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ADEN, Yemen (AP) — At least five people have died in clashes between supporters of Yemen's main separatist group and local security forces, with more than two dozen others injured, officials and separatists said on Wednesday.

Eshraq al-Maqtari, the newly appointed legal affairs minister inYemen's internationally recognized government, wrote on X that the Shabwa governorate has experienced "painful events."

The clashes erupted when supporters of Yemen's separatist Southern Transitional Council stormed the governorate's local administrative authority building in the city of Ataq, during which an attempt was made to take down the Yemeni flag, eyewitnesses Khaled al-Merfedi and Salem Lahtal told The Associated Press.

They said local security forces quickly regained control of the building, secured it, and deployed throughout the surrounding area.

"Hope rests on the leaders, elites, youth, and women of Shabwa to resolve this tension, in which the only losers are the lives, safety, and security of its citizens. The interests of Shabwa must be prioritized above all narrow interests," al-Maqtari said.

The STC branch in Shabwa confirmed in a statement the deaths of the five protesters.

Shabwa is currently under the control of thePresidential Leadership Council, headed by Rashad al-Alimi. Forces allied with the council reportedly intervened and fired warning shots to disperse the crowd.

In December, the STC madeadvances in Hadramout and al-Mahra governorates, pushing out the Saudi-aligned National Shield Forces and forcing simmering tensions between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi into the open. Deadly clashes in the country's south erupted and the separatist groupannounced its dissolutionin the weeks that followed, butprotestscontinued in support of the STC, withcalls for an independent south.

Yemen has been mired for more than a decade in a civil war that involves a complex interplay of sectarian and tribal grievances and the involvement of regional powers. The STC leader, Aidarous al-Zubaidi, is wanted for treason and has fled to Abu Dhabi.

"Masked members of the security and military forces opened fire on the demonstrators," the STC branch in Shabwa said in the statement.

It added: "As the mass march moved toward the al-Fakhama Hotel … the security and military forces began firing directly at the protesters using light and medium weapons, resulting in deaths and injuries."

The STC accused forces affiliated with Shabwa's local administration of storming the designated protest site, dismantling the stage, and surrounding the area with armored vehicles and troops, creating what it described as a scene "more akin to a battlefield."

Last week, al-Alimi,announced a new 35-member Cabinetchaired byPrime Minister Shae'a al-Zandani, who also serves as foreign minister. It included only two women: Afrah al-Zouba, minister of planning and international cooperation, and Ahd Jaasous, state minister for women's affairs.

Major US cities overall experienced a steep drop in violent crime last year, according to astatistical analysisreleased by the Major Cities Chiefs Association.

The analysis reflects an overall downward trend in recent years, after violent crime spiked during the Covid-19 pandemic, according to year-end statistics compiled by the FBI through 2024.

The most recentMajor Cities Chiefs Associationsurvey, which was made up of statistics compiled from 67 of 68 responding law enforcement agencies and released earlier in February, shows homicides were down just over 19% last year. The report also showed that robbery was down almost 20%, rape was down almost 9% and aggravated assault was down almost 10% last year compared to 2024, the statistics show.

The report is just the latest crime statistical analysis that shows declines in violent crimes in 2025. It joins areport from the Council on Criminal Justicethat was released in January that also showed steep declines in homicides and other crimes.

The think tank zoomed in on year-end crime statistics from 40 large cities and found that homicides dropped 21% last year when compared to 2024, the largest single-year decline on record. They also project that when the FBI puts out their year-end statistics, the homicide rate will likely be the lowest it's been nationally since 1900.

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Homicides dropped steeply in Chicago, from 587 in 2024 to 417 last year, the data shows. Columbus, Ohio, saw dramatic drops in every category, including rapes, down to 678 last year from 1,116 in 2024. Houston saw a drop in aggravated assault, from 18,590 in 2024 down to 15,378 last year, according to the report. Robberies were down in Los Angeles, from 8,593 in 2024 to 7,278 last year, the records show.

While it's nearly impossible to zero in on any one reason for why murders and other violent crime has dropped nationally in 2025, analysts point to a combination of renewed precision policing tactics that have coupled with advancements in technology, along with preventative measures, such as violence interrupters and the court system getting through backlogs from the Covid-19 pandemic.

