[FoxNews] Dozens of drones that traipsed over Langley Air Force base in late 2023 revealed an astonishing oversight: Military officials did not believe they had the authority to shoot down the unmanned vehicles over the U.S. homeland.
A new bipartisan bill, known as the COUNTER Act, seeks to rectify that, offering more bases the opportunity to become a "covered facility," or one that has the authority to shoot down drones that encroach on their airspace.
The new bill has broad bipartisan and bicameral support, giving it a greater chance of becoming law. It’s led by Armed Services Committee members Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and Kirsten Gillibrand
...Machine non-entity selected to become the successor to Hillary Clinton as Senatrix-for-Life from Noo Yawk. She ran for the Dem presidential nomination in 2020. She has no observable principles, will apparently say anything to anyone, and seemingly lacks any personality of her own.... , D-N.Y., in the Senate, and companion legislation is being introduced by August Pfluger, R-Texas, and Chrissy Houlahan, D-Pa., in the House.
Currently, only half of the 360 domestic U.S. bases are considered "covered facilities" that are allowed to engage with unidentified drones. The legislation expands the narrow definition of a covered facility under current statute to allow all military facilities that have a well-defined perimeter to apply for approval that allows them to engage with drones.
[FoxNews] Joe Don Baker, the actor known for starring in "Walking Tall" and three James Bond movies, has died. He was 89.
Baker died on May 7, according to an obituary shared by his family on Tuesday. No cause of death was announced.
"Joe Don was a beacon of kindness and generosity," the obituary read. "His intellectual curiosity made him a voracious reader, inspiring a great love of nature and animals, particularly cats. Throughout his life, Joe Don touched many lives with his warmth and compassion, leaving an indelible mark on everyone fortunate enough to know him."
Born on Feb. 12, 1936, Baker spent his early years in Groesbeck, Texas, and attended North Texas State College. After graduating with a degree in business administration, he served in the U.S. Army for two years before moving to New York to pursue an acting career.
According to his obituary, Baker studied at the Actors Studio and launched his career in theater before moving to Los Angeles. He made his onscreen debut in a 1965 episode of the crime drama "Honey West" and his first foray into film was an appearance in 1967’s "Cool Hand Luke."
Baker went on to appear in dozens of TV shows and movies over his nearly five-decade career. He is best known for his starring role as Sheriff Buford Pusser in the hit 1973 crime thriller "Walking Tall." He also appeared as a character actor in three different James Bond movies, including 1987’s "The Living Daylights" starring Thomas Dalton, 1995’s "GoldenEye" and 1997’s "Tomorrow Never Dies" opposite Pierce Brosnan.
The actor had other notable roles in "Mitchell," "Charlie Varrick" "The Natural," "Fletch," "Mars Attacks!," "Reality Bites" and Martin Scorsese’s "Cape Fear" remake.
On the small screen, Baker starred as the titular NYPD detective on the crime thriller series "Eischeid" and made appearances on shows including "Gunsmoke," "Lancer," "Edge of Darkness," "Mission: Impossible" and "In the Heat of the Night."
Baker earned a BAFTA nomination for best actor for his performance in the British miniseries "Edge of Darkness." The actor made his final on-screen appearance in 2012's "Mud," starring Matthew McConaughey, before retiring that year.
According to his obituary, Baker was married for 11 years but did not have children. His obituary noted that the actor is "survived by relations in his native Groesbeck, who will forever cherish his memory. He is mourned by a small but very close circle of friends who will miss him eternally."
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
[Regnum] An earthquake with a magnitude of 5.2 occurred in the central Turkish province of Konya. This was reported on May 15 by the TRTHaber TV channel with reference to the Turkish rescue agency.
The epicenter of the earthquake, which occurred at 15:46 Moscow time, was in the area of the city of Kulu, 100 km from Ankara. The earthquake's source was at a depth of 18.73 km.
It is specified that the tremors were also felt in the nearby provinces and especially in the capital of Turkey. The Ukrainian delegation and the head of the Kiev regime, Volodymyr Zelensky, are currently there.
[Breitbart] The Ethiopian Finance Ministry announced on Tuesday that a two-day investment conference in Addis Ababa produced $1.7 billion dollars in investment deals, most of them from Chinese companies.
Reuters summarized the most prominent announcements from the Invest In Ethiopia 2025 conference:
The deals signed include a planned $500 million investment by Hua Ye Mining Processing Company in minerals exploration and processing, and the development of a special economic zone focused on minerals, the ministry said.
