Authorities are searching for at least two suspects who shot and killed six people — including a teenage mother and her baby — at a central California home in what the local sheriff called a "horrific massacre" related to drugs and gangs. Few details were available Tuesday, including what gangs may have been involved and the results of a narcotics search warrant that sheriff's deputies executed at the home last week. Deputies responded around 3:30 a.m. Monday to reports of multiple shots fired at the residence in unincorporated Goshen, just east of Visalia. Goshen is a semirural community in the agricultural San Joaquin Valley.
The death toll from a weekend Russian missile strike on an apartment building in southeastern Ukraine has climbed to 45. The victims of the deadliest attack on civilians since the spring included six children. In Moscow, a makeshift memorial to the Dnipro attack's victims appeared. It's an unusual act in Russia, where even a hint of criticism of the government's "special military operation" in Ukraine is often suppressed. Underscoring Russia's growing military needs, the military will increase the number of troops from 1.15 million to 1.5 million. Ukraine's first lady pressed leaders at the World Economic Forum's annual gathering to exert influence against a Russian invasion she said is leaving children dying and the world struggling with food insecurity.
By RIO YAMAT and SUSAN MONTOYA BRYAN Associated Press
A failed Republican candidate paid $500 to four men to shoot at the homes of Democratic lawmakers, but was so unsatisfied with their work that he went along for the final drive-by, his gun jamming as bullets ripped into the bedroom of a sleeping 10-year-old girl, police said. The criminal complaint against Solomon Peña, a 39-year-old felon and self-proclaimed "MAGA king," describes how his anger over his landslide defeat in November led to attacks at the homes of four Democratic lawmakers in New Mexico's largest city. A SWAT team arrested him Monday evening after serving search warrants at his home, police said. Peña, whose criminal past came up during last year's campaign, repeatedly made baseless claims that the election was "rigged" against him.
When Ukraine was at peace, its energy workers were largely unheralded. War made them heroes. They're proving to be Ukraine's line of defense against repeated Russian missile and drone strikes targeting the energy grid and inflicting the misery of blackouts in winter. Sometimes at the cost of their lives, energy workers are holding battered power plants together with bravery, dedication, ingenuity and dwindling stocks of spare parts. The Associated Press got rare access to a plant that has been repeatedly struck and extensively damaged. Over decades of caring for the plant, its workers have come to love and cherish it like a child. Seeing it slowly but systematically wounded by repeated Russian bombardments is painful for them.
The fate of a devastated salt-mining town in eastern Ukraine is hanging in the balance. Ukraine says its forces are holding out against a furious Russian onslaught in one of the fiercest and bloodiest recent ground battles of the nearly 11-month war. Soledar is under heavy shelling by Russian forces using jets, mortars and rockets. Ukraine's deputy defense minister on Wednesday denied Russian claims that Soledar had fallen. In an apparent recognition of battlefield setbacks, Russia's Defense Ministry announced the replacement of the head of Russian forces in Ukraine. The former chief was demoted to deputy after three months on the job, signaling that President Vladimir Putin wasn't fully satisfied with his performance.
By MARK STEVENSON and MARÍA VERZA Associated Press
The operation to detain Ovidio Guzman, the son of imprisoned drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, unleashed firefights that turned the northern city of Culiacan into a war zone, authorities said Friday. In a blow-by-blow description of the Thursday battles that killed 10 military personnel and 19 suspected members of the Sinaloa drug cartel, Defense Secretary Luis Cresencio Sandoval said cartel gunmen opened fire on troops with .50-caliber machine guns. The army responded by calling in Blackhawk helicopter gunships to attack a convoy of 25 cartel vehicles, including truck-mounted cartel gun platforms.
By LOLITA C. BALDOR and MATTHEW LEE Associated Press
The U.S. will send Ukraine nearly $3 billion in military aid, in a massive new package that will for the first time include several dozen Bradley fighting vehicles. That's according to U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because details of the package have not been publicly announced. The aid — totaling about $2.85 billion — is the largest in a series of packages of military equipment that the Pentagon has pulled from its stockpiles to send Ukraine so far in the war. Also Thursday, Germany announced it was sending armored personnel carriers to Ukraine.
By FELIPE DANA and JOANNA KOZLOWSKA Associated Press
The Russian military's top brass is under increasing scrutiny as more details emerge of how at least 89 Russian soldiers, and possibly many more, were killed in a Ukrainian artillery attack on a single building. The scene last weekend in the Russian-held eastern Ukrainian town of Makiivka, where the soldiers were temporarily stationed, appears to have been a recipe for disaster. Hundreds of Russian troops were reportedly clustered in a building close to the front line of the war, well within range of the enemy's Western-supplied precision artillery, possibly sitting close to an ammunition store, and perhaps unwittingly helping Kyiv's forces to zero in on them.
