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Wednesday, January 1, 2025

New Year ‘terror attack’ kills 10, injures 35 as killer rammed revelers, shot cops on Bourbon St., New Orleans

At least 10 people were killed and dozens injured after a driver rammed a truck into crowds on the famed Bourbon Street in New Orleans before jumping out and shooting cops — just hours after the city rang in the New Year, according to officials.

“The city of New Orleans was impacted by a terrorist attack,” Mayor LaToya Cantrell said of the carnage early Wednesday — as the FBI investigated possibly improvised explosives left at the scene.

The killer, who police said was “hellbent” on “carnage,” was shot and killed in a gun battle with cops, two of whom were also shot, police sources confirmed.

Photos from the scene showed a crashed white pickup truck — with a black flag attached to the back.

The mass casualty incident unfolded at the intersection of Bourbon and Canal Streets in the French Quarter neighborhood at around 3:15 a.m. – close to where revelers had gathered to watch the city’s New Year’s Eve fireworks, police said.

Ten people were killed and at least 35 others were hospitalized after the male driver intentionally drove through barricades and plowed down the street at a “very fast pace,” according to New Orleans Police chief Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick.

“This man was trying to run over as many people as he possibly could,” Kirkpatrick said, adding the driver “was hell-bent on creating the carnage and the damage that he did.”

The suspect then jumped out of the vehicle and immediately started shooting at cops, injuring at least two officers, she added, noting officers returned fire. Explosives were also found at the scene.

Alethea Duncan, an assistant special agent in charge of the FBI’s New Orleans field office, said officials were currently examining at least one suspected improvised explosive device uncovered at the scene.

It wasn’t immediately confirmed if the device was linked to the driver.

Police didn’t provide details on a possible motive behind the attack.

Unverified videos circulating on social media apparently showed scores of bloodied bodies lining the street as gunshots rang out.

Several EMS and coroner vehicles could be seen on the scene in the aftermath.

The injured were all rushed to five nearby hospitals, including University Medical Center, Touro Hospital and East Jefferson General Hospital, officials said. The extent of the injuries of those hospitalized wasn’t immediately known.

“A horrific act of violence took place on Bourbon Street earlier this morning,” Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry said in a statement.

“Please join Sharon and I in praying for all the victims and first responders on scene. I urge all near the scene to avoid the area.”

The bloodshed unfolded toward the end of New Year’s celebrations and just hours before the kickoff of the College Football Playoff Sugar Bowl between Georgia and Notre Dame at the Caesar’s Superdome.

Jim and Nicole Mowrer, who were in town from Iowa, told CBS News they had earlier watched the city’s fireworks display before they suddenly heard crashing noises and spotted the truck plowing down the street “at a high rate of speed.”

The couple said they immediately tried to help several victims but realized they were already dead.

“We were pretty, pretty close to where it started,” Nicole said.

“Once it was past us, we did hear gunfire, saw police running that direction,” she continued. “Once the gunfire stopped, we stayed in the alcove until the gunfire stopped, came out into the street, and came across a lot of — several people who had been hit, [we] wanted to see what we could do to help.”

https://nypost.com/2025/01/01/us-news/new-orleans-french-quarter-driver-rams-car-into-crowd-of-people-on-bourbon-street-killing-at-least-1/

Foreign Jihadists Appointed To Senior Positions In New Syrian Military

by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

Foreign jihadists have been appointed in senior positions in the new Syrian military, which is now led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), an offshoot of al-Qaeda that led the offensive that ousted former President Bashar al-Assad.

Syrian sources told Reuters that the foreign fighters appointed to the military include Uyghurs, a Jordanian, a Turk, and an Albanian. "This is a small token of recognition for the sacrifices Islamist jihadists gave to our struggle for freedom from Assad’s oppression," an HTS source told the media outlet.

Among the Uyghurs is Abdulaziz Dawood Khudaberdi, the commander of the Turkistan Islamic Party’s (TIP) forces in Syria. The TIP’s stated goal is to create an Islamic State in China’s western Xinjiang region.

