Category: Security

The young boy hid under the bed as the Nazi soldier plunged a blade into his mattress. It grazed his chin, but George Rishfeld didn’t make a sound.

Family friends, who were Catholic, had taken him in as one of their own in German-occupied Poland. They urged him to stay inside and not to speak if he did venture out.

On one rare outing, a Nazi patrolman approached as he walked along a street in Warsaw. The soldier pinched the boy’s cheek and asked where his mother was. Unused to speaking and still grappling with Polish, Rishfeld responded that she was in the “mud,” when he meant to say “ghetto.” Laughing, the Nazi figured the youngster was a comedian, handed him an apple and sent him on his way.

Nazi Germany and its collaborators killed about 1.5 million Jewish children, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Many like Rishfeld survived with the help of compassionate gentiles.

Rishfeld will share his story at 2 p.m. Sunday at the William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum in Atlanta. Admission is free but registration is required. See thebreman.org. Titled “Bearing Witness,” the event comes a week before International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

“I was saved to tell this story. It’s that simple,” said Rishfeld, 84, who shares his story partly to counter Holocaust deniers. “The story has to be told because there are too many nonbelievers out there.”

Fleeing east

There are two parts to Rishfeld’s story, the one he was told by his parents and another he remembers. This is the part he was told.

Rishfeld was born in Warsaw in 1939, months before Germany invaded Poland. His father, Richard, was a successful furrier wealthy enough to hire servants, even a chauffeur. He spoke Hebrew and played on a Jewish men’s soccer team, which faced antisemitic attacks whenever it won. Richard and Lucy Rishfeld were members of their local synagogue.

Amid the Nazi invasion of Poland, Lucy Rishfeld wrapped her son in furs and fled with him to Russian-occupied Vilna, hoping they would be safe in the region where she’d grown up and still had family. Richard Rishfeld, a reservist in the Polish military, eventually joined them.

The Nazis attacked Russia in 1941, capturing Vilna and forcing the Rishfelds and many other Jews into ghettos. As the Nazis carried out the “Final Solution” — their plan for exterminating all Jews in Europe — they murdered Rishfeld’s aunt, uncle, 9-month-old cousin and maternal grandparents.

As the Germans prepared to destroy the ghetto where they were being held, Rishfeld’s parents secretly tossed him over a barbed wire fence to Helena Frackiewicz, a teenager who had worked as a bookkeeper in the Rishfelds’ fur factory. Frackiewicz’s father, Ludwik, had been the factory foreman. The Frackiewicz family opposed the Nazis and promised to protect young George.

In hiding

Rishfeld’s first memory is of arriving at the Frackiewicz family’s three-story apartment building in Warsaw, where he cried and asked for his mother. His protectors sought to console him.

“They kissed me on my lips so hard — they pressed so hard — my gums hurt. And they were hugging me,” he recalled. “And then they started putting food in my mouth. That calmed me down. Ultimately, they showed me so much love that I just couldn’t refuse it.”

He called his surrogate parents Mama and Papa and they treated him as their own. He fondly remembers falling headfirst into a pickle barrel in their kitchen.

Knowing they were risking their lives in hiding him, as evidenced by the Nazis’ mattress-slashing search for Jews one day, the Frackiewiczes told him not to speak much and to mostly stay in, even when other children played outdoors. To fight boredom, he’d look out the window, pretending to shoot the wounded Nazi soldiers arriving at the military hospital across the street. When one of the Frackiewiczes would take him outside, they would carry him down two flights of stairs in their building so only one set of footsteps would be heard.

So their young charge would fit in, the Frackiewiczes gave him a St. Christopher medal and routinely took him to church. One day, the Nazis showed up and started dragging Jewish children out of the sanctuary. Helena Frackiewicz urged Rishfeld to grab his stomach and cry, as if he were sick. Their subterfuge worked, and she carried him out past the Nazis.

Rishfeld’s father, who had escaped captivity and joined the armed resistance, visited his son twice during the war. He showed up the second time on Christmas Eve, wearing a stolen German military uniform. He brought his son a toy wooden gun.

“Where is Mommy? Why didn’t you bring Mommy?” Rishfeld remembered asking.

