Authorities have announced a mandatory curfew in a North Carolina county where around 40,000 customers lost power after two power substations were damaged by gunfire Saturday night.
At a news conference Sunday, Moore County Sheriff Ronnie Fields said the county will implement a mandatory curfew from 9 p.m. until 5 a.m., starting Sunday night.
Municipality and county officials “have formed a plan for the night and the next few nights that we may be out of power. It’s a very serious situation,” Fields said. “So we’ve come to an agreement to best protect our citizens and to protect the businesses of our county, we’re going to implement a curfew tonight.”
The power outage in Moore County is being investigated as a “criminal occurrence” after crews found signs of potential vandalism at several locations, CNN previously reported.
A gate at one of the locations also appears to have been taken off its hinges, Mike Cameron of the Southern Pines Fire and Rescue Department told CNN on Sunday afternoon.
Cameron said the area is experiencing increased emergency calls due to the lack of power, adding that auto accidents have occurred because traffic lights are out. People who rely on oxygen have placed emergency calls, he said.
Initially, local officials estimated power would be restored Sunday evening, but Cameron said after assessing the damage, they’ve determined it could take at least until Monday.
The equipment that was damaged is not easily replaceable and will have to be brought in to make the repairs, Cameron said.
A local supermarket is distributing ice to impacted residents, according to a news release from grocery chain Harris Teeter.
The power outage has also led officials to cancel Monday classes for all schools in the county. “An announcement will be made tomorrow evening to inform parents and staff of the status of schools for Tuesday,” Moore County Schools said in a tweet Sunday afternoon.
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Several communities across the county began experiencing power outages just after 7 p.m. Saturday, the Moore County Sheriff’s Office said in a Facebook post.
“As utility companies began responding to the different substations, evidence was discovered that indicated that intentional vandalism had occurred at multiple sites,” the office said.
At least two substations were vandalized “with criminal intent,” US Rep. Richard Hudson said Sunday morning in a release.
The North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation and the FBI are responding, according to Hudson. He said the motive remains unknown.
Hudson, whose congressional district includes Moore County, said the Southern Pines Police Department has opened a community center for residents to charge devices.
CNN has reached out to Southern Pines police and the FBI.
More than 38,000 customers were without power across the county Sunday morning, according to the Duke Energy outage map. According to poweroutage.us, about 41,000 customers had lost power in Moore County and neighboring Hoke County.
Crews were experiencing “multiple equipment failures” that are affecting substations in Moore County, Duke Energy spokesman Jeff Brooks told CNN affiliate WRAL.
“We are also investigating signs of potential vandalism related to the outages,” Brooks said.
Deputies and officers from other law enforcement agencies responded to the different sites to provide security, according to the sheriff’s office.
Gov. Roy Cooper on Sunday tweeted that state law enforcement would join the investigation.
“I have spoken with Duke Energy and state law enforcement officials about the power outages in Moore County. They are investigating and working to return electricity to those impacted,” Cooper said. “The state is providing support as needed.”
Moore County is in central North Carolina, about 50 miles northwest of Fayetteville.
After days of speculation, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa looks set to fight calls for his resignation despite a damning report that found he could have covered up the theft of hundreds of thousands of dollars at his private game farm.
His spokesman Vincent Magwenya said Ramaphosa would not be resigning “based on a flawed report,” and “neither is he stepping aside.”
“The President has taken to heart the unequivocal message coming from the branches of the governing party who have nominated him to avail himself for a second term of the leadership of the ANC (African National Congress),” Magwenya added.
Prior to the release of the report, Ramaphosa was widely expected to win a second term as ANC leader. The ANC’s top leadership is expected to meet in the coming hours. Ramaphosa’s fate is likely to be top of the agenda.
Ramaphosa himself has not made any public statements since the report was released.
Ramaphosa was elected to root out corruption, but he is being probed in an ongoing scandal linked to the theft of more than $500,000 in cash from his private game farm in 2020. The cash was stuffed inside a leather sofa according to the panel investigation.
The panel, led by a former chief justice, found that the crime was not reported to the police and that there was a “deliberate decision to keep the investigation secret.”
Former South African spy chief Arthur Fraser alleged the theft occurred with the collusion of a domestic worker and claimed that the theft was concealed from police and the revenue service. Fraser, whose allegations were detailed in a report into the investigation, said Ramaphosa paid the culprits for their silence.
Ramaphosa has maintained that the cash was from the sale of buffalo at his Phala Phala farm to a Sudanese businessman and that the theft was reported to the head of presidential security.
The president also disputes claims by Fraser that the amount hidden at his farm was more than $4 million.
“Some are casting aspersions about me and money. I want to assure you that all this was money from proceeds from selling animals. I have never stolen money from anywhere. Be it from our taxpayers, be it from anyone. I have never done so. And will never do so,” he said while addressing members of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) party in June this year.
He is a well-known owner and trader of rare buffalo, cattle, and other wildlife, and has become a multi-millionaire through his private buffalo farm.
The panel found that Ramaphosa’s submitted explanations were not yet sufficient and that he could have violated the constitution and his oath of office by having a second income as president.
The ANC’s top leaders are set to discuss the report and while the party does have a “step-aside” rule for misconduct, the ANC’s national spokesman Pule Mabe told local television that it only applied to those that are “criminally charged.”
Ramaphosa was recently feted at Buckingham Palace at the first state visit hosted by King Charles, but closer to home, the scandal threatens to end his political career, with speculation swirling around political circles in the country that he could step down.
The ANC’s elective conference to choose its leadership is due to take place in mid-December, but is likely to be dominated by the President’s troubles.
