News of the World

[kyonides]

USA

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Several Articles

FAA Recruiting Workers with Psychiatric Problems to Be More Diverse and Inclusive

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is working to hire people with psychiatric problems and other concerning issues in order to be more diverse and inclusive, Fox News reported Sunday.

On the FAA’s Diversity and Inclusion webpage, the agency claimed, “Diversity is integral to achieving FAA’s mission of ensuring safe and efficient travel across our nation and beyond,” adding diversity is “critical.”

Under its People with Disabilities tab, the FAA laid out its People with Disabilities Program (PWD) that offers those individuals equal job opportunities. The site continued:

The FAA meets the goals of the PWD Program through a variety of practices:

Targeted Disabilities
Targeted disabilities are those disabilities that the Federal government, as a matter of policy, has identified for special emphasis in recruitment and hiring. They include hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism.

Near the bottom of the webpage, the FAA said it was last updated on March 23, 2022.

On its Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility webpage, the agency quotes Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg (D). “At its best, transportation can be a powerful engine of opportunity, connecting people to jobs, education, and resources—whether they live in a big city, a rural community, or anywhere in between,” he said. “Ensuring equity and accessibility for every member of the traveling public is one of the Department of Transportation’s highest priorities,” he continued.

The House recently approved a bill to reduce Buttigieg’s salary to $1 after he repeatedly failed Americans, Breitbart News reported November 8.

“The measure, introduced by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), was passed by a voice vote Tuesday as an amendment to the 2024 Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act,” the outlet said.

It is also important to highlight that in June 2018, aviation attorney Michael Pearson told then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson the FAA was placing diversity before public safety when hiring air traffic controllers, according to Breitbart News.

House Passes Pelosi-Schumer CR, Averting Shutdown Fears Until March

The House passed a short-term spending extension only hours after the bill cleared the Senate, pushing the next shutdown threat to March and surrendering Republican leverage on enacting a border security package.

The continuing resolution (CR) passed 314-108, extending spending levels and priorities set by then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) in December 2022 during a lame-duck session of Congress.

The outcome was not in doubt, although many Republicans made clear their opposition to yet another CR.

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) faced a last-minute push from conservatives to attach border security measures to the CR, a process that likely would have delayed House passage of the bill until Friday and sent it back to the Senate, which, in all likelihood, would have not even brought the bill up for a vote.

But with two to three inches of snow expected in the capitol on Friday, Johnson opted to advance the CR as passed by the Senate and send the House home for the weekend.

Republicans aimed frustration at the CR toward Democrats, who refused to address the border. Yet many decried it “business as usual” of yet another short-term funding fix.

New York City Principal Attacks Parents Who Opposed Closing High School to Accommodate Migrants

The principal of a Brooklyn, New York City, high school is now attacking parents who opposed the school closing its doors to its students on Tuesday to accommodate migrants during a storm.

As Breitbart News reported, New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) moved nearly 2,000 border crossers and illegal aliens into the gym at James Madison High School in the Midwood neighborhood of Brooklyn late at night.

To accommodate the border crossers and illegal aliens, James Madison High School Principal Jodie Cohen said all classes would be virtual for the following day. In response, parents protested outside the school, accusing Cohen and Adams of putting foreign nationals ahead of students.

In a virtual meeting on Zoom, according to the New York Post, Cohen attacked those parents who protested and opposed the school’s closing to house border crossers and illegal aliens:

“I don’t understand how people who never come on a Zoom like this could take an opportunity like this evening to throw mud,” Cohen said, her voice breaking.

“This [emergency] is for one night, one night!”

The principal explained she decided to have students attend school remotely on Wednesday because it wasn’t clear how quickly the building would be ready for classroom use after the migrants were bused back to their shelter.

Yeah, one night only that soon becomes one week only. Then one month only...

Questions Arise on How Chinese Billionaire Secretly Became Second-Largest Foreign Owner of U.S. Land

Politicians are demanding answers following the recent revelation that a billionaire Chinese Communist Party (CCP) member is the second-largest foreign owner of U.S. farmland, somehow going under the radar for nearly a decade.

Chen Tianqiao, who has an estimated net worth of $1 billion according to Forbes, made an $85 million purchase of nearly 200,000 acres of Oregon farmland in 2015, the Daily Caller revealed Wednesday.

Chen, 51, is a cofounder of Shanda Interactive Entertainment and a longtime CCP ranking member.

According to China Youth Daily, the newspaper of the Communist Youth League of China, Chen joined the CCP at 18 years old and was elected to the youth league’s central committee in Shanghai. In 2008, the businessman was appointed to the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC).

