What happened
German police have shot dead the man suspected of carrying out a deadly attack at Berlin’s Pride celebrations after locating him nearly a day after the violence. Abdul Ballout, a 21-year-old German citizen of Lebanese heritage, was found at an allotment site in the city’s Spandau district yesterday evening. Officers said he charged at emergency responders carrying a “stabbing weapon”, prompting armed police to open fire.

Authorities believe Ballout drove a car into people in the Tiergarten park before attacking others with a machete. A woman was killed and 29 people were injured, with three still in a critical condition and eight seriously hurt.

Who said what
German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said investigators believed that “everything we see here points to us dealing with an Islamic terror attack”.

Yesterday, despite the suspect then still being at large, hundreds of mourners gathered at the Brandenburg Gate “to grieve the victims of the attack and express the anger and shock over what is seen as an attack on the LBGTQ+ community”, said Deutsche Welle. “Yesterday was an attack on all of us,” said one speaker. “On all our identities, our existence, our community and our democracy. But we will not let it defeat us.”

What next?
Police have ended their manhunt, but German authorities will now review security arrangements for major public events – including upcoming Pride celebrations – amid concerns about possible copycat attacks.

What happened
Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of “The Odyssey” has prompted a sharp rise in the number of people wanting to master Greek, according to new data from language-learning platform Preply. Google searches in the UK for “learn Greek” have climbed 550% over the past month to about 6,000 a month. This burst of enthusiasm has also boosted interest in the literary classic itself, with UK sales of “The Odyssey” increasing by 70% this year to almost 40,000 copies.

Who said what
The teaching of classics “continues to face challenges over access in schools and colleges”, said Georgia Lambert in The Times. Many independent schools teach ancient Greek, but “opportunities for pupils in the state sector are uneven”. In 2021 Susan Greenfield, an Oxford neuroscientist, told The Times Education Commission that the study of classics was a “very economic way of learning” because it combined history, literature and language.

What next?
“The Odyssey” has stormed the global box office, raking in more than $639 million (£479 million) in less than two weeks. Nolan recently told America’s “Today” show that it will be “at least” three years until he makes another movie due to the exhausting challenges that he faced in bringing the epic to the big screen.

Gray whales along the West Coast of the United States’ are undergoing a “catastrophic mortality event”, according to the non-profit group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). Close to 150 carcasses have been found on beaches along the Pacific Ocean this year, with the deaths attributed to “multiple threats, including ship strikes and reduced food sources”.

Between last year and this year an estimated 2,500 to 8,000 whales have died, further reducing a population that had already fallen from 20,500 to 14,526 between 2019 and 2023. The true picture may be even worse, as “marine biologists can only count the whales that are stranded”, said The Guardian. The ones that “wash ashore are only maybe 10% of the whales that are dying”, Rick Steiner, chair of PEER’s board of directors, told Alaskan news station KTOO.

The West Coast’s whale population travels approximately 10,000 miles (16,000 kilometres) between Baja California, Mexico and its feeding grounds in the Arctic, where the mammals “feed on crustaceans called amphipods”, according to the Smithsonian Magazine. But climate change is reducing the amphipod population, forcing whales into dangerously congested places like San Francisco Bay “where they are being fatally struck by ships or becoming entangled in fishing gear”. Other threats include oil spills, algal blooms and microplastic pollution.

Gray whales were removed from the US Endangered Species Act’s protection list in 1994, but it may be necessary to relist them to “give these guys the best chance of making it through this climate bottleneck”, said Steiner. “The loss of thousands of whales in just two years should be of concern to us all.”