Passengers on three-year cruise speak out as ship remains stuck in harbor
Holly Hennessy, a passenger on Villa Vie Odyssey, speaks with ABC News. (ABC News)
(NEW YORK) — Passengers planning to travel the world on a three-year cruise are speaking out as they remain stuck on land, waiting for their ship to depart.
Holly Hennessy said she has been stuck in Belfast, Ireland, for three months as she and her fellow passengers wait for the cruise ship, the Villa Vie Odyssey, to be repaired.
“It’s cold. It’s windy. It’s damp. It usually rains,” Hennessy told ABC News’ Good Morning America, describing the past three months in Belfast. “I’ve been moved five times to different accommodations.”
Johan Bodin and his partner Lanette Canen have spent the past three months traveling around Europe as they wait for the ship to depart from Belfast. The couple relocated from Maui, Hawaii, to spend the next several years on the Villa Vie Odyssey, according to their website, where they post travel content.
“We intend to stay on for a long haul, but who knows how we feel after a year,” Bodin told GMA.
Bodin and other passengers on the Villa Vie Odyssey, operated by Villa Vie Residences, have been waiting since May for the cruise to depart.
Mikael Petterson, the founder and CEO of Villa Vie Residences, told GMA the Villa Vie Odyssey is a 30-year-old ship. He said the ship made the trip to Belfast on its own power before other maintenance issues were discovered.
“The rudder stocks took six weeks to get done, and now we’re dealing with a couple of other things,” Petterson said. “But overall, I think three months is actually not that bad given the circumstances.”
Petterson added that the ship’s repairs are in their final stages, and said he expects the ship to depart the week of Sept. 9.
The cruise is advertised to visit 475 destinations in 147 countries. The price to purchase an all-inclusive cabin starts at around $100,000, with an additional monthly fee for at least 15 years.
While the Villa Vie Odyssey has been out of commission, passengers are allowed on the ship during the day but cannot stay overnight, staying in hotel rooms in Belfast instead.
For passengers who are using the time to travel, Villa Vie Residences has helped them plan trips.
Canen said she and Bodin are optimistic that after months of delays, they will sail out of Belfast soon.
“Hopefully by next weekend, we’ll be floating away, saying goodbye to Belfast,” Canen said.
Gali Mir-Tibon speaks with ABC News’ chief national correspondent Matt Gutman. ABC News
(TEL AVIV, Israel) — For Israeli husband-and-wife Noam Tibon and Gali Mir-Tibon, Oct. 7, 2023, began like any other day.
They went for an early-morning swim off the Tel Aviv coast on that Saturday morning. They heard sirens but continued to swim — it was safer in the water. When they got back to their car, they checked their phones and saw a text from their son, Amir, that there was a terrorist inside their kibbutz, Nahal Oz, in southern Israel.
“I served 35 years in the military,” Tibon, a retired Israel Defense Forces major general, told ABC News. When he pinged IDF generals about the situation, he said they responded: “We are aware and are on the way.” That phrase “on the way” surprised Noam, because Israel’s vaunted military should already have been there. “Something in my heart told me, ‘Noam, you have to go there.'”
They raced southward, speeding through red lights, Mir-Tibon recounted. She was driving, he was riding in the passenger seat, holding his pistol and frantically making calls.
“We are almost the only vehicle on the road,” the novelist told ABC News. “We get another text message [that] says, there are terrorists in our neighborhood, the new neighborhood of Kibbutz Nahal Oz. So it’s getting worse.”
Along the way, they said they saw a police car blocking the road shooting at a white pickup that Mir-Tibon said they would later learn was a Toyota with Hamas terrorists.
They stopped the car while bullets flew ahead of them debating what to do, Tibon said.
“Suddenly, a young couple jump from the bushes wearing party clothes, which is unusual in this situation,” Tibon said.
They were barefoot and asked for help, Mir-Tibon said.
“They get inside and they are very, very afraid,” she said.
When they asked what happened, Tibon said the couple responded, shaking, “We were in the party. Many terrorists came. They slaughtered everybody.”
