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las vegas — One person died and seven others were injured Wednesday when a Tesla Cybertruck that appeared to be carrying fireworks caught fire and exploded outside President-elect Donald Trump’s Las Vegas hotel, authorities said.

Las Vegas Metropolitan Police and Clark County Fire Department officials told a news conference that a person died inside the futuristic-looking pickup truck, and they were working to get the body out. Seven people nearby had minor injuries, and several were taken to a hospital.

The fire in the valet area of the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas was reported at 8:40 a.m., a county spokeswoman said in a statement.

According to a law enforcement official, the truck was rented via the Turo app and appeared to have a load of fireworks. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

Law enforcement officials have not ruled out terrorism as a possible motive, a person familiar with the matter said. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss details of the investigation.

“I know you have a lot of questions,” Jeremy Schwartz, acting special agent in charge of the FBI’s Las Vegas office, told reporters. “We don’t have a lot of answers.”

President Joe Biden was briefed on the explosion. The truck explosion came hours after a driver rammed a truck into a crowd in New Orleans’ famed French Quarter early on New Year’s Day, killing at least 10 people before he was shot to death by police.

“The whole Tesla senior team is investigating this matter right now,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk wrote in a statement on X, adding: “We’ve never seen anything like this.”

In Las Vegas, witness Ana Bruce, visiting from Brazil, said she heard three explosions.

“The first one where we saw the fire, the second one, I guess, was the battery or something like that, and the third was the big one that smoked the entire area and was the moment when everyone was told to evacuate and stay away,” Bruce said.

The 64-story hotel is just off the Las Vegas Strip and across the street from the Fashion Show Las Vegas shopping mall.

Eric Trump, a son of the president-elect and executive vice president of the Trump Organization, posted about the fire on the social media platform X. He praised the fire department and local law enforcement “for their swift response and professionalism.”
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BAYAMON, PUERTO RICO — Power was restored to nearly all electrical customers across Puerto Rico on Wednesday after a sweeping blackout plunged the U.S. territory into darkness on New Year’s Eve. 

By Wednesday afternoon, power was back up for 98% of Puerto Rico’s 1.47 million utility customers, said Luma Energy, the private company supplying power to the archipelago. Lights returned to households as well as Puerto Rico’s hospitals and water and sewage facilities after the massive outage that exposed the persistent electricity problems plaguing the island. 

Still, the company warned that customers could still see temporary outages in the coming days. It said full restoration across the island could take up to two days. 

“Given the fragile nature of the grid, we will need to manage available generation to customer demand, which will likely require rotating temporary outages,” Juan Saca, president of Luma Energy, said in a statement. 

The lights went off in Puerto Rico at 5:30 a.m. Tuesday, darkening almost the entire archipelago as people prepared to ring in the New Year. Authorities are still investigating the cause of the outage, but Luma Energy said a preliminary review pointed to a failure in an underground electric line in the south of the territory. 

Governor-elect Jenniffer Gonzalez-Colon, who is set to take office Thursday, warned that customers might experience interruptions in the coming days, with power plants not yet operating at maximum capacity. 

“These days, I urge you to be moderate with your energy consumption to help reduce load shifting, so that more people can have access to electricity and the system can start up without any major setbacks,” Gonzalez-Colon said on the X social media platform.  

On the campaign trail, Gonzalez-Colon promised to appoint an “energy czar” to oversee the operation of the power grid, which has long been fragile and faulty due to years of neglect. 

The island’s power lines were ravaged in September 2017 by Hurricane Maria, a Category 4 storm. 

Unreliable electricity remains frustratingly common, hindering daily life for Puerto Ricans. In June, over 340,000 customers were left without electricity as people reeled from soaring temperatures. In August, at the peak of Hurricane Ernesto, over half of all utility customers lost power. Tens of thousands of people remained without electricity a week after the storm. 

The New Year’s Eve outage came as clients brace for a hike in electricity rates. Last month, Puerto Rico’s Energy Bureau approved an increase of 2.2 cents per kilowatt hour for residential customers from January through March, causing electric bills for the average household to jump by nearly $20, the Energy Bureau said.
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PALM BEACH, FLORIDA — U.S. President-elect Donald Trump said Tuesday that he’s planning to attend the funeral of former President Jimmy Carter.

Asked about it as he walked into a New Year’s Eve party at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, Trump responded, “I’ll be there.” Pressed on whether he’d spoken to members of Carter’s family, Trump said he’d rather not say.

