[FoxNews] Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said the suspects are facing numerous charges, including armed robbery and grand theft.
More than 100 people, including at least 41 illegal immigrants, have been arrested in Florida for allegedly looting and scamming victims of hurricanes Helene and Milton, local law enforcement officials said.
Looting patrols in Pinellas County over the last three weeks rounded up 45 suspects on 68 charges that included armed robbery, burglary, loitering and prowling, grand theft, vandalism and trespassing, according to Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri.
"They’re going into people's homes, they’re taking stuff, they’re rummaging through their things," Gualtieri said.
Another 58 suspects were arrested in an operation allegedly targeting unlicensed contractors. Gualtieri said their scams mostly involved billing victims a total of $250 million for repairs they never intended to do.
"This is the epitome of people trying to exploit others when they’re down and when they’re out, and they’re trying to rebuild and they’ve got nothing," Gualtieri said.
Of the 45 suspects arrested by anti-looting patrols across the Pinellas County barrier islands, at least 41 of the suspects are illegal immigrants, Gualtieri said at a press conference Thursday. He said nearly all of the suspects were from South America or Central America.
The sheriff added that his office had contact with 196 other individuals who were in beach neighborhoods where they did not belong, but that officers did not have probable cause to arrest them. Of those, 163 were found to be illegal immigrants, he said.
"So, we made contact with them and told them to get out," Gualtieri said. "We’ve never seen anything of this magnitude before. We’ve never seen this influx of people from out of the area that are clearly just here to steal and to pilfer and to do bad things and to target these vulnerable people."
Gualtieri said nearly all of those arrested during the three-week operation had extensive criminal records.
[LawEnforcementToday] A Wednesday report revealed that The Cuyahoga County Division of Children and Family Services (DCFS) has created and maintains a "confidential spreadsheet" for tracking the sexual orientation and "transgender identity" of children, some as young as five years old.
As reported by The Daily Caller News Foundation, the troubling database was created by Cuyahoga DCFS with emails detailing that the agency "worked closely with the Biden-Harris administration to influence and 'imbed' their work into new federal regulations requiring child welfare systems to validate the gender confusion of children."
[Guardian] ’There is no money’: Cuba fears total collapse amid grid failure and financial crisis.
Repeated blackouts leave residents concerned about food, water supply and Cuba’s future
Maria Elena Cárdenas is 76 and lives in a municipal shelter on Amargura Street in Havana’s colonial old town. The building has an elegant past, but for the last few days Maria has been cooking with sticks she had found on the street.
"You know, we Cubans manage the best we can," she said. She lives in the shelter because her home collapsed, a regular occurrence in the poorest, oldest parts of the beautiful city.
Cuba’s government has spent the last days attempting to get the island’s national grid functioning after repeated island-wide blackouts. Without power, sleep becomes difficult in the heat, food spoils and the water supply fails.
#2
Cuba at one time (40-50 years ago) actually had a pretty decent power grid that the Russians helped them assemble. Unfortunately negligence and graft has left it woefully under-maintained.
They've even pulled in three Turkish 'PowerShip' generating stations to supplement the system, but it has not been enough.
Posted by: Mullah Richard ||
10/27/2024 8:13 Comments ||
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#3
The problem is, you don't produce anything, and nobody needs you.
Wants, maybe. Needs, no.
Posted by: ed in texas ||
10/27/2024 10:34 Comments ||
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#4
Without power, sleep becomes difficult in the heat, food spoils and the water supply fails.
#7
From the link, at #6 - The Cuban oil-fired power plants are old and deficient; only five per cent of Cuba’s power comes from alternative energy resources. Cuba has employed seven floating powerplants, which will generate around 400 megawatts. The government plans to buy small diesel-powered land-based generators to support the grid and service its Soviet-era fuel-fired power plants.
Posted by: Bobby ||
10/27/2024 12:22 Comments ||
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#8
If there's no money for fuel, how are they paying for the "power ships"?
