was set to deliver a lecture on artistic freedom at Chautauqua Institution in western New York when police say Matar rushed the stage and stabbed the Indian-born writer, who has lived with a bounty on his head since his 1988 novel "The Satanic Verses" prompted Iran to urge Muslims to kill him.
Following hours of surgery, Rushdie was on a ventilator and unable to speak as of Friday evening, according to his agent, Andrew Wylie. The novelist was likely to lose an eye and had nerve damage in his arm and wounds to his liver, Wylie said in an email.
Two victims, including a pregnant woman, are in a serious condition according to Israeli hospital officials
A gunman opened fire at a bus near Jerusalem’s Old City early on Sunday, wounding eight Israelis in a suspected Palestinian attack that came a week after violence flared between Israel and militants in Gaza, police and medics said.
Two of the victims were in serious condition, including a pregnant woman with abdominal injuries and a man with gunshot wounds to the head and neck, according to Israeli hospitals treating them.
The shooting occurred as the bus waited in a parking lot near the Western Wall, which is considered the holiest site where Jews can pray.
Israeli security forces pushed into the nearby Palestinian neighbourhood of Silwan pursuing the suspected attacker.
The Jerusalem shooting followed a tense week between Israel and Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Last weekend, Israeli aircraft carried out an offensive in the Gaza Strip targeting the militant group Islamic Jihad and setting off three days of fierce cross-border fighting.
Islamic Jihad fired hundreds of rockets during the flare-up to avenge the airstrikes, which killed two of its commanders and other militants.
Israel said the attack was meant to thwart threats from the group to respond to the arrest of one of its officials in the occupied West Bank.
Forty-nine Palestinians, including 17 children and 14 militants, were killed and several hundred injured in the fighting, which ended with an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire. No Israeli was killed or seriously injured.
The Islamic militant group Hamas, which controls Gaza, stayed on the sidelines.
A day after the ceasefire halted the worst round of Gaza fighting in more than a year, Israeli troops killed three Palestinian militants and wounded dozens in a shootout that erupted during an arrest raid in the West Bank city of Nablus.
Wylie did not respond to messages requesting updates on Rushdie's condition on Saturday, though the New York Times reported that Rushdie had started to talk, citing Wylie.
The stabbing was condemned by writers and politicians around the world as an assault on freedom of expression. In a statement on Saturday, President Joe Biden commended the "universal ideals" that Rushdie and his work embody.
"Truth. Courage. Resilience. The ability to share ideas without fear," Biden said. "These are the building blocks of any free and open society."
The study, published in the Science Advances journal, found an increased likelihood of runoff water occurring from harsher storms, creating the threat of debris flows and landslides later, according to a press release from the University of California, Los Angeles.
With every degree that the Earth gets warmer, the likelihood for a “megastorm” increases, too, the study found.
Researchers looked at two different scenarios using present climate models and high-resolution weather modeling. One scenario involved a long series of storms taking place during what scientists predicted climate conditions would be like between 2081 and 2100.
The other scenario predicted what it would be like if those storms took place in the current climate, according to the release.
In the Sierra Nevada Mountains, storms that took place toward the end of the century would see between 200 percent and 400 percent more runoff because of higher precipitation.
“There are localized spots that get over 100 liquid-equivalent inches of water in the month,” UCLA climate scientist and co-author of the research David Swain said in a statement regarding the end-of-the-century scenario.
“On 10,000-foot peaks, which are still somewhat below freezing even with warming, you get 20-foot-plus snow accumulations. But once you get down to South Lake Tahoe level and lower in elevation, it’s all rain. There would be much more runoff.”
The researchers also noted that the state risks a $1 trillion disaster. In addition, parts of major cities like Los Angeles and Sacramento would be underwater if the state endured the kind of flooding that took place during the Great Flood of 1862 in the current climate.
“Modeling extreme weather behavior is crucial to helping all communities understand flood risk even during periods of drought like the one we’re experiencing right now,” Karla Nemeth, director of the California Department of Water Resources, said in a statement.
“The department will use this report to identify the risks, seek resources, support the Central Valley Flood Protection Plan, and help educate all Californians so we can understand the risk of flooding in our communities and be prepared.”
The department contributed some funding toward the study.
Neither local nor federal authorities offered any additional details on the investigation on Saturday. Police said on Friday they had not established a motive for the attack.
An initial law enforcement review of Matar's social media accounts showed he was sympathetic to Shi'ite extremism and Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), although no definitive links had been found, according to NBC New York.
The IRGC is a powerful faction that controls a business empire as well as elite armed and intelligence forces that Washington accuses of carrying out a global extremist campaign.
Asked to comment on the case, Matar's lawyer Barone said, "We're kind of in the early stages and, quite frankly, in cases like this, I think the important thing to remember is people need to keep an open mind. They need to look at everything. They can't just assume something happened for why they think something happened."
A preliminary hearing in the case is scheduled for Friday, he said.
Matar was born in California and recently moved to New Jersey, the NBC New York report said, adding that he had a fake driver's license on him. He was arrested at the scene by a state trooper after being wrestled to the ground by audience members.
The cause of a large boom that was heard across the Wasatch Front on Saturday has not yet been determined, but all signs seem to point to the heavens above.
Early reports of a large boom began about 8:32 a.m. on Saturday, resulting a flurry of social media posts. Many uploaded videos of home cameras that captured the loud boom, heard throughout most of the Wasatch Front, northern Utah and even parts of southern Idaho.
The University of Utah Seismograph Stations quickly confirmed that the boom was not an earthquake. Soon after, both Gov. Spencer Cox and the Utah National Guard tweeted that the boom was not related to any military installations, a frequent cause of sonic booms.
All the focus then turned to the galaxies.
Several people reported seeing a burning object in the sky, thinking the boom may be related to a meteor. The National Weather Service's Salt Lake City office bolstered the meteor theory when flashes appeared on its maps that weren't caused by a thunderstorm.
