Democratic congressman John Lewis, an icon in the fight for civil rights, announced Sunday he has stage 4 pancreatic cancer.”I have been in some kind of fight — for freedom, equality, basic human rights — for nearly my entire life. I have never faced a fight quite like the one I have now,” Lewis said in a statement.”So I’ve decided to do what I know to do and what I have always done: I am going to fight and jeep fighting…we still have many bridges to cross,”Lewis said he is “clear-eyed” about the prognosis and that his doctors tell him he has a fighting chance.House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tweeted that “generations of Americans” have Lewis in their thoughts and prayers, saying she knows he will be well.The 79-year-old Lewis has represented the 5th Congressional District in Georgia since 1986 and has been a stalwart for liberal causes and human rights.But Lewis is best known has a tireless fighter for civil rights — he marched with Martin Luther King in the early 1960s, sat down at segregated lunch counters, and was the victim of police nightsticks and billy clubs, suffering from a fractured skull.Lewis was an original Freedom Rider, traveling on busses across the south as part of the battle for integration. 
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The Taliban’s ruling council agreed Sunday to a temporary cease-fire in Afghanistan, providing a window in which a peace agreement with the United States can be signed, officials from the insurgent group said. They didn’t say when it would begin.A cease-fire had been demanded by Washington before any peace agreement could be signed. A peace deal would allow the U.S. to bring home its troops from Afghanistan and end its 18-year military engagement there, America’s longest.There was no immediate response from Washington.The U.S. wants any deal to include a promise from the Taliban that Afghanistan would not be used as a base by terrorist groups. The U.S. currently has an estimated 12,000 troops in Afghanistan.The Taliban chief must approve the cease-fire decision but that was expected. The duration of the cease-fire was not specified but it was suggested it would last for 10 days. It was also not specified when the cease-fire would begin.Four members of the Taliban negotiating team met for a week with the ruling council before they agreed on the brief cease-fire. The negotiating team returned Sunday to Qatar where the Taliban maintain their political office and where U.S. special peace envoy Zalmay Khalilzad has been holding peace talks with the religious militia since September 2018.FILE – U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation Zalmay Khalilzad attends the Intra Afghan Dialogue talks in the Qatari capital, Doha, July 8, 2019.Talks were suspended in September when both sides seemed on the verge of signing a peace pact. However, a surge in violence in the capital Kabul killed a U.S. soldier, prompting President Donald Trump to declare the deal “dead.” Talks resumed after Trump made a surprise visit to Afghanistan at the end of November announcing the Taliban were ready to talk and agree to a reduction in violence.Khalilzad returned to Doha at the beginning of December. It was then that he proposed a temporary halt to hostilities to pave the way to an agreement being signed, according to Taliban officials.Taliban officials familiar with the negotiations spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to media outlets.A key pillar of the agreement, which the U.S. and Taliban have been hammering out for more than a year, is direct negotiations between Afghans on both sides of the conflict.Those intra-Afghan talks were expected to be held within two weeks of the signing of a U.S.-Taliban peace deal. They will decide what a post-war Afghanistan will look like.FILE – Members of the Taliban delegation are seen at the Sheraton Doha, before the start of the Intra-Afghan dialogue, in Doha, Qatar, July 7, 2019. (Ayesha Tanzeem/VOA)The first item on the agenda is expected to address how to implement a cease-fire between the Taliban and Afghanistan’s National Security Forces. The negotiations, however, were expected to be prickly and will cover a variety of thorny issues, including rights of women, free speech, and changes to the country’s constitution.The intra-Afghan talks would also lay out the fate of tens of thousands of Taliban fighters and the heavily armed militias belonging to Afghanistan’s warlords. Those warlords have amassed wealth and power since the Taliban were ousted from power in 2001 by the U.S.-led coalition. They were removed after Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida carried out the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States. The Taliban had harbored bin Laden, although there was no indication they were aware of al-Qaida’s plans to attack the United States.Even as the Taliban were talking about ceasing hostilities, insurgents carried out an attack in northern Afghanistan on Sunday that killed at least 17 local militiamen.The attack apparently targeted a local militia commander who escaped unharmed, said Jawad Hajri, a spokesman for the governor of Takhar province, where the attack took place late Saturday.Local Afghan militias commonly operate in remote areas, and are under the command of either the defense or interior ministries.Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid claimed responsibility for the attack.Last week, a U.S. soldier was killed in combat in the northern Kunduz province. The Taliban claimed they were behind a fatal roadside bombing that targeted American and Afghan forces in Kunduz. The U.S. military said the soldier was not killed in an IED attack but died seizing a Taliban weapon’s cache.The U.S. military in its daily report of military activity said airstrikes overnight Sunday killed 13 Taliban in attacks throughout the country.Taliban as well as Afghan National Security Forces aided by U.S. air power have carried out daily attacks against each otherThe Taliban frequently target Afghan and U.S. forces, as well as government officials. But scores of Afghan civilians are also killed in the cross-fire or by roadside bombs planted by militants. The United Nations has called on all sides in the conflict to reduce civilian casualties. The world body said increased U.S. airstrikes and ground operations by Afghan National Security Forces, as well as relentless Taliban attacks, have contributed to an increase in civilian casualties.Last year, Afghanistan was the world’s deadliest conflict.
 