#11
Cuba is no Taiwan, now we know why China wants to snatch that island back! Cuba needs to apologize and ‘flip’ like what Puerto Rico is trying to do!
#13
Hmm...further thinking about this as an opportunity. If we can calculate all the cost the illegals are costing us, could be not make a $$ deal in exchange for Cuba becoming one big Gitmo to deport them to? I know a guy who's big on making 'deals'.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
[Regnum] In the People's Republic of China (PRC), as a result of large-scale measures to combat corruption, 589 thousand people were punished. This was reported on the website of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection of China.
How many deserved it, how many were scapegoats, and has the level of corruption significantly fallen as a result?
"From January to September 2024, disciplinary inspection and supervision bodies across the country received 2.7 million letters and reports, including 756,000 reports and complaints. A total of 2,972 cases were transferred to the prosecutor's office for further investigation," the publication states.
It is specified that in 2024, 642,000 cases were initiated, including cases against 58 provincial and ministerial-level employees, 3,263 department and bureau employees, 26,000county-level and district-level employees, and 89,000 township-level employees.
In October 2022, China's top anti-graft official Xiao Pei publicly announced that China had effectively curbed the spread of corruption since the 18th Communist Party Congress in 2012. He said that some 80,000 officials had voluntarily confessed to their wrongdoings over the past five years.
[Peter Schiff] On this week’s episode, Peter covered a record setting week for gold and a stellar week for silver. With the metals nearly cresting $2800 and $35, respectively, Peter sees this price action as confirmation that the Fed’s recent rate cuts are a mistake. Politicians may love inflation, and the media is oblivious, but the metals markets know that America’s economic trajectory is unsustainable.
#2
Who's your local reliable gold assayer? Trying to use a coin or a bar is like trying to use a high value bill which are usually not accepted in basically low transactions. You sure who ever you are dealing with can make viable change and in what medium?
#6
Wine, bourbon, ammunition and single serving prepper meals are low end transaction alternatives. Just watch you six after the trade and practice basic SDR "dry cleaning". As a good friend and former SF Officer once said, I'm not a prepper because I know where you live!
Surveillance Detection Routes (SDRs)
"A Surveillance Detection Route (SDR) is a planned path designed to expose potential surveillance. An SDR includes multiple turns, stops, and changes in speed to encourage any surveillance to reveal itself. If the same individual or vehicle is spotted multiple times during the route, it might indicate surveillance."
[NYP] Pennsylvania Democratic Sen. John Fetterman opened up about the state of the presidential race in his key battleground state and called former President Trump’s support there "astonishing" while predicting that Elon Musk’s endorsement is "going to really matter."
"There’s a difference between not understanding, but also acknowledging that it exists," Fetterman told the New York Times in an interview published Saturday morning when asked about enthusiasm for Trump in Pennsylvania. "And anybody who spends time driving around, and you can see the intensity. It’s astonishing."
Fetterman continued, "I was doing an event in Indiana County. Very, very red. And there was a superstore of Trump stuff, and it was a hundred feet long. [There were] dozens of T-shirts and hats and bumper stickers and all kinds of, I mean, it’s like, Where does this all come from? It’s the kind of thing that has taken on its own life. And it’s like something very special exists there. And that doesn’t mean that I admire it. It’s just — it’s real."
[SEMAFOR] Artificial intelligence will "revolutionize" the process by which drugs are discovered, chip giant Nvidia said this week, after unveiling a pilot project for Danish drugmaker Novo Nordisk to use its new AI-powered supercomputer.
"Computer-aided drug discovery, I think that’s going to revolutionize the industry," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said at a launch event for the computer, which researchers will use to train an AI model to facilitate vaccine design and analyze disease mutations, Bloomberg reported.
Machine learning has excited the pharma industry with its potential — for example, by scanning millions of possibilities to assess the effectiveness of shifting a drug to treat a different disease than first intended, replacing months of lab work.
