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Tag: national security

  • Four takeaways from Utah’s only Senate debate | CNN Politics

    Four takeaways from Utah’s only Senate debate | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Evan McMullin, the independent challenging Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee, said in their only debate Monday night that Lee’s actions around the 2020 election and the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol were “a betrayal of the American republic.”

    Lee, meanwhile, said he accepted that President Joe Biden in 2020 had won the presidency in the “only election that matters – the election held by the Electoral College.” The senator defended his actions that day, pointing to his votes to certify states’ Electoral College results.

    Their clash came on the day elections officials in Utah began mailing ballots to voters.

    McMullin describes himself as conservative but has said he would caucus with neither party if he defeats Lee. He is attempting to unite a coalition of Democrats, independents and anti-Donald Trump Republicans – and he got an assist this spring when Utah Democrats opted to endorse him rather than field their own candidate. But in Utah, even that coalition might not be enough. Trump won 58% of the vote there in 2020.

    McMullin’s entrance into politics came in an effort to serve as an antidote to Trump. He ran for president as an independent against Trump in 2016. He drew 22% of the vote in Utah, well behind Trump’s 46% and Hillary Clinton’s 27%. Among those who voted for McMullin in 2016 was Lee, who said at the time that it “was a protest vote.”

    Here are four takeaways from their Monday night debate:

    McMullin’s sharpest attacks on Lee came after a moderator raised the topic of the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

    “You were there to stand up for our Constitution. But when the barbarians were at the gate, you were happy to let them in,” McMullin said.

    Lee pointed out that ultimately, he accepted the Electoral College vote.

    “Yes, there were people who behaved very badly on that day. I was not one of them. I was one of the people who tried to dismantle that situation,” Lee said.

    McMullin, meanwhile, said Lee only voted to accept states’ electoral votes after no other plan to keep Trump in office materialized.

    “You voted to certify the election in the last moment,” McMullin said. “In the same way that someone knows that a plot that’s not quite working out ought to abandon it, that’s what you did.”

    McMullin repeatedly cited text messages reported by CNN in April between Lee and Trump’s then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in which the two communicated about efforts to overturn Biden’s victory for weeks.

    In early December 2020, Lee began texting Meadows about the idea that states could submit alternate slates of pro-Trump electors to Congress on January 6. Lee ultimately voted to certify states’ electoral votes.

    McMullin said Lee was working “to keep a president who had been voted out of office, according to the will of the people, in power despite the will of the people.”

    He pointed to Lee’s November 7, 2020, texts to Meadows asking him to help Sidney Powell – one of the most prominent attorneys fronting lawsuits that supported Trump and made accusations of widespread election fraud – get access to Trump.

    He mocked the pocket Constitution that Lee carries, telling the senator that it is “not a prop for you to wave about and then when it’s convenient for your pursuit of power, to abandon without a thought. That’s what you’ve done with that.”

    Lee shot back: “I disagree with everything my opponent just said, including the words ‘but,’ ‘and’ and ‘the.’ An information-free, truth-free statement – that’s something of a record.”

    “There is absolutely nothing to the idea that I ever would have supported or ever did support a fake electors plot,” Lee said. “Nothing. Not a scintilla of evidence suggesting that. Yet you continue to suggest that with a cavalier, reckless disregard for the truth.”

    In an effort to cast Lee as extreme, McMullin invoked Utah’s other GOP senator: Mitt Romney.

    Criticizing Lee’s approach to fiscal measures, McMullin said he “routinely votes against bills that would improve water infrastructure.”

    “Meanwhile, Senator Romney has worked hard and consistently over the last three years,” McMullin said. “He works with Republicans and Democrats, Senator Lee, to deliver for Utah. And he voted in favor of the bipartisan infrastructure bill that you voted against. And now tens of millions of dollars have already been directed to Utah to improve our water infrastructure.”

    Lee responded: “Yeah, I voted against that bill – a bill that spent well over a trillion dollars more than we have on all sorts of things that weren’t appropriately federal.”

    Romney has stayed out of the race.

    Lee, in an appearance last week on Fox, made a plea directed at Romney: “Please get on board. Help me win reelection,” he said. The move seemed designed less to win over Romney than to rile up Lee’s conservative base.

    Trump followed Lee’s pleas to Romney with a statement in which he called McMullin “McMuffin” and said that Lee was being “abused, in an unprecedented way” by Romney.

    Lee said he was “thrilled” with the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that had made abortion legal nationwide. He said he believes states should decide how to regulate abortion.

    “This is where it should remain, because it’s within the states that we can achieve the most consensus and protect the most babies,” Lee said.

    McMullin, meanwhile, sought to find a middle ground on abortion rights, saying that he opposes “abortion on demand” but also opposes state legislation to force young rape victims to carry their pregnancies to term.

    “Some of these bills that I see being passed around the country are extreme,” McMullin said.

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  • How a 51-year-old celebrity hacker upended one of the world’s most influential social networks | CNN Business

    How a 51-year-old celebrity hacker upended one of the world’s most influential social networks | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN Business
     — 

    When Peiter Zatko joined Twitter as head of security in late 2020 at the urging of founder and then-CEO Jack Dorsey, he was surprised by what he discovered. Twitter, a social network with hundreds of millions of users, “was over a decade behind industry security standards,” he later testified.

    Barely a year later, Zatko was agitating for Twitter’s top executives to address what he described as “a ticking bomb of security vulnerabilities” and to provide a full accounting of its shortcomings to its board.

    His concerns, raised privately at first and later in a whistleblower disclosure that became public, would upend one of the world’s most influential social networks and raise new questions about its pending acquisition by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk. It would also, he later testified, put his career and his family at risk.

    In his disclosure filed with various US government agencies in July, Zatko alleged that Twitter

    (TWTR)     trusted far too many employees with access to sensitive user data, creating a fragile security posture that an outsider could exploit to wreak havoc on the platform. The disclosure also claimed that one or more current Twitter

    (TWTR)     employees may be working for a foreign intelligence service, potentially threatening user data and US national security, and that Twitter

    (TWTR)     CEO Parag Agrawal misled the company’s board of directors by discouraging Zatko from providing a full account of Twitter

    (TWTR)    ’s security weaknesses. (Twitter

    (TWTR)     has criticized Zatko and broadly defended itself against the allegations.)

    “Given the real harm to users and national security, I determined it was necessary to take on the personal and professional risk to myself and to my family of becoming a whistleblower,” Zatko, better known as “Mudge” in cybersecurity circles and highly regarded in that community, said during a Senate hearing on his disclosure in September. “I did not make my whistleblower disclosure out of spite or to harm Twitter, far from that, I continue to believe in the mission of the company and root for its success.”

    Since going public with his concerns, Zatko, who has held numerous posts in the private and public sector, has found himself at the center of renewed scrutiny of Twitter. He testified last month in a Senate committee hearing about his disclosure, and his allegations have caught the attention of various regulators both in the United States and abroad. Meanwhile, his former colleagues received requests for paid interviews from research firms apparently seeking information, and potentially dirt, on Zatko, according to a report last month by the New Yorker.

    The disclosure also coincided with, and ultimately became a part of, Musk’s fight to get out of his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter. Zatko was deposed by Musk’s team and the billionaire was allowed to add some of Zatko’s allegations to his argument to terminate the deal. Although it now appears Musk wants to go forward with the acquisition, the timing of Zatko’s allegations sparked questions about his motives. (Zatko denies any relationship with Musk and says his decision to go public was unrelated to the deal; Musk’s legal team says it was unaware of the disclosure until it was publicly reported.)

    Twitter pushed back on Zatko’s allegations, saying that security and privacy have “long been top company-wide priorities.” Twitter has said his disclosure is “riddled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies,” and said that it paints a “false narrative” of the company. Twitter has also tried to paint Zatko as a disgruntled former employee with an ax to grind against the company.

    But some who have worked alongside Zatko over the last three decades paint a picture of him as a principled technologist with a knack for making the complex accessible and an earnest desire to fix problems, as he’s done for much of his career. The decision to blow the whistle, they say, is in keeping with that approach.

    “He’s not doing this for fun. It doesn’t get him anything,” said Dave Aitel, a former computer scientist at the National Security Agency and colleague of Zatko’s at cybersecurity consulting firm @stake. “That’s actually what integrity looks like when you have to see it up close.”

    As a result of his whistleblower activities, Zatko may be eligible for a monetary award from the US government. John Tye, founder of Whistleblower Aid and Zatko’s lawyer, previously told CNN “the prospect of a reward was not a factor in [Zatko’s] decision.”

    Nearly 25 years ago, as a young computer programmer with much longer hair, Zatko told Congress that the internet was woefully insecure. A big part of the issue, Zatko told a Senate panel, was that software and e-commerce companies “want to ignore problems as long as possible. It’s cheaper for them.”

    Several years earlier, Zatko had joined the Boston-area hacking collective known as L0pht, according to “The Cult of the Dead Cow,” Washington Post reporter Joseph Menn’s book on how the early hacking scene shaped the cybersecurity industry.

    L0pht members broke into computer systems and then worked with companies that made the equipment to fix the problems. While that is now a well-established practice for companies to work with outside researchers to fix software flaws, it was, at the time, seen as provocative and upsetting to software giants.

    Zatko “sort of bent the industry to his will,” Dug Song, chief strategy officer at Cisco Security, who has known Zatko since the 1990s, told CNN previously. “L0pht created a model for how to do this in a way that was, frankly, respectable and honorable.”

    Zatko was part of a group of hackers who participated in the first Senate hearing on government computer security in May 1998.

    Cris “Space Rogue” Thomas, another ex-L0pht member who testified alongside Zatko that day, said that L0pht would do everything it could to get companies to collaboratively fix software issues the hacker group found.

    Thomas, who, like Zatko, uses his hacker name professionally, told CNN in August that he and Zatko “have had our differences in the past,” adding that he was fired from @stake, the cybersecurity consultancy where Zatko was chief scientist, in 2000. “Feelings were hurt, but that doesn’t change the fact of who [Zatko] is and what he believes in and what he does. So I still think that his moral standards have not really changed … in the 30 years that I’ve known him.”

    In the following years, Zatko, now 51, led an influential cybersecurity grantmaking program at the Pentagon, worked at a Google division for developing cutting-edge technology, helped build the cybersecurity team at fintech firm Stripe, and advised US lawmakers and officials on how to plug security holes in the internet.

    His career has shown that “there was more to hacking than just one-upping each other, that there was actually a social good and impact that you could have,” said Song.

    Twitter hired Zatko in November 2020 to beef up cybersecurity and privacy at the company in the wake of a high-profile hack, allegedly spearheaded by a Florida teenager, in July 2020 that compromised the Twitter accounts of some of the most famous people on the planet, including then-presidential candidate Joe Biden. The senior executive role meant Zatko reported directly to Dorsey, according to the disclosure.

    When he was hired to join Twitter, Zatko framed the move in terms of the public good. “I truly believe in the mission of (equitably) serving the public conversation,” he tweeted at the time. “I will do my best!”

    Zatko, seen here posing for a portrait in August, was hired at Twitter in November 2020 to help improve cybersecurity and privacy at the company.

    But Zatko quickly found that fulfilling that mission at Twitter would be challenging. His disclosure alleges that structural issues and misaligned incentives stood in the way of Twitter addressing many of its biggest issues, including properly protecting user data, addressing foreign manipulation of the platform and ensuring the security of the physical infrastructure supporting the company.

    Agrawal — Dorsey’s successor as Twitter chief and a former CTO who had overseen much of the company’s recent technical development — fired Zatko in January after he began raising concerns about the company’s security and privacy practices, including worries that alleged misrepresentations by executives to its board could constitute fraud, the disclosure says. (Twitter maintains an internal investigation determined Zatko’s fraud claims were unfounded and that it fired Zatko for poor performance; Zatko says his firing was retaliation for having spoken up.)

    “This is about something that everybody should care about with large companies, which is the honesty and the truthfulness of the data that’s being… publicly represented, the national security implications and whether users can trust their data with these organizations,” Zatko told CNN in August of his decision to file the disclosure.

