Category: News

Breaking News – 49 killed as plane crashes into home near Buffalo New York

Yikes!

Forty-nine people reportedly died when an aircraft identified as a Continental Airlines flight crashed into a house in Clarence Center shortly after 10 p.m. last night, starting a huge fire which poured thick smoke throughout the hamlet.

Unconfirmed reports from a source at Buffalo Niagara International Airport said that the dead included 44 passengers, four crew members and a person on the ground.

County Executive Chris Collins said that there may have been as many as 50 people aboard the plane and crew members had reported mechanical problems as they approached Buffalo Niagara International Airport. Several injured people were taken from the scene to Erie County Medical Center for treatment.

via 49 killed as plane crashes into Clarence Center home : Home: The Buffalo News.

CNN, MSNBC, and FOX are all reporting… As is NYT.

Update: Raw Video of Crash Area: (via MetaFilter)

Update #2: This is the Air Traffic Controller Audio from the time of the crash, there is a lot of dead air in this recording, The 3407 is the aircraft in question. The pilot is female, there is no hint of problems. The recording gets a over half in, before they realize something is up:

Update #3:  It seems that now other Blogs are covering the story: Mudville Gazette, TVNewser, Scared Monkeys, JammieWearingFool, protein wisdom and more via Memeorandum

Senator Judd Gregg withdraws his nomination for Commerce Secretary, White House Shocked

Now this is a shock 😮

President Obama’s choice for Commerce Secretary, Senator Judd Gregg, withdrew his nomination on Thursday. He said there were “irresolvable conflicts” between him and the administration.

“It has become apparent during this process that this will not work for me as I have found that on issues such as the stimulus package and the Census, there are irresolvable conflicts for me,” Mr. Gregg said in a statement. “Prior to accepting this post, we had discussed these and other potential differences, but unfortunately we did not adequately focus on these concerns. We are functioning from a different set of views on many critical items of policy.”

The withdrawal comes one week after Mr. Gregg was named to become the third Republican member of the Obama Cabinet. It is the second time that the Commerce Secretary position has been vacant within the last month.

Mr. Gregg, a Republican of New Hampshire, had not resigned his seat in the Senate. He has been away from the Senate floor this week, presumably preparing for his confirmation, and did not vote on the administration’s economic stimulus plan.

via Gregg Withdraws as Commerce Secretary Nominee – The Caucus Blog – NYTimes.com.

Unreal. I believe that Obama’s idea of Bipartisanship is going down in flames. Obviously, the White House was caught off guard.

Update: Yup, the White House was caught off guard.

More via Memeornadum

Police State: Fresno Police Officers Beat Restrained Homeless Man

The Cops say that what is not seen on the tape is important. yeah, I bet. 🙄

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

The United States Army loses track of Nerve Gas

Sweet Jesus on a crouton, no wonder Ronald Reagan said Government is the problem!  Now this is one of them stories that makes you think that crazy people are running the asylum!

Is the Army missing some nerve gas?

Pentagon auditors concede that is a remote possibility because of discrepancies in records between how much chemical weapons agent was initially stored and how much of it was later destroyed at Utah’s Deseret Chemical Depot and other bases nationwide.

But officials believe all the nerve agent in question was destroyed, according to a partially censored U.S. Army Audit Agency report obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. Auditors list in it several reasons that could have caused apparent-but-unreal variances in those records.

But auditors concluded, “The (Army Chemical Materials) Agency didn’t have complete assurance that amounts recorded in the system were accurate, which increased its chances for heightened levels of program scrutiny by federal, state and international organizations that have a vested interest in the elimination of chemical weapons.”

Such words can cause shivers among Utahns who remember such things as the death of thousands of sheep in Skull Valley in 1968 that were blamed on nerve gas tests that went awry at nearby Dugway Proving Ground, and Skull Valley residents who have blamed mysterious illnesses on exposure to tiny amounts of nerve agent from such tests.

via Deseret News | Nerve agent may be missing.

Oy. This is one time, when I can honestly say that I quite happy not to be living in Utah!  😮 I mean, seriously; how the heck hard is it to keep track of Nerve Gas?

First Nukes being flown over residential neighborhoods and being shipped to China by mistake. Good grief.

(H/T to Freedom Fighter Radio, Via Freedom’s Phoenix)

Fire strikes Beijing Hotel Complex

Holy Moses…. This is wild…:

Via the New York Times:

A fierce fire engulfed one of the Chinese capital’s most architecturally celebrated modern buildings on Monday, the last day of festivities for the lunar new year when the city was ablaze with fireworks. By late evening the blaze was still raging and the cause remained unknown, but it seemed clear that the 34-story structure, not yet completed, had been rendered unusable. The building, a luxury hotel and cultural complex designed by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, is part of China Central Television’s new headquarters, an angular two-legged behemoth built to coincide with the Beijing Olympics last year.

