A recent tax lien docket shows President Joe Biden’s daughter, Ashley Biden, allegedly owes roughly $5,000 in income taxes.
The recent tax lien docket, which was first obtained by Fox News, shows that the president’s daughter owes about $5,000 in income taxes from a period starting in 2015.
The Pennsylvania Department of Revenue defines a tax lien as a “charge on real or personal property for the satisfaction of debt or duty.”
According to the tax lien provided to Fox News by Garrett Ziegler, founder of the Marco Polo nonprofit organization and a previous aide to former President Donald Trump, the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue in Philadelphia County notified Ashley Biden on Dec. 1 that the “amount of such unpaid tax, interest, additions or penalties is a lien in favor of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania upon the taxpayer’s property – real, personal, or both – as the case may be.”
Fox News reported that the period in question spanned from Jan. 1, 2015, during Joe Biden’s vice presidency under former President Barack Obama’s administration, until Jan. 1, 2021, during the final days of Trump’s administration.
“The scale is not anything like Hunter, but… Joe is constantly talking about how wealthy and connected people do not pay their fair share and can afford to pay more, and it just so happens that both of his living children did not pay their taxes,” Ziegler told Fox News. “This is just another example of the Bidens being careless. Like, you’d think that they would show a little bit more prudence when you’re the American first family to make sure you don’t have any tax liens on you, especially going into an election year.”
READ MORE: Hunter Biden threatens to flee US: Report
Ziegler founded the BidenLaptopMedia.com website, which features almost 10,000 photos from Hunter Biden’s laptop, spanning the time period between 2008 and 2019. According to Fox News, Ziegler claimed his team discovered Ashley Biden’s tax lien while performing a search in the system of the Philadelphia County courthouse.
Rep. Dan Meuser (R-Pa.), Pennsylvania’s former revenue secretary from 2011 to 2015, told The New York Post that Ashley Biden’s tax delinquency was either due to “carelessness” or “privilege.”
“Ashley Biden has an estimated net worth of nearly $2 million, and she can’t even find the time to pay $5,000 of her Pennsylvania taxes,” Meuser said. “So therefore, the Commonwealth has a lien on her property, meaning PA is a priority creditor and must be paid before Ashley can make any substantial financial transaction.”
Meuser claimed that compliance with tax payments in the state of Pennsylvania is “not difficult” and that the president’s daughter has the financial ability to pay her taxes. Describing Ashley Biden’s tax situation, the Pennsylvania Republican said, “At best it’s sad, at worst it’s unlawful.”
Meuser added, “Joe Biden loves chastising American taxpayers in the highest tax bracket — maybe there are a couple of other people he should be chastising.”
For the second time in little more than a week a drill sergeant was found dead at Fort Jackson, the U.S. Army said Monday.
The body of Staff Sgt. Zachary L. Melton, a 30-year-old with the 1st Battalion, 34th Infantry Regiment, was discovered on Saturday at Fort Jackson, Army officials said in a news release.
After he failed to report to work, an unresponsive Melton was found in his vehicle, according to the release.
The Directorate of Emergency Services were called, and Emergency Medical Services personnel pronounced Melton dead shortly after arriving, officials said.
On Dec. 8, Staff Sgt. Allen M. Burtram was discovered shortly after he failed to report for work, according to the Army. The 34-year-old with 2nd Battalion, 13th Infantry Regiment was also pronounced dead on the Army installation in the Columbia, South Carolina area.
“We are extremely saddened by the loss of Staff Sgt. Melton,” Fort Jackson commanding officer Brig. Gen. Jason E. Kelly said in the release. “Our thoughts are with his family and the soldiers of the Always Forward battalion during this very emotional time.”
Military chaplains and behavioral health personnel are available to help members of the unit, officials said.
As is the case in Burtram’s death, the U.S. Army’s Criminal Investigation Division is also investigating Melton’s death, according to the release.
Although information about Burtram’s cause of death has not been made public, last Wednesday the Army said there was “no apparent evidence of foul play.”
There was no word about Melton’s cause of death, and Army officials did not say if foul play is suspected.
There is no information connecting the recent deaths of the drill sergeants at Fort Jackson.
Melton and Burtram were not the only soldiers to have died at the base this year.
In June, Army Sgt. Jaime Contreras died during a training exercise at Fort Jackson.
Fort Jackson is the nation’s largest military basic training base, with more than 50,000 recruits assigned there each year.
