Finnish police shoot man who stabs 8 people in Turku; 2 dead

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Finnish police shoot man who stabs 8 people in Turku; 2 dead

2017-08-19 09:45 Last Updated At：17:40

A man stabbed eight people Friday in Finland's western city of Turku, killing two of them, before police shot him in the thigh and detained him, police said. Authorities were looking for more potential suspects in the attack.

A suspect — who police said was "a youngish man with a foreign background" — was being treated in the city's main hospital but was in police custody. Security was being stepped up across the Nordic country, Interior Minister Paula Risikko told reporters at a news conference.

The man's identity and nationality were being investigated. Police said he is likely to have acted alone though it was not possible to completely rule out that other people were involved.

Police did not give any information on the two people killed or the conditions of those wounded in downtown Turku, 170 kilometers (106 miles) west of Helsinki, the capital.

Finland's top police chief, Seppo Kolehmainen, said it was too early to link the attack to international terrorism.

"Nothing is known about the motives ... or what precisely has happened in Turku," he said.

It was also not known if Friday's attack was linked to a decision in June by Finland's security agency to raise its threat assessment to the second level of a four-step scale. The Finnish Security

Intelligence Service says the country's "stronger profile within the radical Islamist propaganda" led to the change. It said the Nordic country is now considered part of the coalition against the Islamic State group.

The Ilta-Sanomat tabloid said six people were injured in the attack, one man and five women, and that a woman with stroller had been attacked by a man with a large knife. Finnish broadcaster YLE said several people were seen lying on the ground in Puutori Square after the attack.

Witness Laura Laine told YLE she was about 20 meters (65 feet) away as the attack took place.

"We heard a young woman screaming. We saw a man on the square and a knife glittered. He was waving it in the air. I understood that he had stabbed someone," Laine was quoted as saying.
Finland's government was closely monitoring the police investigation into the attack, Prime Minister Juha Sipila said.

Finnish President Sauli Niinisto arrived at Turku later Friday and condemned the attack as "a shocking and cowardly act."

"This attack touches us all deeply," said Niinisto, adding that the country's political leaders and security officials were doing their utmost "so that all Finns are able to feel safe."

For now, people were avoiding downtown Turku.

"Police have told us not to go to the city center, so we are in this coffee shop a few blocks away," said Vanessa Deggins, an American studying business at one of Turku's three universities, told The Associated Press. She didn't witness the attack, but heard emergency sirens going past.

"This is a safe country by American standards. I have gone home alone at 2-3 a.m. ... I feel safe," she said.

Dua Lipa is all about 'Radical Optimism,' in her music and other pursuits

2024-05-03 21:52 Last Updated At：22:01

NEW YORK (AP) — Dua Lipa is floating in the ocean, the sun just beginning to set behind her. She looks strong, serene — save for the looming threat of a massive shark, fin just breaching the surface a few feet away.

The image is the cover of her third album, “Radical Optimism,” out Friday. It is an apt visual representation for an album about finding and protecting your peace in dangerous waters — a thematic maturation for the Grammy-award winning pop superstar, who has long identified her sound as “dance-crying."

That cheeky term encapsulates the clubby jubilance of her biggest pop hits, but "Radical Optimism," with its psychedelic electro-pop, complicates it.

“There’s definitely something more cathartic that comes with the third album,” she told The Associated Press recently.

“'Future Nostalgia' was my chance for me to be able to do a very polished pop-dance-disco record,” she says of her 2020 sophomore release. “Radical Optimism,” alternatively, was informed by what she's learned from touring the world over the last few years — drawing influence from trip hop and Britpop and including newfound interest in live instrumentation.

“It was so much more free flowing,” she says of her latest album's creative process. “And it didn’t have a formula, per se, but I always had that pop sensibility in the back of my mind. But I wanted to just experiment and try and create something new. But I think this was always kind of the album that I’ve always wanted to make.”

In more ways than one: Around her first album, Lipa wrote down that she'd like to work with Tame Impala's Kevin Parker — specifically on her third album. The manifestation worked, and he became a crucial collaborator on “Radical Optimism."

"It was almost like something deep down, instinctively, was telling me that it was something earned," she says. “That over time I would be able to go in and work with a creative that I was so inspired by, and to be in a room and learn from him."

