Category: US

Editor’s Note: Rosemary Sullivan is a Canadian author. She has published 16 books, most recently “Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary ad Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva (2015)” and “The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation (2022).” The views expressed in this commentary are her own. Read more opinion on CNN.

CNN
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North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un was back in the spotlight last week after appearing at two lavish military events in Pyongyang. In one photograph, he is seen with his generals reviewing a midnight parade of ballistic missiles. Beside him stands his roughly 9-year-old daughter.

Ironically, the photo exactly mirrors one taken almost 100 years ago of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin standing on a similar balcony in Moscow reviewing a military parade with a young girl standing beside him.

Both children look enraptured to have the dictator’s attention. And I think: The predicament of the dictator’s daughter! What will Kim Ju Ae’s future be?

In my biography of Svetlana Alliluyeva, “Stalin’s Daughter,” I quoted Svetlana’s comment on her fate in her own memoir, “Only One Year.” She writes: “You are Stalin’s daughter. Actually, you are already dead. Your life is already finished. You can’t live your own life. You can’t live any life. You exist only in reference to a name.”

On a lengthy visit to Moscow in 2013, I was able to interview Stalin’s grandson Alexander Burdonsky, who told me that life in the Soviet army felt like a liberation after life at home. Like his aunt Svetlana, he took his mother’s name to escape his lineage.

Of Svetlana, he said: “I admired her as a woman and as a human being. I cannot say that of all my relatives. I loved her very much.”

He explained that his father Vasily Stalin was “a product of the freeloaders and leaches who surrounded him.” But Svetlana was her father’s daughter. “She had his organized intelligence, his unbelievable will, but she did not have his evil.”

During her childhood, Svetlana was the “beloved daughter.” Stalin called her his little hostess, little fly, little sparrow. She was the only one who could stop his rages against her mother by wrapping her arms around his Cossack boots.

After her mother’s suicide, her letters to her father are poignant. At age seven, she wrote: “Hello my dear Paposhka, How are you living and how is your health. … I wait for you in Sochi.” In a game he invented for her, Stalin advised his daughter that she should never ask for things; she should give orders. He was her Secretary No. 1.

All this changed when Svetlana was 16 and had her first chaste love affair with a famous filmmaker Aleksei Kapler, who was 39 (the same age as Stalin when he married Svetlana’s mother.) Stalin exiled Kapler to the Gulag for 10 years for having the audacity to romance his daughter. This was when Svetlana began to understand who her father was. Her status as beloved was conditional.

Stalin died in 1953. And Svetlana eventually defected to the US in 1967, but discovered that she still carried her father’s shadow; she was expected to cooperate with the CIA. When she was seduced back to Russia in 1984 to see her son who was supposedly ill, the government there offered her luxury dachas, apartments, cars. She refused them. She slipped back into the US and ended her life in virtual poverty.

She summed up her life in her memoir: “Wherever I go, whether to Australia or some island, I will always be the political prisoner of my father’s name.”

Burdonsky told me that the children of dictators have either to totally reject their heritage or to follow in their father’s footsteps. He said Svetlana was caught in between. She did not defend her father’s murderousness, but she thought he had been turned into a sinkhole for all the evil of his regime.

“He knew what he was doing,” she said of her father in her memoir. “He was neither insane nor misled. With cold calculation he cemented his power, afraid of losing it more than anything else in the world.” But a dictator needs accomplices. He was the head of a homicidal system she had the courage to reject.

This makes me think of Russian President Vladimir Putin today. We know virtually nothing about Kim Jung Un’s daughter, but we know a little about Putin’s two daughters, Mariya and Katerina. As children of the “first person,” people are careful not to speak about them; to do so would be dangerous.

Shrouded in secrecy, they attended university under assumed names (classmates had no idea who they were); they had guards to go to the movies and security details at home. Told that Putin loves his children and spoils them, a journalist once asked if the girls had Putin wrapped around their little fingers. Their mother Lyudmila replied: “Nobody can wrap Papa around their little finger.”

It appears that Putin’s daughters have chosen their father’s side. It is reported that Katerina is head of a new AI institute at Moscow State University and is said to be worth several billion. Mariya leads a state funded genetics program that has received billions from the Kremlin, according to US officials. Supposedly neither have political ambitions, which is reportedly the way Putin wants it.

But it would seem that Kim Jong Un might indeed be grooming his daughter to carry on his dynasty. North Korea just released a new postage stamp carrying photos of the dictator and his “beloved daughter” standing together watching the test-firing of the Hwasong-17 intercontinental ballistic missile.

