Friday’s religious service, with a New Testament reading by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, was meant to honor the queen’s role as head of state. Five former prime ministers that she met with over the decades were on hand: John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Theresa May.
“The queen has been a constant through everything,” said Sharon Kent, who traveled from Devon in southern England to take part in the festivities. “Whether you’re patriotic or not, she’s always been there.”
On Friday, the palace said the queen would also miss the Epsom Derby, a horse race she has attended for decades. That is perhaps an even more painful blow to Elizabeth, a dedicated horsewoman who has had entrants in the derby. (The closest she came to a victory was in 1953, not long after her coronation, when Aureole, a racehorse bred by her father, King George VI, finished second.)
The queen, the palace said, planned to watch the race on television at Windsor Castle, the home to which she has largely retreated since the coronavirus pandemic first forced her to curtail her public schedule in early 2020.
With the queen missing, the spotlight inevitably swung to the younger generation of royals. But just as inevitably, it resurfaced the intergenerational tensions that have spilled out from behind the palace walls.
Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, made the splashiest entrance at St. Paul’s on Friday, emerging from their Range Rover to a welling of cheers — interrupted by a few boos — from the crowd. Once they were inside, every head turned as the couple walked, holding hands, through the cathedral’s soaring nave to their seats.
LONDON — The police evacuated crowds and cordoned off Trafalgar Square on Saturday morning, rattling the British capital on the third day of Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee.
A few minutes later, the police tweeted that the “incident has now been concluded” and that they would reopen the square “in due course.” There were no further details of the nature of the incident immediately available on Saturday morning.
Great Paul, cast in the late 1800s, weighs over 16 tons.Credit…Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis, via Getty Images
LONDON — The history of Great Paul, the St. Paul’s Cathedral bell that was rung for a service commemorating Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee celebration on Friday, is one of toil and grandeur.
It is also a story that involves a giant furnace, over 16 and a half tons of metal and now, of muscles and sweat.
The largest bell ever cast in the British Isles, and the largest still being rung there, Great Paul was commissioned in 19th-century Britain, when a penchant for ambitious, monumental objects was reflected in a high demand for large, deep-toned bells.
Several cities around the country got one, but Great Paul “was destined to outrival all competitors in size, weight and public acclaim,” Trevor S. Jennings, an author who specializes in bells, wrote in his book “The Story of Great Paul.”
The bell, made of bronze, was intended to resemble those of cathedrals in continental Europe. But the foundry that created it — run by John Taylor in Loughborough, a town north of London — made it clear that to reach the note that the cathedral was going for, the bell would need to weigh at least 15 tons.
So the foundry built a new, larger furnace to melt copper, tin and old bells from other British churches, and the workers took four days to load more than 40,000 pounds of metal into the furnaces.
Workers at the John Taylor & Co. bell foundry in Loughborough, England, in April.Credit…Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
When the bell was completed, Mr. Taylor invited locals and workers to a celebratory luncheon, and hundreds of visitors from miles away came to see the bell.
But the work was not over. To transport the huge bell to London, about 140 miles away, options like trains and boats were rejected, because of overly complex logistics, as were elephants — because they weren’t exactly abundant in Britain.
The bell was finally loaded onto a carriage drawn by a steam engine. It took 11 days to reach London, in a large convoy attended by reporters but also vandals trying to inscribe their initials on the bell with chalks and chisels. In May 1882, Great Paul arrived in the cathedral’s southwestern tower, where it still hangs.
Its primacy was tested in 2012 by Britain’s Olympic bell, which weighs about 23 tons but was cast in the Netherlands and is now displayed, silently, in London’s Olympic Park.
Great Paul was also largely silent for over four decades after its electronic motor broke a few years after being installed in the 1970s. After the bell was restored last year, the church’s ringers began sounding it manually so that its powerful, low-pitched chime could resonate across its central London neighborhood.
That is a two-person job, said Simon Read, 26, a member of St. Paul’s Cathedral guild of bell ringers who will ring Great Paul before Friday’s service celebrating the queen’s 70 years as monarch. And it requires tackling the rope with their full bodies to swing the 16-ton bell.
It is, Mr. Read said, a mixture of music and exercise. “I’ll be doing biceps,” he said.
Great Paul is housed in the cathedral’s southwest tower, seen above on the right.Credit…Grant Smith/Universal Images Group, via Getty Images
Mr. Read, who has swung bells hundreds of times over the past 12 years, said that Friday’s was the most important performance of his career. His fellow guild members have also helped Britain commemorate notable events: One, who is 90, rang the cathedral’s bells for Winston Churchill’s funeral in 1965, and another rang them for the wedding of Prince Charles and Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1981.
