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
Starting the process will rein in a president who is undermining American ideals—and bring the debate about his fitness for office into Congress, where it belongs.
On January 20, 2017,Donald Trump stood on the steps of the Capitol, raised his right hand, and solemnly swore to faithfully execute the office of president of the United States and, to the best of his ability, to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. He has not kept that promise.
Instead, he has mounted a concerted challenge to the separation of powers, to the rule of law, and to the civil liberties enshrined in our founding documents. He has purposefully inflamed America’s divisions. He has set himself against the American idea, the principle that all of us—of every race, gender, and creed—are created equal.
Insights into the little-studied realm of last words
Mort Felix liked to say that his name, when read as two Latin words, meant “happy death.” When he was sick with the flu, he used to jokingly remind his wife, Susan, that he wanted Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” played at his deathbed. But when his life’s end arrived at the age of 77, he lay in his study in his Berkeley, California, home, his body besieged by cancer and his consciousness cradled in morphine, uninterested in music and refusing food as he dwindled away over three weeks in 2012. “Enough,” he told Susan. “Thank you, and I love you, and enough.” When she came downstairs the next morning, she found Felix dead.
During those three weeks, Felix had talked. He was a clinical psychologist who had also spent a lifetime writing poetry, and though his end-of-life speech often didn’t make sense, it seemed to draw from his attention to language. “There’s so much so in sorrow,” he said at one point. “Let me down from here,” he said at another. “I’ve lost my modality.” To the surprise of his family members, the lifelong atheist also began hallucinating angels and complaining about the crowded room—even though no one was there.
Dr. Sherman Hershfield woke up one morning and was surprised to find himself behind the wheel of his car. Somewhere between his Beverly Hills apartment and his practice in the San Fernando Valley, the silver-haired physician had blacked out. Somehow he’d avoided a crash, but this wasn’t the first time. “I didn’t know what was going on,” he admitted.
Apart from his frequent blackouts, Hershfield was in fine health for a man in his 50s. He was tall and lean, ran six miles a day, and was a strict vegetarian. “I believe a physician should provide exemplary motivation to patients,” he once wrote. “I don’t smoke and have cut out all alcohol.” Hershfield specialized in physical medicine and rehabilitation, and for decades had helped patients with brain injuries learn to walk again and rebuild their lives. Even with his experience, Hershfield didn’t know what was wrong inside his own head.
America’s largest internet store is so big, and so bewildering, that buyers often have no idea what they’re going to get.
Updated at 5:28 p.m. ET on January 17, 2019.
There’s a Gatorade button attached to my basement fridge. If I push it, two days later a crate of the sports drink shows up at my door, thanks to Amazon. When these “Dash buttons” were first rumored in 2015, they seemed like a joke. Press a button to one-click detergent or energy bars? What even?, my colleague Adrienne LaFrance reasonably inquired.
They weren’t a joke. Soon enough, Amazon was selling the buttons for a modest fee, the value of which would be applied to your first purchase. There were Dash buttons for Tide and Gatorade, Fiji Water and Lärabars, Trojan condoms and Kraft Mac & Cheese.
The whole affair always felt unsettling. When the buttons launched, I called the Dash experience Lovecraftian, the invisible miasma of commerce slipping its vapor all around your home. But last week, a German court went further, ruling the buttons illegal because they fail to give consumers sufficient information about the products they order when pressing them, or the price they will pay after having done so. (You set up a Dash button on Amazon’s app, selecting a product from a list; like other goods on the e-commerce giant’s website, the price can change over time.) Amazon, which is also under general antitrust investigation in Germany, disputes the ruling.
It’s not meant to be comforting, but somehow it is.
If you ever find yourself sinking into the plush blue couch of Dr. Jane Prelinger, you should know that she doesn’t want you to call her Dr. Prelinger. In her office, even when you’re on the couch and she’s facing you from her chair, looking at you through heavy eyeliner and the frame of her white-blond bangs, she insists: You’re just two humans. “It’s Faith and Jane,” she told me when I was in that position. “Here, it’s human to human.”
Jane is an existential therapist. She sees a lot of different clients with a lot of different problems, but she thinks all of those problems can be reduced to the same four essential issues: death, meaninglessness, isolation, and freedom.
Existential therapy isn’t new. Its roots go back to the existential philosophers of the 20th century, and specifically to Jean-Paul Sartre, who summed up his philosophy in 1943 when he wrote that humans are “condemned to be free.” Unlike other animals, humans are conscious and aware of their own mortality—but that means they have the possibility, and responsibility, of deciding in each moment what to do and how to be.
