Modern Day Train Robbers Threatens the Whole Nation

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Sadly and factually, the Department of Justice, the FBI and District Attorneys have been silent on all this and crime across the country.

WSJ:

Michelle Wilde bought a piece of sand art during a visit to Jerome, Ariz., earlier this month. Rather than carry it home, she had the shopkeeper ship the $145 frame to her.

Instead of arriving at her home in Everett, Wash., the package ended up next to a railroad track in East Los Angeles. The frame was gone. The box remained.

It was among thousands of boxes recently found littered along Union Pacific Corp. UNP -2.20% tracks in the middle of Los Angeles. Thieves had broken into the train cars and made off with items shipped by Dr. Martens, Harbor Freight Tools and small businesses alike. The scene has set off finger-pointing between the railroad, local officials and police about who is to blame and how to stop a modern twist on one of the country’s oldest crimes.

“Why are people breaking into [railcars] and why is no one doing anything?” Ms. Wilde said, when she was contacted by a Wall Street Journal reporter to inform her of the fate of her package. “We’re like in year 13 of a pandemic so nothing surprises me about human behavior.”

Union Pacific said it has seen a 160% jump in criminal rail theft in Los Angeles since December 2020, including sharper increases in the months leading up to Christmas, when trailers are loaded with inventory bound for stores or gifts shipped to homes. The total losses to Union Pacific, with a market capitalization of $155 billion, have come to $5 million over the past year. That doesn’t include losses tallied by customers shipping on its rails.

Union Pacific has seen a 160% jump in criminal rail theft in Los Angeles since December 2020.

Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images

Train robberies date to the dawn of railroads, and Union Pacific has had its share of famous heists. In 1899, Butch Cassidy’s gang robbed the Union Pacific Overland Flyer No. 1 as it passed through Wyoming. The group stopped the train and blew up its safe. A posse was sent out in pursuit of the bandits.

In other parts of the country, thieves occasionally plunder everything from alcohol to appliances from freight trains that either stop or crawl through areas. The railroads combat the problem with their own police forces. Union Pacific has more than 200 police officers, but they must patrol thousands of miles of track across 23 states.

Lance Fritz, Union Pacific’s chief executive officer, said rail theft has been a mostly small-scale problem. What is happening in Los Angeles is different. A couple of years ago, opportunistic individuals might see a mile-plus-long train inching through the city and pry open a car to see what was inside, maybe grab a few items, he said, but “today, that’s more organized.”

A Union Pacific freight train in Los Angeles, where thousands of opened packages are strewn.

Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images

The tracks being hit connect to an intermodal Union Pacific rail yard where containers are moved between trucks and trains. The rail corridor carries containers from nearby ports as well as trailers filled with packages from Amazon.com Inc., FedEx Corp. and United Parcel Service Inc., which are bound for other sorting hubs across the U.S.

This month local news footage showing packages strewn along the tracks went viral. On Thursday, empty packages were still piled on the sidewalks near the rails. As trains rolled by, railcars could be seen with their doors hanging open.

Union Pacific complained in a December letter to Los Angeles officials that they weren’t doing enough to police the area and prosecute individuals caught trespassing.

Adrian Guerrero, a general director of public affairs at Union Pacific, said lenient prosecution means many of those arrested for rifling through railcars have their charges reduced to a misdemeanor or petty offense—and are often quickly released. “We just don’t see the criminal justice system holding these people accountable,” Mr. Guerrero said.

In a letter responding to Mr. Guerrero sent on Friday, Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón said the number of cases submitted to his office in which Union Pacific was listed as the victim had fallen each of the past two years, from 78 cases in 2019 to 47 in 2021. The DA brought charges in 55% of those cases, Mr. Gascón said, with the others dismissed for lack of evidence or because they didn’t involve allegations of burglary, theft or tampering.

“It is very telling that other major railroad operations in the area are not facing the same level of theft at their facilities as UP,” Mr. Gascón wrote. “My Office is not tasked with keeping your sites secure.”

Los Angeles Police Capt. German Hurtado, who works in the Hollenbeck station covering the area, said Union Pacific had downsized its police force in 2020, leaving the company with just six officers patrolling between Yuma, Ariz., and the Pacific coast. Resignations and Covid-19 have also left the LAPD short roughly 2,000 officers, he said, including 50 at his station.

The LAPD has run several task forces around the tracks, he said, and since August has arrested about 125 people for rail-related offenses, including burglary and trespassing.

