At least nine people were killed in an attack at Monterey Park, California, late Saturday, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

It was not clear how many people were injured.

The Sheriff’s Department said the shooter was male, but did not specify whether he was still at large. 

The shooting took place after 10 p.m. (0600 GMT) near the site of a Chinese Lunar New Year celebration that had been attended by thousands of people, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Footage posted on social media showed police cars at the scene, with several streets cordoned off.

Monterey Park, a city of about 60,000 people with a large Asian population, lies around 11 kilometres (7 miles) east of downtown Los Angeles.

“Our hearts go out to those who lost loved ones tonight in our neighbouring city, Monterey Park, where a mass shooting just
occurred,” Los Angeles City Controller Kenneth Mejia said in a tweet.

Saturday was the start of the two-day Luna New Year festival, which is one of the largest in southern California.

Officials from the US Department of Justice found six more classified documents during a search of Joe Biden’s family home in Delaware this week, the president’s personal lawyer said in a statement Saturday.

The new disclosure served up another embarrassing twist for Biden in an affair dogging him just as he gets ready to declare whether he will run for another term in 2024.

Biden insists he has done nothing wrong and has downplayed the situation as an innocent mistake.

Documents from his time as vice president and marked as classified first turned up in an office at a Biden-affiliated think tank in Washington last year, and then again at his home in Delaware. Altogether they are about a dozen documents.

After the second find, the White House offered to let the Department of Justice search the Delaware home — the search was carried out on Friday and is now concluded, Biden attorney Bob Bauer said.

“DOJ took possession of materials it deemed within the scope of its inquiry, including six items consisting of documents with classification markings and surrounding materials,” Bauer said.

The search lasted more than 12 hours and covered “all working, living and storage spaces in the home,” Bauer said.

“DOJ had full access to the President’s home, including personally handwritten notes, files, papers, binders, memorabilia, to-do lists, schedules, and reminders going back decades,” he said.

Some of the new papers seized were from Biden’s time in the Senate and some were from his tenure as vice president, according to Bauer.

Bauer said Biden’s personal lawyers and White House counsel previously arranged with the Justice Department to be present during the inspection, and they agreed to not publicize news of the search in advance “in accordance with its standard procedures.”

The White House has said the earlier batches of documents were turned over to the Justice Department and National Archives, which handles presidential records, as soon as they were found.

– Two special counsels –

On Thursday, Biden dismissed the furor over the discovery of the old classified documents.

Asked by reporters during a trip to California about the issue, he said: “I think you’re going to find there’s nothing there.”

“I have no regrets. I’m following what the lawyers have told me they want me to do. It’s exactly what we’re doing. There’s no there there.”

“We found a handful of documents… were filed in the wrong place. We immediately turned them over to the Archives and the Justice Department. We’re fully cooperating and looking forward to getting this resolved quickly,” he added.

Attorney General Merrick Garland earlier this month appointed a special counsel, former government lawyer Robert Hur, to act as special counsel for the investigation.

Garland said the “extraordinary circumstances” of investigating a sitting president required him to take the extra step of bringing in an outside prosecutor.

The discovery, which first came to light earlier this month, has dented Biden’s brand as a return to competency and honesty after the scandal-filled years of Donald Trump’s presidency and brought intense scrutiny from the media and Republicans in Congress.

Indeed, the scandal comes as a different special prosecutor investigates the potentially far more serious case of Trump hauling off hundreds of documents from the White House to his Florida residence and his alleged obstruction of government efforts to get them back.

Germany faced a strong backlash from allies on Saturday over its refusal to supply Ukraine with its vaunted Leopard tanks to boost its fighting capacity in the nearly year-long war with Russia.

On Friday, some 50 nations agreed to provide Kyiv with billions of dollars’ worth of military hardware, including ample armoured vehicles and munitions needed to push back Russian forces.

But German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius told reporters on the sidelines of the event at the US Ramstein Air Base that despite heightened expectations, “We still cannot say when a decision will be taken, and what the decision will be, when it comes to the Leopard tank.”

On Saturday, several allies echoed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in saying that the tanks were essential to Ukraine’s fight with its much larger neighbour.

In a joint statement — and a rare public criticism of Europe’s top power — the foreign ministers of the three Baltic states said they “call on Germany to provide Leopard tanks to Ukraine now.”

“This is needed to stop Russian aggression, help Ukraine and restore peace in Europe quickly. Germany as the leading European power has special responsibility in this regard,” said the statement, tweeted by Latvian Foreign Minister Edgars Rinkevics.

Germany has been hesitant to send the Leopards, or allow other nations to transfer them to Kyiv, with reports earlier in the week saying it would agree to do so only if the US provided its tanks as well. Washington has said it could not provide its Abrams tanks to Ukraine, citing difficulties in training and maintenance.

US Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina who is currently visiting Kyiv, called on both sides to supply the machines.

“To the Germans: Send tanks to Ukraine because they need them. It is in your own national interest that (Russian President Vladimir) Putin loses in Ukraine.”

