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TOMS RIVER, N.J. (AP) — A U.S. senator has called for mysterious drones spotted flying at night over sensitive areas in New Jersey and other parts of the Mid-Atlantic region to be “shot down, if necessary,” even as it remains unclear who owns the unmanned aircraft. “We should be doing some very urgent intelligence analysis and take them out of the skies, especially if they’re flying over airports or military bases,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut said Thursday, as concerns about the drones spread across Capitol Hill. People in the New York region are also concerned that the drones may be sharing airspace with commercial airlines, he said, demanding more transparency from the Biden administration. The White House said Thursday that a review of the reported sightings shows that many of them are actually manned aircraft being flown lawfully. White House National Security spokesman John Kirby said there were no reported sightings in any restricted airspace. He said the U.S. Coast Guard has not uncovered any foreign involvement from coastal vessels. “We have no evidence at this time that the reported drone sightings pose a national security or a public safety threat, or have a foreign nexus,” Kirby said, echoing statements from the Pentagon and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy. Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh has said they are not U.S. military drones. In a joint statement issued Thursday afternoon, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security said they and their federal partners, in close coordination with the New Jersey State Police, “continue to deploy personnel and technology to investigate this situation and confirm whether the reported drone flights are actually drones or are instead manned aircraft or otherwise inaccurate sightings.” The agencies said they have not corroborated any of the reported sightings with electronic detection, and that reviews of available images appear to show many of the reported drones are actually manned aircraft. “There are no reported or confirmed drone sightings in any restricted air space,” according to the statement. The drones appear to avoid detection by traditional methods such as helicopter and radio, according to a state lawmaker briefed Wednesday by the Department of Homeland Security. The number of sightings has increased in recent days, though officials say many of the objects seen may have been planes rather than drones. It’s also possible that a single drone has been reported more than once. The worry stems partly from the flying objects initially being spotted near the Picatinny Arsenal, a U.S. military research and manufacturing facility, and over President-elect Donald Trump’s golf course in Bedminster. In a post on the social media platform X, Assemblywoman Dawn Fantasia described the drones as up to 6 feet (1.8 meters) in diameter and sometimes traveling with their lights switched off. Drones are legal in New Jersey for recreational and commercial use but are subject to local and Federal Aviation Administration regulations and flight restrictions. Operators must be FAA certified. Most, but not all, of the drones spotted in New Jersey appeared to be larger than those typically used by hobbyists. Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey said he was frustrated by the lack of transparency, saying it could help spread fear and misinformation. “We should know what’s going on over our skies,” he said Thursday. John Duesler, president of the Pennsylvania Drone Association, said witnesses may be confused about what they are seeing, especially in the dark, and noted it’s hard to know the size of the drones or how close they might be. “There are certainly big drones, such as agricultural drones, but typically they are not the type you see flying around in urban or suburban spaces,” Duesler said Thursday. Duesler said the drones — and those flying them — likely cannot evade detection. “They will leave a radio frequency footprint, they all leave a signature," he said. "We will find out what kind of drones they were, who was flying them and where they were flying them.” Fantasia, a Morris County Republican, was among several lawmakers who met with state police and Homeland Security officials to discuss the sightings from the New York City area across New Jersey and westward into parts of Pennsylvania, including over Philadelphia. It is unknown at this time whether the sightings are related. Duesler said the public wants to know what's going on. “I hope (the government agencies) will come out with more information about this to ease our fears. But this could just be the acts of rogue drone operators, it’s not an ‘invasion’ as some reports have called it,” Duesler said. “I am concerned about this it but not alarmed by it.” Associated Press reporters Mark Scolforo in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; and reporter Darlene Superville and videojournalists Serkan Gurbuz and Nathan Ellgren in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.ResMed Inc. stock rises Tuesday, outperforms market
