TREBES, France — A gun-wielding extremist went on a rampage Friday in a quiet corner of southern France, killing three people as he hijacked a car, opened fire on police and took hostages in a supermarket, where panicked shoppers hid in a meat locker or ran through the aisles.
After an hours-long standoff, the 25-year-old attacker was slain as elite police forces stormed the market. They were aided by a heroic police officer who had offered himself up in a hostage swap and suffered life-threatening wounds as a result — one of 16 people injured in the day’s violence.
The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attack near Carcassonne, a medieval city beloved by tourists, and the town of Trebes. It was the deadliest attack in France since Emmanuel Macron became president last May.
The officer who volunteered to take the place a female hostage was identified as Col. Arnaud Beltrame. He managed to surreptitiously leave his cellphone on so that police outside could hear what was going on inside the supermarket. Officials said once they heard shots inside the market they decided to storm it.
A police official who was not authorized to be publicly identified confirmed the officer’s identity to The Associated Press.
NEW YORK — Stocks around the world plunged Friday as investors feared that a trade conflict between the U.S. and China, the biggest economies in the world, would escalate. A second day of big losses pushed U.S. stocks to their worst week in two years.
Investors fear that if China responds in kind to sanctions on $60 billion worth of Chinese imports the White House announced on Thursday, it will be a first step toward a full-blown trade war that could damage the global economy and slash profits at big U.S. exporters like Apple and Boeing.
The market’s two biggest sectors slumped the most. Technology stocks have made enormous gains over the past year, but since they do so much business outside the U.S., investors see them as particularly vulnerable in a trade dispute. The sector dropped 7.9 percent this week.
Banks also fell sharply. Amid the trade-war rumblings, investors fled to the safety of bonds and drove down yields, a potential negative for bank profits. That marked a reversal from earlier in the week, when banks rose as the Federal Reserve raised interest rates.
It wound up being the worst week for U.S. indexes since January 2016. The S&P 500 index sank 6 percent. Among notable decliners was Facebook, which lost 13.9 percent, or $68 billion in value, as outrage mounted over its handling of user data. That’s about as much as the company was worth in in 2012, the year of its initial public offering.
NEW YORK — A New York City firefighter died early Friday battling a fierce blaze on a movie set in a former jazz club after getting separated from his fellow firefighters in the thick smoke.
The fire started in the cellar as the crew of “Motherless Brooklyn,” directed by Edward Norton, was nearing the end of its working day at 11 p.m. Thursday. Flames poured out the windows as firefighters stormed into the five-story Harlem building, dumping water on the blaze to get it under control.
Firefighter Michael R. Davidson of Engine Co. 69 was assigned to the nozzle on the lead hose-line and pushed into the burning basement.
But the blaze was too much. Firefighters had to back out, and the 15-year Fire Department veteran was separated from his colleagues. Firefighters searched desperately for him, and he was found unconscious after suffering severe smoke inhalation, Fire Commissioner Daniel Nigro said. Davidson was pronounced dead at a hospital shortly after midnight.
“This is an awful night,” Eric Phillips, a spokesman for Mayor Bill de Blasio, said in a tweet. “You haven’t heard a scream until you’ve heard the scream of a mother who’s seen her son give his life to protect us.”
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration announced criminal charges and sanctions Friday against Iranians accused in a hacking scheme to pilfer sensitive information from hundreds of universities, private companies and American government agencies.
The nine defendants, accused of working at the behest of the Iranian government-tied Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, hacked the computer systems of about 320 universities in the United States and abroad to steal expensive science and engineering research that was then used by the government or sold for profit, prosecutors said.
The hackers also are accused of breaking into the networks of government organizations, such as the Department of Labor, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the United Nations, and private sector entities including technology companies and law and consulting firms.
The Justice Department said the hackers were affiliated with an Iranian company called the Mabna Institute, which prosecutors say contracted with the Iranian government to steal scientific research from other countries.
“By bringing these criminal charges, we reinforce the norm that most of the civilized world accepts: nation-states should not steal intellectual property for the purpose of giving domestic industries an advantage,” Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said in announcing the charges.
From Associated Press