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6 people killed in Tel Aviv mass shooting moments before Iran launches missile attack on Israel, police say
Israeli police said six people were killed in a shooting attack in Tel Aviv on Tuesday evening.
Two suspects opened fire on a boulevard in the Jaffa neighborhood in southern Tel Aviv, police said. The two suspects were killed.
The attack came moments before a massive barrage of rockets from Iran sent people into bomb shelters across Israel, including in Tel Aviv.
Israel’s MDA ambulance service said Tuesday it received a report at 7:01 p.m of people wounded by gunfire. It later said it was treating seven people for wounds.
The shooting came just before Iran launched a barrage of missiles at Israel in response to the killings of Iran-backed militant leaders; the missile attack sent Israelis to shelters and prompted alarm across the region.
A U.S. defense official said the United States intercepted some of the missiles to help defend Israel.
“A short while ago, missiles were launched from Iran towards the State of Israel,” the Israeli military said in a statement, as sirens sounded across Israel.
After about an hour, the military announced there was no longer a threat and “it was decided that it is now permitted to leave protected spaces in all areas across the country,” after a “large number” of Iranian missiles were intercepted.
The explosions from the Iranian missile barrage rang out just hours after a senior White House official told CBS News the U.S. had “indications that Iran is preparing to imminently launch a ballistic missile attack against Israel.”
That warning, which Israel’s military said had been communicated from Washington, came after Israel announced the beginning of “limited, localized, and targeted ground raids” against the Iran-backed group Hezbollah in Lebanon.
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Sen. Katie Britt on JD Vance’s character, VP debate and more
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How election deniers are fueling the push to hand count ballots
Gillespie County, Texas — For the last year, Mark Cook has been preaching a kind of low-tech, election-doubting gospel in political battlegrounds across the country.
“But we’re told: trust the machines…and that is a way to manipulate an election,” Cook recently said at an event in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Traveling by RV, Cook calls the three-hour plus presentation he’s brought to more than 100 counties, the “Hand Count Roadshow.” Cook is part of an election conspiracy movement that’s been growing since 2020 and claims that voting machines can be hacked and manipulated —meaning the only voting system to be trusted is an old-fashioned hand count.
Last year, in deep-red Gillespie County in Central Texas, Cook convinced Republicans who run their own primaries to join the small minority that hand count votes. So, on election night in March, hundreds of volunteers stayed up until as early as 4:30 a.m. the next morning to hand count roughly 8,000 votes, a process that resulted in numerous errors.
“We only have 13 precincts, 12 of which turned in final tally sheets that were inaccurate,” Jim Riley, the elections administrator who oversees elections in Gillespie County, told CBS News.
Riley believes there was no problem in Gillespie County that needed to be solved by hand counting ballots.
“No, the hand counting, in my opinion, did nothing to improve elections in the county,” Riley said.
Riley, a Republican, says Gillespie County’s systems were already top-notch. They involved paper ballots, tallied by a state-approved scanner, that were then verified for accuracy.
Riley says that as much as he and his team have tried to create transparency and visibility to reassure voters, for some “it won’t ever be enough.”
Mo Saiidi was the Gillespie County Republican chair when Cook’s “Hand Count Roadshow” came to town.
“Nobody provided a single iota of evidence, it was just this perception that if it’s plugged into the wall, they’re subject to hacking,” Saiidi said.
Frustrated by his party’s decision, Saiidi resigned.
“We were chasing this elusive problem that never existed,” Saiidi said. “I, in good conscience, I could not lead the effort as a Republican chair.”
The issue has received even more attention following a controversial rule passed last month by the Republican-majority Georgia State Election Board that the number of ballots cast be counted by hand in the November election. Democrats filed a lawsuit Monday in an effort to block enforcement of the rule.
Numerous studies have shown hand counts to be less accurate, more costly and more time-consuming, but that hasn’t stopped Cook from preaching it.
In Michigan, CBS News approached Cook’s RV to ask him some basic questions, but he drove away. When CBS News then approached him in Pennsylvania, he again refused to talk. However, he regularly appears on right-wing podcasts.
Even in the wake of Gillespie County’s hand count ordeal, the hardened hand count faction is flooding county meetings demanding change before November.
Riley calls the hand count experience “a net loss.”
“If you don’t like hand counting, you’re evil,” Riley said of how some of the county’s constituents see the issue.
It appears to be a solution in search of a problem.
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Former CIA official examines Iranian missile attack on Israel
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