Daredevils reach top of Empire State Building with banner, before apparent proposal
The Empire State building and the skyline of Manhattan is viewed on January 21, 2015 in New York City. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
(NEW YORK) — A daredevil couple climbed to the top of the Empire State Building and unfurled a banner on top of its spire Wednesday afternoon, taking their love to new heights.
Angela Nikolau and Ivan Beerkus, who have gained an online following for their death-defying skyscraper climbs around the world, stayed on top of the skyscraper for several minutes as cameras rolled on the action before coming down on the spire, police sources told ABC News.
Beerkus then appeared to propose to his longtime girlfriend before they were taken into custody.
The black banner appeared to reference a Jimi Hendrix quote and said in white letters, “When the power of love beats the love of power the world knows peace.”
The banner has been recovered, police said.
An NYPD helicopter was sent and the building’s observation deck was cleared of visitors as police arrived. The observation deck was reopened later in the afternoon.
The top of the building’s spire is 1,454 feet above the ground.
It was not immediately clear how the couple got into position to free climb the metal structure that services the spire, broadcast antenna and red anti-collision beacon atop the building.
A spokesperson for the Empire State Building said in a statement to ABC News that there was at no time danger to the building’s tenants or visitors.
“It is to be emphasized that the Empire State Building Observation Deck, atop the World’s Most Famous Building in the center of New York City, does offer a practical way for the most memorable marriage proposals,” the spokesman said in a statement.
The Empire State Building’s rules prohibit masks and costumes.
The observation deck was reopened later in the afternoon on Wednesday.
They were featured in a 2024 Netflix documentary “Skywalkers: A Love Story.” The film showcased the couple’s climb of Merdeka 118 in Kuala Lumpur, the world’s second tallest building at 2,227 feet.
The Russian couple have frequently posted photos of their stunts on their social media pages. In many of their posts, they are seen standing and posing at the edge of buildings from extreme heights.
Some of their posts show them hugging and kissing while on top of buildings.
Nikolau and Beerkus appeared to chronicle their climb up the Empire State Building on social media Wednesday and posted close-up images of the proposal from the spire along closeups of the engagement ring.
Doug Band, a former adviser to Bill Clinton, is seen with Ghislaine Maxwell in this undated photo. (U.S. Justice Department)
(WASHINGTON) — Doug Band, a former close adviser to President Bill Clinton, is on Capitol Hill Tuesday for a closed-door interview with the congressional committee probing the government’s investigation of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Band, who began his tenure with Clinton as an intern in the mid-1990s, is expected to be questioned by the House Oversight Committee about the former president’s interactions and travels with Epstein in the years after Clinton left the Oval Office in 2001.
Often described as one of the architects of Clinton’s post-presidential endeavors, including the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative, Band can also expect to be pressed about his own communications with Epstein’s convicted co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, which were made public earlier this year by the Justice Department as part of the release of files mandated by the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
“We know that Mr. Band set up several meetings between Clinton and Epstein,” House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., told reporters on his way into the hearing room. “We know Mr. Band accompanied Mr. Clinton on several flights on Epstein’s jet. We know that Mr. Band also had a lot of communication with Ms. Maxwell, so that’ll be a topic of several questions.”
Emails between Band and Maxwell included talk of meetings with Epstein and numerous exchanges containing suggestive innuendo and cheeky nicknames for each other like “babycakes” and “booboo,” according to files released by the DOJ.
The bulk of the messages were exchanged between 2001-2004, before Epstein first faced criminal charges in Florida in 2006.
Band, 54, has not been accused of any wrongdoing. An attorney expected to accompany Band to the interview did not reply to a message seeking comment in advance of Band’s appearance in Washington, D.C.
Earlier this year, Band told The New York Times that his messages with Maxwell occurred when he was in his 20s and unmarried — and he denied any romantic involvement with Maxwell, who is currently serving a 20-year sentence for sex-trafficking and other offenses.
“There was absolutely no physical relationship that occurred between us. Ever,” Band said in a statement to the Times, in which he referred to Maxwell as “a monster.”
The committee is also expected to query Band about his explosive claim — reported by Vanity Fair in 2020 — that the former president had visited Epstein’s private estate in the U.S. Virgin Islands in early 2003. The article, which centered on Band’s contentious split with the Clintons, did not detail how Band knew about the purported island trip or if he had any evidence to bolster his claim.
