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Cuba electricity returns for some after major power outage left millions in the dark
Cuba’s government on Saturday said that some electricity was restored on the island after one of the country’s major power plants failed and left millions without electricity in an outage that started two days earlier.
Energy minister Vicente de la O Levy said the country had 500 megawatts of energy in its electrical grid early Saturday. He posted on X that “several substations in the west now have electricity.”
O Levy also said two thermoelectric power plants are back and two more will resume their operations “in the next few hours.”
In addition to the Antonio Guiteras plant, whose failure on Friday affected the entire national system, Cuba has several others and it wasn’t immediately clear whether or not they remained functional.
There is no official estimate for when the blackout will be ended. Even in a country that is used to outages amid a deepening economic crisis, Friday’s supply collapse was unprecedented in modern times, aside from incidents involving intense hurricanes, like one in 2022.
The Cuban government has announced emergency measures to slash electricity demand, including suspending classes, shutting down some state-owned workplaces and canceling nonessential services. Officials said that 1.64 gigawatts went offline during peak hours, about half the total demand at the time.
Local authorities said the outage, which started in a smaller scale on Thursday, stemmed from increased demand from small and medium-sized companies and residences’ air conditioners. Later, the blackout got worse due to breakdowns in old thermoelectric plants that haven’t been properly maintained and the lack of fuel to operate some facilities.
Changes to electricity rates for small- and medium-sized companies, which have proliferated since they were first authorized by the communist government in 2021, are also being considered.
At least seven people were killed Saturday after part of a ferry dock collapsed on Georgia’s Sapelo Island, authorities said.
Multiple people were taken to hospitals, and crews from the U.S. Coast Guard, the McIntosh County Fire Department, the Georgia Department of Natural Resources and others were searching the water, according to spokesperson Tyler Jones of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, which operates the dock.
Jones said a gangway at the dock collapsed and sent people plunging into the water. It happened as crowds gathered on the island for a celebration of its tiny Gullah-Geechee community of Black slave descendants.
“There have been seven fatalities confirmed,” Jones said. “There have been multiple people transported to area hospitals, and we are continuing to search the water for individuals.”
Jones said he did not know what caused the gangway to collapse, but officials believe there were at least 20 people on it at the time. The gangway connected an outer dock where people board the ferry to another dock onshore.
Among the dead was a chaplain for the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, Jones said.
Sapelo Island is about 60 miles south of Savannah and is reachable from the mainland by boat.
Cultural Day is an annual fall event spotlighting the island’s tiny community of Hogg Hummock, which is home to a few dozen Black residents. The community of dirt roads and modest homes was founded by former slaves from the cotton plantation of Thomas Spalding.
Small communities descended from enslaved island populations in the South — known as Gullah, or Geechee in Georgia — are scattered along the coast from North Carolina to Florida. Scholars say their separation from the mainland caused residents to retain much of their African heritage, from their unique dialect to skills and crafts such as cast-net fishing and weaving baskets.
A man accused of drugging and sexually assaulting nine women at his homes in Los Angeles County, allegedly killing one of the victims as she died from being drugged, is facing more than a dozen felony charges, prosecutors said Friday.
Michael DiGiorgio, 50, allegedly committed the assaults between May 2019 and November 2021 at his homes in Redondo and Hermosa Beach, according to the LA County District Attorney’s Office. He has been charged with 18 felony counts including murder, forcible rape and rape of an unconscious person, prosecutors said, and faces up to life in state prison if convicted of all charges.
Prosecutors have also filed a special allegation that he caused great bodily injury to a victim during the furnishing of a controlled substance, which carries a sentencing enhancement under California Penal Code Section 12022.7.
DiGiorgio was scheduled to be arraigned at a courthouse in downtown Los Angeles on Friday. CBS News Los Angeles has reached out to the DA’s office for information on how he pleaded.
Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office.
No other details about the alleged crimes or the investigation were released by the DA’s office in a statement.
“I extend my deepest sympathy to the victims, whose lives have been irrevocably changed and the life lost by the alleged brutal acts of the offender,” District Attorney George Gascón said in the statement. “I encourage anyone with information related to these incidents or any other incidents regarding Mr. DiGiorgio to report it to the Redondo Beach Police Department.”
Prosecutors released a photo of DiGiorgio as investigators believe there could be more victims out there.
The charges filed against him include:
- one count of murder
- one felony count of forcible rape
- two felony counts of forcible sexual penetration
- three felony counts of rape by use of a drug
- two felony counts of sodomy by use of a drug
- five felony counts of sexual penetration by use of a drug
- one felony count of oral copulation by use of a drug
- one felony count of rape of an unconscious person
- two felony counts of furnishing a controlled substance
The Sex Crimes Division of the DA’s office and Redondo Beach Police Department are investigating the case. Anyone who may be a victim or has other information is asked to reach Redondo Beach police at 714-863-2859.
Philip G. Zimbardo, the psychologist behind the controversial “Stanford Prison Experiment” that was intended to examine the psychological experiences of imprisonment, has died. He was 91.
Stanford University announced Friday that Zimbardo died Oct. 14 at his home in San Francisco. A cause of death was not provided.
In the 1971 prison study, Zimbardo and a team of graduate students recruited college-aged males to spend two weeks in a mock prison in the basement of a building on the Stanford campus.
The study was ended after six days as the students playing guards became psychologically abusive and those playing prisoners became anxious, emotionally depressed and enraged, according to the Stanford statement.
Zimbardo was criticized for taking the role of superintendent – becoming an active participant in the study and no longer a neutral observer.
“The outcome of our study was shocking and unexpected,” Zimbardo would later co-write with one of the graduate students who was part of the project.
The experiment is now used in psychology classes to study the psychology of evil and the ethics of psychological research with human subjects, Stanford said.
Zimbardo’s research also included persuasion, hypnosis, cults, shyness, time perspective, altruism, and compassion, Stanford said.
Zimbardo is survived by his wife, Christina Maslach Zimbardo, three children and four grandchildren.
