Today in history:

On July 31, 2012, at the Summer Olympics in London, swimmer Michael Phelps won his 19th Olympic medal, becoming the most decorated Olympian of all time. (He would finish his career with 28 total Olympic medals, 23 of them gold.)

Also on this date:

In 1715, a fleet of Spanish ships carrying gold, silver and jewelry sank during a hurricane off the east Florida coast; of some 2,500 crew members, more than 1,000 died.

In 1919, Germany’s Weimar Constitution was adopted by the republic’s National Assembly.

In 1945, Pierre Laval, premier of the pro-Nazi Vichy government in France, surrendered to U.S. authorities in Austria; he was turned over to France, which later tried and executed him.

In 1957, the Distant Early Warning Line, a system of radar stations designed to detect Soviet bombers approaching North America, went into operation.

In 1964, the U.S. lunar probe Ranger 7 took the first close-up images of the moon’s surface.

In 1971, Apollo 15 crew members David Scott and James Irwin became the first astronauts to use a lunar rover on the surface of the moon.

In 1972, vice-presidential candidate Thomas Eagleton withdrew from the Democratic ticket with George McGovern following disclosures that Eagleton had received electroshock therapy to treat clinical depression.

In 1991, President George H.W. Bush and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I) in Moscow.

In 2020, a federal appeals court overturned the death sentence of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, saying the judge who oversaw the case didn’t adequately screen jurors for potential biases. (The Supreme Court later reimposed the sentence.)

Today’s Birthdays:

• Jazz composer-musician Kenny Burrell is 93.
• Actor Geraldine Chaplin is 80.
• Former movie studio executive Sherry Lansing is 80.
• Singer Gary Lewis is 78.
• International Tennis Hall of Famer Evonne Goolagong Cawley is 73.
• Actor Michael Biehn is 68.
• Rock singer-musician Daniel Ash (Love and Rockets) is 67.
• Entrepreneur Mark Cuban is 66.
• Rock musician Bill Berry (R.E.M.) is 66.
• Jazz guitarist Stanley Jordan is 65.
• Actor Wesley Snipes is 62.
• Musician Fatboy Slim is 61.
• Author J.K. Rowling is 59.
• Actor Dean Cain is 58.
• Actor Jim True-Frost is 58.
• Actor Ben Chaplin is 55.
• Actor Eve Best is 53.
• Football Hall of Famer Jonathan Ogden is 50.
• Country singer-musician Zac Brown is 46.
• Actor-producer-writer B.J. Novak is 45.
• Football Hall of Famer DeMarcus Ware is 42.
• NHL center Evgeni Malkin is 38.
• NASCAR driver Kyle Larson is 32.
• Hip-hop artist Lil Uzi Vert is 29.
• Actor Rico Rodriguez (TV: “Modern Family”) is 26.

There was no immediate comment from Israel, which has pledged to kill Haniyeh and other Hamas leaders over the group’s Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel. The strike came just after Haniyeh had attended the inauguration of Iran’s new president in Tehran — and only hours after Israel targeted a top commander in Iran’s ally Hezbollah in the Lebanese capital Beirut.

The assassination of Hamas’ top political leader was potentially explosive amid the region’s volatile, intertwined conflicts — because of its target, its timing and the decision to carry it out in Tehran. Most dangerous was the potential to push Iran and Israel into direct confrontation if Iran retaliates.

“We consider his revenge as our duty,” Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in a statement on his official website. He said Israel had “prepared a harsh punishment for itself” by killing “a dear guest in our home.”

Bitter regional rivals, Israel and Iran risked plunging into war earlier this year when Israel hit Iran’s embassy in Damascus in April. Iran retaliated and Israel countered in an unprecedented exchange of strikes on each other’s soil, but international efforts succeeded in containing that cycle before it spun out of control.

Haniyeh’s killing could also prompt Hamas to pull out of negotiations for a cease-fire and hostage release deal in the 10-month-old war in Gaza, which U.S. mediators had said were making progress.

And it could inflame already heightening tensions between Israel and Hezbollah — which international diplomats were trying to contain after a weekend rocket attack that killed 12 young people in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights.

Tuesday evening, Israel carried out a rare strike in the Lebanese capital that it said killed a top Hezbollah commander allegedly behind the rocket strike. Hezbollah, which denied any role in the Golan strike, said Wednesday that it was still searching for the body of Fouad Shukur in the rubble of the building that was hit in a Beirut suburb, killing two women and two children, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry.

There was no immediate reaction from the White House to the killing of Haniyeh. A key question was whether Israel told its top ally the U.S. ahead of time about the strike.

Asked about Haniyeh’s killing during a visit to Singapore, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, “This is something we were not aware of or involved in.”

