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Quote:Chaos erupted on an Alaska Airlines plane when a massive piece of the aircraft blew off mid-flight, leaving a gaping hole that sucked out passengers’ belongings and forced an emergency landing.
The Friday flight departed from Portland, Oregon, at 4:52 p.m., headed for Ontario, California. However, it had to head back to Portland International Airport only 35 minutes after takeoff when the flight turned into a nightmare, according to data from Flight Aware.
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Fortunately, the seats closest to the hole were empty, and no one was seriously injured.
Passengers described the terrifying incident, detailing to KPTV how people’s cell phones and belongings were sucked out of the aircraft.
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“Portland approach, Alaska 1282 emergency! Aircraft is now leveling 12,000 in a left turn heading three four zero,” the Alaska Airlines pilot said.
“We are emergency, we are depressurized, we do need to return back to, we have 177 passengers. Fuel is eighteen eight.”
First responders arrived at the tarmac when the plane touched back down and treated minor injuries. One individual was taken for further medical evaluations, the Port of Portland told KPTV.
The Boeing 737 Max 9 was practically brand-new, having just been built and approved to fly in late October, according to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) registry.
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“Following tonight’s event on Flight 1282, we have decided to take the precautionary step of temporarily grounding our fleet of 65 Boeing 737-9 aircraft,” Alaska Airlines CEO Ben Minicucci said in a press release. “Each aircraft will be returned to service only after completion of full maintenance and safety inspections.”
Quote:The Supreme Court will hear arguments on former President Donald Trump’s appeal of a Colorado Supreme Court decision to strike him from the ballot, a monumental case with implications for similar ballot access challenges in states across the country that could determine the presidential election.
The court will hear oral arguments on February 8, 2024, an expedited schedule that demonstrates the significance of resolving the case quickly.
The Colorado Supreme Court ruled in December in a four-to-three opinion that the Fourteenth Amendment’s “Insurrection Clause” prohibits Trump from appearing on the ballot for the presidency in 2024. The ruling partially reversed a lower court’s ruling that Trump is not an officer of the United States as defined by the Fourteenth Amendment and that the Amendment, therefore, cannot be used to disqualify him from appearing on the Colorado primary ballot.
The Court unilaterally determined that “clear and convincing evidence” proved “that President Trump engaged in insurrection” despite Trump having never been convicted of that or any other crime or even been charged in court with the crime of insurrection. The U.S. Senate acquitted him of charges of engaging in insurrection, and he continues to deny wrongdoing.
Without any court proceedings to support its legal assertion, the Court cited the U.S. House January 6 Select Committee, notwithstanding that Trump was acquitted of the House’s charges in the Senate.
Quote:One of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-NY) former top aides reportedly laid aside quite a bit of money in donor funds from his political action committee (PAC) for himself.
After stepping down from his position as her communications director in 2019, Corbin Trent created the No Excuses PAC, Fox News reported Saturday.
He created the PAC with the mission to kill the Senate filibuster by targeting Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ). However, Trent reportedly did not spend much money on its mission.
“Instead, Trent paid himself nearly $140,000 for reported communication and management consulting between February 2021 and September 2023, which is shown in Federal Election Commission filings,” the article said.
His group paid more than $14,000 for radio ad buys regarding the two senators, “meaning his PAC had paid him ten times more for reported consulting services than it spent on its stated goals,” the Fox report stated.
According to the Washington Examiner, Trent also wanted the PAC to urge centrist Senate Democrats to be more progressive, the outlet said Wednesday.
EUROPEAN NEWS
The Crisis Doesn't Seem to Be Fading Away Any Time Soon
Quote:Black Lives Matter and feminist activists joined forces with pro-Palestinian protesters in a march in London that saw demonstrators clash with police and shut down Westminster Bridge in a “die-in”.
Various leftist groups, including the UK branch of the Marxist Black Lives Matter movement and the radical feminist group Sisters Uncut, banded together with anti-Israel activists from the London for a Free Palestine and the Palestinian Youth Movement to form what they dubbed the “Free Palestine Coalition (FPC)” in a protest in central London on Saturday.
According to the Metropolitan Police, the organisers of the protest refused to share their planned route, while only stating according to The Telegraph that they would be “blockading a well-known location in London”.
This landmark appears to have been Westminster Bridge, where activists were filmed lying down on the pavement, blocking off traffic on the major bridge in the centre of the British capital.
The activists seemed to deploy the common leftist tactic of a “die-in” in which activists lay motionless on the ground to stymie efforts from police to clear the road and, in this case, likely symbolise those who have died in the war against Hamas terrorists in the Gaza Strip.
In other footage posted on social media, protesters clashed with police while others shouted “shame on you” to the police officers who were attempting to clear the road.