South Africa’s official opposition leader was quick to call for impeachment proceedings and early elections.
“The report is clear and unambiguous. President Ramaphosa most likely did breach a number of Constitutional provisions and has a case to answer. Impeachment proceedings into his conduct must go ahead, and he will have to offer far better, more comprehensive explanations than we have been given so far,” said by John Steenhuisen, the leader of the Democratic Alliance.
The panel was appointed by the speaker of parliament after a motion from a smaller opposition party.
The National Assembly will consider the report and may institute impeachment proceedings – though the ANC does hold a majority of seats.
Ramaphosa took office after his predecessor Jacob Zuma was forced to resign because of multiple allegations of corruption.
A former trade union head and multi-millionaire from his business career, Ramaphosa has repeatedly said that fighting corruption is a priority for his presidency.
But the ANC has, by all accounts, been fractured by factional politics during his tenure. Some allies of former president Zuma are now openly asking for Ramaphosa to step down.
Soon after the report’s findings were released, Ramaphosa’s office reiterated his statement to the panel, “I have endeavored, throughout my tenure as President, not only to abide by my oath but to set an example of respect for the Constitution, for its institutions, for due process and the law. I categorically deny that I have violated this oath in any way, and I similarly deny that I am guilty of any of the allegations made against me.”
Democratic officials and strategists in New York tell CNN they are bracing for what could be stunning losses in the governor’s race and in contests for as many as four US House seats largely in the suburbs.
With crime dominating the headlines and the airwaves, multiple Democrats watching these races closely are pointing to New York City Mayor Eric Adams, accusing him of overhyping the issue and playing into right-wing narratives in ways that may have helped set the party up for disaster on Tuesday.
“He was an essential validator in the city to make their attacks seem more legit and less partisan,” said one Democratic operative working on campaigns in New York, who asked not to be named so as not to compromise current clients.
Other Democrats argue this has it backwards. While they accuse Republicans of political ploys they call cynical, racist and taking advantage of a situation fostered by the pandemic, they insist candidates would be in better shape if they had followed Adams’ lead in speaking to the fear and frustration voters feel.
But going into Election Day, New York Democrats worry about a double whammy from how they’ve struggled to address crime: Swing voters turned off by Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul and suburban House Democrats go vote Republican, while base Democrats in the city, dejected by talk of how awful things are, don’t turn out at all.
“Crime today has been compared to the ’80s and the ‘90s, and the fact of the matter is that crime is lower now than it was then,” said Crystal Hudson, a Democratic New York City councilwoman from Brooklyn. “That’s emboldened the right to use crime as their narrative and put Democrats in a bad spot for these midterm elections.”
Rep. Lee Zeldin, Hochul’s GOP opponent, has taken to regularly invoking Adams on the campaign trail, to the point that some Democratic operatives have grimly joked that Zeldin could just run clips of Adams talking about crime as his closing ads.
There are national ripples: Democratic groups like the Democratic Governors Association are moving in millions of dollars to prop up Hochul in a deep-blue state instead of spending that on tight races elsewhere, with Vice President Kamala Harris flying in on Thursday in one of her own last campaign stops and President Joe Biden heading to Westchester County, north of New York City, on Sunday to rally with the governor. Republicans, meanwhile, are seizing opportunities to pad a potential House majority by targeting seats that Democrats had been counting on as backstops.
Adams was elected mayor last year on a tough-talking, tough-on-crime message, then embraced as such a hero among many Democratic leaders that rumors circulated he might be eyeing a 2024 presidential run himself. In office, he’s often talked about the bad shape the city is in, including citing statistics he says demonstrate connections between the rise in crime and a 2019 progressive-led state law change that barred judges from setting cash bail for all but the most serious offenses.
Multiple top Democrats argue that Adams could have used his credibility to buttress Hochul – whom allies point out is in a tricky political spot talking about crime in New York City as a 64-year-old White woman from Western New York – instead of loudly pushing the governor to call a special session of the legislature to roll back more of the new bail laws. Hochul also seemed to be caught surprised by the attacks and unsure of how to defend her record, with several elected officials and operatives saying she appeared to be balancing between different factions of the party rather than setting a firm agenda of her own.
That’s fed an increasingly tense relationship in the campaign’s final weeks, though Adams recently appeared with Hochul at both an official government event announcing she’d allocate state money to pay for overtime for police patrolling the subways and at a campaign stop in Queens as she seeks to prove to voters that she’s taking crime seriously. Adams has also shifted to blaming the media for sensationalizing the crime problem.
Appearing on “CNN This Morning” on Friday, Hochul said there’s never been a governor and mayor in New York with as strong a relationship as the one she has with Adams. While she acknowledged that violent crime is up and that the issue was rooted in voters’ sincere fears, she said Republicans were “not having a conversation about real solutions.”
She cited her record of getting more cops and cameras on the street and help for the mentally ill, and Zeldin’s opposition to gun control.
“Crime has been a problem,” she said. “I understand that. Let’s talk about real answers and not just give everybody all these platitudes.”
Rep. Kathleen Rice, a retiring moderate Democrat from just outside New York City and a former Nassau County district attorney, said at first she was encouraged by Adams. As a former police officer, he understands the problem, she said, but “the general consensus is that he hasn’t shown he has focused on the issue enough for it to have made a difference.”
Rice said she’s heard from constituents from just outside the city who are turned off by reports of Adams spending late nights at pricey private restaurants juxtaposed with stories about murders on the subways and other horrific incidents.
“People want to feel safe first before they go to a club,” Rice said.