Union Pacific executives said they have added dozens of agents in recent months to patrol the area in Los Angeles, and are using drones, specialized fencing and trespass detection systems to combat the theft. The railroad said it is also actively looking to hire more officers. “While we have a private police force, they do not supplant the vital need and authority of local law enforcement,” a spokeswoman said.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom visited the scene Thursday and helped clean up some of the boxes scattered along the tracks. He touted part of his proposed budget, which would grant $255 million to local law enforcement over the next three years and create a dedicated unit to focus on retail, train and auto theft.

“There’s nothing acceptable about this,” Mr. Newsom said of the thefts. “It looked like a third-world country.”

Jim Foote, the CEO of CSX Corp. , another freight railroad that operates in the eastern U.S., said rail theft elsewhere isn’t as rampant as what he sees happening in Los Angeles. He recalls 20 years ago, while working for Canadian National Railway, there was a similar problem in Chicago. To deal with it, the railroad tried to avoid stopping trains where they were getting ransacked.

“We do everything we can to protect our customer shipments, but if the train stops at the wrong time and the wrong place, the modern-day Jesse James will get you,” Mr. Foote said.

Casey Rowcliffe had ordered a battery for his RV that never showed up. He hadn’t given much thought to his missing package until he saw the viral video showing the littered stretch of tracks in Los Angeles.

“I figured it was stuck in the port or somebody’s got it,” the 45-year-old general contractor said. The location of the battery remains a mystery. But the box with his Bellingham, Wash., address was among those found by a Journal reporter. “Out of all those packages, you picked mine?” Mr. Rowcliffe said.

A FedEx spokeswoman said it has measures in place to discourage theft, including advanced locking mechanisms on railcars. In cases where railcars are tampered with, FedEx works with the railroads to retrieve any shipments they can. A UPS spokesman said it would take a collective response to deter criminals and the company has streamlined the claims process for when there are issues with shipments.

Nellie Bly Kaleidoscopes and Art Glass, the small Arizona shop that sent Ms. Wilde her frame, ships out anywhere from three to 20 packages a day. When notified that its package was found torn open in Los Angeles, the shop reached out to Ms. Wilde, shipped out a replacement and started the claims process.

Anne Miranda, the store’s shipping manager, said it typically only has problems with a handful of shipments a year. “That was before the world went crazy,” she said.

 

Eastern Europe under Extraordinary Threat from Russia

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In part: Russia has been chipping away at the country since at least 2014, when the pro-Russian President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, lost an election, and Putin invaded the Crimea, the peninsula that sticks out into the Black Sea and separates it from the Sea of Azov to its northeast.

Stealth war

As part of Putin’s campaign, a war that isn’t quite a war, most authorities agree that Russian-based hackers mounted a cyberattack called NotPetya back in 2017.  It was aimed primarily at Ukrainian institutions, but it also affected thousands of other systems as well.  The White House later estimated that NotPetya caused about $10 billion worth of damage worldwide.

Now we come down to this week.  On January 15, dozens of Ukrainian government computer systems were infected with malware disguised as ransomware.  An infected computer displayed a demand for a certain ransom to be paid in Bitcoin, but what really happened is that the malware “renders the computer system inoperable,” ransom or no ransom.

Microsoft issued a statement saying that they observed these attacks aimed primarily at Ukrainian government agencies and closely-allied organisations, and that they had issued updates that will address the problems.  But in the meantime, the Ukraine is suffering yet another cyberattack which appears to be instigated by Russia, although no firm evidence of the source has yet been forthcoming.

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The head of Ukraine’s defense intelligence agency told Military Times in November that Russia could launch an attack through Belarus.

source

Then there is the matter of Putin working to install a pro-Russian regime in Ukraine.

The UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) named former Ukrainian MP Yevhen Murayev as a potential Kremlin candidate and once again warned Russia of “severe costs” of activities to subvert Ukraine.

“The information being released today shines light on the extent of Russian activity designed to subvert Ukraine, and is an insight into Kremlin’s thinking,” UK foreign secretary Liz Truss said in a statement on Saturday.

Russia rejects UK claim

Russia on Sunday rejected a British claim that Russia was seeking to replace Ukraine’s government with a pro-Moscow administration.

“The disinformation spread by the British Foreign Office is more evidence that it is the Nato countries, led by the Anglo-Saxons, who are escalating tensions around Ukraine,” Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on the Telegram messaging app on Sunday. “We call on the British Foreign Office to stop provocative activities, stop spreading nonsense.” source

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Some other disturbing details:

  1. The Russian Navy has announced plan gunnery and missile firing 160 nautical miles off Mizen Head. The exercises, from February 3rd to 8th, are just on the edge of the drop-off into deep water. It is also within Ireland’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). Coming at a time of heightened tension between Russia and the West, this highlights Ireland’s strategic position.