NEW YORK (AP) — New York City Mayor Eric Adams met with President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming “border czar” on Thursday, with the Democratic mayor expressing an enthusiasm to work with the incoming administration to pursue violent criminals in the city while Trump promises mass deportations. The mayor’s meeting with Tom Homan, who will oversee the southern and northern borders and be responsible for deportation efforts in the Trump administration, came as Adams has welcomed parts of the president-elect’s hardline immigration platform. Adams told reporters at a brief news conference that he and Homan agreed on pursuing people who commit violent crimes in the city but did not disclose additional details or future plans. “We’re not going to be a safe haven for those who commit repeated violent crimes against innocent migrants, immigrants and longstanding New Yorkers,” he said. “That was my conversation today with the border czar, to figure out how to go after those individuals who are repeatedly committing crimes in our city.” The meeting marked Adams’ latest and most definitive step toward collaborating with the Trump administration, a development that has startled critics in one of the country’s most liberal cities. RELATED COVERAGE Donald Trump will ring the New York Stock Exchange bell as he’s named Time’s Person of the Year San Diego sheriff defies new policy to limit cooperation with immigration officials NYC shrinks migrant shelter systems as border surge slows and Trump threatens mass deportations In the weeks since Trump’s election win, Adams has mused about potentially scaling back the city’s so-called sanctuary policies and coordinating with the incoming Trump administration on immigration. He has also said migrants accused of crimes shouldn’t have due process rights under the Constitution, though he eventually walked back those comments. The mayor further stunned Democrats when he sidestepped questions last week on whether he would consider changing parties to become a Republican, telling journalists that he was part of the “American party.” Adams later clarified that he would remain a Democrat. For Adams, a centrist Democrat known for quarreling with the city’s progressive left, the recent comments on immigration follow frustration with the Biden Administration over its immigration policies and a surge of international migrants in the city. He has maintained that his positions have not changed and argues he is trying to protect New Yorkers, pointing to the law-and-order platform he has staked out throughout his political career and during his successful campaign for mayor. At his news conference Thursday, Adams reiterated his commitment to New York’s generous social safety net. “We’re going to tell those who are here, who are law-abiding, to continue to utilize the services that are open to the city, the services that they have a right to utilize, educating their children, health care, public protection,” he said. “But we will not be the safe haven for those who commit violent acts.” While the education of all children present in the U.S. is already guaranteed by a Supreme Court ruling, New York also offers social services like healthcare and emergency shelter to low-income residents, including those in the country illegally. City and state grants also provide significant access to lawyers, which is not guaranteed in the immigration court as they are in the criminal court. Still, Adams’ recent rhetoric has been seen by some critics as an attempt to cozy up to Trump, who could potentially offer a presidential pardon in his federal corruption case. Adams has been charged with accepting luxury travel perks and illegal campaign contributions from a Turkish official and other foreign nationals looking to buy his influence. He has pleaded not guilty. Homan, who was Trump’s former acting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement director, also met this week with Republicans in Illinois, where he called on Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, both Democrats, to start negotiations over how Trump’s mass deportation plans, according to local media. Separately, New York City officials this week announced continued efforts to shrink a huge emergency shelter system for migrants because of a steady decline in new arrivals. Among the planned shelter closures is a massive tent complex built on a federally owned former airport in Brooklyn, which advocates have warned could be a prime target for Trump’s mass deportation plan. Elsewhere, Republican governors and lawmakers in some states are already rolling out proposals that could help him carry out his pledge to deport millions of people living in the U.S. illegally. ___ Izaguirre reported from Albany, N.Y.