Quote:A group of farmers prevented Germany’s vice chancellor from disembarking a ferry, hours after the government partially climbed down on cost-saving plans that had infuriated the agricultural sector. The protest drew condemnation from both government and opposition figures.
Farmers headed to a jetty in Schluettsiel on the North Sea coast Thursday afternoon ahead of the arrival of the ferry carrying Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck following calls on social media for a protest, police said Friday. Habeck had been on a personal trip to the small island of Hooge.
Between 250 and 300 people gathered to demonstrate. Police said it wasn’t possible to arrange a dialogue between Habeck and organizers in the tense situation, so the ferry departed again. Up to 30 demonstrators tried to board the vessel, but were held back by police using pepper spray.
Habeck, a member of the environmentalist Green party who is also economy and climate minister, was able to reach the mainland during the night.
Chancellor OIaf Scholz’s unpopular government angered farmers in December by announcing plans to cut agricultural subsidies as part of a package to fill a 17-billion-euro ($18.6-billion) hole in the 2024 budget. Farmers staged a protest with tractors in Berlin and called for more demonstrations next week.
On Thursday, the government announced a partial about-turn. It said it would retain an exemption from car tax for farming vehicles and would stagger planned reductions in tax breaks for diesel used in agriculture.
The German Farmers Association quickly said that the change didn’t go far enough. It said it was still demanding that both proposals be reversed and it would stick to its planned protests.
Quote:There were over 127,000 “unauthorised entries” by migrants detected by German law enforcement in 2023, a considerable increase on previous years and the highest since the historic surge of the Europe Migrant Crisis in 2015.
German police have warned the nation should strengthen its border controls for as long as Europe’s external border remains unsecured, flows of migrants will continue across the Schengen open-frontier zone to the wealthy, high-welfare states of northern Europe.
The remarks accompany new Federal migration figures seen by German broadsheet Die Welt which notes there were 127,088 “unauthorised border crossings” in 2023.
The figure is up 38 per cent in just one year from 92,000 in 2022, and is even higher than arrivals in 2016, the second year of the Europe Migrant Crisis. The only year in modern German history with higher levels of illegals, Welt notes was the first year of the crisis when 217,000 “irregular border crossings” took place in 2015.
Chairman of the German Police Union Heiko Teggatz said the figures proved the Euro open borders Schengen system is broken and said Germany had to now play “catch up” on its own border controls. A spokesman for the leftist governing SPD party disagreed, however, and was cited by Welt as having said the surging number of illegals detected on the border merely proved their government’s border plans were working well, as otherwise they’d be undetected illegals.
The left-wingers’ comments came with a not-so-subtle attack on the tone of the debate though, saying when debating illegal migrants Germans should remember the country “depends on immigration”. They said: “In all of this, we should always remember that we in Germany depend on immigration to secure our prosperity, so the most important thing for us is that those who can contribute find their way to us through regular channels”.
Quote:Russian officials in the southern border city of Belgorod offered to evacuate worried residents on Friday, an unprecedented announcement that follows waves of fatal Ukrainian attacks.
The Kremlin has tried to maintain a semblance of normalcy on the home front, but the recent strikes on Belgorod have brought the Ukraine conflict closer to home for Russians.
Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov’s assurance that scared civilians can relocate represents the furthest-reaching measure taken by any major Russian city since Moscow ordered the invasion of Ukraine nearly two years ago.
“I see several appeals on social media where people write: We are scared, help us get to a safe place,” governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said in a video message.
“Of course we will! We have already moved several families,” he added.
His offer came a day after overnight shelling wounded at least two people and knocked out glass from high-rise buildings, prompting widespread concern from residents.
The bout of shelling prompted city officials earlier Friday to urge residents to secure their windows with tape to prevent shattering from blast waves — a measure widespread across Ukraine.
Ukrainian shelling in Belgorod less than a week ago killed 25 people — the worst attack on Russian civilians since the conflict began.
Quote:Russia’s national elections commission on Friday registered the first two candidates who will compete with President Vladimir Putin in the March election that Putin is all but certain to win.
The commission approved putting Leonid Slutsky of the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party and Vladislav Davankov of the New People Party on the ballot for the March 15-17 vote.
Neither poses a significant challenge to Putin, who has dominated Russian politics since becoming president in 2000. Both candidates’ parties are largely supportive in parliament of legislation backed by Putin’s power-base United Russia party.
Slutsky, as head of the lower house of parliament’s foreign affairs committee, has been a prominent backer of Kremlin foreign policy that is increasingly oppositional to the West. In the last presidential election in 2018, the party’s candidate tallied less than 6% of the vote.
Davankov is a deputy speaker of the lower house of parliament, the Duma. His party was established in 2020 and holds 15 seats in the 450-member Duma.
The Communist Party has put forth Nikolai Kharitonov as its candidate, but the elections commission has not formally registered him. Kharitonov was the party’s candidate in 2004, finishing a distant second to Putin.