A congressional staffer for a Democratic senator has been fired after the staffer was exposed for recording a gay sex tape in a Senate hearing room.
A graphic video obtained by The Daily Caller Friday showed the male congressional staffer performing anal sex with an unidentified man in a Senate hearing room. A photo shared by The Daily Caller also showed the naked staff member on a table that is traditionally used by senators during public hearings.
The Daily Caller reported that a source identified the room as Senate Room Hart 216, which is known as the Judiciary Room.
According to The Washington Examiner, the congressional staffer in the leaked video was identified as 24-year-old Aidan Maese-Czeropski, who worked as an aide to Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) prior to the release of the sex tape. On Saturday, Cardin’s office informed Politico, “Aidan Maese-Czeropski is no longer employed by the US Senate.”
READ MORE: Video: GOP senator ends hold on military promotions
“I was angry. I was disappointed,” Cardin told Fox News on Monday when asked about the incident. “It’s a breach of trust.”
While Cardin expressed his disappointment and anger about the sex tape scandal, the Democratic senator did not mention the name of the fired staff member to Fox News and described it as a “personnel issue.”
Cardin told Fox News he did not know any information regarding additional disciplinary actions against the former congressional staffer and had not been in contact with him since he was fired. Cardin also noted that Capitol Police are investigating the incident since the sex tape was filmed in an official Senate room.
Maese-Czeropski has also publicly addressed the sex tape scandal, although the former congressional staffer did not specifically mention the leaked video.
In a post on LinkedIn that has since been deleted, Maese-Czeropski wrote, “This has been a difficult time for me, as I have been attacked for who I love to pursue a political agenda. While some of my actions in the past have shown poor judgment, I love my job and would never disrespect my workplace.”
Maese-Czeropski added, “Any attempts to characterize my actions otherwise are fabricated, and I will be exploring what legal options are available to me in these matters.”
The glove is black, made of simple cloth, the kind a gardener might wear. Or a farmer, like Wood was on his Taylor Ridge property for many decades. But it keeps his hand warm.
“It kind of helps my arm,” Wood said. “It kind of gets cold.”
Farther up from the glove, just below his elbow, are the scars left behind by shrapnel that tore into his arm in 1944. The 98-year-old Wood is a World War II veteran, and while the scars on his left forearm have faded over time, the emotional toll of talking about the war has taken a bit longer to heal.
“I never told my folks what happened, hardly at all,” he recalled from a recliner in his living room. “It just bothered me so bad. I couldn’t sleep and stuff. It was best not to talk about it, because it bothers me terrible.”
Hearing stories from World War II is a rarity, as almost 80 years later, there aren’t many veterans from it around. The U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs estimates that just over 100,000 of the 16.1 million Americans who served are still alive in 2023.
“There ain’t too many World War II veterans around here — I can’t think of a single one,” Wood said. “I go to Edgington Church and I don’t think there’s any there. Once a year on Veteran’s Day I go to Rock Ridge High School and there’s not been one there for many years.”
But in 2010, he took a trip on the “Honor Flight of the Quad-Cities,” a one-day trip bringing local veterans to the various memorials and museums in Washington, D.C.
Meeting other veterans like him made Wood feel more comfortable opening up about his experience. Through information gathered for a brief book published in 2021 by his niece, Wanda Snow Franklin, his tales from World War II are easier to set in stone.
Henry Wood’s story
Wood was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1943, just after his 18th birthday, interrupting his senior year of high school. Looking back now, he says he didn’t mind going into the service.
After doing his basic training in Little Rock, Arkansas, Wood was sent overseas. He got to Europe through a laundry list of transports: a barge, a transport ship, and multiple trains, each vessel cloaked in secrecy.
Upon arriving in Europe, he was assigned to the 3rd Armored Division, a unit nicknamed “Spearhead” for its aggressive role in the liberation of France, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
In April 1945, the unit helped liberate the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp in Nordhausen. But later that month, Wood suffered the injury that still bothers his left forearm to this day.
While advancing eastward through Germany, his unit faced enemy fire, and Wood was hit with shrapnel just below his elbow. He laid face down for a half hour.
“The concussion knocked me cold — I didn’t hear it coming and I didn’t hear it go off,” Wood wrote in a letter months later, published in the Reynolds Press in Illinois in July 1945.
