At least 13 people were killed Tuesday when heavy rains triggered mudslides in parts of Santa Barbara County, California, an area devastated by wildfire just weeks earlier. "It's going to be worse than anyone imagined for our area," Santa Barbara County Fire Department spokesman Mike Eliason said. "Following our fire, this is the worst-case scenario." The rainstorm hit early in the morning, causing "waist-high" mudflows, said Kelly Hoover, a Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Office spokeswoman. The deaths occurred in Montecito. At least 25 other people were injured.
Source: Los Angeles Times Tatsuro Toyoda, the former Toyota Motor Corp. president who led the company’s climb to become one of the world’s top automakers, died Dec. 30. He was 88. The cause was pneumonia, the Japanese automaker said. Other details were not disclosed. Mr. Toyoda, the automaker’s seventh president and son of the company’s founder, stepped down from the position in 1995, while continuing in other posts, such as adviser, a title he held until his death.
Source: Washington Post A heat wave pushed temperatures in Sydney, Australia, to 117 degrees Fahrenheit on Sunday, the hottest in 78 years. The highest temperature in the area, recorded in the suburb of Penrith, fell one degree below an all-time record set in 1939. Authorities in the neighboring state of Victoria were forced to warn drivers that a six-mile stretch of freeway was "melting." The high heat also triggered multiple wildfires. The severe heat came as Europe and many other parts of the world also experienced unusually high temperatures.
Source: The Huffington Post Editor's note: Doesn't anyone know Australia is on the Celsius scale? Temperatures remain extremely low in the Northeast Sunday morning but are expected to rise over the coming week after days of severe cold, high winds, and heavy snow. "With the wind dying down it will probably feel significantly better although many of these areas will still be below freezing," said Patrick Burke of the National Weather Service of Sunday's weather on the East Coast. CBS reports at least 22 people have died in connection to the record low temperatures observed across the country since the end of December.
Source: The Associated Press, CBS News Longtime New York tabloid gossip columnist Liz Smith died on Sunday at her Manhattan home. She was 94. Smith chronicled the lives of the rich and famous for more than 30 years, writing her column for publications including the New York Daily News, Newsday, and finally the New York Post, where it appeared from 1995 to 2009, before it moved onto the internet in the New York Social Diary. For years, her column was syndicated and was published in up to 70 other newspapers. She occasionally got big scoops, such as Donald and Ivana Trump's 1990 split and Madonna's 1996 pregnancy, but Smith was known for a more gentle approach to gossip than the brutal, sensationalist style of many of her competitors, which led critics to accuse her of going easy on celebrities to stay in their good graces.
Source: The New York Times Editor's Note: Familiar with Liz Smith? No, neither was I. Sometimes I think they report the deaths of certain pseudo famous people when their age adds up to a significant numerological number, in this case 13. Occasionally a legitimately famous person dies, whose age seems significant, but this seems more obvious when that person is probably only known by a fraction of the population. North Korean troops shot and injured a fellow soldier on Monday as he dashed across the heavily armed border into South Korea as the two countries remain on high alert due to tensions over the North's missile and nuclear weapons programs. South Korean soldiers found the defector about 55 yards south of the border line and took him to a hospital, where he was being treated for gunshot wounds to an elbow and shoulder. The incident occurred as the U.S. and South Korea conduct joint naval exercises involving three American aircraft carriers off South Korea's east coast. This is the first time in a decade the U.S. has used three carrier groups in the drills, in a show of the kind of force President Trump has said Americans "hope to God we never have to use" against Pyongyang.
Source: The New York Times A 7.3 magnitude earthquake struck near the Iraq-Iran border in the Iraqi city of Halabja on Sunday, killing at least 330 people, most of them in Iran. Iran's state-run news agency reported that at least 328 people were killed and about 3,950 were injured in the country. News videos showed people fleeing their homes in the night. More than 100 aftershocks were reported. At least seven people died in Iraq, and at least 535 were injured. The quake, which was centered just over 200 miles north of Baghdad, was felt across Iraq and as far away Pakistan, Lebanon, Kuwait, and Turkey. Iran sits on several major fault lines and experiences frequent earthquakes. A magnitude 6.6 temblor killed 26,000 people in the historic city of Bam in 2003.
Source: CNN, The Associated Press Editor's Note: 330 is obvious 3 + 2 + 8 = 13 3 + 9 + 5 + 0 = 17 5 + 3 + 5 = 13 And notice how they keep using words like "at least", "about", etc. At least 58 people were killed and dozens more wounded by an explosion in Mogadishu, Somalia, on Saturday when a truck bomb exploded near the entrance of a hotel. About 30 more people were killed in a second attack later that day. While no terrorist group has claimed responsibility so far, Mogadishu civilians are a regular target of al Shabaab, an al Qaeda-linked extremist group that seeks to overthrow the Somali government. Eyewitnesses said the attack, which comes two days after the head of U.S. Africa Command visited the Somali president in Mogadishu, was the biggest they'd seen in years.
Source: Reuters, BBC News Note: At least 58, about 30 more, those numbers are not absolutes, but together they add up to 88. A rush-hour stampede at a rail station in Mumbai killed 22 people and injured dozens more, Indian officials said Friday. Overcrowding and a sudden rain sparked the stampede on a covered footbridge leading into the station, where some passengers sought shelter from the rain at the same time as a rush of passengers tried to leave. The footbridge serves passengers on two main rail lines at Elphinstone station and adjoining Parel station. "Everybody tried to leave at once and it appeared one of them slipped and fell, triggering the stampede," railway spokesman Anil Saxena said.
Source: BBC News, Reuters A 10th-grade student opened fire at a high school near Spokane, Washington, on Wednesday, killing one student and injuring three others. Witnesses said the attacker rode a bus to school, carrying a rifle and handgun in a duffel bag. Three injured girls were rushed to a hospital in stable condition. The boy who was killed, Sam Strahan, was shot in the head as he urged the shooter, whose first gun had jammed, to stop firing. A staffer was credited with tackling the armed boy, identified by students as Caleb Sharpe, before police arrived. The attacker's "face was completely passive," said Elisa Vigil, a 14-year-old freshman. "I crouched down in the hall. I looked up and a girl screamed, 'Help me, help me, help me.' ... She was shot in the back."
Source: The Spokesman-Review, Reuters Note: 1 killed, 3 injured; 13 |
About This BlogCertain numerology has a strong connection with occultism. Various numbers from time-to-time appear in news articles, and one has to wonder if there isn't some occult significance behind this story. Archives
May 2021
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