The post New California Laws Roundup for 2026 appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.

By Sophie Tanno, Sebastian Shukla and Inke Kappeler, CNN

Berlin (CNN) — Amid heavy snow in the German capital and temperatures plummeting to below freezing, nearly 100,000 people were left without power for several days after an alleged left-wing arson attack on Berlin’s power supply on Saturday caused a major blackout.

The activist group Vulkangruppe – or Volcano Group – claimed responsibility for the attack, citing the role that fossil fuels and AI play in accelerating the climate crisis.

Roughly 45,000 homes and more than 2,000 businesses in Berlin’s wealthy southwestern districts were affected by the outage, which lasted more than four days.

The outage is believed to be the longest in Berlin’s postwar history.

What exactly happened?

The attack on Berlin’s power supply occurred in the early hours of Saturday morning, when a fire broke out on a cable duct over the Teltow Canal, which runs through the city’s south. The blaze damaged several high-voltage cables near Berlin’s Lichterfelde power plant.

Authorities put the fire out, but not before power had been cut at around 6 a.m. The outage affected up to 45,000 households and 2,200 business spanning four districts in southern Berlin, including Nikolassee, Zehlendorf, Wannsee and Lichterfelde, according to Stromnetz Berlin, the operator of the city’s electricity network.

The attack left people without power and heating amid nighttime temperatures of –10 degrees celsius (14 degrees Fahrenheit), disrupted overground train lines and hit mobile phone connections.

The Vulkangruppe later claimed responsibility for starting the fire, in a letter sent to police. “We successfully sabotaged the gas-fired power station in Berlin-Lichterfelde,” said the letter, which has been circulated online.

This, the group said, resulted in power outages in Berlin’s “affluent” neighborhoods.

Vulkangruppe apologized to the less wealthy residents of southwestern Berlin in the letter, saying that the goal was to target the fossil fuel industry and the action was a “necessary measure against the expansion of fossil fuel-fired power plants” in Germany.

“Power outages were not the goal of the action; the fossil fuel industry was,” it said.

“We know we must stop this destruction. We know we are not alone. Don’t give up hope for a world where life has space, not greed for money, power, and destruction,” it said, adding: “People call us eco-terrorists, yet we respect life. They call us irresponsible, yet we take responsibility to end this imperial, destructive way of life.”

Berlin mayor Kai Wegner told reporters Wednesday that the incident was “not a minor arson attack, not sabotage, but a terrorist attack by a left-wing extremist organization with massive consequences for the supply of many Berliners.”

German federal prosecutors said Wednesday they had opened an investigation into the incident, with suspected offences relating to membership in a terrorist organization, anti-constitutional sabotage and arson.

What was the impact?

An 83-year-old woman died during the power outages, according to deputy police chief Marco Langner. She was found by a relative, who called an ambulance, but emergency workers were unable to save her, Langner sai

Por CNN Español

Cuando apenas han pasado cinco días del ataque de Estados Unidos a Caracas y la captura de Nicolás Maduro, los venezolanos intentan recuperar cierto grado de normalidad. Pero hay algo que refleja la tensión latente: aunque durante el día la circulación va recuperando el ritmo usual, en la noche el panorama es bien diferente.

Un conductor de Ridery, una aplicación para servicios de traslado, dijo a CNN que una vez que oscurece disminuye drásticamente el número de conductores en línea ofreciendo el servicio. “Está todo muy solitario y es mejor evitar contratiempos”, detalla el ciudadano, que que no quiso ser identificado por temor a represalias.

En el este de Caracas, un local de hamburguesas y perros calientes que usualmente abre hasta las 10:00 pm informa que trabajarán hasta las 06:00 pm “mientras se estabiliza la situación”, explica un empleado a cargo de la caja.

Las calles caraqueñas se vacían al bajar el sol. La gente no sale de sus casas. Los bares y restaurantes están cerrados o vacíos. No hay transeúntes paseando a sus perros, ni caminando. No se ven muchos autos particulares circulando. Un escenario muy diferente al de una semana atrás, cuando los venezolanos celebraban el año nuevo y las calles estaban inundadas de gente.

En cambio, ahora, el silencio y la oscuridad solo se ven interrumpidos por la fuerte presencia de personal de seguridad armado. No son militares, sino policías y miembros de la contrainteligencia. Algo similar a lo que ocurrió luego de las cuestionadas elecciones presidenciales de 2024.

Hay patrullajes permanentes, hombres encapuchados, vestidos de negro, con armas larga recorren las calles en largas caravanas de vehículos. Transitan lento, vigilando lo que pasa en la ciudad, aunque es casi nulo el movimiento civil.

Las pocas personas que circulan son interrogadas por estas fuerzas de seguridad sobre los motivos por los que están en la calle. También se ven policías y civiles armados a las afueras de los supermercados desde que ocurrieron los ataques de EE.UU. en la madrugada del sábado.