On Friday, bells in churches across Britain rang as Great Paul sounded before the service. St. Paul’s bells will then also ring for four hours after the event, which includes Bible readings, anthems, prayers and hymns to honor the queen for her faith and service.
Mr. Read said he planned to get a good night’s sleep and drink some Gatorade before climbing the narrow stairs to the dark, dusty room above the cathedral’s clock to ring Great Paul for the queen.
“I feel very proud and special to be able to ring the biggest bell in the country,” Mr. Read said, adding, “I would hope that she notices that the bells are ringing.”
Were empire thrown overboard, much of the monarchy’s symbolic power would have gone with it. From her first prorogation of Parliament, Queen Elizabeth II, like her predecessors, affirmed old imperial fictions and cultivated new ones. This was her prescribed role, her monarchical duty. She reminded her grieving nation of its imperial greatness and the sacrifices being made to save empire from encroaching terrorism in the empire. “In Malaya,” she declared, “My Forces and the civil administration are carrying out a difficult task with patience and determination.”
This difficult task, meant to suppress an anticolonial, communist insurgency, included mass detention without trial, illegal deportations and one of the empire’s largest forced migrations, moving hundreds of thousands of colonial subjects into barbed-wire villages. Many lived in semi-starvation, under 24-hour guard, and were forced to labor and abused.
Liberal imperialism endured, however, its elasticity giving rise to new lexicons for reform. Colonial subjects were being “rehabilitated” in an unprecedented “hearts and minds” campaign. Updated postwar humanitarian laws and new human rights conventions — legally and politically problematic, particularly on Britain’s widespread use of torture — partly prompted such doublespeak while British governments repeatedly denied repressive measures, secretly ordering wide-scale destruction of incriminating evidence.
Reformist fictions laundered Britain’s past, watermarking official narratives of end-of-empire conflicts in Kenya, Cyprus, Aden, Northern Ireland and elsewhere. Fragments of damning evidence remain, however. Historians, myself included, have spent years reassembling them, demonstrating liberal imperialism’s perfidity and the ways in which successive monarchs manifestly performed the empire and its myths, drawing symbolic power from their sublime in loco parentis role civilizing colonial subjects while — perhaps unwittingly given their governments’ cover-ups — honoring the dishonorable with speeches, titles and medals.
In 1917, for instance, King George V introduced the Order of the British Empire, celebrating civilian and military service with the Knight and Dame Grand Cross (GBE) the highest-ranking honor. The Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) is the lowest, with three others in between. To this day, the queen still confers hundreds of these medals annually, which continue to bear the motto “FOR GOD AND THE EMPIRE,” the two wellsprings of monarchical power.
Such conferrals are inherently political gestures. One case among many was in 1950s Kenya where Britain detained without trial over one million Africans during the Mau Mau Emergency. Terence Gavaghan, the architect of the “dilution technique,” or systematized violence used to “break” detainees, was awarded an MBE. John Cowan, his lieutenant, was also given one despite, or because of, his role in crafting the “Cowan Plan,” which led to the beating deaths of 11 detainees. Known as the Hola Massacre, it threatened the Conservative government of Harold Macmillan, who wrote to the queen in 1959 that the “incident” was by no means “excused,” though Her Majesty’s Government “can hardly be held responsible for the faults of commission or omission of quite minor officials.”
Scapegoating tactics and royal affirmations of empire’s nefarious agents were long part of Britain’s modus operandi, as was developmentalist language masquerading as benign reform. When independence swept through the empire in the 1960s, colonies were “growing up,” according to Macmillan. Britain declared its civilizing mission a triumph, and the Commonwealth of Nations, today comprising 54 countries, most of which are former British colonies, the logical coda.
Dr. Oz and Mr. McCormick, both first-time candidates, worked hard to transform themselves from members of the East Coast elite, with middle-of-the-road politics, into credible champions of the MAGA movement.
Understand the 2022 Midterm Elections
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Why are these midterms so important? This year’s races could tip the balance of power in Congress to Republicans, hobbling President Biden’s agenda for the second half of his term. They will also test former President Donald J. Trump’s role as a G.O.P. kingmaker. Here’s what to know:
What are the midterm elections? Midterms take place two years after a presidential election, at the midpoint of a presidential term — hence the name. This year, a lot of seats are up for grabs, including all 435 House seats, 35 of the 100 Senate seats and 36 of 50 governorships.
What do the midterms mean for Biden? With slim majorities in Congress, Democrats have struggled to pass Mr. Biden’s agenda. Republican control of the House or Senate would make the president’s legislative goals a near-impossibility.
What are the races to watch? Only a handful of seats will determine if Democrats maintain control of the House over Republicans, and a single state could shift power in the 50-50 Senate. Here are 10 races to watch in the House and Senate, as well as several key governor’s contests.