Speaking to Channel News Asia, Blinken said he would not speculate about the impact on cease-fire efforts. “But I can tell you that the imperative of getting a cease-fire, the importance that that has for everyone, remains.”

In Manila, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said he still had hopes for a diplomatic solution on the Israeli-Lebanon border.

“I don’t think that war is inevitable,” he said. “I maintain that. I think there’s always room and opportunity for diplomacy, and I’d like to see parties pursue those opportunities.”

But international diplomats trying to defuse tensions were alarmed. One Western diplomat, whose country has worked to prevent an Israeli-Hezbollah escalation, said the double strikes in Beirut and Tehran have “almost killed” hopes for a Gaza cease-fire and could push the Middle East into a “devastating regional war.” The diplomat spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive situation.

An Israeli military spokesman declined to comment. Israel often doesn’t comment on assassinations carried out by its Mossad intelligence agency or strikes on other countries.

In a statement by his office, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Israel doesn’t want war after its strike on the Hezbollah commander in Beirut, “but we are preparing for all possibilities.” He did not mention the Haniyeh killing.

The killing of Haniyeh abroad comes as Israel has not had a clear success in killing the group’s top leadership in Gaza, who are believed to be primarily responsible for planning the Oct. 7 attack, after nearly 10 months of fighting in the enclave.

Earlier this month, Israel carried out a strike in Gaza targeting the head of Hamas’ military wing, Mohammed Deif, killing at least 90 Palestinians living in nearby tents, according to Gaza health authorities. Israel said it believed Deif was killed, but neither it nor Hamas has confirmed his death. More elusive has been Hamas’ top leader in Gaza, Yehya Sinwar, believed to be the mastermind of Hamas’ brutal surprise assault into southern Israel, during which militants killed some 1,200 people and abducted 250 others.

Haniyeh left the Gaza Strip in 2019 and had lived in exile in Qatar. Israel has targeted Hamas figures in Lebanon and Syria during the war — but going after Haniyeh in Iran was vastly more sensitive. But Israel has operated there in the past: It is suspected of running a yearslong assassination campaign against Iranian nuclear scientists. In 2020, a top Iranian military nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, was killed by a remote-controlled machine gun while traveling in a car outside Tehran.

During Haniyeh’s last hours in Iran — a close ally of Hamas — he was smiling and clapping at the inauguration ceremony of the new President Masoud Pezeshkian. AP photos showed him seated alongside leaders from the Palestinian Islamic Jihad militant group and Hezbollah, and Iranian media showed him and Pezeshkian hugging. Haniyeh had met earlier with Khamenei.

Hours later, the strike hit a residence Haniyeh uses in Tehran, killing him, Hamas said in a statement. One of his bodyguards was also killed, Iranian officials said.

Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guard warned Israel will face a “harsh and painful response” from Iran and its allies around the region because of the killing. An influential Iranian parliamentary committee on national security and foreign policy was to hold an emergency meeting on the strike later Wednesday.

Hamas’ military wing said in a statement that Haniyeh’s assassination “takes the battle to new dimensions and will have major repercussions on the entire region.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said Israel will continue its devastating campaign in Gaza until Hamas is completely eliminated. Israel’s bombardment and offensives in Gaza have killed more than 39,360 Palestinians and wounded more than 90,900, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, whose count does not differentiate between civilians and combatants.

After months of pounding, Hamas has shown its fighters can still operate in Gaza and fire volleys of rockets into Israel. But it is unclear if it has the capacity to step up attacks in retaliation over Haniyeh’s killing.

Instead, the impact may be regional. Besides a direct retaliation on Israel, Iran could work to hike up attacks through its allies, a coalition of Iranian-backed groups known as the “Axis of Resistance,” including Hezbollah, Hamas, mainly Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria and the Houthi rebels who control much of Yemen.

As a show of support for Hamas in the Gaza war, Hezbollah has been exchanging fire almost daily with Israel across the Israeli-Lebanese border in a simmering but deadly conflict that has repeatedly threatened to escalate into all-out war. The Houthis and Iraqi and Syrian militias have also fired rockets and drones at Israel and at American bases in the region, though most have been intercepted.

A strike Tuesday night southwest of the Iraqi capital Baghdad killed four members of one Iranian-backed militia, Kataib Hezbollah, which has targeted U.S. bases previously, according to Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces, a militia coalition. It accused the U.S. of being behind the strike. U.S. officials did not immediately comment.

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Associated Press writers Amir Vahdat in Tehran, Iran, David Rising in Bangkok, and Jon Gambrell in Ubud, Indonesia, contributed to this report.

