Johnnie Langendorff stumbled into the crossfire — a total accident.
Sunday morning was all routine until then. Langendorff — a lanky Texan with a fuzzy chin beard and the long horns of a bull’s skull tattooed across his neck — had breakfast. Then he was driving his truck on the dusty back streets to his girlfriend’s house nearby. When he approached the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, he noticed something odd.
As he passed the churchgoers’ cars parked around the white wood front of the building, he saw that one vehicle’s engine was running. It was a pearl-colored SUV, a Ford Explorer, he said. The driver’s door was open. A man clad all in black was walking toward the vehicle with a pistol. He was trading shots with another man holding a rifle.
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Johnnie Langendorff told The Washington Post how he helped race after the shooter who killed dozens of people on Nov. 5 in Sutherland Springs, Tex. (Dina Parkinson/The Washington Post)
About half of the victims killed in the worst mass shooting inside a house of worship in American history were children, including one who was only a year old, Texas officials said Monday.
Twenty-six people were shot dead during the Sunday massacre at First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, a small, tight-knit town about 30 miles outside of San Antonio. Of them, 12 to 14 were kids, according to Wilson County Sheriff Joe Tackitt.
Some of those children were members of a family who saw three generations — eight members of their extended family, plus an unborn child — all killed within minutes.
“We’re having a hard time,” Joe Holcombe, who lost children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, told NBC News.
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Crystal and John Holcombe were attending the church in Sutherland, Springs, Texas, with their children when a gunman opened fire. Crystal was killed but John survived. Their son Phillip, left, survived but Greg was killed. via Facebook
An armor-clad gunman opened fire inside a rural Texas church on Sunday, killing more than two dozen people in the largest mass shooting in the state’s history, officials said.
Twenty-six people were killed during the shooting at First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said at a press conference Sunday evening.
“We don’t know if that number will rise or not, but we know is that’s too many and this will be a long, suffering mourning for those in pain,” he said.
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Emergency personnel respond to a fatal shooting at First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, Sunday, Nov. 5, 2017. KSAT / via AP
Last summer, a blueberry farm in Oregon was desperate to solve its bird problem. The year before, the farm had lost more blueberries to hungry birds than in any previous growing season, with robins and starlings devouring 25 percent of its crop.
At the start of this year’s growing season, the 168-acre farm installed six Agrilaser Autonomics—which are automated laser guns mounted on a pedestal—and aimed them at its blueberry bushes. The devices shoot a steady green laser beam that sweeps across the bushes from side to side. Birds seem to mistake the sweep of the laser for a predator’s approach, and take flight whenever it comes near.
Bird Control Group, the company that manufactures the lasers, says the devices have reduced the number of birds on the blueberry farm by 99 percent, from an average of 1,500 birds to just a handful. The farm estimates it has saved about 262,500 kilograms (578,713 pounds) of blueberries, worth US $99,733, as a result.
Before you sign up for any mission to Mars, be prepared to say goodbye to the concept of the bedroom as you know it.
On Mars, as in outer space generally, it would be an unimaginable luxury to have a big bed with a thick mattress and a heavy comforter. Given the exorbitant cost of sending things to Mars and the constraints of the cramped habitats we’re likely to build there, we’ll need a whole new set of design principles for furniture and interior spaces on the red planet.
Ikea on Mars
With this challenge in mind, a team of designers from IKEA gathered recently in the Utah desert to spend three days in a mock Mars habitat thinking about designing furniture for a space mission (or a “tiny home” here on Earth).
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The second place entry in the NASA 3-D Printed Habitat Challenge Design Competition.Team Gamma / NASA
The United States provided approximately $35 billion in economic aid to over 140 countries* in fiscal year 2014. In the map below the relative size of each country is proportionate to the aid received from the United States and the color of each country indicates GDP per capita.
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Countries scaled to the economic aid they receive from the U.S. –.
It’s been almost a year since Donald Trump emerged from an election campaign of threats, lies and vitriol as the future president of the United States of America.
His victory speech on Nov. 9, 2016, sparked cautious optimism that perhaps his presidency would not be quite as hate-filled as his campaign.