    Now, as he takes on Twitter publicly, Zatko finds himself in the public conversation like never before.

    “This wasn’t my first choice,” he previously told CNN. “I exhausted all internal options.”

    “But I found that ethically, and with who I am, that I was obligated to follow the law and pursue through legal avenues, lawful disclosure, because [Twitter] is a critically important platform,” Zatko said. “I think it’s important to address some of these challenges. I honestly believe I’m still doing the mission that I was brought in to do.”

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  • Kanye West to acquire conservative social media platform Parler | CNN Business

    Kanye West to acquire conservative social media platform Parler | CNN Business

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    CNN Business
     — 

    Kanye West is acquiring Parler, the alternative social media platform favored by many conservatives.

    Parler’s parent company announced the deal on Monday morning, saying West had made “a groundbreaking move into the free speech media space and will never have to fear being removed from social media again.”

    The acquisition comes after West, who has legally changed his name to Ye, had his account temporarily locked by Twitter this month over an antisemitic tweet.

    Exact terms of the Parler deal weren’t disclosed, though Parler said it must still enter into a definitive agreement with West and expects to close in the fourth quarter. Parler’s parent, Parlement Technologies, would remain involved by providing technical services and cloud support.

    Buying Parler could make West the latest celebrity owner of a social media platform after former President Donald Trump’s bid to win over conservatives with Truth Social and Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s proposed acquisition of Twitter. It also highlights how a small group of wealthy men, some of whom were banned or suspended themselves for incendiary remarks, are looking to own social media platforms in an effort to bolster what they call “free speech.”

    “In a world where conservative opinions are considered to be controversial we have to make sure we have the right to freely express ourselves,” West said in a release by Parler.

    As part of the announcement, Parler linked to West’s account on the platform, which appeared to have launched simultaneously. As of early Monday, the account had roughly 500 followers.

    For Ye, the deal comes during a particularly controversial period. West has made headlines in recent weeks for wearing a “White Lives Matter” T-shirt in public and defending his use of the slogan — a phrase the Anti-Defamation League has linked to white supremacy groups — as “funny” to Fox News host Tucker Carlson. After the shirt incident, the apparel company Adidas this month said it was reviewing its partnership with West. In September, West also said he was abandoning a two-year partnership with the clothing retailer Gap.

    Speaking on CNN Monday, Jonathan Greenblatt, the ADL’s CEO, called Parler a “haven” of hate.

    Parler was founded in 2018 and saw rapid growth surrounding the 2020 election. Billing itself as a loosely moderated free-speech haven, the app became popular with conservative politicians and media figures, peaking at an estimated 2.9 million daily users, according to the market research firm Apptopia. But since then, its fortunes have dimmed, with Parler’s estimated daily user count slipping to just 40,000, Apptopia told CNN on Monday. (Twitter, by comparison, has more than 237 million daily active users.)

    In the weeks following the Jan. 6 riots, Parler was removed from both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store for what the companies said was a failure to adequately moderate violent rhetoric on the platform. Documents provided to the House committee investigating the Capitol riots have shown how the Secret Service was aware of posts on Parler that suggested the possibility of violence surrounding that day. Separately, Parler has written to Congress claiming that lawmakers’ interest in the app’s role in the riots has been intended to “scapegoat” the app.

    Parler has since been restored to both app stores after making changes to its content moderation practices.

    Parler has faced more competition in recent months as the burgeoning right-wing digital media ecosystem has expanded. Truth Social launched in February on Apple’s app store, and was approved for Google’s app store on Oct. 13. Truth Social saw a spike of downloads last week due to its appearance on the Google Play Store, Apptopia said, and before then had been hovering at 144,000 daily active users.

    Musk’s move to buy Twitter, if the deal goes through, also has the potential to upend Parler and similar services. Musk has repeatedly called for eliminating permanent bans and rethinking Twitter’s approach to content moderation, which could once again make the much larger platform a home for some of the users who jumped to small services like Parler.

    It could also effectively mean that Musk and Ye, who are said to be friends, are now competing with each other. After Ye’s antisemitic tweet sparked an outcry, Musk tweeted: “Talked to ye today & expressed my concerns about his recent tweet, which I think he took to heart.”

    One week later, Ye’s deal to buy Parler was announced.

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  • Arizona Attorney General’s office asks for federal investigation of conservative nonprofit True the Vote | CNN Politics

    Arizona Attorney General’s office asks for federal investigation of conservative nonprofit True the Vote | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    The Arizona Attorney General’s office has asked for a federal investigation related to potential violations of the Internal Revenue Code by the conservative nonprofit True the Vote, which claims to be trying to expose voter fraud.

    An investigator in Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich’s office, Reginald Grigsby, said in a letter that the group has “raised considerable sums of money alleging they had evidence of widespread voter fraud” but has failed to provide any evidence to its office, despite publicly indicating they had shared the information with law enforcement agencies.

    “Given TTV’s status as a nonprofit organization, it would appear that further review of its financials may be warranted,” the letter, released on Friday, reads in a striking move for an office overseen by a Republican. Brnovich had sought to win over former President Donald Trump and his supporters in his unsuccessful bid for the nomination for Senate earlier this year.

    Grigsby detailed three meetings representatives from the attorney general’s office had with Catherine Engelbrecht, who founded the Texas-based nonprofit, and Gregg Phillips, who is a contracted partner.

    The meetings were spread out over a year – the first took place in June 2021 and the following two occurred in April and June of this year. Grigsby said prior to each meeting, Engelbrecht and Phillips said they would provide the attorney general’s office with information to support their claims of voter fraud but they never provided any so-called evidence.

    In a statement, True the Vote called the letter “false” and said it “smacks of retribution for the AG’s own decision to ignore suspicious voting activity.” The statement also countered that its hard drive of data is “available to any law enforcement agency which issues a lawful subpoena for the data” and said that it “has documentary records of correspondence with the State of Arizona and the FBI, detailing the evidence and its limitations.”

    In its letter, the attorney general’s office stated that it had requested the information by electronic and US mail and by leaving voicemails after the latest in-person meeting, but it did not indicate whether it had formally subpoenaed the data.

    An IRS spokesperson told CNN, “Due to privacy regulations, the IRS will not comment on the status of an individual or organization.”

    True the Vote and Engelbrecht have advanced claims of election-fraud for years. But the group recently gained new prominence through the film, “2000 Mules” produced by conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza. It claims “mules” were used to illegally collect and deliver ballots to drop boxes in key states in the 2020 election.

    True the Vote has said it purchased cellphone geo-tracking data to identify devices that went repeatedly near drop boxes and certain nonprofits ahead of the election to advance the argument that illegal ballot harvesting occurred in key swing states.

    Multiple fact-checkers have debunked those claims. And in testimony that aired during a hearing of the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, former Attorney General William Barr called the film’s premise flawed.

    The film has been touted by Trump and some Trump-aligned candidates. Earlier this year, the former President hosted a screening of the film at Mar-a-Lago, his waterfront Florida resort and home.

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  • January 6 committee member says panel will ask former Secret Service agent to testify again | CNN Politics

    January 6 committee member says panel will ask former Secret Service agent to testify again | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a member of the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, told CNN on Sunday the panel will ask former Secret Service Assistant Director Tony Ornato to testify again.

    “We’re in a position in the very near future to call the witnesses from the Secret Service back in for a few additional questions,” the California Democrat told CNN’s Pamela Brown on “CNN Newsroom,” explaining that the panel had wanted to “get through all the documentary evidence … over a million documents,” which they’ve now done.

    The House select committee has made clear it believes Ornato was a central figure who could provide valuable information about former President Donald Trump’s movements and intentions leading up to and on January 6.

    Not only did Ornato once run Trump’s detail, but he also made the unprecedented move of joining White House staff as the deputy chief of staff in December 2019 on a temporary assignment and eventually returned to the Secret Service to run its training program.

    To this point, Ornato has met with the panel on two occasions – in January and March – as part of its investigation.

    It’s not clear whether Ornato will end up testifying related to the claims from Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. Hutchinson specifically testified that Ornato had told her about Trump lashing out in anger and lunging at a member of his protective detail as he demanded to be taken to the Capitol on January 6.

    Asked Sunday who else from the Secret Service would be called back to testify, Lofgren also mentioned the head of Trump’s Secret Service detail, Robert Engel, “and a few others,” but did not specify whom.

    “We want to make sure that we’re getting the straight story. Some of the testimony received doesn’t seem to align with some of the documents, so we have a need to understand that better from them,” she said.

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  • Gunmen kill 11, wound 15 in attack on Russian military recruits | CNN

    Gunmen kill 11, wound 15 in attack on Russian military recruits | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Two gunmen opened fire on Russian military recruits at a training ground in Russia’s Belgorod region, killing at least 11 people and wounding another 15, Russia’s state news agency TASS reports.

    The attack took place Saturday during a training session at the Western Military District, according to TASS, which cited the Russian Defense Ministry. The gunmen were said to be from former Soviet states. Russian officials have branded the attack an act of terrorism.

    “As a result of a terrorist attack at a military training ground in the Belgorod region, 11 people were killed, 15 were injured and are receiving medical assistance,” TASS reported.

    “The incident occurred during a shooting training session with volunteers preparing for a special operation. The terrorists attacked the personnel of the unit with small-arms fire.”

    According to TASS, two individuals who committed the “terrorist act” were killed in retaliatory fire at the training ground.

    The Russian Investigative Committee has launched a criminal investigation into the incident, according to a statement published on Sunday.

    “The Main Military Investigation Department of the Investigative Committee of Russia initiated a criminal case on the fact of criminal acts in the Belgorod region,” the statement said.

    The Belgorod region is in western Russia on the border with Ukraine.

    The Governor of Belgorod city said later that no civilians had been killed in the attack.

    “Yesterday, something terrible occurred on our territory, on the grounds of a military unit. A terrorist act was committed. Many servicemen were killed and wounded,” Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said on his Telegram channel.

    “There are no residents of Belgorod region among the wounded and dead,” the governor added.

    Gladkov also offered his condolences to the families of the victims, adding that all of those wounded are “being administered care.”

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  • January 6 panel asks Secret Service for information about contacts between agents and Oath Keeper members | CNN Politics

    January 6 panel asks Secret Service for information about contacts between agents and Oath Keeper members | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Investigators with the House select committee probing the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol have asked the United States Secret Service for information about contacts between its agents and members of the far-right Oath Keepers group.

    The inquiry comes after it was revealed during court testimony that members of the group, including leader Stewart Rhodes, claimed to be in contact with Secret Service agents prior to rallies for former President Donald Trump after the 2020 election. Members of the Oath Keepers are currently on trial for charges relating to the Capitol attack, including seditious conspiracy.

    Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi confirmed to CNN that the January 6 panel had reached out to the agency and “a verbal briefing was provided to the staff.”

    NBC News first reported the inquiry.

    Guglielmi told CNN the Secret Service would provide records of contact between the Oath Keepers and Secret Service agents.

    Members of the Oath Keepers occasionally reached out to the Secret Service prior to January 6, 2021, with questions about permissible items for rallies, an official with the agency told CNN earlier this week. Further, when agents learned the group planned to attend events, agents reached out and met with members.

    While it’s not uncommon for law enforcement agents to maintain contacts with groups that are of investigative interest, the relationship with the Oath Keepers has come under increased scrutiny during the trial.

    John Zimmerman, a former North Carolina leader of the Oath Keepers, testified earlier this month that to prepare for the rally, Rhodes said he was in contact with a member of the Secret Service who offered advice on what weapons were allowed near the rally. Rhodes also repeatedly represented he was in touch with an agent, said Zimmerman, who noted that he had not heard the entire conversation.

    CNN has asked the Secret Service for dates of contacts and names of Oath Keepers contacted, as well as whether the contacts were documented at the time.

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  • US shift on Venezuelan migrants fuels anxiety in Mexico

    US shift on Venezuelan migrants fuels anxiety in Mexico

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    TIJUANA, Mexico — Jose Maria Garcia Lara got a call asking if his shelter had room for a dozen Venezuelan migrants who were among the first expelled to Mexico under an expanded U.S. policy that denies rights to seek asylum.