Will she, like Svetlana, inherit her father’s will but reject his murderous legacy? Or will she prove a well-trained apprentice and possibly become more dangerous than her father? Given the closed universe of North Korea and the seduction of wealth and power, the latter is more likely.

Now, though, instead of being sold at auction, Mayhew’s old items will go to the late actor’s foundation and then be displayed at a Texas toy store dedicated to “Star Wars.”

Mayhew, center, played Chewbacca in several “Star Wars” films, appearing last in 2015’s “The Force Awakens.” Credit: Lucasefilm/Bad Robot/Walt Disney Studios/Kobal/Shutterstock

Within days of Angie Mayhew’s tweets and a chorus of “Star Wars” fans’ differing opinions on what to do with the items, the auction was called off. Ryedale Auctioneers head Angus Ashworth said in a statement to CNN that the couple who uncovered the “Star Wars” memorabilia in their attic were “quite happy to donate” the lot of items to the Peter Mayhew Foundation to have in its collection, “not for profit, so that fans can access it in perpetuity.”

“I can only apologise to all of the Star Wars (sic) fans who had already shown great interest in owning a bit of film history!” Ashworth said.

As for Mayhew’s souvenirs from his stint as Chewbacca, the foundation’s philanthropy director, Matthew Egan, told CNN that the items will be displayed at the Holocron Toy Store in Fort Worth, Texas, a popular “Star Wars” shop Egan said has donated more than $300,000 in “Star Wars” toys that the foundation then distributed to patients at children’s hospitals and to shelters for women who have experienced domestic violence.

Top image: Peter Mayhew, who played Chewbacca for decades in “Star Wars” films, left several scripts and memorabilia from his time on the films in his former home’s attic

Washington
CNN
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US intelligence officials are assessing the possibility that the suspected Chinese spy balloon was not deliberately maneuvered into the continental US by the Chinese government and are examining whether it was diverted off course by strong winds, multiple people briefed on the intelligence tell CNN.

After the balloon lifted off from Hainan, China last month, US officials monitored it as it made its way across the Pacific, sources said. After tracking the balloon for a little while, officials believed it would head towards Guam, where it would probably try to surveil military sites on the island.

But the balloon instead went north unexpectedly and crossed into Alaska, Canada, and then downward, reentering the US through northern Idaho and moving towards Montana – a path that US officials are not sure was purposeful, and may have been determined more by strong winds than deliberate, external maneuvering by Beijing.

China did maintain some ability to maneuver the balloon, however. Once the balloon was over Montana, officials believe China took advantage of its position to loiter over sensitive sites and try to collect intelligence.

The balloon then moved eastward over the US and was shot down off the coast of South Carolina on February 4 by US fighter jets. As CNN has reported, the US intelligence community last year developed a method of tracking what it says is a fleet of Chinese balloons operating across the globe.

Weather modeling done by CNN suggests it is plausible that the wind currents at the time diverted the balloon northward toward Alaska.

The Washington Post first reported that officials are examining the possibility that China didn’t intend for the balloon to travel over the continental US.

Any intelligence suggesting that the balloon’s path into the US may have been unintentional could ease tensions between Washington and Beijing and may offer both countries a way out of what has become an increasingly tense diplomatic crisis.

A day after the US publicly revealed the balloon had been spotted, Secretary of State Antony Blinken postponed a high-profile trip to Beijing and accused China of deliberately flying the balloon over the US in call with his counterpart Wang Yi, calling it “both unacceptable and irresponsible.”

“I made clear that the presence of this surveillance balloon in US airspace is a clear violation of US sovereignty and international law, that it’s an irresponsible act and that the PRC (People’s Republic of China) decision to take this action on the eve of my planned visit is detrimental to the substantive discussions that we were prepared to have,” Blinken told reporters on February 2.

Blinken and Wang will both attend the Munich Security Conference this weekend. US officials said a meeting between the two is not currently planned but have not fully ruled out the possibility.

It is not clear what intelligence the US has gleaned that has made officials consider it a credible possibility that the balloon’s overall trajectory may have been at least partly accidental. The US intelligence community is also closely scrutinizing which elements of the Chinese government ordered and approved the balloon’s mission.

The US and Chinese governments have been clashing publicly over the vessel, which China has said was a weather balloon that accidentally entered US airspace.

“Affected by the westerly wind and with limited self-control ability, the airship seriously deviated from the scheduled route,” China’s Foreign Ministry said on February 3. “China regrets that the airship strayed into the United States due to force majeure. China will continue to maintain communication with the US to properly handle the unexpected situation.”

