Graz school shooting survivors not in life-threatening condition, hospitals say
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(BELGRADE and LONDON) — Eleven people injured in a school shooting in Graz, Austria, on Tuesday are still being treated but are not in life-threatening condition, officials at the three hospitals treating the patients told ABC News.
Ten people were killed in the shooting at a high school in Austria’s second-largest city on Tuesday, with the shooter also dying by suicide in a bathroom during the incident, according to local officials.
Twelve people were initially injured, one of whom died in hospital on Tuesday.
Austrians observed a nationwide minute of silence on Wednesday morning to mourn the victims.
The suspect, a 21-year-old Austrian citizen and former student of the school who never graduated, acted alone, authorities said. The shooter used a long gun and a handgun which were found at the scene and are now being investigated, a Styria police spokesperson said.
The suspect — who was not employed at the time of the shooting — legally owned the two weapons used in the attack, officials said.
Police had no prior records on the suspect, a spokesperson said, and there was no prior warning. Officials searching the premises where the suspect lived found a farewell letter, but police have not offered a motive for the attack.
“The school shooting in Graz is a national tragedy that has deeply shocked our entire country,” Austrian Chancellor Christian Stocker said in a statement posted on social media.
He added, “Young people suddenly ripped from the lives they had ahead of them. There are no words for the pain and grief that all of us — all of Austria — are feeling right now.”
ABC News’ Morgan Winsor, Kevin Shalvey, Felix Franz and Megan Forrester contributed to this report.
(VATICAN CITY) — The process by which a new pope is elected has undergone numerous changes in the nearly two millennia that the Catholic Church has existed, with the current procedure a combination of ancient traditions and modern updates as recent as 2013, reflecting changes instituted by Pope Benedict XVI. Even so, the essential ritual has remained largely unchanged for centuries.
Pope Francis’ death sets into motion a series of formalized rites and observances that occur during what is called the interregnum, which begins upon the pontiff’s passing and ends with the election of his successor. The period of time during which the papacy is vacant is known as the sede vacante, Latin for “vacant seat.”
The pope’s death is first ritually verified by the cardinal camerlengo, or chamberlain, who who runs the ordinary affairs of the Vatican city-state during the sede vacante. A traditional nine days of mourning then commences. This includes the pope’s funeral, which per tradition is held within four to six days of his death, after his body lies in state for several days in St. Peter’s Basilica. This also allows global dignitaries and heads of state to pay their respects and attend the funeral.
It’s also during the interregnum that all cardinals under the age of 80 who are eligible to participate are summoned to Rome to prepare for the secret conclave inside the Sistine Chapel to choose the next pontiff, a gathering that typically commences between 15 to 20 days after the pope’s death. The cardinals spend the interregnum housed in private rooms in the Domus Marthae Sanctae — essentially a residence hotel in the Vatican with dining facilities that usually houses visiting clergy and laity. Per tradition, the cardinals are cut off from the outside world, including televisions, phones, computers and newspapers.
The College of Cardinals will cast as many as four ballots in a single day for the next pope, with a two-thirds majority required to elect a pontiff. After each vote, the ballots are burned and smoke is released from the Sistine Chapel’s chimney as a signal to the throngs holding vigil in St. Peter’s Square. Black smoke — fumata nera in Italian — indicates an inconclusive vote, while white smoke — fumata bianca — will signify that a new pope has been elected. If three days pass with no pope elected, voting can be suspended for a day to allow the cardinals time for reflection before the next round of ballots are cast.
Once the College of Cardinals elects a new pope, the candidate is formally asked in the Sistine Chapel if he accepts the election and, if so, to choose his papal name. While popes have the option of keeping their baptismal name, every pope for the last 470 years has chosen to change his name, usually to honor a predecessor and to signal their intention to emulate his example.
The interregnum ends when the newly elected pope makes his first public appearance in his new role, stepping onto the central balcony at St. Peter’s Basilica, overlooking St. Peter’s Square, to bless the gathered crowd there after being introduced by the senior cardinal deacon with the traditional declaration “Habemus papum” – Latin for “We have a pope.”
LONDON — The “Make America Great Again” roadshow arrived in Europe this week with events in two nations where American conservatives see prime opportunities for a new transatlantic political culture — one molded by President Donald Trump’s right-wing populism and imbued with grand “clash of civilizations” rhetoric.
The Conservative Political Action Conference — CPAC — opened its week of European events on Tuesday in Jasionka, Poland, where Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was among the speakers, urging Poles to vote for right-wing presidential candidate Karol Nawrocki in this weekend’s runoff election.
Noem eschewed the diplomatic norm of non-alignment in elections in allied nations, as have other administration officials including Vice President JD Vance. “You will be the leaders that will turn Europe back to conservative values,” she told attendees in Jasionka.
“We need you to elect the right leader,” Noem said, dismissing Nawrocki’s rival — liberal Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski — as “an absolute train wreck of a leader.”
“Donald Trump is a strong leader for us, but you have an opportunity that you have just as strong of a leader in Karol if you make him the leader of this country,” Noem said.
CPAC’s next stop will be in Budapest, Hungary, on Thursday, hosted by populist Prime Minister Viktor Orban — a totem of the European anti-establishment right wing who has long enjoyed cozy relations with Trump.
Peter Kreko, the director of the Political Capital Institute in Budapest, said Orban is positioning himself as “another recipient of the MAGA soft power export.”
