stolen

Election body says deadlocked result won’t be undermined even if foreign interference claims are found to be true.

The head of Israel’s elections commission has said the results of the country’s general election would still stand even if claims of foreign interference were substantiated.

“Our position is that even if the suspicions are substantiated, this would not undermine the integrity of the electoral process or the election results as a whole,” Central Elections Committee head Noam Sohlberg said in a video on Sunday, in which he appeared with the head of the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, and the attorney general.

Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu’s Likud party had questioned the results after saying, without providing evidence, that Arab-led parties, which made significant gains in Tuesday’s elections, “stole” the vote and accepted funding from Qatar to do it.

Qatar has rejected the allegations, calling it a disinformation campaign.

Also on Sunday, Israeli police released two out of three political activists arrested before Tuesday’s polls opened. They were carrying envelopes of cash, allegedly to bribe voters, police said.

One was released on unspecified conditions, while another was ordered to remain on house arrest.

Police said the suspects were connected to the Arab-led Ra’am party, which won eight seats.

Its leader, Mansour Abbas, denounced the arrests as undemocratic and “an attempt to influence the election results”.

‘Orchestrated and organised campaign’

Main opposition leader Eisenkot on Sunday accused Netanyahu of launching an “orchestrated and organised campaign to delegitimise the results”.

Eisenkot has previously ruled out forming a coalition with Arab parties, but a deadlock in Tuesday’s elections means siding with the parties could help him form a government.

Netanyahu’s bloc won 53 seats in Tuesday’s elections, while the opposition bloc, led by Gadi Eisenkot, won 48, meaning neither side can form a government in Israel’s 120-seat parliament alone.

Israel’s three Arab-led parties, including the Ra’am party, won a record 19 seats.

A coalition of Arab parties with Eisenkot would provide a comfortable majority of 67 in parliament. However, for many in Israel, the idea of siding with Arab parties is politically unpalatable.

The results are due to be officially certified this week, after which President Isaac Herzog must nominate a candidate to form a new government.

Binance, which was founded in China in 2017, allows users to trade digital assets and is estimated to have more than 300 million registered users worldwide.

The company said in 2024 that it had more than $160bn in assets under its custody.

A lot of the fear right now from Binance users – and the crypto industry at large – is whether or not Binance will actually be capable of covering this enormous financial loss.

The company has said repeatedly that customer funds will be covered and that the firm is strong enough to weather the storm.

But crypto history watchers have been pointing out online that this is exactly the kind of message that FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried gave before his crypto exchange collapsed in 2022, leading to huge losses for customers and the industry.

Several experts have warned customers not to regard Binance’s promise to cover losses as legally binding and said they may need to pursue litigation to recover them.

Daniel Tunkel, of the London-based Edwin Coe law firm, said that would “come down to what [customers] have been promised in their contracts”, and “where Binance can be sued for non-performance, if it comes to it”.

Binance has been subject of regulatory scrutiny around the world.

Meanwhile, AI-powered investigations company TRM Labs said that several elements of the attack resembled earlier North Korean-linked incidents, including the Bybit hack.

In the last five years the crypto industry has been beset by enormous losses from hackers.

In nearly all cases investigators have blamed hackers from North Korea, pointing to the infamous Lazarus Group – also know as TraderTraitor. The names refer to clusters of cyber criminals accused of working directly for the regime.

Chainalysis, a crypto analytics firm, said it had “high confidence” that a North Korean is linked to the hack.

North Korea is an impoverished country with very little industry and heavy international sanctions and experts say the regime uses cyber crime as a way to bring money in.

North Korea has always denied this, but the wealth of evidence from cryptocurrency flow analysis and insider interviews from defectors is compelling.

It makes North Korea likely to be the only nation that uses hacking as a way to raise public funds.

Democrats, election officials and voting rights groups have long wondered whether President Trump, upon his return to the Oval Office, would again attempt to overturn an election when his party is trailing.

It’s no longer hypothetical.

Late last week, the president directed his Department of Justice to preemptively contest a potential Republican loss in the U.S. Senate race in Alaska. The department is demanding a court hold up certification of a possible Democratic win until it’s determined whether voters were confused by having two candidates with the same name on the ballot.