Despite the overall downward trend in homicides and other violent crimes, not all cities were down, according to the statistics from the Major Cities Chiefs Association, made up of police executives who represent the largest cities in the US and Canada.

Boston saw more homicides last year, with 31, up from 24 in 2024. El Paso, Texas, also showed an increase of 30 homicides last year, up from 24 the previous year. Fort Worth, Texas, was up from 75 homicides in 2024 to 81 last year. Suffolk County on Long Island, New York, also saw a jump, from 11 homicides in 2024 to 26 last year, the data shows.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

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A group of Buddhist monks, a day after completing a108-day Walk for Peacefrom Texas to Washington, walked to Capitol Hill on Wednesday before heading to the Lincoln Memorial to conclude their journey.

Buddhist Monks Peace Walk Washington

The 19 monks and their dog, Aloka, walked 2,300 miles (3,700 kilometers) across several Southern states — sometimes in frigid conditions — drawing large crowds in churchyards, city halls and town squares. The group, with itsmessage of peace, has captured hearts across the nation and globe, earning it millions of online followers.

On Wednesday morning, themonks walked single file, followed by about 100 other monks and nuns who had joined them in Washington. Behind them was a sea of people showing peace signs and marching silently. More than 21,000 people followed the livestream online from around the globe, posting messages in Spanish, Hindi, Thai and Sinhalese.

Crowds cheered and thanked the monks from sidewalks as they walked from George Washington University, where they stopped for the night, to Capitol Hill. Later in the day, they were expected to address a large crowd at the Lincoln Memorial and formally conclude the peace walk. The Venerable Bhikkhu Pannakara, who has led the group, will also lead a loving-kindness meditation session at George Washington University.

Pannakara walked barefoot on Wednesday as he waved and smiled at crowds. Several people, including young children, handed flowers to the monks.

On Tuesday, the monks made stops at American University and the Washington National Cathedral for an interfaith conversation where thousands thronged to hear Pannakara speak.

The monk urged those gathered to practice mindfulness every day and cultivate peace in their hearts. He asked them to wake up every morning and intentionally write on a piece of paper the words: Today is going to be my peaceful day.

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The monks' trek has had its perils. In November, outside Houston, the group was walking on the side of a highway when their escort vehicle was hit by a truck.Two monks were injured; Venerable Maha Dam Phommasan had his leg amputated. Phommasan, abbot of a temple in Snellville, Georgia, rejoined the monks near Washington and entered American University's arena in a wheelchair and joined the group on their walk to the Capitol.

Peace walks are a cherished tradition in Theravada Buddhism. Some of the monks have walked barefoot or in socks during parts of the journey to feel the ground directly and help them be present in the moment.

The monks practice and teach Vipassana meditation, an ancient Indian technique taught by the Buddha that focuses on breath and the mind-body connection. Pannakara's peace talks, given at stops along the way, have urged listeners to put down their phones and find peace within themselves.

Their return trip should be less arduous. After an appearance at the Maryland State House, a bus will take them back to Texas, where they expect to arrive in downtown Fort Worth early on Saturday.

From there, the monks will walk together again, traversing 6 miles (9.6 kilometers) to the temple where their trip began.

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP'scollaborationwith The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

Just 10 seconds into NASCAR's2026 Super Bowl ad touting the sport's new slogan— "Hell Yeah" — there's a telling detail on a license plate: The "e" in "Hell" is a 3. And in case you missed that, there's a fan wearing a 3 jacket, and a Craftsman truck decked out in a familiar black paint scheme doing a dramatic slow-mo burnout. The message is unmistakable: No more screwing around. NASCAR's bringing back that Dale Earnhardt attitude.

Twenty-five years after his sudden, shocking death on the final lap of the 2001 Daytona 500, Dale Earnhardt remains as vital to NASCAR as ever. A quarter-century after we last saw his Goodwrench No. 3 knifing through the pack, Dale Earnhardt is still exactly what NASCAR wants to be.

