(NewsNation) — After Arizona spent more than $100 million in taxpayer dollars putting up shipping containers along the U.S.-Mexico border, the state is now shelling out more than $76 million to remove them, according to a contract with AshBritt, Inc.

Shipping containers removed from the border will be taken to the state prison in Yuma. But agents told NewsNation they are concerned over holes that will be left in the wall. Even though migrant encounters actually increased while the containers were in place, agents said they had an operational advantage responding to large groups with them there, because people were only able to cross along one area of tribal land. Once the containers are removed, agents will once again have to respond to multiple areas with limited manpower.

Meanwhile, the take down of shipping containers that were placed in the Coronado National Forest is set to begin Monday. These will go to the state prison in Tucson.

Construction of the container wall began in Yuma, a popular crossing point, this past August despite objections from conservation groups, the federal government and activists. These containers filled areas left open when Trump’s 450-mile border wall was built.

The Biden administration filed a lawsuit, saying the wall was trespassing on federal land as Gov. Doug Ducey did not have permission to stack the containers there, and the governor agreed to remove them.

Border Patrol agents have seen record-high numbers of crossings in recent months, which they say have overwhelmed them and towns in the area, spurring the shipping containers.

Work on the wall was about on-third of the way completed, but protestors concerned about the environmental impacts helped hold it up in recent days.

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack previously said in a statement that the project “is not an effective barrier — it poses safety hazards to both the public and those working in the area and has significantly damaged public land.”

“We need serious solutions at our border, with input from local leaders and communities,” Vilsack said. “Stacking shipping containers is not a productive solution.”

But Yuma County Sheriff Leon Wilmot says the containers were not just a political stunt — they were meant to help impacted farmers after they didn’t see action from the federal government.

For the federal government to build a permanent wall along this line, Wilmot says the containers have to be removed. The problem, though, is that no one knows when that might be.

Materials have been sitting in the area for nearly two years, and there is no movement indicating construction will resume anytime soon. NewsNation reached out to the Department of Justice to see if a timeline is in place on when the wall construction will resume and is waiting to hear back.

Ducey, meanwhile, has long said the shipping containers were temporary, and that he wants the federal government to say when it would fill gaps in the permanent wall.

This all comes as Ducey’s replacement, Democrat Katie Hobbs, who has criticized the shipping container wall, is set to be sworn in as governor next week.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

(NewsNation) — The nation’s top transportation official put the CEO of Southwest Airlines on notice Thursday, warning that the Transportation Department will take action if the airline fails to compensate passengers for cancellations that have left travelers stranded across the country.

In a letter to Southwest CEO Robert Jordan, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg faulted company leadership for the operations meltdown that resulted in more than 60% of flights being canceled for several consecutive days this week.

“In the coming days, I expect that Southwest will have repositioned its people and aircraft and be on track to resume normal operations,” Buttigieg said. “I hope and expect that you will follow the law, take the steps laid out in this letter, and provide me with a prompt update on Southwest’s efforts to do right by the customers it has wronged.”

The troubles at Southwest began late last week when a major winter storm caused cancellations and delays across the country. Unlike its competitors, Southwest struggled to return to normal operations, which experts attributed to its point-to-point route system that left planes and crews scattered across the U.S.

Southwest said Thursday it expects to return to normal operations by Friday. The airline has acknowledged that it has inadequate and outdated technology that can leave flight crews out of position when bad weather strikes.

The airline has declined requests to make executives available for comment and did not provide an update about operations on its website. Its main public outreach has been to post video statements by Jordan and its chief commercial officer.

Buttigieg in his letter to Jordan demanded Southwest reimburse all passengers impacted between Dec. 24 and Jan. 2, including costs for other airline tickets, Amtrak or rental cars. The company had already previously stated it would honor “reasonable” reimbursement requests for alternate transportation.

“It would be an unfair and deceptive practice not to fulfill this commitment to passengers,” Buttigieg said. “The Department will use the fullest extent of its investigative and enforcement powers to hold Southwest accountable if it fails to adhere to the promises made to reimburse passengers for costs incurred for alternate transportation.”

He reiterated that warning in three other demands that the airline provide meals, hotels and transportation to and from hotels; refund passengers who choose not to rebook; and reunite passengers with their baggage.