A Russian politician calling for peace in Ukraine was rejected last month from the presidential ballot.
Quote:The United Nations Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery, Obokata Tomoya, asked the communist regime of Cuba to respond to evidence that it was selling its citizens to nations such as Spain, Italy, Ghana, and Qatar for labor exploitation in a letter published Tuesday by the human rights organization Prisoners Defenders.
Prisoners Defenders is a Europe-based NGO that has focused on documenting human rights abuses in Cuba. It filed a complaint with the United Nations against Cuba in 2019 accusing the Castro regime, and offering copious evidence, of selling health workers, athletes, artists, and laborers as slaves to a long list of countries around the world. Cuba’s medical slavery – in which it forces doctors, often under duress and with minimal information on where they are going – is one of the communist regime’s most lucrative industries, netting as much as $11 billion a year in profit for the impoverished nation’s 65-year-old government.
Cuban health workers trapped in the industry often have the vast majority of their salaries confiscated, lose their right to free movement and travel, cannot meet with their families or develop friendships or romantic relationships with locals, and are forced to work in dangerous locales. Two Cuban doctors forced to work in Kenya who were abducted by the Sunni jihadist terror group al-Shabaab, Landy Rodríguez Hernández and Assel Herrera Correa, remain missing at press time, nearly five years after their disappearance in 2019.
The international legal definition of slavery, as presented in the 1926 Slavery Convention, describes it as “the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised.” The United Nations considers modern slavery as a broad category of violations including “forced labor” and “human trafficking.” The U.N. letter addressed to Cuba refers to potential violations of “forced labor” restrictions.
ASIAN NEWS
4 Articles
Quote:Bishop Shao was ordained coadjutor bishop in 2011 with a papal mandate from Pope Benedict XVI but has never been recognized by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) because of his unwillingness to enlist in the Patriotic Association.
Shao was supposed to assume the leadership of the Catholic diocese of Wenzhou — one of China’s oldest and most vibrant Catholic communities — upon the death of his predecessor, Bishop Vincent Zhu Wei-Fang, in 2016, but he has been prevented by authorities from carrying out his ministry.
Beginning in 2014, the CCP has targeted Wenzhou in its brutal cross-removal program where authorities have removed more than 2,000 crosses from church buildings. The crusade to eradicate the iconic Christian symbol from China’s landscape has included the demolition of crosses and churches as well as beatings and arrests when Christians have attempted to resist.
In place of Bishop Shao, the Chinese government instead unilaterally named Father Ma Xianshi, a member of the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, to run the diocese of Wenzhou in the absence of a CCP-approved bishop.
Quote:China’s state-run Global Times on Thursday mocked Taiwanese and U.S. media for being concerned about “harmless weather balloons flying over the island.”
Three such balloons made an unusual transit over the middle of Taiwan Island on Monday and Tuesday, coming close to a Taiwanese airbase. The Taiwanese Defense Ministry merely stated it would “closely monitor” the balloons, and all other objects that enter Taiwanese airspace.
The Global Times accused media outlets in Taiwan and the United States of “sensationalizing” the balloons and “hyping” the threat they could pose. Nowhere in the article did anyone explain why Chinese balloons were suddenly floating over the middle of Taiwan two weeks before a crucial election.
The Chinese Communist Party paper was especially furious at the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) because it dared to mention that Taiwan might be thinking back to the Chinese spy balloon debacle over the United States in February 2023.
The WSJ further speculated that even if the balloons over Taiwan were indeed harmless meteorological devices, they could still be part of China’s efforts to intimidate the Taiwanese out of voting for candidates Beijing dislikes in their upcoming election. This is a common tactic of the Chinese tyranny, long known to security analysts as “gray zone warfare,” and the Chinese Communists do not like to see it discussed or resisted.
Quote:North and South Korea exchanged hundreds of rounds of artillery fire on Friday near the Northern Limit Line, the maritime border between the two peninsular powers.
The demonstrations of artillery prowess began with North Korea lobbing over 200 artillery rounds into the sea, in what Pyongyang described as a “natural response” to provocations by the “military gangsters” of South Korea.
The South Korean military carefully monitored the North’s artillery exercise and determined that none of the shells passed over the Northern Limit Line. However, the South Korean military ordered civilians on nearby Yeonpyeong Island to move into shelters as a precaution.
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Yeonpyeong has about 2,000 civilian residents and troops, including an artillery unit. The South Korean Marine Corps quickly arranged its own artillery exercise, firing about 400 shells from Yeonpyeong and another base in the area, Baengnyeong Island.
South Korean Defense Minister Shin Won-sik and South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff observed the reciprocal live-fire drill. Shin said North Korea’s artillery fire was an “act of provocation that escalates tension and threatens peace on the Korean peninsula.”
