By CLAIRE RUSH

SALEM, Ore. (AP) — A dozen people were injured in a stabbing attack at an Oregon homeless shelter on Sunday night, and a suspect was arrested, police said.

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A man with an eight-inch knife walked into the lobby of the Union Gospel Mission in Salem around 7:15 p.m., the Salem Police Department said on Monday. The man had been talking to people in the lobby when he allegedly pulled out a knife and stabbed several people, according to police.

Other people in the vicinity were hurt when they tried to intervene, police said. The man then left the building and stabbed others who were nearby, sitting outside.

Police arrested a suspect identified as Tony Williams, 42, across the street from the shelter.

Eleven victims, including two shelter staff members, were taken to a hospital for treatment and a 12th victim was identified as officers interviewed witnesses. Police said the victims suffered “varying types of injuries.” All of the injured were men between the ages of 26 and 57, police said.

Five people remained hospitalized Monday with serious injuries.

This image taken from video provided by KATU-TV shows police investigating a stabbing at a shelter in Salem, Ore., June 1, 2025. (KATU-TV via AP)

Police haven’t specified a motive for the stabbings, but said it didn’t seem targeted at people who are homeless.

Craig Smith, the shelter’s executive director, said in an online statement that the two staff members were among those still hospitalized on Monday.

“As you can imagine, our guests and staff are shaken up and grieving,” the statement said. “Already we are in conversation and meetings with staff and guests to discuss safety improvements, to the best of our ability, moving forward.”

Williams was traveling by bus from Portland to Deschutes County when he got off in Salem on Saturday, according to Salem Police Violent Crimes Unit detectives. The next night, Williams arrived at the shelter shortly before the call for police assistance.

“I’m in disbelief that something like this could happen. We are most concerned with those who are still in hospital and for those who were just there. It’s a difficult thing to process,” Salem Mayor Julie Hoy said.

Bobby Epperly was on the second floor when he said he saw the man screaming outside at traffic and holding a knife, the Salem Statesman Journal reported.

“It’s like a horror movie,” Epperly said. He said he didn’t realize some people had already been stabbed inside the building until he went downstairs and saw “blood everywhere.”

Up to 150 men seek refuge at the shelter each night, according to its website.

The entire state of Minnesota continues to be affected by the wildfire smoke from Canada, triggering an air quality alert through noon on Wednesday, according to officials.

Parts of the state are in the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency’s most severe “hazardous” category because of the levels of fine particles in the air.

According to the MPCA:

Northwestern Minnesota is in the maroon category, meaning the air quality is hazardous for everyone, with the potential for serious heart and lung effects such as asthma attack, heart attack, or stroke. Most people will experience irritated eyes, nose and throat, coughing, chest tightness or shortness of breath.
North central Minnesota is in the purple category, or very unhealthy for everyone.
Central and northeastern Minnesota, including the Twin Cities, is in the red category, or unhealthy for everyone.
Southwestern and southeastern Minnesota is in the orange category, or unhealthy for sensitive groups.

More than 25,000 residents in three provinces of Canada have been evacuated because of wildfires. Most of the evacuated residents were from Manitoba, which declared a state of emergency last week.

Water bombers fighting the fires in Canada have been intermittently grounded due to heavy smoke and interference from drones.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service deployed an air tanker to Alberta and said it would send 150 firefighters and equipment to Canada.

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By MICHAEL R. SISAK and LARRY NEUMEISTER

NEW YORK (AP) — A former personal assistant who accuses Sean “Diddy” Combs of rape testified Monday that she continued sending the hip-hop mogul loving messages for years after her job ended in 2017 because she was “brainwashed.”

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The woman, testifying under the pseudonym “Mia,” pushed back at defense lawyer Brian Steel’s suggestions that she fabricated her claims to cash in on “the #MeToo money grab against Sean Combs.”

Mia was on the witness stand for her third and final day at Comb’s federal sex trafficking and racketeering trial in Manhattan, which is in its fourth week of testimony.

Combs, 55, has pleaded not guilty. His lawyers concede he could be violent, but he denies using threats or his music industry clout to commit abuse.

Steel had Mia read aloud numerous text messages she sent Combs. In one from 2019, she told Combs that he’d rescued her in a nightmare in which she was trapped in an elevator with R. Kelly, the singer who has since been convicted of sex trafficking.

“And the person who sexually assaulted you came to your rescue?” Steel asked incredulously. He rephrased, asking if she really dreamed of being saved by a man “who terrorized you and caused you PTSD?” Prosecutors objected and the judge sustained it.

It was one of many objections during a combative and often meandering cross-examination that stood in contrast to the defense’s gentler treatment of other prosecution witnesses. Several times, the judge interrupted Steel, instructing him to move along or rephrase complicated questions.

In an Aug. 29, 2020, message to Combs, Mia recalled happy highlights from her eight years working for him — such as drinking champagne at the Eiffel Tower at 4 a.m. and rejecting Rolling Stones front man Mick Jagger’s offer to take her home — saying she remembered only “the good times.”

In the same message, Mia mentioned once feeling “bamboozled” by a woman. Steel asked why she didn’t say Combs had bamboozled her as well.

“Because I was still brainwashed,” Mia answered.

Asked to explain, Mia said that in an environment where “the highs were really high and the lows were really low,” she developed “huge confusion in trusting my instincts.”

When Steel suggested her assault claims were made up, Mia responded: “I have never lied in this courtroom and I never will lie in this courtroom. Everything I said is true.”

She said she felt a moral obligation to speak out after others came forward against Combs, telling jurors: “It’s been a long process. I’m untangling things. I’m in therapy.”