LONDON (AP) — Far-right protesters fueled by anger and false online rumors hurled bottles and stones at officers and set a police van ablaze Tuesday outside a northwest England mosque near where three girls were fatally stabbed a day earlier.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer condemned the “thuggery” and said the crowd had hijacked what had earlier been a peaceful vigil attended by hundreds in the center of Southport to mourn the dead and 10 surviving stabbing victims, seven of whom were in critical condition.

Police said the violent crowd was believed to be supporters of the English Defence League, a far-right group, and the unrest was inspired by rumors about the identity of the teenage suspect arrested on suspicion of murder and attempted murder.

“There has been much speculation and hypothesis around the status of a 17-year-old male who is currently in police custody and some individuals are using this to bring violence and disorder to our streets,” Merseyside Police Assistant Chief Constable Alex Goss said.

Police previously said a suspect’s name circulating on social media accounts was incorrect and the boy was born in Britain, contrary to online claims that he was an asylum seeker.

The Liverpool Region Mosque Network posted a statement decrying the “heinous” stabbing as an attack against society that was unconnected to Islam.

“A minority of people are attempting to portray that this inhumane act is somehow related to the Muslim community,” the group said on the X social media platform. “Frankly it is not, and we must not let those who seek to divide us and spread hatred use this as an opportunity.”

Officers outside the Southport Mosque in riot gear were pelted with objects by members of the crowd, some of whom wore masks, amid chants of “No surrender!” and “English till I die!” Firecrackers exploded, sirens wailed and a helicopter hovering overhead added to the chaos.

Some officers were bleeding after being struck by objects and police said one had a broken nose.

A day earlier, a short distance from the turmoil, the girls had taken part in a Taylor Swift-themed dance and yoga workshop on the first week of summer vacation when a teen armed with a knife entered the studio and began a vicious attack, police said.

“It’s difficult to comprehend or put into words the horror of what happened,” Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said while briefing members of Parliament. “What should have been a joyful start to the summer turned into an unspeakable tragedy.”

Alice Dasilva Aguiar, 9, Elsie Dot Stancombe, 7, and Bebe King, 6, died from their injuries, police said.

“Keep smiling and dancing like you love to do our princess,” Aguiar’s parents said in a statement released by police. “Like we said before to you, you’re always our princess and no one would change that.”

King’s family said no words could describe their devastation at the loss “of our little girl Bebe.”

Eight children and two adults remained hospitalized after the attack in Southport. Both adults and five of the children were in critical condition.

An emotional crowd that gathered in Southport outside The Atkinson theater and museum in the early evening held a minute of silence for the victims.

June Burns, the mayor of the Sefton region that contains Southport, called for calm and respect and urged people to be good to one another. She said she was overcome with emotion when she visited the scene of the tragedy earlier.

“It’s unbelievable that we find ourselves laying flowers for little girls who just wanted to dance,” she said.

Swift said earlier on Instagram that she was “completely in shock” and still taking in “the horror” of the event.

“These were just little kids at a dance class,” she wrote. “I am at a complete loss for how to ever convey my sympathies to these families.”

People left flowers and stuffed animals in tribute at a police cordon on the street lined with brick houses in the seaside resort near Liverpool where the beach and pier attract vacationers. They also posted online messages of support for teacher Leanne Lucas, the organizer of the event, who was one of those attacked.

The 17-year-old suspect was arrested on suspicion of murder and attempted murder shortly after the attacks just before noon. Police said he was born in Cardiff, Wales, and had lived for years in a village about 3 miles (5 kilometers) from Southport. He has not yet been charged.

The rampage is the latest shocking attack in a country where a recent rise in knife crime has stoked anxieties and led to calls for the government to do more to clamp down on bladed weapons, which are by far the most commonly used instruments in U.K. homicides.

The prime minister was jeered by some as he visited the crime scene and lay a wreath of pink and white flowers with a handwritten note that said: “Our hearts are broken, there are no words for such profound loss. The nation’s thoughts are with you.”

“How many more children?” one person yelled as Starmer was getting in his car. “Our kids are dead and you’re leaving already?”

Starmer told reporters earlier that he is determined to get a grip on high levels of knife crime but said it was not a day for politics.

Witnesses described hearing screams and seeing children covered in blood in the mayhem outside the Hart Space, a community center that hosts everything from pregnancy workshops to women’s boot camps.

Joel Verite, a window cleaner riding in a van on his lunch break, said his colleague slammed on the brakes and reversed to where a woman was hanging on the side of a car covered in blood.

“She just screamed at me: ‘He’s killing kids over there. He’s killing kids over there,’” Verite told Sky News.

The woman, who was on the phone with police, directed him to where the violence was unfolding and then collapsed. Verite said he ran in the direction she had pointed.

A woman honking the horn of her car caught his attention and he found her with five or six bloody children inside. The woman said she was trying to get the kids to safety.

