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Pilots Are Seeing Some Very Strange Things In Arizona’s Military Training Ranges

Encounters with small unidentified “objects,” sometimes in swarm-like groups of as many as eight. Sightings of other objects, including some characterized as drones, flying at altitudes up to 36,000 feet and as fast as Mach 0.75. Another apparent small drone actually hitting the canopy of an F-16 Viper causing damage. These incidents and many more, all occurred in or around various military air combat training ranges in Arizona since January 2020.

The events are described in reports from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) filed over roughly a three-year period. Overall, the data points to what are often categorized as drones, but many of which are actually unidentified objects, as well as what do appear to be drones, or uncrewed aerial systems (UAS), intruding into these restricted warning areas with alarming regularity.

Marc Cecotti, a contributor to The War Zone, has been able to obtain additional partially redacted reports about a number of these incidents from the U.S. Air Force’s Safety Center via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) that provide additional insights. Cecotti, together with Adam Kehoe, another one of our contributors, had first begun to notice a clustering of reports of unusual aerial encounters in southwestern Arizona back in 2021. An interactive online tool they created for The War Zone that leverages the FAA’s public database of drone-related incident reports helped highlight that trend.

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Nuclear Weapons: Devastation Inside the US

Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer has focused new attention on the legacies of the Manhattan Project — the World War II program to develop nuclear weapons.

As the anniversaries of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and Aug. 9, 1945, approach, it’s a timely moment to look further at dilemmas wrought by the creation of the atomic bomb.

The Manhattan Project spawned a trinity of interconnected legacies. It initiated a global arms race that threatens the survival of humanity and the planet as we know it. It also led to widespread public health and environmental damage from nuclear weapons production and testing. And it generated a culture of governmental secrecy with troubling political consequences.

As a researcher examining communication in science, technology, energy and environmental contexts, I’ve studied these legacies of nuclear weapons production. From 2000 to 2005, I also served on a citizen advisory board that provides input to federal and state officials on a massive environmental cleanup program at the Hanford nuclear site in Washington state that continues today.

Hanford is less well known than Los Alamos, New Mexico, where scientists designed the first atomic weapons, but it was also crucial to the Manhattan Project. There, an enormous, secret industrial facility produced the plutonium fuel for the Trinity test on July 16, 1945, and the bomb that incinerated Nagasaki a few weeks later.

(The Hiroshima bomb was fueled by uranium produced in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, at another of the principal Manhattan Project sites.)

Later, workers at Hanford made most of the plutonium used in the U.S. nuclear arsenal throughout the Cold War. In the process, Hanford became one of the most contaminated places on Earth (for more see video below). Total cleanup costs are projected to reach up to $640 billion, and the job won’t be completed for decades, if ever.

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‘Jealous’ transgender woman murdered three sex workers because they were ‘more attractive than she could ever plan to be’, criminologist suggests

A transgender woman who killed three sex workers in 1990 may have been motivated by jealousy, a criminologist has suggested. 

Donna Perry – who used to be known as Douglas Perry before undergoing gender reassignment surgery in 2000 – murdered 26-year-old Yolanda Sapp, 34-year-old Nickie Lowe, and 38-year-old Kathy Brisbois. 

Their naked or partially exposed bodies were found dumped on the banks of the Spokane River in Washington state. 

When finally arrested connection with the crimes five years ago, she claimed that she had transitioned into a female to stop her male persona from being violent.

‘Douglas didn’t stop, Donna stopped it,’ Perry told police about the killings, according to an affidavit filed in January 2014. ‘I’m not going to admit I killed anybody, I didn’t. Donna has killed nobody.’

When asked if Doug was responsible, she responded: ‘I don’t know if Doug did or not, it was 20 years ago and I have no idea whether he did or did not,’ according to ABC News. 

And crime expert Brian Frederick told Channel 5’s latest episode of Making a Serial Killer. which is available on My 5, that Perry may have picked the victims based on their looks. 

‘I can imagine that there was also a little bit of jealousy,’ he told the documentary.

‘He picked some attractive victims, perhaps more attractive than he could ever plan to be as Donna and he felt that they were squandering this beauty by giving sex to other men who didn’t necessarily have the purpose that he had. He was mission oriented.’

