Random News and Notes 29 December

There was an aviation incident in New Jersey that took the life of a pilot and put a second in the hospital. Two helicopters – an Enstrom F-28A and an Enstrom 280C- collided in mid air sending both aircraft to the ground. Both choppers are small piston powered craft.

According to the FAA, only the pilots were aboard at the time of the collision.

The corpse of a California triathlete was found Saturday after she was attacked by a shark last week. Erica Fox’s corpse was found Saturday afternoon still clad in her black wetsuit south of Davenport Beach in Santa Cruz about 25 miles from where she was attacked.

This is the second fatal shark attack at Lovers Point in 73 years, and the first since a 17-year-old boy was killed in December 1952, according to Mercury News.

Your editor has detailed his personal shark encounter elsewhere and will not rehash it other than to say the sharks live there, humans don’t.

This is a fun one. The Spaniards seem to be rising up over illegals, particularly those from North Africa. Several videos circulating on X shows some local Spaniards forcibly evicting North African squatters.

An anti-squatting law was passed in Spain earlier this year, but police have not been enforcing it. It seems there is an entire sub-culture of squatters in Spain to the point they have a name. Okupas, which is a play on the Spanish verb ocupar (to occupy).