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The U.S. carried out military strikes in Iraq and Syria targeting a militia blamed for an attack that killed an American contractor, a Defense Department spokesman said Sunday.U.S. forces conducted “precision defensive strikes” against five sites of Kataeb Hezbollah, or Hezbollah Brigades, an Iran-backed Iraqi militia, spokesman Jonathan Hoffman said in a statement.
The U.S. blames the militia for a rocket barrage Friday that killed a U.S. defense contractor at a military compound near Kirkuk, in northern Iraq.
Officials said attackers fired as many as 30 rockets in Friday’s assault.
The Defense Department gave no details immediately on how the strikes were conducted. It said the U.S. hit three of the militia’s sites in Iraq and two in Syria, including weapon caches and the militia’s command and control bases.
Hoffman said the U.S. strikes will weaken the group’s ability to carry out future attacks on Americans and their Iraqi government allies.
Iraq’s Hezbollah Brigades, a separate force from the Lebanese group Hezbollah, operate under the umbrella of the state-sanctioned militias known collectively as the Popular Mobilization Forces. Many of them are supported by Iran.
A senior member of the Popular Mobilization Forces, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media, said at at least 12 fighters with the Hezbollah Brigades had died in U.S. strikes along the Iraq and Syria border. His account could not immediately be independently confirmed.  
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The first one occurred 19 days into the new year when a man used an ax to kill four family members, including his infant daughter. Five months later, 12 people were killed in a workplace shooting in Virginia. Twenty-two more died at a Walmart in El Paso in August. 
 
A database compiled by The Associated Press, USA Today and Northeastern University shows that there were more mass killings in 2019 than in any other year dating to at least the 1970s, punctuated by a chilling succession of deadly rampages during the summer. 
 
In all, there were 41 mass killings, defined as when four or more people are killed, excluding the perpetrator. Of those, 33 were mass shootings. More than 210 people were killed. 
 
Most of the mass killings barely became national news, failing to resonate among the general public because they didn’t spill into public places like massacres in El Paso and Odessa, Texas; Dayton, Ohio; Virginia Beach, Virginia; and Jersey City, New Jersey. 
 
Most of the killings involved people who knew each other — family disputes, drug or gang violence, or people with beefs who directed their anger at co-workers or relatives. FILE – Family and friends watch as the casket of Virginia Beach shooting victim Katherine Nixon is wheeled to a hearse after a funeral service at St. Gregory the Great Catholic Church in Virginia Beach, Va., June 6, 2019.In many cases, what set off the perpetrator remains a mystery. 
 
That’s the case with the very first mass killing of 2019, when a 42-year-old man took an ax and stabbed to death his mother, stepfather, girlfriend and 9-month-old daughter in Clackamas County, Oregon. Two others, a roommate and an 8-year-old girl, escaped; the rampage ended when responding police fatally shot the killer. 
 
The perpetrator had had occasional run-ins with police over the years, but what drove him to attack his family remains unknown. He had just gotten a job training mechanics at an auto dealership, and despite occasional arguments with his relatives, most said there was nothing out of the ordinary that raised significant red flags. 
 