Another $600 million will come from Sequoia Mining & Processing Plc to develop coal mining projects, while another $360 million will come from Hainan Drinda New Energy Technology to build a solar cell manufacturing plant.
Another $250 million will come from CSI Solar, also for solar energy development, the ministry said.
The Ethiopian Investment Commission (EIC), the government agency which organized the forum, did not provide a timetable for when these projects would begin.
The Finance Ministry celebrated the Invest In Ethiopia 2025 conference as a “significant step in the country’s drive to attract foreign investment and foster private sector growth.”
Ethiopia is often seen as synonymous with poverty and starvation, but as the EIC eagerly points out, it actually holds enormous mineral wealth. Everything from gold and gems, to coal, iron, nickel, and phosphates can be mined from Ethiopian soil. Ethiopia boasts one of the oldest and most detailed geological survey operations in Africa.
One of Ethiopia’s challenges is that none of its riches were extensively mined until recently, except for gold, which became such a dominant product that it distorted the entire mining industry. Gold mining absorbed most of the country’s skilled workforce and most of its foreign investment. When the gold mines were booming, the industry had a habit of growing careless with its money. When the value of gold dropped, the entire Ethiopian economy sank with it.
Then there was the painful problem of political instability and tribal violence, which has kicked the legs out from beneath Ethiopian industry every time it tried to stand tall. Decades of unrest began when the government began shifting from an agrarian economy to industrialization and big cities in the early 1990s.
Ethiopia’s brutal Tigray War, from 2020 to 2022, drew in many ethnic groups, as well as neighboring Eritrea. Credible allegations of atrocities were leveled against all parties to the conflict.
The Tigray War was only the latest of Ethiopia’s devastating conflicts, and it is not entirely over. Ethiopia’s desperate central government recruited numerous tribal militias to help it battle the Tigray insurgents. When the Tigray conflict ended, the government told its allies to disarm, but they refused — and now thousands of people are once again being displaced by a violent insurgency.
Such unstable environments do not easily attract foreign investors, even when the ground is full of buried treasure. One of the major goals of this week’s investment forum was to convince outside companies their mines and energy projects would be safe.
Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed launched an ambitious post-civil war reform program last year, including extensive privatization of stagnant state industries, stabilization of Ethiopia’s wildly inflated currency, and more capital made available to foreign buyers.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) was sufficiently impressed with Abiy’s reforms to extend $3.4 billion in credit last year. In April, Ethiopia succeeded in restructuring $8.4 billion of its debt, securing more time to make payments. The government hopes massive foreign investment to develop Ethiopia’s mineral resources will provide the income it needs to manage its older debts and satisfy the IMF.
Chinese companies accounted for about $1.1 billion of the $1.7 billion in deals flowing from the recent investment forum. China now makes about half of the foreign direct investments in Ethiopia.
This is not necessarily good news for the Ethiopians, as China’s ventures have been criticized for exploiting the local workforce, and a government hungry for big foreign money is not the most receptive audience for complaints from its abused citizens. On the other hand, some Ethiopians are outspokenly grateful for China’s investments, and they appreciate Beijing’s reluctance to criticize their government for using whatever force is necessary to suppress insurrections.
[X] Chris Brown, the American musician, was arrested on Thursday at The Lowry Hotel in Manchester for an alleged assault on a music producer using a tequila bottle at a London nightclub in February 2023.
Only two years later? Talk about the mills of justice grinding slowly…
He is currently held on suspicion of causing grievous bodily harm. This arrest occurred shortly after Brown publicly supported another artist, Tory Lanez, with the message 'Free Tory'. I have no idea who Chris Brown is, but I suppose this might be significant to someone. Purveyor of jungle music... "King of Hip Hop", beater of Rihanna
Posted by: Fred ||
05/16/2025 00:00 ||
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[DarkReading] The spyware company must pay the tech giant $168 million in punitive and compensatory damages after a 2019 attack targeting 1,400 devices.
In a lawsuit spanning more than five years, Meta has finally come out the victor, winning nearly $168 million in damages yesterday from NSO Group, an Israeli cyber-intelligence company.
The verdict is something of a milestone, as this may be one of the few times, if not the first, that a spyware vendor is being held accountable for its actions in court.