“Don’t worry. She is fine,” his father responded. “She will be with you soon.”

Richard Rishfeld later told his son he had lost contact with Lucy and believed she had been killed.

The reunion

Lucy Rishfeld’s talents saved her. Her Nazi captors recognized her sewing skills and sent her to a forced labor camp. She was certain her husband was dead.

After the Russians recaptured Vilna in 1944, Rishfeld’s parents sought to reunite with him. As Rishfeld’s mother prepared to travel by train to her son, she spotted a handsome man on the platform. He appeared well-fed and clean-shaven and was wearing a stolen Russian military uniform with polished boots. In contrast, she was malnourished and clothed in rags. Lucy realized it was Richard. They hugged. Then she slapped his face.

“How dare you look so good. How dare you smell so good,” Rishfeld remembers his mother’s description of their reunion.

Rishfeld recalls his parents’ arrival at his hiding place as the happiest moment of his life. At the same time, he was sad to leave his rescuers.

The Rishfelds were taken to a crowded camp for displaced people, where they stayed for nearly a year. They slept on the floor in a bleak apartment building and were often hungry. Other displaced children who had lost siblings amid the Holocaust jealously picked on Rishfeld because he had survived. The Rishfelds moved with a family friend to Belgium before resettling in New York City.

Righteous Among the Nations

Gratefully, Rishfeld’s family sent clothes and a gold ring studded with diamonds to the Frackiewiczes, who experienced deprivation living behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. They also contacted Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, to recognize the Frackiewiczes’ heroism. In 1997, Ludwik and Ludmila Frackiewicz and their daughter, Helena, were included in Yad Vashem’s Righteous Among the Nations Program, which honors people who risked their lives saving Jews during the Holocaust.

To decide who is honored, a commission of Holocaust experts seeks survivors’ testimony or documentation. Rescuers receive medals and certificates, and their names are added to the Wall of Honor in the Garden of the Righteous at Yad Vashem. They also receive honorary Israeli citizenship.

As of January 2022, 28,217 people around the world have been named “Righteous Among the Nations.” Among them is Oskar Schindler, the businessman made famous by Steven Spielberg’s award-winning film “Schindler’s List.” Schindler has been credited with saving more than 1,000 Jews from deportation to Auschwitz, the Nazi complex in Poland where more than 1.1 million people died.

Yad Vashem has similarly honored many Catholic nuns who helped rescue Jewish children. Suzanne Vromen, a retired sociology professor, interviewed some for her book, “Hidden Children of the Holocaust: Belgian Nuns and Their Daring Rescue of Young Jews from the Nazis.” The nuns, she said in an interview, hoped the children they saved would convert to Catholicism, but they also “knew they were saving their lives.”

“They contend that what they did was to be expected; it was simply the humane thing to do,” she wrote in her book.

The largest share of people who have received “Righteous Among the Nations” recognition — 7,232 — were traced to Poland, where the Frackiewicz family aided Rishfeld and other Jews in Warsaw.

“In saving Jewish refugees,” Yad Vashem says in its database, “the Frackiewiczes were guided by humanitarian considerations and never expected anything in return.”

Bearing witness

Dozens of elementary schoolchildren from Decatur listened with rapt attention inside the Breman Museum’s auditorium recently as George Rishfeld spoke. He showed them a photo of Helena Frackiewicz, calling her his hero. He also showed them his St. Christopher medal, which he still wears on a chain.

“I am a living witness,” Rishfeld told them. “Now that you have heard me, you are all witnesses. And I am asking you to tell the story to whoever is going to stand still and listen to you.”

As a young man, Rishfeld experienced flashbacks and nightmares. He slept with his bedroom door open and the lights on. Over the years, his traumatic symptoms faded.

Meanwhile, he attended college, served in the U.S. Army between the Korean and Vietnam wars and worked in the electronics industry. Today, Rishfeld lives in Cumming. He and his wife, Pamela, celebrated their 51st wedding anniversary in June and have two daughters and six grandchildren.

