CNN
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German police have launched a murder investigation after a bestselling novelist was found dead on her houseboat in Hamburg.

Alexandra Fröhlich was discovered dead by relatives onboard her houseboat in the Moorfleet district of the German city, according to a statement that Hamburg Police shared with CNN.

“After a 58-year-old woman was found dead on her houseboat in Hamburg’s Moorfleet district on Tuesday morning, the police and public prosecutor’s office are now assuming a homicide and are asking for information from the public,” the statement said.

It added that members of Fröhlich’s family initially contacted the fire department after finding her lifeless body, but that police were soon informed.

“As the cause of death was unclear and outside influence could not be ruled out, officers from the homicide squad took over the investigation at the scene in close coordination with the public prosecutor’s office,” the statement said, adding that police divers had been deployed at the scene.

Examination of the scene and evidence has led police to assume that “the woman died as a result of violence.”

The police called on potential witnesses to contact them with any information they might have about the ongoing investigation.

Fröhlich was a freelance magazine editor, as well as a novelist. She started her career as a journalist. founding a women’s magazine in Kyiv, according to German publisher Knaur, which published her first novel.

According to Penguin, which published her recent books, her novels “My Russian Mother-in-Law and Other Catastrophes” and “There’s Always Someone Dying” were Spiegel bestsellers.

The Trump administration defended its move to deport three children who are US citizens over the weekend, arguing Monday that the decision was made by the parents, who were being deported as undocumented immigrants.

“If you remain in this country illegally, and you ignore a judge’s order about self-deporting, if you choose to have a US citizen child, knowing you’re in this country illegally, you put yourself in that position. You put your family in that position,” White House border czar Tom Homan told CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez during a White House press briefing this morning.

Three children who are US citizens were deported to Honduras with their mothers last week, including a 4-year-old receiving treatment for metastatic cancer, according to the families’ attorneys and civil rights and immigration advocacy organizations, as CNN has reported.

Homan said the administration removed the children because their mothers, who are undocumented immigrants, “requested” that their children stay with them rather than remain in the country.

“This is a parental decision. … Parenting 101, the mothers made that choice,” Homan said.

He said that if the children had stayed in the US, the administration would have been attacked for separating families.

“No — we’re keeping families together. So when a parent says, I want my two-year-old baby to go with me, we made that happen. They weren’t deported. We don’t deport US citizens. The parents made that decision, not the United States government,” Homan said.

But a Trump-appointed judge said Friday that the court does not know that this was a parental decision. The judge scheduled a May 16 court hearing in the case of one of the children, citing the need to resolve a strong suspicion that the government may have deported a US citizen without providing meaningful due process.

And the National Immigration Project executive director, Sirine Shebaya, said in a statement that ICE was “well aware before deporting the children that there were legal custodians and family members who were ready and willing to care for them” in the US, according to reports.

@cnn

White House border czar Tom Homan defended the Trump administration’s move to deport three US citizen children last week. Homan told CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez the children’s parents, who were in the US illegally, made a “parental decision” to leave the country together. Grace Willis, an attorney with the National Immigration Project, denies that the mothers were given a choice whether their children could remain in the US. #immigration #trump #deportations

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CNN
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Spain and Portugal are racing the setting sun as they respond to a massive, unexplained power outage that knocked out traffic lights, caused chaos on roads and in airports, and threatened to plunge tens of millions of people into darkness on Monday.

Portugal’s grid operator Redes Energéticas Nacionais (REN) said electrical supply was lost across the entire Iberian Peninsula, and in parts of France, shortly after midday. It could be several hours until power is fully restored, Spain’s grid operator said, meaning families and businesses around the country could be without energy come nightfall.

The outage took out lighting and power sockets, and caused subway systems to suddenly fail. Some power began to trickle back across Spain hours later, but efforts to fully revive the grid and to identify the cause have not yet been successful.

In Madrid, traffic piled up on the roads after the lights went out. “I was driving and suddenly there was no traffic lights… It was a bit of a jungle,” Luis Ibáñez Jiménez told CNN. “I saw a massive bus coming, and I had to accelerate a lot to go past it.”

