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China pushes back on NATO concerns it could provide lethal support to Russia

Russia’s Admiral Gorshkov frigate, armed with Zircon hypersonic missiles, arrived within the South African port of Richards Bay on Wednesday, forward of deliberate naval workout routines with South Africa and China, Russian state-run information company TASS reported.
The workout routines, scheduled to start on Feb. 27, will happen off the coast of KwaZulu-Natal province within the space between Richards Bay and the port of Durban, which serves as the primary base of the South African Navy within the Indian Ocean, in response to TASS.
The trilateral drills will give attention to “countering maritime safety threats and demonstrating the fleets’ readiness to collectively keep regional peace and stability,” the report mentioned.
China will use a destroyer, a frigate and a assist ship throughout the drills, whereas South Africa will participate with one frigate and two assist ships, TASS mentioned.
Joint maneuvers: Earlier this month, TASS quoted a supply near Russia’s protection trade saying the frigate “will carry out a coaching launch of a Tsirkon (Zircon) hypersonic missile throughout a joint train with South African and Chinese language navies.”
The joint maritime train is predicted to incorporate some 350 South African Nationwide Protection Pressure personnel taking part alongside their Russian and Chinese language counterparts, in response to South Africa. An earlier train between the three navies passed off in 2019.
It’s the primary time that the drills will embody the Admiral Gorshkov frigate carrying Zircon hypersonic missiles, which have been first examined in late 2021.
The long-range weapons journey greater than 5 occasions the pace of sound and are more durable to detect and intercept.
The frigate was actively concerned in testing the missiles, designed and produced by the Analysis and Manufacturing Affiliation of Machine-Constructing, a part of Russia’s Tactical Missiles Company, in response to TASS.

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'Helping every dang soul': Beloved camp director was among those lost in Texas flooding

Just after the summer session ended in late June, Heart O’ the Hills camper Sydney Sutton sent this photo to the camp’s director, Jane Ragsdale, who was killed in the July 4 flooding in Kerr County, Texas.
Erika Sutton
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Erika Sutton
Jane Ragsdale spent her summers by the Guadalupe, the very river that killed her a week ago today in the catastrophic July Fourth flood. Mention her name in Kerrville, Texas, this week, and folks tend to do two things: tear up and smile.
“I mean I can’t tell you how many people, acquaintances of mine say, ‘My dear, dear friend died.’ And then they said, ‘Did you know Jane Ragsdale?’ and I say, ‘Yeah, I did,’ ” said Karen Taylor, who lives in nearby Hunt, Texas. For her, Ragsdale was West Kerr County personified.
“Everybody’s friendly here, but she embodied that friendliness and generosity and love for others. I just can’t imagine life without her,” Taylor said.

Ragsdale, who was in her late 60s, did a lot of things, but she’s best known as the owner and director of Heart O’ the Hills camp for girls. She was born into the business.

Jane Ragsdale ran the Heart O’ the Hills camp for girls in Kerr County, Texas. The camp was between sessions when the deluge hit. The only person killed there was Ragsdale.
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Kerrville Daily Times
Her family bought a boys’ camp, Camp Stewart in 1966, the year Ragsdale turned 9. They bought Heart O’ the Hills about a decade later. Ragsdale helped run it from the start. By 1988, she was in charge.
Unlike Camp Mystic, the girls camp where at least 27 perished when the deluge hit, Heart O’ the Hills was between sessions. The only person killed there was Ragsdale.

“I’ve never in my life met someone like Jane,” said Kathy Simmons, who was a good friend of Ragsdale’s.
Simmons was at Heart O’ the Hills picking up her granddaughter just the week before the flood, on the last night the camp was open.
“We had a candlelight service on the river at 9 p.m., and it was so beautiful. There were prayers and there were songs,” Simmons said. “Jane always led the children in songs. And every one of those girls and those counselors absolutely idolized her.”

