[Daily Mail, where America gets its news] A chaotic street takeover across California's Bay Area saw vehicles doing donuts around spectators trapped inside a ring of fire while other youths hung out the windows.
It even turned fatal at one point, when two shootings left one person dead and another in critical condition.
Terrifying footage from the unruly event obtained by ABC 7 shows people lighting a ring of fire at the intersection of BW Williams Drive and Lewis Brown Drive in Vallejo just after midnight on Saturday, and multiple people jumping in as cars drove donuts around them.
At times, the vehicles appeared to get uncomfortably close to the ring of fire, as teenagers stuck their heads out of the windows.
The street takeover lasted about an hour before Vallejo police dispersed the crowd - during which time there were at least two shootings, according to KRON.
Officers said the two shootings that saw at least 20 shots fired erupted on the outskirts of the sideshow - which saw about 400 to 500 vehicles performing stunts - early Saturday morning.
The Solano County Sheriff's Office eventually responded to the scene, and located an unidentified male victim suffering from at least one gunshot wound.
Police say first responders rendered emergency aid, but the victim succumbed to his injuries and was pronounced dead at the scene.
Another victim is currently in critical condition.
The Vallejo Police Department is now investigating the shooting, as a motive remains unclear.
Yet the violence apparently did not deter the revelers - who are said to have moved the street takeover later to Crockett, where another ring of fire was lit at the intersection of San Pablo Avenue and Merchant Street at around 1am, according to CBS News.
Witnesses told ABC 7 dozens of people blocked intersections during the street takeover and even the off-ramp to Interstate 80.
But police broke up the crowd after just 25 minutes, and four people were arrested, according to ABC 7.
Still, the chaos continued - with a street takeover involving about 50 cars reported in Richmond at around 1.40am.
Police were able to disperse the crowd without any arrests or citations, NBC Bay Area reports.
But less than hour later, Richmond police were called to respond to another sideshow - this time involving 100 vehicles.
Officers then attempted to disperse the group, but a vehicle drove at the officers in an attempt to flee - prompting a short pursuit.
Ultimately, the unidentified driver yielded to officers and was taken into custody without incident, Richmond police say.
He was arrested for assault with a deadly weapon on a police officer and felony evading, and has been booked into Richmond Police Department Jail.
The suspect's vehicle was also impounded for 30 days.
Meanwhile, in Oakland, police said they broke up a sideshow after just 20 minutes.
Now, Vallejo Mayor Robert McConnell says more needs to be done as sideshows have become common occurrences in the Bay Area.
'You know, you have 300, 400, 500 cars. I don't care how large your police department is, it's not going to be enough,' he told NBC Bay Area,
'You're going to have to have outside help, and I think there are things that need to be done legislatively as well,' he said, adding: 'I would love to see the penalty increase substantially.'
Two former Boilermakers Union presidents are among seven former and current union officials indicted Thursday for an alleged 15 year scheme to embezzle $20 million from the union.
The Justice Department said a federal grand jury in Kansas indicted former union presidents Newton Jones, 71, of Chapel Hill, N.C., and Truman "Warren" Fairley, 59, of Chapel Hill along with five others.
"As alleged in the indictment, these defendants, including two former presidents of the Boilermakers Union, enriched themselves by spending millions of dollars in union funds for their own benefit, including for salary and benefits for no-show jobs, tuition, rent, luxury international travel, meals, vacation payouts, and unauthorized loans," DOJ Criminal Division head Nicole M. Argentieri said in a statement.
According to the indictment, the conspiracy to steal money from the union was led over the course of 15 years by former Boilermakers Union president Newton Jones and former secretary-treasurer William Creeden.
Charged were former union president Newton Jones, 71, of Chapel Hill, N.C.; former president Truman "Warren" Fairley, 59, of Chapel Hill; former secretary-treasurer William Creeden, 76, of Kearney, Mo.; former vice president Lawrence McManamon, 76, of Rocky River, Ohio; Kateryna Jones, 32, of Chapel Hill; and Cullen Jones 35, of Chapel Hill.
They allegedly stole the money from the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, Iron Ship Builders, Blacksmith, Forgers and Helpers.