Records created by Epstein’s pilots made public through civil litigation show Clinton — and an entourage that typically included Band — aboard Epstein’s plane on more than two dozen flight legs in 2002-03, but none of those flights went to the island, according to the pilot’s logs. Clinton, Epstein and Maxwell have all denied that the former president had ever been to Little St. James, as Epstein’s island was known.
“He never, absolutely never went. And I can be sure of that because there’s no way he would have gone,” Maxwell told then then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche in a recorded interview last summer.
“I’ve never been to that island,” Clinton said in his own interview with the Oversight Committee in February.
The former president has not been accused of any wrongdoing in connection to his association with Epstein. He has said he stopped interacting with Epstein before any criminal allegations surfaced and has denied knowledge of any of Epstein’s crimes.
Clinton told the committee that he and Band were once “close,” and that Band had been one of the people he tasked to “operationalize” plans to develop the Clinton Global Initiative in his early post-presidency years.
“He worked for me for years,” Clinton said. “[H]e arranged airplane flights and things like that and was doing work on the first Clinton Global Initiative in 2005. And I know that he knew both Epstein and Maxwell. I do not know to what extent he was in contact with them.”
In her interview with Blanche, Maxwell said she began spending time with Clinton after he left the White House in 2001, as he was forging his post-presidential path through the establishment of the Clinton Foundation and, later, the Clinton Global Initiative.
“I was part of the beginning process of the Clinton Global Initiative. And that was something that I helped with and that was me, and Epstein may have helped me help them,” she said, according to a transcript of the July 2025 interview.
“I started spending time with the former president and with Doug and his team,” Maxwell said. “I had no purpose, really, other than I had — obviously offered something. I don’t know, ideas.”
Band’s appearance before the Oversight Committee is voluntary and will not be recorded. The committee has typically released transcripts of interviews after they are reviewed for accuracy and redacted to remove any potential references to alleged victims.
In recent weeks the committee has heard from Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and two of Epstein’s former assistants, Sarah Kellen and Lesley Groff.
Later this summer, interviews are scheduled with former Obama White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler, former Epstein attorney Alan Dershowitz, and Epstein’s former private banker at JPMorgan Chase, Jes Staley.
Comer has indicated that a report on the investigation’s findings will be issued by the end of the year.
A man is arrested after throwing a hand-made smoke grenade at a protest near Gracie Mansion, on March 7, 2026, in New York. (Ryan Murphy/Getty Images)
(NEW YORK) — Two improvised explosive devices brought to a counterprotest outside Gracie Mansion in New York City Saturday are being investigated as “an act of ISIS-inspired terrorism,” and the two suspects arrested in connection with the incident are facing federal terrorism charges, New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said Monday.
According to a federal criminal complaint released Monday, both suspects openly pledged allegiance to ISIS while in the presence of police, and one suspect allegedly told officers they “wanted to carry out an attack bigger than the Boston Marathon bombing,” which the suspect noted “caused only ‘three deaths.’”
The explosive devices contained the volatile substance triacetone triperoxide, known as TATP, and were made to “injure, maim or worse,” Tisch said of Saturday’s incident.
“These were not hoax devices or smoke bombs. They were improvised explosive devices,” Tisch said during a news conference outside the Gracie Mansion mayor’s residence with New York City Mayor Zohran Mandami, the city’s first Muslim mayor.
One of the devices was ignited and deployed at protesters in a crosswalk on East End Avenue and East 87 Street, and the other device was detonated close by, Tisch said.
Tisch said a third suspected IED was found in the car of the two suspects, a black 2010 Honda with New Jersey license plates, parked on the Upper East Side of Manhattan near Gracie Mansion, prompting an immediate evacuation of homes in the area. She said the device did not test positive for explosives.
All of the devices are being sent to the FBI lab in Quantico, Virginia, for additional testing, Tisch said.
Two Pennsylvania men who are in custody are charged in a five-count federal complaint with attempting to provide material support and resources to ISIS, use of a weapon of mass destruction, transportation of explosive materials, interstate transportation and receipt of explosives, and unlawful possession of destructive devices.
The suspects were identified as Emir Balat of Langhorne, Pennsylvania, and Ibrahim Kayumi of Newton, Pennsylvania, according to Tisch and the federal complaint.
The suspects were ordered to be held without bail after they made their initial appearances, both in shackles, in Manhattan federal court on Monday afternoon. They did not enter a plea to the charges.
“They’re suspected of coming here to commit an act of terrorism,” Mamdani said Monday. “Let me say this plainly: Anyone who comes to New York City to bring violence to our streets will be held accountable in accordance with the law.”
