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Mystery drones flying over New Jersey have residents and officials puzzled

Published

1 month ago

December 11, 2024

Mystery drones flying over New Jersey have residents and officials puzzled

Residents across New Jersey have been trying to decipher who has been flying mysterious unidentified drones over the state, with some taking to Facebook to share videos of sightings. Above, a screengrab from video of a potential sighting shared on Facebook.

Scott Ingenito/Screenshot by NPR

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Scott Ingenito/Screenshot by NPR

There is something strange happening in the skies above New Jersey, and no one seems quite sure what to make of it — not the governor, not members of Congress, not the FBI.

What they know is that starting in mid-November, dozens of identified drones have been spotted at night flying in at least 10 different counties across the state. What they don’t know is where the drones are coming from, who’s flying them and why.

The drones have been spotted above critical infrastructure, according to authorities, including reservoirs, electric transmission lines, rail stations, police departments and military installations.

A U.S. Army base in northern Morris County has already had at least 11 sightings, Army officials said this week, several of which came even after the Federal Aviation Administration moved to temporarily restrict drones from flying overhead. In neighboring Somerset County, the FAA has also banned drones from flying over the golf course owned by President-elect Donald Trump.

It’s not illegal to fly a drone in New Jersey, so long as the operator is certified with the FAA. Small unregistered drones being used for recreation can be flown in unrestricted areas.

But the number and mysterious nature of the sightings have left many Garden State residents on edge. So too has their size, as many of the drones appear to be larger than those that are typically used by hobbyists.

The office of New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy did not respond to a request for comment, but speaking at an unrelated bill signing earlier this week, Murphy said there had been 49 sightings on Sunday alone — though several of those may have been duplicates or merely possible sightings.

In a posting on social media last week, Murphy said state officials were “actively monitoring the situation and in close coordination with our federal and law enforcement partners.”

Biden says the 3 aerial objects shot down were not Chinese spy balloons

“There is no known threat to the public at this time,” Murphy said.

Murphy’s assurances have done little to quiet the concerns of residents and other officials across the state. In a statement posted to Facebook last week, the police chief of Florham Park, N.J., said “their presence appears nefarious in nature.” And during a House hearing on Monday focused on unmanned aerial systems, N.J. Rep. Chris Smith, a Republican, said he thought the drones were a “very serious threat.”

Given the alarm the drones have caused, Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., said in a statement Monday that he was calling for more transparency from federal officials.

“There is a growing sense of uncertainty and urgency across the state — from constituents and local officials alike — despite assurances that the drones pose no known threats to public safety,” Booker wrote in a letter to leaders at the FBI, and the Departments of Transportation and Homeland Security.

“As such, I urge you to share any relevant information about these drone sightings with the public. Without transparency, I believe that rumors, fear, and misinformation will continue to spread,” he added.

So far at least one theory has been ruled out — that the drones were coming from the Picatinny Arsenal military research base in Morris County. In a statement obtained by the Morristown Daily Record on Monday, base commander Lt. Col. Craig Bonham II said the drones were not theirs.

“While the source and cause of these aircraft operating in our area remain unknown, we can confirm that they are not the result of any Picatinny Arsenal-related activities,” Bonham said.

The FBI has opened an investigation, but bureau officials say key questions remain unresolved.

Speaking to House lawmakers Monday, Robert Wheeler, the assistant director for the bureau’s critical incident response group, said the FBI still did not know whether a specific individual was responsible for the flights or whether they were the work of a larger group. Wheeler also could not definitively rule out the possibility that the drones may pose a risk to public safety or national security.

Journalist Michael Shellenberger, founder of the Public news outlet, displays redacted reports during a hearing on Capitol Hill Wednesday.

“There’s nothing that is known that would lead me to say that, but we just don’t know, and that’s the concerning part,” Wheeler said.