    “We can’t take anyone, no one will fit,” he answered, standing amid rows of tents in what looks like a small warehouse. He had 260 migrants on the floor, about 80 over capacity and the most since opening the shelter in 2012.

    The phone call Thursday illustrates how the Biden administration’s expansion of asylum restrictions to Venezuelans poses a potentially enormous challenge to already overstretched Mexican shelters.

    The U.S. agreed to let up to 24,000 Venezuelans apply online to fly directly to the U.S. for temporary stays but said it will also start returning to Mexico any who cross illegally — a number that topped 25,000 in August alone.

    The U.S. expelled Venezuelans to Tijuana and four other Mexican border cities since Wednesday, said Jeremy MacGillivray, deputy director of the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration in Mexico. The others are Nogales, Ciudad Juarez, Piedras Negras and Matamoros.

    Casa del Migrante in Matamoros admitted at least 120 Venezuelans from Brownsville on Thursday, said the Rev. Francisco Gallardo, the shelter director. On Friday, the Mexican government was offering free bus rides to Mexico City.

    Venezuelans have suddenly become the second-largest nationality at the U.S. border after Mexicans, a tough challenge for President Joe Biden. Nearly four out of five who were stopped by U.S. authorities in August entered in or near Eagle Pass, Texas, across from Piedras Negras, a Mexican city of about 150,000 people with scarce shelter space.

    “We are on the verge of collapse,” said Edgar Rodriguez Izquierdo, a lawyer at Casa del Migrante in Piedras Negras, which feeds 500 people daily and is converting a school to a shelter for 150 people.

    Tijuana, where Garcia Lara runs the Juventud 2000 shelter, is the largest city on Mexico’s border and likely has the most space. The city says 26 shelters, which are running near or at capacity, can accommodate about 4,500 migrants combined.

    Tijuana’s largest shelter, Embajadores de Jesus, is hosting 1,400 migrants on bunk beds and floor mats, while a group affiliated with University of California, San Diego, is building a towering annex for thousands more.

    Embajadores de Jesus is growing at a blistering pace at the bottom of a canyon where roosters roam freely and shanties made of plywood and aluminum sheets line dirt roads and cracked pavement that easily flood when it rains. A cinderblock building with a kitchen and dining area is nearing completion, while migrants shovel dirt for a soccer field.

    Gustavo Banda, like other shelter directors in Tijuana, doesn’t know what to expect from the U.S. shift on Venezuela, reflecting an air of uncertainty along the Mexican border. Tijuana was blindsided by a surge in Haitian arrivals in 2016, a giant caravan from Central America in 2018 and the implementation in 2019 of a now-defunct policy to make asylum-seekers wait in Mexico for hearings in U.S. immigration court.

    “Nobody really knows what’s going to happen until they start sending people back,” Banda said Thursday as families with young children prepared for sleep.

    Mexico’s Foreign Affairs Ministry said it would temporarily admit “some” Venezuelans who are expelled from the U.S. under a public health order known as Title 42, without indicating a numerical cap. The U.S. has expelled migrants more than 2.3 million times since Title 42 took effect in March 2020, denying them a chance at asylum on grounds of preventing the spread of COVID-19.

    A Mexican official said Mexico’s capacity to take back Venezuelans hinges on shelter space and success of the U.S. offer of temporary stays for up to 24,000 Venezuelans. The official was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke condition of anonymity.

    Until now, Mexico has only accepted returns from Guatemala, Honduras or El Salvador, in addition to Mexico. As a result, Mexican shelters have been filled with migrants from those countries, along with Haitians.

    Venezuelans, like those of other nationalities including Cuba and Nicaragua, have generally been released in the United States to pursue immigration cases. Strained diplomatic relations have made it nearly impossible for the Biden administration to return them to Venezuela.

    Blas Nuñez-Neto, a top U.S. Homeland Security Department official, didn’t answer directly when asked by reporters Thursday how many Venezuelans are likely to be expelled to Mexico, saying only that he expects fewer will try to cross the border.

    Homeland Security said Venezuelans who cross the border by land after Wednesday’s announcement will be expelled. Edward Pimentel was among the migrants who said they were returned despite being in U.S. custody before the policy was announced.

    “The truth is that our dream is the American dream, we wanted to go to the United States,” Pimentel said outside a Tijuana convenience store.

    In Matamoros, hundreds of Venezuelans protested, saying they entered the U.S. before the policy took effect. Gregori Josue Segovia, 22, said he was processed by U.S. authorities Monday in El Paso, Texas, and was moved around before ending up in Matamoros.

    “We were on three buses and they told us nothing, but we thought everything was normal when we realized were on the (international) bridge” to be returned to Mexico, he said Friday.

    About 7 million Venezuelans have fled their homeland in recent years but had largely avoided the U.S. The U.S. offers a relatively strong economy and slim chances of being returned to Venezuela, suddenly making it more attractive.

    For Venezuelans in Mexico, their best hope may be a U.S. exemption from Title 42 for people deemed particularly vulnerable.

    In Tijuana, it appears more migrants are getting such exemptions from the U.S. Homeland Security Department. The U.S. has been allowing about 150 migrants a day at a border crossing to San Diego, said Enrique Lucero, Tijuana’s director of migration affairs.

    Many are chosen by advocacy groups from Tijuana shelters — causing some migrants to move there not for a place to stay but for a better shot at being selected to enter the U.S., said Lucero.

    Embajadores de Jesus keeps a notebook with names of migrants hoping to qualify for a Title 42 exemption. Banda, a pastor and shelter director, said they wait about three months to enter the U.S.

    Venezuelans who were in Mexico before Wednesday may also apply for one of the 24,000 temporary slots that the U.S. is making available, similar to an effort launched in April for up to 100,000 Ukrainians fleeing Russia’s invasion. They must have a financial sponsor in the U.S. and pay for their flights.

    Mexico welcomed statements from U.S. officials that the temporarily relief offered to Ukrainians and now Venezuelans may expand to other nationalities.

    Orlando Sanchez slept in a bus station in Mexico City with hundreds of other Venezuelans waiting to receive money from family. He said he didn’t have enough for a flight.

    Naile Luna, a Venezuelan who was on her way to Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, said she hoped being eight months pregnant would spare her being expelled to Mexico. She said she knew nothing about the new policy.

    ———

    Verza reported from Mexico City. Associated Press writer Gisela Salomon in Miami and videographer Jordi Lebrija in Tijuana contributed to this report.

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  • Exclusive: Musk’s SpaceX says it can no longer pay for critical satellite services in Ukraine, asks Pentagon to pick up the tab | CNN Politics

    Exclusive: Musk’s SpaceX says it can no longer pay for critical satellite services in Ukraine, asks Pentagon to pick up the tab | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Since they first started arriving in Ukraine last spring, the Starlink satellite internet terminals made by Elon Musk’s SpaceX have been a vital source of communication for Ukraine’s military, allowing it to fight and stay connected even as cellular phone and internet networks have been destroyed in its war with Russia.

    So far roughly 20,000 Starlink satellite units have been donated to Ukraine, with Musk tweeting on Friday the “operation has cost SpaceX $80 million and will exceed $100 million by the end of the year.”

    But those charitable contributions could be coming to an end, as SpaceX has warned the Pentagon that it may stop funding the service in Ukraine unless the US military kicks in tens of millions of dollars per month.

    Documents obtained by CNN show that last month Musk’s SpaceX sent a letter to the Pentagon saying it can no longer continue to fund the Starlink service as it has. The letter also requested that the Pentagon take over funding for Ukraine’s government and military use of Starlink, which SpaceX claims would cost more than $120 million for the rest of the year and could cost close to $400 million for the next 12 months.

    “We are not in a position to further donate terminals to Ukraine, or fund the existing terminals for an indefinite period of time,” SpaceX’s director of government sales wrote to the Pentagon in the September letter.

    Among the SpaceX documents sent to the Pentagon and seen by CNN is a previously unreported direct request made to Musk in July by the Ukrainian military’s commanding general, General Valerii Zaluzhniy, for almost 8,000 more Starlink terminals.

    In a separate cover letter to the Pentagon, an outside consultant working for SpaceX wrote, “SpaceX faces terribly difficult decisions here. I do not think they have the financial ability to provide any additional terminals or service as requested by General Zaluzhniy.”

    The documents, which have not been previously reported, provide a rare breakdown of SpaceX’s own internal numbers on Starlink, detailing the costs and payments associated with the thousands of terminals in Ukraine. They also shed new light on behind-the-scenes negotiations that have provided millions of dollars in communications hardware and services to Ukraine at little cost to Kyiv.

    The letters come amid recent reports of wide-ranging Starlink outages as Ukrainian troops attempt to retake ground occupied by Russia in the eastern and southern parts of the country.

    Sources familiar with the outages said they suddenly affected the entire frontline as it stood on September 30. “That has affected every effort of the Ukrainians to push past that front,” said one person familiar with the outages who spoke to CNN on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive conversations. “Starlink is the main way units on the battlefield have to communicate.”

    There was no warning to Ukrainian forces, a second person said, adding that now when Ukraine liberates an area a request has to be made for Starlink services to be turned on.

    The Financial Times first reported the outages which resulted in a “catastrophic” loss of communication, a senior Ukrainian official said. In a tweet responding to the article, Musk didn’t dispute the outage, saying that what is happening on the battlefield is classified.

    SpaceX’s suggestion it will stop funding Starlink also comes amid rising concern in Ukraine over Musk’s allegiance. Musk recently tweeted a controversial peace plan that would have Ukraine give up Crimea and control over the eastern Luhansk and Donetsk regions.

    After Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky raised the question of who Musk sides with, he responded that he “still very much support[s] Ukraine” but fears “massive escalation.”

    Musk also argued privately last month that Ukraine doesn’t want peace negotiations right now and that if they went along with his plan, “Russia would accept those terms,” according to a person who heard them.

    “Ukraine knows that its current government and wartime efforts are totally dependent on Starlink,” the person familiar with the discussions said. “The decision to keep Starlink running or not rests entirely in the hands of one man. That’s Elon Musk. He hasn’t been elected, no one decided to give him that power. He has it because of the technology and the company he built.”

    On Tuesday Musk denied a report he has spoken to Putin directly about Ukraine. On Thursday, when a Ukrainian minister tweeted that Starlink is essential to Ukraine’s infrastructure, Musk replied: “You’re most welcome. Glad to support Ukraine.”

    More than seven months into the war, it’s hard to overstate the impact Starlink has had in Ukraine. The government in Kyiv, Ukrainian troops as well and NGOs and civilians have relied on the nimble, compact and easy-to-use units created by SpaceX. It’s not only used for voice and electronic communication but to help fly drones and send back video to correct artillery fire.

    CNN has seen it used at numerous Ukrainian bases.

    Elon Musk pauses and looks down as he speaks during a press conference at SpaceX's Starbase facility near Boca Chica Village in South Texas on February 10, 2022.

    “Starlink has been absolutely essential because the Russians have targeted the Ukrainian communications infrastructure,” said Dimitri Alperovitch, co-founder of the Silverado Policy Accelerator, a think tank. “Without that they’d be really operating in the blind in many cases.”

    Though Musk has received widespread acclaim and thanks for responding to requests for Starlink service to Ukraine right as the war was starting, in reality, the vast majority of the 20,000 terminals have received full or partial funding from outside sources, including the US government, the UK and Poland, according to the SpaceX letter to the Pentagon.

    SpaceX’s request that the US military foot the bill has rankled top brass at the Pentagon, with one senior defense official telling CNN that SpaceX has “the gall to look like heroes” while having others pay so much and now presenting them with a bill for tens of millions per month.

    According to the SpaceX figures shared with the Pentagon, about 85% of the 20,000 terminals in Ukraine were paid – or partially paid – for by countries like the US and Poland or other entities. Those entities also paid for about 30% of the internet connectivity, which SpaceX says costs $4,500 each month per unit for the most advanced service. (Over the weekend, Musk tweeted there are around 25,000 terminals in Ukraine.)