Remembering the moment from his living room in Taylor Ridge, Wood said when he finally made a run for help, officers were concerned that he was a “deserter.” They couldn’t see that his arm had nearly been completely separated, and assumed he was simply fleeing.
“I was carrying my arm, which I thought was shot clear off,” Wood said. “When I dropped my arm, he was able to see that I was wounded and he called for a medic.”
The injury shattered his bone, and Wood received blood plasma and a temporary splint that night in Nordhausen. He was later transferred to a hospital in England, where he remained in a body cast for a few days and underwent further operations. He finally headed home in June 1945.
Wood rehabbed his arm injury in Okmulgee, Oklahoma, and in December 1945, he was honorably discharged from the Army, almost 14 months after he first reported for active duty.
Returning back home to Taylor Ridge, Wood worked on his family’s farm for decades, tending various crops and raising beef cattle. He met his wife, Nancy, in a grocery store not long after returning from the war. They married in 1947, and had two daughters, Judy, who died in 1951, and Debbie, who died just last year.
Wood still lives on his farm, now with his son-in-law Bill. The natural light from the remote farm creeps in through his windows, overlooking a sea of crop fields.
In this home, lined with 70 years of Wood family history, he remembers the time in 1983 a runaway bank robber once stopped in, holding Wood up with his own shotgun. He misses spending time with his cattle in the farm, and remembers in the nineties, when he started collecting cut glass with his wife and mother.
His dining room is lined with shelves and shelves of glasses, shimmering with a crystalline translucency you’d find in a luxury chandelier. Cut glass is sought after for its intricacy, the sheer effort and detail it takes to form the zig-zagging lines and imperfect patterns on each glass.
Of course, like all glass, his collection is fragile. But still, it is growing. And Wood is proud of it.
Four years ago, Wood slipped on his porch and broke his arm, the same one that was originally injured in the war. When asked to see the scars both injuries left behind, Wood shamelessly pulled his entire crewneck sweater over his head, leaving the glove on.
With a heavy breath, he pointed to where his bone juts out and told his story.
The girls said they were molested in bed and raped in an administrative office, leered at in the communal shower and surveilled in the bathroom.
If they told, they said, they were threatened with solitary confinement and revoked phone privileges. If they stayed quiet, they might get out a few weeks early.
Starting in the late 1990s, the complaints by young girls incarcerated at Camp Scott began to pile up — all alleging similar sexual abuse by the same man: Thomas E. Jackson, then a deputy at the Santa Clarita juvenile camp.
L.A. County Supervisor Hilda Solis called for the county to “clean house” of probation staff accused of sexual abuse after news of the lawsuits broke. (Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times/TNS)
Eventually, the complaints all stalled. The girls finished their sentences and left. Jackson stayed for decades.
It wasn’t until this fall that Jackson resigned from the Los Angeles County Probation Department, capping a 33-year career during which 20 women say he sexually abused them when they were girls. His last day was Sept. 28.
Ernest Walker, a longtime probation supervisor, resigned two days later, also after 33 years with the department. His departure would come nearly two decades after he was accused of having sex with a teenage girl he supervised.
Faced with roughly 1,500 plaintiffs accusing the county of tolerating unchecked sexual abuse at its juvenile facilities, the Probation Department has spent the last two years removing alleged sexual abusers from its ranks. Since early 2022, 23 probation staffers — including Walker and Jackson — have been placed on leave after accusations of sexual violence, according to figures provided by the county’s outside counsel.
Irvine attorney Courtney Thom, whose firm represents roughly 150 clients suing the county, said she found the sheer number of alleged predators employed until recently by the county “revolting.”
“It makes my stomach sink,” said Thom, a former sex crimes prosecutor. “To hear that number — and I guarantee it’s probably double if not more — it just shows how irresponsible the county is.”
Of the 23, the county’s lawyers say one employee has been fired, and two identified by The Times as Walker and Jackson, have resigned.
Neither Walker nor Jackson has been criminally charged. Tom Yu, who represents Walker, said his client had retired after three decades “in good standing” and called the allegations that he had sex with a minor “patently false.” Jackson did not respond to calls or a letter left at his home.
The crackdown can be traced to the 2019 passage of the Child Victims Act, a state law that gave victims of childhood sexual abuse a new window to sue. Four years later, L.A. County — with its sprawling network of foster homes, children’s shelters and probation camps and halls — has emerged as one of California’s biggest institutional offenders.