“It was like a scene you’d see on a disaster film,” he said. “I can’t explain to you how horrific it is what I saw.”

He ran to the dance studio, where he was startled to lock eyes with a man in a hooded tracksuit holding a knife at the top of the stairs.

“All I saw was a knife and I thought: ‘There are more people in there,’ and I just wanted to hurt him so bad,” Verite said. “But I was scared for myself and I wanted to help people. So I came outside and I was screaming because I knew where he was.”

Britain’s worst attack on children occurred in 1996, when 43-year-old Thomas Hamilton shot 16 kindergartners and their teacher dead in a school gymnasium in Dunblane, Scotland. The U.K. subsequently banned the private ownership of almost all handguns.

Mass shootings and killings with firearms are exceptionally rare in Britain, where knives were used in about 40% of homicides in the year to March 2023.

Mass stabbings are also very rare, according to Iain Overton, executive director of Action on Armed Violence.

“Most knife attacks are one-on-one and personal — either domestic violence or gang related — so this tragedy is very unusual and, accordingly, garners lots of media interest,” Overton said. “This offers no comfort to the grieving families, of course.”

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Associated Press journalist Danica Kirka contributed to this report.

Today in history:

On July 30, 1976, Caitlyn Jenner, who was then known as Bruce Jenner, set a world record of 8,618 points and won the gold medal in the Olympic decathlon at the Montreal Summer Games.

Also on this date:

In 1619, the first representative assembly in Colonial America convened in Jamestown in the Virginia Colony.

In 1916, German saboteurs blew up a munitions plant on Black Tom, an island near Jersey City, New Jersey, killing about a dozen people.

In 1930, Uruguay won the first FIFA World Cup, defeating Argentina 4-2.

In 1945, the Portland class heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis, having just delivered components of the atomic bomb to Tinian in the Mariana Islands during World War II, was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine; only 316 out of nearly 1,200 service members survived.

In 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a measure making “In God We Trust” the national motto, replacing “E Pluribus Unum.”

In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Social Security Amendments of 1965, which led to the creation of Medicare and Medicaid.

In 2008, ex-Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic (RA’-doh-van KA’-ra-jich) was extradited to The Hague to face genocide charges after nearly 13 years on the run. (He was sentenced by a U.N. court in 2019 to life imprisonment after being convicted of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.)

In 2012, three electric grids in India collapsed in a cascade, cutting power to 620 million people in the world’s biggest blackout.

In 2013, U.S. Army Pfc. Chelsea Manning was acquitted of aiding the enemy — the most serious charge she faced — but was convicted of espionage, theft and other charges at Fort Meade, Maryland, more than three years after she’d spilled secrets to WikiLeaks. (The former intelligence analyst was later sentenced to up to 35 years in prison, but the sentence was commuted by President Barack Obama in his final days in office.)

In 2016, 16 people died when a hot air balloon caught fire and exploded after hitting high-tension power lines before crashing into a pasture near Lockhart, Texas, about 70 miles northeast of San Antonio.

Today’s Birthdays:

• Former Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig is 90.
• Blues musician Buddy Guy is 88.
• Singer Paul Anka is 83.
• Actor and former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is 77.
• Actor Jean Reno is 76.
• Actor Ken Olin is 70.
• Actor Delta Burke is 68.
• Law professor Anita Hill is 68.
• Singer-songwriter Kate Bush is 66.
• Film director Richard Linklater is 64.
• Actor Laurence Fishburne is 63.
• TV personality Alton Brown is 62.
• Actor Lisa Kudrow is 61.
• Basketball Hall of Famer Chris Mullin is 61.
• Actor Vivica A. Fox is 60.
• Actor Terry Crews is 56.
• Actor Simon Baker is 55.
• Film director Christopher Nolan is 54.
• Actor Tom Green is 53.
• Actor Christine Taylor is 53.
• Actor Hilary Swank is 50.
• Olympic gold medal beach volleyball player Misty May-Treanor is 47.
• Actor Jaime Pressly is 47.
• Alt-country singer-musician Seth Avett (AY’-veht) is 44.
• Former soccer player Hope Solo is 43.
• Actor Yvonne Strahovski is 42.
• Actor Martin Starr is 42.
• Actor Gina Rodriguez is 40.
• Actor Nico Tortorella is 35.
• Actor Joey King is 25.

O’Brien died Saturday after a long illness, according to a statement by her publisher Faber and the literary agency PFD.

“A defiant and courageous spirit, Edna constantly strove to break new artistic ground, to write truthfully, from a place of deep feeling,” Faber said. “The vitality of her prose was a mirror of her zest for life: she was the very best company, kind, generous, mischievous, brave.” She is survived by her sons, Marcus and Carlos.