Firefighters, their ladders only reaching up a dozen or so floors, could do little to contain the blaze, a spectacular wall of flames eerily reflected in the glass skin of the adjacent CCTV tower.

The CCTV complex was a hugely expensive trophy of the pre-Olympics building boom, the result of many billions of dollars that the ruling Communist Party had devoted to making Beijing a city of the future. The main CCTV tower appeared untouched by the fire.

The 241-room Mandarin Oriental hotel, which had been due to open this summer, was unoccupied at the time, hotel executives said.

According to Chinese television, the fire began at 8:27 p.m., although witnesses said they spotted flames as early as 7:45 p.m. Within 20 minutes, they said, the fire had spread from the lower floors to the building’s crown. Black smoke drifted across the night sky, obliterating a full moon.

The authorities blocked off a thoroughfare known as the Third Ring Road, which runs adjacent to the complex. Subway cars running underneath the site were briefly halted, stranding thousands of passengers. Frantic police officers tried to shoo away huge crowds as sirens wailed and fireworks lit up the skyline. People watching noted that the timing of the fire — coming at the end of the spring festival — was inauspicious.

While errant fireworks were suspected as a possible cause, fires of such magnitude are nonetheless highly unusual in Beijing.

Videos:

Of course, the Alex Jones crowd is trying to compare it to WTC-7. Proving that you cannot fix stupid. What happened at WTC-7 was that airlines destroyed the Twin Towers and the falling debris from the towers damaged key structural members and the resulting uncontrolled fires led to the collapse hours after the rest of the complex. Anyone who says otherwise is insulting the dead. Which is something Alex Jones is good at. 🙄

Why can’t people just accept the damned truth and be glad they even got it. Damned morons. 😡

16 illegal aliens sue Arizona rancher

Now this is totally messed up!:

An Arizona man who has waged a 10-year campaign to stop a flood of illegal immigrants from crossing his property is being sued by 16 Mexican nationals who accuse him of conspiring to violate their civil rights when he stopped them at gunpoint on his ranch on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Roger Barnett, 64, began rounding up illegal immigrants in 1998 and turning them over to the U.S. Border Patrol, he said, after they destroyed his property, killed his calves and broke into his home.

His Cross Rail Ranch near Douglas, Ariz., is known by federal and county law enforcement authorities as “the avenue of choice” for immigrants seeking to enter the United States illegally.

Trial continues Monday in the federal lawsuit, which seeks $32 million in actual and punitive damages for civil rights violations, the infliction of emotional distress and other crimes. Also named are Mr. Barnett’s wife, Barbara, his brother, Donald, and Larry Dever, sheriff in Cochise County, Ariz., where the Barnetts live. The civil trial is expected to continue until Friday.

The lawsuit is based on a March 7, 2004, incident in a dry wash on the 22,000-acre ranch, when he approached a group of illegal immigrants while carrying a gun and accompanied by a large dog.

Attorneys for the immigrants – five women and 11 men who were trying to cross illegally into the United States – have accused Mr. Barnett of holding the group captive at gunpoint, threatening to turn his dog loose on them and saying he would shoot anyone who tried to escape.

The immigrants are represented at trial by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), which also charged that Sheriff Dever did nothing to prevent Mr. Barnett from holding their clients at “gunpoint, yelling obscenities at them and kicking one of the women.”

In the lawsuit, MALDEF said Mr. Barnett approached the group as the immigrants moved through his property, and that he was carrying a pistol and threatening them in English and Spanish. At one point, it said, Mr. Barnett’s dog barked at several of the women and he yelled at them in Spanish, “My dog is hungry and he’s hungry for buttocks.”

via Washington Times – 16 illegals sue Arizona rancher.

Let me get this straight…… A man defends his land against unwanted intruders and he’s being sued?!?!?! Something is wrong with America. I would have just shot them all. Told the law that they charged me or tried to attack and I was simply defending myself. It would have been my word against theirs.  But this guy shows a little aggression and brandishes a gun and he gets sued? Oy.

Of course, these are Obama’s people and thanks to the stupid idiot Republican Party who ran an idiot moderate, and a dumb assed harpy bitch. We are going to see a bunch more of this.  Welcome to Liberal America people! Because it is only going to get worse from here! 🙄

Others: Townhall.com, Debbie Schlussel and Infidel Bloggers Alliance

Australian Fires Devastate

I have not blogged about this, because it really didn’t not hit close to home. However, I was over reading in the comments section at Rachel Lucas’s Blog.

It seems that Australian Conservative Blogger Tim Blair has really been covering this story big time:

Here are his postings:
FIRE LATEST
STATE RALLIES
BRIAN NAYLOR
FIRE WITHOUT END
STATE ABLAZE

It my understanding that some of the blazes were intentionally set.

Google News has much more on the fires.

The Australian Red Cross is taking donations.