When are the key races taking place? The primary gauntlet is already underway. Closely watched races in Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia were held in May, with more taking place through the summer. Primaries run until September before the general election on Nov. 8.
Go deeper. What is redistricting and how does it affect the midterm elections? How does polling work? How do you register to vote? We’ve got more answers to your pressing midterm questions here.
Dr. Oz is a professor emeritus of surgery at Columbia University, but he called for the firing of Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert. He pledged to oppose nearly all abortions, despite having once held the opposite view. And on the eve of the election, he held a telephone town hall with the gun-rights absolutist Ted Nugent, even though he once helped write columns that called for gun controls.
Mr. McCormick, an Iraq War veteran who had criticized isolationism and backed an occasional Democrat, was quoted during the campaign as opposing “the weakness and wokeness that you see across the country.”
Mr. McCormick and his allies attacked Dr. Oz as a “Hollywood liberal” and for having served in the Turkish army as a dual citizen. Dr. Oz said he would give up Turkish citizenship if elected to the Senate.
Dr. Oz was also criticized as a carpetbagger who had moved to Pennsylvania to run for office. The American-born son of Turkish immigrants, Dr. Oz received his medical degree and a business degree from the University of Pennsylvania in the 1980s. His career was spent in New York, and for three decades, he lived in Northern New Jersey.
He only registered to vote in Pennsylvania in 2020 and has said that around the same time, he moved to a home owned by his in-laws in Bryn Athyn, Pa., a Philadelphia suburb. Last year, he and his wife, Lisa, bought a home nearby, according to a financial statement he filed in April, which put his personal fortune between $76 million and $300 million. If elected, he would be one of the wealthiest members of the Senate. He has already poured $12 million of his own money into his quest.
Both Dr. Oz and Mr. McCormick competed aggressively for Mr. Trump’s endorsement. In deciding on Dr. Oz less than six weeks before the election, the former president cited the popularity of the long-running “Dr. Oz Show” with women. Women “are drawn to Dr. Oz for his advice and counsel,” Mr. Trump said. “I have seen this many times over the years.”
Though “The Dr. Oz Show” has been criticized for a long history of offering viewers dubious medical advice, Mr. Trump was politically on-target about the electoral importance of women, especially in the suburbs. They have been key swing voters in recent Pennsylvania elections, notably in Mr. Trump’s defeat in 2020.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney had a defibrillator implanted in 2001. He finished two terms in the White House, including a hard-fought re-election campaign in 2004.
“Doctors have told me I need to continue to rest, eat healthy, exercise, and focus on my recovery, and that’s exactly what I’m doing,” Mr. Fetterman said. “It will take some more time to get back on the campaign trail like I was in the lead-up to the primary. It’s frustrating — all the more so because this is my own fault — but bear with me, I need a little more time. I’m not quite back to 100 percent yet, but I’m getting closer every day.”
Ed Rendell, a Democratic former governor of the state and a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said in an interview on Friday that he had no qualms about Mr. Fetterman’s fitness to serve. He downplayed how much Mr. Fetterman’s health would weigh on the minds of voters, saying that he did not think it would be an issue.
“When I was governor, the Republicans used to say I was one cheese steak away from having a heart attack, and I never did,” said Mr. Rendell.
Nancy Patton Mills, the chairwoman of the Pennsylvania Democrats, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee did not immediately comment on Friday.
Mr. Fetterman has been off the campaign trail since his stroke and has occasionally released brief videos since then. In a sign that Mr. Fetterman was moving back toward some political engagement, Senator Bob Casey, Democrat of Pennsylvania, wrote on Twitter that he’d had a “virtual double date” with Mr. Fetterman and his wife, Gisele Barreto Fetterman, earlier Friday afternoon.
“Looking forward to many more on the campaign trail this summer!” Mr. Casey wrote.
Gina Kolata and Neil Vigdor contributed reporting.
Vladimir Efimov, a local politician on the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia’s Far East, was charged with “discrediting the army” and ordered to pay a $500 fine three times in recent months over antiwar images that he displayed on social media.
When he continued, reposting battlefield pictures like the wholesale destruction of the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol under Russian bombardment, prosecutors ratcheted up the charges and accused him of a felony — punishable by up to five years in prison or stiffer fines.
“They thought that I would be afraid,” Mr. Efimov said, that the fines “would give me cold feet and make me hide away.”
Three months ago, President Vladimir V. Putin signed into law draconian measures designed to silence war critics, putting even use of the word “war” off-limits. They prompted some Russians appalled by the invasion to flee the country, forced independent news outlets to shut down, and created a climate of suspicion in which neighbor turned on neighbor.
