Several dead in Austrian school shooting, local police say
(LONDON, PARIS and BELGRADE) — At least nine people are dead after a shooting on Tuesday at a school in Graz, Austria, the city’s mayor said, adding that the alleged shooter is also dead.
Austrian state police said earlier on social media that there had been several fatalities at the school, the BORG Dreierschützengasse.
Officers responded after gunshots were heard at the school, the Styria State Police said in a message posted on social media, later adding, “The school was evacuated and all persons were brought to a safe meeting point.”
Emergency vehicles, including Cobra tactical vehicles, had been deployed to the site, police said. Video shot near the scene showed a street lined with ambulances and other emergency vehicles.
The city of Graz sits in southern Austria, in the Styria province. It’s the second-largest Austrian city by population, with about 300,000 residents.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
ABC News’ Ellie Kaufman contributed to this report.
(LONDON) — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia is showing signs it may want to end the war after Zelenskyy spoke by phone with President Donald Trump, White House adviser Steve Witkoff and European leaders on Tuesday.
“During the call, there was a signal from Mr. Witkoff, who was also on the call, that Russia is ready to end the war, or at least to make a first step toward a ceasefire, and that this was the first such signal from them,” Zelenskyy said. “Everyone on the call felt positive about this — that there was some kind of shift.”
Zelenskyy emphasized there were no demands or concrete proposals from the U.S., just discussions, and it’s still unclear to him what exactly Russian President Vladimir Putin told Witkoff.
The Ukrainian president also said he was told that since a meeting with him and Trump already took place, one between Putin and Trump logically followed. “And then a trilateral meeting — the U.S., Ukraine and Russia – should take place,” Zelenskyy said.
The White House officially announced the summit between Trump and Putin will take place in Anchorage, Alaska, on Friday.
Prior to the call, Zelenskyy took a more pessimistic tone, saying Putin is preparing for “new offensive operations” despite Friday’s looming peace summit in Alaska — and as Russian forces appear to have scored significant front-line success in eastern Ukraine.
Fierce front-line combat and long-range drone and missile strikes are ongoing as the U.S. and Russia prepare for Friday’s meeting. Ukrainian representatives are not expected to attend, though a source in Zelenskyy’s office told ABC News on Monday that “everything is very fluid.”
Zelenskyy and his officials have gone on a diplomatic offensive ahead of the meeting, seeking to shore up foreign support behind Ukraine’s key demands in any peace deal.
On Monday, Zelenskyy suggested that Putin is not ready to end the fighting, despite Friday’s meeting in Alaska.
The president’s warning came as Russian troops broke through an area of the front north of the important defensive city of Pokrovsk — in the east of the country — advancing at least six miles toward the town of Dobropillia.
The breach could give Russian forces an opportunity to drive a wedge between two Ukraine’s key eastern defensive hubs — Pokrovsk and Kostyantynivka — and imperil other cities in the region.
Citing a report from his intelligence and military commands, Zelenskyy said in a statement that Putin “is definitely not preparing for a ceasefire or an end to the war. Putin is determined only to present a meeting with America as his personal victory and then continue acting exactly as before, applying the same pressure on Ukraine as before.”
Zelenskyy said on Telegram on Monday, “So far, there is no indication whatsoever that the Russians have received signals to prepare for a post-war situation. On the contrary, they are redeploying their troops and forces in ways that suggest preparations for new offensive operations.”
“If someone is preparing for peace, this is not what he does,” Zelenskyy said.
Zelenskyy has said Kyiv will not cede any territory to Russia, will not abandon its NATO ambitions and will not allow any limitations on its armed forces.
Among Moscow’s demands are that Ukraine cede several regions — not all of which are controlled by Russian troops — in the south and east of the country, accept curbs on the size and sophistication of its military and be permanently excluded from NATO. Putin also wants all international sanctions on Russia to be lifted in the event of a peace deal.
Russia’s demands, Zelenskyy has said, constitute an attempt to “partition Ukraine.”
