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Tag: Protests and demonstrations

  • 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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  • How Iran’s protests transformed into a national uprising | CNN

    How Iran’s protests transformed into a national uprising | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Nearly a month after the start of nationwide protests, parts of Iran now bear the hallmarks of battle zones, with flares lighting up skies, gunfire ringing out and bloody scenes recorded in video footage.

    “I am recording this video about the situation in Sanandaj,” said one demonstrator, his face covered with a black scarf and dark glasses, in a message to CNN from the Kurdish-majority city in western Iran, where some of the most dramatic images have emerged from the protests, despite a near total internet shutdown in the area.

    “Last night, the security forces were firing in the direction of houses. They were using military-grade bullets,” he said. “Until now, I hadn’t heard such bullets. People were really afraid.”

    Video apparently shot from rooftops showed what appeared to be clashes between young protesters and heavily armed security forces. Bullets and flares crossed the night sky and a cloud of dust and smoke covered the city blocks.

    At street level, other videos showed protesters throwing rocks at police, with the officers sometimes traveling in a procession of motorcycles, who appeared to be shooting at the crowd.

    Large numbers of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards have been participating in the crackdown in addition to local police, say activists in Sanandaj, who accuse authorities of lashing back indiscriminately. According to Oslo-based Kurdish rights group Hengaw, a 7-year-old boy died in his mother’s arms on Sunday after security forces fired into a crowd of protesters.

    While it is impossible to independently verify a death toll from such clashes, gruesome images circulating online, and eyewitness testimony collected by CNN as well as rights groups, point to the bloodshed. Video showed a driver in the city lying dead with a large gunshot wound in his face – activists said he was honking his horn in solidarity with protesters.

    “In Sanandaj, they shoot the people honking their horns with bullets. And they shoot young and old alike,” said another protester in a video message to CNN. “The injured don’t go to hospitals because if they go there plain-clothes police will arrest them.

    “We are protesting for freedom in Iran. For the prisoners and the condemned, for the people of Iran calling for the regime to go. Everyone wants this regime to go.”

    Despite the government’s repeated claims of having restored calm, the scenes are being replicated throughout the country to varying degrees, with the Kurdish-majority west of the country appearing to bear the brunt of the crackdown.

    With remarkable defiance, Iranian people keep pouring into thoroughfares across the country. The protests were first ignited by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini (also known as Zhina), who died nearly one month ago after being detained by the country’s morality police, but demonstrators have since coalesced around a range of grievances with the regime.

    Increasingly, activists and experts are characterizing the protests as a national uprising and one of the biggest challenges to the Iranian regime since its founding.

    “This is not a protest for reform,” Roham Alvandi, an associate professor of History at the London School of Economics, told CNN. “This is an uprising demanding the end of the Islamic Republic. And that is something completely different to what we’ve seen before.”

    What started as protests against the death of Mahsa Amini has transformed into something much larger.

    In the last month, Iran’s protesters have targeted the economic and political nerve centers of the regime. Videos showed people throwing rocks at police in the center of Tehran. In the capital’s bazaar, security forces were seen running away from demonstrators. Even in the conservative cities of Mashhad and Qom – the heart of the regime’s powerbase – demonstrators crop up frequently.

    Some gas and oil refineries have also turned into sites of protests, which are rapidly spreading in the country’s southwest. The country’s Council of Oil Contractor Workers has said it would potentially call a strike and pause oil production.

    The petroleum industry is the lifeline of Iran’s economy, which has been buckling under the strain of US sanctions unleashed by the Trump administration in 2018 and sustained by the Biden administration. US officials have been in indirect negotiations with Iran for a year and a half in a bid to restore a landmark 2015 nuclear deal – which former President Donald Trump withdrew from four years ago – that would see Iran curb its uranium enrichment program in exchange for sanctions relief.

    Video suggested that the demonstrations at the refineries began as protests over wages, but then transformed into anti-regime protests, with laborers chanting “death to the dictator” – a reference to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

    Around the country, protesters have pushing for economic strikes with some success. In Kurdish-majority areas, where the protests are believed to be more organized than elsewhere in the country, social media videos showed lines of shops shuttered. In Tehran’s bazaar, a number of stores have closed in recent days, though many merchants say they did so to protect their shops from the protests and the crackdowns that follow. A general strike, which Iranian activists have called for, has yet to materialize.

    Labor strikes are loaded with historic meaning in Iran. In 1979, oil and gas refineries played a critical role in the popular movement that overthrew the pro-Western Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and paved the way for the Islamic Republic.

    More widespread protest action by workers and merchants, experts say, could mark another escalation in the protests.

    “If there is a nationwide general strike, what can the government do really,” said Alvandi. “That would completely paralyze the state and would show the powerlessness of the state in the face of this movement.”

    Meanwhile, the crackdown continues to intensify in various parts of Iran, most notably in the Kurdish-majority north and northwest, where allegations of the mistreatment of the ethnic minority was already widespread.

    An Iranian police officer on a motocycle raises a baton to disperse protesters last month.

    Hengaw, the Kurdish rights group, believes that the violence against protesters being reported from the region “is just a drop in the ocean,” with only partial information emerging about the crackdown.

    Authorities have sporadically shut down the internet across Iran in an apparent bid to quash the protests, with the Kurdish-majority parts of the country experiencing the longest shutdowns, according to activists and the internet watchdog NetBlocks.

    A “major disruption” to internet access has occurred since 9:30 a.m. in Iran (2 a.m. ET) on Wednesday, according to NetBlocks. Kurdish activists say that authorities have also shut the area’s landline network, arguing that the bloodshed seen in the videos could just be the tip of the iceberg.

    “The Iranian regime and its security apparatus has no limit,” said Ramyar Hassani of Hengaw. “They know no limits.”

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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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  • US State Department says Iran nuclear deal ‘not our focus right now’ | CNN Politics

    US State Department says Iran nuclear deal ‘not our focus right now’ | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    The Iran nuclear deal is “not our focus right now,” US State Department spokesperson Ned Price said Wednesday, noting the administration was instead focusing on supporting the protesters in Iran as efforts to restore the nuclear deal have hit yet another impasse.

    “The Iranians have made very clear that this is not a deal that they have been prepared to make, a deal certainly does not appear imminent,” Price said at a department briefing.

    “Iran’s demands are unrealistic. They go well beyond the scope of the JCPOA,” he said, using the acronym for the formal name of the deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

    “Nothing we’ve heard in recent weeks suggests they have changed their position,” Price added.

    The spokesperson said the administration’s current focus “is on the remarkable bravery and courage that the Iranian people are exhibiting through their peaceful demonstrations, through their exercise of their universal right to freedom of assembly and to freedom of expression.”

    “And our focus right now is on shining a spotlight on what they’re doing and supporting them in the ways we can,” Price said.

    US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in late September that he did not “see any prospects in the very near term” to bring about a return to the Iran nuclear deal.

    In an interview with CBS’ “60 Minutes,” Blinken said that “Iran has continued to try to add extraneous issues to the negotiation that we’re simply not going to say yes to.”

    “We will not accept a bad deal, the response that they’ve given to the last proposals put forward by our European partners have been a very significant step backwards,” he said.

    A senior State Department official said at that time that “we’ve hit a wall” because of Tehran’s “unreasonable” demands.

    Speaking to reporters during the UN General Assembly, the official said the UN nuclear watchdog’s probe into unexplained traces of uranium found at undisclosed Iranian sites remained the key sticking point.

    “At the same time as Iran is standing against its people on the street, it’s standing in the way of the kind of economic relief that a nuclear deal would provide. So I think they have to explain that to their own people why, on the verge of the deal, they would choose this issue and jeopardize at this point the possibility of the deal,” the official said in late September.

    Amid the standstill on the JCPOA, the Biden administration has unveiled a series of measures aimed at punishing the regime for its repression of the Iranian people and to try to support the protesters.

    In late September, the US announced sanctions on Iran’s Morality Police following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in their custody.

    In a statement, the US Treasury Department said it was sanctioning the morality police “for abuse and violence against Iranian women and the violation of the rights of peaceful Iranian protestors.”

    Shortly thereafter, amid internet shutdowns by the Iranian government in the face of widespread protests over Amini’s death, the US government took a step meant to allow technology firms to help the people of Iran access information online.

    Last week, the US issued additional sanctions on seven senior Iranian officials for the government shutdown of internet access and the violence against protesters, targeting Iran’s Minister of the Interior, Ahmad Vahidi, who oversees all Law Enforcement Forces that have been used to suppress protests, as well as its Minister of Communications.

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  • South Carolina judge upholds activist’s 4-year prison term

    South Carolina judge upholds activist’s 4-year prison term

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    COLUMBIA, S.C. — A pregnant Black activist serving four years in prison over comments she made to police during racial justice protests in the summer of 2020 will not receive a lesser sentence, a judge in South Carolina has ruled.

    A jury this spring found Brittany Martin, 34, of Sumter, South Carolina, guilty of breaching the peace in a high and aggravated manner. Martin’s attorneys pushed for the sentence to be reconsidered and expressed concern about her pregnancy and health. Racial justice groups also got involved.

    In an Oct. 5 order, Judge R. Kirk Griffin pointed to Martin’s prior criminal convictions that he said contributed to her original sentence.