In April, the county estimated it will need to spend $1.6 billion to $3 billion to resolve a deluge of lawsuits accusing county staffers of raping and molesting the children they were paid to protect — an estimate so large that staffers say government services would almost certainly shrink if the higher figure proved true.
County officials said at the time that they expected roughly 3,000 people to sue. But as of early November, the county had seen roughly 3,800 plaintiffs — some 1,500 of them alleging sexual abuse at the probation halls and camps. Nearly all the rest accuse the county’s Department of Children and Family Services of rampant sexual abuse at MacLaren Children’s Center, a since-shuttered shelter for foster kids in El Monte.
Dominique Anderson, 30, is one of the more than 1,000 people who say they were forced into close contact with sexual abusers as part of their purported rehabilitation. In May 2021, she sued the Probation Department, accusing Walker of molesting her in a motel room in South Los Angeles when she was a teenager.
According to the lawsuit, Anderson was about 13 when Walker, who would have been around 42, slipped her his business card and urged her to call anytime, “no matter the time of day.” About a week or two later, the suit says, Walker picked her up at her grandmother’s house near Westlake in his car and ejaculated on the way to a motel with her in the passenger seat.
They drove to the motel a few miles away at Vernon Avenue and Broadway and had sex in a room he had paid for, according to the lawsuit. When he dropped her back at her grandmother’s house, he allegedly handed her $200.
Anderson said in an interview that she’d found herself under Walker’s supervision after she jabbed a classmate with a pencil and was charged with a stabbing around 2006. A judge ordered her to report to the Probation Department. When she showed up at the Crenshaw office to meet her probation officer, she said Walker — who at the time was her officer’s boss — began to flirt.
“He said, ‘Do you always have this effect on men?’” recalled Anderson, now a customer service representative. “I just remember him saying those specific words to me.”
She said he’d scrawled his personal phone number on the card. She called him that night from her grandmother’s phone and said the conversation quickly turned sexual. Within a month, she said, he was picking her up from her grandmother’s in a silver Mercedes-Benz.
In California, it is illegal for an adult to have sex with someone younger than 18, who is considered too young to consent. Anderson said she later anonymously reported Walker to the Probation Department. The complaint stalled, but she said Walker began to leave cash for her in a gas station flower bed near his office in exchange for her skipping her appointments with her probation officer.
The bribes, she said, helped buy her silence and secured his job for the next decade and a half.
Walker would later become the vice president of Juvenile Field Services for the union representing the county’s probation supervisors, according to the group’s website.
Yu, Walker’s attorney, said his client had dedicated his career to serving the residents of L.A. County and left the job a “highly-decorated” peace officer.
“The allegations made in the lawsuit are an effort to smear my client’s reputation,” Yu wrote in a text message, noting Walker had not started working at the department’s Crenshaw office until 2007, about a year after Anderson estimated the abuse took place. “The obvious motive is to get paid at the expense of the taxpayers.”
County officials say these lawsuits have proved particularly thorny to resolve, in part because so many of the allegations are decades old. Records related to the cases — some of which date back to the 1950s — have disappeared. Staffers have almost certainly died. Others will have retired or moved away.
But some never left.
In the summer of 2022, after news of the lawsuits broke, the county supervisors agreed at a public meeting that they wanted to see the “weight of the county” come down on any guards still on the county payroll.
“We have to clean house,” Supervisor Hilda Solis told then-probation chief Adolfo Gonzales after he called it a scale of sex abuse he’d never seen in his 50-year career. “These abusers will not continue in our service.”
But finding the accused officers still employed has posed another set of challenges. Most are identified in the lawsuits with pseudonyms — JOHN DM-4 ROE, JOHN TP-3 ROE — and only a fraction of the filings have identifying details, such as a surname, a nickname or, in one case, a distinctive haircut.
The Times found 40 staff members who are identified with their full names. Of those, most have left the department — a handful after criminal charges were brought.
For example, Jeffrey Eckler and Oscar Calderon Jr., both probation staffers named by multiple women, were charged with having sexual relations with minors they had overseen. Eckler pleaded guilty in 2011 to meeting with a minor for lewd purposes after arranging a sexual liaison at a motel with a teen he met on the job. Calderon, who was a deputy at a Santa Clarita juvenile camp, pleaded guilty to assault in 2017 after he was accused of inappropriately touching four teenage girls. Eckler and Calderon were sentenced to six months and a year in jail, respectively.
