News of the World

[kyonides]

Palm Springs Train Derailed Due to Tropical Storm Hilary

A train derailed Monday morning in the Palm Springs, California, area due to the impact of Tropical Storm Hilary.

Aerial footage showed water flowing around the derailed train cars.
...
Officials with Union Pacific are reporting that two routes are closed, in and out of the Los Angeles Basin due to washouts and flood waters over the rails. Additionally, the company is reporting that widespread road closures are slowing down its employees’ ability to get to work and operate the company’s trains safely.
...
A train derailed Monday morning in the Palm Springs area over by the Gene Autry overpass.
...
The storm, which made landfall on Mexico’s Baja California Peninsula on Sunday, was downgraded to a post-tropical cyclone but resulted in mass power outages and flooding across Southern California. Over 45,500 customers were without power across the state as of 1 p.m. Eastern, per Poweroutage.us. Over 10,000 of those outages are in Los Angeles County.

Biden Jokes About the ‘Hot Ground’
While Visiting Maui Wildfires
‘You Guys Catch the Boots Here?’

The moment occurred on Monday as the president mingled with a first responder, prompting laughter from people nearby.

“You guys catch the boots out here? That’s a hot ground, man,” he joked.
...
In another moment, the president addressed Maui’s wildfire victims, and he attempted to relate to them by citing a fire his home endured back in 2004.

“I don’t want to compare difficulties, but we have a little sense, Jill and I, what it’s like to lose a home,” he said.

Biden said that he almost “lost my wife, my ’67 Corvette, and my cat.”

The president used the moment to commend firefighters for their bravery.

According to a 2004 report from Firehouse.com, the fire at the Biden residence was contained to the kitchen.
...
“The country grieves with you, stands with you, and will do everything possible to help you recover, rebuild, and respect culture and traditions,” Biden said.

An estimated 480 people have died in the catastrophic fire, with over 800 still missing.

U.S. Military Weighs Allowing Calculators
for Entrance Test as Applicants Struggle

United States military applicants may soon be able to use calculators while taking entrance exams as government officials grapple with recruitment troubles.

President Joe Biden’s (D) Pentagon is weighing a policy regarding the devices that would “change how applicants take the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, or ASVAB,” Fox News reported Monday.

The news comes as many Americans, who are of age for the military, have experienced difficulty making adequate scores on the test to qualify.

A June 2022 report said the Pentagon was falling short of its recruitment goals, and officials were considering dropping some of its disqualifiers for military service.

It is not exactly clear how bad the problem is for every branch, but the Army — the military’s largest branch —  is facing historic struggles. It has met only about 40% of its enlisted recruiting mission for fiscal year 2022, which ends in three months on September 30.

In hopes of meeting its goal, the Army last week announced it is dropping its requirement for recruits to have high school diplomas or GED certificates if they can ship to basic training by October 1, according to Military.com.

On Monday, a defense official told Fox in a statement, “The department is carefully considering the use of calculators for the ASVAB.”

NYC Mayor Eric Adams Opens Migrant Mega-Camp
Costing New Yorkers $20M Every Month

On Sunday, Adams’s office began filling up the newly built migrant camp with single adult male border crossers and illegal aliens who have arrived in the sanctuary city from the United States–Mexico border.

According to the New York Post, by the end of Monday, there will be at least 150 border crossers and illegal aliens at the migrant camp. City officials have the capacity to put some 3,000 single adult male migrants in the camp at a massive $20 million per month cost to taxpayers.

“We’re taking away from people who are real New Yorkers,” a Queens woman told the Post. “… I was born here, on the Lower East Side, and you’re telling me they come first? How is that? I pay my tax money, federal, local, all that beautifulness, and my children don’t get to enjoy New York.”

Indeed, New York City’s school children who use the soccer fields on Randall’s Island will have their leagues and games disrupted as a result of the migrant camp. Thousands of parents signed petitions asking Adams not to put border crossers and illegal aliens on the soccer fields, but the opposition was ignored.

Biden’s DHS Sends over $770M in Taxpayer Money to NGOs
Sanctuary Cities Facilitating Illegal Immigration

On Monday, Mayorkas announced that the DHS, through the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), would give 53 NGOs and cities more than $77 million in federal grants for their help in absorbing border crossers and illegal aliens released into their communities.

