WASHINGTON (Xinhua) – As the United States was celebrating 248 years of independence, shootings and other forms of violence during the extended Fourth of July weekend left at least 33 people dead across the country, local authorities said.
The Fourth of July holiday saw 11 people killed and 55 wounded in shootings in Chicago alone, the Associated Press reported, citing a Chicago Sun-Times report as saying. The recent violence “has left our city in a state of grief,” said Mayor of Chicago Brandon Johnson. Two people were killed and three others injured in Huntington Beach, California, in an Independence Day attack after a fireworks show ended, local police said. Three shootings broke out in Boston at approximately 1:30 a.m. local time Friday, resulting in one fatality. Historically, the Fourth of July period is one of the year’s deadliest in the United States. Last year, there was a spate of shootings around the holiday, leaving over a dozen dead and more than 60 injured. 

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The cost of an Air Force program to replace aging nuclear missiles has ballooned to about $160 billion from $95.8 billion, three people familiar with the matter said, threatening to slash funding for other key modernization plans. The project, now named the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) program, is designed and managed by Northrop Grumman Corp. and aims to replace aging Minuteman III missiles. Its latest price tag has risen by around $65 billion since a 2020 cost estimate, according to a U.S. official, an industry executive and a hill aide briefed on the matter. This may force the Pentagon to scale back the project’s scope or time frame, a second industry executive said. Bloomberg reported earlier that the new price tag was around $141 billion with the Pentagon assessing modifications of construction and schedule. Northrop Grumman declined to comment. The Pentagon did not comment on the figure, but said it expects to give a new cost estimate around Tuesday. The new Sentinel cost estimate eclipses an increase to “at least” $131 billion that the Air Force made public in January.
 
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KURIGRAM (AFP) – The death toll from floods in Bangladesh this week has risen to eight, leaving more than two million affected after heavy rains caused major rivers to burst their banks, officials confirmed Saturday. The South Asian nation of 170 million people, crisscrossed by hundreds of rivers, has seen more frequent floods in recent decades. Climate change has made rainfall more erratic and melting glaciers upstream in the Himalayan mountains. Two teenage boys were killed when a boat capsized in flood waters in Shahjadur, the northern rural town’s police chief Sabuj Rana told AFP. “There were nine people in the small boat. Seven swam to safety. Two boys did not know how to swim. They drowned,” he said. Bishwadeb Roy, a police chief in Kurigram, told AFP that three others had been killed in two separate electrocution incidents after their boats became entangled with live electricity wires in flood water. Another three died in separate flood-related incidents around the country, officials told AFP earlier this week.

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NEW DELHI (AFP) – Eight people were arrested in India on Saturday for the murder of a politician who championed the rights of lower-caste Indians, police said. K. Armstrong, the state boss of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), was hacked to death with machetes and sickles near his home in the southern city of Chennai on Friday night. Six men traveling on motorbikes attacked Armstrong while he was “chatting with friends and supporters” near his home in the Tamil Nadu state capital, the Indian Express newspaper reported. The men reportedly escaped before anyone could intervene. Several of Armstrong’s supporters took to the streets later in the evening to protest his assassination and demand justice. Senior Chennai police officer Asra Garg said eight suspects were being interrogated after a “preliminary investigation.” Mayawati, the national head of Armstrong’s BSP, who uses one name, said the attack was “highly deplorable and condemnable.”

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MANILA (Dispatches) – The Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) said on Saturday that China’s largest coast guard vessel has anchored in Manila’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ) in the South China Sea a warning to its smaller Asian neighbor. The China coast guard’s 165-meter ‘monster ship’ entered Manila’s 200-nautical mile EEZ on July 2, spokesperson for the PCG Jay Tarriela told a news forum. China’s embassy in Manila and the Chinese foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment. China’s coast guard has no publicly available contact information. The Chinese ship, which has also deployed a small boat, was anchored 800 yards away from the PCG’s vessel, Tarriela said. In May, the PCG deployed a ship to the Sabina shoal to deter small-scale reclamation by China, which denied the claim. China has carried out extensive land reclamation on some islands in the South China Sea, building air force and other military facilities.

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PARIS (AFP) – Cybercrime gangs are looking to rebuild with new tactics after global police operations this year made a huge dent in their activities, experts have told AFP. The gangs have had a bad year so far, with law enforcement operations taking out some of prominent groups including LockBit, a loose network of cyber criminals. LockBit was one of the major developers of malicious software that allows criminals to lock victims out of their networks, steal their data and demand a ransom for its return. Ransomware attacks using LockBit and other software have led to major disruption of governments, businesses and public services like hospitals. Victims have paid hundreds of millions of dollars to gangs, usually in untraceable cryptocurrencies.