“I spent almost a year in a locked-down facility, with a disgusting, horny, grown man that’s supposedly my probation officer,” one of Calderon’s victims said in an impact statement, The Times reported in 2017. “I’ve never been blackmailed, let alone sexually abused, until I entered that camp.”
Out of the small pool of easily identifiable employees, the county’s lawyers say they found 23 who still work for the county — all of whom were placed on leave while the allegations are investigated by the department’s internal affairs division, then by an outside law firm.
The disciplinary process has sparked outrage among some staff members who say they were abruptly removed from their post without a decent explanation.
“They toss you to the side like trash,” said Altovise Abner, a supervisor who said she was put on administrative leave in February.
She said it wasn’t until September that she found out she’d been accused in a lawsuit of groping a 17-year-old at a juvenile camp in Lancaster around 2006. She declined to comment on the allegations.
Others, such as Kenyth Henry, a deputy who was accused in a lawsuit of digitally penetrating a teenage girl at a juvenile facility around 2004, vehemently denied allegations of sexual abuse, but said he felt the department had dismissed him without a fair process.
“I’m a square dude. I don’t get in trouble. I don’t disrespect women,” said Henry, who added his wife had recently left him because of the accusations. “When it comes to probation, I sacrificed so much. … For them to just not talk to me — it’s very sad.”
Attorneys predict the number of probation employees under investigation could easily hit 50. Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Lawrence Riff, who is overseeing all of the probation lawsuits, recently allowed the two sides to start discovery, meaning attorneys can begin to review documents that could allow them to identify the scores of probation staffers described in the suits with pseudonyms.
Thom, whose firm represents Anderson, said the fact that at least 23 staffers accused of abuse remained county employees until recently highlights a systemic failing by the department to listen to victims and discipline guards.
“We have a number of survivors who’ve told us they either reported or tried to report their abuse and they were ignored,” said Thom, with Manly, Stewart & Finaldi, a prominent sex abuse case law firm that has litigated hundreds of cases against the Catholic Church.
Thom’s firm represents at least 19 women who say Deputy Jackson sexually abused them while they were young girls confined at Camp Scott in the late 1990s through the mid-2000s.
The lawsuits say Jackson would threaten the women — some as young as 12 at the time — with extended sentences and solitary confinement if they didn’t acquiesce. One woman, at Camp Scott in 1998, accused Jackson of molesting her the first night she was in “the box,” telling her she had to “earn” her way out. She said she was released from solitary the next day.
At least five of the women reported the abuse to a higher-up at the time, according to the lawsuits. But it wasn’t until the women sued the county that Jackson was put on leave and later resigned.
Victims say sexual abuse at the camps and halls was an open secret. One man suing the county said a female officer would isolate him while at Barry J. Nidorf Juvenile Hall in Sylmar around 2005. He said the woman, who was employed by the county until at least 2022 per county records, would grope and kiss him, once in a room storing shower supplies, another time in a blanket supply room.
The Times is not identifying the man in keeping with its policy of generally not naming victims of sexual assault unless they grant permission.
“Some of the staff knew what was going on,” said the man, who was 16 at the time. “When she came to get me, they would give a certain look and I feel like they knew — but they never said nothing.”
Both the man and Anderson, who accused Walker of molesting her as a teenager, said the trauma from the alleged sexual abuse became evident when they became parents. Each said they experience paranoia when their children are left alone with adults. Anderson said she has found herself deeply distrustful of bus drivers, teachers, even her own husband.
“I was so paranoid that I could not let them be alone,” said Anderson, who added that the trauma has strained both her marriage and her ability to parent. “When I would go take a bath, I would have to call my child to come in and sit next to me in the bath because I’m scared.”
She said she feels the county has barely reckoned with the lasting damage it inflicted on young people like her — children from broken homes who broke the law.
In other words, she said, the kind of people nobody would listen to — until now.
Former Florida Power & Light CEO Eric Silagy made millions selling his stock as a political scandal rocked the energy company, according to a federal court lawsuit.
First reported by the Orlando Sentinel, the lawsuit alleges that current and former officers and board members of NextEra Energy, Inc., the parent company of Florida Power & Light, violated federal securities laws by making “materially false and misleading statements” related to the company’s political spending.
