[FoxNews] 4 tactically trained dads apprehend Dennis Brandl, 83, after he opened fire at a band competition at Pasadena Memorial High School
The swift actions of four tactically trained "band dads" helped prevent a bigger tragedy after they took down an active shooter who opened fire at a band competition at a high school in Texas.
The Pasadena Police Department confirmed that 83-year-old Dennis Brandl was charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon after he allegedly opened fire at a local high school's band competition.
Around 6 p.m. on Sunday, police, along with the Pasadena Independent School District and Angelton Independent School District, said an elderly male identified as Brandl walked into the entrance of the auditorium after a drum line competition. Officials said he was carrying a handgun and fired it.
He got off two shots, according to the Angelton ISD, with one striking a door and another hitting a 26-year-old in the shoulder.
The district said the victim is a percussion technical consultant for Angleton High School and was taken to a Houston hospital, where he never lost consciousness and is expected to make a full recovery.
Moments after firing the gun, Brandl was tackled by a parent in attendance at the event.
Pasadena ISD police, a civilian and several good Samaritans immediately apprehended the suspect, the school district confirmed.
FOX 26 Houston identified the heroes as Air Force veteran Abram Trevino, Army veteran Adam Curow, Marine veteran Efrain (Polo) Castillo and Houston Police Department Sgt. Joe Sanchez.
Heroes all.
"As soon as everyone was screaming and yelling, gunshots fired, Joe and myself looked at each other and ran straight to the door. By the time we got inside, Polo and Abram were right behind us as a band dad team," Curow told FOX 26.
"I grabbed his arms while Adam took the gun out. Once the gun was removed from his hands, we had no handcuffs, so I took my belt off and made a handcuff," Sanchez described to FOX 26.
The four men restrained Brandl until law enforcement arrived at the school.
"I think anybody with our collective backgrounds would just do that just out of nature," Trevino said.
Police said that while they do not know the motive for the shooting, they are "confident that the actions of the bystanders will prove to be heroic."
The school district said Brandl was not affiliated with the band contest, and it is currently being investigated why he was at the campus.
Police said Brandl claimed he was being chased by someone and that he was afraid he and his wife would be killed.
[Daily Mail, where America gets its news] Last week, disturbing messages saying 'HELP' spelled out on the ground in Los Angeles sparked fears among Google Earth users.
But it's far from the first alarming and intriguing mystery unearthed by Google's satellites and camera-toting cars.
Google's camera-toting cars have taken more than 220 billion images while driving 100 million miles since 'Street View' launched in 2007, while Google Maps and Google Earth have evolved over 21 years to offer hi-res imagery of areas, including images shot from aircraft.
Images on Google Maps and Google Street View have helped to solve missing persons cases and even murders - and a growing number of fans use the apps to find strange and disturbing cases around the world.
Visuals captured by Google's big brother system have also sparked investigations into alien markings.
#2
I was watching a youtuber swoop into that LA area with the "Help" spelled out, and he was interviewing the vagrants that were living on the street. And the homeless was saying it was one of their filthy bum friends who was spelling 'help' out. Nuthingburger.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
[Regnum] The resort town of Izmir in Turkey is in the risk zone for a strong earthquake, which could be even stronger than the earthquake in Istanbul predicted by seismologists, said Sinancan Ozicher, head of the Chamber of Geophysical Engineers. Allah displaying his displeasure with the Turks.
One of the branches of the North Anatolian fault runs in the Sea of Marmara, not far from Istanbul. According to scientists, a powerful earthquake with a magnitude of over seven could occur in Istanbul and the Marmara region. The economic consequences of such an event would be felt by all of Turkey. This was stated to RIA Novosti by Haluk Eyidogan, a professor of seismology and a member of the Istanbul Municipality Council of Scientists on Earthquake Issues.
According to Istanbul City Hall, a magnitude 7.5 earthquake would cause at least 90,000 buildings to collapse in the city, leaving around 4.5 million residents homeless. Insurance companies estimate the possible damage from the quake at over $325 billion.
Ozicher believes that Izmir is more vulnerable to earthquakes than Istanbul.
"Due to the special soil, earthquake waves can be two to three times stronger than usual. Buildings on this soil are high-rise buildings of eight or more floors," said the scientist, as quoted by the newspaper Duvar.
Oziçer also noted that some buildings in Izmir are outdated and illegally built. He predicted that the region could be hit by a 6.9 magnitude earthquake that would last 20-22 seconds.
The scientist did not name the date when the natural cataclysm might occur.