    In his July letter to Musk, Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, Gen. Zaluzhniy, praised the Starlink units’ “exceptional utility” and said some 4,000 terminals had been deployed by the military. However, around 500 terminals per month are destroyed in the fighting, Zaluzhniy said, before asking for 6,200 more terminals for the Ukrainian military and intelligence services and 500 per month going forward to offset the losses.

    SpaceX said they responded by asking Zaluzhniy to instead take up his request to the Department of Defense.

    On September 8 the senior director of government sales for SpaceX wrote the Pentagon saying the costs have gotten too high, approaching $100 million. The official asked the Department of Defense to pick up Ukraine’s new request as well as ongoing service costs, totaling $124 million for the remainder of 2022.

    Those costs, according to the senior defense official, would reach almost $380 million for a full year.

    SpaceX declined repeated requests for comment on both the outages and their recent request to the Pentagon. A lawyer for Musk did not reply to a request for comment. Defense Department spokesman Bob Ditchey told CNN, “The Department continues to work with industry to explore solutions for Ukraine’s armed forces as they repel Russia’s brutal and unprovoked aggression. We do not have anything else to add at this time.”

    Early US support for Starlink came via the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) which according to the Washington Post spent roughly $3 million on hardware and services in Ukraine. The largest single contributor of terminals, according to the newly obtained documents, is Poland with payment for almost 9,000 individual terminals.

    US Pentagon in Washington DC building looking down aerial view from above

    The US has provided almost 1,700 terminals. Other contributors include the UK, NGOs and crowdfunding.

    The far more expensive part, however, is the ongoing connectivity. SpaceX says it has paid for about 70% of the service provided to Ukraine and claims to have offered that highest level – $4,500 a month – to all terminals in Ukraine despite the majority only having signed on for the cheaper $500 per month service.

    The terminals themselves cost $1500 and $2500 for the two models sent to Ukraine, the documents say, while consumer models on Starlink’s website are far cheaper and service in Ukraine is just $60 per month.

    That’s just 1.3% of the service rate SpaceX says it needs the Pentagon to start paying.

    “You could say he’s trying to get money from the government or just trying to say ‘I don’t want to be part of this anymore,’” said the person familiar with Ukraine’s requests for Starlink. Given the recent outages and Musk’s reputation for being unpredictable, “Feelings are running really high on the Ukrainian side,” this person said.

    Musk is the biggest shareholder of the privately-held SpaceX. In May, SpaceX disclosed that its valuation had risen to $127 billion and it has raised $2 billion this year, CNBC reported.

    Last week, Musk faced a barrage of criticism on Twitter – including from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky – after presenting in a series of tweets his peace plan to end the war. It would include giving Crimea to Russia and re-do referenda, supervised by the United Nations this time, in the four regions Russia recently illegally annexed.

    It echoed comments he’d made last month at an exclusive closed-door conference in Aspen, Colorado called “The Weekend,” at which Musk told a room full of attendees that Ukraine should seek peace now because they’ve had recent victories.

    “This is the time to do it. They don’t want to do it, that’s for sure. But this is the time to do it,” he said, according to a person in the room. “Everyone wants to seek peace when they’re losing but they don’t want to seek peace when they’re winning. For now.”

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  • FCC could ban all new purchases of Huawei and ZTE telecom gear | CNN Business

    FCC could ban all new purchases of Huawei and ZTE telecom gear | CNN Business

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    Washington
    CNN Business
     — 

    The US government is poised to ban all future telecom equipment produced by Huawei and ZTE, two Chinese technology giants, from the American market in an expanding crackdown against perceived national security risks from China, according to a person familiar with the matter.

    The restrictions, outlined in a draft order by the Federal Communications Commission, would also target video surveillance gear by three other Chinese firms: Hytera, Hikvision and Dahua, the person said, adding that the ban would only apply to new products by the companies that have not already received FCC equipment authorization.

    A vote to approve the measure is expected before mid-November, the person added. The draft order was first reported by Axios.

    Asked for comment, an FCC official confirmed the proposal’s existence and told CNN that, if approved, it would update agency rules surrounding its list of providers deemed to be unacceptable national security risks — and fulfill the agency’s congressional mandate under the Secure Equipment Act of 2021.

    That bipartisan legislation, signed by President Joe Biden last November, required the FCC to develop rules within one year to stop reviewing or approving devices made by the covered companies.

    All electronics that can emit radio frequencies must undergo an FCC authorization process before they can be sold in the United States. The long-established process is intended to keep devices out of the US market that may produce harmful signal interference. But under the draft order the FCC would, for the first time, apply a national security interest to the equipment authorization process, the person said.

    “The FCC remains committed to protecting our national security by ensuring that untrustworthy communications equipment is not authorized for use within our borders, and we are continuing that work here,” FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said in a statement provided to CNN Business on Thursday.

    In a separate statement, Republican commissioner Brendan Carr said: “The FCC has determined that Huawei, ZTE, and similar gear pose an unacceptable risk to our national security. That is why I have urged the FCC to stop reviewing and approving that equipment for use in the U.S. I look forward to achieving that result.”

    Spokespeople for the companies didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

    The proposed ban would go further than prior steps the FCC has taken against Huawei and ZTE, whose networking equipment US officials have said could be used to intercept or monitor US communications.

    Previously, the FCC restricted US telecom carriers from using federal funding to purchase products from Huawei and ZTE, as well as from other providers on the agency’s so-called “covered list.” Later, officials such as Carr highlighted how the products were still available to carriers through the use of non-federal funding, and said the FCC should use its equipment authorization powers to effectively block them from the United States entirely.

    Biden’s subsequent signing of the Secure Equipment Act started a one-year clock for the FCC to put those restrictions into place.

    The FCC has also established a program to help carriers “rip and replace” Huawei and ZTE gear from their networks, though the program’s estimated cost has ballooned to $5.6 billion, up from initial estimates of around $2 billion.

    The top US wireless carriers have said they do not use Chinese-made equipment; telecom policy experts have said it is almost exclusively found in the networks of small providers seeking to minimize costs.

    Separately, in 2019, the Trump administration added Huawei to the Commerce Department’s so-called Entity List, which restricts exports to people and organizations named on the list without a US government license. The following year, the US government expanded on those restrictions by seeking to cut Huawei off from its chip suppliers that use US-made technology.

    The policies have contributed to sharp declines in Huawei’s telecom and handset businesses as the company has sought to shift focus to cars, cloud computing and its own mobile operating system.

    Huawei’s founder and CEO has previously claimed the company would never hand data over to the Chinese government, but western security experts have said the country’s national security and intelligence laws require Chinese companies to comply with demands for information.

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  • Secret Service reached out to Oath Keepers ahead of January 6 riot | CNN Politics

    Secret Service reached out to Oath Keepers ahead of January 6 riot | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Secret Service agents were in contact with members of the Oath Keepers prior to January 6 an official with the agency tells CNN, as part of standard intelligence and response duties.

    The official said members of the Oath Keepers occasionally reached out to the Secret Service with questions about permissible items for rallies. Further, when agents learned the group planned to attend events, agents reached out and met with members. The official noted that is common when groups plan to demonstrate.

    The Washington Post first reported the agency’s outreach to the Oath Keepers ahead of January 6, 2021.

    “We are aware that individuals from the Oath Keepers have contacted us in the past to make inquiries,” Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi told CNN last week.

    It’s not uncommon for law enforcement agents to maintain contacts with groups that are of investigative interest. The Oath Keepers and other extremist groups that traveled to Washington for rallies after the 2020 election had numerous contacts with local and federal law enforcement agencies, testimony gathered in congressional and federal investigations has shown.

    The relationship between the Oath Keepers has come under increased scrutiny after testimony last week revealed the leader of the Oath Keepers, Stewart Rhodes, purported to be in touch with agents.

    John Zimmerman, a former North Carolina leader of the Oath Keepers, testified that he believed Rhodes was in touch with a Secret Service agent in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election.

    Zimmerman, who has not been charged with a crime, said members of the Oath Keepers – who are currently on trial for charges relating to the January 6 US Capitol attack, including seditious conspiracy – gathered in September in Fayetteville, North Carolina, for a campaign rally for former President Donald Trump

    Members of the Oath Keepers were recruiting at the rally and working as personal security details, he said.

    To prepare for the rally, Zimmerman testified, Rhodes said he was in contact with a member of the Secret Service who advised the leader on what weapons were allowed near the rally. Zimmerman said he did not hear the entire conversation, but that Rhodes repeatedly represented he was in touch with an agent.

    Rhodes allegedly told other members of the Oath Keepers in a group chat that if Trump called upon them as a militia, he believed the US Secret Service would be “happy” to have their help, according to evidence presented in court Thursday.

    The text was presented during the seditious conspiracy trial of Rhodes and four other defendants. All five have pleaded not guilty.

    “If he calls us up as a militia I think the secret service would be happy to have us out there,” Rhodes wrote, according to prosecutors. Rhodes went on to say this conclusion was based upon numerous positive contacts between Oath Keepers and the Secret Service before several Trump rallies before January 6.

    This story has been updated with additional details.

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  • Barnes seeks to rebut crime attacks headed into final Senate debate with Johnson in Wisconsin | CNN Politics

    Barnes seeks to rebut crime attacks headed into final Senate debate with Johnson in Wisconsin | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Mandela Barnes, the Democrat taking on Republican Sen. Ron Johnson in Wisconsin’s Senate race, on Thursday faces what could be his last clear shot at rebutting the avalanche of GOP attacks on crime and police funding that have taken a months-long toll on his campaign.

    Barnes and Johnson are set to meet for their second and final debate Thursday night – hours after the House committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol holds a hearing that is expected to function as its closing argument ahead of the November midterm elections.

    Barnes is highlighting Johnson’s actions on that day, seeking to cast him as an unreliable and hypocritical messenger on what it means to support police officers. Johnson, who played a role in trying to push “fake electors” for then-President Donald Trump before the start of the congressional certification of the 2020 electoral votes, has repeatedly downplayed the attack on the Capitol, saying it was not an “armed insurrection,” including as recently as earlier this month.

    Johnson and Republican outside spending groups have hammered Barnes, the Wisconsin lieutenant governor, throughout the fall in television advertisements, at events and in their first debate on crime – echoing a theme the GOP has made a core component of its closing message in Senate races across the map. Those attacks have coincided with Johnson rebounding from a summer slump in the polls less than four weeks from Election Day.

    During a campaign event Tuesday in Milwaukee where the Wisconsin Fraternal Order of Police and the West Allis Professional Police Association endorsed the two-term Republican senator, Johnson said that Barnes has shown “far greater sympathy for the criminal or criminals versus law enforcement or the victims.” He pointed to Barnes’ history of statements in support of decreasing or redirecting police funding.

    “The dispiriting nature of attempting to cut or use the code words of ‘reallocate,’ ‘over bloated budgets,’ – my opponent says that it pains him to see a fully funded police budget. I mean, that type of rhetoric,” Johnson said, “Those types of policies are very dispiriting for police.”

    Barnes, who says he does not support defunding the police, is attempting to shift the debate over crime away from his previous comments by targeting Johnson’s actions around the attack on the Capitol after President Joe Biden defeated former President Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.

    Ahead of Thursday’s debate, Barnes plans to hold a virtual news conference with retired Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who served on the National Security Council and emerged as a star witness against Trump during the his first impeachment. Barnes’ campaign said the event would serve to “hold Ron Johnson accountable for his attempt to send a fake slate of electors to the Vice President.”

    Johnson’s role in trying to put forward the slate of electors who had not been certified by any state legislature was uncovered in June by the House select committee investigating the events around the insurrection. “I was aware that we got this package and that somebody wanted us to deliver it, so we reached out to Pence’s office,” Johnson told CNN at the time.

    In his first debate with Barnes, Johnson said he did not know what he was being asked to hand Pence.

    “I had no idea when I got a call from the lawyers for the president of the United States to deliver something to the vice president, did I have a staffer who could help out with that – I had no idea what it was,” Johnson said. “I wasn’t even involved. I had no knowledge of an alternate state of electors.”

    His comment was part of perhaps the most memorable clash in their first debate last week. Barnes said that Johnson didn’t have any concern for the “140 officers that were injured in the January 6 insurrection.”