Jim Dresback, a former Spokane detective, said that Perry’s former girlfriend Claire-Anne – who was also a sex worker who suffered with cocaine addiction – may have served as motivation as well.

‘It was interesting that Claire-Anne was booked in to jail on the night that two of these people were killed,’ he told the programme.

‘Now she’s back in jail again and that makes Doug Perry mad and then he finds somebody to take out on. 

‘And the first people he’s gonna look at are the people that maybe he thinks are standing in the way.’

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JFK Documents Reveal Assassin’s CIA Monitor Was Reuben Efron, a Jewish Spy

For decades, armchair analysts scrutinizing the mysteries of the President John F. Kennedy assassination have fixated on whom, exactly, opened his future assassin’s mail while he was under CIA surveillance.

As the conspiracy theory went, that person would have understood Lee Harvey Oswald’s relationship with the Soviet Union and thus could unlock new information about a possible Communist plot against Kennedy — or a U.S. government plot to obscure his true killer.

Last month, a new document dump in the ongoing declassification of Kennedy documents revealed the identity of the CIA screener: one Reuben Efron, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army and a Jewish immigrant from Lithuania.

The New York Times was the first to report Efron’s identity. “And that means — what, exactly?” the newspaper asked in its report. “A tantalizing clue to unraveling a complicated conspiracy that the government has sought to cover up for decades? Additional proof that the C.I.A. knew more about Oswald than initially acknowledged? Or a minor detail withheld all this time because of bureaucratic imperatives irrelevant to the question of whether Oswald was the lone gunman on the fateful day?”

A deep dive into Efron’s Jewish identity does not answer those questions. But it does reveal that Efron not only worked as a spy but had a deep knowledge of the spies in Jewish tradition.

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency has confirmed that Efron spent time living in Israel before dying on Nov. 22, 1993 — 30 years to the day after Kennedy’s assassination. While there, he contributed five articles in the 1970s to the Jewish Bible Quarterly, a World Zionist Organization-affiliated publication based in Jerusalem, that channeled his expertise in espionage.

“Rahab and her premises were under surveillance of a counterintelligence team of the king of Jericho who soon established that the two men visiting Rahab were actually Israelite spies,” he writes in one of the essays, referring to a Jericho courtesan who, according to the Book of Joshua, assisted the Israelites in preparing to rout the Canaanites. Efron called Rahab “a prototype of a Mata Hari,” the World War I-era exotic dancer-turned-spy.

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Backpage Founder, Alt-Weekly Entrepreneur, and Free Speech Warrior James Larkin Has Died

Entrepreneur, journalist, and First Amendment warrior James Larkin has died, just a little over a week before he was slated to stand trial for his role in running the web-classifieds platform Backpage. Larkin, 74, took his own life on Monday.

A native of Maricopa County, Arizona, he leaves behind a wife and six children, as well as a string of newspapers and a legacy of fighting for free speech.

With journalist Michael Lacey, Larkin built the Phoenix New Times from an anti-war student newspaper into a broad—and still-thriving—record of Maricopa County culture and politics. New Times didn’t shy away from honest reporting on local law enforcement and power figures—including Sen. John McCain and his wife Cindy—or on controversial issues like abortion, immigrant rights, or the 1976 murder of Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles.

“I had just come back from school in Mexico City and had been exposed to the Mexican student movement in the late 60’s and early 70’s and they were really serious radicals, serious revolutionaries, and a lot of them were killed in the ensuing years, murdered by the Mexican government. I realized that politics were serious,” Larkin told Reason in 2018. “I felt that the paper…really had an opportunity to be politically powerful.”

San Francisco Bay Guardian publisher Bruce B. Brugmann described Larkin and Lacey’s aesthetic as “desert libertarianism on the rocks.” They expanded their alt-weekly empire nationwide, eventually running 17 free papers, including the Miami New Times, Westword, the Dallas Observer, and The Village Voice.

The company stood out for being both highly profitable and a hard-hitting journalistic enterprise—a perfect blend of Larkin’s business acumen, Lacey’s brash indie-press M.O, and the pair’s shared commitment to exposing and standing up to government malfeasance. Collectively, the papers and their staffers were nominated for more than 1,400 national writing awards, won one Pulitzer, and were finalists for the Pulitzer six other times.