“We will deal fairly with everyone, with everyone — all people and all other nations,” Trump vowed. “We will seek common ground, not hostility; partnership, not conflict.”
But within weeks, he had unleashed the first of a seemingly endless stream of Twitter tirades from his new bully pulpit. He lambasted the “failing” New York Times, the “highly overrated” Broadway musical “Hamilton,” the “unwatchable” “Saturday Night Live” and, of course, the “crooked” media, to name a few.
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John MacDougall/Pool/Reuters
Trump and British Prime Minister Theresa May wait at the start of the first working session of the G-20 meeting in Hamburg, Germany, on July 7.
Federal investigators have gathered enough evidence to bring charges in their investigation of President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser and his son as part of the probe into Russia’s intervention in the 2016 election, according to multiple sources familiar with the investigation.
Michael T. Flynn, who was fired after just 24 days on the job, was one of the first Trump associates to come under scrutiny in the federal probe now led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller into possible collusion between Moscow and the Trump campaign.
Mueller is applying renewed pressure on Flynn following his indictment of Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, three sources familiar with the investigation told NBC News.
The investigators are speaking to multiple witnesses in coming days to gain more information surrounding Flynn’s lobbying work, including whether he laundered money or lied to federal agents about his overseas contacts, according to three sources familiar with the investigation.
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From left, retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, his son Michael G. Flynn, and Boris Epshteyn, a spokesman for President-elect Donald Trump, board an elevator at Trump Tower in New York on Nov. 17, 2016. Carolyn Kaster / AP file
Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary in the Trump administration, shares business interests with Vladimir Putin’s immediate family, and he failed to clearly disclose those interests when he was being confirmed for his cabinet position.
Ross — a billionaire industrialist — retains an interest in a shipping company, Navigator Holdings, that was partially owned by his former investment company. One of Navigator’s most important business relationships is with a Russian energy firm controlled, in turn, by Putin’s son-in-law and other members of the Russian president’s inner circle.
Some of the details of Ross’s continuing financial holdings — much of which were not disclosed during his confirmation process — are revealed in a trove of more than 7 million internal documents of Appleby, a Bermuda-based law firm, that was leaked to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. The documents consist of emails, presentations and other electronic data. These were then shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists — a global network that won the Pulitzer Prize this year for its work on the Panama Papers — and its international media partners. NBC News was given access to some of the leaked documents, which the ICIJ calls the “Paradise Papers.”
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Wilbur Ross, picked by President-elect Donald Trump to serve as his commerce secretary, arrives to testify at his confirmation hearing in front of the Senate Commerce Committee on Capitol Hill on January 18, 2017 in Washington. Joe Raedle / Getty Images file
In fall 2010, the Russian billionaire investor Yuri Milner took the stage for a Q. and A. at a technology conference in San Francisco. Mr. Milner, whose holdings have included major stakes in Facebook and Twitter, is known for expounding on everything from the future of social media to the frontiers of space travel. But when someone asked a question that had swirled around his Silicon Valley ascent — who were his investors? — he did not answer, turning repeatedly to the moderator with a look of incomprehension.
Now, leaked documents examined by The New York Times offer a partial answer: Behind Mr. Milner’s investments in Facebook and Twitter were hundreds of millions of dollars from the Kremlin.
Obscured by a maze of offshore shell companies, the Twitter investment was backed by VTB, a Russian state-controlled bank often used for politically strategic deals.
And a big investor in Mr. Milner’s Facebook deal received financing from Gazprom Investholding, another government-controlled financial institution, according to the documents. They include a cache of records from the Bermuda law firm Appleby that were obtained by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and reviewed by The Times in collaboration with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
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By The New York Times
Mr. Milner, right, with Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook. The company, along with Twitter and other social media sites, has become a major focus of investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.Credit Kimberly White/Getty Images for Breakthrough Prize
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
Johnnie Langendorff told The Washington Post how he helped race after the shooter who killed dozens of people on Nov. 5 in Sutherland Springs, Tex. (Dina Parkinson/The Washington Post)
The second place entry in the NASA 3-D Printed Habitat Challenge Design Competition.
Countries scaled to the economic aid they receive from the U.S. –.
By The New York Times