Kansas U.S. Attorney Kate E. Brubacher said in a statement, "Union members pay their dues believing union leaders will use the money in support of the organization's mission to advocate for and protect employment rights. The Department of Justice is deeply concerned whenever there are accusations of fraud and misappropriation of union funds."
The defendants face 20 years in prison if convicted on the RICO conspiracy count.
[POSTMILLENNIAL] A Portland Public Schools (PPS) teacher has been arrested on child sex crime charges. Craig W. Douglas-Meyers, 38, of Portland, a math teacher at Hosford Middle School, has been accused of making plans to meet up with a detective posing as a 13-year-old child for sex.
Douglas-Meyers has been charged with one felony count of luring a minor, according to a blurb from the Portland Police Bureau.
Police said a detective with the Yuba City (Caliphornia, an impregnable bastion of the Democratic Party,) Police Department contacted the Portland Police Bureau's Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Unit regarding an undercover chat operation on July 18. During the operation, the detective posed as a 13-year-old child and began communicating with Douglas-Meyers. The conversations were "sexual in nature and involved discussions on how to meet," according to police documents. Following a weekslong investigation, Douglas-Meyers was arrested and taken into custody around 7am on Friday, Aug. 23.
"PPB's ICAC Unit, with assistance from PPB's Special Emergency Reaction Team (SERT), HSI agents in Portland, and the Milwaukie Police Department's Electronic Storage Device Detection K-9, served a search warrant at Douglas-Meyers' home in Northeast Portland. Douglas-Meyers was arrested and ultimately transported to the Multnomah County Detention Center," the PPB said.
Detectives said that due to Douglas-Meyers' "brazen conversations with who he thought was a child, and his employment as a teacher at Hosford Middle School in Southeast Portland, detectives fear there could be additional children with who he has had inappropriate contact."
[JustTheNews] RFK signals there are more Democrats willing to defect to join a "unity party" under Trump where dissent and disagreement will be tolerated.
When Robert F Kennedy Jr. formally divorced the party his family once ruled as kingmakers, he opened the door for more Democrats to follow suit in embracing Donald Trump in 2024 and creating a "unity party" where Americans can disagree and debate without destroying each other.
“I attended my first Democratic Convention at the age of six in 1960,” Kennedy fondly recalled Friday of the era when his uncle John and father Robert Sr. ruled the Democratic establishment. “Back then, the Democrats were the champions of the constitution, and of civil rights. The Democrats stood against authoritarianism, against censorship, against colonialism, imperialism and unjust wars."
“We were the party of labor, of the working class,” he added. “The Democrats were the party of government transparency and the champion of the environment. Our party was the bulwark against big money interests and corporate power. True to its name, it was the party of democracy,” he said during a nationally televised press conference Friday where he announced he was suspending his independent presidential campaign and backing Trump.
Kennedy argued he didn’t leave the Democrat Party, but rather that “it had departed so dramatically from the core values that I grew up with” that it left him and other traditional Democrats like him.
“It has become the party of war, censorship, corruption, Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Ag and big money,” he declared.
With that political indictment, Kennedy opened an unprecedented political door for defection. And standing at the threshold are two other celebrity defectors: billionaire tech innovator Elon Musk and former presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard.
Even Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, echoed similar sentiment, saying on X that "We may disagree with RFK Jr. about many things, but he’s right about how the Democratic Party uses lawfare and dirty tricks to suppress democratic competition and voter choice. The Dems preach about ‘saving democracy,’ but in reality they’re working overtime to stamp it out."
[Breitbart] The state of South Carolina is set to execute its first convict in more than 13 years after pharmaceutical companies resumed supplying it with lethal injection drugs.
Companies refused to sell the drugs to the state for several years due to concerns that sales would have to be disclosed to the public, but state legislators changed the law in May to keep the names of the drug providers anonymous, according to the Associated Press (AP).
In July, South Carolina’s Supreme Court decided to permit the resumption of executions, which also includes the electric chair and firing squad as options, CNN reported.
The state’s first execution since 2011 will be of 46-year-old Freddie Eugene Owens, who is scheduled to be put to death on September 20 for the 1997 murder of Irene Graves, a single mother of three who was working the overnight shift at a Greenville County gas station when Owens robbed it, the South Carolina Daily Gazette reported.
Owens and his friends were on a robbery spree on Halloween night when he shot Graves in the head “after she said she did not know the combination to the safe at the Speedway gas station,” the outlet stated.