The suit was filed in the Southern District of Florida by two investors, Sara Lewis and James Lewis. The suit, filed in October, focuses on Silagy selling more than 62,000 shares of the company’s stock in December 2021, making $5.4 million on the deal.
The investors bought stock in NextEra Energy between Dec. 2, 2021, the day that Silagy sold his stock, and Jan 30, 2023, shortly after NextEra announced Silagy’s departure from the company.
Court documents accuse Silagy, NextEra and its board of exposing NextEra to “substantial monetary and reputational damage” for orchestrating a scheme to fund ghost candidates to derail the political campaigns of “unfriendly legislators,” spying on journalists and improperly courting public officials to benefit FPL.
The company, the lawsuit claims, breached its duties by not disclosing legal and reputational risk tied to FPL; not maintaining adequate internal controls; and making positive statements about the business that were “materially misleading.”
In August 2022, the Miami Herald reported that Silagy was secretly running the Capitolist, a small news website that portrayed itself as a feisty independent outlet. The Capitolist, aimed directly at Tallahassee decision makers, was bankrolled and controlled by executives of the power company through a small group of trusted intermediaries from an Alabama consulting firm, according to an investigation based on a massive leak of documents.
FPL’s political consultants also used a nonprofit to steer funding toward a no-party candidate in a 2018 state Senate race, the Miami Herald reported. That candidate helped split the liberal vote and swing the race in favor of the Republican candidate.
Five people have been criminally charged in connection to the ghost candidate scheme, including two of the ghost candidates. No one at FPL has been accused of wrongdoing by authorities and the company has said an internal review cleared its employees, the Orlando Sentinel reported.
The company, according to the suit, falsely claimed that allegations of political misconduct didn’t expose it to meaningful legal or occupational risk. However, amid the scandal — and Silagy’s retirement — NextEra stock dropped by almost 9%.
Silagy, who led FPL for 11 years, stepped down in January.
The cutter sailed more than 8, 000 nautical miles over 36 days from Portsmouth, Va., to join the Coast Guard’s District 14, which is headquartered on Oahu and is the service’s largest area of operations.
This week U.S. Coast Guard’s CGC Harriet Lane and its crew arrived in its new home port of Honolulu.
The cutter sailed more than 8, 000 nautical miles over 36 days from Portsmouth, Va., to join the Coast Guard’s District 14, which is headquartered on Oahu and is the service’s largest area of operations.
“Re-homeporting U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Harriet Lane is indicative of the Coast Guard’s commitment to the Indo-Pacific—the most dynamic region in the world, ” said deputy commander of U.S. Coast Guard Pacific Area Rear Adm. Brendan McPherson in a media release. “Harriet Lane will work by, with, and through allies and partners within the Indo-Pacific region to promote capacity building and model good maritime governance.”
The Coast Guard has been steadily boosting its footprint in the Pacific. In 2021 the service added an unprecedented three fast-response cutters to its sector on Guam, and in February, Rear Adm. Michael Ryan, the Coast Guard deputy commandant for operations and policy, told military news outlet Defense One that the service intends to triple its deployments in the Pacific in coming years.
In March the Coast Guard announced that the Harriet Lane would be coming to Hawaii. The ship was commissioned in 1984 and recently spent more than 15 months in a Service Life Extension Program in Baltimore to prepare for its new mission as an “Indo-Pacific Support Cutter.” The 270-foot vessel brings with it a crew of about 100 new Coast Guardsmen and puts the number of cutters assigned to District 14 up to 11.
Several of the Coast Guard’s cutters already assigned to District 14 are set to go through maintenance periods.
“The crew and I look forward to building partnerships in Oceania to enhance our capabilities, strengthen maritime governance and security while promoting individual sovereignty, ” said Cmdr. Nicole Tesoniero, commanding officer of the cutter. “We plan to build upon many decades of enduring support, operating in concert with the needs of our partners.”
Many Pacific island nations lack a navy or coast guard of their own. The U.S. Coast Guard regularly receives requests for assistance in search and rescue operations as well as tracking suspicious vessels. U.S. officials have cited concerns about overfishing, particularly by China’s large state-subsidized fleet, as among the reasons for a boosting the Coast Guard’s footprint in the region.
The vessel already has a long history at sea.
In 1994 it was the command ship for Operation Able Manner forces, a mission to rescue thousands of Haitian and Cuban refugees who became trapped at sea while they joined a wave to cross the Windward Passage and Florida Straits toward shores in the United States. The crew was credited with saving over 2, 400 people during the operation.