    “One officer was stabbed with a metal stake. Another crushed between a revolving door. Another hit in the head with a fire extinguisher,” Barnes said. “Let’s talk about the 140 officers that he left behind because of an insurrection that he supported.”

    Johnson said of the insurrection that he “immediately and forcefully and have repeatedly condemned it and condemned it strongly.”

    Barnes consistently led polls of the Senate race over the summer. But that edge has evaporated, more recent polls show – a change that has coincided with Republicans spending millions on TV ads focused on crime.

    A Marquette University Law School poll of Wisconsin released Wednesday showed movement among likely voters toward Johnson. The Republican led Barnes by 6 percentage points, 52% to 46%, among likely voters, the poll found. That’s a jump in Johnson’s favor from the neck-and-neck race the same poll found, with Johnson at 49% to Barnes’ 48%, in September.

    The poll’s results among likely voters are significantly more favorable to the GOP than are its results among all registered voters, suggesting substantial uncertainty hinging on Democrats’ ability to turn out less motivated supporters. By contrast, in Marquette’s latest results among all registered voters, Barnes and Johnson are tied at 47% in the Senate race.

    Other recent polls of the race have found likely voters deadlocked. In a CBS News/YouGov poll released Sunday, Johnson took 50% to Barnes’ 49% among likely voters.

    The Marquette poll found that inflation is a top issue in Wisconsin, with 68% of registered voters saying they are very concerned about it. Smaller majorities are also very concerned about public schools (60%), gun violence (60%), abortion policy (56%), crime (56%) and an “accurate vote count” (52%).

    But it’s crime that Republican strategists say has been central to Johnson’s rebound in the race.

    The attacks have taken place against the backdrop of rising violent crime figures, including a 70% increase in Wisconsin’s homicide rate from 2019 to 2021, according to the state’s Department of Justice. Republicans have also highlighted those convicted of violent crimes who have been paroled by the Wisconsin Parole Commission, an independent agency whose chairperson is appointed by the governor.

    “They don’t have an answer,” Brian Schimming, a Republican strategist in Wisconsin, said of Barnes’ campaign. “With Mandela Barnes, it’s not just one thing. It’s not anecdotal. There are three, four, five issues there that are not playing with an electorate that’s pretty concerned about crime right now, and not just if they’re in Milwaukee.”

    In the month of September, 61% of the nearly $9 million that Johnson and GOP groups spent on TV ads in the Wisconsin Senate race was behind ads focused on crime, according to data from the firm AdImpact.

    That share has dropped to 30% so far in October, but nine of the 14 ads that Republican groups have aired so far have been focused on crime.

    It has forced Democrats to respond. Barnes and Democratic groups have focused 40% of their TV ad spending so far in October on crime, with ads rebutting the GOP groups.

    The Republican attacks have focused on Barnes’ efforts as a state lawmaker to end cash bail, as well as a 2020 interview with PBS Wisconsin – weeks after the police killing of George Floyd in neighboring Minnesota – in which Barnes suggested that funding should be redirected from police budgets to other social services.

    “We need to invest more in neighborhood services and programming for our residents, for our communities on the front end,” he said then. “Where will that money come from? Well, it can come from over-bloated budgets in police departments.”

    He did, however, also stress in that same interview that he did not want police budgets completely done away with, saying, “The more money we invest in opportunity for people, the less money we have to spend on prisons.”

    One Johnson campaign ad shows video of Barnes saying that “reducing prison population is now sexy.” A narrator in the ad highlights Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ administration’s efforts to reduce the state’s prison population and says: “That’s not sexy. It’s terrifying. And as a mother, I don’t want Mandela Barnes anywhere near the Senate, from defunding our police to releasing predators.”

    Another Johnson spot features the sheriffs of Ozaukee and Waukesha counties, both huge sources of Republican votes in the Milwaukee suburbs.

    “Barnes wants to defund our police,” Waukesha County Sheriff Eric Severson says in the ad.

    “Mandela Barnes’ policies are a threat to your family,” Ozaukee County Sheriff Jim Johnson says.

    Barnes’ campaign has responded with ads of its own, including one in which Barnes says of GOP ads claiming he supports defunding the police, “That’s a lie.”

    “Mandela doesn’t want to defund the police,” a retired Racine Police Department sergeant says in another Barnes spot. “He’s very supportive of law enforcement and I know his objective is to make every community in the state of Wisconsin better.”

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  • 20 years after Bali bombings, ‘the ache does not dim’

    20 years after Bali bombings, ‘the ache does not dim’

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    DENPASAR, Indonesia — Hundreds gathered Wednesday on the Indonesian resort island of Bali to commemorate 20 years since a twin bombing killed 202 people, mostly foreign tourists, including 88 Australians and seven Americans.

    Services were held simultaneously in several places in Australia and at Bali’s Australian Consulate in the city of Denpasar, where Australian survivors of the 2002 terrorist attack and relatives of the deceased were among the 200 in attendance to pay tribute.

    Survivors and relatives laid wreaths and flowers at the Memorial Garden after a moment of silence.

    Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese attended a service in his hometown, Sydney, at the beachside suburb of Coogee. Six members of the Coogee Dolphins Rugby League Football Club died in the blasts.

    Albanese paid tribute Wednesday to the strength and unity the Coogee community had shown since the tragedy.

    “Twenty years ago, the shock waves from Bali reached our shores. Twenty years ago, an act of malice and calculated depravity robbed the world of 202 lives, including 88 Australians. Twenty years on, the ache does not dim,” Albanese said.

    At a ceremony at Australian Parliament House in the national capital Canberra, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong welcomed Indonesian Ambassador Siswo Pramono, who was among the dignitaries.

    “Ambassador, on behalf of the Australian government, I warmly welcome you and acknowledge the strength, the courage and the cooperation of our two peoples,” Wong said in Bahasa, the official language of Indonesia.

    “Today, we remember what was taken. Today, we remember what was lost. And we wonder what might have been had they all come home,” Wong added.

    Pramono said the terrorist attack had created a “better and stronger bond” between Indonesia and Australia.

    “Twenty years ago today, a hideous crime struck and it was one of the saddest days in Indonesian history,” Pramono told the gathering.

    “Family and friends were left with overwhelming grief and even though a lot of hearts were broken and our loved ones were taken from us, there are some things that a terrorist couldn’t take: our love and compassion for others and the idea that people are equal in rights and freedoms,” Pramono added.

    Survivors are still battling with their trauma of the tragedy, when a car bombing in Sari Club and a nearly simultaneous suicide bombing at nearby Paddy’s Pub on a Saturday night in October 2002.

    After the attack, the bustling tourist area was quiet for a time, but it has since returned to a state of busy weekends, packed traffic and tourists. What used to be Sari Club is now a vacant lot, while Paddy’s Pub has resumed its operation 100 meters (300 feet) from its original location.

    A monument stands less than 50 meters (yards) from the bombing sites with the names of the those who died inscribed on it. People regularly come and pray and place flowers, candles, or flags with photos of their loved ones.

    A photo of two women tied with a bouquet of fresh chrysanthemums and roses sits next to a laminated paper that reads: “To our beautiful girls Renae & Simone. It is twenty years on and not a day has gone by without thinking of you both, and how we lost two treasures. Our hearts will cry for you forever. We love and miss you so very much. Your loving Dad and Brothers.”

    The 2002 attack in Bali, carried out by suicide bombers from the al-Qaida-linked group Jemaah Islamiyah, started a wave of violence in the world’s most populous Muslim nation. Three years later, another bomb attack the island and killed 20 people. Numerous attacks followed, hitting an embassy, hotels, restaurants, a coffee shop, churches, and even police headquarters across the archipelago nation.

    Two decades after the Bali bombings, counterterrorism efforts in the world’s most populous Muslim country remain highly active. Indonesia founded Densus 88, a national counterterrorism unit, in the wake of the attacks. More than 2,300 people have since been arrested on terrorism charges, according to data from the Center for Radicalism and Deradicalization Studies, a non-government Indonesian think tank.

    In 2020, 228 people were arrested on terrorism charges. The number rose to 370 last year, underscoring authorities’ commitment to pursue suspects even as the number of terrorist attacks in Indonesia has fallen.

    The pursuit of suspects related to the Bali bombings has also continued, most recently resulting in the arrest of Aris Sumarsono, 58, whose real name is Arif Sunarso but is better known as Zulkarnaen, in December 2020. The court sentenced him to 15 years in prison for his role. Indonesian authorities also suspect him to be the mastermind of several other attacks in the country.

    In August, Indonesia’s government considered granting an early prison release to the bombmaker in the Bali attack, Hisyam bin Alizein, 55, better known by his alias, Umar Patek, who has also been identified as a leading member of Jemaah Islamiyah.

    Indonesian authorities said Patek was an example of successful efforts to reform convicted terrorists and that they planned to use him to influence others not to commit terrorist acts. But the Australian government has expressed its strong opposition to his possible release.

    ———

    McGuirk reported from Canberra, Australia.

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  • Ex-NSA worker accused of selling secrets ordered detained

    Ex-NSA worker accused of selling secrets ordered detained

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    DENVER — A former National Security Agency employee from Colorado accused of trying to sell classified information to Russia will remain behind bars while he is prosecuted, a magistrate judge ruled Tuesday.

    Jareh Sebastian Dalke, 30, is facing a possible life sentence for allegedly giving the information to an undercover FBI agent whom prosecutors say he believed was a person working for the Russian Federation. He pleaded not guilty through his lawyer during a hearing in Denver federal court before a hearing to determine if he should be released from jail.

    Dalke was arrested Sept. 28 after authorities say he arrived at Denver’s downtown train station with a laptop and used a secure connection set up by investigators to transfer some classified documents.

    Magistrate Judge S. Kato Crews said Tuesday the stiff penalty Dalke could face makes him a flight risk along with the sympathies he has allegedly expressed for Russia. Crews also said he was not sure that Dalke, who is accused of sharing the documents after promising not to disclose information he obtained while working at the NSA, would honor any conditions he could impose that would allow Dalke to live with his wife and grandmother in Colorado Springs while the case proceeds. He was also concerned about authentic-looking but counterfeit badges for government agencies, including the NSA, allegedly found during a search of Dalke’s home.

    Dalke’s lawyers had proposed that his wife, who was in court for the hearing, could supervise the Army veteran and report any violations of his bond. However, Crews was concerned whether she would be able to do that, describing Dalke as her “caretaker.”

    One of Dalke’s federal public defenders, David Kraut, said Dalke supported the household with Veterans Administration benefits and had been “supportive” of his wife in difficulties in her life. He said Dalke would not want to put her at risk by not complying with bond conditions. However, Assistant U.S. Attorney Julia K. Martinez said he already had by taking her with him when he went to scout out a public location to transmit the documents.

    Public defender, Kraut, downplayed Dalke’s access to classified information since he only worked at the NSA for less than a month this summer.

    Shortly after he left the agency, citing a family illness, and signed the non-disclosure agreement, he allegedly began talking with the undercover agent using encrypted email.

    Martinez argued that the government does not know whether Dalke obtained more information from the NSA that is stored somewhere else or possibly memorized. She said he has the motivation to sell more secrets if he were to be released.

    “He knows how to make money. Sell secrets to Russia,” said Martinez, who alleged Dalke took the job at the NSA with the intent of selling secrets.

    The information Dalke is accused of providing includes a threat assessment of the military offensive capabilities of a foreign country which is not named. It also includes a description of sensitive U.S. defense capabilities, a portion of which relates to that same foreign country, according to his indictment.

    The Army veteran allegedly told the undercover agent that he had $237,000 in debts and that he had decided to work with Russia because his heritage “ties back to your country.”

    Before Dalke transfered the classified documents, he first sent a thank you letter, which opened and closed in Russian, in which he said he looked “forward to our friendship and shared benefit,” according to court filings.

    Dalke worked for the NSA, the U.S. intelligence agency that collects and analyzes signals from foreign and domestic sources for the purpose of intelligence and counterintelligence, as an information systems security designer. After he left and allegedly provided documents with the undercover agent, prosecutors say he re-applied to work there.

