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Hard Numbers: Georgia school shooting, Harris' tax policy, Grenfell inquiry blames deaths on “incompetence,” Lebanon embezzlement scandal grows, Musk blinks in Brazil dispute, Heavy cars kill more people than they save
Students and staff gather next to the football field after law enforcement officers responded to a fatal shooting at Apalachee High School in a still image from aerial video in Winder, Georgia, U.S. September 4, 2024.
4: Four people -- two students and two teachers -- were killed and 30 wounded when a gunman opened fire at a high school in suburban Atlanta on Wednesday. The 14-year-old student accused of carrying out the shooting is in custody, and had been interviewed by the F.B.I last year for making school shooting threats online. For a look at the skyrocketing number of US school shootings over the past decade, see our recent Graphic Truth here.
28: Kamala Harris released her tax policy on Wednesday. In it, she distances herself from Joe Biden by endorsing a lower capital gains tax increase. Her proposal attempts to win over the business community and wealthier Americans by only taxing investment income for Americans earning more than a million dollars a year at a rate of 28%, far below the 39.6% proposed by the president.
72: The deaths of the 72 people killed in the Grenfell apartment tower fire in London in 2017 were the result of “incompetence, dishonesty, and greed” on the part of government officials and contractors. That’s according to the official inquiry on the incident, which was released on Wednesday. The fire was the worst in the UK since World War II.
42 million: Lebanon’s former Central Bank Gov. Riad Salamehhas been charged with embezzling as much as $42 million. Salameh, who served in the post from 1993 until 2023, was once hailed as a hero for righting the country’s finances after 15 years of civil war, but with Lebanon mired in a deep financial crisis, he resigned last year under suspicion of malfeasance. He was arrested earlier this week.
225,000: About 225,000 people in Brazil who rely on Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet service are about to lose access to X. That’s because Starlink has reversed course, agreeing now to comply with a Brazilian government order to block the social media platform amid a larger clash with the Brazilian government over the site. Brazil’s supreme court says X hasn’t followed local laws that forbid extremism and disinformation, but X says regulators are overreaching and stifling free speech.
12: Heavier cars may feel safer – and for their owners they are – but the bulkiest 1% of passenger vehicles kill 12 additional people in other cars for every occupant life they save. That’s one of many fascinating findings in an extensive Economist study on the effects of increasingly heavy vehicles.