In a statement, the FBI said it “remains engaged with our federal, state, local, and tribal partners to share information and protect the public.” It added that any drones “that pose a danger to any aircraft or are observed operating in restricted airspace or near critical infrastructure and other sensitive sites, can be reported to the FBI at 1-800-CALL-FBI (1-800-225-5324) or online at tips.fbi.gov.”

Unidentified drones have puzzled the public before. Earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal reported about unidentified drones swarming Langley Air Force Base in Virginia for 17 days. As with the drones over New Jersey, those flights called to memory the Chinese spy balloon that the U.S. military shot down over the coast of South Carolina in 2023.

The flights over New Jersey have led to calls for the military to shoot down the unidentified drones, but under federal law the military is largely prohibited from doing so unless the drone poses an imminent threat. It is also illegal for individuals to shoot down any aircraft — including drones.

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Tulsa Massacre Was a ‘Coordinated, Military-Style Attack,’ Federal Report Says

Published

2 hours ago

January 11, 2025

Press Room

Tulsa Massacre Was a ‘Coordinated, Military-Style Attack,’ Federal Report Says

The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, in which a prosperous Black neighborhood in Oklahoma was destroyed and up to 300 people were killed, was not committed by an uncontrolled mob but was the result of “a coordinated, military-style attack” by white citizens, the Justice Department said in a report released Friday.

The report, stemming from an investigation announced in September, is the first time that the federal government has given an official, comprehensive account of the events of May 31 and June 1, 1921, in the Tulsa neighborhood of Greenwood. Although it formally concluded that, more than a century later, no person alive could be prosecuted, it underscored the brutality of the atrocities committed.

“The Tulsa Race Massacre stands out as a civil rights crime unique in its magnitude, barbarity, racist hostility and its utter annihilation of a thriving Black community,” Kristen Clarke, assistant attorney general for civil rights, said in a statement. “In 1921, white Tulsans murdered hundreds of residents of Greenwood, burned their homes and churches, looted their belongings and locked the survivors in internment camps.”

No one today could be held criminally responsible, she said, “but the historical reckoning for the massacre continues.”

The report’s legal findings noted that if contemporary civil rights laws were in effect in 1921, federal prosecutors could have pursued hate crime charges against both public officials and private citizens.

Though considered one of the worst episodes of racial terror in U.S. history, the massacre was relatively unknown for decades: City officials buried the story, and few survivors talked about the massacre.

The Justice Department began its investigation under the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, which allows the agency to examine such crimes resulting in death that occurred before 1980. Investigators spoke with survivors and their descendants, looked at firsthand accounts and examined an informal review by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation, the precursor to the F.B.I. In that 1921 report, the agency asserted that the riot was not the result of “racial feeling,” and suggested that Black men were responsible for the massacre.

The new 123-page report corrects the record, while detailing the scale of destruction and its aftermath. The massacre began with an unfounded accusation. A young Black man, Dick Rowland, was being held in custody by local authorities after being accused of assaulting a young white woman.

According to the report, after a local newspaper sensationalized the story, an angry crowd gathered at the courthouse demanding that Mr. Rowland be lynched. The local sheriff asked Black men from Greenwood, including some who had recently returned from military service, to come to the courthouse to try to prevent the lynching. Other reports suggest the Black neighbors offered to help but were turned away by the sheriff.

The white mob viewed attempts to protect Mr. Rowland as “an unacceptable challenge to the social order,” the report said. The crowd grew and soon there was a confrontation. Hundreds of residents (some of whom had been drinking) were deputized by the Tulsa Police. Law enforcement officers helped organize these special deputies who, along with other residents, eventually descended on Greenwood, a neighborhood whose success inspired the name Black Wall Street.

The report described the initial attack as “opportunistic,” but by daybreak on June 1, “a whistle blew, and the violence and arsons that had been chaotic became systematic.” According to the report, up to 10,000 white Tulsans participated in the attack, burning or looting 35 city blocks. It was so “systematic and coordinated that it transcended mere mob violence,” the report said.