The couple had fled the Nova music festival, the site of one of the worst civilian casualty incidents in Israel’s history.
At least 260 people were killed by Hamas militants at the music festival, held in the Negev desert in southern Israel, during the terrorist group’s surprise attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Overall, militants killed some 1,200 people and took about 250 hostages — about 100 of whom remain in captivity, according to Israeli officials. It was the deadliest single day for the Jews since the Holocaust.
In the year since, Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed over 41,000 Palestinians, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry.
As the full scope of the attack that day was still unknown to them, Tibon said they turned around and drove away with the couple.
“You don’t leave anyone behind you, it’s not a hard decision,” Tibon said.
They were able to drop the couple off with police before continuing on toward the kibbutz, Tibon recalled. Along the way, they continued to hear shots being fired and see dead bodies.
“It’s all the way burning cars, bodies, bodies, bodies,” Tibon said.
When they came upon a group of Israeli soldiers, Tibon begged them to take him to his son’s kibbutz.
“The commander hesitates,” he said. “And then one brave guy by the name of Avi … he said, ‘I’m going to help you.'”
Mir-Tibon stayed behind in a shelter while Tibon left with the soldier to find his son and his family. They joined Israeli paratroopers as they got to the gate of Kibbut Nahal Oz, he said.
“We are under very, very heavy fire by the terrorists,” he recalled. “I was fighting for my life.” He said he killed a squad of terrorists, and then tended to three Israeli paratroopers who’d been wounded, two of them severely. He was just yards from the gate of his son’s kibbutz. He turned around and drove the wounded men back to his wife, who then drove back out of the hellscape with the men bleeding out in her car. Eventually, she found a pair of ambulances. The men all survived, the couple recounted.
Tibon returned through the gunfire again towards his son’s kibbutz. Meeting another group of soldiers at the gate. He said he then spent several hours searching homes in the kibbutz — ensuring everyone else was safe — before arriving at his son’s house, about 10 hours after the initial attack. He said he found the door locked, which gave him “hope.”
“From all the houses that I search, if the door was locked, inside there is live people. If the door is open, blood and no people, or blood and bodies,” he said.
Tibon said he banged on the window and yelled for his son, calling out, “It’s Dad!”
He first heard his 3-year-old granddaughter say, “Grandpa here,” he recalled.
Noam’s son Amir, his wife and their children were all rescued.
“This was a very emotional moment,” Tibon said. “I felt I fulfilled my mission. But I have to rescue them and I have to rescue the whole kibbutz, they are not alone.”
Tibon said he helped to evacuate more than 400 people out of the kibbutz.
Mir-Tibon had feared the worst at points while waiting to find out if her family survived.
“There were moments I think, if they’re not alive, I don’t think there is any point to my life,” Mir-Tibon said. “We are the lucky ones.”
(PARIS) — Pavel Durov, the Russian-born billionaire CEO of the social media messaging app Telegram, was released from custody in France on Wednesday after being arrested in connection with an “ongoing judicial investigation,” the Paris Prosecutor’s Office told ABC News.
Durov will be brought to court for “questioning at first appearance, with a possible indictment,” the Paris Prosecutor’s Office said.
The office did not say when Durov would be brought to court.
Durov, 39, was arrested at Le Bourget airport outside Paris shortly after landing on a private jet late on Aug. 24. French President Emmanuel Macron confirmed his arrest two days later.
Durov is accused of allegedly being passive with regard to cyber and financial crimes being committed on the Telegram platform and is facing 12 charges, according to the Paris Prosecutor’s Office.
The charges are related to child pornography, drug trafficking and fraudulent transactions on the platform, prosecutors announced Monday.
In his statement, Macron maintained that Durov’s arrest was “not political,” saying, “France is more than anything attached to freedom of expression and communication, to innovation and to the spirit of enterprise. It will remain so.”
What is Telegram?
Telegram is one of the most popular messaging apps in the world, with approximately 800 million active users and a large user base in Russia and Ukraine.
Launched in 2013, Telegram was designed to address growing concerns about digital privacy and censorship. Unlike many messaging apps of the time, Telegram was built with a focus on security, offering end-to-end encryption and features that prioritized user privacy.