    Of all the world’s ocean, it is interesting that Russia selected this small area in the Irish EEZ. It is far from Russia’s operating bases and regular training areas. So the location seems chosen for strategic or political reasons.

  2. Germany is actively collaborating with Russian armed aggression against Ukraine. The Estonians will tell the Germans to go to hell and the rest of NATO will back Estonia against the Moscow-Berlin axis.
    The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is still in force. The Russian regime of state terrorism and the Putinversteher faction in Germany are allied to destroy the freedom and independence of Eastern Europe.
    Germany has no business being in NATO when it aggressively thwarts the principle of collective security on which the alliance was founded. Germany has gone full Soviet with the new Chancellor.
    Russian ally Germany refuses to permit Estonia to transfer artillery to Ukraine, giving a boost to the Russian army which is mobilized for an offensive.
  3. The U.S. has ordered all family members of its embassy in Ukraine to evacuate amid rising tensions of a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine. The U.S. State Department also said non-essential personnel could also leave the country at the U.S. government’s expense.

One more item. Since President Biden halted the United States from being energy independent which was achieved under President Trump, the United States no longer exports energy to Europe. In fact, conditions are so dire that the United States is actually buying dirty oil from Russia. Think of that. If Russia decides to punish the U.S. even more….you can bet the cost of gasoline at the pump with reach $8.00 to $10.00 a gallon.

Then there is the threat of the United States versus Russia in the Arctic and in Space…imagine escalating hostilities in those battle-spaces…

Meanwhile…Ukrainians are drilling for safety in fallout shelters.

 

Will Justice Sotomayor Recuse on the Mandate Cases?

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If Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor reads the New York Times and watches CNN, then we clearly understand how her alleged knowledge of all things vaccines and mandates are so wrong and exaggerated. This Judge made statements during oral arguments that were wildly wrong. Yeesh. The Justices do gather after arguments are presented and confab on the cases and then collaborate with their clerks. We can only hope Sotomayor gets the memo on how wrong she is or she must recuse from the case(s) dealing with OSHA, vaccines and mandates.

If the Supreme Court rules on the side of the Federal government then the power of the government over all citizens is limitless and tyranny is in stone.

As noted by The Federalist in part for more details –>

Brian Fletcher, U.S. Principal Deputy Solicitor General, representing the federal government in Biden v. Missouri, told justices that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra should be allowed to keep the mandate. Challengers, however, noted that the rule forces a medical procedure on healthcare workers who could leave the workforce, and leave rural and poor populations in need of care vulnerable.

“Exercising this kind of power to force the individual to submit to a medical treatment has never ever been something that has been authorized by Congress or done by an agency on an emergency basis,” Louisiana Solicitor General Elizabeth Murrill said. “But I don’t think in this case that justifies them co-opting a quintessential state police power. In fact, the opposite is true.”

Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, and Neil Gorsuch all seemed skeptical of the vaccine mandate on the grounds that the federal government was extending its reach into state issues. In his questioning, Gorsuch emphasized that the mandate seems less effective as a health and safety protocol and is more of an issue of control.

“Could CMS also implement regulations about exercise regimes?” Gorsuch asked, wondering if “substances that must be ingested by hospital employees” could be implemented “in the name of health and safety?”

Part of this control, Gorsuch hinted, is coming via funding threats.

“These statutes sometimes constitute, we’re told, 10 percent of all the funding state governments receive. This regulation affects, we’re told, 10 million healthcare workers and will cost over a billion dollars for employers to comply with. So what’s your reaction to that? Why isn’t this a regulation that effectively controls the employment and tenure of healthcare workers at hospitals, an issue Congress said the agency didn’t have the authority, that that should be left to the states to regulate?” Gorsuch asked.

In response, Sotomayor asserted her belief that “if you want my money your facility has to do this.”

“This is not an issue of power between the states and federal government. This is an issue of what right does the federal government [have] to dictate what it wants to buy,” Sotomayor said.

“Your Honor, it is a vaccine requirement masquerading as a condition of participation,” Jesus Osete, Missouri Deputy Attorney General, replied.

During the arguments, Justice Elena Kagan, Justice Stephen Breyer, and the counsel arguing in favor of the mandate continued to spew misinformation about COVID-19 and the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines. Kagan repeatedly lied that vaccinated workers couldn’t transmit the virus despite numerous admissions from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that the jab doesn’t stop viral spread and data showing a significant number of breakthrough COVID cases.

“All the Secretary is doing here is to say to providers, you know what? Basically, the one thing you can’t do is to kill your patients. So you have to get vaccinated so that you’re not transmitting the disease that can kill elderly Medicare patients, that can kill sick Medicaid patients,” Kagan said. “I mean, that seems like a pretty basic infection prevention measure. You can’t be the carrier of disease.”