"Today, the jury's decision to force NSO, a notorious foreign spyware merchant, to pay damages is a critical deterrent to this malicious industry against their illegal acts aimed at American companies and the privacy and security of the people we serve," said Meta, which owns WhatsApp, in a statement.
A LONG WIN IN THE MAKING
In May 2019, the Israeli firm used WhatsApp servers to distribute Pegasus spyware to roughly 1,400 cellular devices, some of which belonged to journalists and activists, through a zero-day vulnerability found in the messaging service's systems.
And then it gets technical. I don’t even know what most of those letter combinations mean.
Romania has 24 hours to save the country from a Russian-backed kleptocrat seeking to reverse all the progress that brought them out of decades of brutal repression.
"Life in freedom or death! everyone shouts. Let's vote! Go Nicușor! Long live Romania!" pic.twitter.com/LpT4zh6cq2
[TownHall] Imagine any business in America boasting in its annual report about killing hundreds of thousands of human beings. In addition to this bizarre self-congratulation, this same profiteer, which regularly touts its main mission of human elimination, annually celebrates being heavily funded by taxpayers to the tune of nearly a billion dollars.
That business is Planned Parenthood. And it’s finally facing the reckoning that has been decades in the making. The Republican-led Congress has advanced a bill to defund the abortion giant.
Days ago, Planned Parenthood released its latest annual report, revealing that it’s slaughtered 402,230 people. Yes, people. Every human is a person; every person is a human. It’s really that simple. And we know from science, that a new human being is created at the moment of fertilization. Not only did the nation’s activist arm of the Democratic Party kill more people than ever before in its history, but it also received more money from American taxpayers in the process: $792.2 million! That’s nearly $100 million more than the previous year.
Abortion is their big moneymaker. It’s what they fight for. It brings in over 60% of their ’Health Services Revenue." And each year, it enables a huge profit. In 2023, it was $179 million. In 2024, it was $27.4 million (lessened, no doubt, by the massive $69.5 million in 2023-2024 election spending as well as considerable increases in salary, advertising, public policy, and public relations expenses to the tune of over $258 million). Meanwhile, primary medical services at Planned Parenthood have been plummeting for decades. In the last 20 years, breast cancer exams plunged 79% from 921,541 in 2004 to 191,197 in 2024. Keep in mind, an organization with $3.1 billion in assets only provides manual exams; women aren’t worth purchasing a single mammogram machine. Pap Tests have plummeted nearly 70%. Prenatal care, which is less than 0.1% of their total services, is down 57%.
[NYP] FBI Director Kash Patel announced Friday that the bureau is leaving its longtime headquarters in the J. Edgar Hoover Building and would transfer 1,500 employees to locations around the country.
"This FBI is leaving the Hoover building because this building is unsafe for our workforce," Patel told Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo in an interview.
"We want the American men and women to know if you’re going to come work at the premier law enforcement agency in the world, we’re going to give you a building that’s commensurate with that, and that’s not this place."
"So we are taking 1,500 of those folks and moving them out. Every state is getting a plus-up. And I think when we do things like that, we inspire folks in America to become intel analysts and agents and say we want to work at the FBI because we want to fight violent crime and we want to be sent out into the country to do it."
He added: "in the next 3, 6, 9 months we’re going to be doing that hard."
Courtesy of Fred:
[PUBLISH.TWITTER]
🚨 #BREAKING: Kash Patel announces he is SHUTTING DOWN the FBI Headquarters in DC
Posted by: Super Hose ||
05/16/2025 12:20 Comments ||
Top||
#3
There's more than 1500 FBI employees in the DC area. What's gonna happen with them? So I'm guessing FBI gets there Greenbelt Office? That's what I am reading.
Remember when DC politicians got mixed up with N.Virginia Fairfax prostitutes - honey pots - when FBI was trying to secure funding for their new location. Once funded, the prostitute stories disappeared.
#4
11,000 FBI employees in the 50 mile radius around Washington, DC, per Director Patel in the tweeted video. Only 1500 being moved out in this first iteration, separate from those already being sent on temporary assignments or long business trips across the country and all over the world as they pursue their cases.
#5
Patel is closing the FBI headquarters, which is on Pennsylvania Avenue. There is also an FBI field office, on 4th St NW. A high school classmate was stationed there before he retired.