In the aftermath, the survivors were left to rebuild their lives with little or no help from the city. The massacre’s impact, historians say, is still felt generations later.

In the years since the attack, survivors and their descendants and community activists have fought for justice. Most recently, a lawsuit seeking reparations filed on behalf of the last two known centenarian survivors was dismissed by Oklahoma justices in June. In recent years, Tulsa has excavated sections of a city cemetery in search of the graves of massacre victims. And in 2024, the city created a commission to study the harms of the atrocity and recommend solutions. The results are expected in the coming weeks.

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The strange world of the Euro-Gulf

Published

4 hours ago

January 11, 2025

Press Room

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Waiting for the Tube, I see a poster for an upmarket gym chain. Locations? “City of London. High Street Kensington. Dubai.” What a shame to choose a setting that is so disfigured with bad taste and clueless expats. Still, the City and Dubai branches must be first-rate.

Soon after, I am in Doha, and again the Euro-Gulf linkage is inescapable. The emir of Qatar is back from a state visit to Britain, where the hosts were angling for a trade deal. Swiss-headquartered Fifa has just given the World Cup hosting rights to Saudi Arabia. Even in skyscraper-free Muscat, where alleys that might have been rationalised elsewhere in the Gulf twist freely behind the corniche, three restaurants in my hotel are outposts of Mayfair brands.

What a shame the word “Eurabia” is taken. And by such cranks. (It is a far-right term for a supposed plot to Islamise Europe.) Because we are going to need a word for this relationship. The Arabian peninsula has what Europe lacks: space, natural wealth and the resulting budget surpluses to invest in things. For its part, Europe has “soft” assets that Gulf states must acquire, host or emulate to carve out a post-oil role in the world. This isn’t the Gulf’s deepest external connection. Not while 38 per cent of people in the UAE and a quarter in Qatar are Indian. But it might be the most symbiotic, if I understand that word correctly.

True, the US has a defence presence in all six Gulf Cooperation Council states. This includes the Saudi footprint that Osama bin Laden wasn’t super-stoked about. But everyday contact? America is a 15-hour flight away. Its soft assets are either harder to buy or less coveted. Its citizens have little fiscal incentive to live in tax havens, as Uncle Sam charges them at least some of the difference.

In the 1970s, when Opec profits gushed through London, Anthony Burgess wrote a dystopia in which grand hotels became “al-Klaridges” and “al-Dorchester”. What a mental jolt it was for even the worldliest Europeans to see — we mustn’t pussyfoot around this — non-white people with more money than them. Still, they could condescend to the Gulf as being no place to live. Half a century on, their grandchildren would call that copium. In fact, their grandchildren might literally live there for economic opportunities. (Al-Dorado?) As a banker friend explains it, the time zones allow you to sleep late, trade the European markets, then dine late, so it is the young ones who do a Gulf stint, not the burnouts who are my age.

For how long, though? It is the sheer unlikelihood of this tryst, between a universal rights culture and monarchical absolutism, between a mostly secular continent and the home peninsula of an ancient faith, that distinguishes it from anything I can think of. A relationship can be both necessary and untenable. It wouldn’t take much — some intra-GCC violence, say, which seemed close in 2017 — for Europe’s exposure to the Gulf to age as badly as its former openness to Russia. If Abu Dhabi-owned Manchester City are found to have committed financial chicanery, a chunk of Premier League history will be tainted. Because it is “just” sport, I sense people are underprepared for the backlash.

And it is parochial to assume that the relationship could only ever break down on one end. It is the Gulf side that has to make the awkwardest cultural adjustments. Because Europeans associate 1979 with Iran and perhaps with Margaret Thatcher, they sometimes pass over the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by zealots who thought the House of Saud had grown soft on western habits. Governments in the region assuredly don’t forget.