While the laws initially led to a few, highly publicized cases, it is now becoming clear that local prosecutors nationwide are applying them with particular zeal.
At least 50 people face prison sentences of up to either 10 years or five years hard labor, or fines of as much as $77,000, for spreading “false information” about the military. More than 2,000 people have been charged with lesser infractions, according to a human rights organization that tracks cases nationwide.
The charges piling up against activists, politicians, journalists and ordinary Russians in big cities and remote towns, from Kamchatka in the Far East to Kaliningrad in the west, provide a stark gauge of how the Kremlin has intensified the repression of those who criticize the war.
“Clearly, the goal was to have a chilling effect on the public and on any critical voices against the military operation,” said Pavel Chikov, the head of the Agora Human Rights Group, which tallied the cases and has helped to defend some of the accused. “To a certain extent it was successful, because people are kind of cautious about how they express their opinions.”
The two laws address slightly different actions. The harsher one criminalized deliberately spreading “false information” about the military, interpreted as anything outside the official version of events. If the actions cause undefined “grave consequences,” the sentence goes up to 15 years imprisonment or an $80,000 fine.
The second outlawed virtually any protest or public criticism of the war as potentially “discrediting” the military, in a kind of “three strikes” law. It carries fines for the initial incidents, while repeat offenders face criminal charges that carry prison sentences of up to five years or financial penalties. To date, four criminal cases have emerged from among the 2,000 charged, but the numbers are expected to rise, Mr. Chikov said.
“If we talk about cases involving freedom of expression, I would say it is the highest number ever,” he added.
With the first criminal cases only now coming to trial, it remains unclear how harshly judges — generally prone to toe the Kremlin line — will treat defendants.
Defense lawyers are not optimistic. “I would like to hope that the courts will be just and they will listen to our arguments,” said Marina Yankina, the lawyer for a freelance journalist in southwestern Siberia whose trial started Wednesday. “But I have been working for a long time, and unfortunately it is not going to happen.”
The charges against her client, Andrei Novashov, 45, from a small city called Prokopyevsk, are a case in point. Mr. Novashov said he was surprised at being accused of spreading “false information” over five social media posts, including a repost from a well-known photojournalist about the Russian military destroying a maternity hospital in Mariupol.
Officers began breaking down his door at 6 a.m. as if he were “some drug dealer or pimp,” he said. Like most defendants, Mr. Novashov was barred by the judge from using the internet or his phone, but he was able to speak to a local podcaster.
“It is impossible to keep silent,” Mr. Novashov said, while noting ruefully that people around town had mostly reacted to his case with indifference. He added: “People have been taught that nothing is going to change, so the less you know, the better you sleep.”
In an echo of Stalinist times, the new laws have galvanized people to turn in their fellow citizens. After Aleksei Gorinov, 61, a local politician in Moscow, publicly criticized Victory Day events for children when Ukrainian children were dying, five Russians reported him to law enforcement, said his lawyer, Sergei N. Telnov.
The authorities started the case against Mr. Gorinov on April 25, took him to jail on April 27, and issued an indictment on May 1, Mr. Telnov said, adding that “it is super fast.” Mr. Gorinov was accused of spreading false information, including calling the conflict a “war,” since officially it remains a “special military operation.”
In letters to supporters from pretrial detention — where he said he initially slept on a cement floor in an overcrowded cell with suspected thieves and drug dealers from Central Asia — Mr. Gorinov wrote that Russia had reached a sad state when someone who criticized a war faced 10 years imprisonment.
Supporters on Wednesday flocked to the start of his trial, which was live-blogged by a reporter from Mediazona, a website that covers court cases. “A man is judged for his opinion,” Mr. Gorinov said, speaking from the metal courtroom cage where Russian defendants are kept. “When else will you see this?”
In one of the first sentences to be handed down, a court in the Zabaikalsky Region, near the border with China, fined the administrator of a social media channel called “I Live in Ruins” about $16,000 this week after he was accused of posting forged documents and videos that contained false information about military operations in Ukraine, according to a local website, Chita.ru.
Mr. Chikov says the new laws were modeled on those devised during the pandemic, when the government banned spreading information about Covid that it had not approved.But only nine people have been prosecuted in two years, he said.
Russia-Ukraine War: Key Developments
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On the ground. As the war in Ukraine approaches its 100th day, President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Russian forces now control one-fifth of the country. Though battered and depleted from their failed drive to capture the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, Russian troops are grinding closer to their goal of taking over the eastern regions of Luhansk and Donetsk.
Russian oil embargo. European Union members finally reached an agreement on a Russian oil embargo and new sanctions against Russia. The long-delayed deal effectively exempts Hungary, which had opposed the embargo, from the costly step the rest of the bloc is taking to punish Russia.
