Police respond to reports of an active shooter on the Ohio State University campus in Columbus, Ohio on November 28, 2016.
Andrew Welsh-Huggins / AP
At least 11 people were injured in an attack at the Ohio State University Monday morning.
Shortly before 10 a.m. local time, a suspect drove a vehicle into pedestrians, and then emerged from the car and started attacking them with a butcher knife. He was shot and killed by police. Eleven people sustained stab wounds, and at least one person is in critical condition.
Officials have identified the suspect as Abdul Razak Ali Artan, a student at the university. The police officer who shot him is 28-year-old Alan Horujko.
The university initially reported there was an active shooter on campus, according to a tweet by school officials. Students were advised to shelter in place or “Run Hide Fight.” The lockdown was lifted about two hours later.
Classes were canceled for the rest of the day. Aerial footage broadcast on cable news showed multiple police cars and ambulance on campus. Many students had recently returned to campus after Thanksgiving break.
We’re live-blogging the news below. All updates are in Eastern Standard Time (GMT -5).
Police Identify Suspect in Attack, Officer Who Shot Him
Authorities identified the suspect in the attack Monday as Abdul Razak Ali Artan, a student at Ohio State University. No additional details about the suspect or his motive were given. Authorities also identified the officer who shot and killed Artan as 28-year-old Alan Horujko, who has served with the university’s police department since January 2015.
"We all owe a debt of gratitude," Monica Moll, the university's department of public safety director, said of Horujko during a news conference Monday. "He did a fabulous job today."
The Violent Attack at OSU, From a Student's Perspective
Though many Ohio State students first heard the reports of an attack through the university’s campus alert system, some students who were already on campus were close enough to see the events unfold.
Michael Cloonan, a second-year student, said he was in class when he heard gunshots.
“We were going over an example problem and we heard four gunshots,” Cloonan told The Lantern, the university’s student newspaper. “People at the window saw [a] man laying on the ground. We went upstairs to lab upstairs and locked the door. Police responded very quickly. Immediately. Twenty seconds. Maybe less. Really quick.”
Martin Schneider, a student, told the BBC he heard a car engine revving.
“I thought it was an accident initially until I saw the guy come out with a knife,” Schneider said of the vehicle’s driver.
Nicholas Flores, a third-year student, said he was in class when he heard the reports of an active shooter on campus. While the rest of his classmates went to the fourth floor of the building to barricade themselves, he went to the courtyard to help.
“Most of these people here are kids on campus,” Flores, a 27-year-old former marine, toldThe Columbus Dispatch. “Their parents send them here to be safe and be educated. It's sad.”
OSU Police Chief Says Suspect Used Butcher Knife in Attack
Students leave buildings surrounding Ohio State University’s Watts Hall, where police were called to respond to reports of a shooting on campus. (John Minchillo / AP)
Ohio State Police Chief Craig Stone said at a press conference Monday afternoon that the suspect in the attack used a butcher knife to attack pedestrians.
At about 9:52 a.m. local time, the suspect drove a vehicle into pedestrians on campus. “He exited the vehicle and used a butcher knife to start cutting pedestrians,” Stone said. “Our officer was on scene in less than a minute and ended the situation in less than a minute.”
That officer, Craig said, shot and killed the suspect. The officer was not injured.
Michael Drake, Ohio State’s president, said he will visit the injured victims at hospitals later this afternoon.
“We prepare for situations like this and always hope never to have one,” Drake told reporters at the press conference.
The AP and local media report that nine people were transported to hospitals with stab wounds and gunshot wounds. Eight people have non-life-threatening injuries, and one is in critical condition, according to local hospitals.
Local media reports the attack began when a car drove into Watts Hall, located on the school’s North Campus. Two people emerged from the vehicle, one with a knife and the other with a gun, according to witnesses.
The Columbus Dispatchreports one suspect has been killed by police.
Police are continuing to search campus for potential suspects. Police have surrounded a parking garage at West Lane Avenue and Tuttle Park Place on campus.
