News
July 12, 2022 – 9:30 am (ET)
A gunman on a rooftop opened fire on an Independence Day parade in suburban Chicago on Monday, killing at least six people, wounding at least 30 and sending hundreds of marchers, parents with strollers and children on bicycles fleeing in terror, police said.
Authorities said a man named as a person of interest in the shooting was taken into police custody Monday evening after an hourslong manhunt in and around Highland Park, an affluent community of about 30,000 on Chicago’s north shore.
The July 4 shooting was just the latest to shatter the rituals of American life. Schools, churches, grocery stores and now community parades have all become killing grounds in recent months. This time, the bloodshed came as the nation tried to find cause to celebrate its founding and the bonds that still hold it together.
“It definitely hits a lot harder when it’s not only your hometown but it’s also right in front of you,” resident Ron Tuazon said as he and a friend returned to the parade route Monday evening to retrieve chairs, blankets and a child’s bike that he and his family abandoned when the shooting began.
The 30 NATO allies signed off on the accession protocols for Sweden and Finland on Tuesday, sending the membership bids of the two nations to the alliance capitals for legislative approvals — and possible political trouble in Turkey.
The move further increases Russia’s strategic isolation in the wake of its invasion of neighboring Ukraine in February and military struggles there since.
“This is truly a historic moment for Finland, for Sweden and for NATO,” the head of the alliance, Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, said.
The 30 ambassadors and permanent representatives formally approved decisions made at a NATO summit in Madrid last week, when the leaders of member nations invited Russia’s neighbor Finland and Scandinavian partner Sweden to join the military club.
America’s Independence Day this year was marred by a shocking, if now darkly common, tragedy: A shooter killed at least six people and injured dozens more at a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, a Chicago, Illinois suburb.
Every shooting — not just the ones that make national news — should have us reevaluating our wildly lax gun laws, but one happening at a public celebration of America itself should have Americans asking: Is this what we want our country to be?
For the minority of gun radicals who have a stranglehold on the Republican Party and American politics more broadly, the answer is yes: They are hurtling us deeper into a paranoid, dangerous, atomized culture in which individuals are armed as heavily as they want to be, public spaces are potentially deadly and every person is reliant on only themselves or the mythical “good guy with a gun” to protect them from everyone else with a gun. This minority, unfortunately, has deep pockets and vast political power.
For most Americans, though, this is no way to live.
July 5, 2022 – 6:00 pm to 7:00 pm (ET)
