A 17-year-old student shot outside Garfield High School on Thursday died at Harborview Medical Center as police continued searching for the shooter.( )

The suspect is believed to be a high school-aged male, Deputy Chief Eric Barden said in a news conference.

Shots were fired in the school’s parking lot during lunch time, injuring the student. He died later Thursday at the hospital.

“I can’t use the word trauma enough to describe what our children are going through,” said Mayor Bruce Harrell, a graduate of Garfield High School, at a news conference Thursday. “This is not the first shooting at Garfield, and these kids deserve better.”( )

Thursday’s shooting comes as Garfield High nears the end of a school year riddled by gun violence and community members demanding intervention from local officials.

A student was shot in March while waiting for her bus outside the school. There was also a shooting outside the school in October and a string of nearby shootings last June that did not involve students but prompted increased security on campus.

Garfield classes are canceled Friday and Monday. Support and wellness staff members will be available Friday for drop-in counseling at Nova High School.( )

Harrell on Thursday emphasized partnership with community organizations and reiterated his stance toward investing in crime-fighting technology. He said he is directing the Seattle Police Department to enhance patrols.( )

Interim police Chief Sue Rahr said the department would “redouble” its efforts in the Central District to help students and families feel safe.

“We’re not coming in here to be hard-core policing,” Rahr said at the news conference in the Central District’s Mount Calvary Christian Center. “We’re coming into the neighborhood to gather with the community, work with the community.”

Seattle Public Schools’ website on Thursday linked to a page for Gun Violence Awareness Day, which falls on Friday.( )

“Each time I must report an incident of gun violence on or near our campus, it is tough, but this message is the hardest yet to send,” said Garfield Principal Tarance Hart in an email to families Thursday night. “I am deeply saddened by the violence in our community and profoundly disturbed by the devastating impact it continues to have on our school.”

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A member of the Greatest Generation, Robert Persichitti, 102, was on his way to Normandy to attend D-Day 80th anniversary events. But he died in Germany a few days before they were held.

Robert Persichitti, a 102-year-old World War II veteran who served in the Pacific Theater, died May 31 while he was on the way to D-Day commemorative events in France to mark the 80th anniversary of the invasion.

Persichitti, who was born in Calumet, Pennsylvania, served in the U.S. Navy during World War II as a radioman on the command ship USS Eldorado, according to the New York State Senate's Veterans Hall of Fame. His tour of duty included combat in Iwo Jima, Okinawa and Guam.( )

A resident of Fairport, New York, Persichitti and his guardian Al DeCarlo flew overseas with a group organized by the National World War II Museum and arrived in Germany, according to the Honor Flight Heroes organization. They were on a ship headed to Normandy when Persichitti had a medical emergency and had to be airlifted to a hospital in Germany where he died shortly thereafter on Friday, the organization said.( )

The doctor was with him. He was not alone, he was at peace and he was comfortable," DeCarlo told WHAM 13, an ABC affiliate in Rochester, N.Y. "She put his favorite singer, Frank Sinatra, on her phone and he peacefully left us."( )

'The eyes of the world are upon you':Eisenhower's D-Day order inspires 80 years later 

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Facing international criticism of its conduct of the war and its latest strike on a U.N. school building being used as a shelter in Nuseirat, the Israeli military offered a full-throated defense of the operation, insisting its forces had targeted a group of about 30 militants using three classrooms as a base.( )

A military spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, said Israel had carried out “a precise, intelligence-based strike” against “dozens of Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists hiding inside a U.N. school.” He said some of the militants had participated in the attacks against Israel on Oct. 7.

Admiral Hagari said the operation took place after “three days of surveillance” and was designed to destroy three specific classrooms in the school where the Israeli military believed roughly 30 militants were staying and planning operations.( )

 An Israeli strike early Thursday on a school sheltering displaced Palestinians in central Gaza killed more than 30 people, including 23 women and children, according to local health officials. The Israeli military said that Hamas militants were operating from within the school.( )

It was the latest instance of mass casualties among Palestinians trying to find refuge as Israel expands its offensives in the Gaza Strip. A day earlier, the military announced a new ground and air assault in central Gaza, pursuing Hamas militants it says have regrouped there. Troops repeatedly have swept back into sections of the Gaza Strip they have previously invaded, underscoring the resilience of the militant group despite Israel’s nearly eight-month onslaught in the territory.( )

 An Israeli strike early Thursday on a school sheltering displaced Palestinians in central Gaza killed more than 30 people, including 23 women and children, according to local health officials. The Israeli military said that Hamas militants were operating from within the school.