    In November 2020, an Iowa judge sentenced Martin to probation for leaving the scene of an injury and willfully causing bodily harm after her teenage son accused her of purposely hitting him with her SUV and driving away. Griffin also noted previous convictions across multiple states for shoplifting, public disorderly conduct and possession of a short-barreled shotgun.

    Sumter County Assistant Solicitor Bronwyn McElveen said in a September filing that Martin has been on probation at least six times.

    “Probation has not been a deterrent to further criminal activities for the Defendant,” Griffin wrote in his order. “An active prison sentence was appropriate in this instance.”

    Breach of the peace is a misdemeanor charge in South Carolina punishable by up to 10 years imprisonment when elevated to a “high and aggravated manner.”

    Police body camera recordings presented in court and shared with the Associated Press show Martin addressing police officers during multiple days of demonstrations.

    “Some of us gon’ be hurting. And some of y’all gon’ be hurting,” Martin told officers in one video. “We ready to die for this. We tired of it. You better be ready to die for the blue. I’m ready to die for the Black.”

    McElveen also said in the filing that Martin’s actions prompted the city to impose a curfew and a local business lost profits because it had to close early.

    The jury in May acquitted Martin of inciting a riot and reached no verdict on pending charges that she threatened public officials’ lives.

    Martin’s lawyers argued that the sentence was inconsistent with similar cases in South Carolina and stiff compared to those doled out for Jan. 6 rioters. In a Wednesday statement, Bakari Sellers, her attorney and a former state lawmaker, said four years is “excessive” and that he intends to appeal.

    Griffin said it was difficult to compare federal convictions from the Jan. 6 riots and the specifics of the case.

    “The sentence in this case was based on the crime committed, the nature and classification of the offense, the Defendant’s prior criminal history/recidivism, and the seriousness of the crime,” Griffin wrote.

    ———

    James Pollard is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

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  • US to pull visas of Haitian officials, send assistance

    US to pull visas of Haitian officials, send assistance

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    SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — The U.S. government will pull visas belonging to current and former Haitian government officials involved with criminal organizations as well as provide security and humanitarian assistance to Haiti, senior U.S. officials said Wednesday.

    The officials spoke to reporters by telephone on condition of anonymity as a U.S. delegation was arriving in the Caribbean country that has been paralyzed by gangs and antigovernment protests and is facing severe shortages of water, fuel and other basic supplies.

    The U.S. officials declined to name which Haitian officials would see their visas revoked or how many would be affected, adding only that the measure also applies to their immediate family members.

    The U.S. officials also said the government is working with Mexico on a U.N. resolution proposing specific sanctions and additional measures to address the many challenges facing Haiti.

    The officials declined to say how the upcoming aid would be distributed, although they noted that the U.S. Coast Guard will deploy a major cutter at the request of local officials.

    They also declined to say when, how and what kind of security and humanitarian assistance will be deployed, adding only that supplies such as bleach, water jugs and oral rehydration salts will be distributed amid a recent cholera outbreak that has killed dozens of Haitians and sickened a couple hundred more.

    U.S. Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs Brian Nichols flew to Haiti Wednesday and was scheduled to meet with politicians and civil society leaders.

    The trip comes just days after Prime Minister Ariel Henry requested the immediate deployment of foreign troops to help with security. Gangs have blockaded a major fuel depot and protests against Henry have added to the problems.

    The United Nations’ Security Council is scheduled to discuss Henry’s request later this month. In a letter sent to the council Sunday that was viewed by The Associated Press, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres offered several options, including a rapid action force.

    It was not clear whether the U.N. or individual countries or both would send troops under such a plan.

    On Tuesday, State Department Spokesman Ned Price said the U.S. government was reviewing Henry’s request with international partners “to determine how we best could contribute to the removal of security constraints on medical and humanitarian measures aimed at halting the spread of cholera.”

    One month has passed since one of Haiti’s most powerful gangs surrounded a key fuel terminal in the capital of Port-au-Prince, preventing the distribution of some 10 million gallons of gasoline and diesel and more than 800,000 gallons of kerosene stored on site.

    In addition, protesters have blocked streets in the capital and other major cities to demand Henry’s resignation. Prices have soared since the prime minister last month announced that his administration could no longer afford to subsidize fuel.

    On Monday, Price said that the U.S. government wants “to be prudent and responsible in terms of what any such action might look like.”

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  • City unveils plan for major makeover of Boston Common

    City unveils plan for major makeover of Boston Common

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    BOSTON — Boston Common, America’s oldest public park, is getting a multimillion-dollar makeover that includes an expanded visitors’ center, more restrooms, additional sports facilities, and even a sit-down restaurant at the famed Frog Pond, city officials announced Wednesday.

    The goal is to make the 50-acre (20-hectare) swath of green space in the heart of the city more welcoming, convenient, fun and accessible for both city residents and tourists.

    “Boston Common’s gorgeous tree-lined paths and open spaces have hosted so many moments marked in history, from shaping our collective conscience to celebrating our communities,” Mayor Michelle Wu said in a statement. “We’re excited to be sharing a plan that honors the Common’s history, reflects the community’s vision, and creates a space that will be more accessible, more resilient, and more inclusive for generations to come.”

    The Common was founded in 1634 and draws millions of people per year. It has been used as a place for public executions, as a pasture, and a military training field, according to the nonprofit group Friends of the Public Garden, which helped develop the Boston Common Master Plan.

    More recently it has hosted civil rights marches, Vietnam War protests and a 1979 Catholic Mass celebrated by Pope John Paul II attended by an estimated 400,000 people during a soaking rainstorm. It was also the site of huge protests in 2020 against police brutality.

    The multiyear plan also includes tripling the size of a children’s playground, a dog park, and adding wheelchair ramps to the Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Regiment Memorial, and the Parkman Bandstand.

    “With this Boston Common Master Plan, America’s first public park will have a unified vision for evolving and adapting to meet the needs of Boston’s residents and visitors to our city as well as of the park itself,” said Liz Vizza, president of the Friends of the Public Garden.

    The planned changes are the result of years of public input and will be funded in part by $28 million from the 2019 sale of a city parking garage. The city has opened a 45-day public comment period for residents to share their priorities for the makeover plan.

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  • Mother of Nika Shahkarami, teenage protester found dead in Tehran, denies daughter fell from building | CNN

    Mother of Nika Shahkarami, teenage protester found dead in Tehran, denies daughter fell from building | CNN

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    Abu Dhabi
    CNN
     — 

    The mother of Nika Shahkarami, a 16-year-old protester who was found dead in Tehran last month, says her daughter was killed by Iranian security forces at a protest.

    In interviews with Iranian newspaper Etemad and BBC Persian and a video message published by US-funded Radio Farda, Shahkarami’s mother, Nasrin Shahkarami, rejected official explanations that her daughter fell off a roof.

    “It’s clear that my daughter was at the protests and killed there,” Nasrin Shahkarami said, according to the interview with Etemad, an independent Iranian newspaper.

    Etemad removed the interview from its website on Tuesday.

    Nika Shahkarami’s death comes amid ongoing nationwide protests against a regime accused of corruption and stamping out dissent with arbitrary detentions and even mass executions.

    The protests were first ignited by the death of another young woman, Mahsa Amini, after she was detained by morality police in September.

    The Iranian government has said Nika Shahkarami was found dead on September 21 after closed circuit TV footage appeared to show her entering a building in Tehran, and authorities have publicly concluded that she died after falling from the building’s roof.

    Mohammad Shahriari, the head of criminal prosecution of Tehran province, said Shahkarami’s injuries corresponded with a fall, citing an autopsy that revealed multiple fractures in the area of the pelvis, head, upper and lower limbs, hands and feet, state-aligned Tasnim reported.

    He added that “an investigation showed this incident had no connection to the protests. No bullet holes were found on the body and the marks on the body show that the person was killed by falling.”

    Eight workers in the building she allegedly entered have been arrested, according to Tasnim.

    But Nasrin Shahkarami rebuts those official accounts. She said her daughter’s body only had injuries to the head and the rest of the body was in good condition, in the Radio Farda video.

    She also denied that the girl shown entering the building in the CCTV video is her daughter.

    “No one can prove that this is Nika. A shadow was recorded on the camera, the girl is wearing a mask and it’s not clear what is being seen in these images. I don’t believe this is Nika,” Shahkarami told Etemad.

    Nika Shahkarami went missing after attending a protest in Tehran, according to her mother, who has confirmed that her daughter can be seen in social media footage of a protest.

    “I saw this video and the young girl in the video is Nika,” Nasrin Shahkarami told Etemad.

    Nine days after her disappearance, police showed Shahkarami’s photos of her daughter’s body at Kahrizak morgue, she said, according to Radio Farda.

    Though other family members been cited by state-aligned media endorsing the idea that Nika Shahkarami died from a fall, her mother alleges that those statements were “forced” by authorities.

    On Wednesday, Iranian state media aired a report in which Atash Shakarami, Nika Shahkarami’s aunt, told a reporter that the girl died after falling from an apartment building, supporting the government account of the teenager’s death.

    In the report by Iran state-broadcaster IRIB, Atash Shahkarami said that her niece was found in the backyard of the building after falling. The aunt said she was shown photos of where Nika fell and wanted to see where it happened.

    Nika’s uncle, Mohsen Shahkarami, is also seen in the IRIB report condemning protesters and saying “we do not support any actions that harm public property.”