The Harriet Lane was also involved in the search and recovery of Trans World Airlines Flight 800 in 1996 and the response to the disastrous Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.
The U.S. military said it shot down 14 drones in the Red Sea launched from Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen as attacks on commercial carriers continue from the Iranian-backed group, threatening havoc for world trade.
Major shippers MSC Mediterranean Shipping Co. SA and CMA CGM were the latest to announce on Saturday that they won’t send their vessels through the Red Sea for now in the face of rising threats.
The unmanned aerial systems “were assessed to be one-way attack drones and were shot down with no damage to ships in the area or reported injuries,” U.S. Central Command said in a post on X, formerly Twitter. “Regional Red Sea partners were alerted to the threat.”
The drones were struck down by the USS Carney guided missile destroyer early on Saturday. The U.K.’s Royal Navy also repelled a suspected drone attack.
MSC Mediterranean Shipping Co. SA, the world’s largest container line, joined competitors in diverting ships away from the Red Sea.
The MSC Palatium III was attacked on Friday in the Red Sea, the company said in a statement on its website, confirming earlier reports. There were no injuries among the crew of the container ship, though there was “limited fire damage” and the vessel has been taken out of service.
“Due to this incident and to protect the lives and safety of our seafarers, until the Red Sea passage is safe, MSC ships will not transit the Suez Canal eastbound and westbound,” the company said in its statement.
“Some services will be rerouted to go via the Cape of Good Hope instead,” it said, referring to the southern tip of Africa.
Separately, the French group CMA CGM instructed its container ships scheduled to pass through the Red Sea to pause their journey in safe waters until further notice.
U.K. naval forces shot down a suspected attack drone that was targeting merchant ships in the Red Sea, Defense Secretary Grant Shapps said in a post on X on Saturday. The HMS Diamond used a Sea Viper missile to down the target, he said, without giving more details.
Flexport Inc., a freight forwarding platform based in San Francisco, said in a blog post that taking the route around Africa prolongs the journey by seven to 10 days compared with using the Suez Canal.
Rebels in Yemen escalated a threat against ships with ties to Israel in November, calling them “legitimate targets,” and appear to be targeting vessels in the vicinity more generally.
Rerouting the world’s container fleet around the conflict zone during Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza threatens to increase freight rates and cause delays rippling across global supply chains.
About 5% of global trade depends on the Panama Canal and 12% depends on Suez, according to Marco Forgione, director general at the Institute of Export & International Trade.
A report released recently by the United States Army Combat Readiness Center provides new details regarding a U.S. Army helicopter crash that claimed the lives of three soldiers in April.
According to an accident safety report from the United States Army Combat Readiness Center that was obtained by The Associated Press, a U.S. Army AH-64D Apache helicopter hit another Army helicopter while flying through an Alaskan mountain pass with multiple aircraft after a training exercise. The incident resulted in both helicopters crashing near Healy, Alaska, on April 27.
While many of the details in The United States Army Combat Readiness Center’s accident safety report were redacted, the report provided new details regarding the fatal incident.
The Associated Press reported that the Army originally released information that explained the two Army helicopters involved in the crash were from the 1st Attack Battalion, 25th Aviation Regiment, stationed at Fort Wainwright. At the time, the Army said the helicopters collided roughly 50 miles east of Healy as they were returning from military training.
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The new report obtained Friday by The Associated Press noted that the helicopters were two of 14 aircraft that were flying through mountainous terrain from Donnelly Training Area to Fort Wainwright.
According to the report, the aircraft executed a planned right turn into a mountain pass in Alaska roughly 48 minutes into the flight. The report stated, “As the flight of 14 aircraft entered the mountain pass, aircraft in the flight began to decelerate.”
Approximately 30 seconds after making the right turn into the mountain pass, one of the Army helicopters collided with another helicopter, causing both to crash.
According to The Associated Press, the soldiers killed in April’s tragic accident were 32-year-old Warrant Officer 1 Stewart Duane Wayment of North Logan, Utah; 39-year-old Chief Warrant Officer 3 Christopher Robert Eramo of Oneonta, New York; and 28-year-old Chief Warrant Officer 2 Kyle D. McKenna of Colorado Springs, Colorado.
While a fourth U.S. soldier was injured in the incident, the Army has not yet released the name of the soldier.