It does not take much to be accused of “discrediting” the military. Russians have been prosecuted for wearing workout clothes and even nail polish in the blue and yellow colors of the Ukrainian flag, lawyers said. A lawyer in Kaliningrad defending a client faced the same charge herself after using the word “war” in her arguments.
The vague language of the laws gives prosecutors wide flexibility in bringing charges, while defense lawyers wrestle with how to respond. Defense lawyers said that investigators basically compared what the defendants said with reams of transcripts from briefings by the ministries of Defense and Foreign Affairs.
Anything not in the briefings or denied by officials is treated as a lie, said Vladimir V. Vasin, a defense lawyer. “If they write that something is green, it means that it is green, and if they write something is red, then it is red, and everything else will be untrue,” he said.
Mr. Vasin is defending Mikhail Afanasiev, the editor of an online magazine, New Focus, which covers the Republic of Khakassia in southern Siberia.
Mr. Afanasiev has been held in pretrial detention since April 14 for writing a story called “The Refuseniks” about the dreadful conditions — including a perpetually drunk commander, no food and terrible battlefield organization — that prompted 11 members of Rosgvardia, the Russian national guard,to decline to fight.
The journalist believed that he was just doing his job, Mr. Vasin said, but was charged because what he gleaned from interviews was not in the official briefings.
The swelling case list across Russia indicates that prosecutors realized that Moscow wanted results, lawyers said. “There is a feeling that there is a directive to push the cases to the court as soon as possible,” Mr. Chikov said. “Everyone immediately understood that this was of the highest political priority.”
Still, the constant flow of new cases signaled that the laws have not silenced all opposition, he added.
In Kamchatka, a sparsely populated northern Pacific peninsula, Mr. Efimov, 67, heads the local chapter of Yabloko, an ebbing opposition party.
His antiwar posts were not criticizing the military, he said, but the mass “hysteria” in support of the war. Mr. Efimov vowed to continue despite the criminal charges. “Sit there, shut up and praise the president, this is what it is about,” he said.
The amount of planet-warming carbon dioxide in the atmosphere broke a record in May, continuing its relentless climb, scientists said Friday. It is now 50 percent higher than the preindustrial average, before humans began the widespread burning of oil, gas and coal in the late 19th century.
There is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere now than at anytime in at least 4 million years, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officials said.
The concentration of the gas reached nearly 421 parts per million in May, the peak for the year, as power plants, vehicles, farms and other sources around the world continued to pump huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Emissions totaled 36.3 billion tons in 2021, the highest level in history.
As the amount of carbon dioxide increases, the planet keeps warming, with effects like increased flooding, more extreme heat, drought and worsening wildfires that are already being experienced by millions of people worldwide. Average global temperatures are now about 1.1 degrees Celsius, or 2 degrees Fahrenheit, higher than in preindustrial times.
Growing carbon dioxide levels are more evidence that countries have made little progress toward the goal set in Paris in 2015 of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. That’s the threshold beyond which scientists say the likelihood of catastrophic effects of climate change increases significantly.
They are “a stark reminder that we need to take urgent, serious steps to become a more climate-ready nation,” Rick Spinrad, the NOAA administrator, said in a statement.
Although carbon dioxide levels dipped somewhat around 2020 during the economic slowdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic, there was no effect on the long-term trend, Pieter Tans, a senior scientist with NOAA’s Global Monitoring Laboratory, said in an interview.
The rate of increase in carbon dioxide concentration “just kept on going,” he said. “And it keeps on going for about the same pace as it did for the past decade.”
Carbon dioxide levels vary throughout the year, increasing as vegetation dies and decays in the fall and winter, and decreasing in spring and summer as growing plants absorb the gas through photosynthesis. The peak is reached every May, just before plant growth accelerates in the Northern Hemisphere. (The North has a larger effect than the Southern Hemisphere because there is much more land surface and vegetation in the North.)
Dr. Tans and others at the laboratory calculated the peak concentration this year at 420.99 parts per million, based on data from a NOAA weather station atop the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii. Observations began there in the late 1950s by a Scripps Institution of Oceanography scientist, Charles David Keeling, and the long-term record is known as the Keeling Curve.
Scripps’ scientists still make observations at Mauna Loa under a program run by Dr. Keeling’s son, Ralph Keeling. Using that independent data, which is similar to NOAA’s, they calculated the concentration at 420.78.
Both figures are about 2 parts per million higher than last year’s record. This peak is 140 parts per million above the average concentration in preindustrial days, which was consistently about 280 parts per million. Since that time, humans have pumped about 1.6 trillion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Understand the Latest News on Climate Change
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Poor U.S. performance. The Environmental Performance Index, published every two years by researchers at Yale and Columbia, found that the United States’ performance on combating climate change had declined in relation to other countries — largely as a result of Trump-era policies.