“Also, under DOT’s regulation, Southwest is required to reimburse passengers up to $3,800 for provable direct or consequential damages resulting from the disappearance of, damage to, or delay in the delivery of a passenger’s baggage,” Buttigieg said.

While the winter weather impacted operations at most U.S. airlines, Southwest is the only one that has struggled to recover.

“The thousands of cancellations by Southwest in recent days have not been because of the weather,” Buttigieg said. “As Southwest acknowledges, the cancellations and significant delays at least since December 24 are due to circumstances within the airline’s control.”

(NewsNation) — New York Rep.-elect George Santos is resisting calls from Democrats to resign over revelations that he lied about his past, while Republicans have remained silent about the controversy.

Niall Stanage, White House columnist for The Hill, says the GOP has “no incentive” to punish Santos, particularly considering its small majority in the House.

“They don’t want to give up any of those votes, so I think the tactic or the strategy here is to potentially use him for his vote but to otherwise keep him at arm’s length,” Stanage said Thursday on “Rush Hour.”

Watch a portion of his interview above.

Southwest Airlines (LUV.N) promised to reimburse passengers for expenses such as hotels and car rentals in addition to refunding tickets after it canceled thousands of flights due to a massive winter storm and said there would be a still-undetermined hit to its earnings.

“There’ll certainly be an impact to the fourth quarter,” Chief Commercial Officer Ryan Green told reporters on a call on Thursday. “We’re … working through all the financial elements of this. We’ll share that information when we have all that compiled and are ready to do that.”

Some analysts estimate the meltdown could shave as much as 9% off Southwest’s fourth-quarter earnings.

Company executives on the call declined to estimate the number of travelers affected by the disruptions since Friday.

While other U.S. airlines got back to their feet relatively quickly, Dallas-based Southwest is still limping back to normalcy. The carrier has canceled at least 16,000 flights in the past week, including roughly 60% of all scheduled flights on Thursday, according to data from flight tracker FlightAware.

“If you had to make alternative travel arrangements like hotels, meals, rental cars, gas for rental car, those will qualify for reimbursements,” Green said, adding that it would take several weeks for the repayments.

Friday cancellations are expected to drop drastically, with Southwest saying it was “eager to return to a state of normalcy” ahead of the New Year holiday weekend.

Just two months ago, Southwest had forecast “strong” earnings in the fourth quarter and had estimated a 13% to 17% jump in operating revenue.

The bitter weather was just part of the problem for Southwest. Its dated technology failed to map crew to flights and its point-to-point operational structure created chaos for schedules, the company has admitted and union members have said.

The U.S. government has called the airline’s meltdown a system failure and vowed action.

In a letter to Southwest chief Bob Jordan on Thursday, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg warned that the company would be held accountable if it did not fulfill commitments to customers for “controllable delays and cancellations.”

The company has been eager to show it is turning the page on the debacle, which sent its stock price tumbling. Southwest shares on Thursday closed up 3.7% as Wall Street rose broadly, the first day of gains since last Friday.

Jordan apologized for the disruption and said the process to reposition crew and aircraft following the storms had been a “manual process” that has taken time, and a “volunteer army” made up of salaried employees at the company’s headquarters was helping.

“I cannot imagine that this doesn’t drive changes to the plan” to modernize the airline’s operations, Jordan said, adding that technology improvements were under way but it was a “large and complicated process.”

Employee unions say they have repeatedly warned Southwest management that the airline’s technology systems badly needed upgrades.

Flight attendants have been complaining about technological failures at the airline for years, according to Lyn Montgomery, president of the Southwest Airlines Flight Attendants Union, a local 556 of the Transport Workers Union.

“There’s many ways it could have been avoided,” Montgomery said on Thursday on CNN, saying that could have included commitments by Southwest executives to ensure that IT infrastructure would be able to meet the carrier’s growth.

The comments echoed those of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association, which said leadership had failed to adapt operations to address repeated systems failures, despite years of calls for improvements by the union.

Improvements it called for included changes to crew scheduling software and communication tools that would have allowed displaced crews to remain in contact with the company.

Related Galleries:

Belarus protests after ‘Ukrainian missile’ falls on its territory, as Russia launches another wave of attacks

The state-run Belarus news agency BelTA reported that a Ukrainian S-300 missile had fallen on to the territory of Belarus during one of Russia’s largest missile attacks against Ukraine since the start of the war.

