A US lawmaker was in critical condition yesterday after being shot in the head when a gunman opened fire at a public event, killing six people in an attack that shocked the nation.
US Representative Gabrielle Giffords, 40, a member of US President Barack Obama’s Democratic Party, was meeting constituents at a supermarket in Tucson, Arizona, when the assailant unleashed a volley of automatic fire. A nine-year-old girl and a US federal judge were among those killed, and 12 others were wounded.
Obama called the attack a “tragedy for our entire country.” The US House of Representatives, which opened under new Republican leadership just three days earlier, called off proceedings for this week.
PHOTO: AFP
Bystanders tackled the gunman, identified as 22-year-old local resident Jared Lee Loughner. News reports said he had filled the Internet with angry and largely incoherent condemnations of the government, while the army said he had tried to enlist but was rejected.
A Loughner profile posted on YouTube listed Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ The Communist Manifesto and Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf among his favorite books.
“There’s some reason to believe that he came to this location with another individual,” Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik told reporters, saying the gunman “has kind of a troubled past, and we’re not convinced that he acted alone.”
Doctors said a bullet passed through Giffords’ brain. Despite initial media reports she had died, local television networks said late on Saturday she was awake in her hospital bed and recognized her husband, NASA astronaut Mark Kelly.
“She is in critical condition [but] I’m optimistic about recovery,” University Medical Center trauma chief Peter Rhee said. “We cannot tell what kind of recovery, but I’m about as optimistic as you can get.”
At a later briefing, however, Giffords family friend and former US surgeon-general Richard Carmona was more cautious, saying: “With guarded optimism, I hope that she will survive, but this is a very devastating wound.”
Giffords was hosting an event dubbed “Congress on Your Corner” at a Safeway supermarket in a strip mall off a major intersection in Tucson, a city of rolling desert and cactus trees in the fast-growing southwestern state.
Giffords, like most rank-and-file US legislators, traveled without any security detail, according to witnesses.
The incident came amid heightened security after packages ignited in a post office in Washington on Friday and two government buildings in neighboring Maryland on Thursday.
Dupnik noted two incidents involving Giffords during the recent election campaign — one when at a meeting “someone in the audience dropped a gun out of their pants,” while in another windows were broken at her offices.
Denouncing “vitriol” notably by some media outlets, he added that a suspicious package had been found at her headquarters since the shooting, which was being investigated.
Giffords, the first Jewish woman to be elected to US Congress from Arizona, barely survived a bruising re-election bid last year to a Republican rival from the right-wing “Tea Party” movement.
Giffords is a centrist and a member of the so-called Blue Dog Coalition of Democrats who support fiscal conservative, pro-business policies.
Obama condemned the attack as an “unspeakable tragedy” adding: “Such a senseless and terrible act of violence has no place in a free society.”
Arizona US Senator and former US presidential candidate John McCain said: “Whoever did this; whatever their reason, they are a disgrace to Arizona, this country and the human race.”
While the US has witnessed a stream of shootings, assassination bids against elected officials are rare. The last major incident was in 1981 when then-US president Ronald Reagan was shot and injured at a Washington hotel.
The only member of Congress ever to die in the line of duty was Leo Ryan, a California Democrat killed in 1978 in Guyana, as he investigated a cult that later carried out a notorious mass suicide.
Conservative standard-bearer Sarah Palin had controversially placed Giffords on a political hit list, putting her under an image of a gun’s crosshairs for her support of Obama’s healthcare overhaul.
Palin offered condolences for the victims, writing on her Facebook page: “We all pray for the victims and their families, and for peace and justice.”
TAIWAN IS TAIWAN: US Representative Tom Tiffany said the amendment was not controversial, as ‘Taiwan is not — nor has it ever been — part of Communist China’ The US House of Representatives on Friday passed an amendment banning the US Department of Defense from creating, buying or displaying any map that shows Taiwan as part of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The “Honest Maps” amendment was approved in a voice vote on Friday as part of the Department of Defense Appropriations Act for the 2026 fiscal year. The amendment prohibits using any funds from the act to create, buy or display maps that show Taiwan, Kinmen, Matsu, Penghu, Wuciou (烏坵), Green Island (綠島) or Orchid Island (Lanyu, 蘭嶼) as part of the PRC. The act includes US$831.5 billion in
‘WORLD WAR III’: Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene said the aid would inflame tensions, but her amendment was rejected 421 votes against six The US House of Representatives on Friday passed the Department of Defense Appropriations Act for fiscal 2026, which includes US$500 million for Taiwan. The bill, which totals US$831.5 billion in discretionary spending, passed in a 221-209 vote. According to the bill, the funds for Taiwan would be administered by the US Defense Security Cooperation Agency and would remain available through Sept. 30, 2027, for the Taiwan Security Cooperation Initiative. The legislation authorizes the US Secretary of Defense, with the agreement of the US Secretary of State, to use the funds to assist Taiwan in procuring defense articles and services, and military training. Republican Representative
Taiwan is hosting the International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL) for the first time, welcoming more than 400 young linguists from 43 nations to National Taiwan University (NTU). Deputy Minister of Education Chu Chun-chang (朱俊彰) said at the opening ceremony yesterday that language passes down knowledge and culture, and influences the way humankind thinks and understands the world. Taiwan is a multicultural and multilingual nation, with Mandarin Chinese, Taiwanese, Hakka, 16 indigenous languages and Taiwan Sign Language all used, Chu said. In addition, Taiwan promotes multilingual education, emphasizes the cultural significance of languages and supports the international mother language movement, he said. Taiwan has long participated
The paramount chief of a volcanic island in Vanuatu yesterday said that he was “very impressed” by a UN court’s declaration that countries must tackle climate change. Vanuatu spearheaded the legal case at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands, which on Wednesday ruled that countries have a duty to protect against the threat of a warming planet. “I’m very impressed,” George Bumseng, the top chief of the Pacific archipelago’s island of Ambrym, told reporters in the capital, Port Vila. “We have been waiting for this decision for a long time because we have been victims of this climate change for
RSS