By PHILIPP JENNE, Associated press

GRAZ, Austria (AP) — A former student opened fire at a school in Austria’s second-biggest city on Tuesday, killing nine people and wounding at least 12 others before taking his own life, authorities said.

There was no immediate information on the motive of the 21-year-old man, who wasn’t previously known to police. He had two weapons, which he appeared to have owned legally, police said.

Special forces were among those sent to the BORG Dreierschützengasse high school, over half a mile from Graz’s historic center, after a call at 10 a.m. At 11.30 a.m., police wrote on social network X that the school had been evacuated and everyone had been taken to a safe meeting point.

Police said they didn’t immediately have information on the man’s motive, but said that he killed himself in a toilet after fatally shooting nine people.

The shooter was a former student at the school who didn’t finish his studies, Austrian Interior Minister Gerhard Karner said at a press conference in Graz.

Austrian Chancellor Christian Stocker said there would be three days of national mourning, with the Austrian flag lowered to half-staff and a national minute of mourning at 10 a.m. Wednesday. He said that it was “a dark day in the history of our country.”

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Photos from the scene showed a large police deployment, including at least one helicopter and emergency vehicles around the school.

President Alexander Van der Bellen said that “this horror cannot be captured in words.”

“These were young people who had their whole lives ahead of them. A teacher who accompanied them on their way,” he said.

“Schools are symbols for youth, hope and the future,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen wrote on X. “It is hard to bear when schools become places of death and violence.”

Graz, Austria’s second-biggest city, is located in the southeast of the country and has about 300,000 inhabitants.

By VASILISA STEPANENKO and SAMYA KULLAB, Associated Press

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia attacked two Ukrainian cities with waves of drones and missiles early Tuesday, killing three people and wounding at least 13 in what President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called “one of the biggest” strikes in the 3-year-old war.

The attack struck Kyiv and the southern port city of Odesa. In an online statement, Zelenskyy said that Moscow’s forces fired over 315 drones, most of them Shaheds, and seven missiles overnight.

“Russian missile and Shahed strikes are louder than the efforts of the United States and others around the world to force Russia into peace,” Zelenskyy wrote, urging “concrete action” from the U.S. and Europe in response to the attack.

A maternity hospital and residential buildings in the southern port of Odesa were damaged in the attack, regional head Oleh Kiper said. Two people were killed and nine injured, according to the regional prosecutor’s office.

Another person was killed in Kyiv’s Obolonskyi district, regional head Tymur Tkachenko wrote on Telegram.

“Russian strikes are once again hitting not military targets but the lives of ordinary people. This once again shows the true nature of what we are dealing with,” he said.

Explosions and the buzzing of drones were heard around the city for hours.

Attacks continue despite talks but POWs swapped

The fresh attacks came a day after Moscow launched almost 500 drones at Ukraine in the biggest overnight drone bombardment of the war. Ukrainian and Western officials have been anticipating Moscow’s response to Kyiv’s audacious June 1 drone attack on distant Russian air bases.

Russia has been launching a record number of drones and missiles in recent days, despite both sides trading memoranda at direct peace talks in Istanbul on June 2 that set out conditions for a potential ceasefire. However, the inclusion of clauses that both sides see as nonstarters make any quick deal unlikely, and a ceasefire, long sought by Kyiv, remains elusive.

Residents react near their damaged multi-storey building damaged in Russia’s missile and drone attack in Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, June 10, 2025. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)

The only tangible outcome of the talks has been the exchange of prisoners of war, with a swap that began Monday for soldiers aged between 18 and 25.

Amina Ivanchenko was reunited Monday with her husband, a POW for 18 months, and she was grateful to Ukrainian officials for supporting her.

“My struggle was much easier thanks to them. Our country will definitely return everyone. Glory to Ukraine! Thank you!”

Anastasia Nahorna waited in the Chernyhiv region to see if her husband, who has been missing for eight months, was among those being released in the latest swap.

“This pain is more unbearable every day,” she said. “I really want to hear some news, because since the moment of his disappearance, unfortunately, there has been no information. Is he alive? or maybe in captivity? Has someone seen him?” she asked.

