Three more people have been criminally charged with destruction of property at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Officers say they detained Cameron Thiers, Sophie Dennison-Gibby and Justin Carreno one Saturday afternoon in June and described in court documents witnessing them peeling and removing pieces of blue paint from the Reflecting Pool. One officer “witnessed Carreno reach down into the reflecting pool and pull up a piece of the blue paint,” according to the court documents.
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/07/08/politics/three-people-charged-damaging-reflecting-pool
An Italian fishing village on Lake Como has introduced a fine for anyone found wandering its streets bare-chested or in swimwear. Anyone flouting the village’s new dress code will now face a penalty of up to 200 euros ($228) under the latest measure aimed at limiting the impact of mass tourism in Italy. Visitors to Varenna, which hugs the eastern bank of the scenic lake in northern Italy, have been warned that the only places where they are allowed to be in swimwear or go bare-chested are the village’s beaches, piers and boat docks.
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/07/08/travel/italian-village-fine-bare-chests-swimwear-scli-intl
Lesley Groff, Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime assistant, told members of Congress last month that she never met any of the girls and young women who provided massages to Epstein and that she didn’t know anything about their backgrounds – including how old they were. Some Epstein survivors say that Groff was not telling the truth. In interviews with CNN, multiple Epstein victims, including four women who spoke on record and two who shared their accounts anonymously, took issue with various aspects of Groff’s recent testimony to lawmakers. They described meeting Groff in person, discussing with Groff how old they were and being directly paid by Epstein’s assistant of 18 years — all contrary to what Groff told lawmakers.
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/07/09/politics/lesley-groff-jeffrey-epstein-survivors
A political gamble looks like it has spectacularly backfired. When British right-wing populist leader Nigel Farage announced he was resigning as a lawmaker and triggering a special election in the face of a swirl of allegations over personal financing, he sought the high ground, declaring that the “judges of my actions” should be his constituents. Instead, rival parties dismissed his actions as a stunt and said they would sit out the election, leaving his principal opponent as a garbage-can wearing comedian whose policies include forcing rule-breaking cyclists to ride unicycles.
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/07/09/uk/nigel-farage-special-election-bin-face-intl
Let the people decide. That was the defiant message of two of the world’s most famous populists on Tuesday, as Nigel Farage and Marine Le Pen announced, within hours of each other, their intention to defy their country’s norms in order to put the same pitch to the same jury, with both French and British mainstream politics now in the balance. In France, Marine Le Pen took to the evening news to launch her defiant fourth run for the presidency, just hours after a court announced that legally she could. In a sweltering courthouse in central Paris, journalists had crammed into overflow rooms to hear, just after lunchtime, a ruling on Le Pen’s appeal against the 2025 criminal conviction that found her, her far-right National Rally party and 11 of its most senior members guilty of embezzling millions of euros worth of European funds to pay the salaries of party-political workers in France.
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/07/08/europe/farage-le-pen-populist-appeal-intl-cmd