[BBC] Last week, 46-year-old Charl Kleinhaus was living on his family farm in Mpumalanga province Eastern Transvaal, South Africa. With its scenic beauty, wildlife and deep canyons, it's known as "the place where the sun rises".
His new home - for now - is a budget hotel near an American highway.
He and dozens of other white South Africans were moved to the US under President Donald Trump's controversial policy to protect them from the discrimination he alleges they are facing - an accusation that South Africa rejects.
Mr Kleinhaus defends the US president, telling the BBC he left his homeland after receiving death threats in WhatsApp messages.
"I had to leave a five-bedroom house, which I will lose now," Mr Kleinhaus tells the BBC, adding that he also left behind his car, his dogs and even his mother. "I didn't come here for fun," he adds.
The contrast in homes couldn't be more stark. But for Mr Kleinhaus, his situation in Buffalo, New York, is already a better one. "My children are safe," says Mr Kleinhaus, whose wife died in a road accident in 2006.
The status of white South African farmers has long been a rallying cry on the right and far-right of American politics.
Trump and his close ally, South Africa-born billionaire Elon Musk, have even argued that there has been a "genocide" of white farmers in South Africa - a claim that has been widely discredited.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
[Regnum] The US Air Force will soon receive the world's first sixth-generation fighter jet, the F-47. This was announced on May 15 by US President Donald Trump.
Speaking to US troops at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, the White House chief said he did not know why the plane was given that designation and called the fighter "incredible."
According to Trump, the United States is also considering the possibility of modernizing the fifth-generation F-35 fighter jet currently in service with the American army.
"I think we'll call it the F-55. It'll be a twin-engine airplane. I like twin engines. Sorry to say that. But it makes sense, right?" he added.
As reported by IA Regnum, on March 21, Trump said that the US has been testing the sixth-generation F-47 fighter jet for five years, which will be the "most lethal aircraft." According to him, stealth technology will make the new aircraft virtually invisible to radar.
The US President also announced the transfer of the contract for the development of the fighter under the NGAD (Next-Generation Air Dominance — F-47) program to Boeing, the development and production of the new product will cost at least 20 billion dollars. The cost of the aircraft themselves is expected to reach approximately 300 million dollars per product.
On March 24, the head of the Bureau of Military-Political Analysis, Alexander Mikhailov, told the Regnum news agency that Trump's statements about the F-47 tests reflect more of a desire to get political PR than military-technical sense. According to the expert, the drawn multimedia flight of the sixth-generation fighter does not mean anything, since it would be worthwhile to first see such a fighter take off and demonstrate its aerobatics.
Secretary Pete Buttigieg was too busy working out the details of chest feeding his adopted child to do anything about the known problem, so it festered. Thank goodness the Trump administration is finally working on it, which means will gets lots more of these stories until the new system is slotted into place.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is investigating how pilots flying into Denver International Airport temporarily lost contact with air traffic controllers on Monday.
The FAA told FOX Business that part of the Denver Air Route Traffic Control Center (ARTCC) experienced a loss of communications for approximately 90 seconds around 1:50 p.m. local time on Monday after both transmitters that cover a segment of airspace went down.
Sources told Denver7 that as many as 20 pilots were unable to speak with ATC. However, the FAA said the controllers used another frequency to relay instructions to pilots and that the aircraft remained safely separated. Controllers used another frequency to relay instructions to pilots, and there were no impacts to operations, the FAA added.
According to its website, the Denver ARTCC covers approximately 285,000 square miles of airspace over some or all of the following states: Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, Wyoming and Montana.
The air traffic control system has been under immense pressure for years, given the persisting staffing shortages, outdated technology and underinvestment in critical infrastructure. These shortfalls have come into focus in recent weeks as New Jersey's Newark Liberty International Airport, the second-busiest airport in the New York airport system, had back-to-back outages within a two-week period, each lasting about 90 seconds.
Air traffic controllers at the FAA facility in Philadelphia lost radar and radio communications while directing planes to Newark at the end of April and for a second time in May. Air traffic controllers at the Philadelphia TRACON facility work on Newark arrivals and departures.
Aside from the longstanding issues with the air traffic control system, Newark's challenges have been further strained by ongoing construction at the airport, which leaves it temporarily operating with only one of two parallel runways.
In a previous statement to FOX Business, the FAA acknowledged that the "antiquated air traffic control system is affecting our workforce."
Following the first outage at Newark, the FAA began working to improve the reliability of operations at the airport, including accelerating technological and logistical improvements and increasing controller staffing.
