Important Takeaways:
- An earthquake with magnitude of 4.7 struck Northern California on New Year’s Day, shaking buildings as far away as Sacramento, but causing little damage and no deaths.
- The U.S. Geological Survey reported that the quake struck 4 kilometers north-northwest of Cobb, CA, about an hour west of Sacramento, the state capital, at 6:34 p.m. on Wednesday.
- Lake County News reported:
- A moderate earthquake that occurred on New Year’s evening shook residents across Lake County and triggered dozens of smaller quakes in the hours afterward.
- Across Lake County, residents reported feeling the powerful main quake, which they variously described as intense and rolling, with items falling off walls and shelves, and furniture moving.
- There were also those who said it was the strongest quake they’ve felt in Lake County.
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Important Takeaways:
- The Associated Press reported approximately 15 people–ages 16 to 20 years–were standing outside Amazura nightclub when armed men approached and began shooting.
- A private event was being hosted at the club at the time of the shooting.
- The gunmen ran to a getaway car after firing approximately 30 rounds into the crowd.
- The New York Post noted there four gunmen and the wounded consist of four males and six females. All the shooting victims are expected to survive.
- AM NY pointed out that the private event at Amazura nightclub was reportedly held “in honor of a known gang member in the community slain last October whose birthday coincided with New Year’s Day.”
- New York is ranked number two in the nation for gun control strength.
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Important Takeaways:
- Hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters marched in New York City on New Year’s Day for “intifada,” blocking Sixth Avenue in Manhattan just hours after a terror attack in New Orleans, Louisiana, and an explosion in Las Vegas, Nevada.
- The Times of Israel reported:
- Attendees chanted “Resistance is glorious — we will be victorious,” “We will honor all our martyrs,” and “Gaza, you make us proud.” They carried signs that said “Zionism is cancer,” “No war on Iran,” and “End all US aid to Israel.”
- “There is only one solution — Intifada revolution,” they chanted, using a common refrain at anti-Israel rallies in the US. “Intifada,” Arabic for “uprising,” is associated with the Second Intifada, a period of terror attacks in Israel in the early 2000s marked by suicide bombings.
- A handful of pro-Israel counter-protesters showed up to wave Israeli and American flags on the sidelines of the demonstration, while heckling the anti-Israel activists. A Jewish retiree led chants of “Get a job” directed at the protesters.
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Important Takeaways:
- Authorities are still searching for potential accomplices to Shamsud-Din Jabbar, who drove a truck into a New Orleans crowd before being killed in a shootout with police on Wednesday.
- Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill told Fox News that there is evidence that Jabbar worked alongside accomplices to coordinate the attack, although she and other officials have declined to offer specifics. Jabbar’s attack killed at least 15 people and wounded dozens of others.
- “In Louisiana, we have the death penalty, and we will carry it out!” Murrill wrote on X.
- Jabbar had posted videos to social media prior to his attack expressing allegiance to the Islamic State. The FBI’s investigation has now spread across multiple states, though the number of potential accomplices remains unknown.
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Important Takeaways:
- The bomber who blew up a Tesla Cybertruck outside the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas has been identified as Army service member Matthew Livelsberger.
- Although officers have not publicly named Livelsberger, 37, as the bomber, senior law enforcement sources confirmed his identity to KOAA and KTNV.
- Livelsberger served over 19 years in the Army – 18 of which were spent with Special Forces, according to his LinkedIn profile. His current role was listed as a Remote and Autonomous Systems Manager, which he had been in for just three months.
- A Colorado townhome associated with Livelsberger was raided by the FBI late Wednesday night. Agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) were brought in to assist.
- He is suspected of renting the Cybertruck in Colorado Springs, via the Turo app, and driving it across the border to Nevada on Wednesday morning
- Law enforcement sources revealed that Livelsberger, who died Wednesday in the explosion outside the hotel, had previously served at the same military base as New Orleans terrorist Shamsud Din Jabbar. Police have not confirmed if the pair were known to each other.
- Jabbar, who had allegedly pledged himself to the Islamic State, rammed a pickup truck – which bore the ISIS flag – into a crowd of New Year revelers, killing at least 15 people and wounding dozens.
- The FBI has said it does not think Jabbar, 42, was ‘solely responsible’ for the Bourbon Street attack. Authorities are ‘conducting a number of court-authorized search warrants in New Orleans and other states’ and investigating his ‘potential associations and affiliations’ with terroristic organizations.
- Officials are still exploring how the explosives were detonated…
- Livelsberger was the sole fatality in the attack, and authorities largely credit Musk’s hulking truck with preventing further damage because it was able to contain much of the explosion.
- Hours before the attack in Las Vegas, Jabbar drove an electric vehicle into crowds in New Orleans, killing 15 pedestrians and injuring dozens more.
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Important Takeaways:
- The FBI seized more than 150 homemade explosives from a Virginia man’s home, ABC News reported on Wednesday.
- Federal investigators made this discovery in December while searching the home of Norfolk, Virginia, resident Brad Spafford.
- According to court documents, it is believed to be “the largest seizure by number of finished explosive devices in FBI history,” ABC News reported.
- The court documents added that most of the bombs, material for building explosives, and tools were found in a garage next to Spafford’s home.
- “Several additional apparent pipe bombs were found in a backpack in the home’s bedroom, completely unsecured,” said prosecutors.
- Spafford’s defense attorneys argued in a motion Tuesday that he never planned anything violent.