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  • Iran’s crackdown on protests intensifies in Kurdish region

    Iran’s crackdown on protests intensifies in Kurdish region

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    DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Iran intensified its crackdown Tuesday on Kurdish areas in the country’s west as protests sparked by the death of a 22-year-old woman detained by the morality police rage on, activists said.

    Riot police fired into at least one neighborhood in Sanandaj, the capital of Iran’s Kurdistan province, as Amnesty International and the White House’s national security adviser criticized the violence targeting demonstrators angered by the death of Mahsa Amini.

    Meanwhile, some oil workers Monday joined the protests at two key refinery complexes, for the first time linking an industry key to Iran’s theocracy to the unrest.

    Iran’s government insists Amini was not mistreated, but her family says her body showed bruises and other signs of beating. Subsequent videos have shown security forces beating and shoving female protesters, including women who have torn off their mandatory headscarf, or hijab.

    From the capital, Tehran, and elsewhere, videos have emerged online despite authorities disrupting the internet. Videos on Monday showed university and high school students demonstrating and chanting, with some women and girls marching through the streets without headscarves as the protests continue into a fourth week. The demonstrations represent one of the biggest challenges to Iran’s theocracy since the 2009 Green Movement protests.

    One video posted online by a Kurdish group called the Hengaw Organization for Human Rights showed darkened streets with apparent gunfire going off and a bonfire burning in Sanandaj, some 400 kilometers (250 miles) west of Tehran.

    Another showed riot police carrying shotguns moving in formation with a vehicle, apparently firing at homes.

    The New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran posted another video showing what it described as a phalanx of motorcycle-riding security forces moving through Sanandaj.

    “They reportedly broke the windows of hundreds of cars in the Baharan neighborhood,” the center said.

    Amini was Kurdish and her death has been felt particularly in Iran’s Kurdish region, where demonstrations began Sept. 17 at her funeral there after her death the day before.

    Amnesty International criticized Iranian security forces for “using firearms and firing tear gas indiscriminately, including into people’s homes.” It urged the world to pressure Iran to end the crackdown as Tehran continues to disrupt internet and mobile phone networks “to hide their crimes.”

    Iran did not immediately acknowledge the renewed crackdown in Sanandaj. However, Iran’s Foreign Ministry summoned the British ambassador over the United Kingdom sanctioning members of the country’s morality police and security officials due to the crackdown.

    Iran’s Foreign Ministry called the sanctions “arbitrary and baseless,” even while threatening to potentially take countermeasures against London.

    Jake Sullivan, U.S. President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, similarly noted that “the world is watching what is happening in Iran.”

    “These protestors are Iranian citizens, led by women and girls, demanding dignity and basic rights,” Sullivan wrote on Twitter. “We stand with them, and we will hold responsible those using violence in a vain effort to silence their voices.”

    ———

    Follow Jon Gambrell on Twitter at www.twitter.com/jongambrellAP

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  • Locks, laws and bullet-resistant shields: Election officials boost security as midterms draw closer | CNN Politics

    Locks, laws and bullet-resistant shields: Election officials boost security as midterms draw closer | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    In Douglasville, Georgia – just west of Atlanta – a new buzzer-entry system secures the doors of the Douglas County election office. And elections director Milton Kidd said he now varies the times and the routes he uses to travel to work – all to evade the attention of election conspiracy theorists who have targeted the office.

    In Madison, Wisconsin, where a top election official faced death threats in the aftermath of the 2020 election, officials have redesigned the city clerk’s office, adding cameras, locking doors and covering the windows with white paper, said city attorney Michael Haas. In addition, a new city ordinance establishes a fine of up to $1,000 for disorderly conduct directed at election officials.

    In Colorado, meanwhile, a new state law – the Vote Without Fear Act – prohibits carrying firearms at polling places or within 100 feet of a ballot drop box. And in Tallahassee, Florida, officials have added Kevlar and bullet-resistant acrylic shields to the Leon County elections office, said Mark Earley, who runs elections in the county.

    With Election Day less than a month away – and early voting already happening in some states – the officials charged with administering the midterms are racing to boost security for their staff, polling places and voters, as baseless conspiracy theories about fraud continue to swirl around the 2020 election and the one now underway.

    As CNN recently reported, the concerns about threats and harassment are so great that federal officials are now offering de-escalation training to local and state officials to help avert violence at the polls.

    “We certainly are in territory that we have not navigated in the past,” said Tina Barton, a former election official in Michigan who sits on the Committee for Safe and Secure Elections. It’s a bipartisan group of election experts and law enforcement officials, working to prevent threats against voters and election officials.

    “I’m sad about the fact that it took a scenario like this for us to have to look at all of these things and say, ‘How do we keep ourselves safe?’” she added of the threats that started after the 2020 election. “But we’re seeing unprecedented threats and harassment.”

    Barton said election officials are deploying a bevy of tactics to secure the elections – from installing cameras and lighting at drop boxes to adding GPS and other tracking devices to ballot bags to monitor their movement on Election Day.

    Election officials in North Carolina last week issued what they described as their “most comprehensive” guidance to local elections officials for maintaining order at polling places this fall. It reinforces that it’s a crime to interfere with voter or election workers. The North Carolina State Board of Elections has also developed a guide for local law enforcement to help officers identify and respond to voter intimidation.

    In Leon County, Florida, Earley said his staff has received active-shooter training as part of their preparations in recent election cycles. But he said it has taken on “more significance since January 6,” referring to the 2021 attack on the US Capitol.

    The extra steps to secure the building and protect the staff, Earley said, have sprung from worries about “people buying into myths and disinformation and feeling it’s their patriotic duty to take action.”

    “In today’s world, that action, unfortunately, oftentimes comes with firearms,” he added.

    In Oregon, meanwhile, the secretary of state’s office is urging local election officials to install signs outside ballot boxes that spell out voters’ rights and warn that voter intimidation violates the law – following social media references to activists targeting the boxes, said Ben Morris, a spokesman for the office.

    The state mails a ballot to every voter, which Oregonians return either by mail or by depositing into drop boxes. About 200 drop boxes are used around the state.

    In neighboring Washington state, officials in the Seattle area found and removed some 11 signs that had been posted by an “election integrity” activist and that warned that drop boxes were “under surveillance” ahead of the August 2 primary. King County officials called the signs an example of voter intimidation.

    (Amber Krabach, the activist who erected the signs, has sued King County and state officials in federal court, arguing that removing the signs violated her First Amendment right to free speech.)

    King County election officials are not aware of any security issues with their 76 ballot drop boxes right now, said Kendall Hodson, the county election office’s chief of staff, but “given what happened in the primary, we are keeping our eyes peeled for any unusual behavior.”

    Back in Douglas County, Georgia – a community of roughly 145,000 people that backed President Joe Biden in 2020 – Kidd said he’s dismayed and discouraged by what he and his staff have endured.

    Activists have trailed workers and photographed their license plates. In the 2020 election, people claiming election fraud dug through the trash at one polling location, found destroyed sample ballots and accused officials of throwing out votes, he said.

    And this year, he’s had several companies refuse to rent the trucks to the county that it needs to transport equipment to precincts.

    “In this climate, any business that’s associated with elections becomes a target,” he said. (Kidd has secured the trucks but said he doesn’t want to name the supplier for fear of further trouble.)

    Kidd, who has worked in the county’s election system for seven years, said he’s lost much of his once-stable workforce of temporary poll workers as a result of all the harassment and stress.

    “We’re able do things at the precinct” to protect workers, he said. “But we’re not able to go home with you. We’re not able to be with you in the grocery store.”

    “The level of depression, the level of anxiety that is now present in election administration is ridiculous,” he added. “And I don’t know, personally myself, how much longer I am going to do this.”

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  • Elon Musk’s bumpy road to possibly owning Twitter: A timeline | CNN Business

    Elon Musk’s bumpy road to possibly owning Twitter: A timeline | CNN Business

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    CNN Business
     — 

    A board seat accepted and then rejected. A stunning $44 billion takeover offer with uncertain financing. And a surprise early morning tweet putting the deal on hold, temporarily.

    Even by the standards of Twitter, a company that has known plenty of chaos and dysfunction in its history, the weeks-long effort by billionaire Elon Musk to buy the company has proven to be uniquely tumultuous – and there’s no clear end in sight.

    Should the deal go through, it would place the world’s richest man in charge of one of the world’s most influential social media platforms. The acquisition has the potential to upend not just Twitter itself but politics, media and the tech industry. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO has repeatedly stressed that his goal is to bolster what he calls “free speech” on the platform, by which he means all legal speech that complies with local laws in the markets where Twitter operates. He has also said he would reverse Twitter’s ban of former President Donald Trump.

    But the attempt by Musk, a wildly successful entrepreneur with a history of erratic behavior, to buy Twitter has been viewed with some skepticism from the start. On the day he made his offer, Musk said: “I’m not sure I’ll actually be able to acquire it.” Some have questioned how he would finance the deal, especially as shares of Tesla

    (TSLA)    , which he’s partially using to back his financing of the Twitter deal, and the broader tech sector have declined in the weeks since.

    After Musk recently said he was temporarily pausing the deal so he could assess the amount of spam and fake accounts, it prompted speculation that the billionaire might be looking to renegotiate the deal – or back out of it entirely. His actions in the days that followed only reinforced that thinking.

    Here is a look back at the many twists and turns in one of the most high-profile tech deals in recent memory.

    Musk starts quietly buying up Twitter shares, building his stake in the company. But it would be months before he disclosed this fact to the public.

    Musk’s stake in Twitter tops 5%, but that fact is not disclosed until the following month. Musk was obligated to disclose his stake within 10 days of crossing the 5% threshold, but waited 21 days to do so. During that time, he continued building up his stake.

    The billionaire begins to make pointed statements about the platform from his account. “Twitter algorithm should be open source,” he wrote, with a poll for users to vote “yes” or “no.”

    The following day, Musk tweets out another poll to his followers: “Free speech is essential to a functioning democracy. Do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres to this principle?”

    Musk reaches out to Twitter cofounder and former CEO Jack Dorsey to “discuss the future direction of social media,” according to a company filing later put out by the company. The two tech founders are known to have a bit of a billionaire bromance on and off Twitter.

    Twitter’s board and some of its leadership team meet with representatives from Wilson Sonsini, a law firm, and J.P. Morgan to discuss the possibility of Musk joining the company’s board, according a later securities filing. Dorsey is said to have told the board that “he and Mr. Musk were friends,” according to the filing.

    In the meeting, the Twitter board discussed wanting Musk to agree to “‘standstill’ provisions”,” according to the filing. This would effectively “limit his public statements regarding Twitter, including the making of unsolicited public proposals to acquire Twitter (but not private proposals) without the prior consent of the Twitter Board.”

    Musk is revealed to be Twitter’s largest individual shareholder, with a more than 9% stake in the company.

    News of the purchase sends shares of the social media company soaring more than 20% in early trading and kicks off a wave of speculation about how Musk might push for changes on the platform.

    Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal announces Musk will join Twitter’s board of directors. “Through conversations with Elon in recent weeks, it became clear to us that he would bring great value to our Board,” Agrawal says in a post on Twitter.

    As part of the appointment, Musk agrees not to acquire more than 14.9% of the company’s shares while he remains on the board. His term on the board is set to go through 2024, according to a regulatory filing.

    Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal (left) and former CEO Jack Dorsey in an undated photo.

    Agrawal announces that Musk has decided not to join the board after all. “I believe this is for the best,” Agrawal writes in a letter to the Twitter team.

    The reversal opens the door for Musk to pursue a greater stake in the company – and frees him to tweet his many thoughts about the company.

    Musk stuns the industry by making an offer to acquire all the shares in Twitter he does not own at a valuation of $41.4 billion. The cash offer represents a 38% premium over the company’s closing price on April 1, the last trading day before Musk disclosed that he had become the company’s biggest shareholder.

    “I invested in Twitter as I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe, and I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy. However, since making my investment I now realize the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form. Twitter needs to be transformed as a private company,” Musk writes in his offer letter. “Twitter has extraordinary potential. I will unlock it.”

