Two mass shootings erupted less than 15 minutes apart overnight in Trenton, New Jersey, and Chicago, leaving three people dead and 18 others injured as investigators in both cities work to determine what led to the gunfire.

In Trenton, officers were called to the area near 194 Locust Street around 12:25 a.m. local time Sunday after reports of multiple shots fired, Mayor W. Reed Gusciora said in a statement.

When first responders arrived, they found 11 shooting victims at the scene.

Two victims were pronounced dead. Nine others were transported to Capital Health Regional Medical Center, though police have not yet provided updates on their conditions.

The names of those killed have not been confirmed.

Gusciora said officials were still learning about the victims but shared details about one of the people killed, a man who had been trying to turn his life around after leaving prison.

“We understand that one of the individuals who lost his life had been working to turn his life around after returning home from incarceration and had recently been recognized for his commitment to reentry and positive change,” Gusciora said.

New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill said she had been briefed on the shooting.

“As local law enforcement continues to investigate, my Attorney General remains in close contact with officials on the ground,” Sherrill wrote in a post on X Sunday. “I’m thinking of the families who lost loved ones, those who were injured, and the Trenton community.”

No arrests have been announced, and police have not said what may have led to the Trenton shooting.

Officials said 12 minutes earlier and hundreds of miles away, police in Chicago were called to another mass shooting.

Chicago police said officers were breaking up a large gathering on Chicago’s South Side at about 11:37 p.m. local time Saturday night when gunmen opened fire into a crowd, hitting 10 people.

A 35-year-old man was shot multiple times and taken to the University of Chicago Medical Center, where he died.

Nine other people — six men and three women ranging in age from 23 to 45 — were wounded.

Several were listed in good condition, including a 26-year-old woman who was shot multiple times in the chest. The conditions of some of the other victims were not immediately known.

Police have not said what the gathering was for or what may have led to the shooting. Investigators also have not released a description of the gunmen.

Cook County Crime Stoppers is offering a reward of up to $10,000 for information leading to an arrest.

“This senseless act of violence has devastated another Chicago community and left families dealing with unimaginable pain,” Executive Director Paul Rutherford said.

Under Pol Pot’s brutal rule in Cambodia, members of the regime’s army and secret police treated something as ordinary as a pair of eyeglasses as a political signal — a crude test of who did or did not belong in their imagined socialist paradise.

For many Cambodians, being seen wearing glasses could be enough to mark them as educated, bourgeois or suspect — labels that, in countless cases, carried a death sentence.

Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a Washington Democrat, stirred echoes of that anti-elite framing last week when she proposed adding illustrations to newly introduced bills in Congress, arguing that dense legislative text can be inaccessible to many Americans.

“For too long, our laws have been written for ‘staffer bros’ with bow ties who will issue guidance on how to follow them from cubicles on Pennsylvania Avenue,” she wrote in a letter addressed to congressional leaders.

She added that Congress should be capable of crafting legislation that communicates with a broader public “regardless of how they learn or the profession they work in — from visual learners and foremen to lawyers and policy experts.”

“Ultimately, this is about representation.”

An unusual position for an elected official to take: Literacy belongs to the socially undesirable, to unfashionable “staffer bros.”

(Note, too, the snobbery: Blue-collar workers, for whom “foremen” serves as a clear stand-in, ipso facto can’t read this way.)

Perez is right that the byzantine tangle of both our legal code and our regulatory regime baffles and confuses even the most intelligent and skilled Americans. 

But published federal regulations already contain plenty of images — and this hasn’t done much for their legibility.

A more elegant solution might be for law- and policy-makers simply to produce fewer, clearer laws and regulations, as legal scholars like civil-rights legend Harvey Silverglate have argued.

Yet the vivid and impassioned language Perez reserves for mocking the bespectacled, bow-tied “bros” who can parse and explicate textual difficulties in our law stands out amid her letter’s otherwise tepid prose — all the more so as her remarks come amid what can only be described as a national literacy crisis.

Consider our kids’ persistent underperformance on the NAEP reading test, thanks to teachers’ unions and their ever more aggressive erosion of standards.

In Perez’s own Washington state, according to 2024 NAEP data, almost 40% of fourth graders fall below the “basic” standard in reading.

Consider, too, the elite private and public universities whose incoming students, at Berkeley, Princeton and elsewhere, can’t manage to read more than a few pages a day per class — let alone digest, comprehend and develop insights into difficult novels or philosophical texts. 

