AP News in Brief at 11:04 p.m. EDT

Uvalde: Visitations, funerals and burials, one after another

UVALDE, Texas (AP) — It should have been the first day of a joyous week for Robb Elementary School students — the start of summer break. Instead on Monday, the first two of 19 children slain inside a classroom were being remembered at funeral visitations.

The gathering for 10-year-old Amerie Jo Garza was at Hillcrest Memorial Funeral Home in Uvalde, Texas, directly across from the grade school where the children, along with two teachers, were shot to death on Tuesday before the gunman himself was killed. Visitation for another 10-year-old, Maite Rodriguez, was at the town’s other funeral home.

Over the next two-and-a-half traumatic weeks, people in the southwestern Texas town will say goodbye to the children and their teachers, one heart-wrenching visitation, funeral and burial after another. As family and friends unleash their grief, investigators will push for answers about how police responded to the shooting, and lawmakers have said they’ll consider what can be done to stem the gun violence permeating the nation.

This week alone, funerals are planned for 11 children and teacher Irma Garcia.

On Monday, some mourners at Amerie’s visitation wore lilac or lavender shades of purple — Amerie’s favorites — at the request of her father, Angel Garza. Many carried in flowers, including purple ones.

___

EU leaders agree to ban 90% of Russian oil by year-end

BRUSSELS (AP) — European Union leaders agreed Monday to embargo most Russian oil imports into the bloc by year-end as part of new sanctions on Moscow worked out at a summit focused on helping Ukraine with a long-delayed package of new financial support.

The embargo covers Russian oil brought in by sea, allowing a temporary exemption for imports delivered by pipeline, a move that was crucial to bring landlocked Hungary on board a decision that required consensus.

EU Council President Charles Michel said the agreement covers more than two-thirds of oil imports from Russia. Ursula Von der Leyen, the head of the EU’s executive branch, said the punitive move will “effectively cut around 90% of oil imports from Russia to the EU by the end of the year.”

Michel said leaders also agreed to provide Ukraine with a 9 billion-euro ($9.7 billion) tranche of assistance to support the war-torn country’s economy. It was unclear whether the money would come in grants or loans.

Mikhail Ulyanov, Russia’s permanent representative to international organizations in Vienna, responded to the EU’s decision on Twitter, saying: “As she rightly said yesterday, Russia will find other importers.”

___

Hurricane Agatha, 1st of Pacific season, is ashore in Mexico

PUERTO ESCONDIDO, Mexico (AP) — The strongest hurricane on record to make landfall in May in the eastern Pacific swept ashore on a stretch of tourist beaches and fishing towns in southern Mexico on Monday.

Torrential rains and howling winds from Hurricane Agatha whipped palm trees and drove tourists and residents into shelters in a region that is sparsely populated except for a handful of small communities along the shore.

Oaxaca state’s civil defense agency showed families hustling into a shelter in Pochutla and a rock and mud slide that blocked the highway between that town and the state capital.

Agatha made landfall about 5 miles (10 kilometers) west of Puerto Angel as a strong Category 2 storm, with maximum sustained winds of 105 mph (165 kph). But it quickly began losing strength as it moved inland.

By evening, maximum sustained winds fell to 80 mph (130 kph). It was moving northeast at 8 mph (13 kph), heading toward the Gulf of Mexico, where its remnants might re-emerge.

___

Probe could shed light on police time lapse in Uvalde deaths

Since the Columbine High School massacre more than 20 years ago, police have been trained to quickly confront shooters in the horrific attacks that have followed.

But officers in Uvalde, Texas, took more than an hour to kill a shooter who massacred 19 children, a lapse of time that will likely be a key part of a Justice Department probe into the police response.

The rare federal review comes amid growing, agonized questions and shifting information from police. Authorities now say that several officers entered the elementary school just two minutes after alleged gunman Salvador Ramos and exchanged fire with him, but he wasn’t stopped until a tactical team entered a classroom more than an hour later.

That’s a confounding timeline for law enforcement experts like Jarrod Burguan, who was the police chief in San Bernardino, California, when the city was hit by a terrorist attack that killed 14 people in 2015. Officers entered that facility, a training center for residents with developmental disabilities, within two minutes of arriving.

“Columbine changed everything,” Burguan said Monday. Officers are now trained to form up and enter buildings to confront shooters as quickly as possible to prevent them from killing more people. “This has been drilled into this industry for years now.”

___

O’Rourke bets shooting will shake up Texas governor’s race

WASHINGTON (AP) — Still mourning a Texas mass shooting, Democrat Beto O’Rourke gave his long-shot campaign a jolt by imploring a national audience that it was finally time for real action to curb the proliferation of high-powered guns in his home state and across America.

That was 2019, and the former congressman was running for president when he declared during a debate, “Hell, yes, we’re gonna take your AR-15,” weeks after a gunman targeting Mexican immigrants killed 23 people at a Walmart in O’Rourke’s native El Paso.

Last week, following the massacre of 19 elementary school students and two teachers by an 18-year-old man with an AR-15-style rifle in Uvalde, Texas, O’Rourke — now campaigning for governor — again briefly seized the national political spotlight. This time, that meant crashing the news conference of the man he wants to unseat, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, and declaring — in a moment subsequently viewed widely online — that the carnage was “on you.”

O’Rourke is betting that the tragedy can reset the governor’s race in America’s largest red state — despite Abbott twice previously winning election by landslides and having begun the campaign with $55 million in the bank and despite gun culture looming larger in Texas than perhaps anywhere else.

