Disaster over the Potomac

On Wednesday night around 9 p.m. near Washington D.C., a UH-60 Black Hawk on a training flight crashed into American Eagle Flight 5342 bound from Wichita, Kansas to Reagan National Airport.

There were no survivors from either aircraft, resulting in the deaths of all 64 airplane passengers, 4 crew members and the 3 crew members on the helicopter, with the wreckage plunging into the Potomac River.

Sources: Flight data by Flightradar24 (jet) and ADS-B Exchange (helicopter); aerial image from Google Earth Studio with data from SIO, NOAA and U.S. Navy. Notes: Flight altitude is an estimate based on publicly available data. The last recorded locations of the two aircraft were transmitted at slightly different times. By The New York Times

The night was clear, and the crash was captured from several angles, including from a live webcam operated by the nearby Kennedy Center.

This tragedy is the deadliest U.S. plane crash in over two decades. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has taken the lead on the investigation.

A Deeper Dive

The radio transmissions between the Black Hawk's pilot and Reagan National controllers during the final two minutes before impact provide insight into the sequence of events.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Thursday that the helicopter was conducting “a required annual night evaluation” flight and was being flown by “a fairly experienced crew” operating with night-vision goggles.

A preliminary report from the Federal Aviation Administration stated that staffing at the air traffic control tower was “not normal for the time of day and volume of traffic.” According to The New York Times, “The controller who was handling helicopters in the airport’s vicinity on Wednesday night was also instructing planes that were landing and departing from its runways — jobs typically assigned to two different controllers. A supervisor combined those duties sometime before 9:30 p.m. and allowed one controller to leave, according to a person briefed on the staffing, who was not authorized to speak publicly.”

The helicopter had requested to fly in Route 4, a pre-established flight path. Having previously navigated this route, the helicopter’s crew was familiar with both the elevation constraints and the narrow aerial corridor authorized for flight operations near the airport.

However, “‘the helicopter pilot did not follow the intended route,’ the people briefed on the matter said. Rather, the helicopter was above 300 feet, not below 200 feet, and was at least a half-mile off the approved route when it collided with the jet.”

Gustavo Petro Blinks

Last weekend, President Trump announced sweeping punitive measures against Colombia after its president, former Marxist guerrilla fighter Gustavo Petro, denied entry to two U.S. military deportation planes filled with returning illegal immigrants. Trump immediately imposed a travel ban and visa sanctions on Colombian government officials, plus an “emergency” 25 percent tariff on Colombian goods, with a promise to raise that tariff to 50 percent in a week.

Just 47 minutes after Trump announced the sanctions, Petro changed his mind, offering his presidential plane to pick up the deportees.

This comes as illegal immigration has steeply declined over the past couple of weeks and ICE averages about 1,200 deportations per day. Deporter-in-chief Tom Homan wants to see that number greatly increase, as it would take nearly 7,000 deportations per day to return the estimated 10 million illegal immigrants that came in under the last administration alone.

DeepSeek Unsettles Markets

On Monday, DeepSeek, a Chinese AI startup, unveiled their R1 model that reportedly matched leading U.S. AI models' capabilities but was developed for just $5.6 million—a fraction of what U.S. companies typically spend. This news triggered significant market turbulence, most notably affecting Nvidia, whose stock plunged 17%, wiping nearly $600 billion from its market value. The dramatic reaction stemmed from concerns that DeepSeek's achievement could threaten demand for Nvidia's expensive chips used to power AI. The news also sparked broader market declines, with the Nasdaq falling 3% and the S&P 500 dropping 1.5%, reflecting wider concerns about U.S. tech valuations and competitiveness in AI.

The development highlights ongoing tensions in the U.S.-China tech rivalry, with concerns about Chinese advancements in AI potentially undermining U.S. dominance. American entrepreneur Marc Andreessen called the release of DeepSeek R1 “AI’s Sputnik moment,” a reference to Russia’s 1957 launch of the Sputnik 1 satellite, the first man-made object to orbit Earth, which came as a shock to the U.S. and ignited the Space Race and a reevaluation of science education and defense in the U.S.