Anna Rodionova, the wife of another Ukrainian POW, also was waiting.

“I just want him to come back soon and for this to all be over,” she said. “We are tired of waiting, we come every exchange and he is not there.”

A similar exchange was announced for the bodies of fallen soldiers held by both sides, although no schedule has been released. Asked to comment on the exchange of dead, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said it was unclear when it could take place and how many bodies Ukraine would hand over. He again accused Kyiv of dragging its feet on the exchange.

“There is one unarguable fact, we have had trucks with bodies standing ready for it on the border for several days,” he told reporters.

Kyiv residents seek shelter

Plumes of smoke rose in Kyiv as air defense forces worked to shoot down drones and missiles Tuesday.

Viktoriia Melnyk, 30, vented her anger at the Russians after her building in the Obolonskyi district was struck by a drone.

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“I want them to leave our territory, to leave us alone, to leave our families alone,” she said. “Small children are dying. This is not normal. It’s not normal that (the world) is turning away. This is not normal for the 21st century.”

Mariia Pachapynska, the 26-year-old manager at a T-shirt company in the Obolonskiy district that produces T-shirts, decried that her facility was struck.

“There were military facilities here,” she said, noting that “everything and half of me, half of my soul, burned down.”

Seven out of 10 districts were damaged in the attack, according to Maryna Kotsupii of the State Emergency Service of Ukraine, adding that 16-story and 25-story residential buildings were hit.

Residents took shelter and slept in metro stations during the long attack, including Nina Nosivets, 32, and her 8-month-old son, Levko.

“I just try not to think about all this, silently curled up like a mouse, wait until it all passes, the attacks. Distract the child somehow because it’s probably the hardest thing for him to bear,” she said.

Krystyna Semak, 37, said she was scared by the explosions and ran to the metro at 2 a.m., carrying a rug.

Fires broke out in at least four Kyiv districts after debris from downed drones fell onto residential buildings and warehouses, according to the Kyiv City Military Administration.

“I was lying in bed, as always hoping that these Shaheds would fly past me, and I heard that Shahed (that hit the house),” said Vasyl Pesenko, 25, standing in his damaged kitchen. “I thought that it would fly away, but it flew closer and closer and everything blew away.”

The attack sparked 19 fires across Ukraine, Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko wrote on Telegram. “Russia must answer for every crime it commits. Until there is justice, there will be no security. For Ukraine. And for the world,” he said.

Death toll rises from recent attacks

The Russian Defense Ministry said an attack early Tuesday targeted arms plants in Kyiv, as well as military headquarters, troop locations, air bases and arms depots across Ukraine. “The goals of the strikes have been achieved, all the designated targets have been hit,” it said in a statement.

The death toll rose Tuesday from previous Russian strikes. In Kharkiv, rescuers found a body in the rubble of a building that was hit Saturday, Mayor Ihor Terekhov wrote on Telegram. The discovery brought the number of dead there to five, with five others potentially under the debris, Terekhov said.

In the northern city of Sumy, a 17-year-old boy died of his injuries Tuesday after a June 3 attack, acting Mayor Artem Kobzar wrote on Telegram, bringing the number killed to six.

Airports close amid strikes on Russia

The Russian Defense Ministry reported downing 102 Ukrainian drones over Russian regions and Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula Moscow illegally annexed from Kyiv in 2014.

The drones were downed both over regions on the border and deeper inside Russia, including central Moscow and Leningrad regions, according to the Defense Ministry. Flights were temporarily restricted at multiple Russian airports, including all four in Moscow and the Pulkovo airport in St. Petersburg, the country’s second-largest city.

AP journalist Illia Novikov contributed.

By LOLITA C. BALDOR and TARA COPP, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is expected to field sharp questions from members of Congress about his tumultuous start as Pentagon chief, including his sharing of sensitive military details over a Signal chat, in three separate Capitol Hill hearings beginning Tuesday.

Lawmakers also have made it clear they are unhappy that Hegseth has not provided details on the administration’s first proposed defense budget, which President Donald Trump has said would total $1 trillion, a significant increase over the current spending level of more than $800 billion.

