THE AMERICAN DISEASE: Four people were killed yesterday including children ages 5, 8, and 11, and a teacher in a shooting at an elementary school in Bend, Oregon.

  This was the 433^rd mass shooting in the US this year … shootings in which four or more people are shot. 

  The incident began when a 911 caller reported being in their car and shot at by someone carrying a long gun. The shooter then fired through the locks on a door at the Silver Rail Elementary Schooland went inside. Police say he was followed by a bystander with a gun who killed the gunman identified only as a 16-year-old Bend resident.

  The entire incident transpired in a matter of minutes.

  Another teacher and 7-year-old child were taken to the hospital with what were described as critical injuries.

THE WAR ROOM: With Russia stepping up use of jet-powered attack drones, Ukraine has run out of its American-made Patriot interceptor missiles.

  This development comes in the midst of a serious breakdown in relations between President Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump blames Ukraine’s attacks on Russian energy facilities for rising fuel prices and Zelensky says he has been betrayed by Trump’s decision to buy sanctioned diesel fuel from Russia.

  Zelensky said he will continue attacking Russian fuel installations in defiance of Trump’s demand that he stop. He was critical of Trump’s relationship with Valdimir Putin, saying in an interview with The Financial Times, “How can Trump be friends with him? I think it’s a mistake.”

  The war has also escalated to attacks on data centers and telecommunication sites. Russian hit a data center in Kyiv while Ukraine damaged three major data centers operated by the technology giant Yandex, known as the Russian Google.    

INFINITE SCROLL:

— President Trump cancelled his defense secretary’s plan to live stream the execution by firing squad of the Fort Hood mass shooter, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan.

  Hegseth’s plan produced an uproar with the vast majority of Americans appalled at the thought of a live streamed killing. “Many very good and well meaning people would rather not watch him die, through streaming, or through any other visual device,” President Trump wrote on his 

social media. “He will die, as scheduled, by firing squad, but this event will not be streamed.”

  In another example of miscommunication and the lack of communication within the administration, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth did not tell Trump about his plan before announcing it.

  Hasan is still scheduled to be executed by firing squad at Fort Hood on December 3. Back in 2009, he went on a shooting rampage killing 13 people and wounding 32.

— Chasing the ghost of voter fraud, the Justice Department yesterday sued California asking a federal court to immediately bar the state from counting ballots from about 20,000 voters statewide, many of them in Los Angeles County, whom the administration claims are “likely noncitizens.”

  Californians have already begun early voting. “This is a sad, desperate attempt by Trump to use his politicized Justice Department to try to suppress California voters just three weeks before Election Day,” Gov. Gavin Newsom wrote on Twitter/X. “Courts have made clear the federal government has no role in running state elections.”

— President Trump’s new press secretary Katie Zacharia has called herself a lawyer and the President has referred to her as an attorney although she never passed the bar exam anywhere in the US. She failed the test once in California. 

  Simply having a law degree does not make anyone a lawyer, but Zacharia told the NY Times that she was once advised by a president of Pepperdine University that it was acceptable for her to identify as a lawyer on television. 

  Appearing on the “Real America’s Voice” with right-wing influencer Jack Posobiec, she said, “I never came across as someone who was an attorney at law.” 

  Her test now is whether she can come across as a press secretary.

ECON 101: Thirty-year mortgage rates are at 7.4 percent, the highest since 2023. That’s high, but far from the worst. 

  Mortgages hit 16.35 percent in April of 1980. The 30-year hit its most recent low of 2.65 percent in January of 2021. If you have one of those, don’t move. 

STRIKE FOUR: The Milwaukee Brewers swept the Los Angeles Dodgers in the National League Championship Series, eliminating the 2025 World Series champions. Last year it was the Dodgers who swept Milwaukee.

  The Brewers haven’t been to the World Series since 1982.  

THE OBIT PAGE: Frank Mancuso, the Hollywood executive who ran Paramount and later MGM and greenlit the hits “Top Gun,” “Ghost,” “Fatal Attraction,” and, “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” died earlier this month in Los Angeles at age 93.

  Mancuso rose from being a teenage theater usher from Buffalo to a man who decides what goes up on the screen. He also pioneered using music videos and soundtracks to promote movies, helping to make “Saturday Night Fever” (1977) a global disco hit and “Flashdance” (1983) into a fashion phenomenon. If you’re old enough you might remember when dance wear hit the streets.

THE SPIN RACK: Even though the Trump administration has been pinching it for research money, Harvard reported that its endowment grew by $11 billion in the past year, up to about $68 billion. Harvard already had the world’s fattest endowment but their financial managers made a 27 percent return on the school’s investments in the past year. — Actress Hillary Swank is pregnant with her third child at age 52.

BELOW THE FOLD: A woman in Costa Mesa, California who registered her dog to vote, and cast ballots in the animal’s name in 2021 and 2022, has been sentenced to pay for anti-voter-fraud billboards with her picture on it, prosecutors announced. The billboards will say, “Don’t be a dog. Voter Fraud is a Crime.”

  It’s bad, but at least the dog was not an immigrant.

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