For reasons unclear at this time, the billionaire’s purchase of U.S. farmland does not appear in government records of land ownership by foreign investors, the Daily Mail reported Saturday.
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The 2015 purchase was reportedly made by Chen via the investment ­vehicle Whitefish Cascade Forest Resources LLC, acquiring the land from Fidelity National Financial Ventures at $430 per acre.

This remained a secret from the public until December 2023, when Oregon tax records revealed that the 198,000-acre block is ­currently owned by Shanda Asset ­Management LLC, Chen’s investment company.

Hunter Biden to Sit for Closed-Door Deposition, Along with 5 Associates

Hunter Biden will sit for a closed-door interview on February 28, along with five Biden family associates at various dates, House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) and Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) announced Thursday.

The announcement came as a surprise to some Republicans. Last week, the chairmen went through procedural hurdles to prepare for a House vote to hold Hunter in contempt of Congress for failing to sit for the deposition.

Hunter proposed last week to sit for the deposition if Congress reissued a subpoena, arguing the prior subpoenas “are legally invalid” because the impeachment inquiry “did not yet exist when the subpoenas were issued.”

The Republican chairmen initially accepted the offer but warned the House would move forward with contempt proceedings for this week.

The chairmen deemed Hunter’s offer to be another delay tactic. Hunter’s offer also appeared to be a public relations ploy to provide Attorney General Merrick Garland with a reason not to prosecute him upon a successful contempt vote.

After wrangling with Hunter’s lawyers, Comer and Jordan changed their strategy. They did not schedule a vote to hold Hunter in concept of Congress and agreed to a deposition.

Dem Rep. Correa: Despite Fentanyl, Border, Mayorkas Is Doing ‘Good’ Because We Haven’t Had Terrorist Attack

On Thursday’s broadcast of NewsNation’s “The Hill,” House Homeland Security Committee member Rep. Lou Correa (D-CA) stated that while there are problems on the border and with fentanyl, “Alejandro Mayorkas is not the reason” and is “doing a good job” because we haven’t had any terrorist attacks on U.S. soil and we’ve “essentially minimized” cyberattacks on the U.S.

Correa said, “Well, think about what’s going on around the world right now. We have two wars. We have fentanyl [on] our doorstep everywhere on Main Street across the country. We have challenges of fentanyl, sad, tragic deaths, parents mourning. And then, of course, we have a worldwide refugee challenge. So, naturally, we want to find out why this is happening. But Alejandro Mayorkas is not the reason. Alejandro’s doing his job. If you think about those two world wars going on in the Middle East and in Europe…what you’re not talking about is the fact that we haven’t had a terrorist attack, thank God, on our soil, the fact that we’ve essentially minimized any attack — cyberattacks on our society. So, Mayorkas is doing a good job. But we still have a lot more to do in this country. And, in my opinion, instead of spending our time going through these hearings to impeach the guy, he hasn’t committed any crimes. Let’s focus on working together.

Would some group of independent investigators agree on the claim that there has not been any terrorist plots and actual attacks?  Once again, time will tell.

LATIN AMERICA

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Gulf Cartel Continues Migrant Kidnappings in Mexican Border States

The kidnappings continued even after Mexico’s President was forced to admit that his government didn’t rescue a group of 32 migrants that cartel gunmen had kidnapped, but in fact, it was the cartel that released them.

Last week, Tamaulipas authorities, with help from Mexican Army soldiers, raided a house in the border city of Reynosa, where they rescued 61 migrants. The migrants were from Guatemala, Ecuador, and El Salvador and were reportedly being kept against their will in a stash house. However, authorities and military forces did not arrest any of the kidnappers who held the migrants against their will.
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As Breitbart Texas reported, on December 30, a group of Gulf Cartel gunmen in at least five SUVs stopped a passenger bus and kidnapped 32 migrants who were inside. The gunmen were able to leave before law enforcement arrived and moved the migrants to a stash house. They held the migrants hostage for days until they released them. The case became a national scandal after Mexican authorities tried to take credit for the rescue, with federal officials claiming it was the result of a coordinated effort. Days later, Mexico’s President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador was forced to state that the cartel had simply released the migrants on their own accord.

After their release, authorities moved the 32 migrants to the border city of Matamoros, where they stayed in some shelters awaiting their appointments with U.S. authorities to make asylum claims.

EUROPE

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Some Articles

Leaked German Military Docs Warn of WWIII with Russia by 2025, Hundreds of Thousands of Troops Deployed in Europe

Leaked classified documents from the German military have warned of a potential full-blown war between Russia and NATO in which hundreds of thousands of troops are deployed in Europe.