Trump on Monday described the coming summit as a “feel-out meeting,” telling reporters, “I’m going in to speak to Vladimir, and I’m going to be telling him, ‘You got to end this war. You got to end it.'”
“And at the end of that meeting, probably in the first two minutes, I’ll know exactly whether or not a deal can be made,” Trump said.
When asked how he would know if a deal is possible, the president replied, “Because that’s what I do. I make deals.”
ABC News’ Yulia Drozd, Ellie Kaufman, Oleksiy Pshemyskyi, Kelsey Walsh and Michelle Stoddart contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — Humanitarians in Sudan, where a two-year civil war has given rise to the world’s most acute needs and made assistance increasingly difficult, warn that a vacuum left by cuts to U.S. funding for aid programs cannot be filled.
The civil war between the country’s army and a paramilitary group has displaced 11 million people internally and 4 million more are refugees in other countries. It’s the only place in the world where famine conditions have been confirmed in multiple locations, and the United Nations says 30 million Sudanese require assistance — or 60% of the country’s population.
The U.S. shuttered its arm for foreign assistance at the beginning of July, formerly the U.S. Agency for International Development, folding it under the State Department in a move Secretary of State Marco Rubio said marked the end of an “era of government-sanctioned inefficiency.” And the U.S. Senate could vote on legislation proposed by the Trump Administration as soon as this week to claw back over $8 billion in funding due to be dispersed for USAID in the remainder of the fiscal year.
“Moving forward, our assistance will be targeted and time limited,” Rubio wrote on Substack, adding the U.S. “will favor those nations that have demonstrated both the ability and willingness to help themselves and will target our resources to areas where they can have a multiplier effect.”
The months-long drawdown of USAID reduced its staff by 83% — down from 10,000 employees to a few hundred — and resulted in stop-work orders for grantees of its funds, including in Sudan. The State Department says the life-saving work of the agency, which distributes grants to aid implementers, is continuing, and said its new “America First” foreign assistance policy would be accountable to policymakers in Washington instead of global entities like the United Nations.
A senior State Department official last week called the end of USAID and the institution of a new overarching office at State “a milestone for American engagement in the world,” saying U.S. assistance abroad would be “linked up diplomatically” with U.S. interests.
The British medical journal Lancet found that in the absence of USAID’s funds and works, 14 million more people would die in the next five years, a third of those children under 5.
The senior State Department official downplayed the study.
“You can go back and relitigate all these little decisions. That’s not our focus. That’s not the secretary’s focus,” the official said. “We are excited about what sort of the America First foreign assistance agenda is going to look like, and how much impact we can have moving forward.”
Meanwhile, in the world’s most dire humanitarian crisis, where access for emergency food and medical workers has been made increasingly difficult by warring parties, people are fleeing violence on foot, children are malnourished, and Sudanese are dying from treatable conditions.
Pietro Curtaz, an emergency logistics coordinator for Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders, or MSF) said children he sees crossing Sudan’s border are malnourished at a rate of 29%.
The cuts to USAID — and the chaos that followed — have “come with a body count” in Sudan said Tom Perriello, the U.S. special envoy to Sudan in the last year of the Biden administration from 2024 to 2025.
There were 29 USAID employees in Sudan in 2023, at the outset of the war, according to then-administrator Samantha Powers.
The July 1 reprogramming of USAID into the State Department cut two additional U.S. staffers dedicated to Sudan, leaving just nine remaining in the region, said Andrea Tracy, a former USAID Sudan official who now runs her own humanitarian funding mechanism for the country.
Tracy saw colleagues lose their jobs on a daily basis as USAID wound down the programs it funded in the country, she told ABC News in a June phone call.
“I was talking to one of the regional directors the other day, and just that morning, she got an email saying another 40 programs are going to be cut,” she said. “So we haven’t found the floor yet.”
The dramatic reorientation of U.S. aid abroad comes as the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Germany have announced a scaling down of their own foreign assistance budgets and as humanitarian crises in places like Sudan — where the civil war has stretched into a third year — deepen.
According to data from the U.N., USAID provided 44% of the world’s humanitarian funding in 2024 for Sudan.