It will be lawmakers’ first chance to ask Hegseth about a myriad of other controversial spending by the Pentagon, including plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on security upgrades to turn a Qatari jet into Air Force One and to pour as much as $45 million into a parade recently added to the Army’s 250th birthday bash, which happens to coincide with Trump’s birthday on Saturday.

Lawmakers may quiz Hegseth on the latest searing images coming out of the immigration raid protests in Los Angeles. Hegseth has deployed about 700 active-duty Marines to assist more than 4,100 National Guard troops in protecting federal buildings and personnel. But there are questions about what the troops will have to do and how much it will all cost.

Under the Posse Comitatus Act, troops are prohibited from policing U.S. citizens on American soil. Invoking the Insurrection Act, which allows troops to do that, is incredibly rare, and it’s not clear if Trump plans to do it.

The commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. Eric Smith, will be on Capitol Hill testifying at a separate budget hearing at the same time as Hegseth and is likely to face similar questions.

What Hegseth has focused on so far

Hegseth has spent vast amounts of time during his first five months in office promoting the social changes he’s making at the Pentagon. He’s been far less visible in the administration’s more critical international security crises and negotiations involving Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Gaza and Iran.

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Most recently, Hegseth directed the renaming of a Navy ship that had honored Harvey Milk, a slain gay rights activist who served as a sailor during the Korean War. His spokesman, Sean Parnell, said the renaming was needed to ensure “the names attached to all DOD installations and assets are reflective of the commander-in-chief’s priorities, our nation’s history, and the warrior ethos.”

Hegseth has posted numerous videos of his morning workouts with troops or of himself signing directives to purge diversity and equity programs and online content from the military. He has boasted of removing transgender service members from the force and firing so-called woke generals, many of whom were women.

He was on the international stage about a week ago, addressing an annual national security conference in Asia about threats from China. But a trip to NATO headquarters last week was quick and quiet, and he deliberately skipped a gathering of about 50 allies and partners where they discussed ongoing support for Ukraine.

His use of the Signal messaging app

Hegseth’s hearing Tuesday before the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee will be his first public appearance on Capitol Hill since he squeaked through his Senate confirmation with a tie-breaking vote. It was the closest vote of any Cabinet member.

While he has talked a lot about making the military more lethal, it was his use of the unclassified, unsecured Signal messaging app that quickly caught public attention.

Set up by then-national security adviser Mike Waltz, a group chat included Hegseth and other senior administration leaders and was used to share information about upcoming military strikes in Yemen.

The chat became a public embarrassment because the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, was inadvertently added to it. Waltz took responsibility for the gaffe, but Hegseth was roundly criticized for sharing details about the military strikes in this chat and in another one that included his wife and brother.

Multiple investigations are looking into his use of Signal. The Defense Department’s acting inspector general has been looking into the initial chat at the request of the Republican and Democratic leaders of the Senate Armed Services Committee. The Pentagon’s watchdog also is reviewing whether any of Hegseth’s aides were asked to delete any Signal messages.

Controversial Pentagon spending

While any number of those issues could come up at the House Armed Services Committee hearing Thursday, money issues are more likely to be the focus of the hearings Tuesday in the House and Wednesday before the Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee.

Already defense leaders have been grilled in other hearings on the plans to retrofit the Qatari jet and the costs of the military parade. Trump has long wanted a parade, and Army leaders defended it as a good way to attract new recruits.

Other questions may involve the costs of expanding the use of military forces to secure the southern border, the plans for the Golden Dome missile defense program, and how the department intends to fund modernization programs for drones and other critical weapons systems.

Editor’s Note: The following is excerpted with permission from Art Above Everything: One Woman’s Global Exploration of the Joys and Torments of a Creative Life (Beacon Press; June 10, 2025).

My dad drummed for presidents once. He drummed for admirals and ambassadors, movie stars and ministers. He drummed in halftime showcases of the NFL and Mardi Gras parades in New Orleans. He drummed in nightclubs from Amsterdam to Yokosuka. 