    Nasrin Shahkarami said that Iranian security forces arrested the aunt and uncle and forced them to make a false statement, according to BBC Persian and Radio Farda.

    Shahkarami told BBC Persian her brother was threatened not to speak out or his wife and 4-year-old son would be arrested.

    “They put them under intense pressure to make a false confession and aired it on television. The (security forces) do whatever they can to exonerate themselves,” Shahkarami said in a video provided to Radio Farda.

    The UN Human Rights Office told CNN on Thursday that it has “received reports indicating that the authorities forced Nika Shakarami’s family to give a TV interview, which was broadcast on 5 October, stating she died after falling from a building.”

    “We call for an end to harassment and threats against victims’ families and those calling for accountability,” the statement from a spokesperson for the UN Human Rights Office said.

    CNN has reached out to family members for comment.

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  • EXPLAINER: Haiti’s troubled history of foreign interventions

    EXPLAINER: Haiti’s troubled history of foreign interventions

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    SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — Haiti Prime Minister Ariel Henry and 18 members of his cabinet have requested the immediate deployment of foreign troops in response to gangs and protesters who have paralyzed the country.

    Fuel, water and other basic supplies have dwindled nearly a month after one of Haiti‘s most powerful gangs blocked access to a main fuel terminal in Port-au-Prince where more than 10 million gallons of gasoline and diesel are stored, along with more than 800,000 gallons of kerosene. In addition, demonstrators have blocked roads in the capital and other main cities to demand Henry’s resignation and protest rising fuel prices after the prime minister announced in early September that his administration could no longer afford to subsidize fuel.

    Gas stations and schools remain shuttered. Banks and grocery stores are operating on a limited schedule.

    The United Nations secretary-general has offered the Security Council various options, including the immediate deployment of a rapid action force.

    Opponents claim Henry hopes to use foreign troops to keep himself in power – a leadership he assumed last year after the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse and that many consider illegitimate because he was never elected nor formally confirmed in the post by the legislature. He has failed to set a date for elections, which have not been held since November 2016, but has pledged to do so once the violence is quelled.

    Here is a look at previous foreign military interventions in Haiti and the impact they’ve had on the country of more than 11 million people:

    HOW MANY FOREIGN MILITARY INTERVENTIONS HAVE THERE BEEN IN HAITI?

    Since the early 1900s, there have been at least three major foreign military interventions in Haiti led by the United States and the United Nations.

    The U.S. first occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934.

    Nearly 60 years later, the U.N. launched a peacekeeping mission in 1993, followed by the arrival of U.S. troops in 1994. Another intervention occurred in 2004. The first of those was to restore President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power. The second followed a rebellion that removed him again.

    WHAT LED TO THE INTERVENTIONS?

    The interventions came at moments of great political instability.

    Seven Haitian presidents were ousted or killed from 1911 to 1915, prompting U.S. President Woodrow Wilson to send U.S marines to Haiti in 1914. The U.S. removed half a million dollars from the Haitian National Bank for alleged safekeeping in New York. A formal U.S. occupation began in July 1915 and lasted until August 1934.

    In September 1994, the U.S. sent more than 20,000 troops and two aircraft carriers to Haiti as part of an operation dubbed “Restore Democracy” under President Bill Clinton. The aim was to restore to power Aristide, who had been ousted in a 1991 military coup. Aristide had become Haiti’s first democratically elected president the year before. A smaller contingent of U.S. troops remained in Haiti until early 2000, often under U.N. auspices.

    A parallel United Nations peacekeeping effort was launched in September 1993 and ran until 2000.

    Aristide was overthrown again in February 2004 in a rebellion originally launched by a street gang. The U.S., which had pushed him to resign, flew Aristide out of the country and sent troops — as did Canada, France and Chile. They were soon replaced by troops of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti, which stayed until 2017.

    WHAT IMPACT HAVE FOREIGN INTERVENTIONS HAD ON HAITI?

    Robert Fatton, a Haitian politics expert at the University of Virginia, said that overall, “The occupations didn’t really improve anything in Haiti.”

    He said the 1915-1934 occupation created a unified Haitian military, which was the country’s dominant force until the dictatorial regime of François Duvalier and later his son, Jean-Claude Duvalier, from 1957 to 1986.

    The occupation also established a type of unpaid forced labor known as “corvée” in which U.S. officials used Haitian peasants to build roads, railroads and other infrastructure.

    “The occupation was very coercive,” Fatton said. “It was also very centralizing and … very racist.”

    He said the second intervention in 1994 was more popular because it helped restore the charismatic Aristide, a former priest who once served poor communities.

    The invasion led to the creation of Haiti’s National Police, which effectively replaced the Haitian Army that was disbanded in 1995, though many police officers were former soldiers.

    However, there were two failed couple attempts during that occupation and deepening political chaos.

    The U.N.’s 2004-2017 peacekeeping mission was marred by allegations of sexual assault by its troops and staffers and the fact that peacekeepers from Nepal were blamed for introducing cholera into Haiti’s largest river in October 2010 by sewage runoff from their base. The U.N. has since acknowledged it played a role in the epidemic and that it had not done enough to help fight it, but it has not specifically acknowledged it introduced the disease.

    Fatton said that while the U.N. mission “established a modicum of order,” in Haiti, it was a “very repressive organization.”

    “To destroy gangs, they used forceful means. That left a very bad taste with poor Haitians,” he said, noting that they live side-by-side with gangs in slums. “Whether you’re with the gangs or not, you suffered the consequences.”

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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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  • A failed truce renewal in Yemen could further complicate US-Saudi relations | CNN

    A failed truce renewal in Yemen could further complicate US-Saudi relations | CNN

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    Editor’s Note: A version of this story first appeared in CNN’s Meanwhile in the Middle East newsletter, a three-times-a-week look inside the region’s biggest stories. Sign up here.


    Abu Dhabi, UAE
    CNN
     — 

    After a rare six months of relative calm, Yemen’s warring sides last week failed to renew a truce deal, with calls from the United Nations for an extension falling on deaf ears.

    With one side backed by Iran and the other by Saudi Arabia, it remains to be seen whether the US will support its Middle Eastern ally after last week’s whopping oil cut – seen as a snub from the oil-rich kingdom to the Biden administration ahead of the US midterm elections.

    The country’s Iran-backed Houthis and their rival Saudi-led coalition had agreed on a nationwide truce in April, the first since 2016. The two-month truce was renewed twice but came to an end last week over eleventh-hour demands put forward by the Houthis with regards to public sector wages.

    At the last minute, the Houthis imposed “maximalist and impossible demands that the parties simply could not reach, certainly in the time that was available,” said US Special Envoy for Yemen Tim Lenderking in a statement, adding that diplomatic efforts by the US and the UN continue.

    “The unannounced reasons [for not renewing the truce] are speculated to be that the Iranians asked the Houthis, directly, to help escalate things in the region,” said Maged Almadhaji, director of the Sanaa Center for Strategic Studies.

    “Iranians and Houthis are in a difficult political position,” Almadhaji told CNN, adding that Iranians are under immense pressure amid raging protests at home and might be trying to keep Gulf rivals at bay by keeping them occupied with Yemen’s conflict.

    The few months of ceasefire were a breath of fresh air for millions of Yemenis who, in the last seven years of conflict, were driven to “acute need,” the UN said. The peace period saw the monthly rate of people displaced internally dip by 76%, and the number of civilians killed or injured by fighting lowered by 54%, said the UN last week.

    Yemen has been described by the UN as the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis.

    Lenderking said that some aspects of the initial truce are still being upheld, such as relatively low violence, continued fuel shipments that can still offload into the Houthi-held Hodeidah port as well as resumed civilian-commercial flights from Sanaa airport. But the risks are very high.

    The Houthis have already warned investors to steer clear of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as they are “fraught with risks” – a message seen as a direct threat that the Iran-backed group is ready to strike once again.

    “With the Houthis, it is always risky not to take their threats seriously,” Peter Salisbury, consultant at International Crisis Group, told CNN.

    Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthis have previously launched attacks on the oil-rich countries, mainly targeting oil fields and key airports. In March, Houthis claimed responsibility for an attack on an Aramco oil storage facility in Jeddah. And in January, they said they were behind a drone strike on fuel trucks near the airport in Abu Dhabi.

    Saudi Arabia has previously sounded alarms to its powerful US security ally over these attacks, criticizing the Biden administration over what it perceived as waning US security presence in the volatile Middle East.

    Security agitation among Gulf monarchies was exacerbated by US nuclear talks with Iran earlier this year, where the possibility of lifted economic sanctions posed the risk of an emboldened Tehran that, it was feared, would, in turn, further empower and arm its regional proxies – predominantly the Houthis.

    But the Houthis are already arguably emboldened, said Gregory Johnsen, a former member of the United Nations’ Panel of Experts on Yemen.

    “I think Iran would like nothing better than to leave the Houthis in Sanaa on Saudi’s border as check against future Saudi behavior,” Johnsen told CNN.

    Saudi Arabia’s strongest security ally has been the US, and traditionally the two countries’ unwritten agreement has been oil in exchange for security – namely against Iranian hostility.

