What happened
A man in Shreveport, Louisiana, yesterday shot dead his seven children and their cousin and critically wounded his wife and another woman. The gunman, identified as Shamar Elkins, then stole a car and led police on a chase that ended in his death. 

Who said what
Police did not speculate what prompted the murder of the children — five girls and three boys age 3 to 11 — but Shreveport Police Department spokesperson Chris Bordelon said detectives were confident it was “entirely a domestic incident.” Elkins, 31, and his wife were separating and due in court today, Crystal Brown, a cousin of one of the wounded women, told The Associated Press. 

It was the deadliest U.S. mass shooting since January 2024, according to a database from the AP, USA Today and Northeastern University. “Domestic violence shootings generally receive less media attention,” but each of the six other mass killings this year were “carried out by someone who knew the victims,” The Washington Post said. All six “occurred in southern states near Louisiana.” 

What next?
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R), who represents Shreveport in Congress, said “we’re holding the victims, their families” and “our Shreveport community close in our thoughts and prayers.”

What happened
A humanoid robot called Lightning (pictured above) won a half-marathon in Beijing yesterday, beating his robotic competitors and the human runners in a parallel race by completing the 13-mile course in 50 minutes and 26 seconds. That’s nearly seven minutes faster than the record set by Uganda’s Jacob Kiplimo in Lisbon last month. 

Who said what
The victory of Lightning, built by Chinese smartphone brand Honor, “marked a significant step forward from last year’s inaugural race,” when the winning robot “finished in 2 hours, 40 minutes and 42 seconds,” The Associated Press said. The “remarkable feat” was also a “big stride for China in its technological rivalry with the U.S.,” CNN said. 

China already has “more robots at work” than “the rest of the world combined,” The New York Times said. Beijing also recently hosted the first Humanoid Robot Games, featuring “plenty of running, kicking and punching,” though the robots “also flailed around, crashed and fell over many times.”

What next?
The leap forward in China’s humanoid engineering “is genuinely impressive,” Oregon State University robotics professor Alan Fern told the Times. But it is “much less obvious” how a robot winning a half-marathon “translates into productivity and ultimately, profitability.” 

The Internet Archive has saved and provided access to trillions of websites for 30 years. The nonprofit builds a “digital library of internet sites,” according to its website, using web crawlers to capture snapshots that are then made available through its public-facing tool, the Wayback Machine. However, amid the rise of AI, the Internet Archive’s “commitment to free information access has turned its digital library into a potential liability,” Nieman Lab said in an analysis.

Currently, “241 news sites from nine countries explicitly disallow at least one out of the four Internet Archive crawling bots,” including The New York Times and Reddit, said Nieman Lab. Many of the same media outlets banning crawlers have used the resource themselves to access older data and articles. “Journalists rely on the Archive in our reporting, and many digital investigations into issues like misinformation or censorship are possible only because it preserves material that would otherwise disappear,” the organizations Fight for the Future, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge said in a letter. 

Artificial intelligence is the biggest reason sites are blocking the Internet Archive. There is “evidence that the Wayback Machine has been used to train large language models,” said Forbes. But Mark Graham, the director of the Wayback Machine, “emphasizes that the digital archive has controls to limit abuse of AI automation,” said Morning Brew.

There is “no widely available public tool comparable to the Wayback Machine,” said Wired. If it “continues to lose access to major news sources,” early “digital records of history” may become “lost altogether.”