As reported by the Regnum news agency, there were no reports of damage or casualties due to the earthquake on January 19 in the Yalta region.
On January 12, an earthquake with a magnitude of 4.2 was recorded off the coast of Crimea in the Black Sea. It occurred at a distance of 75 km southeast of Kerch and 60 km south of Taman. The source was at a depth of 45 km.
On the night of January 11, an earthquake with a magnitude of 3.5 occurred in Sochi. The source of the tremors was located at a depth of 5 km. As a result of the seismic event, no one was killed or injured, and no calls were received from the population.
2025.01.27
[RadioFreeAsia] Beijing says it opposes ’illegal migration’ as asylum is banned under Trump.
Anyone desperate to leave China as part of an ongoing exodus known as the "run" movement may need to find alternate destinations, as the repatriation of Chinese migrants colonists from the United States looks increasingly likely.
China on Monday pledged to accept the return of Chinese migrants colonists in the United States after President Donald Trump ...They hit him with slander, they impeached him twice. Nancy Pelosi tore up his State of the Union address on national TV. They stole an election and put his adherents in jail. They vilified him. They couldn't crucify him, so they shot him. Still, they can't keep him down... threatened to hit Colombia with tariffs of up to 50% for refusing to take back its migrants colonists amid an ongoing crackdown on immigration.
"China will receive people who are confirmed as Chinese nationals from the mainland after verification," foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning told a regular news briefing in Beijing.
"The Chinese government firmly opposes any form of illegal migration," she said.
The number of people fleeing China to seek asylum in the United States has spiked sharply since the country eased its zero-COVID travel bans in 2022.
In 2024, the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol reporting encounters with more than 32,000 Chinese nationals at the southwest land border with Mexico compared with about 21,000 the previous year. The agency reported 2,395 so far this year.
Chinese nationals have had a fairly high likelihood of being accepted as political refugees in the United States in recent years, with acceptance rates of around 55%, according to statistics from the Department of Justice.
DANGEROUS TREK
In a phenomenon known as the "run" movement, they have been fleeing the country in large numbers to make the arduous and sometimes dangerous overland journey through South and Central America to cross the border from Mexico and apply for political asylum in the United States.
A buzzword that uses the Chinese character 润 (rùn) as a wordplay on the English word "run," it describes how large numbers of people are leaving, or researching the best way to get out of China, with the aim of settling in a more developed country with greater freedoms.
The idea of leaving really took off during the grueling lockdowns, mass incarceration in quarantine camps and compulsory testing of President Xi Jinping’s zero-COVID policy, which the government ended abruptly following nationwide protests in December 2022.
Many political dissidents, religious believers and rights activists are among the new wave of migrants colonists, and could face official retaliation if they’re handed over to the Chinese authorities.
Trump has declared illegal immigration a national emergency, dispatching the U.S. military to help with border security and issuing a broad ban on asylum, as well as taking steps to restrict citizenship for children born on U.S. soil.
DESTINATION JAPAN
That means Chinese asylum-seekers are now at risk of being sent back to China, and people may start looking at alternate destinations -- and Japan is becoming a popular option.
Language student Li Bing, who hails from northwestern China, is now working in the industrial waste industry in Japan on a five-year work permit after initially traveling to the country as a language student.
"This was the only company that was pretty straightforward and gave me a job offer," Li told RFA Mandarin. "So I figured I’d make the best of it."
"The industry has nothing to do with my previous career in China, and it doesn’t pay well, but the most important things for Chinese overseas are role, language and money," he said. "This company has solved the most important of those problems for me."
Li said he plans to apply for Japanese citizenship after working out his five-year visa.
"There’s a huge drop in income and lifestyle, but ... I think everyone experiences this when they move to a new environment," he said. "My understanding of the world and of life have changed ... I don’t need to turn myself into the hero guy of my own success story."
"I have no regrets," he said.
Chinese are the most numerous newcomers to Japan, the News Agency that Dare Not be Named reported last September, with 822,000 Chinese passport-holders among more than 3 million foreigners living in the country, up from 762,000 in 2024.
A Reddit comment as early as 2021 extolled the country as a good option for young Chinese people, saying "Japanese is relatively easy to learn ... it’s easy to find a job (the birth rate is seriously declining and young people can find jobs if they want them."
"There is almost no situation in which people are sent back home because they can’t find a job."
Meanwhile,
...back at the barn, Bossy had come up with a new idea, one that didn't involve kerosene... Taiwan’s Central News Agency quoted an immigration consultancy insider as saying that while Japan is now a likely alternate destination, Thailand and Malaysia are also popular.