Germany’s Bild, the largest circulation newspaper in Europe, has claimed to have obtained classified documents from the Bundeswehr labelled “Classified Information – For Official Use Only” in which the Defence Ministry lays out details for a possible “path to conflict” between Russia and NATO beginning as soon as next month.

Under the scenario laid out by the German military, the Kremlin would begin a mobilisation of 200,000 soldiers in February and launch renewed efforts to capture the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, which it failed to do so at the outset of the invasion in 2022. This would be followed by a series of cyber attacks and other forms of hybrid warfare waged by Moscow intended to destabilise the Baltic states.

Using the destabilisation and potential clashes in border regions as a pretence, Russia would then — the Gemran planning assumptions state — deploy 50,000 soldiers to western Russia and Belarus by September, with massive troop buildups along the Polish and Lithuanian borders as well as the deployment of medium-range missiles to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad between Lithuania and Poland to pre-empt an alleged NATO attack.

The German military then predicted that by December, when the United States will likely be in the transition period between presidents — assuming the defeat of President Joe Biden — a border conflict with “riots with numerous deaths” will be artificially sparked by Russia in the Suwałki Gap, a strategically important corridor between Lithuania and Poland that separates Belarus and Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave.

The border crisis would be used as justification for Russia to send soldiers onto NATO territory to seize the Suwałki Gap while the United States will be in a state of flux. In the plans,  the German army predicted that this would ultimately spark a full-scale war between the West and Russia, with hundreds of thousands of troops being mobilised throughout Europe and fighting to break out by the summer of 2025.

‘Russian’ GPS Jamming Again Impacts Poland and Baltic, Sweden Military Intelligence Investigating

Aircraft flying over Poland and the Baltic once again reported major discrepancies in their GPS signals this week, only the latest in several apparent attacks on the navigation system on the edge of Russia’s war in Ukraine on which the modern world has come to depend.

Half of Poland and much of the Baltic Sea pinged as suffering from interference with the U.S. military-backed Global Positioning System (GPS), a satellite-based navigation aid made available to the public in the 1980s and now present in everything from cell phones and cars to enormous oil tanker ships and passenger jets. It is passenger jets which revealed the unreliability of the signal, given their unshielded position in the sky makes them more vulnerable to sources of interference.

GPSJAM revealed the extent of the interference by mapping publicly available data from passenger jets flying over Europe, showing areas where aircraft couldn’t get a good GPS signal. While areas near fighting in the Ukraine war always suffer from bad GPS reception — as well as other conflicts worldwide including over the Eastern Mediterranean and Israel — there have been several incidences of apparent GPS interference over Poland and the Baltic in recent weeks.

Polish news magazine Wprost reports the phenomenon has been experienced several times in recent months, but recently the interference has been more widespread. Other recent periods of interference have been described as “massive” and theorised the source of the issue was Russian jamming equipment in the Kaliningrad Oblast — a small, separate piece of territorial Russia surrounded by European Union member states.

The latest incident on the 17th came as Sweden’s Military Intelligence and Security Service (MUST) said it was investigating the issue amid complaints to the authorities by airlines their navigation systems were being jammed.

90,000 Troops: NATO Starts Biggest Wargames in Decades Next Week

NATO will launch next week its biggest military exercises in decades with around 90,000 personnel set to take part in months-long wargames aimed at showing that the alliance can defend all of its territory up to its border with Russia, top officers said Thursday.

The exercises come as Russia´s war on Ukraine bogs down. NATO as an organization is not directly involved in the conflict, except to supply Kyiv with non-lethal support, although many member countries send weapons and ammunition individually or in groups, and provide military training.

In the months before President Vladimir Putin ordered Russian troops into Ukraine in February 2022, NATO began beefing up security on its eastern flank with Russia and Ukraine. It´s the alliance´s biggest buildup since the Cold War. The wargames are meant to deter Russia from targeting a member country.

The exercises – dubbed Steadfast Defender 24 – “will show that NATO can conduct and sustain complex multi-domain operations over several months, across thousands of kilometers (miles), from the High North to Central and Eastern Europe, and in any condition,” the 31-nation organization said.

Troops will be moving to and through Europe until the end of May in what NATO describes as “a simulated emerging conflict scenario with a near-peer adversary.” Under NATO´s new defense plans, its chief adversaries are Russia and terrorist organizations.

“The alliance will demonstrate its ability to reinforce the Euro-Atlantic area via transatlantic movement of forces from North America,” NATO´s Supreme Allied Commander, U.S. General Christopher Cavoli, told reporters.