Khudaberdi was named a brigadier general in the Syrian military, and two other Uyghur fighters were appointed colonels.

Sources told Reuters that Turkish citizen Omar Mohammed Jaftashi and Jordanian citizen Abdul Rahman Hussein al-Khatib were also made brigadier-generals.

Abdul Jashari, an Albanian fighter who was designated a terrorist by the US Treasury Department, was made a colonel.

HTS is still designated by the US as a foreign terrorist organization, but the Biden administration has celebrated its takeover of Syria. The US has also made clear it’s willing to work with the new government and its de facto leader, Abu Mohammad al-Julani, who has been going by his real name Ahmed al-Sharaa.

Earlier this month, Barbara Leaf, the US Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs, met with Julani and announced the US was removing a $10 million bounty on his head.

Julani, a former al-Qaeda leader, appointed other HTS members in senior positions of the "transitional government" and has said elections in Syria probably won’t happen for at least four years.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/foreign-jihadists-appointed-senior-positions-new-syrian-military

Fed-up parents’ education lawsuit chance to rescue our schools, get rid of the lemons

In every state in America, lemon laws protect consumers if they’re sold a new car that turns out to be grossly defective.

Big pharma companies and the entire tobacco industry whose false advertisements caused harm get punished with huge fines and penalties.

In sports, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton just filed a lawsuit against the National Collegiate Athletics Association for deceptively designating events that include biological males as “women’s sports,” causing devastating impacts on women.

What about America’s public education?

With precious few exceptions, American schools are graduating more and more students who are illiterate, innumerable, illogical, and ignorant.

International assessments like TIMSS and PISA expose how atrociously American students lag behind, despite high, and still-skyrocketing, public spending.

Two Massachusetts families decided they had finally suffered enough. They took action — with a potentially trailblazing lawsuit.

On Dec. 4, parents Karrie Conley and Michele Hudak filed a state class-action lawsuit against “the creators, publishers, and promoters” of Lucy Calkins’ Reading and Writing Project and of the Classroom curriculum by Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell.

Named as defendants alongside these author-educators are Heinemann Publishing, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Columbia University’s Teachers College.

Previous education-related lawsuits, which have met with mixed outcomes, have hinged on the state’s obligation to provide basic education.

This one is different: It’s the first case filed against Big Education for “deceptive and fraudulent marketing and sale of products and services” — products that allegedly caused developmental, emotional, and financial injuries.

This complaint goes straight to the heart of the matter: Big Education provides a glaringly defective product that causes undeniable harm and is demonstrably fraudulent — and its consumers, America’s families, are entitled to protection under existing consumer-protection laws.

Founded in 1981 at Columbia University, Lucy Calkins’ now-debunked reading program deservedly plays a major role in this lawsuit.

By 2022, Calkins estimated that about 25% of US elementary schools mandated her program, including nearly half of those in New York City, the country’s largest school district. About the same proportion of Massachusetts schools use Calkins or the similar Fountas-Pinnell curriculum.

Calkins’ “vibes-based literacy,” as critics have called it, rejected generations of teaching experience, disparaging the hard work of learning phonics, vocabulary, and comprehension in favor of a “balanced” approach to literacy including workshops, “sharing,” “liv[ing] as a character” and “inhabit[ing] the world of the book.”

Decades later, it turns out, students are not well-served when they’re instructed to ignore letters and vocabulary and taught instead to use “picture power” to guess what the words on the page might be.

How is guessing from pictures useful beyond simple nouns, let alone for abstractions and paragraphs?

No surprise, then, that fewer than half of Massachusetts’ and New York City’s fourth graders are reading-proficient.

The Massachusetts lawsuit focuses on reading and literacy, charging that the plaintiffs have been materially harmed by these curricula — but a win could allow the families’ consumer-protection argument to be deployed more widely.

Take Jo Boaler of Stanford University, whose fraudulent “research” has helped equity warriors around the country dumb down mathematics.

Boaler’s conclusions have led to bans of middle-school algebra courses with “inequitable” enrollment and high-school calculus classes deemed “non-inclusive.”