The rise of the app’s popularity was meteoric, making Durov among the wealthiest people in the world. He is estimated to have a net worth of approximately $15.5 billion, according to Forbes.
The app distinguished itself from competitors such as Facebook Messenger, WeChat and WhatsApp with its commitment to free speech and resistance to government censorship.
The app has positioned itself as a refuge for activists and journalists. Its features include self-destructing messages, secret chats and robust channel functionalities.
Additionally, Telegram offers a platform for larger messaging groups, allowing 200,000 users to be added to a chat.
Because of the large group sizes, Telegram has been criticized for hosting far-right and extremist groups. Most recently, the U.K. government denounced Telegram for its role in extremist groups organizing riots across the country in July.
Who is Pavel Durov?
Born in Leningrad, now Saint Petersburg, Russia in 1984, Durov began his foray into technology entrepreneurship in 2006, founding the Russian social network VKontakte (VK).
Likened to Facebook, VK quickly gained traction among Russian-speaking users, offering a platform for social interaction, content sharing and networking.
However, the platform’s success attracted scrutiny from the Russian government, and Durov faced increasing pressure to comply with government requests for user data.
In 2014, Durov was forced to leave VK after refusing to comply with demands to shut down opposition communities on the platform.
He reportedly refused to block late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s page on the platform.
After leaving his position at VK, Durov left Russia and moved to Dubai, where he runs Telegram, which was founded a year prior in 2013.
Frequently traveling to Europe from the United Arab Emirates, Durov was granted citizenship in France in 2021.
Response to Durov’s arrest
In the wake of Durov’s arrest over the weekend, Elon Musk posted #FreePavel on X, sharing a clip of the Telegram founder’s previous interview with Tucker Carlson.
U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden called Durov’s arrest “an assault on the basic human rights of speech and association” in a post on X.
“I am surprised and deeply saddened that Macron has descended to the level of taking hostages as a means for gaining access to private communications. It lowers not only France, but the world,” Snowden wrote.
ABC News’ Hugo Leenhardt and Ellie Kaufman contributed to this report.
In this photo released by Israel Aircraft Industries, an Arrow II anti-missile missile is successfully launched December 2, 2005 from an unnamed military base in central Israel. (IAI via Getty Images)
(NEW YORK) — Israel’s layered missile defense system was once again put to the test on Tuesday as Iran launched more than 200 ballistic missiles at Israel.
The Iron Dome air defense system garners most of the attention because it is used to bring down frequent incoming unguided short-range rocket systems fired at Israel by both Hezbollah and Hamas.
But targeting guided ballistic missiles that travel at higher altitudes, longer ranges, and faster speeds requires different intercept systems that are specifically designed to bring down ballistic missiles.
David’s Sling and the Arrow 2 and 3 are Israel’s two other home-grown air defense systems that are capable of bringing down medium-range and long-range ballistic missiles.
Both systems along with the Iron Dome were utilized during Iran’s attack on Israel last April when 99% of the more than 300 drones, ballistic and cruise missiles launched by Iran were intercepted.
David’s Sling is designed to target medium and long-range missiles and has a range of 25 to 186 miles and produced by Raytheon and Rafael, the same Israel defense contractor that makes the Iron Dome.
The two-stage missile has no warhead, it destroys incoming ballistic missiles with the sheer force of impact, making it what is known as a “hit- to- kill” which has been characterized as hitting a bullet with a bullet given the high velocities involved.
The Arrow 2 and 3 systems are capable of handling much longer-range missiles like Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM’s) that will likely travel at altitudes beyond the Earth’s atmosphere, a capability similar to the U.S. military’s THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) air defense system.
The Arrow 3 system is believed to have a range of 1,500 miles and can reach an altitude of 100 miles.
The Arrow 2 is designed to explode near a missile to bring down an incoming missile, but the Arrow 3 is a hit-to-kill missile.
The Arrow 2 system was used most recently to shoot down long-range missiles fired at Israel by the Houthi militant group in Yemen, supposedly in support of Hamas and Hezbollah in their wars with Israel.