Cavoli said it will demonstrate “our unity, our strength, and our determination to protect each other.”

France Ramps Up Weapons Production for Ukraine, Cut Time to Make New Artillery From 30 to 15 Months

French manufacturers have reduced the manufacturing times for some of the weapons systems they supply to Ukraine by half or more, as France increasingly switches away from its previous policy of dipping into its own military stocks to support the war effort against Russia’s invasion, France’s defense minister said in an interview published Thursday.

“The logic of ceding materiel taken from the armies’ stocks is reaching its end,” the minister, Sébastien Lecornu, said in the interview with Le Parisien. “From now on, the solution is to directly connect French defense industries with the Ukrainian army.”

He cited the Caesar self-propelled 155 mm howitzer, made in France by Nexter, as an example of how French defense contractors are adopting a war footing. Caesars are among an array of Western-supplied artillery systems that have given Ukrainian gun crews an edge, especially when paired with high-precision munitions, against Russian artillery batteries using older Soviet-designed systems.

Nexter used to take 30 months to make one Caesar but now requires half that time, Lecornu said. The aim is to produce 78 Caesars this year, and Ukraine intends to pay for six of them itself, he said. France will also help finance Caesar deliveries and hopes other backers of Ukraine will also provide funding, he added.

Ammunition production is also being ramped up. From the end of this month, France will supply Ukraine with 3,000 shells per month for its 155 mm guns, up from 1,000 shells in April 2023. Lecornu said. Thales now takes six months – down from 18 months – to deliver one of its GM200 radars that have been provided to Ukraine for its air defenses, and MBDA’s production time for the Mistral short-range air-defense missile has also been substantially reduced, he said.

Demographic Decline: France Sees Lowest Number of Births Since WWII

The number of births in France has fallen to its lowest level since the Second World War in a grim indicator of Western demographic collapse.

Figures released this week from the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (Insee) reported that 678,000 babies were born in France last year, a decline of 48,000 over 2022 and the lowest of any year since 1946.

As with other countries in the West, France has long faced a declining birth rate, falling nearly every year since 2010 when 832,799 babies were born in the country, approximately 20 per cent higher than in 2023. However, according to Insee, the speed of decline has been increasing, with the birth rate standing at 1.68 children per woman in 2023, compared to 1.79 in 2022 and 1.99 in 2013.

A rate of 2.1 babies per woman is typically considered the baseline requirement for a modern nation to maintain its population rate. While France was well below this rate, the population did not in fact decline, given a 6.5 per cent decline in deaths, which stood at 631,000.

This was driven by an increase in life expectancy to 85.7 for women and 80 for men, representing a 0.6-year increase for women and a 0.7 per cent rise for men over 2022. While welcome news, the ageing population will likely put further strain on the pension and healthcare systems, with one in five people in France now being 65 years of age or older and one in ten being 75 or older.

The population, which grew by 0.3 per cent to 68.4 million, also increased due to mass migration, with 183,000 foreigners becoming residents last year. Neo-liberal governments, including in France, have often touted immigration as the solution to demographic decline and as a means to prop up their generous welfare states.

Arnold Schwarzenegger Detained for Hours by German Airport Officials over Watch

Action star and former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was left furious after being detained for more than three hours at a German airport Wednesday after officials accused him of tax evasion for not declaring a $21,000 watch he was preparing to auction off for charity.

Schwarzenegger was preparing to enter Germany when Munich airport authorities found a Swiss brand Audemars Piguet wristwatch in his luggage during an inspection, according to the German newspaper, Bild.

The Terminator star freely admitted the watch was an item he planned to auction off for his Schwarzenegger Climate Initiative charity auction which is to be held in Kitzbuhel, Austria, on Thursday.

It was reported that Schwarzenegger was friendly and cooperative at first, but as the inefficiency and incompetence of the customs officials worsened with every minute, the movie star began getting frustrated.

The paper added that officials demanded the action star pay a fee for the potential taxes on the watch, but when the agent tried to use a credit card reader in the office, he couldn’t get it to work.

Then they demanded he accompany them to a local bank to withdraw the money for them in cash. But the bank was closed and his debit card had a limit on it that would not let him take out the amount the customs cops wanted.

After that, officials took him back to the airport where another official then transported him to yet another bank — one that was open — and he was able to withdraw the amount they were demanding.

Thomas Meister, a German government customs agent, told the media that the state is initiating “criminal tax proceedings” against the Expendables star.

So now you don't own your own watch and are forced to pay taxes or else you'll get charged for not paying those taxes!?  What the heck is going on at Germany's customs?