Trump followed that by calling for the prosecution of Democratic candidate Mary Peltola, a former congresswoman, based on a New York Times report that her campaign helped recruit someone named Dan Sullivan to siphon away votes from the Republican incumbent, also named Dan Sullivan. The governor has ordered an investigation.

Academics believe the lawsuit is the first time since the Civil Rights era that the federal government has sued to halt certification of an election, a duty the Constitution places in the hands of states.

Trump, for years, has claimed elections are rigged when he or his party loses, and this time is no exception. He has used his midterm rallies to say Democrats cheat, criticize election officials by name and call the ranked choice voting system in Alaska, which might hold the key to Senate control, a scam.

But the certification lawsuit elevates Trump’s crusade beyond mere rhetoric, indicating that he is preparing to use the power of the presidency to try to reverse a possible loss as his party struggles to hold its control of Congress in Tuesday’s elections.

Earlier this week, the president also announced a $1 million bounty for anyone who provides proof of prior or current voter fraud in the country. It wasn’t clear whether or how he planned to follow through.

“For at least the last year and a half, they’ve been laying that groundwork,” said Theresa Lee, a senior attorney with the ACLU. “We’ve been preparing for just as long, if not longer.”

Trump says he’ll accept results if the election is ‘honest’

Trump told reporters this week that he would accept the election results, but with his typical caveat: “If they’re honest elections,” he said.

That follows a pattern. Trump has preemptively claimed that upcoming elections will be rigged and labeled elections he’s lost as stolen. It started with the 2016 Republican Iowa caucuses, when he came in second to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.

“Ted Cruz didn’t win Iowa,” Trump said at the time. “He stole it.”

Democrats and other groups that oppose Trump have been concerned that his words would turn into directives to have his administration interfere in the midterms. They have been running exercises for months and have lawsuits pre-written. They also plan to have tens of thousands of people monitoring the polls on Election Day.

So far, early voting has been quiet, with about 35 million people already casting ballots without any notable disruption.

In that respect, this year’s election so far resembles 2025’s off-year elections in New Jersey, Virginia and a handful of other states. Democrats braced for possible Trump action then, but the election proceeded with no major issues. But the Justice Department’s more aggressive actions this month already make 2026 different from any election in recent memory.

It has sued California to block it from counting ballots after it alleged the state had 20,000 noncitizens on its rolls and made a similar demand of Washington related to about 400 voters in that state. Both states said the demands came too close to the election to fulfill, and a federal judge Wednesday rejected the federal government’s California demands.

Earlier, the Justice Department seized ballots and election records related to the 2020 presidential election in Georgia’s Fulton County, and the administration launched a sweeping investigation of that vote, though it has yet to turn up evidence supporting Trump’s false claims of fraud.

Attorney General Todd Blanche said the Justice Department does not want to intervene in elections, but had no choice in Alaska.

“We are not doing anything improper,” Blanche said Sunday on CNN. “But I do think it’s important for the American people to understand that we are not — (and) President Trump is not — trying to take over a state election in any way, shape or form.”

After the lawsuit was filed, Trump told reporters he was the one who pushed for it: “I’m the one that said do it,” the president said.

Lawsuits seem more ‘impulsive’ than strategic

Though the Trump administration claimed to be acting on behalf of Alaska’s voters in its lawsuit to hold up certification, the president’s Republican allies in the state didn’t appear happy.

Sen. Sullivan would not say whether he supported the lawsuit. Alaska’s Republican-controlled state government filed court papers to try to have it dismissed. The state’s other Republican senator, Lisa Murkowski, said the administration “should never have filed” it.

While controversial, the situation in Alaska is not that unusual. Political parties often support extra candidates on the ballot to try to pull votes from their rivals. If state courts allow it, legal experts say, the federal government has no role challenging the results.

Derek Muller, a Notre Dame law professor, wrote that the Alaska lawsuit’s legal argument was “one of the worst ones I’ve ever seen.” He said that should reassure the public that Trump won’t be able to change election outcomes.