Rice’s seat is one of two Democratic-held seats on Long Island now seen at risk. Democrats are also in danger of losing two seats north of New York City – one held by Rep. Pat Ryan and the Lower Hudson Valley district of Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, the chair of Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
“It is an issue for voters, but it is not because they have personally experienced crime in the Hudson Valley or their neighbors are talking about crimes committed in the Hudson Valley as much as it is the narrative pushed by the industrial fear machine at Fox and the New York Post describing New York City as a lawless hellscape,” Maloney said in an interview. “That, understandably, is raising concerns among suburbanites.”
Months ago, Maloney warned other House Democrats, in conversations and in a March memo sent around by the DCCC and obtained by CNN, to be ready to respond and rebut attacks for being weak on crime. The guidance started with telling candidates to be firmly against calls to “defund the police” but also to talk about the more than $8 billion Democratic lawmakers had secured for law enforcement in bills such as the American Rescue Plan.
Maloney pointed to his votes for legislation to fund programs for body cameras and plate reading technology for local police departments in his district, as well as for the gun control measures enacted over the summer.
He also stood by a remark he made last July – catching several Democratic operatives’ attention at the time – when he stood with Adams on the steps of the Democratic National Committee headquarters and called him “a rock on which I can build a church.”
“What I meant is that I like his combination of respecting good policing and understanding the need for public safety with a genuine passion for justice and fairness in our system,” Maloney said in an interview. “He may not get everything right, and it may not be everything I would do. But he recognizes that we’re not where we should be. And I support his efforts to clean it up.”
Others have not been convinced.
“The concern over crime is real. It is acute,” said Rep. Mondaire Jones, a progressive Democrat who lost a primary to represent parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn after Maloney opted to run for a redrawn suburban seat that also included parts of Jones’ district. “But once this election is over, I hope people have an honest conversation about how Democrats like Eric Adams have validated a hysteria over crime that is uninformed and that has been debunked.”
Conversations about crime in New York are bound up in the debate over reforming the bail laws, and in well-worn internal political power struggles among officials. In phone calls and meetings at the beginning of the year, Adams urged top officials in Albany to change the laws, warning them that crime would likely be a major political liability in the fall, according to people familiar with the conversations.
Legislative leaders have already passed two partial rollbacks, including one supported by Hochul earlier this year. But they have resisted doing more, despite warnings from suburban members.
Adams has charged that the “insane broken system” of bail laws now puts criminals back on the street who then tend to get back to committing crimes. According to figures from the New York Police Department, in the first half of the year, 211 people were arrested at least three times for burglary and 899 people were arrested at least three times for shoplifting, increases of 142.5 percent and 88.9 percent, respectively, over the same period in 2017. The mayor’s office also pointed to statistics that show double-digit jumps in recidivism for felony, grand larceny and auto theft.
Still, crime statistics don’t tell as simple a story as what shows up in political ads. Suburban counties are reporting safer streets and communities – a report in February by the Westchester County executive from just north of New York City, for example, showed a 26.5 percent drop in its crime index.
Murders and shootings are down in the city from last year, but rape, robbery, felony assault, burglary, grand larceny and auto theft are all up, by over 30 percent from 2021 in several categories, according to New York Police Department data.
But those are the stories which play on the same local news – and campaign ads during the breaks – that reach into the homes of suburban voters who may not have been crime victims themselves, or even spent much time in the city for years. And that’s left Hochul and Democratic House and state legislative nominees leaching support in Long Island, Westchester and the northern New York City suburbs.
“A lot of the story that’s being told is of New York City crime,” said Democrat Bridget Fleming, a former prosecutor who’s been endorsed by police unions in the House race for much of the area Zeldin currently represents on Long Island. “We’re making sure law enforcement is supported – and other than gun crime, we’re keeping crime down here.”
Evan Roth Smith, a pollster working on several local races, said Adams “may be a drag on Democratic trustworthiness on crime.”
But Adams spokesman Maxwell Young said the mayor’s job isn’t to put a rosy spin on things in a way that could benefit Hochul’s or any of the other candidates’ campaigns.
“We can’t, and won’t, ignore the reality,” Young said. “Those who claim we aren’t making progress or, conversely, that we’ve been crying wolf aren’t paying attention and have no idea what they’re talking about.”
Evan Thies, a top Adams political adviser, said he wished other Democrats had taken lessons from the mayor’s win last year.
“You have to convince people you’re worthy to lead by following their lead on issues and meeting their urgency, not by disagreeing with them,” Thies said. “The mayor became mayor by listening to and advocating for people in high-crime communities – he’s not going to abandon them now.”
Democratic Rep. Adriano Espaillat, whose district covers Upper Manhattan and parts of the Bronx, points to how many systemic, as well as larger societal and economic issues, are involved in making a real impact on crime – and that Adams has only been on the job for 10 months.
“He’s really trying hard. This is not easy,” Espaillat said. “It’s going to take some time.”
Biden had his own bromance with Adams, from hosting him in the White House weeks after he won his mayoral primary to offering him half of his peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich as they rode together in the limo in February during a presidential visit to New York to talk about gun violence. White House chief of staff Ron Klain praised Adams for tapping into the same coalition of pragmatic, working-class and African American voters, which won Biden the 2020 Democratic nomination.
Through an aide, Klain did not respond to questions about how he and the president view Adams these days.
But what many Democrats are left with as they approach the end of campaigning in New York is a potentially devastating example of failing again to break a decades-long paradigm of Republicans capitalizing on calling them soft on crime.