O’Brien published more than 20 books, most of them novels and story collections, and would know fully what she called the “extremities of joy and sorrow, love, crossed love and unrequited love, success and failure, fame and slaughter.” Few so concretely and poetically challenged Ireland’s religious, sexual and gender boundaries. Few wrote so fiercely, so sensually about loneliness, rebellion, desire and persecution.

“O’Brien is attracted to taboos just as they break, to the place of greatest heat and darkness and, you might even say, danger to her mortal soul,” Booker Prize winner Anne Enright wrote of her in The Guardian in 2012.

A world traveler in mind and body, O’Brien was as likely to imagine the longings of an Irish nun as to take in a man’s “boyish smile” in the midst of a “ponderous London club.” She befriended movie stars and heads of state while also writing sympathetically about Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams and meeting with female farm workers in Nigeria who feared abduction by Boko Haram.

O’Brien was an unknown about to turn 30, living with her husband and two small children outside of London, when “The Country Girls” made her Ireland’s most notorious exile since James Joyce. Written in just three weeks and published in 1960, for an advance of roughly $75, “The Country Girls” follows the lives of two young women: Caithleen (Kate) Brady and Bridget (Baba) Brennan journey from a rural convent to the risks and adventures of Dublin. Admirers were as caught up in their defiance and awakening as would-be censors were enraged by such passages as “He opened his braces and let his trousers slip down around the ankles” and “He patted my knees with his other hand. I was excited and warm and violent.”

Fame, wanted or otherwise, was O’Brien’s ever after. Her novel was praised and purchased in London and New York while back in Ireland it was labeled “filth” by Minister of Justice Charles Haughey and burned publicly in O’Brien’s hometown of Tuamgraney, County Clare. Detractors also included O’Brien’s parents and her husband, the author Ernest Gebler, from whom she was already becoming estranged.

“I had left the spare copy on the hall table for my husband to read, should he wish, and one morning he surprised me by appearing quite early in the doorway of the kitchen, the manuscript in his hand,” she wrote in her memoir “Country Girl,” published in 2012. “He had read it. Yes, he had to concede that despite everything, I had done it, and then he said something that was the death knell of the already ailing marriage — ‘You can write and I will never forgive you.’”

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She continued the stories of Kate and Baba in “The Lonely Girl” and “Girls in Their Married Bliss” and by the mid-1960s was single and enjoying the prime of “Swinging London”: whether socializing with Princess Margaret and Marianne Faithfull, or having a fling with actor Robert Mitchum (“I bet you never tasted white peaches,” he said upon meeting her). Another night, she was escorted home by Paul McCartney, who asked to see her children, picked up her son’s guitar and improvised a song that included the lines about O’Brien “She’ll have you sighing/ She’ll have you crying/ Hey/ She’ll blow your mind away.”

Enright would call O’Brien “the first Irish woman ever to have sex. For some decades, indeed, she was the only Irish woman to have had sex — the rest just had children.”

O’Brien was recognized well beyond the world of books. The 1980s British band Dexy’s Midnight Runners named her alongside Eugene O’Neill, Samuel Beckett, Oscar Wilde and others in the literary tribute “Burn It Down.” She dined at the White House with first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and Jack Nicholson, and she befriended Jacqueline Kennedy, whom she remembered as a “creature of paradoxes. While being private and immured she also had a hunger for intimacy — it was as if the barriers she had put up needed at times to be battered down.”

O’Brien related well to Kennedy’s reticence, and longing. The literary world gossiped about the author’s love life, but O’Brien’s deepest existence was on the page, from addressing a present that seemed without boundaries (“She longed to be free and young and naked with all the men in the world making love to her, all at once,” one of her characters thinks) to sorting out a past that seemed all boundaries — “the don’ts and the don’ts and the don’ts.”

In her story “The Love Object,” the narrator confronts her lust, and love, for an adulterous family man who need only say her name to make her legs tremble. “Long Distance” arrives at the end of an affair as a man and woman struggle to recapture their feelings for each other, haunted by grudges and mistrust:

“Love, she thought, is like nature but in reverse; first it fruits, then it flowers, then it seems to wither, then it goes deep, deep down into its burrow, where no one sees it, where it is lost from sight and ultimately people die with that secret buried inside their souls.”

“A Scandalous Woman” follows the stifling of a lively young Irish nonconformist — part of that “small solidarity of scandalous women who had conceived children without securing fathers” — and ends with O’Brien’s condemning her country as a “land of shame, a land of murder and a land of strange sacrificial women.” In “My Two Mothers,” the narrator prays for the chance to “begin our journey all over again, to live our lives as they should have been lived, happy, trusting, and free of shame.”