Rishfeld did not begin talking publicly about his experiences until 1994, when his rabbi asked him to speak at a Holocaust remembrance event in Ventura, California. It was cathartic. Pamela remembers how he “cried through the whole thing.” Since then, Rishfeld has shared his story hundreds of times at clubs, houses of worship, public schools and other places. It’s heartwarming for him when people ask for his autograph or want to take photos with him.

“If I speak to 50 kids,” he said, “and one or two of them come up to me at the end and want to shake my hand, I know I am a winner because I know I reached at least those two kids.”

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© 2024 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Martin Lawrence supporters are reportedly throwing cold water on speculation that he might be sick following his recent appearance at the 2024 Emmy Awards.

The 58-year-old funnyman reunited with his former “Martin” co-stars as part of a lineup of tributes honoring iconic TV series such as “Grey’s Anatomy,” “The Sopranos” and “All in the Family.”

Towards the end of the skit, Lawrence transitioned into presenting the award for outstanding lead actor in a comedy series but began to visibly have trouble reading from the teleprompter, pausing and slurring his words.

Fans immediately took to social media to voice their concerns about his health, asking questions like “Did Martin Lawrence have a stroke just now?”

However, sources with direct knowledge tell TMZ that Lawrence is in “tip-top shape.” In fact, the former “What’s Happening Now!” breakout is reportedly heading on a comedy tour after recently wrapping the latest installment of “Bad Boys” with Will Smith.

The outlet reported that Lawrence’s missteps during the live broadcast were attributed to “a technical glitch with the teleprompter caused by late changes to the script.”

But fans may have had a reason to express concern. In 1999, Lawrence suffered an apparent heat stroke and fell into a three-day coma, during which time he was placed in critical condition. The “Big Momma’s House” star reportedly collapsed during a jog while wearing several layers of clothing in a near fatal attempt to lose weight for an upcoming film role.

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© 2024 New York Daily News

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

This article was originally published by Radio Free Asia and is reprinted with permission.

Chinese-made drones could pose a national security risk to the United States due to laws in China that force companies to provide authorities access to user data, two U.S. agencies say in a new memo.

These “unmanned aircraft systems,” or UAS, are often used by operators of critical infrastructure in the United States without regard to the data they may be sending to Chinese servers, according to the memo from the FBI and the new Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

That puts security and economic interests at risk by potentially exposing vulnerabilities in key infrastructure or the details of intellectual property to China’s intelligence services, and could also put key networks at risk of cyber-attack, the agencies say in the memo.

The 2017 National Intelligence Law, the memo says, “compels Chinese companies to cooperate with state intelligence services,” including by providing access to all user data collected anywhere in the world.

“This includes prominent Chinese-owned UAS manufacturers that the Department of Defense has identified as ‘Chinese military companies’ operating within the United States,” it says, adding that the 2021 Data Security Law then introduced “strict penalties” for non-compliance.

The data is essential, it says, to China’s Military-Civil Fusion strategy, “which seeks to gain a strategic advantage over the United States by facilitating access to advanced technologies and expertise.” 

An statement released by the FBI and CISA says the agencies understand that drones “reduce operating costs and improve staff safety.” But instead of Chinese-made drones, it suggests alternatives “that are secure-by-design and manufactured by U.S. companies.”

Drone wars

It’s not the first time that U.S. federal agencies have warned of the dangers of Chinese-made drones, with the Army in 2017 banning the purchase of drones from heavyweight Chinese manufacturer DJI, which has denied working closely with China’s government.

U.S. senators in 2022, meanwhile, expressed alarm about “swarms” of Chinese-made drones flying over restricted airspace in Washington, while a Homeland Security official said in 2018 that “hundreds” of drones had violated restrictions meant to protect the president.

In April, Rep. Elise Stefanik, a Republican from New York who chairs her party’s House caucus, and Rep. Mike Gallagher, a Republican from Wisconsin who chairs the House Select Committee on China, called for DJI to be banned from using U.S. communications channels.

“Over 50% of drones sold in the U.S. are made by Chinese-based company DJI, and they are the most popular drone in use by public safety agencies,” the pair said. “It has been reported that the Chinese government is an investor in DJI, directly contradicting DJI’s public statements regarding their relationship with the Chinese government.”

More recently, Congress has moved to at least stop federally funded agencies from using Chinese-made drones in their operations.