Mia alleges Combs forcibly kissed her and molested her at his 40th birthday party, and raped her months later in a guest room at his Los Angeles home. She testified last week that the assaults were “random, sporadic, so oddly spaced out” she didn’t think they’d happen again.

For a long time, Mia said, she kept the assaults to herself — staying quiet even after her friend, Combs’ former longtime girlfriend Cassie, sued Combs in November 2023 alleging sexual abuse. The lawsuit, settled within hours for $20 million, touched off Combs’ criminal investigation.

Mia followed Cassie as the second of three key prosecution witnesses. The third, using the pseudonym “Jane,” will testify later this week.

Mia said she didn’t feel comfortable telling Cassie, the R&B singer whose legal name is Casandra Ventura, that she was also victimized. She said she didn’t tell prosecutors when she first met with them in January 2024, waiting about six months to do so.

“Just because you find out something doesn’t mean you immediately snap out of it. I was still deeply ashamed and I wanted to die with this,” Mia testified.

Steel suggested Mia only told prosecutors after she obtained legal counsel, accusing the witness of trying to lay the groundwork for a lawsuit against Combs.

But Judge Arun Subramanian shut down Steel’s attempts to ask Mia if she chose her attorney because of that lawyer’s success getting hefty judgments for writer E. Jean Carroll in sex abuse-related lawsuits against President Donald Trump.

Prosecutors warned that Steel’s treatment of Mia in the closely watched Combs case could deter victims from testifying in other, unrelated cases.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Maurene Comey accused Steel of yelling at and humiliating Mia, and argued that picking apart her social media posts was excessive and irrelevant.

“We are crossing the threshold into prejudice and harassing this witness,” Comey told Subramanian after jurors left the courtroom for a break.

Subramanian said he hadn’t heard any yelling or sarcasm in Steel’s questions but cautioned the lawyer not to overdo it with questions about Mia’s social media posts.

“It’s never been more important that the public and private sector address this safety crisis by expanding our network of pools and supporting programs that teach children to swim.”

The public pool at Goodhue Park in Staten Island in 2021. (Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)

Confession time: I’m a lifelong New Yorker who grew up in a neighborhood that abuts the East River, secured millions of dollars to restore one of the city’s most iconic public pools, and never learned how to swim. 

Unfortunately, the same is true for many children growing up around the city today. It’s why, as we prepare for summer, many New Yorkers are extra vigilant about their children going near the water to cool off. Headlines about missing children that evolve into drownings have become far too common from June to August, when young people with few other outlets seek the unfamiliar terrain of the water to cool off. 

This has to stop. It’s never been so important for us to reverse the trend and ensure as many New York City children as possible learn how to swim. It will certainly take all of us to get this done, but there’s already a network of programs like the one I now run ready to work with city and state leaders to make this happen. It’s never been more important that the public and private sector address this safety crisis by expanding our network of pools and supporting programs that teach children to swim. 

We know the challenge of the work ahead. Seven people drowned while swimming off of New York City beaches last year, which marked the highest number of fatalities since the pandemic. Almost all of those were off the shores of the Rockaways. The City Council to its credit has raised the alarm bell, as Speaker Adrienne Adams noted in her State of the City address last year that one in four New York children don’t know how to swim. The ratio of Black New York children, she noted, is an alarming one in three. 

There isn’t a magic bullet to a solution here. Of course, we always need more lifeguards at city beaches to spring into action when there’s an emergency. Then there’s the fact that a City Council analysis found a whopping 3 million New Yorkers—more than a third of our population—live in a district that doesn’t have a public pool. That alone is a problem because pools provide a safe, well-staffed venue for young people to learn and then safely swim. 

Public pools are important and the 91 currently operated is certainly not enough. Even still, all but 12 of those pools are outdoors, which means they’re only open basically two months out of the year—essentially Fourth of July to Labor Day. That doesn’t match the need when climate change has made it hotter from May into late September (if we’re lucky). 

That’s where the non-profit space must step up to fill the gap. At Variety Boys & Girls Club of Queens, we’ve sought to do our part by offering different swim programs throughout the year. These lessons come at various levels based on children’s familiarity with the water, their age, and other factors. Apart from just lessons, we provide free access to many of the 4,000 students in our program. 

Our mission is to ensure the children who grow up in the Queensbridge, Ravenswood, Astoria and Woodside Houses have a healthy relationship with the water that surrounds them. We, along with the network of other swim programs throughout the city, have done our part to reverse this trend. In many cases, we have worked together to ensure this generation is the last to not have a safe relationship with the 520 miles of coastline that make up New York City. 

This kind of commitment is why Variety Boys & Girls Club of Queens has made swimming an essential part of our plans for the future. Our hope is to break ground later this year on a new, $293 million facility that will deliver the first planetarium to Queens, along with new housing, a school, and  a state-of-the-art theater. Our new aquatic center will be the crown jewel of this proposed project which will include a regulation-sized eight lane pool, wading pool for youth beginning their swimming journey with their parents, and wet locker rooms open year round. T

his vision became closer to reality this spring thanks to a $2.5 million allocation from State Sen. Jessica Ramos, who grew up using our existing pool. This new facility will allow us to serve 16,000 youth here in Queens, giving each a chance for interaction with the aquatics center and potentially lifesaving swimming lessons. 

As we continue to raise funds for this project, we’re also committed to expanding swimming programs right now because our children cannot wait. We need to build on the existing capital commitments to build more public pools as well as support the nonprofit-owned ones that operate throughout the year. 

With the weather getting warmer, we all have a role to play. Let’s ensure the tragedies of last summer don’t repeat themselves this year.  

Costa Constantinides is the CEO of Variety Boys & Girls Club of Queens and previously represented City Council District 22. 

The post Opinion: NYC Needs a Serious Conversation About Swimming appeared first on City Limits.