“The paradox here is: Crime is high in some of the reddest parts of the country where they have the weakest gun safety laws. We needed to tell that story and done so loudly to neutralize the issue. You can’t sit idly by and wish it away,” said Charlie Kelly, a political adviser to former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s gun safety group Everytown and former executive director for the Democratic-aligned House Majority PAC.
In New York and beyond, some Democrats are already hoping for a post-election recognition and realignment that pushes their party both toward a tougher attack on Republicans and a more forceful deflection of their own left flank.
“We can’t dismiss people’s concerns,” said Justin Brannan, a New York City councilman from a moderate district in Brooklyn. “It’s another thing to be a Republican, to say, ‘If you go outside, you’re going to die.’”
“It’s both true that crime is down from the 1990s and that it has been increasing and that people feel uncomfortable,” said Mark Levine, the Manhattan borough president. “Democrats have to be able to talk about that and offer real solutions.”
The Phoenix Police Department has arrested a 36-year-old man in connection with a break-in at Democratic Arizona gubernatorial candidate Katie Hobbs’ campaign headquarters earlier this week.
Daniel Mota Dos Reis was booked on one count of third-degree burglary, according to the department.
On Wednesday night, a patrol officer saw a news story that included a surveillance image and recognized the man shown as a suspect who had been arrested earlier in the day in connection with a separate, unrelated commercial burglary, police said in a statement Thursday.
“The officer researched the arrest and learned the suspect, 36-year-old Daniel Mota Dos Reis, was still in jail but would soon be released. The officer contacted the jail and was able to re-arrest Dos Reis,” according to the statement.
CNN is working to identify an attorney for Dos Reis.
Police earlier said in a statement that “items were taken from the property sometime during the night.”
A source within the Hobbs campaign had told CNN that CCTV video showed the man they say broke into the campaign headquarters. The Hobbs campaign hasn’t been able to get a full inventory of what was taken, the source added.
Hobbs, Arizona’s secretary of state, faces Arizona Republican gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake in next month’s midterms.
Nicole DeMont, who manages Hobbs’ gubernatorial campaign, told CNN in a statement Wednesday that “Secretary Hobbs and her staff have faced hundreds of death threats and threats of violence over the course of this campaign. Throughout this race, we have been clear that the safety of our staff and of the Secretary is our number one priority.”
“Let’s be clear: for nearly two years Kari Lake and her allies have been spreading dangerous misinformation and inciting threats against anyone they see fit,” DeMont continued. “The threats against Arizonans attempting to exercise their constitutional rights and their attacks on elected officials are the direct result of a concerted campaign of lies and intimidation.”
DeMont said that intimidation “won’t work,” and expressed thanks to the Phoenix Police Department for keeping Hobbs and her team safe.
Lake on Wednesday appeared to claim without evidence that Hobbs’ campaign was lying about the motivations behind the incident and said it “sounds like a Jussie Smollett part two,” in reference to the actor who was convicted of making false reports to police that he was the victim of a hate crime in January 2019.
When asked by CNN if she had a response to DeMont’s claim that the incident was a “direct result of concerted campaign of lies and intimidation” by Lake and her allies, the Arizona GOP nominee shot back and said the statement was “absolutely absurd.”
“And are you guys buying that? Are you really buying that? Because this sounds like a Jussie Smollett part two,” Lake said before launching into a lengthy attack on the media.
This headline and story have been updated with additional developments.
Jolie’s nerves were running high as she walked into the campus of Goldsmiths, the University of London, last Friday morning. She’d planned to arrive early enough that the campus would be deserted, but her fellow students were already beginning to filter in to start their day.
In the hallway of an academic building, Jolie, who’d worn a face mask to obscure her identity, waited for the right moment to reach into her bag for the source of her nervousness – several pieces of A4-size paper she had printed out in the small hours of the night.
Finally, when she made sure none of the students – especially those who, like Jolie, come from China – were watching, she quickly pasted one of them on a notice board.
“Life not zero-Covid policy, freedom not martial-lawish lockdown, dignity not lies, reform not cultural revolution, votes not dictatorship, citizens not slaves,” it read, in English.
The day before, these words, in Chinese, had been handwritten in red paint on a banner hanging over a busy overpass thousands of miles away in Beijing, in a rare, bold protest against China’s top leader Xi Jinping.
Another banner on the Sitong Bridge denounced Xi as a “dictator” and “national traitor” and called for his removal – just days before a key Communist Party meeting at which he is set to secure a precedent-breaking third term.
Both banners were swiftly removed by police and all mentions of the protest wiped from the Chinese internet. But the short-lived display of political defiance – which is almost unimaginable in Xi’s authoritarian surveillance state–has resonated far beyond the Chinese capital, sparking acts of solidarity from Chinese nationals inside China and across the globe.
Over the past week, as party elites gathered in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People to extoll Xi and his policies at the 20th Party Congress, anti-Xi slogans echoing the Sitong Bridge banners have popped up in a growing number of Chinese cities and hundreds of universities worldwide.
In China, the slogans were scrawled on walls and doors in public bathrooms – one of the last places spared the watchful eyes of the country’s ubiquitous surveillance cameras.
Overseas, many anti-Xi posters were put up by Chinese students like Jolie, who have long learned to keep their critical political views to themselves due to a culture of fear. Under Xi, the party has ramped up surveillance and control of the Chinese diaspora, intimidating and harassing those who dare to speak out and threatening their families back home.
CNN spoke with two Chinese citizens who scribbled protest slogans in bathroom stalls and half a dozen overseas Chinese students who put up anti-Xi posters on their campuses. As with Jolie, CNN agreed to protect their identities with pseudonyms and anonymity due to the sensitivity of their actions.