After Heart O’ the Hills camper Sydney Sutton sent a photo of herself to Jane Ragsdale, the camp director wrote this letter back to Sydney.
Erika Sutton
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Erika Sutton
The summer camps on the Guadalupe River in Kerr County are institutions. Generations of girls and boys go through them, often forming life-long attachments. Simmons considered Ragsdale the heart and soul of her camp, both spiritual leader and educator.
“I mean, Jane taught these girls how to change a tire, how to ride a horse, how to swim, how to shoot a gun, archery, cooking. I mean, the necessities of life,” Simmons said.
In the off-season, when she wasn’t running the camp, Ragsdale often traveled to Guatemala, where she volunteered as an interpreter and a project organizer. It was mission work she started doing when she was 19 and studying journalism. She was a badass. But she was also about the sweetest person in town.
“Jane was one of the most genuine, kind, honest people and very intelligent, very warm,” recalls Mindy Wendele, president and CEO of the Kerrville Area Chamber of Commerce. “She had a smile that you knew Jane Ragsdale was smiling at you.”
Wendele grew up with Ragsdale, who she describes as a real go-getter: deeply involved in the Chamber of Commerce, a board member of the local liberal arts college, a class leader in high school.
“Anytime that we were out with Jane and her family at Heart O’ the Hills, we had just a fabulous time, just fabulous memories out there,” Wendele said.
Now, with some of the camps and almost all of the riverfront in ruins, Kerr County faces a monumental clean-up and rebuilding effort.
Another reason to miss Jane Ragsdale.
“Oh, she would be out there volunteering. She would be out there clearing property,” Simmons said. “She would have her boots on, her gloves on, she would be helping every dang soul that needed to be helped.”
So the flood took one of Kerr County’s most capable citizens, but Ragsdale’s influence on the community and the girls who came through Heart O’ the Hills camp is going to last a long time.
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Video: Clashes After Immigration Raid at California Cannabis Farm

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Clashes After Immigration Raid at California Cannabis Farm
Federal agents fired crowd control munitions at protesters who blocked a road outside of the farm. Some demonstrators threw objects at the agents’ vehicles.
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Please make a path for emergency vehicles or chemical munitions will be deployed.
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Trump heads to Texas as recovery efforts from deadly flood continue

President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump will travel to Texas on Friday to meet with first responders and grieving families in the aftermath of last week’s catastrophic flooding that has left more than 100 people dead.
During his visit, Trump is expected to receive a briefing from local elected officials and meet with victims’ relatives. He will be joined by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.
Republican Sens. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn told reporters this week that they planned to travel with Trump to tour the flood damage. It is unclear whether state Attorney General Ken Paxton, a staunch ally of the administration who is challenging Cornyn in next year’s GOP primary, will join them.
Authorities continue to search miles of the Guadalupe River for more than 150 people who remain missing as hopes of finding more survivors dwindle. Among those confirmed or feared dead are 27 children and counselors at Camp Mystic, a Christian summer camp in Hunt.
Trump on Sunday signed a major disaster declaration for Texas to make federal funding available for hard-hit Kerr County, where nearly 77% of voters backed him in the 2024 election.
The trip to Texas will be Trump’s second to the site of a natural disaster since he was inaugurated for his second term; he visited Los Angeles in January after a wildfire devastated large swaths of Southern California. During his first term, he made multiple trips to Texas in 2017 in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey and its deadly floods. The same year, he traveled to Puerto Rico to survey damage caused by Hurricane Maria.
The Trump administration has faced criticism from officials and lawmakers at various levels of government who have argued that recent job cuts at the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, alongside plans to shutter the Federal Emergency Management Agency, prevented accurate forecasting and worsened the effects of the floods. Administration officials have repeatedly rejected those assertions.
Trump has pledged to “get rid” of FEMA, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, and his administration has overseen a largely voluntary exodus of experienced personnel at the agency, fueling concerns about its ability to promptly respond to disasters. The concerns were heightened by a new policy from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem mandating her approval for any agency spending in excess of $100,000.
Asked by NBC News on Thursday whether the new policy delayed FEMA’s response to the tragedy in Texas, Trump defended Noem.
“We were right on time. We were there — in fact, she was the first one I saw on television,” Trump told “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker in a phone call. “She was there right from the beginning.”
Criticism of the disaster response has also focused on Kerr County’s emergency management system after reports indicated local officials did not use warnings from FEMA to send text alerts when the severity and speed of the flooding heightened, catching hundreds of people in a region known as “flash flood alley” by surprise. In addition, Kerr County, which has a population of more than 50,000 people, had no siren system to alert residents, in part because some local officials felt it was too expensive to install.
Trump called for additional flood alarms in Texas on Thursday, though he argued that the storm was unprecedented and that “nobody ever saw a thing like this coming.”
“After having seen this horrible event, I would imagine you’d put alarms up in some form, where alarms would go up if they see any large amounts of water or whatever it is,” he told NBC News.
Joe Herring, the mayor of Kerrville, told MSNBC’s Katy Tur this week that the state rejected an effort to install a siren system nearly a decade ago.
“The county government looked into that in 2017, and from what I heard, their grant application was denied,” Herring said. “I wasn’t in government at that time, but it sounds like we talked about it, we asked for help, and we were denied before.”
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