The US, however, has insisted that the balloon was being used for surveillance, and that it was not completely at the mercy of the winds. China has flown similar surveillance balloons into mainland US airspace in the past, including near Florida and Texas. But US officials have acknowledged that the balloon’s maneuverability was limited.

Asked earlier this month whether the Chinese government is “controlling the movement of the balloon, or is it just floating with air streams,” Pentagon press secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder declined to comment in detail.

“I’m not going to go into any specific intelligence that we may have,” he said. “Again, we know this is a Chinese balloon and that it has the ability to maneuver, but I’ll just leave it at that.”

CNN
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Some Michigan State University students who survived Monday’s mass shooting – and their parents – had already been through a similar, horrific experience.

“(Fourteen) months ago I had to evacuate from Oxford High School when a fifteen year old opened fire and killed four of my classmates and injured seven more. Tonight, I am sitting under my desk at Michigan State University, once again texting everyone ‘I love you,’” Emma Riddle, a freshman studying history at the university tweeted overnight Monday. “When will this end?”

Her father, Matt Riddle, told CNN Tuesday his daughter survived the November 30, 2021, shooting at Oxford High School in a community about 80 miles northeast of the MSU campus in East Lansing.

There, another gunman opened fired Monday night, killing three students and wounding five others and sending terrified students running or escaping out of windows while others barricaded themselves inside classrooms. The shooter died from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound, authorities said.

Emma Riddle survived the first shooting in Oxford by hiding in the band hall where others had barricaded the door before eventually fleeing to a store in the area, her father said, recalling the phone call he got as she ran away.

Less than a year and a half later, his daughter called again, Matt Riddle said – this time hiding in her dorm at Michigan State.

“She was very fearful and scared,” Matt Riddle told CNN. “And shocked. She has been through this before. I just talked to her and tried to make her feel calm.”

In the hours after the shots rang out, as hundreds of police officers converged on the school to search for the gunman, the father and daughter exchanged texts and phone calls.

“Not knowing what was happening and the danger was hard,” Riddle said.

Andrea Ferguson told CNN affiliate WDIV her daughter and other classmates were also survivors of both shootings.

“I never expected in my lifetime to have to experience two school shootings,” Ferguson said. “There’s several kids there that our daughter’s friends with that are going through the same thing.”

CNN has reached out to Ferguson for comment.

Her daughter, Ava, a freshman, told “CNN This Morning” on Wednesday that the MSU shooting compounded her trauma from the 2021 tragedy.

“After Oxford they said that this wasn’t going to happen again, that we were going to be safe going back to school, and that’s just not the case,” Ava Ferguson said. “The other night, I was in shock. I didn’t think it was real, honestly.”

Ferguson said the latest shooting was “traumatizing all over again” and she’s “still a little like shaken up by it.”

“There should have been laws made here years ago – when Sandy Hook happened – and it never did,” she said. “And I feel like now’s the time people need to start realizing there is people dying every day because of gun violence and something needs to be done about it.”

Ava Ferguson said she is a cancer survivor and had only been on the MSU campus for a few weeks.

Her mother told WDIV that Ava was getting on a bus on another part of campus on Monday when she started receiving texts about the shooting.

“It was like reliving Oxford all over again,” said Ferguson, who had been on the phone with her daughter when the young woman received texts about the latest mass shooting.

The mother described her daughter as “unbelievably terrified” and said it was “really, really surreal” to relive such a horrific experience.

US Rep. Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat, said it was haunting to see a young person wearing an “Oxford Strong” sweatshirt in footage from MSU after Monday’s shooting.

“As a representative of Oxford, Michigan, I cannot believe that I’m here again doing this 15 months later,” Slotkin said during a news conference Tuesday. “And I am filled with rage that we have to have another press conference to talk about our children being killed in their schools.”

She added, “We have children in Michigan who are living through their second school shooting in under a year and a half. If this is not a wake-up call to do something, I don’t know what is.”

“I feel for our children and young people,” East Lansing Mayor Ron Bacon told CNN on Tuesday.

“We now have a complete generation that has grown up with this, many times over, from elementary all the way up to now, they live with this the entire time,” Bacon added.

Monday’s assault occurred hours before the five-year anniversary of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. It marked the 67th mass shooting – with four or more shot, not including a gunman – in 2023, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive.

Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard confirmed deputies from his office responded to both the Oxford High and MSU shootings.

“So very many thoughts are running through my head right now after being on Michigan State’s campus last night during the tragedy,” he tweeted Tuesday.

“To our Oxford community, I know that this is terribly traumatic. Know that we are here for you.”

As for Emma Riddle, her father drove from his home in Oxford to the Michigan State campus to pick up his daughter and her roommate. Emma is home for now until classes resume, he said, and she is working through the trauma.