Many said they were shocked and moved by the Sitong Bridge demonstration and felt compelled to show support for the lone protester, who has not been heard of since and is likely to face lifelong repercussions. He has come to be known as the “Bridge Man,” in a nod to the unidentified “Tank Man” who faced down a column of tanks on Beijing’s Avenue of Eternal Peace the day after the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989.
Few of them believe their political actions will lead to real changes on the ground. But with Xi emerging triumphant from the Party Congress with the potential for lifelong rule, the proliferation of anti-Xi slogans are a timely reminder that despite his relentless crushing of dissent, the powerful leader may always face undercurrents of resistance.
As China’s online censors went into overdrive last week to scrub out all discussions about the Sitong Bridge protest, some social media users shared an old Chinese saying: “A tiny spark can set the prairie ablaze.”
It would appear that the fire started by the “Bridge Man” has done just that, setting off an unprecedented show of dissent against Xi’s leadership and authoritarian rule among mainland Chinese nationals.
The Chinese government’s policies and actions have sparked outcries online and protests in the streets before. But in most cases, the anger has focused on local authorities and few have attacked Xi himself so directly or blatantly.
Critics of Xi have paid a heavy price. Two years ago, Ren Zhiqiang, a Chinese billionaire who criticized Xi’s handling of China’s initial Covid-19 outbreak and called the top leader a power-hungry “clown,” was jailed for 18 years on corruption charges.
But the risks of speaking out did not deter Raven Wu, a university senior in eastern China. Inspired by the “Bridge Man,” Wu left a message in English in a bathroom stall to share his call for freedom, dignity, reform, and democracy. Below the message, he drew a picture of Winnie the Pooh wearing a crown, with a “no” sign drawn over it. (Xi has been compared to the chubby cartoon bear by Chinese social media users.)
“I felt a long-lost sense of liberation when I was scribbling,” Wu said. “In this country of extreme cultural and political censorship, no political self-expression is allowed. I felt satisfied that for the first time in my life as a Chinese citizen, I did the right thing for the people.”
There was also the fear of being found out by the school – and the consequences, but he managed to push it aside. Wu, whose own political awakening came in high school when he heard about the Tiananmen Square massacre by chance, hoped his scribbles could cause a ripple of change – however small – among those who saw them.
He is deeply worried about China’s future. Over the past two years, “despairing news” has repeatedly shocked him, he said.
“Just like Xi’s nickname ‘the Accelerator-in-Chief,’ he is leading the country into the abyss … The most desperate thing is that through the [Party Congress], Xi Jinping will likely establish his status as the emperor and double down on his policies.”
Chen Qiang, a fresh graduate in southwestern China, shared that bleak outlook – the economy is faltering, and censorship is becoming ever more stringent, he said.
Chen had tried to share the Sitong Bridge protest on WeChat, China’s super app, but it kept getting censored. So he thought to himself: why don’t I write the slogans in nearby places to let more people know about him?
He found a public restroom and wrote the original Chinese version of the slogan on a toilet stall door. As he scrawled on, he was gripped by a paralyzing fear of being caught by the strict surveillance. But he forced himself to continue. “(The Beijing protester) had sacrificed his life or the freedom of the rest of his life to do what he did. I think we should also be obliged to do something that we can do,” he said.
Chen described himself as a patriot. “However I don’t love the (Communist) Party. I have feelings for China, but not the government.”
So far, the spread of the slogans appears limited.
A number of pro-democracy Instagram accounts run by anonymous Chinese nationals have been keeping track of the anti-Xi graffiti and posters. Citizensdailycn, an account with 32,000 followers, said it received around three dozen reports from mainland China, about half of which involved bathrooms. Northern_Square, with 42,000 followers, said it received eight reports of slogans in bathrooms, which users said were from cities including Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Wuhan.
The movement has been dubbed by some as the “Toilet Revolution” – in a jibe against Xi’s campaign to improve the sanitary conditions at public restrooms in China, and a nod to the location of much of the anti-Xi messaging.
Wu, the student in Eastern China, applauded the term for its “ironic effect.” But he said it also offers an inspiration. “Even in a cramped space like the toilet, as long as you have a revolutionary heart, you can make your own contribution,” he said.
For Chen, the term is a stark reminder of the highly limited space of free expression in China.
“Due to censorship and surveillance, people can only express political opinions by writing slogans in places like toilets. It is sad that we have been oppressed to this extent,” Chen said.
For many overseas Chinese students, including Jolie, it is their first time to have taken political action, driven by a mixture of awe and guilt toward the “Bridge Man” and a sense of duty to show solidarity.
Among the posters on the notice boards of Goldsmiths, the University of London, is one with a photo of the Sitong Bridge protest, which showed a plume of dark smoke billowing up from the bridge.
Above it, a Chinese sentence printed in red reads: “The courage of one person should not be without echo.”
Putting up protest posters “is the smallest thing, but the biggest I can do now – not because of my ability but because of my lack of courage,” Jolie said,pointing to her relative safety acting outside China’s borders.
Others expressed a similar sense of guilt. “I feel ashamed. If I were in Beijing now, I would never have the courage to do such a thing,” said Yvonne Li, who graduated from Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands last year.
Li and a friend put up a hundred posters on campus and in the city center, including around China Town.
“I really wanted to cry when I first saw the protest on Instagram. I felt politically depressed reading Chinese news everyday. I couldn’t see any hope. But when I saw this brave man, I realized there is still a glimmer of light,” she said.