A U.N. spokesman told ABC News that “food aid, nutrition support and essential health services” have been cut back as the U.N.’s annual fund for Sudan is funded at only 14%.
“Without urgent additional support, the risk of famine and further deterioration remains high,” said Dan Teng’o, a spokesperson for the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
The State Department did not respond to requests by ABC News for the current data on its assistance commitments to Sudan after foreign aid freezes and layoffs.
But it said in a statement that “foreign assistance continues to arrive in Sudan,” citing a $56 million donation to the World Food Programme and a wheat grain delivery under USAID that would feed “as many as 3.2 million people for an entire month.”
It also said emergency assistance continues for refugees of Sudan who have been displaced to “seven neighboring countries due to the conflict.”
Important dollars for refugee assistance are in jeopardy, too, as humanitarians brace for the impacts of a proposed $1.7 billion cut to U.S. refugee assistance. As a part of Rubio’s reorganization, the State Department proposed a 50% reduction for aid to the world’s refugees in its 2026 budget request to Congress.
Chain reactions and health care at the brink
Humanitarians, who are legally protected under international law, have not been spared from the violence of the civil war, which has deprived people of the chance to stave off starvation and made access increasingly difficult.
Five humanitarians in June died when a U.N. convoy came under attack, the U.N. said.
In the void, small, grassroots organizations began to sprout when war broke out two years ago. A coalition known as Mutual Aid stood up emergency clinics and soup kitchens that became “a lifeline” for Sudanese, Tracy said. The coalition was backed by nearly 80% funding from USAID, organizers have said.
When the White House on President Donald Trump’s first day in office froze all U.S. assistance abroad, Tracy said, some 1,500 of the kitchens in Sudan closed almost immediately.
Perriello, whose role as the special envoy in Sudan has been left vacant by the Trump administration, said the Mutual Aid coalition was among a group of “edgy efforts … redefining approaches to aid.” These programs suffered the first and “deepest” cuts, he said.
Tracy said the pain from the cuts has been felt most acutely in the health sector, where medicine is not moving the way it used to and a “chain” of “different components that rely on each other” are not in place.
“Once you break one of those components, it all breaks,” she said.
MSF, which provides emergency medical care in Sudan, is operating in a country where the World Health Organization estimates only 20 to 30% of health facilities are operational.
“Wherever we look in Sudan, you will find humanitarian and medical needs. All those needs are overwhelming, urgent, and unfortunately, unmet,” Claire San Filippo, MSF’s emergency coordinator for Sudan, said.
A “case study” for impact of cuts
At the Tine border point in Chad, east of the violence-plunged Darfur region of Sudan, Curtaz, the emergency coordinator for MSF, told ABC News the cuts are impossible to miss.
“Clinically … we tend to see people that are in much worse condition than before because of all of that,” he said.
MSF is independent and donor-funded, taking no dollars from the U.S. government and therefore not directly affected by the cuts and shutdown of USAID.
Sudan has become a “case study” for the “impact of those cuts,” Curtaz said.
“One of the examples you can touch first,” he said, is the lack of shelter for refugees under a 110-degree sun. People arrive by foot in Chad having spent the day with no form of shelter, he said.
The 18,000 people hosted in Tine should have had at least 350 toilets, meeting a standard in acute situations of one toilet for every 50 people, Curtaz said. But for a group surging toward 20,000 people, it had only nine toilets.
Asked whether the large, interconnected humanitarian system is neglecting Sudan, Curtaz agreed.
“A majority of the weight is lying on us, on the host community and on grassroots organizations that are doing their best to support the population,” he said. “So, yes.”
“For the first time in my life,” Tracy said, MSF doctors and administrators told her “‘We really need the USAID money … to come back online, because we’re carrying way more of a load than we can handle. We’re falling apart here.’”
(LONDON and DELHI) — An Air India airliner carrying 242 passengers and crew en route to the United Kingdom from India crashed shortly after takeoff, with at least one passenger surviving the crash, local officials said.