Heavy police presence at the Lane Avenue Garage. Officer on scene said the remaining shooter is believed to be inside. pic.twitter.com/YN9m2mFYUV
Molly Clarke, a student in the university’s MBA program, told CNN over the phone that she and her classmates are locked inside one of the buildings on campus. “It’s slightly terrifying,” Clarke said. She said several of her classmates who previously served in the military are guarding the door of their classroom.
At least seven people have been taken to the hospital, CNN reports. WBNS-TV, a network in Columbus, Ohio, reports the number of injured is at least eight, citing local fire officials.
Staffers from The Lantern, the school’s student newspaper, are tweeting photos from the scene. They report that ambulances, SWAT vans, and a bomb squad is on campus.
Ambulances line Woodruff Avenue, street is blocked off between High and College pic.twitter.com/oQD7rhjP7y
The former president’s 2015 backers, in their own words
Now that Donald Trump’s presidency is over, how do the Americans who supported him at the beginning of his political run feel about his performance in the Oval Office? I put that question to 30 men and women who wrote to me in August 2015 to explain their reasons for backing his insurgent candidacy.
Among the eight who replied, all in the second week of January, after the storming of the Capitol, some persist in supporting Trump; others have turned against him; still others have lost faith in the whole political system. They do not constitute a representative sample of Trump voters. But their views, rendered in their own words, offer more texture than polls that tell us an approval rating.
Donald Trump did not merely lie to exaggerate his accomplishments, or smear his opponents. For Trump and the Republican Party, lies were a loyalty test. To reject Trump’s lies or exaggerations, even if they contradicted prior assertions by the now-ex-president, was to express disloyalty, the only Trump-era sin that was unforgivable by his faithful. This allowed the president to fashion for his supporters alternate realities whose tenets could not be questioned, such as his false allegations of voter fraud.
President Biden is inheriting one of Trump’s pet projects.
The headquarters of the United States Space Command was supposed to be based in Colorado. Since then-President Donald Trump revived the command in 2018, the state had been its temporary home, and last February, when the search for a permanent location was still on, he had teased that the current arrangement could win out. “I will be making a big decision on the future of the Space Force as to where it is going to be located, and I know you want it,” Trump said at a rally in Colorado Springs last February. “You are being very strongly considered for the space command, very strongly.”
The Space Command is not the same thing as the Space Force, which was created in 2019 (and which, by the way, is not the same thing as NASA, either). The Space Force trains service members, some of whom serve under Space Command. But in Trump’s mind, they are wrapped up together, as one of his signature accomplishments. Space is cool and flashy, and who doesn’t love Mars? When Trump mentioned the Space Force at a rally, the crowd erupted in cheers. A new Space Command headquarters would, in theory, help cement part of his legacy—Trump, the president who made space great again.
After growing up in a family that never lied, I spent decades being off-puttingly truthful.
When I was a child, my dad invented a game that I loved. Wherever we went, he’d predict what strangers were about to say or do. We’d walk into a store and he’d point at the salesman and say something like, “Watch this. When I tell him how much I’m willing to spend, he’ll immediately show me something more expensive.” The salesman did exactly as Dad had prophesized. When Dad took me to my first concert, he told me the musician would ask the audience how they were feeling tonight and, when everyone cheered wildly, would respond, “I can’t hear you!” It wasn’t long before the musician spoke those exact words.
It felt like magic, like Dad was telling the future or reading minds, so I asked how he did it. Most people follow a script, he said. I asked him why and I remember him replying, “Because they’re afraid that if they say what they really feel, people won’t like them. And they’d rather be liked than be honest.” I knew then that I wanted to be honest, regardless of the consequences. I stuck to that for the next 25 years. And there were consequences.
Election changes such as ranked-choice voting and nonpartisan primaries are popping up across the country—and are already upending national politics.
Lisa Murkowski did not waste time, and she did not mince words. Just two days after former President Donald Trump provoked an insurrectionist mob to storm the Capitol on January 6, Alaska’s senior senator told her local newspaper: “I want him to resign. I want him out.”