The recipients include NGOs like Catholic Charities, United Way, Mission: Border Hope, and Louisiana Advocates for Immigrants in Detention, among others, which rely heavily on illegal immigration to circulate funding.

Sanctuary cities like Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Chicago, Illinois; Washington, DC; Albuquerque, New Mexico; and New York City, New York, are also receiving millions in taxpayer money through the initiative, as well as border cities like McAllen, Texas, and Pima County, Arizona.

In total, DHS has now granted more than $770 million to NGOs and mostly sanctuary cities for facilitating illegal immigration.

Much of the taxpayer money is flowing through a new route under Biden after he created the Shelter and Services Program (SSP) to funnel funding from the federal government to NGOs and sanctuary cities that help with their mass immigration goals.

Alejandro Mayorkas Expands Migration from War-Torn Ukraine

President Joe Biden is expanding Ukrainian migration into the United States, just as Ukraine’s government is drafting more men to operate all the U.S. weaponry that Biden is sending into the embattled country.

The expansion was announced on August 18 when top officials expanded the offer of “Temporary Protected Status” (TPS) to cover an additional 167,000 recent Ukrainian migrants in the United States:

“Russia’s ongoing military invasion of Ukraine and the resulting humanitarian crisis requires that the United States continue to offer safety and protection to Ukrainians who may not be able to return to their country,” said [Department of Homeland Security] Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas. “We will continue to offer our support to Ukrainian nationals through this temporary form of humanitarian relief.”

The 167,000 expansion follows a prior award of TPS to 26,000 Ukrainians. The roughly 190,000 Ukrainian migrants traveled to the United States via routes through Germany, Hungary, Poland, Ireland, Mexico, and many other peaceful states.

They were allowed to enter the United States due to the greatly expanded “humanitarian parole” loophole for emergency cases in the nation’s border laws. This loophole has been formalized into the “Uniting for Ukraine” program that allows Ukranians through the borders, but the TPS extension gives the arrivals more rights, including the right to work.

Iran Claims Alleged American Prisoners’ Release May Take Months

The Iranian Foreign Ministry said on Monday it could take up to two months to complete the “process” of releasing five American hostages after President Joe Biden’s reported $6 billion ransom payment.

The Foreign Ministry also indicated the $6 billion in unfrozen assets from South Korean banks might not be enough, ominously musing that Iran has assets frozen in Iraq as well.

“The agreements were signed with an expectation that they will be implemented within two months. We view the prospects for their implementation on time with optimism, because, according to the information we have, the work in this direction is proceeding well,” Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani said on Monday.

Kanaani claimed the “handover process” for Iranian assets in Iraq has begun, and “some of them have already been moved out of Iraq.” He offered no further details.

The Biden administration has also been remarkably tight-lipped about the hostage deal. No formal announcement has been made to date — everything the American people know about the arrangement was leaked anonymously to news networks in an orchestrated backdoor media rollout on August 10.

Niger: Coup Leader Says Military Junta
Will Not Last More than Three Years

General Abdourahamane Tchiani, the leader of the military junta that seized power in Niger in July, announced in a speech this weekend that he had ordered his offers to draft a detailed plan to transition towards democracy, vowing not to remain in power for more than three years.
...
In response, the countries of Mali and Burkina Faso, also led by recently installed military coup juntas, claimed any attack on the Niger coup leaders would be “a declaration of war” against them as well — creating the potential for a world war and prompting ECOWAS to resume attempts at dialogue.
...
As the fourth coup in the region against governments considered relatively friendly to the West — and in Burkina Faso and Mali, leading to the installment of military juntas favoring closer ties to Russia — Tchiani’s move alarmed the government of leftist President Joe Biden, which has repeatedly demanded the restoration of Bazoum’s administration to no avail.

Following negotiations with ECOWAS this weekend, however, Tchiani issued a 12-minute speech on national television vowing that the coup was aware of “the desire for true democracy” in the country and would not result in an indefinitely ruling dictatorship.

Hard to believe when there are other tyrants in the African continent that have not loosen their grip on power for years or even decades.  There are other nations that might still return to a despotic type of government lead by military juntas even after struggling with thousands of deaths and extreme poverty for a long time.