Essra Mohawk, 75, formerly of Philadelphia, an eclectic singer-songwriter who wrote a hit for Cyndi Lauper, released more than a dozen albums and was often compared to Joni Mitchell, Carole King and Laura Nyro, died Monday, Dec. 11, of cancer at her home in Nashville, Tennessee.
A self-described “flower child,” Mohawk learned to sing, write songs, and play piano as a girl in West Philadelphia and Northeast Philadelphia in the 1960s. She went on to create a colorful career that featured her song “Change of Heart,” performed by Lauper and ranked No. 3 in Billboard’s February 1987 Hot 100. A decade earlier, in 1977, her 1970 album “Primordial Lovers” was cited by a Rolling Stone magazine writer as one of the best 25 albums ever made.
She played the mandolin and other instruments as well as piano, and sang folk, pop rock, jazz, and blues as a headliner and alongside Frank Zappa, Joe Beck, Jerry Garcia and other musical masters. She wrote hundreds of songs, dozens of which were recorded by the Shangri-Las, Vanilla Fudge and other notable singers. Tina Turner recorded her “Stronger Than the Wind” in 1989.
From the 1960s until recently, Mohawk played in hundreds of pubs, clubs, and larger venues in Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, Nashville and elsewhere. She told music writer A.D. Amorosi during a 2010 return to Philadelphia: “Good songs don’t get old. Time gives them more credibility.”
Amorosi described her music as “complex melodies with mystical, poetic lyrics.” In 1983, former Inquirer and Daily News music writer Jonathan Takiff called “Primordial Lovers” “a stunning package of dark, sensual ballads.” In 1995, he said her “Raindance” album was a “pungently phrased, tune-rich affair.”
Mohawk told Takiff in 1983: “The music still has to touch me, move me. If it isn’t honest, what’s the point?” Longtime disc jockey and music expert Michael Tearson said: “Essra Mohawk always followed her own path regardless. She was truly an artist through and through.”
In between gigs and making albums, Mohawk wrote and recorded advertising jingles, provided backup vocals for singers and cut demonstration tracks for other songwriters. She sang songs for TV shows such as “Sesame Street” and “Schoolhouse Rock,” and collaborated with other musicians on a variety of projects.
“She was highly intelligent with an irreverent sense of humor,” said her cousin Jeff Hurvitz. “She was a lot of fun to be around, and her musical contributions give her a sense of immortality.”
Sandra Elayne Hurvitz was born April 23, 1948, in Philadelphia. She changed her name to Essra because friends, playing off her first initial, called her that for fun, and she was married to record producer Frazier Mohawk in the 1970s. They eventually divorced, and he later died.
Her parents wrote and sang songs at home when she was young, and relatives recall her singing along with the band at family celebrations. She played piano at 13 and released her first song at 16 under the name Jamie Carter.
She made her first album, “Sandy’s Album Is Here at Last!,” in 1968 but admittedly failed to forge lasting relationships with record labels and managers over her career. She said in 1983: “I was naive.”
She graduated from George Washington High School and spent a few months at Philadelphia College of the Performing Arts before heading up to Greenwich Village in 1967. She moved from New York to Los Angeles in 1977, back to Philadelphia in 1982, and finally to Nashville in 1993.
In 1983, she compared the music scenes of Philadelphia and Los Angeles by saying: “Out there, you have to be opportunistic, be a brown noser, to succeed. Here, people respect you for your talent and your individuality.”
Mohawk, who was born into a Jewish family, embraced Buddhism and advocated often for peace and environmental responsibility. She wrote poetry, read tarot cards and collected unique perfume bottles.
She was also married to and divorced from musicians Sam Weatherly and Daoud Shaw. Shaw died earlier.
She loved animals, especially cats and dogs, and liked to watch “Monk,” “The Love Boat” and “Match Game” on TV. “She was magical,” said longtime friend and caregiver Laurel Parton. “She was so intelligent and intuitive. She was connected.”
In 2010, Mohawk told Amorosi: “Life is a creative endeavor, an exciting work in progress. It’s a lifelong symphony.”
In addition to her cousin, Mohawk is survived by other relatives. A brother died earlier.
A celebration of her life is to be at 1 p.m. Monday, Dec. 18, at Lamb Funeral Home at Shalom Memorial Park, 101 Byberry Road, Huntington Valley, Pa. 19006.