This provides a profoundly ugly context for Perez’s demonization.

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What does a broadside against high literacy tell children — or adults, for that matter — struggling to master the basics?

Foremost that their effort will be wasted, that success will leave them bespectacled and bro-ish, and that complex texts can be mocked and ignored — or worse, degraded and bowdlerized.

In previous eras, deep interpretive ability drew admiration: Think of the awe in which Jews held Talmudic sages.

And despite the best efforts of Perez’ party comrades to delegitimize the Supreme Court, the analytical brilliance of its justices still commands high esteem.

Mocking people who possess those capacities seems the very embodiment of the mindless malice the Khmer Rouge displayed when they put myopics up against the wall.

Indeed, Perez holds an undergraduate degree in economics — meaning she herself has mastered the art of extracting meaning from abstruse technical materials, just like those tedious bespectacled bros.

Why denigrate such mastery in others?

Yet there’s an uglier irony here.

Perez’s letter introduces this anti-literacy tirade with the foundational buzzword of wokism, “representation.”

Its prominence seems meant to suggest that discarding America’s hard-won mass contemporary literacy — deeply compromised though it may be — would somehow serve to make us more equal, more free, more human.

Yet citizenship in America cannot be disentangled from literacy, nor can true liberty — as the great Frederick Douglass demonstrated in his autobiography.

In a famous passage, Douglass described his owner Mr. Auld’s furious reaction upon discovering that his wife was teaching the young Frederick to read.

“It was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read,” Auld raged — saying that once Douglass became literate, “there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave.”

Perez serves nominally in the cause of protecting that citizenship, and that liberty.

One wonders what Douglass might make of her letter.

Sam Munson’s most recent novel is “The Sofa” (2025).

A community charity says it was pushed to the brink of insolvency after being mistakenly sued by the daughter of M*A*S*H star Sally Kellerman in a dispute that began when a cafe declined to admit her dog.

Claire Kellerman, a US-born 62-year-old whose late aunt and adoptive mother played Major Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan in the original 1970s M*A*S*H film, brought taxpayer-funded legal action against the Great Bernera Community Development Trust (GBCDT) in the Outer Hebrides.

Ms Kellerman, whose outspoken role on the island of Great Bernera has divided opinion locally, sought to pursue the organisation connected to a community cafe after staff allegedly refused entry to her dog, which she maintains is a service animal.

However, solicitors acting on her behalf served the legal papers on GBCDT rather than Bernera Community Association, the volunteer-run group responsible for the cafe’s day-to-day operations.

GBCDT, a non-profit established to support the island’s economic and social wellbeing, has now told the Daily Mail it was left in a precarious financial position after spending thousands of pounds defending the claim before it was eventually withdrawn ahead of a hearing.

Ms Kellerman, who locals accused of ‘bullying’ staff at the cafe, is understood to have been banned from the site over her behaviour before launching legal action claiming volunteers had refused access to her service dog.

GBCDT director Mark Bryant told the Mail how his organisation was wrongly served with a writ despite board members repeatedly attempting to contact Ms Kellerman, and her lawyers, to inform them of the error.

They also informed the Scottish Legal Aid Board (SLAB) of the mistake before its decision to fund Ms Kellerman’s case, he said, but the board chose to do so anyway. 

GBCDT is completely separate from the island’s community cafe and has no role whatsoever in its running or organisation.

But after emails and phone calls went unanswered, the non-profit had to spend some £7,000 on lawyers of their own before those acting for Ms Kellerman finally admitted their mistake.

‘The cafe and the community centre have nothing to do with our business. We’re baffled by their [Ms Kellerman’s legal firm’s] incompetence in prosecuting the trust,’ Mr Bryant said.

To make matters worse for the trust, it has been told it cannot recoup any of its costs due to Ms Kellerman having been granted legal aid by the Scottish government.

Mr Bryant said: ‘We can’t get our money back through the court process. It is just wrong. 

‘The only way the trust has avoided having zero cash is because private individuals have stepped up to support the trust through this difficult period.’ 

He added: ‘If she didn’t have legal aid she wouldn’t have a platform to do this. They waste taxpayers’ money supporting vexatious writs but they fill the courts with these actions that shouldn’t be there.’