Funeral services honoring Carter, who died Sunday at 100, will be held in Georgia and Washington, beginning Jan. 4 and concluding Jan. 9.

Trump was a frequent and fierce critic of Carter on the campaign trail ahead of November’s election, using the rising inflation rates of the 1970s to unfavorably compare President Joe Biden to Carter and his administration.

The president-elect was gracious about the former president, though, in posts on his social media site after Carter’s death Sunday, writing that the nation “owed him a debt of gratitude.”

“While I strongly disagreed with him philosophically and politically, I also realized that he truly loved and respected our Country, and all it stands for,” Trump wrote of Carter. “He worked hard to make America a better place, and for that I give him my highest respect.”

Wearing a tuxedo as he entered the festivities, Trump took a few minutes of questions from reporters on various topics. He was asked about the possibility of a ceasefire in Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza but said only, “We’re going to see what happens.”

Of hostages seized more than a year ago by Hamas, the president-elect said, “I’ll put it this way: They better let the hostages come back soon.”

Trump also said he thought 2025 would be a “great year” and “we’re going to do fantastically well as a country.”

“There’s a whole light over the whole world, not just our country. They’re a lot of happy people,” Trump said of recent weeks.

Asked about his resolutions for the new year, Trump said, “I just want everybody to be happy, healthy and well.”

Trump later took the stage to briefly address the crowd ringing in the new year at Mar-a-Lago and promised “to do a great job as your president.”

Biden, for his part, spent New Year’s Eve celebrating the wedding of his niece Missy Owens in Greenville, Delaware, followed by the reception in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. Biden and first lady Jill Biden cut short their traditional holiday trip to the U.S. Virgin Islands to attend the ceremony.
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HONOLULU — Harry Chandler, a Navy medic who helped pull injured sailors from the oily waters of Pearl Harbor after the 1941 Japanese attack on the naval base, has died. He was 103. 

Chandler died Monday at a senior living center in Tequesta, Florida, according to Ron Mahaffee, the husband of his granddaughter Kelli Fahey. Chandler had congestive heart failure, but Mahaffee said doctors and nurses noted his advanced age when giving a cause of death. 

The third Pearl Harbor survivor to die in the past few weeks, Chandler was a hospital corpsman 3rd class on Dec. 7, 1941, when waves of Japanese fighter planes dropped bombs and fired machine guns on battleships in the harbor and plunged the U.S. into World War II. 

He told The Associated Press in 2023 that he saw the planes approach as he was raising the flag that morning at a mobile hospital in Aiea Heights, which is in the hills overlooking the base. 

“I thought they were planes coming in from the states until I saw the bombs dropping,” Chandler said. His first instinct was to take cover and ”get the hell out of here.” 

“I was afraid that they’d start strafing,” he said. 

His unit rode trucks down to attend to the injured. He said in a Pacific Historic Parks oral history interview that he boarded a boat to help pluck wounded sailors from the water. 

The harbor was covered in oil from exploding ships, so Chandler washed the sailors off after lifting them out. He said he was too focused on his work to be afraid. 

“It got so busy you weren’t scared. Weren’t scared at all. We were busy. It was after you got scared,” Chandler said. 

He realized later that he could have been killed, “But you didn’t think about that while you were busy taking care of people.” 

The attack killed more than 2,300 U.S. servicemen. Nearly half, or 1,177, were sailors and Marines on board the USS Arizona, which sank nine minutes after it was bombed. 

Chandler’s memories came flowing back when he visited Pearl Harbor for a 2023 ceremony commemorating the 82nd anniversary of the bombing. 

“I look out there, and I can still see what’s going on. I can still see what was happening,” Chandler told The Associated Press. 

Asked what he wanted Americans to know about Pearl Harbor, he said: “Be prepared.” 

“We should have known that was going to happen. The intelligence has to be better,” he said. 

After the war Chandler worked as a painter and wallpaper hanger and bought an upholstery business with his brother. He also joined the Navy reserves, retiring as a senior chief in 1981. 

Chandler was born in Holyoke, Massachusetts, and lived for most of his adult life in nearby South Hadley, Mahaffee said. In recent decades he split his time between Massachusetts and Florida. 

An avid golfer, he shot five hole-in-ones during his lifetime, his grandson-in-law added. 

Chandler had one biological daughter and adopted two daughters from his second marriage, to Anna Chandler, who died in 2004. He is survived by two daughters, nine grandchildren, 17 great-grandchildren and five great-great-grandchildren. 