Her work has claimed mathematics as an instrument of capitalism, imperialism, and racism, leading some proponents to push ethnomathematics instead of regular math, or even a bizarre method called “subitizing” — that’s teaching numbers without counting.

As a result, American college students today are stumped by simple questions like “Which of a/5 or a/8 is bigger” (don’t they ever eat pizza?).

The logic of the Massachusetts lawsuit could even be used against damaging social and disciplinary policies in our schools.

For years, Big Education has been pushing diversity, equity, and inclusion principles into every aspect of school life, promising it will bring racial harmony.

Yet systematic meta-analyses of data, capped by a widely cited study from Rutgers University, confirm that DEI has in fact the opposite effect, aggravating overall racial bias and hostility.

Big Education’s multibillion-dollar DEI fraud is ripe for consumer-protection accountability.

Likewise, social-emotional learning is a framework that’s become ubiquitous in America’s schools.

SEL, including such concepts as “restorative justice,” promises to decrease emotional distress, enhance coping skills and resiliency, and increase students’ sense of safety.

But hysterical campus protests and the hypersensitive snowflakeism that makes young Americans unemployable demonstrate exactly the opposite: SEL indoctrination makes our kids fragile, insecure, needy, and angry.

Fraudulent and harmful SEL programs are another potential consumer-protection liability for Big Education.

Then there’s the multibillion-dollar scam of “gender affirmation”: From mandatory pronouns to transition-grooming readings to gender-violating bathrooms and sports, Big Education plays a key role in incubating this irreversible harm to ever-increasing numbers of families.

It’s time to hold the pushers of this contagion to account.

For America’s future, Massachusetts families and all families must get consumer protection in education — and get the lemons out of our schools.

Wai Wah Chin is an adjunct fellow of the Manhattan Institute.

https://nypost.com/2025/01/01/opinion/fed-up-parents-education-lawsuit-could-rescue-our-schools/

How Africa Became A Key Link For Mexican Cartels In Fentanyl Production

by Darren Taylor via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The Mexican organized crime group accused of fueling the United States’ fentanyl crisis is now making the deadly drug in Africa, according to local and international law enforcement agencies.

The Sinaloa cartel has chosen South Africa as a major operational base, they said, largely because of its strong trade links to China, which produces the chemicals used to make the synthetic opioid.

“At this stage, there isn’t a big market for fentanyl in Africa, so much of this drug that’s being made in underground labs on the continent is being smuggled into the United States, the biggest fentanyl market in the world,” said Lt. Gen. Godfrey Lebeya, chief of The Hawks, South Africa’s top police investigative unit.

Drug overdoses have killed an estimated 400,000 Americans since 2021, with the majority linked to fentanyl, according to statistics compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In its legal prescription form, fentanyl is a highly effective painkiller.

Criminals, however, copy its chemical makeup in labs and illegally sell it as a powder, dropped onto blotter paper, put in eyedroppers and nasal sprays, or made into pills that look like legitimate prescription opioids, according to a report by the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse.

A few milligrams of fentanyl can kill, as it is 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine.

Lebeya told The Epoch Times that South African “drug traffickers and gangs linked to the Sinaloa cartel” are testing local narcotics markets.

“Fentanyl has definitely entered our trafficking conveyor belts,” he said. “We know that because we’re arresting suspects who are in possession of it and they tell us, ‘We want to see if South Africans get a taste for fentanyl.’

“This is very concerning because we’ve seen the scale of America’s crisis and we don’t want our country to go the same way.

“But we must be realistic and admit that it’s possible that we end up with a tragedy of our own because fentanyl is much cheaper than the other drugs circulating in South Africa, like cocaine and heroin, and the Mexicans who are driving fentanyl use in America are now on our soil.”

In July, The Hawks raided what they later described as a “drugs superlab” in South Africa’s northern Limpopo province, seizing large quantities of methamphetamine, a small quantity of fentanyl, and about 500 pounds of chemicals used to manufacture both drugs.

South African farmer Roelof Botha, 57, and three Mexican citizens—Gonzales Jorge Partida, 51, Gutierrez Lopes, 43, and Ruben Vidal Rodriguez, 44—are awaiting trial for alleged manufacturing, dealing, and possession of illicit drugs, as well as money laundering.