Last month’s 2024 defense authorization bill included the American Security Drone Act of 2023, which bans the federal government and its agencies from procuring or using drones manufactured by Chinese firms or even “entities subject to influence or control by China.”

Expensive alternatives

The FBI and CISA memo says U.S. law enforcement agencies and private companies alike should consult the Department of Defense’s “Blue UAS Cleared List” for drones that are federally compliant.

However, many of the American-made drones are considered to be of lower quality and higher cost than their Chinese-made equivalents.

Stefanik and Gallagher said in a statement on Wednesday that it was clear the Chinese Communist Party was subsidizing China’s drone industry “to destroy American competition and spy on America’s critical infrastructure sites” and that a complete ban was needed.

“We must ban CCP-backed spy drones from America and work to bolster the U.S. drone industry,” the two lawmakers said.

This article was originally published by Radio Free Asia and is reprinted with permission.

Only 3% of adults in Taiwan see themselves as primarily Chinese, despite Beijing insisting that Taiwan is a Chinese province and should be reunified with the mainland, a new survey has found.

Some 67% of respondents to the survey said they were primarily Taiwanese and not Chinese, while 28% think of themselves as both Taiwanese and Chinese, U.S. Pew Research Center said in its report on Tuesday. 2% did not respond. 

In total, 2,277 people took part in the survey which focused on how people in Taiwan think of their identity.

Interviews were conducted via telephone, and the margin of error was 2.64.

To the question “How emotionally attached do you feel to the country of China,” 11% of respondents said they are “very emotionally attached” while 32% answered “not at all attached.”

Adults under the age of 35 are especially likely to identify as solely Taiwanese (83%), and women are more likely than men to do so (72% vs. 63%).

Pew conducted the survey in the period between June 2 to Sept. 17, 2023, several months before the election that saw Lai Ching-te from the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) elected president.

The DPP, however, lost its majority in the 113-seat legislature after the Jan. 13 election to the more pro-Beijing Kuomintang.

Tied to politics

“Identity in Taiwan is tied to politics,” Pew’s researchers said, “Those who consider themselves primarily Taiwanese are most likely to align themselves with the DPP.”

“Meanwhile, those who regard themselves as both Chinese and Taiwanese, or as primarily Chinese, are more aligned with the Kuomintang (KMT),” they said.

At the parliament, the KMT won 52 seats to the DPP’s 51 seats.

“Few in Taiwan are happy with how things are going there today,” the report said.

Some 24% of respondents expressed satisfaction, while 32% were dissatisfied and 37% were neither satisfied nor dissatisfied. 

Those who support the ruling DPP, as well as those who consider themselves primarily Taiwanese, were more likely to express satisfaction with how things are going in Taiwan. Only 10% of those who support the opposition KMT said they were content with the current situation.

Most people across age groups and political alignments, even those who identify as primarily Chinese, consider China’s power and influence a threat to Taiwan, according to the survey.

The survey found that 66% categorize it as a major threat, more than those who said the same about the United States (45%) or Russia (25%).

Earlier research found DPP supporters favor the U.S. over China, while KMT supporters favor China over the U.S., the report added.

In the two months since its launch, Mayor Eric Adams’ legal defense trust has raised at least $650,000 to help cover lawyer fees he and his associates rack up as part of an FBI investigation into his 2021 campaign’s finances.

Vito Pitta, Adams’ longtime campaign compliance attorney who helps run the trust, disclosed the fundraising haul in a statement Monday.

“The Eric Adams Legal Defense Trust has drawn strong support in a short amount of time, raising more than $650,000 since it was formed just two months ago,” Pitta’s statement said.

Pitta would not immediately provide any more information about the matter, including how many individual donors were behind the $650,000 haul, which was first reported by NY1. The trust is expected to file its first full disclosure Tuesday that will spell out more details.

City rules state Adams can accept contributions of up to $5,000 per person for the fund. He’s barred from collecting donations from city employees and those engaged in city business. Donors must also agree their contribution won’t “affect any future business dealings” with the city.

Adams launched the trust in mid-November after FBI agents raided the home of Brianna Suggs, his political fundraising chief, as part of a federal investigation into whether the Turkish government funneled illegal contributions into the mayor’s 2021 campaign coffers.