To reach the Paris Agreement target of 1.5 degrees Celsius, emissions must reach “net zero” by 2050, meaning sharp cuts, with any remaining emissions balanced out by absorption of carbon dioxide by the oceans and vegetation. If the world approached that target, the rate of increase in carbon dioxide levels would slow down and the Keeling Curve would flatten out.
If emissions were completely eliminated, Dr. Tans said, the Keeling Curve would start to fall, as the oceans and vegetation continued to absorb the existing carbon dioxide from the air. The decline in atmospheric concentration would continue for hundreds of years, although progressively more slowly, he said.
At some point an equilibrium would be reached, he said, but carbon dioxide concentrations in both the atmosphere and oceans would be higher than preindustrial levels and would remain that way for thousands of years.
Over such a long time scale, sea levels could rise significantly as polar ice melts and other changes could take place, like the conversion of Arctic tundra to forests.
“It’s that long tail that is really worrisome to me,” Dr. Tans said. “That has the potential to really change climate.”
In the early hours after the shooting at a Tulsa medical center on Wednesday, the details were murky. Soon, it became clear that the death toll there was not going to be as nearly as high as the tolls from the recent shootings in Uvalde and Buffalo.
Four people were killed in Tulsa (in addition to the gunman), compared with 21 in Uvalde and 10 in Buffalo. But the Tulsa shooting is nonetheless horrific in its own way — not only for its victims and their families but also for what it says about gun violence in the United States.
Shootings that kill multiple people are so common in this country that they often do not even make national news. They are a regular feature of American life. Tulsa has become the latest example — yet another gun crime that seems almost ordinary here and yet would be extremely rare in any other country as wealthy as the U.S.
To give you a sense of how common these shootings are, we’re devoting the rest of the lead item of today’s newsletter to a list of every documented mass shooting in which a gunman has killed at least three people in the U.S. so far this year. (The Gun Violence Archive defines a mass shooting as any in which at least four people are shot, including survivors.)
Among the patterns we noticed: Family disputes are a common motivation, and gang disputes are another. Every identified suspect has been a man, many under 25. Baltimore and Sacramento have experienced multiple such mass shootings this year.
2022, so far
Jan. 19, Baltimore: A man who worked for a gun violence reduction program was killed in an East Baltimore neighborhood, along with two others. A fourth person was injured.
Jan. 23, Milwaukee: Five men and a woman were found shot to death at a Park West neighborhood home. The police believe the attack targeted specific people.
Jan. 23, Inglewood, Calif.: The same day, a shooting at a birthday party killed four people, including two sisters, and wounded a fifth. The shooting was gang-related, the mayor said.
Jan. 29, St. Louis: A shooting near an intersection killed three young men and wounded a fourth. Police said they had no suspects.
Feb. 5, Corsicana and Frost, Texas: A 41-year-old man murdered his mother, his stepfather, his sons and the son of his ex-girlfriend in an overnight shooting. The man later fatally shot himself.
Feb. 28, Sacramento: A man shot dead his three daughters and their chaperone at a church during a court-approved visit. The children’s mother had a restraining order against the shooter, who killed himself.
March 12, Baltimore: A shooting in Northwest Baltimore killed three men in a car and wounded a fourth.
March 19, Fayetteville, N.C.: A Saturday night shootout in a hotel parking lot killed three people and wounded another three. The shooting may have been linked to a fight between motorcycle gangs.
March 19, Norfolk, Va.: Hours later, an argument outside a bar escalated into a shooting that killed three young bystanders. One of the victims was a 25-year-old newspaper reporter whose editor called her to cover the shooting, not realizing she had been killed.
April 3, Sacramento: At least five shooters fired more than 100 rounds a block from the State Capitol, killing six people — three men and three women — and wounding 12. The police described the shooting as gang-related.
April 27, Biloxi, Miss.: A 32-year-old man killed the owner of the Broadway Inn Express motel and two employees in an argument over money. He fled to a neighboring town and fatally shot a fourth person. Police later found the gunman dead, barricaded inside a convenience store.
May 14, Buffalo: An 18-year-old avowed white supremacist killed 10 people and wounded three more with an assault-style weapon in a live-streamed attack at a supermarket.
May 27, Stanwood, Mich.: A 51-year-old man allegedly killed his wife and her three young children at a home in Mecosta County before shooting himself, police said. The man remains in critical condition.
June 1, Tulsa, Okla.: A gunman killed his back surgeon, another doctor, a receptionist and a visitor at a medical building. He then killed himself.