The explosives were deployed at an anti-Muslim protest outside Gracie Mansion that was organized by far-right, anti-immigrant provocateur Jack Lang, officials said. The event was called “Stop the Islamic Takeover of New York City.”
The anti-Muslim protest drew counterprotesters who called their response “Run Nazis Out of New York City,” according to the criminal complaint.
“FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force is investigating the matter with our partners at NYPD as well as the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York,” the FBI said in a statement Sunday.
Balat and Kayumi are suspected of attending the event as part of the counterprotest to the anti-Muslim demonstration, authorities said Monday.
Neither Mamdani nor his wife, Rama Duwaji, were in Gracie Mansion when the incident occurred, the mayor said Monday.
Immediately following his arrest, Kayumi was asked by someone in the surrounding crowd why he allegedly attempted to bomb the protest, according to the complaint.
“Kayumi responded in part and as captured on NYPD body-worn camera footage, ‘ISIS,'” the complaint states.
Balat waived his Miranda rights to remain silent following his arrest, according to the complaint, and allegedly provided a written statement in which he “pledge[d] [] allegience [sic] to the Islamic State,” the complaint states.
Balat also allegedly told police that “they wanted to carry out an attack bigger than the Boston Marathon bombing, which Balat noted caused only ‘three deaths,'” according to the complaint.
The April 15, 2013, Boston Marathon bombing also left more than 500 people injured.
Kayumi, whom the complaint said also waived his Miranda rights, allegedly “stated, in substance and in part, that he was affiliated with ISIS; watched ISIS propaganda on his phone; and was partly inspired to carry out his actions that day by ISIS,” according to the complaint.
“Anti-Muslim bigotry is nothing new to me, nor is it anything new for the one million or so Muslim New Yorkers who know this city as our home,” Mamdani said at Monday’s news conference.
“While I found this protest appalling. I will not waver in my belief that it should be allowed to happen. Ours is a free society, where the right to peaceful protest is sacred. It does not only belong to those we agree with. It belongs to everyone,” Mandani added.
Many of the counterprotesters on Saturday confronted the “display of bigotry,” the mayor said. He also praised NYPD officers who swiftly responded to the incident and arrested the suspects, saying they were “faced with a chaotic situation that quickly could have become far more dangerous.”
The mayor specifically cited the “courageous and selfless” acts of two NYPD officers, Assistant Chief Aaron Edwards and Sgt. Luis Navarro, who attended Monday’s news conference. Mamdani said the officers “ran towards the danger so that others could run safely.”
Tisch said the last incident in New York City in which an IED was deployed occurred in December 2017, when Akayed Ullah detonated a homemade bomb he had strapped to his torso in a pedestrian underpass connecting the Port Authority Bus Terminal to the Time Square subway station.
Ullah, a permanent resident of Bangladesh who was living in Brooklyn at the time, was the only person injured in the act, which federal prosecutors said was committed on behalf of ISIS of Iraq. Ullah was convicted in April 2021 by a federal jury on all six counts of the indictment and was sentenced to life in prison.
In this booking photo released by the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office, Hisham Abugharbieh is shown. (Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office)
(FLORIDA) — The man accused of killing two University of South Florida doctoral students allegedly asked ChatGPT about disposing of a body three days before the victims were last seen alive, according to court filings.
Hisham Abugharbieh, 26, has been charged with two counts of first-degree murder with a weapon in the deaths of his roommate, Zamil Limon, and Nahida Bristy, the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office said. The two 27-year-old students were last seen alive on April 16, and a mutual friend reported them missing the following day after being unable to reach them both, authorities said.
Detectives located Limon’s remains on the side of a Tampa bridge on Friday, according to the motion. His naked body was in “numerous black utility trash bags and was in advanced stages of decomposition,” according to a motion for pretrial detention filed by prosecutors. There were deep cuts at his hips “to permit folding of the legs into the bag,” and his wrists and ankles appeared to be bound, according to the filing.
The Pinellas County Medical Examiner’s Office confirmed Limon had sustained numerous lacerations and stab wounds to his abdomen and lower back and his cause of death was “multiple sharp force injuries,” the filing stated.
Human remains were recovered from waterways near the bridge on Sunday amid a search for Bristy, 27, according to the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office. Positive identification has not been determined at this time, authorities said.
Bristy is “believed to have been disposed of in a similar way’ to Limon, the motion stated.