The Ukrainian ambassador was summoned to the foreign ministry in Minsk to receive a formal protest after the spokesperson for the ministry of foreign affairs said the missile landing on Belarussian soil was “extremely serious”.

Russia launched a wave of missile attacks across Ukraine on Thursday morning, with Ukraine’s air force claiming it shot down 54 Russian winged cruise missiles out of 69 launched into Ukraine from Rostov in Russia, the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, acknowledged that most regions were suffering power outages after the attacks but he said the damage would have been worse without “heroic” air defence. Zelenskiy, in a video address on Thursday night, said air commands in central, southern, eastern and western Ukraine repelled 54 Russian missiles and 11 drones during one of Russia’s biggest aerial assaults since it started the war in February.

The mayor of Kyiv, Vitali Klitschko, stated that three people were known to have been injured in the capital, including a 14-year-old girl. Two people had been rescued from a private house that had been struck by debris. Klitschko said 40% of the capital’s consumers were without electricity after the missile attack.

Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, pledged that Rome would continue to help Kyiv’s war effort and that she would visit before the end of February.

The UK will commit £2.3bn in aid to Ukraine in 2023, said the UK’s defence secretary, Ben Wallace.

Kazakhstan was preparing to deport a Russian security officer who fled his country because he objected to the invasion of Ukraine and hoped to find refuge in the west, his wife said on Thursday. As an officer of the Federal Protective Service (FSO), tasked with protecting the Russian president, Major Mikhail Zhilin, 36, was barred from leaving Russia and illegally crossed into Kazakhstan in September when it became clear he could be sent to Ukraine.

Continue reading…

BUCHAREST (Reuters) – Romanian prosecutors said on Thursday they have detained divisive internet personality and former professional kickboxer Andrew Tate on suspicion of human trafficking, rape and forming an organised crime group.

Tate, banned from many social media platforms for misogynstic comments and hate speech, and his brother Tristan will be detained for 24 hours alongside two Romanian suspects, prosecutors from the anti organised-crime unit said in a statement after raiding their properties in Bucharest.

The Tate brothers have been under criminal investigation since April.

They declined to comment but their lawyer confirmed they had been detained.

“The four suspects … appear to have created an organised crime group with the purpose of recruiting, housing and exploiting women by forcing them to create pornographic content meant to be seen on specialised websites for a cost,” prosecutors said.

“They would have gained important sums of money.”

Prosecutors said they had found six women who had been sexually exploited by the suspects.

Tate has said women are partially responsible for being raped and that they belong to men.

Earlier this week, the British national was told to get a life by climate activist Greta Thunberg on Twitter after he told her he owned 33 cars with “enormous emissions.”

Kyiv, Ukraine

CNN

 — 

Explosions rattled villages and cities across Ukraine on Thursday, harming civilian infrastructure and killing at minimum three folks in what Kyiv has referred to as 1 of Moscow’s greatest missile barrages given that the war started in February.

Authorities have been cautioning for days that Russia was making ready to start an all-out assault on the power grid to close out 2022, plummeting the country into darkness as Ukrainians try to ring in the New Calendar year and rejoice the Christmas holiday seasons, which for the country’s Orthodox Christians falls on January 7.

“Russian terrorists have been preserving a person of the most enormous missile assaults considering that the beginning of the total-scale invasion for the previous times of the year,” Ukraine’s Defense Ministry claimed in a statement on Twitter Thursday. “They desire that Ukrainians will celebrate the New 12 months in darkness and cold. But they can not defeat the Ukrainian men and women.”

When Anastasiia Hryn, a 34-year-previous Kyiv resident, woke up to the seem of air raid sirens adopted by an explosion, she and her son descended to the basement shelter beneath their developing. But they were being not significantly stunned, nor did they permit it dampen their spirits.

“I predicted this variety of assault prior to the New 12 months. There were being experiences in the information that something like that was becoming ready,” she explained to CNN.

Just after the sirens gave the all clear, everyday living in the funds went back to standard, Hryn claimed: “In the elevator I achieved my neighbors with their child who have been in hurry to get to the cinema for the new Avatar film on time.” Parents took their young children to university and individuals went to work, while some others ongoing with vacation designs in defiance.