“We weren’t trying to curry favor,” Larkin told Reason in 2018. And they took a “stubborn approach to bureaucrats telling us ‘you can’t do that’ or ‘we’re not going to allow you to do that.’ We knew what our rights were.”

“Law enforcement, politicians, bureaucrats, regulatory types. They don’t really understand the First Amendment,” he added.

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Virginia Cracks Down On Intoxicating Hemp Products With Enforcement And Fines

Several Virginia businesses have been hit with five-figure fines this month as state officials start enforcing stricter new rules on the contents and labeling of hemp products to try to crack down on alternatives to marijuana.

The Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services had sent five non-compliance letters as of July 24, assessing penalties ranging from $13,000 to $97,500, according to the agency. The letters, sent under a new civil penalty structure that took effect July 1, give the business owners an opportunity to pay a reduced fine of $10,000 if they agree to bring their stores into compliance and meet other conditions.

The largest fine so far was sent to a store in Southwest Virginia’s Gate City called Tobacco Discount. Of 36 impermissible products that VDACS inspectors said they found, 27 had a concentration of intoxicating THC above the 0.3 percent legal limit, agency records show. Others contained synthetic forms of THC or had labels that bore a “significant likeness” to mainstream snack brands, particularly cereal bars with names like “Lucky Marshmellow” and “Berry Crunch.” Many of the products tested were gummies and cereal bars labeled as containing delta-8, a hemp-derived compound that can produce a high similar to marijuana.

Inspectors reported finding a total of 26 violations at the business, ranging from paperwork, labeling and ingredient problems to “a heavy accumulation of dead insects and insect fragments” in some areas of the store.The total fines assessed on the business added up to $97,500.

“If the same violations are cited in a future inspection, the assessed civil penalties will increase,” VDACS said in the letters detailing the new enforcement system.

Tobacco Discount did not respond to multiple requests for comment sent to email addresses and a phone number listed in the state inspection paperwork.

The hemp/THC legislation was one of the more complex and contentious bills the General Assembly passed this year, drawing strong opposition from critics who said the proposal was overly punitive and could threaten Virginia’s entire hemp industry.

“This is just going way over the top, as we warned everyone,” said Jason Amatucci, president of the Virginia Hemp Coalition. “They’re fining people and they’re being very aggressive about it.”

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The Next Generation Is Being Groomed For Destruction – Here’s Why They Are Vulnerable

The past week the National Education Association, the largest teachers’ union in the US, issued guidance on the use of leftist activist symbols in public school classrooms. As part of their advice to teachers, they recommended violating district and state rules and hanging items such as pride flags and BLM flags. This is generally cited as a means to “start a conversation,” a way for teachers to circumvent school rules. They might not be able to spend each day spinning lessons on woke concepts, but if a child asks a question about the flags in the room, then they can provide “context.”

The NEA has been one of the primary driving forces behind the intrusion of woke ideology into the public school setting. Around 97% of their political fundraising goes towards Democrat candidates. They seem to be obsessed with the grooming of children into the leftist fold with lessons focused on Critical Race Theory, gender-fluid propaganda and socialism. If you want to know where the sudden surge in social-justice cultism came from in terms of America’s kids, leftist teachers and the NEA are to blame.

Keep in mind that the teachers’ unions are encouraging their members to break the law and lose their jobs, just to double-down on political indoctrination. Contrary to popular belief, teachers do NOT have free speech rights while at work. Woke teachers might fantasize about being Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society fighting against the system, but the the truth is they ARE the system. There are numerous reasons why rules for teacher behavior are necessary.

Narcissistic teachers are parasites that view the classroom as a place where they are owed affirmation. They see the children in their class as a captive audience that they can feed off of to gain attention, admiration and justification. They look down on parents as inferiors and treat students as their own personal puppets for molding and controlling.

In their minds, the kids don’t belong to the parents, the kids belong to “society.” Progressive educators see themselves as the benevolent shepherds chosen by the collective to condition the minds of the next generation. Teaching academics is secondary – manufacturing new leftist recruits is more important to them. This is the hill they have chosen to die on and they will not back away from it. They have made it clear that the targeting of children is their paramount concern.