She later claimed, without evidence, that “people are not showing up to hospitals because they’re afraid of getting COVID from staff.”

Breyer, who used rising COVID-19 case numbers to justify his support for the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate for the private sector, also lied about the shot and COVID hospitalizations.

“There are 750,000 people got this yesterday, but the hospitals are full to overflowing, that there is a problem worse than diptheria,” Breyer said. “They’re filling up hospital beds and others are dying because they can’t get in. Okay. Now public interest, call it something else, call it what you might, but it seems to me, it’s hard for me to believe, but it seems to me that every minute that these things are not in effect, thousands of more people are getting this disease. And we have some discretionary power.”

 

Researchers are Diligently Working on Alternative/Creative Drugs to Treat Covid

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Don’t you wonder why any part of the media never does a story on new and promising coronavirus treatments? Do you wonder the same for the Biden White House much less Dr. Fauci?

Is Fluvoxamine the Covid Drug We’ve Been Waiting For?

A 10-day treatment costs only $4 and appears to greatly reduce symptoms, hospitalization and death.

The Food and Drug Administration last week authorized two oral antiviral medicines for the early treatment of Covid-19. But don’t get too excited. The U.S. will still have a meager treatment arsenal this winter.

The U.S. has been relying on monoclonal-antibody treatments, but most don’t hold up against the Omicron variant. One, by GlaxoSmithKline and Vir Biotechnology, does better at neutralizing the variant, but supply is limited. Pfizer’s newly authorized antiviral pack Paxlovid will also have to be rationed. There will be more of Merck and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics’ newly authorized antiviral, molnupiravir, but patients may be reluctant to take the drug. Some scientists worry it could cause DNA mutations in people, though the FDA determined that the likelihood of this was low when used on a short-term basis.

Fluvoxamine could keep those with COVID-19 out of the ...

Yet a promising alternative isn’t getting its due: fluvoxamine, a pill the FDA approved in 1994 to treat obsessive-compulsive disorders. Doctors often prescribe it off-label for anxiety, depression and panic attacks. Studies show that fluvoxamine is highly effective at preventing hospitalization in Covid-infected patients, and it’s unlikely to be blunted by Omicron.

Doctors hypothesize that fluvoxamine can trigger a cascade of reactions in cells that modulate inflammation and interfere with virus functions. It could thus prevent an overreactive immune response to pathogens—what’s known as a cytokine storm—that can lead to organ failure and death. It also increases nighttime levels of melatonin—the hormone that makes you sleepy—which evidence suggests can also mitigate inflammation.

While experimenting with mice in 2019, researchers at the University of Virginia discovered that fluvoxamine could be an effective treatment for sepsis, or blood-borne infection. A large study in France during the early months of the pandemic found that Covid-19 patients treated with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors such as fluvoxamine were significantly less likely to be intubated or to die.

A small randomized control trial last year by psychiatrists at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis was a spectacular success: None of the 80 participants who started fluvoxamine within seven days of developing symptoms deteriorated. In the placebo group, six of the 72 patients got worse, and four were hospitalized. The results were published in November 2020 in the Journal of the American Medical Association and inspired a real-world experiment.

Soon after the study was published, there was a Covid outbreak among employees at the Golden Gate Fields horse racing track in Berkeley, Calif. The physician at the track offered fluvoxamine to workers. After 14 days, none of the 65 patients who took it were hospitalized or still had symptoms. Of the 48 who didn’t take the drug, six, or 12.5%, were hospitalized and one died. Twenty-nine had lingering symptoms, which might have resulted from inflammatory damage to their organs. Those who took the placebo were more likely to be asymptomatic when they tested positive, so they would have been expected to fare better.

The studies drew the attention of Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health. “A big need right now is for a drug that you could take by mouth, that you could be offered as soon as you had a positive test, and that would reduce the likelihood that the virus is going to make you really sick,” he said in an interview with “60 Minutes” in March. “Fluvoxamine could certainly be something you want to put in the tool chest,” Dr. Collins added. “It looks as if it has the promise to reduce the likelihood of severe illness.”

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Related Reading: Drug inspired from sharks’ immune system may aid pulmonary fibrosis treatment

Researchers are looking to sharks and their antibody-like proteins to neutralize the current COVID virus and prepare for viruses that could come in the future.

Coronaviruses, which refer to specific types of viruses, have existed long before COVID-19 was detected. As the John Hopkins School of Medicine explains, coronaviruses are named based on their appearance — “corona” means “crown,” and the term is used to describe the virus’s out layers, which are covered with spike proteins. In 2019, a coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, was found. It causes a respiratory illness, which is now known as COVID-19.