The incident in Oregon was one of 18 mass killings in which family members were slain, and one of six that didn’t involve a gun. Among other trends in 2019: 
 
— The 41 mass killings were the most in a single year since the AP/USA Today and Northeastern database began tracking such events back to 2006, but other research going back to the 1970s shows no other year with as many mass slayings. The second-most killings in a year prior to 2019 was 38 in 2006. 
 
— The total of 211 people killed in this year’s cases is still eclipsed by the 224 victims in 2017, when the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history took place in Las Vegas. 
 
— California, with some of the most strict gun laws in the country, had the most mass slayings, with eight. But nearly half of U.S. states experienced a mass slaying, from big cities like New York to tiny towns like Elkmont, Alabama, with a population of just under 475 people. 
 
— Firearms were the weapons used in all but eight of the mass killings. Other weapons included knives and axes, and at least twice, the perpetrator set a mobile home on fire, killing those inside. 
 
— Nine mass shootings occurred in public places. Other mass killings occurred in homes, workplaces or bars. James Densley, a criminologist and professor at Metropolitan State University in Minnesota, said the AP/USA Today/Northeastern database confirms and mirrors what his own research into exclusively mass shootings has shown. FILE – Demonstrators gather to protest after a mass shooting that occurred in Dayton, Ohio, Aug. 7, 2019.”What makes this even more exceptional is that mass killings are going up at a time when general homicides, overall homicides, are going down,” Densley said. “As a percentage of homicides, these mass killings are also accounting for more deaths.” 
 
He believes it’s partially a byproduct of an “angry and frustrated time” that we are living in. Densley also said crime tends to go in waves, with the 1970s and 1980s seeing a number of serial killers, the 1990s marked by school shootings and child abductions, and the early 2000s dominated by concerns over terrorism. 
 
“This seems to be the age of mass shootings,” Densley said. 
 
He and James Alan Fox, a criminologist and professor at Northeastern University, also expressed worries about the “contagion effect,” the focus on mass killings fueling other mass killings. 
 
“These are still rare events. Clearly the risk is low but the fear is high,” Fox said. “What fuels contagion is fear.” 
 
The mass shootings this year include the three in August in Texas and Dayton that stirred fresh urgency, especially among Democratic presidential candidates, to restrict access to firearms. 
 
While the large death tolls attracted much of the attention, the killings inflicted a mental and physical toll on dozens of others. The database does not have a complete count of victims who were wounded, but among the three mass shootings in August alone, more than 65 people were injured. 
 
Daniel Munoz, 28, of Odessa was caught in the crossfire of the shooting that took place over a 10-mile (16-kilometer) stretch in West Texas. He was on his way to meet a friend at a bar when he saw a gunman and the barrel of a firearm. Instinctively, he got down just as his car was sprayed with bullets. FILE – Law enforcement officials process the crime scene, Sept. 1, 2019, in Odessa, Texas, from a shooting that ended with the alleged attacker being shot dead by police in a stolen mail van, right.Munoz, who moved to Texas about a year ago to work in the oil industry, said he had actually been on edge since the Walmart shooting, which took place just 28 days earlier and about 300 miles (480 kilometers) away, worried that a shooting could happen anywhere at any time. 
 
He remembers calling his mother after the El Paso shooting to encourage her to have a firearm at home or with her in case she needed to defend herself. He would say the same to friends, telling them before they went to a Walmart to take a firearm in case they needed to protect themselves or others during an attack. 
 
“You can’t just always assume you’re safe. In that moment, as soon as the El Paso shooting happened, I was on edge,” Munoz said. 
 
Adding to his anxiety is that, as a convicted felon, he’s prohibited from possessing a firearm. 
 
A few weeks later, as he sat behind the wheel of his car, he spotted the driver of an approaching car wielding a firearm. 
 
“My worst nightmare became a reality,” he said. “I’m the middle of a gunfight and I have no way to defend myself.” 
 
In the months since, the self-described social butterfly steers clear of crowds and can only tolerate so much socializing. He still drives the same car, still riddled with bullet holes on the side panels, a bullet hole in the headrest of the passenger seat and the words “evidence” scrawled on the doors. His shoulder remains pocked with bullet fragments. 
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