“To the (US President Joe) Biden Administration: Send American tanks so that others will follow our lead,” he said.

Expectations had grown ahead of Friday’s Ukraine Contact Group meeting, a grouping of some 50 US-led countries that are providing weapons to Ukraine, that Germany would at least agree that other countries operating Leopards would be permitted to transfer them to Kyiv’s army.

– Funeral –

In Kyiv on Saturday, Zelensky attended the funeral of his interior minister and other officials who were killed in a helicopter crash outside the capital Wednesday.

Denys Monastyrsky, who as interior minister was one of Zelensky’s top aides, became the highest-ranking Ukrainian official to die in the war that Russia launched on February 24, 2022.

The cause of the helicopter crash that killed him and 13 others when the chopper crashed near a kindergarten, was still under investigation.

US officials said Ukraine still faces an uphill battle against Russian forces, who still occupy one-fifth of the country, 11 months after invading.

But they spoke of a possible campaign in the coming weeks by Ukraine to retake parts of its land.

US Joint Chiefs Chairman General Mark Milley pointed to the substantial amount of equipment — much of it armoured vehicles and artillery — that Ukraine was being pledged at Ramstein, as well as the large-scale training of its forces by allies.

“I do think it’s very possible for the Ukrainians to run a significant tactical or even operational-level offensive operation to liberate as much Ukrainian territory as possible,” Milley said.

But the Kremlin warned Friday that Western tanks will make little difference on the battlefield.

“One should not exaggerate the importance of such supplies in terms of the ability to change something,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.

A building collapsed in Syria’s second city of Aleppo on Sunday killing 10 people including one child, state media reported, adding that rescue efforts were ongoing.

The five-storey structure in the city’s Sheikh Maksoud neighbourhood collapsed “due to a water leak in the building’s foundations”, state news agency SANA quoted a police source as saying.

Rescuers, civil defence forces and firefighters continued their search for others believed to be missing in the rubble, the news agency added.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights meanwhile reported that the 10 victims were all displaced people from the northern district of Afrin.

The Sheikh Maksoud neighbourhood is predominantly inhabited by Syrian Kurds, including fighters, many of whom fled from Afrin after Turkey began an offensive there in 2018.

Nearly half a million people have been killed in Syria’s conflict since it broke out in 2011, and about half of its pre-war population has been displaced.

Many of those displaced have had to move into buildings that are structurally unsound, resulting in relatively frequent collapses.

Last September, a building collapse in the Ferdaws neighbourhood of Aleppo killed 10 people, including three children.

Security forces in Burkina Faso have rescued 66 women and children after they were kidnapped by suspected militant jihadists in the north of the country last week, state TV reports.

In an unprecedented mass kidnapping, the victims were seized while gathering food in an area hit by an insurgency.

They were found on a bus at a security checkpoint some 200km (125 miles) south of where they were taken, reports say.

It is not clear if their captors have also been detained.

On Friday night, state TV showed pictures of the children and women, some with babies on their backs, boarding a bus at an airport after being addressed by a military officer.

“They have found freedom after eight long days in the hands of their kidnappers,” the reporter says.

They are now in the capital, Ouagadougou, where they are expected to be questioned to find out “more about their abductors, their detention and their convoy”, a security source told the AFP news agency.

The women and children were kidnapped in two groups on 12 and 13 January in the district of Arbinda.

Roads in and out of the area have been blocked by militant jihadists. There is severe hunger as food supplies are limited, and the humanitarian situation is desperate.

Last month, protesters in Arbinda broke into warehouses to get food and supplies.

Burkina Faso as a whole has been hit by a decade-long insurgency that has displaced nearly two million people.

The military took power last January, promising an end to attacks. A different group of officers mounted a second coup in September over a failure to end the insurgency but the violence has continued.

A US air strike assisting government troops in Somalia has killed about 30 Islamist al-Shabab militants, the US military says.

The operation happened near the town of Galcad, about 260km (162 miles) northeast of the capital Mogadishu.

Over the past few days, the Somali army and al-Shabab militants have fought for control of the town.

Friday’s air strike came as the army was being attacked by more than 100 militants, the US Africa Command says.

Earlier the Islamists killed seven soldiers after storming a military base in Galcad. Somalia’s Information Ministry said dozens of the militants were killed.

Al-Shabab has been fighting Somalia’s central government since 2006, aiming to impose an extremist Islamist regime. While it has been pushed out of Mogadishu and other areas it continues to attack military and civilian targets.

Last Monday the government said its army and local militias had captured the port town of Harardhere, which had been a key al-Shabab supply centre since 2010.

In its report on the Galcad fighting the US Africa Command said three al-Shabab vehicles were destroyed and “the command assesses that no civilians were injured or killed”. The details have not been independently verified.

“US Africa Command’s forces will continue training, advising and equipping partner forces to help give them the tools they need to defeat al-Shabab, the largest and most deadly al-Qaeda network in the world,” the statement said.