“The notion that there’s going to be something systemic that’s going to thwart the will of the voters seems much more speculative,” he said. “A lot of the conduct seems impulsive rather than strategic and planned.”

The courts have repeatedly rebuffed the administration, in many cases because the Constitution gives the president no direct power over how elections are run. Courts put on hold two Trump executive orders seeking to change voting procedures. The administration also has lost more than two dozen cases trying to get detailed voter information from the states.

That resembles 2020, when Trump and his allies tried to overturn his loss to Democrat Joe Biden and in the process lost dozens of lawsuits.

Can the institutions hold?

Pat McCrory, a former Republican governor of North Carolina, is part of Right Count, a group of conservatives pushing back against election conspiracy theories and intervention in local elections. He said he’s confident the system will hold.

“The only thing that protects us from anarchy is this thin piece of paper called the Constitution,” McCrory said. “That thin piece of paper is, to me, a cement wall.”

It’s one that many analysts expect will continue to stymie Trump in the courts.

“The courts are likely to throw most, if not all, of these charges out,” said Matt Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University. “But this is a way of intensifying the signal to Trump’s supporters that the elections are rigged.”

The Justice Department in 2020 refused to join Trump’s allies in litigation. In his second term, Trump has pushed out career staff and stocked his administration with people who helped him challenge the 2020 election. That’s led to mounting concern he could deploy immigration agents, the FBI or even the military to the polls or seize ballots or voting machines, although multiple administration officialshave denied they have such plans.

All of that could happen before courts even have a chance to weigh in, said Brendan Nyhan, a Dartmouth political scientist.

“The threat is that he’ll take actions that can’t be undone,” Nyhan said.

Riccardi and Swenson write for the Associated Press.

A FedEx truck parked near the sprawling grading center of Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA) in Santa Ana was robbed a week ago of trading cards worth nearly $1 million, the Santa Ana Police Department said.

PSA reported to police that two stolen pallets of about 100 packages of cards apiece had an approximate value of $963,000. About 50 packages from a third pallet were also stolen, and their value was still being calculated as of Tuesday morning.

The cards had been sent from all over the country to PSA to be graded, a necessary step for collectors in authenticating their wares. Items included primarily sports cards and Pokémon cards, as well as one-of-one pieces. The cards had been graded and were set to be returned to their owners when they were stolen.

The FedEx driver left the vehicle, which was parked near PSA’s shipping and receiving address at 1610 E. St. Andrew Place, for an hour to 90 minutes, police said. The truck lock was busted and packages stolen while he was away.

“It remains an open case,” Santa Ana police spokesperson Natalie Garcia told NBC News, “and we have not made any arrests or recovered any stolen goods.”

PSA said it was taking measures to prevent the stolen cards from circulating through the usual venues and marketplaces while also reimbursing card owners for at least a portion of their losses. Trading cards and other collectibles are verified and assigned condition grades by PSA, which establishes their value and protects them by assigning serial numbers and certification information. PSA said it has deactivated the certificates tied to the stolen items.

“We have deactivated the certificates for the stolen items and notified marketplace partners so they can be on the lookout for rare and serialized items,” PSA said in a statement. “Our customer service team has contacted affected customers directly and is arranging compensation based on fair market value.”

PSA sent a letter to affected cards owners, detailing the steps taken to make the owners whole.

“After leaving our PSA facility in Southern California, a FedEx vehicle transporting PSA orders was burglarized, and items were stolen,” the letter read, continuing with a list of items titled “What we are doing.”

Among the items are deactivating the serial numbers on the affected items, notifying commerce partners across digital, auction and other selling platforms so they can look out for stolen items; aiding FedEx and law enforcement in their investigations; and studying what happened so a repeat can be avoided.

Nick Andrews, whose social media persona is the Boston Card Hunter, is keeping track of items reported stolen, a number that had exceeded 1,000 by Tuesday morning. He wrote on X that one victim had cards worth $500,000 stolen.

Card trader Sky-B said on a video that 104 of the cards he collected over the past two years are missing. They had been certified at PSA and were being returned to him in Michigan when he learned about the theft. He said he spent $8,000 on grading, and the cards carried insurance of up to $156,000, less than their market value.

“There were cards in that order that you can’t replace,” Sky-B said.