The day after Owens was convicted of murder in 1999, he also killed his cellmate at the Greenville County Jail.
At his sentencing hearing the next day, he confessed to the second killing and said, “I really did it because I was wrongly convicted of murder.”
Owens has been fighting the death sentence but has exhausted his appeals — being re-sentenced to death three separate times.
His attorney is still waiting to receive a sworn statement about the “purity, potency, and quality” of the lethal drug from prison officials, the AP stated.
“The lack of transparency about the source of the execution drugs, how they were obtained, and whether [they] can bring about as painless a death as possible is still of grave concern to the lawyers that represent persons on death row,” lawyer John Blume told the outlet.
[FoxNews] Retiring the vessels would free up around 700 sailors and marines for redistribution
The Navy will reportedly sideline 17 vessels due to a manpower shortage that makes it difficult to properly crew and operate ships across the fleet.
There just aren't enough Merchant Marines to keep all the ships going at once, according to Rear Admiral (Ret.) Mark Montgomery, senior director of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation for the Foundation for Defense of Democracy, told Fox News Digital. Merchant Marines operate the many support vessels needed to keep the Navy running.
"The problem, of course, is the ships are at sea, away from home port 12 months of the year," Montgomery said. "So you need two crews … we're desperately short of the number of people."
"There’s a lack of experienced merchant mariners to crew the ships, and this is really a clear danger to national security," Montgomery added.
The Military Sealift Command drafted a plan to put 17 ships into "extended maintenance," which would include a redistribution of crews to other vessels across the Navy, the U.S. Naval Institute reported.
The ships include two replenishment ships, one fleet oiler, a dozen Spearhead-class Expeditionary Fast Transports and two forward-deployed Navy expeditionary sea bases – the USS Lewis Puller, based in Bahrain and the USS Herschel "Woody" Williams, based in Souda Bay, Greece.
The effort is known as the "great reset" and is awaiting approval from Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti. The change will reduce Navy demands for officers by 700 mariners.
The U.S. military has suffered some recruiting problems over the past few years, most notably in the Army, which had to cut its force by 24,000 – roughly 5% of jobs – in 2024 to account for recruiting shortfalls. The Army stressed that it is not asking current soldiers to leave but is aiming to affect posts that have remained empty.
#1
They're slitting the fleet's throat - one of the few advantages we still have is our ability to keep the fleet supplied and fighting at the far end of nowhere. We give that up, especially in the Pacific, and we're back to the first six months of WWII.
The MAGA types don't trust anything about the O'Biden run DOD. Then we have the O'Biden supporting Smartphone Generation, it would rather View and than Do.
#6
The Navy is the worst of the services. On patrol a doctor told me that after a sub refueling, 90% of the crew was married. After two patrols only 10% were married. A fast attack can be out of home port over 200 days. Kids today do not know how to work!
Posted by: Old Salty ||
08/25/2024 14:25 Comments ||
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#7
One reason why those 'we need more ships' analysis types are a problem is that we can't provide the personnel to keep the ships operating.
We are going to need ships which require very small crews as well as all kinds of quasi autonomous devices to guard the ship and project offense.
Posted by: Lord Garth ||
08/25/2024 19:31 Comments ||
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#8
We are going to need ships which require very small crews as well as all kinds of quasi autonomous devices to guard the ship and project offense.
The problem with quasi-autonomous is little or no damage control. That takes personnel.
[BBC] While the US and Russia were busy finalising the biggest exchange of prisoners since the Cold War, a gifted but little-known Russian pianist was dying in silence in jail.
Pavel Kushnir had protested repeatedly against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and began a hunger strike soon after his arrest in May, later refusing water too.
He died, slowly and without publicity, on 28 July - four days before a group of better-known dissidents were swapped for Kremlin spies, sleeper agents and killers imprisoned in the West.
After his lonely death, at a pre-trial detention centre in Birobidzhan in Russia’s Far East, the 39-year-old was mourned by only 11 people at his cremation.
Svetlana Kaverzina, an independent politician in Siberia, said no-one had tried to talk him out of sacrificing himself because they hadn’t been aware what was happening.
"We couldn’t chip in and send him a lawyer - we didn’t know," she wrote on the Telegram messaging app. "He was alone."