    Twitter’s board of directors adopts a “poison pill” provision, a limited-term shareholder rights plan that potentially makes it harder for Musk to acquire the company.

    Tesla CEO Elon Musk speaks during the official opening of the new Tesla electric car manufacturing plant on March 22, 2022 near Gruenheide, Germany.

    Musk lines up $46.5 billion in financing for the deal, including two debt commitment letters from Morgan Stanley and other unnamed financial institutions and one equity commitment letter from himself, according to a regulatory filing.

    The billionaire also reveals that he has not received a formal response from Twitter a week after his acquisition offer. He said he is “seeking to negotiate” a definite acquisition agreement and “is prepared to begin such negotiations immediately” — an apparent reversal from his statement in his acquisition offer letter that it would be his “best and final” offer.

    Although he is the richest person in the world, much of Musk’s wealth is tied up in Tesla stock, and some followers of the company speculate that it could be challenging for Musk to raise debt against the historically volatile stock.

    Twitter announces that it has agreed to sell itself to Musk in a deal valued at around $44 billion. At a conference later in the day, Musk describes his offer to buy Twitter in characteristically sweeping terms as being about “the future of civilization,” not just making money.

    At an all-hands meeting that afternoon, Twitter employees raise questions about everything from what the deal would mean for their compensation to whether former US President Donald Trump would be let back on the platform.

    Filings reveal Musk sold $8.5 billion of his Tesla stock in the three days after Twitter board agreed to the sale for an average of $883.09 per share. The filings did not disclose the reason for the sale, but Musk appeared to be raising funds to buy Twitter.

    Tesla cars sit in a dealership lot on March 28, 2022 in Chicago, Illinois.

    Musk raises another $7 billion in financing for the deal. The new investors include Oracle founder Larry Ellison, cryptocurrency platform Binance and venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, according to a filing.

    Musk aims to increase Twitter’s annual revenue to $26.4 billion by 2028, up from $5 billion last year, according to a New York Times report, citing Musk’s pitch deck presented to investors. To achieve that lofty goal, Musk intends to bolster Twitter’s subscription revenue and build up a payments business while decreasing the company’s reliance on advertising sales, according to the report.

    Musk confirms what many have assumed for weeks: he would reverse Twitter’s Trump ban if his deal to buy the company is completed.

    “I do think it was not correct to ban Donald Trump, I think that was a mistake,” Musk said. “I would reverse the perma-ban. … Banning Trump from Twitter didn’t end Trump’s voice, it will amplify it among the right and this is why it’s morally wrong and flat out stupid.”

    Former President Donald Trump looks at his phone during a roundtable with governors on the reopening of America's small businesses, in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington, June 18, 2020.

    Twitter confirms to CNN Business that the platform is pausing most hiring and backfills, except for “business critical” roles, and pulling back on other non-labor costs ahead of the acquisition. In addition, Twitter says general manager of consumer, Kayvon Beykpour, and revenue product lead, Bruce Falck, are leaving the company.

    Musk tweets that the deal is on hold, linking to a Reuters report from nearly two weeks earlier, about Twitter’s most recent disclosure about its amount of spam and fake accounts. The figure cited in the report, however, is in line with prior quarterly disclosures.

    “Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users,” Musk tweeted.

    Shares of the social media site plummet after Musk’s announcement, dropping more than 10% at market open. Two hours after announcing the hold, Musk says he remains set on purchasing Twitter. “Still committed to acquisition,” he wrote.

    Later in the day, Musk says his team is testing Twitter’s numbers and “picked 100 as the sample size number, because that is what Twitter uses to calculate

    Musk tweets out that Twitter’s legal team accused him of breaking a nondisclosure agreement when the billionaire revealed the platform’s sample size for automated user checks is allegedly just 100 users.

    “Twitter legal just called to complain that I violated their NDA by revealing the bot check sample size is 100! This actually happened,” wrote Musk.

    The standoff over bot accounts continues as Musk exchanges a series of tweets with Agrawal over the issue. After Agrawal carefully explains how Twitter attempts to combat and measure spam accounts, Musk responds with a poop emoji.

    Musk follows up with a somewhat more thoughtful question. “So how do advertisers know what they’re getting for their money?” Musk asked. “This is fundamental to the financial health of Twitter,” he added.

    Musk announces that his acquisition of Twitter “cannot move forward” until he sees more information about the prevalence of spam accounts, claiming that the social media platform falsified numbers in filings. Without citing a source, he claims in a tweet that Twitter is “20% fake/spam accounts” and suggests Twitter’s previous filings with the SEC were misleading.

    Later in the day, Musk posts a poll to his Twitter followers: “Twitter claims that >95% of daily active users are real, unique humans. Does anyone have that experience?” before calling on the SEC to evaluate the platform’s numbers. “Hello @SECGov, anyone home?” Musk tweets, in an apparent attempt to get the regulator to look into the matter.

    In a statement, Twitter says it remains “committed to completing the transaction on the agreed price and terms as promptly as practicable.” Later, the company says it intends to “enforce the merger agreement.”

    In a letter to Twitter’s head of legal, Musk threatens to walk away from his purchase of the platform, alleging that Twitter is “actively resisting and thwarting his information rights” as outlined by the deal.

    In the letter, an attorney for Musk accuses the social media company of breaching the merger agreement by not providing the data he has requested on Twitter spam bots, stating that the lack of information gives him a right “not to consummate the transaction” and “to terminate the merger agreement.”

    Musk moved to terminate the acquisition agreement. A lawyer representing him claimed in a letter to Twitter’s top lawyer that the company is “in material breach of multiple provisions” of the deal over its alleged failure to provide all the data Musk says he needs to evaluate the number of spam and fake accounts on the platform.

    “For nearly two months, Mr. Musk has sought the data and information necessary to ‘make an independent assessment of the prevalence of fake or spam accounts on Twitter’s platform,’” the letter reads. “This information is fundamental to Twitter’s business and financial performance and is necessary to consummate the transactions contemplated by the Merger Agreement. … Twitter has failed or refused to provide this information.”

    Twitter was not having it.

    “The Twitter Board is committed to closing the transaction on the price and terms agreed upon with Mr. Musk and plans to pursue legal action to enforce the merger agreement,” Twitter board chair Bret Taylor said in a tweet Friday, echoing earlier statements by the company that it planned to follow through with the deal. “We are confident we will prevail in the Delaware Court of Chancery.”

    Twitter sued the Tesla billionaire in Delaware court in an attempt to force him to complete the deal.

    The 62-page lawsuit, sprinkled with memes, tweets and a poop emoji, effectively highlighted the bizarre spectacle of the deal from the start. The company paints Musk as a non-serious potential owner — alleging at one point that he has “disdain” for the company, and at another saying, “Musk’s strategy is … a model of bad faith” — while seeking to compel him to become its owner. (Twitter’s board has an obligation to its shareholders to try to see the deal through if they believe it is in their best interest. The dispute could also end in a settlement.)

    Twitter’s lawsuit against Musk over his move to terminate their $44 billion acquisition agreement will go to trial on Oct. 17 and run for five days, a Delaware judge ruled.

    The decision came after Judge Kathaleen St. Jude McCormick, who is overseeing the case, previously ruled in Twitter’s favor that the proceedings could be expedited and take place in October. Twitter initially pushed for an October 10th start.

    Musk’s legal team had asked for the trial to take place in 2023. Twitter’s legal team argued it was necessary to expedite the case in order to limit the “harm” to its business and to ensure the deal can be completed before Oct. 24, the “drop dead” date by which the two sides had previously agreed to close the deal.

    Peiter

    Twitter whistleblower Peiter “Mudge” Zatko testifies before Congress in his first public appearance after his bombshell allegations against the social media company were reported in August by CNN and The Washington Post.

    In a whistleblower disclosure sent to multiple lawmakers and government agencies in July, Zatko accused Twitter of failing to safeguard users’ personal information and of exposing the most sensitive parts of its operation to too many people, including potentially to foreign spies. Zatko — who was Twitter’s head of security from November 2020 until he was fired in January — also alleged company executives, including CEO Parag Agrawal, have deliberately misled regulators and the company’s own board about its shortcomings.

    Zatko claimed in his testimony that Twitter is extremely vulnerable to being penetrated and exploited by agents of foreign governments, as well as detailed some of the personal information Twitter collects on users and alleged that the company does not know where the majority of its collected data goes.

    Days earlier, a judge allowed Musk’s legal team to add arguments based on the whistleblower disclosure to its case.

    Musk sends a letter to Twitter proposing to complete the deal as originally signed for $54.20 per share, citing people familiar with the negotiations. News of the letter, revealed in a security filing the next day, sends Twitter stock surging more than 20%, approaching the deal price for the first time in months.

    Such an agreement could bring to an end a contentious, months-long back and forth between Musk and Twitter that has caused massive uncertainty for employees, investors and users of one of the world’s most influential social media platforms.

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  • DeSantis’ migrant flights to Martha’s Vineyard appear outside the scope of Florida transport program guidelines, state documents show | CNN

    DeSantis’ migrant flights to Martha’s Vineyard appear outside the scope of Florida transport program guidelines, state documents show | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    A pair of flights carrying migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard last month, orchestrated by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, may have exceeded the original scope of the state’s plan to transport undocumented individuals, according to records obtained by CNN.

    The records show that in the months leading up to those flights, Florida had planned a narrower mission for a controversial new state program to transport migrants to other states. The goal, according to a callout to contractors and guidelines for the program, was to, “relocate out of the state of Florida foreign nationals who are not lawfully present in the United States.”

    But that’s not what transpired. On September 14, two planes picked up 48 migrants in San Antonio – not Florida – and dropped them off in Martha’s Vineyard.

    The documents, provided to CNN through a records request and released Friday evening by the Florida Department of Transportation and the governor’s office, offer new details about the stunt that thrust DeSantis even deeper into the middle of a national debate on immigration. From the White House to Florida, Massachusetts and beyond, the condemnation from Democrats was swift. So was the praise from Republicans for DeSantis, who only further bolstered his standing in his party as he considers running for President in 2024.

    A Democratic state lawmaker is already suing the state and asking a judge to stop future flights, arguing the DeSantis administration was illegally spending taxpayer dollars. The budget act that created the $12 million program specified the money was set aside to relocate “unauthorized aliens from this state.”

    The governor’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    The records for the first time also directly tie a $615,000 state payment made to Vertol Systems Company for the September flights that sent migrants from San Antonio to Martha’s Vineyard. Previously, the payment to Vertol was disclosed by the state, but the governor’s office for weeks declined to confirm that the check was linked to the flights that landed in Massachusetts.

    The Florida Department of Transportation, the agency tasked with executing the new migrant relocation program, received a price quote from Vertol CEO James Montgomerie on September 6 for “the first Project,” one document showed. Montgomerie identified that project as “the facilitation of the relocation of up to fifty individuals to the State of Massachusetts or other, proximate northeastern state.” The price, he said, was $615,000.

    The next day, FDOT officials sent a letter asking for authorization for the $615,000 and the state made the payment within the next 24 hours, according to financial statements maintained on the Florida Chief Financial Officer’s website previously reported by CNN.

    In communications with FDOT earlier during the summer, Montgomerie offered the state services that suggested a considerably less ambitious mission for the migrant relocation program.

    On July 26, after a discussion with FDOT’s general counsel, Montgomerie gave the agency estimates for his company to charter flights that could carry four to 12 people from Crestview, Florida, to the Boston or Los Angeles areas, according to an email from the Vertol executive to FDOT.

    “We are certainly willing to provide you with pricing information on specific ad-hoc requirements on a case by case basis,” Montgomerie wrote in the email.

    The prices quoted for flights originating from Florida more closely aligned with FDOT’s guidelines for the program that it sent to prospective contractors and the agency’s request for quotes. In the three-page guidelines, FDOT stipulated the chosen company needed to ensure “that the Unauthorized Alien has voluntarily agreed to be relocated out of Florida.” The quotes also showed Montgomerie early on anticipated Vertol would be moving less people. Later, in September, his quotes evolved to include many more people on board.

    Ultimately, the planes that left San Antonio briefly touched down in Crestview before eventually landing in Massachusetts.