One major breakthrough was Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold software, which predicts the structure and interactions of molecules — a previously complex, time-consuming process. Its inventors were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry this month.
#5
No actual evidence of this to date. There’s been a lot of money thrown at this concept but little has come of it. Actual people are pretty good at identifying compounds that might be able to become a real therapeutic drug that can go through the IND/clinical trial process.
Oct. 26 (UPI) -- SpaceX on Saturday successfully launched a Falcon 9 rocket carrying a payload of 22 Starlink Internet communications satellite from Cape Canaveral in Florida, marking a state record 73rd orbital rocket launch this year.
The Falcon 9 rose from Launch Complex 40 at the Kennedy Space Center as scheduled at 5:47 p.m. EDT.
Less than 10 minutes later, the first-stage booster used in 18 previous launches landed safely aboard SpaceX's drone ship Just Read the Instructions in the Atlantic Ocean.
Saturday's launch was the 100th Falcon 9 mission for the company so far in this year -- 66 of them have been to deploy Starlink satellites into the network's low-orbit megaconstellation, according to Space.com.
Meanwhile, local officials along Florida's Space Coast celebrated the 73rd launch of 2024, the most ever in a single calendar year with more than two months remaining.
#1
"Were the satellites launched into an elongated orbit?", he asked innocently.
the first-stage booster used in 18 previous launches landed safely aboard SpaceX's drone ship
Rockets landing tail-first as God and Heinlein intended. Reusable boosters landing on ships in the ocean. On SHIPS! This is the 21st century I was hoping for.
By reducing the cost to orbit, Musk is opening space to commerce and exploration. And he is doing it despite a whole lot of people and feral government agencies trying to stop him. NASA has some some bold and heroic things in the past, but lately, they have turned into the NATO of space.
#2
"Mission capable rates for tactical aircraft have generally not met service goals for several years. Our prior work attributes this to numerous interrelated, complex factors, such as aging aircraft, maintenance challenges, and supply
support issues."
DOD’s usual bullroar. There is a real personnel problem that no one will admit exists.
Posted by: Albert Pelosi3459 ||
10/27/2024 12:05 Comments ||
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#3
Just remember, we need to replace everything with this. If you don't agree, you're a traitor to the service. General said so.
Posted by: ed in texas ||
10/27/2024 14:18 Comments ||
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#4
Skid,
They work especially well for the Israelis. They insisted that if they were going to buy -35s, then it would be their avionics and other critical systems in the planes, or no deal. Israeli participation in the -35 program was something that had to happen, so DOD quietly authorized it.
[Metro] Mutant sharks. White sand laced with plutonium. Water tainted with strontium. Hub cap-sized hermit crabs eating coconuts containing caesium. A dome ‘coffin’ crammed with radioactive material in plastic bags.
The Marshall Islands, a ring of coral reefs in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, looks like the perfect place to throw on a floppy sun hat and read a book below swaying palm trees.
But in the 1940s and ’50s, the US used two of the far-flung atolls, Bikini and Enewetak, to test out 67 nuclear bombs.
One was 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, according to Hibakusha Worldwide, which tracks nuclear incidents.
This was part of Operation Crossroad, an atomic testing programme that came out of the anxiety of the Cold War.
With 52,000 Marshallese people calling the islands home at the time, the 20 islands are the remnants of ancient volcanoes halfway between Hawaii and Australia.
Yet entire islands were vaporized and craters gouged into its shallow lagoons, forcing hundreds of people out of their homes, never to return.
Bikini Atoll now has such a reputation for groovy wildlife it inspired the setting of Spongebob Squarepants.
While the islands are unlikely home to talking sponges, the radiation that lingers in its waters is impacting the wildlife.
Nurse sharks with just one dorsal fin swim around the Bikini Atoll and car-sized coral grows along the seafloor.
‘Popular belief is that radiation causes mutations, and you know what, it’s true,’ Steve Palumbi, a professor of marine sciences also at Stanford, told The Sun.