Sure, the tattoos Earnhardt fans got during his lifetime are fading and sagging. The last Cup driver to run in a race with Earnhardt, Ryan Newman, retired more than two years ago. But you don't have to look far to see Earnhardt's persistent influence. He's the focus of new documentaries, books, endless social media recollections. His image — sunglasses, mustache, attitude, black No. 3 flag — is still everywhere at NASCAR tracks.

No other driver — not Jeff Gordon, not Chase Elliott, not even Earnhardt's boy — has ever come close to matching The Intimidator's impact. And given the way that NASCAR, and American culture, have trended in the years since his death, it's likely no one ever will.

If Dale Earnhardt hadn't existed, a team of marketers — or a superhero movie screenwriter — couldn't have created a more perfect avatar of NASCAR's ideal self-image. Born in the blue-collar mill town of Kannapolis, North Carolina, he lived hard and raced harder. Some people climb over obstacles; Earnhardt just drove right through them.

He was mean as hell; you don't get the name "The Intimidator" because you're a go-along, get-along kind of guy. But he also inspired deep respect up and down the garage. You might not like him, you definitely wouldn't outrun him, but you damn sure respected him. Drivers from Jeff Gordon to Jimmie Johnson to Kurt Busch have spent the last 25 years telling stories of how nervous they were in Earnhardt's presence, and these are NASCAR's champions.

But Earnhardt wasn't just a surly S.O.B. Besides being tougher than a three-dollar steak, Earnhardt was also funny as hell. His disgust at drivers who complained about going too fast at Talladega created one of racing's all-time great quotes: "Put a kerosene rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat that candy ass." It's tough to say which was scarier — Earnhardt in your rear-view mirror charging at you, or Earnhardt in his sunglasses smiling at you.

Sure, he wasn't perfect. He played by the rules right up until the rules didn't suit him. If he needed to turn someone to win a race, like Terry Labonte in Bristol, well, he'd rattle their cage and plead innocence later. He could be a tough man to love, whether you were his wife or his friend or his child. And he was beyond stubborn; it's tough to reconcile the fact that he refused to wear the neck-protecting HANS device that could have saved him from the exact spinal injury that killed him.

In the years since Earnhardt died, American culture has swung away from the worship of the car, and of Earnhardt's brand of tough, unapologetic masculinity. Maybe he would have changed with the times, or maybe he would have stubbornly remained set in his ways. Or maybe both. He was complex and unpredictable, and he swerved away from expectations just like he swerved around slower-moving cars.

Earnhardt swung conservative in his political beliefs, but famously once cut the Confederate flag off his truck's bumper sticker after he understood the offense it caused. He was as wealthy as a king, but he loved driving his tractor on his farm — sometimes even riding up to unsuspecting onlookers trying to catch a glimpse of his estate. He stoked a public rivalry with Gordon, but privately went into business with him, monetizing their personality clashes.

But he didn't whine. He didn't play victim. He just strapped himself into his Goodwrench No. 3 and figured out how to beat you, one way or another.

Even now, Earnhardt's influence persists far beyond the grandstands of NASCAR tracks. Anyone who's ever felt the hum of an engine in their bones, or mashed the gas on an open highway, discovers that bit of Earnhardt in their soul. Maybe that's why his absence still hurts, and always will.

Raise hell. Praise Dale. Now and forever.

AC Milan received a major boost on Wednesday, Feb. 11 as Christian Pulisic returned to full team training.

Pulisic has dealt with a number of minor injuries of late, most recently missing Milan's 3-0 win at Bologna on Tuesday, Feb. 3 due to bursitis.

But with his return to group training, the American star now appears on track to return for a match at Pisa on Friday, Feb. 13.

In addition to his recent bout with bursitis, Pulisic has also dealt with a hamstring injury for several months. The Pennsylvania native has started three of theRossoneri's last seven league matches.

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Pulisic is Milan's leading scorer with 10 goals in all competitions, but he hasn't scored or assisted a goal yet in 2026.

The match at Pisa is massive for Milan's title hopes. Max Allegri's men enter the match in second place, trailing Inter by eight points with a game in hand.

With Pisa currently in the relegation zone, picking up full points will be a must for theRossoneri.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY:Christian Pulisic injury news: USMNT star back in AC Milan training

Tanking in the NBA is getting out of hand.Jaren Jackson Jr. made his debut with the Utah Jazzand had 22 points through three quarters. Then he sat down and watched a 15-point lead disappear. So did Lauri Markkanen. And so did Jusuf Nurkic. Utah lost. That was the point.