“The flight, which departed from Ahmedabad at 13:38 hrs, was carrying 242 passengers and crew members on board the Boeing 787-8 aircraft,” the airline said in a statement posted on social media. “Of these, 169 are Indian nationals, 53 are British nationals, 1 Canadian national and 7 Portuguese nationals.”
The Civil Hospital in Ahmedabad confirmed to ABC News that Ramesh Vishwaskumar, one passenger on the downed Air India flight, is alive and hospitalized there.
Officials earlier said no survivors had been expected in the crash.
The plane, a Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner, crashed in the Meghaninagar area near Ahmedabad airport, in India’s Gujarat state, Malik said Thursday. Boeing’s Dreamliner planes had not previously been involved in an incident where passenger fatalities were reported. This plane had more than 41,000 hours of flying time, which is considered average for this aircraft, according to Cirium, an aviation analytics firm.
We are aware of initial reports and are working to gather more information,” Boeing said in a statement.
The Indian Directorate General of Civil Aviation said the plane “fell on the ground outside the airport perimeter” immediately after it departed from the airport. Video from the site appeared to show the jet disappear below the tree line, which was followed seconds later by a ball of fire and a thick plume of gray smoke.
“Heavy black smoke was seen coming from the accident site,” the Directorate General said in the statement.
India’s Central Industrial Security Force released photos from the site of the crash, which appeared to include civilians and emergency personnel working to put out flaming wreckage. One photo appeared to show the damaged tail of the airplane resting partially inside a hole in a building.
The Indian Civil Aviation Minister Ram Mohan Naidu Kinjarapu said he had “directed all aviation and emergency response agencies to take swift and coordinated action” to respond to the crash.
“Rescue teams have been mobilized, and all efforts are being made to ensure medical aid and relief support are being rushed to the site,” the minister added.
GE Aerospace, the aircraft engine manufacturer, said in a statement they have also activated their emergency response team and are “prepared to support our customer and the investigation.”
The local governor, Bhupendra Patel, spoke with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi after the crash to coordinate their emergency response, officials said. Patel said he ordered a so-called “green corridor” for emergency vehicles to travel between the crash site and local hospitals.
Modi in a statement confirmed that he’d been in touch with local officials.
“The tragedy in Ahmedabad has stunned and saddened us,” he said in a statement on social media. “It is heartbreaking beyond words. In this sad hour, my thoughts are with everyone affected by it.”
The airline initially announced the crash in a statement on social media, saying the flight had been “involved in an incident,” adding that it was “ascertaining the details” of the incident. The airline updated its social media profiles to display all-black profile pictures.
Air India also announced it will organize two relief flights, one each from Delhi and Mumbai, to Ahmedabad for the next of kin passengers and Air India staff.
Tata Group, an Indian multinational conglomerate of companies that owns Air India, said they will provide families of each person who has lost their life in the crash with ₹1 crore (about $116,000) and will also cover the medical expenses of those injured.
The flight was scheduled to fly from Ahmedabad airport, which is officially Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International Airport, to London’s Gatwick Airport.
It had been scheduled to depart at 9:50 a.m. local time, with a planned arrival time in London at 18:25 p.m. local time. Gatwick in a statement confirmed the scheduled arrival time.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said he was being updated on the situation in Ahmedabad, adding that his “thoughts are with the passengers and their families at this deeply distressing time.”
“The scenes emerging of a London-bound plane carrying many British nationals crashing in the Indian city of Ahmedabad are devastating,” Starmer said in a statement.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement he is “heartbroken to hear the news of the tragic plan crash” and will “stand with the emergency responders working to help those impacted.”
Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif also responded to the incident, saying he extends condolences “to the families of the victims grieving this immense loss.”
The captain had 8,200 hours of experience and the copilot had 1,100 hours of flying experience, India’s Directorate General added.
The National Transportation Safety Board will be leading a team of U.S. investigators traveling to India to assist in the investigation of the crash.
All information regarding the investigation will be provided by the Indian government.
ABC News’ Joe Simonetti, Ellie Kaufman, Clara McMichael, Sam Sweeney and Camilla Alcini contributed to this report.