O’Brien’s other books included the erotic novel “August Is a Wicked Month,” which drew upon her time with Mitchum and was banned in parts of Ireland; “Down By The River,” based on a true story about a teenage Irish girl who becomes pregnant after being raped by her father; and the autobiographical “The Light of Evening,” in which a famous author returns to Ireland to see her ailing mother. “Girl,” a novel about victims of Boko Haram, came out in 2019.

O’Brien is among the most notable authors never to win the Nobel or even the Booker Prize. Her honors did include an Irish Book Award for lifetime achievement, the PEN/Nabokov prize and the Frank O’Connor award in 2011 for her story collection “Saints and Sinners,” for which she was praised by poet and award judge Thomas McCarthy as “the one who kept speaking when everyone else stopped talking about being an Irish woman.”

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Josephine Edna O’Brien was one of four children raised on a farm where “the relics of riches remained. It was a life full of contradictions. We had an avenue, but it was full of potholes; there was a gatehouse, but another couple lived there.” Her father was a violent alcoholic, her mother a talented letter writer who disapproved of her daughter’s profession, possibly out of jealousy. Lena O’Brien’s hold on her daughter’s imagination, the force of her regrets, made her a lifelong muse and a near stand-in for Ireland itself, “the cupboard with all things in it, the tabernacle with God in it, the lake with the legends in it.”

Like Kate and Baba in “The Country Girls,” O’Brien was educated in part at a convent, “dour years” made feverish by a disorienting crush she developed on one of the nuns. Language, too, was a temptation, and signpost, like the words she came upon on the back of her prayer book: “Lord, rebuke me not in thy wraith, neither chasten me in thy hot displeasure.”

“What did it mean?” she remembered thinking. “It didn’t matter what it meant. It would carry me through lessons and theorems and soggy meat and cabbage, because now, in secret, I had been drawn into the wild heart of things.”

By her early 20s, she was working in a pharmacy in Dublin and reading Tolstoy and Thackeray, among others, in her spare time. She had dreams of writing since she sneaked out to nearby fields as a child to work on stories, but doubted the relevance of her life until she read a Joyce anthology and learned that “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” was autobiographical. She began writing fiction that ran in the literary magazine The Bell and found work reviewing manuscripts for the publishing house Hutchinson, where editors were impressed enough by her summaries to commission what became “The Country Girls.”

“I cried a lot writing ‘The Country Girls,’ but scarcely noticed the tears. Anyhow, they were good tears. They touched on feelings that I did not know I had. Before my eyes, infinitely clear, came that former world in which I believed our fields and hollows had some old music slumbering in them, centuries old,” she wrote in her memoir.

“The words poured out of me, and the pen above the paper was not moving fast enough, so that I sometimes feared they would be lost forever.”

LONDON (AP) — Bloodied children ran screaming from a dance and yoga class “like a scene from a horror movie” to escape a teenager’s savage knife attack that killed two children and wounded 11 other people Monday in northwest England, police and witnesses said.

A 17-year-old boy was arrested on suspicion of murder and attempted murder in the stabbing in Southport, a seaside town near Liverpool, Merseyside Police said. The motive was not clear, but police said detectives were not treating the attack as terror-related.

Nine children were wounded — six of them in critical condition — in the latest headline-grabbing attack amid a recent rise in knife crime that has stoked anxieties and led to calls for the government to do more to clamp down on bladed weapons.

Two wounded adults who tried to shield the pupils were in critical condition, police said.

“We believe the adults who were injured were bravely trying to protect the children who were being attacked,” Merseyside Police Chief Constable Serena Kennedy said.

The Taylor Swift-themed workshop was held on the first week of school vacation for children aged about 6 to 11. The two-hour session was led by two women — a yoga instructor and a dance instructor — according to an online listing.

Witnesses described hearing blood-curdling screams and seeing children covered in blood emerging from the business that hosts everything from pregnancy workshops and meditation sessions to women’s bootcamps.

“They were in the road, running from the nursery,” said Bare Varathan, who owns a shop nearby. “They had been stabbed, here, here, here, everywhere,” indicating the neck, back and chest.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer called the attack “horrendous and deeply shocking.” King Charles III sent his “condolences, prayers and deepest sympathies” for those affected by the “utterly horrific incident.”

Police were called shortly before noon to a street where several small businesses are located behind rows of brick houses in the city of about 100,000.

The first officers who arrived were shocked to find so many casualties from the “ferocious attack,” most of them children with serious injuries, Kennedy said.

Colin Parry, an auto body shop owner, said most of the stabbing victims appeared to be young girls.

“The mothers are coming here now and screaming,” Parry said. “It is like a scene from a horror movie. … It’s like something from America, not like sunny Southport.”

The suspect, who has not been identified, lived in a village about 5 miles (8 kilometers) from the site of the attack, police said. He was originally from Cardiff, Wales.