Every year, tanking happens. But the scale of it this season is staggering, and it's undermining the product. The Jazz are not alone in their mission to intentionally lose. The Grizzlies traded away Jackson and aren't rushing back Zach Edey or Ja Morant. The Pacers rested six veterans in a loss against the Jazz last week. The Bucks are keeping Giannis Antetokounmpo away from the court for as long as possible. Trae Young and Anthony Davis haven't played yet for the Wizards. The Bulls flipped half the team for a nonsensical roster with eight guards on it. The Nets and Kings aren't trying to win. Neither are the Mavericks. Even the team thatjust hit the jackpotis back in the tank.

That's nine teams. We're not even at the All-Star break. This is happening despite a 2019 lottery reform that flattened the odds so the three worst teams share a 14% chance at the top pick. That was supposed to fix things. It hasn't. No team is tanking to the extremes of the Process Sixers. But more teams are tanking into the top 10, because odds in the middle of the lottery now have a real chance of jumping into the top four like the Mavericks did one year ago, leaping from 11th to first to take Cooper Flagg. Since the 2019 reform, 11 of the 28 top-four picks have gone to teams with seventh-or-worse odds. Under the new rules, the NBA has matched decades of lottery chaos in just seven years.

That's one reason tanking has reached this scale. The other? An absolutely stacked 2026 draft class. There are at least three players worthy of the first pick: Kansas guard Darryn Peterson, BYU forward AJ Dybantsa, and Duke big Cam Boozer. Even beyond them, the rest of the top 10 is stacked. Executives believe this draft has a chance to be historic.

"What's happening is largely a byproduct of this draft class," said one general manager of a playoff team. "But that doesn't make it right. The league office needs to make an example out of someone. That's how you send a message."

Adam Silver could punish a tanking team if he wanted with a massive fine or by stripping a pick. But tanking lives in gray areas. Is Utah resting stars in the fourth quarter more punishable than Washington keeping its new acquisitions in street clothes? The Jazz got fined $100,000 last year for resting Markkanen. In 2023, the Mavericks got hit for $750,000 for tanking out of the play-in and into the lottery. But teams treat those fines as a tax for better draft odds. The NBA's draft system directly rewards losing, and as long as that incentive exists, front offices will exploit it. Enforcement becomes whack-a-mole.

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Plenty of half-measures have been floated over the years — wins-based odds, multi-year standings formulas, tournaments for lottery teams — but every one of them still ties record to draft position, which means every one of them can be gamed.

Is tanking inevitable? What if you could design a system that completely severs the link between losing and draft position? Here's an idea: I call it the Lottery Wheel.

The basics of the Lottery Wheel

The premise is simple: remove a team's record from the draft equation entirely. Use predetermined lottery odds assigned years in advance to every team. Those odds rotate annually. This system retains randomness through a lottery draw, and those odds would remain tradable, which would create an entirely new market for teams to rebuild without needing to lose on purpose.

The Lottery Wheel works by dividing the NBA's 30 teams into five tiers of six teams each. Every tier is assigned a percentage of the total lottery odds, and those odds are distributed equally among the six teams within that tier.

All 30 teams would be eligible for the lottery, not just the 14 teams that miss the playoffs. Why? Because if only non-playoff teams are eligible, you recreate a tanking incentive at the margins. Under any 14-team lottery in which all playoff teams are excluded, a team on the bubble has a genuine reason to lose its way out of the playoffs to retain lottery position.

Before the system launches, the NBA would seed every team into its starting position on the wheel based on cumulative record, with the worst teams selecting first. Once every team has its spot, the wheel locks in and rotates automatically.

The tiers would rotate on a five-year cycle, meaning every team passes through every tier exactly once over five years. The rotation is staggered — Tier 1, then Tier 3, then Tier 5, then Tier 2, then Tier 4 — so that no team ever has back-to-back premium years. Everyone knows where they'll be. Records are irrelevant. Odds are determined solely by which tier the wheel assigned to you that year. There is literally zero incentive to lose.