On the heels of the Suggs raid, FBI agents stopped the mayor in the street and seized his electronics, including two cellphones.

The FBI has also carried out raids at the homes of Rana Abbasova, an aide to Adams at City Hall, and Cenk Öcal, a former Turkish Airlines executive who served on the mayor’s 2021 transition team.

Neither Adams nor anyone connected to his campaign have been formally accused of wrongdoing.

According to sources familiar with the matter, federal investigators are, among other issues, looking at whether KSK Construction, a Brooklyn-based contractor founded by Turkish nationals, was used as a vessel to pump illegal foreign cash into the mayor’s 2021 campaign account. Campaign disclosures show KSK executives donated more than $13,000 to Adams’ campaign on the same day in May 2021.

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© 2024 New York Daily News

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

This article was originally published by Radio Free Asia and is reprinted with permission.

This report contains graphic content that may be disturbing to readers. Discretion is advised.

A deleted article detailing the torture and death of a young man in police custody in China’s northwestern region of Xinjiang offered a picture of the methods typically used by police during interrogations, a former police officer and a rights lawyer told Radio Free Asia in recent interviews.

In 2018, police officers in Xinjiang’s Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture detained Sun Renze, the 30-year-old son of a police officer who died on active duty, on suspicion of “picking quarrels and stirring up trouble,” according to the Jan. 14 article on the news website Caixin, which cited court documents from a November 2023 trial of eight police officers in connection with Sun’s treatment.

On the early morning of Sept. 27, 2018, Sun Renze fell into a coma after being interrogated and tortured for seven hours straight by officers in Ili’s Kuitun city, Caixin reported, detailing a litany of torture methods including the being forced to carry an iron chair, electric shocks, mustard, hanging heavy objects from the victim’s genitals and waterboarding.

While the article, which focused on the Nov. 6, 2023, trial of eight of the officers involved, was deleted within minutes of appearing on the Caixin website, copies were still available on overseas websites, including China Digital Times.

While it has been increasingly targeted for deletion and censorship under Xi Jinping’s nationwide crackdown on public speech, Caixin nonetheless once made a name for itself as a cutting-edge media organization that published a number of hard-hitting reports on the suppression of press freedom and purges at the Guangzhou-based Southern media group in 2012 and early 2013.

Sun, who is Han Chinese, was taken to the ICU and transferred between “multiple hospitals” after losing consciousness, eventually dying at the age of 30 on Nov. 9, 2018, Caixin reported.

The Kuitun Municipal People’s Court found eight Ili police officers, including two named as Wu Xuemin and Liu Xianyong, guilty of “intentional injury,” and sentenced them to jail terms ranging from three to 13 years, it said.

‘Murderers!’

Sun’s mother and police widow Ren Tingting was present at the trial, crying on a number of occasions during proceedings, and standing up and shouting at the officers: “Murderers! I will never forgive you!” at one point, the report said.

The article said Sun was initially held at the Qapqal Xibe Autonomous County Detention Center, then transferred to a basement room at the Ili traffic police headquarters because officers felt they had made little progress in extracting a confession.

According to the Caixin article, Sun was arrested during a region wide crackdown on criminal gangs, and police were hoping to extract a confession that was precisely worded, in connection with the death of a young woman, Deng Xuefei, who fell from a building during a visit by debt collectors including Sun several years earlier.

Sun was then taken to the “case-handling station” at Huocheng County police, where the officers were asked to take him away again because Sun’s screams could be heard in the front-of-house offices.

Sun eventually wound up in the Huocheng County Detention Center, where the officers arranged for an interrogation room without surveillance cameras, the court heard.

The interrogations were so intense that even the officers were exhausted, and asked their bosses for a break on Sept. 26.

But they were told to intensify their efforts to “completely break Sun Renze’s spirit,” Caixin reported.

Waterboarding, beatings

The court heard that the interrogation room was one used exclusively by state security police, and was equipped with two surveillance cameras. The detention center director ordered one of the members of staff, surnamed Chai, to shut down the cameras, but Chai kept one of them rolling for seven hours, for fear that the case would come back to bite him, the report said.