To be sure, the woke cult is losing steam lately. Even the kids are starting to fight back against it, with the largest spike in conservatism among high-school boys that the US has seen in a long time. They are getting fed up. But there is definitely good reasons why leftists are implementing psychological warfare against America’s youth. Lets examine what I feel are the top three…

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‘Four Pinocchios’: The Washington Post Admits Biden Has Been Lying About Hunter Not Accepting Money From China

President Joe Biden has been a regular recipient of “Pinocchios” by the Washington Post for his false statements on subjects ranging from election laws to abortion protections to deficit reduction. 

Biden is undeterred and regularly repeats false stories from his life that have ranged from an invented arrest with Nelson Mandela to a zombie-like train conductor. Undeterred, this week he continued with the false claim about the “Joey, Baby” conductor.

Now, the President has a fresh set of “Four Pinocchios,” but the false claim is far more serious than inventing a conductor or rewriting the history of the Second Amendment. 

The Post is admitting that Biden has been lying about how his son Hunter never made money from China. It is the latest indication that the protective media wall surrounding Biden is beginning to crumble under the weight of new evidence in the corruption scandal.

Glenn Kessler wrote yesterday that Biden has repeatedly and categorically maintained that his son did not receive money from China.

“But now, nearly three years later, Biden’s assertions have been directly rebutted by Hunter himself. In court testimony last week, the younger Biden acknowledged that he in fact had been paid substantial sums in China — the first official confirmation that this was the case.”

What is curious is that Kessler and the Post waited for Hunter to effectively confess rather than take notice of money transfers and records released by House committees investigating the corruption scandal. The Post and most of the media have taken little observable journalistic interest in independently confirming such payments or benefits. Instead, the media has adopted a largely passive stance and waited for confessions rather than find confirmation.

Nevertheless, as with the laptop, there is some credit to be given for eventually confirming what has long been known.

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20,000-50,000 Ukrainians Have Lost Limbs Since Russia Invaded

Between 20,000 and 50,000 Ukrainians have lost one or more limbs since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.

The figure is based on estimates made by prosthetics firms, doctors, and charities. The number could be higher as it takes time to register amputees after they undergo surgery, and fighting has intensified since Ukraine launched its counteroffensive in June.

The higher-end estimate of 50,000 came from the German prosthetics manufacturer Ottobock, which cited data from the government and medical partners. The estimate of 20,000 was based on data from the Kyiv-based charity Health of the Ukrainian People ICF. The charity estimates the number of serious injuries in the war is at 200,000 and says about 10% of serious injuries typically require amputations.

The number of Ukrainian amputations puts the war on the scale of World War I. According to the report, some 67,000 Germans and 41,000 Britons had to have amputations during the four-year war. Less than 2,000 Americans who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan in this century have had amputations.

Ukraine has kept its casualty rates a secret throughout the war for propaganda purposes, but the staggering number of Ukrainians who lost limbs gives an idea of the human cost of the war.

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BLM Activist Shaun King Quietly Settles Defamation Suit With Candidate He Said Framed Man for Murder

Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King and his left-wing super PAC quietly settled a defamation lawsuit with former Philadelphia district attorney candidate Carlos Vega, who King falsely accused of framing a black man for murder.

King’s Real Justice PAC on April 12 paid $75,000 to the law firm representing Vega, according to campaign finance records. Vega—who ran against Philadelphia district attorney Larry Krasner—sued Real Justice PAC, King, and Krasner in May 2021 for defamation after King called Vega a “real life supervillain” and accused him of framing a black man who was falsely convicted of rape and murder in the 1990s.

“I previously posted that Carlos framed and convicted Anthony Wright of rape and murder in 1993 and that Carlos has lied about it for generations,” King, who served as a surrogate for Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns, wrote in an April 4 Instagram post. “I was wrong when I made those statements.⁣” Days later, on April 14, Vega agreed to settle and dismiss the lawsuit, according to court filings obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

The settlement marks another setback for King, who has faced allegations of financial mismanagement at his activist groups and of making false allegations in high-profile criminal cases. In 2019, King falsely identified a white man named Robert Cantrell as the possible killer of a 7-year-old black girl in Houston. King posted a photo of Cantrell online and suggested he was racist. Two black men were later charged with the killing. Cantrell committed suicide several months later.

Deray McKesson, a former ally of King’s in the Black Lives Matter movement, also accused King of committing fraud at his activist groups. The mother of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy killed by police, said King “robbed” her by holding unauthorized fundraisers in her son’s name. King has denied the fraud allegations.

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