AP News in Brief at 12:04 a.m. EDT

Shooting at a Seattle food festival leaves 2 dead and wounds 5, fire official says

SEATTLE (AP) — A shooting killed two people and wounded five including a child on Sunday evening during a popular food festival near the Space Needle in Seattle, a city fire department spokesperson said.

The gunfire erupted around 6 p.m. at the Seattle Center during the Bite of Seattle festival. Police were investigating the shooting and urged people to avoid the area just northwest of downtown. Authorities did not immediately say if anyone was in custody.

Two people died at the scene, said Grace Nuñez, spokesperson for the Seattle Fire Department.

Five patients were transported to Harborview Medical Center, including a 56-year-old woman in serious condition, Nuñez said.

A 2-year-old boy, a 23-year-old man and a 39-year-old woman are in stable condition, while a 40-year-old woman had minor injuries, she said.

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The suspect in the deadly Berlin Pride attack is killed in a confrontation with police

BERLIN (AP) — The suspect in the deadly Berlin Pride attack that left one person dead and 29 injured was shot and killed by police during a confrontation on Sunday in a suburb of the city, authorities said.

Abdul Ballout, a German citizen with Lebanese roots, was killed following a search that lasted nearly 24 hours after the attack in downtown Berlin. Prosecutors said he had previously sought to join the militant Islamic State group.

Ballout was suspected of driving a van into a crowd near Berlin’s Pride festival Saturday night before apparently stabbing others with a machete in what authorities believe was an Islamic extremist terror attack.

Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said the attack occurred a few hundred meters (yards) from a party near the Brandenburg Gate that was supposed to close out the city’s Pride festival.

Ballout was tracked down around 6 p.m. Sunday at a garden in Spandau, a Berlin suburb, the city’s police department wrote on X. They said he apparently ran toward officers with a sharp instrument, and police fired at least one shot. He died at the scene.

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US and Iran pause their attacks after days of escalation

CAIRO (AP) — The United States and Iran paused their attacks for a second straight day Sunday, as efforts continued to bring them back to negotiations on an interim ceasefire deal largely undermined by recent exchanges of fire.

It was not clear why the U.S. has paused after targeting Iranian coastal areas and infrastructure in a nearly two-week escalation sparked by Iran’s firing at ships trying to transit the Strait of Hormuz. The Pentagon did not respond to questions.

U.S. President Donald Trump is “giving talks some space. He’s giving it a little bit of room,” Mike Waltz, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, told Fox News. “We’ve had both Oman and Iran, and a number of our other negotiators, engaged at every level, from the most senior levels all the way down to the technical level over the past few weeks, and particularly in the past few days.”

Waltz dismissed the idea that the U.S. stockpile of interceptors crucial in defending against Iranian attacks is running low, but experts have questioned how long both the U.S. and Iran can afford to keep up attacks.

Since the U.S. has halted attacks for the past two nights, Iran has as well, its army spokesperson told Iran’s state TV on Sunday. Tehran in recent days has counterattacked against countries in the region hosting U.S. military forces, killing at least three service members at a base in Jordan and one in Iraq.

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Wildfires in France drive 250,000 people from their homes and creep toward wine city of Bordeaux

LEGE-CAP FERRET, France (AP) — A raging wildfire in southwest France forced the evacuation of 55,000 people overnight Sunday, bringing the total forced out of their homes to a staggering 220,000 in one region alone, as flames crept ever closer to the wine region city of Bordeaux. Neighboring Spain oversaw its own fire evacuations on the country’s east coast.

Shifting and gusting winds, as well as arid conditions, complicated massive efforts to limit the spread of the monster blaze burning out of control since midweek in France’s Gironde region, where Bordeaux is located. Authorities issued overnight evacuation orders for five more localities southwest of the historic city.

“The situation remains very unfavorable,” French Interior Minister Laurent Nunez said after what he described as “another difficult night” for fire crews battling round-the-clock against the blaze that has burned an area four times the size of Paris.

“The fire became extremely virulent again and unpredictable, generating its own winds and advancing erratically toward the Bordeaux metropolitan area,” Nunez posted on X.

“It became calmer by the end of the night,” the minister added.

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Exclusive: In a Ukrainian bomb shelter, Laura Loomer explains shift on Russia’s war

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Laura Loomer became infamous for spreading conspiracy theories online. Now, as she travels across Ukraine to see the damage inflicted by Russia in its yearslong war, she wants to admit that she fell for some falsehoods of her own.

A close ally of President Donald Trump, Loomer has completely reversed her longtime criticism of Ukraine and is urging fellow conservatives to be wary of Moscow’s propaganda, which she blames for duping large swaths of the American right.

“You don’t need to listen to a podcaster and let them influence your opinion about a country. You can look at those facts yourself,” she told The Associated Press in Kyiv shortly after returning from a trip close to the front line in Ukraine’s east. The interview was supposed to take place in Loomer’s hotel, but it had to be moved to the building’s underground bomb shelter as the city faced another ballistic missile attack.

Loomer has remained influential with Trump despite not having an official role, and she said they spoke over the phone after she sat down with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. She also said that she expects to meet with Trump after returning from her trip.

Loomer’s turnaround on Ukraine has been welcomed by the country’s leaders, whose relationships with Trump have been strained at times. But it has also stirred confusion, surprise and suspicion in the United States. She continues to insist that Ukraine is not paying for her travels.