BLUF:
[Washington Examiner] According to one officer involved in the operation and three people familiar with it, speaking with the Wall Street Journal, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky originally approved of the operation. Valery Zaluzhny, then the commander in chief of the armed forces, was in charge of it. "Shocking" to some possibly.
However, in June 2022, the Dutch intelligence agency MIVD learned of the plot and tipped off the CIA. After approaching Zelensky, he decided to call the operation off. According to those familiar with the situation, Zaluzhny ignored the order and pressed onward.
After the operation, Zelensky reportedly angrily approached Zaluzhny. The military chief shrugged it off, suggesting that he had called it off too late.
"He was told it’s like a torpedo — once you fire it at the enemy, you can’t pull it back again, it just keeps going until it goes ’boom,’" a person familiar with the conversation said.
#2
In another scenario tendered at one point, Gazprom (majority owner of Nordtream 2) was under contract with several European countries to provide natural gas in specified quantities and at specified prices. After Germany suspended certification of the Nordsteam 2 pipeline in February 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine, Gazprom could not fulfill its contractual obligations for NG delivery through it but also could not invoke 'Force Majeure' (which would relieve parties to a contract of performance of their contractual obligations in the event of an occurrence outside the control of the parties such as natural disasters, war, terrorism, government actions, riots and strikes) under international trade laws. These being as follows:
#1 - the Ukraine 'Special Military Operation' was not classified as a war by Russia (Gazprom's headquarters and NG delivery source country), so that condition didn't exist within the trade laws.
#2 - It was Germany's 'government action' that stopped the NG flow, not Russia's (again, Gazprom's NG origination point).
#3 - There was no 'Civil Unrest' or 'Terrorism' in Russia at the time.
Gazprom needed to create a Force Majeure condition, without making it seem as if the Russian government was involved in any way, in order to vacate their existing contracts.
Posted by: Mullah Richard ||
08/25/2024 8:49 Comments ||
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#3
When Russia and Ukraine split, they split soviet black sea fleet. Ukraine, eventually, sold their part for metal.
#4
^ #2 Gazprom needed to create a Force Majeure condition
At the time of the original break, there was a credible theory that the operator could have damaged the line with sloppy maintenance and operation of one or more "pigs'.
I still like that better. No divers required.
Posted by: Bobby ||
08/25/2024 11:54 Comments ||
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[FoxNews] Four people, including the suspect, were injured in the stabbing incident.
According to the New South Wales Police, officers were initially called to the scene of a crash at an intersection in Engadine, Australia on Sunday morning local time.
When they arrived at the scene, police said they found a 55-year-old man, who appeared to be suffering from stab wounds, running from the crash scene.
Authorities took him into custody and used a Taser during the arrest.
Authorities said that during the interaction, a male police officer suffered a "serious" laceration to his left wrist.
Police said that the woman, who was the passenger in the crashed vehicle, was found with multiple stab wounds.
A fourth person was also injured and police said it was unclear what their involvement in the incident was.
[BBC] A climate tech company has won an £8m investment to mass produce tiny particles that can be "programmed" to soak up and store greenhouse gases.
Promethean Particles, in Nottingham, is working with metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) - tiny nanoparticles that have extremely large internal surface areas.
One teaspoon of the super adsorbent particles contains the equivalent area of two tennis courts.
The company is hoping to use the new financing, which has been led by Mercia Ventures and Aramco Ventures, to build a bigger manufacturing facility and expand its team.
It is also aiming to drive down the price of MOFs from tens of thousands of pounds to just £25 per kilo.
The key to reducing the price and scaling up production would be to make the nanoparticles from cheap, widely available metals such as zinc and magnesium.
James Stephenson, chief executive officer (CEO) of Promethean, said: "MOFs are an incredible class of materials that have shown all kinds of potential in lots of applications."
Their internal surfaces can be lab-engineered to become "sticky" for different gases.
Out in the real world, the nanoparticles can act as both mini-sponges and mini-sieves, able to both separate and store large volumes of different gases.
These properties could be used to reduce the climate impact of producing cement, metals and energy, which continue to emit huge quantities of greenhouse gases.
MOF particles from Promethean are already being used in a prototype carbon capture unit at Drax power station in Yorkshire.