    But now, as Saudi Arabia defies the US with its latest OPEC oil cut, the two countries’ friendship is under increased strain. And with already existing reluctance in congressional politics to increase military support to Saudi Arabia, it remains unclear whether the US will respond with swift support to its Middle Eastern ally should violence flare, said Salisbury.

    A number of US Democratic politicians have accused Saudi Arabia of siding with Russia, saying the oil cut should be seen as a “hostile act” against the US.

    The threats made by certain US senators against Saudi Arabia after Wednesday’s OPEC oil cut – some of whom have called on US President Joe Biden to “retaliate” – are not credible, said Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a political science professor in the UAE, adding that the response from the Biden administration “has been more restrained.”

    It is in America’s interest to protect Middle Eastern oil producers, Abdulla told CNN, especially as supply tightens amid the Ukraine war and stalled nuclear talks with Iran.

    “At this moment in history, America needs Saudi Arabia, needs the UAE, just as much as we need them for security purposes,” Abdulla said.

    US policy toward Yemen has in recent years been in disarray, analysts say. The Obama administration first backed the Saudi-led coalition in 2016, but levels of support later changed as evidence emerged of civilian casualties in the Saudi-led air campaign.

    Saudi Arabia enjoyed extensive support for its Yemen policy during the Trump administration. In late 2019, Biden promised to make the kingdom a pariah and, a little over a year later, he slashed US support for Saudi Arabia’s offensive operations in Yemen, “including relevant arms sales.”

    The US continues, however, to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia through the loophole of “defense.”

    The Biden administration last August approved and notified Congress of possible multibillion-dollar weapons sales to both Saudi Arabia and the UAE, citing defense against Houthi attacks as a legitimate cause for concern.

    “Now, the US is frustrated with Saudi Arabia and the UAE, while it has no leverage with the Houthis,” said Johnsen. “The US has been lost at sea for the past year and a half when it comes to a Yemen policy,” he added, labelling it a situation largely “of its own making.”

    While there is pressure within the US to sternly react to Saudi Arabia’s energy policies, it is yet to be seen how the US will respond to the developments in Yemen, where some say Washington would be wise to uphold its security guarantees.

    “I don’t think it is in the best interest of America to reduce their military assistance to Saudi Arabia,” said Abdulla. “If they do, it will backfire on America more than many of these senators would imagine.”

    At least 185 people, including at least 19 children, have been killed in nationwide protests across Iran since September, said Iran Human Rights (IHR), an Iran-focused human rights group based in Norway, on Saturday.

    CNN cannot independently verify death toll claims. Human Rights Watch said that, as of September 30, Iranian state-affiliated media placed the number of deaths at 60.

    Now in their third week, protests have swept across Iranian cities following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who died after being arrested by morality police and taken to a “re-education center” for not abiding by the country’s conservative dress code.

    Here is the latest on this developing story:

    • Iranian police on Sunday dispersed high school girls who gathered to protest in southwestern Tehran. Meanwhile, an eyewitness told CNN that in the southeastern part of the city, girls took to the street shouting “woman, life, freedom” and “death to the dictator.”
    • The death toll from the crackdown on Saturday’s protests in Iran’s Kurdish city of Sanandaj has increased to at least four, according to the Iranian human rights group Hengaw on Sunday.
    • Iran’s state broadcaster IRINN (Islamic Republic of Iran News Network) was allegedly hacked during its nightly news program on Saturday, according to the pro-reform IranWire outlet, which shared a clip of the hacking. Iran’s semi-official Tasnim News Agency reported on the hacking, saying that IRIB/IRINN’s 9 p.m. newscast was hacked for a few moments by anti-revolutionary elements.
    • The internet connectivity monitoring service NetBlocks on Saturday said that Iran had shut off the internet in the Kurdish city of Sanandaj in an attempt to curb a growing protest movement amid reports of new killings.

    Violent weekend as four Palestinians killed in West Bank, Israeli soldier killed in Jerusalem shooting

    An Israeli soldier has died following a rare shooting at a military checkpoint in East Jerusalem on Saturday, the Israel Defense Forces said. The attack comes after a violent two days in the occupied West Bank where Israeli forces killed four Palestinians, Palestinian authorities said.

    • Background: The shooting happened at a checkpoint of the normally quiet area near the Shuafat Refugee Camp in northeast Jerusalem, an area considered occupied territory by most of the international community. Video of the incident shows a man coming up to a group of soldiers and shooting them point blank before running away. Noa Lazar, an 18-year-old female soldier, was killed, and a 30-year-old guard was critically injured. In a statement, Prime Minister Yair Lapid called the attacker a “vile terrorist” and said Israel will “not rest until we bring these heinous murderers to justice.” Prior to the checkpoint attack, Israeli forces killed four Palestinians in the occupied West Bank over two days, according to Palestinian authorities. Two were killed in the Jenin Refugee Camp on Saturday when, the IDF said, clashes broke out as they came to arrest an “Islamic Jihad operative” that the IDF claimed was “involved in terrorist activities, planning and carrying out shooting attacks towards IDF soldiers in the area.” Another two, including a 14-year-old boy, were killed in separate incidents elsewhere in the territories. The occupied West Bank, especially the areas of Jenin and Nablus, is in an increasingly volatile and dangerous situation, as near-daily clashes take place between the Israeli military and increasingly armed Palestinians.
    • Why it matters: More than 105 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces so far this year, making it the deadliest year for Palestinians in the occupied territories since 2015, according to Palestinian health authorities. Israel says most Palestinians killed were engaging violently with soldiers during military operations, although dozens of unarmed civilians have been killed as well, human rights groups including B’Tselem have said. Some 21 civilians and soldiers have been killed so far this year in attacks targeting Israelis.

    US says a failed rocket attack targeted US and partnered forces in Syria

    One rocket was launched at a base housing US and coalition troops in Syria on Saturday night, according to US Central Command. No US or coalition forces were injured in the attack, and no facilities or equipment were damaged, CENTCOM said in a statement.

    • Background: The rocket was a 107mm rocket, and additional rockets were found at the launch site, CENTCOM said. The attack is under investigation. On September 18, a similar rocket attack using 107mm rockets was launched against Green Village in Syria, a base housing US troops. Three 107mm rockets were launched and a fourth was found at the launch site.
    • Why it matters: The attack comes two days after US forces killed two top ISIS leaders in an airstrike in northern Syria, and three days after a US raid killed an ISIS smuggler. Although there is no attribution for the attack, such rocket launches are frequently used by Iranian-backed militias in Syria.

    UAE president to meet with Putin during visit to Russia on Tuesday

    UAE President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan will meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin during a visit to Russia on Tuesday, UAE state-run news agency WAM said.

    • Background: “During his visit, His Highness Sheikh Mohammed will discuss with President Putin the friendly relations between the UAE and Russia along with a number of regional and international issues and developments of common interest,” WAM said.
    • Why it matters: The visit comes less than a week after OPEC+, the international cartel of oil producers, announced a significant cut to output in an effort to raise oil prices. The UAE is a member of the organization led by Saudi Arabia and Russia. CNN has reached out to the UAE government for comment.

    Before clicking enter on your Google search today, take a minute to check out today’s ‘Google Doodle.’ Standing by a library and a lighthouse is prominent Egyptian historian Mostafa El-Abbadi, who would have turned 94 today.

    Hailed as “champion of Alexandria’s Resurrected Library” by the New York Times, he was the key player in resurrecting the Great Library of Alexandria.

    The son of the founder of the College of Letters and Arts at the University of Alexandria, El-Abbadi’s love for academia came at a very young age.

    The intellectual went on to graduate from the University of Cambridge and returned home as a professor of Greco-Roman studies at the University of Alexandria, where his love for the Library of Alexandria grew.

    El-Abbadi sought to restore the glory of the “Great Library” which disappeared between 270 and 250 A.D. – and he succeeded.

    Combined efforts by the Egyptian government, UNESCO, and other organizations led to the opening of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina on October 16, 2002.

    Despite being the main driver of the project, El-Abbadi was not invited to the ceremony after he became a critic of how the scheme was handled by the authorities.

    “It became the project of the presidents, of the people who cut the rope, the people who stood on the front stage, and not of Mostafa El-Abbadi,” said Prof. Mona Haggag, a former student of El-Abbadi and head of the department of Greek and Roman archaeology at the University of Alexandria, according to the New York Times.

    By Mohammed Abdelbary

    Models present creations by Italy's iconic fashion house Stefano Ricci at the temple of the ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Hatshepsut on the west bank of the Nile river, off Egypt's southern city of Luxor, on October 9.

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  • Gunfire, blasts in western Iran amid Mahsa Amini protests

    Gunfire, blasts in western Iran amid Mahsa Amini protests

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    DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — The sound of apparent gunshots and explosions echoed early Monday through the streets of a western Iranian city, one of the hot spots of protests over the death of a 22-year-old woman. At least one man reportedly was killed by security forces in a village nearby, activists said.

    The incidents come as demonstrations rage on in cities, towns and villages across Iran over the Sept. 16 death of Mahsa Amini in the custody of the country’s morality police in Tehran.

    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 Tehran and elsewhere, online videos have emerged despite authorities disrupting the internet. Videos showed some women marching through the streets without headscarves, while others confronted authorities and lit fires in the street 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.

