AP Photos: Heartbroken New Zealanders mourn mass shooting

By The Associated Press
March 16, 2019 | 6:10 AM

CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand (AP) — Heartbroken New Zealanders lit candles and placed flowers at makeshift memorials set up in the city of Christchurch in the wake of the deadliest mass shooting in the country’s history.

Some mourners hugged their neighbors, while others stood in solemn silence at sites in the city center, not far from the two mosques where Muslims gathered for Friday prayers were mowed down by a racist gunman.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the shooter, an Australian native, had chosen to strike in New Zealand “because we represent diversity, kindness, compassion.”

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Analysis: The world Washington built is fraying. What comes next?

By J.J. Green
August 20, 2026 | 8:57 PM

The United States is confronting a global security environment that increasingly resembles the outcome its Cold War adversaries once hoped to produce: a divided West, weakened alliances, economic exhaustion, multiple simultaneous wars and declining confidence in American leadership. That does not mean today’s crises were orchestrated according to some surviving Soviet master plan. The Soviet Union is gone, and the threats facing Washington now come from several different states with different interests. But the strategic effect is strikingly familiar. Early NATO assessments of Soviet intentions warned that Moscow sought to weaken the democratic powers, deny the West a secure European base and ultimately exhaust North America economically. Now, NATO says Russia is again trying to reconfigure the Euro-Atlantic security order through military force, sabotage, cyberattacks, coercion and disinformation. The difference is that much of the pressure now confronting the West is occurring simultaneously — and some of the damage to alliance cohesion is self-inflicted.

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