Anna Kovalchuk, another Kyiv resident, claimed she was established not to permit the Russians ruin her future celebrations. “I’m more apprehensive that most most likely there will be no energy on New Year’s Eve and the holiday break will have to be used in the dim. But I started to get ready myself for these kinds of a situation in advance, stocked up on garlands, power banks, so the blackout would upset us, but not end us,” she told CNN.

In other places in the funds, Halyna Hladka stocked up on water as quickly as the sirens sounded and immediately made breakfast for her relatives so they would have a little something to eat. Following practically two several hours, they read the seems of explosions. “It appeared to me that they ended up really shut to our location but it turned out to be air defense,” she informed CNN. “Not a one assault will cancel the point that we will celebrate the new year with the family members.”

As the war seems set to extend into another 12 months, Russian International Minister Sergey Lavrov claimed Thursday that Moscow will not negotiate with Kyiv on the basis of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s proposed 10-level peace components, which includes Russia’s withdrawal from all Ukrainian territory, a path to nuclear protection, foods security, a special tribunal for alleged Russian war crimes, and a remaining peace treaty with Moscow.

Lavrov advised Russian condition-operate information company RIA Novosti that Zelensky was “nursing the illustion” that, with the assist of Western nations, he could pressure the withdrawal of Russia from Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula that it annexed from Ukraine in 2014, and occupied parts of Ukraine’s Donbas, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, as nicely as bring Russia in front of international courts and pay reparations. “We will not talk to anyone beneath this sort of circumstances,” he said.

However, he stressed Russia was open for diplomatic remedies, echoing opinions made by Russian President Vladimir Putin in current times that he preferred an conclusion to the war. Putin’s claim that he is open up to negotiating was roundly dismissed by Kyiv and the West as a ruse.

At minimum a few people have been killed and seven hurt in the nationwide assaults, according to the Ukrainian Condition Unexpected emergency Assistance.

Russia’s onslaught on Thursday was aimed at the country’s electrical infrastructure, and knocked out power in quite a few locations. Engineering crews had been racing to restore products and services as the New Year’s getaway approaches this weekend.

Ukraine’s Power Minister Herman Halushchenko mentioned that Lviv, Kyiv and Odesa ended up notably tricky strike, and enduring crisis electricity outages – when the electrical power is protectively turned off to diminish injury from the grid shorting out.

“Today the enemy carried out a different large assault on the strength infrastructure of Ukraine,” Halushchenko said in a publish on Facebook. “Unfortunately, there is some damage to era amenities and ability grids.”

Forty per cent of Kyiv citizens ended up without having energy, mayor Vitali Klitschko claimed, adding that this was owing to stability steps taken by electrical power engineers for the duration of the air raid alarm and that they were now doing work to resume providers. “The city is supplying heat and h2o in normal mode,” Klitschko explained on the messaging app Telegram.

At the very least 3 men and women, such as a 14-12 months-outdated, had been injured and two people today pulled from a destroyed household on Thursday, Klitschko stated earlier. Properties, an industrial facility and a playground in the money ended up ruined in attacks on Kyiv, in accordance to the town military services administration.

In western Ukraine, Lviv Mayor Andrii Sadovyi stated 90% of the metropolis was without having power, cautioning that the city’s waterworks could also to cease doing the job with electrical power down.

Authorities in Odesa, in southern Ukraine, reported that emergency electrical power outages experienced been rolled out amid the missile attacks. “They are introduced because of to the threat of missile attacks to prevent important damage if the enemy manages to hit power services,” DTEK, a utility organization, reported in a assertion.

At the very least two people have been killed in assaults on Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv area. Oleh Syniehubov, head of the Kharkiv regional armed forces administration, reported four rockets had strike the metropolis — probable S300s — and that essential infrastructure was the supposed concentrate on.

“Senseless barbarism.” Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba reported people ended up the only text that arrived to intellect seeing Moscow launch a clean wave of assaults on Ukrainian towns ahead of the New Yr, incorporating there could be “no neutrality” in the face of this kind of aggression.

The Ukrainian military services mentioned that the the greater part of cruise missiles fired at Ukraine on Thursday were intercepted, with its protection forces taking pictures down 54 of 69, according to preliminary facts. Klitschko claimed 16 missiles were being ruined by Ukraine’s air defenses over Kyiv.