It didn’t work in 2019. O’Rourke’s debate declaration won him praise from other Democrats on stage and a fundraising bump. But he dropped out of the race barely six weeks later.

___

Populist millionaire faces ex-rebel for Colombia presidency

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) — Leftist Sen. Gustavo Petro celebrated his first-round lead in Colombia’s presidential election in the way most politicians would: in a conference room packed with hundreds of supporters as confetti rained down upon him.

The man he’ll meet in a June 19 runoff had a different approach.

Rodolfo Hernandez sat at his home kitchen table and spoke to his followers for five minutes on Facebook Live.

“Today the country that does not want to continue with the same politicians, that does not want the same people who have brought us to our current situation, has won,” he declared.

The 77-year-old populist rode a wave of disgust at the country’s condition to what until just weeks ago would have been a shocking place in the runoff, surging late in the campaign past more conventional candidates.

___

War in Ukraine adds to food price hikes, hunger in Africa

MOGADISHU, Somalia (AP) — It now costs Ayan Hassan Abdirahman twice as much as it did just a few months ago to buy the wheat flour she uses to make breakfast each day for her 11 children in Somalia’s capital.

Nearly all the wheat sold in Somalia comes from Ukraine and Russia, which have halted exports through the Black Sea since Moscow waged war on its neighbor on Feb. 24. The timing could not be worse: The U.N. has warned that an estimated 13 million people were facing severe hunger in the Horn of Africa region as a result of a persistent drought.

Abdirahman has been trying to make do by substituting sorghum, another more readily available grain, in her flatbread. Inflation, though, means the price of the cooking oil she still needs to prepare it has skyrocketed too — a jar that once cost $16 is now selling for $45 in the markets of Mogadishu.

“The cost of living is high nowadays, making it difficult for families even to afford flour and oil,” she says.

Haji Abdi Dhiblawe, a businessman who imports wheat flour into Somalia, fears the situation will only worsen: There is also a looming shortage of shipping containers to bring food supplies in from elsewhere at the moment.

___

France blames ticket fraud for Champions League final chaos

PARIS (AP) — French authorities defended police on Monday for indiscriminately firing tear gas and pepper spray at Liverpool supporters at the Champions League final, while blaming industrial levels of fraud that saw 30,000 to 40,000 people try to enter the Stade de France with fake tickets or none at all.

UEFA ordered an independent report that it said would “examine decision making, responsibility and behaviors of all entities involved in the final” and be made public.

After a meeting into Saturday’s chaos, the French ministers of the sport and the interior shifted responsibility onto the Liverpool fans while not providing details on how they were sure so many fake tickets were in circulation. People with legitimate tickets bought through Liverpool and UEFA reported struggling to access the stadium.

“There was massive fraud at an industrial level and an organization of fake tickets because of the pre-filtering by the Stade de France and the French Football Federation, 70% of the tickets were fake tickets coming into the Stade de France,” Interior minister Gérald Darmanin said. “Fifteen percent of fake tickets also were after the first filtering … more than 2,600 tickets were confirmed by UEFA as non-validated tickets even though they’d gone through the first filtering.

The French sports ministry provided no evidence for its claims and it did not respond to a follow-up email after hosting a combative news conference.

___

Jubilee: Balcony moment tells UK monarchy’s story over years

LONDON (AP) — As a 9-year-old girl, Princess Elizabeth appeared with her family on Buckingham Palace’s balcony to mark her grandfather George V’s Silver Jubilee, an excited grin on her face as she gazed at the crowds below.

The better part of a century later, the former princess — now 96-year-old Queen Elizabeth II — is expected to take to the same balcony this week to smile and wave at millions celebrating her 70 years on the throne.

The balcony appearance is the centerpiece of almost all royal celebrations in Britain, a chance for the public to catch a glimpse of the family assembled for a grand photo to mark weddings, coronations and jubilees. Every June, the extended royal family put on their finest uniforms, hats and frocks and gather to mark the queen’s birthday, celebrated with an extravagant military parade known as Trooping the Color and concluding with the balcony moment after the Royal Air Force flies past.

Balcony images through the decades chronicle the changing faces of the monarchy, and offer snapshots of many milestones in Elizabeth’s life. As a young woman, the princess donned her military uniform and stood alongside Winston Churchill to celebrate the end of World War II in 1945.

Eight years later, she wore the Imperial State Crown and regal robes to greet a sea of ecstatic subjects after her own coronation.

___

WHO: Monkeypox won’t turn into pandemic, but many unknowns

LONDON (AP) — The World Health Organization’s top monkeypox expert said she doesn’t expect the hundreds of cases reported to date to turn into another pandemic, but acknowledged there are still many unknowns about the disease, including how exactly it’s spreading and whether the suspension of mass smallpox immunization decades ago may somehow be speeding its transmission.

In a public session on Monday, WHO’s Dr. Rosamund Lewis said it was critical to emphasize that the vast majority of cases being seen in dozens of countries globally are in gay, bisexual or men who have sex with men, so that scientists can further study the issue. She urged those at risk to be careful.

“It’s very important to describe this because it appears to be an increase in a mode of transmission that may have been under-recognized in the past,” said Lewis.

“At the moment, we are not concerned about a global pandemic,” she said. “We are concerned that individuals may acquire this infection through high-risk exposure if they don’t have the information they need to protect themselves.”

She warned that anyone is at potential risk for the disease, regardless of their sexual orientation. Other experts have pointed out that it may be accidental that the disease was first picked up in gay and bisexual men, saying it could quickly spill over into other groups if it is not curbed.