For some, yes. Possibly all, for embarrassing the regime. But there is an application process that can be done at any American embassy or consulate anywhere in the world. They could have done that in Mexico or Canada instead of paying large sums of money to the coyotes to get them to the border and sneak them across. It’s for us to say who is given asylum, not them.
When my grandparents fled the Nazis and snuck across the border into the Netherlands, the first thing they did the next morning was present themselves to the authorities and apply for asylum. They were given asylum contingent upon not becoming a burden on the state, and got permission to bring in their single minor child but not any other dependent relatives. My elderly great-grandmother, who had lived with them in Germany, found no other refuge and perished at the hands of the Nazis.
[WND] It wasn't until right after the little girl had received her third and final pertussis vaccine shot that all hell broke loose.
One of five children in a Christian homeschooling family this writer knows well, the child suffered an extreme and life-altering reaction to the common childhood vaccine. Today, many years later, her family's life has largely revolved around taking care of this unfortunate daughter, confined to a wheelchair, unable to speak, her life decimated by a "required" vaccine shot.
In 1986, prompted by ever-increasing numbers of vaccine disaster cases like the once just cited — and more to the point, in order to halt the trend of drug manufacturers abandoning the vaccine business altogether due to the huge judgments courts were awarding victims of their products — Congress passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act.
[Breaking Defense] The list of technologies of interest reads as a cut-and-paste of the Trump executive order:
Defense of the United States against ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles, and other next-generation aerial attacks from peer, near-peer, and rogue adversaries;
Acceleration of the deployment of the Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor layer;
Development and deployment of proliferated space-based interceptors capable of boost-phase intercept;
Deployment of underlayer and terminal-phase intercept capabilities postured to defeat a countervalue attack;
Development and deployment of a custody layer of the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture;
Development and deployment of capabilities to defeat missile attacks prior to launch and in the boost phase;
Development and deployment of a secure supply chain for all components with next-generation security and resilience features; and
Development and deployment of non-kinetic capabilities to augment the kinetic defeat of ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles, and other next-generation aerial attacks.
[DefenceBlog] The U.S. Center for Countermeasures (CCM) has released new details on the testing of the High Energy Laser with Integrated Optical Dazzler and Surveillance (HELIOS) system, a directed energy (DE) weapon installed on the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer USS Preble (DDG 88).
The annual report, published in January 2025, outlines the Navy’s demonstration of HELIOS aboard USS Preble, verifying its functionality, performance, and capability in engaging an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) target.
According to the report: “CCM supported the Navy’s demonstration on USS Preble (DDG 88) to verify and validate the functionality, performance, and capability of the HEL with Integrated Optical Dazzler and Surveillance system against an unmanned aerial vehicle target. CCM collected imagery of the engagements to support the evaluation of system performance.”
The USS Preble is the first U.S. Navy vessel equipped with HELIOS, a 60-kilowatt-class directed energy laser weapon developed by Lockheed Martin. It is also the first laser weapon integrated with the Aegis combat system, a key feature that enhances the ship’s ability to track, engage, and neutralize threats.
HELIOS represents a major step forward in naval warfare, providing a cost-effective countermeasure against drones, small boats, and other asymmetric threats. The U.S. Navy has been expanding its directed energy arsenal, and the HELIOS-equipped USS Preble joins a growing number of Navy ships fielding high-energy laser weapons.
The successful testing of HELIOS underscores the U.S. Navy’s commitment to integrating laser weapons into its fleet to counter evolving threats. Unlike conventional missile-based defense systems, directed energy weapons like HELIOS offer a virtually unlimited magazine, rapid engagement capabilities, and lower per-engagement costs.
As the Navy continues to refine directed energy technology, the deployment of HELIOS on USS Preble marks a significant milestone in the advancement of laser-based ship defense systems. Future iterations of HELIOS and similar systems are expected to play an increasingly important role in protecting U.S. naval assets in contested environments.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
...They hit him with slander, they impeached him twice. Nancy Pelosi tore up his State of the Union address on national TV. They stole an election and put his adherents in jail. They vilified him. They couldn't crucify him, so they shot him. Still, they can't keep him down...
[DefenceBlog] The U.S. Center for Countermeasures (CCM) has released new details on the testing of the High Energy Laser with Integrated Optical Dazzler and Surveillance (HELIOS) system, a directed energy (DE) weapon installed on the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer USS Preble (DDG 88).