Even low levels of radiation can cause genetic mutations. Caesium, strontium and other radioactive isotopes break apart DNA, compressing thousands of years of evolution into a few decades in what one paper once described as ‘unnatural selection‘.
Marine life is on the rebound in Bikini. ‘The fact there is life there and the life there is trying to come back from the most violent thing we’ve ever done to it is pretty hopeful,’ said Steve Palumbi, a professor in marine sciences at Stamford University.
The water, though, remains undrinkable and sealife and plants cannot be eaten due to the radioactive water and soil.
People living on nearby islands, now part of the Republic of the Marshall Islands, during and after the testing show a higher risk of developing cancer – not one of the top two causes of death – and birth defects.
The list of woes for the Marshallese does not end there, with rising sea levels fuelled by climate change slowly swallowing up the habitable atolls.
The largest nuclear detonation was the hydrogen bomb Castle Bravo, fired on March 1, 1954, in Bikini. As the mushroom-shaped clast cast a shadow over the island, the radioactive fallout and debris spewed well beyond the shorelines.
‘Traces of radioactive material were later found in parts of Japan, India, Australia, Europe, and the US,’ says the Atomic Heritage Foundation.
‘This was the worst radiological disaster in US history and caused worldwide backlash against atmospheric nuclear testing.’
Bikini, the colonial spelling of Pikinni, became so radioactive there’s little hope it’ll ever be habitable.
After the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963 put an end to atmospheric nuclear testing, this left American officials – and the islands’ displaced citizens – with one option: wait.
The Defence Department concluded in the ’70s that the soil was so contained with cesium-137 and strontium-90 – both taking about three decades to decay, called a half-life – that the best course of action was to just let it rot.
Plutonium-239, however, takes a little longer; 24,000 years. The US dumped 437 plastic bags filled with lumps of plutonium that had spewed after a bomb misfired into a 33-foot crater left behind in 1958 by a nuke on Runit Island.
That, and about 35 Olympic-sized swimming pools’ worth of radioactive soil and nuclear waste.
The crater was plugged up by a 350-foot-wide slab of concrete called the Rumit Dome, which locals call ‘The Tomb’, in the ’70s. The dome almost looks like something from a science fiction movie, surrounded by a tropical paradise.
And the dome is leaking. ‘The dome is a significant visible scar on the landscape,’ Ken Buesseler, a marine radioactivity expert at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), told Oceans magazine in 2020.
‘But it’s a relatively small source of radioactivity.’
Overall, more than half of the 167 original inhabitants of Bikini Atoll have died. Some started showing cancers related to radiation exposure in the 1960s, while people living downwind of the explosions suffered burns and low blood counts.
Several generations later, about 5,400 Bikinians are still living in exile. Some live on a lone Pacific island called Kili, roughly 400 miles from Bikini, and others from Honolulu to the ‘Wheat Capital’ of Oklahoma, Enid.
Bikini Atoll largely remains uninhabited, with a tiny caretaker team taking care of the island infrastructure and divers pop in from time to time.
Bikinians continue to fight, however. Lobbying the US Congress for money to redevelop and clean up the place they once called home.
Scientists are hopeful. Remediation efforts include sprinkling affected areas with potassium fertilizer which reduces how much cesium-137 seeps into locally grown crops. How radioactive the soil is has also been decreasing.
The Marshall Islands Program advises that, once resettlement finally begins, a radiation monitoring programme be set up.
‘In this way, the Kili-Bikini-Ejit Local Government and the people of Bikini can be assured that radiological conditions on the islands remain at or below applicable safety standards, and the United States Government can avoid mistakes of the past,’ the programme says.
#1
"sea levels fuelled by climate change slowly swallowing up"
Very slowly. And occaisonally spit them back up.
With Cesium and Strontium laying around, I'll pass.
Posted by: ed in texas ||
10/27/2024 8:31 Comments ||
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#2
How fast are the islands sinking?
Posted by: James ||
10/27/2024 15:44 Comments ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