ANALYSIS
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) has long been proposed as essential to national plans for a carbon-neutral future.
The idea is that carbon dioxide from energy-hungry industries is intercepted before it enters the atmosphere and is then transported for permanent storage deep underground.
The UK has announced several carbon capture projects as part of its pledge to capture and store 20 to 30 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year by 2030.
Yet so far, CCS has proved expensive and energy-intensive. No large-scale project is yet up and running.
Critics see it as a dangerous distraction from the need to rapidly reduce emissions.
The potential for MOFs to first filter out greenhouse gases at source, and then store them for easier transportation, is what has got the experts excited.
But up to now, the cost of these nanoparticles has made that eye-wateringly expensive.
If MOFs could be produced for a fraction of the current price, it could be a game-changer for CCS and good news for a fast-warming planet.
#2
The 'key to climate change', assuming that climate change is both rapid and caused my man, and that gas capture would be an effective means of reducing it to whatever level, in whatever time period, at whatever cost.
Posted by: Bobby ||
08/25/2024 12:13 Comments ||
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#4
Global Warming is a myth propagated by rich people to give them an excuse for poor people elimination. The power to regulate is the power to control!!!!!!
Posted by: Old Salty ||
08/25/2024 14:07 Comments ||
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#5
/\ No valid counterthesis appears to have surfaced.
#6
^If I want my PHD, I have to agree with the myths!
Posted by: Titus Ebbegum3551 ||
08/25/2024 16:18 Comments ||
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#7
Not necessarily agree with the myths. But definitely give them lip service, and use all the popular phrases possible in your grant proposals and subsequent publications in order to increase the odds of getting money and then getting published.
But this is not new – my father played that game very successfully in his oncology research starting in the 1960s. Before that, he was the one in charge of handing out the money, and so could apply more objective scientific standards.
#8
If you could store carbon inexpensively (a big if that will require about 2 or 3 orders of magnitude increase in efficiency), it would be a great thing.
This is because if the world then gets too cold, the storage could be reversed.
Posted by: Lord Garth ||
08/25/2024 22:15 Comments ||
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#1
Think you nailed it Skid. Cover up the DEI hire mistakes. Could have been the same system that brought us the OceanGate private sub that imploded on the way to the Titanic.
Project GENESIS not only breathed new life into the aging Oliver Hazard Perry class frigates, but it also set the country up to build its own advanced warships.
by Tayfun Ozberk
[TWZ] The U.S. Oliver Hazard Perry (OHP) class frigates, dozens of which once served the U.S. Navy, are still actively used by a number countries. While they may all appear similar from the outside, upon a closer look, the OHP frigates of the Turkish Navy, known as the “Gabya” class, are significantly different. This transformation is due to the GENESIS project, a major initiative of the Turkish defense industry that has not only rejuvenated the combat capability of these second-hand warships, but has set Turkey on a path to independently developing its own more advanced warships.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE OHP FRIGATES IN THE TURKISH FLEET
The Turkish Navy started to use Gabya class frigates in the late 1990s when TCG Gaziantep (ex-USS Clifton Sprague) was commissioned in 1997. Between 1997 and 2003, eight Gabya class frigates were commissioned, and the ex-USS Duncan was purchased as the ninth ship and used as a spare parts source for the other eight vessels.
The Gabya class frigates, which were reactivated and put into service after the U.S. Navy decommissioned them, were used by the Turkish Navy for anti-air warfare (AAW) as their main mission function due to the medium-range SM-1 missiles they carried.
Since the late 1990s, these ships have been used in critical missions such as the non-combatant evacuation operation from Beirut in 2006 and Operation Unified Protector in Libya in 2011. They have also participated in numerous NATO and United Nations missions.
These ships, which have formed the backbone of the Turkish Navy by sailing thousands of hours every year since they entered service, have been subjected to a number of modernizations by the Turkish defense industry. These upgrades focused on countering modern threats more effectively, increasing compatibility in joint operations, enhancing detection and identification abilities by replacing outdated sensors with modern sensors, and increasing their firepower
#1
A simple idea: They were good boats, with a lot of life left in them, but obsolete. So howzabout we replace the obsolete part, and get more mileage out of them.
Posted by: ed in texas ||
08/25/2024 9:19 Comments ||
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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.
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A 