The Lottery Wheel's odds

The NBA's current lottery implementation talks about odds in the context of 1,000 combinations assigned to teams. For simplicity, the Lottery Wheel could use 600 combinations to evenly distribute odds within each tier:

Tier 1:40 combinations per team (240 total)

Tier 2:25 combinations per team (150 total)

Tier 3:18 combinations per team (108 total)

Tier 4:11 combinations per team (66 total)

Tier 5:6 combinations per team (36 total)

A Tier 1 team has roughly a 6.7% chance at the No. 1 pick. That's the best seat at the table, but it's less than half of the 14% the current system gives the worst team. Even Tier 5 teams carry a 1% chance, which is comparable to what the 13th-worst team gets under today's rules. No tier is a dead year.

Every team would receive 40, 25, 18, 11, and six combinations over the five-year cycle. That's exactly 100 per team. The system is perfectly equitable by design. No franchise is advantaged or disadvantaged over time. The only variable is which years your premium odds fall.

How the order is determined

The top six picks are determined by a weighted lottery draw. All 30 teams are in the pool, and their odds are based on their tier assignment, plus whatever odds were acquired via trade. Each pick is drawn individually.

Here's how those odds look:

Picks seven through 30 are slotted by tier. After the lottery draws the top six, the remaining teams fill in by tier order: all remaining Tier 1 teams go first, then Tier 2, then Tier 3, and so on. Those picks could be determined by randomizing their placement with a mini-lottery, similar to a reform ideapresented by Boston Celtics executive Mike Zarren, which helped inspire my firstWheel concept published over a decade ago.

The second round would follow the same tier-based structure for every pick in the round, with placement randomized within each tier.

You might be thinking: A 6.7% chance seems kinda low for Tier 1 teams. True. But because of how slotting works, a Tier 1 team's floor is the 7-12 range. That's a lottery pick in today's system.

Owners of bad teams will ask: "Why would I vote for a system that stops rewarding me for being terrible?" But the Lottery Wheel shifts the rebuilding engine from losing games to winning trades.

The trade market would change

Under the current system, teams trade future draft picks. With the Lottery Wheel, odds would also be tradable. And that changes everything. Draft capital would also have a known, quantifiable value attached to it. It turns draft capital into a liquid currency. That's a fundamentally different rebuilding engine for teams trading away or acquiring odds.

Here's an example: It's the 2036 trade deadline. Toronto is at the top of the standings and in its Tier 2 year for the draft. That means Toronto has 25 combinations, a 4.2% shot at the first pick and a 25.2% chance at a top-six pick. In today's NBA, a contender's first is usually a pick in the 20s and rarely the centerpiece of a rebuild trade. But under the Lottery Wheel, suddenly a contender's pick has value. And New Orleans, a non-contender in its Tier 5 year, has a player that Toronto desires. So the Pelicans acquire that pick from the Raptors to increase their odds, and the Raptors get a player to compete for a title.

That's an approach that doesn't exist in the current system, and it's the kind of transaction that would replace tanking as the primary engine of rebuilding.

The honest problems

I'm not going to pretend this system is flawless. It isn't. Let me address the biggest concerns head-on.

1. Chronically bad teams lose their safety net

This is the most legitimate objection. Under the current system, if you're terrible for seven straight years, you get seven straight years of great odds. There at least appears to be a path out for terrible teams. Whereas, with the Lottery Wheel, you get one Tier 1 year, and in my proposal those odds are only 6.7%.

"You're asking bad teams to give up the one thing that makes being bad tolerable," said an executive who heard my proposal.

Fair point. But the current system doesn't necessarily help chronically bad teams either. Only one team with under 20 wins (Minnesota in 2020) has actually secured the top overall pick since the rules were changed in 2019. The most common outcome for the teams with the best odds? The fifth pick. This has happened seven times for the 21 teams that have had 14% odds. In other words, the NBA has already effectively removed the safety net. And unlike today, a bad team doesn't have to stay bad to improve its position. It can acquire better odds through trades at any point in the cycle, or simply get lucky in any given year. Even Tier 5 teams have a shot at the top six.