Motion outlines evidence of alleged premeditated murder
The 23-page motion detailed digital and physical evidence — including phone, shopping and other activity — that prosecutors allege show Abugharbieh committed premeditated murder.
On April 13, three days before the two students were last seen alive, the suspect allegedly asked ChatGPT, “What happens if a human has a put in a black garbage bag and thrown in a dumpster,” according to the motion.
Prosecutors noted that ChatGPT answered “that it sounds dangerous,” and then Abugharbieh allegedly asked, “How would they find out.”
Two days later, he allegedly asked, “Can a VIN number on a car be changed,” according to the filing.
On the day the two students were last seen alive, detectives determined Abugharbieh’s vehicle was in the same area in Clearwater Beach, around the same time of the last pinged location of Limon’s phone, it noted.
Shortly before 11 p.m. that night, Abugharbieh allegedly received a Doordash delivery at the apartment of items purchased from CVS — “trashbags, Lysol wipes, Febreze, Funyuns, and Irish Spring Body Wash” — according to the motion. He had also allegedly ordered duct tape, fire starter, charcoal, trash bags and lighter fuel from Amazon earlier in the month, according to the motion.
Around 12:26 a.m. on April 17, he allegedly asked ChatGPT, “are cars checked at the Hillsborough River state park.”
About an hour later, around 1:30 a.m., his phone stopped on the Howard Frankland Bridge, according to the filing. It was on the bridge again nearly three hours later, including in the exact location where Limon’s body was found a week later, according to the filing.
A third roommate in the apartment reported seeing Abugharbieh dispose of multiple cardboard boxes from his room to a compactor dumpster on site sometime late on April 16 or early on the morning of April 17, according to the motion. Limon’s wallet and glasses, bloodied clothing and Bristy’s iPhone case were among the items located in trash bags in the compactor, according to the filing.
On April 19, the suspect allegedly asked ChatGPT, “will Apple know who is the new iPhone user after the previous user,” according to the filing.
On April 23, he asked, “What does missing endangered adult mean,” according to the filing. That day, the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office announced it had elevated the status of the two missing USF students to endangered.
Other ChatGPT messages noted in the filing focused on firearms, according to the motion. Abugharbieh allegedly asked on April 15 if you can “keep a gun at home with out a license,” and, on April 19, “will my neighbors hear my gun” and “Has there been someone who survived a sniper bullet to the head,” according to the motion.
OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Suspect denies any role in disappearance
Blood evidence was uncovered in the apartment, including the suspect’s room, where there were two “distinct patterns on the floor which appeared to have a relatively humansized shape,” the filing stated.
Trash bags found under the suspect’s bed were similar to the ones located in the compactor and on the bridge, according to the filing.
Abugharbieh was interviewed by detectives multiple times and denied having anything to do with their disappearance, according to the motion.
When asked about his vehicle being in Clearwater Beach on April 16, he allegedly initially said he was fishing, according to the filing. When confronted about Limon’s phone also being in the area, he allegedly said he drove Limon and Bristy to Clearwater Beach at Limon’s request, and said that they were “both alive when he dropped them off,” the filing stated.
When asked about the boxes in the compactor, Abugharbieh “advised he removed old clothing he no longer wanted,” the filing stated.
He had lacerations on his left pinky, which he allegedly told detectives were from cutting onions, as well as his upper tricep area and left and right legs, according to the filing.
“Based on the totality of the circumstances, interviews, evidence, and data, evidence would show Hisham Abugharbieh utilized a bladed instrument to fatally wound Zamil Limon and Nahida Bristy multiple times which caused their deaths,” the filing stated.
The motion does not state an alleged motive in the crime.
Prosecutors seek no bond
Abugharbieh is being held without bond and his next detention hearing is set for Tuesday morning.
The Hillsborough County State Attorney’s Office said prosecutors “will argue that Abugharbieh remains a danger to our community and should be held without bond until trial.”
“Our hearts are with both students’ families during this incredibly difficult time, and we are keeping them in our thoughts as they await answers,” State Attorney Suzy Lopez said in a statement.
The suspect has been assigned a public defender. The public defender for the Thirteenth Judicial Circuit did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Abugharbieh was arrested on Friday. He had barricaded himself at a residence and surrendered following a brief standoff, authorities said. He was seen exiting the home with nothing but a towel wrapped around his waist.
The suspect is not a current USF student or employee, school officials said.
A family member told investigators that Abugharbieh “was known to struggle with managing his anger and was violent with family in the past,” according to the motion.