For someone who actively avoids criticizing the president, Senator Jim Risch has a lot to say about how he will deal with Trump.
It’s a familiar pattern: President Donald Trump’s Republican allies disagree with him on a major issue. They send statements and tweets, and repeat talking points on cable news. But will those in positions of power actually stand up to the president when they are at odds with him?
For Jim Risch, the incoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a big test could come if Trump decides to withdraw from NATO, the military alliance with Europe that the U.S. has led for more than 70 years, as he has reportedly suggested he may do.
“There is zero appetite in the United States Congress to leave NATO,” Risch told me on Wednesday. “Fair statement?” he asked, turning to an adviser. “Maybe one voice,” the adviser joked. Risch amended his statement: “Almost zero appetite.”
She beat George W. Bush on Social Security privatization, and she’ll beat Trump on the wall.
Democrats sometimes portray themselves as high-minded and naive—unwilling to play as rough as the GOP. Speaker Nancy Pelosi is, once again, proving that self-image wrong. She’s not only refusing Donald Trump’s demand for a border wall. She’s trying to cripple his presidency. And she may well succeed.
Pelosi’s strategy resembles the one she employed to debilitate another Republican president: George W. Bush. Bush returned to Washington after his 2004 reelection victory determined to partially privatize Social Security. “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital,” he told the press, “and I intend to spend it.” Bush’s plan contained two main elements. The first was convincing the public that there was a crisis. Social Security, he declared in his 2005 State of the Union address, “is headed toward bankruptcy.” The second was persuading Democrats to offer their own proposals for changing it.
Astronomers have produced the best measure yet of the planet’s signature bands.
Saturn has confounded scientists since Galileo, who found that the planet was “not alone,” as he put it. “I do not know what to say in a case so surprising, so unlooked-for, and so novel,” he wrote. He didn’t realize it then, but he had seen the planet’s rings, a cosmic garland of icy material.
From Earth, the rings look solid, but up close, they are translucent bands made of countless particles, mostly ice, some rock. Some are no larger than a grain of sugar, others as enormous as mountains. Around and around they go, held in place by a delicate balance between Saturn’s gravity and their orbiting speed, which pulls them out toward space.
Scientists got their best look at the planet nearly 400 years after Galileo’s discovery, using a NASA spacecraft called Cassini. Cassini spent 13 years looping around Saturn until, in September 2017, it ran out of fuel and engineers deliberately plunged it into the planet, destroying it. More than a year later, scientists are still sorting through the data from its final moments, hoping to extract answers to the many questions that remain about Saturn.
A controversial set of guidelines aims to help men grapple with “traditional masculinity.”
This week, the American Psychological Association, the country’s largest professional organization of psychologists, did something for men that it’s done for many other demographic groups in the past: It introduced a set of detailed guidelines for clinicians who treat men and boys. The 10 guidelines make suggestions on how to encourage fathers to engage with their kids, how to address problems that disproportionately affect men, like suicide and substance abuse, and how to steer men toward healthy behaviors. The guidelines’ development began in 2005, and has included input from more than 200 physicians and researchers.
This emphasis on understanding the issues men face comes at a crucial time, according to Ryon McDermott, a psychologist who helped the APA craft its new standards. Although people of all genders face no shortage of obstacles in America, “men are struggling,” he says. “The recession has hit men harder than women, men are less likely to graduate from college, men are more likely to complete suicide than women.” To help patients, the guidelines assert, psychologists need to understand what’s making their lives untenable. For a lot of men, it might be the harsh cultural expectations that can come along with manhood itself.
The speaker threatened to scrap his speech. The president grounded her plane.
She disinvited him from delivering the State of the Union during a government shutdown. He grounded her plane, abruptly canceling her taxpayer-funded trip to a foreign war zone.
Two weeks in, the relationship between the new House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and President Donald Trump is off to a smashing start.
Forget a swift resolution to the record-breaking shutdown: As hundreds of thousands of federal employees continue to work without pay, the two most powerful elected leaders in the country are locked in a duel of personal vengeance, making the possibility of good-faith negotiations to end the impasse even more unlikely.
On Thursday, Pelosi suggested that Trump delay his annual speech to Congress, essentially threatening to use her power as speaker to block him from the Capitol. (The State of the Union is delivered by formal invitation from lawmakers.) In response, the president was initially, and uncharacteristically, silent. No name-calling tweets, no blustery sound bites. But on Thursday afternoon, just as Pelosi was about to board a plane bound for Europe, Trump exacted his revenge.
