💬 Quoted… “Abject failure.”

There was nothing preventing officers in Uvalde, TX, from entering a dual elementary school classroom where a shooter was actively gunning down students and teachers, the director of Texas’ Department of Public Safety told state lawmakers at a hearing yesterday.

• He specifically criticized the decisions of Uvalde school district police chief Pedro Arredondo, whom he said was “the only thing stopping the hallway of dedicated officers from entering [the] rooms.” 

+Dig deeper: From the Left | From the Right

📊 Stat of the Day: A record-low 81% of Americans believe in God, according to a new Gallup poll, down from 87% in 2017.

🌎 Around the World: The Indian government has asked state oil companies to purchase huge volumes of cheap crude from Russia, which would likely take most of the sting out of Western energy sanctions, industry executives told the WSJ.

• India has increased imports of Russian oil by more than 25-fold since the start of the war, buying an average of 1 million barrels a day in June vs. 30,000 in February.

+Dig deeper: How Russia is evading Western oil sanctions.

🤯 Did You Know?... Tiger beetles can run so fast that they effectively blind themselves; at speeds of ~120 body lengths per second, their eyes don’t take in enough photons to create an image, leaving them temporarily unable to see.

📖 Worth a Read: 'The Worst Person You Know': The Man Who Unwittingly Became a Meme → (The Guardian)