Her name was Uli Derickson.
She was born in Germany, immigrated to America, married, had a young son in New Jersey, and worked as a purser for TWA. On the morning of June 14, 1985, she was working a scheduled flight from Athens to Rome — breakfast trays being cleared, coffee smell in the cabin, 153 passengers settling into their seats.
Then two men sprinted up the aisle.
One held a 9mm pistol. The other held a grenade with the pin already pulled. They slammed Uli against the galley wall, forced their way into the cockpit, struck the pilot with the gun, and ordered the aircraft diverted to Beirut. The hijackers spoke Arabic and German. Of the entire crew, only Uli spoke German.
She became the sole line of communication between the men with the weapons and the people in the seats.
The first test came quickly. The hijackers ordered her to collect all passports and separate out those belonging to Jewish passengers. She walked down the aisle with a plastic bag, opening document after document. When she found passports with Israeli stamps or Jewish-sounding names, she did not put them in the bag.
She slipped them under an empty seat cushion.
She handed the bag to the hijackers. They didn't notice the missing names.
The plane flew erratically — Beirut to Algiers and back, over and over, for more than two weeks. In Algiers, the fuel ran out. The ground crew refused to pump without immediate payment. The hijackers threatened to start executing passengers. TWA had no mechanism to authorize an emergency international transaction in real time.
Uli reached into her purse and pulled out her personal Shell Oil credit card.
She handed it out the cockpit window. The ground crew ran the charge — $5,500 for jet fuel. The pump turned on. The plane could keep flying. One hundred fifty-two people stayed alive because a flight attendant had a credit card.
On the tarmac in Beirut, the hijackers identified an American Navy diver named Robert Stethem — 23 years old, unarmed, his military ID giving him away. They bound his hands with elastic luggage cords and beat him with metal armrests torn from the seats. Uli physically inserted herself between the blows and the passenger, absorbing hits to her own body trying to shield him.
It wasn't enough. They shot Robert Stethem and threw his body onto the tarmac. Uli was forced to close the door behind him.
She sat in the jump seat, covered in his blood. One of the hijackers pointed his gun at her and demanded she sing him a German folk song to calm his nerves.
She sang "Muss i denn."
Her voice shook. He lowered the weapon.
For 17 days she stood in that aisle. She translated demands to control towers. She negotiated the release of passengers at each stop. She bandaged head wounds with cloth torn from galley supplies. She wiped blood from people's faces. She kept talking, kept translating, kept the fragile thread of communication from breaking — because if it broke, people would die.
By the end, 152 of the 153 people on that plane were alive.
When she stepped off the aircraft in Algiers on the final day, she was dehydrated and bruised, still carrying the plastic bag of hidden passports.
She went back to New Jersey. She went back to work. She transferred to Delta Airlines and flew international routes until she retired.
In 1989, she stood in a German courtroom and pointed her finger at the man who had held the grenade to her neck and forced her to sing in a blood-stained cabin. He received a life sentence. He was paroled in 2005.
The Navy named a ship after Robert Stethem. The USS Stethem still sails.
Uli Derickson received the Department of Transportation's Award for Outstanding Achievement — one of the few civilians ever to receive it.
She was ordered to hand over the passports of the people they wanted to kill.
She hid them under a seat cushion instead.
🚨UNBELIEVABLE: 18-year-old mother Sarah McKinley made a split-second decision to defend her 3-month-old infant when an intruder armed with a 12-inch hunting knife tried breaking into her home on New Year's Eve.
Just one week after losing her husband to cancer, Sarah was home alone with her baby in Blanchard, Oklahoma, when two men began aggressively trying to smash through her doors. Panicked, she barricaded the door with a couch, grabbed a shotgun, and called 911. In audio that quickly went viral across the nation, Sarah asked the operator: "I've got two guns in my hand, is it OK to shoot him if he comes in this door?"
The dispatcher responded: "You do what you have to do to protect your baby." The moment the intruder kicked through the door with the knife raised, Sarah fired, stopping the threat instantly. Prosecutors later ruled her actions completely justified under home defense laws.
A mother's instinct and the fundamental right to protect your family in your own home.
Welcome to Ireland....
- Your taxi driver from the airport is Nigerian man.
- When you arrive at the hotel, you are checked in by a Ukrainian woman.
- After settling in you take a walk to Arnotts, but there are 40 people from the Congo outside doing a voodoo ritual because one of their people died while shoplifting.
- Later, on the way to an Irish pub, you pass the mosque, the vape shops, the kebab shops and oh so many Turkish barbers.
- When you arrive, you are served a terrible pint of Guinness by a middle-aged Brazilian woman.
- Afterwards, you want some fish and chips, but the chip shop is owned by a group of men from Afghanistan so you return to the hotel and go to sleep.
- The next day you visit the Phoenix Park, but you leave immediately after you are approached by what looks like a gang of Somali pirates.
- So you head to the historic GPO, the base of the Irish rebellion, to take some pictures you will cherish forever. Unfortunately it's dole day, so 200 Africans are queueing up outside for their free money.