    The violence early Monday occurred in Sanandaj, the capital of Iran’s Kurdistan province, as well as in the village of Salas Babajani near the border with Iraq, according to a Kurdish group called the Hengaw Organization for Human Rights. Amini was Kurdish and her death has been particularly felt in Iran’s Kurdish region, where demonstrations began Sept. 17 at her funeral there.

    Hengaw posted footage it described as smoke rising in one neighborhood in Sanandaj, with what sounded like rapid rifle fire echoing through the night sky. The shouts of people could be heard.

    There was no immediate word if people had been hurt in the violence. Hengaw later posted a video online of what appeared to be collected shell casings from rifles and shotguns, as well as spent tear gas canisters.

    Authorities offered no immediate explanation about the violence early Monday in Sanandaj, some 400 kilometers (250 miles) west of Tehran. Esmail Zarei Kousha, the governor of Iran’s Kurdistan province, alleged without providing evidence that unknown groups “plotted to kill young people on the streets” on Saturday, the semiofficial Fars news agency reported Monday.

    Kousha also accused these unnamed groups that day of shooting a young man in the head and killing him — an attack that activists roundly have blamed on Iranian security forces. They say Iranian forces opened fire after the man honked his car horn at them. Honking has become one of the ways activists have been expressing civil disobedience — an action that has seen riot police in other videos smashing the windshields of passing vehicles.

    In the village of Salas Babajani, some 100 kilometers (60 miles) southwest of Sanandaj, Iranian security forces repeatedly shot a 22-year-old man protesting there who later died of his wounds, Hengaw said. It said others had been wounded in the shooting.

    It remains unclear how many people have been killed in the demonstrations and the security force crackdown targeting them. State television last suggested at least 41 people had been killed in the demonstrations as of Sept. 24. In the over two weeks since, there’s been no update from Iran’s government.

    An Oslo-based group, Iran Human Rights, estimates at least 185 people have been killed. This includes an estimated 90 people killed in violence in the eastern Iranian city of Zahedan.

    The London-based group Amnesty International said security forces killed 66 people, including children, in a bloody crackdown on Sept. 30, and that more people were killed in the area in subsequent incidents. Iranian authorities have described the Zahedan violence as involving unnamed separatists, without providing details or evidence.

    Meanwhile, a prison riot has struck the city of Rasht, killing several inmates there, a prosecutor reportedly said. It wasn’t immediately clear if the riot at Lakan Prison was linked to the ongoing protests, though Rasht has seen heavy demonstrations in recent weeks since Amini’s death.

    The semiofficial Mehr news agency quoted Gilan provincial prosecutor Mehdi Fallah Miri as saying, “some prisoners died because of their wounds as the electricity was cut (at the prison) because of the damage.” He also alleged prisoners refused to allow authorities to access those wounded.

    Miri described the riot as breaking out in a wing of a prison housing death penalty inmates.

    ———

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

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  • UN ponders rapid armed force to help end Haiti’s crisis

    UN ponders rapid armed force to help end Haiti’s crisis

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    SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres submitted a letter to the Security Council on Sunday proposing the immediate activation of a rapid action force following a plea for help from Haiti as gangs and protesters paralyze the country.

    The letter, which was seen by The Associated Press but has not been made public, said the rapid action force would be deployed by one or several member states to help Haiti’s National Police. That force would “remove the threat posed by armed gangs and provide immediate protection to critical infrastructure and services,” as well as secure the “free movement of water, fuel, food and medical supplies from main ports and airports to communities and health care facilities.”

    The letter also states the secretary-general may deploy “additional U.N. capacities to support a ceasefire or humanitarian arrangements.”

    However, the letter notes that “a return to a more robust United Nations engagement in the form of peacekeeping remains a last resort if no decisive action is urgently taken by the international community in line with the outlined options and national law enforcement capacity proves unable to reverse the deteriorating security situation.”

    The letter suggests that the rapid action force be phased out as Haitian police regain control of infrastructure, and that two options could follow: member states establish an international police task force to help and advise local officers or create a special force to help tackle gangs “including through joint strike, isolation and containment operations across the country.”

    The letter notes that if member states do not “step forward with bilateral support and financing,” the U.N. operation may be an alternative.

    “However, as indicated, a return to U.N. peacekeeping was not the preferred option of the authorities,” it states.

    The letter also says the Security Council could decide to strengthen the police component of the current United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti known as BINUH, and to call on member states to provide additional equipment and training to local police, which are understaffed and lack resources. Only about a third of some 13,000 are operational in a country of more than 11 million people.

    The secretary-general said the issue is a matter of urgency, noting Haiti “is facing an outbreak of cholera amid a dramatic deterioration in security that has paralyzed the country.”

    On Friday, Haiti’s government published an official document signed by Prime Minister Ariel Henry and 18 top-ranking officials requesting from international partners “the immediate deployment of a specialized armed force, in sufficient quantity,” to stop the “criminal actions” of armed gangs across the country.

    The request comes nearly a month after one of Haiti’s most powerful gangs surrounded a key fuel terminal in the capital of Port-au-Prince, preventing the distribution of some 10 million gallons of diesel and gasoline and more than 800,000 gallons of kerosene stored on site.

    Tens of thousands of demonstrators also have blocked streets in Port-au-Prince and other major cities in recent weeks, preventing the flow of traffic including water trucks and ambulances, as part of an ongoing protest against a spike in the prices of gasoline, diesel and kerosene.

    Gas stations and schools are closed, while banks and grocery stores are operating on a limited schedule.

    Protesters are demanding the resignation of Henry, who announced in early September that his administration could no longer afford to subsidize fuel.

    The deepening paralysis has caused supplies of fuel, water and other basic goods to dwindle amid a cholera outbreak that has killed several people and sickened dozens of others, with health officials warning that the situation could worsen amid a lack of potable water and cramped living conditions. More than 150 suspected cases have been reported, with the U.N. warning that the outbreak is spreading beyond Port-au-Prince.

    The outbreak comes as UNICEF warns that three-fourths of major hospitals across Haiti are unable to provide critical service “due to the fuel crisis, insecurity and looting.”

    The U.S. Embassy has granted temporarily leave to personnel and urged U.S. citizens to immediately leave Haiti.

    Haitian officials have not specified what kind of armed forces they’re seeking, with many local leaders rejecting the idea of U.N. peacekeepers, noting that they’ve been accused of sexual assault and of sparking a cholera epidemic that killed nearly 10,000 people during their a 13-year mission in Haiti that ended five years ago.

    A Brazilian general and former U.N. peace mission leader who declined to be identified because he is still involved with the U.N. told The Associated Press this weekend that any peacekeeping mission would be established following a decision by the Security Council if it believes there’s a risk to international security.

    The U.N. would send a team for evaluation, and then the Security Council would decide if money is available and which countries would be available for volunteering. He noted that a military mission could cost between 600 to 800 million dollars and would count with 7,000 military components, plus police and civil components.

    “It is an ongoing crisis, which makes it difficult for short term solutions,” he said. “There needs to be international help, no doubt about that.”

    ———

    Associated Press reporter Carla Bridi in Brasilia, Brazil contributed.

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  • ‘A time bomb’: Anger rising in a hot spot of Iran protests

    ‘A time bomb’: Anger rising in a hot spot of Iran protests

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    SULIMANIYAH, Iraq — Growing up under a repressive system, Sharo, a 35-year-old university graduate, never thought she would hear words of open rebellion spoken out loud. Now she herself chants slogans like “Death to the Dictator!” with a fury she didn’t know she had, as she joins protests calling for toppling the country’s rulers.

    Sharo said that after three weeks of protests, triggered by the death of a young woman in the custody of the feared morality police, anger at the authorities is only rising, despite a bloody crackdown that has left dozens dead and hundreds in detention.

    “The situation here is tense and volatile,” she said, referring to the city of Sanandaj in the majority Kurdish home district of the same name in northwestern Iran, one of the hot spots of the protests.

    “We are just waiting for something to happen, like a time-bomb,” she said, speaking to The Associated Press via Telegram messenger service.

    The anti-government protests in Sanandaj, 300 miles (500 kilometers) from the capital, are a microcosm of the leaderless protests that have roiled Iran.

    Led largely by women and youth, they have evolved from spontaneous mass gatherings in central areas to scattered demonstrations in residential areas, schools and universities as activists try to evade an increasingly brutal crackdown.

    Tensions rose again Saturday in Sanandaj after rights monitors said two protesters were shot dead and several were wounded, following a resumption of demonstrations. Residents said there has been a heavy security presence in the city, with constant patrols and security personnel stationed on major streets.

    The Associated Press spoke to six female activists in Sanandaj who said suppression tactics, including beatings, arrests, the use of live ammunition and internet disruptions make it difficult at times to keep the momentum going. Yet protests persist, along with other expressions of civil disobedience, such as commercial strikes and drivers honking horns at security forces.

    The activists in the city spoke on the condition their full names be withheld fearing reprisals by Iranian authorities. Their accounts were corroborated by three human rights monitors.

    THE BURIAL

    Three weeks ago, the news of the death of 22-year old Mahsa Amini in the custody of the morality police in Tehran spread rapidly across her home province of Kurdistan, of which Sanandaj is the capital. The response was swift in the impoverished and historically marginalized area.

    As the burial was underway in Amini’s town of Saqqez on Sept. 17, protesters were already filling Sanandaj’s main thoroughfare, activists said.