VNARs (variable new antigen receptors), which are unique antibody-like proteins derived from the immune systems of sharks, can prevent the virus that causes COVID, its variants, and related coronavirus from infecting human cells, a study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison has found.

In the study — a collaboration between UW-Madison, the University of Minnesota, and Elasmogen, a Scotland biomedical company that develops therapeutic VNARs — shark VNARs were tested against SARS-CoV-2 and a version of the virus that cannot replicate in cells. Three VNARs from a “pool of billions” were found to be effective in stopping the virus from infecting human cells.

The three VNARs were also determined to be effective against SARS-CoV-1, which caused the 2003 outbreak of SARS. Shark VNARs were also able to neutralize WIV1-CoV, a variant currently found only in bats.

Another VNAR, 2CO2, appeared to lock the spike protein in an inactive form, researchers report. Where this VNAR binds, though, is altered in some of SARS-CoV-2’s variants. Researchers say they “do not have any structural data for the binding location” for the third VNAR, 4C10, but virus “mutations do not have a substantial effect” on its effectiveness.

Researchers say multiple shark VNARs could be included in a cocktail for future therapies. This is cheaper and easier to manufacture than human antibodies, but has not yet been tested in humans.

“The big issue is there are a number of coronaviruses that are poised for emergence in humans,” said Aaron LeBeau, a UW–Madison professor of pathology who helped lead the study, in a news release. “What we’re doing is preparing an arsenal of shark VNAR therapeutics that could be used down the road for future SARS outbreaks. It’s a kind of insurance against the future.”

Identified Released Bagram Prisoner Killed our Marines in Kabul

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SIS-K suicide bomber who carried out deadly Kabul airport attack had been released from prison days earlier

Where is the outrage? This is on Biden….

NYP: The United States has put together a profile of the suicide bomber who killed 13 US troops outside Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul four months ago.

The Islamic State terrorist attack — which also left 200 Afghans dead — was carried out by Abdul Rahman Al-Logari, the New York Times reported. The terrorist was a one-time engineering student was freed from a high security prison by the Taliban.Abdul Rahman al-Logari

As the militants overran the country, they emptied jails stocked with both their own prisoners and Islamic State terrorists opposed to them and the US.

“It’s hard to explain what the thinking was in letting out people who were a threat to the Taliban,” Edmund Fitton-Brown, a senior U.N. counterterrorism official said during a recent conference in Qatar, the outlet said.

Al-Logari has been active in terrorist for years before. A 2017 plot he was involved with in New Delhi, India was foiled and Al-Logari was eventually transferred to the CIA which stuck in at Parwan prison near Bagram Air Base.

The base — and its two runways — was infamously abandoned and overrun by the Taliban on July 1. The situation forced the US do conduct its later evacuation from the more exposed and less well-equipped Hamid Karzai International Airport.

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The US controlled the base until it abandoned Bagram in early July. The revelation underscores the chaos around the final days of the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the struggle of the US to control a rapidly deteriorating situation around the airport as it relied on the Taliban to secure the perimeter of the airport.
The US handed Bagram Air Base over to the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF) on July 1, as the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan neared 90% completion.
At the time, there were approximately 5,000 prisoners at Bagram, an Afghan Ministry of Defense spokesman told CNN. A few hundred were criminals, but the vast majority were terrorists, the spokesman said, including members of al Qaeda, the Taliban, and ISIS. There were also foreign prisoners from Pakistan, Chechnya, and the Middle East detained there. It was up to the Afghans to secure the compound.
As the US was turning over Bagram to the ANDSF, the Taliban accelerated their sweep across the country, claiming to control 150 of Afghanistan’s 407 districts by July 5. It was a sign of things to come, as provincial capitals began falling to the Taliban offensive in rapid succession. By mid-August, the Taliban were on the doorstep of Kabul and the complete collapse of the Afghan military was virtually complete.Biden said, “We will not be deterred by terrorists… we will continue the evacuation.” He said that ISIS-K leadership and facilities will be attacked. More than 100,000 people were “taken to safety in the last 11 days. In the last 12 hours or so, another 7,000 have gotten out,” he said. “These ISIS terrorists will not win. We will rescue the Americans who are there…America will not be intimidated.”

He called those who died “part of the bravest, most capable and selfless military on the face of the earth.. the backbone of America, the spine of America, the best the country has to offer. Jill and I, our hearts ache for all those Afghan families who lost loved ones, including small children, in this vicious attack. We’re outraged.” source