The cause of the blackout was unclear, but its impact was dramatic: transport hubs were shuttered and governments in both countries, which share a population of around 60 million people, hastily arranged emergency meetings to co-ordinate a response.

Madrid’s mayor José Luis Martinez Almeida asked people to minimize their movements and only call emergency services if it was truly urgent. He also called on people to clear the roads for emergency workers. Later in the day, Madrid’s emergency services provider urged the country’s government to declare a national emergency, and local leader Isabel Díaz Ayuso asked the country to deploy the army.

Portugal’s grid operator said restoring power was a “complex operation.” By Monday evening, both Portugal’s and Spain’s grid operators said the supply of energy was gradually being restored in pockets of both countries, although Portugal’s operator said it would still take several hours for Lisbon, the capital, to be reconnected.

Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said authorities are still not sure what caused the power outage. Earlier, Antonio Costa – president of the European Council and Portugal’s former prime minister – said although the cause of the outage is not clear, there are “no indications” of a cyberattack.

Efforts could stretch into the night. “The experience of other similar events that have taken place in other countries indicate to us that this process – the total reestablishment of the electrical supply – will take several hours, Eduardo Prieto, director of services for system operation at Red Eléctrica, Spain’s national grid operator, told broadcaster La Sexta.

Portugal’s prime minister blamed his neighboring nation for the scenes. Luis Montenegro said his government did not yet know what caused the cut, but that it “did not originate in Portugal” and “everything indicates” that the problem started in Spain.

João Faria Conceição, head of REN, said Portugal was badly affected because it imports electricity from Spain in the morning, because Spain is one hour ahead and electricity produced by its solar plants is cheaper than producing it internally, during those hours.

“We are peripheral,” Conceição told a news conference Monday evening. While Spain received support from France and Morocco, Portugal had no country to turn to for emergency supplies of electricity.

Monday’s blackout hit a huge and busy swathe of southern Europe. Dozens of Iberian cities, like Madrid, Lisbon, Barcelona, Seville and Valencia, are major hubs for transport, finance and tourism. Two of the five busiest airports in the European Union in 2023 were Madrid’s and Barcelona’s, according to EU data.

For a few hours, modern routines were suspended: cash replaced card payments, police officers used arm signals to direct traffic, and restaurants, supermarkets and stores closed their doors. Madrid’s firefighters carried out 174 “elevator interventions” across the city on Monday, its Emergency Information Office said, and some shoppers stocked up on essentials and on canned goods.

The worst-case scenarios appear to have been averted, at least in the first hours of the blackout. Spain’s nuclear sites were declared operational and safe, while Portugal’s National Institute for Medical Emergencies said it had “activated its contingency plan,” running its telephone and IT systems through a back-up generator. Spain’s health ministry said the same process happened in hospitals there.

But travel was hit harder. Flights at major airports in the region were suddenly delayed or canceled, with travelers scrambling to adapt; online flight trackers reported that several airports saw their frequent departures suddenly halted after midday. Portugal’s flag carrier TAP Air Portugal told people not to travel to the airport until further notice.

Ellie Kenny, a holidaymaker inside Lisbon’s Humberto Delgado airport, said hundreds of people were stood in the dark in lines, with no air conditioning or running water. Shops were only accepting cash, she told CNN.

Trains were also suspended in Spain. And darkness suddenly descended in subway tunnels; video posted on social media showed blackened subway cars stuck in standstill on platforms in Madrid, where the metro was suspended and entrances to stations were taped off.

Sporting events were impacted too. Tennis fans at the Madrid Open filed out of courts after the outage caused play to be suspended.

Some parts of southern France, near the Spanish border, felt a more sporadic impact.

Emilie Grandidie, a spokeswoman for France’s electricity transmission operator RTE, told CNN there was “a small power cut” in the French Basque Country; “It lasted only a couple of minutes and was restored very quickly,” she said.

For several hours on Monday, tens of millions of people were asking each other when power would return, and why it was knocked out in the first place.

Neither question was easy to answer. But once power returns, it could still take days to untangle the damage caused by Monday’s worrying blackout.

Spain’s transportation minister said medium and long-distance trains won’t resume service until at least Tuesday, and the impact of a huge backlog in flights could stretch throughout the week.