Despite a preponderance of data on the high level of financial and environmental risks, the World Bank has opted to become a major financial backer of the Rogun hydropower dam project in Tajikistan, an initial $350 million grant to help finish the first phase of construction. Following up on the World Bank’s decision, the Asian Infrastructure Development Bank a $270 million loan for dam construction and the Kuwait Fund for Arab Economic Development a $100 million line of credit to the project, the first loan installment of which has already been delivered. Though largely unspoken, Rogun’s potential as a hotbed of cryptocurrency production may have been the difference in making the project financially attractive enough to secure international financing, some analysts appear to believe. Rogun is envisioned to become the world’s tallest dam with an annual of 3,600 megawatts, an amount of power that could turn it into a goose that keeps laying golden bitcoins. “Taking into account the gigantic volumes of generated electricity, the mining capacity of the Rogun HPP should be simply fantastic,” said Alexander Kolotov, who heads a regional environmental watchdog, Rivers Without Boundaries. In a sent earlier this year to another regional watchdog group, CEE Bankwatch, World Bank officials defended Rogun as a potentially “transformative clean energy project that will improve domestic and regional welfare and contribute to the decarbonization of regional power grids in Central Asia, provided it is managed under sound macro-economic, commercial, and social and environmental sustainability frameworks.” The rapidly changing nature of the electricity market in Central Asia, as well as crypto-mining’s notoriety for causing environmental harm, appear to undermine the World Bank’s “clean energy” argument for Rogun. A UN published in 2023 on crypto-mining’s environmental impact noted that “in addition to a substantial carbon footprint, global Bitcoin mining activities have significant water and land footprints.” The report added that hydropower, “an energy source with significant water and environmental impacts, is the most important renewable source of energy of the Bitcoin mining network, satisfying 16 percent of its electricity demand.” International financial institutions are probably reluctant to discuss the Rogun-crypto connection because of bad optics, Kolotov said. “Mining cryptocurrency is not a story about the development of a country or a region,” he added. “A mining farm does not create jobs for local residents, does not develop the surrounding area. It produces a purely virtual and extremely volatile product.” Officially, the dam has long been billed as a driver of economic development for Tajikistan, Central Asia’s poorest state. Plans currently call for roughly 70 percent of the electricity generated by the hydropower station to be exported, thus bringing in considerable revenue for the government. But watchdogs, including Rivers Without Boundaries, warn that the project’s skyrocketing construction costs, as well as the growing efficiency of solar and wind power generation, threaten to render Rogun uncompetitive before it can reach its maximum generating potential. The cost of completing Rogun according to its present specifications now stands at $6.4 billion and is expected to keep climbing. Meanwhile, export options for the dam’s power appear rapidly shrinking. One challenge for Rogun is it will be before it is fully operational, while its main potential customers need added power than that to alleviate chronic electricity supply problems. Kazakhstan, originally seen as a major taker of Rogun’s electricity, appears to be moving in a different direction. In October, a approved the idea of building a nuclear power plant in the country. also has a deal in place to build a nuclear plant with Russia’s . Meanwhile, Kyrgyzstan is pondering nuclear power while at the same time pushing its own hydropower project, dubbed , which is projected to generate 2,000 megawatts of electricity per year. Yet another source of competition for Rogun is a joint initiative launched in 2024 by Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan to export solar and wind power to Europe via an underwater cable beneath the Caspian Sea. A possible role model for Rogun is the Bratsk hydropower plant on the Angara River in Russia’s Irkutsk Region. A locally based entity called has taken advantage of the comparatively cheap power generated by the Bratsk plant to rapidly expand operations: the company now bills itself as the biggest crypto player in Eurasia and one of the biggest in the world, even though it was subjected to by the US Treasury Department in 2022. Rogun becoming a major power source for crypto-mining offers perhaps the most certainty that international investors will get a return on their investments. Whether the dam can fulfill its promise as a driver of economic growth and prosperity for Tajikistan is far less certain. Tajikistan is by watchdogs as one of the least democratic and most corrupt states in the world. “I am sure that we will hear about the [crypto] mining [link] at the Rogun HPP only when the budget of the project swells to some completely indecent size,” said Chinara Aitbaeva, director of the Kyrgyzstan-based watchdog group Nash Vek. “That’s when it’s possible to present the option of creating crypto-mining at [Rogun] as an additional instrument for project profitability.”JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE:JPM) Shares Down 0.7% – Should You Sell?
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