The two Instagram accounts, Citizensdailycn and Northern_square, said they each received more than 1,000 submissions of anti-Xi posters from the Chinese diaspora. According to Citizensdailycn’s tally, the posters have been sighted at 320 universities across the world.
Teng Biao, a human rights lawyer and visiting professor at the University of Chicago, said he is struck by how fast the overseas opposition to Xi has gathered pace and how far it has spread.
When Xi scrapped presidential term limits in 2018, posters featuring the slogan “Not My President” and Xi’s face had surfaced in some universities outside China – but the scale paled in comparison, Teng noted.
“In the past, there were only sporadic protests by overseas Chinese dissidents. Voices from university campuses were predominantly supporting the Chinese government and leadership,” he said.
In recent years, as Xi stoked nationalism at home and pursued an assertive foreign policy abroad, an increasing number of overseas Chinese students have stepped forward to defend Beijing from any criticism or perceived slights – sometimes with the blessing of Chinese embassies.
There were protests when a university invited the Dalai Lama to be a guest speaker; rebukes for professors perceived to have “anti-China” content in their lectures; and clashes when other campus groups expressed support for Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests.
But as the widespread anti-Xi posters have shown, the rising nationalistic sentiment is by no means representative of all Chinese students overseas. Most often, those who do not agree with the party and its policies simply choose to stay silent. For them, the stakes of openly criticizing Beijing are just too high. In past years, those who spoke out have faced harassment and intimidation, retaliation against family back home, and lengthy prison terms upon returning to China.
“Even liberal democracies are influenced by China’s long arm of repression. The Chinese government has a large amount of spies and informants, monitoring overseas Chinese through various United Front-linked organizations,” Teng said, referring to a party body responsible for influence and infiltration operations abroad.
Teng said Beijing has extended its grip on Chinese student bodies abroad to police the speech and actions of its nationals overseas – and to make sure the party line is observed even on foreign campuses.
“The fact that so many students are willing to take the risk shows how widespread the anger is over Xi’s decade of moving backward.”
Most students CNN spoke with said they were worried about being spotted with the posters by Beijing’s supporters, who they fear could expose them on Chinese social media or report them to the embassies.
“We were scared and kept looking around. I found it absurd at the time and reflected briefly upon it – what we were doing is completely legal here (in the Netherlands), but we were still afraid of being seen by other Chinese students,” said Chen, the recent graduate in Rotterdam.
The fear of being betrayed by peers has weighed heavily on Jolie, the student in London, in particular while growing up in China with views that differed from the party line. “I was feeling really lonely,” she said. “The horrible (thing) is that your friends and classmates may report you.”
But as she showed solidarity for the “Bridge Man,” she also found solidarity in others who did the same. In the day following the protest in Beijing, Jolie saw on Instagram an outpouring of photos showing protest posters from all over the world.
“I was so moved and also a little bit shocked that (I) have many friends, although I don’t know them, and I felt a very strong emotion,” she said. “I just thought – my friends, how can I contact you, how can I find you, how can we recognize each other?”
Sometimes, all it takes is a knowing smile from a fellow Chinese student – or a new protest poster that crops up on the same notice board – to make the students feel reassured.
“It’s important to tell each other that we’re not alone,” said a Chinese student at McGill University in Quebec.
“(After) I first hung the posters, I went back to see if they were still there and I would see another small poster hung by someone else and I just feel really safe and comforted.”
“I feel like it is my responsibility to do this,” they said. If they didn’t do anything, “it’s just going to be over, and I just don’t want it to be over so quickly without any consequences.”
In China, the party will also be watching closely for any consequences. Having tightened its grip on all aspects of life, launched a sweeping crackdown on dissent, wiped out much of civil society and built a high-tech surveillance state, the party’s hold on power appears firmer than ever.
But the extensive censorship around the Sitong Bridge protest also betrays its paranoia.
“Maybe (the bridge protester) is the only one with such courage and willingness to sacrifice, but there may be millions of other Chinese people who share his views,” said Matt, a Chinese student at Columbia University in New York.
“He let me realize that there are still such people in China, and I want others to know that, too. Not everyone is brainwashed. (We’re) still a nation with ideals and hopes.”
Binance, which describes itself as the largest crypto exchange by trading volume, is the latest company to be impacted by a major theft this year.
A Binance-linked blockchain was involved in a $570 million hack late Thursday, a company spokesperson confirmed to CNN Business on Friday.
Binance temporarily suspended its blockchain network, BNB Smart Chain, “due to irregular activity,” the company tweeted Thursday.The company said Friday that hackers had stolen two million BNB cryptocurrency tokens – which are issued by Binance – worth about $570 million at the time.
Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao initially tweeted that an estimated $100 million worth of crypto had been stolen.
“Your funds are safe,” Zhao tweeted on Thursday night. “We apologize for the inconvenience.”
The company said $100 million worth of tokens remain “unrecovered” and moved off chain by the hacker. The remaining funds have been frozen on the BNB Chain.
In order to carry out the theft, the hackers targeted what’s called a cross-chain bridge. Bridges, increasingly the targets of hackers in recent months, are the infrastructure that allow users to exchange crypto assets between different blockchains.
Bridge services typically hold large reserves of various coins. These coin reserves are attracting the attention of hackers and turning blockchain bridges into prime targets for heists, according to blockchain analysis firm Elliptic.
Some $1.83 billion has been stolen from bridges as of August, with the majority of that ($1.21 billion) taking place just this year, according to Elliptic. Some of the largest thefts this year include $190 million stolen from cryptocurrency bridge provider Nomad in August, California-based firm Harmony’s $100 million loss in late June, and Axie Infinity’s Ronin bridge $625 million hack in March.