Military historian J. Michael Wenger has estimated that there were some 87,000 military personnel on the island of Oahu on the day of the attack. With Chandler’s death, only 15 are still living, according to a tally maintained by Kathleen Farley, the California state chair of the Sons and Daughters of Pearl Harbor Survivors. 

Bob Fernandez, who served on the USS Curtiss, also died this month, at age 100, and Warren Upton, 105, who served on the USS Utah, died last week.
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NEW ORLEANS — New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell is calling the New Year’s Day mass casualty incident that killed 10 people and injured 30 a “terrorist attack.” 

The FBI is investigating what occurred early Wednesday, when a vehicle drove into a crowd on New Orleans’ famed Canal and Bourbon Street in the first hours of New Year’s Day. 

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

Earlier, the New Orleans Police Department said it was responding to a mass casualty incident Wednesday that included fatalities. NOLA Ready advised people to stay away from the area. 

It said the injured had been taken to five local hospitals. 

The incident came at 3:15 a.m. toward the end of New Year’s celebrations in New Orleans and hours before the kickoff of the Sugar Bowl, a college football quarterfinal held in the city’s Superdome, with thousands expected to be in attendance. 

Earlier this week, the police department said security would be beefed up ahead of New Year’s Day celebrations. The department said it would be staffed at 100% capacity with 300 officers from partner agencies and a strong presence of marked and unmarked vehicles. 
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U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts on Tuesday warned about a rising number of threats to the judiciary’s independence, including calls for violence against judges and suggestions by elected officials to disregard court rulings they disagree with.

Roberts in an annual year-end report on the judiciary released just weeks before Republican President-elect Donald Trump takes office did not directly address what polling suggests has been a decline in public confidence in the judicial system broadly.

But Roberts said he felt compelled to highlight several areas of “illegitimate activity” that went far beyond informed criticism and debate concerning judicial rulings, which he said, “threaten the independence of judges on which the rule of law depends.”

Those areas of threats, he said, include a significant uptick in violent threats and online intimidation directed at judges, disinformation about court cases magnified by social media, and cyberthreats posed by foreign state actors.

In the past five years, the U.S. Marshals Service has investigated more than 1,000 serious threats against federal judges, Roberts wrote. In some extreme cases, judicial officers have been issued bulletproof vests, he said.

He cited the risks of hackers stealing confidential information and of hostile foreign state actors spreading disinformation online, including by using bots to distort judicial decisions and “foment discord within our democracy.”

Roberts also highlighted what he said were instances in the past few years in which “elected officials from across the political spectrum have raised the specter of open disregard for federal court rulings.”

“These dangerous suggestions, however sporadic, must be soundly rejected,” Roberts wrote.

Roberts, a member of the court’s 6-3 conservative majority, did not specify what cases he was referring to, nor did he reference recent Supreme Court rulings that have set off political firestorms.

Those include its 2022 decision rolling back abortion rights or its July ruling granting Trump substantial immunity for actions taken in office in the now-dismissed 2020 election subversion criminal case he faced.

The abortion ruling prompted protests outside of several justices’ homes, and an armed man was charged in 2022 with attempting to assassinate conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh after being arrested near his home.

Roberts’ report also did not discuss recent ethics controversies concerning gifts and travel received by members of the Supreme Court that have prompted investigations by Democratic lawmakers and calls for reforms.

Roberts acknowledged court rulings can “provoke strong and passionate reactions” and said criticism was not a threat, and that “public engagement with the work of the courts results in a better-informed polity and a more robust democracy.”

But he said public officials “regrettably have engaged in recent attempts to intimidate judges — for example, suggesting political bias in the judge’s adverse rulings without a credible basis for such allegations.”

“Public officials certainly have a right to criticize the work of the judiciary, but they should be mindful that intemperance in their statements when it comes to judges may prompt dangerous reactions by others,” he wrote. 
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OTTAWA, ONTARIO, CANADA — An American man who fled after being sentenced to prison for his role in the U.S. Capitol riot is now seeking political asylum in Canada, as he waits and hopes for a pardon when Donald Trump returns to the White House.

Antony Vo, 32, was sentenced to nine months behind bars and ordered to report to a federal prison on June 14, 2024, but instead he fled to Canada.

More than 1,500 people have been charged in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on Congress, which sought to disrupt certification of President Joe Biden’s election victory.

Vo, from Indiana, was convicted at a jury trial in Washington of four counts of entering a restricted building and disorderly conduct related to his actions.