“Our military must assume the readiness to completely wipe out the enemy so that they wouldn’t dare another provocation, and to back up the pace through strength,” he said.
Quote:Japanese authorities tallied 94 deaths, 222 people missing, and 846 trapped in unreachable parts of the Noto Peninsula on Friday as a result of the devastating 7.6-magnitude earthquake that occurred on Japan’s west coast on Monday.
The death toll is expected to grow, as rescuers believe many of the missing are trapped under the rubble of communities destroyed by the earthquake, burned in the subsequent fires, covered in mudslides, or swept away by the ensuing tsunami. The lives of many survivors who escaped their homes but are staying in shelters inaccessible to emergency services are still threatened, as the earthquake cracked some of the major roads deeper into the Noto Peninsula into pieces, rendering them useless.
Also complicating rescue efforts is the advanced age of many living in the region. Slightly over half the population of Suzu, one of the cities most severely damaged by the earthquake, was over the age of 65 as of 2020, Japanese media noted. The mayor of Suzu, Masuhiro Izumiya, told reporters on Tuesday that he believed 90 percent of the homes in his city were “completely or nearly completely destroyed.”
The Yomiuri Shimbun, a national Japanese newspaper, reported Friday that some survivors had been forced to trek up the precarious paths created by landslides into parts of the region still connected to the rest of Japan to find food and water. Both food and water supplies jeopardize the safety of hundreds believed to be in otherwise secure locations on the other side of the broken roads.
MIDDLE EASTERN NEWS
Iran & the Far East
Quote:The BRICS economic group dealt with some internal oil drama this week, as Iran withheld oil shipments from China to demand higher prices and India cut back on its heavy purchases of Russian oil because Russia was no longer peddling crude at fire-sale discounts.
The original members of BRICS were Brazil, Russia, India, and China. South Africa joined in 2010. Six more members were added at a summit in August 2023, disturbing U.S. policymakers who worried about the growing influence of the China-dominated bloc. One, Argentina, declined the invitation to join, so the current number of BRICS countries stands at ten.
Rising oil prices have created some fissures within BRICS. China’s brisk oil trade with Iran ran into trouble this week as the Iranians withheld shipments of oil to demand higher prices.
China currently gets about ten percent of its oil from Iran, taking advantage of discounted prices due to Western sanctions on Iranian products. In November, Iran agreed to sell China oil at a discount of about $10 per barrel, which was already a step down from the $13 discounts Chinese buyers had been enjoying. In December, the Iranians changed their mind and said they would only offer discounts of $5 to $6 per barrel.
Chinese executives told Reuters they were not happy about Iran changing the terms of the oil deal.
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My Original Stories (available in English and Spanish)
List of Compiled Binary Executables I have published...
HiddenChest & Roole
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Just some scripts I've already published on the board...
KyoGemBoost XP VX & ACE, RandomEnkounters XP, KSkillShop XP, Kolloseum States XP, KEvents XP, KScenario XP & Gosu, KyoPrizeShop XP Mangostan, Kuests XP, KyoDiscounts XP VX, ACE & MV, KChest XP VX & ACE 2016, KTelePort XP, KSkillMax XP & VX & ACE, Gem Roulette XP VX & VX Ace, KRespawnPoint XP, VX & VX Ace, GiveAway XP VX & ACE, Klearance XP VX & ACE, KUnits XP VX, ACE & Gosu 2017, KLevel XP, KRumors XP & ACE, KMonsterPals XP VX & ACE, KStatsRefill XP VX & ACE, KLotto XP VX & ACE, KItemDesc XP & VX, KPocket XP & VX, OpenChest XP VX & ACE
Maranatha!
The Internet might be either your friend or enemy. It just depends on whether or not she has a bad hair day.
My Original Stories (available in English and Spanish)
List of Compiled Binary Executables I have published...
HiddenChest & Roole
Give me a free copy of your completed game if you include at least 3 of my scripts!
Just some scripts I've already published on the board...
KyoGemBoost XP VX & ACE, RandomEnkounters XP, KSkillShop XP, Kolloseum States XP, KEvents XP, KScenario XP & Gosu, KyoPrizeShop XP Mangostan, Kuests XP, KyoDiscounts XP VX, ACE & MV, KChest XP VX & ACE 2016, KTelePort XP, KSkillMax XP & VX & ACE, Gem Roulette XP VX & VX Ace, KRespawnPoint XP, VX & VX Ace, GiveAway XP VX & ACE, Klearance XP VX & ACE, KUnits XP VX, ACE & Gosu 2017, KLevel XP, KRumors XP & ACE, KMonsterPals XP VX & ACE, KStatsRefill XP VX & ACE, KLotto XP VX & ACE, KItemDesc XP & VX, KPocket XP & VX, OpenChest XP VX & ACE