It began slowing arrivals and departures at the airport to account for staffing and technology issues at the Philadelphia TRACON facility.
In the meantime, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and acting Administrator Chris Rocheleau announced a slew of initiatives to improve operations in Newark and build an all-new, state-of-the-art air traffic control system.
Among their objectives, Duffy and Rocheleau are looking to add three new high-bandwidth telecommunications connections between the New York-based STARS and Philadelphia TRACON, which they believe will improve speed, reliability and redundancy.
STARS is an FAA system that processes radar data for Newark and is based in New York. Telecommunications lines feed this data from New York to the Philadelphia TRACON.
Duffy projected that building an all-new, state-of-the-art air traffic control system will take three to four years.
#2
Very high paying government jobs go unfilled for a reason. Unlike many civilian job recruitment standards, Air Traffic Control standards cannot be significantly lowered to permit the recruitment of DEI hires. Therefore, government mandated DEI hiring percentages cannot be achieved.
The consequence appears to be a nationwide shortage of Air Traffic Control personnel. Some things can simply not be faked. Successful completion of the challenging Air Traffic Control school appears to be one of them.
#3
I wouldn't be surprised if those who couldn't cut it in ATC, but are still good enough DEI hires, get put in GTC, and the demographic audit is an umbrella Tower Personnel type category.
Or there's the hire who checks more boxes than a tic tac toe game, and xer is put on an important sounding station which is just a closed system computer which simulates something important, requiring input and the occasional alert,
"Captain, sensors indicate a shortage of blinker fluid in units 18 through 24 on runway 18, condition 8, which requires your notification and response."
"Very well Scarlet Shutterfly, transfer 4 mikes of fluid type B4 from units 25 and 27, enhance, and make notice if the temperature exceeds plus minus 2 degrees on the y axis. Fabulous work, you are a valuable member of this organization."
And everyone else is snickering like when Dad sends the 10 year old into the auto parts store for headlight lubricant.
#4
I wouldn't be surprised if those who couldn't cut it in ATC, but are still good enough DEI hires, get put in GTC, and the demographic audit is an umbrella Tower Personnel type category.
How would you like to be a member of our HR team? You can always attempt the course again at some future date.
#5
Hadn’t the previous administration flat out forbidden qualified wrong-category applicants even from being allowed to test? I seem to recall one of he first things the new secretary did was put out a call for those people to please reapply as soon as can be managed.
[NAHARNET] Parliament on Thursday approved an urgent draft law doubling the penalty of illegal shooting into the air, which was proposed by MP Ashraf Baydoun.
The development comes days after dozens of people were arrested for firing into the air during the country's municipal elections.
Celebratory gunfire that erupted Sunday in the wake of north Leb ...Formerly inhabited by hardy Phoenecian traders, its official language is now Arabic, with the usual unpleasant side effects.... 's municipal elections had maimed several people, including LBCI news hound Nada Andraous, and a child who was critically maimed.
The army meanwhile issued a statement announcing the arrest of 35 people suspected of firing in the air after the elections. It also said that it seized arms and ammunition and that are efforts were underway to arrest more suspects.
Whether it's joy, political passion or grief, for many Lebanese, there's only one way to show it: by lifting a gun and firing off rounds into the air.
But the deadly practice, a tradition in many Arab countries, has been largely condemned in recent years following a spate of deaths and serious injuries in incidents involving indiscriminate gunfire.
Officially, celebratory gunfire is illegal in Lebanon, where firearm ownership remains widespread more than three decades after the end of its 1975-1990 civil war.
A 1959 law stated "anyone firing in residential areas or in a crowd, whether their gun is licensed or not" faces up to three years in prison or a fine.
Posted by: Fred ||
05/16/2025 00:00 ||
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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.
[X] Chris Brown, the American musician, was arrested on Thursday at The Lowry Hotel in Manchester for an alleged assault on a music producer using a tequila bottle at a London nightclub in February 2023.
[TownHall] Imagine any business in America boasting in its annual report about killing hundreds of thousands of human beings. In addition to this bizarre self-congratulation, this same profiteer, which regularly touts its main mission of human elimination, annually celebrates being heavily funded by taxpayers to the tune of nearly a billion dollars. 
...Formerly inhabited by hardy Phoenecian traders, its official language is now Arabic, with the usual unpleasant side effects....