- For your second night you travel to rural Ireland, where you are due to meet Paddy, your Airbnb owner. But it turns out Paddy is actually an Indian man and he owns 12 Airbnb's in this small Irish town.
- On day 3 you wake up and travel to the scenic Powerscourt Waterfall, but you are greeted by 500 Pakistanis who are cooking goats and blasting Islamic music.
- On the taxi trip back you are driven by a 73-year-old man from Bangladesh who arrived in Ireland 3 weeks ago. His cousin is the Mayor of a rural village in County Cork.
- Becoming frustrated with your "Irish trip" you decide to spend the night in, and luckily the Rose of Tralee is live on TV, but the Dublin Rose is a Somali Muslim.
- Day 4, you wake up and book a flight to Poland. You will never visit Ireland again.
🚨 BREAKING:
Meanwhile in China 🇨🇳
A new Chinese achievement for humanity:
Zhejiang University develops a liquid to treat and repair teeth, where just two drops can regrow tooth enamel very similar to the original.
Sehr traurig.
Vor wenigen Tagen ist der legendäre Radreisefahrer Heinz Stücke gestorben. 51 Jahre lang radelte er ohne Unterbrechung um die Welt, auf allen Kontinenten und legte dabei unglaubliche 648.000 Kilometer zurück. Heinz hat eine ganze Generation mit seinen Reisen inspiriert.
Das untere Bild zeigt Heinz im Jahr 1962 bei seinem Aufbruch, lange bevor Social Media jeden Winkel dieser Erde ausgeleuchtet hatte. Es muss eine unglaubliche spannende und abenteuerliche Zeit zum Radreisen gewesen sein.
Es gibt eine ganz tolle Dokumentation über Heinz und seine Reise auf Netflix. „The man who wanted to see it all“. Sie begleitet ihn nach seiner Rückkehr nach über 50 Jahren und blickt auf seine Reise und sein Leben zurück. Große Empfehlung!
Jetzt ist er im Alter von 86 Jahren in seiner Heimat Hövelhof gestorben. Möge er in Frieden ruhen.
Quelle: Facebook
Jane Michelle Arc, a trans identifying software engineer from San Francisco, “fled” the US last year after Trump won, seeking asylum in the Netherlands over fears of persecution
Now placed in Ter Apel, the country’s largest asylum center, surrounded by migrants from war torn regions, the Red Cross has pulled its own aid workers out due to violence, and stabbings have become routine
Arc’s own words: “I will be hurt or killed”
Turns out the danger wasn’t Trump. It was never Trump
Seventy-two. That is how many separate wounds John Cruickshank had in him, two of them through his lungs, while he lined up a burning flying boat for a second run at a U-boat that had just shot his aircraft to pieces. Most men have one of those wounds and they are finished. He had seventy-two and he pressed the attack.
He was 24, a former bank clerk from Aberdeen, flying a Catalina flying boat out of the Shetland Islands with Coastal Command. The job was the long, freezing, mind-numbing patrol, fourteen hours over the grey Atlantic hunting the U-boats that were strangling Britain. On the 17th of July 1944, far out over empty water, they caught one on the surface, U-361, and Cruickshank took the big slow flying boat down to attack.
The first run failed. The depth charges would not release. Any sane man makes a note and turns for home. Cruickshank swung the aircraft around and came back for a second pass, low and straight, and this time the submarine's gunners were waiting. Flak ripped through the Catalina. It killed the navigator, wounded half the crew, and tore into Cruickshank again and again, those seventy-two wounds, two punching into his lungs, ten into his legs.
And he flew the attack home anyway. Bleeding everywhere, in agony, with the fuselage holed and on fire, he held the aircraft dead level, aimed, and released the depth charges himself. They straddled the U-boat perfectly. It broke apart and sank beneath him.
Then came the part that should have killed him. He collapsed from blood loss, and the wounded co-pilot, who had never landed a Catalina, took the controls for the long flight back. Cruickshank refused the morphine that would have knocked him out, because he knew the man flying needed him. Drifting in and out, he had himself carried back up to the cockpit again and again through the night to help nurse the shot-up aircraft down, and at dawn they got it onto the water safely. He had lost so much blood the doctors said he had no business being alive.
He lived. He took the Victoria Cross from the King, went quietly back to banking after the war, and rarely spoke of it. And he kept on living, and living, and living. John Cruickshank died in 2025 at the age of 105, the last man on earth wearing a Victoria Cross earned in the Second World War. Seventy-two wounds over the Atlantic, and he outlasted every other hero of that war by decades.
@ChazzNelson7@MustafarZa60863@storm1news When an animal attacks like that, even a man with perfect training, like you believe yourself to be, can be easily defeated.
📱✈️ Traveling internationally? Know your rights! 🇺🇸 At US airports, CBP can search your phone without a warrant, but they can't deny entry to confirmed citizens for refusal. 📵 American Samuel Tunick faces charges after his phone's data was erased during a CBP search. Legal
@MustafarZa60863@storm1news That is how low-IQ fourth-worlders, including yourself, think.
White children are too intelligent to ignore a cowardly, animalistic attack, and they will live their lives believing non-whites are untrustworthy creatures.