Dec. 14, 2025, 10:59 AM EST

At least a dozen people have been killed and nearly 30 others injured in a shooting at a Hanukkah celebration on Sunday at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia.

Among the dead is one of the two identified shooters, according to New South Wales police. The second alleged shooter is in critical condition. Authorities are calling the incident a terrorist attack and are investigating to determine if there are other threats.

The shooting took place at a “Chanukah by the Sea” celebration, near a children’s playground. Emergency services were called to the area around 6:45 p.m. local time.

New South Wales Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon said in a press briefing on Sunday evening that officers had found a nearby vehicle, linked to the suspect who was killed, with what appeared to be several improvised explosive devices inside. Lanyon said a rescue bomb disposal unit was on the scene.

Police have requested mobile phone or dashcam video relevant to the shooting from those in the Bondi Beach area.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called the shooting “a targeted attack on Jewish Australians on the first day of Hannaukah, which should be a day of joy, a celebration of faith.”

Albanese, along with New South Wales Premier Chris Minns, praised a bystander who took quick action to disarm one of the gunmen. Video circulating on social media shows a bystander wrestling with a gunman before ripping his weapon away. Australian media outlet 7News identified the bystander as Sutherland shop owner Ahmed al Ahmed and reported that he was in the hospital recovering from gunshot wounds to his arm.

“It’s the most unbelievable scene I’ve ever seen,” Minns said. “A man walking up to a gunman who had fired on the community and single-handedly disarming him, putting his own life at risk to save the lives of countless other people. That man in a genuine hero.”

Erum Salam is a breaking news reporter and producer for MS NOW. She previously was a breaking news reporter for The Guardian.

Dec. 14, 2025, 8:07 AM EST

Following an all-night manhunt, a person of interest has been detained in the campus shooting that left two people dead and nine others injured Saturday afternoon on the campus of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

Providence Mayor Brett Smiley said during a news conference on Sunday morning that the individual was taken into custody in the early morning hours, and that police are not currently looking for anyone else.

Smiley confirmed the shelter-in-place order had been lifted and said hopefully the people of Providence can “breathe a little easier this morning.”

Smiley also said on Sunday that one of the injured had been discharged from the hospital.

As of Saturday night, six of the injured were in critical but stable condition, one was in critical condition and one was in stable condition, according to a Brown University Health spokeswoman. Smiley said that an additional victim had suffered non-life-threatening injuries from “fragments” near them and is expected to make a full recovery. Authorities have not identified the two people killed or those injured.

Authorities released a short video late Saturday night showing the person they believe to be the suspect in the shooting. The video showed a man dressed all in black and wearing a black beanie walking down a sidewalk at a brisk pace before taking a sharp right turn and continuing down the sidewalk until he is out of the frame. The man’s face could not be seen in the video.

Smiley said on Saturday that authorities were canvassing the neighborhood and campus “for additional video footage, still photography and are interviewing witnesses.” And Providence Police Commander Timothy O’Hara asked the public during a Saturday news conference to contact police if they recognized the person.

The shooting took place inside a first-floor classroom in the Barus & Holley Building, a university engineering and physics building thatcontains classrooms and lab space, Providence Police Chief Col. Oscar Perez Jr. said. Police were alerted to the gunshots at 4:05 p.m.

Perez said police do not know how the suspect entered the building but that he exited on the Hope Street side of the complex.

According to Smiley, no “useful video” from inside the building where the shooting took place had been found.

“My community is afraid right now, and we’re saddened that this has come to Providence,” Smiley said. “And there’s two people who, a week away from Christmas, aren’t going to be celebrating with their family, or two days away from the first day of Hanukkah.”

Brown President Christina Paxson said Saturday night that the two who were killed and at least eight of those injured were students at the university. Authorities said they had not confirmed that.

“This is the day that one hopes never happens, and it has. Our focus right now is on supporting the families who have been affected by this,” Paxson said.

Police have not given a motive for the violence.

Rhode Island Gov. Daniel McKee said he had spoken with President Donald Trump on the phone. Trump expressed urgency and offered support from federal authorities “to make sure that we catch the individual that brought so much suffering to so many people,” McKee said.

Trump said earlier Saturday evening that he had been briefed on the situation and that the FBI was working alongside local law enforcement. “What a terrible thing it is,” he told reporters outside the White House. “All we can do right now is pray for the victims.”

Members of the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are on the scene and working with local and state authorities, O’Hara said. Smiley said he expects the FBI will take over the investigation.

Law enforcement members established a perimeteraround a portion of Brown’s campus, according to an update from university police. Individuals in residential buildings within the perimeter were told to continue sheltering in place. Those in administrative campus buildings were told to wait until law enforcement officials arrive to escort them out.

All final exams scheduled for Sunday have been canceled, Brown University Provost Francis Doyle said.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., said he was “praying for the victims and their families,” adding, “My heart breaks for the students who were looking forward to a holiday break and instead are dealing with another horrifying mass shooting, this time in our own Providence community.”

Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., said in a statement: “Brown’s students and its neighbors are shaken. Some families, classmates, and loved ones are gathered together in hospital waiting rooms at this very moment waiting for updates on patients. We are with them in spirit. They will need the support of all of us in the days ahead.”

Ian Ritter, university news editor for the student-run Brown Daily Herald, said he had been in contact with several students who were in Barus & Holley at the time of the shooting. Some fled the scene, some took shelter and others were evacuated by law enforcement, Ritter said.