Murkowski was the first GOP senator to demand Trump’s exit after the deadly riot. The speed and bluntness with which she spoke out against the former president surprised her allies, who saw in her words the first reverberations of how Alaska voted in November. Murkowski wasn’t on the 2020 ballot, but in passing a ballot measure to change the way the state elects its leaders, Alaskans effectively gave their long-serving senator a fresh infusion of political freedom: She no longer needs to worry nearly so much about a conservative primary foe defeating her next year. “I think we’ve seen the result of it already,” former Alaska Governor Bill Walker told me.
What should have been a week-long celebration of the resilience of American democracy has turned into a dark circus. Instead of citizens lining Pennsylvania Avenue to cheer and greet a new president, all of downtown Washington, D.C., is an armed camp. Soldiers patrol the streets while workers clean excrement off the walls of the Capitol, a perfect tableau for the end of the short and ghastly age of Trump.
We are expecting far too much of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris if we think they can fix all of the damage Donald Trump did to the republic. Presidents and vice presidents are not wizards. They cannot rewind history. They cannot single-handedly make us better people.
However, I do believe that Biden can inspire the American people to regain one of the most important virtues Trump destroyed: seriousness, our understanding that ideas, actions, and words matter.
In the aftermath of the January 6 riot, extremists have become obsessed with the federal agents who might lurk among them.
Updated at 9:15 a.m. E.T. on January 25, 2021
Judging by the actions of those who stormed the Capitol, far-right extremists don’t fear arrest. But they do fear one thing: glowies.
During the Trump administration, many far-right groups’ main concern was figuring out how to recruit more people to the cause. But as federal law-enforcement officials continue to round up people suspected of involvement in the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol, and Joe Biden’s administration promises a crackdown on white-supremacist and anti-government radicals, extremists are on the verge of a crack-up, posting widely and worriedly about spies in their midst—“glowies.” That’s the term far-right groups use to describe people they suspect of being federal law-enforcement agents or informants infiltrating their communication channels, trying to catch them plotting violence, or prodding them into illegal acts.
With vaccination racing the spread of COVID-19 variants, America could be at a tipping point.
In the past week, a new picture has emerged in COVID-19 data: The pandemic seems to be receding from its high-water mark in the United States. The most dependable metric of COVID-19’s spread—the number of people currently in the hospital with the disease—is in its first sustained, week-over-week decline since September, according to the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic. Hospitalizations fell in the past week in every state but Vermont.
The number of people diagnosed with COVID-19 is falling too. New cases declined in every region of the country last week. Cases even seem to be ebbing in the coronavirus epicenters of California and Arizona, though the Sun Belt remains a hot spot. In the past two weeks, only two states—New York and Virginia—have set a single-day record for new cases. (In contrast, 13states set a new record three weeks ago.)
And the seven-day average of COVID-19 cases has dropped significantly too.
Today marks two weeks of declining COVID-19 hospitalizations in the U.S., 14 straight days without a blip upward, according to data from the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic. Case numbers, too, are declining, and today the seven-day case average is down a third since its peak, on January 12.
That day, the count of current hospitalizations was 131,326; it’s now down to 108,957. It’s the first significant decline since September 21, when the climb down from the summer surge stopped just under 29,000. As the country passes the milestone of 25 million cases, it’s a stable indicator pointing in the right direction.
During the winter surge, hospitalization numbers bumped over a number of small, false summits, in which hospitalizations declined for a day or two before continuing their rise. They also rose for a couple of days after coming down from January 6’s absolute peak of 132,474.
With each passing day, new tendrils of the former president’s efforts come into view.
Nothing concentrates the mind, Samuel Johnson said, like an impending hanging. Perhaps we might add a codicil: Nothing distracts the mind quite like a mock hanging.
The attempted coup reshaped the debate over then-President Donald Trump’s attempts to steal the 2020 presidential election, focusing both opponents and defenders on the insurrection itself and what role he played in inciting it. Now out of office, Trump is facing a second Senate impeachment trial. But as blockbuster reports in three newspapers over the weekend imply, January 6 was not the only or even necessarily the most important example of Trump’s attempts to hang on to power despite losing an election.
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