    People of all ages were present and began chanting slogans that would be repeated in cities across Iran: “Woman. Life. Freedom.”

    The Amini family had been under pressure from the government to bury Mahsa quickly before a critical mass of protesters formed, said Afsanah, a 38-year-old clothing designer from Saqqez. She was at the burial that day and followed the crowds from the cemetery to the city square.

    Rozan, a 32-year old housewife, didn’t know Amini personally. But when she heard the young woman had died in the custody of the morality police in Tehran and had been arrested for violating the Islamic Republic’s hijab rules, she felt compelled to take to the street that day.

    “The same thing happened to me,” she said. In 2013, like Amini, she had ventured to the capital with a friend when she was apprehended by the morality police because her abaya, or loose robe that is part of the mandatory dress code, was too short. She was taken to the same facility where Amini later died, and fingerprinted and made to sign a declaration of guilt.

    “It could have been me,” she said. In the years since then Rozan, a former nurse, was fired from the local government health department for being too vocal about her views about women’s rights.

    After the funeral, she saw an elderly woman take a step forward and in one swift gesture, remove her headscarf. “I felt inspired to do the same,” she said.

    SUPPRESSION

    In the first three days after the burial, protesters were plucked from the demonstrations in arrest sweeps in Sanandaj. By the end of the week, arrests targeted known activists and protest organizers.

    Dunya, a lawyer, said she was one among a small group of women’s rights activists who helped organize protests. They also asked shopkeepers to respect a call for a commercial strike along the city’s main streets.

    “Almost all the women in our group are in jail now,” she said.

    Internet blackouts made it difficult for protesters to communicate with one another across cities and with the outside world.

    “We would wake up in the morning and have no idea what was happening,” said Sharo, the university graduate. The internet would return intermittently, often late at night or during working hours, but swiftly cut off in the late afternoon, the time many would gather to protest.

    The heavy security presence also prevented mass gatherings.

    “There are patrols in almost every street, and they break up groups, even if its just two or three people walking on the street,” said Sharo.

    During demonstrations security forces fired pellet guns and tear gas at the crowd causing many to run. Security personnel on motorcycles also drove into crowds in an effort to disperse them.

    All activists interviewed said they either witnessed or heard live ammunition. Iranian authorities have so far denied this, blaming separatist groups on occasions when the use of live fire was verified. The two protesters killed Saturday in Sanandaj were killed by live fire, according to the France-based Kurdistan Human Rights network.

    Protesters say fear is a close companion. The wounded were often reluctant to use ambulances or go to hospitals, worried they might get arrested. Activists also suspected government informants were trying to blend in with the crowds.

    But acts of resistance have continued.

    “I assure you the protests are not over,” said Sharo. “The people are angry, they are talking back to the police in ways I have never seen.”

    DISOBEDIENCE

    The anger runs deep. In Sanandaj the confluence of three factors has rendered the city a ripe ground for protest activity — a history of Kurdish resistance, rising poverty and a long history of women’s rights activism.

    Yet the protests are not defined along ethnic or regional lines even though they were sparked in a predominantly Kurdish area, said Tara Sepehri Fars, a researcher for Human Rights Watch. “It’s been very unique in that sense,” she said.

    There have been waves of protest in Iran in recent years, the largest in 2009 bringing large crowds into the streets after what protesters felt was a stolen election. But the continued defiance and demands for regime change during the current wave seem to pose the most serious challenge in years to the Islamic Republic.

    Like most of Iran, Sanandaj has suffered as U.S. sanctions and the coronavirus pandemic devastated the economy and spurred inflation. Far from the capital, in the fringes of the country, its majority Kurdish residents are eyed with suspicion by the regime.

    By the third week, with the opening of universities and schools, students began holding small rallies and joined the movement.

    Videos circulated on social media showing students jeering school masters, school girls removing their headscarves on the street and chanting: “One by one they will kill us, if we don’t stand together.”

    One university student said they were planning on boycotting classes altogether.

    Afsanah, the clothing designer, said that she likes wearing the headscarf. “But I am protesting because it was never my choice.”

    Her parents, fearing for her safety, tried to persuade her to stay home. But she disobeyed them, pretending to go to work in the morning only to search for protest gatherings around the city.

    “I am angry, and I am without fear — we just need this feeling to overflow on the street,” she said.

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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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  • 2 killed as demonstrations around Iran enter 4th week

    2 killed as demonstrations around Iran enter 4th week

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    SULIMANIYAH, Iraq — Anti-government demonstrations erupted Saturday in several locations across Iran as the most sustained protests in years against a deeply entrenched theocracy entered their fourth week. At least two people were killed.

    Marchers chanted anti-government slogans and twirled headscarves in repudiation of coercive religious dress codes. In some areas, merchants shuttered shops in response to a call by activists for a commercial strike or to protect their wares from damage.

    Later Saturday, hackers broke into the evening news on Iran’s state TV for 15 seconds, just as footage of the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was being broadcast. The hackers flashed an image of Khamenei surrounded by flames. A caption read “Join us and stand up!” and “The blood of our youth is dripping from your claws,” a reference to Khamenei.

    A song with the lyrics “Woman. Life. Freedom” — a common chant of the protesters — played in the background.

    The protests erupted Sept. 17, after the burial of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, a Kurdish woman who had died in the custody of Iran’s feared morality police. Amini had been detained for an alleged violation of strict Islamic dress codes for women. Since then, protests spread across the country and were met by a fierce crackdown, in which dozens are estimated to have been killed and hundreds arrested.

    In the city of Sanandaj in the Kurdish-majority northern region, one man was shot dead Saturday while driving a car in a major thoroughfare, rights monitors said. The France-based Kurdistan Human Rights Network and the Hengaw Organization for Human Rights, said the man was shot after honking at security forces stationed on the street. Honking has become one of the ways activists have been expressing civil disobedience. Video circulating online showed the slain man slumped over the steering wheel, as distraught witnesses shouted for help.

    The semi-official Fars news agency, believed to be close to the elite paramilitary force, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, said Kurdistan’s police chief denied reports of using live rounds against protesters.

    Fars claimed that people in Sanandaj’s Pasdaran Street said the victim was shot from inside the car without elaborating. But photos of the dead man indicate that he was shot from his left side, meaning he likely was not shot from inside the car. The blood can be seen running down the inside of the door on the driver’s side.

    A second protester was killed after security forces fired gunshots to disperse crowds in the city and 10 protesters were wounded, the rights monitors said.

    A general strike was observed in the city’s main streets amid a heavy security presence and protesters burned tires in some areas. Patrols have deterred mass gatherings in Sanandaj but isolated protests have continued in the city’s densely populated neighborhoods.

    Demonstrations were also reported in the capital Tehran on Saturday, including small ones near the Sharif University of Technology, one of Iran’s premier centers of learning and the scene of a violent government crackdown last weekend. Authorities have closed the campus until further notice.

    Images on social media showed protests also took place in the northeastern city of Mashhad.

    Other protests erupted at Azad University in northern Tehran, in other neighborhoods of the capital and in the city’s bazaar. Many shops were closed in central Tehran and near the University of Tehran.

    President Ebrahim Raisi in a meeting with students from the all-female Al-Zahra University in Tehran alleged again that foreign enemies were responsible for fomenting the protests. He has made the claim without giving specifics or providing any evidence.

    “The enemy thought that it can pursue its desires in universities while unaware that our students and teachers are aware and they will not allow the enemies’ vain plans to be realized,” he said.

    Meanwhile, thousands of people in The Hague, Netherlands chanted and sang in a solidarity demonstration in support of the protesters in Iran.

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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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  • At least 2 killed in Iran as security forces intensify crackdown over protests | CNN

    At least 2 killed in Iran as security forces intensify crackdown over protests | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Iran’s security forces shot at protesters and used tear gas in the Kurdish cities of Sanandaj and Saqez in fresh protests on Saturday afternoon, as weeks of nationwide demonstrations gathered momentum.

    In Sanandaj, security forces shot and killed a driver in his car, while in one of the schools in Saqqez, two teachers were injured, according to the Iranian human rights group Hengaw.

    Another protester was shot in the abdomen by IRGC security forces and died, Hengaw said.

    “Students in the schools in Sanandaj and Saqqez started the protests. Then government forces started an attack on one of the schools in Saqqez,” Azhin Sheikhi, from Hengaw told CNN on Saturday.

    Widespread strikes are taking place in Saqez, Diwandareh, Mahabad, and Sanandaj, said Hengaw.

    The Norway-registered Hengaw human rights organization has been monitoring human rights violations in Iran’s Kurdish region, where the protests began three weeks ago, following the death of Mahsa Amini, an Iranian Kurdish woman, while in custody of the morality police. Saqez is also her hometown.

    Meanwhile, protests also continued in other locations across the country on Saturday including Tehran, Karaj, Esfahan, Shiraz, Kerman, Mashhad, Tabriz and Rasht.

    Speaking at Alzahra University, an all-girls institution in Tehran, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi commented on the latest riots across the country.

    “The enemy thought that they could follow their desires inside the university, unaware that our students and professors were awake and would not allow the enemy’s false dreams to come true,” Raisi said according to a statement issued by his office.

    Social media video showed protests at the same university with women chanting “Death to the oppressor, whether it be the Shah or the Supreme Leader.”

    It was unclear if the protest took place while the president was at the university.