As long as this list is, it’s also a very incomplete accounting of American gun violence. It doesn’t include the at least 60 shootings that left three people dead but don’t technically count as mass shootings (because fewer than four people were shot). It doesn’t count shootings that wounded people without killing anybody, like one in Milwaukee that injured 17 people. And it leaves out the individual gun homicides and suicides that make up a majority of the gun violence that kills more than 100 Americans on an average day.
Advice from Wirecutter: Think you’ve been hacked? Here’s what to do.
Lives Lived: Marion Barber III regularly busted into the end zone as a running back for the Dallas Cowboys. His life took a downward turn after his playing days were over. He died at 38.
ARTS AND IDEAS
‘The Wire’ at 20
“The Wire” premiered two decades ago yesterday. The show, set in Baltimore, began as an indictment of the war on drugs and grew to explore the collapse of other institutions: blue-collar work, City Hall, public education, the media. Its audience was not huge, but it was devoted: Barack Obama, a vocal fan, hailed it as one of the greatest works of art in decades.
The show’s creators, David Simon and Ed Burns, reflected on its legacy in a Q.&A. with The Times. “This show will live forever, because what it tries to portray will be around forever,” Burns says. “It’s just getting worse and worse.”
In an appraisal, The Times’s chief television critic, James Poniewozik, applauds the show’s ensemble cast. It looked like the city it portrayed, with Black actors playing the good, the bad and the morally conflicted. “‘The Wire’ was determined not to be another story of hero cops and faceless perps,” he writes. “No group on ‘The Wire’ would be less fully human than any other.” — Natasha Frost, a Briefings writer
WASHINGTON — President Biden demanded on Thursday that lawmakers respond to communities turned into “killing fields” by passing far-reaching limits on guns, calling on Congress to ban assault-style weapons, expand background checks and pass “red flag” laws after massacres in Texas and New York.
In a rare evening address to the nation, Mr. Biden dared Republicans to ignore the repeated convulsions of anger and grief from gun violence by continuing to block gun measures supported by large majorities in both parties, and even among gun owners.
“My God,” he declared from the Cross Hall, a ceremonial part of the White House residence, which was lined with candles in honor of victims of gun violence. “The fact that the majority of the Senate Republicans don’t want any of these proposals, even to be debated or come up for a vote, I find unconscionable. We can’t fail the American people again.”
Mr. Biden’s speech came a day after a mass shooting in Tulsa, Okla., that killed four victims and nine days after a massacre in Uvalde, Texas, that took the lives of 19 elementary school children and two teachers. Ten days before that, 10 Black people were gunned down in a grocery store in Buffalo. The list, Mr. Biden said, goes on.
“After Columbine, after Sandy Hook, after Charleston, after Orlando, after Las Vegas, after Parkland — nothing has been done,” he said, lamenting decades of inaction.
With the 17-minute address, Mr. Biden abruptly shed the reluctance of his White House to engage in what could become yet another fruitless partisan confrontation, played out amid funerals in Uvalde, Buffalo and Tulsa. After weeks of carefully calibrating his calls for action, the president on Thursday did not hold back.
“Enough, enough. It’s time for each of us to do our part,” he told Americans. “For the children we’ve lost. For the children we can save. For the nation we love.”
“Let’s hear the call and the cry,” he said, almost pleading with his fellow politicians in Washington. “Let’s meet the moment. Let us finally do something.”
Whether that will happen remains unclear. Despite his forceful tone, Mr. Biden all but acknowledged in his speech the political realities that could make him just another in a long line of presidents to have demanded action on guns, only to fail. He called the fight “hard,” and moments after urging a ban on assault weapons, he offered alternatives if that proved to be impossible.
“If we can’t ban assault weapons, then we should raise the age to purchase them from 18 to 21, strengthen the background checks,” he said. He called on Congress to “enact safe storage law and red flag laws, repeal the immunity that protects gun manufacturers from liability, address the mental health crisis.”
In his remarks, Mr. Biden turned his evident cynicism about Republicans into a kind of political threat, saying that “if Congress fails, I believe this time a majority of the American people won’t give up either. I believe the majority of you will act to turn your outrage into making this issue central to your vote.”
Mr. Biden is not a newcomer to the gun debate.
He has repeatedly said he favors reinstating the ban on assault weapons that he helped pass as a senator and was law for a decade before it expired in 2004. He has called on lawmakers to pass universal background checks for a decade, since 20 children were killed in a shooting in Newtown, Conn., in 2012.
But both of those measures are seen as highly unlikely to pass in Congress, where fierce Republican opposition has historically stood in their way. Lawmakers in both parties have said recently that they do not believe there is enough bipartisan support to approve either approach.
House Democrats on Thursday advanced a wide-ranging package of gun control legislation that would prohibit the sale of semiautomatic rifles to people under 21 and ban the sale of magazines that hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition. But those measures, too, were all but certain to die in the Senate.