La situación se extiende hacia las afueras de la capital. Anoche, frente a la plaza Altamira, en el municipio de Chacao, al este de Caracas, se podía observar un contingente de entre 40 o 50 miembros de la Policía Nacional Bolivariana (PNB), apostados con autos y motos.

En la urbanización las Mercedes había otro contingente de la PNB apostado en una de las entradas.

Así, mientras crece la incertidumbre de lo que pasará de aquí en más en Venezuela, la aparente normalidad del día contrasta con el rotundo cambio de la rutina nocturna de los ciudadanos.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.

The post Apenas cae el sol, las calles de Caracas se vacían: así cambió la rutina nocturna de los venezolanos tras el ataque de EE.UU appeared first on News Channel 3-12.

By Brynn Gingras, Mark Morales, Alisha Ebrahimji, Sarah Boxer, CNN

(CNN) — They went from the palace to the big house.

Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, can reasonably expect two things to happen as they get accustomed to their new day-to-day life at the notorious Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York: They will be uncomfortable and kept out of harm’s way.

“It truly is hell,” federal prison consultant Sam Mangel told CNN. “There is very little HVAC. There is very little heating. Every inmate gets one wool blanket. They’re on a very thin 2-inch mattress pillow combination on a metal slab.”

The ousted Venezuelan president and first lady are the latest high-profile detainees to be held in the federal jail known as MDC, with a documented history of power outages, staffing shortages and detainee complaints.

CNN could not determine precisely how the couple is being treated. Neither prison officials nor lawyers representing the couple responded to requests for comment.

Mangel as well as a former federal prisons official and a defense attorney with clients housed at MDC told CNN of the prison’s challenging conditions and how high-profile detainees are typically handled in such an environment.

The federal Bureau of Prisons doesn’t comment on current inmates, but Mangel said Maduro and Flores are likely housed in a segregated area, not with the general population — in separate cells and alone.

“His case, he is a security risk in general population,” Mangel said. “No one knows what other inmates might think of him, other gang members, other cartel members, so putting him in general population at any time … I think would be tremendous security risk for the facility.”

Before their US military capture on Saturday, the couple had lived at Miraflores Palace, a sprawling presidential residence known for its neoclassical architecture, large windows, grand halls and manicured courtyards.

They are now among detainees who include a mix of suspects and defendants, including people accused of serious crimes, high-profile cases, and others awaiting sentencing or transfer.

In their Read more

By Katie Hunt, CNN

(CNN) — Fossils unearthed in Morocco from a little-understood period of human evolution may help scientists resolve a long-standing mystery: Who came before us?

Three jawbones, including one from a child, teeth, vertebrae and a femur were unearthed from a cave known as Grotte à Hominidés in Thomas Quarry in Casablanca, Morocco, dating back 773,000 years. They are intriguing to scientists because they are the first hominin fossils from this period to have been discovered in Africa.

“There are a lot of fossil hominins in Africa until about a million years ago, but then after that there is a jump to around 500,000 years ago, and in this gap we have almost nothing,” said Jean-Jacques Hublin, an author of the study that published Wednesday in the scientific journal Nature.

“It is extremely exciting to have fossils right in the middle of this gap,” added Hublin, a paleoanthropologist at Collège de France and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

CT scans and analysis of the fossils’ features revealed an ancestor who had a “mosaic” of primitive and more evolved features. For example, it didn’t have a defined chin, unlike Homo sapiens, but the teeth and other dental features were quite similar to those of our own species and Neanderthals.

Most of the fossils were unearthed in 2008 and 2009, but they were definitively dated much more recently, Hublin noted, using a technique known as paleomagnetism, which detects the geological signature of a reversal of the Earth’s magnetic field in certain minerals with magnetic properties.

The strength of Earth’s magnetic field fluctuates, and, at times, the magnetic north and south poles have flipped. The research team found that the layer where the fossils were found coincided with the Matuyama-Brunhes transition, a well-known chronological marker that dates to 773,000 years ago and was the most recent major polar reversal.

Study coauthor Serena Perini, a geologist and paleomagnetist at Italy’s University of Milan, said in a statement the technique allowed the team to “anchor the presence of these hominins within an exceptionally precise chronological framework.”

The world’s earliest known Homo sapiens remains have also been found in Morocco at a site known as Jebel Irhoud, and they date to 400,000 years ago. However, Hublin said it would be incorrect to regard this region as the exact place our species emerged. More likely, it was a result of geological conditions in the region that allow fossils to be preserved particularly well.

Hublin noted that the cave these individuals called home would have been a dangerous place. The leg bone was covered in bite marks from a predator, most likely a hyena, and there was much evidence that carnivores occupied the cave.

‘Elusive figure’

The newly described fossils are important because they shed light on the ancestral species of the three types of human that lived most recently: Neanderthals, Denisovans and, of course, Homo sapiens, the only surviving human species.

Neanderthals and Denisovans are thought to have gone extinct around 40,000 years ago, although the timing is less clear for Denisovans, a shadowy