Longtime sports business reporter Darren Rovell, an avid trading card and memorabilia collector since childhood, said on social media that expensive collectibles are at risk any time they are shipped. Not only can shipping labels and declared insurance values reveal their potential contents, “the simple name PSA or Collectors in the address box is the threat,” Rovell wrote.

The cultural exchange comes amid strengthening ties between the two countries.

Israel has returned 22 ancient artefacts stolen from Greece, a cultural exchange that comes as the two countries strengthen ties.

Greek and Israeli officials did not provide details on Tuesday on how the artefacts were discovered in Israel or the circumstances surrounding their illegal removal from Greece.

The Israel Antiquities Authority’s Theft Prevention Unit had located the items, Pninat Yanay, Israel’s ambassador to Greece, said.

Greek Minister of Culture Lina Mendoni accepted the objects from the Israeli Antiquities Authority at a ceremony held at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.

“It is the first time that Israel has returned antiquities to Greece, marking the starting point of closer cooperation between the two countries for the protection of cultural heritage,” Mendoni said.

“Every return of a cultural object to its place of origin has a broader symbolic and moral dimension.”

The collection includes 15 Attic vases, six Corinthian vases, and a bronze female statuette.

The objects are dated between 700 BC and 320 BC.

Yanay said the return of the antiquities created “the conditions for further strengthening cooperation between Greece and Israel”.

Greece-Israel relations

Greece and Israel have strengthened energy and defence ties in recent years.

In August, Israel signed a $3.5bn defence deal to build a multi-layered air defence system in Greece, called the Achilles Shield. It is the largest defence deal between the two countries, and one of the most significant export agreements in Israel’s recent history.

Renoir art heist suspects were planning ‘imminent’ second robbery, prosecutors say.

Two paintings by the impressionist master Renoir which were stolen from a French museum last month have been found damaged behind a false wall in a private home after police made several arrests ahead of what prosecutors say was an imminent second heist.

Marseille prosecutor Nicolas Bessone said six suspects were arrested on Wednesday after authorities discovered they were planning to target the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, home to one of Europe’s largest collections of modern art.

Bessone said the arrests were prompted by the “very strong suspicion that another heist was imminent”.

“We were very clearly looking at the repetition of a criminal scheme”, said Eric Antonetti, the head of the Alpes-Maritimes judicial police.

On September 8, thieves used an electric saw to cut through a fence to enter the Renoir Museum in Cagnes-sur-Mer on the French Riviera, according to investigators.

An alarm sounded and police officers arrived four minutes later, a swift response that “apparently caused the perpetrators to panic,” Bessone said.

The stolen works, “Madame Colonna Romano” and “Young Woman at the Well” by impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, were valued at about 4.2m euros ($4.7m), Bessone said.

The thieves also attempted to steal two other Renoir paintings, “Madame Pichon” and “Coco Reading”, which depicts Renoir’s young ‌son ‌Claude. They abandoned them in the museum gardens while fleeing police.

“As they fled, they were unable to take all four paintings and abandoned two of them, which were later found in a protective sleeve,” he said.

Damaged and torn

The paintings were found hidden behind a false wall in a house on Friday. Both works were damaged and will need ⁠restoration. One of the paintings, “Madame Colonna Romano”, had been torn.

“These two paintings are not simply works of art. They are part of our city’s history,” Bryan Masson, the mayor of Cagnes-sur-Mer, near Nice, said on Friday. “Knowing they have been recovered is an immense relief.”

The recovery came almost exactly one month ⁠after the theft, following an investigation that used ⁠DNA evidence, mobile phone geolocation data and surveillance video.

The two key suspects include a 29-year-old, who was charged after investigators recovered DNA from a bag left behind during the getaway.

They ⁠were charged with organised theft and other offences. A third man, accused of hiding the paintings, was charged with organised handling of stolen goods.

A fourth suspect, who investigators say was approached about buying the artworks, was charged ‌with handling stolen goods and taking part in a criminal conspiracy.

Bessone said the suspects had denied planning a second museum raid, but he added that he did “not believe the principal suspect visited that ‌museum simply out of a love of art”.