”

Climate check: US flood maps outdated thanks to climate change, Fema director says

Pet owners rescue two cats and a dog from their home in East St Louis, Illinois, in July.
Pet owners rescue two cats and a dog from their home in East St Louis, Illinois, in July. Photograph: Derik Holtmann/AP

Flood maps used by the federal government are outdated, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or Fema, said yesterday, considering a series of devastating floods caused by excessive rainfall induced by climate change. Deanne Criswell told CNN’s State of the Union: “The part that’s really difficult right now is the fact that our flood maps don’t take into account excessive rain that comes in. And we are seeing these record rainfalls that are happening.”

Last Thing: Donald Trump once tried to pay a lawyer with a horse, new book says

Donald Trump, a horse and Andy Warhol, 1983.
Donald Trump, a horse and Andy Warhol, 1983. Photograph: Mario Suriani/AP

Donald Trump once tried to pay a lawyer he owed $2m with a deed to a horse. The bizarre scene is described in Servants of the Damned: Giant Law Firms, Donald Trump and the Corruption of Justice, a book by David Enrich of the New York Times that will be published next week. Enrich reports that “once he regained the capacity for speech”, the lawyer to whom Trump offered a stallion supposedly worth $5m “stammered … ‘This isn’t the 1800s. You can’t pay me with a horse.’”

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