A 16-year-old resident of Bend, Oregon opened fire at an elementary school on Thursday, killing three children — ages five, eight, and eleven — and one teacher before being shot dead by a community member. The attack ended at a church reunification center where parents collected surviving children clutching stuffed animals. The shooter has not been publicly identified. The massacre arrives in a country where school shootings have become a recurring structural failure, not an aberration. Donald Trump escalated his rhetorical alignment with Moscow, calling Ukraine's strikes on Russian oil refineries a "disgrace" and declaring Volodymyr Zelenskyy "more difficult to deal with than Putin." The comments came after a US-brokered energy ceasefire collapsed. European leaders moved to fill the credibility vacuum: Ursula von der Leyen announced a 22nd round of EU sanctions against Russia, while Emmanuel Macron emphasized that Ukraine must receive "all the means necessary to protect itself." The transatlantic gap on Ukraine is now a chasm. In Yemen, Houthi missiles struck the Al-Maashiq presidential palace in Aden — the first such attack on the complex in the current conflict — killing five people. Yemen's prime minister and cabinet were reported safe. Former PM Maeen Abdulmalik Saeed framed the Houthis' drone capabilities as "a new era of radical terrorism," while advisers to the Yemeni president accused the Iran-backed militia of seeking full territorial control to "help Iran to expand the chaos." Trump reversed his widely condemned plan to livestream the firing-squad execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan, settling instead for allowing victims' families to attend in person. The de facto leader of Pete Hegseth's Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, Douglas Wilson, had endorsed the original plan, saying he preferred "public execution" and "the older forms, like a firing squad, as opposed to attempts to 'medicalize' it." The reversal came only after sustained global condemnation. The sole holdout juror in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial, Michael Desronvil, told Fox News he never doubted Clancy's guilt, describing how "methodical Lindsay was in the execution of the children" and crediting "constantly praying" for guiding him through 38 hours of deliberation. Former congressman Matt Gaetz faces new civil allegations of sex trafficking of two young women, filed in Florida district court. Saudi Arabia is set to execute a man for attending protests and funerals at age 15, described by rights groups as a "new low." Texas faces a lawsuit after a glitch delayed nearly 600,000 voter registrations, while the DOJ is separately suing California over noncitizen voting allegations — a persistent Trump administration talking point. The FBI is investigating letters containing an "unknown substance" sent to election officials. Meanwhile, VW, Ford, and Tesla battery supply chains have been linked to destructive deforestation of primary rainforest in nickel-rich Indonesian lands, per satellite analysis. California issued wildfire evacuations and briefly closed part of Interstate 5 as multiple fires ignited amid strong winds and high temperatures. Federal forecasters say El Niño is likely to shift weather patterns later this year, bringing a generally wetter and warmer US winter. In Vienna, a neighborhood introduced guidelines requiring dog owners to rinse pet urine from trees with bottled tap water to protect vulnerable urban canopy.