“Orban is still positioning himself as someone who is exporting his campaign tactics, who can help others in terms of campaign consultancy and provide help from the United States,” Kreko said. “He’s trading off of his good partnership with Donald Trump.”
On the web page promoting CPAC’s Hungary event, the organization hit out at “corrupt elites” who it said “betray all that once made us great: patriotic virtue has been replaced by internationalism, common sense by bureaucracy and tradition by woke madness.”
“People on both sides of the Atlantic have risen up against this repackaged version of socialism, but success can only be complete when the tides of change converge and the age of patriotism begins at both poles of the West,” CPAC wrote.
Internationalism is front and center in the CPAC event agendas. Among the speakers in Budapest will be American conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, Yair Netanyahu — the son of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Santiago Abascal, the leader of Spain’s far-right Vox party.
Also attending will be a host of other European conservative politicians from Poland, Austria, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Denmark, France, Estonia and Greece — among others.
“With the triumph of Donald Trump and the rise of the European Right, the Age of the Patriots of Western Civilization has begun — CPAC Hungary 2025 will be the hub of this movement,” the organizing website said.
But the CPAC events come at a moment of peril for transatlantic relations. Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs threaten to touch off a costly trade war with the European Union.
Trump has made no secret of his disdain for the bloc. “Now we’re going to charge the European Union,” Trump said when unveiling his tariff plans in April. “They’re very tough. Very, very tough traders. You know, you think of the European Union, very friendly. They rip us off. It’s so sad to see. It’s so pathetic.”
Trump announced last weekend that his planned 50% tariffs on EU goods would be delayed into July. But the bloc remains on a collision course with the Trump administration.
The economic and political aspirations of all EU leaders rely heavily on the bloc’s own fortunes, even for those populist leaders like Orban who so often define themselves in opposition to the grand European project.
The president’s European offensive could yet sour budding ties between the MAGA movement and its foreign allies, if the latter’s “core interests appear directly threatened by Trumpism,” Celia Belin, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and head of its Paris office, told ABC News.
Kati Piri, Hungarian-born member of the Dutch parliament and the Labour Party’s spokesperson for foreign affairs, migration and asylum, told ABC News in a statement that “Trump’s unilateralist policies are designed to hurt all Europeans, and that so-called allies will not be spared.”
“Trump’s continued threats of tariffs on EU products and global trade wars are making him an unpopular friend to have — and this is fragmenting the unity of the global right,” Piri suggested.
The glitz and glamour of CPAC’s Budapest event will be welcome for Orban, Kreko said, as the prime minister grapples with his own domestic challenges — not least the meteoric rise of liberal opposition leader Peter Magyar.
Around 10,000 people rallied in Budapest earlier this month to protest government plans to restrict the rights of independent media organizations — the latest in a wave of large protests against Orban and his Fidesz party government.
Kreko said Orban’s popularity is flagging after 15 years of uninterrupted power, even as he positions himself at the forefront of the nascent right-wing “illiberal international.”
“Orban is nowhere as popular as he was, let’s say in 2022, when he won the last elections,” Kreko said. “His popularity is waning, he is having a hard time getting it back and he also uses increasingly authoritarian tools to be able to keep power.”
“He has a hard time at home persuading his own constituency that the regime he is promoting all over the world is as powerful, as beautiful, as successful as it is seen by the MAGA camp in the United States,” Kreko added.
Trump’s America has become the center of gravity of the global right-wing movement — with the weight of the federal government and the broader national conservative movement behind it.
This week Samuel Samson — a senior advisor for the State Department’s Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor — gave an indication of the prevailing winds in American transatlantic policy, publishing an article setting out “the need for civilizational allies in Europe.”
Claiming the existence of “an aggressive campaign against Western civilization itself,” Samson accused European governments of having “devolved into a hotbed of digital censorship, mass migration, restrictions on religious freedom and numerous other assaults on democratic self-governance.”
Opening the CPAC event in Poland on Tuesday, chairman Matt Schlapp told attendees, “The globalists intend to take each one of us out one by one — to shame us, to silence us, to bankrupt us, to ruin us, to make our kids turn against us.”
That is why, he said, it was important to “win all these elections, including in Poland, that are so important to the freedom of people everywhere.”
For now, Kreko suggested the transatlantic MAGA project is incomplete, as did recent election results in Romania, Portugal and the first round of Poland’s presidential vote in which conservative and far-right candidates did not win power.
“What is common between Trump, Orban and many others in central and eastern Europe is that they really want to build this illiberal international,” Kreko said.
“But at the same time, we also have to be careful about overestimating its impact,” he said.
(LIVERPOOL, England) — The suspect accused of ramming a car into a crowd in Liverpool at a Premier League victory parade on Monday has been arrested for attempted murder, reckless driving and is believed to have been on drugs during the attack, officials said during a press conference on Tuesday.
Merseyside Police said on Tuesday that 65 people were injured from the attack, and 11 — all in stable condition — still remain in the hospital.
Officials said a robust traffic plan was in place for the parade, which included Water Street — where the attack occurred. But, the street was temporarily reopened for an ambulance to treat someone suffering a suspected heart attack, and the 53-year-old suspect followed the ambulance inside the crowd.
The attack is still not being treated as a terrorism and authorities are continuing their investigation. The suspect remains in custody and is being interviewed by officials.
Police said they will not speculate on the attack and encourage others to “refrain from sharing distressing content online.”