Democrats put forward the legislation in response to the killings in Uvalde and the racist massacre in Buffalo — both, the police say, at the hands of 18-year-old gunmen using legally purchased AR-15-style weapons.
A bitterly divided House Judiciary Committee spent Thursday considering the legislation and approved it Thursday evening, on a party-line vote of 25 to 19. Fierce Republican opposition during the committee debate underscored the partisan animosity.
Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, warned that another shooting was not far away. He pleaded with Republicans, “My friends, what the hell are you waiting for?”
Republicans deride such measures as unconstitutional attempts to take guns from law-abiding Americans, robbing them of their right to defend themselves. Representative Dan Bishop, Republican of North Carolina, expressed outrage that Democrats had painted Republicans as complicit in mass shootings, declaring, “You are not going to bully your way into stripping Americans of fundamental rights.”
Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, said administration officials had been in close touch with lawmakers over the past several days as a bipartisan group of senators discussed a narrower set of limits on gun ownership.
The negotiations have centered on expanding background checks and providing incentives for states to pass red flag laws, which allow guns to be seized from dangerous people. The group is also looking at proposals on the safe storage of guns at home, community violence and mental health, according to aides and senators involved in the talks.
With Republicans unanimously opposed to most major gun control measures, the Senate talks offer what is probably the best chance at finding a bipartisan compromise on guns that could pass the 50-to-50 Senate, where 60 votes are needed to break a filibuster and bring legislation to a vote.
But the endeavor faces long odds, with little evidence that either side is willing to give ground on a debate that has been stalled for years.
Senator Christopher S. Murphy of Connecticut is leading the talks for Democrats, joined by his fellow party members Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico. The Republican senators they are huddling with include Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Patrick J. Toomey of Pennsylvania, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Susan Collins of Maine.
Those nine negotiators met over Zoom on Wednesday to discuss their progress, convening for an hour after days of individual phone calls and smaller meetings with each other and their colleagues. Talks were expected to continue before the Senate returns early next week.
“We are making rapid progress toward a common-sense package that could garner support from both Republicans and Democrats,” Ms. Collins said in a brief statement after the meeting.
Senator John Cornyn of Texas, a top ally to Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, has also been involved in discussions, including a Tuesday meeting with Mr. Murphy, Ms. Sinema and Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina.
Democratic leaders have warned that if an agreement cannot be reached quickly, they will force votes on the bills in the House, which do not have Republican support, to demonstrate for Americans which lawmakers are standing in the way of passing gun safety measures.
“I’m cleareyed about the history of failure,” Mr. Blumenthal said in an interview after Wednesday’s meeting. “But if there’s ever a moment to put up or shut up, this one is it.”
In the days immediately after the Buffalo and Uvalde shootings, both the president and Vice President Kamala Harris largely stayed away from any direct negotiations with lawmakers about how to create a response to the shootings that can pass in Congress.
But on Thursday, Mr. Biden abandoned that approach, deciding instead to lay down a marker that will cement his legacy as a president who fought for tougher gun laws, successful or not.
In his speech on Thursday, Mr. Biden described the deep grief that he experienced when he and his wife talked to the families of victims in the two mass shootings.
“At both places, we spent hours with hundreds of family members, who were broken, whose lives will never be the same,” he said. “They had one message for all of us: Do something. Just do something. For God’s sake, do something.”
“How much more carnage are we willing to accept?” he asked. “How many more innocent American lives must be taken before we say: Enough. Enough.”
And he made the target of his comment clear, saying it now falls to Congress to pass the far-reaching laws it has refused to in the past.
“The question now is: What will the Congress do?” he said. The president said he supported the efforts by the bipartisan group in the Senate to find a compromise, but called it the least lawmakers should do.
The approach Thursday night was more like the response from former President Barack Obama in January 2013, just weeks after the shooting at the school in Newtown.
Mr. Obama, flanked by Mr. Biden, who was then the vice president, proposed a package of gun control measures, including: ensuring that all gun owners go through a background check; improving state reporting of criminals and the mentally ill; banning assault weapons; and capping magazine clip capacity at 10 bullets.
In the face of Republican opposition, Mr. Obama dropped his demand for an assault weapon ban and limits on the size of magazine clips. After months of pushing by Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden, the Senate rejected a bipartisan effort to expand background checks.
In scathing comments after the bill died, Mr. Obama derided senators for deciding that the lives of children were not worth the effort to pass legislation. A decade later, Mr. Obama’s grim assessment stands as a warning for Mr. Biden of what might happen again.
“All in all,” Mr. Obama said at the time, “this was a pretty shameful day for Washington.”
Emily Cochrane, Catie Edmondson and Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed reporting.
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