“The surveillance video showed that for more than seven hours between 4 p.m. and 11:30 p.m., Sun Renze was waterboarded, both directly and with a towel, more than ten times, with two of the sessions lasting more than 15 minutes at a stretch. He was also forced to carry an iron chair and dumbbells back and forth repeatedly for 40 minutes.

“In the video, when the interrogators were carrying out the waterboarding, we couldn’t see Sun Renze’s expression and reaction, but we saw the iron frame bed shaking violently for a long time, and we can imagine how much he was suffering,” one witness told the court.

Sun’s interrogators also slapped him in the face, beat his calves and heels with a white PVC pipe, and administered electric shocks with an old-fashioned telephone, while he was restrained on the bed.

While some of the police officers claimed that they wouldn’t typically engage in such torture methods, a former police officer told Radio Free Asia that they were common in Chinese law enforcement.

“Some officers get emotionally involved in interrogations, and they will hit a bit harder,” former Zhuzhou city cop Cheng Xiaofeng told RFA Mandarin.

“This kind of water torture can make it hard for suspects to breathe, and it can cause suffocation and death,” he said. “It’s a harsher method that they use in the north, but we typically don’t use it in the south.”

According to Cheng, officers are more likely to torture suspects when they are under pressure to crack a case from higher up.

“The higher-ups would say things like ‘you have to crack this case in the next week’, which would prompt the lower-ranking officers to rush their investigations and start using ‘methods’,” Cheng said. “This was quite common, and a primary cause [of torture].”

Guo Min, a former deputy director of a police station in Zhuzhou, Hunan, agreed that torture is commonplace in Chinese law enforcement.

“Actually, we would often use such methods when handling cases,” Guo told RFA. “Using ‘methods’ is pretty common when suspects are uncooperative.”

He said there has been more of an attempt to prevent the abuse and torture of suspects in run of the mill police work, but political cases had fewer restraints.

“The police are a bit more regulated while handling [regular] criminal cases, but in political cases, they stop at nothing,” Guo said.

‘It happens in almost every case’

U.S.-based rights attorney Chen Jiangang, who once exposed the details of the torture of fellow rights lawyer and client Xie Yang, agreed.

“Based on my more than 10 years of experience in handling criminal cases, it is common for the public security to use illegal methods like torture, ill-treatment, beatings and intimidation when handling cases,” Chen told RFA in a recent interview. “It happens in almost every case.”

But in Chen’s view, torture and ill-treatment aren’t effective ways of getting a suspect to tell the truth, and will likely just generate miscarriages of justice.

He said it’s extremely rare for a case such as the torture of Sun Renze to win any kind of public redress — the vast majority have no consequences for the perpetrators.

“The law states that video cameras must be switched on during interrogations … but obviously officers who torture won’t be recording it,” he said.

“Cases like [Sun’s, in which perpetrators are brought to justice] only happen by accident, and the ratio is less than 1 in 10,000,” he said. “It’s the tip of the iceberg.”

“Torture is huge [in China] — it’s a humanitarian disaster,” Chen said.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is receiving backlash after a new report highlighted the government organization’s “National Outreach Program for Diversity and Inclusion,” which is a hiring program designed to push the recruitment of individuals with “severe intellectual” disabilities, “psychiatric” disabilities and other disabilities.

Fox News reported on the FAA’s “Diversity and Inclusion” hiring initiative earlier this week; however, the outlet noted that the initiative has been active for a considerable length of time, as it was last updated on March 23, 2022.

The FAA’s website notes that individuals with “targeted or ‘severe’ disabilities” are currently under-represented in the federal government’s workforce.

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

READ MORE: Pentagon wants $114 million for ‘diversity, inclusion’ programs

The Cleveland Clinic defines a severe intellectual as a disability that causes an individual to “use single words, phrases and/or gestures to communicate.” The Cleveland Clinic’s definition adds, “People with severe intellectual disability have an average mental age of between 3 and 6 years.”

According to Fox News, the FAA is responsible for the employment of approximately 45,000 in the aviation industry and is supervised by President Joe Biden’s Department of Transportation, which is currently directed by Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

Rep. Jeff Van Drews (R-N.J.), who is a member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, told Fox News, “All I ask is that the FAA hire individuals based on who is most qualified for the position and who will best protect our airspace, ensuring that we are all safe. That is the job of the FAA; it is not their job to be politically correct.”