2. A contender could win the first pick

Yup. It's possible. But that's already possible under the current system, with the Thunder holding the rights to an unprotected first courtesy of the Clippers. In 2017, we saw the Celtics land the first pick with a pick they acquired from the Nets.

The lottery is inherently unpredictable. And so is the draft. Great players can be found anywhere. The Lottery Wheel makes it more of a regular thing for good teams to get high picks, but the question is whether it's better for randomness to exist within a system that incentivizes winning or one that incentivizes losing. If the price of eliminating tanking is that sometimes a great team lucks into a great player, that's a price worth paying.

The modern day draft is no longer "compensation for being bad." It's simply how new talent enters the league. But losing is still rewarded because of the probability of moving up. That needs to change. And if a contender landing in Tier 1 feels like too much of an advantage — between the lottery odds and the guaranteed slotting floor of picks seven through 12 — the league could simply expand the weighted draw beyond six picks to soften that edge.

3. The known draft class problem

Everyone in the basketball world has a rough sense of which draft classes are loaded three to four years out. It's not an exact science, of course. But a team whose Tier 1 year falls in a weak class gets unlucky through no fault of its own.

This was one of the classic criticisms of the Zarren "wheel" idea: if teams know in advance when they'll be positioned well, elite prospects can time their draft entry to land in preferred situations. With modern NIL and two-year college stays on the horizon, that dynamic becomes even more plausible.

4. Expansion breaks the math

The NBA is almost certainly expanding to 32 teams at some point in the 2030s. Thirty divides cleanly into five tiers of six, but 32 doesn't. The league would need to adjust to either four tiers of eight, or vice versa, or have tiers with uneven group sizes.

5. Some teams are still going to stink

Even if draft incentive disappears, teams will still protect assets with load management and minutes limits, and still prioritize development over short-term wins, and still make financially motivated choices by ducking the tax and dumping salaries. So yes, the Lottery Wheel removes draft-driven tanking, but it does not magically create 30 teams playing like it's Game 7 every night.

Every one of those problems is an edge case, an optics concern, or something patchable with rules tweaks. But the numbers and percentages are adjustable. The structure is the point. The core mechanic is simple: your record has nothing to do with your draft position.

Realistically, a system like this couldn't take effect until the 2030s. Teams have already traded picks over the next seven years under the existing rules. This is around the time when expansion is expected. Restructuring the draft alongside expansion would give the league a natural window to start from scratch with enormous benefits.

The benefits of the Lottery Wheel

With all 30 teams in the pool, you'd see teams on the playoff bubble like the Bucks, Bulls, Grizzlies, and Mavericks all still competing for a spot this year if their odds weren't tied to being in the lottery.

More games would have meaning, making the regular season matter more. You would not see teams throwing out idiotic lineups or coaches installing bad game plans meant to increase their chances of losing. Instead, the focus shifts to winning games and developing players.

The Lottery Wheel also changes the conversation around resting players. The league's player participation policy would still exist since stars should play in marquee games. But the league would no longer have to guess whether a team is resting a player or tanking. That suspicion disappears. This is important not just for optics but for the genuine integrity of the league. The NBA has fully embraced sports betting and is making money off fans betting on games. Games that some teams are intentionally losing. The league can't partner with sportsbooks and profit off fan engagement while allowing teams to deliberately lose.

The on-court product improves, and so does the off-court spectacle. This is a bigger, better TV product than the current four-pick drawing involving only non-playoff teams. With the Lottery Wheel system, every fan base in the league is watching because their team has skin in the game. Drawing only the top six picks keeps the truly franchise-altering picks subject to chance, while letting the tier structure do its work from pick seven onward.

No system is perfect. The Lottery Wheel has edge cases and implementation questions that would need to be worked through. But the question facing the NBA isn't whether a new system would be flawless. It's whether it would be better than what we have.

Fans are paying the price. Buying tickets days in advance is a gamble when you don't know if the stars you're paying to see will actually play. The league knows this is an issue, which is one reason why they created the NBA Cup (to give the early part of the season more meaning) and the play-in tournament (to make the playoffs more attainable for more teams). The NBA is an entertainment product, and it's not just competing with other sports leagues anymore. It's competing with everything: Netflix, YouTube, every other piece of content fighting for attention. The games need to matter.