This latest attack put the BNB blockchain offline for about nine hours. In order “to stop the incident from spreading,” the chain ecosystem contacted each of the chain’s validators, who verify transactions on the blockchain as legitimate, BNB wrote in a company post.
The chain was back up and running around 2:30 a.m. ET. according to a company tweet.
A judge has ruled that Anna Sorokin, the fake heiress Netflix’s “Inventing Anna” is based on, can be released from jail on bond while she fights deportation – if certain conditions are met.
According to court records, Immigration Judge Charles Conroy found this week that Sorokin can be released on $10,000 bond from Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody. But he also ruled that she must remain confined 24 hours a day at a residential address and refrain from accessing any social media platform either directly or through a surrogate while her case continues.
“This ruling does not mean that Anna will get a free pass. She will continue to face deportation proceedings and her release will be closely monitored by ICE and the State of New York,” attorney John Sandweg, a former acting director of ICE who’s one of Sorokin’s attorneys, said in a statement Thursday. “As the Court found, however, the evidence clearly demonstrated that any risks can be more than adequately mitigated by appropriate supervision.”
The judge’s ruling also says ICE may use an ankle monitor to keep tabs on Sorokin once she’s released.
As of Thursday afternoon, the 31-year-old Sorokin remained in ICE custody, a spokesman for the agency said.
She’s been in ICE custody for 17 months, according to her attorney – mostly at the Orange County Correctional Facility in upstate New York.
The show ends with Sorokin’s conviction. But in real life, the drama has continued.
Sorokin was released from jail in February 2021 after serving nearly four years on theft and larceny charges. But it wasn’t long before she ended up back behind bars.
ICE took custody of Sorokin on March 25, 2021. In November, the Board of Immigration Appeals granted an emergency stay in her case, according to ICE. She’s been fighting her deportation – and also joined a group of plaintiffs suing the agency earlier this year, alleging they’d requested and been denied Covid booster shots while in custody. They dropped their lawsuit in March after receiving the shots, according to court records.
While she’s been detained, frequent posts have been made on Sorokin’s social media accounts. Recently they’ve featured Sorokin’s artwork, which was featured in a New York show in May.
Earlier this year an attorney representing Sorokin told NBC News that he feared her deportation when he couldn’t reach her, but word later emerged that she was still in ICE custody.
“I was from Germany, which was true, but nobody ever asked me about my job,” Sorokin said. “Nobody asks who are your parents and how much money do they make. It’s just outrageous.”
She told host Alex Cooper that she never “told any senseless lies.”
But she admitted – sort of – to lying about her status and background.
“I guess I did,” she said. “I mean, I cannot tell an exact instance, but I’m sure.”
Sorokin also said she was surprised by the public’s fascination with her story.
“It was just really a surprise to me that people would be, like, so interested in the way I went about the things, because it just made so much sense to me,” she said.
A Russian Orthodox cathedral in New York appears to have been defaced with red paint, following a similar incident in which the Russian consulate was vandalized with red spray paint.
An eyewitness told CNN that they saw a person in a face mask splash red paint on the steps of St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Cathedral on New York’s Upper East Side late Friday night.
The cathedral’s spokesperson, Abbot Nicodemus, also confirmed the vandalism to CNN.
Remnants of the paint could be seen Saturday morning, after the eyewitness observed a woman working to scrub it away.
“We sincerely do not understand those individuals that allow themselves acts of vandalism in relation to our cathedral. We pray for them,” Nicodemus said n a statement to CNN. “We want them to realize that the Russian Orthodox Church in the USA carries out important spiritual and peacemaking activities here, and we are open to all people, regardless of their nationality and political beliefs.”
The New York Police Department said it was not aware of or investigating this incident.
The NYPD previously told CNN it was investigating the red graffiti on the Russian consulate building as a “possible bias incident.” There were no updates in that investigation.
The spokesperson told CNN that Friday’s incident is the third case of vandalism since the beginning of the year in which the cathedral has been marked with paint or written with “insulting” inscriptions.
In addition, “insulting” calls and emails have been received by the cathedral, Nicodemus said, adding that some include direct threats against the clergy and parishioners.
Saint Nicholas Cathedral said it is “compelled to turn such messages to the police,” said Nicodemus. “We are grateful to the law enforcement agencies of New York for their prompt response to our messages and their constant support.”
The cathedral said that since February, its parishioners have been actively involved in collecting financial and humanitarian assistance for the victims of the armed conflict in Ukraine.
Half of the parishioners of the cathedral are Ukrainian, Nicodemus said
The document was written in a Greek monastery in southern Italy during the late 10th to early 11th centuries, says the Museum of the Bible. But sometime between the 14th and 15th centuries, it moved to the Kosinitza Monastery, also known as the Theotokos Eikosiphoinissa Monastery, in northern Greece.
When the Bulgarian Army invaded Greece during World War I, soldiers looted the monastery, stealing over 400 precious manuscripts as well as other books, objects, and cash. Some of the manuscripts were sold in Europe – and eventually ended up in American museums.
The Eikosiphoinissa Manuscript 220 was sold by Christie’s in 2011, says the museum, and then purchased by the Green Collection of Oklahoma City, which donated it to the Museum of the Bible.
In 2015, the Greek Orthodox Church had asked several American institutions that held manuscripts from Kosinitza to voluntarily return them to the monastery. The museum started researching its Greek New Testament manuscripts in 2019, leading scholars to realize the document had been stolen from the Kosinitza Monastery. And in 2020 the museum reached out to Eastern Orthodox leaders to express its desire to return the manuscript.