In addition to lawmakers questioning the FAA’s diversity hiring initiative, social media users, including Tesla CEO and X owner Elon Musk, have publicly criticized the FAA over the past week.

“Do you want to fly in an airplane where they prioritized DEI hiring over your safety?” Musk tweeted. “That is actually happening.”

When approached by Fox News regarding the controversial diversity initiative, the FAA explained that it “seeks qualified candidates from as many sources as possible.” The agency also claimed that all of its employees are required to meet “rigorous qualifications.”

National Transportation Safety Board Chair Jennifer Homendy warned Wednesday that a partial government shutdown would force the board to pause its investigation into an Alaska Airlines accident in which a Boeing 737 Max 9 door plug blew out mid-flight.

Homendy issued the warning in a letter to Senate Commerce Chair Maria Cantwell, D-Washington, two days before Friday’s cutoff for some federal spending authority, including the NTSB funding that is part of the Transportation-HUD spending bill.

Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer, D-New York, said Wednesday he hopes to pass an extension of current-year funding on Thursday. The hope is that the measure would then have time to be acted upon on the House.

“If there was a government shutdown, because the (737 Max 9) planes are grounded and because we have the information we need, our investigation will entirely pause,” Homendy said in an interview Wednesday. She said in the letter that it would also “dramatically hinder” the board’s ability to begin and complete any other investigations.

Homendy, who was on Capitol Hill Wednesday to brief the committee on the accident, said the investigation is still in its preliminary stage. It’s not clear if the accident resulted from a manufacturing error, she said.

Since the Jan. 5 accident, the Federal Aviation Administration has grounded all Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft and Boeing announced it is evaluating its quality control measures. FAA Administrator Mike Whitaker briefed senators virtually Wednesday and Homendy said that she and Whitaker talk daily about the investigation.

“Right now we need to figure out what happened to this aircraft. The evidence tells us a story on what occurred,” she said. “What we find in this investigation will help the FAA in their efforts to ensure proper inspection, proper maintenance and proper repair.”

Cantwell sent a letter of her own last week asking FAA to share documentation of its safety audits of Boeing and the builder of Max 9 fuselages, Spirit AeroSystems, over the last two years. Cantwell said the briefing also focused on oversight of the FAA’s investigation process.

“Yes, manufacturers have to submit specifications of design and they have to meet those, but you also have to have a very strong oversight, second system of redundancy to make sure that that really does meet the standards of certification,” Cantwell said after the briefing on Wednesday.

Whitaker and Homendy also told senators that important provisions in the Senate FAA reauthorization bill would help in their investigations, Cantwell said. Homendy cited a provision, for example, that would require some aircraft to be fitted with a cockpit voice recorder capable of recording up to 25 hours.

In the case of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282, the jet’s cockpit voice recorder data was overwritten because of it has only a two-hour capacity. Homendy estimated that NTSB is missing important cockpit voice recorder data on about 10 accidents over the past several years.

“We are going to want to hear everything that’s going on in the cockpit . . . we can pinpoint to the smallest sound, almost inaudible, with our equipment in the lab so we can hear how the engine is running,” Homendy said. “In this situation all we have then to rely on is the interviews with the crew.”

Cantwell and the panel’s ranking member Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said they intend to hold a public hearing on the accident. Cantwell added that she would invite representatives from Boeing and Spirit AeroSystems.

“People get on a plane, they expect the doors to stay on — and so that didn’t happen,” Cruz said in an interview. “My staff and I will continue pressing the agencies to make sure we’re doing everything possible to ensure that these planes are safe.”

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© 2024 CQ-Roll Call, Inc

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Sophie Turner and Joe Jonas’ contentious divorce battle seems to be simmering down.

The “Game of Thrones” star asked a judge to dismiss the lawsuit she filed in September accusing Jonas of child abduction. In new legal documents obtained by The Times, attorneys for the former couple asked the New York judge overseeing their case to drop the suit in light of an agreed-upon parenting plan. On Wednesday, the case was officially closed.