Long retired from the U.S. Navy jazz band that sailed him around the globe, Dad mostly drums in the garage now. His audience consists of Mom and me as we carry groceries from the car. Every time I pass him, during my brief visits home to Corpus, I think, I really should sit with him. Sit with him, listen to him, maybe even sing along when he switches to the keyboard, like I did when I was little. We especially loved the chorus of “The 59th Street Bridge Song” by Simon and Garfunkel: All is groooo-vy. But there are always meals to prepare, errands to run, tías to greet. Before I know it, Dad is driving me back to the airport.

Today, however, I set down the groceries and pull up a chair. Dad is practicing the rudiments, but, sensing my interest, he starts striking the snare again and again, revving it like an engine, before volleying from tom to tom so that the sound swells and drops, swells and drops. His sticks move so fast, they blur. A thunderclap of cymbals detonates a kick pedal boom that blasts me through the cosmos.

“Do you ever miss performing?” I blurt out, once I’ve recovered.

“Well, sure. Sure I do,” Dad says. His beard, once thick and red, has thinned and whitened. Sunspots speckle his hands. 

“But . . . I did it!” he says, then flashes his million-watt grin. With that, he returns to his sticks.

In his ninth year of Alzheimer’s, Dad loses the ability to walk. We decide as a family to move him into a neighborhood facility. Once a month, I fly to Corpus to discover something new he cannot do. How to brush his teeth. How to slip on his shoes. How to feed himself. How to talk. This month, it’s eye contact. His indigo eyes cannot find mine. Desperate to connect, I notice that—while his hands have long since curled into fists—there is still enough room for a drumstick. I slide one in until it feels secure, then raise up a book to meet it. Nothing happens. I tap the book against the drumstick, for encouragement. Still nothing. Dad stares off into space for a moment before closing his eyes. Mind racing, I remember the chant he once sang to his students to teach a particular groove.

“BOOM get a rat-trap/bigger than a cat-trap/BOOM!” I call out.

Dad’s eyes flutter open. A long moment passes. He taps out the groove, faintly but perfectly. Drumming is no longer his livelihood. It is his lifeline.

The night Mom texts me to come home, I am at a dinner party 550 miles away. Another guest takes one look at my shaking shoulders and insists on driving. It is nearly 10 p.m. by the time I’ve thrown mismatched clothes into a suitcase and locked up the house where I’ve been writing for the past two weeks. As we peel out of Marfa, the night air fills with skunk. I breathe in the musk, like Dad would do. Once, when he was little, his dog got sprayed while they were romping around the park. He has claimed to love the stench ever since, as it induced his favorite childhood memories. Riding sleighs with his brother Reed at Christmas. Pounding the beat in the high school marching band. The Mexican in me knows this skunk is a sign, then. I spend the next 545 miles trying not to interpret it.

We pull up to the care facility just after sunrise.

“Daddy, I’m here,” I call out as I enter his room.

Dad’s expression does not change, but there is movement beneath the blanket. I lift up a corner. His fist rises, as if in greeting. I wrap one hand around it and caress his face with the other. His indigo eyes are wide open. Peering into them, I chant words of love and gratitude. He moans in response.

At some point in the hours that ensue, Mom drives home for a shower. Holding our dad in our arms, my sister Barbara and I play his favorite songs. John Denver’s “Rocky Mountain High.” Judy Garland’s “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Frank Sinatra. Then I cue up Simon & Garfunkel’s “59th Street Bridge Song.” Moments after the chorus ends—All is groooo-vy—a nurse walks in. I peel my eyes away from Dad’s to ask how much time we have left. A couple of days, she says. His skin isn’t mottling yet. His legs are warm. His vitals have stabilized. There is still—

Barbara gasps. I look down. Dad is gone.

It is still dark the next morning when Alex, my sister’s husband, knocks on the door of my childhood bedroom. I roll out of bed and join him in the garage. He is breaking down the drum kit Grandma Madge bought Dad some sixty-five years ago. Prior to entering the care facility, Dad played it every day. I grab the throne, turn it upside down, and stare at the wingnuts. When I was little, I prided myself on knowing how to collapse every tripod in the kit. The muscle of that memory has since atrophied. I serve instead as the roadie, grabbing the pieces Alex disassembles and packing them into the trunk.