Ryan Carney, who lives with his mother in the street, said his mother saw emergency workers carrying children “covered in red, covered in blood. She said she could see the stab wounds in the backs of the children.”

“All this stuff never really happens around here,” he said. “You hear of it, stabbings and stuff like that in major cities, your Manchesters, your Londons. This is sunny Southport. That’s what people call it. The sun’s out. It’s a lovely place to be.”

Britain’s worst attack on children occurred in 1996, when 43-year-old Thomas Hamilton shot 16 kindergarten pupils and their teacher dead in a school gymnasium in Dunblane, Scotland. The U.K. subsequently banned the private ownership of almost all handguns.

Mass shootings and killings with firearms are rare in Britain, where knives were used in about 40% of homicides in the year to March 2023.

Today in history:

On July 29, 1967, an accidental rocket launch on the deck of the supercarrier USS Forrestal in the Gulf of Tonkin resulted in a fire and explosions that killed 134 service members.

Also on this date:

In 1836, the newly-completed Arc de Triomphe was inaugurated in Paris.

In 1890, artist Vincent van Gogh, 37, died of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound in Auvers-sur-Oise, France.

In 1914, transcontinental telephone service in the U.S. became operational with the first test conversation between New York and San Francisco.

In 1921, Adolf Hitler became the leader of the National Socialist German Workers’ (Nazi) Party.

In 1954, the first volume of JRR Tolkien’s novel “The Lord of the Rings” (“The Fellowship of the Ring”) was published.

In 1957, the International Atomic Energy Agency was established.

In 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act, creating NASA.

In 1981, Britain’s Prince Charles married Lady Diana Spencer in a glittering ceremony at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. (They divorced in 1996.)

In 1986, a federal jury in New York found that the National Football League had committed an antitrust violation against the rival United States Football League, but the jury ordered the NFL to pay token damages of just three dollars.

In 1994, abortion opponent Paul Hill shot and killed Dr. John Bayard Britton and Britton’s escort, James H. Barrett, outside the Ladies Center clinic in Pensacola, Florida.

In 1999, a former day trader, apparently upset over stock losses, opened fire in two Atlanta brokerage offices, killing nine people and wounding 13 before shooting himself; authorities said Mark O. Barton had also killed his wife and two children.

In 2016, former suburban Chicago police officer Drew Peterson was given an additional 40 years in prison for trying to hire someone to kill the prosecutor who put him behind bars for killing his third wife.

In 2021, American Sunisa Lee won the gold medal in women’s all-around gymnastics at the Tokyo Games; she was the fifth straight American woman to claim the Olympic title in the event.

Today’s Birthdays:

• Former Sen. Nancy Kassebaum-Baker is 92.
• Former Sen. Elizabeth H. Dole is 88.
• Artist Jenny Holzer is 74.
• Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns is 71.
• Style guru Tim Gunn is 71.
• Rock singer-musician Geddy Lee (Rush) is 71.
• Rock singer Patti Scialfa (Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band) is 71.
• Actor Alexandra Paul is 61.
• Country singer Martina McBride is 58.
• Actor Wil Wheaton is 52.
• R&B singer Wanya Morris (Boyz II Men) is 51.
• Actor Stephen Dorff is 51.
• Actor Josh Radnor is 50.
• Hip-hop DJ/music producer Danger Mouse is 47.
• NFL quarterback Dak Prescott is 31.

Organizers overseeing the event at the Paris Games are optimistic that triathletes will be able to swim in the city’s famed waterway when the competition starts Tuesday.

The sport’s governing body, World Triathlon, its medical team and city officials are banking on sunny weather and higher temperatures to bring the bacteria levels below the necessary limits to stage the swim portion of the race, which also includes biking and running.

World Triathlon made the decision to cancel the swim workout early Monday following a meeting over water quality in the Seine, which is closely linked to the weather. Rain deluged Friday’s opening ceremony and showers persisted Saturday, forcing some tennis matches and the skateboarding competition to be postponed.

The representatives for Paris 2024 and triathlon’s international federation said tests conducted in the Seine on Sunday showed water quality levels leading into the training session that “did not provide sufficient guarantees to allow the event to be held.” The delegation blamed the recent rain.

French sports minister Amélie Oudéa-Castéra told French news channel CNEWS on Monday that officials are “absolutely serene about all of this.” The plans they put in place to control bacteria levels in the river have been effective, but the weather is beyond their control, she said.

The recent rain contributed to the water quality concerns, but she said she believed things would improve.

“I am confident in the fact that we will be able to be there tomorrow for the men’s triathlon event,” she said.

Organizers say the backup plan is to postpone the events and, if elevated bacteria levels persist, the swimming portion of the race will be abandoned and the athletes will compete in a duathlon.