- The prosecution responded, “While he is not known to have engaged in any apparent violence, he has certainly expressed interest in the same, through his manufacture of pipe bombs marked ‘lethal,’ his possession of riot gear and a vest loaded with pipe bombs, his support for political assassinations and use of the pictures of the President for target practice,” ABC News reported.
- According to the court documents, “this investigation began in early 2023 when the defendant’s neighbor and friend reported that the defendant disfigured his hand in 2021 while working with a homemade explosive device and was stockpiling weapons and homemade ammunition.”
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Important Takeaways:
- Scientists have warned that an underwater volcano off the coast of the northwestern US is likely to blow sometime in 2025.
- The volcano, called Axial Seamount, is more than 3,600-feet-tall and sits half a mile underwater just 300 miles off the coast of Oregon.
- Experts made the prediction on December 10 after detecting seafloor swelling around Axial that mimicked a level seen immediately before an eruption in 2015.
- Seismic activity has also increased, with hundreds of earthquakes generated around the volcano per day and earthquake swarms greater than 500 per day.
- ‘Based on the current trends, and the assumption that Axial will be primed to erupt when it reaches the 2015 inflation threshold, our current eruption forecast window is between now (July 2024) and the end of 2025,’ researchers said in the new study.
- The team first noticed the swelling in November using a suite of tools to meticulously monitor this volcano’s activity, collecting real-time data about its rumbling, shaking, swelling and even tilting.
- Located on the Juan de Fuca ridge, Axial is the most active underwater volcano in the northeast Pacific.
- Because Axial erupts with some regularity, it provides a unique opportunity for scientists to study the warning signs leading up to an eruption, and learn how to forecast one.
- Fortunately, eruptions from Axial pose little threat to people and infrastructure on the West Coast.
- That’s largely because it is a shield volcano, which generally do not have very explosive eruptions.
- What’s more, the seismic activity around it is too minimal to cause a tsunami or a major earthquake.
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Important Takeaways:
- A mobile communications system that can move through complex terrains has been developed by Chinese scientists
- China has unveiled the world’s first mobile 5G base station, which, after passing rigorous tests, is now poised for deployment on the battlefield.
- Jointly developed by China Mobile Communications Group and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), it can provide unprecedented high-speed, low-latency and extremely secure and reliable data exchange services to at least 10,000 users within a 3km (1.8 mile) radius.
- Even when PLA troops are advancing at 80km/h (50mph) in complex terrains, such as mountains or cities, and are subjected to electromagnetic interference, the system can still maintain an uninterrupted total throughput of 10 gigabits per second and a latency of less than 15 milliseconds.
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Important Takeaways:
- Beijing’s newly revealed experimental aircraft sends a strong signal to competitors, Dmitry Stefanovich has told RT
- The images of China’s latest warplanes, which appeared online this week, are a bold “invitation” to an arms race for a next-generation fighter, Dmitry Stefanovich, a military researcher at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations of the Russian Academy of Sciences, has told RT.
- The videos and photos posted to social media on December 26 show two previously unseen tailless jets – a larger diamond-shaped aircraft, and a smaller plane with an arrow-wing-shaped airframe. While Beijing has not spoken publicly on the matter, the display sparked discussion in the international media, with some observers suggesting the aircraft could be the first sixth-generation fighter planes.
- So far, we have only seen two variants of experimental aircraft,” Stefanovich said. “Presumably, one of them can be tailored for strike missions that involve attacks on ground and, perhaps, naval targets, while another one is tasked with dominating the skies and controlling the airspace.”
- The footage “demonstrates the general state of the development” of Chinese aircraft rather than sixth-generation planes specifically, the expert argued, noting that ‘sixth generation’ is a “loosely applied term.” Therefore, it is too early to draw definitive conclusions about the capabilities of the new planes, he cautioned.
- Beijing will have to compete with American next-generation fighter programs, Stefanovich noted. “While there are no game-changers on the horizon, China is explicitly inviting to participate in an arms race, at least in terms of quality.”
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Important Takeaways:
- Some 175,000 people now actively work for Mexico’s smuggling cartels, according to a shocking new estimate that would make them the country’s fifth-largest private employer.
- The cartels’ secret is their viciously efficient ability to recruit, said Rafael Prieto-Curiel, who led the researchers and who said the cartels are the country’s top recruiter at more than 350 new people each week.
- That helps them counter their massive losses thanks to arrests, killings and dropouts.
- “Cartels, they need to have roughly 175,000 members. They cannot be much smaller because they would have collapsed. They cannot be much bigger because they would have grown so fast,” Mr. Prieto-Curiel said. “So they have to be roughly 175,000 members, which means roughly, just to put it into context, the fifth-largest employer in the country.”
- He and his fellow researchers used computer models to peer into the country’s notoriously secretive cartels, running millions of permutations on the 150 different cartels, evaluating their recruiting and losses to arrests, killings and dropouts.
- He called recruiting the “secret of the success of a cartel.”
- President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to take a heavy hand with the cartels.
- That includes designating the cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, and potentially tasking the U.S. military to conduct some counter-cartel operations.
- Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has bristled at those ideas, calling them “interference” in her nation’s affairs.
- The cartels have their hand in drug manufacturing and smuggling, money laundering, sex trafficking, human smuggling and other assorted mayhem. During the Biden border surge, experts said their income from moving people across the border topped even their income from drugs.
- S. officials also blame them for the epidemic of fentanyl deaths, saying the cartels have taken over the production and smuggling business after Chinese syndicates were pushed out of business in the last decade.
- ZME Science said Mr. Prieto-Curiel also calculated that 60,000 cartel members died over the 10 years from 2012 to 2022. Another 60,000 have been “incapacitated.”
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