president joe biden
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Residents in the region around Washington D.C. got startled by a sonic boom, which officials state was caused by fighter jets intercepting a private plane.
On Sunday afternoon (June 4th), a loud noise that resonated across most of the area around Washington D.C. caught the attention of many residents. Officials with North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, confirmed to the press later on that night that the noise was a sonic boom, attributing it to two F-16 fighter jets that were scrambled from Joint Base Andrews in an authorized response to a Cessna Citation plane that entered restricted airspace over Virginia.
NORAD went on to state that when hailed by the F-16s, the Cessna was unresponsive, even as the jets used flares to get the pilot’s attention. The plane would later crash close to the George Washington National Forest near Montebello, Virginia close to 3:30 P.M., and they said it was not shot down.
The Federal Aviation Association issued its own statement, and stated that air traffic control attempts to reach the plane had been unsuccessful. According to tracking data, the Cessna Citation apparently left Elizabethton, Tennessee at 1:13 P.M., then reached Long Island before turning back around towards Virginia.
The sonic boom caused many to react across the region from Bowie, Maryland to Annandale Virginia, and speculate on the cause. President Joe Biden was out golfing with his brother, Jimmy close to Joint Base Andrews and reportedly heard “a faint boom”. The president was fully briefed on the situation, a spokesperson for the White House said. Police at the U.S. Capitol were briefly placed on alert, according to authorities.
The FAA said that investigators for the National Transportation and Safety Board were making their way to the crash scene, hoping to arrive there on Monday (June 5th). The private business jet was confirmed to be owned by Encore Motors of Melbourne, a Florida-based company.
John Rumpel, a 75-year-old pilot who runs Encore Motors, confirmed to the New York Times that his daughter, granddaughter, and a nanny were on the plane with the pilot returning home to East Hampton, N.Y. after visiting him in North Carolina.
In tears, Rumpel theorized that the plane might’ve lost pressurization, saying that “they all just would have gone to sleep and never woke up.” Virginia State Police would later confirm that first responders reached the site at 8 P.M. that evening, and found no survivors.
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Photo: Getty
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President Joe Biden traveled to Selma, Ala. over the weekend for the 58th anniversary of the deadly “Bloody Sunday” incident and declared the fight that began nearly six decades ago is still ongoing. In a speech, President Biden said that the right to vote is still under attack in the United States with the Voting Rights Act facing changes under the conservative-majority Supreme Court.
As the Associated Press and New York Times reports, President Joe Biden spoke to gatherers seated near the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the site of the “Bloody Sunday” event where peaceful demonstrators were assaulted on March 7, 1965, for simply crossing the bridge heading into Montgomery, Ala. Among those harmed that fateful day was the late congressman John Lewis before his vaunted political career took off.
A bill, The John Lewis Voting Rights Act, failed in Congress when the Democratic Party held a slim majority. With the House now controlled by the Republican Party, the bill has little chance of seeing the light of day as a full-on law.
“As I come here in commemoration, not for show, Selma is a reckoning,” Biden said. “The right to vote, the right to vote, to have your vote counted, is the threshold of democracy and liberty. With it, anything’s possible. Without it, without that right, nothing is possible.”
The disturbing images of the Bloody Sunday event still shock the senses as police and townsfolk unleashed violent rage on the marchers simply angling for a right to the democratic process and having their voices count among their fellow countrymen.
President Joe Biden also spoke widely about the state of the economy and also spoke directly to the concerns of local residents still recovering from the destruction of storms that erupted in the area on January 12.
President Biden’s full speech can be read here.
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Photo: Anadolu Agency / Getty