Swimming in the Seine has been banned for over a century in big part because of the poor water quality. Organizers have invested 1.4 billion euros ($1.5 billion) to prepare the river ahead of the Olympics.

In addition to the swimming part of the men’s triathlon Tuesday, the women’s triathlon Wednesday and the triathlon mixed relay Monday, the Seine is expected be used for the marathon swimming competitions on Aug. 8 and 9.

Daily water quality tests in early June indicated unsafe levels of E. coli bacteria, followed by recent improvements. Some of the measures put in place to improve the water quality include the construction of a giant basin to capture excess rainwater and keep wastewater from flowing into the river, renovating sewer infrastructure and upgrading wastewater treatment plants.

Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo took a very public swim in the river about two weeks before Olympic events were set to start, hoping to ease fears about the long-polluted waterway being clean enough to host swimming competitions.

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AP Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/2024-paris-olympic-games

Da Vinci’s painting depicts the moment when Jesus Christ declared that an apostle would betray him. The scene during Friday’s ceremony featured DJ and producer Barbara Butch — an LGBTQ+ icon — flanked by drag artists and dancers.

Religious conservatives from around the world decried the segment, with the French Catholic Church’s conference of bishops deploring “scenes of derision” that they said made a mockery of Christianity — a sentiment echoed by Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova. The Anglican Communion in Egypt expressed its “deep regret” Sunday, saying the ceremony could cause the IOC to “lose its distinctive sporting identity and its humanitarian message.”

The ceremony’s artistic director Thomas Jolly had said it was meant to celebrate diversity and pay tribute to feasting and French gastronomy. Paris 2024 spokesperson Anne Descamps was asked about the outcry during an International Olympic Committee news conference on Sunday.

“Clearly there was never an intention to show disrespect to any religious group. On the contrary, I think (with) Thomas Jolly, we really did try to celebrate community tolerance,” Descamps said. “Looking at the result of the polls that we shared, we believe that this ambition was achieved. If people have taken any offense we are, of course, really, really sorry.”

Jolly explained his intentions to The Associated Press after the ceremony.

“My wish isn’t to be subversive, nor to mock or to shock,” Jolly said. “Most of all, I wanted to send a message of love, a message of inclusion and not at all to divide.”

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Follow AP coverage of the Olympics at https://apnews.com/hub/2024-paris-olympic-games

Today in history:

On July 28, 1945, A U.S. Army B-25 bomber crashed into the 79th floor of New York’s Empire State Building, the world’s tallest structure at the time, killing 14 people.

Also on this date:

In 1794, Maximilien Robespierre and Louis Antoine de Saint-Just were executed by guillotine during the French Revolution.

In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced he was increasing the number of American troops in South Vietnam from 75,000 to 125,000.

In 1976, an earthquake devastated northern China, killing at least 242,000 people, according to an official estimate.

In 1984, the Los Angeles Summer Olympics opened; 14 Eastern Bloc countries, led by the Soviet Union, boycotted the Games.

In 1995, a jury in Union, South Carolina, rejected the death penalty for Susan Smith, sentencing her to life in prison for drowning her two young sons (Smith will be eligible for parole in November 2024).

In 1996, 8,000 year-old human skeletal remains (later referred to as Kennewick Man) were discovered in a bank of the Columbia River in Kennewick, Washington.

In 2004, the Irish Republican Army formally announced an end to their armed campaign against British rule in Northern Ireland.

In 2015, it was announced that Jonathan Pollard, the former U.S. Naval intelligence analyst who had spent nearly three decades in prison for spying for Israel, had been granted parole.

In 2018, Pope Francis accepted the resignation of U.S. Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the emeritus archbishop of Washington, D.C., following allegations of sexual abuse, including one involving an 11-year-old boy.

In 2019, a gunman opened fire at a popular garlic festival in Gilroy, California, killing three people, including a six-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl, and wounding 17 others before taking his own life.

Today’s Birthdays:

• Music conductor Riccardo Muti is 83.
• Former Senator and NBA Hall of Famer Bill Bradley is 81.
• “Garfield” creator Jim Davis is 79.
• TV producer Dick Ebersol is 77.
• Actor Sally Struthers is 77.
• Architect Santiago Calatrava is 73.
• CBS TV journalist Scott Pelley is 67.
• Actor Lori Loughlin is 60.
• Jazz musician-producer Delfeayo Marsalis is 59.
• UFC president Dana White is 55.
• Actor Elizabeth Berkley is 52.
• Basketball Hall of Famer Manu Ginobili is 47.
• Actor John David Washington is 40.
• Actor Dustin Milligan is 39.
• Rapper Soulja Boy is 34.
• England soccer star Harry Kane is 31.
• Pop/rock singer Cher Lloyd is 31.
• Golfer Nelly Korda is 26.