“She is OK – as OK as she can be,” he said. “It was heartbreaking, as a parent, because she said ‘I have tools to work through this. I have been through this before so I know how to process this.’”

Riddle advised other parents in the same situation as his family to just let their children know they aren’t alone.

“Just being there for them, no matter what they need,” he said. “As much as you are able don’t let them be alone.”

London
CNN
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Duangphet Phromthep, one of the 12 boys rescued from a flooded Thai cave after a weekslong operation that drew global attention in 2018, has died in the UK, British and Thai officials announced Wednesday.

Phromthep, who was enrolled in a soccer academy in Leicestershire, England, died after being rushed to hospital on Sunday, Leicestershire Police said in a statement to CNN.

Th northern regional branch of the Thai government’s public relations arm said on Facebook that Phromthep, 17, died due to an accident, without providing more details.

“The atmosphere at his house in Chiang Rai province was full of sorrow,” PR Thailand’s statement said.

Zico Foundation, a Thai non-profit organization which had helped Phromthep study in the UK via a soccer scholarship, wrote on Facebook Wednesday: “Zico Foundation would like to express our sorrow for the pass of Dom Duangpet Phromthep, a scholarship student from Zico foundation,” posting a picture of Phromthep.

Phromthep was the captain of the Wild Boars youth soccer team which was rescued after being trapped for more than two weeks in a flooded cave network in the northern Thai province of Chiang Rai in the summer of 2018.

The 12 boys and their coach became trapped when rising flood water cut them off deep inside the cave, sparking what became a near three-week international rescue effort.

The miraculous story of the Thai cave rescue

Divers involved in the rescue described treacherous conditions, with fast-moving shallow water passing through very narrow passages.

In a complicated three-day final operation, the boys were split into groups of four and provided with 5-millimeter-thick wetsuits, full face mask breathing apparatus and air bottles.

Each boy was taken out by two divers, who carried their oxygen tanks and guided them through murky tunnels. Each rescue took several hours, with much of the time spent under water.

The most dangerous part was the first kilometer, during which the divers and boys were required to squeeze through a narrow, flooded channel.

Rescuers needed to hold the boys’ oxygen tanks in front of them and swim pencil-like through submerged holes. Having completed this section, the boys were then handed over to separate, specialist rescue teams, who helped assist them through the remainder of the cave, much of which they could wade through.

Phromthep, known as Dom, left the cave as part of the second group of boys carried out on more than two weeks after they were first trapped. He was one of three boys whose birthdays slipped by while they were deep underground. In his first message to his parents he implored them not to forget. “I’m fine, but the weather is quite cold. But don’t worry,” he said. “Don’t forget my birthday,” he said.

From hospital, after his rescue, he said he wanted pork and rice to eat and thanked everyone for all their support.

All 12 of the rescued boys and their coach were then transported to a nearby hospital for recuperation.

Family members greeted the news of their rescue with relief and tears of happiness, punching the air when they heard that their boys were alive.

Reacting to Phromthep’s death, Prajak Sutham, one of the Thai cave survivors, wrote on Facebook: “We have been through together a lot, good and bad times. We had went through life and death situations together, when you told me to wait and see the time you became a national player. I always believed that you could do it. Last time we met before you left to UK, I jokingly told you that, when you’re back I would ask for your signature. Rest in Peace Bro, we always have each other, the 13 of us.”

Rick Stanton, the lead diver from the 2018 rescue mission, told CNN’s Don Riddell that he was shocked at the news, and said that fellow rescuers had been informed.

“When John Volanthen and I first found the Wild Boars at the end of a fraught nine day search, it was Dom who took the lead and wrote the first messages to the outside world,” he said in an email.

“As a personal recollection, it was Dom whose unconscious body I swam with as I escorted him to safety on the second day of the rescue mission. I carefully held his precious life in my grasp, bearing the full weight of responsibility towards his survival through the most extreme of circumstances.”

The Doi Wao temple in his hometown in Chiang Rai also expressed their condolences to Phromthep’s mother.

Brooke House College, the school which Phromthep attended as a Football Academy student, said in a statement that his death “has left our college community deeply saddened and shaken.”

“This event has left our college community deeply saddened and shaken. We unite in grief with all of Dom’s family, friends, former teammates and those involved in all parts of his life, as well as everyone affected in any way by this loss in Thailand and throughout the college’s global family,” the college’s principal, Ian Smith, said.

According to the statement, Brooke House College is liaising with statutory authorities and the Royal Thai Embassy in London, and “dedicating all resources to assist our student body, as they as young people process Dom’s passing.”