Lawyers for Ms Kellerman, who grew up in California, have been acting via Glasgow’s publicly-funded Ethnic Minorities Law Centre (EMLC).

They have now amended their claim to sue the cafe’s actual voluntary operators, Bernera Community Association, for £10,000 – a claim which the charity said will all but bankrupt them if legal costs continue to mount.

It is already having to rely on a fundraiser to aggregate money to fund legal representation in the year-long dispute. 

Ms Kellerman is claiming the charity’s cafe refused to let her service dog inside due to them preparing food on the premises. 

But locals have told the Daily Mail she only sued after she was banned from the site over her behaviour, not due to the presence of her dog.

They have alleged the animal, which she insists aids her with an undisclosed disability, has been seen harassing livestock and chasing wild animals on the island.

One source even claimed it had defecated on a public bus, which Ms Kellerman then did not clean up.

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They added she had shown ‘consistent behaviour’ in which she ‘bullies staff, reduces staff to tears’.

They accused her of ‘weaponising’ her dog and taking part in disputes in cafes across the island.

‘She wants the confrontation,’ the source told the Mail. ‘She shouts loudly, reduces people to tears. It’s a very consistent MO and everybody is petrified to say it.’

Ms Kellerman, who arrived in Lewis around four years ago, is meanwhile still pursuing the case against Bernera Community Association, with a hearing set for December.

Online, Ms Kellerman speaks of the alleged ‘normalisation of abuses’ on Great Bernera, writing: ‘I am grateful to be encouraged by the many resilient individuals who’ve been harmed the past decade on Bernera, and for the opportunity to end the BCA’s unbridled abuses.’

She accused the BCA and cafe of ‘exclusion, collective harassment, shaming, ostracisation, wrongful blaming, illegal discrimination and victimization’.

She went on to cite ‘an illegal sign’ she said had hung in the cafe reading: ‘No dogs allowed in centre.’ 

Ms Kellerman added: ‘They act self-righteously abusing, harassing, targeting and illegally discriminating against incomers.’

She described the environment the charity had created for those who are disabled with assistance dogs as ‘vile’ with ‘intentional, targeted hostility’, blaming this on their ‘ignorance, and unwillingness to welcome all equally’.

The case has caused shock throughout the small community, which Mr Bryant described as ‘a very different world’ which prides itself on coming together to help those in need.

Labour MSP Donald Mackinnon has written to SLAB urging it to ‘urgently review’ its funding of the case because of the potential damage to its reputation.

He said it ‘raises broader concerns about the safeguards applied when public funds are used to support litigation’.

Under Scottish legislation, parties cannot typically recoup any costs from a party who has been assisted by legal aid. 

A spokesman for GBCDT said: ‘The GBCDT has suffered significant cost, stress and wasted time being wrongly sued by Claire Kellerman, supported by the Ethnic Minorities Law Centre (EMLC) and Scottish Legal Aid Board (SLAB). 

‘The GBCDT has been punished. It has nothing to do with the matters raised in the writ. EMLC & SLAB were clearly informed that GBCDT were not the right Defender in the writ. The Scottish Government should review funding for EMLC and SLAB.’

A spokesman for Bernera Community Association said: ‘We can confirm that legal proceedings have been raised against the Bernera Community Association. As the matter is now before the court, it would not be appropriate for us to comment further on the allegations or issues in dispute. 

‘The Association remains focused on serving the local community and appreciates the support it has received.’

A spokesman for the SLAB said it was bound by strict confidentiality requirements regarding individual cases.

They added: ‘SLAB’s role is to assess whether the statutory tests for legal aid are met based on the information available at the time of application and throughout the life of a case. Decisions are made in accordance with legal aid legislation, regulations and guidance.

‘We are satisfied that our decision-making in this matter was, and remains, thorough, appropriate and fully consistent with the legal aid framework. Granting legal aid does not mean that SLAB supports a particular case or is financing a firm of solicitors; it means that the statutory tests for legal aid have been met.

‘Questions about the merits of a case, legal issues arising within a case or the conduct of proceedings – including whether or not an action is vexatious and whether such a finding should be reflected in awards of expenses – are matters for the courts, not SLAB.

‘We note that the case was called recently and the court allowed the action to continue. On that basis, there does not appear to have been any further change in circumstances that would require us to revisit the grant of legal aid.’

Ms Kellerman was approached for comment.