Tariffs on China, Mexico & Canada

Yesterday President Trump imposed 25 percent tariffs on Mexican and Canadian imports (exempting some Canadian energy exports) and 10 percent on Chinese goods, citing concerns over migration and fentanyl trafficking, though the administration provided few specifics about what conditions would need to be met for the tariffs to be lifted. In response, China announced plans to challenge the action through the World Trade Organization. Canada's Trudeau outlined retaliatory tariffs on $20 billion of U.S. goods immediately and $85 billion more within three weeks. Mexico's President Sheinbaum rejected Trump's accusations of the Mexican government cooperating with drug traffickers as "slander," called for U.S. action on domestic drug demand, and promised unspecified retaliatory measures.

Other News

• *Medical plane crashes in Philadelphia: ** A medical transport Learjet crashed near a Philadelphia shopping center Friday evening, killing all six people aboard—including a pediatric patient returning to Mexico after treatment, her mother, two pilots, and two medical staff, all Mexican nationals—as well as one person in a vehicle on the ground. The plane, which crashed just one minute after takeoff from Northeast Philadelphia Airport, created a large fireball that damaged nearby buildings and vehicles, injured at least 19 people on the ground, and left a blackened crater surrounded by burning debris near Roosevelt Mall. It is currently unclear why the plane crashed. Radio transmissions reveal that despite multiple attempts by the air traffic controller to contact the aircraft after takeoff, there was no response from the pilot.

A Biden-era CIA report released by the new CIA director concludes that the Covid-19 pandemic most likely arose from a lab leak in Wuhan, China. It joins the FBI and Energy Department, who reached the same conclusion. The conclusion is “low confidence,” or “more likely than not.” This report continues the veneration of those such as Senator Tom Cotton, who were dismissed as conspiracy theorists for originally proposing the lab leak theory.

The 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz was celebrated on January 27, 2025. Only a few dozen Holocaust survivors from Auschwitz remain of the 7,000 who were liberated on January 27, 1945.

MSNBC pundit compares ICE deportations to “Gestapo raids”: Anand Giridharadas on Tuesday compared Immigrant and Customs Enforcement’s deportations to "Gestapo raids," saying on Morning Joe, “When you start having Gestapo raids in America, and we start becoming a country where, as in East Germany, a knock on the door is the thing people are thinking about instead of the brilliant idea they want to go create, then we are moving very, very far from the president worrying about what regular people need.”

U.S. students' reading comprehension scores are at a record low: The 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) revealed concerning trends in student achievement, with reading scores continuing to decline across grade levels. Fourth and eighth graders scored two points lower than in 2022 and five points below 2019 levels—the worst ever for eighth grade and the worst in 20 years for fourth grade. The Department of Education noted that not only has there been little recovery from pandemic-related learning losses, but the achievement gap has widened, with struggling students falling even further behind. President Trump issued an executive order citing these findings and directing education officials to develop guidance for states on using federal funds for school choice initiatives and instructing the Departments of Labor and Education to propose plans supporting school choice through grant programs.

“One man’s trash is another man’s treasure”:

An antique collector's $50 garage sale find in 2016 has been adjudged to be a Van Gogh painting potentially worth $15 million. The artwork, titled “Elimar,” was authenticated by LMI Group through extensive research, which determined Van Gogh created it while staying at Saint-Paul asylum in France during the late 1800s. The research firm suggests there could be more undiscovered Van Gogh works, as the artist was known to lose pieces, give them away to friends, and be careless with what he considered study pieces.

Last of the fugitive monkeys captured: In November 2023, South Carolina residents were warned to lock their doors and windows after 43 rhesus macaque monkeys escaped from a “monkey farm.” The monkeys were finally recaptured in January after a months-long search. What did it take to find and lure them back? NSA-level spying and tracking technology? Perhaps a treaty and a prisoner swap? Nope. Just some good old-fashioned peanut butter and jelly sandwiches: a universal love language of all primates.