“I knew Canada has a history of being welcoming to refugees, from Vietnam War draft dodgers to the people who hid Edward Snowden in Hong Kong,” he told AFP. “So I packed up my snowboarding gear and drove across the border.”

In refugee claim documents, Vo said the riot was “a peaceful protest” that was “subverted as part of a domestic regime-change operation to politically assassinate Trump and his supporters.”

He added that he was “persecuted, maltreated,” and subjected to an “unfair trial” over his political beliefs, and if sent back to the United States would be jailed “under inhumane conditions.”

The assault on the Capitol followed a fiery speech by then-president Trump to tens of thousands of his supporters near the White House, in which he repeated his false claims that he won the 2020 vote.

More than 140 police officers were injured during hours of clashes with rioters wielding flagpoles, baseball bats, hockey sticks and other makeshift weapons along with Tasers and canisters of bear spray.

Vo insisted that he saw no violence.

Images on social media showed Vo and his mother, Annie — who fled Vietnam in 1991 and was granted asylum in the United States — smiling inside the Capitol that day. She was arrested in March and is awaiting trial.

Vo said he hopes to stay in Canada “until the situation is safe for me to return” to the United States. “When Donald Trump takes office, I hope he pardons me and the rest of the January 6 protesters.”

Trump has called the rioters patriots and political prisoners and told a CNN town hall that he was “inclined to pardon many of them.”

Several Capitol riot defendants have seized upon Trump’s election victory over Vice President Kamala Harris to ask that their trials or sentencing be put on hold.

Trump himself, who takes office again in January, was charged with conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

But the case never made it to trial and is now being wound down under the Justice Department’s policy of not prosecuting a sitting president.

Vo said that he had also tried to seek asylum in Argentina, Mexico, El Salvador, Vietnam, Belarus, and Russia.

“I seriously explored getting paramotoring lessons and then paramotoring from Key West to Cuba to seek asylum there too,” he said in his claim.

Vo said that in Canada, “people have really taken good care of me.” 
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Доповідь також містить дані про випадки страт полонених: «йдеться про щонайменше 62 жертви внаслідок 19 інцидентів»
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Washington — The United States on Tuesday imposed sanctions on entities in Iran and Russia, accusing them of attempting to interfere in the U.S. election this year.

The U.S. Treasury Department in a statement said the entities — a subsidiary of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps and an organization affiliated with Russia’s military intelligence agency — aimed to “stoke socio-political tensions and influence the U.S. electorate during the 2024 U.S. election.”

The Cognitive Design Production Center planned influence operations since at least 2023, the Treasury said, while the Moscow-based Center for Geopolitical Expertise (CGE) circulated disinformation about candidates in the election and directed and subsidized the creation of deepfakes.

The Treasury said CGE also manipulated a video to produce “baseless accusations concerning a 2024 vice presidential candidate.” It did not specify which candidate was targeted.

Republican Donald Trump was elected president in November, beating Democratic candidate Kamala Harris and capping a remarkable comeback four years after he was voted out of the White House.

“The Governments of Iran and Russia have targeted our election processes and institutions and sought to divide the American people through targeted disinformation campaigns,” Treasury’s Acting Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, Bradley Smith said in the statement.

“The United States will remain vigilant against adversaries who would undermine our democracy.”
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The U.S. military said its forces carried out multiple precision strikes in Houthi-controlled territory in Yemen amid escalating tensions in the region.

A statement Tuesday from the U.S. Central Command said the strikes hit Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, along with other Houthi-controlled coastal locations.

The strikes were carried out by U.S. Navy ships on Monday and Tuesday and targeted a Houthi command and control facility along with sites that produced and stored weapons, including missiles and drones.

The facilities targeted in the strikes were used in previous Houthi operations, “such as attacks against U.S. Navy warships and merchant vessels in the southern Red Sea and Gulf of Aden,” according to the U.S. statement.

The U.S. Central Command said the strikes are “a part of CENTCOM’s effort to degrade Iran-backed Houthi efforts to threaten regional partners and military and merchant vessels in the region.”

A Houthi spokesperson called the strikes “a blatant violation of the sovereignty of an independent state and a blatant support for Israel.”

The Houthis have conducted multiple missile attacks directed at Israel and have carried out more than a year of drone and missile attacks on vessels in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.

The Houthis say their campaign is in solidarity with the Palestinians amid the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.

The United States has designated Hamas and the Houthis as terror groups.
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Порушників затримуватимуть й доставлятимуть до відділення «для з’ясування»
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