“We’re still questioning the Mexican guys,” Lebeya said. “They’re not saying much. But international partners have given us information that these men are working for the Sinaloa cartel.”

Lufuno Sadiki, senior lecturer in criminology at the University of Cape Town, told The Epoch Times that it’s “easy for Mexicans to blend in with locals” because they look very similar to mixed-race South Africans.

“It appears as if the Mexicans, mostly from the Sinaloa cartel, are linking up with the local gangs and showing them the ropes, so to speak, [with regard to] fentanyl,” she said.

“In exchange, the South Africans introduce the cartel guys to trusted contacts in the criminal underground and to corrupt officials.”

Organized crime groups are attracted to South Africa for several reasons, according to Professor Anthony Minnaar, a security risk management expert at the University of Limpopo.

“It’s the continent’s wealthiest economy with a banking system that’s linked internationally but is flawed,” he told The Epoch Times. “The country has well-established drug markets of its own and a plethora of drug-trafficking gangs.

“South Africa also offers regular flight connections to Central and South America, with its ports visited daily by vessels registered in Mexico.

“Then it has high volume trade traffic from China, and criminals are hiding chemicals used to make crystal meth and fentanyl in containers coming from China.

“South Africa also has a high level of official corruption.”

Professor Francois Steyn, head of the Department of Criminology at the University of the Free State, told The Epoch Times that the Sinaloa cartel had “probably been in South Africa for longer than we think,” maybe for more than a decade.

“We’re picking up evidence of this only now because our systems have improved over the past five years or so and so has our cooperation with American law enforcement,” he said.

In September 2022, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers in Louisville, Kentucky, intercepted a package sent from South Africa containing enough cocaine and fentanyl to kill 220,000 people.

“That fentanyl must have been made in South Africa or somewhere else in Africa,” Steyn said. “If that wasn’t the case, it’s still clear that South Africa is being used as a conduit to get fentanyl and other narcotics into the American market and other markets.”

In January 2024, police found crystal meth and fentanyl worth 37 million rands (about $1.98 million) hidden in ornaments in a cargo shed at O.R. Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg.

The shipment was headed to New Zealand.

“It’s really sad to know that our territory is being used to play a role in America’s fentanyl pandemic,” Lebeya said.

“But I’d like Americans to know we are cooperating with the relevant agencies in the United States and doing our best [to prevent fentanyl manufacturing and distribution].”

An indictment in a U.S. court case relating to fentanyl production described it as the “single deadliest drug threat” ever encountered in the country.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/how-africa-became-key-link-mexican-cartels-fentanyl-production

New Orleans Mayor Calls Bourbon Street Massacre A "Terrorist Attack"

Watch Live:

* * *

Update (0750ET):

New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell confirmed that the truck ramming attack on Bourbon Street was a "terrorist attack."

"First of all, the city of New Orleans was impacted by a terrorist attack. I've been in direct contact with the White House, Governor Landry, and the unified command here."

Let's not forget...

Two weeks ago...

* * *

Update (0730ET):

Local media outlets have published an image of the truck involved in the mass casualty incident on Bourbon Street.

The Ford F-150 Lightning truck has a Texas license plate reading "LZ 1575." A flagpole hitch holder is visible with what appears to be a flag, although it seems covered. Additionally, there are four bullet holes in the rear cabin window of the truck.

* * *

Update (0700ET):

The New Orleans Police Department told ABC News that "the strike appeared to be intentional" and "the driver has not been taken into custody."

Witness tells CNN:

* * *

Update (0640ET):

The City of New Orleans has confirmed ten dead and 30 injured after a vehicle plowed into a large crowd on Canal and Bourbon Street.

The New Orleans Police Department has yet to confirm whether the mass casualty incident was intentional. No details about the driver have been released.

Governor of Louisiana Jeff Landry writes on X:

A press conference is expected shortly.