    At the time of the state’s request for contractors, DeSantis was publicly claiming that President Joe Biden could send buses of migrants from the US-Mexico border to Florida. But DeSantis acknowledged last month those buses never arrived, and his focus began to shift hundreds of miles away to Texas.

    DeSantis has said the intention of executing the flights from Texas was to stop the flow of migrants at the source before they came to Florida.

    “If you can do it at the source and divert to sanctuary jurisdictions, the chance they end up in Florida is much less,” DeSantis told reporters in September.

    DeSantis has vowed to use “every penny” of the $12 million allocated to his administration for migrant transports. However, the state has not publicly taken credit for any transports since the two planes landed in Martha’s Vineyard.

    State Sen. Jason Pizzo, the lawmaker now suing DeSantis, said the governor cannot choose to ignore the law when spending state money.

    “You can’t even play by your own rules,” Pizzo told CNN last month when speaking of DeSantis. “This isn’t something that we passed 12 years ago. It was done four months ago at your request.”

    DeSantis’ office previously said the lawsuit by Pizzo was an attempt at “15 minutes of fame.”

    The state has paid Vertol $1.6 million so far through its migrant program, which is funded by interest earned on federal coronavirus relief money, according to the state budget documents. The initial payment of $615,000 was made by the FDOT on September 8, six days before the Martha’s Vineyard flight. Another payment for $950,000 followed on September 16, though it’s not clear what that payment went for.

    A few days after that second payment, reports of a similar flight plan from San Antonio to Delaware, Biden’s home state, sent officials there scrambling to prepare for migrant arrivals. The flights, though, never arrived.

    The state did not provide a contract with Vertol in the records released Friday night. Nor do the documents offer further insight into why Vertol was chosen over two other companies that appeared to submit quotes to the state, according to records.

    CNN has reached out to Montgomerie for further comment.

    Vertol had an existing link to a DeSantis administration official prior to its work with the state. Lawrence Keefe, Florida’s “public safety czar” appointed by DeSantis to lead the state’s crackdown on illegal immigration, represented the aviation company from 2010 to 2017.

    In its quoted price to the state, Vertol said it was providing “Project management, aircraft, crew, maintenance logistics, fuel, coordination and planning, route preparation, route services, landing fees, ground handling and logistics and other Project-related expenses,” according to the documents.

    The request for quotes from the state also asked that potential contractors have “multilingual capability for Spanish.” The chosen contractor would also have to develop procedures for “confirming with Partner Agencies that the person to be transported is an Unauthorized Alien.” Pizzo and others have questioned whether the migrants are considered “unauthorized” by the federal government if they are legally seeking asylum.

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  • Mandela Barnes has signaled support for removing police funding and abolishing ICE — despite ad claiming otherwise | CNN Politics

    Mandela Barnes has signaled support for removing police funding and abolishing ICE — despite ad claiming otherwise | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Wisconsin Democratic Senate nominee Mandela Barnes has previously signaled his support for removing police funding and abolishing ICE, according to a review by CNN’s KFile, despite claiming otherwise in a recent ad in which he speaks directly to the camera to defend his record on those issues.

    “Look, we knew the other side would make up lies about me to scare you. Now they’re claiming I want to defund the police and abolish ICE. That’s a lie,” says Barnes to the camera in a recent 30-second television ad called “Truth.”

    But a CNN KFile review of Barnes’ social media activity and public comments he made in interview appearances reveal a different and more nuanced picture in which Barnes often signaled his support for such positions.

    In multiple posts from 2018 uncovered by CNN, Barnes liked tweets that criticized the immigration agency and called to abolish them. He told a group that supported abolishing the institution in 2019 that the “wrong ICE” was melting and attended one of their “Abolish ICE” local rallies.

    This week, Barnes pushed back on attacks on his record on criminal justice and crime, saying he wouldn’t be “lectured on crime” by Republicans, citing the January 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol in which more than 100 police officers reported injuries.

    Barnes, the lieutenant governor of Wisconsin, fielded another attack Friday night from incumbent Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, with whom he is locked in a tight race. The outcome could determine control of the US Senate next year.

    “He has a record of wanting to defund the police,” Johnson said of Barnes during a debate. “And I know he doesn’t necessarily say that word, but he has a long history of being supported by people that are leading the effort to defund, who uses code words like (Missouri Democratic Rep.) Cori Bush said, talking about reallocate over bloated police budgets.”

    Barnes shot back that Johnson didn’t have any concern for the “140 officers that were injured in the January 6 insurrection.” Johnson in turn said that he “immediately and forcefully and have repeatedly condemned (the Capitol riot) and condemned it strongly.”

    Though Barnes has never outright embraced the “defund the police” slogan, he has on numerous occasions said he supports redirecting or decreasing police funding – even before the slogan gained popularity in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd by police.

    In one 2020 interview reviewed by CNN, Barnes told a local Wisconsin public radio show that funding should go to social workers and a “crisis intervener or a violence interrupter,” instead of police.

    Maddy McDaniel, spokesperson for the Barnes campaign, said he does not support defunding the police or abolishing ICE.

    “As independent fact-checkers have verified, Lt. Governor Mandela Barnes does not support abolishing ICE or defunding the police.”

    In previously unreported activity on social media reviewed by CNN’s KFile, Barnes repeatedly liked tweets about abolishing ICE.

    He liked one September 2018 tweet that used the “#AbolishICE” hashtag and compared the agency to “modern day slave catchers.” His Twitter account also liked other tweets calling for abolishing ICE twice in July 2018 and twice in June.

    “Imagine a world without ICE,” read one of the tweets liked by Barnes.

    Barnes also once solicited an “Abolish ICE” T-shirt on Twitter in 2018 writing, “I need that,” when offered the Democratic Socialists of America-branded shirt. A photo of Barnes holding a similar shirt later circulated on social media. Barnes told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, which first reported on the shirt, he was not part of the abolish ICE movement saying “no one slogan can capture all the work we have to do.”

    While speaking to the Wisconsin-based immigration group Voces de la Frontera Action in 2019, Barnes alluded to calls to get rid of the immigration enforcement agency.

    “We’re bringing science back. We’re bringing science back for the next generation. We’re bringing science back because the wrong ICE is melting,” Barnes said.

    In June of 2018 at a different event from the group, Barnes attended what was labeled a protest to “top the Indefinite Imprisonment of Families & Abolish ICE,” according to photos on his Facebook page.

    “Great turnout at Voces de la Frontera’s event to #protest President Trump’s #immigration policies at the Milwaukee Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office! However, there is more to do to ensure that immigrants’ rights – human rights – are protected. Let your voices be heard!” Barnes wrote on Facebook about the event, which featured the executive director of the organization calling for the abolishment of the agency.

    While he has never outright embraced the “defund the police” slogan, Barnes has long called for reforming or changing policing, especially in communities of color and reducing their budgets.

    Speaking in 2015 on a panel entitled “Civil Rights in the Age of Extremism,” Barnes called police officers who don’t live in communities in which they police an “occupying force.” He also advocated reducing police budgets even before the “defund the police” slogan became popular on the far-left in the summer of 2020.

    Which policies the “defund the police” slogan stands for are actively debated, with some arguing it means abolishing police departments all together, while others have embraced shifting police funding to other social services in the community. Barnes reiterated support for the latter in a 2012 survey for the organization Vote Smart where he indicated he supported slightly decreasing budgets for law enforcement and corrections.

    In early June 2020, Barnes said “defunding” police wasn’t as “aggressive” as it was portrayed, citing budget cuts to other social services.

    “Defunding isn’t necessarily as aggressive as a lot of folks paint it,” Barnes said. “You know, school budgets get cut almost every year.”

    When asked directly if he supported defunding the police, Barnes told Wisconsin public radio in late June 2020 that he thought funding for police was a “mismatch” compared to other services in the city.

    “You can look at the City of Milwaukee, for example, where 45% of the departmental allocations that goes to police while libraries are like two or three percent, neighborhood services, two or three percent,” Barnes said. “I think that you can look at that a, a priorities mismatch.”

    Barnes, comparing police budgets to money spent on prisons and the military, said the money could be better spent on social workers or violence interrupters.

    “We’re working to reduce our prison population, we’re very intentional about making that happen and it takes that intentionality,” he said. “It’s easy to look at the police department and say, ‘Well, yeah, we are spending a lot of money. How do we get smarter about this?’”

    “It becomes the conversation about needs,” he continued. “This isn’t about attacking the police. If anything, it’s about making their jobs easier by implementing programs … where we have services where they wouldn’t have to respond to things that aren’t crime, where they don’t have to respond to, you know, instances that would be better suited for a social worker or some sort of crisis intervener or a violence interrupter that would help, you know, uh, promote peace and communities in the first place.”

    “I think that’s where our funding should go,” Barnes reiterated. “What’s going on right now isn’t necessarily working, you know, police brutality is one thing – but in general, uh, the idea of promoting safer communities, I don’t, I don’t think that we’re doing a good job at that.”

    This story has been updated with additional developments Friday.

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  • US to host top officials from 30 countries in effort to escalate crackdown on Russian defense supply chains | CNN Politics

    US to host top officials from 30 countries in effort to escalate crackdown on Russian defense supply chains | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Top officials from 30 countries are scheduled to meet next week with senior US sanctions and intelligence officials as the Biden administration continues to escalate its efforts to strangle Russia’s military industrial complex.

    The meeting will serve as a critical opportunity for senior officials from across the Western sanctions coalition to detail where the effort has effectively blocked or shattered critical supply networks, as well as share intelligence and information about ongoing Russian evasion efforts, the official said.

    “We’re getting together the countries that are really taking action,” Deputy Treasury Wally Adeyemo told CNN in an interview on the first event of its kind since Russia invaded Ukraine in February. “We’re bringing all 30 countries together to talk about how our attack on Russia’s supply chain is going.”

    The meeting comes at an inflection point in the eight-month conflict as Ukraine continues to notch major battlefield gains and Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to escalate his country’s military efforts despite the defeats. US officials and their allies have focused intensively on finding and cracking critical supply chains for a Russian military already facing morale and materiel shortages.

    It’s been an effort driven by US market and intelligence information, as well as significant coordination with officials from the Defense Department and Defense Intelligence Agency who bring significant experience with the shape and critical elements of military supply chains.

    But the meeting also comes at a moment Russia is desperately engaged in an intensive effort to find work-arounds to the Western coalition’s crackdown in order to maintain the effort, even as it has turned to countries like Iran and North Korea for potential supplies and equipment.

    If the Russian central bank’s emergency actions to keep the broader Russian economy afloat amid an avalanche of sanctions marked one key element of the Russian response, the constant search for new shell companies, entities and go-betweens to evade sanctions has been critical to the other. Both have maintained a semblance of productivity despite the scale of the Western efforts, but both face growing pressures – and atrophying stockpiles and supplies – each month that passes.

    The Treasury Department will host the October 14 event, which will be co-led by Adeyemo, Deputy Commerce Secretary Don Graves and Deputy Director of National Intelligence Morgan Muir.

    Muir’s presence is particularly notable. Adeyemo and Graves serve as point people in the administration’s sanctions effort and head up teams engaged daily with coalition members about sanctions efforts. But Muir, representing the intelligence community at the meeting, signals the goal of providing allies with critical information to tighten their own sanctions efforts.

    A goal of the meeting is “to provide information to them that many of them have never received before,” a senior Treasury official said. It’s something that underscores the range of participants in the meeting – and the coalition generally.

    While G7 countries have served as the critical players in crafting and implementing the sharpest edge of the economic sanctions and export controls, dozens of other nations have played a significant role in shutting off financial and technological avenues for Putin.

    “It’s important to remember that countries from Asia and around the world have taken actions to constrain the Russian military industrial complex,” Adeyemo said.

    US officials, relying on the intelligence community’s efforts and extensive assistance from the financial sector, have made tracking those efforts central to their economic war strategy, underscoring the

    The meeting will be in person on the margins of the annual fall meetings of the IMF and World Bank, and will include representatives at the deputy finance minister level from Baltic nations, Poland, Japan, Cyprus, the European Commission and New Zealand.

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