How far a place can liberalise without tripping a cultural wire occupies (and is answered differently in) each state, or emirate. Everyone is very nice to “Mister Janan” in his Doha hotel. But the metal scanners that must be passed on each re-entry to the building stand as a reminder of the stakes here. I wonder if Europe and the Gulf throw so much into their liaison out of a niggling doubt that it can last.

Email Janan at janan.ganesh@ft.com

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Fox News headed for trial, again, over 2020 election fraud claims

Published

4 hours ago

January 11, 2025

Press Room

Fox News headed for trial, again, over 2020 election fraud claims

Fox News appears headed for trial over false election fraud claims made after the 2020 election, after a New York state appellate court chose not to dismiss a lawsuit brought by voting tech company Smartmatic.

Spencer Platt/Getty Images/Getty Images North America

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Spencer Platt/Getty Images/Getty Images North America

Fox News appears to be headed once more to court over the lies involving election fraud it aired about the 2020 presidential race. This time, it’s over the false claims that election tech company Smartmatic sabotaged the re-election of then-President Donald Trump.

In April 2023, on the eve of a trial in Delaware in which Fox founder Rupert Murdoch was set to testify, the network and its parent corporation agreed to pay $787.5 million to settle a defamation suit filed by Dominion Voting Systems.

Fox News settles blockbuster defamation lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems

A flood of revelations from the pre-trial process of discovery yielded damning internal communications. The judge found that network figures from junior producers to primetime hosts, network executives, Murdoch and his son Lachlan knew that Joe Biden had won the election fairly. Yet, they allowed guests to spread lies that Trump had been cheated of victory to win back Trump viewers. Some hosts amplified and even embraced the claims.

Now, an appellate court ruling in New York state is allowing Smartmatic’s parallel, $2.7 billion suit to press ahead. The same ruling also dismissed some counts against the network’s parent company, Fox Corp.

Pro-Trump Fox hosts including Maria Bartiromo and the late Lou Dobbs invited guests making unsubstantiated and wild claims about Smartmatic on the air, and at times appeared to endorse those allegations themselves.

Fox forced Dobbs off the air just a day after Smartmatic filed its suit in February 2021. Two weeks later, Fox News and Fox Business Network ran an awkward segment with a voting tech expert, Edward Perez, to present viewers with a rebuttal to those outlandish claims. Newsmax, a right-wing channel in competition with Fox for viewers who supported Trump, did much the same.

“Today, the New York Supreme Court rebuffed Fox Corporation’s latest attempt to escape responsibility for the defamation campaign it orchestrated against Smartmatic following the 2020 election,” Smartmatic’s lead attorney, Erik Connolly, said in a statement. “Fox Corporation attempted, and failed, to have this case dismissed, and it must now answer for its actions at trial. Smartmatic is seeking several billion in damages for the defamation campaign that Fox News and Fox Corporation are responsible for executing. We look forward to presenting our evidence at trial.”

Unlike Dominion, whose voting machines were used in two dozen states, Smartmatic says its technology was used only in Los Angeles County in 2020. Fox has sharply questioned the value of Smartmatic and the contracts it says were jeopardized and lost.

“We will be ready to defend this case surrounding extremely newsworthy events when it goes to trial,” a network spokesperson said in a statement. “As a report prepared by our financial expert shows, Smartmatic’s damages claims are implausible, disconnected from reality, and on their face intended to chill First Amendment freedoms.”

In the Dominion case, Fox also relied on arguments that its shows and hosts were simply relaying inherently newsworthy allegations from inherently newsworthy people — the then-president and his allies. The presiding judge in Delaware, Eric M. Davis, rejected that argument; he found that Fox’s executives, stars, and shows had broadcast false claims and defamed Dominion in doing so.

Fox has said that the New York case offers a new venue, with slightly different implications, although Davis applied New York defamation law in his Delaware proceedings.

Fox settled, as it has in many other cases, before opening arguments of the trial with Dominion. It maintains it will fight the allegations Smartmatic is making in court.