* * *

The New Orleans Police Department told local media outlet WGNO that multiple people are dead after a vehicle plowed into a crowd on Bourbon Street in the French Quarter. The area, a bar and restaurant district popular with tourists, was still very active just hours after New Year's Eve celebrations.

NOPD said the vehicle struck a group of people around 3:15 a.m. local time at the intersection of Bourbon Street and Iberville

Witnesses told CBS News reporter Kati Weis that a truck crashed into the crowd at "high speeds," adding that the driver exited the vehicle and started discharging a weapon, prompting police officers to return fire.

Unconfirmed video.

Weis reported that multiple people were on the ground with serious injuries.

BREAKING NEWS: GRAPHIC WARNING: Mass casualties as car rams into crown in New Orleans. Several dead… Bourbon Street shut down … I knew this would happen somewhere #terroristattack #ThanksBiden pic.twitter.com/oVroB6wdyU
— Mighty_Marsha (@Mighty_Marsha) January 1, 2025

NOPD told CBS News that "initial reports show a car may have plowed into a group of people. Injuries are unknown but there are reported fatalities."

*Developing...

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/reported-fatalities-bourbon-street-after-vehicle-plows-crowd-during-new-years

France Launches First Air Raids Over Syria Since Assad's Overthrow

Now France is getting in on the Syria action in the wake of President Bashar al-Assad's overthrow on December 8. Currently the hardline Islamist movement Hayat Tahrir-al-Sham (HTS) holds Damascus and major cities across southern, central, and coastal Syria.

The Turks hold parts of the north near the border (and Turkey's proxies, particularly the the Syrian National Army, or SNA), while the United States still occupies the northeast (also through its proxy the Kurkish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF). The Israeli military holds an expanse out of the Golan Heights in the south.

France's defense ministry announced Tuesday that its warplanes launched airstrikes against Islamic State (ISIS) over the weekend.

This marks the first such French strikes in Syria since HTS took over Damascus:

“On Sunday, French air assets carried out targeted strikes against Daesh sites on Syrian soil,” the minister said in a statement on social platform X, using an Arab acronym for ISIS. He also published a video showing the military operation. “Our armies remain engaged in the fight against terrorism” in the region, Lecornu said.

French Rafale fighter jets and American Reaper drones "dropped a total of seven bombs on two military targets belonging to Daesh in central Syria," the statement specified.

The 'ISIS threat' has also been cited by the Pentagon as ongoing justification for keeping some 2,000 or more American troops in Syria. The rationale for occupying Syria's oil and gas fields has also been the 'counter Iran' mission, according to US officials.

But we should note the fact that ISIS has been relatively quiet since the HTS Jolani takeover of the country. Where are the big ISIS terror bombings of prior years when Assad held the country?

The reality is that ISIS terrorists are actually embedded with HTS and its foreign fighter affiliates, as recent American television footage has demonstrated.

The French government released footage of preparations for its weekend strikes on ISIS targets:

France says it carried out missile strikes against ISIS in Syria last weekendpic.twitter.com/iSECAEaz3Z
— Guy Elster (@guyelster) December 31, 2024

ISIS is the threat that keeps on giving: Western allies will stay in Syria for the time being while continually claiming that the coalition (Operation Inherent Resolve) must battle terrorists, even while giving tacit support to HTS in Damascus.

US-designated terrorist Abu Mohammad al-Julani of course began his jihadist career in Syria as a high-ranking member of ISIS and later al-Nusra Front (Al-Qaeda in Syria). As we highlighted previously, this is putting lipstick on a pig.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/france-launches-first-air-raids-over-syria-assads-overthrow

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Wednesday, January 1, 2025

New Year ‘terror attack’ kills 10, injures 35 as killer rammed revelers, shot cops on Bourbon St., New Orleans

Foreign Jihadists Appointed To Senior Positions In New Syrian Military

Fed-up parents’ education lawsuit chance to rescue our schools, get rid of the lemons

How Africa Became A Key Link For Mexican Cartels In Fentanyl Production

New Orleans Mayor Calls Bourbon Street Massacre A "Terrorist Attack"

Watch Live:

France Launches First Air Raids Over Syria Since Assad's Overthrow