From Weber Road, we hang a left on Ocean Drive. The bay stretches out before us, black ink with white swells. We pull into Cole Park and set up Dad’s kit at the water’s edge. Alex, a professional photographer, grabs his Nikon and lenses. We kneel before the kit, waiting. Finally, the sun breaks the horizon. Its fire illuminates the bay, shimmering the cymbals. Alex photographs the kit from every angle, crouching, tiptoeing, lying flat on the damp grass, before turning to me and nodding. I have neither dressed nor groomed for this occasion but do as requested, stepping into the camera frame. Dad’s last sticks crisscross the floor tom. I take them into my hands. The blond wood is splintered from years of grazing rims. This is the closest I will ever come to holding his hands again.

A pair of early morning walkers pause and smile. They expect a concert to spring from my hands. A man on a bike stops to listen too. I look down at the kit. In a parallel universe, I would rub these sticks together, and thunder would follow. Yet somehow, in our forty-five years of co-existence, I never took one lesson from Dad. I don’t even know the proper way to hold the sticks. After an anxious moment, I raise them above my head and smash them atop the high tom, with enthusiasm, with love, but with nothing resembling skill.

My audience turns on their heels and walks away.

Nine days later, we place the cherrywood box of Dad’s ashes on the altar of a funeral home. Seventy of his closest friends, family, and former students file into the pews behind us. I give the eulogy. Barbara and Alex light the candles. My nephew Jordan gives the reading. We pass around baskets of CDs from Dad’s vast collection. An hour from now, Dad will receive a military sendoff at the Coastal Bend State Veterans Cemetery via a seven-gun salute. But first, we must give him his artist sendoff.

I play over the loudspeakers an excerpt from a jazz concert Dad played in Japan in 1961. Called “Skin and Bones,” the song features a two-minute drum solo. Dad utilizes the entire kit, unbelievably fast but with total control, manipulating the dynamics so that the sound swells and subsides, swells and subsides. Not even the saxophonists can keep up. His long-ago audience cheers him on—and soon enough, the attendees at his funeral do too.

Next, I screen a video of Dad playing a military march against the breakfast table. He is wearing his navy cap and windbreaker. It is our last Thanksgiving together. After zooming in on his hands, the camera pans over to those of his granddaughter, Analina, accompanying on doumbek. Dad started teaching her on a practice pad when she was five years old. When she finally graduated to his kit, the power transfixed her, as did the pleasure. By eleven, she had a sparkly gold kit of her own, which she played for hours each day. Upon graduating from St. Mary’s, she will take her sticks to the sea as Dad once did, only aboard a Carnival cruise ship instead of a naval aircraft carrier. 

In the video, Analina never takes her eyes off her teacher. Though capable of thunder, she abides by his slow, steady pulse. When the video ends, she squeezes the hand of her girlfriend before rising from the pew. Standing beneath the cherrywood box is Dad’s longtime throne. Analina takes her seat upon it. Before her is a snare drum and a pair of sticks. She slowly drops one stroke, then another, again and again, until she has created an opening roll. She segues into a sampling of the rudiments Dad taught her. Paradiddles. Flams. Single and double stroke rolls that predate the American Revolution, that signal to soldiers when to rise, when to fire, when to retreat. And finally, the “Downfall of Paris.” It is riveting, especially when Analina incorporates Dad’s signature move, slipping a drumstick under her right armpit after striking the left stick on 1, striking left again on 2 before transferring the stick to her right hand for the strike on 3, then removing the pit-stick with her left hand and slamming both sticks down on 4. From there, she transitions into her own improvisation. Something like jazz, but at a speed metal pace. Her skill is atavistic. 

Suddenly, Analina dips her head. Grief seems on the verge of overwhelming her—until something visibly intervenes. It straightens her spine, steadying her gaze.

“I don’t believe in god or the afterlife, I am not spiritual,” Analina will explain later. “But at the funeral, when I was closing it out, over my right shoulder, where his ashes were, he said, ‘Bring it back now, bring it back.’ It was so insane. I had never felt anything like that before in my life. But I felt it.”

Everyone in the funeral home feels it too. My father is actively channeling his art through his granddaughter. By and by, their double strokes start slowing, closing the roll. But their final beat lands like a roar.

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