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2 dead in Ukraine from Russian attacks, 4 more in Russian-held area hit by Ukrainian drones

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russian ballistic missiles struck the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv early on Sunday, setting off fires and wounding at least three civilians, while attacks on other parts of the country later killed at least two people, local officials said.

The strikes came as Ukraine’s successful drone attacks have stalled the Russian army’s advances in an expanded campaign inside Russia that has been causing fuel shortages and piling pressure on Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

In Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine, Kremlin-installed authorities said a Ukrainian drone strike had killed four civilians in the city of Horlivka. According to Ivan Prikhodko, the city’s Russian-appointed mayor, the city had been under fire since the early hours of Sunday.

According to Russia’s defense ministry, Russian forces overnight struck down 133 Ukrainian drones over Russia, the Black Sea and Crimea, the peninsula that Moscow forcibly annexed from Ukraine in 2014.

Blasts rocked Kyiv in the early hours of Sunday, with falling debris sparking a blaze in a tower block near the historic center, according to mayor Vitali Klitschko.

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As Trump boosts nuclear power, regulators seek to eliminate a longstanding radiation safety practice

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is proposing to eliminate a foundational safety principle that has for 50 years minimized the radiation people in the United States are exposed to and that has been adopted around the world.

Currently, facilities such as nuclear plants, hospitals or academic institutions that use radioactive materials must ensure radiation exposures are kept “as low as reasonably achievable” — the ALARA principle. The NRC proposal would abandon that philosophy while keeping a separate standard on maximum radiation exposure.

The two standards have worked together in radiation safety. Dose limits set the maximum amount of radiation the public and radiation workers can be exposed to, while ALARA kept radiation exposure as low as practical under those limits. Research shows radiation exposure increases a person’s chance of getting cancer, a risk that increases as the dose increases.

The dose limits are not changing. But the NRC, which regulates civilian nuclear energy technologies and radioactive materials, now wants to replace ALARA with a “graded approach” that includes several actions facilities must take depending on the potential dose of radiation to workers. More rigorous radiation protection measures would be required when approaching dose limits to ensure they aren’t exceeded.

This comes as President Donald Trump attempts to quadruple domestic nuclear energy production because of surging electricity demand amid a data center and artificial intelligence boom. Reforming the NRC is one way Trump is trying to speed up nuclear reactor development. He instructed the federal agency in an executive order last year to “ adopt science-based radiation limits.”

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2 mosques in the West Bank are set on fire during a deadly surge in settler violence

TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — Two mosques in the Israeli-occupied West Bank were set on fire overnight in an apparent Israeli settler attack, officials said Sunday, after a spate of deadly violence that killed four Palestinians and two Israeli soldiers.

Palestinians and the Israeli opposition accuse Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hard-line government of turning a blind eye to attacks by settlers against Palestinians, which threaten to ignite widespread violence across the territory.

Israeli soldiers and police fanned out across the West Bank after the attack, closing off major roads and blocking access to a hospital where it said two militants were hiding. Israel also arrested more than 70 Palestinians over the weekend as they attempted to contain the escalating violence.

The mosques, in the villages of Qusra and Kour in the northern West Bank, suffered extensive damage in the fires.

In Qusra, the attackers spray-painted “revenge Benayahu,” referring to one of the Israeli soldiers killed on Friday, and “the land of Israel is redeemed with blood.” The soldier lived in a nearby settlement.

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Former President Juan Orlando Hernández returns to Honduras after arrest warrant suspended

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras (AP) — Four years after being extradited to the United States for his drug trafficking trial, former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández arrived in his country Sunday to face corruption charges that lawyers fear will be a sham process.

Hernández, once considered an ally by the U.S. in the drug war, led Honduras from 2014 to 2022, during which he boasted that he would “shove the drugs right up the noses of the gringos,” according to U.S. prosecutors.

His extradition shortly after leaving office marked a rare chance at justice for Hondurans, who feared his hold on the country’s justice system would never allow a conviction on Honduran soil.

But the former leader, sentenced to 45 years in prison in the United States, was released in December, to the shock of many in the U.S. and Honduras, after receiving a presidential pardon from U.S. President Donald Trump. He said Hernández did not receive a fair trial and that it was a setup orchestrated by the Biden administration.

Hernández now returns to Honduras to face corruption charges amid concerns that a weak justice system and his party’s return to the presidency will ensure his impunity.

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For some, so-called ‘Skynet Day’ came too close to sci-fi after a rogue agent hacked into a startup

To be fair, James Cameron did warn us.

Long before OpenAI broke out of its test corral and hacked into Hugging Face, before the internet and Sam Altman were even born, Cameron wrote a screenplay about an autonomous artificial intelligence system that triggers a nuclear apocalypse.

That system, “Skynet,” was solidly science fiction — and, for its day, pure speculation. But four decades after it appeared in “The Terminator,” it looks more like a forecast of the “unprecedented cyber incident” in which a rogue artificial intelligence system hacked into another AI company on its own.

Cue “Skynet Day,” the new shorthand for July 22, 2026, when real-life AI sent a chill around the world by learning and acting in ways its creators did not anticipate.

For many, the moment recalled the instant in “Aliens” (also written by Cameron) when the xenomorph queen learns to use an elevator. Or when the “Jurassic Park’s” velociraptors figure out how to open a door. Or the sequence in which the self-aware HAL 9000 reads the astronauts’ lips and decides to kill them in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” That one came out in 1968.