In September, the “Dark Phoenix” star sued Jonas after he allegedly kept their daughters, ages 1 and 3, in the U.S. without her consent, withheld the children’s passports and refused to return the girls to England.

A spokesperson for Jonas denied that he had “abducted” the girls, accused Turner of attempting to remove the children from the United States permanently and urged Turner to “reconsider her harsh legal position and move forward in a more constructive and private manner.”

About two weeks after the actor filed the suit, Jonas and Turner reached a temporary custody agreement regarding the care of their two daughters. Jonas filed to dismiss the custody portion of their divorce case in Florida because that part had been resolved, and “the rest of the case was abated to see if the parties can resolve it themselves,” a Jonas spokesperson told The Times. Days later, they agreed to navigate their split privately.

Court documents filed in New York City and reviewed by The Times revealed that Jonas and Turner agreed to share custody of their daughters, who will split their time between the United Kingdom with their mother and the United States with their dad.

“After a productive and successful mediation, we have agreed that the children will spend time equally in loving homes in both the U.S. and the UK. We look forward to being great co-parents,” Jonas and Turner said in a joint statement.

Jonas filed for divorce from Turner last year after four years of marriage, stating that their relationship was “irretrievably broken.” Not long after the filing, the former couple released a joint statement addressing speculation about their divorce.

“After four wonderful years of marriage we have mutually decided to amicably end our marriage,” their joint Instagram posts said. “There are many speculative narratives as to why but, truly this is a united decision, and we sincerely hope that everyone can respect our wishes for privacy for us and our children.”

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© 2024 Los Angeles Times

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The world’s largest deep-sea coral reef has been discovered off the East Coast: a massive 6.4 million acre seascape that stretches from Miami to Charleston, South Carolina, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Ocean Exploration.

That makes it larger than Vermont, NOAA says.

The discovery, published Jan. 12 in the journal Geomatics, disproves a long held belief that the Blake Plateau in the Atlantic might be a dead zone.

Instead, scientists found a “stunning” ecosystem populated by “dense thickets of the reef-building coral.”

“For years we thought much of the Blake Plateau was sparsely inhabited, soft sediment,” NOAA Ocean Exploration Operations Chief Kasey Cantwell said in a news release.

“Past studies have highlighted some coral in the region, particularly closer to the coast and in shallower waters, but until we had a complete map of the region, we didn’t know how extensive this habitat was, nor how many of these coral mounds were connected.”

The reef’s borders are between 35 and 75 miles off the coastline, beginning southeast of Miami and moving north to Charleston, South Carolina, NOAA says.

One spot, nicknamed “Million Mounds” by scientists, accounts for the largest part of the reef. It is made up primarily of “a stony coral” commonly found at depths of 656 to 3,280 feet, where temperatures average about 39 degrees, the study reports.

“Cold-water corals such as these grow in the deep ocean where there is no sunlight and survive by filter-feeding biological particles,” the scientists reported.

“While they are known to be important ecosystem engineers, creating structures that provide shelter, food, and nursery habitat to other invertebrates and fish, these corals remain poorly understood.”

Hints of a massive reef were found in 2019, but scientists waited until a multi-agency effort had mapped the reef before announcing the discovery.

Data from than 30 multi-beam sonar mapping surveys (and 23 submersible dives) was combined to create a nearly complete map. In the process, the team “identified 83,908 individual coral mound peak features,” according to the news release.

“The study documents the massive scale of the coral province, an area composed of nearly continuous coral mound features that span up to 500 kilometers (310 miles) long and 110 kilometers (68 miles) wide,” the scientists reported.

A “core area” has high-density mounds up to 158 miles long and 26 miles wide, the report states.

In addition to NOAA Ocean Exploration, the multi-year exploration campaign included the Ocean Exploration Trust, the University of New Hampshire, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Temple University and the U.S. Geological Survey.

“This strategic multiyear and multi-agency effort to systematically map and characterize the stunning coral ecosystem … is a perfect example of what we can accomplish when we pool resources,” according to Derek Sowers, lead author of the study and Mapping Operations Manager for the Ocean Exploration Trust.

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© 2024 The Charlotte Observer

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.