“The enemy keeps resorting to its missile terror towards the tranquil citizens of Ukraine,” Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces, mentioned on Telegram, incorporating that the Russians had introduced air and sea-based mostly cruise missiles, as effectively as anti-plane guided missiles this kind of as the S-300 at electrical power infrastructure facilities. The Ukrainian navy also shot down 11 Iranian Shahed drones, which are made to detonate on impact, he reported.

There have been conflicting reviews on the scale of the assaults. An adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky, Mykhailo Podolyak, explained in an earlier publish that Russia had introduced a lot more than 120 missiles in the barrage, with out giving further more information. He stated the intent of the assault was to “destroy significant infrastructure and eliminate civilians en masse.”

Source website link

The post Ukrainians defiant amid one of Moscow’s biggest missile barrages appeared first on Ukraine Intelligence.

While the GOP has spent the last two years presenting Joe Biden as being soft on China, all but accusing him of being a puppet for that authoritarian nation to the degree that the former guy was doing the bidding of the Kremlin, the fact is that President Biden has not only stood up to China in a way that Donald Trump never would, but the media barely covered it.

Already halfway into his first term, it’s clear that the president has made bolder steps in America’s trade war against China than Trump ever did in four years.

A new set of federal rules being rolled out this winter will target China’s high tech industry, primarily their ability to manufacture computer chips while also creating federal authority to monitor U.S. investments in the country – the first of its kind. A subsequent executive order will also limit the amount of data Chinese apps will be able to collect from American users.

While the Trump administration largely used rhetoric against China (that was also typically racist), they never really implemented a coherent strategy for dealing with the country – or established an incentive to give American jobs and growth a competitive edge. We’ve already had a strong recovery and we’re going to see the economy grow even stronger under President Biden’s watch.

The post Score another one for Joe Biden appeared first on Palmer Report.

The U.S. House of Representatives committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol wrapped up its work with a recommendation that former President Donald Trump be charged with insurrection and conspiracy to commit fraud against the United States.

The committee conducted over a thousand witness interviews, the most significant elements of which were explored in public hearings. Since the release of its report last week, the committee has released testimony transcripts highlighting other developments in Trump’s White House, before and after the riot. Here are six of those:

Trump wanted to issue blanket pardons for everyone who participated in the riot, according to testimony from John McEntee, former head of personnel at the White House.

“The president floated the idea and Cipollone said no,” McEntee told the committee, referring to Pat Cipollone, former White House counsel. “I remember the president saying, well, what if I pardoned the people that weren’t violent, that just walked in the building? And I think the White House counsel

gave him some pushback.”

Trump considered firing any member of his staff who did not believe the 2020 election was stolen, in a memo that Cipollone and former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson mentioned.

“Anybody that thinks there wasn’t massive fraud in the 2020 election should be fired,” the memo read, according to Cipollone.

“Pat looked at it. He said something to the effect of, God, no,” Hutchinson told the committee, referring to the memo. Cipollone said he did not remember this interaction.

Former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told the Jan. 6 committee that he and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo briefly discussed using the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office. The 25th amendment deals with presidential succession and disability.

The topic “came up very briefly in our conversation,” Mnuchin said, telling the committee he did no significant research into the topic.

Mark Meadows, who served as Trump’s chief of staff from late March 2020 until the end of the administration, was seen burning documents roughly a dozen times in the period between President Joe Biden’s election and his inauguration, Hutchinson testified.

She did not know what the documents were or whether they were originals. Originals of all White House documents must be kept for the archives, but copies can be burned.

Several times Meadows burned documents after meeting with lawmakers including Representative Scott Perry, a Republican involved with efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, Hutchinson said.

A Trump-friendly lawyer represented Hutchinson during her initial depositions with the committee, but switched lawyers and was more forthcoming about the intense pressure she faced from what she called “Trump world” to not hurt the former president.

“I was scared,” she said, recounting her emotions after her depositions with the committee in May and June. She suspected her former lawyer of leaking her testimony to the press, and telling other Trump-adjacent figures about what she told the committee.

“I remember turning to the staffer (with the committee), and I had said, ‘I’m about to be fucking nuked,'” she said in September.

Both Donald Trump Jr., the former president’s son, and his fiancee Kimberley Guilfoyle, took $60,000 speaking fees for a rally held ahead of the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, according to testimony from Caroline Wren, a Trump aide.

Related Galleries: