By Eric Levenson, CNN

(CNN) — In Orlando, around 1,000 teenagers showed up to the Icon Park area on a Saturday night last month, spurring fights and a substantial police response that led to nine arrests on charges including battery on an officer, resisting arrest and trespassing.

In Washington, DC, a group of about 200 teens gathered at a park in the Navy Yard neighborhood this spring, leading to gunfire, disorderly conduct and robbery.

And in New York, hundreds of teens flooded a mall in the Bronx in February, trashing stores and berating mall employees.

The incidents are just a few examples of what’s become known as “teen takeovers,” the term for a mass gathering of rowdy youngsters in a public space like a mall or park. Spread by social media flyers or mass messages beforehand, the takeovers have on occasion spiraled into chaos, with reports of fights, robberies, gunshots and general disruption.

The takeovers seen in Orlando, Washington, New York, and across the US show how social media has supercharged these gatherings into something more significant.

“It’s a new form, but it’s not a new substance,” said Thaddeus Johnson, a senior fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice think tank, comparing teen takeovers to the flash mobs of a decade ago. “What’s new is the scale and how these things are networked.”

Of course, large gatherings of teens have long caused consternation and fear among the olds. In general, juvenile crimes are more often committed with others, and images of roaming throngs of teens has an outsized presence in media and in the public’s amygdala.

The ultimate fear is something like what happened in Oklahoma last weekend, when a “Sunday Funday” party promoted on social media drew young revelers to a lakeside picnic pavilion outside Oklahoma City. There, an argument among attendees escalated into a shootout between rival gang members, leaving one person dead and more than 20 wounded, according to police.

With summer on the horizon – when school is out and crime typically increases – police and officials have taken steps to crack down on large gatherings of teens.

Some police departments have begun scouring social media for teen takeover plans and are treating these events more like civil unrest.

“Once we see these large gatherings, we put eyes on them and officers on them,” DC Metro Police Assistant Chief Ramey Kyle told the Police Executive Research Forum, a national police research and policy organization.

“If the kids try to break off a little bit, we try to have an officer within sight of them. When we do that, we have a lot fewer fights, robberies, and shootings.”

Teen takeovers around the country

DC officials have taken several notable steps in their crackdown, including an April public emergency declaration after “several weeks of disorderly behavior.”

The DC Council approved a measure this week giving police

Por Zahra Ullah, CNN

El presidente de Rusia, Vladimir Putin, preside este sábdo un desfile del Día de la Victoria en la Plaza Roja de Moscú más sobrio que otros años, tras la entrada en vigor de un alto el fuego de tres días con Ucrania.

El desfile anual del 9 de mayo en Rusia conmemora la victoria de la Unión Soviética sobre Alemania en la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Bajo el mandato de Putin, se ha convertido en un símbolo del poderío militar del país.

Sin embargo, en un cambio significativo este año, las autoridades rusas anunciaron que no habría exhibición de armamento militar pesado, renunciando a la tradicional demostración de fuerza en favor de la seguridad.

El desfile tiene lugar en medio de la intensificación de los ataques ucranianos en territorio ruso, particularmente contra refinerías de petróleo, mientras el Gobierno de Ucrania acusa al Kremlin de continuar los ataques contra Kyiv y otros lugares.

El viernes, víspera del desfile, el presidente Donald Trump anunció que Rusia y Ucrania acordaron un alto el fuego de tres días, del 9 al 11 de mayo, que incluirá la suspensión de los combates y un intercambio de prisioneros a gran escala.

La noticia fue confirmada tanto por el Kremlin como por el presidente ucraniano Volodymyr Zelensky, quien afirmó que el intercambio de prisioneros se realizaría “en la proporción de 1.000 por 1.000”.

El Ministerio de Defensa ruso anunció que el desfile incluirá un sobrevuelo de aviones de combate y que los soldados marcharán por la Plaza Roja, frente al mausoleo de Lenin.

En la Unión Soviética murieron alrededor de 27 millones de personas durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial, más que en cualquier otro país.

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By Clare Duffy, CNN

New York (CNN) — A group of rural Utah residents wants a chance to vote in November to oppose a massive AI data center development — the latest example of Americans resisting new data center projects over fears they’ll disrupt the environment and their communities.

The Utah project was approved by Box Elder County commissioners on Monday, despite protests from community members. Developers hope to begin early work on the site in the fall.

Backers of the data center, including Shark Tank investor Kevin O’Leary, say that the project will boost the local economy and that increasing America’s computing and energy production capacity is crucial for national security. But residents are calling for more time and more information to evaluate its impact on the already fragile local ecosystem.

The conflict is, in some ways, a microcosm of the larger AI debate. While wealthy builders make lofty promises about the technology’s benefits, many individuals worry about the consequences of the race to build a world-changing technology they may not want and have little say in.

“I love what technology can give us, but Big Tech has shown us that they are not accountable,” said Caroline Gleich, an environmental advocate and resident of nearby Park City, Utah. “It’s very concerning and difficult to be a proponent of this, with the amount of land, energy and the impacts to our communities, without guardrails, accountability and transparency.”

A group of Box Elder voters this week applied to add a referendum to the local ballot in November to overturn the county commission’s approval of the project, County Clerk Marla Young confirmed to CNN. The application, earlier reported by the Salt Lake Tribune, is now undergoing legal review and would need more than 5,000 signatures for the referendum to appear on the ballot.

Similar protests are occurring around the country, with some communities seeking to ban data centers. Developers are now scrambling to address those public concerns, fearing that a slowdown in progress could dent America’s competitiveness in AI.

“The potential of what we’re creating is so important for defense, for the economy,” O’Leary told CNN on Friday. “It should be, for everybody, a mission. We can’t let the Chinese beat us.”

Stratos Data Center Project

While development of the “Stratos Project” is expected to take place in phases over several years, the plan is to construct a 9-gigawatt AI data center and a natural gas plant to power it, as well as other potential facilities on the site.

The facilities will be built on a planned 40,000-acre campus on unincorporated land in northwest Utah dominated by ranching, farming and picturesque open space. Sitting just north of the already shrinking Great Salt Lake, the area is also a sanctuary for migratory birds. The county’s population is just over 65,000.

The project area comprises privately owned land — the owners of which have signed onto the project — as well as military and state-owned land, according to documents released by local officials. The project is backed by Utah’s Military Installation Development Authority, created by the Utah legislature to develop land in the state to support defense-related infrastructure.

Building a plant to power the data center is intended to ensure the project won’t str

By Fiona Sinclair Scott, CNN

Venice (CNN) — After a dramatic lead up to this year’s Venice Biennale, involving the tragic death of its chief curator, outcry over Russia, Israel and the United States’ participation, and a prize jury that abruptly quit, it was, in the end, a set of portable toilets that stole the show during the opening week of the “Olympics of the art world.”

The toilets were the doing of choreographer and performance artist Florentina Holzinger – Austria’s representing artist who, together with curator Nora-Swantje Almes, staged the event’s most popular and brilliantly mucky pavilion show titled “Seaworld Venice,” which tackles themes of purity and impurity, actions and consequences and ecological catastrophe.

More than half a million people are expected to visit the monumental international art fair over the next six months to see the work of over 100 artists and 99 nations, spread across 31 permanent national pavilions and a series of other exhibition spaces.

In the preview days before the public opening on Saturday, hundreds of people lined up to enter the Austrian pavilion, a white cube structure that first opened in the Giardini della Biennale in 1934. Once inside, visitors were encouraged to urinate in two onsite toilets which filter and pump sanitized water back into a large aquarium tank where performers float for four hours at a time, breathing through a scuba mask. Off to the side was a room filled with spewing, brown wastewater. Inside the flooded pavilion was yet more water: in one pool, a naked woman rode a jet ski, in the other, a series of more unclothed women performers climbed and hung from a large rotating weathervane sculpture — suggesting a new direction (or a new world order?) was needed.

According to Almes, the show asks viewers to rethink the patriarchal systems “that currently control our lives.”

An anticlimax

Meanwhile there were no queues to enter the US and Russian pavilions and the Israeli building stood locked and empty (a smaller satellite show was staged outside the main Giardini instead). Russia was banned from the Biennale in 2022 following its invasion of Ukraine, but was allowed back by organizers this year. The decision was met with significant backlash including condemnation from the European Commission, which threatened to pull a $2 million funding grant for the Biennale if it did not reverse the decision by May 11.

During the pavilion’s preview, a brief but loud protest led by Russian dissident disruptors Pussy Riot and the Ukrainian feminist group FEMEN might have been the most exciting thing to happen at the underwhelming and carelessly presented group show of live performance and video art.

While President Donald Trump has a strong command of the attention economy, his national pavilion — featuring the sculptures of Alma Allen — did not appear to draw crowds during the preview days. The pavilion and its organizers had attracted some criticism for their chaotic handling of the artist selection process. But once open, all was quiet within a hollow space that has historically shown the work of some of America’s greatest artists including Louise Bourgeois, Jasper Johns and, more recently, Simone Leigh. Leigh triumphed at the 2022 Biennale when she was awarded the prestigious Golden Lion prize after becoming the first Black woman to represent the United States.

For all the hullabaloo, some of the most provocative pavilions were also the most lackluster, inadvertently making way for exhibitions elsewhere to shine.

Beyond the Giardini

While the Giardini and nea

By Zahra Ullah, CNN

Moscow (CNN) — Russian President Vladimir Putin has begun presiding over a pared-back Victory Day parade on Moscow’s Red Square, after a three-day ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine took effect.

Russia’s annual May 9 parade commemorates the Soviet Union’s victory over Germany in World War II. Under Putin, it has come to symbolize the country’s military strength.

However, in a marked departure this year, Russian authorities announced there would be no display of heavy military hardware – forgoing the traditional show of force in favor of security.

The parade takes place amid intensified Ukrainian strikes deep inside Russian territory, particularly against oil refineries, as the Ukrainian government accuses the Kremlin of continuing attacks on Kyiv and beyond.

On Friday, on the eve of the parade, US President Donald Trump announced that Russia and Ukraine have agreed to a three-day ceasefire from May 9 to 11, which will include a halt to fighting and a large-scale prisoner exchange. The news was confirmed by both the Kremlin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, with the latter saying the prisoner exchange would be “in the format of 1,000 for 1,000.”

Russia’s Ministry of Defense said the parade will feature a flyover by fighter planes, and soldiers will march on Red Square, in front of Lenin’s mausoleum.

Around 27 million people in the Soviet Union died during WWII, more than in any other country.

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