BERLIN (Reuters) - A 29-year-old man drove his car into a crowd of people in Berlin on Wednesday, killing one person as his vehicle veered onto a pavement twice in a district of the German capital popular with tourists and shoppers, police said. Police identified the driver as a German-Armenian man, whose car eventually crashed into a shop window. He was detained by bystanders and handed over to the authorities.

 

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WASHINGTON (The Guardian) - A teacher wounded in a school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, has criticized police as “cowards” for delaying taking action while his pupils were killed. In a harrowing interview with ABC News he said he told his students to pretend to be asleep during the shooting. Eleven of them died when the gunman stalked his and an adjacent classroom for over an hour as police stood in the hall. “You had a bulletproof vest. I had nothing,” he said of the police. The shooting claimed the lives of 21 people, including 19 young children. The attack by an 18-year-old local has led to renewed national debate about gun regulations.

 

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QUETTA, Pakistan (Reuters) - At least 22 people were killed, including nine members of one family when a passenger van fell into deep ravine in southwest Pakistan, officials said on Wednesday. The accident happened apparently due to excess speed at Quetta – Zhob highway in district Killa Saifullah 200 km (120 miles) from Quetta in Balochistan province, though the exact cause of the crash was not immediately known, officials said.

 

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MOSCOW (Reuters) - Moscow will respond to France’s decision to ban some Russian television channels, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Wednesday. “The Foreign Ministry will react to such actions, and a response to this will be given,” Zakharova told reporters, without elaborating. Russia on Monday warned U.S. news organizations they risked being stripped of their accreditation unless the treatment of Russian journalists in the United States improves, according to sources with knowledge of the matter.  

 

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WASHINGTON (AP) - The FBI has seized the electronic data of a retired four-star general who authorities say made false statements and withheld “incriminating” documents about his role in an illegal foreign lobbying campaign on behalf of the wealthy Persian Gulf nation of Qatar. New federal court filings obtained Tuesday outlined a potential criminal case against former Marine Gen. John R. Allen, who led U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan before being tapped in 2017 to lead the influential Brookings Institution think tank.

 

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VIENNA (AFP) – More than 100 German school children and teachers had to be rescued, most of them airlifted to safety, after getting stuck on an Alpine hiking trail, described online as a “classic after-work tour,” police said Wednesday. Dozens of rescuers using two helicopters had to extract the 99 students aged 12 to 14 and eight teachers Tuesday after the path they were on became increasingly difficult and it started to rain, they said. Two pupils within the group, from the southwestern German city of Ludwigshafen, had slipped, suffering minor injuries, and some were panicking, a police statement said.