Israeli forces kill at least 27 at food site while minister’s al-Aqsa visit causes outrage

Good morning.

At least 27 people were killed by Israeli forces while trying to get food and six others died from starvation or malnutrition in Gaza on Sunday, Palestinian officials said, amid a regional outcry over the visit by Israel’s far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, to Jerusalem’s most sensitive holy site.

Witnesses said Israeli forces fired on hungry crowds who were attempting to get food aid from a distribution site run by the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) in the south of the territory, with some describing the firing as indiscriminate.

Sunday’s killings were the latest in a string of deadly shootings targeting hungry people. At least 1,400 people have been killed while seeking food since 27 May, most of them near GHF sites, while others were killed along the routes of aid convoys, the UN said on Friday. The GHF says it only uses pepper spray or fires warning shots to control crowds.

Where did Ben-Gvir visit and what was the reaction? Ben-Gvir led prayers at al-Aqsa mosque in occupied East Jerusalem, provoking outrage among regional powers. The compound, which Jews call the Temple Mount, is a highly revered site – the holiest in Judaism and the third holiest in Islam. The site is under Jordanian custodianship; under a decades-old agreement, Jews are allowed to visit but not pray there.

Texas Democrats leave state to prevent vote on redrawing congressional map

Texas Democrats are leaving the state to prevent a vote today that could create five new Republican-leaning seats in the House of Representatives.

About 30 Democrats said they planned to decamp to Illinois, where they plan to stay for a week, to thwart Republican efforts by denying them a quorum, or the minimum number of members to validate the vote’s proceedings.

In a statement, Texas Democrats accused their counterparts, the Texas Republicans, of a “cowardly” surrender to Donald Trump’s call for a redrawing of the congressional map to “continue pushing his disastrous policies”.

What do the Republicans want to do? Last week, Texas Republicans released a proposed new congressional map that would give the GOP a path to pick up five seats in next year’s midterm elections, typically when the governing party loses representation in Congress.

Montana shooting victims named as manhunt for suspect continues

Montana’s attorney general on Sunday released the names of the four people who were shot dead in a mass murder at a bar two days earlier.

The victims were Daniel Edwin Ballie, 59; Nancy Lauretta Kelly, 64; David Allen Leach, 70; and Tony Wayne Palm, 74. All four were residents of Anaconda, Montana, where the quadruple murder took place, a statement from Austin Knudsen, said.

A former US army soldier, Michael Paul Brown, 45, is suspected of having killed Ballie, Kelly, Leach and Palm at the Owl Bar in Anaconda. Kelly was a bartender and the others were patrons, Knudsen said at a news conference yesterday.

Has Brown been caught? Brown remained at large as of last night, with officials warning that he may be armed as well as getting around in a stolen car containing clothes and camping gear.

In other news …

Attorneys for the Trump administration have denied the existence of a daily quota for immigration arrests, despite reports and previous statements from White House officials.
The Kremlin responded to Trump’s nuclear submarine remarks by saying it would not engage in a polemic and played down their significance. A spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, urged caution with nuclear rhetoric after Trump suggested he would be ready to launch a nuclear strike as tensions rise over the war in Ukraine.
South Korean authorities have begun removing loudspeakers that blare propaganda broadcasts along its border with the North, Seoul’s defence ministry said today, as the new government of President Lee Jae Myung seeks to ease tensions with Pyongyang.

Stat of the day: world in $1.5tn ‘plastics crisis’ hitting health from infancy to old age, report warns

Plastics are a “grave, growing and under-recognised danger” to human and planetary health, an expert review has warned. The world is in a “plastics crisis”, it concluded, which is causing disease and death from infancy to old age and is responsible for at least $1.5tn (£1.1tn) a year in health-related damages.

Don’t miss this: Demis Hassabis on our AI future – ‘It’ll be 10 times bigger than the Industrial Revolution’

The head of Google’s DeepMind says artificial intelligence could usher in an era of “incredible productivity” and “radical abundance”. Demis Hassabis paints a picture of medical advances, room-temperature superconductors, nuclear fusion, advances in materials, mathematics. But who will it benefit? And why does he wish the tech giants had moved more slowly?

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At 59, life expectancy of women in west Africa is the lowest of any female population in the world. In a rare project, Sylvia Arthur set out to give voice to those who have lived beyond expectation, whose experiences have been largely overlooked, carrying out 100 interviews in villages and towns on the coasts of Benin, Togo, Sierra Leone and the Gambia.

Last Thing: choir that drowned out Germany’s AfD leader happy to ‘bend the ear’ of country

Alice Weidel was being interviewed on the terrace of a parliament building overlooking the River Spree in Berlin when Corner Choir’s protest song Scheiß AfD Jodler (Shit AfD Yodellers) began to be blasted out from a 100,000-watt sound system on the other bank. “We had not intended to bend the ear of the whole country but we’re happy we’ve done so,” a member of the choir said.