As for the album's title: “It’s euphoric, it’s togetherness,” she says.

“Dance music has such a long history of creating such a safe space. And I just want to embody that,” she adds.

She's been working hard to get there. Lipa, now 28, began her career at age 15, when she convinced her family to let her move from Kosovo to London, where she was born, to pursue a pop career. She went to school, modeled, and in 2017 released her eponymous debut album with the blockbuster dance-pop hits “New Rules” and “One Kiss.” Then came the nu-disco electropop of 2020’s “Future Nostalgia," which solidified her status as one of pop music's biggest players. Not bad for a unique voice in the streaming era, where capturing the attention of the masses — and sustaining it — has never been more of a challenge.

In 2024, her pop songs contain a kind of learned elasticity. The melodies stack atop unusual synth sounds, the vocal range stretches (particularly on the cut “Falling Forever”), the dance breaks inspired by U.K. rave culture and format-benders Primal Scream and Massive Attack — they're all elements Lipa says she wouldn’t have dared attempt on her last album. That came from working with Parker, producer Danny L Harle, songwriter Tobias Jesso Jr. (known for his work with Harry Styles and Adele ), and Lipa's longtime collaborator Caroline Ailin.

“She understands how to handle a lot of opinions in the room, including her own,” Jesso tells the AP. "She doesn’t value hers above anyone else’s, she simply uses the ones which work best for what she is trying to achieve.”

“We were a band,” Lipa says of the group. The first day they wrote “Illusion.” The second day, “Happy for You.” ("I’d never written a song like that before," she points out. “And I loved that version of myself.”) The third day, the post-disco pop of "Whatcha Doing." In bright, airy studios in London and Malibu, they finessed what would become Lipa's most ambitious — and euphoric-sounding — record to date.

That experimentation appears across Lipa's endeavors, too. She's acting more — “little baby roles!” she says with a smile — after playing Mermaid Barbie in the blockbuster “Barbie” (she also contributed the ubiquitous, Grammy-nominated song “Dance the Night” to the soundtrack ) and LaGrange, a sultry spy in “Argylle” (a brief performance AP film critic Jake Coyle described as the movie's best few minutes ).

In 2022, she founded a newsletter called Service95, what she views as an extension of a childhood blog, to “tell stories from all around the world, not solely from a Western lens,” she says. It has grown into a website, podcast and book club: “It's just another hobby of mine that I’ve somehow managed to turn into a job, which is just great,” she says, smiling.

“My day job, which is my music career, which I love, comes with constantly being online. And I think for me, at least now I’m searching for other things, and not doomscrolling on Twitter," she says of her media enterprise. "At least this way I’m like learning something new about the world. I love having that kind of duality in my life.”

It's a duality fueled by curiosity, like when Lipa made headlines late last year for challenging Apple CEO Tim Cook in an interview on her podcast over reports of children in the Democratic Republic of Congo mining cobalt for iPhones.

“That was scary, and really exciting,” she says. “You never really know what to expect when you go in to interview someone.”

A few days after visiting the AP's New York headquarters, Lipa appears at a public high school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan to speak to students in a conversation moderated by Drew Barrymore.

“One of the things I admire about her is how incredibly intelligent she is,” Barrymore says in her introduction, commending Lipa for not only being an “icon,” but someone who is “globally aware.”

In conversation, Lipa is generous and warm, particularly to a freshman drama student named Dolce, who is also Albanian, and expresses a desire to make it in the entertainment industry. Lipa tells her that identity, intentionally or not, is woven into her music.

At the end of the event, Lipa says she feels "optimistic about life overall, everything that comes with it,” and takes a moment to look out at the audience. “I'm the most optimistic about the next generation.”

And then, almost as swiftly as she arrived, Lipa leaves. A lingering positivity permeates the air. It recalls something she told the AP earlier in the week: that she strives to be “violently happy" in life and in her endeavors.

“You sometimes have to push yourself into that feeling,” she says. Remaining grateful is “definitely a muscle that needs to be exercised.”

On "Radical Optimism," she's written the workout soundtrack.

Finnish police shoot man who stabs 8 people in Turku; 2 dead

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Finnish police shoot man who stabs 8 people in Turku; 2 dead

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