    Video provided to US-funded Radio Farda also showed riot police beating up a young woman in Tehran.

    Total death toll figures since protests kicked off vary from government, opposition groups, international rights organizations and local journalists.

    An Iran-focused human rights group based in Norway, IranHR, tallied the number of deaths since the protests started across Iran at 154. Human Rights Watch said as of September 31, Iranian state affiliated media placed the number of deaths at 60.

    CNN cannot independently verify the death toll – a precise figure is impossible for anyone outside the Iranian government to confirm – and different estimates have been given by opposition groups, international rights organizations and local journalists.

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  • Breonna Taylor warrant details deepen mistrust in police

    Breonna Taylor warrant details deepen mistrust in police

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    LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Recent revelations about the search warrant that led to Breonna Taylor’s death have reopened old wounds in Louisville’s Black community and disrupted the city’s efforts to restore trust in the police department.

    Former Louisville officer Kelly Goodlett admitted in federal court that she and another officer falsified information in the warrant. That confirmed to many, including U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, that Taylor never should have been visited by armed officers on March 13, 2020.

    Protest leaders who took to the streets of Kentucky’s largest city after she was fatally shot by police say Goodlett’s confession confirms their suspicions that Louisville police can’t be trusted and that systemic issues run deep. They say officers abused demonstrators after the botched raid, and that her fatal shooting is just one of many reasons why the community remains wary.

    “What bothers me so incredibly, is that so many lives were lost because of this lie,” said Hannah Drake, a Louisville poet and leader in a push for justice after Taylor’s death. “They don’t even understand the far-reaching tentacles of what they did.”

    More than once during that long, hot summer, individual officers escalated rather than calmed a situation. An officer who shot into the restaurant, injuring the dead man’s niece, was fired after taunting demonstrators on social media, daring them to challenge the police. Another Louisville officer faces a federal charge over hitting a kneeling protester in the back of the head with a baton.

    “We were right to protest,” Louisville Urban League President Sadiqa Reynolds tweeted shortly after Goodlett’s plea. “People are dead and lives upended because of a pile of lies.”

    Some Louisville officers have been disciplined, fired, and even charged with crimes for abusing protesters, in addition to the four officers now charged federally in relation to the botched raid. But the problems can’t be blamed on a few rogue officers, according to a lawsuit brought by Taylor’s white neighbors, who were nearly hit by gunfire during the raid.

    They accuse the department of having a “warrior culture” and cultivating an “us vs. them” mentality. And the family of a Black man shot dead in his restaurant’s kitchen by law enforcement says in a lawsuit that police aggression during a curfew instigated his death.

    Louisville is working on numerous reforms, implementing a new 911 diversion program, increasing leadership reviews of search warrant requests and improving officer training. The city has outlawed “no knock” warrants, conducted an independent audit and paid Taylor’s mother $12 million in a civil settlement. A new police chief, Erika Shields, was hired in 2021.

    Such reforms have been implemented amid a continuing U.S. Department of Justice investigation of LMPD’s policing practices, which could land at any moment.

    The chief called Taylor’s death “horrific,” and said in an interview with The Associated Press that she welcomes the federal investigations, which led to charges against Goodlett and the other officers. “I think we’re in an important place that was necessary to get to, before we move on,” she said.

    Mayor Greg Fischer, whose 12-year run ends this year, said city officials turned the probes over to state and federal officials “because the community rightfully was saying LMPD should not be investigating LMPD, and I agree with that.”

    Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron’s investigation then ended without any officers being charged directly in Taylor’s death. It took federal prosecutors to convict Goodlett — she pleaded guilty to conspiracy and admitted to helping create a phony link between Taylor and a wanted drug dealer. Goodlett resigned the day before her charges were announced in August and awaits sentencing next month.

    In August court filings, federal prosecutors said another former officer, Joshua Jaynes, inserted the crucial information into the warrant request that drew Taylor into the narcotic squad’s investigation — claiming that a postal inspector had verified that the drug dealer was receiving packages at Taylor’s apartment.

    Goodlett and Jaynes knew that was false, as did their sergeant, Kyle Meany, when he signed off on the request, Garland said.

    “Breonna Taylor should be alive today,” Garland said.

    Goodlett, Jaynes and Meany were all fired, as was a fourth officer, Brett Hankison, who faces federal charges for blindly firing into Taylor’s home through a side door and window. He was exonerated on similar state charges earlier this year. Jaynes and Meany are being tried together. That trial, along with Hankison’s, is scheduled for next year. Goodlett is expected to testify against Jaynes.

    Metro Council President David James, a former police officer, said that to restore trust, Louisville’s Black community “just wants the police to treat them the same way they would treat people in another part of the city.”

    No incident highlighted the racial divide more than the fatal shooting of Black restaurant owner David McAtee as police sought to enforce the city’s curfew in a predominantly African American neighborhood far from the center of the Taylor protests.

    Just before midnight on May 31, 2020, Louisville officers and Kentucky National Guard members were sent to a gathering spot near McAtee’s YaYa’s BBQ “for a show of force (and) intimidation,” McAtee’s family alleges in a lawsuit.

    A few nights earlier, officer Katie Crews had been photographed in a line of police as a protester offered her a handful of flowers. Crews posted the image on social media, writing that she hoped the protester was hurting from the pepper balls she “got lit up with a little later on.”

    “Come back and get ya some more ole girl, I’ll be on the line again tonight,” Crews wrote.

    When officers marched toward McAtee’s restaurant, Crews escalated the tension by firing non-lethal pepper balls at the crowd, an LMPD investigation found. Many people rushed into McAtee’s kitchen, where his niece was shot in the neck by Crews with the non-lethal rounds.

    That prompted McAtee to pull a pistol from his hip and fire a shot. Seeing that, Crews and other officers switched to live rounds and McAtee, leaning out his kitchen door, was fatally shot in the chest by a National Guard member. The deadly force was found to be justified, but the police chief was fired by Fischer because the Louisville officers involved had failed to turn on their body cameras, just as they did during the Taylor raid.

    Crews later admitted that no one in the crowd had been disorderly. She was fired by Shields in February. Now she faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted of a federal charge of using unreasonable force.

    James groaned while recalling McAtee’s death, saying he was saddened because he knew him and had eaten his food. The “extremely unfortunate and tragic” shooting has stuck with him as an example of bad policing, he said.

    Drake said more systemic changes are needed. In the meantime, she said authorities should apologize for their treatment of protesters, and drop any cases against people arrested for demonstrating that summer. Hundreds have been cleared, but some remain criminally charged. Knowing it was all so unnecessary only deepens the pain, she said.

    “We could have avoided all this,” Drake said. “And I think that’s where the pain comes from — we were right!”

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  • Iran’s ‘women’s revolution’ could be a Berlin Wall moment | CNN Politics

    Iran’s ‘women’s revolution’ could be a Berlin Wall moment | CNN Politics

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    A version of this story appeared in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.



    CNN
     — 

    The Islamic regime in Iran has ruled for decades with fear and intimidation.

    Outrage at the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22 year-old who died after being detained by Iran’s morality policy, allegedly for improperly wearing her hijab, ignited nationwide protests across the country that have gone on for weeks.

    That Iranians are risking their lives and freedom to stand up to their government has sparked hope among many that change is coming. Read CNN’s latest report.

    I talked on the phone to Masih Alinejad, an Iranian in exile in the US who works as a journalist and activist.

    Key points:

    • She uses social media – 8 million followers on Instagram alone – to amplify and aid the protests inside Iran.
    • US authorities charged four Iranian nationals with trying to kidnap her last year.
    • To Alinejad, that women in Iran are removing their headscarves as an act of protest is equal to the fall of the Berlin Wall.
    • She sees solidarity with dissidents from other oil-rich autocracies like Russia and Venezuela, and has a stern message for feminists in the West.

    Our conversation, edited for clarity and length, is below. I’ve also added some context and links in parentheses where appropriate.

    WHAT MATTERS: This newsletter is not usually focused on Iran. Can you first just explain what’s happening?

    ALINEJAD: Mahsa Amini was only 22 years old. … She came from Saqqez to Tehran for a vacation. Then she got arrested by the so-called morality police – because I call them the hijab police.

    And for your audience, if they don’t know what morality police means, they’re a bunch of police walking in the streets, telling people whether their way of wearing hijab is proper or not.

    Mahsa was arrested for wearing inappropriate hijab. So she was not unveiled.

    (Here is a CNN report in which the Iranian police deny the allegation she was beaten.)

    ALINEJAD: That created huge anger among Iranians. And that is why women across Iran first started to cut their hair. Then they took to the street and they started to burn their headscarves. And now, with men, shoulder to shoulder, across Iran they’re not only saying no to compulsory hijab, they are actually chanting against the dictator and they are saying we want an end to the Islamic Republic.

    This is a revolution.

    To me, this is a women’s revolution against a gender apartheid regime.

    WHAT MATTERS: The Iranian government has tried to crack down on this. We see video that gets out of Iran of these protests. How have things changed in the weeks since Mahsa’s death?

    ALINEJAD: From the beginning, the level of crackdown was so brutal. They opened fire, they really opened fire on teenagers, school leaders, university students, they opened fire on unarmed people.

    Now some reports say more than 130 people have been killed. But it’s strongly believed the number is much more than this. Only in Zahedan on only one day, they opened fire on those who were praying. Who were praying. They killed more than 80 people in Zahedan.