The league's open-mindedness for experimentation to improve that product is admirable. But the flattened odds have failed at influencing teams to care more about putting the best team on the floor every night of the long season. Nine teams are tanking before the All-Star break. Others will join them in the weeks ahead. The problem isn't going away. The league needs to stop tinkering and start reimagining.

"You won't see that this year," Jazz general manager Austin Ainge said in June when asked about Utah's tanking approach. He lied. And until the NBA stops rewarding teams for losing, they all will.

At least nine people were killed and dozens more injured in shootings at a high school and residence in the northeast part of the province of British Columbia, Canadian police said Tuesday. The suspected shooter is dead, officials said.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police declined to identify the shooter or clarify details about the gun, such as its model and whether it was registered, with a spokesperson telling CBS News on Wednesday that additional updates "will be provided as information becomes available."

The school shooting was first reported at 1:20 p.m. Pacific Time at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School, the RCMPsaid in a news release.

Authorities responded to find six people dead inside the school, the RCMP said, and a seventh person died while being transported to a hospital.

Police responded to a second crime scene at a residence that is believed to have been linked to the school shooting, where two more people were found dead, the RCMP reported. The exact nature of their injuries were not immediately disclosed.

Two more people from the shooting at the school were airlifted to area hospitals with serious or life-threatening injuries, police said.

The suspected shooter was found dead in the school from a "self-inflicted injury," Canadian police said.

About 25 others were assessed at a local medical center for non-life-threatening injuries, the RCMP said.

RCMP Superintendent Ken Floyd told reporters that investigators had identified a female suspect but would not release a name, and that the shooter's motive remained unclear. He added that police were still investigating how the victims were connected to the shooter.

The Peace River South School District initially said Tuesday that there was a "lockdown and secure and hold" at both the secondary school and the Tumbler Ridge Elementary School. It later said both schools would be closed through the rest of the week.

The provincial government website lists Tumbler Ridge Secondary School as having 175 students from Grades 7 to 12.

Speaking with Canadian station CBC Radio on Wednesday, Tumbler Ridge Mayor Darry Krakowka described the community of about 2,700 people as "one big family" where "everybody knows everybody." He did not elaborate on the identity of the shooter and said the RCMP was still investigating.

The office of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said he was suspending a planned trip to Halifax, Nova Scotia and Munich, Germany. He was set to announce a long-awaited defense industrial strategy in Halifax on Wednesday before heading to Europe for the Munich Security Conference.

"I am devastated by today's horrific shootings in Tumbler Ridge, B.C.," Carneysaidin a statement on social media. "My prayers and deepest condolences are with the families and friends who have lost loved ones to these horrific acts of violence."

David Eby, premier of British Columbia,wrote: "Our hearts are in Tumbler Ridge tonight with the families of those who have lost loved ones. Government will ensure every possible support for community members in the coming days, as we all try to come to terms with this unimaginable tragedy."

Canada's gun violence record

Mass shootings are relatively rare in Canada, especially in school settings. It has been nearly four decades since one of the country's most notorious massacres, when a shooter killed 14 female students and wounded 13 others at Ecole Polytechnique University in Montreal, Quebec, in 1989,according to the Canadian government.

Canada's deadliest attack happened more recently. In April 2020, 22 people were killed in a 12-hour shooting rampage that touched multiple cities in the eastern province of Nova Scotia, Canadian news outletCBC Newsreported. The government passedan assault weapons banin response.

In January 2017, a shooting at a mosque in Quebec City, the capital of Quebec province, left six people dead and 19 others wounded,accordingto the office of former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

A year before that, in January 2016, a student opened fire at a remote high school in La Loche, Saskatchewan, killing two and injuring seven, after first killing two of his cousins at home, according toCBC News.

Only a handful of significant acts of gun violence took place in Canada between 1996 and 2014, including: a massacre at a wedding inVernon, British Columbia,during which a man killed nine of his relatives; an attack inOttawa, Ontario, in which a former employee of the city's transit service shot and killed four of his colleagues; and separate shootings of police officers inMayerthorpe, Alberta, andMoncton, New Brunswick, which happened roughly a decade apart.

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