It was the latest instance of mass casualties among Palestinians trying to find refuge as Israel expands its offensives in the Gaza Strip. A day earlier, the military announced a new ground and air assault in central Gaza, pursuing Hamas militants it says have regrouped there. Troops repeatedly have swept back into sections of the Gaza Strip they have previously invaded, underscoring the resilience of the militant group despite Israel’s nearly eight-month onslaught in the territory.( )

Ayman Rashed, a man displaced from Gaza City who was sheltering at the school, said the missiles hit classrooms on the second and third floor where families were sheltering. He said he helped carry out five dead, including an old man and two children, one with his head shattered open. “It was dark, with no electricity, and we struggled to get out the victims,” Rashed said.( More....)

Researchers have discovered a major driver of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and several other immune disorders that affect the spine, liver and arteries, raising hopes for millions of people worldwide.( )

The breakthrough is particularly exciting because the newly found biological pathway can be targeted by drugs that are already used, with work under way to adapt them to patients with IBD and other conditions.( )

“What we have found is one of the very central pathways that goes wrong when people get inflammatory bowel disease and this has been something of a holy grail,” said Dr James Lee, the group leader of the genetic mechanisms of disease laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute in London.( )

Lee added: “Even for pure, fundamental immunology this is a really exciting discovery. But to show this is dysregulated in people who get disease not only gives us a better understanding of the disease, it tells us this is something we can treat.”

More than half a million people in the UK have inflammatory bowel disease, the two main forms of which are Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, with at least 7 million affected globally. They arise when the immune system attacks the bowel, causing an array of debilitating symptoms from abdominal pain and weight loss to diarrhoea and blood in stools. While medicines such as steroids can ease the symptoms, some patients require surgery to remove part of their bowel.( )

Lee’s research team “stumbled” on the discovery after investigating a “gene desert”, a stretch of DNA on chromosome 21 that does not code for proteins, which has previously been linked to IBD and other autoimmune diseases. Writing in Nature, they describe how they found a section of DNA that behaves like a volume control for nearby genes. This “enhancer” was seen only in immune cells called macrophages where it boosted a gene called ETS2 and ramped up the risk of IBD.

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The World Health Organization (WHO) has said a man’s death in Mexico was caused by a strain of bird flu called H5N2 that has never before been found in a human.( )

The WHO said Wednesday it wasn’t clear how the person became infected. “Although the source of exposure to the virus in this case is currently unknown, A(H5N2) viruses have been reported in poultry in Mexico,” it said in a statement.

Scientists are on alert for changes in the virus that could signal that bird flu is adapting to spread more easily among humans.( )

But the UN agency said Wednesday said the current risk of the bird flu virus to the general population in Mexico is low.

The 59-year-old man, who had been hospitalised in Mexico City, died on 24 April after developing a fever, shortness of breath, diarrhoea, nausea and general discomfort, the WHO said.( )

Mexico’s health ministry added in a statement on Wednesday that there had so far been no evidence of person-to-person transmission of bird flu in the case of the man who died, and that he had several prior health conditions. All people who had contact with him have tested negative, it said.

In March, Mexico’s government reported an outbreak of A(H5N2) in an isolated family unit in the country’s western Michoacan state, but said at the time it did not represent a risk to distant commercial farms, nor to human health.( )

After the April death, Mexican authorities confirmed the presence of the virus and reported the case to the WHO, the agency said.

There had been three poultry outbreaks of H5N2 in nearby parts of Mexico in March, but authorities haven’t been able to find a connection.( )

Scientists said the case in Mexico is unrelated to the outbreak of a different strain of bird flu – H5N1 – in the United States that has so far infected three dairy farm workers.

Other bird flu varieties have killed people across the world in previous years, including 18 people in China during an outbreak of H5N6 in 2021, according to a timeline of bird flu outbreaks from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.( )

Andrew Pekosz, an influenza expert at Johns Hopkins University said that since 1997, H5 viruses have continuously shown a propensity to infect mammals more than any other avian influenza virus.

“So it continues to ring that warning bell that we should be very vigilant about monitoring for these infections, because every spillover is an opportunity for that virus to try to accumulate those mutations that make it better infect humans,” he said.

Cases of bird flu have now been identified in mammals such as seals, raccoons, bears and cattle, primarily due to contact with infected birds.( )

Australia reported its first human case of A(H5N1) infection in May, noting there were no signs of transmission. It has however found more poultry cases of H7 bird flu on farms in the state of Victoria.

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