“It was chaos from what I’ve heard,” Ritter said. “And students weren’t really sure where the gunshots were coming from, and throughout the afternoon we were learning different things about possible locations where the shooter may have gone, or at that time, people thought there could possibly be more than one shooter.”

For one Brown student, Saturday’s school shooting was painfully familiar. Mia Tretta, a junior, said she had been shot in the stomach with a 45-caliber ghost gun during a mass shooting at her California high school in 2019.

“There’s no handbook that you get when you get shot in the stomach during a school shooting and your best friend is killed, and you no longer feel safe at school,” Tretta said in an interview with MS NOW. She said she learned of the news in her campus dorm room. “It’s the worst possible thing that you can imagine, and to have to go through that once, let alone twice, is horrific.”

Tretta urged her fellow students to seek support and lean on one another.

“It is because of decades and years of inaction across the country, within each individual state, that things like this continue to happen,” Tretta said.

Gun safety advocates condemned the tragedy and called for meaningful action.

“Students should only have to worry about studying for finals right now, not hiding from gunfire,” former congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who survived a shooting in 2011, said in a statement. “Guns are the leading cause of death for young people in America — this is a five alarm fire and our leaders in Washington have ignored it for too long.”

“While we await details, one thing is clear: today’s shooting at Brown University is another unacceptable reminder of our nation’s gun violence crisis,” John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety, said in a statement. “We either take action, or we bury more of our kids.”

Angela Ferrell-Zabala, executive director of Moms Demand Action, said, “No student should ever receive an alert telling them to run, hide, and fight just to survive on campus. This is not normal, it is not acceptable, and our students deserve action that ends gun violence — not instructions on how to endure a tragedy that never should have happened.”

Dec. 14, 2025, 6:00 AM EST

ByMatt Johnson

“We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” Elon Musk boasted in February, shortly after President Donald Trump gave him permission to hack his way through the federal government. As a “special government employee” with no oversight running the “temporary organization,” the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, Musk destroyed the 64-year-old humanitarian agency in a matter of days, abruptly halting deliveries of lifesaving medicine, emergency food aid and many other forms of support to the poorest people on the planet. This was done in the name of DOGE’s mission to “maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.”

Musk claimed that DOGE would slash government spending by “at least $2 trillion,” but it ended up saving a microscopic fraction of that figure. Now that DOGE has been disbanded, Musk claims “We were a little bit successful” — but admits that he wouldn’t do it again.

Musk tried his hand at government, shrugged and moved on. The same can’t be said for the people who are dead and dying thanks to the DOGE-led onslaught on the U.S. Agency for International Development. “No one has died as [a] result of a brief pause to do a sanity check on foreign aid funding,” Musk declared in March. According to models created by Boston University epidemiologist Brooke Nichols, hundreds of thousands of people have in fact died as a result of eliminated and disrupted aid.

It’s impossible to calculate the ultimate human toll of shuttering USAID. The U.S. was responsible for 40% of the total foreign aid tracked by the United Nations in 2024, and much of the infrastructure that delivered this aid has now been destroyed. Beyond the frozen payments for active aid projects, partner organizations have closed, supply chains for medicine and food deliveries have been severed and staff who administered and monitored programs have been fired. Early warning systems for starvation and infectious diseases have shut down.

The individual stories are harrowing. A South Sudanese child with HIV died from pneumonia because he didn’t receive the medication necessary to sustain his immune system. People participating in studies were abandoned with experimental drugs in their systems and medical devices in their bodies. Cases of acute malnutrition at refugee camps have surged.

In the MAGAverse, none of this is true because USAID was never an aid organization to begin with. Mike Benz, a right-wing influencer who has accused the agency of being a terror organization and subverting governments around the world, was a big influence on Musk’s assault on USAID, which Benz called the “Terror Titanic.” Like Musk before him, Benz has now been appointed as a special government employee to investigate his allegations that USAID was a massive covert influence operation and front for the CIA.

Benz’s campaign is just the latest example of MAGA propaganda using USAID as a convenient political scapegoat. DOGE viewed the takeover of USAID as an opportunity to find instances of “viral waste,” which could be broadcast to the American people as a justification for its other cost-cutting efforts. One example cited by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was the “50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza.” Trump later declared that the money had been “sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas.”

There was just one problem: The money was actually for family planning in a province of Mozambique called Gaza.

The destruction of USAID was undertaken with breathtaking carelessness and incompetence. Musk demanded an immediate cutoff of communications with USAID personnel around the world, including those in conflict zones. When Acting USAID Director Jason Gray said this could put lives at risk and refused, he was fired.

Members of DOGE with no government or foreign aid experience — such as 23-year-old computer programmer Luke Farritor or 19-year-old Edward Coristinewho went by “Big Balls” — were responsible for investigating USAID staff for evidence of “insubordination.” This allegation was then weaponized to destroy the entire agency. Musk declared: “USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.” The following day, Musk said Trump had given him the authority to feed the agency into the woodchipper.

What a difference a few months can make. Musk has gone from swinging his chainsaw around at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), siccing his DOGE goons on career civil servants and bragging about his power to crush entire agencies to meekly arguing that he was a “little bit successful.”

But DOGE hasn’t just been exposed as a fiasco — it somehow accomplished the twin feats of utterly failing to reduce government spending in any meaningful sense and causing a global calamity at the same time.

DOGE will forever be a cautionary tale: This is what happened when messianic tech oligarchs and political neophytes were temporarily handed the reins of government. They didn’t just fail — they destroyed one of the U.S.’ most important organs of soft power. They made the world sicker, poorer and more miserable. And it was all for nothing.