    (CNN has not verified all of these claims. Related CNN report: Iranian security forces beat, shot and detained students of elite Tehran university, witnesses say.

    Amnesty International has reported on the killing of 66 in Zahedan along with other deaths recorded in other places.

    Regarding death tolls: CNN cannot independently verify the death toll –  a precise figure is impossible for anyone outside the Iranian government to confirm – and different estimates have been given by opposition groups, international rights organizations and local journalists.)

    ALINEJAD: The Iranian regime cut off the internet in some cities to prevent the rest of the world from getting to know about the crackdown, to get to learn about the number of people killed.

    But again. That didn’t stop people. Actually, it changed the tone of the protesters. They became more angry. They were holding the names and photos of those who got killed and the major slogan was this: ‘We are ready to die, but we won’t live under humiliation.’

    One of the young women whose name was Hadis Najafi, she was only 20 years old. She made a video of herself walking in the street and saying I’m joining the protests. In the future, if I see that Iran has changed, that change came, then I was proudly part of this demonstration. She got killed. There are many of them.

    (CNN has reported that Najafi’s family said she was shot six times and never made it home from a protest. She was 23. There are reports of multiple young women killed. Here’s a CNN video report on Nika Shahkarami, whose family found her body at a morgue after not being able to find her for 10 days following an Instagram story of her burning her headscarf.)

    Students filmed themselves burning their headscarves, but they got killed. But murdering and killing didn’t stop the protests. Instead they became more angry. Now schoolgirls came out, university professors came out, teachers came out and ask for a strike.

    (Here’s a CNN report that explains the special significance of strikes in Iran.)

    WHAT MATTERS: The flashpoint is one woman’s death that set off all of these protests. But it’s a movement that’s been building for months –

    ALINEJAD: Don’t say for months. I don’t accept that. It has been building for years. Years of women pushing back the boundaries the anti-woman laws, especially compulsory hijab laws.

    For years and years, these women that you see in the streets, they have been fighting back compulsory hijabs alone. Like lonely soldiers. I myself have published videos of women being beaten by morality police under the hashtag #mycameraismyweapon. I really want you to go and check this hashtag. Brave women filming themselves while being harassed by morality police and looking to the morality police and saying that you cannot tell me what to wear.

    Slavery used to be legal. I’m not going to respect bad law in Iran.

    This is being built up by women within the society practicing their civil disobedience in bravely saying no to forced hijab and the gender apartheid regime for years and years. That’s my opinion. Mahsa’s name became a symbol of resistance for women to take to the streets in large numbers. That’s the new thing.

    WHAT MATTERS: How will this be transformed into permanent change? How will it evolve from here?

    ALINEJAD: Look, this is not going to happen overnight. This is the beginning of an end. It takes time. It reminds me of the revolution 40 years ago. People were taking to the streets for like one month and were going back home and then coming back again. The national strike helped a lot. For me and millions of people, this is just the beginning to an end.

    The compulsory hijab is not just a small piece of cloth for Iranians. It’s like the Berlin Wall. I keep saying that. If women can successfully tear this wall down, the Islamic Republic won’t exist.

    Maybe in the West, people ignore me and they never take this seriously. But the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, he knows what I’m talking about. That’s why, just two days ago, he referred to my statement comparing the hijab to the Berlin Wall, saying that ‘she is an American agent and we have taken action against her.’

    (Alinejad shared this video of Khamenei on Twitter, in which he refers to US political elements making the comparison to the Berlin Wall.)

    ALINEJAD: But it’s not me. It’s millions of people who believe that compulsory hijab is like the main pillar of the religious dictatorship. It’s like the main pillar of the Islamic Republic.

    That’s why I believe that now people are being fearless and clear that we want to break this weakest pillar of the Islamic Republic… I strongly believe that the biggest threat to the Islamic Republic are the women who are leading the revolution, who are facing guns and bullets and saying that we want an end for this gender apartheid regime.

    WHAT MATTERS: In Iran, and we’ve seen this in Russia as well, social media is helping spread the word and is essential to organizing protests. Here in the US, it is often viewed as a threat to our democracy because that’s where misinformation is spread. I wonder if you had any thoughts on that dichotomy.

    ALINEJAD: Let me be very clear with you. Right now, the tech companies are actually helping the Islamic Republic. First of all, Iranians are banned from using social media – Instagram, Facebook and Twitter are filtered. The leaders like Khamenei and other officials who ban 80 million people from using social media, they all have verified accounts. They have multiple accounts on social media. Basically, the Iranian regime cut off the Internet for its own people, but they’re being more than welcomed on social media to spread fake information, misinformation, disinformation.

    (Accounts that appear to be associated with Khamenei are on Twitter and Instagram and have large followings. They are not verified by Instagram or Twitter. Twitter did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesman for Meta said this in an email: “Iranians use apps like Instagram to stay close to their loved ones, find information and shed light on important events – and we hope the Iranian authorities restore their access soon. In the meantime, our teams are following the situation closely, and are focused on only removing content that breaks our rules, while addressing any enforcement mistakes as quickly as possible.”)

    WHAT MATTERS: The US government has tried to increase Iranian’s access to the internet. Is that working?

    ALINEJAD: Oh, of course, this is phenomenal. But we need more. We need more.

    The thing is, at the same time, the US government, we’re pleased that they’re providing internet access for Iranians. This is good. We appreciate that.

    But at the same time, the US government is focused on getting a deal from this regime, the same regime.

    They condemn the brutality, they condemn the Iranian government for killings, but at the same time, they try to give money, billions of dollars, to the same murderers. And I don’t understand this contradiction.

    (The US government could give Iran’s government ​access to billions of dollars of frozen Iranian funds if it re-joins an agreement whereby Iran can sell oil in exchange for abandoning nuclear weapons capability. Recent talks, however, have not gone well. Read more.)

    ALINEJAD: Many people in the streets are now risking their lives and want an end for the same regime. They aren’t asking for US government to go there and save them at all. They’re brave enough to do it themselves. But they’re really clearly asking the US government not to save the Iranian regime. …

    People believe that the money goes to the benefit of the people. It doesn’t go to the people. The money goes to Syria, Lebanon, to Hamas, Hezbollah, to terrorist organizations.

    For millions of Iranians now, this is the moment they want the US government to ask its allies, the European countries, to recall their ambassadors and to cut their ties with the murders until the day that they are sure that the Iranian regime is stopped killing its own people.

    (CNN isn’t able to confirm that all the money goes to terrorist organizations or that none of it goes to Iranian people. Iran does fund terror groups outside its borders, according to the US government, and its own Islamic Revolutionary Guard is a terror group, according to the US government.)

    WHAT MATTERS: I want to talk about another dichotomy you’ve pointed out. You wrote in The Washington Post that feminists all over the world need to pay attention and take to the streets.

    ALINEJAD: You cannot call yourself a feminist in the West, in America, and not take action on one of the most important feminist revolutions, in Iran.

    By saying that, I don’t mean that I want the feminists to just appear on TV and cut their hair to show their solidarity.

    I want, especially the female politicians, to cut their ties … and instead take to the streets to show their solidarity with the women of Iran. When the Women’s March happened here in America, like every single feminist around the world showed solidarity. I was part of the Women’s March in New York. The main slogan was ‘my body my choice.’

    But at the same time I’m witnessing that when it comes to Iran and Afghanistan, it seems that my body my choice is not as important as it is in the West.

    (Here Alinejad said women representing Western governments who meet with Iranian and Afghan officials should refrain from wearing headscarves.)

    WHAT MATTERS: You took part this week in an Oslo Freedom Forum event in New York with other dissidents from Russia and Venezuela. Those are two places that are repressive, and they’re also funded largely by oil. The US wants more oil on the market. I just wondered if you had any larger comments to make on this question?

    ALINEJAD: This is what’s missing here. The dictators are more united than our freedom fighters.

    Let me give you an example. Just two months ago, (Vladimir) Putin went to Iran. (Nicolás) Maduro from Venezuela went to Iran … from China to Russia to Venezuela to Nicaragua, everywhere. The leaders from autocracies and dictatorships are united. They’re helping each other. They’re supporting each other to oppress protests taking place in each country. But we the freedom fighters, we the opposition to these dictators must be united as well, because when we fight against autocracy or dictatorship on our own, we’re not going to be successful.

    (Alinejad said she has talked to dissidents from Russia and Venezuela about calling a World Liberty Congress for opposition and activist leaders.)

    ALINEJAD: If we don’t get united to end dictatorship, then the dictators will get united to end democracy. We’re not fighting just for ourselves. I’m not fighting just for Iran. Garry Kasparov is not fighting for just Russia. Leopoldo Lopez is not fighting just for Venezuela. We are fighting for democracy. We’re trying to protect the rest of the world from these dictators.

    (Our conversation continued from here and Alinejad argued the “United Nations is useless.” It’s true the United Nations prioritizes inclusion of most countries over action. And it is awkward at best that Iran sits on the UN’s Commission on Women’s Rights and Russia sits on the Security Council.)

    ALINEJAD: We need to have our own alternative United Nations, where all the good people get united, not the bad guys. Now the bad guys are winning because they’re helping each other. So this is the time that all the good people who care for freedom and democracy get united and have their own society.

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