“When the Museum of the Bible discovered that this text was illegally and rapaciously taken from the Monastery, it moved quickly, responsibly and professionally to see to its restoration and repatriation,” said Archbishop Elpidophoros of America, who represented His All-Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew during the return ceremony, according to the statement.
“We cannot express enough our gratitude to the Green Family and the Museum for their Christian and professional service,” he said. “You have set an example for others to follow, and we pray that they do.”
Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, the leader of the Eastern Orthodox church, loaned three other manuscripts to the Museum of the Bible as a “gesture of gratitude for the gospel manuscript’s return,” says the statement.
George Tsougarakis, general counsel at the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, told CNN that he hopes the return prompts other institutions to return manuscripts stolen during the Bulgarian invasion.
Repatriation is “recognition of the inequities and the injustice that these areas went through back then, which led to the removal of these priceless artifacts,” he said. “And it’s a way of, sort of making the world right again.”
He noted that copies of the manuscript can allow academics to continue to study it from afar. But for the monks who venerate the manuscript, the physical document represents a powerful connection to the monks who came before them and to the religious tradition itself.
“There is something to say about touch,” Tsougarakis said. The ability for the monks to say, “‘I touched the page that my predecessor touched’ – it means something, it’s a community.”
And the Museum of the Bible has set a compelling example for other institutions that have manuscripts stolen from Kosinitza, he added.
“We urge them to do the right thing,” he said. “There’s only one right answer here. And we hope that they follow suit.”
Criminals, volunteer fighters and arms traffickers in Ukraine stole some Western-provided weapons and equipment intended for Ukrainian troops last year before it was recovered, according to a Defense Department inspector general report obtained by CNN.
The plots to steal the weaponry and equipment were disrupted by Ukraine’s intelligence services and it was ultimately recovered, according to the report, titled “DoD’s Accountability of Equipment Provided to Ukraine.” CNN obtained the report via a Freedom of Information Act request. Military.com first reported the news.
But the inspector general report noted that after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year, the Defense Department’s ability to track and monitor all of the US equipment pouring into Ukraine, as required by law under the Arms Export Control Act, faced “challenges” because of the limited US presence in the country.
According to the report, which examined the period of February-September 2022, the Office of Defense Cooperation-Kyiv “was unable to conduct required [end-use monitoring] of military equipment that the United States provided to Ukraine in FY 2022.”
“The inability of DoD personnel to visit areas where equipment provided to Ukraine was being used or stored significantly hampered ODC-Kyiv’s ability to execute” the monitoring, the report added.
The report is dated October 6, 2022. In late October, the US resumed on-site inspections of Ukrainian weapons depots as a way to better track where the equipment was going. The department has also provided the Ukrainians with tracking systems, including scanners and software, the Pentagon’s former under secretary of defense for policy, Colin Kahl, told lawmakers in February.
But the report underscores how difficult it was in the early days of the war for the US to track the billions of dollars worth of weapons and equipment it was sending to Ukraine.
Republicans have criticized the Biden administration over what they view as a lack of accountability over the billions of dollars of aid going to Ukraine. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said earlier this year that he supports Ukraine but doesn’t “support a blank check.” The same sentiment has been shared by Republican presidential candidate and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
CNN reported in April 2022 that the Biden administration was willing to take the risk of losing track of weapons supplied to Ukraine despite a lack of visibility, as they saw it as critical to Ukraine’s defeat of Russian forces.
“We have fidelity for a short time, but when it enters the fog of war, we have almost zero,” a source briefed on US intelligence told CNN at the time. “It drops into a big black hole, and you have almost no sense of it at all after a short period of time.”
US European Command tried to alleviate the issue last year by requesting and maintaining hand receipts from the Ukrainians, which the Ukrainians made a “good faith effort” to provide, the report says, citing EUCOM personnel. The personnel did not provide the IG with corroborating paperwork by the time the investigation concluded, however, the report notes.
The Office of Defense Cooperation-Kyiv also asked the Ukrainian government for expenditure, loss, and damage reports for US-provided equipment, the report says, and they “made efforts to prevent illicit proliferation of defense material provided by the United States.”
Still, criminal organizations managed to steal some weaponry and equipment provided by the US and its allies, the report says.
In late June 2022, an organized crime group overseen by an unnamed Russian official joined a volunteer battalion using forged documents and stole weapons, including a grenade launcher and machine gun, and more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition, the report says. Ukraine’s intelligence service disrupted the plot, according to the report.
That same month, Ukraine’s intelligence services also disrupted a plot by arms traffickers working to sell weapons and ammunition they stole from the frontlines in southern Ukraine, as well as a separate plot by Ukrainian criminals posing as aid workers who stole $17,000 worth of bulletproof vests, the report says.
And in August 2022, Ukraine’s intelligence services discovered a group of volunteer battalion members who stole 60 rifles and almost 1,000 rounds of ammunition and stored them in a warehouse, “presumably for sale on the black market.”
The report does not specify whether the weapons and equipment were American, but the anecdotes are outlined in a highly redacted section that deals with Ukrainian tracking of US-provided weaponry.
The Pentagon inspector general wrote that some larger items like missiles and helicopters were easier to track through intelligence mechanisms. Smaller items, like night-vision devices, however, were harder to monitor.
The report ultimately does not make any recommendations, noting that the Defense Department “has made some efforts to mitigate the inability to conduct in-person” monitoring.
